JOHN PRENDERGAST RIDES AGAIN: SAVING AFRICANS FROM AFRICAN SAVAGERY

John Prendergast and Milton Allimadi differ radically on the purpose of the Pentagon's hunt for Joseph Kony
 
The hunt for the infamous Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) are back in the news.  Some even say Kony’s sick, and might surrender. Nevertheless, leading humanitarian militarist and white savior John Prendergast and his ENOUGH Project have just published a new list of Kony/LRA hunting urgencies: Blind Spots: Gaining Access to Areas Where the LRA Operates. They say that U.S. Special Forces and our African “military partners,” meaning primarily the Ugandan People’s Defense Force (UPDF), need more helicopters, vehicles, communications, and funds. All to gain more access to remote regions in the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the phantom Kony might be hiding. In 2012, Prendergast published a Foreign Policy editorial, “Let Them Hunt,” which began, “If President Obama is serious about wanting to apprehend Joseph Kony, he’s got to unleash the dogs of war.”  (And let them hunt.)  
 
Warlord Joseph Kony is the singular East African evildoer identified in the 2012 viral video that quickly became a global laughingstock: KONY 2012.  The Mail and Guardian reported that, when Kony 2012 was finally screened for rural Northern Ugandans, on a sheet stretched between two metal rods, “the event ended with the angrier members of the audience throwing rocks and shouting abusive criticism, as the rest fled for safety, leaving an abandoned projector, with organisers and the press running for cover until the dust settled.”  And, that “while the film has a viral power never seen before in the online community, it did not go down nearly so well with the very people it claims it is meant to help.”
 
The video’s creators, Jason Russell and Jedediah Jenkins, are white evangelical hipsters on a mission to save Africans from African savagery. Their non-profit corporation, Invisible Children, is a well-funded astroturfing operation which exists to help John Prendergast lobby the U.S. commander-in-chief for more U.S. troops and humanitarian military operations in East Africa and Central Africa.
 
Prendergast makes a cameo appearance in KONY 2012. He’s also an evangelist, for U.S. Mass Atrocities Response Operations (MARO), as is his longtime colleague, UN Ambassador and former NSC Advisor Samantha Power. The epic violence occasioned by U.S. and European resource imperatives is not among the mass atrocities they’ve resolved to eradicate.
 
I left several comments on Prendergast’s latest Huffington Post exhortations about this, all of which were met with this message: “Due to the potentially sensitive nature of this article, your comment may take longer to appear publicly.”  All but a single line, which I wrote in response to a commenter who wants to off Omar al-Bashir, have yet to appear a week later. 
 
Black Star’s own editor, Milton Allimadi, has done more than anyone to expose the Kony crusaders as lobbyists for expanding U.S. military presence in East Africa and Central Africa. Milton commonly uses “Hunt Kony = Secure Oil” as shorthand in Black Star, and on RT, Democracy Now, and Pacifica’s KPFA and WBAI. In December 2010, before South Sudan’s independence referendum, he explained, on KPFA, that an LRA-hunting outpost on the western border of the Central African Republic would also serve as a convenient frontline to weaken the government of Sudan in Khartoum and make it difficult for Sudan to launch an attack against South Sudan to settle disputes over their oil rich border regions and the oil pipeline running from South Sudan to Aden, Sudan’s port on the Red Sea.
 
I spoke to Milton again, at the end of last week, after Prendergast, ENOUGH, and Invisible Children’s latest lobbying efforts:
 
ANN GARRISON: Milton, the ENOUGH Project says that the UPDF, aided by U.S. Special Forces, need access to remote regions in northeastern Congo, but that the UPDF hasn’t been allowed across the border since 2011, because they were plundering resources and Congolese believed they were also interfering in the Congolese election. So, do you think they should be allowed across now, to hunt the LRA?
 
MILTON ALLIMADI: No no no, they should not be allowed to cross any territory, since Uganda’s General Yoweri Museveni has been implicated in using the proxy army M23 to terrorize Congolese, to massacre Congolese, to plunder from Congo. And M23, which essentially is a proxy army of Uganda and Rwanda, has just been defeated by the Congolese Army and the UN Force Intervention Brigade. The issue of the LRA at this stage is just another one of those diversionary tactics and it does not make sense to anybody, except the ENOUGH Project, perhaps. 
 
AG: OK, second, they say that the UPDF, with U.S. Special Forces, need access to remote regions of Darfur that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is not eager to grant them.  What do you think of that? 
 
MA: The United States is not going to be involved in any new military exercise. The U.S. backed off from getting involved  in Syria and there’s no appetite for the United States military forces to be engaged in any conflict in Africa.  The ENOUGH Project is going to have to do a much better job to sell any new war  that involves U.S. forces. And people have to really question what their true motive is. They should be focussing right now on securing the peace in eastern Congo, after the defeat of M23.  It seems to be very sinister that, at this point, when Central African Republic has a much bigger problem than Joseph Kony, when the United Nations has spoken about the possibility of genocide in Central Africa, by the various armies fighting there. Other forces , but not the LRA, have been mentioned.  Why is the ENOUGH Project trying to force this onto the front pages?
 
AG: OK, third, the World Bank, they say, needs to build infrastructure so that the UPDF and the U.S. Special Forces can get into these remote regions.
 
MA: There are far better reasons to build infrastructure in Africa than to make way for a discredited army like the UPDF. Is the ENOUGH Project not aware that the Wall Street Journal published an article, on June 8, 2006,  saying that Uganda’s President/General Yoweri Museveni asked then Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan to block an ICC investigation of alleged war crimes committed by the UPDF in Congo. Why is the ENOUGH Project not sending out a press release about that, and asking whether indeed somebody blocked an ICC investigation of possible war crimes committed by the UPDF, in Congo, under Commander-in-Chief General Yoweri Museveni? 
 
AG: Lastly, they say that the LRA is surviving in part by elephant poaching deep in the Congolese jungle, so they want to send the UPDF in, even though the New York Times’ East Africa correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman, and Congolese rangers, have said that the UPDF is responsible for poaching elephants by shooting them from military helicopters. 
 
MA: If anybody is to believe that, although Joseph Kony’s reported to be sickly, with a rag tag army of a few fighting men, he has the capacity to poach elephants, fly away with the tusks and somehow land somewhere unseen, then we may as well believe that the LRA in fact are not on earth but live on Mars, and that they fly to earth on Martian ships, go back to Mars and come back whenever they feel like causing havoc.  I would rather believe that than this story peddled by the ENOUGH Project.
 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *