GERTLER’S BLING BANG TORAH GANG
Israel and the Ongoing Holocaust in Congo
(part one)
keith harmon snow
www.allthingspass.com
7 February 2008
Maurice Templesman is one of the top funders of
Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Templesman was the
unofficial ambassador to the Congo
(Zaire)
for years, but a new Israeli-American tycoon has replaced him. In the world of bling bling and bling bang, some things change, some stay the same. The CIA, the
MOSSAD, the big mining companies, the offshore accounts and weapons deals—all
hidden by the Western media. The holocaust in Central Africa has claimed some six
to ten million people in Congo
since 1996, with 1500 people dying daily.
But while the Africans are the victims of perpetual Holocaust, the persecutors
hide behind history, complaining that they are the persecuted, or pretending
they are the saviors. Who is responsible?
For Israeli-American Dan
Gertler, business in blood drenched Congo is not merely business, it is
a quest for the Holy Grail. Young Dan Gertler goes nowhere—does nothing—without
the spiritual guidance of Brooklyn-born Rabbi Chaim Yaakov Leibovitch, a
personal friend of Condoleeza Rice.
Gertler and Leibovitch are two of the principals behind a diamond mining
company, Emaxon Finance Corporation, involved in the Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC). Gertler and gang won the majority rights to the diamonds from the state
mining company, Société Minière de
Bakwange, MIBA, found near the government-controlled town of Mbuji-Mayi, the rough
diamond capital of the world.
Emaxon Finance Corp. has
apparently out-maneuvered diamond competitors, especially the big rivals
Energem and De Beers. Energem is one of the many shady mining companies
connected to Anthony Teixeira, a Portuguese born businessman now residing in South Africa
whose daughter married Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba. The warlord’s deadly
battle in Congo in March 2007 was a bid between rival agents—Jean-Pierre Bemba
and Joseph Kabila—to be the black gatekeeper for the mining cartels run by
dynastic families like Templesman, Oppenheimer, Mendell, Forrest, Blattner, Hertzov,
Gertler and Steinmetz, and for companies like NIKANOR, whose stock prices rose
early in July 2006 in expectation of a July 30th “win” for Joseph Kabila.
Africa Confidential called President Kabila’s 2003 visit to the Bush
White House a “coup” for the Israeli diamond magnates Dan Gertler and Beny Steinmetz.
Canadian-based Energem,
formerly DiamondWorks, is owned by British mercenary Tony Buckingham and its
director/shareholders include Mario and Tony Teixeira, J.P. Morgan, and
Gertler’s partner Israeli-American Beny Steinmetz (50%).
Through subsidiary Branch Energy, the Energem-DiamondWorks gang has perpetuated
war in 11 African countries.
In December 2007, Energem re-launched itself on the London Stock Market with
the newly laundered image of a renewable energy company. Regarding diamonds, it
said only it “had decided to give up exploration rights in the Central African Republic.”
The Energem spokesman explained that Tony Teixeira “had a clean bill of health”
etc., etc. Of course, Energem “quit” the C.A.R. because Jean-Pierre Bemba marched
his troops into C.A.R., where they raped and pillaged widely.
Energem is still operating in Congo,
but Dan Gertler is the new, unofficial ambassador to the Congo for the
George W. Bush gang.
Gertler and partners like
Beny and Danny Steinmetz, Nir Livnat, Chaim Leibovitz and Yaakov Neeman run a
hornet’s nest of companies involved in African hotspots, including: Dan Gertler
International (DGI), Steinmetz Global Resources, International Diamond
Industries, NIKANOR and Global Enterprises Corporate.
“Dan Gertler is ‘the new kid
on the block,’” writes Yossi Melman in Israel’s Haaretz news.
“Bold, sophisticated, brutal, he is an adventurer with a short fuse.” Haaratz
confirmed that Dan Gertler owns a complex network of interconnected companies, often
registered in offshore tax havens and involved in India,
Russia, Belgium and the United States, and that Dan Gertler
is looking to God for guidance.
THOU SHALT NOT STEAL
“In the diamond industry,”
Melman wrote, “Gertler is considered something of an odd bird. He maintains few
ties with the other merchants and is not very sociable... Alongside his
business affairs, most of his energy is channeled into matters of faith. He is
a donor to religious institutions and from time to time makes a pilgrimage to
the rabbi he most admires, Rabbi David Abuhatzeira, from Nahariya, in order to
consult with him and receive his blessing. Gertler is surrounded mostly by
religious people and laces his speech liberally with praise to God.”
