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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Keith Harmon Snow has spent the last six years researching war, plunder and genocide in Central Africa. Since 2004 he has traveled on five extensive missions into the most remote regions of Central Africa, through four CARPE landscapes. Setting off to expose the Congo Basin Forest Partnership negotiated by Colin Powell, he has worked with conservationists, UN peacekeepers, Congolese soldiers, refugees, rogue militias and mercenaries of all stripes. His reportage has won four Project Censored awards, and he is published by Z Magazine, Toward Freedom, Guns and Butter (KPFA), National Public Radio, and others. This story is grounded in extensive field research and interviews.
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