Introduction
by Jeffrey Steinberg


On Dec. 1, 1996, former President George Bush gave an interview to {Parade} magazine, in which he stated: ``I don't want to be at the head table anymore. I care about being a good citizen. I don't join boards of directors, and I don't go into business deals. I've had every opportunity to join in putting a petrochemical plant in Kuwait, a chance to make money. I haven't done it. The way I make a living is giving speeches. Get paid a lot of money for giving a speech. No conflict of interest.''
This statement was an outright lie; a lie that Sir George Bush arranged to appear in the pages of a weekly newspaper insert that reaches millions of households in every part of the United States. George Bush does, indeed, have a very important foreign corporate affiliation: In May 1995, the Canada-based Barrick Gold Corp. created an international advisory board around the personal leadership of Bush, and Bush was designated ``honorary senior adviser'' to that board--a legal fiction to disguise the former President's active role as chief business developer for the company.
What, then, is Barrick Gold Corp.?

- The destruction of Africa -
It is understandable that Bush did not wish to advertise his ties to Barrick. The company is not only an important corporate element of the London-centered Club of the Isles and the British global raw materials cartel--a British link that might prove embarrassing to Sir George, at a point when Anglo-American relations remain at a low point, and when British propaganda organs are leading an all-out assault upon the U.S. Presidency. But, Barrick, along with the South Africa-based Anglo American Corp., is engaged in a strategic metals grab in Central Africa, which is being abetted by the greatest genocide per capita in modern times.
From April 1993, when Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, on behalf of London, launched the genocide of the Hutu majority in Rwanda, through to the ongoing invasion by the same Museveni-led forces in eastern Zaire, Central Africa and the Horn of Africa have been turned into a killing field. Local, British-sponsored ``countergangs'' have been unleashed to depopulate a region that possesses the world's richest strain of precious metal deposits, while a string of Club of the Isles metals cartels, including Barrick, moves in for the kill.
As you will read below, the invasion of eastern Zaire, by the combined armies of Rwanda and Uganda, which began in September 1996, coincided with the Barrick and Anglo American metal grabs in the very same area. The net result of the invasion, and the simultaneous launching of an ``internal'' rebellion by longtime British provocateur Laurent Kabila, was the depopulating of a string of camps that were holding Rwandan Hutu refugees. Thousands of those refugees were killed in the fighting between the British-backed invaders and French-supported Hutu guerrillas; at least another quarter of a million refugees were driven into the wilderness, to face death by disease and starvation; and another half a million fled back across the border into Rwanda, to face likely extermination at the hands of the Tutsi.
{EIR} first exposed this policy of genocide on Aug. 19. 1994, in a cover story titled ``The British Hand Behind the Horror in Rwanda.'' Then, on Oct. 28, 1994, in a {Special Report} titled ``The Coming Fall of the House of Windsor,'' we revealed the existence of the secretive Club of the Isles, the House of Windsor-led oligarchical institution centered upon a tightly knit alliance of European princely families, London-based financial and insurance houses, and food and raw materials cartels. The Club of the Isles in turn deploys the resources of the global environmentalist movement, headed by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund), and its funding arm, the 1001 Club, as a propaganda and paramilitary arm of their one-world ``New Dark Age'' agenda.
Under the WWF umbrella, the British Crown has built up a string of strategically located nature preserves and national parks, which serve as staging grounds for cross-border incursions, as training grounds for terrorist gangs, and as command posts for British ``former'' SAS commandos to direct the killings in every part of sub-Saharan Africa.
As we document below, in joining the advisory board to Barrick Gold, and throwing his political clout into facilitating Barrick's worldwide strategic metals grab, George Bush, has cast his lot with a collection of very unsavory characters, including Barrick's chairman, Peter Munk, and with the entire Canadian Bronfman gang.
Barrick and the South African Oppenheimer family's Anglo American Corp. are at the cutting edge of a Club of the Isles drive to recolonize a severely depopulated African continent, by busting up the post-colonial nation-states, beginning with Zaire; and then creating privately owned micro-states, in which what is left of the indigenous population is impressed into slavery. The novelist Joseph Conrad described these conditions graphically in his 1899 book {Heart of Darkness}. Unless the oligarchy is stopped, Bush and his friends intend to reimpose those conditions.