In 2003, Condoleeza Rice,
then Assistant to President Bush for National Security Affairs, introduced Dan Gertler
and Chaim Leibovitch to U.S.
official Jendayi Frazer, a Harvard Kennedy School
affiliate and former National Security Council agent focused on Africa. On December 6, 2006, Frazer, then Assistant
Secretary of State for African Affairs, was one of seven special Bush delegates
sent to the inauguration of Congo’s
newly installed President Joseph Kabila in Kinshasa.
When Dan Gertler and Chaim Leibovitch
and their friends visit the luxury Gertler villa in Lumumbashi, the capital of Katanga, Congo’s
large southern province, their kosher meals arrive by private plane from Kinshasa. The special executive
jet that flies their kosher meals a few hundred miles over the roadless Congo costs some $US 23,000 per trip.
The average income for Congolese
citizens each year—if they survive it—is about $95. Shootings at mining
facilities and diamond mines are common, land is stolen from Congolese people,
strikes are crushed by security forces that companies are partnered with, and black
overseers of state terror routinely arrest and torture any vocal opposition—and
sometimes disappear them—in support of white bosses. The Société Minière de Bakwange—MIBA—and the diamond fields of Mbuji-Mayi
in Congo have a long history
of bloodshed backed by Western powers, including Israel, from the beginning.
Amnesty International points out that not a single state agent has ever been
prosecuted for the extrajudicial executions of suspected “illegal” miners in
Mbuji-Mayi.
After a century of
exploitation and slavery, we find MIBA consistently withholding payment of
salaries to starving Congolese laborers and middle managers for months at a
time. April and May 2007 saw strikes and protests leading to the Kabila
government’s arbitrary arrest, detention and torture of trade union organizers
like Leon Ngoy Bululu; police have also shot protestors.
So-called ‘illegal’ diamond workers—disenfranchised local Congolese people
forced into “criminal” activities to survive—were summarily executed on MIBA
concessions in Mbuji-Mayi. MIBA security guards have also been sniping
unemployed diamond miners.
Meanwhile, Dan Gertler’s
kosher meals depart Kinshasa, the capital of the
big Congo,
through the arrangements of Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila, high priest of the Chabad
of Central Africa. Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila has been a Kinshasa Rabbi since 1991,
and he was a spiritual force who survived the terrorism of the old dinosaur,
Mobutu Sese Seko, the way most elites did: by working with him. Rabbi Bentolila
is a member of the Chabad Lubavitch Global Emissary Network, headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, and
his wife Miriam is the sister of Rabbi Mena’hem Hadad, a high priest in Brussels.
“Kosher does not mean that a
Rabbi blesses the food,” Rabbi Betolila corrected me, “but rather that the food
was supervised by a Rabbinical Thora [sic] authority who sees that the
ingredients were in accordance with the laws of Kashrut expressed in the Bible
(Leviticus and Deuteronomy).”
Dan Gertler often flies
people into Congo,
on his private jet, for sacred Jewish rituals. For the Bar Mitsvah of Rabbi
Chlomo Bentolila’s son Binyamin Avrahim in June 2005, guests included eminent
Rabbis, Hassidic singer Yoni Shlomo and special orchestra Yossef Brami, all
arriving in “special flights” from Israel,
New York and Brussels. The reception was held at the luxurious
and exclusive Memling Hotel. Joseph Kabila sent a sizeable delegation but did
not attend: his closest advisers provided a blessing on his behalf.
The Gertler, Steinmetz and
Templesman interests are advanced in part through the support of the Committee
of the Jewish Community of Kinshasa—le
Comité de la Communauté Israélite—that is tightly coordinated with the
power structure in Kinshasa
to exert influence and assure control of Israeli-Belgian-Anglo-American
interests over the geopolitical arena.
From June 26-30, 2007, the Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa
received a visit from the Israeli Ambassador Yaakov Revah, director of the
Africa Department of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Revah also flew
to Lumumbashi for meetings with Dan Gertler and his agents, including Moishe
(Moses) Katumbi, the Governor of Katanga, and they most likely enjoyed a lovely,
$23,000 kosher meal sent from the Chabad in Kinshasa.
The Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa maintains very intimate political
relations with President Joseph Kabila’s PPRD party, the People's Party for
Reconstruction and Democracy. On March 1, 2006, in a formal ceremony, the
President of the Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa, Ashlan Piha, was awarded the Congo’s Medal of Civil Merit.
THOU SHALT NOT COVET
Before his assassination on
January 16, 2001, Laurent Desire Kabila—the President of the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC)—made a deal with the Gertler gang that would play out
in favor of the current President Joseph Kabila and, it seems, be a central
factor in relation to both Congo’s ongoing war and the bloody warlord’s battle in
Kinshasa in March 2007.
Back in 2000, former
Congolese president Laurent Kabila offered a monopoly on Congolese diamonds,
and 88% of the proceeds, to Gertler’s International Diamond Industries (IDI) in
exchange for Israeli military assistance to his new government.
Top Congolese military officials apparently flew to Israel in 2000 to negotiate the
deal. Gertler pledged military assistance to President Laurent Kabila through
top Israeli officials.
The original Gertler-Kabila
deal fell through after Laurent Kabila was assassinated for not cooperating
with the Great White Fathers of industry (January 2001), but Gertler and
Leibovitch and their disciples formed another company, Dan Gertler
International, and advanced their Congo plan.
By 2002 Gertler’s company was the leading exporter of Congolese gems,
controlling a diamond mining franchise worth about $US 1 billion annually.
In 2003, the mighty Congolese
diamond parastatal Societe Miniere De
Bakwanga (MIBA)—which has been forever controlled by the Great White Fathers
in Belgium, Israel and America—signed an exclusive
contract with Gertler’s startup company, Emaxon Finance International. The deal
involved Israeli’s Foreign Defense Assistance and Defense Export Organization
(SIBAT), and high-level Israeli defense and intelligence officials. Gertler and
his buddies reportedly bribed Congolese officials and Angolan generals who, on
and off, have commanded Angolan Army troops protecting Kinshasa,
Congo’s
capital.,
Security for mining
operations in Congo
is provided by exclusive security companies like Overseas Security Services
(OSS) one of the many DRC interests of Belgian billionaire tycoon Philippe de
Moerloose. A member of the Kinshasa
elite, de Moerloose supplies jets and other presidential toys to DRC President
Kabila. In 2006, President Joseph Kabila’s campaign helicopter was at the
centre of a legal battle involving Philippe de Moerloose.
De Moerloose’s companies operated in Mobutu’s Zaire from at least 1991, backing
state terrorism and Western corporate plunder that was rendered invisible by
the Western media. De Moerloose is also an adviser to European Union (EU)
Commissioner—and diamantaire—Louis
Michel.
Dan Gertler and Philippe de
Moerloose were, reportedly, the only two white men who attended the wedding of
Joseph Kabila and the two clearly share interests in “security” provided by OSS at MIBA and elsewhere in Congo. The April 2003 secret
agreement signed between the Gertler/Steinmetz company Emaxon Finance and the
Kabila government involved MIBA and two de Moerloose companies, OSS-Congo and
Demimpex, and other firms.
Overseas Security Services
(OSS) operations are apparently grounded in the experience of top expatriate
security operatives formerly involved with the biggest security firm in
Mobutu’s Zaire.
According to OSS
public relations materials, “these persons have a not unimportant experience in
the safety of this country.”
Providing mine security, body-guard and protection services, OSS
operates in Burundi, Ivory Coast, Rwanda,
Dubai, South
Africa, Republic
of Congo (Brazzavile) and Belgium, placing them in cahoots with all sides
warring and plundering eastern Congo
today.
Emaxon Finance International
is a real gem, one of these octopuses of mining tangled up with interlocking
companies and subsidiaries based in specious geographical offshore “tax havens”
that work to shield from prosecution people who are responsible for money
laundering, weapons and drugs operations, assassinations and other terrorism.
NIKANOR is registered as an
Isle of Man (UK) company, an offshore tax haven that helps to conceal criminal
activities and maximize profits. NIKANOR directors include Dan Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel (2001-2005) and Principal
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research under
Madeleine Albright. NIKANOR partners include Mende and Moshe Gertner [sic],
Israeli property tycoons with vast holdings in London who control 22 percent of NIKANOR. Another
partner is Israeli-born Nir Livnat, managing director of Johannesburg-based
Ascot Diamonds, a member of the Steinmetz Group of Diamond Companies, and a
principal involved in numerous U.S.-based businesses from Miami
to New York.
THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS
Back in 2001, when the
Gertler enterprises surfaced in dirty diamond deals, public relations was
handled by Lior Chorev, the “Special Strategic and Communications Consultant”
to International Diamond Industries (IDI), and Chorev continued in this role to
support Dan Gertler businesses.
Today, Lior Chorev is partnered with the brothers Yuval and Eyal Arad as
director-owners of the Israeli marketing and public relations firm, ARAD
Communications.
“We do work for Mr. Gertler
on some of his business issues,” said Lior Chorev.
ARAD’s many clients include Dan Gertler
companies, Los Angeles-based Coral Diamonds and an Israeli aeronautics weaponry
manufacturer producing Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs)—robotic weapons and intelligence
platforms like those being used against the people of Congo today. As a political strategist, Lior Chorev has worked
for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
He has also participated in Israel-NATO defense planning conferences.
