Mission Congo’ Alleges Pat Robertson Exploited Post-Genocide Rwandans For Diamonds

The documentary ‘Mission Congo,’ which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, alleges that televangelist Pat Robertson’s charity in Zaire to help refugees that fled from post-genocide Rwanda, Operation Blessing, really served as an elaborate front for his diamond mining operation. Marlow Stern reports. 

 

AP; Getty

Pat Robertson has said some awful things in the past. He claimed “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays,” should take part of the blame for 9/11, that Hurricane Katrina was due to America’s pro-choice policies, and that the 2010 Haiti earthquake was because Haiti’s founders had sworn “a pact to the Devil.” But if the allegations in Lara Zizic and David Turner’s documentary Mission Congo—which premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival—are true (and there is a mountain of evidence presented that back up the filmmaker’s claims), then Robertson is much, much worse than even his fiercest detractors imagined.

In the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 800,000 people, one million Rwandans fled to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Many of the refugees were stashed in camps with little to no shelter, running water, or medical supplies. One of these refugee camps was in Goma.

So Robertson, sensing an opportunity, took up the cause. He began pleading on his TV program The 700 Club, broadcast by the Robertson-founded Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), for viewers to pledge at least $25/month to Robertson’s non-profit organization, Operation Blessing International (OBI), to help.

“We’re going to ship enough medicine to take care of a quarter of a million refuges,” said Robertson at the time.

“I want to chart a 727 airplane with 100 doctors directly into Goma,” he later proclaimed. “It will be the largest contingent of doctors, I believe, on the field.”

Chris McGreal, a journalist for The Guardian who was stationed at the refugee camp in Goma, recalled a strange sight. The camp was plagued by a cholera epidemic, which claimed over 40,000 lives. As victims were rushed to medical tents on stretchers, he witnessed a preacher running alongside the stretcher clenching a Bible and preaching to the victim. The Bible-thumper was a member of OBI.

“They had one tent and a stack of Bibles,” said a member of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which provided actual aid to the refugree camp in Goma, in the film.

“People began to refuse the Bibles,” added a local. “‘What we need is food and medicine,’ they said. Operation Blessing would say, ‘That’s not our mission.’”

Furthermore, Robertson repeatedly alleged on The 700 Club that he had purchased a fleet of Vietnam-era cargo planes from United Flights to ship medical supplies to Goma.

“I thought this was a good deal… men helping men,” said Robert Hinkle, Chief Pilot for Operation Blessing in 1994. “They began asking me, ‘Can we haul a 1,000-pound dredge over?’ I didn’t know what the dredging was about.”

According to Jessie Potts, who served as Operations Manager for OBI in 1994, the charity stopped sending medical teams to Goma several weeks into the operation. Instead, the film alleges that these resources—the donations, the cargo planes, etc.—were used for the for-profit African Development Company Ltd., a diamond mining operation that was headquartered in Kinshasa, while the mining site itself was located in the remote village of Kamonia. Robertson was the sole shareholder and president of ADC.