Why Rwanda's clockwork election is a bad day for democracy

Why Rwanda's clockwork election is a bad day for democracy

British colonialists and their dogs and the British media reporters who have been swamping Rwanda are impressed by the appearance of the capital of Rwanda. They say that the capital is clean and has first class hotels.
British have been praising Kagame for economic achievements on the basis of what they see in the capital. As you are aware Western people, especially British people are interested more in where they will sleep. They do not care about hunger, diseases and malnutrition that characterise daily lives of most African people.
The British are happy that their foreign aid has been well used and that Kagame should have the salary three times higher than David Cameroon’s salary. They are happy that their foreign is used to maintain the Rwandan military personnel and unelected members of parliament.
For the British, this what they believe to be international development!
-------------------------------------------------------------
By Mary Riddell Politics Last updated: August 9th, 2010
Rwanda's capital, Kigali, has been transformed since the genocide. Skyscrapers are sprouting up and the streets are swept daily (Photo: Corbis)
Today, Rwanda elects its president. Early reports from the capital, Kigali, suggest a high turn-out and oiled efficiency at polling stations. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has visited Rwanda. Give or take the gated communities of the Home Counties, there are few more orderly places on earth.
Citizens of the capital are required to turn up, on appointed days, to sweep streets on which no stray litter ever blows. Inspectors drop by to make sure that people have tidied their homes and made their beds. The smarter hotels sell home-made jam and pastries. None of this is likely to change under a new president – if only because the old one is 100 per cent certain to be re-elected.
Paul Kagame’s serious opponents have been barred from standing, leaving only puppet parties to seek his displacement. A political rival and a disobliging journalist have been found murdered in recent weeks, and some have sought to implicate the Kagame government, which denies any involvement.
These events and suspicions should alarm western leaders and, in particular, David Cameron. Britain gives Rwanda £55 million in aid money each year, and Kigali is the favourite destination of any minister in search of aid tourism. President Kagame’s residence is an oasis of westernised home comforts, with bougainvilleas blooming among watered lawns and Ivy-league educated aides in attendance.
When I visited him there last year, I asked him about the Rwandan citizens who have grown rich on the proceeds of minerals smuggled in from DR Congo, his dirt poor and war-ravaged neighbour, and he dismissed talk of minerals fuelling wars as “superficial.” No one asks too many questions of President Kagame, least of all the British ministers who describe his country as corruption-free.
The shadow of exploitation and suspicions of injustice and much worse hang over a regime whose flaws are always excused by the genocide suffered by the Rwandan people. While the terrible nature of the slaughter is not in doubt, Rwanda has since grown rich on genocide guilt.
Paul Kagame’s inevitable re-election is very far from being the worst thing that could befall his country. But the west, the British government included, has fallen into the trap of mistaking a functioning state for democracy. The two are not the same, and western leaders should dare to say so
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/maryriddell/100050118/why-rwandas-clockwork-election-is-a-bad-day-for-democracy/

Why UK should be expelled from the UN Security Council?

Dr Alexander Betts, University of Oxford

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/aug/31/uk-complicit-bankrolling-congo-conflict


As the Guardian reported last week, a 600-page report by the UN high commissioner for human rights was leaked, documenting the role of Rwanda in possible genocide in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s (Leaked UN report accuses Rwanda of possible genocide in Congo, 27 August). This has seismic implications for British foreign and development policy towards Rwanda, which the present government needs to take extremely seriously.

Since the 1990s the Paul Kagame regime has represented itself as the progressive and modernising "Singapore of Africa", courting international support and legitimacy in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Yet, alongside the suppression of human rights domestically, it has continued to play a direct and indirect military role in North Kivu, both in pursuit of Hutus who fled Rwanda in 1994 and natural resources that have bankrolled Rwanda's "economic miracle". All the while, the British government has continued to unquestioningly back Kagame, being Rwanda's largest source of overseas development aid. It has failed to recognise the complicity of Britain in effectively bankrolling a conflict in the Congo that has lead to millions of deaths.

The argument is simple: 1) More people have died in the conflict in the eastern Congo than in any war since the second world war; 2) The UN report provides evidence that Rwanda and Paul Kagame are directly and inextricably implicated, not only in fuelling that conflict, but in possibly carrying out the most serious crime in international human rights and humanitarian law – genocide; 3) The UK – its taxpayers and voters – are Kagame and Rwanda's biggest international supporters, largely unconditionally, and David Cameron and his colleagues continue to take annual Conservative party summer holidays to promote Rwanda's international reputation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/aug/31/uk-complicit-bankrolling-congo-conflict

Why UK should be expelled from the UN Security Council?