Dan Gertler
is close to Israeli politicians, especially Avigdor Lieberman, head of the
right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, and he is very close to diamantaire Beny Steinmetz, a good friend of Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert. Gertler’s inseperable friend,
Chaim Leibovitz, is also very close to Lieberman, and was “a regular fixture”
in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offices.
Beny Steinmetz is considered
to be one of the richest billionaires in Israel. The Steinmetz Group,
controlled with his brother Daniel, is one of the biggest clients of the de Beers diamond
syndicate. Steinmetz is also involved in an Israeli real estate group that
purchased the assets of the British Haslemere real estate company for $1.46
billion. Steinmetz’s real estate partners include the billionaire Israeli
investors David and Simon Reuben, and
the Saudi Arabian Olayan Group, an investment company that is deeply connected
with Bechtel Corporation.
The Steinmetz web site map
of operations hides their involvement in war-torn Congo.
Seems Dan Gertler’s land
grabs and exclusion in Congo have a lot in common with the current crimes
against humanity being committed by Israel through its illegal partition in the
Middle East. On January 3, 2008, the Jerusalem Post reported that Lior
Chorev was an integral part of past Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s advisers, and
he was recently quoted to say that even though Sharon did not get to finalize
Israel’s final borders (he suffered a debilitating stroke in 2006), the route
of the security fence—which he decided—would ultimately serve as the basis for
the border and as Sharon's lasting legacy.
“He felt he needed to set
the border because he didn't trust the younger generations,” Chorev was quoted
to say. “He knew the fence route by heart and the reason for every stretch of
land being on one side or the other.”
In 2003, the U.N. Panel of
Experts on war in Congo
revealed that Emaxon Finance International is controlled by Israeli diamond
traders Chaim Leibovitz and Dan Gertler.
Emaxon lists as its address an office in Montreal,
Canada, but Emaxon’s majority
shareholder is listed as FTS Worldwide, a nebulous global corporation whose
business address is that of a firm of lawyers, Mossack Fonseca & Company,
in Panama City.
FTS Worldwide is registered with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission to
lawyer Andre Zolty of Geneva Switzerland. A
copy of the MIBA-Emaxon contract was signed on 13 April 2003 by Israeli-Americans
Yaakov Neeman and Chaim Leibovitz.
Yaakov Neeman is a founding
partner of Herzog, Fox and Neeman, Tel Aviv, one of Israel’s top law firms, and he has
held Israeli government cabinet and ministerial positions.
Neeman is on the Advisory Board of Markstone Capital Group, a very influential
group of investment bankers, with Eli Hurvitz. On the board of Israel’s Teva
Pharmaceutical Industries with Eli Hurvitz is Northrup-Grumman director Philip
Frost.
Both Philip Frost and Maurice Templesman are top-level councilors for the
American Stock Exchange. Eli Hurvitz sat on the International Advisory Counsel
of Harvard University’s
Belfer Center, 2002-2005, during the period when the Belfer Center
and their intelligence operative Robert Rotberg formalized the “Kimberley
Process” to officially whitewash blood diamonds.
Yakov Neeman is also a governor of the World Zionist Organization and Jewish
Agency for Israel.
One of the main objectives
of the Kimberley Process, and the Harvard
Belfer Center’s
role, was to protect the South African Oppenheimer and De Beers diamond cartels
and their leading buyers and agents like Maurice Templesman and Beny Steinmetz.
Added to those diamond industry firms whitewashed by the Kimberley Process are
all the Zionist diamond dealers and cartels that have risen like a phoenix out
of the ashes of the Holocaust.
The Israeli-American
enterprises of the Gertler/Steinmetz gang have proliferated and today are major
shareholders or owners of diamond concessions in Congo’s
Kasai province and copperbelt concessions in Katanga. The copperbelt is the big
money in Congo.
Copper prices recently hit an all time high due to monopoly control by
corporations and new applications in transportation, aerospace and weaponry.
Cobalt is used in dye and paint processes for manufacturing. More importantly,
it is elemental to superalloys used for tank armor, spacecraft, turbines, ship
hulls, ship hulls, blast furnaces, refineries, petroleum drilling rigs, nuclear
reactors and nuclear weapons. Like coltan, or columbium-tantalite, cobalt is also
used in cell phone batteries. The Katanga copperbelt is also rich in
germanium, a rare metal used in optical fibers, infrared lenses and
telecommunication satellites.
