Methane disco

 

My reaction to the methane surge and the fact that it will fuck up the Paris Agreement. KIDDING!!! 

Surge

 

More bad news, this time about methane!  

Methane surges from tropical wetlands, threatening climate plans

Folkmord, vilket folkmord?

 

Credit: Efe Ersoy (Pexels)

Har liberalerna slutat gulla med den auktoritära tutsi-regimen i Rwanda? Undrar varför...

Tidigare var ju kritik av Rwanda närmast otänkbart.  

Rwanda spionerar på den svenska ambassaden i Kongo-Kinshasa

Two of each kind

 

Two very short pieces on “fringe cryptozoology”, one of them about creationism in cryptozoology. While not wrong, I don´t think it really explains why young earth creationists (YECs) are often interested in cryptozoology.

It has to do with the literalist reading of the Flood story in Genesis. If Noah brought two individuals of every animal species (or at least “created kind”) onto the Ark, this number must have included dinosaurs, pterodactyls, bipedal apes and other animals usually deemed extinct by modern science. I suppose a YEC *could* claim that they died out shortly after the Flood, but a more intriguing possibility is of course that they are still around – hence the interest in cryptozoology. If animals which modern science claims have been extinct for millions of years are still around, indeed, if animals from all “geological periods” in Earth history really live together right under our very noses, then “evolution” becomes a problematic concept. At least from a YEC perspective.

That being said, I also suspect that the emphasis creationist cryptozoologists put on surviving dinosaurs and pterodactyls isn´t a co-incidence. Dinosaurs are sexy, pardon my French, so obviously an expedition to Africa to find a live mokele-mbembe will get more media attention than, say, trying to prove that ground sloths died out only recently (cuz who cares).

Of course, the “cultic milieu” might also be in play here, but the more fundamentalist the Bible interpretation, the less likely it is that “rejected knowledge claims” will be accepted just because they are unacceptable to the Establishment. They must be sifted through the KJV first. UFOs survive the test if they are deemed demonic. Neo-dinosaurs survive the sifting, too, but what about bipedal hairy monsters that are too human-like? But I suppose they could be fitted in somewhere in a “Biblical” worldview, perhaps as Nephilim… 

Creationism in cryptozoology

Zooform phenomena

Mountains of the Moon

 

A Giant Potto (and it really is huge) and two scary mystery birds...don´t get me wrong, but is *this* the best the fabled Mountains of the Moon at Ruwenzori can offer us in terms of cryptids? Geezus, I had expected albino killer apes, dinosaurs, or at the very least some really nasty spider, but naah!

Some cryptozoological riddles from Ruwenzori

Chimps with the gorilla mindset?

 

"Where´s the Bili Ape at,
we have unfinished bizniz!"

They are big, they are bad, they have a taste for leopard flesh, they sleep on the ground in Africa´s most dangerous forest and the only man they suffer is Tarzan himself. When they´re not busy howling at the moon!

Or is it just media hype as usual?

Three somewhat different takes on the "Bili Ape" below, the chimpanzee with the gorilla mindset! 

Unmasking the Congo´s giant chimpanzees

The Bili Ape of the Congo

Found: the giant lion-eating chimps of the magic forest

 

Friendly ghosts

 

I don´t like chimpanzees (they lack the Gorilla Mindset), but here are some interesting blog posts by Karl Shuker, a British cryptozoologist and frequent writer on the weird and wonderful. The topic? You guessed it: aberrant chimpanzees. 

The "ghost" chimp of Nkata Bay was real and apparently quite friendly to humans, but strangely out of place. There are no chimpanzees in Malawi, where Nkata Bay is located. Koolookambas are also real, but probably not chimp-gorilla hybrids (thank God), but simply unusually looking chimpos from Gabon. 

"Ape-Man" Oliver was a strange-looking but genetically perfectly regular chimpanzee hyped by the American media as some kind of "missing link", humanzee, or what have you. Oliver´s life was hard, at one point even being sold to a animal testing facility, but he was eventually saved and placed in an sanctuary. Interestingly, the ape was fully bipedal, the result of training and habituation, not some hideous mutation or hybrid origins.

The extraordinary creature mentioned in the fourth link is probably a hoax. Ahem, a spiny backed chimpanzee that walks upright on two legs? Shuker is very nice, as usual, trying to come up with alternative explanations, but unless this troglodyte shows up at the White House lawn, I refuse to believe it!  

Ufiti - the ghost chimpanzee of Nkata Bay

Going ape about the koolookamba

"Ape-man" Oliver

The spiny backed chimpanzee - a Congolese chupacabra chimp!

Our cryptid predicament

 

Somehow, I suspect that it´s really the other way around... 

Welcome to the jungle

 

Our closest living relatives. OK, we are actually related to the bonobo, as well. A peaceful, matriarchal, vegan paedophile ape. Whatever. 

