Most people today fail to understand the real meaning of the word colonialism. King Leopold was an excellent example of its repugnant meaning.
Leopold II:
King of Belgium, Mass Murderer
By Bob Frost
Biography magazine, 2000 | History Access
[dropcap]K[/dropcap]ing Leopold II of Belgium created an image for himself as a fine fellow, a humanitarian, a solid citizen of the world. In fact he was a monster, terrorizing and pillaging a large section of Africa for a quarter-century. How did this crime happen? And how did humanity put a stop to it?
Born in Laeken Palace near Brussels on April 9, 1835, Leopold grew up sullen and obnoxious. His father, King Leopold I, was a chilly old coot; his mother, Queen Louise, thought her son repulsive because of his huge trowel-shaped nose. Leopold’s first cousin, Queen Victoria of England, noted the prince’s tendency to blurt out “disagreeable things.”
The boy’s sense of woe increased as he pondered his future. He was fated, it seemed, to be a minor actor on the world stage, far less grand than his lucky cousin in England. How to avoid this bleak destiny?
He began to dream of acquiring an overseas colony – a vast land that would relinquish its bounty without much of a fight, as India gave her riches to Britain. Imperial suzerainties, Leopold convinced himself, would mean greatness for himself and Belgium. This yearning came to rule his life.
Colonial expansion was in its heyday in the 19th century. Europeans gained control over “uncivilized” people at gunpoint. (Similarly, Americans, Canadians, Australians, and South Africans assailed native tribes.) People often rationalized their aggression by saying they wanted to “protect” and “Christianize” the locals, help the race “grow up,” but the core driving forces were racism, power lust, and a craving for raw materials to feed the factories and furnaces of the Industrial Revolution. Historian Stephen Kern summarizes:
(Europe’s colonial effort represented) a collective mystification about value that at once magnified material worth and concealed human misery. It glossed over the suffering of native populations and glorified the prize of empire. The rhetoric varied slightly from country to country, but the idea that large national territory betokened greatness was, as even that optimistic pacifist Norman Angell conceded, a “universal assumption.”
Leopold became king of Belgium in 1865 at age 30 with the death of his father. By this time, he had developed a surface charm, a smooth and convincing political patter.
His regime forced Africans, at gunpoint, to work brutally hard at the tasks of empire: collecting ivory, tapping rubber, mining copper, building railroads, and carrying raw materials on their backs along narrow paths for miles. People who tried to avoid slavery were whipped, starved, and shot.
His personal life continued to be odd and benighted. In 1853 he married an Austrian archduchess named Marie-Henriette; the union was arranged for diplomatic reasons. The newlyweds didn’t know how to have sex and/or were afraid to try. Queen Victoria learned of the difficulty when the young couple visited England several weeks after the marriage ceremony; Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, spoke quietly to the pair about the facts of life and their royal duty. The results were positive. Marie-Henriette gave birth to Louise in 1858, Leopold in 1859, Stephanie in 1864, and Clementine in 1872. Because King Leopold believed that only males should ascend to the throne, his son became the most important person in the world to him. Sadly, the boy died at age 9 in 1869 after falling into a pond and catching pneumonia.
Queen Marie-Henriette spent most of her time as far away from her husband as possible, but she couldn’t escape completely. By her middle 30s people commented about how miserable she looked. She hung on grimly until 1902.
Leopold kept a series of young mistresses. According to sworn testimony in a London courtroom in 1885, he paid a regular fee to a British procurer for a supply of virgins for his bed. Some of these girls were apparently as young as ten years old, kidnapped or purchased in Britain, perhaps in alleyways in London’s East End, a few miles from the courtroom. Leopold never appeared in London to respond to the testimony, and the trafficking case was swept under the rug, possibly because men of high position were involved. This sordidness, if true, demonstrates Leopold’s willingness to exploit the weak for personal pleasure and gain. The ultimate fate of the girls is not known.
A new occupation emerged among Europeans in the late 1800s – the African explorer. Henry Stanley, the most ambitious of these, followed the Congo River in the 1870s from its headwaters to the Atlantic Ocean, a 1,500-mile trek that opened the region to Europe.
King Leopold read newspaper accounts of Stanley’s trip with a mounting sense of excitement – here, he decided, was his colony. “Get me the Congo!” came the directive from Leopold to the explorer, accompanied by a fat finder’s fee. From 1879 to 1884, Stanley signed contracts with hundreds of tribal chieftains, giving Leopold unchecked power over a territory of more than 800,000 square miles, as large as the U.S. east of the Mississippi. Leopold named his colony the Congo Free State. (The region would go through several names over the next century: the Belgian Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Zaire, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.)
Many of the tribal chiefs had “no idea what they were signing,” reports journalist and historian Adam Hochschild in his book“King Leopold’s Ghost” (1998): “Few had seen the written word before….The idea of a treaty of friendship between two clans or villages was familiar; the idea of signing over one’s land to someone on the other side of the ocean was inconceivable.”
Leopold backed up his contracts with the most lethal weaponry of the day. Meanwhile he hid details of his effort from the Belgian parliament. He assured his fellow citizens, and the world, that his interest in the Congo was benevolent, that he would tread lightly and encourage the spread of civilization. Many visitors to his palace came away believing he was at least benign, and perhaps could take his place among the world’s leading humanitarians.
Leopold’s actual work in the Congo was enslaving the population and using its labor to cart off resources. He lined his pockets with the profits and financed Belgian public works, bought real estate, built a fabulous villa in the south of France, and achieved what he regarded as greatness.
His regime forced Africans, at gunpoint, to work brutally hard at the tasks of empire: collecting ivory, tapping rubber, mining copper, building railroads, and carrying raw materials on their backs along narrow paths for miles. People who tried to avoid slavery were whipped, starved, and shot. Families were held hostage. People were raped and held as sex slaves. Crops were burned. Villages were leveled.
A Belgian officer named Rene de Permentier was not untypical in his conduct. Hochschild writes, “If he found a leaf in a courtyard that women prisoners had swept, he ordered a dozen of them beheaded. If he found a path in the forest not well-maintained, he ordered a child killed in the nearest village.” And, if he wanted an afternoon of target practice, he used live human beings.
Tens of thousands of natives were murdered in cold blood. Many thousands more were worked to death. Large numbers of people became refugees, stripped of lands and crops, fleeing in terror at the approach of Leopold’s men. Many died from famines caused by Leopold’s army. Millions of people succumbed to diseases brought by Belgians, or illnesses that they might have survived had they not been under the Belgian fist. It was, says writer Algis Valiunas, “wickedness triumphant….Leopold merits a place among the great modern enemies of civilization.”
Novelist Joseph Conrad was “so horrified by the greed and brutality among white men he saw in the Congo,” writes Hochschild, “that his view of human nature was permanently changed.” Until his Congo sojourn in 1890 Conrad had skipped rather blithely through life. In the wake of the trip he developed a brooding fascination with the darkness of the human soul – with what critic Adam Kirsch, reviewing a Conrad biography, calls “the cruelty and existential void lurking beneath the surface of advanced European civilization.” Conrad became a great literary chronicler of evil, giving an enduring name to what Leopold had wrought: “Heart of Darkness.”
Leopold knew what was happening in the Congo but was unconcerned. “To be a great person,” he announced, stepping into the role of moral philosopher, “is not necessarily the same thing as being a good person.” As the years passed he accelerated his efforts, working seven days a week at Laeken Palace, poring over stacks of paper with all the diligence thatEichmann would show at his desk in Berlin. Leopold’s greed “could not be contained,” writes historian Barbara Emerson.
Then came the disclosures.
Shortly after 1900 British newspapers began publishing stories about the Belgian regime based on the remarkable detective work of a solitary individual, an Englishman named E.D. Morel. These accounts were not the first such reports from the Congo, but they were the most sustained and effective, and in their wake an international protest movement formed, enlisting thousands, including Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Leopold tried to stamp out the fire of outrage by enlisting powerful new voices of support. He hired well-connected lobbyists to get him a good press, and granted lucrative Congo business licenses to the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims, and others. But the reform movement eventually achieved a measure of success. In 1908 the king was forced to sell his colony, transferring it from his personal control to the national government, ensuring somewhat more oversight by the parliament.
