The truth behind the cannibals of Congo (Independent)

[bobthedrummer]

Eliza Griswold discovers how an astonishing story became even more chilling then claimed.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=505078

[mmm]

1. Important subject; too bad the author can't write worth a damn.

I find the author's jumbled writing style extremely
irritating.

[seemslikeadream]

2. Cannibals massacring pygmies: claim

By James Astill in Nairobi
January 10 2003

Marauding rebels are massacring and eating pygmies in the dense forests of north-east Congo, according to United Nations officials who are investigating allegations of cannibalism in Ituri province, where fighting between several rebel groups has displaced about 150,000 people in the past month.

Many of the refugees tell of rebel fighters capturing and butchering pygmies, Manoddje Mounoubai, spokesman for the UN ceasefire monitoring mission in Congo, said on Wednesday.


Ituri's forest-dwelling pygmy tribes have been caught between opposing groups supporting the government and Ugandan-backed rebel groups in the last battles of Congo's four-year civil war. The two Ugandan-backed movements routinely enslave pygmies to forage for forest food and prospect for minerals, a UN official said.

Hunters returning empty-handed were killed and eaten.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/09/1041990047245.html

[DulceDecorum]

3. Eliza Griswold

appears to be a New York based poet who has missed her calling as an author of soap operas. In a few more years, we hear her name being bandied about in the same category as Judith Miller, Jack Kelley, Jason Blair, Inigo Gilmore, and others of that ilk.

She seems to turn up around those places where Private Military Companies (mercenaries) are operating and it would appear that her mission is to dehumanize the locals in the eyes of the American taxpayer.

Twice this year we have heard the term cannibal used.
First it was in reference to the president of Equatorial Guinea whom the US wishes to depose.
Today it is in reference to the peoples of the Congo who ALSO just so happen to sitting atop incredible mineral wealth.

In all my years, I have NEVER met ANY western journalist who could or even would speak with the local Africans to obtain information. The western journalists always go to Africa with their story already written and soon head to Nairobi to sit at the New Stanley or the Norfolk Hotel where they corroborate each other's stories.

[seemslikeadream]

4. What do you think of James Astill?

James Astill

Merlin Media Award


James Astill began his career in journalism as a theatre critic for the Japanese press, while completing postgraduate studies in Tokyo. After working for the Daily Telegraph in Indonesia and London, he moved to Kenya, to report for the Guardian and the Economist. During three years in Africa, he has reported from over 20 countries, including seven wars. He has written extensively on the Democratic Republic of Congo’s little-reported civil war, spending weeks on foot in the east of the country to expose the humanitarian consequences of the crisis. His film highlighting a massacre in Bunia, Ituri province, recently aired on BBC2’s Newsnight.



Sudan's stolen children

James Astill in Ed Daien, Sudan
Sunday March 3, 2002

As the Arab horseman thundered towards him, six-year-old Wol Bol feared for his goats. But when he was swept up across the raider's saddle, the little Dinka boy really got scared.
Slapping his face suddenly, Wol shows how it bounced against the horse's belly, as he was carried north through Sudan into slavery.

Wol tells the next two years as a graphic narrative of beatings and abuse. But, here in Ed Daein, the slavery capital of Sudan, it is a familiar story. The southern Dinka tribe can name more than 14,000 children abducted by Arabs in the past decade; many will have passed through this dusty, cattle-town.

more
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,661162,00.html

James Astill in Nairobi
Wednesday May 14, 2003
The Guardian

France promised to send a relief force to Bunia in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo yesterday as 625 UN peacekeepers and about 8,000 civilians sheltered in two UN compounds.
Unidentified rebels who seized control of the town on Monday after a week of inter-tribal fighting continued marauding through the streets and fired random shots outside the compounds.

Meanwhile, Africa analysts have been castigating the UN for failing to foresee the bloodbath predicted since Uganda agreed last year to withdraw its troops from Bunia.

Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch said: "This is an appalling response by the international community. The UN knew this was going to happen, yet they've been completely overwhelmed.

"The UN has to reinforce immediately."

The fighting around Bunia exemplifies many aspects of Congo's civil war, estimated to have killed up to 4.7m in the past four and half years.

more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,955454,00.html


James Astill, writing for Scotsman on 24 November 2003, says, "British and Afghan officials in Kabul privately complain that their efforts have been badly compromised by the US’s ongoing military campaign against the Taleban and al-Qaeda."

