(KEITH HARMON SNOW) Pentagon Produces Satellite Photos Of 1994 Rwanda Genocide
COMMENT - For all the links and photographs, see the original post.PENTAGON PRODUCES SATELLITE PHOTOS OF 1994 RWANDA GENOCIDE
Commemorating More Than 18 years of Terrorism in Central Africa
April 6, 1994 - April 6, 2012
keith harmon snow
Published: 6 April 2012
Revisions: 9 April 2012
(Authors note: My apologies to Dr. Timothy Longman, whose work I mis-characterized unfairly in the 6 April 2012 version of this story; I have corrected the text here.)
Eighteen years after the historic '100 days of genocide' in Rwanda the United States Government has suddenly produced never-before-seen satellite images to support the genocide extradition trial of a former Rwandan now U.S. citizen in New Hampshire (USA). The existence of satellite imagery from 1994 would enable the 'international community' to further explore heretofore hidden facts about the double presidential assassinations of April 6 or massacres committed before, during and after 1994. As the world commemorates the official Rwanda genocide story on the 18th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide the people of Central Africa continue to suffer under the brutal terrorism of the Kagame military regime. Instead of celebrating, we should be asking: who are the real victims and who are the real criminals, and what really happened in Rwanda?
If there is any truth at all to the clichéd Holocaust slogan "never again" it is that now never again can the U.S. officials in power at the time -- William Jefferson Clinton (President) or Warren Christopher (Secretary of State) or Madeleine Albright (Ambassador to the United Nations) or William Perry (Secretary of Defense) or R. James Woolsey (CIA Director) or Anthony Lake (National Security Adviser) -- claim that they didn't know what was happening on the ground in Rwanda. They did. They always did. They knew at the time and they have known since.
In his opening statements in a Concord, New Hampshire (USA) courthouse on February 23, 2012, federal prosecutor John Capin launched the U.S. government's trial against a 41 year-old Rwandan so-called 'genocide fugitive' by wielding satellite photographs purportedly showing the road blocks where she "commanded extremist Hutu militia and ordered the rapes and killings of Tutsi" in Rwanda in 1994.
In a remarkable development, this is the first time in the history of the 'Rwanda genocide' trials or related Rwanda asylum hearings where Pentagon satellite photographs have been produced as evidence, and the first time that the existence of satellite photographs taken over Rwanda during the so-called '100 days of genocide' has ever been verified.
Later in the Munyenyezi trial the U.S. prosecutors produced a 'Pentagon analyst' who testified about the satellite photographs. The Pentagon analyst was Mr. Eric R. Benn, Technical Executive, Analysis and Production Directorate, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The photographs introduced into the public record include very high resolution images shot over Rwanda in May, June and July of 1994. The NGA is one of the most secretive organizations on earth and its customers include the Pentagon and all 16 shadowy agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC).
The confirmation of satellite reconnaissance and intelligence photographs newly implicates the U.S. government in the mass atrocities of 1994, and raises serious new questions about the coverup of the double presidential assassinations of April 6, 1994 and the atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) commanded by now President Paul Kagame.
The sudden and unexpected revelation of the existence of satellite imagery shot over Rwanda in 1994 also further corroborates claims and evidence that U.S. and Pentagon officials had plenty of satellite evidence of the numbers and whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees massacred by the Kagame war machine in Congo's forests.
Eighteen years after the so-called '1994 Rwanda genocide', Rwanda is today everywhere peddled as an economic miracle of recovery and freedom, once again 'the Switzerland of Africa.' Rwanda is also peddled as the model homeland for the 'stateless' Tutsis -- the so-called 'Jews of Africa' -- who exercise victim's license and a false moral righteousness to justify the commission of atrocities anywhere, anytime, and against anyone. All thanks to His Supreme Majesty President Paul Kagame, who is everywhere applauded for rescuing the Tutsis, stopping the genocide, and rebuilding Rwanda in His own image.
Meanwhile, the real situation for ordinary people in Central Africa is everywhere inhumane and unjust. The average Ugandan citizen suffers under the brutal dictatorship of Yoweri Museveni. The people in northern Uganda, already subject to genocide as policy under the Museveni government, now have a new threat: the hysterical KONY2012 movement.
The people of Congo continue to suffer under the terrorist government of Hyppolite Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila), a Tutsi and the nephew of Rwandan Tutsi general James Kabarebe. Since January 2012 more than 100,000 Congolese have been internally displaced by violence under the occupation of the Kagame regime in the Kivu provinces.
And, as it as been since 1994, both Hutus and Tutsis suffer massive repression under the Kagame regime inside Rwanda.
MILLION DOLLAR MUNYENYEZI TRIAL
On June 24, 2010, Beatrice Munyenyezi (MOON'-yen-yezi) was arrested in Manchester, New Hampshire (USA) and charged, according to U.S. prosecutors, with "procuring U.S. citizenship unlawfully by misrepresenting her activities during the 1994 Rwandan genocide."
Munyenyezi is a U.S. citizen falsely accused of Rwanda genocide rape crimes in yet another case adding up to millions of U.S. taxpayers dollars being used to fund fabricated Rwanda genocide and asylum trials and, now, genocide tourism expeditions in Rwanda.
The U.S. Department of Justice seeks to deport Beatrice Munyenyezi to face genocide charges in Rwanda. But Ms. Munyenyezi's will be a milestone case: this is the first ever international legal proceeding in the United States involving a woman accused of rape as a genocide and war crime.
According to the government of Rwanda, Beatrice Munyenyezi, 41, allegedly "participated in, committed, ordered, oversaw, conspired to, aided and abetted, assisted in and directed persecution, kidnapping, rape and murder during the Rwandan genocide of 1994."
The Kagame regime makes general accusations that you can arrest and charge any Hutu with. These are generic genocide charges used by the Rwandan military regime against all people of the Hutu ethnicity.
The fifteen-day trial of Beatrice Munyenyezi in February and March 2012 was concluded with four additional days of deliberations by an all-white jury. On March 15 the jury delivered a deadlocked decision and the U.S. government declared a 'mistrial'. The re-trial is set to begin September 10, 2012.
Mark Howard, one of Beatrice Munyenyezi's attorneys, revealed to the press the huge sums of money spent by the U.S Judiciary to try Rwandan genocide suspects.
Howard estimated that U.S. taxpayers paid between US$ 2.5 million and $US 3 million for Munyenyezi's recent prosecution and trial in federal court. Howard estimates that a retrial is likely to cost an additional US$ 1 million.
Howard's estimates include attorney fees, agent salaries, the "extraordinary expense" of investigating in a foreign country, the costs of bringing some fifteen witnesses to New Hampshire, and the hiring of experts.
Several of the prosecution witnesses brought over from Rwanda in the latest charade staged by the Kagame military regime are described by the U.S. and Rwanda government as convicted "extremist Hutu genocidaires" serving life sentences in prison.
Others are witnesses from a women's genocide survivor organization in Butare, paid by the U.S. government to travel to New Hampshire, whose profits from the traveling and testifying can be used to support their mission in Butare. Such economic interests play a major role in the official choice and production of 'genocide witnesses' and 'genocide survivors'.
Defense attorneys described the fifteen Rwandan witnesses flown over to the U.S. from Rwanda as "psychopathic killers who never mentioned Munyenyezi in nearly two decades of trials and investigations into the Rwanda genocide."
The cost of bringing Kagame's authorized 'witnesses' to the United States and putting them up -- some under tight security and others at expensive hotels -- for the duration of the trial represents additional massive costs to U.S. taxpayers for what amounts to fraud by the U.S. government.
The credibility of 'witnesses' incarcerated in Rwanda is highly suspect. First there is the problem of coercion: many people in prison in Rwanda or accused by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) and Gacaca [people's] courts have been framed. Other 'confessed genocidaires' have been tortured, and some have been silenced or coerced to lie by the RPA threat of retaliation against their families.
Often enough, 'witnesses to killings' and 'genocide survivors' are frauds, sometimes they are people who were not even in Rwanda during the 1994 cataclysm. Other government plants and handlers have been coached.
The prosecutors in the Munyenyezi case are claiming that Beatrice Munyenyezi was present and directed killings and kidnappings at a road block just outside the Hotel Ihuriro in Butare. The RPA/F apparently captured Butare through an offensive launched from Burundi. Satellite images produced during the trial included images from around May 23, and a series from May 28 to June 1. At this time the Hotel Ihuriro was intact, but in a later image dated 18 July 1994 the hotel had been leveled to the ground by the RPA/F attack and the photo is marked "destroyed building".
The satellite pictures are taken over a time period and show clear changes from day to day. The implications of these photos are incredibly important. This is definitive proof that the United States knew exactly what was happening all over Rwanda during most if not all of the so-called Rwanda genocide, and the extended war from 1990 to 1994. The high-resolution files enable you to zoom in on details.
"They first showed the hotel, which doesn't exist any more," said one source who was present at the trial. "They tried to show that somehow there was a roadblock that [Beatrice Munyenyezi] was at. The pictures were also supposed to show a mass grave a few feet from the hotel and another mass grave near the Episcopal church nearby. The defense attorneys were [apparently] able to prove that there was no road block shown in the pictures, and there were no mass graves."
In Munyenyezi's case, the press apparently decided that the witnesses brought in to accuse Beatrice Munyenyezi were not credible.
First, the claim by the RPA that Munyenyezi commanded soldiers to rape Tutsi women in the basement of the hotel is presented as an absolute. The rape occurred 'in the context of genocide' and so it is believable and believed. However, no Rwandan woman in the context of Rwandan culture would ever oversee mass rape of other Rwandan women. In fact, Beatrice Munyenyezi was also pregnant at the time -- making the hypothesis of rape even less plausible.
Second, we can imagine that any credible testimony on a genocide rape charge against a woman would have provoked an endless barrage of news stories titled 'Hutu genocidaire woman ordered rape of innocent Tutsis in hotel's basement', stories that would have made their way right up to CNN and the New York Times. But the court's decision on the rape charges went unmentioned by the New Hampshire press because the credibility of dishonest government witnesses (coached to lie) was easily destroyed.
The charge that Beatrice Munyenyezi commanded and organized the rape of Rwandan women is as implausible as the charge by Invisible Children founder Jason Russel that Joseph Kony "he's the most perverse, in the world, he's just the most perverse. No one makes...anyone else... takes children... makes them kill their parents and eat their parents."
