“US Secretary Antony Blinken to visit South Africa next week to strengthen relations between the two countries”

https://www.iol.co.za/news/world/us-secretary-antony-blinken-to-visit-south-africa-next-week-to-strengthen-relations-between-the-two-countries-94074c14-3a43-4b87-80d9-2879c791ba23

August 1, 2022

Cape Town - In a bid to strengthen ties and launch the US Strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit South Africa and surrounding countries.

Asian News International reported that Blinken who will be travelling from August 2 through to August 12, will visit Cambodia and the Philippines ahead of his South African trip.

During his visit to the ASEAN (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) countries, the Secretary will participate in three separate ministerial hosted by Cambodia as ASEAN chair this year. The aim is to elevate their relationship to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.

Blinken will also meet with newly elected president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. and the new Secretary of Foreign Affairs Enrique Manalo.

Meanwhile, Blinken is scheduled to travel to South Africa, the Republic of Congo and Rwanda from August 7 to 12 where he will lead the US delegation to the US-South Africa Strategic Dialogue in South Africa.

>>16944822

“Africa: Blinken to Visit South Africa, DR Congo and Rwanda [UPDATED]” - Part 1

https://beautifulrwanda.org/2022/08/01/africa-blinken-to-visit-south-africa-dr-congo-and-rwanda-updated/

August 1, 2022

Washington, DC — US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will travel to three African countries from August 7 to 12 with visits to South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda. These stops will follow visits to Cambodia and the Philippines beginning August 2. The trip will be his second to Africa since taking office, following a November visit to Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal.

A centerpiece of the trip will be a major policy speech enunciating the administration’s Africa strategy. A new policy framework has been under discussion for many months, coordinated by Judd Devermont, a former US intelligence analyst who joined the National Security Council as special advisor for Africa strategy last October. On July 1, Devermont was tapped as the NSC senior director for Africa, replacing Dana Banks.

The visit comes days after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavlov toured four African capitals and French President Emmanuel Macron visited three west African states and follows on the announcement by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of a US Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, DC in mid -December.

___According to the State Department announcement, Blinken in Pretoria will take part in the US-South Africa Strategic Dialogue, which was launched in 2010 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to deepen cooperation on a range of issues including health, education, food security, law enforcement, trade, investment, energy, and non-proliferation.__

The policy speech he will deliver while there “will be an amplification of our conviction that partnership with Africa is really critical to meeting shared challenges,” Assistant Secretary of State Molly Phee told reporters on Friday. He will build on his November policy address in Nigeria and provide an overview of “what we’ve been doing since the administration came into office.” In his meetings with leaders media and civil society representatives, Blinken can expect to be quizzed about a range of issues including vaccine and other health inequities, US funding for climate-change mitigation and concrete support for peace-building and the African Continental Free Trade Area , as well as the upcoming Summit in Washington.

Along with Phee, the Secretary will be accompanied by Enoh T. Ebong, who directs the US Trade and Development Agency, and Dr. John Nkengasong, the former head of the African CDC who is the US Global AIDS Coordinator leading the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). dr Reuben Brigety II, President Biden’s choice to be ambassador to South Africa who was confirmed by the Senate on July 21, is expected to be at his new post to welcome the Secretary to the country.

From Johannesburg, Blinken will travel to Kinshasa where he “will meet with senior DRC government officials and members of civil society to discuss our mutual interest in ensuring free, inclusive, and fair elections in 2023, promoting respect for human rights and protecting fundamental freedoms, ” the announcement states. The Secretary’s trip “will also focus on combating corruption, supporting trade and investment, addressing the climate crisis, building agricultural resilience, and support regional African efforts to advance peace in eastern DRC and the broader Great Lakes region” Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy , and the environment Jose Fernandez will join the delegation in Kinshasa, Phee said.

>>16944822

>>16944824

“Africa: Blinken to Visit South Africa, DR Congo and Rwanda [UPDATED]” - Part 2

https://beautifulrwanda.org/2022/08/01/africa-blinken-to-visit-south-africa-dr-congo-and-rwanda-updated/

August 1, 2022

The final stop will be Kigali where the State Department says “he will meet with senior Rwandan government officials and civil society members to discuss shared priorities, including peacekeeping.” Further elaborating on the two-day stopover agenda, the announcement says: “The Secretary will focus on the role of the government of Rwanda can play in reducing tensions and ongoing violence in eastern DRC. Recent outbreaks of fighting in eastern Congo have escalated tensions between the geovernments in Kinshasa and Kigali, with DR Congo accusing Rwanda of backing the M23 militia in the North Kivu region.

Blinken “will also raise democracy and human rights concerns, including “transnational repression, limiting space for dissent and political opposition, and the wrongful detention of US Lawful Permanent Resident Paul Rusesabagina,” the State Department statement said. Asked about the recent letter from Senator Robert Menendez, who chairs the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raising concerns about Rwanda’s human rights record and calling for called for a review of US policy toward, Phee told reporters the Secretary had spoken with Menendez and said “he intended to raise the issues outlined in the letter” in his talks with Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

Menendez’s call for a halt in security assistance to Rwanda is gaining bipartisan backing. The House Intelligence Committee heard testimony on July 26 from Carine Rusesabagina, alleging that the Rwandan government used the Pegasus spyware from Israel to track her father’s movements prior to his kidnapping in Dubai and to target her and other family member.

While Blinken will be the most senior administration official to visit Africa this year, there have been a series of trips by senior officials in recent months. USAID Administrator Samantha Power was in Kenya and Somalia this month focusing on food security. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman traveled to South Africa, Angola and in May, accompanied by Phee and Banks. State Department Counselor Derek Chollet visited Senegal and Mauritania earlier this month. Scott Nathan, CEO of the US International Development Finance Corporation visited Nigerian and Sierra Leone this week “where DFC financing is supporting construction of the country’s first major utility-scale power plant,” according to an agency release. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland visited Djibouti, Mozambique, and Nigeriav in June.

A week after Lavlov’s visit to Kampala, US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield will travel to Uganda, and Ghana “to discuss the US and global response to the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine on global food security, as well as other regional and bilateral priorities.”

Senior administration officials have also met with a number of visiting top-level African officials in Washington. This week, the foreign minister of Niger Massaoudou Hassoumi met with Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman at the State Department and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the White House to discuss conflict in the Sahel and USsupport for food security, democracy and econmoic development.

>>16944822

>>16944824

>>16944829

“Africa: Blinken to Visit South Africa, DR Congo and Rwanda [UPDATED]” - Part 3

https://beautifulrwanda.org/2022/08/01/africa-blinken-to-visit-south-africa-dr-congo-and-rwanda-updated/

August 1, 2022

“High level visits should signal commitment, not just competition,” according to Michael Gavin, writing in a blog for the Council on Foreign Relations. “That energy and high-level engagement is unequivocally positive,” writes Gavin – a former US ambassador and White House official during the Obama administration. But successful engagement “will take expertise, resources, and sustained commitment to move beyond crisis-management and execute a thoughtful strategy suited to US interests and Africa’s dynamic future.”

The administration’s delegation to the US-Africa Business Summit in Marrakesh earlier this month was led by Alice Albright, CEO of the Millennium Challenge Corporation and “senior representatives from 10 departments and agencies contributing to Prosper Africa, the US government’s signature initiative to increase trade and investment between African nations and the United States,” according to MCC. These included the UTDA director Ebong, Travis Adkins, President and CEO, US African Development Foundation; Leslie Marbury, Acting COO, Prosper Africa; senior officials from the Export Import Bank; Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Akunna Cook; Leslie Marbury, Prosper Africa Chief Operating Officer; Andrew Herscowitz, Chief Development Officer of the US International Development Finance Corporation; and Dana Banks and Deniece Laurent-Mantey from the NSC.

Vice President Kamala Harris spoke by video to the opening session, where she disclosed the mid-December timing for the US African Leaders Summit that she and President Biden will host in Washington, DC. Banks has moved from her post as NSC senior director for Africa to spearhead planning as the President’s senior advisor for the December gathering.

“The continent is an important business market and African states are possible allies that no world power can afford to ignore for long,” Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies Africa Program said in Congressional testimony this month, adding that But US engagement doesn’t match Africa’s potential.”We ask why?”

Blinken’s address in South Africa is expected to provide the clearest outline to date of how Africa fits into the administration’s foreign policy objectives. He likely also will get feedback on what issues should be prioritized during the US African Leaders Summit in Washington December 13 to 15.

That gathering “will build on our shared values to better foster new economic engagement; reinforce the US-Africa commitment to democracy and human rights; mitigate the impact of COVID-19 and of future pandemics; work collaboratively to strengthen regional and global health; promote food security; advance peace and security; respond to the climate crisis; and amplify diaspora ties,” according to the White House statement, released as Harris was speaking to the Corporate Council on Africa Business Summit in Morocco.

Obama’s 2014 Summit had a similarly broad agenda, raising questions about outcomes and long-term impact. Participants included 40 African heads of state, senior representatives from 10 more countries and the head of the African Union, along with hundreds of US and African business people and civil society leaders. Not invited were leaders from Sudan, Eritrea, Zimbabwe and the Central African Republic, as well as AU member Western Sahara, which the United States does not recognize.

The invitation list for December has not been announced but is expected to be one topic of discussion during Blinken’s bilateral meetings. One leader who has received an invitation is Liberian President George Weah, extended by US Ambassador Michael McCarthy during his Liberian Independence Day speech on January 26, following a story in a Liberian newspaper pointing out that – unlike almost all his predecessors – Weah had not had a White House meeting since taking office five years ago.

[This article has been updated with additional details about the Secretary’s agenda and ppolicy speech.]

>>16944829

>Blinken “will also raise democracy and human rights concerns, including “transnational repression, limiting space for dissent and political opposition, and the wrongful detention of US Lawful Permanent Resident Paul Rusesabagina,” the State Department statement said.

“Hollywood gets involved as Paul Rusesabagina’s health worsens, according to family” - https://youtu.be/1Kj034ryAms

“Why Paul Rusesabagina was arrested” - ‘Hotel Rwanda dissident’

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/11/why-paul-rusesabagina-was-arrested

11 September 2020

In Britain, the ‘Hotel Rwanda dissident’ would almost certainly be charged under our anti-terrorism laws, says the MP Andrew Mitchell

I am surprised that the Guardian should take such a partisan attitude to the case of Paul Rusesabagina, the Rwandan who has been arrested and is in custody in Kigali (UN urged to intervene in case of detained Hotel Rwanda dissident, 8 September). Mr Rusesabagina, whose role during the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis was fictionalised in the well-known movie Hotel Rwanda, has been the subject of controversy ever since.

Mr Rusesabagina was arrested because he is believed to be the leader, founder and sponsor of a violent extremist group operating in Rwanda and more widely, known as MRCD/FLN. The international arrest warrant under which he has been detained included accusations that in June and July 2018 in Nyungwe, and in December 2018 in Nyamagabe, attacks by the MRCD/FLN were carried out against innocent Rwandan civilians which left nine people dead and several seriously injured.

A video is available on the internet in which Mr Rusesabagina expresses his support for this terrorist grouping. In Britain, he would almost certainly be charged under our anti-terrorism laws.

While we are on the subject, your newspaper’s support for bringing to justice the five alleged Rwandan genocide perpetrators who have been living freely, often on taxpayer benefits in the UK where they have sanctuary, for more than a decade would be very welcome.

Despite repeated attempts by the Rwandan government and its legal authorities to bring these five to account, no progress has been made. It is difficult to believe this would be the case if they were alleged Holocaust perpetrators. To be blunt, it is the British justice system, not Rwanda’s, that is in the dock over this matter.

Andrew Mitchell MP

Former secretary of state for international development

>>16944848

This is déjà vu! Did he get his rhetoric from the ANC? He sounds like Nelson Mandela 2.0.

“FULL VIDEO: Paul Rusesabagina pledges full support for FLN armed militia”

https://youtu.be/4ZegIcDyowo

This is a transcript of Rusesabagina’s speech as posted on MRCD’s “RadioUbumwe” YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZrXqNRfkmY&t=0s) in late 2018 or early 2019. It was removed by MRCD from their channel on 18 September 2020 (almost three weeks after Rusesabagina was arrested). The video had been downloaded immediately after his arrest by many people and reposted

4:50 – “Due to all these atrocities, it is imperative that in 2019 we speed up the liberation struggle. Rwandan people can no longer stand the cruelty and all kinds of ill-treatment directed to us by the RPF regime. The time has come for us to use any means possible to bring about change in Rwanda. As all political means have been tried and failed, it is time to attempt our last resort. Hence, I pledge my unreserved support that our youth, the National Liberation Forces – NLF, launches against the Kagame's army, in order to free the Rwandan people.”

>>16944848

>>16944856

“Paul Rusesabagina speaking on the creation of MRCD coaltion and FLN armed group on July 16, 2020”

https://youtu.be/8r0X2MMYGko

Paul Rusesabagina speaking on the creation of MRCD_Ubumwe Coalition and FLN armed group during a virtual press conference on July 16, 2020 On July 16, 2020, MRCD-Ubumwe coalition organized a virtual press conference due to Covid-19 prevention measures. It started with a welcoming speech by Paul Rusesabagina as the coalition’s President after being introduced by the moderator Faustin Twagiramungu. The latter is also member of the MRCD-Ubumwe as his political party RDI Rwanda Nziza joined the coalition on June 18, 2019. After giving his welcoming message, Rusesabagina was invited again by Faustin Twagiramungu to share updates on the background of MRCD and the FLN armed group. The full video (2h38min) was posted on MRCD YouTube Channel run by Esperance Mukashema, but it was immediately deleted after the arrest of Paul Rusesabagina. The meeting was attended by MRCD Coalition members. PDR Ubumwe was represented by Paul Rusesabagina as President and chairman of the Coalition, the RRM party of Callixte Nsabimana was represented by Francois Mutuyemungu, the in-charge of diplomacy, while RDI Rwanda Nziza was represented by its President Faustin Twagiramungu who was also the meeting moderator. Twagiramungu said that they were expecting their colleagues from CNRD-Ubwiyunge to join the coalition at anytime. He added that they were also waiting for Gen Wilson Irategeka who was the FLN forces commander. Reminder: When the press conference was taking place, reports emerged from DRC that Gen Wilson Irategeka was killed by FARDC forces. Many of his soldiers were brought to Rwanda along with refugees they were using as human shields. On MRCD/FLN background Paul Rusesabagina said: “We started MRCD in November 2016. It was a coalition of CNRD-Ubwiyunge led by Wilson Irategeka and PDR-Ihumure led by me. After a long discussion we set five pillars under one platform. The first pillar is what is being carried out by our soldiers. The second was diplomacy, the third was mobilization, the fourth was communication and the fifth was Finance. We worked together and, in the end of 2017, our brothers from Rwanda Revolutionary Movement (RRM) led by Callixte Nsabimana wanted to join us. After a long discussion, RRM was accepted in March 2018 and we were successful in our executions and that’s when we started asking ourselves the name we will give our soldiers”. “We called them FLN because RRM brought its soldiers as well which meant we had to get an inclusive name. Since then, our boys were named FLN and that’s why FLN doesn’t belong to PDR, CNRD or RRM, it is under MRCD.” I think I have responded to what our Moderator (Faustin Twagiramungu) asked me to give more details on FLN and its creation

“When It Comes to Rwanda, Don’t Believe Everything You See in the Movies” (This can also be said about South Africa)

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/10/when-it-comes-to-rwanda-dont-believe-everything-you-see-in-the-movies/

February 10, 2021

Many Rwandans regard the protagonist of a Hollywood film as a terrorist, not a hero.

In his recent Foreign Policy article on the protagonist of the popular Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda, Anjan Sundaram adds his name to the list of commentators who have chosen the court of public opinion to absolve Paul Rusesabagina—a man who stands accused of multiple counts of terrorism.

While the screenplay written by Keir Pearson and Terry George does make for compelling drama, it diverges significantly from the reality and the lived experience of the survivors of the genocide against the Tutsi who sought refuge at the Hotel des Mille Collines in 1994.

It is not my duty to litigate in these pages; I will leave that to Rwanda’s independent and internationally recognized judiciary. But it would be a betrayal of the truth to allow for uncritical, one-sided narratives pushed by several journalists—and supported by Rusesabagina’s public relations machine—to run rampant. I would therefore like to draw the attention of the media to an often neglected side of the story.

According to numerous accounts from survivors, the popular portrayal of Rusesabagina—the erstwhile manager of the Hotel des Mille Collines, or “Hotel Rwanda”—is patently false. In a Le Monde investigation, the survivor Cyrille Ntaganira told journalists how when “Rusesabagina came to tell us we had to pay,” he was only able to stay when one of his roommates “signed an IOU with him.” Another survivor, Immaculée Mukanyonga, claimed that Rusesabagina withheld food and water to those unable to pay, forcing guests to drink chlorinated pool water. In his comprehensive book Inside the Hotel Rwanda, Edouard Kayihura—a genocide survivor who spent 100 days as a refugee in the Hotel des Mille Collines and was later the official in charge of prosecuting crimes against humanity in Rwanda—corroborates these testimonies and adds more, including the allegation that lists of hotel guests and their room numbers were passed on to Hutu Power radio stations by Rusesabagina.

Accounts from some foreign officials who were posted in Rwanda in 1994 and spent extensive time at the Hotel des Mille Collines during the genocide align with the allegations above. These include the United Nations peacekeepers Gen. Romeo Dallaire and Capt. Amadou Deme. Both have expressed disgust at the film. Dallaire has said it was “not worth looking at” because it was troops with the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda “who stayed in Rwanda … who saved the people at the Hotel Mille Collines—not the hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina.” To Deme, the film’s portrayal of events is “repulsive for its untruthfulness.”

When confronted with these facts, Sundaram’s opinions do not stand up to scrutiny. The article fails to discuss the facts surrounding the trial, including Rusesabagina’s admission that he helped found the National Liberation Front (FLN), which the Rwandan government regards as a terrorist group. This makes Sundaram’s premature dismissal of the trial as a “Kafkaesque farce” irresponsible, at best.

Rusesabagina is charged with founding and supporting the FLN, which has openly claimed responsibility for murdering innocent Rwandans. Not only has Rusesabagina publicly admitted that he helped form the FLN, but he also called for FLN troops to “use any means possible … against the Kagame army.”

Sundaram sees no issue with “[a]rmed groups seeking to overthrow Kagame” being “attracted to Rusesabagina as a figurehead.” His disregard for the suffering of ordinary Rwandans, who have tragically lost their lives at the hands of terrorist groups like the FLN, is unethical and dangerous.

Rwanda’s government welcomes outside voices, just as we welcome strong partnerships with other nations based not on deference but on cooperation. In our commitment to national self-reliance, we accept that we will not always be perfect. But we ask that the international perception of our history and sovereign recovery be based on objective fact, not on one-sided and selective reporting.

Paul Rusesabagina Case Outcome – US Department of State Press Statement

https://www.state.gov/paul-rusesabagina-case-outcome/

PRESS STATEMENT

NED PRICE, DEPARTMENT SPOKESPERSON

SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

The United States is concerned by the Government of Rwanda’s conviction of U.S. lawful permanent resident Paul Rusesabagina on September 20. The reported lack of fair trial guarantees calls into question the fairness of the verdict. We have consistently highlighted the importance of respect for all applicable legal protections throughout these proceedings and have raised concerns that these protections were not addressed in an impartial manner consistent with Rwanda’s international commitments. We are concerned by the objections Mr. Rusesabagina raised related to his lack of confidential, unimpeded access to his lawyers and relevant case documents and his initial lack of access to counsel. We urge the Government of Rwanda to take steps to examine these shortcomings in Mr. Rusesabagina’s case and establish safeguards to prevent similar outcomes in the future.

https://www.state.gov/biographies/ned-price/

Ned Price

DEPARTMENT SPOKESPERSON

JANUARY 20, 2021 – PRESENT

Ned Price was sworn in as the Spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State on January 20, 2021. He previously was Co-Founder and Director of Policy and Communications at National Security Action, a non-profit advocacy organization. During the Obama-Biden administration, he served as Special Assistant to President Obama on the National Security Council staff, where he also was the Spokesperson and Senior Director for Strategic Communications. Prior to his time at the White House, he was at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he was a senior analyst and Spokesperson. He has been an NBC News analyst and contributor and taught at Georgetown University. He graduated summa cum laude from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and received a Master’s from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is originally from Dallas, Texas.

>>16945748

>He [Ned Price] previously was Co-Founder and Director of Policy and Communications at National Security Action

“National Security Action”

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/national-security-action/

National Security Action (NSA) is a left-wing 501(c)(4) advocacy group largely composed of former Obama administration staffers and leadership. NSA works to advance global policies and oppose the foreign policy of the Trump administration.[1] NSA provides Democratic candidates for public office with talking points and policy and legal expertise intended to support the Obama administration’s foreign policy consensus.[2]

Website: nationalsecurityaction.org

“National Security Action is dedicated to advancing American global leadership and a strong, unified progressive foreign policy by supporting the next generation of leaders in Washington and across the country who share our vision and values.”

TAX ID: 82-2007387

Tax-Exempt Status: 501(c)(4)

Formation: February 2018 (Unincorporated Washington, D.C. Nonprofit)

Type: Left-Leaning National Security Advocacy Group

Founders: Ben Rhodes Jake Sullivan

Background

National Security Action was established in February 2017 by Ben Rhodes, a former national security advisor in the Obama White House, and Jake Sullivan, a national security advisor to former Vice President Joe Biden. Both Rhodes and Sullivan were key figures in establishing the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. [3] Sullivan later served as a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.[4]

National Security Action was designed as an advocacy group that could lobby and engage in political activity. It was created to oppose the foreign policies of the Trump administration. Sullivan and Rhodes have been critical of Trump. Sullivan said: “We have a president who is erratic on the world stage, escalating conflicts and belligerently threatening war – even a potentially catastrophic nuclear conflict on the Korean peninsula.”[5]

NSA co-chair Ben Rhodes has claimed that the group is a temporary organization that plans to dissolve in 2021.

Leadership

ADVISORY COUNCIL

NSA’s leadership is comprised of 60 Advisory Council members. A majority of the Advisory Council and staff have professional or personal connections with the Obama administration.[6]

Some notable NSA advisory members include Rosa Brooks, a foreign policy writer and former counselor of defense who also sits on board of U.S. Programs for George Soros’s Open Society Foundations; John Bisognano, who served as an NSA senior advisor and former Obama campaign staffer who also works as outreach director for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee; and Nicholas Burns, formerly Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and currently a professor who teaches International Relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Lobbying

In 2018, National Security Action spent $100,000 on lobbying and was represented by lobbyist Helen Rebecca Brocato. NSA lobbied for a bill called S.J.RES.54, a joint resolution to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized by Congress.[7]

>>16959589

>>16959599

>>16959604

“Samuel Pisar, Aide to JFK”

https://forward.com/news/breaking-news/318033/samuel-pisar-aide-to-jfk-dies-at-86/

Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor who went to become a lawyer and writer, as well as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, has died.

Pisar became a member of Kennedy’s economic and foreign policy task force in 1960, and also served as an adviser to the State Department.

>>16794975

>The corporate crooks are in bed with (or even behind) the corrupt politicians (like Bill Clinton, who gave Marc Rich a presidential pardon late in 2001, during Clinton's last day in office.)

>>16959604

>Pisar represented Armand Hammer in a number of his international negotiations.

It is interesting to see that US Presidents pardon Jewish oil tycoons who have ties to the Soviet Union and regard themselves as world citizens.

“ARMAND HAMMER PARDONED BY BUSH” and Later, Clinton pardoned Marc Rich

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/15/us/armand-hammer-pardoned-by-bush.html

August 15, 1989

President Bush pardoned Armand Hammer today for making illegal contributions to President Richard M. Nixon's re-election campaign 17 years ago.

Dr. Hammer, who heads the Occidental Petroleum Corporation in Los Angeles, announced the pardon, saying: I deeply appreciate President Bush's action in clearing my name. Having spent my lifetime fighting injustice, this vindication reinforces my abiding faith in the American system of justice.

The White House later confirmed the pardon.

The 91-year-old Dr. Hammer, who is chairman and chief executive of the oil company, had spent several years seeking a pardon and there had been speculation President Ronald Reagan would grant one in his last days in office. Issue of 1972 Donation

Dr. Hammer got in trouble for donating $54,000 to the Nixon re-election campaign in 1972. He pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor charges.

But he recanted his guilty plea after the trial, saying that an associate, former Governor Tim Babcock of Montana, was responsible for the illegal contribution. Mr. Babcock was a former vice president of Occidental.

Dr. Hammer, acting anonymously, gave $46,000 legally to the campaign. But a 1971 law barred political contributions given in the name of another person after April 7, 1972. He broke the law by giving an additional $54,000 in September 1972, using the names of friends of Mr. Babcock. Mr. Babcock was convicted in 1974 of concealing the source of the money.

Dr. Hammer's insistence that he did not know that the contribution was made illegally resulted in a second hearing on the charges, in which Dr. Hammer again pleaded guilty. When pressed for an explanation, he replied, Because I'm guilty.

In March 1976, Dr. Hammer was fined $3,000 and placed on probation for one year. The judge at Dr. Hammer's trial, Lawrence T. Lydick, cited his age and health for not sentencing him to prison.

Dr. Hammer is known for the warm relations he has cultivated with leaders of the Soviet Union for more than 50 years.

https://jewishcurrents.org/may-21-armand-hammer

Armand Hammer, a multi-millionaire whose name was derived from the “arm and hammer” symbol of the Socialist Labor Party of America (in which his father was a leader), was born in New York on this date in 1898. Hammer earned a medical degree from Columbia in 1921, then made his first fortune selling pharmaceuticals to the Soviet Union and serving as the trade representative to the USSER for some three dozen American companies. When the Soviets bought out his business in 1930, he came home with huge treasure confiscated from the Tsarist Romanoffs. After many other business twists and turns, most of them very profitable, Hammer helped to found Occidental Petroleum, a company he headed for decades until his death in 1990… Hammer conceived of himself, however, simply as a world citizen: “I can’t think of anything better to do with a life than to wear it out in efforst to be useful to the world,” he said. Daniel Yergin called him “a go-between [for] five Soviet General Secretaries and seven U.S. President.”

“Deal-maker Armand Hammer Moscow's capitalist comrade” - https://www.csmonitor.com/1980/0703/070362.html

With Lenin's official blessing and encouragement, he injected the beleaguered Russian economy with a touch of free enterprise. He brought some much- needed vigor to that economy and gained the admiration and support of Lenin in the process.

>>16413927

>Marc Rich, “A Citizen of the World”

>https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0510/S00322.htm

>Such “world citizenship” makes perfect sense, of course, to those persons who make their livelihood from global trade—what can best be termed the merchant adventurer class which brought us slavery, tobacco, rum, spices, and last but not least, opium. Part of the author’s research is to explore the genealogies of various members of this class of merchant traders from one generation to another to see how their accumulated knowledge and interrelationships have been used to take control of governments throughout the world and to indoctrinate others through advertising techniques and propaganda.

>>13944437

>https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1979/eirv06n49-19791218/eirv06n49-19791218_052-who_controls_southern_africas_mi.pdf

>Union Miniere

>The only non-British company with southern African mining interests comparable to Rio Tinto-Zinc and Lonrho is Union Miniere which is tightly controlled by the finance company Societe Generale de Belgique. Union Miniere has extensive interests in copper, cobalt and zinc in the Shaba province of Zaire (called Katanga province in the former Belgian Congo), and some investment in Europe and North America. Societe Generale/Union Miniere organized the recent invasion of Shaba province by "Katangese rebels" in collaboration with the Diamond Security division of the Oppenheimer Anglo American Corporation-with the effect of stopping a French-arranged loan package to the Zairean government.

>There is little public-domain evidence of who exerts control over Societe Generale de Belgique. However, information received by EIR establishes that the control is Hapsburg. Count Otto von Hapsburg and several of his siblings inhabit the board of directors, under assumed names.