British-backed the mining companies are stealing Zaire's patrimony by Richard Freeman

When the forces of Uganda's President
Yoweri Museveni overran eastern Zaire in October 1996, under the guidance of Baroness Lynda Chalker, the head of Britain's Overseas Development Office, this military phase was the culmination of an invasion of Zaire which had been ongoing for the past three years: the theft of Zaire's wealth and patrimony. Zaire, as a nation, is being dismembered. Its various energy-rich provinces, including Shaba and Kivu, are being encouraged to form separate micro-states. Already, because of the economic dislocation forced on Zaire over the past seven years, most of the provinces act semi-autonomously from the central government; for example, Shaba province issues its own currency.
In the following report, we document some of the most important features of this genocidal looting operation.
On Sept. 21, 1996, a tiny Toronto, Canada-based raw materials company, Banro Resources Corp., obtained the concession to mine gold in Zaire's central-east province of Kivu. The rich concession starts in the town of Bukavu, and extends southward. Bukavu was the site of one of the major Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire, which was teeming with half-starved women and children. Banro needed this site cleared of people to begin its mining operations; the clearing started with Uganda's invasion of Zaire in mid-October. Banro appears to be a cutout for the Anglo American Corporation, which is the world's biggest mining company, and a key cog in the international oligarchy's Club of the Isles raw materials cartel.
In August 1996, Toronto-based Barrick Gold obtained a gold mining concession in Zaire's northeast province, Haut Zaire, which reportedly covers 83,000 square kilometers. The Hollinger Corp.-allied Barrick is chaired by Peter Munk, and its strategy is shaped by the international intelligence network of former U.S. President George Bush, who is honorary senior adviser to its international advisory board.
Also during 1996, the tiny Vancouver-based raw materials company Consolidated Eurocan, headed by international wheeler-dealer Adolf Lundin, began work on exploiting the Tenke-Fungurume copper-cobalt mines in Zaire's southernmost Shaba province, near the border with Zambia, which has the richest cobalt reserves in the world. Cobalt is a strategic metal, crucial in forming alloys with steel and other metals, giving them great strength and heat resistance. Some 40% of cobalt's use is in aircraft gas turbine engines, and 10% is in magnetic alloys. Consolidated Eurocan is purchasing the mining property in phases, for a quarter of a billion dollars, which is a ``song,'' for a property that could yield many tens of billions of dollars in revenues. Consolidated Eurocan is in a joint venture in this deal with Anglo American.
Simultaneously, over the past 18 months, the American-based, Canadian-run American Mineral Fields, of former DeBeers Diamond executive Jean-Raymond Boulle, has obtained the Kipushi zinc mines in Shaba province, one of the largest sources of zinc in the world; the Vancouver- and Cayman Islands-based Panorama International has obtained significant cobalt holdings in Shaba province; and, Zaire's diamond company, MIBA (Zaire is one of the three largest diamond producers in the world), has been thrown open to bidding and takeover by foreign firms.

