Source: Boiling Frogs Post
William Engdahl
According
to their website, the American NGO, Invisible Children, claims now to
have had over 80 million viewers to their YouTube video, “Kony2012,”
since its release on YouTube a few weeks ago. For anyone with the
patience to sit through the entire YouTube of Kony2012, it is
questionable how truthful the figure of 80 million viewers is. Eighty
million is unprecedented in YouTube history by all accounts.
The
bizarre thing about “Kony2012” is that Joseph Kony either fled Uganda
or was killed fleeing more than six years ago. It is claimed he fled to
the wilds of Congo or Central Africa, hence he makes a perfect echo of
the elusive Osama bin Laden, justifying US military action across the
rich terrain of central Africa from Uganda to the Democratic Republic of
Congo, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Uganda and beyond.[6]
Like Joseph Kony, Osama bin Laden was reliably reported to have died in
Afghanistan years before his staged murder by Navy Seals a year ago.
But his legend was kept alive to justify spreading the US War on Terror;
so now, with the legend of Joseph Kony propagated by Invisible Children
Inc. in San Diego. The issue is not whether Kony had committed
atrocities; that is beyond dispute. The issue is whether “Kony2012” is
being falsely promoted to justify US military intervention where it is
unwanted by all parties.
The
“Kony2012” video is being credited with giving the US Congress the spur
to demand US military forces be sent to not just Uganda, but to the
entire region of central Africa where the elusive Kony and his child
army warriors are allegedly terrorizing the land. Democrat Jim McGovern
of Massachusetts and Republican Ed Royce have just introduced a
resolution in Congress calling on the Pentagon’s AFRICOM (Africa
Command) to proceed with “expanding the number of regional forces in
Africa to protect civilians and placing restrictions on individuals or
governments found to be supporting Kony.” [8]
Last year before the “viral” YouTube airing of “Kony2012”, McGovern and
Royce also sponsored “The Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and
Northern Uganda Recovery Act.” The media attention to the YouTube makes
their case easier for military intervention. After all, it’s
“humanitarian”; it’s about children, isn’t it?
# # # #
F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics in the New World Order. He is a contributing author at BFP and may be contacted through his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net where this article was originally published.
Endnotes:
William Engdahl
A Major AFRICOM & US State Department Campaign to Undermine Chinese Influence in Central Africa
According
to their website, the American NGO, Invisible Children, claims now to
have had over 80 million viewers to their YouTube video, “Kony2012,”
since its release on YouTube a few weeks ago. For anyone with the
patience to sit through the entire YouTube of Kony2012, it is
questionable how truthful the figure of 80 million viewers is. Eighty
million is unprecedented in YouTube history by all accounts.
The video features such prominent
Hollywood personalities as Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Lady GaGa,
Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and other notables.
It’s a slick, sentimental story directed by Jason Russell, a 33-year-old
now-hospitalized American filmmaker who apparently just underwent a
bizarre mental disconnect on the streets of San Diego.[1]
The YouTube video depicts a young Ugandan, Jacob Acaye, whom Russell
claims he befriended some ten years earlier after Acaye escaped
conscription into Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) as an
11-year-old killer. The film portrays Kony as the world’s worst beast
and terrorist, in effect, Africa’s Osama bin Laden. [2]
The Invisible Children NGO is itself
opaque. It reportedly rakes in millions from sales of such things as
buttons, Invisible Children T-shirts, bracelets and posters priced from
$30-$250, but it ranks low on transparency regarding other donors. The
group, which employs around 100 people, is expected to raise millions of
dollars from their “Kony2012” video, but so far it refuses to say how
much has been donated or how it will spend the money. The founders of
the group, who advocate direct US military intervention in response to
the LRA, had been previously criticized for posing with guns alongside
members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in 2008, an
organization widely accused of rape and looting. The group issued a
statement in response: “We thought it would be funny to bring back to
our friends and family a joke photo. You know, ‘Haha – they have
bazookas in their hands but they’re actually fighting for peace’.” [3] HaHa…
According to the London Guardian, Invisible
Children’s “accounts show it is a cash-rich operation, which more than
tripled its income in 2011” to nearly $9 million, mainly from personal
donations. Of this, nearly 25% was spent on travel and film-making. Most
of the money raised has been spent in the US, not for Africa’s
“invisible children” or even visible ones. According to information
obtained by the Guardian, “the accounts show $1.7million went
to US employee salaries, $850,000 in film production costs, $244,000 in
‘professional services’ – thought to be Washington lobbyists – and
$1.07 million in travel expenses. Nearly $400,000 was spent on office
rent in San Diego” Charity Navigator, a US charity evaluator, gave the
organization only two stars for “accountability and transparency.” [4]
The USAID, a State Department agency which coordinates its foreign
interventions with the Pentagon and CIA, openly states on its website
that it has funded Invisible Children Inc. in the past. [5]
The
bizarre thing about “Kony2012” is that Joseph Kony either fled Uganda
or was killed fleeing more than six years ago. It is claimed he fled to
the wilds of Congo or Central Africa, hence he makes a perfect echo of
the elusive Osama bin Laden, justifying US military action across the
rich terrain of central Africa from Uganda to the Democratic Republic of
Congo, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Uganda and beyond.[6]
Like Joseph Kony, Osama bin Laden was reliably reported to have died in
Afghanistan years before his staged murder by Navy Seals a year ago.