“COLD CASE HAMMARSKJOLD” – Full Documentary (MUST WATCH!) – Katanga, Congo, Union Miniere (ties to Oppenheimer’s Anglo American), ace of spades

https://www.bitchute.com/video/GDqpAuauKjE1/

Danish director Mads Brügger and Swedish private investigator Göran Bjorkdahl are trying to solve the mysterious death of Dag Hammarskjöld. As their investigation closes in, they discover a crime with even farther reaching consequences….2019

8:35 – “Hammarskjold was on his way to Ndola for peace talks with Moise Tshombe, the rebel leader of the breakaway region of Katanga. People need to know about Katanga. How Katanga in 1960 seceded from the Congo, declared independence, and a war broke out. And it’s important people understand that Katanga was basically the property of a Belgian corporation called Union Miniere, a mining corporation and it was more or less Union Miniere who installed Moise Tshombe as the leader of Katanga… as a figurehead because right below him, the big mining corporations were running the shows. And they brought in a lot of mercenaries… Backed by mining interest and European mercenaries, Katanga had seceded from the Congo, and a UN lead military operation to capture Moise Tshombe and put an end to Katanga’s secession from the Congo, had backfired.”

24:18 – “He [Hammarskjold] had the death card in his collar… The ace of spades.”

>>17069440

“COLD CASE HAMMARSKJOLD” – Full Documentary (MUST WATCH!) - South African Maritime Research Institute (SAIMR)

https://www.bitchute.com/video/GDqpAuauKjE1/

30:33 – “The documents come from, allegedly, from a shadowy private paramilitary intelligence organization known as the South African Maritime Research Institute. And they are the manuscript for killing Dag Hammarskjold. The full set of documents, discovered in the vaults of South Africa’s secret service, was said to consist of 12 pages, but the originals have since vanished in South African state archives. What remains are blurred photocopies of nine pages, outlining a plot to kill Dag Hammarskjold with a bomb. The documents say that Hammarskjold had to be removed because the United Nations had become “troublesome”. Among the conspirators, British Intelligence is mentioned, as well as the American Intelligence Service, the CIA.”

32:10 – “None of the journalists went to look for the institute themselves. Maybe because the British foreign office, as well as the CIA, quickly scrambled to bury the story as a piece of cold war misinformation planted by the Russians. As a result, The South African Institute for Maritime Research, or in short, SAIMR, remains mostly uncharted territory.”

33:15 – “He [Keith Maxwell] described himself as commander of the SAIMR’s military unit, Delta… He said that the unit is a successor of a 184-year old organization, first formed by a group of British mariners. Preferring to remain anonymous, the group’s interests are divers. Some orders come from London, and others are initiated here in South Africa.”

44:36 – “They [The Operation Celeste papers] also tell how the explosives for the bomb to kill Dag Hammarskjold were provided by the Belgian mining corporation, Union Miniere.”

55:21 – “He [Keith Maxwell] had the resources to use violence, and to supply weapons and so on and so forth. But I was convinced that he was financed and directed by MI6 of British Intelligence. How? After spending 3 ½ years in Britain, you get to know some people involved in the intelligence field. And certain names which are mentioned in our discussion was familiar to him. Which told me, well, obviously, he knows these people.”

1:10:10 – “Amazingly, we are given permission to start digging inside the airport. But then suddenly, someone calls from Lusaka and tells the airport to stop this. They don’t want us to be digging for the wreckage.”

1:20:17 – “He [Clive] went to a secret SAIMR training camp outside Johannesburg where they were wearing white clothes… I know, Clive, it’s a long time ago, but can you recollect names of anybody in charge of SAIMR when you were there?… There was one guy from the NCIS, whatever, the Intelligence Bureau, I remember, and was an American guy. Curly hair, black hair, with a mustache… The American guy is Robert Cedars. His resume reads like a real-life Rambo. Ex-green beret. Ex-mercenary. He has worked for the Anglo-American mining corporation and the King of Afghanistan. Among his interests are para-psychology and Rock ‘n Roll.

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“COLD CASE HAMMARSKJOLD” – Full Documentary (MUST WATCH!) – SAIMR (Financed by foreign governments, CIA’s ace of spades, Actively spreading AIDS through vaccines)

https://www.bitchute.com/video/GDqpAuauKjE1/

1:23:04 – “Soon after, we meet with him [Alexander Jones] and he is the guy we have been looking for for six years… So, simply put, what is SAIMR?… SAIMR was a clandestine mercenary organization for hire… Financed by whom?… Financed by foreign governments… And what was the purpose of SAIMR?… SAIMR was there to go and destabilize certain countries. And, basically, we were soldiers… And what was your role, specifically? Were you in the front lines, so to speak?… Yes, I was definitely in the front line. Operational front line. Hand-to-hand front line. Fighting front line. Leading operations, if you want to call it that… Did you kill people yourself?… Yes… Is it dangerous for you talking to us about this?… Definitely. Very, I mean I could get backlash from my own people. You’re sitting with a list of names and all of those names on that list are. Can be verified… But why are you taking that risk, may I ask?… I think it’s about time that we need closure. I need personal closure… How many people did it involve? SAIMR?… Anything from 5 000 people upwards… That many?… That many. So SAIMR was a big organization… SAIMR was very clever in the way that they operated. You and I could be sitting in the same room, and you could belong to the medical division of SAIMR and I wouldn’t know you from a bar of soap… They were very sucker to the 1800’s British naval traditions and attire. Especially the hierarchy. We wore normal whites… [Keith Maxwell was] very dangerous… Dangerous in what way?… If he didn’t like you and if you a posed a threat to him, he would take you out… He would simply kill you?… Ja… Himself?… Ja… And what kind of operations were you doing?… Well, it was clandestine operations. We were involved in coups. Taking over countries from other leader. We were involved in Mozambique spreading the AIDS virus through medical conditions. [Does this not sound like COVID?] We were involved in Angola with Dr. Jonas Savimbi for various operations. We gave military support… So people were killed during these operations?… Oh, definitely… You mentioned actively spreading AIDS?… There was a unit from SAIMR. One of the things was that we went into African countries… And how was that done exactly?… Through inoculation… Through vaccines?… Ja, through vaccines. Pretending to inoculate people and that type of thing.… The Idea being to kill black people?… Ja, to eradicate black people. You must understand, the concept was that AIDS was a killer. It was incurable at that point in time, so it was let to believe that if you infected people it was “the quick non-militaristic approach” to eliminate black people. And that is something you know for a fact? That AIDS was actively being spread to other countries?… Yes, to African countries…

1:34:29 – “And furthermore, he tells us that the purpose of Maxwell’s clinics in and around Johannesburg, was to infect black people with HIV… And these were research facilities for them to inject people with a “solution” to say that they prevented AIDS in it. In the meantime, they were injecting people with AIDS… And he was only working on black people in these clinics?… Yes, sir… For almost nothing?… Ja… That’s what I am saying. So, you know, what I mean. What easier way to get a big guinea pig? That you live in an apartheid system. Black people have got no rights. They need medical treatment. There is a white “philanthropist” [like Bill Gates] coming in and saying, “You know what? I’ll open up these clinics and I’ll treat you. I’ll do this in the meantime, you’re actually the wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

1:38:55 - People were murdered and the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission did not want to even investigate it “as it was too controversial.”… “Just the mention of the South African Maritime Institute made people nervous.”

1:42:41 – __“Everyone in the military field knew about SAIMR. The government knew about SAIMR. That’s why we were allowed to operate out of South African premises… Were they taking orders from South African military? Or?… No. I think our orders, our main orders, came from the British government… From our British handlers, controllers or whatever and to this day I still believe that we were a sub-unit of some British entity.”___

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“COLD CASE HAMMARSKJOLD” – Full Documentary (MUST WATCH!) – “And who’s got the most to lose? Corporate. Corporate business worldwide.”

https://www.bitchute.com/video/GDqpAuauKjE1/

1:45:54 – “So, did the South African Maritime Research Institute kill Dag Hammarskjold?… There was involvement… What do you based this theory on?… There were photos that I can recalls seeing in one of our meetings, and it was what they used as a recruitment tool. There was one photo where you could see where all the trees were burnt. Where there was a forest, I assume it was a forest. All the trees were burnt in it. You could see the ant hills. Stuff like that. There was a photo of the guys in their “fatigues” standing on the ant hills and that. And then, there was the photo of the plane on one side. So we were given three photos… What guys were on the photo?… Maxwell was in the photo. He was very young… Keith Maxwell?… Ja. He was definitely there… I can still remember the pictures. He was still wearing shorts, long socks and combat boots with his camouflage hat. There was 2 other guys. One was in full military fatigues. And he had a beard… Could the bearded guy be the agent code named “Congo Red”?… Ja, I would say 80% probably that would have been Congo Red.”

1:52:27 – “There is a picture of Dag Hammarskjold and in the picture of Dag Hammarskjold, there is a playing card tucked in his shirt collar… Yes, there is an ace…. Yes… Yes, there’s an ace… The ace of spades?… The ace of spades. And that was well known in security circles. That was the way that the CIA operated. That was a CIA card. And that’s why I say the CIA was involved… So, that is a calling card from the CIA?… That is a calling card from the CIA… Did you encounter the ace of spades being used later on in your own career in SAIMR?… In SAIMR, yes. Once or twice. Up in the DRC itself… And that was also because of CIA involvement?… Because of CIA involvement.”

1:57:50 – “Anybody that resisted any white form of manipulation in the African continent, SAIMR was prepared to go and quell those for a price. At a cost. And that was one thing Dag Hammarskjold was totally against. And he wanted every country for the people of the country. And obviously, when you’ve got investments, when there’s minerals, gold, diamonds, oil and all of that stuff. And we all know which countries. He was a threat… He was killed because he was going to change the way that Africa dealt with the rest of the world financially. And he was a threat. And who’s got the most to lose? Corporate. Corporate business worldwide. People are greedy. People want what other have got, and they don’t want to pay for it. That’s why they come to Africa. Because Africa seem to be easy and third world.”

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>“Put everyone on DNA database, says judge” – Stephen Sedley “Former” Communist

>https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1562193/Put-everyone-on-DNA-database-says-judge.html

>>16386558

>17:12 – Albie [Sachs]: “The team of the [Kenya judges and magistrates vetting] board includes 3 Kenyan lawyers, 3 Kenyan non-lawyers and 3 foreign judges. In fact, judges they say of some distinction from commonwealth countries who going to participate as full members of the board. A friend of mine, Lord Stephen Sedley [father was a Jewish immigrant, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Sedley] a wonderful judge from the court of appeal in England, retired had agreed. He’d helped with the drafting of the regulations… (https://youtu.be/GPBpbHnCPiU - embedded)

“United Nations — Update on investigation into the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld” – Former Apartheid Judge, Richard Goldstone, and Sir Stephen Sedley part of the investigation team

https://inteltoday.org/2017/05/04/united-nations-update-on-investigation-into-the-tragic-death-of-dag-hammarskjold/

May 4, 2017

Mr. Mohamed Othman, former Chief Justice of Tanzania, held meetings last week with Member States in New York in his role as Eminent Person in relation to the investigation into the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him.

Mr. Othman was appointed by the Secretary-General pursuant to General Assembly resolution 71/260, and is familiar with this matter from his position as Chair of the 2015 Independent Panel of Experts. Similar to the 2015 Panel, the Eminent Person’s mandate is to review potential new information, assess its probative value, and determine the scope that any further investigation should take.

The mandate of the Eminent Person also goes further, allowing Mr. Othman to potentially draw conclusions from the investigations already conducted, including those of the 2015 Panel, and of the 2013 Hammarskjöld Commission comprised of Sir Stephen Sedley (Chair), Ambassador Hans Corell, Justice Richard Goldstone, and Justice Wilhelmina Thomassen.

Operation Celeste

In July 2015, an independent panel reviewing new information about the crash concluded that the United States and Britain have retained some classified files, and that South Africa had not responded to several requests for information.

The panel had cited documents from the South African Institute for Maritime Research that refer to “Operation Celeste”, purportedly to “remove” Hammarskjold with cooperation from then U.S. CIA director Allen Dulles. The panel was not able to conclude whether the documents were authentic.

The new investigation could be explosive… I have long suspected that Crypto AG had entered into a close relationship with the NSA and that some of their machines were rigged to allowed the US Agency to easily ‘decrypt’ the coded messages. These claims were vindicated by US government documents declassified in 2015.

According to Sixten Svensson (Brother- in- law of Crypto AG Founder Boris Hagelin), the machine used by Hammarskjöld during his visit to Congo was one of the rigged machine. [Svensson got this information directly from Boris Hagelin.] So the CIA, the NSA and the GCHQ were able to read his communications in real – time. (This information will not be officialy published before 2033.)

>>17069503

“Dag Hammarskjöld UN Report” -“There appear to be links between SAIMR and Katanga”, “without the problem of "a repeat of the Lumumba affair"”

http://www.hammarskjoldinquiry.info/pdf/ham_245_Final_UN_report_071019.pdf

12 September 2019

1. There appear to be links between SAIMR and Katanga. For example, the mercenary “Mad” Mike Hoare is referred to in later SAIMR documents from the 1980s. There are allegations that SAIMR also operated as part of, or had links to, South African and/or British special forces and that its personnel included ex-Rhodesian soldiers.

In a new development, in 2019, I received from the Cold Case Hammarskjöld film team an extract from a handwritten version of Maxwell’s memoirs, which, unlike the typed version, refers specifically to Hammarskjöld. The film team had, I was informed, obtained the memoirs through the family of a former member of SAIMR who had been murdered. This extract, entitled “Johannesburg 1961”, purports to discuss the plot to kill Hammarskjöld in terms described below.

1. “Johannesburg 1961” provides certain historical information about the situation in Katanga in 1961 and states that Hammarskjöld had a dual purpose in coming to Katanga, which was both to arrange for Congo-Katanga peace talks and to negotiate with Rhodesian and/or South African leaders regarding the possible presence of an enlarged United Nations air force. The senior officers of the “Delta Unit” of the “Marine Institute of South Africa” are gathered, and “Acting Commodore Wagman” states that the three key figures of Hammarskjöld, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Sean McKeown are to be “removed”, without the problem of “a repeat of the Lumumba affair”. Wagman advises the officers that in “middle to end September”, their forces would launch a counter-attack against (ONUC operation) Rumpunch while Hammarskjöld was in the Congo and that, concurrently, “Congo Red” would “deal with the three”.

1. The alleged “Operation Celeste” documents analysed by Williams bear similarities to those of later SAIMR operations, including those relating to the so-called “Operation Anvil”, an attempted coup in Seychelles in 1981, in which Maxwell and Dalgleish, along with Jerry Puren and Mike Hoare – former mercenaries who had been in the Congo in 1961 – and others were allegedly involved. The same letterhead is used, and names of units and personnel are referred to consistently, including “Congo Red”. It seems from Truth and Reconciliation Commission records that the Commission itself was satisfied that the SAIMR organization existed, at least in the 1990s.

1. The files recently released under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act contain a large amount of information about WIROGUE and QJWIN that has not been released elsewhere; they also hold new information relating to the Congo about CIA intelligence officers, recruits for contract missions and other coded projects (including one focused on pilots and planes with the cryptonym of “WICLAM”). Some of the material relates to “ZRRIFLE”, the CIA cryptonym for operations including assassinations (referred to under the euphemism “executive action capability”). However, many of the released documents are heavily redacted. In some cases, files of nearly 200 pages have been redacted so extensively that almost all the pages are blank, which renders their release of extremely limited utility (by way of example, record No. 104-10182-10003 has only 3 out of 186 pages not wholly redacted, No. 104-10182-10004 has only 8 out of 176 pages not wholly redacted and No. 104-10182-10002 has only 8 out of 144 pages not wholly redacted). There are further records on WIROGUE, ZRRIFLE and Lumumba in the so-called CIA “Miscellaneous files”, which have been identified as being related to the Kennedy assassination but have not yet been released or described online.

1. Regarding his observations on other foreign presence, [CIA’s Larry] Devlin has also stated that “American insiders [believed] that the French hoped to displace the Belgians in Katanga and to obtain control of the province’s great mineral wealth”, as, according to him (and mirroring certain findings of the Independent Appointee of France), some of the more competent mercenary officers of Katanga came from France. Devlin also suggested that “Jacques Foccart, the head of French intelligence for Africa in the Elysée Palace in Paris, offered some of [the mercenaries] an eventual pardon if they would fight for Tshombe in Katanga”.

>>17069487

>“COLD CASE HAMMARSKJOLD” – Full Documentary (MUST WATCH!) – “And who’s got the most to lose? Corporate. Corporate business worldwide.”

>He was killed because he was going to change the way that Africa dealt with the rest of the world financially. And he was a threat.

People who were a threat and died - Dag Hammarskjöld, JFK, Patrice Lumumba, HF Verwoerd, Bernt Carlsson

Dag Hammarskjöld, JFK, Patrice Lumumba – “mysterious deaths”

https://isgp-studies.com/death-list-potential-government-assassinations

Harold Julian, the only (temporary) survivor of the plane crash that killed United Nations secretary general Dag Hammarskjold, who, together with JFK, was trying to keep Patrice Lumumba in power in the Congo. All three were greatly opposed by the CIA and Belgian colonists – and all three died under mysterious circumstances. There have been international calls to reopen the investigation. (September 19, 1961, Chicago Daily Tribune, ‘Explosions in Dag Plane’)

“1960’s Assassinations – Dr Hendrik Verwoerd vs John F Kennedy (and RFK)”

https://gumshoenews.com/2015/04/15/1960s-assassinations-dr-hendrik-verwoerd-vs-john-f-kennedy-and-rfk/

http://web.archive.org/web/20150525191548/https://gumshoenews.com/2015/04/15/1960s-assassinations-dr-hendrik-verwoerd-vs-john-f-kennedy-and-rfk/

John Vorster was appointed as successor to Verwoerd. And like President Johnson establishing the Warren Commission, Vorster quickly appointed his own commission of enquiry – consisting of ONE MAN – who found that there was “no ground for the rumour that the wounds had been inflicted by an expert”.

Like JFK who spoke out against secret societies and signed the Executive Order 11110 to issue interest free loans – Dr Verwoerd, too, was putting the screws on big business and big banking.

Verwoerd launched an inquiry into “Die Georganiseerde Geldmag” (The Organized Money Power) known as “The Hoek Report”. Smith writes: Professor Piet Hoek was asked to investigate the stranglehold that economic monopolies such as Anglo American (the Oppenheimers, mining), Rembrandt (Anton Rupert, liquor and cigarettes) , Trust Bank (Jan Marais), Sanlam (A.D. Wasenaar, insurance), etc were holding.

This report was finished after Verwoerd’s death and Vorster refused to publish it. Parts of it leaked out in 1969. Hoek found that Anglo American Corporation, the largest private group in the economy, was large enough to frustrate government policies and should be brought under much stricter control. Anglo’s Harry Frederick Oppenheimer (1908 – 2000) had ties with the Rothchilds, and had emerged (like Rhodes) from diamonds becoming one of the world’s richest men.

>>16299738

Bernt Carlsson who died in the Lockerbie bombing

>United Nations Assistant Secretary-General & UN Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson, who would have assumed control of the country until Namibia's first universal franchise elections had been held, was unable to attend the signing ceremony, being one of the 243 passengers killed when Pan Am Flight 103 crashed at Lockerbie on 21 December 1988.[7]

Following the UN Commissioner's death at Lockerbie, South African foreign minister Pik Botha went ahead and signed the Tripartite Accord on 22 December 1988. However, instead of handing control of Namibia to the United Nations, Pik Botha put the apartheid regime's Administrator-General, Louis Pienaar, in charge.

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/The_How,_Why_and_Who_of_Pan_Am_Flight_103

>“Bernt Carlsson and The Case of the Disappearing Diamonds [Namibia] Part 3” - https://youtu.be/IHIDaGrIsmY (embedded) [The Thirion report exposed the cartel]

>Following Bernt Carlsson's untimely death in the Lockerbie bombing, the case against URENCO [the joint Dutch/British/West German uranium enrichment company] was inexplicably dropped and no further prosecutions took place of the companies and countries that were in breach of the United Nations Council for Namibia Decree No. 1.

https://www.serendipity.li/more/lockerbie_bombing.htm

>Thirion Report – “The three hundred and fifty page mining report from Judge Thirion and his team paints a devastating portrait of the world wide De Beers diamond cartel and its behaviour towards Namibia.”

http://www.gordonbrownisinnocent.co.uk/thirionreport.html

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“Did British intelligence kill [Chris] Hani?” – Janusz Walus (Hani’s ‘assassin’) ties to SAIMR

https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1993/eirv20n19-19930514/eirv20n19-19930514_036-did_british_intelligence_kill_ha.pdf

May 14, 1993

Even more interesting, Hani, who had been the victim of several previous assassination attempts and whose concern for his own security was notorious, had unaccountably given his two bodyguards time off, the precise day the assassin(s) struck. The bodyguards' absence smelled of complicity from inside the ANC, and in fact Hani' s factional ally Winnie Mandela charged that the ANC had killed him.

The whole affair was so riddled with inconsistencies that even the left-wing newspaper the New Nation commented April 23, "To attribute the assassination to the lunatic rightwing fringe is a poor attempt at exonerating the more sophisticated forces from culpability." The police's nice-and-tidy verdict of Walus as a "lone assassin," backed by a loose bunch of right-wingers, is viewed by most informed people within South Africa with the same incredulity with which Americans regard the Warren Commission's verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy.

According to South African intelligence sources, Janusz Walus was intimately associated with the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR), about which, said one intelligence veteran, "That's a very curious outfit. They have no naval guys in it, and they do no research." Furthermore, the SAIMR reportedly has been involved in various coup operations, including in the Seychelles Islands. In fact, according to a November 1990 article in the Sunday Times of London, the SAIMR was founded as a mercenary group of elite special forces people operating throughout Africa. An investigation by one South African intelligence agency determined that SAIMR was a front for Britain's MI-6.

Walus's possible involvement with British intelligence becomes highlighted also with the sudden visit to South Africa, just days before the assassination, of one of the most important figures in British intelligence, former MI-6 Africa desk head Nicholas Elliott. Despite being in his seventies, Elliott made the arduous journey to Johannesburg from London for a mere three days of meetings. According to sources in London, he met with Julian Ogilvie-Thompson, head of the Anglo-American Corp., the ANC's chief financial sponsor inside the country. Elliott, whose father had been headmaster at the elite British boarding school Eton, was the lifelong friend of Soviet spy Kim Philby, and was suspected of having tipped off Philby in 1963 that he was being investigated by British counterintelligence, allowing him to escape to Moscow. Elliott is also a former board member of Lonrho of Tiny Rowland. Rowland's Lonrho purchased the ANC's Johannesburg headquarters for them, and is bankrolling a planned new ANC newspaper.

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Richard Goldstone was part of the commission to investigate Clayton Sizwe Sithole death, Zindzi Mandela’s boyfriend (daughter of Winnie and Nelson Mandela)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1990/04/08/at-the-gates-of-freedom/ed3f4da7-9938-4c50-879e-2d0e45b6ee55/

April 8, 1990

As we stand in the airport waiting room, Zindzi tells me about the death of her lover, Clayton Sizwe Sithole, the father of her last child. Sithole, 20, was found hanging from shoelaces and a belt in a shower room at John Vorster Square police headquarters in Johannesburg on January 30. He had been jailed under the Internal Security Act on suspicion of possible terrorist activity. At first, Sithole's death looked suspicious to all. But the story took an unexpected turn when South African police claimed that Sithole killed himself because of the "trauma" of having "implicated" Zindzi and Winnie Mandela in criminal activity, and because he suspected that he had been "betrayed" by other ANC members who gave the police information on his activities.

Justice Richard J. Goldstone, who headed the commission to look into Sithole's death, ruled that the allegations should be kept private and would not be the subject of further inquiries. At the close of the investigation, even the Mandelas' lawyer agreed there was no evidence to show that Sithole had not committed suicide.

By the time of the funeral on February 10, Zindzi was in emotional turmoil. She was simultaneously confused by the idea that Sithole had given the police information about her and her mother and grieved by the death of a man she loved. Winnie Mandela, wearing khaki fatigues, walked to the grave with Zindzi, who was dressed in black. Twice Zindzi stopped walking and seemed on the verge of emotional collapse. Her mother had to hug her tightly to get her to continue.

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“Mediclinic accepts R75 billion bid from SA’s richest man Johann Rupert” – “partnering with MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company SA”

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/mediclinic-accepts-r75-billion-bid-from-sas-richest-man-johann-rupert-bloomberg-rich-list-forbes-latest-news-msc-breaking-4-august-2022/

04-08-2022

Mediclinic International Plc agreed to the latest in a series of offers from a consortium led by billionaire Johann Rupert, valuing the South African hospital operator at £3.7 billion (R75 billion).

According to the Bloomberg website, Rupert’s investment group Remgro Ltd, already Mediclinic’s biggest shareholder, is partnering with MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company SA to pay 504 pence a share for the stock it doesn’t already own, according to a statement on Thursday.

That was the fourth approach, including a 463 pence bid that was rejected in June.

The deal represents another expansion for MSC, which has grown in stature after cargo transport boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic. The container group also bought the African transport and logistics business of Bollore SA for $6.3 billion.

Mediclinic shares gained 3.4% to 501 pence as of this afternoon in London, having climbed 56% this year amid the takeover battle. The company has health-care facilities in Switzerland and the UAE as well as South Africa, where it has a dual listing.

The deal still needs approval from shareholders representing 75% of votes cast at a general meeting, and “pressure from minorities for improved terms is a real possibility,” analysts at financial group Cowen said in a note.

Remgro is a long-term Mediclinic investor with a 45% stake, while the Public Investment Corporation, Africa’s biggest money manager, holds about 11%.

The Stellenbosch-based company has been shaking up its portfolio in recent months, increasing the amount of unlisted assets and selling a 30% stake in Distell Group Holdings Ltd., South Africa’s largest wine and spirits maker, to Heineken NV.

Rupert, 72, who has a net worth of almost $10 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is South Africa’s richest person.

>>17113234

Jan van Risseghem was named as the Belgian pilot who shot down Hammarskjöld’s plane – Avikat, Union Minière, Mitraco

http://www.hammarskjoldinquiry.info/pdf/ham_245_Final_UN_report_071019.pdf

1. The air force of Katanga (Avikat) was effective in operations against Congolese forces and civilians and ONUC forces… Armaments for Avikat [The air force of Katanga] operations appear to have included those purchased as well as those made locally with the involvement of the mining company Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK).

1. According to his logs, the flights [Jan] Van Risseghem made for Avikat in September 1961 were all recorded as being in a “Dornier-28” plane (presumably the Dornier DO-28, discussed below), with the copilot “Colonel John Cassart”. Cassart is understood to be Jean Cassart (born “02/07/1906”), a volunteer during the Second World War and officer in the Belgian army until the mid-1950s. Following that service, reports note that Cassart became managing director of the Congolese company Mitraco, which acted as an intermediary in the purchase of Dornier aircraft by the government of Katanga in 1961. I note that it is unclear whether Van Risseghem knew how to fly a Dornier DO-28 before September 1961.

1. New information regarding Van Risseghem was also received from various private sources in 2018/19. According to an interview with Pierre Coppens shown in Cold Case Hammarskjöld, Van Risseghem was said to have admitted in 1965 to performing an attack on Hammarskjöld’s plane. Coppens, a former paratrooper and friend of Van Risseghem, stated that he knew Van Risseghem from the early 1960s when the latter acted as a pilot for a parachutist training centre in Belgium. He said that Van Risseghem told him in 1965 that he had shot down Hammarskjöld’s DC-6 using the Fouga, despite the difficulties of doing so, but that Van Risseghem had not known who the passengers were. Van Risseghem is alleged to have stated that the attack was launched from Kipushi airfield and that he flew with extra fuel tanks. The Cold Case Hammarskjöld film team stated that Coppens first mentioned what Van Risseghem told him to another ex-mercenary from the Congo, Edouarde Dinant, in the 1980s.

1. According to an article published by the journalist Bruno Struys in March 2019 in De Morgen, he held an interview in 2019 with Marion Fowkes, Van Risseghem’s widow. Fowkes is said to have stated that Van Risseghem was recruited to Katanga by his friend, Jean Cassart, the Belgian owner of Mitraco, a company that supplied military equipment to Katanga. Struys states that Fowkes presented him with Van Risseghem’s mother’s diary, which referred to Van Risseghem stating that he had been made a “boss” of Avikat. Information in the diary is said to state that Van Risseghem landed in Belgium on 8 September 1961, which accords with information provided by Belgium, and that he was asked by his “secret organization” to leave immediately, after which his mother received a letter from him, writt en from Paris and received on 19 September 1961. It does not state when he arrived in Katanga or when that letter was sent. Fowkes has the flight logs of Van Risseghem.