Some so-called 'genocidaires' may be guilty, but others are not, and the Kagame regime uses all kinds of bribery, subterfuge and threats to pull the wool over the eyes of tourists, researchers and other 'guests'. Many people in Rwanda are forced to spy, tattle and inform on others or else face personal persecution or threats to their families.
Anyone who challenges the officially sanctioned narrative in Rwanda is branded, arrested, exiled, disappeared or -- in the case of pesky American academics, like Dr. Christian Davenport, Dr. Alan Stam or Dr. Susan Thomson, who all asked too many questions of the 'wrong' kind -- barred from Rwanda forever.
Dr. Timothy Longman is another academic who has fallen into disrepute with the Kagame regime, though only mildly. Longman, now director of African Studies at Boston University, is the Rwanda genocide expert that was brought in to testify as a witness for the prosecution in the Beatrice Munyenyezi case. Dr. Longman and former Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher Alison Des Forges (d. 2009) co-authored the HRW book on Rwanda Leave None to Tell the Story, and both formerly worked with USAID, the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon; the 790 page tome did not mention a word about Beatrice Munyenyezi.
Beatrice Munyenyezi's defense attorneys took advantage of the prosecution's Rwanda genocide expert and successfully cross-examined Dr. Timothy Longman making important points. Dr. Longman, Dr. Susan Thomson and other academics came under fire from the Kagame regime just prior to the April 2011 publication of the book Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights After Mass Violence. Someone enamored with the Kagame regime put up a web site spreading disinformation and attacking the authors of the edited edition.
"The book is a collection of articles by a group of people who have made it their mission to shoot down anything that the government of Rwanda does," the propagandist begins. "The new book should be seen as the latest project of an association of what may be appropriately called 'Genocide Deniers Inc.' and 'Hate Rwanda Ltd'. The editors have brought together the works of a wide array of members of these two groups."
The lists of 'friends' and 'enemies' of the government of Rwanda is constantly in flux, but ever growing. First, France was the hostile enemy of Kagame, after the publication of the report on the shooting down of the presidential plane produced by French anti-terrorist Judge Louis Brugiere. Then when business and profits took precedents over truth and human rights, President Nicholas Sarkozy made a deal with Kagame and the French government soon after this became more hostile to Madame Agatha Habyriamana and more accommodating to Paul Kagame. But the recent volume of supposed 'Genocide Deniers Inc.' includes articles by some very accomplished and highly respected Rwanda scholars, including as professors David Newbury and Catherine Newbury, and Dr. Scott Strauss. None of these accomplished academics have ever previously fallen anywhere near the category 'genocide deniers'.
Hordes of western NGO workers and humanitarian relief workers involved in millions of dollars of private profit come and go from Rwanda, always advertising their effectiveness in "peace" and "reconciliation" programs. And yet, Tutsis and Hutus alike inside and outside Rwanda are increasingly speaking about military confrontation as more and more people become alienated and disaffected by the elite Tutsis in the Kagame regime.
CLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS
The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) certainly collected satellite imagery over the four years of warfare in Rwanda. One of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, the NRO designs, builds and operates U.S. government spy satellites and coordinates the analysis of aerial surveillance and satellite imagery from several intelligence and military agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). All NRO operations are highly classified - black programs operations -- and even the existence of the NRO was only declassified in 1992.
According to the U.S. Government, "The NRO was declassified to facilitate interaction with other parts of the government, to make it easier for the NRO to support military operations, and in response to Congressional pressure." However, the declassification of beyond top secret intelligence entities like the NRO represents a growing trend toward privatization of the defense and intelligence sectors.
As part of the process of declassification NRO consulted Richard Curl, head of the Office of Intelligence Resources of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, recommended a "low-key approach" to declassification.
This is a tactic that the intelligence and defense sectors use often: casually bring the formerly beyond top secret 'asset' - some previously classified plane, satellite or document -- into the public sphere without any mention. Then, after the unusual and unknown 'asset' is finally noticed, acknowledge the 'asset' with a summary dismissal saying, "that has been there all along" -- and "it has been public knowledge for some time." The implication is, you just weren't paying attention!
A declassified secret intelligence memo of July 1992 shows that NRO consultant Richard Curl recommended that the U.S. government and Pentagon very quietly make public the 'fact of' the NRO. Specifically, Curl advised "not worrying public relations guidance too much, not making a big public announcement, and just letting the change pass with little notice... keep down the fanfare and just let the change happen."
In fact, perhaps thinking that the Beatrice Munyenyezi story would remain a quiet, local New Hampshire affair, this is exactly how the Pentagon made public the 'fact of' the 1994 Rwanda genocide satellite reconnaissance images used in Beatrice Munyenyezi's trial. Never previously acknowledged - even denied to Ambassador Flatten from 1990 to 1993 - and never formally revealed, the images were casually introduced in the Munyenyezi trial. The local media missed the significance, focusing only on the fantastic charges of Munyenyezi's involvement in genocide.
INTERNATIONAL WARS OF AGGRESSION
In 1981, Yoweri Museveni and his newly formed National Resistance Army (NRA) launched an invasion of the sovereign country of Uganda. From 1980 to 1986, the NRA perpetrated massive war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Luwero Triangle and other areas in central and northern Uganda. These atrocities were universally attributed -- and are so attributed to this day -- to the government forces, the Uganda National Liberation Army, commanded by then President Milton Obote. (See for example: Notes On the Concealment of Genocide in Uganda, A. Milton Obote, April 1990.)
The massive atrocities committed by the NRA set the stage for the rise of Joseph Kony, the Ugandan bogey man used by Museveni, Washington, London and Israel to facilitate a permanent state of insecurity in northern Uganda. Under permanent emergency, Museveni was able to justify the forcible displacement of millions of indigenous Acholi people and their internment into concentration camps. Museveni also allegedly authored a document attesting to genocidal intent against the Acholis.
One of the 27 guerrillas who took up arms alongside Yoweri Museveni in the illegal NRA invasion of Uganda was Paul Kagame, the future leader of the Rwanda Patriotic Army/Front, the Ugandan guerrilla army that illegally invaded Rwanda on October 1, 1990.
Loyal to Museveni and his bloody guerrilla tactics, Kagame rose through the ranks to become Museveni's director of military intelligence -- a position for which his enemies now claim he was known as 'the butcher'.
At the time of the October 1990 invasion of Rwanda, Paul Kagame was being trained at the Pentagon's General Staff and Command College at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas (USA). Kagame returned and led the four year war that resulted in the deaths of perhaps several hundred thousand Hutu people between October 1990 and April 1994 alone.
A prima facie case can be made that each of the invasions of Uganda, Rwanda and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) constitute the supreme crime against humanity, that being the illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.
The United States, Britain and Israel were the strongest backers behind backed Museveni and Kagame in all three of these illegal wars of aggression.
Involved at the highest level in the RPA/F invasion of Rwanda from 1990 to 1994 were United States intelligence agent Roger Winter and Israeli MOSSAD agent David Kimche. U.S. defense attaché Lt. Colonel Thomas P. Odom and defense attaché Richard Skow are two more U.S. military intelligence agents who have deep inside knowledge of the Pentagon- and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)-backed invasions of both Rwanda and Congo-Zaire.
After the RPA/F victory, Roger Winter encamped in Kampala, Uganda, from where he directed the U.S./Nato/Israeli covert operations against the Islamic government of Sudan: his primary mouthpiece in the English-language world -- always hysterically screaming about genocide, inflating casualties and inventing facts, and published anywhere and everywhere -- is Smith College professor Dr. Eric Reeves.
The U.S. House of Representative hearings by the Subcommittee on Africa of the Committee on International Relations reveal that the United States knew that the Hutu refugees in Congo-Zaire were being massacred, and it makes clear some of those who knew what, where it was happening, and when.
In May 2001, U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) convened a hearing for the Subcommittee on Africa where investigative journalist Wayne Madsen testified about U.S. covert operations and U.S. involvement in genocide in Central Africa.
"A French military intelligence officer said he detected some 100 armed U.S. troops in the eastern Zaire conflict zone," Madsen's statement began. "Moreover, the DGSE [French secret service] reported the Americans had knowledge of the extermination of Hutu refugees by Tutsis in both Rwanda and eastern Zaire and were doing nothing about it. More ominously, there was reason to believe that some U.S. forces, either Special Forces or mercenaries, may have actually participated in the extermination of Hutu refugees." (See: Statement by Wayne Madsen, Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, 17 May 2001, and Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Wayne Madsen, Mellen Press, 1999.)
THE 'OFFICIAL' RWANDA GENOCIDE NARRATIVE
Just as Yoweri Museveni and his backers conferred victor status on Museveni after the NRA victory in Uganda, and then charged the NRA's victims and the Obote government with genocide, so too did Museveni and Paul Kagame and their backers confer savior status on Paul Kagame and accuse the Hutu victims of genocide.
The multiparty coalition government of Juvenal Habyarimana was falsely accused of genocide as early as 1993. This was after a sham international "Commission of Inquiry" investigation led by Alison Des Forges (HRW), William Schabas and others traveled to Rwanda and produced a one-sided report blaming the Habyarimana government [1]. The investigators spent about a week in Rwanda all told, they had RPA/F support, and they never investigated RPA/F atrocities in RPA/F controlled zones. Branded with 'genocide', the label stuck to Habyarimana and the genocide charge was then repeated over and over until it was considered fact.
Contrary to the official narrative that casts Hutus as killers and Tutsis as victims, the RPA/F plan included the sacrificing of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. Given opportunities to negotiate a ceasefire, and even the unconditional surrender by the national armed forces -- Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) -- soon after the plane was shot down on 6 April 1994, the RPA/F continued the war to achieve absolute military dominance and to eliminate as many 'enemies' as possible. To Kagame and his elite thugs, the 'enemies' were Hutu and Tutsi people who lived in Rwanda. The plan succeeded and the land and property of millions of people was taken over by invading Tutsis and western multinational corporations.
The RPA/F leadership was comprised of elite English-speaking Tutsis from Uganda backed by Ugandan generals James Kazini and Salim Saleh, and by Yoweri Museveni himself. As the RPA/F invasion continued -- prior to April 6, 1994 -- Tutsis were also killed, both in revenge killings and because of RPA/F attacks. After April 6, 1994, both Hutus and Tutsis suffered at the hands of the Kagame regime. The minority Twa population also suffered massive loss of life in what should also be recognized as genocide, were the term reasonably applied.
