The Cannibal Planetarchy: The Dictatorship of Opacity

(PHOTO: "People walk past a banner supporting Edward Snowden in Hong Kong's business district. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP"--Photo caption from The Guardian)

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A fiction would have us believe that a kind of a sudden mutation in the body of "stateness" had occurred on September 11, 2001.

According to that myth, it was Mohamed Atta and his 18 al Qaeda compadres who'd suddenly transmogrified the United States into what it has now become: a global panoptic chronotope.

In other words, Nine-Eleven is a marker, it is alleged, when the United States and its vassal states turned into cannibalistic entities not only towards enemies but towards their own citizens.

Edward Snowden on this state cannibalism:

"The N.S.A., specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default."

But the simple truth is that  since time immemorial, or rather since their inception or emergence, states have strived for that ideal of "total-information-awareness."

And the cluster of programs unveiled by Snowden are just one milestone among several upcoming others towards the ultimate realization of the totally-aware state with fully "biometrized" citizens.

As Noam Chomsky told The Guardian on Wednesday, "governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy – which is their own population."

Two spurious arguments to debunk:

1) The claim by NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander this past week before Congress that these blanket surveillance  programs à la "Stasi state" "have protected our country and allies … over 50 times since 9/11"; 

2) The claim made Wednesday at  Berlin's Brandenburg Gate by Planetarch Barack Obama that, "Our current programs are bound by the rule of law, and they're focused on threats to our security — not the communications of ordinary persons."

A flaw in Gen. Alexander's reasoning: It wasn't the need to thwart terrorist attacks that ushered in the cannibal state; it was the imperative of the total control underlying the very notion of stateness that led to the current global matrix.

The hubris of Exceptionalism in Gen. Alexander's argument: "our country and allies" and the hell with the rest of the world!

What's more, the recent revelations by Snowden about the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ mining intelligence from allies--including South Africans--at the 2008 London G8 and G20 summits erodes the argument that the intelligence effort  deployed is utterly being focused on gathering intelligence on al Qaeda operations.

On the other hand, Obama's invocation of the "rule of law" is and will remain untenable until such time when the opinions of the secretive and opaque FISA courts are declassified.

Besides, an insidiously specious argument is being developed these days by supporters of the surveillant state to induce supineness in citizens in reaction to the outrage.

(I owe Crikey's Bernard Keane this notion of "supine reaction" to the current outrage: http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/06/14/australias-supine-reaction-to-our-surveillance-planet/)

The argument goes along this line: Everyone should've known about the blanket surveillance programs as there were scattered media reports that mentioned them these past few years!

An illustration of this stance: Hendrik Hertzberg posts on next week issue of The New Yorker a comment titled "Snoop scoops" that concatenates the investigative reports strung out along the years revealing NSA total surveillance of world citizens! 

Investigative reports spanning from 2006 to 2010!

(http://m.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/06/24/130624taco_talk_hertzberg)

Strangely, in his concatenation,  Hertzberg misses the investigative piece by James Bamford titled "The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)" posted on Wired on March 15, 2012.

The "biggest spy center," called Utah Data Center, is located in Bluffdale, Utah.

The center is more "than five times the size of the US Capitol," writes Bamford.

 

Adding:

"Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013."

(http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/)

By the way, Bamford just showed us in that piece the proverbial belly of the beast, as it were. The belly of the cannibal state.

In early December 2010, I took position on this blog against another blind supporter of state opacity: the French historian Elisabeth Roudinesco who, in an op-ed published in the Paris daily Libération, had "accused Julian Assange of being a conspiracy theory buff committed to the DICTATORSHIP OF TRANSPARENCY."

(http://alexengwete.blogspot.com/2010/12/wikileaks-dictatorship-of-transparency.html?m=1)

(Roudinesco's op-ed: http://www.liberation.fr/monde/01012305697-wikileaks-la-dictature-de-la-transparence)

Roudinesco is undoubtedly celebrating at this very moment the "dictatorship of opacity" of the Cannibal Planetarchy.

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PHOTO CREDITS: guardian.co.uk

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Meet Dr. Benjamin Kabwe, freelance digital archivist of Kinshasa roadworks

(PHOTO 1: Dr. Benjamin Kabwe takes photos of workers painting pedestrian crosswalk marks on the newly-Chinese-repaired Oshwe Avenue in Matonge, Kinshasa. The three-storied building under construction in the background belongs to soukous star Koffi Olomide) 

(PHOTO 2: Dr. Kabwe poses for my iPhone at the same location. He's just put back in the bag he's zipping up a Samsung tablet containing some of the hundreds of thousands of photos and videos  of Kinshasa roadworks he's been accumulating over the years)

***

I stumbled upon Dr. Benjamin Kabwe in the mid-morning of Saturday, June 8, in the Matonge quarter of Kalamu Commune.