Below are articles about him;

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/12/former-raf-pilot-shot-down-un-chief-dag-hammarskjold-1961-plane

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/12/raf-veteran-admitted-killing-un-secretary-general-dag-hammarskjold-in-1961

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/04/dag-hammarskjold-plane-shot-down-mercenary-cable

>>16959589

>>16959599

>>16960573

>Robert Maxwell

>>17069580

>Janusz Walus

It is interesting that Keith and Robert share the same surname, Maxwell.

“Susan Williams Connects SA Institute for Maritime Research [SAIMR] to Hammarskjold Death Plot” – “closely linked to Britain’s MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies, the American CIA, as well as the Israeli Mossad”

http://jacana.bookslive.co.za/blog/2012/02/10/susan-williams-connects-sa-institute-for-maritime-research-to-hammarskjold-death-plot/

In a special report for The New Age, De wet Potgieter focuses on one staggering revelation made by Susan Williams in her recently released book, Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa.

In her book on the conspiracy-laden death of UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, Williams claims that the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) had close ties with Britain’s MI5 and MI6, and America’s CIA – all of which were involved in the plot to kill Hammarskjöld:

The South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) – a sinister international organisation, based in South Africa during apartheid – was linked to the British secret services.

British historical researcher Dr Susan Williams makes this shocking revelation in her latest book, Who Killed Hammarskjöld?

Williams claims that SAIMR was, since the ’60s, closely linked to Britain’s MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies, the American CIA, as well as the Israeli Mossad and that British and American agents were part of the plot to kill Hammarskjöld, because he had “become troublesome”. This shadowy organisation was headed during the apartheid years by a “Commodore” Keith Maxwell – a quack obsessed with Aids research.

Potgieter explores this revelation further in a companion article in The Southern Times:

Damning evidence of alleged foul play in the fiery death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in a plane crash in Zambia more than 50 years ago has been uncovered in South Africa.

The “hit squad” that allegedly bombed Hammarskjöld’s plane was linked to the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) during the apartheid years.

This is the same organisation that had close ties with jailed Polish assassin Janusz Walus four years before he killed Chris Hani, who was the leader of the South African Communist Party.

British historical researcher Dr Susan Williams stumbled upon this evidence by chance in the archives of the National Intelligence Agency.

”Paul Kagame: “Our Kind of Guy”” – “What if we got it wrong about the massacres that ripped across Rwanda in 1994?” – Part 1

https://www.voltairenet.org/article167972.html

3 January 2011

What if we got it wrong about the massacres that ripped across Rwanda in 1994? According to Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, what really happened was not a genocide by the Hutu Power against the Tutsis, but a secret U.S. war that butchered an equal number of victims on both sides of the Hutu-Tutsi divide. At the heart of this slaughterous game we find the impervious Paul Kagame.

Back in 1995, a senior Clinton administration official, commenting on Indonesian President Suharto, then on a state visit to Washington, referred to him as “our kind of guy”. [1] He was speaking about a brutal and thieving dictator and double-genocidist (first in Indonesia itself, then East Timor), but one whose genocide in Indonesia terminated any left threat in that country, aligned Indonesia militarily as a Western ally and client state, and opened the door to foreign investment, even if with a heavy bribery charge. The first segment of the double-genocide (1965-1966) [2] was therefore serviceable to U.S. interests and was so recognized by the political and media establishment. Indeed, following the mass murders in Indonesia proper, Robert McNamara referred to the transformation as a “dividend” paid by the U.S. military investment there [3], and in the New York Times, James Reston called Suharto’s rise a “gleam of light in Asia”. [4]

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame clearly is another “our kind of guy”: Like Suharto, Kagame is a double-genocidist, and one who ended any social democratic threat in Rwanda, firmly aligned Rwanda with the West as a U.S. client, and opened the door to foreign investment. Later, and far more lucratively, Kagame helped carve out resource-extraction and investment opportunities for his own associates and the U.S. and other Western investors in neighboring Zaire, the massive, resource-rich Central African country renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1997 during the First Congo War (ca. July 1996 - July 1998).

For many years Kagame has been portrayed in the Western mainstream media as the savior of Rwanda, having allegedly terminated the genocide committed against his own minority ethnic group, the Tutsi, by the Hutu majority (April - July 1994) [5]. He and his supporters have long justified the Rwanda Patriotic Front’s military invasions of Zaire - the DRC as a simple pursuit of the Hutu genocidaires who had fled Rwanda during the war within, and Kagame’s conquest of, the country. This apologetic, long considered fraudulent by many marginalized dissidents, has finally come into question even within the establishment with the leak [6] and then wide circulation of a draft UN report prepared for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (i.e., "Report of the Mapping Exercise documenting the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed within the territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003", June, 2010 - http://www.genocidewatch.org/images/DRC10_06_xx_Report_Draft_Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo_1993-2003.pdf).

Not only does this report catalogue the massive atrocities committed in the DRC over a ten-year period, it attributes the responsibility for the most serious of these atrocities to the RPF. "There is no denying that ethnic massacres were committed and that the victims were mostly Hutus from Burundi, Rwanda, and Zaire", the draft report quotes the findings of a 1997 UN inquiry (para. 510). Factoring-in the "scale of the crimes and the large number of victims" as well as the "systematic nature of the attacks listed against the Hutu…[p]articularly in North Kivu and South Kivu…suggests premeditation and a precise methodology" (para. 514). The draft report’s section on the "Crime of genocide" concludes: "The systematic and widespread attacks…which targeted very large numbers of Rwanda Hutu refugees and members of the Hutu civilian population, resulting in their death, reveal a number of damning elements that, if they were proven before a competent court, could be classified crimes of genocide" (para. 517) [7]. As Luc Cote, a former investigator and head of the legal office at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), observed: "For me it was amazing. I saw a pattern in the Congo that I’d seen in Rwanda. It was the same thing. There are dozens and dozens of incidents, where you have the same pattern. It was systematically done". [8]

”Paul Kagame: “Our Kind of Guy”” – “What if we got it wrong about the massacres that ripped across Rwanda in 1994?” – Part 2

https://www.voltairenet.org/article167972.html

3 January 2011

Actually, this was not the first time the UN had pointed to Kagame’s genocidal operations in Rwanda and the DRC. Even before the 1997 inquiry (quoted above), the surviving written summary of Robert Gersony’s oral presentation at the UN in October 1994 reports "systematic and sustained killing and persecution of the Hutu civilian populations by the [RPF]" in southern Rwanda from April through August of that year, and "Large-scale indiscriminate killings of men, women, [and] children, including the sick and the elderly…." The Gersony report estimated between 5,000 and 10,000 Hutu deaths each month from April on. "It appeared that the vast majority of men, women, and children killed in those actions were targeted through the pure chance of being caught by the [RPF]". ("Summary of UNHCR Presentation Before Commission of Experts," October 11, 1994.) Importantly, the members of this UN Commission agreed at this time to treat Gersony’s testimony and evidence as "confidential", and ordered that it should "only be made available to members of the Commission"—who promptly suppressed its findings [9]. (See the letter written on UN High Commissioner for Refugees stationary by François Fouinat, addressed to Ms. B. Molina-Abram of the Commission of Experts on Rwanda, October 11, 1994.)

Among the many other UN reports on the DRC, the second in the series by the UN Panel of Experts on the “Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo” (S/2002/1146, October, 2002) also stands out. The UN Panel estimated that by September 2002, some 3.5 million excess deaths had occurred in the five eastern provinces as “a direct result of the occupation of the DRC by Rwanda and Uganda” (para. 96). This report also rejected the Kagame regime’s rationale that its armed forces’ continued presence in the eastern DRC was needed to defend Rwanda against hostile Hutu forces terrorizing the border region and threatening to invade it; instead, the "real long-term purpose is…to ’secure property’", the UN countered (para. 66) [10]. But though this 2002 report was not ordered suppressed the way the 1994 Gersony report was, it was nevertheless ignored in the Western media, despite the fact that 3.5 million deaths greatly exceeds the highest toll attributed to the "Rwanda genocide” of 1994.

This suppression was surely a result of the fact that Kagame is a U.S. client, whose deadly efforts in the DRC were actually in line with the U.S. policy of opening up the country to U.S. and other Western mining and business interests. In fact, in answering questions on this leaked report, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley admitted that “We do have a relationship with Rwanda apart from the tragic history of genocide and other issues in the 1990s. Rwanda has played a constructive role in the region recently. It has played an important role in a variety of UN missions. It is in our interest to help to professionalize military forces. And we work hard on that in various parts of the world. So we have engaged Rwanda.” [11] Crowley and company hadn’t gotten around to studying that draft UN report at the time. But then, on the other hand, there were those earlier UN reports of Kagame’s mass killings of civilians in both Rwanda and the DRC, which led to no discernible U.S. or UN response (except, as noted, suppression). Could it be that these were the acceptable responses of those “professionalized military forces”, as they have been to the performance of the professionalized forces of Suharto and the U.S.-trained Latin American troops fresh out of the School of the Americas? Could it be that these horrors were also “dividends” and a new "gleam of light”—in Africa?

It is interesting to note that the first New York Times article on the draft UN report, by Howard French, refers to the difficulty encountered in getting this new report out—it was in fact leaked first to Le Monde in France by insiders who were concerned that its really critical parts might be excised before its release. The UN had already felt it necessary to show the draft to the Kagame government for comments [12], and that government’s denunciation of this “outrageous” document was spelled out in a full paragraph in the NYT article. As French explained it, there were “difficulties over seven months” in getting the report released over the objections of a government “which has long enjoyed the strong diplomatic support from the United States and Britain”. [13]

”Paul Kagame: “Our Kind of Guy”” – “What if we got it wrong about the massacres that ripped across Rwanda in 1994?” – Part 3

https://www.voltairenet.org/article167972.html

3 January 2011

Perhaps the UN insiders and media were emboldened to act by the remarkable 93 percent vote total obtained by Kagame in the August 9, 2010 presidential election, where he seems to have gotten massive support from the Hutus whose relatives and ethnic compatriots he was busily slaughtering on such a large scale in the DRC. This election got enough publicity to put Rwanda back on the media stage, if only briefly, with even the U.S. administration expressing mild “concerns” over "what appear to be attempts by the government of Rwanda to limit freedom of expression" (Philip Crowley, August 9) [14] and urging voluntary reforms. Suppose credible evidence was found by the UN that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez had massacred thousands of refugee women, children, elderly, and wounded in a neighboring country. Can you imagine the UN asking Chavez to comment on a draft report on his activities, and granting him seven months before someone leaked it to a major newspaper?

We may note also that this possible DRC genocide is discussed by Howard French and the rest of the mainstream media within the partially exonerating context of “The Genocide” of 1994, where Kagame was allegedly the savior who ended a Hutu-engineered mass killing. As French writes, following the established Western party-line, “In 1994, more than 800,000 people, predominantly members of the ethnic Tutsi group in Rwanda, were slaughtered by the Hutu”. [15] In this and other current mainstream reports there was, first, the primary genocide of the Tutsi by the Hutu, which it now appears may have been followed by a secondary genocide in response by the Tutsi against the Hutu.

But this context is based on a monumental establishment lie about the first genocide, and in fact the great difficulty in publicizing the mass murder in the DRC has an obvious common source with that lie: namely, as Kagame is a servant of the U.S. and other Western imperial powers, reports of his crimes are ignored by Western officials and avoided in the mainstream media. The truth, which Howard French and his associates cannot admit, is that the real 1994 genocide was also mainly the work of Paul Kagame, with the assistance of Bill Clinton, the British and Belgians, the UN, and the mainstream media [16].

Paul Kagame relies on the myth of his savior role to maintain his domination of Rwanda [17], although this merely supplements his primary dependence on force. But he has made “genocide denial” a crime, with the standard model of the "Rwandan genocide" taken as the truth, so that those contesting his power can be treated as “genocide deniers” or “divisionists” and prosecuted for crimes against the Rwandan state. On this basis, Peter Erlinder, a U.S. lawyer and lead defense counsel at the ICTR, was arrested when he arrived in Rwanda in late May to represent Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, a Hutu opposition political candidate, who had also been arrested and barred from running for political office. Although Erlinder was released on bail in mid-June, his arrest and the systematic crackdown on opposition parties and candidates prior to the August election has been awkward for defenders of the savior and standard model [18].

As to the mythical character of that model, consider the following:

The “triggering event” in the first genocide is generally accepted to have been the April 6, 1994 shooting down of the jet carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, the Hutu president of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi. There is overwhelming evidence that this shootdown was organized by Paul Kagame. This was the conclusion of Michael Hourigan, an investigator who researched the subject for the ICTR in 1996 [19]. But his report on this to ICTR prosecutor Louise Arbour was set aside, after consultation with U.S. officials, and the ICTR failed to engage in any further investigation of the “triggering event” over the next 13 years. Why would the ICTR, a creature of the U.S.-dominated Security Council, drop this subject unless credible evidence pointed to the U.S.-supported Kagame and the RPF?

”Paul Kagame: “Our Kind of Guy”” – “What if we got it wrong about the massacres that ripped across Rwanda in 1994?” – Part 4

https://www.voltairenet.org/article167972.html

3 January 2011

An even more extensive investigation of the “triggering event” by French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière concluded that Kagame needed the "physical elimination" of Habyarimana in order to seize state-power within Rwanda before the national elections called for by the 1993 Arusha Accords, elections that Kagame almost certainly would have lost, given that his minority Tutsi were greatly outnumbered by the majority Hutu [20]. Bruguière also noted that the RPF alone in Rwanda in 1994 were a well-organized military force, and ready to strike. And the politically weak but militarily strong Kagame-led RPF did strike, resuming its assault on the government of Rwanda within two hours of the Habyarimana assassination. This suggests advance knowledge as well as planning and an organization ready to act, whereas the Hutu planners in the establishment’s mythical version of these events seem to have been disorganized, overmatched, and quickly overpowered. In less than 100 days, Kagame and the RPF controlled Rwanda. On the assumption that the shoot-down was central to the larger plan of Hutu Power and genocide, this would have required a miracle of Hutu incompetence; but it would be entirely understandable if it was carried out by Kagame’s force as part of their plan to seize state-power.

• Kagame was trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and has received steady U.S. material and diplomatic support from the time he assumed command of the RPF shortly after the RPF’s invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990 [21], a serious act of aggression that was somehow not taken seriously in the Security Council, up to and beyond the RPF’s final assault on the Rwandan state that began on April 6, 1994. During that April assault, when the “genocide” was presumably well underway, the remnants of the Rwandan government urged the UN to provide more troops to contain the violence, but Paul Kagame didn’t want more UN troops as he was sure of a military victory, and—surprise!—the United States was also against such a troop addition. In consequence, the Security Council greatly reduced the number of UN troops in Rwanda—a bit hard to reconcile with the standard account that the locus of primary responsibility for the 100 days of killings resides with "Hutu Power" (and killers) and their genocidal plan. The apology in 1998 by Bill Clinton on behalf of the "international community" for "not act[ing] quickly enough after the killing began" [22] was unconscionable hypocrisy. Rather than failing at some non-existent humanitarian objective, the Clinton administration facilitated Kagame’s conquest of Rwanda in 1994, so Clinton shares Kagame’s criminality for the violence in Rwanda and for the violence that the RPF extended so ferociously into the DRC for so many years.

As regards evidence on the killings, there is no doubt that many Tutsi were killed, although mostly in sporadic bursts and localized vengeance killings, not as the result of a systematically planned operation of Hutu commanders. Only the Kagame forces seem to have killed on a systematic and planned basis.

And their killings were played down by the UN and United States. Not only was the 1994 Gersony report on Hutu killings by the RPF suppressed by the UN, an internal memorandum to the U.S. Secretary of State in September 1994 that reported the killing of "10,000 or more Hutu civilians per month" by Tutsi forces also never saw the light of day, except for its unearthing by Peter Erlinder and its use as evidence at the ICTR [23]. When the U.S. academics Christian Davenport and Allan Stam, who were initially employed by the ICTR to document all deaths in Rwanda during 1994, concluded that the "majority of victims are likely Hutu and not Tutsi", they were promptly fired. "The killings in the zone controlled by the FAR [i.e., the Armed Forces of Rwanda] seemed to escalate as the [RPF] moved into the country and acquired more territory", they write, summarizing what they consider the "most shocking result" of their research. "When the [RPF] advanced, large-scale killings escalated. When the [RPF] stopped, large-scale killings largely decreased." [24]

Would it not have been incredible for Kagame’s Tutsi forces, the only well-organized killing force within Rwanda in 1994, whose surges on the battlefield were systematically accompanied by spikes in deaths, and who were able to conquer Rwanda in 100 days, to have been unable to prevent Tutsi deaths from exceeding the Hutu deaths by a large margin, as the standard model of the "Rwandan genocide" holds? Indeed, it is incredible, and should be considered a propaganda myth.

”Paul Kagame: “Our Kind of Guy”” – “What if we got it wrong about the massacres that ripped across Rwanda in 1994?” – Part 5

https://www.voltairenet.org/article167972.html

3 January 2011

This myth is also incompatible with basic population numbers. As we first reported elsewhere [25], and will now repeat here (see Table 1, below), the official 1991 census of Rwanda determined the country’s ethnic breakdown to be 91.1% Hutu, 8.4% Tutsi, 0.4% Twa, and 0.1% "other." Thus out of Rwanda’s 1991 population of 7,099,844 persons, Rwanda’s minority Tutsi population was 596,387, compared to a majority Hutu population of 6,467,958. Additionally, as Davenport and Stam point out in their Miller-McCune article, the Tutsi survivors organization IBUKA claimed that "about 300,000 Tutsi survived the 1994 slaughter"—a number which means that "out of the 800,000 to 1 million believed to have been killed then, more than half were Hutu". [26] In fact, it is highly likely that far more than half of those killed in Rwanda during the April-July 1994 period were Hutu; and of course after the RPF seized state power in July, Hutu deaths inside both Rwanda and later the DRC continued unabated for another decade-and-a-half.

Concluding Note

There is great continuity in U.S. policy in the Third World, and it is not pleasant. Thus a Bill Clinton official could find the mass killer Suharto “our kind of guy” in 1995, and Suharto received steady U.S. support for 33 years, through the administrations of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton, until his downfall during the Asian currency crisis in 1998. In a more recent time frame, extending from 1990 to today, Paul Kagame, an even more ferocious mass killer, has gotten support from the first George Bush, Bill Clinton, the second George Bush, and now Barack Obama (whose Deputy Secretary of State hadn’t gotten around to looking at the draft UN Report on Kagame’s mass killings in the DRC). It is interesting, also, to see the media treat this latest “our kind of guy” so kindly, with the liberal New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch even comparing Kagame to Abe Lincoln (in his 1998 book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families), and Stephen Kinzer publishing a hagiography of this deadly agent of U.S. power (A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It [2008]).

This leaked UN report and the negative publicity generated by Kagame’s sham election in August 2010 may open up the mainstream a bit to a more honest examination of this U.S.-supported mass killer. But that is no sure thing, given the value of his service to U.S. power in Africa, and given the U.S. establishment’s deep commitment to a narrative that for many years has protected and even sanctified the “man who dreamed”.

“Making Foreign Aid Work in Africa; Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Howard Buffett talk about why development assistance needs to be a two-way street”

https://science.time.com/2013/12/19/q-and-a-with-rwandan-president-paul-kagame-and-howard-buffett/

December 19, 2013

The philanthropist Howard G. Buffett—eldest son of multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett—and Rwandan President Paul Kagame go back a long way. Buffett’s foundation has been active in Africa for years, investing more than $140 million in central Africa’s Great Lakes region, which includes Rwanda. Almost every time Buffett visits Africa, he stops by the Rwandan capital of Kigali to see Kagame. Rwanda is a bright spot in a troubled region, a poor, landlocked country that has nevertheless managed to persevere despite the horrors of the 1994 genocide, which led to the deaths of as many as 1 million people. Buffett—and many international observers—give most of the credit to Kagame, the soft-spoken, steely-eyed former rebel who has been the country’s president, and its driving force, since 2000. “You go to Rwanda and the president can say ‘this is who you need to talk to, this is what you need to do’,” says Buffett. “It comes down to the leadership and the commitment.”

Buffett and Kagame were in New York last week—the Rwandan president was presenting the philanthropist with a humanitarian award at the U.N.—and I had a chance to sit down with both of them. It’s been a challenging year for Kagame and Rwanda. Kagame is celebrated internationally for his efficiency and effectiveness in steering Rwanda’s impressive economic growth—traits that stand out in Africa, where too many leaders are corrupt, ineffective or both. But he’s come under criticism for allegedly supporting the rebel group M23 in a long-running civil conflict in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. That led a number of Western countries in recent years—including the U.S.—to cut or suspend foreign aid to Rwanda, which makes up as much as 40% of the country’s budget.

To Buffett, the suspension of Western aid is more than unfair—and he’s willing to do something about it. “Partners shouldn’t pull out the rugs from each other,” he says. “You should stick with it, and if you’re not willing to stick with it, don’t start it in the first place.” Last week’s Buffett’s foundation announced that it would provide $3.7 million for Rwanda’s Strategic Capacity Building Initiative, a development program designed to strengthen government institutions. That money was meant in part to close a funding gap left by other donors who had withdrawn aid to Rwanda. And Buffett—who was critical about contemporary philanthropy in his recent book Forty Chances—was scathing when he discussed the suspension of aid and the effects it had on Rwanda.

“Africa: U.S. Covert Action Exposed” – Maurice Tempelsman (middleman for the De Beers diamond cartel), Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, CIA, George Bush Sr – Part 1

https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/Africa_U_S_Covert_Action_Exposed_3718.shtml

April 25, 2001

(FinalCall.com) - Corporate greed, combined with a desire to never allow the "throne of civilization" to unite and become self-sufficient, continues to join at the hip the U.S. Government, the United Nations and corporate cartels in a persistent war on Africa, a recent congressional hearing concluded.

Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) chaired the hearing, "Covert Action in Africa: A Smoking Gun in Washington, D.C.," and led the voices of castigation that claimed the U.S. Government, the UN, private militias and western economic interests possessed complete knowledge of pending civil unrest in Africa and fed the fray between African nations. Their aim was to use war, disease, hunger and poverty as covers while continuing the centuries-old practice of rape and exploitation of the continent's human and mineral resources, testimonies charged.

Among those named as collaborators during the daylong hearing were U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeline K. Albright and international diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman.

Mr. Tempelsman, whose role in the confluence of public policy and private profit as a middleman for the De Beers diamond cartel, according to submitted evidence, helped to shape practically every major covert action in Africa since the early 1950s. Declassified memos and cables between former U.S. presidents and State Department officials over the last four decades named Mr. Tempelsman with direct input in the destabilization of Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Rwanda and Ghana.

He earned his stripes with western powers in the overthrow of Ghana's first elected president, Kwame Nkrumah, and the CIA-backed assassination of Congo's first-elected president, Patrice Lumumba, documents reveal.

As late as 1997, Mr. Tempelsman was named in the ongoing cover-up of U.S.-CIA covert support of the former president of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC]), Mobuto Sese Seko, who died in exile in 1997 after the overthrow of his regime by recently assassinated Congolese President Laurent Kabila. Mr. Tempelsman is named as the agent in charge of selling off the gross excess of the strategic diamond stockpile in the United States that was used to fund the deceased dictator's exploits. According to documents entered into evidence, Mr. Tempelsman was rumored in 1998 to have engaged in a romantic relationship with then-Secretary of State Albright.

During the hearing, Ms. McKinney said the legacy of former Pres. Clinton and his foreign policy toward Africa is one of grave deceit. She charged that not only did his administration turn a deaf ear to the genocide that occurred in Rwanda under his watch, but that everyone who aided in the silencing were rewarded with promotions.

"Look at Madeline Albright. At the time U.N. Ambassador, she got promoted to secretary of state," she charged. "Susan Rice, over at the National Security Council, she got promoted to assistant secretary of state for Africa. Kofi Annan, whom The Carlsson Report [a United Nations inquiry] makes 19 observations, of which 17 blame Kofi Annan, and yet [he] gets a promotion to secretary-general and is about to be re-elected as secretary-general."

Rep. McKinney also blasted International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) Judge Louise Arbor, who, shortly after suspending the investigation of the April 1994 rocket attack on the presidential plane that killed Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, was awarded a Canada Supreme Court appointment.

“Africa: U.S. Covert Action Exposed” – Maurice Tempelsman (middleman for the De Beers diamond cartel), Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, CIA, George Bush Sr – Part 2

https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/Africa_U_S_Covert_Action_Exposed_3718.shtml

April 25, 2001

"America's policy toward Africa during the past decade, rather than seeking to stabilize situations where civil war and ethnic turmoil reign supreme, has seemingly promoted destabilization," testified Wayne Madsen, author of "Genocide and Covert Activities in Africa 1993-1999."

Ms. Albright was fond of describing as "beacons of hope" those pro-U.S. military leaders in Africa who assumed power by force, Mr. Madsen said. "These leaders, who include the current presidents of Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Angola, Eritrea, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), preside over countries where ethnic and civil turmoil permit unscrupulous international mining companies to take advantage of the strife to fill their own coffers with conflict diamonds, gold, copper, platinum and other precious minerals including one that is a primary component of computer microchips," he said.

Mr. Madsen said the United States played more of a role in the Rwandan tragedy than it admits, citing the U.S.-backed Rwandan and Ugandan-led invasions of Congo. Speculation behind the recent assassination of Pres. Laurent Kabila and the rapid visit to the United States by his successor and son Joseph Kabila at the same time as a visit by Rwandan President Paul Kagame, coupled with meetings with Corporate Council for Africa and a lavish dinner-reception thrown by Maurice Tempelsman has done little to put America in a favorable light in the region, the author asserts.

"After all, the date of Kabila's assassination [Jan. 16, 2001] was practically 40 years from the very day of the CIA-planned-and-executed assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba," he concluded.

When policy and profit converge

"This is a western syndicated proxy war and, like Sierra Leone, Angola and Sudan, it is war-as-cover for the rapid and unrestricted extraction of raw materials, and war as a means to totally disenfranchise the local people," said Keith Snow, freelance writer and journalist who supplied investigative reports for the panel.

Diamonds, gold, cobalt, manganese, petroleum, natural gas, timber and possibly uranium, he said, are just a few of the major spoils being pillaged behind the scenes as war destroys Africa. "Some of these minerals are almost solely found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo," Mr. Snow said.

One of those minerals, columbium tantalite, or "Col-Tan", is a primary example of the role strategic minerals play in sustaining war. This scarce mineral is found almost exclusively in Eastern Congo and used by western nations in everything from aircraft engines to computer chips.

"Economic interests are a significant factor in the fighting in the DRC," said Bill Hartung, of the World Policy Institute in New York. In his co-authored report "Deadly Legacy Update: U.S. Arms and Training Programs in Africa," the researcher acknowledged the significant role economic interests play in the fighting in the DRC and throughout Africa.

"Africans need western technology, investment and cooperation to transfer minerals. Africans do not process these minerals; they are processed in the west. Africans are not dependent upon minerals used in high-tech industry, sophisticated defense projects, or materials used in space exploration. The west, and particularly the United States, is dependent upon the availability of strategic minerals, many of which the U.S. does not produce. Africa does not have a vibrant market for diamonds, which are cut and distributed in the west," he said.

“Africa: U.S. Covert Action Exposed” – Maurice Tempelsman (middleman for the De Beers diamond cartel), Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, CIA, George Bush Sr – Part 3

https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/Africa_U_S_Covert_Action_Exposed_3718.shtml

April 25, 2001

Western corporations are aware that revenues from mineral exploitation received by African countries involved in war are used to purchase military equipment. Considering the history of a strong U.S.-led corporate presence in Africa, it is quite likely that U.S. mining interests have benefited from the war, concluded the panel.

__This may also explain the interest of American Mineral Fields International (AMF), which, according to Mr. Snow, is a classic case of cronyism. The company secured a $1 billion mining deal for cobalt and copper before Laurent Kabila came into power. According to Mr. Snow, the deal was secured through a shared interest; namely Pres. Clinton. AMF's chairman at the time of the deal was Mike McMurrough, a native of Mr. Clinton's hometown of Hope, Arkansas. Mr. Snow also alleged that Mr. Clinton has financial interest in AMF. Former Pres. George Bush Sr. was also cited at the hearing for his advisory board membership at Barrick Gold, Ltd., for which he used his connections with the CIA, having once been director of the spy agency._

The UN's failure

The Carlsson Report, released one year ago, is an independent inquiry into the UN's actions during the 1994 Rwanda genocide presented to the UN Security Council by the report's chairman Ingvar Carlsson. The report condemns the Security Council for not preventing the systematic slaughter of over 800,000 men, women and children in Rwanda, which occurred within a 100-day period between the months of April and July of 1994. The UN's decision to reduce the strength of the mandated United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) after the genocide started, despite its knowledge of the atrocities was the cause of much bitterness stated his report.