Gorillas against guerillas

"Primates" is a 2020 BBC mini-series about apes, monkeys and prosimians. Some humans (mostly primatologists) have been thrown in for good measure, too! Most of the documentary is standard fare: spectacular footage of non-human primates from all over the world, and calls to save them for posterity. Good for a boring Christmas holiday, but perhaps not *that* interesting...

However, I did notice a few things. 

In the Congolese hills, the Virunga National Park - with a rare population of mountain gorillas - is protected by "park rangers", actually a heavily armed uniformed militia. The park rangers have been repeatedly attacked by rebel groups operating in the region. But why would humans volunteer to protect gorillas against guerillas, risking their lives in the process? The BBC interviews a ranger who claims to have a spiritual bond with the gorillas. Maybe he has. 

However, there is a much more mundane explanation. The rangers are recruited from the local population and paid by international organizations. Eco-tourism from Western nations is another source of income. Also, the local communities get a share of the profits. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it *does* mean that the rangers have a very vested *human* (Homo sapiens sapiens) interest in protecting the gorillas. They are simply protecting their own sources of income. Since the rebels are presumably Hutu expats or expellees from Rwanda, some kind of ethnic dimension can´t be ruled out either. The people in the Virunga area are literally defending their homeland against foreign intruders. See how I managed to de-romanticize the whole situation? When the Western money stops coming, the mountain gorillas are bush meat, if you ask me...

Another uncomfortable fact. As I have repeatedly pointed out on this blog, even Native peoples deplete their resource bases if given half the chance. Research carried out at Koram Island off the coast of Thailand shows that monkeys, specifically crab-eating macaques, do exactly the same thing! The monkeys are tool-users: they use heavy stones to crack open oysters. The tool-use leads to over-exploitation of the oysters, which tend to become smaller and less abundant as a result. Imagine what would happen if some primate started to use tools consistently...wait... 

Edenic ecological balance doesn´t even exist among tool-using freakin´ *animals*, it seems. 

"Primates" does contain other interesting information, to be sure. We get to meet a team of animal rescuers trying to "retrain" young orphaned orangutans for a life in the wild (the orphans are used to human "foster parents" and have therefore lost these skills). As part of their project, the human trainers have to take climbing lessons in really tall trees! Another team tries to reintroduce pet gibbons into the wild. Gibbons are popular as exotic pets, but many of them are snatched from the wild and essentially trafficked as part of the illegal animal trade. The gibbons shown in the docu are rescued and taken back to their original habitat. 

So perhaps there is some hope, after all. However, I have to say that what really caught my attention was the somewhat more pessimistic facts, some of which BBC doesn´t really want the viewers to confront...  

Revolutionaries are not normal people

"Che Guevara" is a book in Swedish by Dick Harrison, a professor of history. The title is self-explanatory. Yes, it´s a relatively short biography (about 200 pages in paperback format) of the Cuban revolutionary (who was originally from Argentina). 

For obvious reasons, it´s impossible to avoid politics when writing about Ernesto Guevara, but Harrison has tried to make the book as much as possible about Che the man, rather than Che the Guevarista. Harrison does manage to paint a compelling portrait of the Argentine radical, and follows Che from his childhood home in Argentina through Guatemala, Mexico and Cuba to the Congo, and the eventual defeat in Bolivia. Che comes across as an idealistic socialist of deep convictions, but also as a hard guerilla fighter, a brutal revolutionary, an impatient adventurist, and above all as a man who constantly pushed himself to the limits. I was surprised to learn that Che Guevara suffered heavily from asthma! He was also a womanizer of some standing. Another surprise was his intellectual side. He could probably have become a university teacher in another life. 

Che Guevara´s revolutionary career is too well known to be recounted here, yet there are still unresolved mysteries around him. Harrison retells the unconfirmed story that Guevara met former Argentine president Juan Perón in the latter´s Spanish exile. Perón supposedly warned him not to foment socialist revolutions in Latin America, since this was simply impossible! A strange tale *not* discussed in the book is Che´s supposed relations with the kook-Trotskyist "Posadistas" in Cuba. Harrison believes that it was Régis Debray rather than Ciro Bustos who revealed that Che was in Bolivia when Debray and Bustos had been captured and were interrogated by the Bolivian military. (Bustos subsequently moved to Sweden. I don´t know if the author ever met him.)  

Inevitably, "Che Guevara" also discusses the virtual cult of Che after his death by execution in Bolivia. One aspect I wasn´t aware of is that Che is literally worshipped as a saint by the peasants in the area where he was captured and killed. They call him San Ernesto de la Higuera and compare him to both Jesus and John the Baptist. San Ernesto is said to work miracles, and sometimes walks the mountain paths as an ordinary mortal. There are bizarre similarities between the famous or infamous picture of a dead Che in Vallegrande and old paintings of the dead Christ taken down from the cross. There is also a legend that could perhaps be called "the curse of Che", which claims (or points out) that many of the people responsible for his death met violent ends. 

It seems revolutionaries aren´t normal people, after all...

If Swedish is your first language, perhaps recommended. 

