American NGO involved in slaughter of Indigenous people to ‘protect’ a Congolese park

Teresita Dussart
October 31st

The slogan "Black lives matter" does not seem to apply to blacks in Africa. At least not if the lives of these people are perceived as an obstacle to the realisation of a totalitarian ideal of nature conservation, or even an obstacle to the concretisation of less avowed strategic interests. This is what emerges from a report by the NGO Minority Rights Group (MRG) published in October 2020. Its title is eloquent: “To Purge the Forest by Force: Organized violence against Batwa in Kahuzi-Biega National Park” (PNKB). According to the NGO's April 2022 press release. “[the report] documents a three-year campaign of organized violence by park authorities to expel Batwa from their lands, underwritten by the German and US governments and the global conservation organization, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Joint contingents of park guards and Congolese Army soldiers killed at least 20 Batwa, group-raped at least 15 women, and forcibly displaced hundreds more after their villages were burnt to the ground.”

Strangely, this indictment describing dantesque scenes of crimes against humanity was covered with a veil of modesty by the mainstream press. The notable exception was RFI, which in its English edition, questions the merits of a possible financial contribution from the French Development Agency (AFD) to NGOs complicit in these crimes. The Batwa are a Pygmy minority who have lived for millennia in one of these emblematic reserves of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The report is also difficult to find through search engines. No negative article accompanies the mention “Wildlife Conservation Society” nor its acronym, “WCS”. It takes prior knowledge of the situation to track down stories that relate to these facts, which is understandable when one knows the identities of WCS's major donors, their political exposure, and the tools they have in matters of censorship and control of information.

FranceSoir has already provided an exclusive on the reality of this multinational conservation company as part of a field survey carried out in another territory managed by WCS, the Okapis Wildlife Reserve (RFO) in Ituri Province. But, in regard to the RFO, if we're disturbed by the economic asphyxiation to which the population is subjected, their endemic poverty and the total absence of any investments by the WCS to justify the donations received, the report of MRG on this other reserve located 400 km further south evokes a scenario which calls for the term “crime against humanity”.

 

A Batwa home, burnt and destroyed.

If the word Batwa were replaced by "Ukrainian", the people who participated in the events reported by MRG would be brought before the International Court of Justice. For the time being, the only body referred to is the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. The Batwa massacre took place in three phases, according to the MRG report. A first phase in July-August 2019, a second on July 23, 2021, and an extension in November-December 2021.

“Almost exactly two years after the July-August 2019 operation, on 23 July 2021, park guards and soldiers again targeted and destroyed Batwa villages inside the PNKB. The author had been in the final phases of drafting this report when frantic calls came from Batwa leaders and community members, describing scenes of carnage. In the following days and weeks, the research team was able to document a devastatingly violent joint assault on three Batwa villages inside the PNKB by park guards and soldiers who opened fire on unarmed civilians and burned the villages down entirely.”

The report very often evokes the concept of organised violence: “The field research immediately following the attacks of July, November and December 2021 gathered a preponderance of physical evidence demonstrating that park authorities and soldiers targeted Batwa civilian sites inside the PNKB in acts of organized violence in which unarmed Batwa were killed and villages were burned to the ground, with a chillingly similar modus operandi to that which was employed in July-August 2019. Acts of violence undertaken in subsequent operations progressively escalated, becoming more brutal and gratuitous over time...involving multiple instances of group rape, mutilation of victims, and the taking of Batwa body parts as trophies.”

The ultimate objective of this violence is the expulsion of the Batwa: “The overwhelming physical evidence gathered by the research team and the harrowing accounts of survivors and eyewitnesses, as well as interviews conducted with park guards and soldiers who participated in attacks, crucially demonstrate that the PNKB—despite denials on the part of park authorities—is indeed actively engaged in a program of forced expulsion targeting Batwa civilians living on their ancestral lands inside its perimeter.”

“International support from German and US government agencies, conservation NGOs like Wildlife Conservation Society, and private military contractors like Maisha (Israeli) represent a crucial part of the program of forced expulsion”. The reference to Germany is aimed at the Kreditantstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), a German credit institution very involved in conservation in Africa. Where the American WCS is, KfW is never far away. The two institutions share the idea that humans are a form of pollution and that good conservation requires clearing them out.

