Congo Genocide: Will Obama's America collaborate or refuse?
by Ann Garrison
Global Research, August 15, 2012
San Francisco Bayview
On Aug. 4, I reported on KPFA Radio that cholera had broken out in the internally displaced persons camps growing again in eastern Congo, as Congolese people flee the war which, with backing from the Kagame regime in Kigali, Rwanda, resumed in April. The cholera outbreak has sparked fears of an epidemic.
Several days later, the AP’s Michele Faul reported – with a heartbreaking photo essay – that drenching rain was adding to the refugees’ misery.
This looks in many ways like Native American Genocide or any genocide of native people. Armies break up families and communities, forcing them off the land that someone else covets, to die in refugee camps of hunger, disease or heartbreak. It took four centuries to decimate the native population of what became the United States, but millions of eastern Congolese people have perished since 1996 alone, mostly from hardship after being displaced.
As I worked on the radio news, I asked myself, as I often do, why report this on KPFA’s FM radio signal here in Northern and Central California, or even on KPFA’s webstream, to an audience which is mostly American?
My answer always is, because the U.S. is very, very involved. Two of the Pentagon’s most longstanding “partners,” Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, have been the principle aggressors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996.
Two of the Pentagon’s most longstanding “partners,” Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, have been the principle aggressors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996.
The U.S. has armed, trained and provided logistical and intelligence support to both their armies for many years and employed their soldiers in service to its national security agenda in Haiti, Sudan, Somalia, elsewhere on the African continent, and even Iraq.
Congolese wait for aid in Kibati with little or no shelter from the storm or protection from the insipient cholera epidemic. – Photo: Jerome Delay, AP
In October 2010, President Obama announced the introduction of combat equipped U.S. Special Forces into the region, and this week the ENOUGH Project’s John Prendergast published a horrifying argument, “Let Them Hunt,” in the influential journal Foreign Policy, where he called on Obama to “unleash the dogs of war” in Congo and neighboring countries to hunt down minor East African warlord Joseph Kony and his LRA militia.
“Hunt” is a terrible word to use in combination with an admonition to unleash dogs, including the “dogs of war,” to go after people, any people, but in this case, African people. And, as Ugandan American Black Star News Editor Milton Allimadi, TransAfrica Forum’s Nii Akuetteh, war correspondent and human rights investigator Keith Harmon Snow and many other Africa scholars and journalists have told KPFA, AfrobeatRadio, the SF Bay View, RT, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now and other outlets, this is not a hunt for Joseph Kony or any other bad actors. It’s a military operation to secure oil and other African resources and limit Chinese access.
In October 2010, President Obama announced the introduction of combat equipped U.S. Special Forces into the region. But this is not a hunt for Joseph Kony or any other bad actors. It’s a military operation to secure oil and other African resources and limit Chinese access.
If the phony Kony hunt escalates, as Prendergast and the ENOUGH Project urge, as more and more Congolese people flee the Rwandan backed M23 militia, seeking shelter in camps, without adequate food, clean water or sanitation, Obama will become the Black face of genocide in the heart of Africa.
Many agree that has already happened.
Driven from her home, where she would have been warm and dry during the rainstorm, this child must try to survive a war fomented by foreign forces plundering resources that belong to her and all Congolese in a camp threatened with cholera. – Photo: Jerome Delay, AP
However, cynical as I may become about the brutal and ruthless scramble for Congolese resources, I never imagine that this is what the American people who rose above their history to elect their first African American president imagined. Americans voted him into the job, but they didn’t write the job description.
Hugely powerful people no doubt realized that Western corporate, criminal and military interests would be more difficult to resist in Africa with a Black man in charge, but far more Americans cheered or even wept when Obama was elected, because they had so long believed that they’d never see the day.
And now, grim as the news from eastern Congo is, there is some hope. It is still possible to fight for the Obama so many Americans hoped to elect. Here are reasons for hope:
1) Last week, a bi-partisan Congressional coalition headed by Washington State’s Jim McDermott wrote a letter to Rwandan President Paul Kagame to say that the latest U.N. report decisively proves that Kagame is backing the M23 militia’s resumption of the war in eastern Congo and that the current relationship between the U.S. and Rwanda must end.
2) The most recent U.N. experts report on Congo includes photographic and other documentary evidence that Rwanda is backing the M23 militia in Congo.
3) In response to the U.N. experts report, the U.S. suspended $200,000 in military aid to Rwanda, and the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden suspended contributions to Rwandan budget support.
4) More prominent people and publications, including Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, writing in the same Foreign Policy journal that published Prendergast’s “Let Them Hunt,” are pointing to President Obama’s own Senate legislation, the Obama Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006, which became Public Law 109-456, and suggesting that it gives Obama both special expertise and obligation in Congo.
5) On Friday, Aug. 17, Rwandans and Congolese will gather in The Hague, Netherlands, to present a complaint with documentary evidence and petition the new chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to indict Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
These efforts all deserve the attention and support of those who worked to elect Barack Obama, not because they thought he would serve as the Black face of resource war and African genocide, but because they hoped his election would signal the end of it.
Ann Garrison is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Ann Garrison
Labels: ANN GARRISON, DRC, KEITH HARMON SNOW, PAUL KAGAME, WAR CRIMES
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COMMENT - Keith Harmon Snow on what is really going, including KONY2012, and how propaganda works.
(YOUTUBE)
The Plunder and Depopulation of Central AfricaLabels: KEITH HARMON SNOW, NEOCOLONIALISM, PROPAGANDA
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COMMENT - What the BBC isn't saying is that the 'rebel groups' are supported by the UK and US governments, and that the 'ethnic hatred' originates from their protegees, the Tutsi dominant Rwandan Army of US trained Paul Kagame, and it's affiliates and stooges like Laurent Nkunda. This is how Coltan makes it's way into western cell phones. Somehow the BBC omits those facts.
DR Congo bans mining for mobile phone minerals
By BBC News
Sat 11 Sep. 2010, 14:30 CAT
Mr Kabila said
there was a"mafia" controlling mineral mining in DR Congo Mining in three provinces of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has been banned on the orders of the President Joseph Kabila. President Kabila ordered the indefinite suspension during a visit to the mining hub town of Walikale.
The president said he wanted to weed out what he called a "kind of mafia" involved in the mining industry. Control over mining minerals like coltan and cassiterite has fuelled conflict between
rebel groups. The minerals are used in mobile phones and computers.
Enforce
The ban covers the provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu and Maniema.
There has been a prolonged conflict there, last monthat least 150 women were reportedly raped by militia members near the town of Walikale.
The conflict is also fuelled by ethnic hatred, a hang-over from the 1994 slaughter of Tutsis in neighbouring Rwanda and Congo's subsequent civil wars.
The BBC's Thomas Hubert in eastern DR Congo says the ban may be difficult to enforce.
UN peacekeepers recently said they had control of the airstrip in Walikale, which is the easiest way out, but people might find other routes to export minerals.
Labels: COLTAN, KEITH HARMON SNOW, LAURENT NKUNDA, NEOCOLONIALISM, PAUL KAGAME
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The Rwanda Hit List: Revisionism, Denial, and the Genocide Conspiracy
keith harmon snow
12 March 2010
My experience with the Great Lakes region of Africa began in 1991. While traveling in southern Uganda I was witness to the shooting of an unarmed man by unknown assailants believed to be rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front. Since then I have worked tirelessly to uncover the truth about the war in the Dem. Republic of Congo (DRC) and 'genocide' in Rwanda.
I began researching and reporting on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Rwanda in 1995; I began reporting on events in Zaire (DRC) in 1996. In 2000 at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania I explored the case of Major Bernard Ntuyahaga, ex-Forces Armée Rwandaise (ex-FAR), a celebrated Hutu 'genocide ringleader, who I personally met there.
Of course, I presumed the man guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide, prior to any trial, according to the prevailing climate of institutionalized suspicion and assumptions of guilt against all Hutu people, and certainly against all officials of the former government under President Juvenal Habyarimana. Major Ntuyahaga committed genocide. We all knew it. Why bother with a trial?
On April 6--the anniversary of the double presidential killings--2001 I gave expert testimony at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing, convened by Cynthia McKinney, ranking member of the International Operations and Human Rights Subcommittee, International Relations Committee, convened to assess genocide and covert operations in Central Africa.1
For the last 15 years I have been investigating militias and criminal rackets and propaganda about Central Africa. I investigated massacres, assassinations, torture, rape as a weapon of war, and disappearing, individuals and groups, multinational corporations, state and non-state actors, Africans and non-Africans.
Eastern Congo's north and south Kivu provinces are effectively controlled to this day by criminal networks from Rwanda: there are Rwandans who have fled Rwanda there, and others who are allied with the Kagame regime.2 In DRC, I investigated numerous cites of atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front (RPA/F) and Ugandan People's Defense Forces (UPDF) as they marched across Zaire (DRC), calling themselves the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Zaire/Congo (ADFL), and hunted down and slaughtered perhaps as many as 600,000 unarmed refugees, 1996-1997, mostly women and children under 15 years old.3
I have also interviewed European expatriates who are direct witnesses regarding massacres and/or the creation of mass graves, and the destruction of evidence (including the collection, removal and incineration of bodies and/or skeletons).4
My early reportage on Rwanda (1995-1997) unknowingly advanced false narratives about victims v. killers, and the nature of and culpability for atrocities, including 'genocide' in Rwanda. The established narrative remains overly simplified and the truth has been hijacked and suppressed by the mass media. My work has been very high profile, and I have been warned to stay out of Rwanda by Rwandan insiders. A few years ago the Government of Rwanda (GOR) labeled me a 'genocide denier' and I consider myself persona non grata in Rwanda (and Ethiopia).
On February 24, 2010 a communiqué was received by email from a Rwandan human rights organization in Belgium, written in Kinyarwanda and allegedly leaked, listing alleged directives from the Rwandan intelligence services to members of Rwanda's Annual Ambassadors and High Commissioners Retreat. The closed-doors meeting of February 17-18, 2010--'officially' organized by Rwandan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Communications (MINAFFET) Minister Ms. Louis Mushikiwabo, and 'officially' held at MINAFFET headquarters in Kigali, Rwanda--was actually held in Gisenyi. The topic was: "Failure to implement Kigali's orders: crack down the on opposition and other people tarnishing the current RPF government image."
The document circulated coincident with the late February 2010 defection and flight of Rwanda's ambassadors to Holland and India (see below). While its origin remains unverified, this document exemplifies the GOR's modus operandi on public and international relations.
***************
Some Conclusions of the Ambassadors' Meeting in Kigali
During an in camera meeting between the Rwandan ambassadors and President Kagame in February 2010, many issues were discussed.
The ambassadors have been criticized of failing to fulfill their mission of representing Rwanda abroad. They were reminded the instructions they failed to fulfill, with the consequences of tarnishing the Rwanda image following the negative propaganda by the Rwandan refugees.
They were given a report from the Intelligence Services revealing the enemies of the country who should be fought by all means possible and if necessary by assassination. The following are names of foreigners and organizations that need to be fought urgently.
Foreigners to target: Robin Philpot5; C. Peter Erlinder; Keith Harmon Snow; Jordi Palou-Loverdos; Peter Verlinden; Pierre Péan; Charles Onana; Filip Reyntjens; Luc de Temmerman.
Also target Rwandan refugees representing the FDLR [Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Congo] in Africa; Europe; America; and elsewhere.
Organizations to target, starting by their leaders (CLIIR; COSAR; FEDA; AJIIR; AGPJR; OPJDR).
Political parties that are active abroad, starting with their leaders (FDU/UDF; Intwari Partnership; PDR-Ihumure; PDP-Imanzi).
We are still collecting information about the list of the Rwandese people to be hunted specifically because they are sabotaging the Kigali regime. This list is long and it keeps growing, as enemies are getting more numerous.
The ambassadors were given all authority to have these people eliminated or discredited. Each ambassador would request, as needed, the government to provide all capabilities to attain his objectives. Whoever gets more information would kindly share with other group members.
Wishing you all the best.
***********
The westerners listed above (a few key 'enemies' names do not appear, including Christopher Black, Wayne Madsen, Cynthia McKinney, Luc Marchal, Mick Collins and Helmut Strizek) have pressed against public opinion and propaganda to expose the lies, disinformation and terrorism victimizing innocent people and shielding the true perpetrators of the crimes in Central Africa.
While we are led to believe that the perpetrators are those nasty genocidaires, the extremist Hutus, their Interahamwe militias, the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in Congo, and other undesirables, the primary responsible perpetrators are always protected. These are:
[1] Rwandan President Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front: the elite, extremist Tutsi network that has committed massive atrocities and widespread terrorism in Central Africa as far back as 1980, and primarily responsible for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Rwanda (1990-present) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (1996-present);
[2] Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and the Ugandan People's Defense Forces (UPDF): the elite, extremist Hema networks operating out of Uganda and the source of the RPA/F Tutsi networks, who together perpetrated massive war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, in Uganda (1980-present), Rwanda (1990-1998) the DRC (1996-present);6
[3] The backers, partners, allies and propagandists of the Kagame and Museveni regimes who are from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Europe.
How do these terrorist networks maintain and spread their ideology and terrorism worldwide, even as into the United States?
ABOVE: Map from the petroleum sector showing petroleum concessions (green) under Lake Albert and in northern Uganda areas where the Ugandan government has interned Acholi people in death cames, leading to one of the greatest unacknowledged genocides of the current era, and the Barrick Gold (Bau) concessions in Congo and Tanzania.
The Dehumanization of Hutu People
Any person of Rwandan, Ugandan or Burundian origin, no matter their sex, age or ethnicity, or their civilian or military status, who has sought asylum from or in any way annoyed the Government of Rwanda (GOR), will be persecuted, subject to intimidation, arbitrary arrest, and detention without trial, if not torture, forced labor, extrajudicial execution, or being 'disappeared'.
Rwandans inside and outside Rwanda are accused of 'genocide' or 'complicity in genocide' through fabricated evidence, coerced testimonies, bribery, and petty jealousies. There is no possibility of any kind of fair trial procedure in Rwanda and no possibility of freely investigating facts, or identifying and securing witnesses.
The categories 'extremist Hutu' and 'moderate Hutu', like the general categories of 'Hutu' and 'Tutsi,' are complex and not easily negotiated in the context of 'genocide', 'terrorism' and other violence in Rwanda from 1990 to the present. The labels 'genocidaire' and 'Interahamwe' are freely applied by the RPA/F regime to demonize anyone they see fit, no matter the veracity or falseness of the claims against those they accuse.7
The GOR under the one-party control of Paul Kagame projects a shiny veneer of tourism, development and 'entrepreneurism', but submerged barely under the surface of this veneer there exists a climate of absolute terror and there are profound ethnic divisions leading towards war. We are beginning to see this more openly with the approach of the 2010 elections.8
Rwanda (and Uganda) is run by a secretive criminal military organization in parallel with formal government structures, responsible for the systematic and intentional deaths of: scores of thousands of persons in Rwanda from Oct 1, 1990 to April 5, 1994; hundreds of thousands of persons in Rwanda from April 6, 1994 to December 31, 1995; tens of thousands of persons in Rwanda between January 1, 1995 and January 1, 2010; between 200,000 and 700,000 Rwandan refugees in DRC and for the deaths of between 100,000 and 300,000 Burundian refugees in DRC between September 1996 and September 1997; and millions of persons of Rwandan, Congolese, Burundian and Ugandan origin in DRC between September 1996 and the present day.9
Language has also been manipulated for the dehumanization of all Hutu people. For example, the label 'Interahamwe' has come to stand for 'extremist murderous Hutu militias' and has usually been translated from Kinyarwanda to mean "those who attack together." Yet President Paul Kagame and the RPA/F military-intelligence apparatus applies this terminology to mean "anyone who is in opposition to the Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front movement, its government, or its elite clandestine networks," and in the case of Paul Kagame, even to "anyone I don't like," and the labels 'Interahamwe' and genocidaire are used to dehumanize all Hutu people everywhere, just as the Jews were dehumanized by National Socialism in Germany prior to and during World War II. This has created the political, social and economic conditions for the perpetration of genocide by the RPA/F government, and its collaborators, and this dehumanization has been perpetuated through the international mass media, human rights institutions, think tanks, non-government organizations, and foreign governments everywhere.