"The failure by the United Nations to prevent and, subsequently, to stop the genocide in Rwanda was a failure by the United Nations system as a whole," said the report. "There was a persistent lack of political will by Member States to act, or to act with enough assertiveness. This lack of political will affected the response by the Secretariat and decision-making by the Security Council, but was also evident in the recurrent difficulties to get the necessary troops for the UNAMIR. Finally, although UNAMIR suffered from a chronic lack of resources and political priority, it must also be said that serious mistakes were made with those resources which were at the disposal of the United Nations," Mr. Carlsson said.

A similar report released by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) last July also singled out France, Belgium, the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches along with the United States and UN as those most guilty and demanded "a significant level of reparations" be paid.

According to Mr. Carlsson, Mr. Annan as Under Secretary General was made privy to a Jan. 11, 1994 cable which leaked information concerning a plot hatched by the Interahamwe militia to kill Belgian soldiers, force the withdrawal of Belgian troops and dispatch Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) soldiers, who were Tutsi by ethnicity, to Kigali camps "for their extermination." The informant said that his personnel were able to kill up to 1,000 Tutsi soldiers in 20-minute intervals and that a cache of weapons with at least 135 G3 and AK 47 assault rifles were at their disposal.

"He was prepared to show UNAMIR where these weapons were located in exchange for his family's protection," said the report.

The report said Mr. Annan wrote a letter to then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutrous-Ghali's special representative in Rwanda, stating that the information contained in the cable was cause for concern, but insisted the information be handled with caution. The original cable was filed into archives and Mr. Boutrous-Ghali said that he was not shown a copy of the cable until much later. Several such communications, the report alleges, were similarly ignored.

“Africa: U.S. Covert Action Exposed” – Maurice Tempelsman (middleman for the De Beers diamond cartel), Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, CIA, George Bush Sr – Part 4

https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/Africa_U_S_Covert_Action_Exposed_3718.shtml

April 25, 2001

"The Secretary-General responded to the Carlsson Report by saying that he received it with deep regret and agreed with the report's findings," said Fahran Haqq, a spokesman for Mr. Annan at UN headquarters in New York.

On Apr. 6, 1994 Presidents Habyarimana and Ntaryamira flew back together from a reportedly successful sub-regional peace summit where, according to Tanzanian officials present, Pres. Habyarimana had committed his country to implement the Arusha Agreement, a UN peace accord. At approximately 8:30 p.m., the plane was destroyed by rocket fire as it approached its landing at Kigali's airport. Everybody onboard died, thus officially unleashing the civil war that engulfs the Great Lakes Region today.

Mr. Haqq denied comment on Ms. McKinney's allegation of UN collusion and told The Final Call that, since Mr. Carlsson's report, Mr. Annan has been the greatest voice behind the UN's Brahimi Report, a wide-ranging, seven-part resolution containing recommendations and decisions on peacekeeping missions, which must be the responsibility of the Secretary-General. Further, it urges prospective parties to peace agreements, including regional and sub-regional organizations, to cooperate fully with the United Nations from an early stage in negotiations. It mandates the Secretariat to continue comprehensive political briefings on relevant issues before the Security Council and requests regular military briefings from the Secretariat, including by the military adviser, the force commander or designate, before the establishment of a peacekeeping operation.

What should Africa expect from Mr. Bush?

No one during the hearing expressed any optimism that things will fare better under a Bush Administration. Mr. Bush did state during his campaign that Africa was not a major area of national security interest to the United States; his key advisors have suggested otherwise.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has expressed interest in Africa but has not defined in any detail what those interests are outside of resolving the conflict in the Sudan.

The new threat to development in Africa has become recent decisions by Pres. Bush to appoint Walter H. Kansteiner III as assistant secretary of state for Africa. He has expressed desire to draw new territorial boundaries on the continent. Also still in the works are the enactment of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act that was passed into law before the expiration of Pres. Clinton's term and the Zimbabwe Democracy Act 2000, a sanction measure against the rights of Black Zimbabweans' claims to land ownership in their own country. That bill is currently engrossed in Senate debate.

“Maurice Tempelsman Joins the U.S.-Africa Business Forum Google Hangout” - https://youtu.be/8796v2nAfS0

“Maurice Tempelsman Background”

Maurice Tempelsman (born August 26, 1929) is a Belgian-American businessman and diamond merchant. He was the longtime companion of Jacqueline Onassis, former First Lady of the United States.

Tempelsman was born on August 26, 1929 in Antwerp, Belgium, the son of Leon and Helene Tempelsman, both Orthodox Jews, in a Yiddish-speaking family in Antwerp’s Jewish community. In 1940, Tempelsman and his family emigrated to the United States to escape persecution by Nazi Germany during World War II. When he was 16, Tempelsman began working for his father, a diamond broker. He attended New York City’s public schools and New York University.

Business interests

In 1950 he created a new marketing niche by persuading the US-government to stockpile African diamonds for industrial and military purposes, with him as middleman, and in 1957, at the age of 27, he and his lawyer, Adlai Stevenson, traveled to Africa, where Tempelsman had begun forging ties with leaders. His contacts eventually ranged from South African anti-apartheid politician Oliver Tambo to Zaire's kleptocratic dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko and the influential Oppenheimer diamond family. Tempelsman is chairman of the board of directors of Lazare Kaplan International Inc. (LKI), the largest diamond company in the United States, noted for its "ideal cut" diamonds sold worldwide under the brand name, Lazare Diamonds. Tempelsman is one of fewer than 90 ″sightholders″ in the world, which means that 10 times a year he is permitted to buy diamonds directly from the powerful De Beers cartel in the City of London. Because DeBeers was a virtual monopoly, for many years it could not operate legally in the United States.

He is also a general partner of Leon Tempelsman & Son, an investment company specializing in real estate and venture capital.

Philanthropic and political activities

Tempelsman maintains relations with political and business leaders, in particular government leaders in Africa and Russia, and leading figures in the U.S. Democratic Party. His extensive political contacts and monetary contributions often provide him with access and prestige in those markets, as was the case during the presidency of Bill Clinton. From 1993 to 1997, Tempelsman visited the White House at least ten times, met privately with Hillary Clinton on two separate occasions, vacationed with the Clintons and the Kennedy family in Martha's Vineyard, and flew to Moscow and back with President Clinton on Air Force One.

In Southern Africa, Tempelsman has played a key role in negotiations between hostile governments and companies engaging in diamond exploration. He met with Mobutu Sese Seko, to assist the regime’s business dealings with De Beers. In the 1960s Tempelsman hired as his business agent the CIA station chief in Kinshasa, Larry Devlin, who helped put Mobutu in power and afterward served as his personal adviser. From March 3, 1977, Tempelsman briefly held the title of honorary consul general for Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), at the DRC’s consular offices in New York City. In addition to the DRC, Tempelsman has played a key role in the diamond industries of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, and Sierra Leone.

Tempelsman served as chairman of the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA) from 1999 to 2002 and again from 2007 to 2008, after which he was named chairman emeritus. An example of his work with the CCA involved assisting government leaders with establishing the New Partnership for Africa's Development. Tempelsman was a board member of the Southern African Enterprise Development Fund, and past chairman and long-serving board member of the Africa-America Institute.

Tempelsman is a trustee of the Eurasia Foundation, and a director of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Center for National Policy, the Business Council for International Understanding, and the U.S.-Russia Business Council.

He is chairman of the International Advisory Council of the Harvard School of Public Health’s AIDS Initiative, and is an honorary trustee and an honorary member of the corporation of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Tempelsman is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was named a visitor to the Department of Classical Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A director of the Academy of American Poets, Tempelsman also serves as a trustee of the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and on Lenox Hill Hospital’s Advisory Board. He has served on several Presidential Commissions including the President’s Commission for the Observance of Human Rights, the Citizen’s Advisory Board of Youth Opportunities and the National Highway Safety Advisory Committee, and was appointed to the New York Council on International Business.

>>17352586

> In the 1960s Tempelsman hired as his business agent the CIA station chief in Kinshasa, Larry Devlin, who helped put Mobutu in power and afterward served as his personal adviser.

“The Lumumba Assassination and CIA Accountability” [discusses Larry Devlin] - https://youtu.be/OhZsPIrpYI4

13:32 – “Larry Devlin withheld his knowledge of a plan to transfer Lumumba to one of these 2 secessionist states from CIA headquarters, from the state department until Lumumba was already dead. The telegram, indicating he had been warned 3 days in advance of a transfer, arrived hours after Lumumba was already dead.”

34:59 – “I don’t think there’s any real reasonable doubt that Devlin was involved strongly with giving a green light for this. The important aspects of this were under project Wizard, you had all these people who were the key Congolese leaders. I won’t go into detail about who they were, who were being supported by the CIA through the 2 coups. They’re being funded regularly through the project. In addition, another quarter million dollars was given to them in October to pay them and to personally support Mobutu to pay the top Congolese leaders. Contingency military planning was in course in order to support them if there was a clash with Lumumbists and as the document that I had mentioned, the one that hasn’t been declassified yet, said there was a daily intimate working relationship between the CIA station and these so-called Congolese moderates. Devlin himself in his memoir writes… “I was working closely with Mobutu and many new ministers providing them with advice and guidance.””

Larry Devlin was station in Congo at the time of Hammarskjold’s death

http://www.hammarskjoldinquiry.info/pdf/ham_245_Final_UN_report_071019.pdf

1. In 1961, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) appears to have had a significant presence in the Congo. Its stations in Leopoldville and Elisabethville had operations that included air operations (including Chief of Station Larry Devlin’s coordination of agents “WIROGUE” and “QJWIN”) and activities that included planned assassinations, such as those under the programme “ZRRIFLE” and other programmes. CIA operatives may have acquired Dornier and Helio aircraft for operations in the region.

“Namibian President Hage Geingob (SWAPO) Receives AAI [Africa-American Institute] Lifetime Achievement Award” – Maurice Tempelsman presented the reward and provided some history

https://youtu.be/Qela4kYM9sw

Maurice Tempelsman, chairman of the board of directors of Lazare Kaplan International Inc., presented H.E. Hage Geingob, President of the Republic of Namibia and AAI alumnus, with the AAI Lifetime Achievement and Distinguished Alumnus Award.

14:29 – “[In 1962] I will tell you I walked once 5 days and 5 nights in Botswana. We got lost. The situation got so tough, our plane we’re supposed to take, an ANC hired plane was sabotaged. Luckily enough, it was still on the ground.”

18:14 – “Rest is history. We were told by Maurice how I studies when I was a full-time student however I was asked to go and train Namibians in Zambia. Today I will tell you, those people who trained in Zambia with UN assistance… I’m telling you Chief Justice was trained there in Zambia at that institute, Deputy Chief Justice, Minister of Justice, Minister of Home Affairs. I mean, when we talk about the permanent secretaries and midlevel managers, they came from there… I was thanking them all and I must thank you all. People like Maurice. People like Frank Ferrari, may his soul rest in peace, he was the key man that time in AAI and coming from Africa, you know, from the bush, you guys were so nice to us, helping us… Now today I am enjoying the sweet; freedom, democracy, everything. Thank you very much!”

>>17352647

>People like Maurice. People like Frank Ferrari, may his soul rest in peace, he was the key man that time in AAI

Africa-America Institute – Frank Ferrari [not African]

https://www.aaionline.org/who-we-are/history/

>>17352647

“A new war- Namibian President Hage Geingob says white people are declaring another war [at the voting booths].” - https://youtu.be/vHOOCU-R4WY

“Geingob says the world has changed, not Swapo” - Swapo leading the 4th industrial revolution

https://www.namibian.com.na/114798/read/Geingob-says-the-world-has-changed-not-Swapo

2022-08-02

“We are talking about the Swapo government and the fourth Industrial Revolution. We are leading it. The future of Swapo is bright. For 70 years, Swapo has maintained peace, unity and stability in the country,” he said.

Former president Hifikepunye Pohamba has urged the Swapo Party Elders Council to encourage a high degree of solidarity and comradeship among members.

In a speech read on his behalf by Swapo secretary general Sophia Shganingwa, Pohamba said the elders must avoid infighting and disunity among themselves.

“We must know we cannot all be at the helm of the movement at the same time, and we must appreciate the fact that the Swapo leadership has always been about team effort for the sake of the party,” he said.

“Companies; “‘the engine of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo”” – US, Rwanda, Canada, Cabot Corporation, Barrick Gold, George Bush, so on

https://www.terry.ubc.ca/2006/12/01/congo-a-critical-political-economic-analysis-of-the-war-in-the-democratic-republic-of-congo-and-its-effects-on-women/

December 1, 2006

As Lindsey Benedict notes, the “motives that originally drew foreign countries in the Congo…have been displaced by exploitation of the Congo’s vast resources.”

To keep the war going, with the instability resulting in cheap access to the country’s wealth, “the U.S. has given arms and/or military training to all seven armies,” according to Ismi, with Uganda receiving $1.5 million in 1999, Rwanda obtaining $325,000 under the U.S.’s International Military Education Training in 2000, and on the opposite camp “Zimbabwe getting $1.4 million in U.S. military training in 2000 and Namibia $500,000.” Unsurprisingly, according to Human Rights Watch’s 1999 World Report, Rwanda and Uganda are the U.S.’s “staunchest allies in the region.” Millions of dollars of U.S. tax-payer money has been spent to ensure that companies, American and other, have unrestricted access to the mineral plunder, while the Congolese people are further impoverished and slaughtered. “Western governments,” notes Ismi, “rewarded Rwanda for invading the Congo by doubling aid to the country from $26.1 million in 1997 to $51.5 million in 1999.”

Members of the United Nations have not ignored the role of corporations in the conflict: In 2001, the Group of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a UN panel created to research the conflict in the region, submitted a report to the United Nations, corroborating the argument that Western companies are instrumental in the misnamed Congolese ‘civil war.’ “The role of the private sector in the exploitation of natural resources and the continuation of the war has been vital,” the report noted. “A number of companies have been involved and have fuelled the war directly, trading arms for natural resources. Others have facilitated access to financial resources, which are used to purchase weapons.” The panel added that “[c]ompanies trading minerals…[are] considered to be ‘the engine of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’…The only loser in this huge business venture is the Congolese people.” The chairman of the panel, Mahmoud Kassem, said at a news conference that “the role of these companies is really important. Corporations have a direct and indirect role. Without them, this kind of commerce would not be possible.”

The UN Panel reported that the Cabot Corporation, whose former CEO and Chairman, Samuel Bodman, now U.S. Secretary of Energy (and former Deputy Director of the Department of the Treasury, before becoming Deputy Secretary of the Department of Commerce in George W. Bush’s first term, providing a fitting example of the close relationship between industry heads and public servants in the U.S.), had a contract to obtain coltan from Eagle Wings Resources International during the war. Cabot is the world’s largest refiner of coltan. The Panel also stated that Eagle Wings achieved special access to coltan sites and use of captive labor, largely through “its contacts with the Rwandan military.”

Several Canadian companies are benefiting from the war in the DRC, including First Quantum Minerals and Barrick Gold. First Quantum Minerals, whose special advisor on Africa in the mid 1990s was former Canadian PM and Foreign Minister Joe Clark, owns a copper deposit in the DRC. Barrick, whose directors include former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and John Trevor Eyton, a Canadian Senator appointed by Mulroney (as well as until recently having former U.S. President George H.W. Bush as a paid advisor), owns mining properties in parts of the Eastern Congo under Rwandan and Ugandan occupation. According to Le Monde Diplomatique, Barrick, among numerous others, have been “funding military operations in exchange for lucrative contracts in the east of the DRC” “[s]ince the outbreak of the first war in the Congo.” Not only have Canadian companies profited from a conflict situation of genocidal proportions, but former Canadian PMs have also assisted them in their ventures.

“Bush, Clinton in the Web: Behind the Assassination of Kabila” – Part 1

http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Company/kabila1.htm

http://web.archive.org/web/20020415102509/http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Company/kabila1.htm

The failure of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to express even the most perfunctory regret over the assassination of Congo President Laurent Désiré Kabila last year, betrays how implicated Washington is in this latest outrage against the most important country in central Africa.

Washington's silence is even more glaring considering that its foreign policy experts are well aware that the African people view the secret intelligence agencies of the U.S. government, which work closely with corporations seeking vast fortunes in the region, as the probable authors of this crime.

George Bush Sr., father of the president, even had an intimate connection with one of these plundering corporations.

But this is not mentioned in the commercial media, which, as usual, go even further than indifference to insult the fallen head of state, while speculating on the breakup of the Congo.

What they carefully omit in their reporting is the deadly record of U.S. interventions in the Congo, beginning with President Dwight D. Eisenhower's order at a meeting of the National Security Council on Aug. 18, 1960, to assassinate Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was the young and inspiring independence leader who was briefly the Congo's first president. The 40th anniversary of his assassination, Jan. 17 of this year, was the day after Kabila was shot.

Kabila Resisted 'Globalization'

What U.S. corporations wanted from Kabila, and what he refused to give, was outright control over an area that contains some of the world's most important deposits of gold, diamonds, cobalt, manganese, uranium, copper, zinc, germanium, silver, lead, iron and tungsten.

It has been Washington's theme song for the last decade that oppressed countries must join the "global economy"–meaning sell off state-owned enterprises to imperialist investors, open their domestic markets and devalue their currencies, thus further lowering the standard of living.

Even Mobutu tried to resist this and hold on to state control over the mines–one of the reasons the U.S. decided to dump him after having propped him up for almost 35 years. Washington helped a coalition force headed by Kabila but based on Rwandan and Ugandan military forces to topple Mobutu in 1997.

But once Kabila became president, he surprised his former allies by refusing to be a puppet and trying to rally the Congolese people to unite and defend their country's sovereignty.

Kabila also retracted a number of mining contracts signed with U.S. and European corporations during the period of the alliance with Rwanda and Uganda. And he refused to pay back the huge debt to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank incurred by the Mobutu regime. For this, it seemed, they never forgave him.

A most interesting essay on "The geopolitical stakes of the international mining companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo" by mining civil engineer Pierre Baracyetse can be found on the Web at http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html. [English translation] It explains in detail the high stakes involved for foreign capital.

“Bush, Clinton in the Web: Behind the Assassination of Kabila” – Part 2

http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Company/kabila1.htm

http://web.archive.org/web/20020415102509/http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Company/kabila1.htm

Billions of Dollars at Stake

American Mineral Fields (AMFI), a consortium based originally in Hope, Ark.yes, Bill Clinton's hometownis a big player in exploiting Congo's mineral wealth. In 1997, just a month before Mobutu fell, it signed contracts with the Kabila-Rwanda-Uganda alliance forces for almost a billion dollars investment in copper, cobalt and zinc mines and processing plants in Kolwezi and Kipushi.

The industrial enterprises that set up AMFI, according to Baracyetse, "are interested in the contract for the construction of the orbital platform around the world that is destined to replace the Russian station MIR."

This project is part of the $60-billion so-called National Missile Defense system that George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Richard Cheney are pushing so vigorously. Building the space station will require many of the rare metals found in eastern Congo.

Another big player in the eastern Congo is Barrick Gold Corp., headquartered in Canada. It is the world's second- largest gold producer after Anglo-American of South Africa.

This company was able in 1996 to get the Mobutu regime's Gold Office of Kilomoto, a government monopoly, to transfer mining rights over almost all its 82,000 square kilometers of land to Barrick. The land is estimated to have 100 tons of gold in reserve.

George Bush Sr. sat on the board of directors of Barrick, according to Baracyetse.

The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, signed into law by President Clinton last May 18, brought the full power of the U.S. government behind expanding corporate domination in Africa. The biggest companies, including Texaco, Mobil, Amoco, Occidental Petroleum, Chevron, General Electric, Enron and Caterpillar spent some $200 million lobbying for this legislation.

Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Susan Rice described Africa as "a huge market insufficiently exploited of 700 million people" in calling for passage of the act. The vision being pushed by both Democrats and Republicans is that only U.S. intervention can bring development and prosperity to Africa.

But politically conscious Africans are calling it the "Recolonization of Africa" act, and warn that it will only increase the plunder of this rich continent by corporate pirates.

[This article was published earlier this year and distributed by the International Action Centre (http://www.iacenter.org/). We refer readers also to: http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html].

>>17352721

>A most interesting essay on "The geopolitical stakes of the international mining companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo" by mining civil engineer Pierre Baracyetse can be found on the Web at http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html. [English translation] It explains in detail the high stakes involved for foreign capital.

“THE GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES OF INTERNATIONAL MINING COMPANIES IN THE DRC” (Google English Translation) – Barrick Gold (BGC), Anglo American Corporation (AAC) – Part 1

http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20011126143934/http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

December 1999

THE MEDIA REVEALS

Since 1996, when the rebellion announced the capture of the main localities of the DRC, the media hastened to specify their economic importance and at the same time revealed the main actors hitherto unknown: major financiers interested in the exploitation of mines in the Congo. Judge their importance: the Consolidated Eurocan Ventures of the Lundin Group, Barrick Gold Corporation (BGC) today in second position for the world production of gold, the Anglo American Corporation (AAC) of South Africa, the most major mining company in the world, apart from the oil companies. There are also "small" ones, less known but who dare to face the big ones on a field in full crisis, this is the case of American Minerals Fields Inc.

The AMFI, created in 1995, was forged as an instrument intended to carry out in Africa the will of economic domination of the Western financiers and particularly to satisfy in DRC the intentions of the American companies whose leaders take part in the great world strategic stakes which concern science, technology, finance, industry or politics.

Having enormous capital, these large industrialists began a slow transformation which reached its maturity in the mid-1990s. powerful, nor to control these states. They now nourish the ambition of founding a new world order, by proceeding to the creation of new state entities which would be their own emanations and would function as one of their organs (remember the famous sentence of Georges BUSH at the beginning of the war from Iraq: We are going to establish a New World Order .

The military means that these groups possess and manipulate allow them to impose their will on national institutions as well as on governments; to take possession of a State, to buy it entirely but also to annihilate it, to dismantle its structures and to erect instead a new state entity functioning as a simple subsidiary, a vulgar establishment or a banal trading post .

Today no institution, no organization, national or international, no government, no country and inevitably, no individual, even the President of the Republic, can oppose significant resistance to these new masters of the world. Headless monsters, the powerful multinational firms through successive mega-mergers increase their size as much as their power and their capacity to cause harm in the face of trivialized populations.

These financial powers undertook the reconquest and the remodeling of the countries of the world, redrawing new borders as in ex-Yugoslavia, forcing the creation of new States as in the Balkans, in Central Asia and soon in Central Africa.

Africa is indeed at the center of these new planetary challenges. With nearly a third of the planet's reserves of raw materials abandoned by the former metropolitan powers which are gradually disengaging, both from the point of view of cooperation (now left to NGOs) and from the military point of view, African countries have become easy prey for multinational corporations.

To better control their capital, they impose on the populations the political leaders of their choice, who are often very little known to the people, thus destabilizing the region and giving, through the hypocritical means of a so-called pacification, the opportunity for the armies of the UN to ratify a de facto split that the people do not want. They then created their state within the state.

__The governments of the former Western colonial powers no longer have the means for their policy in Africa; the multinationals owners and manipulators of enormous capital henceforth occupy the place left vacant, and, willingly or by force, set up a new political order dictated by their sole interests to the detriment of the populations.___

The dimensions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (as large as the current European Union), its geostrategic location in the heart of the continent, the sharing of its borders with nine other countries as well as its mineral wealth designated it as the first target and terrain of choice. for the pursuit of this global strategy in Africa.

“THE GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES OF INTERNATIONAL MINING COMPANIES IN THE DRC” (Google English Translation) – American Minerals Fields Inc. (AMFI), Anglo American, Bill Clinton – Part 2

http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20011126143934/http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

December 1999

The attempted appropriation of the Congo by war should allow these mining multinationals, if victory chooses the side of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi who are fighting for them, to take control of the Congolese mineral wealth and make the use of it that best suits their interests.

It is in fact a real recolonization of Africa by international private capital. The new order desired by these firms is characterized by the abolition of the old African political order resulting from the Berlin Conference of 1885, by the systematic dismemberment of the old States and by the creation of new entities whose role and existence will be determined by the sole will of the directors of these companies.

Many American industrial companies that participated in the creation of AMFI [American Minerals Fields Inc.] in 1995 are involved and interested in the contract for the construction of the orbital platform around the Earth intended to replace the Russian station MIR. This is a 60 billion dollar market which will end in the year 2004 with the launch of the last module; companies and industries from 60 countries participate.

The replacement of the old political "order" of Mobutu, deprived of economic infrastructures, financial means, armed forces and entirely instrumentalized by the AMFI constituted the primary objective of the conflict sponsored by the USA.

On December 1, 1996, agreements were signed between Consolidated Eurocan Venture, a component of Lundin Group, with the Kengo government, for the exploitation of copper and cobalt in the Tenke-Fungurume mining concession of Gécamines in Katanga (Shaba). This Tenke-Fungurume deposit would contain the highest copper (4.42%) and cobalt (0.33%) grades in the world. We expect 100,000 tons of copper and 8,000 tons of cobalt in the year 2000. This production would increase to 400,000 tons of copper and 17,000 tons of cobalt in 2010. All this under the umbrella of 55% of Consolidated Eurocan Ventures and 45 % of Generale des Carrières et des Mines (GECAMINES), a Congolese State company since 1967.

These agreements were almost signed by two of the most important South African mining firms, GENCOR and ISCOR, more specialized in the extraction and processing of copper and cobalt, but the Canadian offer of Lundin Group was preferred to them. This would explain the position of South Africa in the current conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In March 1997, as soon as the AFDL [The Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire was a coalition of Rwandan, Ugandan, Burundian, and Congolese dissidents, disgruntled minority groups, and nations that toppled Mobutu Sese Seko and brought Laurent-Désiré Kabila to power in the First Congo War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_of_Democratic_Forces_for_the_Liberation_of_Congo] took Kisangani, the leaders of AMFI set up their office in Goma to get in touch with the Alliance authorities. The contact took place thanks to an ex-Belgian colonel Willy MALLANTS, military advisor to the AFDL and former military advisor to Mobutu. AMFI succeeded in snatching the offer to the detriment of its competitors, including the large AAC-GENOR. It should be noted that these two companies have unclear relations, since four of AMFI's administrators worked for AAC for several years.

It would be:

Michael McMULLOUGH, Simon BROWNLIE, Bernard VAVALA, Stephen MALOUF.

On April 16, 1997, a month before Kabila's troops entered Kinshasa, the AFDL signed three agreements with American Mineral Fields Inc. (AMFI ), a Canadian company operating from Arkansas in the USA, in the stronghold of the President of the USA Bill CLINTON , and whose main shareholder is none other than Jean-Raymond BOULLE, who to have the signature of the AFDL had explained that the offer presented to the government of KENGO had been refused. Even if this offer was the best, the Mobutu regime preferred in January 1997 the submission of the South African companies Anglo American Corporation-GENCOR .

The agreements between AMFI and AFDL concerned three sites:

A first US$200m project in Kolwezi for the extraction of copper and cobalt.

A second US$30m project for a cobalt extraction plant from copper tailings at Kipushi.

A third project for a zinc processing plant, requiring more than US$550 million of investment in Kipushi.

“THE GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES OF INTERNATIONAL MINING COMPANIES IN THE DRC” (Google English Translation) – American Minerals Fields Inc. (AMFI), Anglo American – Part 3

http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20011126143934/http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

December 1999

On May 2, 1997, two weeks before Mobutu's flight, after having ratified the agreements of the Kengo Government, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) received a sum of 50 million US dollars (M $ US) on a US$250 million transaction. The remaining 200M are pledged over the next four years. The overall project being US$1.5 billion.

The media were also able to reveal the audacity of Jean-Raymond Boulle during the war of liberation: he did not hesitate to say that he saw "a new era dawning in Zaire… There was a risk, but for AMFI was logical". Other less daring companies, such as Union Minière Belge, which signed an agreement with GECAMINES in 1996, are waiting to see clearly the political situation in the DRC. This Belgian company associated with the AAC for the exploitation of a cobalt and copper mine in Kasomba, as well as another in Kolwezi, is very cautious, but fortunately for it, its initial investment would already be recovered if the we believe its Chairman of the Board Etienne DAVIGNON.