In the land of the killer clowns

The Indonesian orchid "Kimilsungia"

"Guns, Guerillas and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World" is a book written hy Benjamin R Young. It was recently published by Standford University Press as part of their "Cold War International History Project". While the book does contain interesting facts (and a lot of borderline factoids), it nevertheless comes across as a rough draft. The book tries to describe North Korea´s foreign policy from 1956 to 1989, but lacks a more detailed analysis of the entire period in question. There isn´t even a general summary chapter. To be honest, the book comes across as a kind of catalogue of every weird North Korean mishap in the Third World, but without any attemp at a real synthesis. There are also a number of strange errors: the author (or his editor?) confuses Mauritius with Mauritania, claims that Muhammad is a "deity", and insists on calling the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna "the People´s Liberation Front" - while that is what the name means, everyone else just calls it JVP. After reading the book, I still don´t understand *why* the DPRK did what they did (as in "why really"), although a few answers can be gleaned by reading the narrative carefully. 

Which doesn´t mean you shouldn´t read the book. If you love killer clowns on a Halloween rampage in the Third World, you gonna love "Guns, Guerillas and the Great Leader". 

A long time ago, I assumed that the DPRK were a super-isolationist Communist regime which really did have an independent line, and in contrast to Enver Hoxha´s Albania didn´t even try to create a "world movement" all their own. Later, I assumed that North Korea was really just a Soviet satellite, although a slightly idiosyncratic one. Judging by Young´s overview, the truth is more complex and also more sinister. North Korea was politically independent from both the Soviet Union and the People´s Republic of China, but also economically dependent on them - the "North Korean miracle" was really Made in Elsewhere. The solution seems to have been to play off the Soviets and the Chinese against each other, reaping dividends from both. When necessary, the DPRK carried out its own influence operations, economic deals and even terrorist attacks. There is a certain irony in this, since the "Democratic People´s Republic of Korea" was established by the Soviet Army and saved from USA/UN occupation by the People´s Liberation Army of China! Yet, since both the Soviets and the Chinese left early, the Kim family clan could remain firmly in control and pursue their own policies without direct supervision by Moscow or Beijing (both of which frequently complained about the North Korean attitude). So why were the North Koreans allowed to continue, year after year, even when they carried out crazy stuff worthy of a Gaddafi? I assume the reason is geopolitical: neither the Soviets nor the Chinese Communists can allow a "capitalist" or "pro-American" unification of Korea, and therefore need the DPRK as their buffer state in the north. This gives the Kims (including the present one) a certain leverage and ability to manoeuvre. They can go very far without risking more than some diplomatic reprimands backstage... 

I think the main, or even only, reason for DPRK´s "solidarity" with "the Third World" is the North-South conflict on the Korean peninsula. Judging by Young´s account, this is the case even when North Korea tries to get influence in Africa. It´s really a way to counter attempts by *South* Korea to gain such influence, or to move first. Sometimes, North Korea wants to test its weaponry, or even engage South Korean agents and military personnel abroad. During the Vietnam War, North Korea supported North Vietnam and the NLF, while South Korea did likewise with South Vietnam. The DPRK sent fighter pilots to Vietnam, and tried to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the South Korean troops active there. They also attempted to abduct South Korean military, spread Communist propaganda among them, etc. In Africa, the two Koreas were engaged in a decades-long propaganda war against each other, the purpose of which was to secure African support for the North Korean position within the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which North Korean diplomacy tried to use as a forum and a tool for DPRK interests. While the aid to various Third World nations was originally free of charge (the North Koreans even paid handsomely for propaganda in various foreign newspapers), during the 1980´s the relations became more business-like, with the DPRK demanding payment (in foreign currency) for services rendered. 

What struck me most was the intensely opportunist character of the North Korean foreign operations. Machiavelli would have liked these guys. In Uganda, North Korea supported both Idi Amin, Milton Obote and Yoveri Museveni! In southern Africa, North Korea originally had cozy relations with Zaire´s very own killer clown Mobutu Sese Seko, only to abandon him (and his Angolan FLNA proxies, and I suppose his avasuits), in favor of the Angolan MPLA. In the Middle East, Kim Il Sung secretly supported Egypt´s peace deal with Israel, while saying the opposite in public! And despite its support for North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, the DPRK pivoted to Pol Pot´s Cambodia after the war, even trying to get Vietnam expelled from the NAM. The bromance between Cambodia´s Sihanouk and Kim Il Sung must have been something to behold, with Sihanouk telling a high-ranking US official that the North Korean leaders don´t want war, since they are used to a life in complete comfort and luxury (something that must have impressed this truly precious prince who, alas, was no stranger to war). Sihanouk preferred having North Korean body guards, notorious for their brutality, being intensely suspicious of Cambodian royal palace guards... 