But his legend was kept alive to justify spreading the US War on Terror;
so now, with the legend of Joseph Kony propagated by Invisible Children
Inc. in San Diego. The issue is not whether Kony had committed
atrocities; that is beyond dispute. The issue is whether “Kony2012” is
being falsely promoted to justify US military intervention where it is
unwanted by all parties.
One American human rights worker in
Uganda in a recent interview declared, “Invisible Children’s campaign
is…an excuse that the US government has gladly adopted in order to help
justify the expansion of their military presence in central Africa.
Invisible Children are ‘useful idiots’, being used by those in the US
government who seek to militarize Africa, to send more and more weapons
and military aid, and to bolster the power of states who are US allies.
The hunt for Joseph Kony is the perfect excuse for this strategy – how
often does the US government find millions of young Americans pleading
that they intervene militarily in a place rich in oil and other
resources?” [7]
The
“Kony2012” video is being credited with giving the US Congress the spur
to demand US military forces be sent to not just Uganda, but to the
entire region of central Africa where the elusive Kony and his child
army warriors are allegedly terrorizing the land. Democrat Jim McGovern
of Massachusetts and Republican Ed Royce have just introduced a
resolution in Congress calling on the Pentagon’s AFRICOM (Africa
Command) to proceed with “expanding the number of regional forces in
Africa to protect civilians and placing restrictions on individuals or
governments found to be supporting Kony.” [8]
Last year before the “viral” YouTube airing of “Kony2012”, McGovern and
Royce also sponsored “The Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and
Northern Uganda Recovery Act.” The media attention to the YouTube makes
their case easier for military intervention. After all, it’s
“humanitarian”; it’s about children, isn’t it?
Even the politically correct Washington Post
was moved to write critically, “The very viral campaign to capture Kony
by the nonprofit Invisible Children has largely been a U.S. phenomenon.
Ugandans say the LRA has not been active for years.” [9]
Already President Obama has sent 100
US elite special forces troops to Central Africa to serve as “advisers”
in efforts to hunt down Kony. If it all has echoes of Vietnam in the
early 1960’s it is not accidental. This is now the prelude to a huge
Pentagon militarization of the entire region of central Africa,
following the NATO destruction of order in Libya, and the chaos in Egypt
and other Islamic states targeted by the US State Department’s “Arab
Spring,” better termed these days as, “Arab Nightmare.”
“Kony2012” was produced by an
apparently well-financed NGO headed by Russell called Invisible Children
Inc. in San Diego. The video reeks of US State Department propaganda
with its slick camera effects and repeated scenes of Russell’s small boy
to make it appear credible. Rosebell Kagumire, an award-winning Ugandan
journalist responded to the clamor over Invisible Children’s “Kony2012”
video, accusing Invisible Children Inc. of “using old footage to cause
hysteria.” [10] Kagumire adds,
Is it about the dollars or a
false belief that unless Americans know about it, no solution comes our
way? … the Juba Peace Talks 2006-2008, which restored stability and
paved way for the end to abductions in northern Uganda, was not an
American invention. It was local civil society and peace actors like the
Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiatives (ARLPI) who pushed for a
negotiated solution. In fact the moment America got involved, we
witnessed “Operation Lightening Thunder”- a military operation with
disastrous effects as the LRA eluded air strikes, and scattered into DR
Congo and the Central African Republic where they continue to commit
atrocities in retaliation.[11]
The entire brouhaha over Joseph Kony
appears to be a flank in a major AFRICOM and US State Department
campaign especially to undermine Chinese influence in central Africa —
now that they have successfully driven the Chinese oil companies out of
Libya, and carved out a new “republic” of South Sudan containing much of
the oil that fuels China’s economy. That splitting of South Sudan and
its oil, for those who did not follow it closely, was a consequence of
sending in US and NATO special forces to “stop genocide” in Darfur.
George Clooney was also the poster boy for the Darfur action.