The entire
military-industrial-prisons complex revolves around minerals like cobalt, niobium
and heterogenite (cobalt oxide), yet the truth about what happens to African
people in lands taken over by these mining companies is hidden by the corporate
media. More and more land is being stolen, more and more atrocities committed,
with less and less transparency, and less and less accountability, and fewer
and fewer voices for the voiceless. And, as usual, there are always a lot of
empty promises.
THOUGH SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS
Over the past fifty years,
elite Israeli nationals have perpetrated conflict and injustice in Africa, fueled by and for minerals. Operatives associated
with the Israeli military or intelligence services—the Mossad—maintain
strategic criminal syndicates in competition and in partnership with other
syndicates involving men like Philippe De Moerloose, Louis Michel, Viscount
Etienne Davignon, John Bredenkamp and Tony Buckingham.
Israeli trained shock troops
became Mobutu’s bodyguards, with Mossad advisers. According to a report by the
American Jewish Committee: after 1980 “Mossad agents, military emissaries, and
a small group of private businessmen… replaced diplomats as Israel’s main
interlocutors with African leaders and political (mainly opposition) groups.”
The report cites rising involvement of private defense and security interests,
especially in Angola, DRC
and Central Africa Republic,
since 1992.
Israeli
operatives and “businessmen” appear everywhere there is egregious suffering and
dispossession. Dan Gertler’s forays into the bloody world of diamonds involve
Israeli arms dealers Yair Klein, who is reportedly wanted by the U.S. for training Medellin
drug-cartel militias in Colombia,
and Dov Katz.
Klein was convicted by Israel
(1991) for his involvement with groups that targeted and assassinated Colombian
politicians, journalists, and police. Jailed in Sierra
Leone in 1999, Klein was a field representative for
Gertler in war-torn Sierra Leone
and Liberia.
Gertler also mingles with the Russian Military Brotherhood, a group of “retired
Russian generals whom Gertler describes as good friends.” ,
Retired Israeli Defense
Forces Colonel Yair Klein reportedly organized arms for diamonds networks in Sierra Leone and Liberia after President Charles
Taylor was deposed. In 1999 Klein was arrested in Sierra Leone on charges of
smuggling arms to the rebel Revolutionary United Front.
The U.N. also documented collaborations between Sierra Leone’ rebels and Lazare
Kaplan agent Damian Gagnon; Lazare Kaplan International is one of the organized
crime syndicates of Jewish American Maurice Templesman.
The Steinmetz Group of companies
are also involved in the bloody diamond fields of Sierra
Leone, along with Energem (formerly DiamondWorks), the company
described above that is connected to the white mercenaries depicted in Hollywood’s Blood Diamond propaganda film.
In December 2007, local people in Sierra Leone struggling to gain the
smallest livelihood from their own resources were shot by police during
peaceful protests against the Steinmetz-controlled Koidu Holdings site. It’s
the same old local people’s story, happening everywhere. These were people from
communities driven off their own land by mining companies that promised the
world, cajoled the trusting people, and gave nothing after. The Steinmetz gang
called in the local paramilitary, a curfew was imposed and people were shot; the
police, as usual, falsely claimed that protesters were armed.
Like most mining mafias in
Africa, the Israeli octopus—organized crime syndicates, offshore subsidiaries,
interlocking directorships and affiliated mercenaries—has gripped the very
heart of Congo like an octopus grips and stuns its prey. Mining regulates the
pulse of Congo,
and foreign mining companies with their black sell-out agents are sucking the
blood out of the people and the wealth out of the land.
THOU SHALT NOT KILL
Beyond the intriguing Jewish
rivalry for diamonds in the heart of darkness, this tale takes a chilling turn
with the involvement of certain German firms and New York City lawyers. NIKANOR, another
Gertler/Steinmetz company of dubious origins operating in DRC, has a
subcontract with the notorious ThyssenKrupp conglomerate, a company comprised
of two former Nazi weapons manufacturers linked to the New York law firm of
Sullivan and Cromwell, to Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., Lehman Brothers, Chase
Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan, DuPont and IBM, in the great Nazi-American money
plot.
These companies were all
behind the Jewish Holocaust. The infamous German Krupp firm is the industrial
corporation that collaborated with former CIA director Allen Dulles and former U.S. Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles. Clients of the Dulles brothers’ law firm Sullivan
and Cromwell included Adolph Hitler.
Ted Terry, one of the senior counselors of the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell
today, is also a director of a philanthropy called the Harold K. Hochschild
(HKH) Foundation, named for the mining magnate behind AMAX, a company operating
in the copperbelt in Zambia, but whose parent company, Phelps Dodge, operates
in Katanga, Congo. Harold K. Hochschild was close to the CIA, and he appears to
have backed the Katanga
succession in the 1960’s just as Dan Gertler in recent years backed the reorganization
of power in Congo
by force. Sullivan and Cromwell was also the law firm for AMAX.,
Brown Brothers Harriman & Company (BBH) was the primary Wall Street
connection for German companies and the U.S. financial interests of Fritz
Thyssen, an early financial backer of the Nazi party. BBH bought and shipped
millions of dollars of gold, steel, fuel, coal, and U.S.
treasury bonds to Germany.