A fun fact is that North Korea weren´t the only opportunists in these transactions. Frequently, *they* were taken advantage of themselves, especially in the super-corrupted African theatre. Once, a pro-Western newspaper in Cameroon published pro-DPRK propaganda just for the money. Many "Korean friendship associations" in Africa paid people to become members, which all kinds of unscrupulous elements took advantage of. In Uganda, the "friendship association" supported Museveni, at a time when the North Korean regime was still aiding and abetting Obote. The Communist Dergue regime in Ethiopia cynically accepted aid from both Koreas! But then, the Dergue may also have been the only regime in the world which accepted aid from both Cuba and Israel...

Judging by Young´s account, the best aid rendered by the Kim regime to its "allies" in the Third World was the military one, which included both weapons, ammunition and frequently brutal instructors. He doesn´t have an opinion on the quality of the huge palaces and monuments built in Africa by North Koreans. Much other aid was substandard, including porcelain factories which made dishes of such bad quality that you could cut through them with a steak knife. I´m not surprised. One popular "export" were the Mass Games, a kind of political gymnastic exercises, which could be used for propaganda purposes in a variety of nations (although the locals preferred to enhance the Mass Games with references to their own cultures). This brings me to perhaps the most entertaining portion of North Korean foreign propaganda: its notoriously inept character. It´s not clear to me whether the Kim Il Sung leadership really didn´t get it, or whether they simply didn´t care, since the real deals between DPRK and its "allies" were negotiated off-stage. 

North Korea is notorious for its bizarre and hysterical personality cult of Kim Il Sung, and later also of Kim Jong Il, his son and heir-very-apparent. This personality cult was liberally diffused abroad (or in North Korea to visiting foreign delegations), often to the bemusement and slight consternation of the intended targets. After reading some of the Great Leader´s sage pronouncements myself, I have to say that most of them are basic bitch commonplaces. "We have to strengthen the people, weaken imperialism, and mobilize. This is very important". That kind of level. I assume that the statements *about* the Great Leader and the Dear Leader are more, shall we say, turgid. Even foreign diplomats, including from friendly socialist nations, where frequently forced to listen to long speeches extolling the virtues and excellencies of Kim Il Sung. One Spanish visitor, I think, was taken to the doctor for a check up before being allowed to visit Kim - the medic explained that the Leader is such a great man, that people frequently faint in his presence! An African delegation, when realizing that the next 40 rooms of a Kim Il Sung exhibition in Pyongyang were very similar to the 20 rooms they had already walked through, kindly asked to be taken elsewhere. The translations of books about Kim Il Sung to foreign languages were frequently pretty bizarre. One English translation had the headline "Kim Il Sung: The Divine Man", while an Arabic translation claimed that Kim Il Sung is God! (No less.) Ironically, the idea known as Juche, which the Korean Workers´ Party claims is Kim Il Sung´s foremost contribution to revolutionary theory, was succeful in the Third World mostly because it was interpreted as a commonplace. Thus, in India, Juche was associated with everything from Plato to Mahatma Gandhi, which seems correct - for what is Juche other than the idea of autarkic self-reliance from the Western-dominated world economy, the dream of many Third World nationalists? 

Unfortunately, the Communist fun house of North Korea also had a darker side. One thing that struck me was that the North Koreans sometimes attacked "progressive" governments they should logically have tried to lobby diplomatically instead, as when they supported the mad Maoists of the JVP against the left-nationalist SLFP government of Sri Lanka, or when they backed a small revolutionary foco against the Mexican PRI government. In both cases, the rebellions were adventurist and doomed from the start (the Mexicans hardly started theirs before the police arrested them). Notoriously, North Korea supported the Japanese Red Army, a kind of East Asian version of the Baader Meinhof gang. Further, there was the Rangoon bombing of 1983, during which North Korean agents tried to assassinate Chun Doo-hwan, the president of South Korea, during his official visit to Burma (at the time a socialist nation). Finally, there was the bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987, killing over 100 people, in retaliation for South Korea refusing to co-host the 1988 olympic summer games. After the Cold War, it´s been pretty much downhill from there, with the North Korean regime looking upon the Third World as a gigantic smorgasbord for smuggling, hacking and other ways to obtain hard currency (implicitly or explicitly threatening to nuke the US unless the West pays tribute is another sure method). 

North Korea has become a rogue state and international outlaw, and it seems the roots of the predicament go pretty deep. So does the geopolitical realities that seemlingly make the North Korean entity as viable as ever, at least for the Kim clan and its cronies. Today, the great benefactor of "self-reliant" Juche DPRK is, of course, China.  

My arachnophobia just got worse

Another link to Karl Shuker´s crypto-zoology website, this time about supposed observations of giant spiders. And I do mean huge - the size of a dinner plate, a chihuahua or...even larger.

Of course, we all "know" that such creatures are impossible in Earth´s present atmosphere, since spiders (and insects) breath through trachea, which imposes absolute physiological limitations on their size. 

OR SO WE ASSUMED UNTIL KARL SHUKER DID MORE RESEARCH ON THE MATTER!!!

It turns out that one oversized arthropod, the coconut crab (a crustacean) has evolved a novel organ for breathing, since it lives exclusively on land. 

