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Kong Six: Mapping the Road to Tayna

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U.S.-based members of the Weidemann team traveled to Congo and were joined by the fourth member—“a local area specialist”—on October 29, 2005. They spent one week in Kinshasa, and flew to Gabon—with meetings in Libreville and site visits to CARPE Landscape 2. During week three, they flew back to Kinshasa and then to Goma, where they split up “to maximize their resources and time.”

The team leader focused on the Virunga landscape by traveling to Rwanda (Kigali, Ruhengeri, Volcanoes National Park), and then back to the southern region of the Virungas Park in DRC. Other team members flew to Epulu, DRC, to assess “progress” in the Ituri landscape, and then flew to Beni, North Kivu, where they met with commercial loggers and CARPE partners. Returning to Kinshasa they drafted some conclusions and recommendations for CARPE officials. (16)

Let’s get this straight: a team of three U.S. consultants—with one Congolese “area expert”—reads some “key” reports stateside, and then flies into the war-torn Congo—chewing on a $20 million pie. So they land in Kinshasa, stay at luxury hotels, fly to Gabon—more luxury hotels in the most expensive country in Africa—fly to Gamba in Shell Oil slave country down south, fly back to Kinshasa, fly to Goma, jump to Kigali, email a questionnaire—and go nowhere near Tayna or Kahuzi-Biega because it’s raining?

The “commercial logging” stop in Bena was with ENRA, a company (and plantations) owned by the family of warlord Jean Pierre Bemba, which ships finished mahogany furniture and parquet floors to Belgium. There is a cooperative CARPE project with ENRA on logging concessions which involves the Wildlife Conservation society (WCS). (17)

The evaluation team missed the remote villages and people who most needed the light of truth shined upon their situation—and the validation or refutation of the conservation claims about helping them. The spotlight instead was on the minions of KONG, the logging, the volatile Virunga Park, Ituri, Rwanda and other areas of most importance to USAID and multinational interests. No one visited the interior villages.

The Weidemann Report criticized the linkage of funding to specific geographic “landscapes” without “accountability to the village governances” which signed over the land in the first place. We would later confirm this and find that—like the hapless villagers in recent Greenpeace reports who traded salt for vast tracks of virgin forests—the villagers in the CARPE program traded land for “universities” and “health clinics.”

The 2004 CARPE partner report of Conservation

International indicated simple goals had not been attained—less than 50% of the Mwamis had either been reached or supportive of the project and “at least” 300 children were directly attending education activities. A grand total of two typewriters and supplies were delivered to each of 8 UGADEC projects. (18) CI noted that Tayna had “enough infrastructure and equipment for land-use planning,” but as we would witness at the end of the road, there was nothing that could by any stretch of the imagination grant “university” status to TCCB.

In a sad indictment of priorities, 3000 human samples of fecal material were analyzed for worm infestations and compared against GORILLA samples. This study was done to protect the gorillas from human worm infestations and not the other way around, as any humanitarian might expect. ONLY the people who participated in the study were treated for worms. The scientific results “examined that the gorillas living closest to humans have the highest rates of infestation.” Never mind the humans!

CI specifically singled out DFGF-I as having “some staffing and equipment but this is insufficient for effective management.” (19)

It was in 2004 that the Mwami on the run sent correspondence after correspondence to DFGF-I and CI, pleading that someone, anyone, do something about the deplorable conditions at the reserve. (See Kong Three: The Mwami’s Tale: http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1911.) Meanwhile, CI reported enough money for “at least seven international conferences are (sic) attended by upper staff members.” (20) The CI report corroborates what our conservation expert told us about Congolese never being invited to attend international conferences. That privilege is reserved for the elite staff of the BINGOs and DINGOs.

How much money is spent on elite conferences for career specialists from the U.S. and Europe? Here’s how the money comes around, and comes back around.

In responses to a U.S. Congressional inquiry of September 2006, USAID outlined some conferences and expenditures. In FY 2005 there were 3,909 USAID personnel sent to 1,479 events; in FY 2006, there were 1,513 USAID personnel sent to 1,029 events. (21)

Some fourteen USAID people attended one week-long conference in Toronto on AIDS in the summer of 2006. USAID reported “estimated” travel costs at $75,000, conference fees at $14,000, and salary expenses of around $34,300. (22)

That’s $123,300 exclusively for USAID staff, at one posh conference, and there were 2,508 conferences attended by USAID personnel (2005-2006) all over the world. Then there are the thousands of technical, conservation, mapping and “humanitarian” conferences for other agencies, programs and business sectors like CARE, ESRI and GRASP—the Great Apes Survival Project.

In FY 2006 the total amount spent by the USAID and its agencies and offices on conferences—including general support, programming, staff salaries, travel and other associated costs—was $7,139,550; and in FY 2005 it was $8,939,525.(23)

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Georgianne Nienaber is an investigative environmental and political writer. She lives in rural northern Minnesota and South Florida. Her articles have appeared in The Society of Professional Journalists' Online Quill Magazine, the Huffington (more...)
 

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