These were used to build Hitler's war machine, and the ties proliferated even
after the Nazi concentration camps began churning out skeletons. The horrors of
the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau
and Buckenwald became public knowledge long before they became public outrage. It is
the same story for Congo.
A PRAYER FOR THE DEAD
There are no records or
statistics of the numbers of people brutalized or killed in the diamond or
cobalt mining areas, like Kolwezi, Mbuji Mayi, Tshikapa, Banalia, or Kananga
in DRC, or Ndola in Zambia, and many of the victims of
security abuses will never be known.
When Gertler and Steinmetz
and their buddies came to Congo it was soon clear that they had to challenge
Zimbabwean tycoons John Bredenkamp and Billy Rautenbach—two cronies of dictator
Robert Mugabe involved in pillaging Congo and Zimbabwe for decades. The United
Nations Panel of Experts on DRC named both men for plundering copper and cobalt
from Katanga,
and both deal globally in weapons. Bredenkamp is one of the fifty richest men
in England and he reportedly
owns a mansion several doors down from Margaret Thatcher’s residence in London.
On November 7, 2007 it was reported
that Dan Gertler was instrumental in putting together a deal in which Katanga Mining
Ltd. would buy rival NIKANOR for $2.1 billion and merge their adjacent mine
projects in Congo
to form the world’s largest cobalt company. Also announced was a joint venture
between the Central African Mining & Exploration Company (CAMEC) and
another Gertler-controlled firm called Prairie International Limited.
The CAMEC/Prairie joint
venture will exploit DRC’s Luita copper processing facility, develop the
Mukondo Mountain cobalt mine—called the world's richest cobalt mine—and work on
“other” exploration properties. Prairie is majority owned by the family of Dan
Gertler. CAMEC is connected to Zimbabwean/South African/British tycoon Billy Rautenbach.
The DRC government effectively banned controversial Zimbabwean businessman
Billy Rautenbach
from the country by declaring him persona
non grata in July 2007, but this doesn’t seem to stop him from getting what
he wants. Rautenbach
is also wanted in South
Africa on 300 charges of fraud, corruption
and theft.
Rautenbach is a former motor
car rally driver who controls a business empire in Southern and Central Africa
through a British Virgin Islands company
called Ridgepoint Overseas Development Limited. In 1998, the short-lived
President of Congo, Laurent Kabila, named Rautenbach the managing director of La Générale des Carrières et des Mines
(Gécamines), one of Africa's biggest cobalt mines, the Katanga properties of the Union Miniere de Haut Katanga formerly
developed by the Belgian colonial government. Rautenbach today is one of the
Africa's largest exporters of heterogenite (cobalt ore) from the DRC through
his Congo Cobalt Company (CoCoCo), but he also has shares in two other
lucrative DRC mining firms—Boss and Mukondo—which reportedly earn over US$100
million a month.
While there has been a lot
of Western media fanfare over the Kabila governments’ supposed “independent”
review of mining contracts, little substantive change can be expected.
Structural factors exploit the Congolese people and lands and benefit white
businessmen, arms dealers, bankers, and their embraceable black agents. Big
business benefits from perception management articles well-placed in media to
give the impression that the international system is just, that there are
watchdogs, checks and balances.
However, while the DRC and
the World Bank present a propaganda front about their ostensible attention to mining
reform and the new mining code, NIKANOR—Mining Journal reports—“is in
the advantageous position of having entered into a post mining-code contract,
‘which makes us [NIKANOR] relatively comfortable’”
In other words, the mining review is a sham, it may force some changes, but it
will be cosmetic at best.
Dan Gertler and the
Steinmetz Group’s partner Jewish-American Nir Livnat is also a director of
Anglovaal Mining with Rick and Brian Menell and Basil Hersov of the South
African Menell and Hersov dynasties.
Hersov has been named as a beneficiary of fraud and racketeering involving
British BAE Systems weapons deals with shady offshore companies.
The octopus of South African
connections is a story in itself, with links to top officials from Britain to Canada, like Canadian Senator J.
Trevor Eyton, and offshore mining companies involved in all the big money
(diamonds, gold, petroleum, cobalt) and big corporations with interlocking directorships:
Coca Cola, Nestlé, General Motors, and the Bush-connected Barrick Gold
Corporation. Barrick, of course, is partnered up with the Oppenheimer/De Beers
firm Anglo-American Corporation at six sites in Africa, including Congo.