UK complicit in bankrolling Congo conflict

Dr Alexander Betts, University of Oxford

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/aug/31/uk-complicit-bankrolling-congo-conflict



As the Guardian reported last week, a 600-page report by the UN high commissioner for human rights was leaked, documenting the role of Rwanda in possible genocide in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s (Leaked UN report accuses Rwanda of possible genocide in Congo, 27 August). This has seismic implications for British foreign and development policy towards Rwanda, which the present government needs to take extremely seriously.

Since the 1990s the Paul Kagame regime has represented itself as the progressive and modernising "Singapore of Africa", courting international support and legitimacy in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Yet, alongside the suppression of human rights domestically, it has continued to play a direct and indirect military role in North Kivu, both in pursuit of Hutus who fled Rwanda in 1994 and natural resources that have bankrolled Rwanda's "economic miracle". All the while, the British government has continued to unquestioningly back Kagame, being Rwanda's largest source of overseas development aid. It has failed to recognise the complicity of Britain in effectively bankrolling a conflict in the Congo that has lead to millions of deaths.

The argument is simple: 1) More people have died in the conflict in the eastern Congo than in any war since the second world war; 2) The UN report provides evidence that Rwanda and Paul Kagame are directly and inextricably implicated, not only in fuelling that conflict, but in possibly carrying out the most serious crime in international human rights and humanitarian law – genocide; 3) The UK – its taxpayers and voters – are Kagame and Rwanda's biggest international supporters, largely unconditionally, and David Cameron and his colleagues continue to take annual Conservative party summer holidays to promote Rwanda's international reputation

Apocalypse in Central Africa: The Pentagon, Genocide and the War on Terror By Keith Harmon Snow

Apocalypse in Central Africa: The Pentagon, Genocide and the War on Terror By Keith Harmon Snow
20 July 2010

keith harmon snow

Published (edited extensively) by:
Z Magazine, July 2010 under the title:
BRUTAL REGIMES:
Apocalypse in Central Africa:



Ongoing repression, war crimes, and U.S. involvement
*
"As a key partner, we are very happy to be working with the Rwandan Defense Force as they seek to improve their capacity to do various peacekeeping missions as well as contribute in other ways to bringing peace to this region. And what we’re doing as a part of this visit is demonstrating to our Rwandan friends that we indeed are a committed partner… And by so doing, that stability is felt around the world…"
General William E. Ward, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM)
Press conference, Kigali, Rwanda, 22 April 2010

Rwandan Defense Minister Gen. James Kabarebe (R)—indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Central Africa—speaks to US AFRICOM chief General William Ward, on a recent visit in Rwanda, July 2010. (Photo credit AFRICOM.)
The U.S. "War on Terror" destabilizes popular governments, communities, and indigenous societies all over the globe. This has occurred more than anywhere else in the Great Lakes region of Africa, where people face absolute terrorism and grotesque atrocities–the complete destruction of everything they know–a.k.a. genocide.
But genocide in Congo is off the agenda, in keeping with the prerogatives of private profit, western big business, white supremacy, and the politics of genocide.[0]
The U.S. has for years intervened in the region–U.S. multinational Union Carbide, for example, was in control of the SOMIKIVU mines in the Congo’s Kivu provinces in the early 1960′s–but through an expanding military partnership with key agents in Central Africa since 1980, the U.S. interventions have produced an unprecedented loss of life facilitated by direct U.S. government polices, covert military operations and guerrilla warfare, all cloaked in euphemisms of "peacekeeping," "humanitarianism" and "development."

Now Rwanda and Uganda (Ethiopia right behind them) have become the Pentagon’s primary bases of operations in Africa, from which scores of millions of dollars of military hardware and Pentagon-trained African proxy warriors are routed into Congo and Burundi, but also far beyond these to the Pentagon’s theaters of operation in Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia–even to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti.
MASSIVE UNPRECEDENTED

SILENCE
The United States has a long history of supporting brutal regimes. The western mass media system provides cover stories and blankets the truth with propaganda campaigns–a business area formally known as "perception management"–devised by corporate nationalist foundation think tanks like the Center for American Progress, the Atlantic Council and the Council on Foreign Relations.
General Augusto Pinochet came to power in a coup d’etat on the other September 11 in 1973. The United States backed Pinochet’s reign of terror in Chile and other perpetrators of mass atrocities in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Honduras, Bolivia, and El Salvador. In the 1980′s mainstream western photographers images of decapitated and dismembered bodies strewn across the verdant land were rarely published by the establishment press. "Disappearing" as a terror tactic became routine–a product of western military ‘training’ from the School of the Americas. The people on the ground resisted, even as entire generations of families and whole communities were obliterated. Perpetrators were known but rarely held accountable; General Augusto Pinochet died in 2006, with 300 Chilean charges and several international war crimes charges against him.
The same story has unfolded in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, but methods of information control and perception management have been refined. People in Canada, Europe, and the United States are so misinformed that they contribute to deceptive do-gooder campaigns launched by big government contractors masquerading as charities, like Save the Children and CARE International, or other so-called non-profit organizations whose main business is really propaganda, like the ENOUGH Project–funded by the Center for American Progress. But tax dollars are supporting brutal regimes committing the atrocities and causing the suffering people make donations for.