"The continuation of the genocide of the Tutsis was a key part of the [RPA] victory strategy," writes former Rwandan Patriotic Front official Jean-Marie Ndagijimana, in How General Paul Kagame Sacrificed the Tutsis. "[A] ceasefire and a halt to the genocide risked strengthening his adversaries [Forces Armées Rwandaises] by freeing them from their police duties. Furthermore, a halt to the massacres would have taken from Kagame the sole pretext on which he based his legitimacy. The government [FAR] army had to be made to appear like a genocidal force the defeat of which no one would regret... Why stop the massacres when they were working to legitimize Kagame and weaken his adversaries?"
Here is how the typical U.S. news agency reporting on the Munyenyezi story describes the Rwanda genocide. "The genocide in Rwanda began in April 1994," reads the commentator, in an ominous tone, in a local New Hampshire TV station video clip. "It lasted 100 days. Up to 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militias and as many as 10,000 people were killed each day. The Hutu were defeated three months later."
However, the genocide against Tutsis during those 100 days of 1994 cannot be understood out of context, and the true context is never provided by the establishment media, by the U.S. or British governments, by Israel, or by the mercenaries working to clean the blood off the Kagame regime.
Former British prime Minister Tony Blair, Canadian academic Gerald Caplan, New Yorker magazine writer Philip Gourevitch, 'human rights' investigator William Schabas, U.S. intelligence agent John Prendergast, British mouthpiece Linda Melvern, the RPA/F's Somalian mouthpiece Rakiya Omaar, and their Rwandan mouthpiece Tom Ndahiro are some of the most prominent individuals who have whitewashed the Kagame regime. Of course, there is a long list of Clinton and Bush officials who have lied again and again about our involvement in terrorism in the Great Lakes.
Kagame has also hired the Racepoint Group, a U.S. lobbying and public relations firm to "build a strong and sustained image campaign communicating the successes of Rwanda with key stakeholders in the political and financial elite communities" and "[o]ffset the negative and factually incorrect information of those parties with vested interests in mis-portraying Rwanda's advancements."
Racepoint's campaign themes include "Rwanda's Visionary Leader...highlighting President Kagame" and "The Rwandan Miracle: Healing of a Nation." The company's fees are listed as US$ 50,000 per month plus 2500 to 3500 pounds Sterling per month for "out of pocket expenses."
DEEPER HISTORICAL REALITIES
When he came to power in 1973, Rwanda's Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana warned Colonel Joseph Mobutu, the western-imposed president in Zaire (now Dem. Rep. of Congo), that Tutsis settling and seeking citizenship in Zaire were slowly infiltrating with the intent to annex the mineral rich eastern provinces; this is one reason Mobutu promoted isolationism in the far eastern provinces on the frontiers with Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.
Meanwhile, Rwandan Tutsis continued to infiltrate eastern Congo, pressing for land and citizenship, and giving rise to what has become known as the Congolese Banyamulenge--"the people of Mulenge". The "Banyamulenge problem" is another mythology created to support Tutsi expansionism to annex Congolese territory. There is no such area or territory in the Congo: both Hutus and Tutsis have become refugees in Congo-Zaire off and on, but they have never been concentrated in one specific area. They have lived all over the country, moving about and, sometimes, living and working as if they were Congolese.
Throughout the 1960's and 1970's, the elite Tutsis who fled Rwanda during the independence struggle (1958-1962) led guerrilla attacks from neighboring countries against the new Hutu-led governments (Kayibanda, Habyarimana) in Rwanda. In response, and never forgetting centuries of the Tutsi monarchies and conquest, Hutus retaliated against Tutsis inside Rwanda, driving more refugees from the country. As Black Nationalism gained power in Africa the Belgians supported majority Hutu rule in Rwanda, at the expense of their former allies in oppression, the elite upper class Tutsis.
Thus did the elite Tutsis who fled Rwanda find sympathy with other peoples involved in the international struggle against imperialism in the 1960s and 1970s. The 'Third World' non-aligned movement (outside the Nato versus Soviet arena) welcomed the elite Tutsis in the diaspora, their brothers and sisters in the struggle for freedom and rights, because the Tutsi elites proclaimed themselves the victims of post-independence oppression by the colonial Belgian masters.
Members of the non-aligned movement funded and armed the Tutsis guerrillas that attacked the Belgian-backed Hutus from outside Rwanda. With every Tutsis guerrilla attack against the Hutu power structure came more genocidal pograms against Tutsi people in Rwanda.
On July 5, 1973, while serving as Army Chief of Staff, Juvenal Habyarimana seized power by overthrowing Hutu leader Grégoire Kayibanda, the first elected and second president of Rwanda (Hutu Dominique Mbonyumutwa was the first president of a ten-month transition in 1961).
During the Soviet era, and pre-1989, the elite benefactors of the international financial and political system were only too happy to turn a blind eye to the human rights record of Juvenal Habyarimana--and his friend, Mobutu, the CIA's big man in Zaire--in exchange for their military, economic and political allegiance against the so-called "Communist bloc". With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the international monetary system put the screws on the Habyarimana (and Mobutu) government, ramming neoliberal 'reforms' down the throats of the Rwandans. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank enforced 'Structural Adjustment' programs that severely degraded the lives of ordinary Rwandans. On top of this, coffee prices fell. By the time of the Ugandan and RPA/F invasion of October 1990, the stage was set in Rwanda for class warfare.
While advancing and creating a stable country in many ways, with some Tutsi power sharing, Habyarimana's exclusionary policies against Tutsis also led to widespread Tutsi disaffection inside Rwanda. Habyarimana refused to address the "refugee" question and "rights to return" of Tutsis, a thorny issue pressed upon Rwanda by the international community. When thousands of Tutsis expelled by the government forces of Milton Obote fled Uganda in the early 1980's, Habyarimana refused to allow them to stay in Rwanda. Later, both Habyarimana and Yoweri Museveni jockeyed for power and profit where the pawns in the game were the Tutsis who had lived in Uganda for decades. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of French-speaking ethnic Tutsis had stayed and prospered inside Rwanda since 1959.
When the Rwandan Patriotic Army--elite Tutsi guerrillas led by Paul Kagame--invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, the situation shifted rapidly. Over the next four years the ethnic labels of Hutu and Tutsi became more politicized and more fluid. Hundreds of thousands of French-speaking ethnic Tutsi who had stayed and prospered inside Rwanda from 1959 until 1990 were now confronted with the choice of supporting the invading Tutsi army or retaining allegiance to the Habyarimana government. Complicated economic and political considerations, such as long-standing business relationships, and class issues, belied the Hutu-Tutsi divide.
Major Paul Kagame and his Ugandan Tutsi commanders, and other (very influential) elite Tutsis in the diaspora, who were mostly English language speakers, considered French-speaking Tutsis who stayed behind in Rwanda traitors to the Tutsi cause. While the RPA propagandized the masses and recruited Tutsi males for RPA military service from inside Rwanda, recruits were also subject to an internal RPA terrorism -- another story that has never been told -- and many Tutsis who joined the RPA/F were marginalized, many mistreated, and some were disappeared.
SEARCH AND SEIZURE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE
On June 22, 2010 a Search and Seizure Warrant was approved by the U.S. District Court in New Hampshire for the purpose of invading the Manchester N.H. home of Beatrice Munyenyezi. This warrant offers a perfect example of how the official narrative about genocide in Rwanda is maliciously used against innocent people.
The warrant is based on the affidavit of Thomas Brian Andersen, Jr., an ICE Special Agent assigned to the National Security Group of the Boston Office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In his affidavit, Andersen distilled the Hutu/Tutsi conflict in Rwanda down to a few essential details that helped to frame Beatrice Munyenyezi as a genocidaire.
The affidavit is extremely biased, and it offers a portrait of western arrogance and ignorance. For example: "Just prior to Rwanda's independence from Belgium in 1962," wrote Thomas Brian Andersen Jr., summarily dismissing the entire history of the elite Tutsi monarchy's brutal oppression and domination over the peasant Hutu masses, "the Hutu majority gained control of the government, and after independence, the Hutu majority engaged in acts, including discrimination and acts of violence against Tutsis. As a result, numerous Tutsis fled Rwanda, and some formed a rebel guerrilla army, known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front ("RPF")."
For Thomas Brian Andersen, Jr, it is not even incidental that the elite Tutsi rebels were attacking Rwanda, sneaking into Rwanda under cover of darkness, committing massive atrocities, targeted assassinations, bombings, spreading wholesale terrorism, and then sneaking back out of the country. This is where the Kinyarwanda term 'Inyenzi' came from: this is the infamous cockroach slur used in all Hollywood movies to portray the Hutus as the blood thirsty killers set on exterminating the Tutsi cockroaches. The Inyenzi slur, when attributed to the Hutus, implicated their dehumanization of the Tutsis, and dehumanization is part of the ideology that underpins genocide (according to its unbastardized original etymology). But Inyenzi was a term the Tutsi guerrillas proudly assigned to themselves: they were proud of their capacity to come and go under cover of night, just like cockroaches, spreading terrorism and committing murder.
When ICE Special Agent Thomas Brian Andersen, Jr. invaded the Munyenyezi home, he and the other officers were even searching for 'weapons used by Munyenyezi'. Special Agent Thomas Brian Andersen, Jr. had been deeply conditioned to believe the official narrative. That is, Thomas Brian Andersen, Jr. was expecting he might even find a machete. They asked the children of Beatrice Munyenyezi if there were machetes in the house or the garage.
The affidavit assumes and asserts Beatrice Munyenyezi's guilt, and the Search and Seizure Warrant was approved by Judge Daniel J. Lynch. It is an example of insufferable arrogance and entitlement and the abuse of power.
THE PENTAGON SACRIFICES MILLIONS OF AFRICANS
The double presidential assassination of April 6, 1994 is defined as the trigger for the massive backlash of Tutsi killings by Hutu people. Since the war began in October 1990, more than 10 million people have died in Central Africa due to Pentagon backed insurgency, with the greatest numbers killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
An elderly Congolese man sits in utter despair in a dilapidated section of Kisangani, DRC, unsure how he will survive and take care of his family. c. keith harmon snow, 2004.
Jean-Marie Ndagijimana was the Rwandan Ambassador to Paris under the Habyarimana government from October 1990 to April 1994, before being removed from his post for speaking out against the mass killings of Tutsis and Hutus.