" The US employs local warlords to prosecute its war, including many allegedly involved in opium production. US special forces in southern Hilmand province last week told The Scotsman that they routinely patrol through opium fields, but had no orders to interfere," he says.

The warlords, who patronize the processing labs in the north and poppy crops in the south, are the ones that have corrupted the entire landscape to continue with their drug business.

It is a super-empire, overshadowing anything else that exists in Afghanistan. Warlords double as drug barons and, in turn, serve as minor functionaries for greater drug czars.


http://pakistantimes.net/2004/01/28/scoop.htm

Child rebels raise fears of a massacre

Up to 5 000 child fighters have been encircled by Sudanese and Ugandan troops in southern Sudan, in readiness for an all-out assault on the cult-linked rebel army

JAMES ASTILL

Nairobi. April 22, 2002 - With the abducted and apparently brainwashed children violently resisting efforts to negotiate, the United Nations children's agency, Unicef, warned of a possible massacre. "These are indoctrinated children who believe they have to fight to the death; neither Ugandan nor Sudanese soldiers are likely to feel too sorry for them," Nils Kastburg, Unicef's director of emergency programmes, said: "It is proving impossible to reach them, and we're getting desperate."

The joint offensive against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a brutal Ugandan rebel group largely composed of abducted children and led by a self-declared spiritual medium who claims supernatural powers, began a few weeks ago.

After fleeing their four main camps on the eastern bank of the White Nile in southern Sudan, the 7 000 rebels divided into several groups.

more
http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/0/dad442d3cf7687e9c1256bad003060b0?OpenDocument

[gottaB]

5. The evidence for atrocities in the DRC is compelling

I hear what you're saying about Western journalists, however, I believe atrocities have been committed in the DRC, including the use of cannibalism to terrorize people.


Human Rights Watch:

http://hrw.org/doc/?t=africa&c=congo


Amnesty International:

http://web.amnesty.org/pages/cod-040803-background_1-eng


Follow the links to the tragedy. You will need a strong stomach to actually look at the photos:

http://www.un.int/drcongo


Another site with photographic documentation and extensive news coverage of genocide in the DRC from Anglophone and Francophone sources--Disturbing Images. Please use discretion:

http://www.nkolo-mboka.com/genocide.html


A condemnation of cannibalism by RCD:

http://www.congorcd.org/statements/011603.htm


Ituri Delegates tell UN of cannibalism, other war crimes in DRC:

http://www.un.org/apps/news/storyAr.asp?NewsID=7160&Cr=DR&Cr1=Congo

UNIFEM

http://www.womenwarpeace.org/drc/drc.htm


If you only follow one of these links, make it the last one, to UNIFEM.

[Judi Lynn]

6. It's going to take anyone a long time

of intense studying to gain any real sense of what he/she is actually seeing in photos, or reading. There are a lot of people at play in propaganda. People are being told and shown tricks, and most likely don't have any first hand knowledge of these subjects.

Your best bet is to engage common sense, and invest some time thinking and doing research for yourself.

This means you don't jump to the conclusion the writer of the first article you read tells you is the god's truth. Stay open as long as it takes until you believe you know what's happening.

I've got a lot of work ahead before I have any clue about this. I do know I'm going to remember that people have left links I didn't have time to read to articles indicating there are a lot of wealthy Americans connected to companies who are ALL very involved in wanting control of that area. _{George H. W. Bush} is one of them. Maybe a DU'er who knows more will show up and shed some light here.

On one hand, the author wrote, concerning the "pygmy":

The story, as I've heard it, is that he watched a group of rebel soldiers cook and eat his family in 2002: "They even sprinkled salt on the flesh as they ate, as if cannibalism was all very natural to them," he said at the time.

Yet, in the same story,

I ask Amuzati exactly what he saw in the clearing the day his family was massacred.

"They were cutting them the way they cut meat," he tells me. Amuzati watched as his mother, Mutandi, his younger sister, Salam, his older brother, Mangbulu, and his nephew, 5- or 6-year-old Zipoa, were dismembered by rebel soldiers.

Amuzati says he never saw anyone eaten, although he's certain that's what happened after he ran off into the jungle.

Every time his story is repeated he says, it gets more lurid. For pygmies, who occupy the lowest rung on DRC's social scale, Amuzati has become a hero.

Thanks to his newfound fame, he was flown to the capital Kinshasa to meet President Joseph Kabila. He loved the city; people outnumbered trees. He fell in with a group of prostitutes he calls his girlfriends.

Is this condescending, or WHAT? Maybe it's not the "pygmy" who is having trouble with the truth.