So why not spiders?

My arachnophobia just got worse. Let´s hope all the reports detailed in the linked blog post below are drunken tall tales or misidentified frying pans, chihuahuas or coconut crabs... 

Giant spiders: monstrous myth or simply mayhem?

The Wizard of the Nile

”Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror” by Helen C Epstein is a shocking book about the regime of Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, with some excursions to neighboring Rwanda, governed by Paul Kagame, an old associate of Museveni. Both Museveni and Kagame are backed by the United States and “the international community”. The book was published in 2017.

According to the propaganda still touted by many Western media outlets, Museveni´s administration in Uganda, while of course not perfect, is nevertheless better than the African average. It´s less corrupted, less repressive, more free market oriented, even slightly feminist. Museveni is pictured as the savior of Uganda from the brutal dictatorships of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. Above all, Museveni is fighting Hutu genocidaires in Rwanda and the mysterious cult “the Lord´s Resistance Army” (LRA) in northern Uganda. In the same vein, Museveni´s allies in Rwanda, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) are always pictured as the good liberal or slightly leftist guys fighting the already mentioned Hutu extremists. I readily admit that I used to believe all this myself once. Well, almost. It *was* difficult to believe that Paul Kagame in Rwanda did not rig the elections which gave him essentially all votes, especially since his tribe (the Tutsi) is a small minority hated by the majority Hutu…

Clearly, I didn´t know half of it.

Judging by this book and its scholarly sources, Museveni is not much better than Amin and Obote, only smarter at rising “democratic” Potemkin villages and promoting them to a gullible Western audience. Uganda is really a one-party state with rigged elections and widespread repression against the political opposition. The ruling party, the NRM, is civilian in name only, actual power in the state being in the hands of the military and the secret service. As for being less corrupted than other African nations…well, no, not really. Museveni and his cronies systematically steal millions of dollars in aid money, take hefty bribes from foreign companies, and loot the national treasury (most of Uganda´s civil service is financed by the World Bank and other foreign donors). While the NRM is officially anti-tribalist, most political conflicts in Uganda seem to revolve around ethnic affiliation. Museveni comes from the southern Hima tribe, which is related to the Tutsi in Rwanda, thus explaining why the Ugandan leader is so adamant in his support for Kagame and the RPF. He is simply aiding his ethnic cousins across the ex-colonial borders. Museveni´s two main domestic targets are the Baganda, the erstwhile dominant ethnic group in Uganda, and the northern tribes, who backed Amin and Obote (both northerners themselves). The northern Acholi have been subjected to repression of near genocidal proportions by the NRA or UPDF (the Ugandan army). Sorting out who´s who in the many-sided Ugandan conflict isn´t always easy, one reason being the propensity of the NRA to carry out false flag operations by attacking civilians dressed in the uniforms of their enemies…

Museveni was originally a Marxist firebrand, but seems to have flip-flopped even before the Cold War properly ended. Shortly after taking power in 1986, Museveni became a prime US asset in Central and East Africa, even being invited to Ronald Reagan´s private ranch in California. The Tutsi RPF, then still in exile in Uganda, were also trained in the United States. Interestingly, RPF leader Paul Kagame was trained in the art of “psy-ops” (propaganda), something he has put to good use after becoming acting Rwandese leader in 1994. Museveni has intervened militarily in Rwanda (through his RPF proxies), the Congo (alongside the RPF), South Sudan (through the SPLA of John Garang, an old friend from his Marxist days) and even Somalia, always with the full knowledge and backing of the United States. In Somalia and Sudan the fight was against Islamists, making Museveni´s Uganda part of the US-led War on Terror (in the Ugandan-Sudanese border regions, the NRA also fought Joseph Kony´s bizarre cult LRA). 

In Rwanda, the Ugandan-backed RPF supposedly stopped the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were brutally murdered in a matter of months by extremist Hutu militias. Epstein believes that the RPF killed almost as many Hutus in “revenge”, many of them innocent civilians, and that the Hutu had good reasons to fear the return of the Tutsi to power, the Tutsi being the traditional aristocracy of Rwanda which for centuries treated the Hutu as virtual slaves. Most sensationally, Epstein claims that the airplane of Rwandese Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, not by Hutu extremists critical of the president´s concessions to the RPF, but by the RPF themselves. If so, the RPF had no intention of sharing power with Habyarimana – note also that it was this assassination which triggered the genocidal violence in the country. 

Uganda and the RPF then invaded the Congo, overthrowing Mobutu Sese Seko, an old US ally who had become a nuisance after the end of the Cold War, replacing him with ex-Marxist and ex-petty warlord Laurent Kabila, destroying the democratic opposition to Mobutu in the process. Uganda and the RPF looted the mineral riches of eastern Congo, hotly coveted in the West, while supporting various marauding militias with a taste for murder, rape and plunder. Literally millions of people have been killed in the Congolese war, a war originally triggered by the Ugandan-RPF invasion of the country in 1996-97.

