Are USAID Gorilla Conservation Funds Being Used To support Covert Operations in Central Africa by Georgianne Nienaber and Keith Harmon Snow

Dandelion Salad

by Georgianne Nienaber and Keith Harmon Snow
Global Research, September 20, 2007
Opnews.com

On Wednesday September 19, 2007 the U.S. State Department and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced the provision of $496,000 of new funds for wildlife conservation in the Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to a State Department press release, poaching, armed conflict and “demographic pressures” are justification for the grant.

But investigations in Eastern Congo reported by these authors over the past six months indicate that USAID “conservation” funds—millions of taxpayer’s dollars—have been misappropriated, misdirected and disappeared. Evidence suggests that ongoing guerrilla warfare in Central Africa is receiving clandestine financial support in AID-for-ARMS type financial transfers.

“Our efforts are focused on conserving and protecting the habitat of these magnificent animals,” said Claudia A. McMurray, U.S. Assistant Secretary for State Oceans, Environment, and Science. “The survival of the mountain gorillas of Virunga is severely threatened by the tragic events in the region, and we will continue to devote whatever resources we can to protect the gorillas and other threatened species there.”

However, as reported by these authors, millions of dollars in USAID funds given to Virunga Park through the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE) over the past ten years have virtually disappeared. Wildlife conservation in eastern Congo is a shambles, and “rebel” armies fighting in the region are receiving massive military support from unknown sources.

The realities on the ground in Central Africa are disturbingly different from those painted in the fundraising drives and brochures produced by the big conservation organizations, and their partners and sponsors. Are these conservation programs merely providing a smokescreen for other activities?

The Virungas region is located in North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, also the base for long-time Rwandan-backed warlord General Laurent Nkunda.

There is evidence that the United States backs General Laurent Nkunda through both clandestine and open military program and missions in Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.

Fighting in Congo’s North Kivu province has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in the past year alone. The death toll for the region is unknown but cataclysmic—in the millions of people dead since warfare began in the area in 1996.

Playwright Eve Ensler, producer of the Vagina Monologues, recently launched a campaign to stop sexual violence in Eastern Congo that is unprecedented. Sexual violence is used as a weapon of war to sow terror and break down resistance to facilitate military occupation and conquest by invading forces. Hundreds of thousands of women and girls have suffered attacks of sexual violence in the area.

THE MISSING USAID MONEY

In 2005, after years of activity with zero oversight or program verification, the activities of Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund-International (DFGFI) and Conservation International expenditures of USAID funds ostensibly for gorilla conservation in Central Africa came under scrutiny.

A Freedom of Information Act request was submitted regarding DFGFI’s failure to file required A-133 audit forms on its USAID funding. These A-133 forms are federally mandated from every non-governmental organization (NGO) receiving USAID monies, which come from U.S. taxpayers.

A Freedom of Information Act request determined that DFGFI has not filed audits for more than two years, while they received a total of at least $4,693,384 from USAID between September 24, 2001 and September 29, 2004.

In September of 2005, US Congressman James Oberstar was contacted by a constituent who claimed that the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International had failed to file federally mandated audits (Form A-133) after receiving millions of dollars in grants from USAID.

Congressman Oberstar’s informal inquiry found that, indeed, the DFGFI had failed to file required forms accounting for millions of dollars in USAID money.

“USAID is covering up for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International,” said a source close to this investigation, in January 2006. “The US government has backed off their investigation of where the million’s of dollars in grants went.”

The source claims that DFGFI officials working in Congo and Rwanda are using the gorilla conservation as a front for other activities. The source also provided information revealing the interesting backgrounds of top-level DFGFI directors.

“The little old lady in Iowa who sends in her five bucks to save the gorillas would freak out if she knew where her money was really going,” the source said. “The gorillas are getting zip in the wild.”

In 2006 Congressman Oberstar demanded that USAID produce a report on the activities of the DFGFI in Central Africa, but as of this writing there had been no substantive action by the DFGFI or USAID. Oberstar noted that the DFGFI has violated U.S. law by not filing required audit reports.

“I’m personally pursuing the matter” Oberstar told a reporter for the Rwanda-owned state newspaper, the New Times, in November 2005, “and have to make sure that USAID explains to the government why DFGFI has not been presenting their audit reports.”

The Rwandan state-run newspaper New Times reported that DFGFI President and CEO Clare Richardson told their reporter that DFGFI had presented audits to USAID in March 2005. The New Times also reported that the Director General of the Office of Rwanda Tourism and National Parks (ORTPN), Rosette Rugamba, told the New Times that she didn’t understand the activities of the DFGFI.

“I don’t know what they are doing in Rwanda,” Rugamba told the New Times. “They have been here for over three decades claiming they are doing research work but they haven’t given us any results. The living conditions of the DFGFI trackers are miserable and yet the DFGFI has lots of money.”