The level of human misery gradually decreased but the effects can still be felt. The Congo today is called “the worst place on earth” by journalist Lisa Ling, reporting for The Oprah Show, and“the worst place on earth to be a woman” by author Lisa Shannon, where rape and murder are common occurrences.
Neighboring Rwanda also suffered from the Belgians. The 2004 film “Hotel Rwanda” suggests that some of the roots of the 1994 massacre of Tutsis (and Hutu moderates) by Hutu extremists can be found in Belgian depredations on the culture after World War I (which does not for a moment lessen the guilt of the Hutu butchers). As scholar Manus I. Midlarsky writes, “….It was under colonial rule that the distinctions between (the Tutsi and Hutu) were hardened into virtually hermetic racial categories.” (Seehere for additional background.)
King Leopold died in his bed at Laeken Palace on December 17, 1909, age 74, sanguine that the world would assess his course as proper. Amazing, really, how many of history’s villains have died with full confidence that they would be judged noble.
Leopold was also wary at the end – eager to continue his long public relations campaign. Before he died he ordered the burning of his Congo files, putting to the flame every scrap that could be collected. The fire lasted for eight days. He hoped to cover his tracks, but the high court of history has found him out.
-The End-
Andre Vltchek
Treatment of Vietnamese patriots by French colonizers. (Click to enlarge)
Photos by Andre Vltchek, unless otherwise noted
[M]any North American intellectuals have this ongoing love affair with everything that is European, particularly with the European ‘social system’ and ‘European culture’.
It is never propounded or defined like that, of course, but this belief (and yes, it really resembles a religious faith) indirectly points out that it is quite legitimate that the West (or at least a big part of the West) continues its rule over our planet.
North American Eurocentric intellectuals tell us indirectly or even directly, that the US is some kind of desperado, which is derailing that wonderful, that glorious, centuries old, European cultural process, and the quest for egalitarianism.
French military maneuvres over Ile de Goree, former slave island in Senegal. (Click to enlarge)
This view is somewhat romantic (in a Wagnerian way, searching for the idyll), but it also fully ignores clear historic facts, and defies essential logic.
It also blurs reality, doing tremendous harm to any sincere attempts to solve the present global nightmare, which has its roots exactly in the domination over so many long centuries, by European brutality and greed.
It is also arrogantly racist. Instead of US ‘exceptionalism’, it is advancing a clear and vulgar ‘Euro-exceptionalism’ and Euro-centrism. Everything has to be defined and judged by ‘European logic’ and measures, from Chinese socialism, to ‘human rights’, as well as ‘democracy’ and the entire scale of other essential issues.
Europe is often shown as a contrast, or counter-pole, to the United States; to its brutal selfishness and turbo capitalism…
But let us go back to that European ‘social system’ – the holy cow of the great majority of North America’s left:
It has not been built by the exertions and honest labor of the European people. Anyone who bothers to look and study those maps of the world depicting our planet up to WWII would understand the reality, in just a few seconds.
To admire it, is like admiring some brutal thuggish oligarch, who has amassed huge wealth by extortion and open plunder, built a gigantic palace and provided his family or his village with free medical care, education, some theatres, libraries and parks.
They murdered everybody, unlike the US neo-colonialists, but 100% of the people, as happened during the French reign of places like Grenada or (near 100%) in the Polynesian Easter Islands.
Europe committed slaughters that are unimaginable in today’s times, like those by the Belgian king, Leopold II, who was responsible for around 10 million lost lives in Congo, in the days when Congo had just a fraction of the population that it has now.
When it comes to the list of crimes against humanity committed by Europe, in the past and now, I never know where to begin and where to end. The list is so long, so horrible, that an entire book would, perhaps, be needed to simply compile the most exhaustive list.
European companies have been so ‘deeply involved’ all over the world, that it is often impossible to separate their corporate activities from the worst fascist nightmares that have been taking place on our planet Earth, from the above-mentioned DRC, to Mercedes factories in Argentina, or, in Southern Chile, the German Nazi ‘Colonia Dignidad’ (a huge builder of motorways), where prisoners were savagely tortured, and women raped.
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The perception of Europe being somehow more ‘progressive’ than North America is clearly manufactured by Europhiles and Eurocentric groups in New York, Toronto, San Francisco and elsewhere.