Fancy brochures and PR leaflets — funded by the Center for American Progress–are distributed by ENOUGH at CAP-funded events and CAP-funded college chapters.
The media don’t report the massacres, decapitations, dismemberments, and routine disappearances in Congo, and if they do the violence is attributed to African savagery, rather than terrorism as a military instruction (counter-insurgency, tactical operations, invasions and psychological operations) taught at the School of the Americas at Fort Bragg (GA) or at Fort Leavenworth (KA). The western news consumer has been sensitized to the mass rape occurring in eastern Congo, a cause that inspires hugely successful fundraising, like that of Eve Ensler’s United Nations-backed V-Day Campaign, or for Ben Affleck’s "humanitarian" charity in eastern Congo, but the narrative and discourse on rape blames the victims and shields or rewards the perpetrators. The western psyche is inculcated with racist stereotypes about savagery, disease, and the abject poverty and hopelessness of Africa–as if you and I and other westerners have nothing at all to do with the poverty, starvation, sexual atrocities, or genocide. The public does not hear about the western interests involved, the mining companies behind the systematic rape, or Ben Affleck’s business ties to the regime in Rwanda–the military regime that occupies and terrorizes areas in Congo where Affleck’s ‘humanitarian’ project operates.
Pinochet’s reign of terror in Chile pales in comparison to the scale and nature of atrocities committed by the western proxies in Central Africa today. Topping the list of the Pentagon’s agents of repression are Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni and his brother-in-law General Salim Saleh; Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame and generals James Kabarebe and Karake Karenzi; and Congo’s president Hypolite Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila) and General John Numbi.
The contemporary apocalypse in Central Africa began with the guerrilla war led by Yoweri Museveni, 1980-1985, where Paul Kagame was Director of Military Intelligence; Kagame is known for perpetrating massacres and for torturing people at intelligence ‘safe houses’ in Uganda. Due to Kagame and Museveni, Uganda’s Acholi people have been suffering a simmering genocide, hidden from the world, in northern Uganda. The Kagame-Museveni guerrilla warfare in Uganda (1980-1985) set a course that determined the fate of millions of innocent people in Central Africa where the death toll continues to mount.
"A central demand of the people of the Congo is justice," says Maurice Carney, director of Friends of the Congo. "Grotesque crimes have been committed–fueled by the looting of Congo’s riches by a multitude of multinational corporations and U.S. and British allies Rwanda and Uganda. Unfortunately, most humanitarian and advocacy organizations in Washington have failed to demand that the US hold its allies and corporations accountable, in spite of existing US law that call for such accountability."
BLAME THE VICTIMS, REWARD THE KILLERS
In October 1990, the Ugandan army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF) led by Major General Paul Kagame invaded Rwanda. The guerrillas who violated international laws and committed massive war crimes were backed by Britain, Belgium, the United States and Israel. They were Ugandans. They were not the victims and they were not–as depicted by Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker–"a stateless people" and "The Jews of Africa": they were Tutsi elites, extremists bent on recovering power and domination, who had attacked Rwanda repeatedly over the decades since their overthrow in 1959. By July 1994, the RPF completed its coup d’etatand consolidated its power in Rwanda. The government of Paul Kagame has since then maintained political power and manipulated public sympathy by promoting a highly politicized ideology of genocide.

New York Times’ propaganda about ‘genocide in Rwanda’ like "Ugly Reality in Rwanda", produced May 9, 1994, by James C McKinley Jr. — with reality further psychologically obliterated by advertisements using subliminal sexuality — obscured the truth and set the stage for the massive psychological operation that today blinds westerners to the reality of the Pentagon’s involvement in Central Africa.
After more than 18 years of systematic disinformation about Rwanda there exists a collective ignorance about what really happened and who is responsible. The so-called "Rwanda Genocide" is one of the most widely misunderstood events in contemporary history, and not because the evidence is lacking or because the truth is obscured by butchery, but because this was a psychological operation or PSYOP meant to obscure the reality of western military and corporate backed genocide. [1]
According to the official story, extremist Hutus in the government and military committed an orchestrated and pre-planned genocide against the Tutsi minority from April 6 to about July 16, 1994. In this mythology, some 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsi were butchered over the now infamous "100 days of genocide" with hoes, axes, and machetes.
Anyone who challenges the official story is branded a ‘genocide negationist’ or ‘genocide revisionist’ by the Kagame regime, and they are castigated as ‘killers of remembrance’. [2] Rwanda passed a formal law on ‘genocide ideology’ that prevents anyone from questioning the official historical record and criminalizing all ideas that might provoke ethnic division. Under the law, children below the age of 12 will be sent to a rehabilitation center for a year if found guilty, but Rwanda has shipped hundreds or thousands of people to ‘reeducation camps’–one of these exists on remote and deserted Iwawa Island in Lake Kivu; internees are guarded by soldiers.[3]
In reality, the RPF were the preponderant killers, most victims were Hutus, and the numbers of dead during those 100 days were far less. The final insult to truth comes in the upside-down assertion that the RPF "stopped the genocide by winning the war." Also, the RPF typically killed everyone in its path: Kagame did not trust any Tutsis who stayed in Rwanda after pogroms that created the Tutsi exile community prior to the Habyarimana government (1973-1994) and so Tutsis were also targeted by the RPF. Under the new power structure there were strong motivations to accuse the stigmatized Hutus of crimes that were never committed–the access and control of land. It is the same in Uganda and Congo.
On April 6, 1994, the governments of Rwanda and Burundi were decapitated when the plane carrying the two presidents and top military staff was shot down over Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. The well-planned assassinations of Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira sparked a massive escalation of warfare that is falsely portrayed as the result of meaningless tribal savagery. These assassinations were major war crimes, and the RPF and UPDF were responsible, but almost every attempt to honestly investigate the double presidential assassinations has been blocked by the U.S. and its allies.
On November 17, 2006, French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière issued international war crimes indictments after concluding that the RPF, under the direct orders of Paul Kagame, carried out the surface-to air-missile attacks on the airplane carrying the two presidents.[4]
On February 6, 2008, a Spanish court delivered international arrest warrants against forty of the top military officials in the Rwandan regime. President Paul Kagame was not indicted only because heads of state have immunity. The RPF officials are charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1990 and 2002.[5]
Of course, Kagame’s propagandists have produced extensive documentation that falsifies the truth about Habyarimana and Ntaryamira’s murders and the violence by the RPF; Philip Gourevitch and The New Yorkerlauded the pro-Kagame whitewash before the ink had dried (see: Philip Gourevitch, "The Mutsinzi Report on the Rwandan Genocide," The New Yorker, January 8, 2010). Establishment and intelligence agency venues purporting to provide balanced, independent and honest news, like AllAfrica.com, support the distortions by publishing the public relations productions of the Kagame regime verbatim and censoring penetrating rebuttals. [6]
Rwandan General Karake Karenzi, indicted by the court in Spain, was nonetheless contracted as the deputy force commander for the African Union-U.N. Mission in Darfur, another ‘peacekeeping’ euphemism for the Pentagon-NATO proxy war targeting Sudan’s Islamic government of Omar al Bashir. The U.N. urged the Rwandan government to replace Karenzi after the Spanish indictments, but the UN reversed itself after Kagame threatened withdrawal of the 3000 Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF=former RPF) troops from Darfur.