Matonge, the hub of Kinshasa, is these days "occupied," as it were, by the Chinese. 

Well, Chinese road workers, that is.

Dr. Kabwe was behind his tripod-mounted Nikon camera, photographing a live event: the painting, by Congolese workers, of pedestrian crossings.

This was happening on Oshwe Avenue, newly-rebuilt by the Chinese, like a host of other streets that intersect with or radiate from the historic "Couloir Madiakoko" main street that saw the emergence to stardom of Papa Wemba, Koffi Olomide, and other big names of Congolese music.

I was standing on Couloir Madiakoko that mid-morning, watching with fascination Dr. Kabwe take shot after shot of the roadwork in progress.

I thought I was watching a Kinshasa photojournalist at work. 

I was therefore somewhat thrown off balance when Dr. Kabwe told me he is an anesthesiologist at Kinshasa University Clinics as well as a professor at the medical school of Université de Kinshasa. A career spanning 35 years!

He was a freelance amateur photographer and videographer, he informed me.

He further told me he was in the midst of a one-man massive project of setting up a digital museum and archives of the roadworks in Kinshasa over the years.

His digital archives already have in their holdings 400,000 photographs and 26,000 videos! 

Parts of this digital trove are being stored in a Samsung tablet, of which Dr. Kabwe gave me a fascinating preview.

"Do you realize that there have been over 26 bridges recently repaired or built in Kinshasa;,and yet no one knows about it?" he wondered in amazement.

Dr. Kabwe is a soft-spoken and outgoing man who is consumed by his hobby--and his keen and raw passion would also draw you in it without fail.

His passion for photography is not new, as I learned when I asked people on campus about him.

One female administrator at Kinshasa University fondly recalled Dr. Kabwe as kindly taking pictures of her newborn baby shortly after childbirth though he was only one in the team of several doctors during the particularly difficult C-section delivery.

She also added that at the time Dr. Kabwe  used to don a thick Afro hairdo!

This passion of photography came in handy in one lifelong professional pursuit of Dr. Kabwe: his line of research on road accidents and traumas.

And from there to a genuine documentary interest in roadworks, it only took a small step in the right direction--as the saying goes...

***PHOTOS by Alex Engwete

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DRC: Re-enter Monsieur l'Abbé Apollinaire Malumalu

(PHOTO: Monsieur l'Abbé Apollinaire Malumalu, 52, at an impromptu

presser in Kinshasa, June 4, 2013)



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The designation earlier last week by the "religious groups" component

of the DRC civil society of Monsieur l'Abbé Apollinaire Malumalu as

chairman of the revamped Independent National Electoral Commisson

(CENI) was confirmed Friday, June 7, by the National Assembly.



(I couldn't think of or find a satisfactory English equivalent for

"Monsieur l'Abbé," as a Catholic priest without an affiliation to a

specific priestly order is deferentially called in Francophone

countries. Neither "Abbot" nor "Don" would do--by the way, a VOA

report last weekend on this story kept referring wrongly to Malumalu

as "Don Malumalu"!)



Paradoxically, though Abbé Malumalu is a Catholic priest, his

appointment as CENI chairman is a major blow to the Congolese Catholic

Church, especially to Kinshasa Laurent Cardinal Monsengwo. (Find out

why below.)



Malumalu's rise from the ashes is also a worrisome unanticipated

development for the opposition.



Abbé Malumalu, who turrns 52 on July 22, is a member of the powerful

ethnic Nande group of North Kivu Province.



Up to his confirmation as CENI chair, he was acting as the DRC

government expert at the Kampala negotiations with M23.



In a previous incarnation, Malumalu was the chairman of the

Independent Electoral Commission (CENI) that oversaw the 2006 general

elections.



At the time, the opposition accused him of rigging the presidential

election on behalf of the incumbent Joseph Kabila, in the often

violent and bloody contest that pitted the latter against Jean-Pierre

Bemba--with more than 600 deads in Kinshasa.



Fast forwad to... now... and those accusations are the very same

accusations leveled at Malumalu's successor at the helm of the

electoral commission, Reverend Daniel Ngoy Mulunda.



In the post-November 2011 general elections deleterious period, with

the remake of the post-2006 frenzied clamor growing both domestically

and incoming from abroad for amending the electoral law and reshaping

the electoral commission in order to avoid rigging and to reflect the

actual forces of current political stakeholders, the stage was set for

yet another electoral bill.



A bill lobbied and amended to death by international donors and the opposition.