The government of Angola granted IDAS contracts to ensure security, but also the exploitation of some Angolan mines in exchange for its services, to face the UNITA of Jonas SAVIMBI. And in turn IDAS instructed AMFI to exploit these mines in its place.

The redistribution of the concessions of the various mining sites of the new democratic Congo to American, Canadian and South African companies was to allow Kabila to honor his short-term drafts and to pay the daily expenses of his political-administrative apparatus.

THE ROLE OF AMFI

In the war that has been going on in the DRC since the fall of 1996, the role of AMFI has experienced unexpected developments. On August 2, 1998, the Rwandan wing of the AFDL rebelled against President Kabila and as a result the Congo was again called upon according to the two classic poles: in the East, the rebels supported by the Rwandans, the Burundians and the Ugandans, with AMFI as the main funder, and in the West, the governments officially assisted by three countries: Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia.

Unconscious, in the hands of the new masters who were trying to erect a New Order in the Congo, Laurent Desiré Kabila was in the wrong war and objective. After the AFDL victory he became a prisoner of the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian Tutsis he had named; to key positions. He was also the military hostage of Rwandan troops firmly established in Kinshasa and in the East and supported by AMFI. The Congolese president therefore gave himself up to the leaders of AMFI, his future murderers, with whom in April 1997 he signed an agreement to sell Gécamines.

This agreement to sell the giant of the Congolese economy enabled AMFI to accelerate the execution of one of its objectives: the dismemberment of the country and its partition into antagonistic micro-states, deprived of financial means and economic infrastructure (sort of balkanization). Not having an army, these States in the grip of insecurity would therefore be placed under the total dependence of the AMFI by the grip placed on the strategic sectors of the economy.

“THE GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES OF INTERNATIONAL MINING COMPANIES IN THE DRC” (Google English Translation) – American Minerals Fields Inc. (AMFI), Anglo American – Part 4

http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20011126143934/http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

December 1999

American Mineral Fields Inc.'s (AMFI) plan did not go as planned. Laurent Désiré Kabila first violates the agreements made in September-October 1996 with his former allies Museveni, Kagame and Buyoya. These agreements concerned the price to be paid by the Congo for the aid given in the war of liberation, and the problem of security at the borders of the four countries.

According to the terms of the pact concluded, the revision of the delineation of the borders in favor of Rwanda and Uganda was to simultaneously satisfy these two countries, but also the geostrategic plans of AMFI in full agreement with the territorial ambitions of the mono regimes. -ethnic and minority groups in place in Kigali, Kampala and Bujumbura. Hence the outbreak of the crisis when LDKabila brutally dismisses the Rwandan military contingent present in Congo-Kinshasa.

The spark that ignited the powder between the Rwandans and Kabila is not due solely to the barbaric behavior of the Rwandan soldiers of the RPF but also to the questioning of the contracts signed with the American-Canadian consortium AMFI for the benefit of the AAC from South Africa. The other element that has thwarted AMFI's projects in the DRC is due to the denunciation of the Gécamines privatization contract that the company had negotiated in April 1997 with the new Congolese authorities of the AFDL.

The agreement between the directors of AMFI and MM. Museveni, Kagame, Buyoya and Kabila dated back to a period prior to 1995, the year AMFI was created. The cooperation between one of the leaders of this company (Jean Raymond BOULLE) and the Museveni-Kagame tandem, could even have preceded the double assassination of the Rwandan Presidents Habyarimana and Burundian Ntaryamira, shot down, in the presidential jet on the night of April 6 1994. Such an "feat" required technical means and political assurances, particularly in terms of advanced telecommunications, the acquisition of missiles, essential diplomatic complicity, as well as the imperious complacency of international judicial authorities after the forfeit ; means and assurances that only the

It can thus be reasonably estimated that when AMFI was officially created in 1995, all the plans concerning the Congo and the other Great Lakes countries were already ready, the strategy adopted, the financial, logistical and military resources mobilised, the support of the USA and the diplomatic complacency of the Western powers guaranteed.

France, which will follow the USA and support its actions in the Great Lakes region, will only understand later, that is to say too late, the double game of the Americans, orchestrated by AMFI in this part of the black continent. .

This agreement continued during the war of liberation until May 1997. Today, while Kabila is fighting against it, AMFI continues to play the same role. Museveni and Kagame know perfectly well AMFI's real intentions for the Congo and the Great Lakes Region; they also know the place assigned to them, the nature of the cause they are defending as well as the role assigned to Kabila. The convergent objectives pursued by American society and its Rwandan-Ugando-Burundian partners are opposed to the interests of Kabila, the DRC and the Congolese people.

The war in Zaire (like that in Rwanda in 1990) was presented as an internal war of political liberation to depose Marshal Mobutu. AMFI provided decisive financial, military and logistical support to the coalition organizations within the AFDL. Today, the arms, ammunition and sophisticated military equipment that enabled the AFDL to achieve victory over the Zairian Armed Forces continue to be made available to Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi by the same company AMFI, in the war that these three countries are waging in the Congo.

“THE GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES OF INTERNATIONAL MINING COMPANIES IN THE DRC” (Google English Translation) – Billy Rautenbach, Robert Mugabe, Eduardo Dos Santos – Part 5

http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20011126143934/http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

December 1999

KABILA'S NEW ALLIES

The West, the South and the South-West, that is 45/a of the Congolese territory are still under government control, officially aided by: Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia.

For reasons of alliance and payment of the war bill estimated at more than 45 M $ US, Kabila had signed an agreement between "GECAMINES" and the Zimbabwean company Ridgepointe Overseas Developments of British Virgins Islands of the RAUTENBACH family. The latter has very good relations with President Mugabe who, by the very fact, feels close to the rich cobalt reserves of Katanga. This guarantees and justifies the presence of Zimbabwean soldiers in the DRC, alongside Kabila.

Billy RAUTENBACH director of this Zimbabwean Ridgepointe group, currently heads the recovery committee of GECAMINES; this confirms Zimbabwe's fierce commitment to the DRC's resistance to the war waged by Ugandan, Rwandan and Burundian troops and their Congolese collaborators.

Kabila did not remain ungrateful either towards the Angola of Eduardo Dos Santos: the current fuel market in Kinshasa is invested by petroleum products from Angola. Each year, the Kinshasa market absorbs approximately 600,000 m3 of fuel. Since the Congolese President's visit to Luanda at the beginning of 1998, 24,000 m3 of petroleum products have landed in Congo-Kinshasa every month. Since then, the two new companies GIP and PANACHE enjoy enormous advantages (notably tax exemption).

THE GOLD OF THE EASTERN PROVINCE :

As with cobalt, copper and its associates, gold in the DRC is also exploited by mining transnationals. Indeed, the global gold industry is also undergoing a transformation. The small companies merged to compete with the large ones and particularly the Anglo American Corporation (AAC) of South Africa, the first producer of gold in the world. This movement benefited the medium-sized companies which bought the smaller ones.

The 49 leading companies in importance (AAC not included) controlled, in 1995, 56% of world production against 37% in 1984.

The current negotiations around gold cannot be done without taking into account South Africa which is the first producer in the world. In fact, despite the fall in its production, the AAC supplied, in 1995, 350 tons of gold on the world market; its closest rival, the Barrick Gold Corporation of Canada, supplied only 97 tonnes. But the exploitation of gold in South Africa dates back more than a century, 2/3 of its reserves are already exploited and the last 1/3 is part of the reserves whose cost price has become too high. mainly because of the depth of the mines. The AAC must therefore find other deposits.

“THE GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES OF INTERNATIONAL MINING COMPANIES IN THE DRC” (Google English Translation) – Barrick Gold Corporation, George Bush Sr., Canadian Prime Minister – Part 6

http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20011126143934/http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

December 1999

For a long time already, important groups have been fighting over gold concessions in the eastern province of the DRC. This is why this part has always been a strategic area in all the wars and conquests of the eastern region of Greater Congo. The government's monopoly of the Office d'Or de Kilomoto (OKIMO) over an area of 82,000 km2, with reserves estimated at 100 tonnes, has never ceased to irritate the large mining transnationals; especially when we know how much the management of the Congolese leaders has always left something to be desired. In August 1996 under the Mobutu regime, OKIMO had already ceded its monopoly to the Barrick Gold Corporation (BGC)who hoped to draw all of it from the reserve. Another Canadian-Belgian consortium, Mindev, had received a small concession of 2000 km2 in the same sector.

This transfer of the OKIMO monopoly to the BGC has an important significance (in the world of mining transnationals): in fact, we find in this transaction a "Council" of wise men, including Georges BUSH , former President of the United States (two of his sons are currently governors and one of them is seeking the presidential mandate in the year 2000). The others are not the least: Brian MULRONEY , former Prime Minister of Canada, Paul DESMARAIS, President of the Canadian company Power Corporation, Karl OTTO POL, former Director of the Central Bank of Germany and Peter MUNK who had to leave Canada at the end of the 1960s following the stock market crash of his company Clairtone Sound, for which he was made responsible.

Thus, AMFI stands above the traditional American political divisions between Democrats and Republicans, and encompasses business leaders of different sensitivities. This situation gives an idea of AMFI's colossal economic, financial and political power.

Faced with other competing companies participating in the market and in the construction of the future orbital station, the American industrial firms camouflage themselves behind this lobby and thus have access to strategic raw materials at a low price, since in the event of the success of their plan and their war in Congo-Kinshasa by interposed Tutsi armies, they would dispose sovereignly of these mineral wealth. This was already the case with the Manhattan project for the manufacture of the first two American atomic bombs dropped over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since the uranium came from Katanga from the Shinkolobwe mine (near Likasi ex-Jadotville ) as reimbursement of Belgium's "war debt" vis-à-vis the USA.

It is not surprising that with such characters, the Barrick Gold Corporation is today the second largest producer of gold in the world, after its important acquisitions in America, Asia and Africa. This company only acquires deposits already prospected by others, with gold reserves of at least 60 tonnes, and aims to reduce production costs as much as possible. They are very proud to keep these costs as low as US$180 to US$183 per ounce, while for other companies the cost is US$270 per ounce.

To increase the profits of its shareholders, it plans to further reduce these costs by 10%. It would be surprising in these conditions that this company does something significant for the development of the eastern province of the DRC.

To minimize its costs, Barrick would exploit the deposits of this Eastern Province through the intermediary of the firm Caled International, belonging to the half-brother of Ugandan President Museveni, Major General Salim Saleh, who at the time when relations between the two heads of state of the DRC and Uganda were still in good shape, made known to Kabila his desire to exploit a deposit in eastern Congo.

“THE GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES OF INTERNATIONAL MINING COMPANIES IN THE DRC” (Google English Translation) – Tutsis rule while Hutus presidents are assassinated – Part 7

http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20011126143934/http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

December 1999

Victor Prigogyne NGEZAYO KAMBALE who, like the former Zairian Prime Minister Léon Kengo wa Dondo, has Rwandan (Tutsi) ancestry, the latter must certainly be in the secret of the latest contracts of the mining internationals with the last governments of Mobutu, particularly those signed with the AAFC in January 1996.

Like Jean-Raymond BOULLE, Victor Prigogyne NGEZAYO is one of the troubled characters of all the conflicts of the last decades in the Great Lakes Region. Since his childhood, he evolved and prospered in the coffee trade in Kivu, to reach his peak in the 1970s. He also became the first wealthy "Zairian" thanks to coffee, he is one of the financial backers of all time. Like his friends Kagame in Rwanda, Museveni in Uganda and Buyoya in Burundi, he has the great ambition to be the strong man of Kivu.

The assassinations, in less than three quarters, of three Hutu Presidents, Habyarimana of Rwanda, Ndadaye and Ntaryamira of Burundi, would be linked among other things to the fact that in the exercise of their functions, they wanted to see a little more clearly in the trafficking of precious stones of this Region of which Bujumbura and Kigali were hubs.

Kivu-Maniema always fall very quickly into the hands of the aggressors each time there are "rebellions": it is so easy to "collect" gold and tin in this region. It was also a "godsend" for the Rwandans under Kagame during the dismantling of the camps and the massacre of refugees in eastern Zaire in 1996, which continued until the fall of Mobutu in May 1997. The mono armies ethnic groups from Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi who waged this war against the soldiers of the former Zaire, while pursuing and exterminating the Hutu refugees, looted the banks and the mines of the region. The leaders of these armies have become the "great" men of Africa and the partners of the mining internationals who in turn finance the "

The stocks of minerals that were in the mines were evacuated by the Rwandan soldiers of the RPF by Antonov planes whole on Kigali as spoils of war. It is also the tonnages of colombo-tantalites (niobium and tantalum ores) which are amassed on the plains of Punia or elsewhere in the occupied region and which are evacuated directly to Kigali in the former installations of the Société Minière du Rwanda (SOMIRWA).

“THE GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES OF INTERNATIONAL MINING COMPANIES IN THE DRC” (Google English Translation) – De Beers, AMFI, – Part 8

http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20011126143934/http://www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mineralsfre.html

December 1999

THE DIAMOND OF KASAI AND KISANGANI:

It is the Central Selling Organization (CSO) run by De Beers and incorporated into the large AAC of South Africa, which tightly controls the world diamond market. Africa produces nearly 66% of the world's production, but the control of these precious stones has been disturbed since 1990, by the discovery of new deposits, in Canada in particular, but above all by the end of the cold war, which opened up to smugglers the roads of Russia, Angola and Zaire.

De Beers not only sets the price of diamonds worldwide, but also the volume of stones put into circulation each year. When the AFDL took power in Kisangani, all the counters were closed. When they reopened, De Beers did not want to resume its activities, and the AFDL authorities awarded them for US$10,000 a day, solely to American Diamond Buyers, a subsidiary of Jean-Raymond Boulle's American Mineral Fields.. At the same time, the AFDL offered AMFI the latest production from the Société Minière de Bakwanga (MIBA), the large diamond mining company in Kasai, thus amplifying the rivalry between De Beers and AMR. But De Beers, as a large company, momentarily took the hit and after some negotiation, went to Goma to buy, at a little more than 5M $US, the diamonds which were intended for it.

The mining industry of Burundi and Rwanda plays a tiny role in their economy, but the "Eldorado" presented by their western neighbor, the DRC, makes them for the moment prosperous countries in gold and diamonds. .

Between 1998 and 1999, for example, Rwanda sold at least 2.5 tonnes of gold to Belgium. The war in the DRC is financed by its own mineral wealth. But such "self-financing" obviously results from a subtle arrangement between the banking institutions of the invading countries and the "receiver" countries which support the government and the "Congolese" rebellion.

Once peace has returned and the rules of the political game have been established, under the control and "advice" of the international financial institutions, another war, that of the transnational corporations, for the sharing of the world's resources, will begin. All this media hype about the war in the DRC and the role of English, American, Belgian, Egyptian, French, Libyan, South African, Zambian diplomats… in this crisis in the Great Lakes Region, must be interpreted in this sense .

“Credit Suisse Banked And Financed Zimbabwean Fraudster In Deal That Saved Mugabe” - Billy Rautenbach, Anglo American – Part 1

https://www.occrp.org/en/suisse-secrets/credit-suisse-banked-and-financed-zimbabwean-fraudster-in-deal-that-saved-mugabe

20 February 2022

Details from the Suisse Secrets leak cast new light on Credit Suisse’s role in a controversial platinum mine sale that helped finance a wave of violence around Zimbabwe’s 2008 election. The bank helped provide funds for the mine purchase, which eventually earned over $100 million for the Mugabe crony who set up the deal.

Key Findings

• Credit Suisse opened two accounts for Billy Rautenbach, a notorious mining magnate who was later sanctioned for his role in Zimbabwe’s 2008 election.

• The accounts were opened weeks before a mining deal funneled $100 million to Robert Mugabe’s government, which reportedly funded violence that helped him win the election.

• The sanctioned Rautenbach was able to sell his shares from the deal for a huge profit, but the mine was left undeveloped for over a decade.

In 2008, Zimbabwe was at a turning point. President Robert Mugabe faced electoral defeat by pro-democracy challengers for the first time in two decades. Suddenly, his cash-starved regime received a surprise $100 million, which it allegedly funneled into a violent campaign that enforced the status quo, and kept Zimbabwe on the road to an economic disaster from which it is yet to recover.

Now, leaked data from Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse has shed new light on the role the bank played in the deal that saved Mugabe from potential defeat, and blocked an opportunity for political and economic reform.

The $100 million came from the sale of platinum mining rights that Mugabe’s government had quickly appropriated, then given to a company owned by Muller Conrad “Billy” Rautenbach, a longtime friend of the regime. Mugabe’s regime used the proceeds of the deal to pay for the president’s campaign of violence, according to multiple reports.

Rautenbach and Credit Suisse knew each other well. They both owned a large share of the same company: Central African Mining and Exploration Company (CAMEC). By mid-2007 the bank owned six percent of CAMEC through its London-based investment subsidiary, Credit Suisse Securities Ltd.

Credit Suisse touted Rautenbach as a key asset in the region. Its mining analysts promoted CAMEC in the press and in briefing notes, telling investors the company was a “new major in the making,” and a possible rival to mining behemoth Xstrata.

Credit Suisse also gave CAMEC, which was listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market index, a $60 million line of credit, which the company fully used.

On March 4, 2008, a chain of events began that would quickly get the Mugabe administration the money it needed for its re-election campaign while also earning Rautenbach a sizable profit. It started when Rautenbach opened two accounts with Credit Suisse, according to leaked bank records that are part of the Suisse Secrets investigation, coordinated by OCCRP and based on a huge trove of banking data leaked to Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Then, two weeks later, the Zimbabwean government strong armed mining company Anglo American into handing over a tranche of land that included the rights for mining platinum there. The government immediately transferred those rights to Rautenbach’s offshore company and a state mining company.

>>16405067

>Gertler is a close friend of Congo’s President Joseph Kabila and has been a focus of major foreign bribery investigations in the US and UK. In a finding by US authorities in September against the hedge fund Och-Ziff, an “infamous Israeli businessman” was identified as having paid bribes to Congolese officials to win mining licences for Och-Ziff. The businessman is widely understood to be [Dan] Gertler. He is reported to be a central focus of a corruption investigation by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office into Kazakh mining company ENRC, based in part on ENRC’s deals with Gertler in Congo. https://www.globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/glencore-redirected-over-75-million-mining-payments-scandal-hit-friend-president-global-witness-reveals/

“Credit Suisse Banked And Financed Zimbabwean Fraudster In Deal That Saved Mugabe” - Billy Rautenbach, Och-Ziff Capital Management Group - Part 2

https://www.occrp.org/en/suisse-secrets/credit-suisse-banked-and-financed-zimbabwean-fraudster-in-deal-that-saved-mugabe

20 February 2022

CAMEC announced a few days later, on March 28, that it would issue 200 million shares of its stock worth about 100 million British pounds ($1.99 million). One of the buyers that helped finance the controversial deal was reportedly Credit Suisse, which bought an unknown number of shares. The majority of shares was bought by Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, a U.S.-based hedge fund (now called Sculptor Capital Management).

Two weeks later, on April 11, 2008, CAMEC bought out Rautenbach’s company for $5 million and 215 million CAMEC shares. CAMEC provided its new company with $100 million to enable it “to comply with its contractual obligations” to Mugabe’s government, according to CAMEC’s stock market filings. But the money does not appear to have been used for meeting any obligation, or doing any mining. Instead, the company was widely reported to have transferred the funds to Mugabe’s ZANU-PF political party.

With a flurry of activity, the entire process was completed in less than three weeks. CAMEC had its mining rights, the Mugabe regime had $100 million, and Rautenbach had pocketed a substantial sum.

A former executive at the mining company that had to give up the platinum rights, speaking anonymously due to the risks posed by commenting, said it was obvious they had to comply.

“There was no doubt our presence [in Zimbabwe] was under threat had we not agreed to the surrender of land,” he said, adding that Rautenbach and CAMEC “relied solely on…political connections.”

Documents from a U.K. government corruption investigation looking at mining deals in central Africa, obtained by OCCRP, showed CAMEC may have acquired “tainted assets from those who engage in corruption.”

The $100 million arrived within weeks of Mugabe losing the first round of elections to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. With a run-off vote looming, and money in the bank to pay thugs and supporters, the ZANU-PF set to work delivering on a threat to punish anyone who betrayed them at the ballot box.

Within days of the money arriving, a three-month campaign of terror had started.

Soldiers and armed gangs unleashed Operation Makavhoterapapi? (‘Where did you put your vote?’), in which more than 100 people were killed and over 1,000 attacked. Opposition leader Tsvangirai was forced to flee the country only four days after the $100 million arrived with the regime. With the opposition decimated by violence, Mugabe went uncontested into the next round.

“That money totally brought about all the heartache, pain, gerrymandering, violence, intimidation, repression that took place at the 2008 election,” said Roy Bennett, a former anti-Mugabe politician, on a Zimbabwean radio show in 2012. “[The election violence] is directly linked to that $100 million.”

Three days after the platinum deal closed, and as Zimbabwe descended into violence, a Credit Suisse research paper lauded CAMEC as one of its “African 20” stock picks.

There is no evidence that Credit Suisse knew about the planned corruption but it should have seen that the deal was suspicious. A classified U.S. State Department cable, sent May 23, 2008, and later released by Wikileaks, described the sale as a “swiftly concluded and murky deal.”

“Credit Suisse Banked And Financed Zimbabwean Fraudster In Deal That Saved Mugabe” - Billy Rautenbach, DRC, CAMEC in DRC - Part 3

https://www.occrp.org/en/suisse-secrets/credit-suisse-banked-and-financed-zimbabwean-fraudster-in-deal-that-saved-mugabe

20 February 2022

Mining Controversy

Rautenbach was already a controversial figure when Credit Suisse opened his accounts in early March 2008, having fled fraud charges in South Africa and been deported from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for mining-related corruption. A 2006 U.N. report questioned Rautenbach’s integrity and criticized inadequate due diligence on his DRC mining deals.

Rautenbach’s accounts at Credit Suisse were open for several months after both the U.S. and EU sanctioned him for his role in subverting Zimbabwe’s democracy. [The fight among the cartels] It’s not clear if Rautenbach closed them or if the bank acted.

“It beggars belief that Credit Suisse continued to provide Rautenbach with banking facilities given the furor created by CAMEC gifting $100 million to Mugabe,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, executive director of U.K.-based corporate watchdog RAID.

“Credit Suisse’s process to verify its clients was either woefully inadequate or completely ignored,” she said.

By the end of May 2008, the two Rautenbach accounts were worth more than $20 million, and potentially as much as $38 million, though OCCRP cannot assess whether these funds were tied directly to the platinum deal. The accounts were finally closed in April 2009, after U.K. authorities froze Rautenbach’s holdings in CAMEC.

By then, Mugabe was well into his fifth term, and Rautenbach had already profited from the platinum sale.

Backing CAMEC and Rautenbach

Even before CAMEC took control of the Zimbabwe platinum mine, the company was growing rapidly during the height of the early 2000s commodity boom. The company’s share price soared and by 2007 it had attracted a range of large institutional investors eager to capitalize on rising metals prices.

A business intelligence consultant with knowledge of Rautenbach’s dealings, who requested anonymity for professional reasons, said companies like CAMEC relied on backing from institutional banks and investors to secure mining deals.

“[The banks and companies] bring not only capital, but high level connections and influence. Investors in CAMEC were desperate to defend CAMEC and Rautenbach.”

By late 2008, one of Credit Suisse’s leading Africa mining analysts had even joined CAMEC as its head of investor relations.

Rautenbach also held a major stake in CAMEC and was responsible for most of its day-to-day operations in DRC, where he had long been a key player in the troubled mining sector –– often acting on behalf of Mugabe’s regime.

“Credit Suisse Banked And Financed Zimbabwean Fraudster In Deal That Saved Mugabe” - Billy Rautenbach, DRC, Och-Ziff Capital Management Group - Part 4

https://www.occrp.org/en/suisse-secrets/credit-suisse-banked-and-financed-zimbabwean-fraudster-in-deal-that-saved-mugabe

20 February 2022

“[Banks and companies] liked that Rautenbach got things done – he was the hands-on organizer,” said the business intelligence consultant.

To finance the platinum rights acquisition, CAMEC had tapped both old and new investors. Credit Suisse bought in, but the main investor was a New York-based hedge fund then called Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, which would later become enmeshed in a lawsuit that shed light on the Zimbabwe deal.

In September 2016, Och-Ziff admitted to bribing officials in countries across Africa, from DRC to Libya, and agreed to pay a $412 million fine to the U.S. Department of Justice to settle pending criminal charges.

Documents from that case describe a March 2008 visit to DRC and Zimbabwe by an Och-Ziff executive. He met with Rautenbach, described in documents as a “Zimbabwe shareholder” of a “London stock exchange-listed mining company with operations in the DRC.” The documents corroborate Rautenbach’s role in the platinum rights deal and the $100 million that reportedly made its way to Mugabe.

According to media reports, the Och-Ziff executive’s trip to Zimbabwe and DRC was organized by Credit Suisse.

Credit Suisse did not respond to questions about specific accounts or customers. The bank said it “operates its business in compliance with all applicable global and local laws and regulations” and that it had strengthened its “risk management framework and control systems.”

Rautenbach did not respond to questions.

Sanctions Ignored

In November 2008, once the scale of Zimbabwe’s election violence had become clear, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned several Mugabe “cronies,” including Rautenbach and one of his companies, accusing him of supporting mining deals that benefitted corrupt officials.

The EU followed suit in January 2009, sanctioning Rautenbach and hundreds of Zimbabwean officials and enablers. The EU lifted its sanctions in 2012, while U.S. sanctions remained in place until 2014. Rautenbach had reportedly lobbied both the U.S. and EU to get off the blacklists.

In September 2009, Kazakh mining company Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) agreed to buy CAMEC for an estimated $955 million, delivering a huge payday to its shareholders, including Rautenbach and Credit Suisse.

Rautenbach never publicly revealed how much he profited from the sale to ENRC, but OCCRP analysis of the share price shows that he would have made at least $99 million, on top of the $5 million he earned when the platinum rights were sold.

CAMEC’s dealings in Zimbabwe were so dubious that ENRC was required to file a Suspicious Activity Report to U.K. authorities when it bought the company, according to court documents OCCRP obtained.

The report said CAMEC “might have been involved in breaches of Zimbabwe sanctions” and “might have made unlawful payments in order to secure or retain its mining licenses.”

Because Rautenbach was under EU sanctions at the time, ENRC had to get special permission from U.K. authorities to buy out his CAMEC shares. Though the U.K. Treasury did not confirm the waiver was granted, ENRC acquired 100 percent of CAMEC.

By the end of 2013 ENRC had delisted and left London after the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office opened an investigation into its business in Africa.

The platinum site in Zimbabwe was left undeveloped for over a decade, and no platinum appears to have ever been mined.

“De Beers asked to explain ties with US diamond” – Oppenheimers, Maurice Tempelsman, John Stockwell (CIA), Larry Devlin (CIA)

https://mg.co.za/article/2000-07-14-de-beers-asked-to-explain-ties-with-us-diamond/

14 July 2000

Some of the more controversial dealings of De Beers, the Oppenheimers and the United States government have been cast in a new light by a South African government request that the diamond conglomerate explain its ties with Maurice Tempelsman. Tempelsman, most renowned as a former consort to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, has worked with De Beers since the 1960s, and is believed to have helped the diamond giant tie up exclusivity deals with African countries such as the former Zaire. The New York press reported at one stage Tempelsman was romantically linked to USSecretary of State Madeleine Albright. The chair of the South African Diamond Board, Gibson Thula, this week confirmed he was in possession of a briefing document detailing the links between Tempelsman and De Beers. Thula said he has asked De Beers to formally comment on the document. Asked when he expected a reply he said, “you can ask them that”. Thula declined to specify which South African government body had forwarded him the document. The document is based largely on declassified US files, especially from the Department of Justice. It paints a portrait of De Beers and the Oppenheimers using Tempelsman as an intermediary and “fixer”, attempting to manipulate for profit the Cold War as it was fought in Africa. It states: “[Tempelsman] was needed as an intermediary by De Beers because the US government could not [and cannot] directly do business with a cartel illegal in the USA as a price- fixing conspiracy.” The document says Tempelsman worked closely with the CIA, and suggests that he or his employees had a hand in shaping various African governments to make them more amenable to De Beers.