How many Asian and African families have to starve, in order to have some early-retired, still strong, German man or woman farting deep holes into his or her sofa, immobilized in front of the television set?
How many Senegalese farmers have to lose their livelihoods and go totally bust, so that French and Spanish farmers get their ‘subsidies’ and drive those latest BMW’s? A generous compensation for ‘not producing’ or a great incentive to produce more, depending on the year.
And where did that theory come from, that it is only the US companies that are plundering the world? It almost appears like an extremely simplified formula: ‘the multi-nationals = US based corporations’.
I have seen German pharmaceuticals in action during the civil war in Peru – what horror and spite for the local population!
I have studied French food giants and their actions in Indonesia, West Africa and elsewhere.
And some of the most horrendous genocides in the world, including those in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Papua are fueled and propelled by many European-based conglomerates, not just those with US headquarters.
Yes, the United States behaves like a global thug, like a bandit, but it is definitely not alone, and its behavioral patterns clearly come from the colonialist culture and mentality of the ‘old continent’.
That German colonialist horse in Namibia! (Click to enlarge)
And Europe is unrepentant, just as arrogant as in the days when their armies marched through all the continents and capitals of the world, which really, was, not too long ago.
As a European UN permanent staff member in Windhoek told me, during my visit there just a few days ago, the statue actually stood right above what used to be one of the first concentration camps on earth, built, of course, by the Germans.
To this day, the government of Namibia is still negotiating with Germany for the return of the skulls of local people who were decapitated and their heads flown to Germany for ‘research’ that was supposed to ‘prove’ that Africans are inferior to that great German race!
Leopold II: Mass executioner of the Congolese people. (BBC.com)
When I was filming my documentary film – “Rwanda Gambit” – about two outrageously brutal puppets of the West in Africa, Kagame and Museveni, I visited Brussels, among many other places, realizing in shock, that the city is still full of statues and train/subway stations named after King Leopold II, the butcher of Congo. This was the man under whose command, people who ‘did not produce fast enough’ on his rubber plantations, had their hands cut off, and their entire ‘lazy villages’ were burnt to the ground, with the inhabitants locked inside their huts.
King Leopold II – one of the great ‘European heroes’! No repentance.
Spain, the ‘mother country’, is dotted with statues of the most outrageous bandits, responsible for the plunder of the ‘New World’, or what is now called Latin America. And not long ago, before this great Revolution that swept through almost an entire continent, gangsters like Francisco Pizarro proudly decorated the main squares of Lima and other capitals. What a horrible insult to the hundreds of millions of local people who were literally exterminated by that European colonial power!
All this is hushed up by European cultural propaganda. In some countries and parts of the world (those that gained real freedom and independence), these facts are known, but in others, like in Southeast Asia, the brainwashing campaign has been much more ‘successful’ and complete.
Europe, not the United States, has developed an incredible propaganda system, effectively justifying its colonialist onslaughts, its crusades, its control and plunder over virtually the entire planet, a system implemented with deadly consistency and predictability, for centuries. This system has been evolving and ‘perfecting itself’ ever since the Middle Ages, and even in ancient times. Machiavelli was, of course, just one of the minor demagogues, not the main culprit.
US propaganda is fully transparent and thoroughly vulgar. To control the world, it needs more ‘refined’ and ‘culturally sophisticated’ supervision – in short, better formulated lies.
European ‘culture’ is behind the crimes, and it is in charge of the propaganda, by its justifications, lies and disinformation.
Europe is also grabbing great chunks of the booty.
In this Imperialist and neo-colonialist game, there are no major and minor roles. All roles are essential, and they are divided masterly.
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In Europe, it is often repeated that the guilt for imperialism and neo-colonialism lies with the United States, and that the rest of the world agrees.
That is absolute rubbish.
In the past I lived in Hanoi, Vietnam, for several years. Holding US citizenship, I was often shocked by how friendly and forgiving the Vietnamese people were. Once, over a mug of beer, I asked my good friend: “Don’t you hold any grudges against the US?”
The answer shocked me, but very soon I understood.
It became clear to me that to those proud Vietnamese people, it was easier to forgive napalm and carpet-bombing than broken bottles inserted into the vaginas of their women, the common method of torture in Indochina. It was better to die proudly than to suffer constant dishonor.