Sanctioned violence against local populations took off from 2015, when Warren Buffet and his son Howard G. Buffet declared “all-out war on poaching in Africa”. To do this, Howard began to buy helicopters and a whole series of heavy armaments to put an end to "eco-criminals" in Africa, even if they were rural families who survived by hunting. After raging in Tanzania, the attention of Warren Buffet's second son quickly focused on the Great Lakes area, particularly the DRC. 2014-2015 marks a before and after in conservation. From this moment scientific conservation disappears, to make way for militarised conservation. The resulting doctrine of the expulsion of humans through terror permeates environmental multinationals, especially since checks are written in the hundreds of millions or even billions.

Moreover, as revealed in the columns of this outlet, their fanaticism is not exactly disinterested. WCS-USAID in Epulu is completely obsessed with the Muchacha gold mine. Promised at the time of ex-president Joseph Kabila to an American company (as an authorised source informed us) the mine was finally awarded to a Chinese company. Americans have since clung to what they think is owed to them.

Militarisation means training and arming. “Park guards described receiving special ‘refresher’ combat training from a contingent of what they referred to as ‘white mercenaries’.” This training involves the use of “heavy weapons such as mortars—weeks before those heavy weapons were used to target Batwa civilian sites in the PNKB.,” reports MRG.

On the use of mortars, we read: “...300 Batwa community members...were in Bugamanda when the [note: nerve center for PNKB pygmies], July-August 2019 operation began, describing an ambush in which a large contingent of park guards and soldiers opened fire with rifles, shelled the village with an estimated 20 mortar bombs.” One of the witnesses quoted in the report said: “remember my children crying as they went back into our destroyed home, they were devastated. [...] But it wasn’t just our house. They burned all the homes here...”

These weapons and training were and continue to be paid for by WCS. This was done, moreover, in the context of an international violation of the arms embargo imposed by the Security Council (at the request of the United States, precisely) on the sale and import of arms to the DRC. What the MRG report does not say, but which we were able to observe on the ground in Epulu, is that the military trainers of WCS, not only take care of the military training, the choice and the importation of weapons , but even the selection of rangers. These eco-guards come from the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN). It is a special force, placed under the supervision of the Ministry of the Environment, and it is armed.

ICCN maintains close proximity with major conservation NGOs, including the WCS, the main manager of Congolese parks and reserves. Extremely corrupt, a source inside the force explaied to us that of the WCS 's few items of expenditure, the utterly corrupt ICCN would be the main one. In fact, the WCS is the ICCN's true boss.

And WCS does not abandon its soldiers. The commander in charge of controlling the rapid intervention units, the elite ICCN unit, during the Batwa massacre, was Innocent Mburanumwe. He arrived at PNKB after working as deputy director of Virunga National Park (the most famous reserve in the world, for its great apes, near the city of Goma, also under the management of WCS). In 2019, Mburanumwe was accused of raping and leaving a 15-year-old girl pregnant, but not before trying to murder her with a gun. A complaint was filed with the Military Court of North Kivu, and yet it was deemed more useful to move him to the PNKB in 2020. Concomitant with his arrival in this park, rape has become a recurring weapon of terror (though this could be a coincidence).

Since 2022, Innocent has been leading the ICCN in the RFO. Its offices sit side-by-side with the Site Chief for the WCS portion, ex-Lieutenant Colonel Mike Nicholls. Following the revelations of FranceSoir, Nicholls was removed from office on October 25. WCS is well aware of Innocent's past but maintains that “we can work with him because he is not too corrupt”, as one of the leaders of WCS told the author of this article.

In response to the allegations, the ICCN eventually issued a report, which can be found on its official website, denying the accusations outright. Lawyers working for human rights NGOs have since been subjected to various threats and intimidation. The WCS for its part has doubled down on its denials, refused any form of self-criticism, maintained its militarisation of conservation and given itself since 2022 to a policy of economic strangulation. This involves erecting obstacles to all NGOs attempting to gain access and provide aid to the populations in the territories that it claims to govern. The WCS continues to beg for billions in handouts, and the most incredible thing is that its friends continue to oblige them.

 

 

The Batwa people.

Source: https://www.francesoir.fr/politique-monde/ong-americaine-proche-du-parti-democrate-impliquee-dans-un-dossier-de-crime-de-lese