Snow is an independent, free-lance journalist who spends a lot of time in Africa trying to unravel the mysteries of the chaos spread by many mercenary armies, corrupt government officials, and the hidden hand of Western corporations. I regard Snow's reports among the very few that we have access to by an independent journalist. Otherwise we occasionally get very biased reports from corporate media who, of course, interpret events in Africa to provide cover for Western mining corporations.
However, I have a few criticisms of Snow's reports. First, they are much too infrequent--it seems like he issues them once every two years. Second, when the are issued, they are extremely voluminous going into details of battle scenes, interminable names of small organizations and leaders, and history. One can easily experience fatigue while trying to put all of his information in each article together in order to attain some kind of overall grasp of what is going on there. It would be much better if he could supply more frequently simpler reports focusing on specific subjects or issues with links to other reports to supply readers with more details if they should need it. This likely would require some funding and organization, and I suspect that he functions mostly alone and with very limited resources.
Anyway for my readers, I am supplying what I believe is the major focus of this report by putting together some excerpts from it as follows:
The perpetual aggressors in this long, bloody saga of despair and death served on millions of innocent people in central Africa, Rwanda and Uganda protect the interests and insure the profits of their U.S., Canadian, European and Israeli patrons. Meanwhile, with a new insurrection afoot in eastern Congo, the western media and its modern day intelligence mercenaries spin disinformation to project black African chaos and whitewash the corruptions of Empire.
"People are killed every day, here and there," says one Congolese human rights investigator in eastern Congo. "U.S. intelligence agents and the organizations they work with produce disinformation favorable to Rwanda and Uganda. These guys are on someone's payroll and they have enough money to throw around to their own networks of informants in the Great Lakes region [of Africa]."
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| BANRO GOLD Corporation runs a mining operation in South Kivu |
The corporations operating in eastern Congo protected by the media and western intelligence apparatus, but soaked in Congolese blood, include Banro Gold, Casa Mining, Mwana Africa, Loncor, Anglo-Gold Ashanti, Kilo Gold, Moku Gold, Randgold and Alphamin Resources.
Israeli Dan Gertler -- one of the Congo's greatest current enemies -- has bought up petroleum operations in the lakes regions on the Uganda-Congo frontier. Gertler's political allies in power in Israel have been making deals with Rwanda. Another Israeli has been awarded oil-drilling rights in Virunga National Park just in the past two weeks after Canadian oil company SOCOM pulled out under public pressure.
Corporations like Alphamin promise to provide community development programs, with all kinds of publicity of their supposed largesse and generosity. Usually these are cheap exchanges, the equivalent of trinkets for land and minerals, the legacy of colonial occupation and theft.
On 10 June 2015, communities dispossessed of lands and livelihoods by Banro Gold in South Kivu began to confront Banro Gold for the substandard homes provided by Banro. "There is trouble in Luhwindja where Banro is exploiting," reported one Congolese human rights investigator on 10 June 2015. "Banro did nothing to help the locals. The houses they [Banro] built are falling down because people had to abandon them. People are dying from pollution."
The operations of the big mining companies present in eastern Congo are completely whitewashed by the western press and western mercenaries and intelligence front group organizations like the International Crises Group, International Rescue Committee, ENOUGH, Raise Hope For Congo, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and the Social Science Research Council.[63]
The reappearance on the ground in Congo of these Rwandan warlords illuminates the apparatus of impunity involving western governments, non-government front organizations, the United Nations, multinational corporations, think tanks, western academia, the genocide industry, and the industries that profit through the creation of careers and markets for the euphemistically named AID, charity, humanitarian relief, conflict-resolution, and development industries. None of these latter industries would flourish without the market-based manufacture of suffering, despair, disease and deracination, or the market-based production of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees.