Officially, Tempelsman is one of De Beers’s 125 “sightholders” – diamond dealers invited 10 times a year to view and purchase De Beers’s diamonds. Diamond industry sources said it was baffling that the South African government has become interested in the Tempelsman connection now, De Beers’s relations with the US businessman having long been common cause in the diamond industry. The timing is intriguing considering the diamond giant’s recent resolve to put an end to African “conflict diamonds” – diamonds mined in countries wracked by civil war. De Beers now guarantees that it sells diamonds from respectable sources only – its own mines, and those of partners in Southern Africa. De Beers has in particular sought to distance itself from any suggestion that it previously had links with the Angolan rebel movement Unita. The briefing document however says Tempelsman sought to “recruit to his staff the CIA chief responsible for arming Unita, John Stockwell. Stockwell’s actions had helped prevent the MPLA developing major diamond mines that would have brought prosperity to Angola.” Stockwell has publicly described providing support for the South African army during its war in Angola. His actions, according to the document, actions “helped prevent the MPLA developing major diamond mines that would have brought prosperity to Angola”. The document says Tempelsman employed as his representative in Zaire one Larry Devlin, previously the CIA head of section for Africa, a man who has admitted planning the murder of Patrice Lumumba and helping put Mobutu Sese Seko in power. Tempelsman was apparently worried Zairean diamonds would be marketed through Russia and not De Beers’s Central Selling Organisation (CSO). So he brokered De Beers’s deal with Zaire – what the US State Department called the Tempelsman plan – in terms of which the CSO took a fee equivalent to more than 50% of all the profits from the Zairean mines via a company managed by Tempelsman. The document suggests Tempelsman might have been aware of plots against Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah, however, did not trust Tempelsman, and monitored calls from Tempelsman’s office in Ghana to the US. Such was Tempelsman’s influence that he was even involved in helping broker the transfer of enriched uranium from the US to South Africa in 1965.

De Beers had not responded to requests for comment at the time of going to press.

>>17381587

>>17381602

>Och-Ziff Capital Management Group

“Glencore and the Gatekeeper [Dan Gertler]” Congo Part 1

https://www.globalwitness.org/documents/17897/glencore_and_the_gatekeeper_may_2014.pdf

May 2014

The company—now Glencore-Xstrata—made secret loans to Dan Gertler and knowingly entered loss-making deals with him from 2007 to 2010. Together Glencore and Gertler took over one of Congo’s biggest copper producers, Toronto-listed Katanga Mining. In the process, Glencore enriched Gertler by $67million in cash and shares channeled through secretive offshore firms.

Gertler first courted controversy in 2000 when his ties to the presidency helped secure him a monopoly on Congolese diamonds. Since 2007 he has been Glencore’s chosen partner as it strengthens its grip on prize mining assets in a country ranked by the UN as the least developed in the world. All in all, Glencore has advanced Gertler’s companies more than half a billion dollars and agreements between them are set to earn Gertler hundreds of millions more in the years ahead.

On 28 April, Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, a New York-based hedge fund firm, saw its shares crash by as much as 11 per cent following reports of its financing oil and mining deals involving Gertler.2 Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, one of Glencore’s competitors, is being investigated by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office for suspicious transactions, including at least one with Gertler. In 2010 ENRC’s lawyers even identified Gertler as a corruption risk in a leaked report to Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency.3 Despite these concerns, Glencore insists its deals with Gertler are problem-free.

Our new analysis shows how Glencore funded Gertler’s purchase of shares as their interests coincided during the merger between Katanga Mining and London-traded Nikanor plc. Together they won control of some of Congo’s most lucrative mineral assets. The deals were carefully constructed in a manner that concealed transactions with no apparent purpose other than protecting the interests of the president’s friend.

Gertler has become central to almost every major copper mine sale in Congo, a gatekeeper for the country’s number one export. Just five of his deals have resulted in the Congolese state losing out on

some $1.4 billion, almost twice the country’s annual spending on health and education combined, the

Africa Progress Panel reported last year.

It was his partnership with Glencore that helped him get there. With the London-listed giant behind him, he was able to knock out the most powerful men in Congo’s mining sector. Global Witness’s findings show how the Glencore-Gertler relationship runs much deeper than either has admitted.

“Glencore and the Gatekeeper [Dan Gertler]” – Congo, George Forrest, Camec, Billy Rautenbach Zimbabwe, Phil Edmonds, Andrew Groves, Nikanor Part 2

https://www.globalwitness.org/documents/17897/glencore_and_the_gatekeeper_may_2014.pdf

May 2014

In 2007 President Joseph Kabila’s government needed cash to rebuild as Congo emerged from a decade of war. Copper prices were nudging record highs.7 And Glencore, with its fearless investment record in Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea and Colombia, was hungry for expansion.

On offer was Katanga Mining which in 2005 had tied up with Belgian-Congolese businessman George Forrest to gain rights to a massive copper deposit. The Kamoto mine in Congo’s mineral-rich Katanga province had potential to yield 150,000 tonnes a year8—twice Congo’s entire output at the time.9

It wasn’t just Glencore that had spotted Kamoto’s potential. Camec, a rival miner with ties to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe,10 was lining up a takeover. Zimbabwe had been a firm military

backer of Kabila’s side from its days as a rebel force to its early years in power—a gamble rewarded with

Congolese mining concessions and even the brief instalment of Billy Rautenbach, a Zimbabwean businessman, as head of Congo’s state mining company. Rautenbach now owned part of Camec, which had gained the backing of Forrest—now Katanga Mining’s biggest shareholder—for its takeover plans.

In outmanoeuvring Camec and Forrest, Glencore would find its interests aligned with Dan Gertler, the young trader whose personal friendship with Joseph Kabila had helped him win lucrative deals. Kabila succeeded to the presidency when his father was assassinated in 2001. The friendship remained and Gertler expanded from diamonds into copper, floating Nikanor plc in London in mid-2006. Nikanor’s key asset was the KOV open pit mine—right next door to Katanga Mining’s Kamoto.

KOV and Kamoto had always gone together. Historically, they had been part of they same concession. Reuniting them made obvious sense— not least because Katanga Mining’s concession held a 150,000-tonne per year copper refinery. Nikanor would need this to process it own mine’s output— and so Gertler’s eye was soon on Katanga Mining too.12 But if Gertler hoped for a deal to share the refinery,

he was disappointed: Forrest refused to cooperate, saying the plant couldn’t handle ore from both Nikanor and Katanga, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal, both of whom requested anonymity.

The dispute that followed would help lay the ground for a bitter takeover battle that pitched Forrest and Camec against Glencore and Gertler. In the end Camec proved no match for Glencore’s financial clout. As the deals unfolded, it became clear that a series of transactions had been carefully constructed to shield Gertler from risk, helping to protect his shareholdings from dilution and earning him millions in the process.

By the summer of 2007, Art Ditto, Katanga Mining’s embattled chief executive, was in a last-ditch fight to hold off the takeover onslaught from Camec. Rautenbach and his partners—former England cricketer Phil Edmonds and Zimbabwean businessman Andrew Groves—had been sucking up Katanga Mining stock since early in the year, forcing Ditto to take special measures to block a “creeping takeover”.

Another reason for Ditto’s caution at the time may have been Rautenbach: the 18 per cent Camec shareholder was a fugitive from South Africa, wanted on fraud charges related to a vehicle import business.14 A 2006 UN report described him as a person of “unknown or questionable standing”15 and in July 2007 he was expelled from Congo, accused of “fraud, theft, corruption and violating commercial law”.16 He was later added to EU and US sanctions lists—measures that were only fully lifted earlier this year.17

Camec’s aggressive stock-buying also brought it into confrontation with Gertler, who already held shares in Katanga Mining through an offshore trust run by a London-based investment firm, RP Capital.

“Glencore and the Gatekeeper [Dan Gertler]” – Congo, Camec, Nikanor, Beny Steinmetz, Mendi and Moises Gertner, Ruwenzori, RP Capital, Part 3

https://www.globalwitness.org/documents/17897/glencore_and_the_gatekeeper_may_2014.pdf

May 2014

As Camec’s challenge gained momentum, Gertler launched his own push for Katanga Mining as a two-pronged assault—taking advantage of the stake he already held in the company via RP Capital, and building up an army of co-investors and cash within his main copper firm Nikanor. What he needed next was some serious muscle to contrive a merger of the two.

Enter Glencore. In May 2007, Gertler formed a consortium with other Nikanor shareholders, including diamond trader Beny Steinmetz and two UK-based property investors, the brothers Mendi and Moises Gertner.19 The plan was to club together with Glencore and buy out Nikanor. When Nikanor’s executives resisted, they were undeterred. Acting together, they had the required majority20 to issue new shares and sell them to Glencore.21

Whatever the method, the result was the same: Glencore became a significant shareholder in Nikanor.22 Not only that—it effectively ran the company: as part of the same deal, Glencore gained the right to appoint or dismiss Nikanor’s top officials and rights to market all Nikanor’s minerals.23 On 1 June 2007, Glencore took its stake in Nikanor by purchasing 50 million newly issued shares. Half of them, it said, were bought on behalf of a company called Ruwenzori . Dan Gertler was “not participating” in the transaction, Nikanor told the stock exchange in a lunchtime announcement.

By mid-afternoon, the mysterious Ruwenzori sale was raising hackles. In a conference call, Nikanor Chairman Jonathan Leslie faced angry investors. “So you treated insiders in a preferential way and gave shares to RP Capital but you don’t know where they are. Where’s the corporate governance?” said one, according to the news website Miningmx. In response, Leslie acknowledged that Gertler had an “indirect interest” in Ruwenzori. 25

At 6pm, Nikanor filed a revised statement: Ruwenzori was owned by the Gertler Family Trust.26

What Nikanor didn’t say is that Gertler’s newly acquired shares were entirely funded by a £150 million ($297.15 million) Glencore loan. That emerged only later, when Glencore disclosed the arrangement to the Toronto Stock Exchange.27

By that time, Glencore and Gertler’s ambitions for Katanga Mining were close to realization.

Gertler had used RP Capital to manage some of his shares in both Nikanor and Katanga Mining. Because RP Capital bought the stock on his behalf, he was able quietly to increase his stake without sparking fears of a takeover. By August 2007, he and Glencore held a combined 42 per cent of Nikanor.28 Gertler, through RP Capital, held 16 per cent of Katanga Mining.

He was now ready to make his play for Katanga. Nikanor wasn’t the only player in the market, however. On 29 August, Camec formally launched its own hostile bid.

Camec already owned 22 per cent of Katanga and had lined up support from insiders holding 32 per cent more—a clear majority.29 But within hours of formalising its offer, what should have been the prelude to a daring corporate raid ended in disarray. Without warning, Congo’s Attorney General stepped in and declared all the firm’s Congolese mining licences invalid.30

In London, Camec’s stock immediately tumbled, at one point plummeting to 36 per cent below the opening price. The company had offered to pay for Katanga Mining in shares and as its share price collapsed, so did the bid. A week later, Camec formally withdrew its takeover offer.

Within a month, on 5 November 2007, Glencore stepped in to save Katanga Mining with a $150 million loan, repayable in Katanga shares.31 And within a week of the loan deal being signed, Glencore and Gertler pushed through a merger of Katanga Mining with Nikanor.

Glencore and Gertler both say they had no role in the revocation and did not profit by it.33 Yet Camec eventually got its permits back after it agreed a settlement that handed 40 per cent of its shares to Gertler.34 “It’s clear that Dan Gertler is a well-connected and influential person in the DRC within the mining sector,” a Camec spokesman said at the time.

“Glencore and the Gatekeeper [Dan Gertler]” – Congo, Billy Rautenbach, George Forrest, Gecamines, ENRC, Och-Ziff Part 4

https://www.globalwitness.org/documents/17897/glencore_and_the_gatekeeper_may_2014.pdf

May 2014

It is 17 years since Gertler arrived in Kinshasa to obtain a diamond trading monopoly by courting the president’s son. In the years that followed, his bond with the Kabila family would help establish him as a gatekeeper to Congo’s mineral riches.

But in those early years he wasn’t the only one. In the chaos that followed Congo’s civil war, there were many paths to the country’s mines, with many gatekeepers to guard them: Billy Rautenbach and

George Forrest—both former chiefs of the state mining company, Gecamines—commanded powerful fiefs. New challengers like Phil Edmonds and Andrew Groves were snapping at their heels.

Until 2007, that is. Glencore’s entry changed everything. In the battle for Katanga Mining, no one could match the commodities giant’s firepower. And Glencore’s chosen gatekeeper—the one with the best ties to the president—shared in the victory.

Katanga Mining wasn’t always a surefire investment. Before Glencore’s takeover, poor management had squandered its cash reserves and the financial crisis nearly ended the project. But while many of its backers were knocked out, Gertler had Glencore’s help to stay in.

By the time another mining giant, ENRC, targeted Congo in 2009 there was only one partner that mattered: Dan Gertler.

ENRC’s mine purchases—completely separate from the Glencore deals—were a windfall for Gertler, netting him a profit of at least $725 million.61 Compared with Gertler’s transactions with Glencore, they were straightforward: in one case, the government simply confiscated mines from another firm and sold them at a discount to Gertler, who resold it for a huge gain. The ENRC deals were so simple, in fact, that the obvious corruption risks helped spark an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.

Glencore’s deals with Gertler, by contrast, are nuanced and convoluted. They involve intricate financial arrangements and secret transactions through offshore companies. Yet in both cases, the outcome is the same. The mining giant gets its assets and the gatekeeper’s interests are taken care of. It may worry Glencore’s shareholders that the man who has stirred controversy at ENRC and hedge fund manager Och-Ziff is also the vital link in their own Congo investments.

Gertler’s influence is now so great in Congo that in almost every sale of copper or cobalt assets by the state in the past five years, he has taken a cut. He has also expanded into oil. As the gatekeeper continues to profit, Congo continues to lose.

>>17380835

The spammers gave me an opportunity to do a lot of research… More coming.

“Plundering of DR Congo natural resources: Final report of the Panel of Experts (S/2002/1146)” – Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe – Part 1

https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/plundering-dr-congo-natural-resources-final-report-panel-experts-s20021146

16 October 2002

1. The regional conflict that drew the armies of seven African States into the Democratic Republic of the Congo has diminished in intensity, but the overlapping microconflicts that it provoked continue. These conflicts are fought over minerals, farm produce, land and even tax revenues. Criminal groups linked to the armies of Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe and the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have benefited from the microconflicts. Those groups will not disband voluntarily even as the foreign military forces continue their withdrawals. They have built up a self-financing war economy centred on mineral exploitation.

1. Facilitated by South Africa and Angola, the Pretoria and Luanda Agreements have prompted the recent troop withdrawals from the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Welcome as they may be, these withdrawals are unlikely to alter the determination of Rwanda and Zimbabwe, and Ugandan individuals, to exercise economic control over portions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The departure of their forces will do little to reduce economic control, or the means of achieving it, since the use of national armies is only one among many means for exercising it.

1. The Uganda People's Defence Forces continue to provoke ethnic conflict, as in the past, clearly cognizant that the unrest in Ituri will require the continuing presence of a minimum of UPDF personnel. The Panel has evidence that high-ranking UPDF officers have taken steps to train local militia to serve as a paramilitary force, directly and discreetly under UPDF command, which will be capable of performing the same functions as UPDF. There will be little change in the control that Ugandans now exercise over trade flows and economic resources. As UPDF continue to arm local groups, only less conspicuously than before, the departure of Ugandan armed forces is unlikely to alter economic activities by those powerful individuals in the north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

1. Like UPDF, and under pressure from its closest allies, Rwanda has started withdrawing. It has prepared for withdrawal by putting in place economic control mechanisms that do not rely on an explicit presence of the Rwandan Patriotic Army. It has replaced Congolese directors of parastatals with businessmen from Kigali to ensure continuing revenue from water, power and transportation facilities. It has replaced local currency with Rwandan currency. RPA battalions that specialize in mining activities remain in place, though they have ceased wearing RPA uniforms and will continue the activities under a commercial guise. The Panel's sources have reported that RPA recently undertook an operation to obtain a large number of Congolese passports so as to give an appropriate identity to RPA officers who continue to be stationed at strategically important sites in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

1. The Panel has learned of other tactics for disguising the continuing presence of an armed force loyal to Rwanda. Reliable sources have reported an initiative by the Chief of Staff of the Armée nationale congolaise, Major Sylvain Mbuki, to reorganize the RCD-Goma forces in order to accommodate large numbers of RPA soldiers inside ANC [Armée Nationale Congolaise] units and local defence forces made up of pro-Rwanda elements. Most of the ANC units have had RPA leadership for some time, and now, with this reorganization, a significant number of RPA soldiers will be integrated into the ANC rank and file.

1. Although troops of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces have been a major guarantor of the security of the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo against regional rivals, its senior officers have enriched themselves from the country's mineral assets under the pretext of arrangements set up to repay Zimbabwe for military services. Now ZDF is establishing new companies and contractual arrangements to defend its economic interests in the longer term should there be a complete withdrawal of ZDF troops. New trade and service agreements were signed between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe just prior to the announced withdrawal of ZDF troops from the diamond centre of Mbuji Mayi late in August 2002.

“Plundering of DR Congo natural resources: Final report of the Panel of Experts (S/2002/1146)” – Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe – Part 2

https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/plundering-dr-congo-natural-resources-final-report-panel-experts-s20021146

16 October 2002

1. Towards the end of its mandate, the Panel received a copy of a memorandum dated August 2002 from the Defence Minister, Sidney Sekeramayi, to President Robert Mugabe, proposing that a joint Zimbabwe-Democratic Republic of the Congo company be set up in Mauritius to disguise the continuing economic interests of ZDF in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The memorandum states: "Your Excellency would be aware of the wave of negative publicity and criticism that the DRC-Zimbabwe joint ventures have attracted, which tends to inform the current United Nations Panel investigations into our commercial activities." It also refers to plans to set up a private Zimbabwean military company to guard Zimbabwe's economic investments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after the planned withdrawal of ZDF troops. It states that this company was formed to operate alongside a new military company owned by the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

1. At the same time, local militias and local politicians have supplemented the role that State armies previously played in ensuring access to and control of valuable resources and diverting State revenue. The looting that was previously conducted by the armies themselves has been replaced with organized systems of embezzlement, tax fraud, extortion, the use of stock options as kickbacks and diversion of State funds conducted by groups that closely resemble criminal organizations.

1. Such activities have become increasingly prominent in the techniques of exploitation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Panel has identified three distinct groups engaged in activities in three different areas and refers to them as elite networks. These elite networks have control over a range of commercial activities involving the exploitation of natural resources, diversion of taxes and other revenue generation activities in the three separate areas controlled by the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, respectively.

1. The Panel has identified the following elements that are common to all of the elite networks and that are essential to understanding the nature of the exploitation carried out by these networks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo:

• The networks consist of a small core of political and military elites and business persons and, in the case of the occupied areas, selected rebel leaders and administrators. Some members of the elite networks occupy key positions in their respective Governments or rebel groups.

• Members of these networks cooperate to generate revenue and, in the case of Rwanda, institutional financial gain.

• The elite networks ensure the viability of their economic activities through control over the military and other security forces that they use to intimidate, threaten violence or carry out selected acts of violence.

• The networks monopolize production, commerce and fiscal functions.

• The elite networks maintain the facade of rebel administrations in the occupied areas to generate public revenues that they then divert into the networks, thereby depleting the public treasury.

• The elite networks derive financial benefit through a variety of criminal activities including theft, embezzlement and diversion of "public" funds, undervaluation of goods, smuggling, false invoicing, non-payment of taxes, kickbacks to public officials and bribery.

• The elite networks form business companies or joint ventures that are fronts through which members of the networks carry on their respective commercial activities.

• The elite networks draw support for their economic activities through the networks and "services" (air transport, illegal arms dealing and transactions involving the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) of organized or transnational criminal groups.

III. Government-controlled area

1. The elite network of Congolese and Zimbabwean political, military and commercial interests seeks to maintain its grip on the main mineral resources - diamonds, cobalt, copper, germanium - of the Government-controlled area. This network has transferred ownership of at least US$ 5 billion of assets from the State mining sector to private companies under its control in the past three years with no compensation or benefit for the State treasury of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“Plundering of DR Congo natural resources: Final report of the Panel of Experts (S/2002/1146)” – Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe – Part 3

https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/plundering-dr-congo-natural-resources-final-report-panel-experts-s20021146

16 October 2002

1. This network benefits from instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its representatives in the Kinshasa Government and the Zimbabwe Defence Forces [ZDF] have fuelled instability by supporting armed groups opposing Rwanda and Burundi.

1. Even if present moves towards peace lead to a complete withdrawal of Zimbabwean forces, the network's grip on the richest mineral assets of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and related businesses will remain. Zimbabwe's political-military elite signed six major trade and service agreements in August 2002 with the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Reliable sources have told the Panel about plans to set up new holding companies to disguise the continuing ZDF commercial operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a ZDF-controlled private military company to be deployed in the country to guard those assets.

The elite network

1. The elite network in the Government-held area comprises three circles of power, namely, Congolese and Zimbabwean government officials and private businessmen. Chief figures in the Congolese branch of the network are the National Security Minister, Mwenze Kongolo, a shareholder and deal-broker for both diamond and cobalt ventures; the Minister of Presidency and Portfolio, Augustin Katumba Mwanke, a former employee of Bateman's mining company in South Africa and a key power broker in mining and diplomatic deals; the President of the State diamond company, Société minière de Bakwanga (MIBA), Jean-Charles Okoto; the Planning Minister and former Deputy Defence Minister, General Denis Kalume Numbi, a stakeholder in the lucrative Sengamines diamond deal and in COSLEG; and the Director General of Gécamines, Yumba Monga, pivotal in facilitating several asset-stripping joint ventures between the State mining company and private companies.

1. The Congolese branch also includes active, but less visible members. Frédéric Tshineu Kabasele is a director of three joint ventures with Zimbabwe using the COSLEG platform - the diamond trading Minerals Business Company, the logging company SOCEBO and the First Banking Corporation Congo. The Director of the National Intelligence Agency, Didier Kazadi Nyembwe, has oversight of many of the private commercial operations and has been linked by several sources to arms supplies for Burundi opposition groups and Mayi-Mayi groups in Maniema and South Kivu. COSLEG, a Congo-Zimbabwe joint stock company, remains a key vehicle for military-backed commerce involving mostly diamonds, banking and timber in the Government-held areas. The Technical Director of COSLEG, Mfuni Kazadi, specializes in the writing of joint venture contracts to accommodate the private interests of the elite network.

27. The key strategist for the Zimbabwean branch of the elite network is the Speaker of the Parliament and former National Security Minister, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa [Now Zimbabwean President since 2017]. Mr. Mnangagwa has won strong support from senior military and intelligence officers for an aggressive policy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His key ally is a Commander of ZDF and Executive Chairman of COSLEG, General Vitalis Musunga Gava Zvinavashe. The General and his family have been involved in diamond trading and supply contracts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A long-time ally of President Mugabe, Air Marshal Perence Shiri, has been involved in military procurement and organizing air support for the pro-Kinshasa armed groups fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is also part of the inner circle of ZDF diamond traders who have turned Harare into a significant illicit diamond-trading centre.

“Plundering of DR Congo natural resources: Final report of the Panel of Experts (S/2002/1146)” – Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe – Part 4

https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/plundering-dr-congo-natural-resources-final-report-panel-experts-s20021146

16 October 2002

1. Other prominent Zimbabwean members of the network include Brigadier General Sibusiso Busi Moyo, who is Director General of COSLEG. Brigadier Moyo advised both Tremalt and Oryx Natural Resources, which represented covert Zimbabwean military financial interests in negotiations with State mining companies of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Air Commodore Mike Tichafa Karakadzai is Deputy Secretary of COSLEG, directing policy and procurement. He played a key role in arranging the Tremalt cobalt and copper deal. Colonel Simpson Sikhulile Nyathi is Director of defence policy for COSLEG. The Minister of Defence and former Security Minister, Sidney Sekeramayi, coordinates with the military leadership and is a shareholder in COSLEG. The Panel has a copy of a letter from Mr. Sekeramayi thanking the Chief Executive of Oryx Natural Resources, Thamer Bin Said Ahmed Al-Shanfari, for his material and moral support during the parliamentary elections of 2000. Such contributions violate Zimbabwean law.

1. In June 2002, the Panel learned of a secret new ZDF diamond mining operation in Kalobo in Kasai Occidental run by Dube Associates. This company is linked, according to banking documents, through Colonel Tshinga Dube of Zimbabwe Defence Industries to the Ukrainian diamond and arms dealer Leonid Minim, who currently faces smuggling charges in Italy. The diamond mining operations have been conducted in great secrecy.

1. Among the businessmen in the elite network, a Belgian national, George Forrest, pioneered the exploitative joint venture agreements between private companies and Gécamines. Mr. Forrest owes his commercial ascendancy to his long-standing ties to the establishment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. One of his companies also makes and markets military equipment. Since 1994, he has owned 100 per cent of New Lachaussée in Belgium, which is a leading manufacturer of cartridge casings, grenades, light weapons and cannon launchers. In a flagrant conflict of interest, Mr. Forrest was appointed Chairman of Gécamines from November 1999 to August 2001 while his private companies negotiated new contracts with the explicit intention of using Gécamines' assets for personal gain. During that time he built up the most wide-ranging private mining portfolio in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He benefits from strong backing from some political quarters in Belgium where some of his companies are based. His operations have been strongly criticized (one Belgian diplomatic cable referred to Mr. Forrest running a "strategy of attrition" in the mining sector of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and have recently come under the scrutiny of the Belgian Senate's investigation into resource exploitation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

1. The techniques used by Mr. Forrest have since been replicated by Zimbabwean-backed entrepreneurs John Arnold Bredenkamp and Mr. Al-Shanfari. Mr. Bredenkamp, who has an estimated personal net worth of over $500 million, is experienced in setting up clandestine companies and sanctions-busting operations. Mr. Al-Shanfari has gained privileged access to the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its diamond concessions in exchange for raising capital from some powerful entrepreneurs in the Gulf such as Issa al-Kawari who manages the fortune of the deposed Amir of Qatar. Also working with ZDF is a convicted criminal based in South Africa, Nico Shefer, who has arranged for Zimbabwean officers to be trained in diamond valuation in Johannesburg. Mr. Shefer's company, Tandan Holdings, has a 50 per cent stake in Thorntree Industries, a joint venture diamond-trading company with ZDF.

1. Zimbabwean Billy Rautenbach headed a joint venture cobalt-mining company and was Chief Executive of Gécamines from November 1998 to March 2000. Although stripped of his cobalt concessions in Katanga, Mr. Rautenbach told the Panel that the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo had offered his company, Ridgepointe International, mining rights to Gécamines concessions at Shinkolobwe, which include substantial deposits of uranium, copper and cobalt. Mr. Rautenbach's representatives said that any new agreement would be subject to the new mining code of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and any uranium mining operations would be open to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“Plundering of DR Congo natural resources: Final report of the Panel of Experts (S/2002/1146)” – Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe – Part 5

https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/plundering-dr-congo-natural-resources-final-report-panel-experts-s20021146

16 October 2002

1. Such high levels of mineral exploitation would be impossible without the collusion of highly placed government officials who provide mining licences and export permits in return for private gain. The Panel has compiled extensive documentation of such facilitations. For example, in its attempts to buy rights to the Kolwezi Tailings, First Quantum Minerals (FQM) of Canada offered a down payment to the State of $100 million, cash payments and shares held in trust for Government officials. According to documents in the possession of the Panel, the payments list included the National Security Minister, Mwenze Kongolo; the Director of the National Intelligence Agency, Didier Kazadi Nyembwe; the Director General of Gécamines, Yumba Monga; and the former Minister of the Presidency, Pierre-Victor Mpoyo. The FQM share offer to those officials was premised on a sharp rise in its share price once it was announced that it had secured some of the most valuable mineral concessions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

1. The Panel has documents showing that three "clans" of Lebanese origin, who operate licensed diamond businesses in Antwerp, purchased diamonds from the Democratic Republic of the Congo worth $150 million in 2001, either directly through Kinshasa or through comptoirs in the Republic of the Congo. The three "clans" - Ahmad, Nassour and Khanafer - are distinct criminal organizations that operate internationally. Their activities, known to intelligence services and police organizations, include counterfeiting, money-laundering and diamond smuggling. Several credible sources have reported that the clans also have ties with Amal and Hezbollah. Some businesses associated with the clans are Sierra Gem Diamonds, Asa Diam, Triple A Diamonds and Echogem. A group linked to the clans operations is providing counterfeit United States dollars to former generals from the time of President Mobutu, who are trying to overthrow the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Strategies and sources of revenue

1. The Panel has identified five strategies for generating revenues for the elite network through diamond, copper and cobalt mining companies. The network coordinates its operations between its political, military and business wings to generate maximum income.