On 19 July 1994, Ndagajimana became Minister of Foreign Affairs in what was called the 'Broad-Based National Unity Government' led by Faustin Twagiramungu. In September 1994, he resigned and went into exile after the report by UNHCR investigator Robert Gersony confirmed that scores of thousands of Hutus were killed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army between July and September 1994.
Robert Gersony was the UNHCR contractor whose report on RPA killings of Hutus was massively denounced at the time and later buried by the United Nations never to be seen again. Gersony went on to work for the UNHCR in northern Uganda and other places. Clearly, Gersony's credentials stood the test, and his silence secured his future employment(s). Indeed, Robert Gersony went on to work for the USAID mission to Kampala, Uganda, where he produced a report detailing the persecution of Acholi people in Northern Uganda. (See, e.g.: The Anguish of Northern Uganda: Results of a Field-Based Assessment of the Civil Conflicts in Northern Uganda, Robert Gersony, USAID Mission to Kampala, 1997).
Jean-Marie Ndagajimana insists that the killings of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis between April 6 and July 1994 was organized, not spontaneous, but that there is no question that there was a double genocide. He claims Tutsis were systematically killed by militias in areas controlled by the interim government of Jean Kambanda, and that the RPA/F systematically killed Hutus in zones under its control.
Based on research for which they were eventually thrown out of Rwanda, U.S. academics Christian Davenport and Alan Stam insist that the numbers of Tutsis killed in Rwanda during the so-called 100 days could not have been as high as the official narrative claims, and that hundreds of thousands of Hutus were killed during this period and these comprise the difference between the official count of 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis and the actual count of hundreds of thousands less Tutsis.
Defense attorneys from the ICTR are adamant that the record shows that there was no systematic planification of genocide by the government of Juvenal Habyarimana or its immediate successors, the interim coalition government of Jean Kambanda formed on April 7, 1994.
The official Rwanda genocide narrative is founded upon the false claim that the Habyarimana government was an extremist Hutu government -- which is what extremist purveyors of the official narrative like Paul Kagame and his elite Tutsi collaborators would like people to believe.
From April 1992 to the middle of July 1993 there was a coalition government led by Prime Minister Dr. Dismas Nsengiyaremye. Members of the coalition represented a diverse political spectrum, including opposition party members from the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR), Parti Liberal (PL), Parti Social Démocrate (PSD) and Parti Démocratique Chrêtien (PDC). There were also members from Habyarimana's ruling party Mouvement Républicain National Pour la Démocratie et le Développement (MRND). Opposition parties had ten ministers in addition to the Prime Minister and the MRND had 10 ministers in addition to President Habyarimana. The one prominent Tutsi in this government was Landoald Ndasingwa from the Parti Liberal, but at least three of the opposition parties were pro-RPF.
From the middle of July 1993 to April 6, 1994, there was a coalition government led by Prime Minister Madam Agathe Uwilingiyimana. The members of the coalition government were from the MDR, PSD, PDC and MRND parties. The MDR party split into two factions after Agathe Uwilingiyimana was appointed Prime Minister by Juvenal Habyariama. PSD, PDC, PL split up later. Some factions were pro-RPF, others were pro-MRND. The pro-MRND factions were later labeled 'Hutu Power'. The label came from a speech made by Froduald Karamira, vice-president of the MDR during a public meeting called to condemn the October 1993 assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye of Burundi, the first Hutu elected president of Burundi. (From Karamira's perspective power belonged to the winners of elections.)
In other words there was no 'Hutu government of Juvenal Habyarimana'. President Habyarimana had been forced by the international community to accept a coalition government, and if there were any extremists in the government, these were the opposition supporters -- like Faustin Twagiramungu and Marianne Baziruwiha -- who sincerely believed that the Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front was bringing equality to Rwanda, and that the RPA/F was genuinely interested in good faith negotiations and peace. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Fautsin Twagiramungu became Prime Minister under the Kagame government at the time of massive atrocities against Hutus inside Rwanda. Marianne Baziruwiha took a position with the RPA/F government after July 1994, where she quickly saw that she was expected to lure Hutus out of hiding so that the RPA/F could kill them: Baziruwiha witnessed this happening. Baziruwiha later worked at the Rwandan Embassy in Washington under RPA/F cadre Theogene Rudasingwa. In the end, Twagiramungu, Baziruwiha and Rudasingwa all fled for their lives and live in exile.
The question or Hutu 'extremists' and the labels like 'extremist Hutu' and 'moderate Hutu' and 'Hutu power' must be unpacked for clarity, and distanced from the reductionist or essentialist narrative where they are used to criminalize and dehumanize all Hutu people. These labels created by and to serve the official 'Hutus killing Tutsis' narrative also inspire the application of labels like 'extremist Tutsi' and 'moderate Tutsi', but the question of Tutsi extremists or Tutsi moderates is never raised, no matter the abject brutality and terrorism of the elite Tutsis of the Kagame inner circles and terror networks. The same is true of language like 'Akazu' or 'inner house' -- another label that was applied to the Habyarimana government and has been applied to Madame Agathe Habyarimana to further the nonsensical proposition that she assassinated her own husband, and which are quite reasonably applied to Kagame and his Akazu.
Other people who could arguably be labeled 'extremists' then would be Belgian academic Philippe Reyntjens, an ardent RPA/F supporter and Habyarimana critic throughout the four year civil war, and up to about 1995 or 1996, where he began to sing a different tune (much to his credit). Dr. Reyntjens has done some fantastic scholarship on the Great Lakes region, and he is not to be confused with French academic Gerard Prunier, whose whitewashing of events and support of the RPA/F official narrative suggests he could easily be an intelligence asset working for the RPA/F or for the United States.
The ICTR acquitted the so-called 'genocide masterminds' of all conspiracy to commit genocide charges, but some were found guilty of 'acts of genocide' and other crimes against humanity. However, every ICTR trial should be declared a mistrial. These trials have been politically motivated, one-sided productions, and not one Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front official or soldier has even been indicted. Controlled and manhandled by the United States, the ICTR is merely dispensing 'victor's justice'.
The ICTR conviction of Jean Kambanda, the former interim prime minister during the 1994 genocide, on the charge of conspiracy to commit genocide was a complete sham: even proponents of the official Rwanda genocide narrative have confirmed that Kambanda was not afforded proper legal representation or anything close to a fair trial. (See, e.g., The Sacrifice of Jean Kambanda: A Comparative Analysis of the Right to Counsel in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the United States, with emphasis on Prosecutor v. Jean Kambanda, Kelly Xi Huei Lalith Ranasing, California Western School of Law, Summer 2004.)
The ICTR trials have persecuted and further dehumanized Hutu people, and they have dismissed and ignored every chance to explore the role of Paul Kagame and the RPA/F in provoking, prolonging and supporting the Tutsi genocide during the 100 days of 1994.
Meanwhile, in 2008 the high court in Spain issued indictments and international arrest warrants against the top 40 Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front officials for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire). The court included Paul Kagame in its consideration of egregious crimes, but is prevented from indicting a sitting head of state.
Business is business: directors of Royal/Dutch Shell Corporation with President Paul Kagame in Kigali.
(Note: The photo on the right to the right and behind shows former President Pasteur Bizimungu, first president under the RPA/F regime, July 19, 1994 to March 23, 2000.)
THE RPA GENOCIDE AGAINST THE HUTU PEOPLE
Beatrice Munyenyezi survived the invasion of Rwanda's Byumba prefecture by the Ugandan troops calling themselves the Rwanda Patriotic Army in 1990. From October 1990 to April 1994 the RPF occupied the large portions of the prefectures of Byumba and Ruhengeri: American satellite pictures would shed light on the destruction caused by the RPF offensive from 1990 to the 1993 ceasefire.
"I spent 3 months in the demilitarized zone resettling internally displaced people," says another unnamed Rwandan genocide survivor. "Based on what I saw, the RPF policy was to kill people, destroy buildings, destroy houses, destroy archives," says witness GOR-3 (not connected to the Munyenyezi trial). "Doors, iron sheets and corrugated metal covering the roofs of houses, furniture, toilets -- everything had been removed and taken to Uganda to be sold. We need the pictures taken by the Pentagon to show the brutality of the RPA invasion and occupation."
Munyenyezi then survived the next four years of RPA/F persecution and genocide that saw entire Hutu villages in Byumba razed, massacres of scores of thousands of mostly (but not only) Hutu people, and the internal displacement of some two million Hutus.
Forced into a life-and-death refugee existence inside Rwanda between October 1990 and April 1994, the displaced Hutu people fought back after the plane carrying the Hutu presidents of both Rwanda and Burundi, and other Rwandan high officials, was shot down over Kigali airport on April 6, 1994.
Beatrice Munyenyezi then survived the so-called '100 days of genocide' in Rwanda from April 6 to July 15, 1994. She fled Rwanda with family members on July 18, 1994, part of the massive exodus of millions of Rwandans, mostly innocent Hutu women and children to eastern Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo).
In Congo-Zaire, Munyenyezi survived the most ruthless and cold-blooded slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilians by the RPA, Ugandan People's Defense Forces and some lesser numbers of Ethiopian, Eritrean, and South African troops. The RPA-led genocide in Congo-Zaire began in August 1996 when the RPA shelled refugee camps in the Kivu provinces in violation of international law.
In Goma, DRC, at this time, a western war correspondent photographed U.S. Special Forces machine-gunning unarmed refugee men, women and children in what he described as "one of the most horrible examples of mass atrocities I have ever seen."
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) had been stockpiling World Food Program provisions and for months these had been denied to starving Rwandan refugees. The massive WFP provisions meant for refugees -- mostly non-combatant Rwandan Hutu men, women and children -- were used to feed the invading RPA/F troops.
For the next year, UNHCR helped the Rwandan Patriotic Front and its backers -- Pentagon, U.S. State Department, USAID, DFID, Israel, Belgium -- to hunt down and forcibly repatriate Hutu refugees as they ran for their lives all across Congo. UNHCR even paid a bounty to local Congolese for refugees. In Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon, and Gabon it was the same story: UNHCR hunted the refugees down, paid a bounty, coerced the local dictatorships (Omar Bongo in Gabon, Paul Biya in Cameron), and forcibly repatriated Rwandan refugees back to death camps, torture and mass graves in Rwanda.
Howard French of the New York Times made a few protestations to his editors in New York, but soon he left Central Africa to work as NYT bureau chief in China. Howard French mumbles a few words about Rwanda and Congo now and then, but he is an officially sanctioned voice who maintains his highly paid job at the New York Times precisely because he has said nothing at all of any real substance about U.S. and British and Belgian and German and Canadian and Israeli agents responsible for the Hutu genocide in Zaire.