Coming full circle, if that, in a vicious circle of sorts. Either

pardon the tautology or think of the "back to the future" franchise.



As usual, after a long-drawn-out cycle of nasty mutual mudslinging

between the opposition and the ruling Presidential Majority (acronymed

"MP") both on the floor of the National Assembly and on TV political

shows, parliament finally voted the bill.



The new electoral law was finally signed by President Kabila on

Saturday, April 27, after languishing for a while on his desk.



As it is well-known that the devil is in the details, and as all

Congolese opposition legiskators are self-proclaimed born-again

Chistian to a man or woman, they had delved into those details in

order to deal the rigging devil, and hence the majority, one

collective fatal blow!



So much so that this new electoral law is quite specific about

anything under the Sun: about the provincial and gender balance as

well as the precise make-up of the 6-member strong executive committee

and the other 7 menbers who'd be sitting in the plenum.



The legislators went even all the way fractal into those specific

details: of the 13 members of CENI: 6 members have to be members of

the ruling Presidential Majority (2 of whom have to be women); 4

members from the opposition (one of whom has to be a woman); and the 3

remaining members have to issue from civil society--a major

requirement lobbied by international donors.



To avoid any political interference in the designation of these

members at the level of the Natuonal Assembly, each entity had to

choose its own designee after an internal vote--the National Assembly

having only the simple role of rubber-stamping those choices already

made by the caucuses of those various groups.



What's more, the new electoral law also unambigupusly requires that

the chaitman of the electoral commision be a member of the subgroup

"religious groups" of the civil society group!



To further balance things out, during the drafting of the bill, the

opposition was banking on the 3 members of the civil society in the

electoral commussion to be empathetic to the interests of the

opposition.



It is abundantly clear that since the time of the late Frédéric

Cardinal Etsau, who had signed on his deathbed a letter claiming that

Bemba had won the 2006 presidential election, Kinshasa Catholic Church

is the bastion of the opposition.



The political outrage of Cardinsl Etsau was nearly duplicated by

Cardinal Monsengwo when he said in the wake of the 2011 presidential

election that the CENI results didn't reflect the "justice" of the

ballot box!



Despite its importance, however, the Catholic Church was just only one

element among 7 other major religious groups of the country making up

that sub-category of civil society. The other 7 majors being the

Protestants, the Orthodox, the Muslims, etc.



And, by mid-May, the Catholic Church and the opposition started to

stridently sound desperate when it was emerging that the 7 other

religious were putting out feelers about the need of recalling

Malumalu as chair of the electoral commission.



He was a polymath, these leaders claimed, holding a doctoral degree in

political science from the University of.Grenoble-II and a host of

otber advanced degrees from the University of Lyon. He was highly

esteemed in France where he was decorated by the government for the

electoral work he'd done in the Congo in 2006!



That's when Cardinal Monsengwo chose to strike, via the proxy of one

his creatures, Monsieur l'Abbé Félicien Mwanama, one of the

secretaries of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops of the

Congo (CENCO), who, on May 13, told told baffled jpurnos at a

poorly-prepared and hastily-convened that Catholic priests and members

of religious who'd join CENI would be infringing Canonical law and

would therefore be sanctioned accordingly.



The bafflement of journalists was all the more profound as Cardinal

Monsengwo has been dabbling in politics since 1990, when he chaired

for two years the transitional Sovereign National Conference, before

that body was dissolved by Mobutu.



Besides, pressed by journalists to tell which ecclesiastical

authority--between CENCO and the hierarchical authority--would be

sanctioning the offending priest, Abbé Mwanama meekly conceded that it

was the latter.



No luck there for Cardinal Malula, for Malumalu falls under the

juridiction of the Archdiocese of Beni-Lubero in North Kivu headed by

the maverick Mgr Melchisedek Sikuli, who will never sanction the new

CENI chairman in this lifetime.



To make a long story short, Malumalu didn't stoop to answer to the

taunting shrills of Cardinal Monsengwo.



Not then and not after his appointment as CENI chairman, when the

indefatigable Monsengwo had a letter penned by him read at mass this

past Sunday in all Kinshasa parishes in which he's lashing out at

priests dabbling in politics!



Incredible!



***

PHOTO CREDITS: John Bompengo via radiookapi.net

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The DRC between two powerful American women & a hard place

PHOTO: "Samantha Power, left, and Susan E. Rice (Mark Von Holden, left, and  Evaristo  Sa/Getty Images)" [Washington Post photo legend]

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I just read on Washington Post the story about Samantha Power being Prez Barack Obama's nominee as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Susan Rice moving from New York to Washington to be Obama's National Security Advisor.

