The wards in hospitals in Goma, in Eastern Congo, are packed, with no room to walk between the cots, with woman and children who have been raped, beaten with burning tires, and left to die. Mosquitoes and flies feed on the festering wounds while moans are all that remain of their voices. Who will speak for them?
The Great Apes Project, based in Seattle, supports Hiasl and advocates the right to life, the protection of his "individual liberty," and the "prohibition of torture."
A USAID supported clinic, deep in an all-but-inaccessible part of Congo is denying the right to life and self-determination to the village it serves. The Jane Goodall Foundation and DFGF-and other gorilla groups-accept money from USAID for "community health."
The BINGOS run these private money shows-did we say money shows? We meant monkey shows-out of sight, out of mind, and entirely out of the press. No oversight, no unfortunate explaining to do!
JGI collaborates with the partnership in the development of a Community Centered Conservation (CCC) Program in the Graueri Landscape of eastern Congo. And like the other BINGOs-who are billed in the American press and television shows as wildlife conservators-JGI is also involved in "community health." Congolese doctors and nurses have told us that this involvement requires convincing the local women-the poorest, most illiterate woman in the world-that they should not be having babies, because having babies is "dangerous to their health." The doctors have been trained to say this!
CARPE PARTNERS (Source: Weidemann Report, USAID, CARPE)
Babies lead to more babies, because three out of five will die, and the two that grow up will soon be eating monkeys for survival and sneaking into the land controlled by the BINGOS for primate conservation and international tourism.
How do you conserve primates in the wild? You stop hungry people from trying to keep their children alive. Don't worry about feeding the people, or selling their resources back to them, or giving them a job in mining the diamonds, gold, coltan or niobium coming out of these areas and into the profits of the mining cartels in America, England, and Vienna.
JGI's "partnership" with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and Conservation International is funding a clinic which tells women that it is dangerous for them to have children, but acceptable to go on an unsupervised regimen of Depo Provera. The Depo comes with all kinds of nasty side-affects, but the nice thing about illiterate black people in Congo is that you don't have to tell them what they can't otherwise read. Women gain weight, get infections, have all kinds of hormonal imbalances-and you don't have to worry about whether or not they will get proper treatment, there's no equipment to speak of and the local medical facilities promised by the conservation organizations-if they exist at all-are as barren as the women who are choosing permanent sterilization.
This partnership is clearly spelled out in recruiting documents (easily found on the Web) as "a partnership between Conservation International (the Landscape lead organization) and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGFI is the implementing partner). JGI collaborates with the partnership in the development of a Community Centered Conservation (CCC) Program in the Graueri Landscape of eastern DRC." (Employment ad placed by EngenderHealth: Consultant Scope of Work: Support to the Jane Goodall Institute/DRC)
When one woman came back to a clinic complaining that she was getting sicker and sicker, the JGI-trained doctor told us that he told her to go home and "be happy-- it didn't cost you anything and now you won't be having children you can't take care of! If it gets worse, you can always come back."
So our hormonally imbalanced two-legged but unappreciated primate hopped right in her brand shiny new 4x4 SUV and went home to watch Jeopardy on her TV and wish for her own private utopia... just like the people who work for the international monkey agencies do... right?
Wrong.
The woman from our clinic, indeed, does not have an SUV. She does not even have any shoes. She has one dress, and a basket to haul her manioc, and a hungry family and her grass-thatched hut is a five-mile trek through the bush!
And the condoms at the clinic remain stacked in boxes. The women die of malaria and tuberculosis and malnutrition and diarrhea. Why? Could it be possible that the habitat is being saved for lowland gorillas and chimpanzees?
This is the nouveau conservation, the international outcry for the protection of gorillas, and chimps, and bonobos, and the expropriation of the land, people and resources in Africa. Meanwhile, according to statistics from April 2007, more than 1000 people die every day in the provinces along Congo's eastern frontier. And so while the popular Viennese primate Hiasl will soon appear in court, the rights of people in Congo remain completely trodden upon.
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