Like almost everyone else, Howard French abandoned the Hutus to be slaughtered. As the truth about atrocities and complicity in mass murder increasingly comes to light, we find establishment insiders arguing with establishment insiders in well-to-do establishment journals that always remain silent when the carnage is happening, as in the case of the atrocities being committed in the Congo (Afghanistan, Iraq, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda) at present.
UNHCR head Sagato Ogata even landed by plane near Tingi Tingi refugees camp in Zaire, when the RPA/F attack was imminent, and threatened refugees -- which by now included Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi, and internally displaced Congolese people -- that if they didn't return to Rwanda they would be killed. The RPA/F attacked, Ogata was off to some posh celebration in some fancy hotel. Tens of and thousands of refugees were killed and scores of thousands fled west into the forests to suffer and die.
"[French] Military officers and the [French] intelligence services were not satisfied with the satellite images furnished by the Americans," writes investigative journalist Pierre Péan, "which showed no signs of the refugees; these pictures did not correspond at all with the information that was coming in to them off the ground from numerous human sources. At the beginning of November, a Bréguet Atlantic reconnaissance plane spotted groups of refugees and transmitted photos of two US Blackhawk helicopters."
"French spies were questioned about the role of the Green Berets in the massacres that took place after the taking of Bukavu at the end of October 1996," Pierre Péan continues, in Carnages, his massive exposé on U.S., Nato and Israeli interventions and dirty tricks in Africa.
"They were also asked about the origins of the nighttime aerial machine gun fire against the refugee camps:
That poses some serious considerations when you know that among the American aircraft used was at least one C-130 gunship from the Special Forces, a veritable flying gunboat, armor-plated and equipped with a 105 mm canon, rockets and machine guns, capable even of dropping mines. What was it doing there if, as the American Commander would have it, it was only searching out the refugees to study ways to bring them aid?
After the refugee camps in eastern Zaire were attacked, Beatrice Munyenyezi fled from Congo to Kenya at the advice of her brother, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, another U.S. citizen also being hunted by the Kagame regime and its political, military and economic partners.
In Tanzania and Kenya, Beatrice Munyenyezi survived RPF agents hunting refugees and assassinating dissidents, including former RPF official Seth Sendashonga, who was minister of the interior in Rwanda from 1994 to 1998.
Jean Marie Vianney Higiro is the real target of the Kagame regime's persecution of Beatrice Munyenyezi: the regime has held a vendetta against Higiro since his refusal to accept a post in the Kagame terrorist government in July 1994. Higiro was evacuated from Rwanda by U.S. marines around April 8, 1994.
The security apparatus of the Kagame regime has been hunting refugees in Europe and in North America since 1994, and Rwandan dissidents have been assassinated in Europe and Africa. In May 2011, an assassination plot was foiled in London by the U.K. government. Former Rwandan minister Juvenal Uwilingiyimana and Colonel Laurent Nubaha 'mysteriously' turned up dead in Belgium. Colonel Theoneste Lizinde and Seth Sendashonga, former RPF interior minister, were both assassinated in Nairobi; Pasteur Musabe was assassinated in Cameroon. There was also an attempt on the life of Rwanda's ex-army chief, Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa in South Africa. International arrest warrants against genocide suspects and non-genocide suspects are also used as weapons to neutralize and silence. The U.S. government, Canada, Britain and Israel back the hunting down of Rwandan dissidents to prop up their client regime: the dictatorship of Paul Kagame.
Rwanda provides a major base for the U.S. Department of Defense military occupation of Africa and for U.S. and allied intelligence and defense operations. While allied operations involve many NATO countries, Britain and Israel are the main intelligence and defense partners for the U.S. in Central Africa; Germany and Belgium are not far behind them.
There is no freedom of speech in Rwanda today. There is no freedom of press. There is no freedom to organize. There is no freedom of assembly. The Kagame regime continues to assassinate and disappear critics, journalists, former business associates, former military and former government officials.
On March 31, 2012, Kagame's former Chief of Staff Theogene Rudasingwa, a Tutsi in exile, announced that Paul Kagame was the instigator of the January 2001 assassination of Congolese President Laurent Desire Kabila. Theogene Rudasingwa is also the former RPA/F Secretary General and former ambassador to Washington under the Kagame regime.
The most recent assassinations include several Rwandan journalists killed in Uganda earlier this year. Opposition candidate Victoire Ingabire remains imprisoned and subject to a political charade trial because she returned to Rwanda from Belgium and courageously proclaimed the heretical obvious: There was a genocide against Hutus as well as Tutsis.
In July 2010, the body of the deputy leader of the Democratic Green Party was found dumped by a river near the southern town of Butare. Opposition politician Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, a Tutsi politician, was decapitated for his opposition to the Kagame regime.
The RPA/F government routinely rounds up numerous supposed supporters of opposition parties, and people have routinely been disappeared merely for showing some allegiance to the opposition Green Party or the PS-Imberakuri party.
"So many Tutsis are also suffering political repression," says 'Ignace', a high level Rwandan dissident who fears retaliation from the U.S. government for speaking out. "Tutsis who live in Rwanda are silent because they fear repression. Tutsis who live abroad in exile, like Theogene Rudasingwa and Gerald Gahima and General Kayumba Nyamwasa are also living in fear of assassination."
Kayumba-&-Kagame.gif
Paul Kagame and former RPA General Kayumba Nyamwasa.
Hutus throughout the country are subject to slavery conditions and millions of people -- Hutus, Tutsis, Twa -- outside the cliques of power are suffering extreme poverty. Most egregious, the RPA/F genocide against Hutu people continues: there is at present a campaign in Rwanda to forcibly sterilize Hutu males. At present the government claims this is "voluntary" sterilization for population control, but the government is already pressing forced sterilization in certain cases and there is a history of deeply repressive and coercive policies that have been put into practice by force. According to an ICTR defense attorney interviewed in Arusha, the program is aimed at substantial reductions of the majority Hutu population.
"The RPF's reconstruction and reconciliation policies do not represent a sincere attempt to unify and reconcile Rwandans," writes Dr. Susan Thomson. "Instead, it is a mechanism of state power that presents a self-serving version of history and manipulates the language of ethnicity to justify and maintain policies of exclusion and oppression of ethnic Hutu in maintaining the appearance of peace and security... In practice, the government approaches post-genocide justice through the maximal prosecution of all Hutu."
A U.S. academic who worked in Rwanda and experienced the indoctrination camps run by the Kagame regime, Dr. Susan Thomson is persona non grata in Rwanda today. (And so is this correspondent.)
THE RWANDA GENOCIDE TOURISM INDUSTRY
After the arrest of Beatrice Munyenyezi in 2010, agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) traveled to Rwanda to gather evidence to support the charges against her.
It is likely both U.S. prosecutors were flown over to Rwanda for some genocide tourism, at least once if not multiple times. Both defense attorneys traveled to RWanda twice. There were also two investigative missions sent there for the Munyenyezi 'discovery'. Because Beatrice Munyenyezi was indigent, both of her defense attorneys traveled to Rwanda all expenses paid by U.S. taxpayers; it is likely that the two primary U.S. prosecutors also traveled there.
While prosecutors John Capin and Aloke Chakravarthy may or may not have traveled to Rwanda, independent investigations in Rwanda are impossible. The U.S. government does not send unbiased investigators to Rwanda: it sends agents intent on collecting the information and documentation provided by their client regime to protect their client regime.
It is especially easy to manipulate tourists or students or researchers who arrive in Rwanda for their first visit to Africa. White people are taken to the genocide memorials and the shock of these staged-managed productions -- all these Hutu and Tutsi skeletons piled up and labeled 'Tutsi victims of genocide' -- strikes deep into the psyche of the spectator. People don't arrive with clean slates: the mass media has deeply conditioned western news and entertainment consumers to see Africa through a racist and exploitative lens.
The viewing of skeletons and skulls in Rwanda has become a lucrative spectator sport and the conditioning by the white systems of power in western countries has created naive and racially conditioned spectators who are easily fooled. Once they have seen the 'horrors' of the genocide memorials the average white and even non-white western spectators (e.g. African Americans) are often horrified into a subconscious shock and disbelief where reason and common sense are no longer accessible.
Foreigners take the skeletons and skulls as the unassailable truth -- it does not cross their minds that there might be some other interpretation of the art project they see before them. It doesn't occur to people that the truth has been distilled down -- essentialized -- into piles of skeletons, or shoes, or scattered clothing, or machetes that no longer appropriately re-present the original circumstances and context..
Skulls-Bogoro.gif
Victims of mass atrocities in Bogoro, DRC. c. keith harmon snow, DRC, 2007.
However, the fact is that virtually everyone in Rwanda owns a machete. Ditto in Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Uganda and rural Tanzania. They are as common a personal item as a wallet or purse or ball point pen is to a westerner. The entire machete narrative -- Hutus butchering Tutsis in 100 days, blah, blah, blah -- is deeply problematic, since the RPA/F routinely killed people with machetes both to disguise (normalize) the means of death such that the perpetrators and the victims could not be distinguished and so that the RPA/F narrative of 'bloodthirsty Hutus killing Tutsis with machetes' could easily be advanced. The RPA/F also wanted to save on bullets.
There is a genocide economy in Rwanda that serves foreign visitors who spend millions of dollars annually to travel to Rwanda, stay in fancy hotels, eat at restaurants, visit the mountain gorillas in Rwanda's national parks, hire cars, and drivers, and interpreters, and purchase souvenirs -- or 'free trade' coffee produced on lands stolen from the Hutu masses. There is a whole industry that revolves around the production and maintenance of the official Rwanda genocide story about Hutus killing Tutsis in 100 days of horror.
The U.S. government pays all the travel and per diem expenses of genocide 'investigators', and everything is covered at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Rwandan 'victims' and 'survivors' who are brought to the United States are also fully paid.
"This is genocide tourism," says 'Ignace'. "They are not investigative. They stay at fancy hotels, they visit some locations, they see the skeletons and skulls at 'genocide memorials', they meet President Kagame, and they are assigned government handlers who make sure they get what Kagame and people in Washington want. They drink a lot of wine and swim in the swimming pools. They don't know anything about Rwanda and everything looks very romantic. Then they come back and accuse innocent people of genocide."