(http://m.washingtonpost.com/politics/national-security-team-shuffle-may-signal-more-activist-stance-at-white-house/2013/06/05/485cf4e4-cdf2-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html)

A while back I celebrated here on this blog the fact that Rice, who was being considered as Hillary Clinton's replacement, had been properly "pre-borked" by Republican lawmakers--with the indefatigable Sen. John MacCain and his sidekick Sen. Lindsey Graham leading the charge over her Benghazi talking points.

This time around there won't be any celebrating here over Rice's downfall though as "[s]he does not need to be confirmed by the Senate to serve as national security adviser," as the piece by Washington Post's Scott Wilson mentioned above reminds readers.

Wilson also adds that Rice's new job is "the most powerful foreign policy post in the government, given the administration's concentration of policy-making authority in the White House."

This info would come as a very unfortunate and worrisome information to the Congolese for obvious reasons. 

Rice, Rwandan President Paul Kagame's fan and business associate (according to her foes), was a strong proponent of the balkanization of the DRC during her stint in the Bill Clinton's administration.

What's more, Rice is also known to treat Congolese with utter contempt. I got to experience her disdain first hand once when, in the George W. Bush's years, she was at the liberal garage of the Brookings Institution.

With then Congo UN Mission Chief Ambassador William Swing among the panelists who were discussing the DRC that day, Rice didn't even deign to reply to a question I put to her--whereas the other panelists answered my queries.

Wilson's article about the appointment of Rice and Power is titled "National security team shuffle may signal more activist stance at White House."

Well, if this "activist stance" translates for Rice playing in the Great Lakes a pro-Kagame advocacy game à la Tony Blair, then Congolese are doomed in the foreseeable future, that is, for the rest of Obama's second term.

The appointment of Power doesn't bode well for the Congolese either--though I personally like her for the irrational reason that she was the housemate of my Burundian buddy Alexis Sinduhije when she was lecturing at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I thus got to see and talk to her on more than one occasion every time I went to visit Alexis.

(See also: http://alexengwete.blogspot.com/2010/05/burundi-alexis-sinduhije-my-hero-in.html?m=1)

Be that as it may, however, just like Rice, "Power has also been influenced by the Rwanda genocide." 

To be "influenced by the Rwanda genocide" often means to be biased for Kagame!

Therefore, as I look at these two appointments by Obama, I got the uneasy feeling that the DRC is suddenly caught between two powerful American women and a hard place!

***

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A Cautionary Tale: Mobbed for snapping Congolese women

(PHOTOS 1 & 2: An unidentified photographer puts up a brave face and gives a thumbs up as she's being mobbed and jeered for snapping Congolese female hawkers at Maluku wharf on The Channel of the Congo River)

***

Don't be fooled by the light, mischievous grin this unidentified woman was flashing at me or the thumbs up she's  giving to me when, as she was being copiously jeered by a small crowd, she noticed that I had quickly pulled my iPhone from my pocket to take a picture of her.

The scene happened this past Saturday at Maluku wharf, on The Channel of the Congo River.

The photographer had just taken a dozen or so of what seemed to me close-ups and mid-shots of  four female hawkers (two of whom are seen from the back sitting on the top left of the picture).

A moment earlier, on two separate occasions, I clearly saw the photographer kindly asking for and obtaining permission from her subjects to be photographed.

That's why she was somewhat taken aback when her shoot caused a spontaneous uproar from the onlookers, who were mostly the well-to-do urbanites from Kinshasa that crowd the rural commune of  Maluku on Saturdays.

"This is so outrageous!" scolded a chubby authoritarian female Kinoise wearing a wig and sunglasses. "You come here from Europe to take pictures of Congolese that you'll show back home to mock us!"

"She'll get tons of monies from those photos!" someone else yelled. "She should pay her unwitting models!"

The Congolese male escort of the photographer attempted to pacify the angry onlookers by saying that he and the photographer worked for a well-known global Catholic charity.

That was apparently the wrong thing to say, as it caused more jeers, sneers, catcalls and swears directed at the Roman Catholic Church.

I was definitely the comic relief the photographer and her male companion desperately needed to defuse the tension: I claimed I was taking their pictures to shame them!

This allowed them to swiftly move away from the outraged onlookers who by this time were applauding me.

That incident will no doubt stand for that photographer as a cautionary tale reminding her about things you simply don't do in Kinshasa.

Like talking on an expensive phone in a busy street: Kinshasa is a city of phone snatchers.

Or walking closely behind another pedestrian: this is a city of heavy spitters and you risk being drenched in other people's saliva by closely following in their footsteps! Or on the back seat of one of those ubiquitous motorcycle taxis...

***

Photos by Alex Engwete

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