‘Save Darfur’ propaganda generated by nationalist US think tanks and the western media obscures the involvement of the Pentagon, Britain, Belgium, Canada and Israel, and of intelligence operatives like Roger Winter and David Kimche, and the Darfur ‘genocide’ discourse mirrors the psychological operations used against the western news consuming public to create the false narrative about genocide in Rwanda.
Using international legal instruments like the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) and now the International Criminal Court, western governments– the U.S., U.K., Belgium, Canada, Britain and Israel in particular–actively assist the Kagame regime in hunting refugees and critics, because these governments backed the Rwanda Patriotic Front’s guerrilla war, 1990-1994, and the years of terrorism that have followed, 1994-2010.
The U.S. Department of State annual Human Rights Country Report on Rwanda and Uganda is always a complete fiction, yet these reports are presented as indisputable truth in Rwandan refugee asylum hearings in the United States.
Eastern Congo’s north and south Kivu provinces are occupied and controlled by criminal networks from Rwanda and Uganda. [7] In DRC, there are countless cites of atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front (RPF) 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 slaughtered perhaps as many as 600,000 unarmed refugees, 1996-1997, mostly women and children under 15 years old.[8]
"There is a group of militaristic U.S. African ‘experts’ in the Pentagon and State Department," wrote intelligence insider Wayne Madsen, "and in-waiting at pro-Hillary Clinton think tanks like the Center for American Progress (CAP). Ironically, these ‘experts’ are mostly women and they include current Assistant US Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs Theresa Whalen, and Bill Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice, who is currently with CAP.
"AFRICOM commander, US Army General William E. "Kip" Ward, will be assisted by military and State Department Foreign Service deputies. As with the top militaristic foreign policy ‘expert’ in the Bush administration, Frazer, an African American, the selection of Ward, also an African American, is a shameless attempt by the Bush administration to mask the true intent of AFRICOM among Africa’s black population."
THE RWANDA HIT LIST
On February 24, 2010 a communiqué circulated on the Internet, written in Kinyarwanda, that purportedly outlined directives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Communications (MINAFFET) Rwanda Ambassadors and High Commissioners Annual Retreat, held in Rwanda, on 17-18 February 2010. The document appeared coincident with the late February defection and flight of Rwanda’s ambassadors to Holland and India. This leaked document exemplifies the regime’s modus operandi on public and international relations and it called for the neutralization of Rwanda’s enemies at home and abroad (including this author).
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 Philpot [9]; C. Peter Erlinder [10]; Keith Harmon Snow; Jordi Palou-Loverdos [11]; Peter Verlinden; Pierre Péan [12]; Charles Onana [13]; Filip Reyntjens [14]; Luc de Temmerman [15].
Also target Rwandan refugees representing the FDLR [Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Congo] in Africa; Europe; America; and elsewhere.[16]
While we are led to believe that the perpetrators of violence in Rwanda and Congo are those nastygenocidaires, 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, because they are the agents of western powers.
Any person who has sought asylum from or in any way annoyed the Rwanda government will be persecuted today. 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 New York Times reportage, "Rwanda’s Huge Stake in Congo’s War" (Ian Fisher, 27 December 1998) was nothing more than damage control that finally revealed what everyone had known since September of 1996: Rwanda (RPF) and Uganda (UPDF) were waging war in Zaire (Congo). However the entire context of US military involvement in planning, logistics and operations of the RPF/UPDF invasion of Zaire (Congo), 1996-1998, was missing and, as always, there was no mention of western multinational corporate interests. (At bottom, part of the insidious propaganda campaign on HIV/AIDS in Africa.)
The one-party regime controlled by 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 saw the same situation with Chile under Pinochet. We are beginning to see this more openly with the approach of the 2010 elections.[17]
Rwanda and Uganda are run by secretive criminal military organizations[18] in parallel with formal government structures, responsible for the systematic and intentional deaths of far more than 10 million people since 1980, just counting in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Congo, to the present.[19]
The label ‘Interahamwe‘ has come to stand for ‘extremist murderous Hutu militias’ and is usually translated from Kinyarwanda to mean "those who attack together." Yet President Paul Kagame and the RPF 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." The labels ‘Interahamwe‘ and genocidaire are used to dehumanize all Hutu people everywhere (just as Jews were dehumanized in Germany prior to and during World War II).[20] This has created the political, social and economic conditions for the perpetration of genocide by the RPF government, and its collaborators, and this dehumanization has been perpetuated through the international mass media, human rights institutions, think tanks, non-government organizations, "peace" organizations and foreign governments everywhere.
This is one of the greatest globalized war crimes in human history.
Even Tutsis–presented as the only victims and only genocide survivors–have been persecuted by the victorious RPF Tutsi regime in Rwanda. It cannot be denied that hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were killed in Rwanda, especially if we confine our discussion to the 100 days of genocide from April 6 to July 1994. However, the RPF regime also killed many Tutsis, because this elite Tutsi rebel force did not trust Tutsis who stayed in Rwanda after President Juvenal Habyarimana’s coup in 1973.
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.[21] 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.[22]
People accused of ‘genocide’ in Rwanda have been brought before the so-called ‘community-based’ Gacaca tribunals repeatedly, compelled by the Rwandan regime to revisit their cases until a guilty verdict is established; many innocent civilians have been tried and retried until they were found guilty.[23]
In December 2008, the Trial Chamber-1 at the ICTR acquitted the four highest-ranking senior military officers of the former government army, the Forces Armee Rwandaise (ex-FAR)–the supposed "masterminds"–of conspiracy to commit genocide.[24] More acquittals were delivered in November 2009, 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).
Today, anyone who remotely steps out of line inside Rwanda will immediately be targeted, accused of genocide revisionism, negationism or participation in "the genocide" itself. Kagame’s elite terrorist network also whitewashes its crimes through its affiliation with Dr. Paul Farmer and Farmer’s Clinton-funded charity Partners in Health, also involved in Haiti (the impetus for Rwandan paramilitary forces sent to Haiti after the earthquake).
The latest high-profile victims of Kagame’s criminal regime include Victoire Ingabire, a Hutu woman who returned to Rwanda from exile in Belgium in January to contest the upcoming presidential elections. Ingabire made a public speech on arrival addressing the suppressed debate about genocide in Rwanda and the mass killing of Hutus. She was immediately arrested and continues to be persecuted by the regime and charged with thought- and speech-crimes like "genocide ideology".
Also targeted is Prof. Peter Erlinder, an International Human Rights and Civil Rights Attorney and a Professor of Law at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota and the former lead defense counsel at the ICTR. Erlinder traveled to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, on May 23, to join the defense team of Rwandan presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza and was arrested on charges of "genocide denial." Erlinder was at first denied bail, but intense pressure for lawyers and citizens led to his release on bail on grounds of ‘medical compassion’. Peter Erlinder faces up to 25 years in prison–the ludicrous conviction for ‘genocide denial’ is 25 years in prison or pay a $1,700 fine!–and the regime in Rwanda intends to prosecute him. The U.S. government took a scandalous position of inaction during Erlinder’s incarceration, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put in the embarrassing (sic) position of having to answer questions about Erlinder’s case while defending a murderous regime that the Clinton’s unwaveringly supported.
WHEN VICTIMS BECOME KILLERS
In mid-November 2009 Dem. Rep. of Congo (DRC) president Hypolite Kanambe secretly airlifted a battalion of Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF)[25] across Congo to crush a new rebellion in the Equateur province of western Congo; the operation was supported by MONUC and AFRICOM. The RDF forces were uniformed as Armed Forces of the Dem. Rep. of Congo (FARDC). Along with RDF regulars, MONUC troops from the international "peacekeeping" mission have been fighting alongside Tutsi Rwandan soldiers infiltrated by Rwanda, with the Hypolite Kanambe (DRC) government’s support, into Congo’s national army, the FARDC.
The Tutsi forces in the FARDC include infiltrated Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF, formerly Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army) and "ex-" CNDP forces from the National Congress for the Defense of the People, the extremist terrorist militia that sprouted out of the Kivu Provinces, originally led by Rwandan war criminal General Laurent Nkunda. The CNDP is backed by Rwanda and infiltrated with thousands of extremist Tutsis. MONUC, Belgium and AFRICOM have collaborated with Rwanda and CNDP forces in committing massive war crimes in the western Congo "Dongo crises".[26]