PENTAGON SATELLITE PHOTOS EXPOSED
The existence of satellite reconnaissance photographs has not been revealed even during the 18 years of very high profile genocide trials held at the ICTR.
During his entire three-plus years in Rwanda from 1990 to November 1993, former U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda Robert Flatten's requests for Pentagon-DIA spy satellite photographs showing the progress of the war in the Rwandan countryside were turned down -- because of "clouds over Rwanda" they told him.
Scott Erlinder tracked down NASA Space Shuttle images shot over Rwanda in 1994. "...[this] shows there were, at least sometimes, clear views of Rwanda in 1994," said Erlinder. "I found this a year ago when I heard about the 'bad weather' that [supposedly] precluded the State Dept from getting photos of Rwanda."
The photograph is described by NASA as a "C- and L-band image [was] acquired on April 12, 1994, on orbit 58 of space shuttle Endeavour by the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar." The existence of these gorilla habitat photos in effect helps to mislead the general public by providing cover for the military (RPA/F support) and commercial (mining) objectives of the NASA shuttle missions over Rwanda. Imagine, if we were to foolishly believe the official narrative, 100 days of slaughter, beginning April 6, 1994, Hutus killing Tutis, and how the U.S. intelligence community 'didn't know' what was going on -- and here contradicting that we have the NASA space shuttle Endeavor snapping photos on April 12, 1994, as the cataclysm is unfolding.
In fact, in the 1960's the U.S. government delineated a policy that would be used to enable the release of highly classified information without acknowledging or revealing the source. "Department of Defense lawyers pointed out that deliberately making public even one space reconnaissance photograph," wrote William E. Burrows (in an article entitled "Imaging Space Reconnaissance Opprations during the Cold War: Cause, Effect and Legacy"), "would open a floodgate of requests for more material through the Freedom of Information Act, which became law in 1966. Answering such requests would in itself consume immense amounts of time and resources. As a result, scenes that were photographed by satellites and which the intelligence community wanted to make public -- showing Soviet activity in Nicaragua in 1982, for example -- would be rephotographed by aircraft before they were shown."
The production and public release of images shot during the so-called '100 days of genocide' over Rwanda by the NASA space shuttle -- a publicly known entity perceived to be involved in scientific research and not recognized as a super secretive defense asset -- certainly qualifies to mask the deep satellite intelligence operations of the Pentagon. The 1960's directive for handling classified intel fits the current story exactly: NRO and NGA images were never previously released, while fixed wing (space shuttle) images of 'gorilla habitat' were released. And, now that the existence of classified satellite imagery has been confirmed, ICTR defense attorneys and others will immediately petition for public release under Freedom of Information Act and other legal means.
In her pivotal propaganda piece, "Bystanders to Genocide" (Harpers, September 2001), Harvard University scholar and U.S. war crimes apologist Samantha Power claimed that the U.S. had the means to 'stop the genocide' but instead we stood by. These means, she correctly noted, would include satellite imagery. However, Power's role was to further whitewash U.S. involvement in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, as her Pulitzer prize-winning book The Road to Hell: America in the Age of Genocide quite clearly demonstrates.
"Whatever the inevitable imperfections of U.S. intelligence early on, the reports from Rwanda were severe enough to distinguish Hutu killers from ordinary combatants in civil war," Samantha Power disingenuously wrote, in 'Bystanders to Genocide'. "And they certainly warranted directing additional U.S. intelligence assets toward the region -- to snap satellite photos of large gatherings of Rwandan civilians or of mass graves, to intercept military communications, or to infiltrate the country in person. Though there is no evidence that senior policymakers deployed such assets, routine intelligence continued to pour in."
Samantha Power's "Bystanders to Genocide" article appeared in Atlantic Monthly in September 2001. While it was a major piece of establishment disinformation, the story was immediately eclipsed by the 9/11 catastrophe. The article was intended to deceive, and that is why Samantha Power is a national security insider in the Obama administration, and why her subsequent book won a Pulitzer Prize.
The Atlantic Monthly, on the other hand, is a major establishment mouthpiece, always producing pseudo-exposés presented as highly revealing investigative journalism. Lockheed Martin is perhaps THE most significant 'black programs' contractor: the beyond top secret "Skunk Works" builds and tests sophisticated satellite intelligence and reconnaissance satellites for the NRO. Lockheed Martin is also a major advertiser with the Atlantic Monthly.
In a December 2001 letter to Harper's editors, U.S. academic Alan J. Kuperman disputed Samantha Power's claim that "the United States failed to snap satellite photos of large gatherings of Rwandan civilians or of mass graves" stating: "Actually, within three days of the outbreak of violence on April 6, 1994, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency obtained satellite photos, communications intercepts, and human intelligence that confirmed a widespread, centrally controlled killing campaign. I reported these facts, based on interviews with senior U.S. intelligence officials, in my recent book, The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Brookings, 2001)."
However, in a 2000 edition of Foreign Affairs, Alan Kuperman argued that President Clinton "could not have known that a nationwide genocide was under way" until about two weeks into the killing. In any case, the existence of satellite photos has never received any substantive attention and they have never been revealed until now.
The authenticity of the satellite images produced in the Munyenyezi trial in New Hampshire has not been established. Question: If satellite images existed, say some critics, then why were they not produced in high-profile cases at the ICTR -- which is a show trial completely run by the United States? Answer: The answer is because the images will probably reveal U.S. military involvement, Nato involvement, RPA/F troop movements and bases, military hardware and weaponry, UNAMIR actions, and other very revealing information. There is substantial reason to believe that the satellite photographs may be exactly what the Pentagon described them as.
If Washington had the capability to monitor events from a satellite platform they certainly were doing so. And Washington had that capacity indeed. When detailed reports of geographical areas, military installations and activities, troop positions, or other picture-based intelligence are required, the Defense establishment relies on data provided by IMINT (Image Intelligence) satellites. Operating in low, near-polar orbits at an altitude of between 500 and 3,000 kilometers, and maintaining the same orbit around the Earth, they make about 14 revolutions per day.
In 1994, the U.S. intelligence and defense establishment was flying two older versions of the LANDSAT remote sensing satellite platforms in outer orbit. LANDSAT-4 and LANDSAT-5 had both exceeded their design lifetimes but were operational and had the capability to capture accurate and detailed imagery of what was happening in Rwanda during the 100 days of genocide.
The U.S. intelligence community was also flying at least three models of the 'Key Hole' reconnaissance satellites launched after 1992: Kh-11, KH-12 and KH-13. The most advanced of these satellites had a resolution of around 10-15 centimeters, but could not see through clouds and did not have 'dwell capability' (the ability to maintain orbit over a specific location). A series of satellites that costs around $1.5 billion, Key Hole enables identification of objects 6 to 8.5 inches across, although it is speculated that the actual resolution may even be as good as 4 inches.
KH-11 satellites have infrared imagery capability, including a thermal infrared imagery capability, and thus allow imagery in darkness. Declassified KH-11 photographs that have been actively used in war-fighting and interventions include photographs of the Zhawar Kili Base Camp in Afghanistan, purported to house training facilities for 'Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization'. KH-12's have advanced infrared capability useful in detecting camouflage, looking at buried structures. By looking at temperature differences between objects, analysts can determine such things as which factories are operational or whether tank engines have been running recently. Its image resolution approaches 10 centimeters. The KH-13 is an electro-optical/IR satellite undetectable by radar or infrared sensors as a safeguard against the possible use of anti-satellite weapons.
High resolution images photographed over Rwanda could also have been captured using the Lockheed SR-71 'Blackbird', an advanced, long-range, Mach 3+ strategic reconnaissance aircraft developed as a black project by the Lockheed Skunk Works. The U.S. Air Force launched the black operations SR-71 in 1964, and it was retired in the early 1990's when unmanned aerospace vehicles became more prominent. However, the SR-71 was reactivated in 1993 after Lockheed Martin billed U.S. taxpayers $US 72 million.
As we will see, there was also the NASA Space Shuttle.
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While reputed to be photo-shopped photo, Congolese experts insist that this photo is authentic: Hyppolite Kanambe alias Joseph Kabila was a military officer attached to Paul Kagame during the 1996-1997 invasion and conquest of Congo-Zaire.
THE GREAT LAKES GENOCIDE COVER-UP
The existence of satellite images raises questions about what the Pentagon knows and what they are hiding. For example, satellite imagery would clearly show the wreckage of the presidential plane crash site, and photos would show who was in control of the crash site immediately after the April 6 assassinations, and who controlled the site over the next weeks and months. But they would also show military hardware being shipped in by the U.S., and U.S. military involvement.
"The U.S. was directly involved in the April-July 1994 events," says ICTR defense attorney Christopher Black. "U. N. investigator Michael Hourigan implicates the CIA in the attack on the plane. There is the presence of U.S. defense attaché Lt. Col. Charles Vuckovic in Kigali just days before the shoot down. After April 6th, the U.S. was supplying the RPF forces using C-130 Hercules aircraft. General Ndindiliyimana testified [at the ICTR] that the U.S. Air Force was airdropping men and weapons to the RPF and he was not challenged on this testimony. Also, the U.N. Rwanda Emergency Office was in reality completely staffed by U.S. army officers and acted as the operational headquarters for the RPF. Further, U.S. allies like Canada also assisted the RPF: General Romeo Dallaire was in breach of his required U.N. neutrality and Belgian forces also are deeply implicated."
The United States has blocked every bonafide investigation into the double presidential assassinations since 1994. The Kagame regime has produced several reports (e.g. Mucyo Report), but these self-interested productions are easily discredited.
Former RPA/F official Theogene Rudasingwa claims that Paul Kagame and an elite RPA/F hit squad are behind the shooting down of the presidential plane, and thus the RPA/F sparked the genocide of Tutsis, knowing Tutsis would be massacred everywhere, and these claims are backed up by other former RPA/F soldiers.
Satellite imagery would also show the locations, strengths and activities of RPA/F troops, government (FAR) troops and militias. It is well known that the RPA/F infiltrated the Interahamwe militias, and therefore RPA/F are believed to have controlled some road blocks, and it is very curious that no satellite photos have previously been produced to show where road blocks and bridges were occupied, and who occupied them.
Probably this is because the RPA/F was in control of areas like the Kagera National Park, and RPA were dumping dead Hutus and (French-speaking) Tutsis in the Kagera River. The infamous mythology about Tutsi bodies floating down the Kagera River is completely contradicted by the declassified memo from Mark Prutsalis of the NGO Refugees International.