Finally, some observations of my own. During the 1990´s, even radical leftists swallowed the Museveni-Kagame psy-ops. Many Trotskyists supported the RPF when it invaded Rwanda and overthrew the “pro-Western” Hutu regime and its extremist militias. Well, the Hutu regime was pro-French and pro-Belgian, but since the RPF were pro-American, I have to say that the “anti-imperialist” angle feels somewhat moot. Another leftist argument in favor of the RPF was that they were multi-ethnic and tried to stop the anti-Tutsi genocide. One particularly dogmatic Trotskyist group in the UK argued that the RPF had both Tutsi, Hutu and Twa in its leadership. Since the Twa were Pygmies living in the rain forests, that would indeed be sensational – I would love to shake the hand of this Pygmy commander of the “Revolutionary” Patriotic Front! Even more leftists supported Kabila, apparently in the belief that they were witnessing a genuine socialist revolution (led by an old comrade of Che Guevara, to boot), rather than a CIA-Uganda-Tutsi psy-op/black-op of *major* proportions. To give the devil his due, Kabila later broke with his Ugandan and Tutsi patrons, instead accepting aid from “leftist” regimes in Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, so I suppose the local anti-imperialistas were on somewhat firmer ground here…

As for myself, I used to believe all the above (except the “Twa” and “socialist revolution” stuff – I argued it was a democratic revolution), so reading “Another Fine Mess” wasn´t a very pleasant experience. I probably won´t take leftists seriously ever again after this! That being said, I have to say that Epstein sounds awfully naïve in some parts of her book. I happen to think the old fox (or was it hare) Museveni is right about Western-style democracy not working in Africa due to the fissiparous nature of tribalism. That may be a self-serving truth, but it´s a truth nevertheless (it´s also a truth honored only in the breach by Museveni, whose political party is just as tribalist as those of his mostly banned opponents). Also, Epstein´s criticism of the War on Terror is absurd – should the West simply accept that Sudan or Egypt falls to the Muslim Brotherhood and even worse groups? The only alternative to using proxies such as Museveni (or some altogether nicer guys, say the YPG in northern Syria) is to send hundreds of thousands of American troops to the Middle East or darkest Africa for an indefinite time…

“Another Fine Mess” isn´t a pretty story, and unfortunately I don´t think the future of Africa will be any better. In fact, I strongly suspect that we´ve only seen the dress rehearsal for the *really* brutal conflicts of the future. Let´s just hope we don´t have to take sides in those ones…

Världsrekord i valfusk?

Vägrar samarbeta med Annie Lööf, anklagad för valfusk?

Valresultatet i Kongo-Kinshasa är ”ifrågasatt”, har vi fått veta. Vinnaren, Felix Tshisekedi, anklagas för valfusk. Det verkar ju lite märkligt. Tshisekedi är nämligen *oppositionens* kandidat (eller snarare en av dem). Hur kan oppositionen rigga ett val? Det måste vara något slags världsrekord i oegentligheter!

Eller kanske inte. Här är en annan teori: Tshisekedi är faktiskt den populäraste kandidaten. Regimen är så svag att den inte längre kan fuska sig till en seger (eller skjuta upp valet i all oändlighet). Så varför anklagas Tshisekedi nu för fusk? Jag vet inte, men ”koppar” och ”Katanga” kan ju vara relevanta sökord för den som vill reflektera över det kongolesiska tillståndet...

In God´s country

“In the Name of God” is a Swedish-produced pro-Tutsi documentary about the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and its aftermath. It was released in 2004 and has been shown 12 times on Rwandan national television, suggesting it´s approved by the Tutsi-dominated administration of Paul Kagame. This is the English-narrated version.

Rwanda is a small nation in Central Africa ethnically (or perhaps quasi-ethnically) divided between two groups, known as Tutsi and Hutu. When Rwanda was a Belgian colony, the traditional Tutsi elite were favored over the majority Hutu population. This changed when educated Tutsis began demanding independence and express support for socialism. Belgium quickly switched its sympathies to the Hutu, and permitted them to carry out a bloody “social revolution” against the Tutsi, many of whom fled to neighboring Uganda. Note the irony: the traditional landed and pastoral elite embraced socialism, while the plebeians had the backing of the colonial power!

After independence, Hutu-dominated Rwanda was transformed into a weird mixture of military dictatorship, one party state and Catholic theocracy, backed by the Belgian Christian Democrats and the Christian Democratic International (CDI). The regime was seen as a firm Cold War ally against international Communism. By this logic, the Tutsi RPF guerillas were seen as Communists, not entirely incorrectly, since they supported Yoweri Museveni´s NRA in Uganda, which originally claimed to be a leftist movement. For some reason, the documentary doesn´t point out that Uganda and the RPF became pro-American after the end of the Cold War, instead implying that the RPF may still have been socialist when attacking Rwanda in 1990. I assume this means the producers are leftists (many naïve leftists actually supported the RPF). On the level of great power politics, this was the United States trying to extend its sphere of influence at the expense of other Western nations such as Belgium and France. (The later overthrow of Mobutu in the Congo also fits this pattern.) We can discuss whether this was good, bad or simply BAU, but it should be pointed out.