ABOVE: Hutu people in the DR Congo, as everywhere, have become the scapegoats for the international organized crime and its white collar war criminals, and their porxy agents, in Central Africa. This is the dehumanization of innocent men, women and children, and even babies have been massacred by the RPA in Rwanda and through the RPA's invaders in Congo (RCD, CNDP) masquerading as Congolese. The FDLR -- Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda -- are some of the most misunderstood and legitimate fighters in Central Africa. Comprisd of soldiers who fled the murderous US -RPA coup d'etat, these people are not Central Africa's nightmare, as they are everywhere portrayed. War is peace. Victims are klillers, teh supposed killers are the victims.
The dehumanization of all Hutu people, and the persecution of anyone in opposition to the RPA/F, was supported as early as 1988 by certain international 'legal' and 'human rights' institutions working as clandestine agents and/or accomplices to the RPA/F agenda.
The terms 'genocidaire' and 'Interahamwe' are meaningless due to the constituency and fluidity of these terms. For example, the President of the Interahamwe, presented to the world as an extremist Hutu killing organization, was Robert Kajuga, a Tutsi businessman. Similarly, the treasurer of the Interahamwe was Dieudonne Niyitegaka, a Hutu businessman resettled in Canada in reward for his collaboration to accuse and frame other Hutus with 'genocide'. The RPA/F had infiltrated and controlled the Interahamwe, and this renders the terminology, and its ideological force, meaningless.
The criminal parallel structure behind the Rwandan government has been identified by numerous experts and investigations, including more than seven United Nations Panels of Experts between 2000 and 2009;10 the high court indictments of Spain11 and France12; the exhaustive analyses by eminent Rwandan experts, including Dr. Filip Reyntjens13; the work of investigative journalists like Charles Onana, Wayne Madsen and myself14; the Michael Hourigan report assessing blame for the presidential assassinations of April 6, 1994; the Robert Gersony report documenting RPF/A atrocities against tens of thousands of Rwandans in Rwanda in 1994; the Helmut Strizek report to the ICTR titled Discredit the Hutu Population Forever;15 ICTR defense attorneys Chris Black, Peter Erlinder, John Philpot, Phil Taylor and others; the McKinney hearings; and research by academics; and by many credible sources, human rights documents, testimonies and other examples in the public record.
Even Tutsis--the supposed victims (of the supposed Hutu conspiracy)--have been persecuted by the victorious and extremist RPA/F Tutsi regime in Rwanda. We all know the standard story about 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed. Well, these numbers are wrong, and the constituency of the dead is wrong. It cannot be denied that hundreds of thousands of Tutis were killed in Rwanda, especially if we confine our discussion to the 100 days of genocide from April 6 to July 1994.
Clearly, there is evidence of persecution and threats of persecution against Tutsis based on the established realities about acts of genocide committed by members of the Hutu ethnic group in Rwanda between April 6, 1994 and July 1994, and there has also been retaliatory violence, post-1994, against Tutsis. However, there is substantial documentation about the RPF/A regime killing Tutsis, because this elite Tutsi rebel force did not trust any members of the Tutsi minority who stayed in Rwanda after President Juvenal Habyarimana came to power in 1973: Rwandan Tutsis were generally eliminated, internally displaced, assassinated and/or forced to flee Rwanda.
The Genodynamics Project of academic researchers Dr. Christian Davenport and Dr. Alan Stam, both U.S. citizens, has seriously challenged the Rwanda genocide mythology. Stam and Davenport were labeled 'genocide deniers' by the mass media and the Tutsi expatriate community after publishing their interim research on 'genocide' in Rwanda and they are persona non grata in Rwanda today.16
ABOVE: Pro-RPF propaganda in the New York Times Magazine takes many forms but all leads to the dehumanization of the Hutu people en masse, and lays the groundwork for the ongoing genocide against them.
There is overwhelming evidence establishing that crimes defined, prosecuted and/or punished as 'genocide' in Rwanda, whether before 1994, in 1994, or after 1994, were for reasons other than ethnicity. The GOR itself admits that both 'Tutsis and moderate Hutus' were victims of the violence in 1994. Thus while these acts of violence may constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other crimes--including acts of genocide--the allegation that Hutus were both the victims and the perpetrators of the 1994 violence does not on its face meet the specific intent required of 'genocide' as defined by the international Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.17 The current regime is responsible for massive bloodshed against all ethnic groups in Rwanda, and the façade is supported internationally due to the economic, political and military interests at stake.18 The International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) also supported the façade, as confirmed by Carla Del Ponte, the former Chief Prosecutor of the ICTR, in her memoirs.19
People accused of 'genocide' in Rwanda have been brought before the so-called 'community-based' Gacaca tribunals repeatedly, compelled by the GOR to revisit their cases until a guilty verdict is established; many innocent civilians have been tried and retried until they were found guilty. After one Gacaca tribunal found the accused persons innocent the citizen judges fled for their lives, were captured, returned to their Gacaca and 'compelled' to retry the case, and returned a guilty verdict. Human rights experts have criticized the Gacaca system as a mechanism of terror used to silence critics.20
(Photo credit unknown.)
ABOVE: The murderous Rwandan RPF-aligned military (RCD, CNDP, etc etc) are the primary problem for eastern Congo, with Ugandan military (UPDF) a close second, and with the Penntagon, and now AFFRICOM, behind them.
Apologists for the Regime
The London-based 'non-government organization' African Rights was co-founded by Rakiya Omaar, a woman of Somali origin who has worked since 1990-1991 as a paid agent of the RPA/F regime, always casting the Hutus as perpetrators and Tutsis, and especially the RPA/F Tutsi extremists, as the victims of the violence, creating a positive image for the RPA/F.21
African Rights has generated false accusations against Rwandans that have led to their arrest and imprisonment and its 'human rights investigations' have whitewashed the RPA/F terrorism. African Rights has petitioned governments, the ICTR and other legal bodies, even Pope John Paul II, and it spreads disinformation in international media (only to happy to comply), and accused and secured the arrest and prosecution of RPA/F 'dissidents'.22 For example, African Rights helped frame Monsignor Augustin Misago, the Bishop of Gikongoro, who was subsequently arrested and jailed in 1999, but cleared by the Rwandan Court in 2000.23 They have produced disinformation targeting Rwandan opposition in DRC24 (used by ICTR prosecutors25).
A Rwandan agent working for African Rights for the past 8-10 years, first in Kigali and then in Zambia, fled to seek asylum in Belgium in February 2010. Felicien Bahizi recently testified in a court of law (Scandinavia) about African Rights' clandestine ties to the RPA/F, the falsification of documents and allegations used to accuse, indict and imprison 'enemies' of the regime.
An extension of the RPA/F network into the 'human rights' sector, African Rights is on the payroll of the RPA/F government, as evidenced by a letter from Rakiya Omaar requesting payment of an "outstanding $100,159" for their production of a propaganda book benefiting the regime.26 Rakiya Omaar works freely in Rwanda, where she has a special office.
There are other rights bodies and 'experts' on 'genocide in Rwanda' who have protected the killers and criminalized the victims, including the pro-RPA/F International Commission of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda Since October 1, 1990, early reports by Africa Watch and Human Rights Watch, and others.27
The 1993 International Commission of Inquiry [ICI] on Rwanda included the Human Rights Watch expert on Rwanda, Alison Des Forges, and Canadian law professor William Schabas, both of whom have provided expert testimony used to convict Rwandans of genocide or related crimes, and both have been discredited in law courts. Schabas has been one of the U.S. government's witnesses of choice for hunting refugees28 and travels free in Rwanda.
William Schabas and French human rights activist Jean Carbonare, both members of the ICI, were amongst the first to apply the term 'genocide' to Rwanda and against the Hutu government of Juvenal Habyarimana.
"On 22 January 1993, in a press statement published in Paris after returning from Kigali [as a member of the ICI], they accused President Habyarimana of having already committed Genocide against the Tutsis under the pretext of the RPF war launched on 1 October 1990. In a television broadcast with Bruno Masure on 28 January 1993, Jean Carbonare was given the opportunity to repeat the accusation to an audience of millions."29
The ICTR has not prosecuted any suspects of the RPA/F, no matter the evidence of crimes, including: the assassinations of the presidents of Rwanda (Juvenal Habyarimana) and Burundi (Cyprien Ntaryamira), their chiefs of staff, several aides, and the French pilots of the Dassault Falcon 50 aircraft (a gift from French President Mitterand) on April 6, 1994, the pivotal event which sparked the 1994 genocide;30 or the massive crimes described in the indictments issued by the judiciaries of France and Spain.31
In December 2008, the Trial Chamber-1 at the ICTR acquitted the four highest-ranking senior military officers of the former government army, the ex-Forces Armee Rwandaise (ex-FAR), including General Theoneste Bagosora (the supposed 'genocide mastermind'), of conspiracy to commit genocide.32
In November, 2009, the Appeals Chambers of the ICTR acquitted Protais Zigiranyirazo, brother-in-law of President Juvenal Habyarimana, of all charges of 'genocide planning', following seven years of trial at the ICTR, where the court found that the Prosecutor's evidence was explained by normal military planning in the course of the four year Rwandan civil war (1990-1994).
In November, 2009, the Appeals Chambers of the ICTR acquitted, and ordered the immediate release of, Hormistas Nsengimana, charged with genocide and crimes against humanity committed in Rwanda in 1994.
The above ICTR judgments destroy the 'conspiracy to commit genocide' conspiracy universally charged to the former Hutu government and responsible for the total dehumanization of Hutu people everywhere.
ABOVE: Kagame's comrades at the US Army's Fort Levenworth, Kansas, 1990.
Vigilante Journalism
The current regime in Rwanda is aggressively hunting down any perceived threat, including dissidents, refugees, political opposition, former soldiers of the Habyarimana government (ex-FAR) and former RPF/A, regardless of ethnicity.
Goucher College (Md.) professor Dr. Leopold Munyakazi is one of their latest targets, falsely accused of being a genocidaire merely because he has been an outspoken critic of the regime. Dr. Munyakazi was unjustly framed--in support of the RPA/F agenda to neutralize him--by a short-lived NBC News television program that sought to gain high prime time ratings (read: corporate profits) by tracking down and 'exposing' supposed genocidaires. The program was titled THE WANTED, and the morality of 'good versus evil' was subliminally underscored by the choice of the show's commentator, Scott Tyler, an ex-Navy Seal, who by moral implication embodies saintliness, while the wanted man, Dr. Leopold Munyakazi, embodies the devil. The zealous NBC News team acted as accuser, judge and jury against Dr. Munyakazi.33
The U.S. Embassy in Kigali allegedly assisted the criminal RPA/F regime in framing Dr. Munyakazi and, from August to December 2009, the U.S. Embassy collaborated in the RPA/F campaign of intimidation, bribery, detention and punishment of hundreds of people acquainted with Dr. Munyakazi, in order to fabricate evidence and coerce witnesses against him.
At Goucher College "a swirling retinue of about ten cameramen, technicians, and professional interrogators" descended on Dr. Munyakazi as he finished teaching a French class.34 Leading the pack was NBC Producer Adam Ciralsky: when contacted by other journalists, Ciralsky hid behind NBC's corporate PR department.35 Prejudged by journalists and mass media, whether acting overzealously or in collaboration with the RPA/F regime, Rwanda's critics, refugees and survivors have been falsely accused and, through the mass media, publicly branded as genocidaires.
Just as the NBC News television team targeted Dr. Leopold Munyakazi at Goucher College in February 2009, mass media sensationalism and genocidaire branding to advance the criminal aims of the GOR has been used before.
In Laredo, Texas in 1998, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Hutu pastor, was accosted by New Yorker magazine writer Philip Gourevitch, an RPA/F supporter and personal friend of Paul Kagame, whose book was one of the earliest propaganda tracts espousing the now entrenched narrative about Hutus (killers) v. Tutsis (victims) and the so-called '100 days of genocide' in Rwanda.36 Ntakirutimana was extradited, tried and cionvicted by the ICTR; his story--sensationalized and fictionalized by Philip Gourevitch--was published in the award-winning non-fiction' book whose title takes it's name from a letter written by Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, but one which Gourevitch misconstrued and criminalized.37
ABOVE: More of Philip Gourevitch's pro-RPF propaganda in the The New Yorker ("The Life After," 4 May 2009) manufactures concepts of justice, if problematic, at so-called "community-based" Gacaca tribunals in Rwandan villages. Gourevitch is cranking out one-sided propaganda: see, e.g., The New Yorker: "The Arrest of Madame Agathe," March 2, 2010, and "The Mutsinzi report on the Rwandan Genocide," January 8, 2010.
The British Broadcasting Corporation in 2006 publicly branded as genocidaire Dr. Vincent Bajinya, a Hutu physician and U.K. citizen who lived and worked in London for years. Similar to the NBC camera crew's unannounced confrontation with Dr. Leopold Munyakazi in Maryland, without any appointment or prior warning, a BBC team showed up on the street in London and shoved a television camera in Dr. Bajinya's face and began interrogating him about his alleged role as a 'mastermind' of the Rwandan Genocide.38
Within days of the first BBC report, the Dr. Vincent Bajinya story was everywhere in the news and was combined with defamatory stories branding three other Rwandan refugees (Charles Munyaneza, Emmanuel Nteziryayo, and Celestin Ugirashebuja) supposedly 'hiding' in the U.K. The BBC framed all four refugees as 'Most Wanted' criminals and 'masterminds' of 'genocide in Rwanda in 1994'. After confronting Bajinya in London the BBC team traveled to Rwanda and, escorted by GOR agents, filmed the places and people who testified on camera to the alleged crimes.
The four Rwandans were jailed for 28 months and the case was supported by RPA/F intelligence agent Jean Bosco Mutangana, the head of Rwanda's genocide fugitives tracking unit, who also turned up with the NBC News crew and confronted the President of Goucher College (MD) and Dr. Leopold Munyakazi.39
The City of Westminster Magistrates' Court ordered the extradition of all four Rwandans but an appeals court on April 8, 2009, ruled that there was no freedom or justice in Rwanda ordered their release.40, 41
Enemies of the State
Who are Paul Kagame and the RPA/F regime's 'enemies'?
Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu, Hutu, opponent of the previous Hutu (Habyarimana) government, later the first Prime Minister appointed by the RPF/A in 1994, who fled to exile 1995 after he challenged the RPF/A massacres of thousands of Hutu civilians at Kibeho refugee camp in April 1995;
Seth Sendashonga, Hutu, member of RPF/A, forced into exile in Kenya, 1995, after challenging the Kibeho massacres, assassinated in Kenya in 1998;
Pierre Celestin Rwigema, Hutu, Prime minister (circa 1995-2000), who fell out with the regime and went into exile in the US, and afterwards he was accused on 'genocide' charges (because he owned a gun in Kigali prior to 1994);
Alfred Mukezamfura, Hutu, Speaker of Rwanda's National Assembly, who fled Rwanda to exile in Belgium (2008-2009), and who was afterwards accused of 'genocide', tried by the Gacaca courts in abstentia, and sentenced to 30 years in prison, who lives in exile, under the threat of an international arrest warrant issued by Kigali;
Stanley Safari, Hutu, civil servant under the Habayrimana government, who later became a Member of Parliament under the RPF government, a position held until 2009, who was forced to flee Rwanda in 2009, and was subsequently tried in abstentia by the Gacaca courts, on 'genocide' charges, and sentenced to 30 years in prison (Mr. Safari, who currently resides in the U.S., is accused by Rwandans in exile of denouncing innocent people who were subsequently imprisoned by the Kagame regime, and sentenced to harsh prison terms, between 1994 and 2009);
General Emmanuel Habyarimana, Hutu, ex-Forces Armee Rwandaise (ex-FAR), the RPF/A Minister of Defense after 1994, now residing in Switzerland, subject to threats of assassination to this day;
Theobald Gabwaya Rwaka, Hutu, founder of the Rwandan League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LIPRODHOR), Minister of the Interior under the RPA/F, fled Rwanda April 2002, lives in the U.S.;
Claudine Mazimpaka, Hutu, wife of Jean-Baptise Mberabahizi, Hutu, Secretary General of Unified Democratic Forces (FDU) opposition party, attacked in Belgium on October 24, 2009 by unidentified assailants (presumed to be sent by Kagame;
Joseph Ntawangundi, Hutu, aide to FDU opposition leader Victoire Ingabire, convicted in abstentia by Gacaca courts in 2007, beaten and jailed on 'genocide' charges in Kigali in February, 2010, after returning from exile to Rwanda in January 2010, to register an opposition party for the national elections of 2011; Mr. Ntawangundi was reportedly in Sweden (International Federation of Trade Unions) during the 1994 genocide, and returned after several months to Kenya, where he stayed in exile, and who remains in prison in Rwanda today;
Colonel Theoneste Lizinde, Hutu, FAR, Director General of Intelligence; imprisoned by the Habyarimana regime for an attempted coup d'etat; freed from a Ruhengeri prison by the RPA in a military raid in 1992; joined the RPA/F high military command: reportedly provided critical information about Kigali International Airport for the April 6, 1994 attack on the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. Fled to Zaire after becoming disenchanted with the RPA/F (1994-1995): assassinated by the RPA/F in Nairobi, 1995;
Jean-Pierre Bizimana, Hutu, former RPF/A intelligence agent, later the RPF government Minister of Education, most recently (2009-2010) Ambassador to the Netherlands, fled Rwanda into exile in late February 2010, after threats against him, allegedly due to his ties to the Rwandan opposition FUD party, and who is at this time seeking asylum in the Republic of Ireland;
Victoire Ingabire, Hutu, leader of the FDU opposition party, formerly exiled in Holland since 1994, threatened and attacked in Rwanda after taking the opposition struggle back to Rwanda, under investigation by the RPA/F for espousing 'genocide ideology' today because she publicly raised questions about massacres of Hutus (and Tutsis) in Rwanda;
Joseph Sebarinzi, Tutsi, went into exile from Rwanda in 1979, returned to Rwanda under the Habyarimana government prior to 1990, but fled to Burundi in 1994, and returned to Rwanda after July 1994 to become Speaker of the National Assembly under the RPF/A government, and then fled (circa 2000) Rwanda after falling out of favor with the Kagame regime, and is now a United States citizen accused by the Kagame regime of treason for supporting the 1959 King of Rwanda;
Col. Balthazar Ndengeyinka, Hutu, member of the RPF/A, in exile in Switzerland after falling out with the Kagame regime;
General Kayumba Nyamwasa, Tutsi, RPF/A commander, more recently the Rwandan Ambassador to India (2001-2010), who was indicted by the Spanish Court (February 2009) 42, along with 40 other top RPF/A military officials, for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and was indicted by the French Court (December 2006)43, along with nine other RPF officials, for his participation in double presidential assassinations of April 6, 1994, who fled Rwanda to exile in Uganda in late February 2010, and escaped the Rwandan military-intelligence networks to exile in South Africa on March 2, 2010;
Journalist Godwin Agaba, previously imprisoned for courageous reporting from inside Rwanda, who was forced into hiding in early March 2010 and is on the run for his life, with an arrest warrant issued by the kagame regime;
Madame Agathe Habyarimana, Hutu wife of the assassinated President Juvenal Habayrimana, who tops Rwanda's 'most wanted' list, falsely accused and arrested in Paris on March 2, 2010, the day after President Sarkozy made a deal with Kagame in Kigali;
The many other Hutu victims of the unjust ICTR court and the Kagame regime it protects.
(Photo credit unknown.)
ABOVE: Military strategist Kagame with his junior officer Hypolitte Kanambe, alias Joseph Kabila, now President of the DRC, behind him, circa 1995, in the RPA in Rwanda--before the RPA and UPDF marched across Congo murdering inncoent Hutu men, women and children by the hundreds of thousands.
Since August 2009 the Kagame regime has been intimidating, bribing and forcing 'witnesses' to fabricate evidence of Dr. Munyakazi's guilt in order to attempt to substantiate these charges and convince the U.S. and public opinion that there are grounds for Dr. Munyakazi's extradition. Some 200-300 people have been terrorized by the RPA/F regime in order to compel witness testimonies out of fear, and to frame Dr. Leopold Munyakazi.
In 2002, two of Dr. Munyakazi's children were threatened and forced to flee to Europe where they were granted refugee status. In 2006 Dr. Munyakazi's wife fled to the United States and applied for asylum after being threatened with imprisonment by local Rwandan authorities and blamed with "being married to a Hutu Interahamwe" because she refused to give false testimonies against the former neighbors of the Munyakazis. Between October and December 2006, three children of Dr. Munyakazi were systematically harassed and terrified, often through unannounced middle of the night visits, by the RPF/A Directorate of Military Intelligence and Local Defense Force agents; the family members fled to Uganda.
On August 3rd 2009, the chairperson of the Gacaca tribunal in Dr. Munyakazi's native area reportedly confirmed that a dozen persons were put in jail because they had refused to give false accusations against Dr. Munyakazi. On September 2, 2009, she again informed Dr. Munyakazi that some 200 people had their cases revised before the Gacaca tribunal mainly to get a 'legal reason' to incarcerate them. From October 12-30, 2009, the Gacaca tribunal condemned 15 of these people to lengthy prison terms based on these fabricated crimes.
In seeking to fabricate evidence and extort or coerce testimonies against Dr. Leopold Munyakazi, the GOR has reportedly forced hundreds (minimum) of civilians from their homes in Dr. Leopold Munyakazi's native and neighboring areas (Gitarama Prefecture), taken them to Kigali, and 'interviewed' them inside the U.S. Embassy, and with the collaboration of U.S. Embassy officials. Many refused to testify against Dr. Munyakazi and were subsequently, while some have accepted bribes to testify against Dr. Munyakazi, and some have later changed their minds when threatened with being brought before a Gacaca court on charges of 'complicity in genocide', while others have had their Gacaca hearings 're-done,' with the understanding that no one is innocent, on penalty of violence from the GOR.
When Victims Become Killers
One of the latest pro-RPA/F vigilante refugee hunters on the Rwanda 'genocidaire' trail is Jason Stearns, a former U.N. (MONUC) and International Crises Group 'analyst' (the ICG and its clone groups ENOUGH and Raise Hope for Congo are front for the U.S. National Security apparatus funded by the Center for American Progress).
Stearns also worked on several U.N. panels of experts on the illegal exploitation in the DR Congo, including the U.N. 'experts' report of November 2009, which launched a smear campaign against Fundacio S'Olivar and Inshuti, Spanish charities affiliated with Juan Carrero Seralegui, Jordi Palou-Loverdos (named on Rwanda's 'Hit List' above) and Joan Casoliva Barcons, accusing them of backing terrorists in Congo. (A key 'confidential source' for the U.N. Panel of Experts [sic] has been the RPA/F front group African Rights: the November 'experts' report was fed information through RPA/F agents Theodore Nyilinkawaya in Brussels and Rakiya Omaar in Kigali. It appears that African Rights has maintained a tight connection to previous U.N. Panel of Expert's as well.) This is the U.N.'s failed attempt to discredit the Spanish indictments against the RPA/F.44, 45
Working out of Yale University grad school, Stearns has been zealously gunning for Rwandans connected to the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), an organization also targeted on Rwanda's 'Hit List' (above) and Kagame's disingenuous excuse, over and over, for RPA/F terrorism in DRC. "For an excellent review of the FDLR Diaspora," Stearns wrote, citing the RPA/F front African Rights, "see Rakiya Omaar's recent report: 'The end in sight?'"46
The Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR)--until 2000 known as the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALIR)--are not the evil genocidaires respondible for every war crime in Central Africa, as they are billed by western flak organizations like ENOUGH, Raise Hope for Congo, the U.N. panels of experts, Jason Stearns and their benefactors in the Kagame muilitary regime. FDLR include ex-FAR soldiers forced out of Rwanda during the illegal RPA/F invasion and coup d'etat. Being in the losing side does not automatically make these soldiers genocidaires or war criminals: their cuilpability in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide is far less evident than the culpability of the RPA/F regime. So-called "FDLR" in Congo also include innocent women and children who have been subject to war crimes by the RPA/F and its factions (RCD, CNDP, etc.) and their artners, including the FARDC, and the United Nations Observers Mission for DR Congo (MONUC). To add insult to injury, the organized crime networks of the Kagame government, and even Canadian BANRO Ciorporation (illegally occupying and terrorizing South Kivu) have alliances and realtyionships with FDLR and other Hutu groups in eastern Congo.
The criminalized genocidaire label of 'FDLR' offers the ready made sound bite utilized by the media, by white skinned propagandists like Nicholas Kristof and Jeffrey Gettleman, by actorvists like Ben Affleck and George Clooney, and by western institutions like the United Nations, and US Government, to whitewash their own involvement in criminal exploitation of one stripe or another. The ultimate goal is western corporatte control achieved with through such supposedly 'progressive' legislation as the U.S. Congress bills in Blood Minerals. The situation with the Lord's resistance Army--the scapegoat for which to excuse President Yoweri Museveni--and the LRA Disarmanent Act is identical, but different, but only to serve wetsren militarization and expropriation of African people's lives and lands and loves.
U.N. 'expert' Jason Stearns never mentions the western corporations, intelligence agents or U.S. officials involved in the Great Lakes plunder. Instead, Stearns is on crusade against Dr. Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro and Dr. Felicien Kanyamibwa, two Rwandan intellectuals living in the U.S.A. named as leaders or former leaders of the FDLR. Stearns has lobbied the U.S. State Department to arrest and charge the Rwandan opposition leaders, by any means necessary, to "get them for material support to a terrorist organization" or "for having committed fraud on their immigration documents." 47
Dr. Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro was director of the Rwandan Information Office (ORINOFOR) under the Habyarimana government: Dr. Higiro was a member of the MDR (Mouvement Démocratique Républicain), a political party opposed to the Habyarimana regime. He is one of very few intellectuals left alive with an insider's understanding of the genocide propaganda leading up to April 6, 1994, and what scares the U.S. and their RPA/F proxy is his understanding of the genocidal media of the RPA/F.48
Dr. Higiro's daughter was born in the USA, and Dr. Higiro and his family were evacuated from Rwanda to Burundi by the U.S. Embassy on April 9, 1994, was flown on a U.S. military Hercules C-130 to Nairobi (the USAF billed him for the flight). He was appointed Minister of Information to the RPF/A government on July 19, 1994, the day he flew to the U.S. He declined to return after reports of the RPF/A's "unmistakable patterns of killings" of scores of thousands of Hutus.49, 50
Dr. Higiro has lived under constant threats and accusations--and assumptions of his 'complicity in genocide'--to the present day, teaching at Western New England College in Springfield, Ma, a U.S. citizen since 2000. A photo that Dr. Higiro (his child in his arms) sent to his aged father in Rwanda was confiscated when African Rights investigators intimidated Dr. Higiro's father at his home village in Rushaki, Rwanda; the photo identifies Dr. Higiro (one of the FDLR terrorists) in an African Rights document authored by Rakiya Omaar.51
Dr. Felicien Kanyamibwa left Rwanda in 1991 and was a Ph.D student in the U.S. in 1994. Funneled disinformation from African Rights, the Rwandan state media accused him of being a Hutu 'hardliner' tied to the Interahamwe and ex-FAR, casting him as a genocidaire.52 Dr. Kanyamibwa lives in New Jersey. As with most Rwandans being hunted by the RPA/F, the Department of Homeland Security is constantly harassing him.
The Christian Science Monitor has also been practicing vigilante journalism for the RPA/F through Max Delany and Scott Baldauf.53 The CSM advances U.S. State propaganda through the International Crises Group intelligence agents John Prendergast, former National Security Council under William Jefferson Clinton, and Guillaume Lacaille, former U.N. Political Affairs Officer and U.S. Embassy Attaché, and they protect western corporations plundering eastern Congo (Banro Resources, Cabot, Moto Gold, Anglo-Ashanti, etc.). Of course, the U.S. military's AFRICOM is all over Central Africa, backing, training and funding the RPA/F and UPDF, building bases in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and South Sudan, and force missions are run by the Pentagon's Special Operations Command--SOCOM: covert operations, death squads, snatch-and-grab black ops, psychological warfare, other terrorism of the kind that first brought the RPA/F to power.54
Max Delany is working on a hit piece about Dr. Higiro and Dr. Kanyamibwa, expected to appear on April 6, 2010--the anniversary of the 'plane crash' [sic] that sparked the '100 days of genocide' [sic]. "I hope that North America will do something about the FDLR leaders on their soil too," the CSM quotes the ICG's Lacaille to say. "Because when you go against the [Hutu] genocidaires of 1994, you are doing it because of justice. When you go against someone like Ignace Murwanashyaka"55--or Dr. Higiro, or Dr. Munyakazi--"it's not only justice, it's about security in the Democratic Republic of Congo."56
The end to impunity for war and terrorism in Central Africa begins with the arrest of the 40 extremist Tutsi RPA/F war criminals indicted by the Spanish court, and with the arrest and indictment of His Excellency, Paul Kagame, the man they call 'the Butcher of Kigali'--one of AFRICOM's leading men in Central Africa.
ABOVE: The Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton and G.W. Bush administrations all supported war crimes and genocide in Central Africa by backing the guerrila warfare of Yoweri Museveni (now President in Uganda) and his National Resistance Army/Movement and then Paul Kagame (Museveni's former Director of Military Intelligence) and the Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front in Rwanda. (Photo credit: some photographer serving the propaganda system.)
______________
Footnotes:
1 Jim Lyons, former Commander of Investigations for the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, also provided expert testimony at this hearing.
2 See, e.g.: keith harmon snow: "Three Cheers for Eve Ensler?" ZNet, October 24, 2007; "Merchant's of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa," Dissident Voice, December 8, 2008; "Over Five Million Dead in Congo? Fifteen hundred People Daily?" February 4, 2008.