In a May 17, 1994 situation report (SITREP #10: Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania) to Refugees International headquarters in Washington D.C., Mark Prutsalis described documented RPA atrocities on the Tanzania-Rwanda border. The document details gruesome and egregious war crimes, crimes against humanity and the indiscriminate killing of both Hutus and Tutsi civilians by RPA soldiers -- atrocities witnessed and documented by foreigners working for UNHCR and UNICEF, and for the international NGOs Refugees International, Red Cross, CARE, International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
For example:
"The following are excerpts from a UNHCR-Ngara protection report on border crossing points from an assessment made on 14 and 15 May:"
"At RUSUMO commune, sector KIGARAMA, the RPF came and called for a 'peace meeting'. Those, who did not participate voluntarily, were forced to the meeting. At the school people were tied together, three by three -- men/women/children - and stabbed. The bodies were put on trucks and thrown into the Kagera River, north of Rusumo Bridge..."
"At RUSUMO commune, sectors NYAMUGARI, GISENYI, NYARUBUJE, the RPF comes at 05h00 waiting for villagers to open their doors. The villagers are caught and taken away to the river by trucks. No one has returned. Refugees from the area have seen people being tied together and thrown into the river. It seems as if guns are used only if somebody tries to escape..."
At RUSUMO commune, sector MUZAZA, village GASARABWAYI (4 kms from the river), the RPF launched several attacks on the village and its population. On the 13.05 [May 13] 40 RPF soldiers came at 07h00. They surrounded the village. Villagers were gathered in houses, which were burned down. An eyewitness saw 20 people being killed this way. 8 villagers were thrown into a latrine, and the latrine was filled with soil. Asked by UNHCR field officer refugees said that the RPF did not care whether victims were Hutu or Tutsi villagers."
"An IRC staff person wrote to their office," the Refugees International SITREP concluded. "Things are getting very bad at the border here... Someone really needs to do something about all of the [RPA] killing and torture on the other [Rwanda] side. Each day there are more and more bodies in the river and most of them without their heads; the count is between 20 and 30 each 30 minutes."
"The people of Rwanda have nowhere else to go and we cannot expect them to stay and be slaughtered in their homes," Mark Prutsalis wrote. "This remote inaccessible part of Tanzania cannot continue to receive thousands of refugees per day. We will soon be overwhelmed here unless someone takes action to end the bloodshed, the atrocities, the massacres in Rwanda."
The genocide against Tutsis and Hutus continued after 1994 and there has never been a U.S. investigation into the roles of the Pentagon, CIA and DIA in the cataclysms in Rwanda and Congo-Zaire.
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Soldiers of the first FARDC integrated brigade. c. keith harmon snow, South Kivu, DRC, 2006.
One direct witness to events in Rwanda leading up the 1994 genocide was a researcher connected to a foreign NGO who knows something about NASA space shuttle images collected over Rwanda but who has never gone public. Witness GOR-2 (not connected to the Munyenyezi case) worked closely with the Juvenal Habyarimana regime prior to April 1994 and again closely with the new Kagame government after 1994.
Witness GOR-2 described how the RPA/F used the Volcanoes National Park as a military base to launch Congo-Zaire operations after 1994. Witness GOR-2 had regular contact with the Rwandan Ministry of Defense, the office of President Kagame, and with former RPA Secretary General Theogene Rudasingwa. According to GOR-2, there were NASA space shuttle flights over Zaire and Rwanda in April and September of 1994, on U.S. government-sponsored research under contract NAS7-1260.
GOR-2 said that white soldiers driving tanks were seen inside the park heading to Zaire in September 1996. GOR-2 said that the United Nation's IRIN report described this as U.S. soldiers going into Goma but that the IRIN report was quickly removed from the Internet. GOR-2 explained how the RPA/F would close the Volcanoes National Park for days at a time while involved in military operations and 'clean-ups': "The Rwandan Patriotic Army would just close the park for days at a time and we didn't know what was going on in there."
The gate at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund / UGADEC compound in Goma, DRC. c. keith harmon snow, 2006.
GOR-2 explained how the Volcanoes National Park was flooded with thousands of Rwandan refugees returning from Zaire after the U.S.-backed invasion by Kagame and Museveni forces in 1996, and that the park became an RPA 'killing zone'.
"We had a massive clean-up operation to remove bodies in 1999," GOR-2 said, "trying to get out all the dead bodies, and all the rags and pots and pans."
GOR-2 was always in close personal contact with Major Richard Skow, the U.S. military attaché from the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, and Robert E. Gribbon, the U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda at the time.
GOR-2 described airborne remote sensing flyovers using a new state-of-the-art technology involving hyper-spectral analysis where flights were made over Rwanda and eastern Congo. GOR-2 claims that some 22 CDs of raw data were delivered by Claire Richardson, the head of the USA-based Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (DFGF), to Theogene Rudasingwa at the Rwandan Ministry of Defense. GOR-2 said the flyovers were coordinated by the National Geographic Society and DFGF and were supposedly for gorilla conservation -- habitat mapping -- but were actually meant to locate mineral resources that the RPA could exploit.
DFGF's initiatives in remote sensing occurred in partnerships with two high-technology intelligence and defense research firms, the Idaho-based Earth Search Sciences Inc. (ESSI) and an affiliated firm, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI). The secrecy of these firms, the lack of oversight and the suspicious nature of the projects suggests they may be involved in covert operations in Central Africa.
Flyovers-2.jpg
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) was created in 2003. Prior to 2003 it was known as the National Imagery and Maping Agency (NIMA), which in 1996 absorbed four highly secretive intelligence entities: National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), Defense Mapping Agency (DMA), the Defense Dissemination Program Office, and the Central Imagery Office. According to one NIMA report, "[i]n the late 1990's... NIMA supported humanitarian relief efforts in Rwanda and Uganda with quickly produced Landsat image maps used by U.N. relief workers to deliver aid shipments to the refugee camps."
The satellite imaging conducted over Rwanda from 1990 to 1994 probably involved the DMA and NPIC. DMA was formed in 1973 to consolidate mapping operations of the armed forces. NPIC began in 1953 as an expansion of the CIA's photo-interpretation organization. NPIC was the agency that identified the missiles that created the Cuban missile crises and also flew the U-2 spy planes that were being shot down over Red China.
According to the NGA web site: "As both a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community and a Department of Defense Combat Support Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) produces timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, to help all levels of users meet their strategic and operational needs in support of national security.
A cursory review of NGA personnel reveals close ties many deep intelligence and defense entities, including Lockheed Martin Corporation, Being, SAIC and a variety of other beyond Top Secret entities like ERDA and ESRI. NGA 'customers' include the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
The prosecution witness and Pentagon analyst Eric Benn joined the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 1983 and he was promoted to Senior Analyst for the DIA's Office for Imagery Analysis in 1991. He attended the National War College at Ft. McNair in 1993-4 and received a Masters Degree in National Security Studies. "The Technical Executive of NGA's Analysis and Production Directorate, Eric Benn serves as the principal adviser to the NGA, IC and DoD leadership on the current and future Geospatial Intelligence analytic environment."
Beyond supporting the 16 Intelligence Community (IC) 'customers', one of the primary responsibilities of NIMA (and its predecessor agencies) is to support Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities (TIARA) and warfighting command. NGA's geospatial intelligence mission supports four main customer sets: (1) The warfighter; (2) National policymakers; (3) Local first responders through federal agencies (FEMA, etc.); (4) Intelligence Community (IC) partners.
The U.S. Army's GEOINT Battalion traces its lineage back to the U.S. Army Intelligence Threat and Analysis Center (ITAC) organized in 1975. In 1977, ITAC was provisionally established by Headquarters, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) as a major subordinate command and was collocated with the Defense Intelligence Agency at Arlington Hall Station. In 1985, ITAC was placed under the control of the Army Intelligence Agency until 1991, when it was again placed under INSCOM.
According to the U.S. Army's own description: "Since its origins in ITAC, the Army GEOINT Battalion has provided geospatial-intelligence (GEOINT) in support of all major U.S. campaigns. Combat operations supported over the last 20 years include Operation Desert Storm (Kuwait), Operation Uphold Democracy (Haiti), Operation Restore Hope (Somalia), Operation Support Hope (Rwanda), Operation Joint Endeavor (Bosnia), Operation Allied Force (Kosovo), Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq), and Operation New Dawn (Iraq)."
photo-3.jpg
It is interesting that the U.S. Army defines Operation Support Hope as a major U.S. combat operation and lists it along with all these other major combat operations. Wikipedia and other sources describe Operation Support Hope as a purely humanitarian mission: "a 1994 United States military effort to provide immediate relief for the refugees of the Rwandan Genocide and allow a smooth transition to a full United Nations humanitarian management program.
On July 22, 1994 President Clinton announced Operation Support Hope and two days later American joint task forces were airlifted to Goma, Zaire; Kigali, Rwanda; Entebbe, Uganda; and Mombasa, Kenya. U.S. Air Force liaison officers were assigned to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)'s air operations cell in Geneva and assigned to joint logistics cells and civil-military operations centers in the field.
The joint task force was headquartered in Entebbe, with the role of providing a cargo airlift to supplement United Nations efforts. The United States Army purportedly set up a "major water supply system at the refugee camp in Goma and helped bury the dead." During the peak of Operation Support Hope in late August, the United States had 2350 service members deployed. As part of Operation Support Hope, the American defense contractor Halliburton Corporation earned $US 6.3 million through its engineering and construction subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR).
Hindsight, and plenty of evidence, suggests that Operation Support Hope was a full-blown military operation to support the RPA/F and UPDF against the fleeing Hutu masses. The U.S. military does not altruistically provide humanitarian aid to refugees -- especially when those refugees are considered the enemy as the Hutus were and the Pentagon's proxy army is consolidating power over a war zone. UNHCR also proved to be hostile to the Hutu refugees. Given the magnitude and speed of mortality amongst the refugee population, Operation Support Hope may even have involved biological weapons. These satellite photographs make it clear that intelligence was not lacking and the U.S. government is in possession of evidence that would answer serious questions about what really happened and in the eastern Congo.
Thanks to the " fact of " the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency images having been declassified and introduced in the trial of Beatrice Munyenyezi, if there is any power beyond the words "never again" it is that now never again can the U.S. officials in power at the time -- William Jefferson Clinton (President) or Warren Christopher (Secretary of State) or Madeleine Albright (Ambassador to the United Nations) or William Perry (Secretary of Defense) or R. James Woolsey (CIA Director) or Anthony Lake (National Security Adviser) -- claim that they didn't know what was happening on the ground in Rwanda. They did. They always did. They knew at the time and they have known since.