- The `Second Great Scramble' -

When Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame, the Rwandan defense minister, recently called for a new Berlin Conference to set new borders for African states--referring to the 1884-85 Berlin Conference of the imperialist powers which ratified the national borders that are now in effect in Africa--he had in mind the fragmentation of Zaire into mini-states as a paradigm for all of Africa.
The first Berlin Conference occurred during what was called the ``Great Scramble,'' during the 1880s and 1890s. Imperialist Britain and France led the way, and were joined by Belgium, Italy, and Germany, in grabbing up the raw material wealth of Africa. The Berlin Conference codified the Congo, which included present-day Zaire, as the personal property of Belgium's King Leopold II. Leopold II worked the Congo like a plantation, with brutal methods. For example, Congolese Africans who did not meet their production quotas had their arms amputated.
This time around, the British are making a move to push the Belgians and French entirely out of Central Africa, and, at the same time, they don't want to have the expense of running a nation-state, an institution that they don't like anyway. Rather, they deploy the companies of their global raw materials cartel to buy up sections of a country. They keep the people needed to run the mining and related enterprises alive at subsistence levels, and the rest of the population is treated as useless eaters, left to starve or be butchered.
Driving the British actions this time, is another ``Great Scramble.'' The international financier oligarchy, grouped around the House of Windsor, knows that the world financial bubble--which they themselves created--cannot be sustained, and will burst. They are getting out of paper financial instruments and into hard commodities: precious metals, such as gold; strategic metals, such as cobalt and tantalum; base metals, such as copper and zinc; energy supplies; and increasingly scarce food supplies. They want to either own the physical assets, or, better still, own the mine production facility for these assets. As the price of the hard commodity asset goes up, the oligarchy makes super-profits. At the same time, they have finger-tip control over the minerals, food stuffs, and so on upon which human life depends. They plan to exercise a food- and raw materials-control dictatorship in a post-collapse world.
The international oligarchy already owns extensive raw materials holdings. But they now seek to obtain those holdings in Africa, Ibero-America, and Asia, which they don't control.
Mineral-rich Zaire is in their target sights. Zaire's mineral belt is located in the eastern and southern part of the country (see {{Figure 1}}). It is a crystalline belt that runs alongside the Great Rift, a geological fault running from the Jordan River Valley in the Middle East, south through the Gulf of Aqaba, through Central Africa (where Zaire is located), down to southern Africa.

- IMF, World Bank, financiers cut off credit -

Most of Zaire's raw materials holdings are owned by the state, and President Mobutu Sese Seko has resisted selling them to foreigners. A seven-year campaign, including a total credit and aid cutoff of Zaire, has been waged to force Mobutu to give in. At the center of the campaign has been the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the international banks, which are run by the same oligarchical forces that run the global raw materials cartel.
On June 29, 1960, Zaire obtained its independence from Belgium, although, as with many African countries, it was only a partial independence, because the countries were kept in economic backwardness. In the case of Zaire, in 1961, its first elected President, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated. Mobutu, who had been an Army general, was made President in 1965. In 1967, he declared that all the minerals in Zaire's subsoil belonged to Zaire, and nationalized the foreign mining holdings, which meant principally Belgium's two all-powerful companies, Union Miniere and Societe Generale. According to one source, ``The Belgians were so angry at Zaire that they took with them all their records and plans needed to mine.''
Despite difficulties, and while never enjoying true economic developments that would have brought a decent standard of living to Zaire's now 40 million people, Zaire nonetheless was able to harness and mine some of its immense raw materials wealth. A sample of what Zaire accomplished can be gleaned from the report of the {Minerals Yearbook}, published by the Bureau of the Mines of the U.S. Department of Interior (Vol. III). In 1988, among the world's raw materials mining countries, Zaire held the following rank, for the following commodities:

Cobalt -- world's largest producer and exporter Diamonds -- 2nd in the world
Copper -- 5th in the world
Tin -- 12th in the world
Zinc -- 20th in the world