There is good reason for the apparent
sudden interest of the Pentagon and politicized US NGOs to focus on
action in central Africa. So long as the world largely ignored it,
Washington policy was to let institutions such as the IMF bleed the
countries like Congo and allow western mining companies to extract
valuable mineral wealth for pennies on the dollar. A few years ago all
that began to change when China turned its attention to Africa, and
especially its Great Rift Belt.
Great Rift Belt
The region in question, according to
the filmmakers of “Kony2012”, includes not only Uganda where in recent
years a giant oil field was discovered, but also some of the planet’s
richest mineral lands — including the Democratic Republic of Congo,
Central African Republic and the US-sponsored Republic of South Sudan.
The area lies in the extraordinary geographical conjuncture called the
Great Rift Belt or Valley stretching from Syria in the north, down
through Sudan and Eritrea and the Red Sea, and deep into southern Africa
across the eastern Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and into
Mozambique.
This East African Rift System, as
geologists term it, is “one of the geologic wonders of the world,” and
also prospectively, one of the richest treasures of subsurface minerals,
including clearly vast untapped reserves of oil and gas.[12]
The red line on this map shows the
eastern and western faults of the Great Rift Valley, which runs 4,500
miles from southern Africa, under the Red Sea, and into Syria in
southwestern Asia. it is so huge a geological feature that it is
prominently visible to lunar and space-shuttle astronauts.
Ever since British oil company,
Tullow Oil, discovered an estimated 2 billion barrels of oil in Uganda
in 2009 the geopolitical importance of the entire central African region
suddenly underwent change. CNOOC Ltd., China’s biggest offshore oil
explorer, is in a joint venture with Tullow Oil to develop three oil
blocks in Uganda’s Lake Albert basin. [13]
According to geologists, “the East
African Rift is suspected to be one of the last great oil and natural
gas deposits on earth.” In a recent article, Time noted,
“Seismic tests over the past 50 years have shown that countries up the
coast of East Africa have natural gas in abundance. Early data compiled
by industry consultants also suggest the presence of massive offshore
oil deposits.” [14]
This region of central and east
Africa is considered one of the hottest unexplored regions in the world
for potential hydrocarbons—oil and gas. In 2010 Texas oil company
Anadarko Petroleum discovered a giant reservoir of natural gas off the
coast of Mozambique. Estimates are that Somalia holds perhaps 10 billion
barrels of untapped oil.[15]
The chronic political unrest and AFRICOM-backed tensions
there—convenient for western oil majors seeking to maintain absurdly
high oil prices by controlling supply—prevent the development of the
oil. While West and North Africa have undergone tens of thousands of oil
well drillings over the last decades, East and Central Africa,
including Darfur and South Sudan, Chad, Central African Republic are all
but terra incognita in terms of drilling.
This all runs smack up against the
popular talk of “Peak Oil.” Far from exhausting the Earth’s resources of
oil and gas, oil companies everywhere, from the eastern Mediterranean
to offshore Brazil to the Gulf of Mexico and now the Great Rift Belt of
eastern and central Africa, are discovering huge new potentials almost
daily. We are, as oil economist Peter Odell once noted, not running out
of oil, “We’re running into oil.”
Oil is one of the most highly
politicized businesses on the planet, and secrecy in the industry among
the four giant Anglo-American companies makes the CIA and MI6 look like
amateurs. Since the publication in 1956 by Shell Oil geologist King
Hubbert of his unproven thesis[16]
that oil fields deplete like Gaussian Bell Curves, Big Oil has fostered
the myth of looming oil scarcity. It serves an obvious aim of
maintaining their grip on the prime energy source for the world economy.
Oil and its control is a geopolitical foundation of the post-1945
American Century.
China alters African geopolitical calculus
So long as Africa was the “forgotten
Continent” in terms of independent oil and gas explorations, Washington
policy was to ignore it. As former South African President Thabo Mbeki
recently put it, “Liberated from the obligation to secure the allegiance
of independent Africa in the context of its global anti-Soviet
struggle, the US had found that Africa was otherwise not of any
importance in terms of its global strategic interests.” [17]
But as Mbeki pointed out, by 2007
that all began to change as China began making economic and diplomatic
inroads all over Africa: “There was increasing international competition
for access to Africa’s oil and other natural resources, including by
China. China was becoming a ‘formidable competitor for both influence
and lucrative contracts on the Continent.’” [18]
But Washington’s vision of so-called
‘globalization’ of the world economic system allows for no one who does
not read from their sheet of music. Hillary Clinton put it clearly
enough: “If you’ve got people who are choosing a different path, then
you have to use all the tools of your suasion to try to convince them
that the path that you wish to follow is also the one that is in their
interest as well.”[19] George W. Bush put it more succinctly: “You’re either with us or you’re against us….”