According to Congressman Oberstar’s office, on March 31, 2006, Congressional Affairs at USAID told a House International Relations Committee staff-member “that an audit is being conducted by a third party auditor, but it has not yet been completed.”

Also, the U.S. government Office of Acquisition and Assistance was reportedly forcing DFGFI to respond to all allegations leveled against them about finance and budget issues.

The “third-party” auditor performing a “private” audit is the Defense Contract Audit Agency, a U.S. government agency responsible for auditing U.S. Department of Defense contracts.

Why is the U.S. Defense Contracts Audit Agency auditing programs and funds designated for “gorilla conservation” in Central Africa?

“The Defense Contract Audit Agency,” reads their web site, “is under the authority, direction, and control of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), is responsible for performing all contract audits for the Department of Defense (DoD), and providing accounting and financial advisory services regarding contracts and subcontracts to all DoD Components responsible for procurement and contract administration.”

The Defense Contract Audit Agency completed the DFGFI/USAID audit in March 2007, but the audit has not been released due to the claimed “proprietary nature” of the audit.

We repeat the question: Why is the U.S. Department of Defense Contract Audit Agency auditing the finances and programs of a conservation organization like the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund?

While oversight and accountability for past USAID ‘investment” in the region has not been achieved, even under the pressure of a U.S. Congressman, some $496 million dollars is being directed to the ongoing black hole in Central Africa.

DIAN FOSSEY GUERILLA FUND

Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International also receives funds from private donors, foundations and corporate sponsors, and they have regular fundraising drives where callers solicit donations from members and the general public.

Sponsors and friends listed in DFGFI documents for January to December of 2003, in the $25,000 and above category included, Dr. and Mrs. Nick Faust and CNN, and certain mining and intelligence connected interests.

Dr Nicholas Faust has deep connection to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense.

CNN’s Ted Turner is an owner-shareholder in a high-tech company called Earth Search Sciences Inc. (ESSI) based out of McCall, Idaho. In 1999 ESSI loaned a state-of-the-art “hyperspectral” probe—a remote sensing instrument carried on an aircraft or satellite platform—to a DFGFI and Georgia Institute of Technology team who performed some interesting “studies” in Rwanda.

The project was directed by Dr. Nicholas Faust who is one of the key scientists with the Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI), Redlands, California, USA, which is directly linked to ESSI.

ESRI Corporation (www.esri.com) is self-described as “the world leader in GIS (geographic information system) modeling and mapping software and technology.”

ESRI is a key contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence sector, providing battle theatre GIS mapping and support technologies used, for example, for “a defense-wide infrastructure, supporting fighting missions, command and control, installation management, and strategic intelligence.”

http://www.esri.com/industries/defense/business/military_ops.html

Remote sensing of gorilla habitat reportedly provides essential information about food sources, like the availability of species of bamboos, or encroaching threats from slash-and-burn agriculture, or other changes to gorilla habitat. But the remote sensing arena has proliferated due to the efficacy of these technologies in identifying deposits of minerals or hydrocarbons (oil & gas)—prospecting from aerospace platforms—and the data was therefore far more significant than a few species of bamboos.

According to two independent inside sources, the 21 data CD’s from the ESSI/ESRI remote sensing over-flights ostensibly for Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International were delivered directly by the DFGFI’s CEO Clare Richardson into the hands of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Minister of Defense.

“These guys aren’t looking for habitat,” comments one remote sensing expert (who has visited the facilities of ESSI), “they are looking for oil, which is what they do, and they probably got funding for habitat assessment from USAID and are using the data to provide their owners with oil, minerals and uranium info. I’m not aware of any natural resource vegetative project that they have done in the past. It strictly sounds like taking the taxpayer dollar to fatten some oil guys pockets.”

The Albertine Rift area and so-called World Heritage Sites of the border zone between Uganda, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo are at present enmeshed in massive petroleum and natural gas exploration and exploitation projects.

Some 1000 people a day die in war-torn Eastern Congo due to guerrilla warfare and covert operations. The extent of western petroleum, mining or military involvement in Eastern Congo is never reported by the international press.

Former CNN journalist Gary Strieker became a member of the DFGFI Board of Trustees. Strieker was the CNN journalist embedded with the Rwandan Patriotic Army during the Pentagon’s covert operation that overthrew the government of Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda in 1994.

CNN is deeply embedded with the Pentagon in reporting the U.S. government slant on military operations in U.S. military hotspots, including Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and Sudan.

CNN reportage never establishes any connections to, or stories about, the deeper, hidden realities of western involvement in war, mining, extortion, pillage, dictatorship, arms-running, genocide, disease, or population control programs in Central Africa. Like virtually all of the western media, there is never any attention to the perpetuation of structural violence or the institutions of control and domination.

Continued…

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