RWANDA'S ONGOING PLUNDER OF CONGO
The U.S. Department of Defense also oversees and supports plunder and depopulation in the Eastern Congo, where Rwanda and Uganda maintain economic, political and military control.
Under the cover of military operations to capture and kill supposed Rwandan 'genocidaires' in Congo (Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda) and supposed Ugandan terrorists (including Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army) western mining companies have been stripping and shipping Congolese minerals without oversight or regulation since the Pentagon-backed invasion of September 1996.
Canadian Banro Corporation is one of the most secretive corporations operating in Congo, and they have established and maintained their control through very tight relations with the Kagame regime. Banro has taken over thousands of hectares of South Kivu province by manipulating the local mwamis (chiefs), by bribing officials and by infiltrating officials onto power who are friendly to Banro and Kagame's interests.
Banro describes its operations as 'stable' and 'community-aligned' but local human rights groups paint a very different picture, one of terrorism all over the region. Banro's secutrity manager is from the private military company Erinys International, a British mercenary firm 'registered' in the British Virgin Islands. Banro works exclusively with Erinys International, a firm that also operates in Iraq.
The areas around Banro concessions (e.g. Shabunda, Fizi, Walungu) have seen some of the worst bloodshed in all of the Congo, often perpetrated by Rwandan forces connected to Paul Kagame and then blamed on Congolese Mai Mai or the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).
The Banro concessions can be seen in the map below, where total territory under Banro exploration is almost as big as the entire countries of Rwanda or Burundi. This would not be possible without a close military and intelligence alliance between Banro and the Kagame government. On 7 March 2012, Banro announced plans to start its second mine in DRC,
------------------------------------
NOTES:
[1] See: Ndiaye, B.w., Report by Special Rapporteur on his mission to Rwanda from 8 to 17 April 1993, Commission on Human Rights, U.N. Economic and Social Council document E/CN.4/1994/7/Add.1, 11 August 1993, p. 23.
Written by: keith harmon snow
Photography Credits: keith harmon snow where noted
Categories: Congo, Immigration & Refugees, Militarism, Pentagon Africa Command, Rwanda, United States
Tags: 18th anniversary of Rwanda genocide, Banro, central africa, commemoration of rwanda genocide, Congo, Hutu genocide, Kabarebe, Kabila, Kagame, Kanambe, refugees international, Sahbunda, Tutsi genocide, Zaire
6 Comments
Joerg Scherze | April 8, 2012 11:41 AM
thanks for the contribution. It uncovers the dirty game of political criminals and exemplified also the background. I've been recently in Rwunda and could tell you much more abaut it. I tried to figure out what really happend those days, so I've been some specific places in order to get in touch with the locals more closly. They told me unbelievable thinks abaut this Genocide. Tutsi as well than Hutu. Up to now it's hard to get out this tragedy of my system.
Mapinga | April 8, 2012 3:53 PM
Toute personne consciente doit prendre ces informations en compte et réagir en conséquence, car selon moi, les blancs qui se trouvent sur notre sol ne sont pas venus pour nous aider, mais, au contraire faire le plan qui a été écrit depuis plusieurs décennies.A la violence, il faut répondre par la violence; ceux qui sont morts doivent être venger par tous les moyens que se soient. Vous savez ce qui vous reste à faire. Game over
JONASSE | April 10, 2012 2:21 AM
Des preuves accablantes s'il en fallait encore davantage pour démontrer aux Congolais combien ils sont aussi bêtes que leurs pieds en s'associant à l'oeuvre dévastatrice et colonisatrice entreprise par la Belgique et le Rwanda au Congo.
Mike Corbeil | April 10, 2012 5:42 AM
Mapinga,
Je ne te connais pas personnellement, mais je peux comprendre la colère que tu exprime. Par contre, nous avons déjà de la grande difficulté à persuader la majorité des électeurs ou voteurs à cesser de voter pour des candidats qui ne sont pas réellement électable et qui, la plupart du temps en tout cas, sont pourris. La meilleure approche est par le vote. Mais les élections de candidats pourris ou pour lesquels nous n'avons pas de preuves que nous pouvons avoir confiance en eux ne cessent pas. Et ça sera énormement plus difficile à convaincre des populations qu'il faut se tourner vers la guerre civile.
Ça devrait être plus facile de persuader les voteurs qu'ils et elles ont fait des choix erronés pour des candidats électorale, et de les aider de cesser de répeter ces erreurs, que ça serait de persuader suffisamment de monde à se révolter avec violence, des actions de guerre civile. Et c'est très difficile. Nous avons, jusqu'à présent, un grand nombre d'électeurs irresponsable, non-vigilant. Nous avons aussi des élections qui sont régulièrement faussée avec l'utilisation de diffèrents trucs (tricks, en anglais).
Les EUA ne sont pas réellement démocratique. Il y a beaucoup de fraude.
Chercher la vengeance ne fournira pas une solution permanente. Ça peut fournir une satisfaction, en premier temps, mais non pas une satisfaction permanente.
Translation:
This isn't an exact translation, but will roughly say the essence of the above.
Resorting to violence, civil war isn't the solution, not a permanent kind anyway. We need a democratic sort of revolution. Voters need to be persuaded that they've been wrong and must cease electing and re-electing unvetted and unvettable candidates. Et cetera.
We need government, politics cleansed of corruption. We need voters to wake up and cease electing an re-electing unvettable candidates. And that's the starting point, or one of the starting points, for we also have election or voting fraud going on with electronic voting that can be easily falsified. And when voter ballots are on paper, then there're many stories about boxes of such ballots "disappearing". Maybe it didn't happen in the USA, but it certainly did in some other countries, and a "funny" thing about those cases is that the "mysterious" disappearance of such boxes worked out "favourably" for Washington and its masters.
While I can empathize with the emotional reaction of wanting civil war, I don't think it can provide a lasting solution, if the war was won by the revolutionists, say.
Furthermore, there's the post by Jonasse.
Jonasse refers to the Congolese as having made idotic decisions.
Did the majority of Congolese make the sort of mistake Jonasse is referring to, or has the problem mostly been due to electoral fraud committed in one or more ways?
amadea | April 12, 2012 6:17 AM
we are going to spread this info in all our networks, the people must know, and to araise their awareness is best way to a powerful congo, knowing where the enemies are, knowing how friends lies
such as the Bible says 'i m protecting myself from my friends Lord protect me from my enemies...
This mess was made possible by congolese collaborators, let 's have a leadership caring for it s own people not corrupted and coresponsible of its people nightmare...and devastation...
Jean-Pierre | April 13, 2012 6:45 AM
Salut a Tous,
Je dois comprendre la colere et la desolation de certain ou de tous mais j'ai toujours pense qu'avant que le congolais puisse entreprendre quelque chose, il doit absolument a prendre a se depasser. Il est certain que si nous arrivions a nous depasser, nous verrions les choses ou nos problemes sous un autre angles et nous arriverions a appliquer les vraies solutions aux vrais problemes que nous faisons face pour l'instant. Le congolais doit d'abord etre conscient que la plus arme et force de nos amis les occidentaux est l'habilete a injecter l'information qu'ils veulent dans les esprits des congolais. Pouquoi n'y t il jamais eu un natif congolais qui ferait ses recherches d'information pour ses frreres? Pourquoi serait ce toujours nos ennemeis qui nous donnent les informations? Et qui vous dit que ces infos sont exactes et approuvees? Nous devons absolument arriver a nous depasser et pas agir sous l'emprise d'une information non verifiee et surtout lancee par les anciens ennemis qui aujourd'hui se disent etre scandalises par certaines verites comme si avant ils ne le savaient pas!!!!???? tous ses gens nous manipulent. Allons nous faire des invstigations a la congolaise s'il vous plait! Depassons nous mes compatriotes!! Je ne crois pas un mot de ce qui se dit dans ces ecrits. POuquoi maintenant??? et pas losrsqu'il y avait 5 millions de morts??A se demander pourquoi ces occidentaux seraient d'accord de vouloir couler l'un des meilleurs presidents du 21eme siecle (Mr. Clinton)? On ne lance pas des peaux de bananes a un ancien president americains gratuitements. Ne nous leurons pas si facilement. Ce n'est qu'une facon de nous detourner du veritable objectif qu'ils ne veulent pas que nous decouvrons. Faisons gaffes et analysons par nous memes. Il y a anguilles sous roche. Qui veulenet ils faire couler ou faire suicider ou encore qui veulent ils accuser de rage dans toutes ses revelations? Kagame? Kanambe? Museveni? mais surement pas Clinton. Mais qui de ces derniers negros esclaves? etre humain sans valeur? s'il faut analyser, Kagame vient de passer le cap de 2010, Museveni ce sera le semblable de Mugabe, donc il n'est donc pas un souci pour l'occident. Kanambe, non plus n'est vraiment pas un danger pour l'occident, ils savent que c'est pour l'instant leur bon eleve, un peu leur Mike Tyson sauf qu'ils doivent controler son temperamement. Donc tous ces negros ne sont vraiment pas un probleme pour les puissances occidentales. Alors, sortons de la boite et comme disent les americains " Think out of the box". En ce qui concerne mes analyses, il ne me reste plus que le peuple congolais n'est ce pas? Les Occidentaux ont tout compris. Eh oui , plus nous leur revelons des informations atroces plus ils ont peur et plus ils reagissent de moins en moins en se disant apres le decouragement :" Le pays est deja aux mains des etrangers ou encore le complot avait deja ete planifier il y a plus d'une decenie. Vraiment la toutes ses informations influencent notre comportement d'une maniere negative et ils le savent. Toutes ses informations erronees pour moi ne servent qu'a nous faire peur, nous faie decourager afin que nous nous disons qu'il ne sert a rien de se battre contre le vent ou la force des choses. Alors je vous demande encore une fois mes freres compatriotes:" Allons chercher l'information nous memes et attendre celle fomentee par les occidentaux, c'est eux qui le disent et pas nous. Donc queue dalle mes freres. Moi je ne croirai qu'a l'information des services des combattants prises a la source et non d'une source occidentale.
Labels: PAUL KAGAME, RWANDA, WAR CRIMES
posted by MrK @ 8:09 PM
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