Zaire also mined other commodities, such as barite, boron, magnesium, and gold. Because of historical ties, Zaire shipped a good amount of these goods to Belgium. In the 1960s, in order to run its mining operations, Zaire created the state-owned La Generale des Carrieres et des Mines du Zaire, which is known by its acronym, Gecamines. One of its other important state-owned companies was based in Kivu province, the Societe Miniere et Industrielle de Kivu, known by its acronym Sominki.
When Belgium granted Zaire independence, it bequeathed to Zaire about $5 billion in debt, which Belgium had run up. By the late 1980s, Zaire's debt stood at about $8 billion--a large debt for a small economy based on raw materials and food, but no manufacturing. Zaire got further and further behind on its debt payments, and finally defaulted on most of it in the early 1990s.
This was the excuse that the banks wanted. They demanded that Zaire pay the debt, but also, joined by the World Bank and others, demanded that Zaire ``democratize'' its government and, especially, privatize its state-owned raw materials mining concerns. Privatization had three components: slashing the social services provided to miners by law, laying off half the workforce at Gecamines, and selling more than half of the different properties of Gecamines and Sominki to foreign investors. Secessionist movements were started in Shaba province; the net effect would be to dismantle the Zairean state.
The banks organized an international credit cutoff, meaning that Zaire could not get the money to purchase mining machinery, spare parts, and other essential imports. The West had always denied Zaire technology transfer, as long as the raw materials wealth was primarily in Zairean hands. Around 1993, the World Bank and IMF declared a credit cutoff to Zaire. A senior source at the U.S. Geological Survey reported on Nov. 27, 1996, that the World Bank and its loan guarantee agency, the Multi-Lateral Investment Guarantee Corporation (MIGA), recommended to Zaire that it would not get new money until it agreed to ``modernize,'' that is, privatize, its mining operations, by selling off sections of state holdings.
At about the same time, the governments of Belgium, France, and the United States cut off all official government aid to Zaire.
Currency warfare was unleashed in 1990, and has continued to this day. At one point, the Zairean currency, the zaire, depreciated from a few new zaires to the dollar, to 3,250 to the dollar. This devaluation meant that Zaire earned almost nothing for its foreign exports.
As the U.S. Geological Survey source explained, ``The economy went down the tubes. Mining production today is 10% of what it was in the late 1980s. Because of the economic dislocation, most of the provinces are operating on their own.'' Indeed, between 1987 and 1993, cobalt production fell 82%, and copper production fell 90%. As a result, exports of minerals and metals, which accounted for three-quarters of Zaire's foreign exchange earnings, dried up. Zaire's ability to service the debt, should it choose to do so, disappeared.
The conditions of life for the population worsened, in a country in which living conditions were already bad. In 1990, only 39% of Zaireans had access to safe drinking water. Infrastructure is virtually nonexistent. In 1994, Zaire's infant mortality rate was 111 deaths per 1,000 live births, i.e., an 11% infant death rate, more than 13 times that in the United States. In 1992, the last year for which figures were available, 335,000 Zairean children under the age of five died. In 1994, life expectancy in Zaire was 53 years, lower than in 1990.
Under this assault, President Mobutu opened the door to privatizing Zaire's patrimony, although still not at a rate fast enough to satisfy the World Bank vultures.