Ask people from the sub-Continent, where they would most like to go, if they decided to leave India. Europe, with the exception of London, would hardly be on their priority list. Yes, one could argue that India is a very unusual place, and has, lately, become excessively chummy with the United States. I criticize it for that. But the reason why a great majority would choose to migrate to the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa, is simply because they feel more at ease there, where they are treated much better, because Europe is, honestly, outrageously racist. It is the continent of milk and honey if you are a white person, particularly if you are white from the ‘West’.
Europeans spilled blood everywhere. And their arrogance left a terrible aftertaste all over the world.
The Dutch and their countless crimes – that insane plunder of what is now Indonesia has never been forgiven, or forgotten on the archipelago, but in Europe is muted.
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Who built the European palaces, theatres, hospitals and schools? Whose blood was spilt so that Europeans could have their ‘social net’? Whose lands were robbed? Whose labor utilized?
The best scenario would be universal and global free medical care, education, and many, many other social projects.
On top of it all, European countries come to their former colonies and lecture them about ‘good governance’, giving scholarships, and teaching young people about ‘democracy’.
‘Good governance’ is of course nothing other than the implementation of systems that will continue to serve the business and geopolitical interests of the West. ‘Democracy’ is a political concept that would never allow real change.
You never hear about the Goethe Institute or Alliance Française arranging a series of lectures in Africa or in Indonesia, about free medical care or free education.
And the people from Africa or Indonesia travel to Europe and say: “My god! What a great social system. Why have we never managed to build it ourselves?” Well, why not? You did build it! But not for yourself! You built it for the Dutch and other Europeans!”
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The North American Left is doing a tremendous disservice to the world, with its staunch Euro-centrism!
It may actually be the greatest single reason why the “Left” lost in so many places.
The world is measured and analyzed by Western, mainly European logic, which is absolutely foreign, even hostile to the people of the rest of the world.
The arrogance and provinciality of these analyses are pushing away people from some of the greatest cultures and societies on earth, including those of China, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, but also to some great extent, of Latin America.
And we are actually talking about societies where the Left – their own, home -grown Left – has lately been victorious!
But this Left is not good enough for most Europeans and their North American admirers. Chinese socialism is not really socialism, because it is not based on European ‘culture’. Unless it gets that seal of approval from the intellectuals in Paris, London or Rome, it is not real socialism, not at all!
For years, since the beginning of the Process, I had been fighting for Chavez. I even began working for, and making films for Telesur. I am a firm Chavista, not because I believe that his governance was flawless, but because I am convinced that it was pulling the country and the world in the right direction. And because his people had chosen him, again and again! But it took more than a decade before the West’s left, and even then just a small part of it, began taking the Venezuelan revolution seriously! And they are still trashing Cuba!
I am behind China with all my heart. I have seen how Chinese socialism is transforming the country, and I have also witnessed the great work it is doing abroad. But the more socialist China is (and it is, once again, increasingly), the more spite it gets from the Western, particularly European intellectuals, who lost, flatly and patently, in their countries, and are now bitter about every nation on earth where that young, progressive, healthy spirit is propelling millions towards constructing new schools and hospitals, high-speed railways and metro systems, public parks and social housing. They would never accept the leadership of some Asians! They would rather bury the entire spirit of the Left, which, in a way, they are actually doing.
I see the same now, here, in South Africa! The more this wonderful country is changing, transforming itself, the more it does for its people – the more it comes under fire, and the more it is being spat at.
It is different here, damn it! It moves on through very different dynamics than those in Europe. China is thoroughly different, and so are its culture and its way of doing things. And thank God it is different! People worldwide have had enough of European cultural chauvinism, which always leads to the same result, in the end – the seeking of exceptional privileges for the people whose greatest ‘achievement’ was the most efficient, intensive plunder and murder seen on our planet!
Ask Africans, whether they trust and want the Chinese here, or the Europeans? Despite all that vitriolic BBC propaganda, the great majority all over this destroyed continent will say that they trust Beijing much more than London, Paris or Brussels!
But they do not count! How many African voices (except the collaborative ones) are carried by European media, or by progressive North American ones?
