African diamond mining on the backs of medical aid

Color me surprised that Pat Robertson was up to no good. [Link]

Officials from other aid operations said that Operation Blessing was not anywhere near the first or largest groups working in Goma. Jessie Potts, the operations manager for Robertson in Goma in 1994, told Mission Congo that the medicines that did arrive were not of great use in fighting the cholera epidemic.

"We got a lot of Tylenol. Too much. I never did understand that. We got enough Tylenol to supply all of Zaire. God, I never saw as much in my life," he said.

Then, Potts said, suddenly everything changed. "Operation Blessing, several weeks into the operation, decided not to send any more medical teams," he said. The flights to Goma dried up.

Robert Hinkle, the chief pilot for Operation Blessing in Zaire in 1994, said he received new orders. "They began asking me: can we haul a thousand-pound dredge over? I didn't know what the dredging deal was about," he said.

The documentary describes how dredges, used to suck up diamonds from river beds, were delivered hundreds of miles from the crisis in Goma to a private commercial firm, African Development Company, registered in Bermuda and wholly owned by Robertson. ADC held a mining concession near the town of Kamonia on the far side of the country.

"Mission after mission was always just getting eight-inch dredgers, six-inch dredgers … and food supplies, quads, jeeps, out to the diamond dredging operation outside of Kamonia," Hinkle told the film-makers.

The pilot said he joined Operation Blessing to help people. Of the 40 flights he flew into Congo, just two delivered aid. The others were associated with the diamond mining. "We're not doing anything for those people," he said. "After several months I was embarrassed to have Operation Blessing on the airplane's tail." He had the lettering removed.

Robertson ordered an airstrip carved out of the bush next to the town of Kamonia, 800 miles from Goma. On his television show he left the impression this was part of his aid operation.

The televangelist was also raising donations for Operation Blessing's other activities in Congo. These included a 100,000-acre farm near the town of Dumi, which Robertson claimed had produced a large harvest of corn and was a "tremendous feeding station".

"The soil is unbelievable. You stick anything in the ground and it grows. You put a shovel in and it starts sprouting," he said in appealing for donations.

In fact, the farm at Dumi had already failed. The soil was of poor quality and Operation Blessing brought seeds from the US unsuited to the region.

To this day, Robertson continues to solicit donations on the back of the project, on the grounds that although the farm failed, it left a legacy with a school that established a "foundation of education" in the town. 2011 posting on the Operation Blessing website described the school as "thriving".

"Despite the turbulence over the years, the children of Dumi still gather to learn and grow in the little school house on the plateau," it said.

Yet Mission Congo visited the Dumi school at the same time and filmed it abandoned, stripped of its desks and falling down.

Similarly, local leaders in Kamonia said that they were promised schools, roads and a hospital by Robertson's mining company – but none of it materialised.

Robertson's activities in Congo were initially exposed by a Virginia newspaper, the Virginian Pilot, in the 1990s. The investigation by Bill Sizemore prompted the attorney general in Virginia, where Operation Blessing is registered, to order a probe by the state's office of consumer affairs.

Its report concluded that Robertson made "fraudulent and deceptive" statements with claims to be ferrying doctors and medical aid to Goma when he was delivering diamond-mining equipment. It accused Operation Blessing of "misrepresenting" what its flights were doing, and of saying that the airstrip at Kamonia was part of the aid operation when it was "for the benefit of ADC's mining operation".

It also said Robertson had falsely portrayed the Dumi farm as hugely successful when it had already failed.

"Pat Robertson made material claims, via television appeals, regarding the relief efforts. These statements are refuted by the evidence in this case," the report said.

But the Virginian authorities declined to prosecute Robertson, describing his misrepresentations as a "blemish". Mission Congo notes that leading state politicians were recipients of large donations from Robertson.

Robertson has been embroiled in mining controversies elsewhere in Africa. He supported the then president of Liberia, Charles Taylor, during that country's civil war without revealing at the time that he had an $8m investment in a Liberian gold mine. Taylor was already indicted by a UN war crimes tribunal at the time and was later convicted of crimes against humanity.