Congolese civilians displaced by Rwandan and Ugandan military operations suffer egregious atrocities and are effectively condemned to death by the policies of the ‘international community’ in league with Paul Kagame, Yoweri Museveni and Hypolite Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila)–and in league with the United Nations Mission in Congo (MONUC).
Thousands of CNDP militia forces were integrated into the FARDC military in 2009 in a strategic maneuver championed by Rwandan general James Kabarebe and Paul Kagame and their western backers. The CNDP is one of the pivotal causes of the massive destabilization of Eastern Congo.
CNDP aligned forces and Rwandan troops have launched a new "rebellion" called "CNDP-Reformed" and they are perpetrating a scorched earth campaign across eastern Congo today. [27].
AFRICOM and MONUC are heavily supportive of CNDP and RDF criminal activities, land grabbing and genocide against Congolese, just as the Pentagon and United Nations supported genocide–no matter who you accuse as killers or who you count as victims–in Rwanda. Ditto for the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces, partnered with AFRICOM under the new Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament Act, and are responsible for massive atrocities in northern Uganda, south Sudan and northeastern Congo.
Recent reports from South Kivu human rights groups have documented Canadian mining company BANRO Gold’s links to local terrorism, yet not one mainstream western media source has reported or even named the involvement of pivotal western mining interests–including BANRO, Moto Gold, Mwana Africa, Heritage Oil & Gas–behind the war and plunder in blood-drenched eastern Congo. Moto Gold director Walter Kansteiner was National Security Council under William Jefferson Clinton.
Rwandan war criminals like General Laurent Nkunda and General Bosco Ntaganda are responsible for massive war crimes, with the blessing of Hypolite Kanambe and Paul Kagame, pursuing the western agenda of balkanizing the Congo and creating a "Republic of the Volcanoes" (Republique des Volcans) as Clinton-Bush official Herman Cohen has repeatedly called for since the U.S.-backed invasions of the 1990′s.
Herman Cohen was former Ambassador to Zaire and official under G. H. W. Bush, and Cohen’s consulting firm Cohen & Woods counts amongst its lucrative clients a company called Contour Global Corporation (NY), now partnered with the Kagame regime to exploit the deadly methane in deep water under Lake Kivu on Congo and Rwanda’s border (another oil industry disaster in the making).