3 The ADFL (RPF/A + UPDF + U.S. & U.K. & Israel backing) war crimes and genocide against Rwandan and Burundian refugees is well documented. In August 1996 there were an estimated 1.5 million refugees in eastern Zaire, and by November the estimated 500,000 to 750,000 Rwandan refugees that did not return to Rwanda under the illegal forced repatriation became the targets of a systematic manhunt by ADFL forces. See, e.g., Roberto Garreton, Special Rapporteur of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Zaire No. E/CN.4/1996/66, June 29, 1996; Howard French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Vintage Books, 2005; and Filip Reyntjens, The Great African War, Cambridge University Press, 2009; Gerard Prunier, Africa's World War, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 120-128; Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Edwin Mellen Press, 1999; and International Non-governmental Commission of Inquiry into the Massive Violations of Human Rights Committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Former Zaire) 1996-1997, Int'l Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 1998; DRC: What Kabila is Hiding: Civilian Killings and Impunity in Congo, Human Rights Watch, Vol. 9, No. 5(A), October 1997.
4 E.g., [1] [name withheld] former Manager for David Blattner SAFBOIS logging corporation in Bosondjo, Equateur Province, DRC; [2] [name withheld] businessman in Kisangani, Orientale, DRC, whose bulldozers were confiscated by the RPF/A and UPDF for excavation and covering of mass graves.
5 See: Robin Philpot, Ça ne s'est pas passé comme ça à Kigali, (That's Not What Happened in Kigali), published in English by the (Phil) Taylor Report: Rwanda 1994: Colonialism Dies Hard, 2004, http://www.taylor-report.com/Rwanda_1994/.
6 Although Rwandan and Ugandan troops warred against each other in Kisangani, DRC, in 2000, and their leaders hate each other, these criminal networks have links, common interests, and equal culpability for ongoing terrorism in Central Africa, Sudan and Somalia.
7 The French term genocidaire has universally been used to castigate innocent Hutus as deeply sinister and evil.
8 This double reality--economic advances and political regression--has been seen before in cases, for example, such as Chile, backed by western powers, under General Augusto Pinochet.
9 The question of mortality statistics by ethnic category have been addressed by Filip Reyntjens, Christian Davenport, Alan Stam and others, leading to the conclusion that the number of Hutu deaths in Rwanda during the so-called "100 days of genocide" of 1994 exceed the possible numbers of Tutsi deaths, a complete inversion of the claims by the GOR, and its supporters and allies, who have always maintained some 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed in the "Rwanda genocide".
10 E.g., Final report of the Group of Experts on the DRC submitted in accordance with paragraph 8 of Security Council resolution 1857 (2008); e.g., Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the DRC, October 2003; Final report of the Group of Experts on the DRC submitted in accordance with paragraph 18(d) of Security Council resolution 1807 (2008); Final report of the Group of Experts on the DRC submitted in accordance with paragraph 8 of Security Council resolution 1857 (2008).
11 Spanish Indictment (Judge Fernando Andreu Merelles), February 2008. The 182 pp. Spanish indictment charges President Kagame and forty members of the RPF/A regime with the deaths of more than 300,000 civilians, detailed in Prefecture-by-Prefecture totals.
12 French Indictments (Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere), December 2006.
13 Filip Reyntjens, The Great African War, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
14 E.g., Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Edwin Mellen Press, 1999; Howard French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Vintage Books, 2005; and International Non-governmental Commission of Inquiry into the Massive Violations of Human Rights Committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Former Zaire) 1996-1997, International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 1998.
15 Dr. Helmut Strizek, Discredit the Hutu Population Forever, Report by Dr. Helmut Strizek, Expert Witness in "The Prosecutor v. Innocent Sagahutu," Before the International Criminal tribunal For Rwanda, (Case No. ICTR 2000-56-I), entered into ICTR records October 30, 2008.
16 See, e.g., Christian Davenport and Alan C. Stam, "What Really Happened in Rwanda," Miller McCune, 2009.
17 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Approved by the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 260 A (III) of December 9, 1948, came into effect on January 12, 1951.
18 See, e.g., the conclusions of the Genodynamics Project of Dr. Christian Davenport and Dr. Alan Stam or the countless human rights reports documenting RPA/F atrocities, e.g., Rwanda: Civilians Trapped in Armed Conflict: The Dead Can No Longer Be Counted, Amnesty International, December 19, 1997.
19 Carla Del Ponte and Chuck Sudetic, Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity's Worst War Criminals, and the Culture of Impunity, The Other Press (NY), 2009.
20 Kenneth Roth, "The Power of Horror in Rwanda," Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2009.
21 See, e.g., Rakiya Omaar, The Leadership of Rwandan Armed Groups Abroad With a Focus on the FDLR and RUD-URUNANA, December 2008: p. 8.
22 See, e.g.: [1] Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal, Death, Despair and Defiance, African Rights, November 1994; [2] Rakiya Omaar, Rwanda: Insurgency in the Northwest, African Rights, 1998; [3] Rakiya Omaar, Letter to Ambassador Mihnea Ioan Motoc, President of the United Nations Security Council, African Rights, October 19, 2005; [4] Rakiya Omaar, An Open Letter to His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, African Rights, May 13, 1998.
23 See, e.g., An Open Letter to His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, African Rights, May 13, 1998.
24 African Rights, A Welcome Expression of Intent: The Nairobi Communique and the Ex-FAR/Interahamwe, December 2007.
25 International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, Minutes of Proceedings, Hategekimana: ICTR-00-55-T, July 1, 2009.
26 See: Delivery of the Murambi Book and African Rights outstanding $100,159, Letters from the GOR's National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide to Rakiya Omaar, Director of African Rights, dated June 6, 2008, and June 22, 2008, stamped with an official seal, and copied to H.E. The President of the Republic, the Rt. Hon. Prime Minister, The Minister of Sports and Culture, and the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning (Kigali).
27 See, e.g., Report of the International Commission of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda Since October 1, 1990, Final Report, Federation Internationale Des Droits de L'Homme (FIDH) (Paris), Africa Watch (New York, Washington, London), Union Interafricaine Des Droits de L'Homme et des Peuples (UIDH)(Ouagadougou), Centre Internationale des Droits De La Personne et du Developpement Democratique (CIDPDD/ICHRDD) (Montreal), March, 1993. Notable members of this Commission included Alison Des Forges and William Schabas.
28 See, e.g., Munyaneza & Ors v. Government of Rwanda, Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London, April 8, 2009; and Dr. Helmut Strizek, The Influence of the International Background on the Creation of the International Tribunal for Rwanda: An Historian's View, October 24, 2009.
29 Dr. Helmut Strizek, The Influence of the International Background on the Creation of the International Tribunal for Rwanda: An Historian's View, October 24, 2009.
30 French indictment Judge Bruguiere, November 2006.
31 Spanish Indictment (Judge Fernando Andreu Merelles), February 2008.
32 Prosecutor v. Bagosora, 98-41-T, Judgment of 12/18/08, published in full February 9, 2009 (www.ictr.org).
33 While the article and the framework for the article are in many ways flawed, displaying the same tendencies toward a priori assumptions of guilt, please see, e.g.: Andrew Rice, "Doubt: A Professor, A Genocide, and NBC's Quest for a Prime Time Hit," The New Republic, August 12, 2009.
34 Andrew Rice, "Doubt: A Professor, A Genocide, and NBC's Quest for a Prime Time Hit," The New Republic, August 12, 2009.
35 Jack Shafer, "To Catch a War Criminal? Why is NBC Being so Cagey about it's New Series?" Slate, February 10, 2009.
36 Notably, a U.S. immigration judge in St. Paul Minnesota imposed Gourevitch's book as compulsory reading for all attorneys dealing with Rwandan refugees requesting political asylum. Similarly, the International human Rights Law Clinic at American University for several years (at least) asked students to read Philip Gourevitch on genocide in Rwanda, in preparation for legal work with the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda. Professor Melissa Crow, who worked with the Law Clinic, followed her term at Human Rights Watch (1994-1995) working for the Office of the ICTR Prosecutor from Kigali, Rwanda, under the RPA/F regime.
37 Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998.
38 Fergal Keane, "Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK" and Fergal Keane, "Rwanda Suspect Worked at UK Trust," BBC News, November 6, 2006.
39 The Government of the Republic of Rwanda v. Vincent Bajinya, Charles Munyaneza, Emmanuel Nteziryayo, and Celestin Ugirashebuja, Decision by Anthony Evans, Designated District Judge, June 6, 2008.
40 Munyaneza & Ors v. Government of Rwanda, Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London, April 8, 2009.
41 The BBC article reporting their release was highly biased, citing, for example, how the Rwandan "president died in a plane crash," and not an act of terrorism--being the double presidential assassinations--and another example of language used to skew perceptions about violence, victims, and killers in Rwanda. See: Unsigned, "Rwanda Accused Win UK Court Case," BBC News, April 8, 2009.
42 Spanish Indictment (Judge Fernando Andreu Merelles), February 2008.
43 French Indictments (Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere), December 2006.
44 See: "The UN in Congo: Watchdog of the Great Mining Interests," Save Rwanda (.org), November 11, 2009.
45 The latest 'Panel of Experts' report on Congo revealed the true pro-RPA/F bias of the United Nations, and discredited the report, which has some solid information in it about certain western criminals, such as, for example, Philippe de Moerloose, whom this author has previously cited for war crimes.
46 Jason Stearns: Congo Siasa (.blogspot.com) [1] "Are We Really Serious About Getting Rid of the FDLR?" October 27, 2009;
47 Jason Stearns: Congo Siasa (.blogspot.com) [1] "Are We Really Serious About Getting Rid of the FDLR?" October 27, 2009; [2] "Ignace in Handcuffs," November 18, 2009
48 Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, "Rwandan Private Print Media on the Eve of the Genocide," in Thompson, Ed., The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, Pluto Press, 2007.
49 U.N. High Commission for Refugees investigator Robert Gersony reported in September 1994 on the RPA/F's killing of more than 30,000 ethnic Hutus--in a period of two months--and gave a detailed account of locations, dates and nature of crimes, as well as the methods used to kill and to make the bodies disappear. Gersony also identified RPF leaders responsible for the killings. The classified U.N. "Gersony Report" has never been released. Sections of the 'Gersony Report' were referenced in other documents, and the conclusions were similar in a declassified Refugees International Situation Report of 1994 (begging questions about why refugees Inetrenationals SITREP are classified by the U.S. State Department...).
50 Raymond Bonner: "Rwandans Say the Victors Kill Many Who Go Back," New York Times, August 5, 1994; and "UN Stops returning Rwandan Refugees," New York Times, September 28,1994.
51 Rakiya Omaar, The Leadership of Rwandan Armed Groups Abroad With a Focus on the FDLR and RUD-URUNANA, December 2008: p. 8.
52 RNA reporter, "U.S. Government Investigating FDLR Official," Rwanda News Agency, December 12, 2008.
53 Max Delany & Scott Baldauf, "Germany Arrests Congo Rebel Leaders," Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 2009; Scott Baldauf, "The Legacy of Rwanda's Genocide: More Assertive International Justice," Christian Science Monitor, April 7, 2009; Scott Baldauf, "Rwanda Rebel Leaders: US, French, Spanish and Congo Business Links," Christian Science Monitor, December 2, 2009.
54 See, e.g., Nicole Dalyrimple, "U.S. and DRC in Partnership to Train Model Congolese Battalion," U.S. AFRICOM Public Affairs, February 18, 2010, http://www.africom.mil/printStory.asp?art=4032; and Kenneth Fiddler, "Ward Leads Africa Command Delegation to Rwanda," U.S. AFRICOM Public Affairs, April 22, 2009, http://www.africom.mil/getArticle.asp?art=2931.
55 FDLR leader Ignace Murwanashyaka was arrested in Germany in November 2009.
56 Scott Baldauf, "Rwanda Rebel Leaders: US, French, Spanish and Congo Business Links," Christian Science Monitor, December 2, 2009(
Labels: KEITH HARMON SNOW, RWANDA
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Keith Harmon Snow who spent 5 Years in the DRC (Congo) will be our guest.
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COMMENT - What really happened in Rwanda
The Grinding Machine: Terror and Genocide in Rwanda
by Keith Harmon Snow
Global Research, April 27, 2007
towardfreedom.com
Paul Rusesabagina
Keith Harmon Snow talks with Paul Rusesabagina, the ordinary man who inspired the film Hotel Rwanda.
"The nickname for my country is ‘the land of thousands of hills,’" writes Paul Rusesabagina, in his autobiography, An Ordinary Man, "but this signifies a gross undercount. There are at least half a million hills, maybe more…we are the children of the hills, the grassy slopes, the valley roads, the spider patterns of rivers, and the millions of rivulets and crevasses and buckles of earth… In this country, we don’t talk about coming from a particular village, but from a particular hill."
Paul Rusesabagina was born into a family of nine children, farmers, on the side of a steep hill, in a home made of mud and sticks. The Rwanda of his youth was green and bright, full of cooking fires and sisters murmuring and drying sorghum and corn leaves in the wind and in the warm arms of his mother. But this image of a happy, quiet youth spent in the quaint hills of some far-off place is not one the western world holds in its modern memory of Rwanda. Instead we are confronted by horror.
The surname "Rusesabagina" was chosen for the young hero of our story by his father when he was born, in 1954. It means "warrior that disperses the enemies." After a brief encounter with the seminary, Paul landed at the posh cosmopolitan Hotel Des Mille Collines, in Kigali, the Rwandan capital city, in 1979. (1) The first 23 years of his life saw great upheaval in Rwanda. The Independence of the country from the brutal colonial enterprise saw massive loss of life. Labels were manufactured—like Hutu and Tutsi—and selectively applied, with structures designed to divide and conquer. In 1959, and again in 1972, genocide occurred in Rwanda. There was no reconciliation, then, and the results of impunity, those years ago, have now been etched—with the blood and skeletons of 1994—in the collective consciousness of humanity.
From the very first impression of Paul Rusesabagina one does not get the sense that they are meeting a warrior in battle, but rather a man disposed to diplomacy and compromise. He is a warm, friendly man with tranquil countenance that belies the horrors he has seen, and those he has survived. Still waters run deep, indeed, and Paul Rusesabagina is today engaged with an enemy: Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda.
In October of 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Army—the military wing of the Rwanda Patriotic Front—invaded northern Rwanda from western Uganda. The RPA was created in Uganda, assisted by Ugandan troops, and led by Paul Kagame. These were Tutsis in exile, refugees, the Tutsi Diaspora, men like Paul Kagame who was carried to safety as a three year-old—in 1959—on the back of his mother. But the government of Rwanda called on its allies—French, Belgian and Israeli-trained forces from Zaire—and stalled the invasion.
Northeastern Rwanda, 1991
Exactly one year later, in October 1991, I bicycled through Uganda and down the same road to Rwanda that the invading forces must have taken. I was oblivious to the war, and to the danger. When a man riding in a pick-up truck was shot—an "RPF rebel" they said—it meant nothing to me. I was not shocked, or surprised, or even curious. I merely thought: this is something that happens in Africa.
On my mountain bike I crossed the Ugandan border, and directly joined a trek into the green, sunny, terraced hillside. I knew nothing at all about Rwanda, or about insurgency, and nothing about genocide (not even that it had ever happened). Paying $100, I hiked with a group of tourists and heavily armed rangers up the steep slopes of Mount Karisimbi, in the Volcanoes National Park, and there in the lush montane forest I saw a troop of silverbacks: I was interested in gorillas, and that is what took me to the land of thousands of hills. I was not interested in guerrillas, and I was not interested in Rwanda, and I left it behind, forever—I thought—and moved on, on my bicycle. But the hills of my Rwanda were tranquil then, as I remember them. They were so quiet that you could hear the wind as it passed over the feathers of a soaring hawk, and the echoes of children playing on the hills across the deep valleys. There were no Hutus or Tutsis in my experience, just a quiet, peaceful, friendly people living on the slopes of those verdant hills.