Since China hosted more than 40
African heads of state in 2006 in Beijing, and followed that with
highest-level state visits across Africa — with Chinese oil companies
and industry signing multi-billion deals with the “forgotten” Africa —
Washington suddenly took notice. In 2008 President Bush authorized
creation for the first time of a single Pentagon command, AFRICOM, for
the African continent. As Daniel Volman, director of the African
security Research Project in Washington stated, “a number of
developments—especially the continent’s increasing importance as a
source of energy supplies and other raw materials—have radically altered
the picture. They have led to the growing economic and military
involvement of China, India, and other emerging industrial powers in
Africa and to the re-emergence of Russia as an economic and military
power on the continent. In response the United States has dramatically
increased its military presence in Africa and created a new military
command—the Africa Command or AFRICOM—to protect what it has defined as
its “strategic national interests” in Africa. This has ignited what has
come to be known as the “new scramble for Africa” and is transforming
the security architecture of Africa.”[20]
By 2012 China had become the second
largest foreign investor in Uganda after Britain. It is the major
investor in the oil resources of South Sudan. In July 2007, the China
oil company CNOOC signed an agreement with the Somali government to
search for oil in the Mudug region where some estimate that reserves
could amount to five to ten billion barrels of oil.[21]
The Chinese investments in this part of Africa also include the joint
venture which CNOOC signed with Tullow Oil in 2011 for the Ugandan
fields. [22]
What is clear is that “Kony2012” is
not documentary fact but manipulative propaganda, which is being used to
advance an AFRICOM military presence in the richest mineral region in
the world before China and perhaps India and Russia preempt it. It
hearkens back to the colonial resource wars of the 19th century, with the only difference being the presence of the Internet and YouTube to propagandize it at warp speed.
Endnotes:
[1] Agence France-Presse, Kony 2012: Uganda PM launches online response, March 17, 2012, accessed in http://www.timescolonist.com/news/Kony+2012+Uganda+launches+online+response/6318818/story.html#ixzz1pNzmSbJC
[3] Julian Borger, John Vidal, and Rosebell Kagumire, Child abductee featured in Kony 2012 defends film’s maker against criticism, guardian.co.uk, 8 March 2012, accessed in http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/08/jacob-acaye-child-kony-2012?intcmp=239
[5] USAID, USAID/OTI Uganda Quarterly Report, Washington, DC, January – March 2009, accessed in http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/cross-cutting_programs/transition_initiatives/country/uganda/rpt0309.html
[6] Mike Tuttle, Kony: Ugandan Says He’s Already Dead–Is Movement a Sham?, March 9, 2012, accessed in http://www.webpronews.com/kony-ugandan-says-hes-already-dead-2012-03.
[7] Adam Branch, Dangerous ignorance: The hysteria of Kony 2012, March 12, 2012, accessed in http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/201231284336601364.html
[8] Stephanie Condon, Joseph Kony resolution introduced in House, March 13, 2012, CBSNews, accessed in http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57396592-503544/joseph-kony-resolution-introduced-in-house/
[9] Elizabeth Flock, Forget Joseph Kony. What Ugandan children fear is the ‘nodding disease,’ March 13, 2012, accessed in http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/forget-joseph-kony-what-ugandan-children-fear-is-the-nodding-disease/2012/03/13/gIQA4Cif9R_blog.html
[10] Rosebell Kagumire, More perspective on Kony2012, March 9, 2012 accessed in http://rosebellkagumire.com/2012/03/09/more-perspective-on-kony2012/
[12] James Wood and Alex Guth, East Africa’s Great Rift Valley: A Complex Rift System, accessed in http://geology.com/articles/east-africa-rift.shtml
[13] Bloomberg News, CNOOC in `Final Discussions’ With Tullow on Ugandan Oil Block Exploration, July 8, 2010, accessed in http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-08/cnooc-holds-final-discussions-with-tullow-oil-to-cooperate-in-uganda.html
[14] Christian DeHaemer, Cutting the Dark Continent, 3 September 2010, accessed in http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/deals-profits-east-africa/1256
[16] M. King Hubbert, “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels,”
Presented before the Spring Meeting of the Southern District Division
of Production, American Petroleum Institute, San Antonio, Texas, March
8, 1956. Publication No. 95. Houston: Shell Development Company,
Exploration and Production Research Division, 1956.
[20] Daniel Volman, The Security Implications of Africa’s New Status in Global Geopolitics, Washington DC, accessed in http://ruafrica.rutgers.edu/events/media/0809_media/volman_nai.doc.
[22] Xinhua, China ranks second in investment in Uganda, January 8, 2010, accessed in http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2010-01/08/content_12773999.htm