The Congolese people have been subject to egregious injustices committed by the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC). Similarly, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR I & II) supported western interests and helped secure the military conquest of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF).
ASSASSINATIONS AND RAPE
The current death toll in the eastern provinces of Congo alone stands at some 1500 people per day, with at least ten million dead in Congo since the U.S. invasion of 1996, with millions of refugees in the Great Lakes member states. Rwandan allied forces in DRC are perpetrating genocide at present in the Kivus, particularly in the lucrative mining areas, and the western media and "humanitarian" agencies are silent.
John Numbi, formerly the head of FARDC Air Forces and now inspector general of the Police National Congolaise (CNP) is reported to be Hypolite Kanambe’s (alias Kabila) main link to Rwandan military officials Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe. Numbi is a regular visitor to Kigali and described as "one of Congo’s most dangerous men." Numbi is responsible for mass graves in eastern Congo that the United Nations will not investigate.[28]
The most recent United Nations Group of Experts Report also cited direct Congolese National Police (under Numbi) involvement in contraband activities involving Rwandan Defense Forces in Eastern Congo.[29] John Numbi also coordinated military operations in January 2009 that resulted in massive war crimes and crimes against humanity against Congolese people in the Kivus.[30]
On June 2, 2010, Floribert Chebeya Bahizire, the Congo’s leading human rights defender, was assassinated after being summoned to meet with John Numbi. Bahizire, founder of the Congolese human rights organization Voix des Sans Voix (Voice of the Voiceless), criticized the human rights abuses of the regimes of President Mobutu Sese Seko, Laurent Désirée Kabila, and Hypolite Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila).[31] Security forces arrested, detained and threatened Bahizire repeatedly over the past two decades. In March Bahizire gave an interview to a newspaper where he deplored the "international community" for turning its back on Congolese human rights associations; in May 2010 he was forced by police to kneel at gunpoint.
Bahizire was assassinated for instituting a Voice of the Voiceless lawsuit in Belgian court against John Numbi and the Kanambe (DRC) government for a massacre in Bas Congo province against a political and religious group named Bundu dia Kongo earlier this year. According to intelligence insiders in Kinshasa, the operation to eliminate Bahizire was run by the Internal Security branch of the ANR–National Intelligence Agency (like U.S. CIA)–headed by Kalev Mutond, "a real killer" and "the man who does Joseph Kabila’s [Hypolite Kanambe's] dirty work," but John Numbi was also involved.


Logging concessions doled out by the Hypolite Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila) regime in Kinshasa, Dem. Rep. of Congo belong to US, European and Canadian companies. This map shows concessions in the Kisangani area, where AFRICOM is building its base, owned by westerners, including those owned by the contractor working with AFRICOM on US military base construction near Kisangani.
One of the latest pro-RPF vigilante refugee hunters on the Rwanda ‘genocidaire‘ trail is Jason Stearns, a former U.N. (MONUC) and International Crises Group ‘analyst’. 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 and Jordi Palou-Loverdos (named on Rwanda’s ‘Hit List’ above) accusing them of backing terrorists in Congo. This is the U.N.’s failed attempt to discredit the Spanish indictments against the RPF. [32],[33]
For years now several high visibility Western intelligence organizations, in particular the groups ENOUGH, STAND, Genocide Intervention Network, and the RAISE HOPE FOR CONGO, and their wealthy backers the International Crisis Group and Center for American Progress, have lobbied college students and Western governments to action, always pushing for legislation, including the new "Conflict Minerals" bill, and licensed by the major mass media to speak as the only bona fide experts on the Congo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. Recent of pending legislation backed by these intelligence fronts includes the "LRA Disarmament Act" (Lord’s Resistance Army), the so-called ‘Blood Minerals’ legislation, and the "Violence Against Women Act" (Resolution 1888). The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is blamed for all terrorism in the northern Uganda region (which is awash in oil and gold) thus shielding the organized war crimes of Ugandan President Museveni and his western allies, just as the FDLR is unanimously targeted to shield the Kagame terror networks.
William Jefferson Clinton’s former national security insider John Prendergast is the leading cheerleader for these groups, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s help, and with John Podesta, Tom Daschle and Madeleine Albright, behind the scenes. John Prendergast was the expert of choice for CBS 60 Minutes‘ "Blood Minerals" broadcast, nationally televised in the United States on Nov. 29, 2009, which was an advertisement for ENOUGH, the International Rescue Committee and so-called "humanitarian" organizations. These lobby and flak entities are working to displace and neutralize all true international grassroots efforts to help the Congolese people take control of their own resources and future, and they cover for hidden Western interests; they also advance military solutions over diplomatic or other peaceful solutions.
The Western media perpetually broadcasts the suffering in Congo, but the propaganda is simplistic disinformation, and the Western "news"-consuming public eats it up and dismisses the Congo, abandoning the people whose lives are determined in part by the raw materials stolen from them in a state of war and organized crime. These include diamonds, gold, columbium-tantalite (coltan), cobalt, copper, petroleum, germanium, niobium, tin, tungsten, palm oil, coffee and chocolate (sold in Whole Foods groceries stores). Beyond the value the above resources combined, the biggest western moneymaker in Congo is humanitarian ‘aid’ and international ‘charity’–a.k.a., and the misery industry. [34]
Congolese from across the country cite conditions all over Congo as worse than at any time in the past 20 years, with increasing insecurity and violence.
In Mid-March, at an exclusive United States Institute for Peace meeting in Washington, DC, AFRICOM spokesman Mark Swayne dismissed AFRICOM involvement in covert operations in Congo. The USIP has funded pro-Kagame disinformation campaigns since the early 1990′s, shielding U.S. involvement in Central African war crimes and genocide. AFRICOM information campaigns exclusively project an image of U.S. troops being only involved in humanitarian and peacekeeping operations. Swayne reportedly ‘apologized’ for AFRICOM’s use of Ugandans in building the new AFRICOM base under construction in Kisangani, Congo.