Asset stripping of State mining companies

1. The richest and most readily exploitable of the publicly owned mineral assets of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are being moved into joint ventures that are controlled by the network's private companies. These transactions, which are controlled through secret contracts and off-shore private companies, amount to a multi-billion-dollar corporate theft of the country's mineral assets. Some 30 businessmen, politicians and military officers are the main beneficiaries of the arrangements. The elite network has been trying to legitimize such corporate theft and market these assets to legitimate international mining companies.

1. The Panel has now obtained documentary evidence that Mr. Al-Shanfari's company, Oryx Natural Resources, is being used as a front for ZDF and its military company OSLEG. Sengamines claims an 800 square kilometre concession, just south of Mbuji Mayi, carved out of the concession of the Société Minière de Bakwanga. According to company officials, Sengamines' diamond concessions would be worth at least $2 billion if they were put into full production.

1. Tremalt Ltd., represented by Mr. Bredenkamp, holds the rights to exploit six Gécamines concessions containing over 2.7 million tons of copper and 325,000 tons of cobalt over 25 years. Tremalt paid the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo just $400,000, but the estimated worth of the six concessions exceeds $1 billion. The joint venture running the concession is the Kababankola Mining Company, in which Tremalt has an 80 per cent share to Gécamines' 20 per cent. Under this agreement, the Panel has learned that Gécamines derives no direct financial benefit. Although Tremalt representatives told the Panel that they have invested $15 million to date, there are no signs of substantial investments having been made on the concessions, nor has any schedule of investment in the form of a business plan been released to Gécamines.

“Plundering of DR Congo natural resources: Final report of the Panel of Experts (S/2002/1146)” – Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe – Part 6

https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/plundering-dr-congo-natural-resources-final-report-panel-experts-s20021146

16 October 2002

1. Like Oryx, Tremalt insists that its operations are not linked to ZDF or the Government of Zimbabwe. However, the Panel has obtained a copy of the confidential profit-sharing agreement, under which Tremalt retains 32 per cent of net profits, and undertakes to pay 34 per cent of net profits to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and 34 per cent to Zimbabwe. This profit-sharing agreement was the subject of a confidential memorandum from the Defence Minister, Mr. Sekeramayi, to President Mugabe in August 2002. Tremalt also undertakes to provide the Congolese and Zimbabwean militaries with motor vehicles, trucks, buses and cash payments as necessary. These are to be subtracted from the two countries' part of the profit share. A forum has been established between Tremalt and ZDF to plan strategy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and "look after the interests of the Zimbabweans". Meeting monthly, the forum's main members are General Zvinavashe, Brigadier Moyo, Air Commodore Karakadzai, Mr. Bredenkamp, the Managing Director of KMC, Colin Blythe-Wood, and the Director of KMC, Gary Webster.

Enterprise General Malta Forrest and Groupe George Forrest

1. Groupe George Forrest (GGF) in partnership with the United States-based OM Group currently runs one of the most profitable mining operations from the Democratic Republic of the Congo with only the most marginal benefit for the State mining company, Gécamines. Through this venture, the Scories du Terril de Lubumbashi (STL), also known as the Big Hill Project, Mr. Forrest and OM Group have secured access to a copper and cobalt stockpile which contains over 3,000 tons of germanium, a rare metal used in optical fibres, infrared lenses and telecommunication satellites. This stockpile, formerly the property of Gécamines, has a current market value of more than $2 billion. Although the shareholdings for the STL project are divided between OM Group (55 per cent), GGF (25 per cent) and Gécamines (20 per cent), the State company has been expressly excluded from the revenues derived from the germanium processing.

1. Gécamines officials complain that OM Group and GGF have deliberately ignored the agreed technical plan for the STL project, which provided for two electric-powered refineries and a converter to be built adjacent to the copper and cobalt stockpile. This would have meant that all the germanium would have been processed within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Gécamines would have been entitled to a revenue share. Instead the semi-processed ore is shipped to OM Group's plant in Finland where the germanium is extracted. The former Chairman of Gécamines, Mr. Forrest, whose construction companies built the STL project, has declined to intervene on behalf of the State company. Gécamines has rejected an offer by OM Group to cede the State company just 5 per cent of the revenues from the germanium processing in Finland.

Tremalt Ltd. (John Bredenkamp)

1. Tremalt's 80 per cent stake in KMC gives it management control over day-to-day administration and longer-term strategic decisions about exploiting the concession. Tremalt also procures equipment for ZDF and the Congolese Armed Forces (FAC), the cost of which it deducts from their share of KMC profits. Although Ridgepointe International, run by Mr. Rautenbach, the previous foreign investor in the Kababankola concessions, had to operate with much more dilapidated processing plants, it generated more than $20 million profit within 18 months of taking over. Industry analysts say that Tremalt's claimed losses of more than $13 million from February 2001 to July 2002 are not credible.

Organized theft

1. FAC and ZDF officers who controlled security at the main joint venture sites have been involved in and facilitate high levels of theft from production. Reliable sources have informed the Panel that managers in several companies, with support from the members of the elite network, collude in these thefts.

1. Some members of the elite network running joint ventures are linked to the smuggling of precious metals and gems, arms trafficking, illegal foreign exchange trading and money-laundering. The Panel has received extensive documentation and first-hand testimony explaining the mechanics of these criminal operations.

“Plundering of DR Congo natural resources: Final report of the Panel of Experts (S/2002/1146)” – Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe – Part 7

https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/plundering-dr-congo-natural-resources-final-report-panel-experts-s20021146

16 October 2002

1. Sengamines supplements its revenues by laundering diamonds smuggled from Angola and Sierra Leone. Sengamines also smuggles its own diamonds out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Panel has learned of specific instances, times, places and persons involved. For example, in March 2001, Mr. Al-Shanfari instructed his security chief to smuggle diamonds from the Sengamines concession to Johannesburg, South Africa, and deliver them to Ken Roberts, the chief executive of Serengeti Diamonds.

1. …The Panel also has documentation substantiating information that an Oryx employee regularly transported parcels of United States dollars ($500,000 at a time) that were withdrawn from the Oryx account at Hambros Bank, London, to Kinshasa without declaring them to the Congolese authorities; at Kinshasa the money was changed into Congolese francs and further transported to Harare and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Oryx employees said they were asked to pay Mr. Mnangagwa a commission on these transactions which contravened Zimbabwe law…

Mining revenues and the military

1. The procurement of military equipment and services is a major source of revenue for the elite network. Several joint venture mining companies have strong links with the military supply companies who facilitate their operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Panel has information that diamond revenues were used to pay for arms purchases for FAC and indirectly used to finance the contribution of the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to salary payments for ZDF. It has received a document recording a transfer of MIBA funds requested by Brigadier General François Olenga for the purchase of weapons for FAC.

1. The Minerals Business Company allows a limited number of other diamond companies to take advantage of the privileged status it enjoys in Kinshasa. Sandrian Mining, based in Kinshasa, has a contractual relationship with MBC. Thorntree Industries, a joint venture between South Africa-based Nico Shefer's Tandan group and ZDF, also has contracts with MBC, as does Mixen Trading, which has offices in Zimbabwe. MBC sells to the United States-based Flashes of Color, and the Swiss-registered Ibryn & Associates, as well as to the Belgian-registered Jewel Impex, Komal Gems and Diagem. One of the most important trading partners of MBC is the Belgian-based company Abadiam, which buys from MBC as well as directly from Sengamines. The Panel has bank records dated September 2001 showing transfers of more than $1 million from the Belgian account of Oryx Natural Resources to Abadiam.

Collapse of the public sector; armed conflict and its humanitarian consequences

Kasai Oriental and Kasai Occidental

1. The diversion of funds from State companies and public coffers, by fraud or under the pretext of effort de guerre, has contributed to eliminating funds available for public services. The public sector in the two Kasai Provinces has effectively disappeared. Of the five water production plants in Kasai Oriental, four plants no longer function and the fifth, in the city of Mbuji Mayi, is said to function at less than 20 per cent capacity. Of the six water production plants in Kasai Occidental, five no longer function; the sixth, in the city of Kananga, operates at best at 10 per cent capacity.

1. Government officials blame the precipitous decline in public spending on the war. Most soldiers are unpaid and become social predators, financing themselves through theft and pillage, living off the population they are presumed to protect, and provincial governments make little effort to discourage them. Taxes and licensing fees have nevertheless increased, as have the forced acquisition of the resources of State enterprises in the name of the war effort. The Government has therefore benefited from the state of war by using it as a pretext, not only to justify an increase in demands on the population to increase government revenues, but also to justify a decrease in expenditure. Insecurity in the Government-controlled area is only a small part of the consequences of support for the military in war. It is much more a consequence of the deliberate neglect of the military, who by virtue of this neglect turn their weapons on the population.

“Plundering of DR Congo natural resources: Final report of the Panel of Experts (S/2002/1146)” – Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe – Part 8

https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/plundering-dr-congo-natural-resources-final-report-panel-experts-s20021146

16 October 2002

Katanga

1. Lubumbashi, and southern Katanga generally, have been affected by Rwanda's presence in the north. The occupation by RPA of the northern portion of Katanga, the rich agricultural plains around Nyunzu and Kongolo, has cut the southern portion off from what was once the breadbasket of Katanga.

1. A recent study by Médecins sans Frontières in Kilwa, a representative town in southern Katanga south of the front line, with a population of 350,000, has found a death rate for children under 5 of 3.2 per 10,000 per day. Over the course of a year this means that 12 per cent of all children under 5 years old will die, and one out of every four children die over a period of two years. Notably, virtually none (0.6 per cent) of the deaths resulted from violence. Deaths instead result from illness - malaria and dysentery: conditions closely linked to malnutrition and the absence of medical facilities.

IV. Rwanda-controlled area

1. The claims of Rwanda concerning its security have justified the continuing presence of its armed forces, whose real long-term purpose is, to use the term employed by the Congo Desk of the Rwandan Patriotic Army, to "secure property". Rwanda's leaders have succeeded in persuading the international community that their military presence in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo protects the country against hostile groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who, they claim, are actively mounting an invasion against them.

1. The Panel has extensive evidence to the contrary. For example, the Panel is in possession of a letter, dated 26 May 2000, from Jean-Pierre Ondekane, First Vice-President and Chief of the Military High Command for RCD-Goma, urging all army units to maintain good relations "with our Interahamwe and Mayi-Mayi brothers", and further, "if necessary to let them exploit the sub-soil for their survival".

1. Prominent members of a Congolese Hutu group, Benemugabohumwe, recently began to encourage Hutus living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, some of them opposition groups, to work instead for the cause of Rwanda in the country. Eugene Serufuli, RCD-Goma Governor of North Kivu Province and reportedly himself a Hutu, has promoted a non-governmental organization, Tous pour la paix et la démocratie, aiming to conscript Hutus of all political persuasions to throw in their lot with the Rwandans. Their purpose, as described by the Nord Kivu Reveil in a circular dated 16 April 2002, has been to "express allegiance to Rwanda by joining its efforts to control the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo".

1. A 30-year-old Interahamwe combatant living in the area of Bukavu described the situation in a taped interview with a United Nations officer in early 2002.

We haven't fought much with the RPA in the last two years. We think they are tired of this war, like we are. In any case, they aren't here in the Congo to chase us, like they pretend. I have seen the gold and coltan mining they do here, we see how they rob the population. These are the reasons for their being here. The RPA come and shoot in the air and raid the villagers' houses but they don't attack us any more. If you are lucky, and you have a big brother in the RPA, he might be able to get you some food and ammunition.

1. The elite network maintains close commercial ties with transnational criminal networks, including those of Victor Bout, Sanjivan Ruprah and Richard Muamba Nozi. Victor Bout's aircraft are utilized for a number of purposes including transport of coltan and cassiterite, the transport of supplies into mining sites, and the transport of military troops and equipment. During the last major military campaign in Pweto, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Victor Bout's aircraft were used to transport RPA personnel to the area.

1. … Officials in the Central Bank of Kinshasa have informed the Panel that Mr. Muamba Nozi's counterfeit activities are politically motivated and designed to deliberately destabilize the present regime by weakening the currency.

“Plundering of DR Congo natural resources: Final report of the Panel of Experts (S/2002/1146)” – “recommends the placing of financial restrictions”

https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/plundering-dr-congo-natural-resources-final-report-panel-experts-s20021146

Annex I. Companies on which the Panel recommends the placing of financial restrictions

Name Address Business Principal officers Comment

1 AHMAD DIAMOND CORPORATION ANTWERP BELGIUM Diamond trading Mr. AHMAD Imad

2 ASA DIAM ANTWERP BELGIUM Diamond trading Mr. AHMAD Ali Said

3 BUKAVU AVIATION TRANSPORT DRC Airline company Mr. BOUT Victor

4 BUSINESS AIR SERVICE DRC Airline company Mr. BOUT Victor

5 COMIEX-CONGO KINSHASA DRC Mr. KABASELE TSHINEU Frederic

6 CONGO HOLDING DEVELOPMENT COMPANY DRC Trading and exploitation of natural resources DRC Mr. Félicien RUCHACHA BIKUMU

Mrs. Gertrude KITEMBO

7 CONMET UGANDA and DRC Coltan trading Mr. Salim Saleh

Mr. and Mrs. PISKUNOV

8 COSLEG ZIM and DRC Joint-venture COMIEX and OSLEG Mr. KABASELE TSHINEU Frédéric

ZVINAVASHE Gava MUSUNGWA Vitalis

9 EAGLE WINGS RESOURCES INTERNATIONAL PO BOX 6355

Kigali, Rwanda Exploitation coltan from the DRC Mr. Alfred RWIGEMA

Mr. Anthony MARINUS

Mr. Ronald S. SMIERCIAK Tel: +250.51.17.25

10 ENTERPRISE GENERAL MALTA FORREST Exploitation Cobalt, Copper in DRC Mr. George FORREST

11 EXACO Exploitation Cobalt, Copper in the DRC

12 GREAT LAKES GENERAL TRADE BP 3737

KIGALI, RWANDA Mineral trading Maj Dan MUNYUZA

Mr. E. GATETE

Mr. Steven K. AKHIMANZI Tel/Fax: +250.78.792

13 GREAT LAKES METALS Kigali, Rwanda Mineral trading

14 GROUP GEORGE FORREST Exploitation Cobalt and Copper Mr. George FORREST

15 MINERALS BUSINESS COMPANY Boulevard Du 30 Juin, Immeuble ex-SCIBE, Kinshasa, DRC Mineral trading Mr. KABASELE TSHINEU Frederic

Lt General ZVINAVASHE Gava Musungwa Vitalis

Mr. Charles DAURAMANZI

16 OKAPI AIR

ODESSA AIR Uganda Airline company Mr. BOUT Victor

17 OPERATION SOVEREIGN LEGITIMACY (OSLEG) Pvt Ltd Harare, Zimbabwe Commercial interests ZIM in DRC Lt General ZVINAVASHE Gava Musungwa Vitalis

18 ORYX NATURAL RESOURCES DRC Diamond exploitation in the DRC Mr. AL-SHANFARI Thamer Said Ahmed

19 RWANDA ALLIED PARTNERS Kigali, Rwanda Mineral trading Mr. Hadji OMARI

Mr. Simba MANASE

20 RWANDA METALS Kigali, Rwanda Mineral trading

21 SARACEN UGANDA Ltd Uganda Security Company Lt General (Rtd) Salim Saleh

Mr. Heckie HORN

22 SIERRA GEM DIAMONDS ANTWERP, BELGIUM Diamond trading Mr. AHMAD Said Ali

Mr. AHMAD Hassan

Mr. AHMAD Nazem

23 TANDAN GROUP SOUTH AFRICA Holding Mr. Niko SHEFER

24 THORNTREE INDUSTRIES (Pvt) Ltd Provides capital to MBC Mr. Niko SHEFER

25 TREMALT Ltd Exploitation cobalt and copper Mr. John Arnold BREDENKAMP

26 TRINITY INVESTMENT GROUP DRC and UGANDA Exploitation resources and tax fraud Mr. NGOLA Sam

General KAZINI

27 TRIPLE A DIAMONDS ANTWERP BELGIUM Diamond trading Mr. AHMAD Moussa Ahmad

Mr. AHMAD Ahmad Ali

28 TRISTAR Kigali, Rwanda Holding FPR

29 VICTORIA GROUP DRC and UGANDA Exploitation resources and tax fraud Lt General (Rtd) Salim Saleh

Mr. KHANAFER Nahim

“Plundering of DR Congo natural resources: Final report of the Panel of Experts (S/2002/1146)” – “recommends a travel ban and financial restrictions”

https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/plundering-dr-congo-natural-resources-final-report-panel-experts-s20021146

Annex II. Persons for whom the Panel recommends a travel ban and financial restrictions

Last name First name Alias Date of birth Passport number Designation

1 AHMAD Ali Said 01.03.1959 Businessman

2 AHMAD Ahmad Ali 01.01.1929

3 AHMAD Imad Businessman

4 AHMAD Said Ali 09.04.1935 Businessman

5 AHMAD Hassan 21.05.1957 Businessman

6 AHMAD Moussa Ahmad

7 AHMAD Nazem 05.01.1965 Businessman

8 AKHIMANZA Steven K. Businessman

9 AL-SHANFARI Thamer Said Ahmed 03.01.1968 00000999 (Oman) Chairman & Managing Director ORYX Group and ORYX Natural Resources

10 BOUT Victor Anatoljevitch BUTT, BONT, BUTTE, BOUTOV, SERGITOV Vitali 13.01.1967 or ??? 21N0532664

29N0006765

21N0532664

21N0557148

44N3570350 Dealer and transporter of weapons and minerals

11 BREDENKAMP John Arnold 11.08.1940 Businessman

12 BURUNDI Colonel UPDF

13 DAURAMANZI Charles Shareholder MBC

14 ENGOLA Sam Businessman

15 FORREST George A. Businessman

16 GATETE Edward Officer RPA; Operation Congo Desk

17 HORN Heckie Manager Saracen Uganda Ltd

18 KABANDA Emmanuel Officer RPA; Operation Congo Desk

19 KABAREBE James Chief of Staff RPA; Former Chief of Staff DRC; in charge of Congo Desk

20 KABASELE TSHINEU Frédéric Manager COMIEX, representative of COSLEG

21 KALUME NUMBI Denis General, shareholder SENGA SENGA

22 KARIM Peter Officer UPDF

23 KATUMBA MWANKE Augustin Minister of Presidency, DRC

24 KAZADI NYEMBWE Didier Director Agence National de Renseignements DRC

25 KAZINI James Chief of Staff, Maj. General UPDF

26 KHANAFER Nahim Businessman

27 KIBASSA MALIBA Politician, former Minister of Mines, shareholder SENGA SENGA

28 KITEMBO Gertrude Businesswoman

29 KONGOLO Mwenze Minister DRC, shareholder SENGA SENGA

30 MANASE SIMBA Businessman

31 MAWAPANGA Mwana Nanga Ambassador DRC in Harare

32 MAYOMBO Nobel Chief Military Intelligence (CMI) in Uganda

33 MNANGAGWA DAMBUDZO Emmerson Speaker of Parliament ZIMBABWE

34 MOYO Mike Wing Commander ZDF

35 MOYO Sibusio Bd-Gen (Rtd) ZDF

36 MUAMBA NOZI Richard MWAMBA NOZY Congolese diamond trader; Counterfeiter

37 MUNYUZA Dan Colonel RPA; In charge of security DRC (96-98)

38 MWENZE KONGOLO Minister National Security, DRC

39 NUMBI KALUME Denis Minister of Planning and Reconstruction DRC

40 NZIZA Jack Officer RPA

41 OKOTO LOLAKOMBE Jean-Charles PDG MIBA

42 OMARI HADJI Businessman

43 OTAFIRE KAHINDA Colonel UPDF

44 MARINUS Anthony Manager Eagle Wings

45 PISKUNOV Anatol Businessman

46 PISKUNOVA Valentina Businesswoman

47 RUCHACHA BIKUMU Felicien Businessman

48 RUPRAH Sanjivan Samir Nasr

Medhi Khan 09.08.1966 D-001829-00 Businessman

49 RWIGEMA Alfred Manager Eagle Wings

50 SALIM SALEH AKANDWANAHO Caleb Lt General (Ret.) UPDF

51 SHEFER Niko Nico 25.12.1950 7616225 (Israel) 6651101 (Israel) Businessman

52 SMIERCIAK Ronald S. Manager Eagle Wings

53 YUMBA MONGA Manager GECAMINES

54 ZVINAVASHE GAVA MUSUNGWA Vitalis Lt General ZDF, Rep. of COSLEG, shareholder MBC

“Plundering of DR Congo natural resources: Final report of the Panel of Experts (S/2002/1146)” – “violation of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises”

https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/plundering-dr-congo-natural-resources-final-report-panel-experts-s20021146

Annex III. Business enterprises considered by the Panel to be in violation of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises

Name of company Business Country Country signatory of OECD Guidelines

1 AFRICAN TRADING CORPORATION Sarl Trading of natural resources from DRC SOUTH AFRICA NO

2 AFRIMEX Coltan trading UK YES

3 AHMAD DIAMOND CORPORATION Diamond trading BELGIUM YES

4 A.H. PONG & Sons Import-Export SOUTH AFRICA NO

5 A. KNIGHT INTERNATIONAL Ltd Assaying UK YES

6 A & M MINERALS and METALS Ltd Trading minerals UK YES

7 ALEX STEWART (Assayers) Ltd Assaying UK YES

8 AMALGAMATED METAL CORPORATION Plc Trading coltan UK YES

9 AMERICA MINERAL FIELDS (AMFI) Mining USA YES

10 ANGLO AMERICAN Plc Mining UK YES

11 ANGLOVAAL MINING Ltd Mining SOUTH AFRICA NO

12 ARCTIC INVESTMENT Investment UK YES

13 ASA DIAM Diamond trading BELGIUM YES

14 ASA INTERNATIONAL BELGIUM YES

15 ASHANTI GOLDFIELDS Mining GHANA NO

16 AVIENT AIR Private military company ZIMBABWE NO

17 BANRO CORPORATION Mining SOUTH AFRICA NO

18 BARCLAYS BANK Banking UK YES

19 BAYER A.G. Chemical industry GERMANY YES

20 B.B.L. Banking BELGIUM YES

21 BELGOLAISE Banking BELGIUM YES

22 CABOT CORPORATION Tantalum processing USA YES

23 CARSON PRODUCTS Commercialization of resources of the DRC SOUTH AFRICA NO

24 CHEMIE PHARMACIE HOLLAND Financial and logistical support to EWRI NETHERLANDS YES

25 COGECOM Coltan trading BELGIUM YES

26 C. STEINWEG NV Freight Forwarders BELGIUM YES

27 DARA FOREST Timber exploitation THAILAND NO

28 DAS AIR Airline company UK YES

29 DE BEERS Diamond mining and trading UK YES

30 DIAGEM BVBA Diamond trading BELGIUM YES

31 EAGLE WINGS RESOURCES INTERNATIONAL Exploitation coltan from the DRC USA YES

32 ECHOGEM Diamond trading BELGIUM YES

33 EGIMEX BELGIUM YES

34 ENTREPRISE GENERALE MALTA FORREST Construction, Mining, Trading DRC NO

35 EUROMET Coltan trading UK YES

36 FINCONCORD SA Coltan trading from DRC SWITZERLAND YES

37 FINMINING Coltan trading from DRC SAINT KITTS NO

38 FIRST QUANTUM MINERALS Mining CANADA YES

39 FLASHES OF COLOR Diamond trading USA YES

40 FORTIS Banking BELGIUM YES

41 GEORGE FORREST INTERNATIONAL AFRIQUE Management DRC NO

42 HARAMBEE MINING CORPORATION Mining CANADA YES

43 H.C. STARCK GmbH & Co KG Processing coltan GERMANY YES

44 IBRYV AND ASSOCIATES LLC Diamond trading SWITZERLAND YES

45 INTERNATIONAL PANORAMA RESOURCES Corp Mining CANADA YES

46 ISCOR Mining SOUTH AFRICA NO

47 JEWEL IMPEX Bvba Diamond trading BELGIUM YES

48 KABABANKOLA MINING COMPANY Mining ZIMBABWE NO

49 KEMET ELECTRONICS CORPORATION Capacitor manufacture USA YES

50 KHA International AG Minerals trading and exploitation GERMANY YES

51 KINROSS GOLD CORPORATION Mining USA YES

52 K & N Project development BELGIUM YES

53 KOMAL GEMS NV Diamond trading BELGIUM YES

54 LUNDIN GROUP Mining BERMUDA NO

55 MALAYSIAN SMELTING CORPORATION Coltan processing MALAYSIA NO

56 MASINGIRO GmbH Minerals trading GERMANY YES

57 MELKIOR RESOURCES Inc Mining CANADA YES

58 MERCANTILLE CC Trading in natural resources from DRC SOUTH AFRICA NO

59 MINERAL AFRIKA Limited Trading in natural resources from DRC UK YES

60 NAC KAZATOMPROM Tantalum processing KAZAKHSTAN NO

61 NAMI GEMS Diamond trader BELGIUM YES

62 NINGXIA NON-FERROUS METALS SMELTER Tantalum processing CHINA NO

63 OM GROUP Inc Mining USA

FINLAND YES (USA)

YES (FINLAND)

64 OPERATION SOVEREIGN LEGITIMACY (OSLEG) Pvt Ltd Commercial interests ZIMBABWE in the DRC ZIMBABWE NO

65 ORION MINING Inc Mining SOUTH AFRICA NO

66 PACIFIC ORES METALS AND CHEMICALS Ltd Coltan trading HONG KONG NO

67 RAREMET Ltd Coltan trading from DRC SAINT KITTS NO

68 SARACEN Security company SOUTH AFRICA NO

69 SDV TRANSINTRA Transport FRANCE YES

70 SIERRA GEM DIAMONDS Diamond trading BELGIUM YES

71 SLC GERMANY GmbH Coltan transport GERMANY YES

72 SOGEM Coltan trading BELGIUM YES

73 SPECIALITY METALS COMPANY SA Coltan trading BELGIUM YES

74 STANDARD CHARTERED BANK Banking U.A.E. NO

75 SWANEPOEL Construction SOUTH AFRICA NO

76 TENKE MINING CORPORATION Mining CANADA YES

77 THORNTREE INDUSTRIES (Pvt) Ltd Provides capital to MBC ZIMBABWE NO

78 TRACK STAR TRADING 151 (Pty) Ltd Exploitation and trading minerals DRC SOUTH AFRICA NO

79 TRADEMET SA Coltan trading BELGIUM YES

80 TREMALT Ltd Mining British Virgin Islands NO

81 TRINITECH INTERNATIONAL Inc Coltan trading and exploitation USA YES

82 TRIPLE A DIAMONDS Diamond trading BELGIUM YES

83 UMICORE International Metals and Materials Group BELGIUM YES

84 VISHAY SPRAGUE Capacitor manufacture USA and ISRAEL YES (USA)

NO (ISRAEL)

85 ZINCOR Mining SOUTH AFRICA NO

“STRONGMAN JOHN BREDENKAMP, A RICH AND POWERFUL FORMER ARMS DEALER, HAS MUSCLED HIS WAY INTO GOLF”

https://vault.si.com/vault/1996/09/23/strongman-john-bredenkamp-a-rich-and-powerful-former-arms-dealer-has-muscled-his-way-into-golf

September 23, 1996

The most mysterious man in golf, John Bredenkamp, began to emerge from the shadows last week. Bredenkampa man who has amassed, according to credible reports, a $350 million fortune as a tobacco merchant and arms dealervisited Las Vegas for three days for the PGA International Golf Show, and from there he flew to Gainesville, Va., for the Presidents Cup. Bredenkamp apparently has left tobacco and weapons and devoted himself to a game he seldom plays. His two-year-old sports-management company, Masters International, which has 60 employees and offices in Jupiter, Fla., as well as in Johannesburg, London, Moscow, Singapore and Tokyo, represents, among others, two

players who competed in the Presidents Cup, Nick Price and Robert Allenby.

