Over Five Million Dead in Congo? Fifteen Hundred People Daily?

In 1995 the IRC's "Freedom Award" went to Richard Holbrooke; in 1996 to Madeleine Albright; and in 2004 to General Romeo Dallaire. All three people were pivotal to the U.S. covert operations and the subsequent massive refugee displacements and mortality in Central Africa. Holbrooke and Albright are also culpable in crimes against humanity in former Yugoslavia, Haiti, Sudan and Iraq.  

Finally, the "Freedom" award was shared in 2005 by William J. Clinton and G.H.W. Bush; Clinton launched the wars in Rwanda and Congo with the background support of his predecessor; Bush's "humanitarianism" includes massive state destabilization, terror networks, torture, coups d'etat and war on sovereign nations. 

The International Rescue Committee is not a neutral or purely "humanitarian" organization. The IRC has a deep history of nefarious activities going far beyond relief operations. The IRC is also a huge financial operation providing scads of executives and business people with scads of income in ways that do not help to alleviate the war or suffering, but rather exacerbate it. While the IRC claims 90% of its funds "are spent on refugee programs and services," much of this money never hits the ground in Africa, what does often barely touches the life of a refugee. Amongst the IRC's biggest funders are HSBC bank, GE, and Goldman Sachs, all involved in Congo's blood diamonds plunder, and Pfizer and Gilead Sciences (the Davignon-Rumsfeld company).

The IRC's involvement in Congo-a mortality study-involves deeply political but generally hidden motives. Why doesn't the IRC focus on feeding the living instead of counting the dead? 

The Horror, The Horror 

Beyond the simple calculus of the IRC's highly political bias and interests, and cloaked in a smokescreen of neutrality, the mortality assessment is flawed. The IRC considers only the period of 1998 to 2007, excluding the first phase of the war, the U.S.-backed overthrow of Zaire and coup d'etat against Mobutu Sese Seko, 1996-1998. The IRC excludes this period for multiple reasons. (Requests to the IRC for comment were not answered.) 

One of the obvious reasons is that the Pentagon was directly involved, 1996-1998, along with the private U.S. military companies Military Professional Resources Incorporated, and Kellogg, Brown and Root (Halliburton). Just as happened with the massive bloodletting in Rwanda, and premised of course from the start on the examples of selective justice at the Nazi Nuremburg trials, the international system manipulates statistics, dates, and timeframes partly to shield those agents who might otherwise be subject to some kind of future reckoning, and partly to serve the falsification of history and fabricate a false consciousness. 

The IRC excludes the period 1996-1997 to shield the governments of now military President Paul Kagame, in Rwanda, and Yoweri Museveni, in Uganda, and their inner circles and extended networks of syndicated, organized crime.  In 1995 and 1996, the Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front (RPA/F) and their partners and backers, the Ugandan People's Defense Forces (UPDF), the Pentagon, MPRI and assorted other mercenaries, laid the groundwork for their imminent war by engaging Zairian territory through significant cross-border covert and terror operations from Uganda and Rwanda.

In October 1996 there were at least 1.5 million Rwandan and Burundian refugees in eastern Zaire, according to most refugee agencies. The full-scale invasion began more formally when the RPA/UPDF proxy forces shelled the refugee camps. This was in violation of international humanitarian law, and it was a pivotal event to understand, because it was a replay of the events of October 1990, whereby the RPA invaded the territory of a sovereign government: Rwanda. Only this time it was eastern Zaire, and it involved the shelling of Hutu refugee camps.

These are egregious crimes of international law. 

France reported at the time that there were 1.2 million refugees and the United States insisted there were only 700,000, and the U.S. took the disingenuous line that all the refugees went back to Rwanda. They did not. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed and innocent men, women and children were driven west, north, and south, running in fear for their lives from the allied invading forces who they knew from experience over the previous six years to be bloodthirsty killers. Many also were forced back to Rwanda where the RPA was targeting them. The RPA/UPDF forces hunted down and killed hundreds of thousands in a clear case of genocide. The names of the U.S. officials, the RPA and UPDF commanders and Congolese collaborators are all very well known to those who were on the ground or involved at the time.  

One of these is long-time UNICEF executive Nigel Fisher, who is today also a member of the Advisory Council of the Diamond Development Initiative, a program run by and for the diamond industry but meant to put a reformative face on corporations and syndicated crime networks that for decades have plundered the Congo. Fisher was the UNICEF Special Representative for Rwanda in 1994, and he led that agency's post-genocide [sic] recovery operations [sic] in the Great Lakes region of Africa (Rwanda, eastern Zaire, western Tanzania and southern Uganda) in 1994-1995. This places him squarely in the know about the massive genocidal killings and other crimes against humanity that occurred as the Rwandan military (then the Rwandan Patriotic Army) under current President Paul Kagame and the Ugandan military under President-for-life Yoweri Museveni first shelled the refugee camps and then marched across Zaire committing genocide.  

So right off the bat we can add between 200,000 and 800,000 deaths to the new IRC mortality figures (and the 200,000 would be a very conservative figure).  

Finally, the IRC is known for its long history of involvement in CIA and NSA activities, including shipping or transporting weapons. According to a top United Nations investigator, the IRC moved into bases in eastern Zaire in 1996 and started shelling the refugee camps with heavy weapons. Here is the direct quote: "The IRC took over some bases near the refugee camps and started shelling the camps with heavy weapons." (Name withheld for confidentiality.) 

The IRC has spent millions of dollars analyzing the "impact of conflict" in the Democratic Republic of Congo but they have said nothing of substance about the parallel economy of plunder that is enriching some of the same organizations that support their "humanitarian" programs. Their recent report is a glossy brochure offering a pornography of violence. 

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