Paul Rusesabagina can no longer visit his particular hill. He was made famous by the film Hotel Rwanda, a Hollywood story inspired by his actions in the face of inhumanity, but Paul Rusesabagina fled Rwanda on 6 September 1996, after an attempted assassination, and he is today in exile from his own country. Paul Kagame’s agents have tracked him in Belgium, where he now lives, and even in the United States, where he tours and speaks. He has been derided and threatened. In an 7 April 2007 ceremony held in Rwanda to mark the 13th anniversary of the genocide, President Paul Kagame called him a "swindler" and "gangster" who works with other swindlers and gangsters who support him. The speech has raised fears in Rwanda, and amongst the Rwandan Diaspora around the world. It was not the slander of Paul Rusesabagina that has upset the Rwandan people, but the other things that President Kagame said, and the way that he said them, in Kinyarwanda. In keeping with the general climate of silence and disinformation about the political realities in Rwanda, Paul Kagame’s words went untold by the Western press.
Congolese refugees flee Rwandan militias
On 6 April 1994 the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were assassinated after the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was struck by surface-to-air missiles as it approached the airport in the capital city, Kigali. Over the next three months the Western media was saturated with stories about meaningless tribal slaughter, unexplained cataclysms of violence, and utter hopelessness descending over the hills of Rwanda. Hutus killing Tutsis, people hacking their neighbors with machetes, the media’s message was clear: that is just something such people do.
In the film, Hotel Rwanda, the hate radio station of the Hutu Power government blames the presidents’ deaths on the Tutsi rebels, and we are left believing that, of course, there is no question that the ruthless, bloodthirsty, Hutu people did it. Paul Rusesabagina is a Hutu whose parents were both Hutu and Tutsi, and the film celebrates the humanity of Paul Rusesabagina in saving the lives of people. Paul Rusesabagina did not run away, he stood firm, and he said, "no."
In April of 1994 the Traprock Peace Center in western Massachusetts held a ceremony to remember and honor veterans. The speakers were Lois Barber, founder of Earth Action, and 2020 Vision, and Howard Zinn, author of the book A People’s History of the United States. I will never forget the sense of powerlessness we all felt when activist Frances Crowe, who was then 75 years old, asked with dismay: What can we do to help the people of Rwanda? There were no answers. The media had whipped up the specter of ancient tribal animosities, and this—as it always does—had emasculated our sensibilities. It was just something that happens in Africa. Some years later—after Rwanda had invaded the Congo—I privately complained to Frances Crowe that no one seemed to care about Rwanda, that there were no vigils, no protests, no willingness to understand. And Frances said to me, "maybe you are the one to be the voice for Rwanda." Well, those words certainly struck me, but it is a job I do not want. One can imagine that Paul Rusesabagina was also given a job that he did not want, but it was a job he did well.
Child labor is often used in DRC mining
Today—thirteen years after the infamous "100 days of genocide"—the political situation in Rwanda remains widely misunderstood and dangerously volatile. Most people continue to believe, even to spread, the disinformation about Rwanda. People have seen the film, Hotel Rwanda, but they know nothing about the protests in America organized by the Kagame machine. They know nothing about the innocent people imprisoned, tortured or disappeared by the Kagame machine. They know nothing of the kangaroo courts of the ICTR—the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda—or the "shenanigans" of the prosecution.
Few people know about the November 2005 assassination of Juvenal Uwilingiyamana, whose body turned up floating naked in a canal in Brussels. And if they have heard of Juvenal Uwilingiyamana, then maybe they think he deserved his fate: he was, after all, a fugitive from genocide. That he had been threatened and intimidated by agents of the ICTR, and yet refused to collaborate to manufacture falsehoods to support the Kagame mythology, few people know.
Rwandan Hutu prisoners accused of genocide, used for forced laborAnd while some might recall the 28 February 1999 massacre of eight Western tourists in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, they have heard nothing about the trials in Washington, where a U.S. judge freed the supposed killers in the fall of 2006: they were obviously tortured, the judge said. Who killed the tourists? Was it the enemies of the RPF, or was it the RPF? Why were the suspects passed through the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? Was this yet another attempt to extract confessions, under duress, that would serve the Kagame machine and uphold the Victor’s Justice dispensed by the ICTR? Answers will never come, when so few are prepared to comprehend the questions. And there are people with answers, people—in hiding—who can reportedly prove that it was the RPF that killed the two Americans, four Britons, and two New Zealanders.
In his 7 April 2007 commemoration of genocide, delivered in Murambi, Rwanda, President Paul Kagame spoke—in the Kinyarwanda language—with the inflection and innuendo of viciousness. He complained that the French should have tasted the RPF’s wrath when—Operation Turquoise, 1994—the RPF had the chance to inflict and wound them. He complained about all the Paul Rusesabaginas abroad, and their white friends, who malign and slander the good name of Rwanda. And when he complained about the Hutus, there was no mistaking the message—Rwandans say—for the threat that it is. President Paul Kagame said that the RPF Army made a mistake: that they should have finished off all the Hutus before they fled to Congo (Zaire), and they should have finished off all those who returned, when they had the chance. Kagame’s supporters, both emboldened and embarrassed by his words, issued a sanitized version of this speech; the original has disappeared from public view. Rwanda today is a cauldron of terror. It is not over. For many Rwandans, every day it begins anew.
Paul Kagame with directors of Royal/Dutch Shell in Rwanda
Below is a candid interview with Paul Rusesabagina given in a Chicago coffee shop. Paul talks about his country, about genocide, about the events of 1994 that occurred outside the walls of the Hotel des Mille Collines. But most important of all, Paul Rusesabagina speaks candidly about the imperatives of facing and naming reality.
Without transparency, with so much impunity, there will be no reconciliation, and no peace. This is the ultimate truth, and it is not about ancient tribal animosity, and it is not even about Rwanda. It is about depopulation, and control, and it is playing out today in Somalia and Sudan and Northern Uganda and Congo. War, terror, assassinations, the disappearing of innocent people—these are not just something that happens in Africa.
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TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW
keith harmon snow: Paul, what would you say about Rwanda today?
Paul Rusesabagina: Rwanda today, that is a very wide subject.
KHS: Let's stick to the claim by the government of Rwanda that there are people trying to commit genocide against the Tutsis, and therefore they have to institute extreme security measures to defend their country.
PR: Well, Rwanda today, in that sense, [President] Kagame has used the label “genocide” to oppress the majority Hutus, who are 85% of the population. Kagame has got a militia, a new militia called the Local Defense [Forces]. (2) The Local Defense are demobilized army guys, who are given weapons, ammunitions. Those guys are not paid. You find them everywhere on the hills of Rwanda. (3)
KHS: They're not paid?
PR: They are not paid.
KHS: Why do they do it?
PR: They pay themselves. And you understand what this means?
KHS: They are robbing and pillaging...
PR: They are pillaging, they are robbing, they are killing...
KHS: Only within Rwanda? You're talking about within Rwanda? Not in the Congo… where the Rwandans are also pillaging and killing.
PR: Within Rwanda. Right now. I am only talking about Rwanda itself, not about the Congo.
KHS: Where do they get their weapons?
PR: From the government; they work for Kagame.
KHS: Are you a friend of Kagame at this point?
PR: Well, to the best of my knowledge, I have never been one. I've never been his friend, because, myself I knew Kagame from the beginning as a war criminal. Why a war criminal? Because, since Kagame came over from Uganda—on his way from Byumba and Ruhengeri in the northeast—what he did was to kill innocent civilians, innocent Hutu civilians. This has never been qualified as a genocide, but it is one; until it is qualified as a genocide, me I won’t call it a genocide, but it is supposed to be one...
KHS: Critics would claim, and people who support the predominant discourse, what I would call, the mythology of genocide in Rwanda, would claim that you are a Hutu, therefore you obviously have something against the Tutsis, and therefore you are saying that they have committed genocide against Hutus, and Kagame is responsible for, you're saying, terrorism.
PR: I'm not talking for Hutus or for Tutsis. I am talking for all those people who have no voice, who cannot have access to the media. I'm trying to be their voice. But I am not talking for Hutus. I am not talking for Tutsis. Because with Paul Kagame, whoever frustrates him, whoever might raise a voice, whoever talks against him—being Hutu or Tutsi—Kagame sees them as his enemy.
KHS: Kagame will come after you?
PR: Kagame will come after you.
KHS: Or he will have you arrested as a génocidaire…
PR: Yes, of course. I will give you an example of Hutus and Tutsis who both have been killed since 1994. You know about Kagame completely destroying the refugee camps in Kibeho?
KHS: Kibeho, Rwanda: the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda [UNAMIR] stood by and watched while 4000 Rwandan refugees were massacred… (4)
PR: You have seen those pictures. Maybe you were not there, you did not experience what happened, but at least you have seen the websites showing how the RPF army destroyed refugee camps with helicopters while soldiers were on the ground with machine guns killing everyone, each and every moving human being trying to flee the camp. So, what can we call that? Is that a genocide? Is that a crime against humanity? To me, that is a crime against humanity, which includes genocide and war crimes.
KHS: The refugees were internally displaced Rwandans—originally forced out of Rwanda by the RPF invasion—and then forced back to Rwanda…
PR: That was April 17th to 20th, 1995. (5) Those were Hutus he [Kagame] was killing. When Kagame followed one of his former Ministers of the Interior, Seth Sendashonga, and he was assassinated in Kenya [16 May 1998], he was killing the Hutu. (6) He followed Augustin Bugilimfura, who was a prominent businessman: he [Kagame] killed him in Kenya. (7) He followed one of his former colonels in the army, Lizinde Theoneste, who used also to be a major in President Habyarimana’s army [Forces Armées Rwandaises: FAR], and he also killed him [1998] in Kenya. But on the other hand, he also kills Tutsis. Kabera Assiel in the year 2000, he raised a voice, and talked, and he was assassinated trying to get into his house in Kigali, in Rwanda. (8)
KHS: And he was a Tutsi?
PR: He was a Tutsi. And he was the advisor to the Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu—who was imprisoned in Rwanda for some years.
KHS: Bizimungu was elected?
PR: No, Bizimungu was not elected, but he was designated by the RPF, the rebels, in 1994. (9)
KHS: So, you see a clear pattern of—what would you call it? Genocide? Murder? Assassinations? —state orchestrated terrorism that has occurred under the Kagame government since 1994.
PR: What you call, what I call myself, the Kagame “government”—I call it akazu. (10) The akazu is a small circle of old friends who rule over the country, who do whatever they want. But this akazu is a Tutsi circle, ruling over a whole nation, it is not Tutsi power: it is a circle of Tutsis.
KHS: There was the akazu under Habyarimana’s rule. (11) But now you have a group of very powerful Tutsis who have powerful Hutu businessmen as friends…
PR: Well, have you ever read my book An Ordinary Man?
KHS: No, I’m sorry. (12)
PR: Read my book An Ordinary Man. Those Hutus, I know they are there, who are trying to buy time. Who are trying to pay each and every now and then. They are the ones financing each and everything. They do not do it because they want to do it that way, but they are forced to.
KHS: To survive under the Kagame machine.
PR: Yes, to survive what they call today in Rwanda, the grinding machine.
KHS: The grinding machine?
PR: Yes, the grinding machine: a machine grinding human beings. You understand what I mean?
KHS: Terrorism, brutality, murder, torture, intimidation, death squads… a reign of terror…And that is the Kagame machine?
PR: Yes, that is the Kagame machine. And to be more specific, the former leader of that grinding machine is today the military attaché in Washington DC. His name is Gacinya, Rugumya.
KHS: And was Gacinya in Rwanda from 1990 to 1994?
PR: He comes from Uganda I think.
KHS: Like Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe (13) … which brings up the question of the Uganda connection to the Kagame machine.
PR: [Laughing.] How do you call this — Pilato? — the nickname, you know this one, who condemned all the babies to death when Jesus was born... They used to call Paul Kagame the Ugandan Pilato…
KHS: And why did they call him that?
PR: He was the head of military intelligence in Uganda. Between 1986 and 1990: Kagame was the one condemning people to life or death in Uganda, the one who was deciding people’s lives. (14)
KHS: Well, Kagame and Museveni have worked together to terrorize Congo, and their own countries right? And this is always with outside military support. But many people don't see, or don't believe, that Paul Kagame has deep connections outside. How do you feel about that? What do you think the reality is?
PR: Well, the reality is that Kagame has got support somewhere. I do not know really whether he gets it from the U.S. military. But Kagame has good support from somewhere. In any case, he does not get that support from France. He doesn't get it really from Europe. But he gets it from somewhere.
KHS: From your point of view—you are the real life hero depicted in the film Hotel Rwanda—what do you think about the movie?
PR: Well, I do not really call myself a hero. I call myself an ordinary man. That is the reason why I call my book, An Ordinary Man: I am an ordinary man who did ordinary things that he was supposed to do. During the more complicated and extraordinary circumstances I remained an ordinary man.
In the movie Hotel Rwanda, it was a true story of what was going on in the Hotel des Mille Collines [Kigali, Rwanda] during Rwanda’s 100 days of killing. I defined it that way, because me I say three months, because I do not know when they count the 100 days.
The genocide started the sixth of April [1994] when the President Habyarimana was assassinated. And this is, to me, what is called—with a blanket explanation—the genocide. That was supposed to have finished on July 4, when the RPF took over the country.
KHS: And that’s the so-called “100 days of genocide” in Rwanda: according to this—which I call a mythology—there was no genocide before 6 April 1994 and no genocide after 4 July 1994 and it was those ruthless Hutus and savage Interahamwe who did all the killing in those 100 days.
PR: Yes, it was finished, when it appeared that the RPF rebels took over the country. So, there was no more genocide afterwards. Whatever happens afterwards, they [RPA] take over. When we come back to the film Hotel Rwanda, and in the Mille Collines, that is the true story of what was going on during that specific time. And sometimes it [the film] has been made a little bit less violent for an audience to come, sit down, watch and get out with a message.
KHS: Do you believe the message is accurate?
PR: The message is very accurate.
KHS: The message that the Kagame regime, that the current government, that the rebels—the Rwandan Patriotic Army—stopped the genocide, and saved everyone...
PR: No, no, Hotel Rwanda [the film] does not say that...
KHS: But it's easy to believe that from the film.
PR: No, this is where I do not agree with people. Because the film Hotel Rwanda is about what is called the “Hotel Rwanda” [Hotel des Mille Collines]. It talks about what was going on between the walls, the four walls, of the building. It does not go outside to define what was going on. You saw the hotel manager going out how many times in the movie? Just twice: once, going out for supplies; the second time with those who are evacuated. That was it. Hotel Rwanda does not talk about what was going on outside. Only, in Hotel Rwanda, the movie shows the rebels as the winners, and they have been the winners.
KHS: Do you feel that the movie leaves people believing that the rebels [RPA] stopped the genocide?
PR: No. No one stopped the genocide. The rebels are still fighting when the movie ends...
KHS: But the movie leaves you believing that the rebels [RPA] stopped the genocide...
PR: No. This is an idea that all Westerners have in mind. This is why a movie is a movie: the movie does not leave people having in mind that the rebels stopped genocide. The movie stops when the rebels and the militiamen are fighting—still fighting—and the militiamen are fleeing, they are running away, and that is how it was.