Rick Menell is a director of
Bateman Engineering—owned by Benny Steinmetz—the junior partner of the NIKANOR projects
in Katanga.
Britain’s
Earl of Balfour is a director of both Bateman and NIKANOR. Menell is also the
director of Teal Exploration and Mining, whose directors include Joaquim
Chissano, former President of Mozambique; Murray Hitzman, a Clinton
administration official with the White House Office of Science and Technology
Policy (1994-1996); Hannes Meyer, who worked with Anglo-Gold Ashanti in Congo, 1999-2006,
when militias in Ituri were funded to get the gold out. Teal Exploration also
has ties to Anvil Mining and Anglo-American Corporation.
Brian Menell, Nir Livnat’s
associate on the board of Anglovaal, is on the board of Energem (formerly
DiamondWorks) with Tony and Mario Teixeira. The Livnat connection ties Teixeira
into networks that have supported both Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba in Congo’s bloody
wars. Energem is also involved in the trans-Uganda-Kenya pipeline, along with
Nexant, a subsidiary of the deep intelligence and defense insider Bechtel
Corporation.
Brian Menell is also on the
board of First Africa Oil, which operates in seven African countries, and First
Africa Oil director John Bentley is a director of Osprey Oil and Gas, whose
directors include Carol Bell, a director of the Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan
Bank. Bentley is also on the board of Adastra Minerals—formerly America Mineral
Fields (AMF, AMFI, AMX), a company based in 1995 in Hope, Arkansas—and set up
by Robert Friedland and Max and Jean-Raymond Boulle, notable “friends of Bill”
Clinton. Since 1995, American Mineral
Fields has been involved in Brazil,
Russia, Norway, Zambia,
Angola
and the DRC. A criminal backer of the war in DRC, Jean-Raymond Boulle, who
holds 36.4 % of the company stock, was the former General Director of De Beers
in Zaire, part of the Templesman alliance of terrorism under the Mobutu regime.,
The Gertler/Steinmetz
interests apparently curry huge favors with Congo’s
number two most powerful man, Augustine Katumba Mwanke, one of Joseph Kabila’s
closest allies and financiers, former Governor of Katanga (1998-2001) and
director of Australia’s
Anvil Mining. The UN Panel of Experts (2002) cited Mwanke for illegal arms
deals and plunder of Congo:
Mwanke negotiated arms purchases through Belgian banks and the DRC mining
company MIBA.
Reportedly, Mwanke personally clears $US
1,000,000 a day through his interests in Katanga mining deals.
Anvil Mining has been
involved in massacres in DRC.
Anvil directors include former U.S. Ambassador Kenneth L. Brown, who served at U.S. embassies in Brussels,
Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville and South Africa. Brown was Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State for Africa
(1987-1989) under George Schultz and George H.W. Bush and Director of Central
African Affairs (1980-1981). The former top internal intelligence and security
chief of the United Nations Observer’s Mission in the Democratic Republic of
Congo (MONUC) has been worked for Anvil mining in Katanga since 2006.
THOU SHALT NOT RAPE AND PLUNDER
Gertler/Steinmetz interests
have also been jostling for copper and cobalt concessions with Kinross-Forrest
Group. Gertler has bought up or invested heavily in companies just to close
them down. George Forrest also made the UN hit list of Congo’s looters and Forrest and his
three sons helped bankroll Joseph Kabila’s 2006 election “victory”.
George Forrest’s daughter is reportedly married to the son of Louis Michel. Malta and
George Forrest are controlling directors in Katanga Mining Limited.
Born as Entreprise Générale Malta Forrest, the Belgian Forrest interests
have been pillars of exploitation in Congo
since at least 1922, when they launched mining operations in Katanga. Forrest’s
Katanga Mining directors include: three Canadians; Congo’s Jean-Claude Masangu
Mulongo, a former Governor of DRC and high official at the IMF and World Bank;
and the current Governor of the Central Bank of DRC. The Forrest dynasty has
munitions factories in Belgium
and Kenya, and has partnered
with OM-Group, in Ohio [USA], dealing in Congo’s cobalt and coltan. Forrest
International also operates in Europe, Burundi—involving
him on both sides of Congo’s
bloody war—and the Middle East.
Forrest interests in DRC include aviation, foods, plantations, construction,
logging, copper and cobalt mining. Forrest companies are enmeshed in the coltan
plunder in eastern Congo.