- The corporate invasion -
At the heart of the invasion of Zaire's mining properties, are the Canadian mining companies and the Oppenheimer family-run Anglo American Corp., which often takes the Canadian companies under its wing in joint ventures. The Canadian mining companies started an invasion of Zaire in 1994, which reached a flood tide in 1996. This was the opening shot of the ``Second Great Scramble.'' The Canadian mining companies represent forward beachheads for the Commonwealth-centered British Empire (see {EIR Special Report,} May 24, 1996, ``The Sun Never Sets on the New British Empire''). Behind the companies, lurks the shadowy presence of the Oppenheimer family's Anglo American Corp., the linchpin of the Club of the Isles' raw materials cartelization strategy.
We look at three examples. First, the takeover of Sominki, in Kivu province, by Toronto-based Banro Resource Corp.
Zaire has three eastern provinces: Haut Zaire, in the northeast; Kivu, in the center-east; and Shaba (formerly Katanga), in the southeast. Kivu province is second in richness of raw materials, after Shaba. The leading mining concern in Kivu is the Societe Miniere et Industrielle de Kivu, or Sominki. Sominki was formed in 1976 as an amalgamation of nine companies that had been operating in Kivu province since the early 1900s. It operates 47 mining concessions, encompassing an area of 10,271 square kilometers.
In 1996, Banro Corp. of Toronto bought 36% of Sominki, raising some of its money for the purchase by floating shares in Singapore. Banro was previously a small financial institution, with little apparent aptitude for mining. The impression is that it was reconfigured as a company for the special purpose of this purchase, perhaps acting as a front for someone. (Who that someone is, will become clear.)
Another large chunk of Sominki was bought by the Belgium-based company Mines D'or du Zaire, or MDDZ. Owning 60% of MDDZ is Cluff Mining Co. of London, and controlling 65% of Cluff is Anglo American Corp., the world's largest mining company and a key component of the Club of the Isles.
On Sept. 21, 1996, Banro and MDDZ announced their merger, with Banro selling its shares to MDDZ. The new Banro-MDDZ company consolidated a 72% stake in Sominki, while the government of Zaire holds 28%. The Banro-MDDZ entity has announced that it plans to acquire that 28% from the government. The overall enterprise is essentially a vehicle for Anglo American.
According to various Banro corporate reports and news releases, Banro was anxious to get its mining operations started as quickly as possible. However, the Sominki mining zone that Banro acquired started in the town of Bukavu, the center for the major camp for Rwandan refugees who had fled to Zaire, with nearly a million people. To get mining started, the entire zone would require clearing. Suddenly, as Uganda launched its invasion of eastern Zaire, near Bukavu, in mid-October, there was firing on the Bukavu refugee camp, supposedly against ``Hutu rebels'' who were hiding there. The military attack on the camp forced hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee Kivu province, back to Rwanda. But, who did the firing? While a clear answer is not forthcoming, it may have involved portions of the newly acquired Sominki apparatus itself. For, in acquiring Sominki, Banro did not just acquire a company; it acquired the effective governmental structure of the entire Kivu province.
According to a Banro corporate press release, ``Sominki owns an extensive infrastructure which includes repair shops, machine shops, electrical shops and a large fleet of Land Rover vehicles. In addition, it operates six hydroelectric sites, a number of air strips, and 1,000 kilometers of roads. Sominki is virtually self-sufficient. The company has about 5,000 employees.'' The release added, ``In fact, Sominki is {the de facto government providing all the essential services for the Kivu Province}'' (emphasis added).
Banro/Anglo American effectively stole a good chunk of the government of Kivu. This is the British model for the Second Great Scramble. As a mining company, Sominki has its own explosives supplies and access to weapons, i.e., it has the capability to carry out such an attack, or is in a commanding position to influence, those who fired on the refugee camps.
The second example, is that of American Mineral Fields (AMF), which is based in Hope, Arkansas, but run from Canada. AMF has acquired from Gecamines the Kipushi copper-zinc mine, one of the world's premier copper-zinc mines, located in Shaba province (copper and zinc are often mined together). The Belgians developed Kipushi and began mining in 1925. At its peak in 1988, the Kipushi mine produced 143,000 tons of zinc, and 43,000 tons of copper. Its total known and probable reserves stand at 22.6 million tons, grading 2.1% copper and 13.8% zinc.
AMF is the brainchild of its owner, Jean-Raymond Boulle, a former executive for DeBeer's Diamonds. In turn, AMF signed an agreement with Anglo American, which allows Anglo American to invest up to $100 million in any AMF venture in Shaba province, representing up to a 50% equity stake in the venture, including the Kipushi mine. Once again, ubiquitous Anglo American shows up.
The third example, is that of tiny Consolidated Eurocan of Vancouver. In 1996, Eurocan finalized a deal that will allow it to purchase from the state mining company Gecamines, a 55% interest in the Tenke-Fungurume copper-cobalt deposits. Eurocan will pay a quarter of a billion dollars over 72 months for its stake, but the stake is worth potentially tens of billions of dollars in revenues. According to a Eurocan spokesman on Dec. 18, Tenke-Fungurume, located in Shaba province, represents the largest operating cobalt reserves in the world. It has geological reserves of 222 million tons of copper and cobalt, with potential reserves of 1 billion tons.
Consolidated Eurocan is owned and run by Canadian wheeler-dealer Adolf Lundin. One U.S. mining source reported, ``There is no way that Eurocan can develop the mines on its own. It doesn't have the capabilities. It will have to sell off shares to established mining companies, most likely Iskor and Gencor, to work the properties.'' Iskor and Gencor are both South African companies, and part of the British raw materials cartel.
Thus, these Canadian companies, in some cases stalking horses for Anglo American, are gobbling up Zaire's gold, copper, zinc, and cobalt reserves.
Add to this, the Barrick Gold purchase of a huge concession in Haut Zaire, and the fact that there is now discussion of opening up the major government-owned diamond mining company, Societe Miniere de Bakwanga (MIBA), to foreign investors. MIBA accounts for 40% of Zaire's official diamond exports. The remaining 60% are developed by artisanal miners, i.e., prospectors, who then sell the gems to ``Israeli diamond buyers and to [international gem dealer] Maurice Templesman,'' according to a knowledgeable source. The Belgian-born Tempelsman, who squired around Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis before she died, is an international tycoon. He is former president of the U.S. Africa Society, a group that is influential in the shaping of U.S. government Africa policy.

