<nettime> Of Genocide and GMOs: How Historical Revisionists became Biotech Apologists

["Soenke Zehle" <soenke.zehle@web.de>]

Another sign that the encounter between media studies and political ecology
is overdue, sz

[via GMWatch Daily at <http://www.gmwatch.org>]

1. Genocide? What genocide?
>From genocide revisionists to biotech apologists

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the start of the genocide that
took place between April and June 1994 in the central African state of
Rwanda. Those largely-systematised massacres left around one in ten of
Rwanda's population dead and much of the remainder physically or
emotionally scarred.

As the director of the Aegis Trust, a British-based charity, speaking at a
conference in Rwanda's capital Kigali this weekend, has noted, "In this
city, you know, there are still more nightmares than dreams, because you
know personally, that just 10 years ago, someone hacked your father to
death, sliced through your brother, raped your mother. Never forget
Rwanda, let it be a dangerous, unsettling, unnerving memory." [1]

Many accuse the rich world of doing precisely the opposite of remembering
Rwanda - of first turning a blind eye to the genocide in the months in
which it occurred and then ignoring its traumatised survivors. Some,
however, have gone much further than mere indifference. Rather than just
ignoring the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, they have become actual
apologists for what occurred, even seeking to deny in racist terms the
murder of around 800,000 people. This the revisionists dismiss as merely
some sort of disorganised tribal bloodletting.

In March 2000 Guardian correspondent Chris McGreal wrote of this
perspective, "Genocide is such a hard crime to deny that those who insist
on doing so usually put themselves on the outer fringes of historical
debate. How many people had heard of Living Marxism (LM) before the ITN
reporters decided to prove the magazine lied about the camps in Bosnia?
Obscuring the truth about Bosnia was not LM's only bid to rewrite history
in favour of the murderers. It has also conducted a long campaign to deny
there was a genocide in Rwanda. But while the magazine is of no great
consequence, it is articulating a lie perpetuated by a host of more
powerful interests..." [2]

In a recent article, Rotten to the Corp (Science in Society 21, Spring
2004), GM WATCH editors, Claire Robinson and Jonathan Matthews, examined
how the LM network, which has now made promoting biotechnology its central
preoccupation, continues to articulate lies on behalf of powerful
interests - this time from within the very heart of the science-media
establishment. [3]

To mark the 10th anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide, we'll
be taking a long hard look again at a network whose carefully placed
members have been at the very heart of campaigns to bring us patents on
life, embryo cloning and the commercialisation of GM crops.

Below is a GM WATCH profile of Science Media Centre director, Fiona Fox,
responsible, as is noted below, for the first denial of the Rewandan
genocide to appear in print in a widely sold English language publication.

Fox in many ways encapsulates the key issues. As the profile notes, "It is
perhaps revealing that someone whose own immensely controversial
journalism has been denounced as 'shoddy' and 'an affront to the truth',
has been selected as the director of an organisation which claims the role
of making sure that controversial scientific issues like GM crops are
reported accurately in the media."

---
2.Fiona Fox - a GM WATCH profile (see [4] for all the links)

Fiona Fox is the director of the Science Media Centre (SMC).

Despite having no previous background in either science or science
communication, Fox has been afforded, since her appointment in December
2001, the status of expert. She has, for example, been included in a
working party on peer review set up by Sense about Science, and in a
steering group on improving communication over science policy and risk set
up by the Office of Science and Technology. In 2003 Fox delivered a
lecture at Green College, Oxford, on the challenge of adapting science to
the mass media.

Within a matter of months of Fox becoming director, the SMC was embroiled
in controversy over its activities. It was accused of operating as 'a sort
of Mandelsonian rapid rebuttal unit' and of employing 'some of the
clumsiest spin techniques of New Labour'. There have also been
controversies about both the SMC's funding and Fox's background.