Bredenkamp was raised in Zimbabwe when it was Rhodesia, and has lived in Holland, Belgium and England. He lives now in a mansion on a golf course in Sunningdale, outside London. On a 1996 Times

of London list of the richest people in Great Britain, Bredenkamp ranked 76th. But Bredenkamp, who became a Dutch citizen in 1970, is little known in Europe and even less known in the U.S. That is likely to change. The business cultures of tobacco and armaments are secretive by nature, but golf is out in the open. Bredenkamp does not work the practice tee pressing flesh and making friends. His reputation, though, precedes him. In the tight circle that comprises the American golf industry, word of a tape of the British investigative news show Dispatches is going around. First aired on British television on Nov. 9,

1994, the documentary describes, in the kind of detail that is hard to fabricate, Bredenkamp's immensely profitable night job as a sanctions-breaking arms salesman, a middleman between manufacturers and warring countries. The program details, for instance, how a company owned by Bredenkamp sold land mines to Iran and antiaircraft guns to Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war in the mid-1980s, and how those mines killed British soldiers in the gulf war in 1991.

__But Bredenkamp's rhetorical question supposes that war is a logical business with open books, and it is not. The British news program implies that the reason charges were never brought against Bredenkamp is that he operated with the tacit approval of British and American intelligence organizations. Moreover,

Bredenkamp, in the interview in his Jupiter house, acknowledged that he has broken sanctions. He admitted to violating United Nations economic sanctions against Rhodesia in 1972, in the days

when Ian Smith was the president of the country, by buying aircraft for the white-run Rhodesian government that was then waging a brutal civil war with black Rhodesians. Finally, even tobacco executives who worked for Bredenkamp routinely heard him speak of arms deals. "He's always been an arms dealer," says Brian Murphy of Harare, Zimbabwe, who worked as an executive at Casalee from 1980 to 1988. Any suggestion to the contrary, says Murphy, "is a very big lie."__

For a brief period Masters International represented two of the best players in the world: Price, who was also raised in Zimbabwe, and Ernie Els, the South African who won the 1994 U.S. Open. Els became part of Masters International when his business manager, Nic Frangos, and Bredenkamp launched the company as 50-50 partners. Bredenkamp and Frangos had known each other as schoolboys; they attended the Prince Edward School in Harare in the late 1950s, the same school that Price went to in the

mid-1970s. Their joint business venture, which began in May 1994, ended six months later. Frangos refuses to discuss the relationship. Els speaks for his manager. "They broke up when that deal came up about John being an arms dealer," Els says, referring to the Dispatches report.

Bredenkamp has known tragedy. When he was a teenager, his father, a Rhodesian tobacco farmer of modest means, killed his wife and then himself. His family life is complex. He has a wife and three grown children but reportedly also has a young son from an extramarital affair. Somewhere along the way, says a man who knows him, "money became his god."

South African nuclear weapons sold through John Bredenkamp

“David Cameron secret 1989 S Africa/N Korea nuclear arms deal behind Mandela's back, £17.9m 4 Tories?” - https://youtu.be/8Q1EN5_9nIk

Old Labour Oxford Economist Martin Summers talks about what he believes was a secret and highly illegal nuclear arms deal involving a young and ambitious David Cameron as well as Doctor David Kelly. Done behind the back of Nelson Mandela and the ANC, designed to raise £17.8m Tory funding for the 1992 General Election Campaign

Let's refresh our minds as to what happened in 1989 when a young Tory researcher, David Cameron (under the apron strings of Maggie Thatcher) went to South Africa on a sanctions busting all expenses paid trip (paid for by ARMSCOR) to Pellindaba a nuclear weapons facility.

Sir Ken Warren who went to South Africa with David Cameron to illegally purchase three 20kt nuclear bombs, which then resulted in the theft of £17.8 million tax payers money which then (due to gross neglect) allowed them to be stolen and sold on the black market

Under the UN radar, South Africa, with the help of Israel, developed ten bombs and test fired one at Prince Edward Island to the South of the country.

This left nine weapons that caused South Africa, US, UK and Israel great concern as they did not want them to fall into the hands of the next black regime.

The plan was to ship the entire load to Chicago for decommissioning but Maggie Thatcher had other ideas and so just before she finished in office she signed an Urgent Operational Requirement (UOR) document that listed them as being three cylinders!

They were prepared and shipped in standard 20 foot sea containers from Durban to Oman without any security. There was a hidden observation window so that the core temperature could be checked as required.

The deal was arranged privately using British Taxpayers money involving the arms dealer John Bredenkamp with the assistance of Mark Thatcher and many high profile politicians. £17.8 million was siphoned into the Tory Party Election Fund.. this money was exposed by the Labour Party in Parliament by Lord Doug Hoyle and Margaret Beckett MP and is listed in Hansard June 22 1993 from Column 197.

The nuclear bombs arrived in Oman, were put into an insecure compound and checked by Dr. David Kelly who had the responsibility to look after the weapons and check that they were in good condition prior to the release of the money. (So you see dear Dr. Kelly knew too much).

Some time later the three weapons were stolen by the same arms dealer, John Bredenkamp and sold on the black market.

It was believed that these weapons found their way to Iraq but were then moved into Syria in three ambulances as they were highly mobile. Tony Blair with the help of Alastair Campbell then sexed up the Iraq Dossier to influence the UK into going to war.. the only problem was that if having nuclear bombs was justification for going to war, then we went to war with the wrong country.

Tony Blair created the Nuclear Explosions Act which technically would now cause great concern for many of the players that took part in this highly illegal and deeply flawed operation. Did Ms Tara Davison have information that could have blown open this deceit at the Chillcot Inquiry?

https://eyreinternational.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/pandora's-box—-massive-fraud-tax-evasion-all-linked-to-illegal-arms/

“Tobacco firm accused of Iraqi arms deal: French TV programme alleges mysterious international company was key player in shipment of 9 million anti-personnel mines, which were used in the Gulf War. Chris Blackhurst reports” – John Bredenkamp

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/tobacco-firm-accused-of-iraqi-arms-deal-french-tv-programme-alleges-mysterious-international-company-was-key-player-in-shipment-of-9-million-antipersonnel-mines-which-were-used-in-the-gulf-war-chris-blackhurst-reports-1505031.html

18 November 1993

MYSTERIOUS international tobacco company, which has an office in Britain and enjoyed close ties to the security services, was accused last night of being a key player in the supply of arms to Iraq.

The respected French television programme Marche du Siecle said that the company, Casalee, based in Luxembourg and with a large branch in Berkshire, acted as an intermediary for a huge shipment of mines to Iraq in 1986.

About 9 million of the anti-personnel mines, which explode when stepped upon, were sent to Iraq and used by the Iraqis during the war with Iran, the Gulf war and the attacks on the Kurds.

The mines were made by Valsella, an Italian company, and were paid for by BNL, the Italian bank that acted for Iraq on many arms contracts. They were shipped to Iraq via Singapore.

According to the French programme and also a new book, Spider's Web - Bush, Saddam, Thatcher and the Decade of Deceit, by Alan Friedman, Casalee put the deal together for the Iraqis. An Italian called Mario Fallani acted as the firm's Middle East man.

Casalee has long been suspected of being a 'front company', closely involved with the Western intelligence services. In April 1984, a deputation of Arab League foreign ministers informed the Belgian government that the company, which had a strong presence in the country, should cease supplying arms to Iran.

When contacted, Casalee protested it was merely trading in tobacco. However, an arms trader, Ruy Mendes Franco, was able to produce a catalogue from the company listing a range of items made by the South African firm Armscor and the Israeli defence contractor Israeli Military Industries.

One of the items was the South African 155mm artillery gun developed for Armscor by Gerald Bull, the 'Supergun' inventor.

Two senior executives allegedly involved in the British end of Casalee's arms supply business were John Bredenkamp and Robert Jolly. Mr Bredenkamp is based at Casalee's offices at Hurst, Berkshire. A Rhodesian national, he worked for Casalee in Britain until 1979. He spent most of the next decade working for Casalee overseas. He returned to Britain in 1990, and set up Casalee Services, which in its first 17 months' existence had a turnover of pounds 42m.

Robert Jolly left Casalee in 1987 to join the arms company BMARC, later taken over by Astra, the ammunition supplier. He now works for Heckler and Koch, part of British Aerospace.

A spokesman for Casalee in Berkshire said last night that he could not comment on the claims.

Earlier this year, the company was taken over by the American conglomerate, Universal Group. Mr Bredenkamp, the spokesman said, was travelling and could not be contacted.

“Smokes, sex and the arms deal” – John Bredenkamp Part 1

https://mg.co.za/article/2008-10-28-smokes-sex-and-the/

28 October 2008

A net of local and international investigations is drawing in on one of the most controversial and influential players in the South African arms deal — Zimbabwean tycoon John Bredenkamp

In March 2006 a heavily armed Scorpions team launched raids on a set of cigarette importing and manufacturing businesses in Linbro Park, Sandton.

In October 2006 members of the United Kingdom Serious Fraud Office (SFO) swooped on the Berkshire premises of Aviation Consultancy Services (ACS).

Dangerous Liaisons 2: JB and the secret

The website of John Bredenkamp’s Breco Group is keen to suggest its hands-on approach: “A small management team enables fast decisions to be taken,” it boasts.

The unnamed company, Aviation Consultancy Services (ACS), represents the dark heart of the Breco empire and despite the reassurances about government approval, Bredenkamp clearly wants it understood that he doesn’t know exactly what goes on there.

Since the raid on ACS and Breco offices in 2006 by the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO), this hands-off approach to the arms dealing side of his business has been emphasised. The raid was part of a broad SFO investigation into possible bribery by defence giant BAE-Systems in various parts of the world, including South Africa.

In January 2007 the M&G revealed the SFO had obtained information indicating that BAE paid £37-million to an ACS-linked company, Kayswell Services, in commissions on the South African deal — alongside generous payments to local BAE agent Richard Charter (see Dangerous liaisons 3: JB and Mrs Charter) and to Fana Hlongwane, former adviser to the late defence minister, Joe Modise.

And earlier this year Africa Confidential revealed that internal company documentation showed that of £26-million paid by BAE to Kayswell between June 2003 and September 2005 about £10-million had been transferred for the benefit of Bredenkamp.

Now the M&G has had insight into the same documentation, which sets out in more detail who exactly makes up ACS and how they benefited.

The three signatories on the Kayswell bank account are listed as Bredenkamp, Jules Pelissier and Graham Andrews. Pelissier, a former Rhodesian special branch policeman, is effectively the chief executive of ACS. Andrews is Bredenkamp’s former accountant, now resident in the UK.

The beneficial owners of Kayswell are listed as Bredenkamp, Pelissier, Walter Hailwax, Richard Passaportis and Trevor Wilmans. Hailwax, who runs the Namibian branch of ACS, sat on the board of Windhoeker Maschinenfabrik, a military vehicle manufacturer owned by the Namibian Defence Force.

Passaportis is based in Zimbabwe.

Wilmans, a former member of South African military intelligence, runs the South African operation of ACS and, according to former associates of Bredenkamp, also has good contacts in Botswana, where he is friendly with President Ian Khama.

The documents obtained by the M&G reflect payments of £2,5-million to Hailwax, £1,5-million to Passaportis, £812 016 to Wilmans and £513 067 to Pelissier — as well as significant transfers to two entities, the Willow Trust and the Sebel Trust, that may be linked to one or more of the owners.

Given these payments, the question being probed — by both the SFO and the Scorpions — is what ACS did to earn its money in South Africa, given that Charter was the “official” registered agent for BAE.

Bredenkamp claims not to have been involved in the South African deal, but one former associate told the M&G Bredenkamp had personally met former defence minister Joe Modise on at least one occasion in South Africa during the lobbying process.

Modise is dead and the M&G was not able to verify this claim.

“Smokes, sex and the arms deal” – John Bredenkamp Part 2

https://mg.co.za/article/2008-10-28-smokes-sex-and-the/

28 October 2008

Bredenkamp was also asked about whether it was correct, as alleged by one of his former associates, that he was on good social terms with Richard Evans, the former chair and chief executive of BAE. Evans has been listed as a suspect in the SFO investigation.

The documents obtained by the M&G also disclose payment of US$5-million to ACS by Italian company Augusta as commission on the sale of helicopters to South Africa.

Dangerous Liaisons 3: JB and Mrs Charter

One of the most remarkable alliances to emerge from the arms deal has been the romantic attachment between John Bredenkamp (68) and Janet Charter (48).

Janet Charter is the widow and heir of Richard Charter, the acknowledged South African agent for BAE-Systems, while Bredenkamp has never admitted to any role in the South African arms deal, despite a long association with BAE — and despite allegations he was a beneficiary of commissions on the deal.

He has previously stated that he met Richard Charter only three times before Charter’s death in 2004, but failed to answer questions from the M&G about how the two men coordinated or divided up the representation of BAE in South Africa between Charter’s Osprey Aviation and Bredenkamp’s Aviation Consultancy Services.

The alliance may also be related to concerns over safety.

According to sources close to the family, Charter has expressed concerns over both her own safety and that of Bredenkamp and on occasion has questioned whether there might have been something untoward in the accidental death of her husband.

Richard Charter was drowned in a canoeing accident near his luxury farm on the Orange River on Sunday January 25 2004.

The M&G has established that Charter was due to attend a consultation with his lawyer on the following Monday relating to a possible request by the Scorpions to answer questions under oath in connection with his role in the arms deal.

According to someone familiar with the investigation, he had indicated he was willing to be cooperative, though he did not believe he was personally guilty of doing anything wrong.

According to several sources close to the family, Charter, normally an extremely calm and controlled person, was agitated in the period before his death.

He indicated he felt betrayed in some way by people in the ANC, and especially by late defence minister Joe Modise’s former adviser, Fana Hlongwane.

Hlongwane has repeatedly failed to respond to attempts to pose questions to him about his role in the arms deal.

“Smokes, sex and the arms deal” – John Bredenkamp Part 3

https://mg.co.za/article/2008-10-28-smokes-sex-and-the/

28 October 2008

Barely legal: John Bredenkamp

Bredenkamp was born in Kimberley in 1940 and educated in Zimbabwe at Prince Edward School.

He joined Gallaher, the international tobacco concern, in Zimbabwe and was transferred to Holland in 1968.

In 1976, he founded the Casalee Group of companies in Belgium. Casalee was primarily a leaf tobacco company but was also engaged in barter deals.

It was Casalee that apparently served as a sanctions-busting vehicle during the dying days of Rhodesia. Bredenkamp told a newspaper in 2000: “Yes, I was requested by the government of the day to help source supplies and equipment for the beleaguered country, and yes, I did so — But no, for many years, I have not been involved in the arms business at all.”

Bredenkamp also appears to have been involved in sanctions busting for South Africa. Minutes of the Strategic Fuel Fund for March 13 1989 carry a note stating: “John Bredenkamp, who has acted confidentially for SA govt. before, offers oil [Casalee].”

Casalee was also linked as an agent for supplies of landmines to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and other supplies to Iran.

It became the biggest non-US leaf tobacco company and was sold in 1993 to Universal Leaf Tobacco for US$100-million.

In Zimbabwe Bredenkamp drew flak in some quarters for his closeness to the Mugabe government. He piggy-backed on the Zimbabwean military support for Laurent Kabila when Kabila seized power in the Democratic Republic of Congo and was granted copper and cobalt mining rights at the Mukondo mine in Eastern DRC.

At some stage this was in partnership with Zimbabwean fugitive Billy Rautenbach, but the two fell out when Rautenbach elbowed Bredenkamp aside.

Bredenkamp was cited in a United Nations report on resource exploitation in Congo, but later cleared, following extensive legal and political lobbying.

The UN report also accused him of being involved in the supply of spare parts for Zimbabwean BAE Hawk jets early in 2002 in breach of European Union sanctions.

In 2006 Bredenkamp was able to sell his stake in Mukondo to Israeli diamond trader Dan Gertler for US$57-million.

He also has tourism interests in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa.

In September 2006 Bredenkamp was acquitted in Zimbabwe on charges that he used a South African passport on international journeys. Zimbabwean citizenship law does not permit dual nationality.

“John Bredenkamp – Agent of BAE Systems” Part 1

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-06-18-john-bredenkamp-agent-of-bae-systems/

18 June 2020

This week, Open Secrets continues to profile the corporations and individuals implicated in corruption in the 1999 Arms Deal but yet to be held to account. The European arms corporations that profited from the deal used a similar modus operandi – pay well-connected middlemen and agents to guarantee access to politicians and key decision-makers. This week we turn the spotlight onto John Bredenkamp, who was contracted by British arms giant BAE Systems in relation to the Arms Deal. This is the first in a three-part series detailing the lucrative relationship between BAE Systems and its covert international network of middlemen.

As the 23 June date set for Jacob Zuma and Thales’ next court appearance approaches, it is important for us to remember that they are in a minority of those implicated to see the inside of a courtroom. Zuma and Thales will (despite their best efforts) ultimately have their day in court related to their formerly clandestine arms deal era partnership. Others have been more successful in their attempts to remain unaccountable for their own dodgy dealings related to the Arms Deal.

The notoriously corrupt John Bredenkamp is a good example. There is a great deal of evidence, detailed below, that he used his political connections to influence the multimillion-dollar agreements to favour BAE Systems. Yet, despite being seriously implicated, lackadaisical law enforcement agencies around the world and botched investigations have left him, and many others, unaccountable. As the Thales/Zuma trial kicks off, it’s time that South African prosecutors dust off the old dockets and reconsider the evidence that has been largely ignored over the past dozen years.

BAE Systems and the 1999 arms deal

Upon the signing of the final agreements related to the multibillion-rand Strategic Defence Procurement Package on 3 December 1999, BAE Systems (previously known as British Aerospace) secured the biggest slice of the arms deal pie. The British arms company was awarded the contract to supply the South African Air Force with 24 of its Hawk trainer aircraft, as well as a second contract – along with its joint venture partner, Swedish Defence company, SAAB – to supply 26 of their Gripen fighter jets. These highly lucrative contracts were together worth R15.77-billion (valued at about R45-billion today) – more than half the total cost of the arms deal at the time.

BAE managed to land these contracts despite protests from heads of both the South African Air Force and the South African National Defence Force, who expressed their concerns about the exorbitant cost of BAE’s Gripen and Hawk, and its failure to meet the full requirement specifications.

So, how did BAE manage to secure these deals when the very institutions for which these aircraft were being purchased were in protest? The controversial choice only starts to make sense when examining the influential middlemen that they had on their side.

Enter, John Bredenkamp.

“John Bredenkamp – Agent of BAE Systems” Part 2

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-06-18-john-bredenkamp-agent-of-bae-systems/

18 June 2020

Bredenkamp’s Background

John Bredenkamp is deserving of the infamy that polite company fastidiously reserves for the corrupt Gupta family. He is a notorious figure in the world of international clandestine deals. A known smuggler, tobacco and arms trafficker, sanctions-buster and occasional businessman, Bredenkamp made a fortune across various industries despite being at the centre of numerous criminal allegations throughout his career.

According to Zimbabwean social media reports Bredenkamp passed away today, 17 June 2020. The soft glow of nostalgia is already evident on social media posts that recall Bredenkamp’s rugby playing days in Rhodesia and support until recently for his Zimbabwean alma mater Prince Edward School. But the facts are glaringly contrary – Bredenkamp’s fingerprints were to be found over decades on the scene of economic crimes that resulted in human rights violations. This is his legacy.

Bredenkamp is alleged to have assisted numerous pariah states to bust sanctions. Zimbabwean-born, Bredenkamp managed to find favour in the inner circle of both the Ian Smith and Robert Mugabe regimes. He has admitted to having assisted Smith, the prime minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1970s, to break international sanctions in order to ensure that the colonial regime remained armed. Despite this history, Bredenkamp was able to form a relationship with Mugabe as the new head of state, which allegedly included the provision of financial and logistical support to Mugabe’s regime. This included a role in the illegal exploitation and plundering of the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2003.

The relationship resulted in Bredenkamp being added to the United States sanctions list, a decision which the European Union and Switzerland shortly followed. Bredenkamp’s legal team eventually had his name and companies removed from the European lists, but he remains on the US Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions list.

In addition to his support of Mugabe, he also allegedly supplied arms to both sides during the Iran-Iraq war. Perhaps most important for present purposes, he also sought to bust sanctions with the South African apartheid government. Declassified South African military documents show that Armscor agents approached Bredenkamp in 1982 in an attempt to procure 20,000 flamethrowers. He agreed to take part and provided fraudulent end-user certificates in order to bypass the arms embargo. Thankfully, the deal fell through when Belgian authorities unknowingly intervened and halted the transport process.

These connections with the South African military establishment mean it is little surprise that Bredenkamp is implicated in the post-apartheid arms deal scandal.

“John Bredenkamp – Agent of BAE Systems” Part 3

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-06-18-john-bredenkamp-agent-of-bae-systems/

18 June 2020

Bredenkamp’s role in BAE’s network

The importance of Bredenkamp to BAE’s bid for the South African deal was brought to the attention of South African authorities by authorities from the United Kingdom.

In 2006, after a number of unsuccessful or compromised attempts by South African authorities to investigate allegations of corruption in the arms deal, the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) submitted a request for assistance from South African authorities in its investigation into BAE’s conduct in securing the arms deal contract. South African investigators granted the request in January 2007.

In 2008, the favour was returned as the SFO submitted an affidavit, based on their investigation, to the National Prosecuting Authority to help further the SA investigation into Bredenkamp and other implicated individuals. The SFO provided damning evidence that BAE were paying a cool R1.2-billion (roughly R2.5-billion in current value) to maintain a complex web of agents, intermediaries and offshore companies that operated in the interest of BAE’s South African arms deal bid.

The affidavit to the NPA sparked a number of probes into the conduct of BAE, and was central to a last-ditch effort by the South African Scorpions unit to enforce accountability for corruption in the deal. This was before it was shut down by order of President Motlanthe in 2009 and replaced with the comparatively toothless Hawks, who would go on to scrap their arms deal investigation by 2010.

What was particularly notable in the SFO affidavit was the huge sum of money paid to John Bredenkamp.

According to evidence obtained by the SFO, Kayswell Services Limited, a company registered in the notorious tax haven of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and in which Bredenkamp held 60% of the shares, entered into a formal consultancy agreement with BAE in 1994. However, by 1999, the decision was made to channel payments to Kayswell through another BVI-registered company that was owned by BAE and used specifically for the purpose of ensuring secrecy and avoiding scrutiny of Red Diamond Trading Limited. Red Diamond was used by BAE to pay Kayswell approximately R400-million in relation to BAE’s South African arms contracts.

These staggeringly high payments were made despite BAE being unable to prove that Bredenkamp and his company had in fact completed any work for them. So why was Bredenkamp paid?

It is important to keep in mind that BAE was awarded these contracts despite concerns about the exorbitant cost of the Gripen and Hawk and their failure to initially meet the full requirement specifications. Were the payments for Bredenkamp’s assistance in securing the contract despite these concerns?

BAE’s former managing director for Africa and Asia, Allan McDonald, admitted that they paid Bredenkamp for political connectivity. McDonald told the SFO that Bredenkamp suggested identifying key decision makers and offering financial incentives to them for the selection of the Hawk and Gripen contracts. In particular, McDonald claims Bredenkamp and his team had direct access to Chippy Shaik, the Chief of Acquisitions for the arms deal, adding that they had obtained secret information about Shaik. It’s worth remembering that Chippy Shaik is the brother of Shabir Shaik who worked with Jacob Zuma and Thales to secure kickbacks in another part of the corrupt arms deal.

“John Bredenkamp – Agent of BAE Systems” Part 4

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-06-18-john-bredenkamp-agent-of-bae-systems/

18 June 2020

New evidence unearthed during the Seriti Commission – but which the commission failed to test or consider – linked a 2002 payment from Bredenkamp’s network of associates to a Julekha Mohamed. The most likely identity of this person is the Julekha Mohamed who was a lawyer to President Jacob Zuma and co-director of a company with Chippy Shaik. In October 2006 the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) in the tiny principality of Liechtenstein sent a note to the National Prosecutor of Liechtenstein. The FIU identified a number of Bredenkamp-linked companies and business partners; Kayswell Services, ACT Worldwide, Julien Pelissier, Trevor Wilmans and Walter Hailwax, as suspects for money laundering offences related to their receipt of funds from BAE Systems’ Red Diamond.

The FIU noted that Julien Pelissier – a business partner of Bredenkamp and significant shareholder of Kayswell – had received $661,000 from Kayswell Services and a further $1.6-million from other sources into a Liechtenstein-based account. The FIU further noted that according to a transaction list from Pelissier’s account, he had transferred $258,000 in September 2002 to an account held at UBS in Switzerland. That account was in Julekha Mohamed’s name.

Bredenkamp’s network of payments reached in many directions. The SFO investigations also determined that he used Jasper Consulting – another one of the many companies within his network of offshore businesses – to make payments to another individual central to the BAE network of agents in South Africa, Fana Hlongwane. Hlongwane is also implicated in the deal regarding his own contract with BAE and is the focus of the next instalment of Unaccountable.

What became of Bredenkamp?

There is a wealth of evidence from different jurisdictions that implicate Bredenkamp in possible crimes. Yet, like so many implicated in complex economic crimes, he escaped accountability until his death. This impunity allows covert and corrupt networks to survive and continue to profit.

The failure to pursue tangible accountability for Bredenkamp, from his sanctions busting activities all the way through to his arms deal escapades, allowed him to continue to grow his wealth and network of influence. Despite the US sanctions against him, he continued to run multiple offshore businesses until 2013 when they were all finally shut down. The wealth he accrued continued to support a luxurious lifestyle. Reports from May 2019 suggest that he continued flying his private jet until it was seized in the midst of claims that he was in a considerable amount of debt.

The Zuma and Thales trial provides us with the perfect backdrop to revisit and explore the roles of the politicians, middlemen and international corporations who have for the most part escaped scrutiny for their involvement in, and more than questionable profiting from, the arms deal. While it is too late for Bredenkamp to be held accountable, many more should follow them into the dock.

“Late Zanu PF benefactor John Bredenkamp removed from US sanctions list”

https://www.newzimbabwe.com/late-zanu-pf-benefactor-john-bredenkamp-removed-from-us-sanctions-list/

6 August 2020

THE US government has removed from its targeted sanctions list, late Zimbabwe businessman and Zanu PF benefactor, John Bredenkamp and 20 of his companies.

Bredenkamp died 20 June this year aged 79.

He was ally to both former President Robert Mugabe and incumbent Emmerson Mnangagwa.

The late tycoon helped Mugabe equip his farm while also contributing towards the building of the Zanu PF headquarters in Harare.

He started funding Zanu PF from the 1980s.

Bredenkamp and 20 of his companies were blacklisted for his strong ties to the government of Zimbabwe and providing, financial and other support to the regime which has been accused of rampant rights abuses, corruption and poll theft.

The 20 companies which were either owned or controlled by Bredenkamp are, Alpha International (Private) Ltd, Breco (Asia Pacific) Ltd, Breco (Eastern Europe) Ltd, Breco (South Africa) Ltd, Breco (U.K.) Ltd and Breco Group.

Also among the firms are Breco International, Breco Nominees Ltd, Breco Services Ltd., Corybantes Ltd, Echo Delta Holdings Ltd, Kababankola Mining Company, Masters International Ltd, Masters International, Inc., Piedmont (UK) Limited, Raceview Enterprises, Scottlee Holdings (Pvt) Ltd, Scottlee Resorts, Timpani Ltd, and Tremalt Ltd.

This individual and these entities were previously designated under E.O. 13469 in 2008 which entailed “blocking Property of Persons Undermining Democratic Processes or Institutions in Zimbabwe”.

US sanctions included a travel and asset freeze on individuals and firms undermining democracy in Zimbabwe.

Said the US department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Affairs Assets (OFAC) in its Wednesday statement, “Treasury joins the U.S. Department of State in urging the Zimbabwean government to take meaningful steps towards creating a peaceful, prosperous, and politically vibrant Zimbabwe, rather than using public resources to blame Zimbabwe’s ills on parties other than its corrupt elite and the institutions they abuse for their personal benefit.

“As a result of Treasury’s designation, all property and interests in property of this individual and entity that are in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons must be blocked and reported to OFAC.

“OFAC’s regulations generally prohibit all dealings by U.S. persons or within (or transiting) the United States that involve any property or interests in property of blocked or designated person.”

The Zimbabwe government has, over the years, adamantly dismissed the sanctions as a form of punishment unfairly visited upon its corridors by the superpower for embarking on a land reform programme that dispossessed white commercial farmers of their land for redistribution to colonially disadvantaged black locals.