- The Anglo American paradigm -

Anglo American Corp. offers a foretaste of how a world without nation-states, run by the financier oligarchs, would operate. It was formed in 1917. Financing for, and investments into Anglo American and its associated companies, came from the Rothschild bank and J.P. Morgan. The South Africa-based Anglo American, through cross-ownership shares, owns DeBeers Centenary and DeBeers Consolidated (which together control the Central Selling Organization, that markets and controls 80% of the world's diamonds), and the Luxembourg-based Minerals and Resources Corp. (Minorco) mineral holding company. In South Africa alone, Anglo American owns more than 1,600 companies, where it is the world's leading gold producer, the world's leading platinum producer, the world's leading diamond producer, and much else.
The Oppenheimer family runs the Anglo American Corp. empire. Cambridge University-educated Harold Oppenheimer was chairman until 1982, and still reportedly makes all important decisions. His son Nicholas is the leading family member in the company. The Oppenheimer family members are in the 1001 Club, the tightly knit, elite society that brings together oligarchs, financiers, raw materials company executives, and billionaires to coordinate strategy worldwide. Barrick Gold chairman Peter Munk is a member of the Club, as are many other heads of the world's top mining companies. The Club is closely intertwined with the World Wide Fund for Nature of Britain's Prince Philip.
Though the Oppenheimers publicly professed to be critics of South African apartheid, they fundamentally supported and benefitted mightily from its existence, which allowed them to run their mines as slave-labor plantations.
But the Anglo American Corp. empire extends to every mineral-producing country in Africa and the world, and it continues to grow. In October 1996, Anglo upped to 26% its ownership stake in the London-headquartered, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)-centered Lonrho raw materials company, which had been run by Tiny Rowland. In turn, Lonrho owns a 30% ownership stake in the Ashanti Mines in Ghana, which represents the richest operating goldfield outside of South Africa. Anglo American has been trying to purchase the state-owned CVRD company of Brazil, which controls the Gran Carajas mining project in Brazil. With everything from iron and copper to precious minerals, some estimates put its worth at more than $1 trillion. According to one report, Anglo American is trying to buy what remains of Zaire's Gecamines, after everything else has been sold off.
But the full global reach of Anglo American only becomes clear when viewed in conjunction with the holdings of the London-based Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ), the world's second largest raw materials producing company. RTZ was formed in the 1870s by China opium trader Hugh Matheson, who was a principal in the Hongkong-based firm Jardine Matheson. The Rothschilds have a significant stake in the company. Queen Elizabeth II is also a significant investor in RTZ. Anglo American and RTZ combined control a stunning percentage of the Western world's most important raw materials (see {Table 1}).
The Anglo American-RTZ combination anchors the House of Windsor's raw materials cartel. {EIR} showed in its Sept. 15, 1995 issue, that the House of Windsor cartel controls, overall, 59.5% of world gold production, 78% of world platinum production, 25% of copper, 55% of alumina bauxite, 64% of cobalt, 42% of manganese, 39% of chromium, and so on.
Thus, Anglo American and the Canadian companies integrated into the process of taking over Zaire, are out to extend the power of the raw materials cartel. If they succeed, there will be no nation-state: Only a portion of the population, that permitted to slave for the mining companies' operations, will remain; the rest will be written off. As is shown by the treatment of the Rwandan refugees in Kivu province, who were either starved, butchered, or simply moved away to make way for mineral production, the mining companies do not care about human lives, only about their profits and their geopolitical control.