You see, foreigners, the majority of the world, cannot be really trusted. Look who writes about China, Russia, Latin America or Africa? Just look at their names! How many Chinese, Japanese, Korean, African names do we see even in progressive Western publications? How many Latin names are allowed in?
India is an exception. Indian intellectuals speak English and many of them (although not all) are part of this Western game: from the Right, Left, and from the Center.
I have very unpleasant but honest news for the North American Eurocentric left: people in many countries worldwide, where socialism is actually being built and fought for as we speak, want nothing to do with the Western left, anymore, exactly for the reasons I have spelled out above. They see it as patronizing, hostile and extremely unhelpful.
I feel the same anger in South Africa.
And I have to declare here, that I share these emotions. If I am forced to choose, to take sides, I would not hesitate for a single moment: my allegiances are with Latin America, with China, Russia, Eritrea, not with the Western Left, and not with those European analyses of the world.
I do not want the world to be judged, defined and ruled by European ideas and perceptions. I do believe in collective guilt and responsibility, and I am holding Europe accountable for most of the conflicts, divisions and nightmarish scenarios that we have on this planet Earth right now.
We need unity, and we are working on it.
It is unthinkable for China to begin trashing South African or Brazilian concepts.
Venezuela would never start criticizing Russian culture or the way Russians are doing things.
To some extent I disagreed, but I saw the point. The argument was full of respect for that far-away suffering African country and her people.
Venezuelan comrades were refusing to dictate the way forward to their brothers and sisters in Africa.
China is adopting exactly the same attitude: “if you need us, we will help, but do not expect us to come and push our system down your throats! And we will not judge you. We will not tell you who you are and what to do!”
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The Western, pro-European Left, may actually cost some terrible harm to all progressive countries, governments and movements, worldwide. By stubbornly embracing and endorsing the continent (and its schemes) that is seen by majority of the planet as the most merciless, arrogant and brutal, it has actually already alienated many genuine revolutionaries in non-white and non-Western countries.
Europe is fully behind all crimes committed in early days of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Murdering of indigenous people was done, mainly, by the first, second and third generation of the European settlers. The ‘Old Continent’ introduced the US exceptionism, and the same goes for slavery, apartheid and brutal discrimination. The same is apparently true about what was done to the territory now called Latin America.
And colonialism and neo-colonialism, as well as the spite for non-white human beings all over the world, came, most clearly, from the logic and concepts that originated in the UK, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and other European countries.
After exterminating hundreds of millions of ‘lesser people’, and after plundering natural resources all over the world, using local slave labor, the European conquerors awarded their own nations with internally egalitarian social systems, which, the North American left-wing intellectual elite cannot stop admiring, until now.
For centuries, the aristocracy, royalty, Church and merchants, were hiring and prostituting court musicians, to bang into their harpsichords and to sing on the stages and in the theatres built on corpses from foreign lands, and amalgamated by blood. They also employed painters to depict the ‘noble faces’ of the elites, the saints, the Jesus and the countryside. That has been the core of that fable European culture!
No horrors, no genocides were depicted or described by that ‘culture’, despite the fact that the entire continent was built on the genocides and plunder committed all over the planet.
‘The European intellectual elites’ have been, historically, the most silent and servile, of any part of the world.
And these facts are totally overlooked, even censured, by most of the North American ‘left-wing’ admirers of Europe.
I believe it is time to revisit both history and the ‘culture’ of Europe.
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They are talking about how pathetic, how useless the African Union and SADC is. They despise this part of the world. They came here to preach. They are full of ‘ideas’ about how to change Africa – pushing her in their direction. I don’t know if they work for some bank, or for the EU.
I have nothing to do with them. I don’t want this world to be run by them, anymore. They are vitriolic, toxic.
Spontaneously, I approach a woman selling fruits at the corner, as if trying to cleanse myself from that Euro-neo-colonialist talk.
“Whom do you trust more: South Africans or Europeans?”
She laughs, thinking that I am joking:
As I board my shuttle to the tiny Maseru airport, for some reason, I feel light and happy and full of hope.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andre Vltchek, a special correspondent with The Greanville Post, is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book: “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. ‘Pluto’ published his discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. His feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” is about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.