Remember the Incubators as told by Nijirah al-Sabah!

Here's the first thing which popped up in a quick run to google, so it's not the best one to cover the subject, but it might help:

(snip)
Like herpes, a virus that hides in the central nervous system and then pops up unannounced in an ugly and painful sore, 'black cannibalism' stories also hide deep in the collective western subconscious, popping up consistently to show us that the white european construct and apparatus is still very much wracked with its ancient and pustulent dis-eases. Judging from the coverage on CNN, which would normally just as soon pretend the Congo did not exist, we are in the middle of a particularly virulent outbreak right now. And this on the heels of the final disrobing of Trent "saltines" Lott.

Ishmael Reed and others have pointed out how the same is true of 'big black penis' stories (images and jokes) such as those that surrounded the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill media circus, which evince the worst of jim crow race marketing. Others have appeared in characters in popular fiction, such as the flasher in Philip Roth's latest novel, which was ironically reminiscent of Nazi propaganda of the '30s and 40s. "Congo rebels eating pygmies" takes us back to witch doctors in dark jungles (where Disney's animated 'tarzan'(a white man) took our tv-entranced children only a few years ago) and even further back, to the very popular turn of the 20th century jim crow ads and postcards which showed ridiculous pickaninnies (black children with bulging white eyes, huge red lips and comical braids) being eaten by voracious and primeval swamp alligators.

Few of the stories linked on google showed any restraint, one which seemed to was the Toronto Star's 'Congo atrocities alleged' which noted that 'Cannibalism, systematic rape, torture and kidnapping were used as weapons by rebels' in an upsurge of atrocities engulfing the country's northeast. Even fewer noted the complex political situation in the Congo, a country which is roughly the size of the whole of Western Europe, which might allow us to look at this situation for what it is, a war atrocity story, a window into the continuing horror of nihilistic young men with guns. For these Congolese rebel soldiers are not intrinsically savages or animals at all, any more than Serb gunmen or Somali irregulars or Colombian AUC paramilitaries are - what they are, all of them, are Nazis : very sick, nihilistic thugs with high powered weapons, set loose on peaceable civilians. They are only the latest perpetrators of the kind of 'autistic violence' decried by Hans Magnus Enzenberger in his powerful 1994 essay "Civil Wars: from L.A. to Bosnia".

Why should they not be compared to Nazis? That penultimate expression of Germanic tribalism that sought to reduce Jewish humans' skins into luminous lampshades, their fat into 'reine Judische seife' (pure jewish soap)? Descriptions of Nazi medical experiments, for example in the first edition of Richard Rubenstein's epic 'After Auschwitz', in fact go far beyond what could be termed 'savage' or 'cannibalistic'.
(snip/...)

http://www.ishmaelreedpub.com/Gyemant2.html

[seemslikeadream]

7. On the Trail of the Congo's "Cannibal Rebels"

Slate published Eliza's work so there is credibility there



Maria lost her arm defending her children; she says soldiers ate flesh from the arm after they amputated it

From: Eliza Griswold
Subject: Cannibalism as a Crime of War
Friday, March 26, 2004, at 8:20 AM PT

Maria lost her arm defending her children; she says soldiers ate flesh from the arm after they amputated it

In Bunia, the town's population has swelled from 6,000 to 120,000 people. Most have left everything—crops, possessions, their families—to escape the ongoing massacres in the bush. Through a network of local human rights organizations, I arrange to meet with a handful of survivors. One Sunday morning, over a hundred people show up to tell their stories.

One of them, Vivienne Nyamutale, 30, says that she spent 75 days captive with the Lendu fighters in the bush. "I was taken as the fourth wife of the fetish chief, Chief Abele." On five separate occasions before the Lendu fighters attacked a Hema village, Vivienne says, Hema men were brought before the crowd, cooked, and eaten by the fighters. Vivienne is Hema. She survived captivity only by swearing that she was Alur, the most common tribe in this part of Congo. Finally, after one massacre, she ran into the night and escaped. Vivienne is one of a handful of women who tell me about rape camps farther along the Fataki road where we found the two dead men.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2097314/entry/2097326/



Amuzati witnessed the massacre of his mother, Mutandi, his older brother, Mangbulu, his younger sister, Salam, and his 4-year-old nephew, Zipoa. He confirmed that they cut up the bodies like he would an animal before they ate them.



Child soldiers wait in Bule for orders to move. When this photo was taken, they were the only defense forces in a 25-mile radius. Two days later they too pulled out, and Bule was attacked.