`Heart of Darkness' -- A glimpse at colonialism in action

by Linda de Hoyos

On Aug. 18, as the Rwandan Patriotic Front began its armed attacks on the camps of Rwandan refugees in Zaire, the London {Observer} published an op-ed by Norman Stone, which went straight to the heart of British policy for Africa. Citing the horrific strife in Rwanda and Burundi, Stone bluntly stated: ``For re-imperialization now begins to make sense again, and the Europeans would be in a good position to push through some sort of international mandate. This was what happened over a century ago, and you can argue that the problems of Africa were made infinitely worse than they needed to be because the process was brought prematurely to an end. The world today has a ghostly similarity to that of a century ago.''
Many Africans who remember the pre-independence days would not agree with Stone's exultation of colonial rule. The reality of imperialism was not highly publicized, however; even as late as the 1960s, on the eve of independence for most countries, life expectancy in most African countries was generally under 30 years of age. One writer who had a first-hand view of colonialism and depicted it was the Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad. In 1889, Conrad traveled the Congo River as master of the ship {Otago.} In 1899, Conrad wrote about his journey through the Belgian Congo, in {Heart of Darkness.} Belgian colonial rule, which was run directly by and for the Belgian monarchy, was notoriously harsh. Conrad relates that the porters for a group of ``pilgrims'' were not given food each day, but handed a nine-inch piece of wire, which they were supposed to exchange for food with area Africans--a form of payment by which they starved. Under colonial rule, the Congo River Basin had been turned into no less than a giant concentration camp, in which people were worked to death, as Conrad described:

- An `Inferno' -

``A continuous noise of the rapids above hovered over this scene of inhabited devastation. A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants.... They were building a railway....
``A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them rhythmically clinking.... All their meagre breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with ... complete, deathlike indifference....
``At last I got under the trees. My purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment; but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near, and an uninterrupted, uniform, rushing noise filled the mournful stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious sound--as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had suddenly become audible.
``Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.
``They were dying slowly--it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now--nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air--and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young--almost a boy--but you know with them it's hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede's ships's biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held--there was no other movement and no other glance.
``Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence. While I stood horror-struck, one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees, and went off on all-fours towards the river to drink. He lapped out of his hand, then sat up in the sunlight, crossing his shins in front of him, and after a time let his woolly head fall on his breastbone.
``I didn't want any more loitering in the shade, and I made haste towards the station.''

1.6 million dead: `Just a drop in the bucket'

by Linda de Hoyos


{EIR} estimates that since October 1990, when the Ugandan Army under the rubric of the ``Rwandan Patriotic Front'' first invaded Rwanda, at least 1.6 million people have died in the wars that the British blueprint for East Africa has instigated. Another 2 million people have been uprooted and displaced, although this is a very conservative figure.
This count is derived as follows:

1990 invasion of Rwanda by Uganda:
150,000-200,000 killed;
One million displaced to the Nyacyonga refugee camp outside Kigali. There are reports of large-scale murders carried out in the north at that time.