KHS: Is Georges Rutaganda—the Interahamwe leader—the bad guy in the film Hotel Rwanda—a good friend of yours? (15)
PR: We grew up together. Georges and myself we grew up together. And even before political parties came up, we were very close. And during that time, I remember telling him myself, “Georges, you are making a mistake.” I told him that. We talked about it during the genocide, during the 100 days, or the three months, as I call it. During that three months, I saw Georges many times. He came to the hotel [Mille Collines], he came to see me many times at the hotel.
KHS: His lawyers from the ICTR [International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda] claim that he was portrayed, and he claims that, the movie portrays him unfairly. (16)
PR: I think the movie does not portray Georges unfairly. But rather Georges portrays himself unfairly. He portrayed—in his real life—he portrayed himself unfairly. Why did he portray himself unfairly? Georges was the second Vice-president of the Interahamwe. The Interahamwe had a President: Kajuga, Robert.
KHS: Was Robert Kajuga a Tutsi?
PR: Yes, Kajuga was a Tutsi.
KHS: How can that be? The Interahamwe, according to the common portrayals of genocide in Rwanda, were a bunch of murderous Hutus with machetes…
PR: How could that be? That is a problem. Because Kagame had infiltrated the [Habyarimana’s] army [FAR], and the militias, everywhere; he [Kagame] had his own militia within a militia.
KHS: Are you saying that Robert Kajuga was one of those infiltrators?
PR: Among many others.
KHS: Does that mean that the Interahamwe were killing people under the command of Paul Kagame?
PR: Well, not under his command, but Kagame had infiltrated the militias.
KHS: Does that mean that the militias—that the Interahamwe who were killing—were killing with the complicity of now President and then military commander Paul Kagame?
PR: Without knowing, for sure. They were not aware, that they were working for him [Kagame]. But most of those guys who were just on the roadblocks [where so much killing was done] were Kagame people. (17)
KHS: When you say, “they were not aware…” Who was not aware they were working for Kagame?
PR: The militias. Me I think that Georges [Rutaganda] was not aware that all of those guys were with him [Kagame]; guys like [Interahamwe President] Kajuga, Robert, who was his [Rutaganda’s] president, I'm sure he [Rutaganda] did not know.
KHS: So you then say that Kagame had something to do with orchestrating what people know as “the genocide in Rwanda,” which was those now famous “100 days”—or three months as you call it—of killing.
PR: What do you think? Who killed [President] Habyarimana? [Laughing.] Who benefited from Habyarimana’s death? It is Kagame and his people. And if you go back to the region, to the Great Lakes region, between 1990 and 1994, as I was describing, the rebels [RPA] on their way from Uganda—in Byumba and Ruhengeri, in northern Rwanda— they were killing civilians. Today you can go to many former communities which Kagame has completely reshuffled, and changed, every way, upside down. Today if I go to the hill where I was born, he has changed the names.
KHS: They have changed the names of the hills where you were born?
PR: Yes. All the names have been changed. So, killing civilians. If you go there today in Byumba, you will notice that 80% of the population are widows, women, all women. Why 80% of the population, today, is widows? Because rebels [RPA] were inviting their husbands to meetings and killing them.
KHS: This is before 1994.
PR: Before 1994. And their sons were being involved in the rebels [RPA] army and being killed.
KHS: Their sons were lured into the rebel army movement… were they Tutsis? Or Hutus? Or doesn’t it matter?
PR: Kagame at that time was killing Hutus only.
KHS: Because you had such an imbalance of power, with so many Hutus in Rwanda—the majority—that he had to depopulate the country, and he did this by any means necessary...
PR: Yes. And then, as a result, by late 1993, early 1994, we had about 1.2 million people surrounding Kigali, coming to beg in town...
KHS: IDPs—internally displaced people—Rwandan people.
PR: Yes, internally displaced people. Coming to beg in town, going to sleep in the open air, without shelter, without food, without water, dying each and every day, by disasters in camps, and also without education for their own children.
By 1993—you remember—in June, a Hutu President was elected democratically in Burundi: N’Dadaye, Melchior. And then he was killed in October [1993] by the Tutsi army [in Burundi]. (18) So the whole region was boiling. So now imagine, someone else taking over for N’Dadaye, and then another President from Burundi [Ntaryamira] now killed—also assassinated—with the President of Rwanda, six months later [6 April 1994]. So, that person, who killed President Habyarimana and President [Cyprien] Ntaryamira of Burundi… (19)
KHS: ...and Major-General Nsabimana…the Rwandan Armed Forces [Forces Armées Rwandaises, FAR] Chief of Staff who was also on the plane...
PR: Yes, he was the Rwandan [FAR] General, the Chief of Staff. So that person who beheaded two nations, to me, is the one, who is responsible for the death of a million people. (20)
KHS: Paul Kagame…
PR: Kagame. He pretends that people are not supposed to be angry; because he pretends that he can keep on killing them. Now, who took machetes first? And went down to the streets? All those refugees who surrounded Kigali, who had been angry for four years, who had lost their family members, killed by the [RPA] rebels; they started revenging on everyone… on Hutus and Tutsis.
KHS: On everyone...
PR: On Hutus and Tutsis, all together; on each and every one.
KHS: But that's not genocide as genocide is defined…if both Hutus and Tutsis are being killed… and both Tutsis and Hutus are doing the killing…
PR: Well, we can call it, let's say, we have to call it genocide, because we can never change it. This genocide designation has been decided by the Security Council.
KHS: But the United Nations Security Council is, in effect, a conspiracy of very powerful people...serving very powerful interests…
PR: Yes. But, well, on November 8, 1994, this was the date of the Security Council resolution made to call it a genocide. We have to maybe wait for another resolution, maybe calling it...
KHS: Politicide, or something else…holding all parties responsible… (21)
PR: Not politicide… because to me it is a genocide. We should call it by its name.
KHS: Committed by the Tutsis, the RPF rebels.
PR: Yes.
KHS: When was the first time you heard the term genocide applied to Rwanda?
PR: In 1994.
KHS: In 1994? You didn't hear it used before that?
PR: Well, it was used before that. That was RPF promotions—that genocide was being committed against Tutsis—that was RPF talking about it on Radio Muhabura … (22)
KHS: Saying that genocide was being committed against the Tutsis.
PR: Saying that genocide was being committed against the Tutsis.
KHS: But Alex de Waal [African Rights, London] came out with a report, and Alison des Forges [Human Rights Watch] came out with a report—and these reports were before April 1994, right? —Saying that the Habyrimana government was responsible for genocide.
PR: Well, I know that many humanitarians, many Western governments, were on the side of the Tutsi [RPA] rebels. The international community Kagame uses the label “genocide”—and he is using the “genocide”—to intimidate each and every one. And the international community is silent. And this has surprised me: that the international community has been silent since ever in Rwanda, and even today.
KHS: Is there any international “community”? Or is this merely another mistaken belief, a mythology… that there is some “community” of concerned people or organizations that do not operate from a profit motive, but from a truly humanitarian motive, for the betterment of the world?
PR: Well, when I say the international community, I'm always speaking about the humanitarian organizations.
KHS: Humanitarian. Such as?
PR: Such as Amnesty International.
KHS: Amnesty International. Is that a “humanitarian” organization? Is that an organization that operates without bias on some principles of truth? Where was Amnesty in 1993? When Rwanda—a sovereign country—was under attack, facing an invasion by the RPF? Wasn’t that a terrorist act? To invade a sovereign country as the RPF did Rwanda? Where was Amnesty then?
PR: Where were they in 1990?
KHS: In 1990…1991…1992, where were they?
PR: Where were they in 1994?
KHS: So, then you ask the question...
PR: They were one-sided. Where were they in 1994, and after, in 1995? Where are they today? We do not see them [in Rwanda].
KHS: What about Alison des Forges [Human Rights Watch]? She's always producing alerts from Kigali about Congo, for example. (23)
PR: Well I believe that Alison des Forges has spoken for the oppressed in a way. There have been some reports, in 1993, talking about the RPF killing civilians [in Rwanda].
KHS: Reports by who?
PR: By Alison des Forges and others from Human Rights Watch.
KHS: About the RPF killings that were going on.
PR: About the RPF killings. She wrote about that in 1993, in a Human Rights Watch Report. And in 1995 and 1996, she did a lot of reports against the RPF. Did you know that at a given time, Alison des Forges became persona non grata and was wanted in Rwanda, until 1999, when Americans had the right to go to Rwanda without a visa. That is when she happened to go back to Rwanda under the RPF regime. That much I know.
KHS: So, you think Alison des Forges has been fairly balanced…
PR: Well, she has tried to be balanced.
KHS: Does that mean you don't think she has succeeded?
PR: Well, sometimes people try and sometimes they succeed, and some other times they fail, that's life. Sometimes people are informed; some other times people may be misinformed as well.
KHS: Do you see parallels between what happened in Rwanda from 1990 to 1994 and what is going on in Darfur today?
PR: Definitely.
KHS: You went to Darfur [January 2005]. Who did you travel with?
PR: I traveled with Don Cheadle [the actor], who played me in Hotel Rwanda. I traveled with five members of the U.S. Congress.
KHS: Which congressmen and congresswomen?
PR: Well, there was Eddie Royce (R-CA) of California... (24)
KHS: Was there a U.S. Military General with you?
PR: Ah, well, there were some U.S. military generals as well.
KHS: Did you see other U.S. military in Sudan when you got there?
PR: In Sudan? No, they are not any in Sudan.
KHS: You didn't see any.
PR: No. In Sudan I didn't see any. I didn’t see any.
KHS: But you do see parallels between Darfur and Rwanda...
PR: But I do see—I saw a lot of parallels. In Rwanda in 1994, as I told you, before 1994, me, I just consider, what happened before 1994 saw the genocide.
KHS: I'm sorry, you say, “what was happening before 1994”…
PR: Yes, what I was describing—RPA killings in Byumba and Ruhengeri. So, this is what is going on in Darfur. What was going on in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994 is exactly what is going on in Darfur.
KHS: That's impossible! In Darfur, we are told that there are all these Arabs on horses, Jangaweed, killing people, just like in Rwanda, where we had the Hutus—the Interahamwe—killing people.
PR: No, before 1994, you had Tutsis, the Tutsi army [RPA], killing Hutu civilians on the hills of Byumba and Ruhengeri, on their way to power, fighting for power.
KHS: This is the reality.
PR: The reality is that. And this is also what is going on in Darfur. You have the Janjaweed on horses killing civilians in camps. Destroying villages...
KHS: Are you saying there are no rebels involved in Darfur?
PR: There are also rebels involved, but this time it is a militia armed by the government. But also in Rwanda before 1994, the militia Interahamwe was also killing civilians.
KHS: What I'm trying to say is that in Rwanda before 1994, in the international press, you didn't see anything about the RPF, they were almost not even there, even though they were invading a country. And today, it’s the same with the “rebels” in Darfur.
PR: Because the RPF was smart enough: if you were a journalist not on their side, they [RPF] would just push you away; you were not allowed to cover their zone. Simply you were not allowed.
KHS: So the media coverage was very slanted in favor of the RPF. Don't you think that is happening in Darfur, with the rebels?
PR: No, with the rebels, I don't think so: because we crossed and went on the rebel side.
KHS: Where do the rebels in Darfur get their weapons and their arms?
PR: They get them, of course, from the West. You see, whatever happens, there's always a superpower behind.
KHS: Well, this is what I am saying, no? So who's giving the rebels in Darfur their weapons? Who supports them?
PR: Well, I don't really know.
KHS: The African Union forces have 2,000 of Kagame's men, and these are the same people who have committed genocide in Congo and Rwanda… (25)
PR: Yes, of course. Those are armed by the U.S. This is actually the observers—if you can call it that—because I can no more call them peacekeepers, or peacemakers. They are, to me, they are just observers.
KHS: These are the Darfur A.U. peacekeepers...
PR: No, to me, they are not peacekeepers, they are just observers.
KHS: And what about Roger Winter, today he is the chief of United States Agency for International development [USAID] in Sudan. What can you say about his involvement in Rwanda before 1994? When he was head of the U.S. Committee for Refugees? Wasn't he close with Paul Kagame and the RPF even before 1990? (26)
PR: This is what they say; they say also that he was a good friend to the RPF people since the beginning, since 1980.
KHS: Did you see Roger Winter when you were there [Darfur]?
PR: No, I didn't see him, because he was supposed to be in Khartoum. He's a representative of the U.S. administration in Khartoum. He's not in Darfur.
KHS: You didn’t see him in Darfur. Did you see him in Rwanda in 1990 and 1994? You weren't working at the Hotel des Mille Collines in this period were you?
PR: Yes, of course, I was working at Mille Collines until November 1992.
KHS: Were you seeing any U.S. military in Rwanda at the time?
PR: Well, the military, the U.S. military, are never in military uniforms. Are they supposed to be in military uniforms? They were mostly in civilian uniforms, just dressed like you and I.
KHS: What role did Canadian General Romeo play? (27) Because it's claimed by ICTR lawyers—for the defense—that Dallaire and the UNAMIR forces closed down half the runway, eliminating one possible approach, which made it possible to shoot down the plane carrying the two presidents. (28)
PR: Well, General Dallaire openly helped the RPF rebels, unfortunately.
KHS: He was working for the RPF…
PR: I couldn’t tell exactly who he was working for. For me, what I cannot understand: A Canadian general who came to Rwanda in 1993, who has 2,500 soldiers, and when they are in the genocide [period] and 10 Belgian soldiers were killed, the Belgian government decided to pullout [of Rwanda]. And they [Belgium] had about 350 soldiers in the U.N. [UNAMIR], supported by the United States, and the United Kingdom, and the whole world decided to pull out, and to abandon the whole [peacekeeping] mission, to abandon Rwanda. When they decided to abandon, the General [Dallaire] himself decided to remain, this time not with 2,500 soldiers, but with 200 soldiers. Can you imagine a Canadian general commanding 200 African soldiers? That is a big question mark. I can't imagine, a U.S. or Canadian general commanding 200 soldiers, and African soldiers… maybe if he was a lieutenant he could have done that…
KHS: So you are saying it was highly irregular for a Canadian General to stay in Rwanda at the time and be commanding only 200 soldiers… So the question then arises: what was a Canadian General doing with 200 African soldiers? Was he working for Canada?
PR: No, not as a Canadian, but maybe on his own.
KHS: Not officially for Canada...
PR: No, not officially.
KHS: But he wasn't officially U.N. anymore either, is that right?
PR: But he was still, in the end, he was still supposed to be a United Nations commander. But myself, I don't imagine a Canadian general commanding 200 soldiers. Can you imagine? And knowing, purposely, that he is unable to do anything to protect any one civilian? And with only 200 soldiers for the whole country: you can imagine what it means: nothing, zero.
KHS: Why did he stay?
PR: Why did he stay? That remains a mystery to me. I haven't understood. But maybe if I was in his position—myself, I would have resigned. Because giving me 200 soldiers, that is a humiliation for a general. So resigning, and staying, remaining, knowing purposely that he was not going to change anything… that was a game. Or maybe secretly he [Dallaire] was working for someone else.
KHS: In other words, the only sensible conclusion is that General Romeo Dallaire remained in Rwanda—after the UNAMIR “peacekeeping” mission was aborted—because he was expected to play a role in the overthrow of the Habyarimana government. And he did play a role: he supported the RPF.
PR: Well, that is a big question mark. Dallaire’s army, his [UNAMIR] soldiers were bringing RPF soldiers, in their [UNAMIR] cars, from the RPF side, to the CND, the house of the parliament in Kigali. (29)
KHS: You are saying that UNAMIR was transporting RPF soldiers from the RPF side of Rwanda, across the ceasefire zone, to Kigali, and this was before April 1994?