According to the profile provided by the SMC, Fox previously ran 'the
media operation at the National Council for One Parent Families' and was
'Head of Media at CAFOD, the Catholic aid agency'. In addition, the SMC
says, Fox 'has written extensively for newspapers and publications,
authored several policy papers and contributed to books on humanitarian
aid.'

What they do not say is that throughout much of that time Fox led a double
life. It's one which seriously undermines the SMC's claims to be open,
rational, balanced and independent, not to mention its being in the
business of ensuring the 'that the public gets access to all sides of the
debate about controversial issues.'

It's a double life that connects the SMC's director to the inner circles
of a political network that compares environmentalists to Nazis and
eulogises GM crops and cloning. More disturbingingly it is a network whose
members have a long history of infiltrating media organisations and
science-related lobby groups in order to promote their own agenda. It is
also a network that has targeted certain media organisations and sought to
discredit them or their journalists.

Fox's double life was first exposed after an article entitled 'Massacring
the truth in Rwanda' appeared in the December 1995 issue of Living
Marxism. The magazine subsequently reported receiving 'a stream of
outraged letters from the Nazi-hunters of the prestigious Simon Wiesenthal
Center in Jerusalem, the Rwandan embassy, the London-based African Rights
group and others.'

Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal of African Rights wrote to the magazine to
express their outrage at the article: 'Investigating crimes against
humanity gives one a high threshold of shock. But the article by Fiona
Foster on Rwanda (Massacring the truth in Rwanda, December 1995) was the
sort of writing that we never expected to appear in print. We each read it
with a growing sense of outrage, leaving us at the end simply numb. Had
your paper been entitled Living Fascism we might have been less surprised,
but even then we would have expected something a little more circumspect.
Not only do you make an apologia for the genocide - the first to appear in
print in a widely sold English language publication - but go so far as to
question its very reality. This is not only an affront to the truth, in
defiance of the fundamentals of humanity, but deeply offensive to the
survivors of the third indisputable genocide of this century'.

Omaar and de Waal, who now works for the U.N., describe the article as
'shoddy journalism' and the ideas advanced in it as 'absurd'. All of which
'would matter less if you were not dealing with one of the greatest crimes
of the century, and playing into the hands of genocidal killers'. Omaar
and de Waal subsequently established that 'Fiona Foster', the author of
the article, was Fiona Fox, then a press officer for CAFOD.

Those trying to understand Fox's bid, in the words of a Guardian article,
'to rewrite history in favour of the murderers', have focussed on her
media role at a Catholic aid agency, linking this to the embarrassment of
the Church over the role of some priests and bishops in the mass murder.
What has received less attention is the nature of Fox's relationship with
Living Marxism.

By the time of the Rwandan article Fox had, in fact, been regularly
writing for the monthly review of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)
for at least two and a half years. Living Marxism was first published in
1987 and although the LM archive only goes back to 1992 and not all issues
are accessible, it is clear that Fox's articles in Living Marxism stretch
from at least 1992 to 1999, ie to not long before it was forced into
closure. Indeed, prior to her Rwanda article, Fox was one of Living
Marxism's most prolific contributors, on one occasion even contributing
two articles to a single issue (LM 75).

Her use of the Fiona Foster alias may have reflected a need to keep her
Living Marxism connections hidden, although the use of aliases was also a
standard practice among leading RCP supporters. These aliases typically
involved retaining first names and altering surnames. For instance, Frank
Furedi was Frank Richards, James Hughes was James Heartfield, Joan Hoey
was Joan Phillips, Keith Teare was Keith Tompson and Claire Fox, Fiona's
sister, was Claire Foster.

The main focus of most of Fiona Fox's articles was the troubles in
Northern Ireland.  In her pieces Fox makes reference to both the Irish
Freedom Movement and the Campaign Against Militarism, both of which were
front groups for the RCP. The line Fox advances in the articles is
precisely that of the RCP which unequiviocally supported the IRA in its
armed struggle against 'British imperialism'.

