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

One of the long term dictator Mobutu Sese Seko's right-hand men was Albert-Henri Buisine, a French mercenary-pirate who worked on the Kamanyola, the luxury yacht where Mobutu arrived by helicopter to receive foreign backers and "VIP" cronies. While Mobutu frequently visited the White House, Brussels, Paris, Tokyo, Geneva, London-and sometimes Tel Aviv-he regularly received his cronies and patrons on his yacht in Zaire.

Protected by Albert-Henri Buisine and Israeli mercenary Meir Meyouhas-and a slew of crack black intelligence operatives-Mobutu received his guests Je me couche tôt.. Hundreds of people came and went from Zaire over the years, and these included Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; Vice-President George H.W. Bush; Ambassadors Andrew Young and Jean Kirkpatrick; and mercenary Frank Carlucci. Diamond tycoon Maurice Templesman dined often with Mobutu on the Kamanyola, sometimes with his lover, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, often with his Zaire-based diamond agents like Jerry Funk or James Barnes, and with De Beers agents like Nicky Oppenheimer or Nick Davenport.

The Templesman and De Beers empires exist today in Congo in their modern forms, and many of the same agents of the Mobutu period are connected to policies or actions that perpetuate suffering and violence in Congo and Angola and South Africa today. It is important to note, also, that the Templesman blood minerals machine has heavily subsidized the campaigns of the democrats, including recent fascist manifestations, Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In the final counting, Hillary Clinton has done more damage to Africa than Obama (but there is still time).    

On May 11 and 12, 1990, Mobutu's shock troops-including the Israeli-trained Special Presidential Division (DSP), SARM and National Gendarmerie-attacked the campus at the University of Lumumbashi, and they killed hundreds of students, at least, while countless more were tortured and brutalized. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency station in Lumumbashi supported the atrocities and cover-up. It sounds like a long time ago, but the players are still around. Some, like James Barnes, Maurice and Leon Templesman, and Nicky Oppenheimer, are still running big operations in Africa. 

What was Albert-Henri Buisine's role in protecting the Mobutu dictatorship and perpetuating such atrocities and where is Mobutu's old mercenary bodyguard today? 

Well, Mobutu's French mercenary bodyguard Albert-Henri Buisine surfaced in October, 2007, in a Harper's magazine article by Bryan Mealer, a journalist who formerly freelanced with the Associated Press and The Independent (London). Buisine is no longer a private military agent serving the terror apparatus of a Cold War dictator; he is the loquacious captain of a barge pressing 2600 tons of cargo up the Congo River (for his private shipping company and substantial personal profit).

One hundred years after Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness we have a white American AP journalist retelling his unfathomable voyage up the Congo.  And there's the nostalgic Captain, a reluctant French mercenary-terrorist-turned-pilot-profiteer, who for 16 years, against his will, Mealer tells us, served Mobutu reluctantly.

"He was chained to Mobutu's shadow at all times, even living four straight years aboard the lavish presidential yacht, the Kamanyola, as it drifted aimlessly down the Congo River."  

Drifted aimlessly? Chained to Mobutu's shadow? Hardly. This is fiction. There are deep cultural stereotypes and subliminal fault lines at work here that have been inculcated through decades of propaganda about Congo/Zaire. There is nothing but dross in Mealer's account, no mention of the brutalities suffered by Congolese people, the strike-breaking and student massacres, or the rented crowds chanting "Mobutu! Mobutu" and the empty slogans of Mobutu's Movement Populaire de la Revolution party. There is no mention of the hated Special Presidential Division terror apparatus, the illegal arrests and detention without trial, the tortures at underground dungeons like the "OAU-2" or the "corridor of death" in Kinshasa. It is all rendered nostalgic, and the plunderers of the past are painted as unwitting victims who missed their lot in life. The story casts the standard dispersions of pathos on the white exploiters, and this works to displace the attention from their past and often current criminality. 

"Buisine now led the simple life of a river rat," Mealer tells us, "making his run six or seven times a year," pointing out "whirlpools roiling in the deep spots, crocodiles camouflaged in the mud, or, along a wooded island, a tree whose leaves cured hemorrhoids."

Harper's never mentions the agents of repression in such places, because the American public is all too happy with the vainglorious version of the beleaguered white hero challenging the savagery in the heart of darkness. How many stories about Congo involve a River and a Great White Hero challenging the savagery and darkness of the forest?

Harper's tells us nothing about Congo: it is the usual racist nonsense meant to displace the truth. The story is "good" reading, but it is fiction, a mirror reflecting our whiteness back to us. The author even claims that the natives communicate by drums so that villages along the river know the boat is coming before Buisine and the heroic white journalist arrive upstream.

This is the falsification of American consciousness. 

To cap the Harper's silly whitewash, the photographer that traveled up river with Mealer is based in Kigali, Rwanda, and everyone in the region knows that you cannot work in and out of Rwanda today and still be telling the truth. Finally, Harper's publisher John R. MacArthur is described by his magazine company as a "tireless advocate for human rights."  

And that is why we have more than 10 million dead in Congo since 1996, and millions more in Uganda and Rwanda. These nightmare numbers are the products of the Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations, a contiguous unfolding of fascism in America.  

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