1993 attempted coup against Burundi government of President Melchior Ndayaye:
100,000 killed.

1993-96 continuing civil war in Burundi: 150,000-200,000 killed.

1994 invasion of Rwanda by the Rwandan Patriotic Front:
1 million slaughtered in mass melee between Hutus and Tutsis;
2 million displaced and forced to flee the country; 200,000 refugees die of cholera and disease at refugee camps in Zaire in summer 1994.

1996 Ugandan-Rwandan-Burundi invasion of Zaire: Totals unknown, however:

-- 600,000 refugees remain unaccounted for inside Zaire. It is not known how many of these are now dead, but in early November, aid workers estimated that up to 10,000 would die per day if they were left without assistance. Those remaining in the Zairean bush, have received very little, if any, assistance so far.

-- 1,000 refugees have been slaughtered in Burundi by the military, according to Amnesty International and the United Nations. This does not include those killed in fighting between the military and Forces for the Defense of Democracy.

-- There are continuing reports in the Western media, such as the Associated Press on Nov. 21 and the Belgian {De Standaard} on Nov. 25, that forces under the nominal command of Laurent Kabila and the Rwandan Armed Forces culled out men and boys from the refugees before their return to Rwanda, and also in Zairean cities and towns under their control.
In total, the imperial land grab of East Africa by George Bush's Barrick Gold et al., even excluding the invasion of Zaire, has cost the lives of 1.6 million Burundians and Rwandans, out of a total population for both countries of only 13 million. In per-capita terms, this would be the equivalent of a slaughter of 31 million Americans.

- The Malthusian cover story -
It has become a standard ruse among the practitioners of mass murder in Africa to justify their policies with the Malthusian myth that, since Africa has too many people anyway, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans are part of a necessary ``solution'' to the ``overpopulation problem.'' Such claims were heard in July 1994, for instance, by the British case officer for East Africa, Baroness Lynda Chalker, Minister of Overseas Development, the self-identified mentor of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Speaking to the Royal Society of London on July 11, 1994, as Hutu refugees were dying of cholera in Goma at the rate of 20,000 a day, Chalker declared: ``The density of population in Rwanda is one reason why the scale of that tragedy is so enormous.''
Similar sentiments are standardly voiced at the U.S. State Department. Dick Cornelius, of the State Department Office of Population, Refugees, and Migration, told a journalist in July 1994:
``The people dying at the moment are not the main issue. I mean, 50,000 people dying of cholera is alarming--but on the grand scale of things, looking at the impact on population in Africa and the region, it's a drop in the bucket.''
Then, on Dec. 17, 1996, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth laid the blame for the war in East Africa on ``overpopulation.'' Speaking to a conference sponsored by the Center for National Policy Wirth declared:
``Population pressure in Rwanda underlaid a great part of the problems that were faced in the conflict between the Tutsis and the Hutus, there were no places to let off steam--you know, you had eight and a half children per woman being born in a country that was the most cultivated, intensely cultivated--in all of Africa.''
The agricultural cultivation of the country, it should be noted, isn't a problem for Rwandans, but it {is} a problem for the mining operations now seeking to control the entire Great Rift Valley. Wirth did not mention the name Barrick Gold, but he did indicate why ``population'' is a problem for Barrick Gold et al.:
``If you ever flew over Rwanda, you see that every inch of land is cultivated. Burma and China pale in comparison to Rwanda; no matter what the political problems are, the fact is the population of Rwanda will double in 25 years, where are you going to put these people? How are you going to feed them? We can discuss the political problems all you want, but what do you do next?|... There are too many people competing for too few resources.''

The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in The Executive Intelligence Review. It is made available here with the permission of The Executive Intelligence Review. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to The Executive Intelligence Review.

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