“In the Name of God” accuses the Catholic hierarchy in Rwanda and their Christian Democratic backers in Belgium of complicity in the genocide. The CDI called upon the Hutu leadership not to sign the Arusha peace accords with the RPF. They supported the Hutu government throughout the genocide, during which an estimated 1 million people were killed, most of them Tutsi. One of the radio presenters in Rwanda calling for genocidal violence was Italian national Georges Ruggiu, who was sent to the country by Christian Democratic interests in Belgium. After the victory of the RPF, the CDI sent a delegation to the Hutu refugee camps in southern Rwanda, still expressing their support for the Hutu leaders. Some of the Christian Democrats interviewed admit that they acted wrongly, while others seem unapologetic.

The documentary concentrates on the role of religion as a propaganda tool in the conflict. Hutu Rwanda was supposed to become God´s kingdom on Earth and a model Christian state. Catholic hierarchs were integrated into the state apparatus. The military held regular prayer sessions when training. The Old Testament was used to deadly effect during the genocide, as several OT passages talk about the Holy Land being threatened by invaders “from the north”. In context, presumably the Assyrians or perhaps Gog and Magog, but in Rwanda, this was seen as a reference to the RPF, which was based in Rwanda´s northern neighbor Uganda. Thus, killing Tutsis and resisting the advance of the RPF were seen as Biblical injunctions. (It would be interesting to know if the Hutu militants also used the Book of Joshua!) A curious fact never explained is that several of the hard-line Christians interviewed are Pentecostals, not Catholics, yet the narrator constantly attacks the Catholic Church. The most sensational part of this production features interviews with the Army of Jesus, an extremist Hutu militia based in eastern Congo from which it makes incursions into Rwandan territory. We get to see the militia as they try to recruit a lonely farmer to its cause. The heavily armed militia men sound like Christian missionaries and end their session with the farmer in joint prayer! The whole thing does look...weird. (Apparently, the Army of Jesus is officially known as the FDLR.)

Despite its rather obvious anti-Christian and anti-Catholic slant, and the annoying naïve leftism (compounded by the heavy Swedish accent of the female narrator), “In the Name of God” is nevertheless worth watching and pondering. Also available on YouTube!

A brilliant genocide...or the lesser evil?

“Rwanda´s Untold Story” is a controversial 2014 BBC documentary which questions the standard narrative about the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. According to that narrative, one million innocent Tutsi were massacred by Hutu extremists in full view of the UN and the world community. Fortunately, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) intervened and put a stop to the genocide. Under the presidency of RPF leader Paul Kagame, Rwanda has become an African success story with economic growth, clean streets and no ethnic divides (indeed the ethno-designations “Tutsi” and “Hutu” have been banned). And presumably some kind of democracy, too, since Kagame is the elected president of the country. Most people still believe this narrative and its corollary: that president Yoveri Museveni of Uganda (RPF´s main backer) is also one of the good guys. To question the official story is tantamount to “Holocaust revisionism” or “genocide denial” in the eyes of many. Indeed, in Rwanda itself, such wrong-think can land you in prison for considerable time.

Perhaps the Kagame faction of the Tutsi is right. And then, perhaps not. Either way, “Rwanda: The Untold Story” is worth watching.

The BBC reporter Jane Corbin has interviewed two US scholars, Allan Stam and Christian Davenport, who after doing research “on the ground” in Rwanda drew the disturbing conclusion that most people killed during the Rwandan genocide were Hutu, not Tutsi. There weren´t one million Tutsi in the country at the time. 200,000 of the victims were Tutsi while 800,000 were Hutu massacred by the RPF in revenge killings. Also, the RPF didn´t stop the genocide – it stopped by itself before the RPF troops reached the areas in question. Unfortunately, I haven´t seen the material these conclusions are based on. Two possible objections: the standard Western narrative at the time was that Hutu extremists killed *both* Tutsi and moderate Hutus, so on that reading of the events, Hutu victims would be no surprise (although hardly as many as 800,000). Second, that RPF didn´t literally stop the Tutsi genocide-in-progress is hardly an argument against the RPF, unless you believe that they deliberately avoided doing so, and even that can have reasonable explanations (such as logistical problems, etc – the Allies never bombed Auschwitz during World War II). More disturbing, of course, is the conclusion that the RPF´s revenge killings were *worse* than the Tutsi genocide.

The 1994 genocide was triggered by the murder of Rwandan Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana, who had signed peace accords with the RPF (which had began to invade Rwanda four years *before* the genocide). Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down over Rwanda´s capital Kigali. Hutu extremists were widely believed to be responsible, but according to “Rwanda: The Untold Story”, the RPF downed the plane. If so, the RPF never had any intention of sharing power with the old Hutu leadership. The killing of the president was in reality a coup d´etat, a coup the Hutu radicals tried to botch by unleashing a wave of indiscriminate anti-Tutsi terror, met with equally brutal counter-measures by the RPF. 