PR: Yes, before April 6, 1994. Initially there were supposed to be 600 soldiers, but in [April] 1994 when the genocide broke out there were about 4000 RPF soldiers.
KHS: And what was the official number of RPF soldiers allowed to be in Kigali? Wasn’t there a restriction of RPF soldiers in Kigali according to the Arusha Peace Accords of 1993?
PR: Yes. Under the Arusha Accords it was 600 [RPA] soldiers.
KHS: So, officially, only 600 RPA soldiers were allowed in Kigali, but in fact there were almost 4000 RPA. So obviously Habyarimana knew that, but he couldn’t do anything about it.
PR: Yes, and that is why he [Habyarimana] was angry against each and every one. He was always upset.
KHS: Did you ever hear anything about the investigations into the shooting down of the presidential plane? The 6 April 1994 event that is always credited with “sparking the genocide?”
PR: Well, I heard about the investigations, and I heard that, at a given time, they had come up with a result. But they couldn't declare the results [at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda], because the prosecutors didn't want the results to appear. And even today, which is still a mystery, the prosecutor does not take the assassination of President Habyarimana into his mission. And yet according to his mission given by his security council, given by the U.N. resolution of 1994, he was supposed to deal with the Rwandan genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes between January 1 and December 31, 1994, the whole year. So he is excluding the most important point of his mission—the investigation of the death of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. And he does not consider this, even now: the ICTR IS not concerned about Habyarimana’s death.
KHS: Right. It's inside the bounds of the court—the ICTR—what the court is allowed and required or mandated to investigate, but they have ignored it completely, and they are still ignoring it, and they have told you that they will continue to ignore it.
PR: Yes. And myself, I will never understand. An International Court for Rwanda, given a mission—a mission of reconciliation—but never talking about a terrorist act. To me—assassinating two presidents—that is a terrorist act. First of all, a peace agreement had been signed between the [RPF] rebels and the [Habyarimana] government.
KHS: The Arusha Accords.
PR: Yes. There was a ceasefire; no one was allowed to fight. Whoever killed, that is a terrorist. So, if someone comes as a tribunal, and this is defined, well defined, in their mission, they are supposed to handle what happens between January 1st and December 31rst, 1994. That is the U.N. resolution on Rwanda. So, saying that this double presidential assassination is outside of their boundaries, is unbelievable.
KHS: So this is just another example of how the evidence is hidden, how the RPF is protected, even rewarded, for their military coup. But the RPF has been killing all along, and you have said this, and they are never challenged, because they use the “genocide” card to manipulate, or silence, or accuse people. And you have said openly that there is a genocide going on in Rwanda now.
PR: I've said openly that if we do not follow up what is going on in Rwanda, if—again—the international community closes eyes, and ears, and turns backs, then another genocide might be committed in the near future.
KHS: By who? And against who?
PR: By who? Who else can commit that? I told you that Kagame has got an army, a very strong army. He's got a militia, and this militia is present all over the country, on each and every hill. They kill whomever they want; whenever they want; however they want. Many people get lost. Whoever says “no,” they kill him. Today, people support no one; businesses have stopped. No one is allowed to sell even beans. Even if you cultivate your beans you are no more allowed to go and sell your own beans on the market. The RPF has taken over everything—even all the markets. They have appointed people who go and buy everything and sell them at their own prices. The RPF controls each and everything.
KHS: You're talking about extortion and racketeering of the kind the RPF have instituted in Congo.
PR: Extortion. So the people are dictated. They have got no more rights, and they are intimidated on the hills. And me, I always say: I fear my fellow Rwandans, when they don't talk, and when they are not allowed to. When they don’t open their mouths and say what they think, I fear them.
KHS: Now, already...
PR: Yes. And now they do not talk, because they are not allowed; they are intimidated.
KHS: When you say another genocide, you're saying that the Kagame government will kill off more people to perpetuate and further consolidate its own power.
PR: But it has been doing it. It did it before 1994. It has been doing it. It is still doing it. He [Kagame] did it before the genocide, during the genocide and after the genocide, and he is still doing it, up to now.
KHS: Kagame is still doing it.
PR: Yes.
KHS: But you're saying there will be a continuing escalation.
PR: Yes.
KHS: Because the Kagame government needs to establish control that it is losing.
PR: Well, it is not losing control; it is strengthening, it is always strengthening.
KHS: But people are fighting back.
PR: People suffer. People are keeping quiet. They are going to fight back.
KHS: So when they fight back, who will commit the genocide? Are you saying that the people that fight back will commit it against the Tutsis, the RPF, in power? Or that those in power —Kagame’s machine—will commit it against the people of Rwanda?
PR: No, the people have no weapons; the people have no ammunitions. How can they commit a genocide? It is the government—the RPF—who will do that.
KHS: What about in Congo? What do you think about Kagame's role in Congo?
PR: Kagame's role in Congo was an international disaster. That was an international disaster and it is, still, an international disaster.
KHS: Because Kagame still has power in Congo…
PR: Oh yes.
KHS: How do you see that?
PR: You know a certain Nkunda?
KHS: General Nkunda. (30)
PR: General Nkunda. You know about him. So, Kagame is still in the Congo. Kagame never left the Congo. How can one fight, without a battle? When Nkunda was injured, about a month ago, he was evacuated by helicopter from the Congo to Kigali. Where does he get that? He is just in the forest [Congo] in the most completely neglected area. Where does he get weapons? Where does he get ammunitions? Where does he get the men? And Rwanda is still doing a lot of mining. (31)
KHS: Mining where?
PR: In Congo. A year ago [2006] all those mining guys were Rwandans prisoners. It was in a documentary—a special documentary—filmed in Eastern Congo, in the North and South Kivu provinces.
KHS: So coltan, diamonds, gold, niobium, cassiterite…
PR: Yeah, the miners were just Hutu prisoners.
KHS: That was happening a lot a few years back—1999, 2000, 2001—and the world was led to believe that Rwanda pulled out of Congo. But you say its still happening now? You don’t think it stopped? So you confirm that this is still happening, in Congo.
PR: Yes. It is still happening today; it is still taking place.
KHS: Forced labor… do they wear the pink jumpsuits that Hutu genocide prisoners wear in Rwanda?
PR: No. Not in Congo.
KHS: How does the government of Rwanda get them across the border if they are prisoners?
PR: Well, there is one thing you do not know: Kagame has got now a navy, on Lake Kivu, and he crosses the borders whenever he wants.
KHS: Into Goma…or across Lake Kivu… he doesn’t go into town… (32)
PR: No, not to Goma, he doesn’t go to town, he doesn’t need to. He just goes straight to those villages [under Rwandan mining control in Congo].
KHS: “Navy”—that means what kind of boats?
PR: Well I can’t tell but I know he has got a navy.
KHS: Are they boats supplied by the West?
PR: Yeah. In Rwanda we don’t make boats.
KHS: How do they get there? They fly them in on C-130’s, straight into Kigali…
PR: Of course. Of course.
KHS: Do you think the U.N. is actively allowing Nkunda to be there?
PR: The U.N., to me, I do not—I am sorry—I do not care for the U.N.
KHS: After what happened in Rwanda?
PR: After what happened in Rwanda, I do not really trust the U.N. When Kagame killed people in Kibeho, 5000 U.N. soldiers were in the country. During 4 days—17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, of April 1995—he destroyed a refugee camp. Where were they?
KHS: And they did the same thing in Congo: Kagame and [General] James Kabarebe attacked the refugee camps. (33) How do you see that?
PR: As a disaster.
KHS: It’s a violation of international law, to attack a refugee camp…
PR: Kagame—I think—Kagame takes himself just as an untouchable guy. He's untouchable.
KHS: Who are his most powerful friends? By that I mean his business associates and allies...
PR: Well, I do not know them. His associates definitely are Anglo-Saxons. Because Kagame, he has taken a turn: he's no more going to continental Europe.
KHS: Well, the RPF originally had a very strong base in Belgium. You're saying he’s going to the U.S.? And you agree that Rwanda is still putting on this massive—what we could call—a massive psychological operation that continues to convince the world that the Kagame government is besieged by people—Hutus and Interahamwe and génocidaires—trying to commit genocide against them? Or do you think the truth is coming out?
PR: Kagame has been manipulating the international community, using “genocide” as a passport.
KHS: With the Anglo-Saxon friends behind him?
PR: Not really the Anglo-Saxon friends, but there are some individuals.
KHS: Powerful people in the USA, Canada and England…
PR: There are some individuals, but I think, he has some individual friends. All of the Anglo-Saxons are not his friends. He has got a few individuals who are his friends, who support him, who are in the Western governments, the Anglo-Saxon governments.
KHS: Do you think Clinton is one of those?
PR: Well, I don't think so. I think that Clinton went to Rwanda [1998] for a purpose. He went to Rwanda to help...He apologized, first of all, after the genocide. So, he felt, I think, he felt guilty, after all that took place in Rwanda. And he is trying to change—maybe to clean up—his image, this is what I have in mind.
KHS: From 1990 to 1994 a lot of people were killed in Rwanda and a lot of refugees were forced into Congo. The homes that they left behind, who occupied those homes?
PR: Of course, impunity prevails in Rwanda since history. Around 1959, 1960 and 1961... and so on, all the Rwandans who fled the country, and went away; their homes were occupied by their neighbors. Those neighbors have never been punished. And when those victims came back in 1994, they committed the same crime. They occupied houses they never bought. They occupied land that never belonged to them. They occupied these, and they took over livestock they never bought. So yesterday's victims, became, that time, perpetrators. I want to tell you that, for me, this is one of the biggest troubles: there was impunity, and history has never taught us any lesson.
KHS: And you said that Kagame’s people are in charge of everything in Rwanda today. What are the big businesses? Tea? Coffee?
PR: Everything: tea, coffee, land, beans, potatoes; everything in detail. No exceptions.
KHS: What about gorilla tourism?
PR: Everything has been taken over by a group of individuals.
KHS: James Kabarebe? (34)
PR: Kabarebe, his lieutenants, all of those guys—and they are controlling everything.
KHS: As early as 1994 and 1995, did you see, or were you aware, that minerals—gold, diamonds, coltan, niobium—were leaving the Congo and going through Kigali on Sabena [Airlines] planes back to Belgium?
PR: Well, that has ever been like that. This is very plain. This has ever been just like that.
KHS: Was it happening that way under President Habyarimana? With Mobutu’s support?
PR: Well, you know Rwanda. Habyarimana was also trucking minerals from Congo [Zaire]. So was Mobutu. And there was no infrastructure in the Congo, so everything was fleeing the Congo by Rwanda. That was very well known. Smuggling minerals, smuggling coffee... Rwanda was producing more coffee than Congo... If you planted coffee over the whole country of Rwanda, you cannot have produced what we were selling outside. That was smuggling.
KHS: Coming from Congo. It was the same under Mobutu and during the Congo war, as now?
PR: Coming from Congo, from Burundi, from Uganda—and going back, crossing Uganda again, to Mombasa [Kenya].
KHS: And you're saying that was true under President Habyarimana and it's also true under Kagame today?
PR: You see, in Rwanda, we say that, we always change dancers, and the music stays the same. Rwanda exports more diamonds and gold, more metals than any other African country. And yet, we do not produce any in Rwanda and we sell so much more than the Congo.
KHS: Even now, in 2007.
PR: Even today.
KHS: So, the Congo pillage is still going on by Rwanda.
PR: So, it is as I told you. That is why General Nkunda is there. Nkunda is on a mission.
KHS: His mission is to make sure the raw materials keep coming into Rwanda.
PR: And also that Kagame controls Eastern Congo. And he does.
KHS: General Nkunda was in Kagame’s RPF army in 1994 right? So he was there in the “rebellion” in Congo where the RPF—personally commanded by James Kabarebe and Paul Kagame—killed all those Hutu refugees. (35)
PR: Yes.
KHS: But he wasn't a general then, obviously.
PR: No, he was not that. Those guys called themselves generals, but they are just lords of war.
KHS: And whomever does it best, who ever steals the most, they give them the name “general”…
PR: They can call themselves a “general”. Whoever is a leader, they can call themselves general, anything they want.
KHS: What do you think of Philip Gourevitch's book? (36)
PR: I think that if Gourevitch was to write his book today, he would write a completely different book.
KHS: What do you think of the book he wrote at the time?
PR: Well, his book took very much the RPF side. He was more or less like an RPF advocate, if he was writing—him as a journalist I have seen—he would write a different book.
KHS: So, you think it's completely one-sided?
PR: Yes, completely. But that is not only him, but many writers and people writing books on Rwanda at that time. What they wrote, if they were to write today, they would write completely different books.
KHS: If they were honest… (37)
PR: Yes, if they were honest.
KHS: Was it at the time because they were operating like you said, they had to have the support of the RPF, or else they were sidelined?
PR: And I do understand people like Gourevitch, being a Holocaust survivor. I sometimes do understand such people, and what they write.
KHS: Did you ever hear about what the British journalist Nick Gordon reported about crematoriums in Rwanda under Kagame? (38)
PR: No, that one I haven't heard. But we know it.
KHS: You know what?
PR: We know that, we knew, as I told you, we have changed dancers, but the music remains the same. We have changed the players but the rules of the game are exactly the same. Killings never ended, but killers changed. And they have improved their ways of killings. They started tying people [arms] from the back since 1994, when RPF took over, throwing them in [metal transport] containers, leaving them there. Many people died like that. And then, they were taking dead bodies in the night, and burning them, in the Nyungwe Forest, in the south, between Gikongoro and Cyangugu, on the Burundi border.
KHS: Burning them gets rid of the skeleton too…
PR: Burning everything. So, they changed the style but the killings never ended. And another new style, people have been disappearing since 1994. You hear that “so-and-so” disappeared, and for life, forever.
KHS: Why do you think that no one is taking it seriously, what you are saying, and what others have been saying, about Kagame's regime? In other words, there is no action to stop it. And while there is no transparency in the international media, and the truth of the Kagame machine is not reported, there is a problem of impunity.
PR: What I have said is that impunity has ever been a problem in Rwanda. And many people in the international community have been maybe, a kind of, apologizing, whenever Kagame intimidates everyone. Kagame comes to the Western Superpowers and tells them, listen you guys: "When these Hutus were killing us, where were you?" And they keep quiet. He comes to Hutus and tells them: “If it was not for me, my Colonels and Lieutenants might have killed you all.” And they keep quiet. And he comes to Tutsis and tells them: "Listen you, you pretend to be survivor. How did you survive? It is us [RPF] who saved your life."
KHS: And you're saying that's not true anyway, that the RPF didn’t “stop the genocide” as Kagame always claims…
PR: That is not true anyway; but he pretends; to intimidate everyone.
KHS: So, Kagame uses the popular belief that the Tutsis stopped the genocide—which isn't true to begin with—in any sense—
PR: No it is not true anyways.
KHS: …and he uses it as a way to manipulate people into supporting the current terrorist program—the illegal commerce, the extortion, the massacres, the disappearing people, the rape and pillage in Congo—or at least being quiet, and apologizing for it in some cases.
PR: Yes. Apologizing.
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All photos copyright keith harmon snow except the Royal Dutch Shell photo which is: courtesy of the NEW VISION Newspaper, Kampala, Uganda, 1998-1999.