Katanga is the world’s
richest mining metropolis, part of the vast copper belt that stretches across
northern Zambia and southern Congo—and the home to unprecedented human misery
due to state orchestrated repression and communities overrun with toxic mining,
tuberculosis, cancers, immune disorders, racial discrimination and slavery. The
Zambian copperbelt concessions over the border involve many of the same companies
and interests mentioned above, and others.
Workers and communities in
and around these mines suffer all the standard treatable maladies (typhoid,
malaria, tetanus, polio, malnutrition) as well. However, such stories are off
the agenda for the North American, European, Japanese, Australian and Israeli
media corporations providing the mainstay of English language indoctrination
meant to instill racial superiority and a vast ignorance and obliviousness that
leaves westerns populations shaking their heads and wringing their hands and
clicking their tongues, while all the while wondering “what is to be done?” It
does not cross people’s minds that their own hands are dirty, that their own
consciousness has been falsified, as all the raw materials from Congo enrich the lives of people in the United States, Canada,
Europe and Israel.
The immediate capital
investment required for just one Gertler project in Katanga—the Komoto Oliveira Virgule
(KOV) project—is reportedly $US 1.8 billion dollars, income to kick start
billions of dollars of unused equipment mothballed in the middle Mobutu era.
There are rumors that Bechtel is involved, but the KOV project involves
ThyssenKrupp AG as a minor player.
The Krupp firm is one of several
German firms involved in the plunder in eastern Congo, exploitation which involves
the DeutscheGesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit—GTZ—a “German technological
cooperation agency” whose Supervisory Board has representatives of four Federal
[German] Ministries.
Krupp industries use coltan and cobalt for superalloys.
Dr.-Ing. Ekkehard D. Schultz, a ThyssenKrupp director, is also a director of
Bayer AG, the Germany firm whose
subsidiary H.C. Starck was named for its involvement in the ongoing illegal
plunder of coltan and cassiterite (tin) in eastern Congo. NIKANOR director Jay
Pomrenze is also a consultant for the Deutsche Bank.
Certain German and U.S. firms benefit from the military occupation of
Rwandan-backed warlord Laurent Nkunda in North Kivu, DRC, where Nkunda controls
the Lueshe niobium mine “owned” by Gesellschaft
fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH, a subsidiary of New York-based Mettalurg
Group.,
HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER
Dan Gertler’s grandfather,
Moshe Schnitzer (d. November 2007), was known in Israel as “Mr. Diamond;” in
youth he joined the pre-state underground organization Etzel (Irgoun), an Israeli military cell self-defined
as an “untra-nationationalist Jewish militia,” but one that committed acts of
terrorism in service to the Israeli cause. Moshe Schnitzer assumed a major role in the
Africa-Israeli diamond trade in the 1950’s in a partnership business called
Schnitzer-Greenstein. Schnitzer later founded the Israel Diamond Exchange in
Tel Aviv in 1960, which today brings Israel $14 billion annually in blood
business, and is the country’s second-largest industry, but Israel’s top export. King Leopold III of Belgium decorated Schnitzer in recognition of
his activities favoring the close relationship of Belgium,
Israel and the DeBeers
diamond cartels, and Schnitzer was also President of the Harry
Oppenheimer Diamond
Museum in Israel.
The diamond jewelry trade in
the United States
is more than $30 billion annually, and 99%—everything that is not synthetic or
artificial diamonds—involves blood diamonds and the above organized crime
syndicates. Israel buys more
than 50% of the world’s rough diamonds, and the U.S. buys two-thirds of these. The
diamond factories are located in Nethanya, Petach Tikvah, Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Jerusalem,
and other cities around the country, but most of the offices were in Tel Aviv
in the financial district on Ahad
Ha'am Street.
Dan Gertler’s father, Asher Gertler, and
his uncle, Shmuel Schnitzer, manage the original family business, and Shmuel is
Vice-Chairman of the Belgian-based World Diamond Council—the entity that spends
more money promoting the false image of “conflict-free” diamonds than it does
helping any of the people dispossessed or brutalized by the diamond industry.
On
August 16, 2007 Rabbi Bentolila in Kinshasa
received a communication asking: “What does the Torah say about men exploiting
other men for vast profits while other men are starving and dying all around
them? Is there some hierarchy to the Torah that suggests, for example, that
black people or Africans are lesser beings, and therefore not to be a concern
where profound profits are being made?”
There
was no reply from Rabbi Bentolila, he was apparently busy readying for another
Bar Mitsvah in Belgium.
Unfortunately for Dan Gertler and his spiritual advisers, the Torah says that a
Jew can keep a slave, but a Jew kept as a slave must be redeemed, and that—an
empty, foolish justification for exploiting innocent people—is how religion falsifies
spirituality. ~