The counter-killings continued after Paul Kagame and the RPF had firmly installed themselves as the new government, now directed at Hutu refugee camps in southern Rwanda and eastern Congo. The RPF claimed that the camps harbored Hutu genocidaires (which is, of course, true) but independent observers regard the RPF attacks on the camps as indiscriminate. The documentary features an interview with a Hutu girl who survived the slaughter by hiding for several years in the Congolese jungle. As noted, the RPF didn´t rest content with controlling Rwanda. Backed by Uganda, they soon extended their reach into the Congo, charging the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko with genocidal designs against the Banyamulenge, a Tutsi tribe. Mobutu´s support for the Hutu was another point of contention. The RPF and Uganda essentially invaded the Congo, toppling Mobutu and installing the government of Laurent Kabila in its place, thereby triggering a decades-long conflict which may have killed up to five million people.

Jane Corbin interviews Carla Del Ponte, the UN-appointed special prosecutor at the ICTR, the international court charged with prosecuting suspects involved in the Rwandan Genocide. When Del Ponte wanted to investigate RPF war crimes (which she suspected had taken place), Kagame made sure the UN removed her. According to Del Ponte, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had told her. “I agree with you, Carla, but it´s all politics, you know”.

“Rwanda: The Untold Story” argues that Western support for Kagame´s presidency (former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is one of his chief advisors and promoters) has convinced the regime that it can act with impunity, including on foreign territory. Several high-ranking defectors from Kagame´s government have been killed abroad, and the BBC had to interview other defectors in secret. They used to have high positions in the government or military, and clearly fear for their safety. Their exact reasons for “turning” are never explained. All of them are Tutsi, interestingly enough. (I´m a bit too cynical to believe that they favor “democracy” in Rwanda. Perhaps they simply had personal fallouts with Kagame.) The easiest part of the documentary to believe is that Kagame is really a dictator. Of course he is – it´s *very* hard to believe that a Tutsi (the Tutsi only being 15% of the population) can get 95% of the votes in a Hutu-majority country. Sounds like election-rigging to me…

Even this anti-Kagame documentary admits that Rwanda has made progress under Paul Kagame´s (authoritarian) rule. Foreign investment and economic growth is part of the picture, the country is stable, and the capital of Kigali actually does look neat and tidy. Health care is free (sic) and there is free Wi-Fi on the buses. Of course, this raises a question “Rwanda: The Untold Story” can´t raise, with its “liberal” perspective on things. What if Paul Kagame, despite everything, is the lesser evil in Rwanda? Democracy doesn´t work everywhere and at all times, despite what woke Westerners like to believe (I used to believe it myself).

Perhaps the real choices in Rwanda are between mono-ethnic authoritarian regimes or a bi-national authoritarian regime…

Interview with the vampire

This is a short documentary from 2006, “Meeting Joseph Kony”. Yes, it does feature an interview with Joseph Kony, the leader of the weird and cultic Lord´s Resistance Army (LRA). At the time, Kony was one of the world´s most wanted war criminals. This could be the only interview of its kind. LRA, which fights the Ugandan government of Yoveri Museveni, are notorious for kidnapping children, turning them into boy soldiers or sex slaves. The conflict in northern Uganda has been extremely brutal, and in all fairness, Museveni is hardly an angel himself!

A group of British reporters were allowed to meet Kony at one of his hide-outs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They are followed by none other than Riek Machar, who at the time was Vice President of Southern Sudan, then still an autonomous region within Sudan. 

Machar was in the process of brokering a peace agreement between Uganda and the LRA. At the time, the LRA were based in Southern Sudan, its fighters quite openly partying in the local capital of Juba. Under the terms of the agreement, LRA apparently evacuated all its soldiers to the Congo, where many of them were massacred three years later when fighting had resumed. Kony has never been apprehended however, and presumably still lives with a dwindling band of supporters somewhere in the Congo.

The interview itself is less interesting. Kony, who looks like a perfectly ordinary guy, simply denies all allegations of war crimes and genocide, claims to fight for democracy in Uganda, and says he wants to restore the Ten Commandments of God. He also claims that “spirits” talk to him, but denies direct contact with God himself. More disturbing is the conduct of his soldiers – some of them admit that they have been abducted by the LRA?! 

Also available directly on YouTube.

I chose feudalism

Never mentions Brilliant Leader Kim Jong-un and the world famous unicorn lair outside Pyongyang. Deserves five star for that very reason. Romantic description of feudal Balkan sanjaks apparently rubs the Korean Workers Party (and the Congo Workers Party) the wrong way.

The irony of history

Wtf, I love Kim Jong-un now! He seems willing to, you know, end the Korean War or something. I hope he also dumps the "Congo Workers Party" which constantly pays tribute to all things DPRK in their (obviously fake) communiques. Let Maduro or Tajikistan take over the Congo Workers Party franchise, please.