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Notes:
1. Paul Rusesabagina began working in a low-level service position at the Hotel des Mille Collines in January 1979; the date is often misreported numerous times as 1978. The date of his departure from the Hotel Des Mille Collines (to work at the Hotel Des Diplomats in Kigali) has also been misreported: not 1993, the correct date is November 1992.
2. In the early years of the new millennium the Rwanda government changed the name of the national military from the Rwandan Patriotic Army to the Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF). The “local defense forces” discussed here are semi-formal, organized militia, not the formal government military, the RDF.
3. As one exiled Rwandan told me: “Every day the local defense forces pass by my father’s house looking for me—my father is over 80 years old—and every day my father is afraid.” (Personal communication, April 2007.)
4. On a single day, one RPF unit, under the command of Colonel Fred Ibingira, reportedly massacred some 4000 refugees at Kibeho, 80 kilometers south of Kigali; some put the figure at 10,000 killed in one day. New York Times journalist Howard French reported that the United Nations estimated 8000 Hutu killed. Ibingira had previously received “humanitarian” training from U.S. military advisers to the RPF government; he also led the 7th RPF Battalion in the U.S. backed invasion of Zaire/Congo. Human Rights Watch charged that the U.N. did not have enough troops to protect refuges who were returning as part of the U.N.’s own repatriation program, Operation Return; the small Zambian battalion of U.N. forces was no match for the RPF troops who carried out the massacres. (See: Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999: p. 174-175,199, 309; and Howard French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004: p. 196.)
5. Wayne Madsen cites the date of the Kibeho massacre as April 22, 1995 (Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999: p. 175).
6. Sendashonga had asked Rwandan Vice-President and Minister of Defense General Paul Kagame repeatedly to restrain his troops, noting their abuses against civilians, mostly Hutus, in some 600 memoranda addressed to Kagame. After leaving the government, Sendashonga fled Rwanda for exile in Nairobi, and was later assassinated. (See also: Human Rights Watch and the FIDH Condemn Assassination of Seth Sendashonga, 18 May 1998, Human Rights Watch, .)
7. The Rwandan, or Kinyarwanda, use of names offers the family name first, followed by the given name; example: Rusesabagina, Paul. The Rwandan names cited herein may be confused, as written, in the ordering of family name, followed by given name; this is solely due to the confusion of the author.
8. Assiel Kabera was former presidential adviser to former president Pasteur Bizimungu. (See: The Search for Security and Human Rights Abuses, Human Rights Watch, 2000, < http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/rwanda/Rwan004-07.htm >.)
9. The case of Pasteur Bizimungu offers a poignant example of how the Kagame regime promotes those they wish to serve their interests, and punishes—arrests, tortures, assassinates—those who stray from the tidy narrative of genocide and victimization. In 1992, Bizimungu, a Hutu, was an RPF representative; he later signed numerous Arusha agreements on behalf of the RPF. In July 1994, with the RPF military victory, Bizimungu was appointed President of a five-party coalition in which the RPF held eight of 17 portfolios, and Hutus were appointed to the other nine; Paul Kagame was self-appointed as Vice-President and Minister of Defense. Bizimungu was attributed with citing a pattern of genocide planning by the Hutu power structure (see, e.g., Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, The International Dimension of Genocide in Rwanda, NYU Press, 1998: p. 112.), but he was regarded as a symbol of reconciliation; he was also seen as a figurehead behind then Vice-President Paul Kagame. Bizimungu resigned in March 2000, in protest over what he considered an unwarranted crackdown on dissent; Kagame then assumed the Presidency. Bizimungu was arrested as an enemy of the state in July of 2000 and, in 2004, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was unexpectedly released in March of 2007. Bizimungu was unexpectedly released in March 2007; early reports are that he was poisoned in prison and mentally incapacitated.
10. The term akazu was previously used to describe the elite circle of power brokers surrounding President Juvenal Habyarimana, and it was clearly used in reference to the planners of the genocide. Alison Des Forges wrote: “The akazu, or “little house,” was a special circle within the larger network of personal connections that worked to support Habyarimana.” It was also described by some as the “Zero Network,” responsible for death squads. (Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, Human Rights Watch, 1999: p. 44, 58.)
11. On 5 July 1973, Major-General Juvenal Habyarimana, then minister of defense, seized power in a military coup d’etat. While the akazu under Habyarimana served the interests of a narrow group, the Habyarimana era was markedly prosperous. According to genocide expert Philip Reyntjens, “One can say anything about Habyarimana, but not that he was a blood-thirsty dictator. The RPF has created that image with some success in order to legitimate its own war” (Gazet Van Antwerpen 31 July 1994). Paul Rusesabagina talks about the control of the Habyarimana akazu in his book, An Ordinary Man.
12. At the time of the interview I had not yet read it.
13. Colonel James Kabarebe was the private Secretary and aide-de-camp of Major-General Paul Kagame. He became Commander of the High Command Unit at Mulindi; the unit later became the Republican Guard under his leadership. Kabarebe was the Commander-in-Chief of the Congolese Army Forces (FAC) after AFDL leader Laurent Desiré Kabila took power in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1997. Soon after, Kabarebe took control of forces determined to overthrow Kabila in Congo’s second war—the First War of Occupation (1998-2001). He was later promoted to Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), now Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF).
14. Born in Rwanda, Paul Kagame was carried to exile as a three year old, in 1959.and Yoweri Museveni were former classmates at the University of Dar Es Salaam, along with Sudan People’s Liberation Army leader John Garang. In 1979, Paul Kagame and other Rwandan Tutsi exiles formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front, in Uganda, whose military wing was the Rwandan Patriotic Army. When the National Resistance Army (NRA) of Uganda, led by now President Yoweri Museveni, drove their war into Kampala, Uganda, in January 1986, the 14,000 NRA troops included some 3000 Rwandan Tutsis. After January 1986, the RPF operated freely in Uganda. From November 1989 to June 1990, Kagame controlled the NRA’s G-2 (military intelligence) apparatus. The constant RPA assault on Rwanda was back by Ugandan military, with NRA battalions involved in the field in Rwanda, and commanded by Ugandan military commanders such as Museveni’s half-brother General Salim Saleh. As Director of Military Intelligence for Museveni, Kagame received training in military tactics and intelligence methods from the U.S. Army’s Fort Leavenworth Command and General Staff College, in Kansas.
15. Accused of responsibility in genocide, Georges Rutaganda was convicted for life by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania.
16. See: Georges Rutaganda, The Unsaid About Georges Rutaganda and the “Hotel Des Mille Collines” During the 1994 Rwandan Tragedy: N. Rutaganda Georges open-statement in regards to the Hollywood movie, “Hotel Rwanda”: the humanity must know the truth.
17. Recall the scene in Hotel Rwanda where the Tutsi refugees, having left the Hotel Des Mille Collines, are stopped at a roadblock: the film’s general inference is that such roadblocks were erected and manned by ruthless Hutu génocidaires and by Hutu Interahamwe militias, because this is the framework of the film, where good-versus-evil is played out by Hutus (evil) versus Tutsis (good); there is never any suggestion that Tutsis connected to the rebel RPF army might have been involved.
18. In 1994 the Tutsi army of Burundi assassinated then President Melchior N’Dadaye, a Hutu; the Tutsi army held power even though a Hutu president had been elected.
19. On the evening of 6 April 1994, the Dasault Mystere Falcon 50 executive jet (a personal gift to President Juvenal Habyarimana from Jean-Christophe Mitterand) was shot down on approach to the airport in Kigali, Rwanda. Killed in the double presidential assassination of were Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana; Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira; Rwandan General Deogratias Nsabimana, Chief of Staff of the Forces Armées Rwandaises; Bernard Ciza and Cyriaque Simbizi, two Burundian Cabinet Ministers; and the three-person French crew.
20. Immediately following the event the U.S. media studiously, and universally, began referring to the 6 April 1994 double presidential assassination as a “mysterious plane crash.” The “plane crash” language proliferated; see, e.g., the use of this language by Arthur Jay Klinghoffer in The International Dimension of Genocide in Rwanda (NYU Press, 1998: p. 89). When the shooting down of the plane came under serious scrutiny at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda—with evidence pointing to the RPF—the investigations were abruptly terminated by high-level officials. The most significant investigation into the downing of the Presidential aircraft has been conducted by French judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere on behalf of the families of the French crew killed in the incident. In November 2006, after an eight-year investigation, Bruguiere issued international arrest warrants against nine members of the Kagame government: James Kabarebe, military chief-of-staff; Charles Kayonga, army chief-of-staff; Faustin Nyamwasa-Kayumba, ambassador to India; Jackson Nkurunziza, presidential guard; Samuel Kanyamera, RPF deputy; Jacob Tumwime, army officer; Franck Nziza, presidential guard officer; Eric Hakizimana, intelligence officer; Rose Kabuye, director general of state protocol. Rwanda broke off diplomatic relations with France after the warrants were issues. Kagame has immunity under French law, as head of state, and he has denied involvement in the shooting down of Habyarimana's plane, but has said he does not regret the death.
21. The term “politicide” applies to politically motivated murder and elimination of a group as a political entity, as opposed to genocide, which is ethnically or racially motivated.
22. Radio Muhabura was an RPF propaganda station. For a discussion of the RPF propaganda machine, see Jean Marie Vianney Higiro, “Rwandan Private Print Media on the Eve of the Genocide,” in The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, Ed. Allan Thompson, 2007, < http://www.idrc.ca/acacia/ev-108186-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html>.
23. Working as a researcher for Human Rights Watch, Alison Des Forges produced the massive post-genocide treatise, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, Human Rights Watch, 1999. Cameroonian journalist Charles Onana, author of The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide: Investigations on the Mysteries of a President, published (French) in 2001, definitively believes that Des Forges has been dishonest. From 1991-1992 Des Forges worked as a U.S. State Department consultant for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
24. Congressman Ed Royce (R-CA), serving in his seventh term in Congress, is a senior member of the House Committee on International Relations. For the 109th session of Congress, Royce was named Chairman of the Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation; Vice-Chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations; and a member of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. He is involved with the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), which is supported by USAID, the World Bank, and the Pentagon. Royce is a member of the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa. He has chaired numerous House hearings focused on genocide in Rwanda; at the 22 April 2004 hearing titled Rwanda's Genocide: Looking Back, the expert testimony was provided by Alison Des Forges (senior adviser to the Africa Division, Human Rights Watch), Samantha Power (Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Road To Hell: America in the Age of Genocide), General Romeo Dallaire, and Louise Mushikiwabo, a prominent Tutsi leader in Rwanda . Mushikiwabo is the international coordinator with the Remembering Rwanda Trust based in Canada, an affiliate of the American Friends of the Kigali Library Project (AFKLP), which has held fundraisers with Paul Rusesabagina, and a collaborator on documentary films depicting the Rwandan genocide, such as the BBC’s “When Good Men Do Nothing,” Internews’ “The Arusha Tapes,” and Barna-Alper’s Productions’ “The Last Just Man.”
25. The role of Kagame, and General James Kabarebe, and the RPA, in committing genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes against hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent people—refugees and IDPs—has been well documented, though in most cases the information has been systematically suppressed. Examples include the report by Robert Gersony, in September 1994, about the “unmistakable pattern of killings” by the RPA against returning refugees (Gersony estimated some 30,000 people killed by the RPA in the north); the Roberto Garreton reports of RPA killings of Hutus in Congo/Zaire. (See: Howard French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004; and keith harmon snow, Hotel Rwanda: Hollywood and the Holocaust in Central Africa, .)
26. See: Jean Marie Vianney Higiro, “Rwandan Private Print Media on the Eve of the Genocide,” in The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, Ed. Allan Thompson, 2007; < http://www.idrc.ca/acacia/ev-108186-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html>, and keith harmon snow, Hotel Rwanda: Hollywood and the Holocaust in Central Africa, .
27. General Romeo Dallaire was the commanding officer for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda, UNAMIR, whose mandate in Rwanda commenced in October 1993. Evaluation of the position, and testimony, of General Dallaire, in his appearance before the ICTR, with Canadian military support, and under cross-examination by ICTR defense lawyers, brings to light serious questions and suspicious irregularities regarding Dallaire’s role in aiding or abetting the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army in their ascension to power and overthrow of the Habyarimana government.
28. Private communication, Christopher Black, defense lawyer, International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.
29. Conseil National du Developpement (National Development Council).
30. Born in North Kivu, Congo (DRC), Laurent Nkundabatware is an agent of the Rwandan government, of Tutsi ethnicity, who has been deeply involved in the military conflagration in Congo (DRC). Nkunda joined the RPA in 1992, worked in military intelligence to gather information on Habyarimana’s army (FAR). Nkunda joined the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire [AFDL] thrust to overthrow Zaire’s President Joseph Mobutu, fighting alongside Laurent Kabila [AFDL], Paul Kagame [RPA] and James Kabarebe [RPA] during the killing, for example, of tens or hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees in Congo/Zaire. Nkunda was reportedly responsible for assassinating all customary Hutu and Bantu chiefs along the Rwanda/Congo border, to replace them with RPF-friendly Congolese Tutsis, and for surveillance operations against the Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire/Congo (see: Tebara Sebahutu, “Nkunda Torpedoes the New Democratic Institutions,” Congo Tribune, 28 December 2006). Throughout the war in Congo, Nkunda has spearheaded massive campaigns involving war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide, while also insuring Rwandan control over elite networks plundering Congo’s resources (see, e.g., David Barouski, Laurent Nkundabatware, His Rwandan Allies, and the Ex-ANC Mutiny: Chronic Barriers to Lasting Peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Z-Net {e-book}, 28 February 2007).
31. See, e.g.: keith harmon snow, “Rwanda’s Secret War: U.S.-backed Destabilization of Central Africa,” World War 4 Report, November 2004, ; keith harmon snow and David Barouski, “Behind the Numbers: Suffering in Congo,” Z Magazine, July 2006; see also the numerous versions of the United Nations “Panel of Experts” reports, such as, Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, S/2001/357, April 2001.
32. The city of Goma straddles he Rwanda/Congo border; the border also passes down the center of Lake Kivu.
33. In 1996, RPA troops led by Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe launched an attack on refugee camps in Eastern Zaire (DRC). The RPF/A attacks were in violation of international humanitarian law, and the scale and nature of these virulent attacks remain poorly documented. One credible witness has testified that the first rockets launched against the camps emanated from the compound of an international humanitarian agency (private interview, DRC, 2006).
34. Rwanda Defense Forces (RDF) General James Kabarebe.
35. See note 25.
36. Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998.
37. Philip Gourevitch’s brother-in-law is Jamie Rubin, former assistant secretary of state under Madeleine Albright, and through Rubin and the New Yorker Magazine Gourevitch played a strategic role in producing flak for the Kagame regime. Funding for Gourevitch’s book came from the United States Institute for Peace, a U.S. State Department offshoot. In a private interview, New York Times journalist Howard W. French accused Gourevitch of “just sheer intellectual dishonesty.” The International human Rights Law Clinic at American University for several years asked students to read Philip Gourevitch on genocide in Rwanda, in preparation for legal work with the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda. Professor Melissa Crow, who worked with the Law Clinic, followed her term at Human Rights Watch (1994-1995) by working in Kigali, Rwanda, under the RPF government, working for the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.
38. Nicholas Gordon: author of Murders in the Mist: Who Killed Dian Fossey?, Hodder and Stoughton, 1993.
Keith Harmon Snow is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Keith Harmon Snow
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Labels: GENOCIDE, HOTEL RWANDA, INTERVIEW, KEITH HARMON SNOW, NEOCOLONIALISM, PAUL RUSESABAGINA, RWANDA
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