According to a former RCP supporter, Fiona Fox became the head of the
Irish Freedom Movement which had a position of never condemning the IRA
even when its terrorist atrocities were aimed at civilian targets. In the
end, her support for the 'armed struggle' was to outflank even that of the
IRA.

After the start of the peace process, Fox's articles provided a platform
for the dissident republican Tommy McKearney (See: Irish republican speaks
out - LM 66, April 94 Opposing the 'peace process' - LM 75, January 95).
Like the RCP McKearney saw the peace process as 'a historic defeat for the
liberation movement', or as he puts it in one of Fox's pieces, 'a cynical
ploy to dupe the republican movement' into surrendering unconditionally to
the British.

Fox writes:

' "First and foremost I don't believe that it is a peace process at all."
That was how Tommy McKearney, a former IRA prisoner of war, began his
speech to the Campaign Against Militarism conference at Wembley in March
1994. He concluded by calling on his audience to expose Britain as a
warmonger not a peacemaker in Ireland.'

According to a former RCP supporter, '...there were some links with the
IRA Continuity Council people/Real IRA etc, through Fiona Fox, but these
links were being undermined by the RCP´s growing dismissal of all
opposition politics as being old fashioned and “meanlingless.” ' It has
obviously been impossible to confirm these links but they would not seem
inconsistant with Fox's willingness to provide a platform for those
opposed to the peace process and in favour of continuing the campaign of
violence.

Ironically, in June 2003 Fiona Fox chaired a session at the two day
conference Communicating the War on Terror which took place at the Royal
Institution, as did Bruno Waterfield and Bill Durodié who organised the
conference for the Centre for Defence Studies at Kings College London. All
have had connections to RCP/LM as had conference speakers like Frank
Furedi, Phil Hammond, Michael Fitzpatrick and Mick Hume, LM's former
editor. LM contributor and Assistant Director of Sense About Science,
Ellen Raphael helped Durodié organise the event. Their LM connections do
not appear to have been disclosed to conference participants or fellow
contributors.

Fox's last article for LM, which was on Africa, was in 1999 but she
appears to have continued her conection with the group, chairing a meeting
for the Institute of Ideas (IoI), the organisation formed by her sister
Claire when LM was sued out of existence, as recently as February 2002.

Claire Fox's LM connections and role within the RCP have been much more
public than her sister's, but to judge from Living Marxism, Claire may
well have been drawn into the RCP in Fiona's wake. Claire Fox's
contributions to Living Marxism do not begin until December 1993 -
eighteen months after her sister's - and they are at first only very
intermittent.

Fiona Fox's presence in the SMC also needs to be seen in the context of LM
contributors holding senior positions, in a series of organisations which
lobby on issues related to biotechnology, eg Sense About Science
(director: Tracey Brown; assistant director: Ellen Raphael), Genetic
Interest Group (policy director: John Gillott), Progress Educational Trust
(director: Juliet Tizzard), and the Scientific Alliance (advisor: Bill
Durodié).

This background has to be an immense cause for concern in relation to
Fox's role as director of the SMC. Fox's Green College Lecture was titled,
'The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: so where does that
leave journalism?' But neither Fox nor the Science Media Centre have been
willing to disclose any of the truth about her long years of involvement
with a network of extremists who engage in infiltration of media
organisations and science-related lobby groups in order to promote their
own agenda. It is also a network which eulogises GM crops and cloning and
is extremely hostile towards their critics.

Fox's own journalism might also suggest that she is none too fussy about
either truth or openness when it comes to pushing her agenda. It is
perhaps revealing that someone whose own immensely controversial
journalism has been denounced as 'shoddy' and 'an affront to the truth',
has been selected as the director of an organisation which claims the role
of making sure that controversial scientific issues like GM crops are
reported accurately in the media.

[1]
<http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4747301>

[2] <http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,181819,00.html>

[3] <http://www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=2785>

[4]<http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=45&page=F>




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