Military communications and intelligence facilities in Kampala, Uganda — a major base of Pentagon operations, involve US and UK corporations and the intelligence sectors from western countries.
Uganda’s organized crime networks and the Ugandan military are hated for their plunder and terror in Congo. The Pentagon’s own web site identifies the elite U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) as ‘training’ Congolese troops in Kisangani, DRC, and Swayne did not reveal that the Ugandans are mercenaries likely affiliated to the western mercenary-linked oil companies (Heritage Oil & Gas, Hardmann Resources, H Oil Company) operating in the Lake Albert basin on the DRC-Uganda border.
One European expatriate who was a direct witness to RPF war crimes and the massacres of scores of thousands of Hutu civilians in Kisangani, Zaire (1996-1997),[35] under the eye of USAID, World Food Program, UNHCR and other officials, [36] ‘won’ a major construction contract for the new AFRICOM base in Kisangani; construction involves Ugandan, Rwandan and Tanzanian mercenary forces and U.S. military and intelligence personnel have overrun one local hotel.[37] MONUC insiders in Kinshasa confirm that U.S. military personnel are operating inside the MONUC peacekeeping (sic) mission in the G-2 division of MONUC military intelligence at MONUC headquarters in Kinshasa. There is also a Pentagon military intelligence ‘fusion cell’, tasked with overseeing strategic minerals plunder (essential for U.S. military stockpiles), operating covertly in northeastern Congo (Kisangani) and run by an "ex" marine named "Tom", two other U.S. military personnel, and Rwandan troops.
The MONUC "peacekeeping" enterprise in Congo is a $1 billion a year operation involving contracts with PAE (Pacific Architect & Engineers, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin). AFRICOM, NATO and private military companies Dyncorp and PAE have also been training and flying Ugandan and Rwandan troops to the U.S.-European-Israeli wars in Somalia and Sudan (Darfur).
There are at least 300 Ugandans backing the US in Afghanistan and more than 10,000 Ugandans in Iraq, with more than 3000 Rwandans in Darfur and 2000 or more Ugandans in Somalia. An unknown number of Rwandan soldiers are also in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there are allegations that "peacekeeping" sorties sent to Darfur, Sudan, may actually serve as cover for military personnel and hardware actually bound from Rwanda/Uganda to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are allegations that some Rwandan forces serving in the Pentagon’s overseas war theatres are forcibly conscripted for the under threat of "genocide" accusations, trials or retrials, and lengthy prison terms at home. Ugandan troops have been subject to slavery conditions and sexual assaults in Iraq.[38]
While the debate about ‘genocide in Rwanda’ is heating up slightly, [39] almost no one pays any attention to the increasing numbers of assassinations and illegal arrests committed by the Kagame regime. In late June 2010 a Rwandan woman and true genocide survivor was arrested in New Hampshire (USA), charged with fraudulent genocide violations fabricated by the Kagame regime, and backed by the Department of Homeland Security.[40] On July 14, 2010, Jwani Mwaikusa, an International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) lawyer and University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) Law Professor, was gunned down outside his home in Tanzania–a clear hit by the Kagame regime.[41]

This New York Times Congo reportage "War Claims Fly in Congo, But What’s Their Basis?" of August 12, 1997, is a tongue-in-cheek whitewash by Howard W. French, who was well aware of western corporate interests in Congo at the time.[45] For example, French knew of Maurice Tempelsman’s diamond interests, and Banro Corporation threats against President Laurent Kabila. (Tempelsman diamonds are sold under the TIFFANY brand, advertised here with more subliminal sexuality by SAKS.)
On July 16, 2010, public protests against Paul Kagame’s presence in Spain led to Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodrigez Zapatero canceling his meeting with visiting war criminal Paul Kagame. Meanwhile, more and more legitimate Rwandan refugees, dissidents, intellectuals and others who do not support the pro-Kagame terror apparatus have been arrested overseas as the Kagame regime increases pressure on foreign governments. The RPF regime’s public relations and western lobbyists organized a major conference in the USA on 20 July 2010, sponsored by the Atlantic Council, a right-wing US nationalist think-tank. The event, titled "Democracy and Genocide Denial Politics", is designed to provide the RPF apologists an opportunity to proactively defend the regime and further attempt to criminalize anyone who questions the RPF’s one-sided genocide mythology, and to give the disingenuous western press some up-to-date ‘spot news’ on Rwanda to splash across the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio and other pro-U.S. government, pro-corporate propaganda venues.[42]
Israel’s ties to bloodshed and plunder (a.k.a. weapons sales, blood diamonds,. cobalt mining) in Central Africa run deep but hidden. Israeli Mossad agent David Kimche is believed to be one of the primary agents behind the ‘genocide in Rwanda’, but because he was aligned with Kagame and the RPF, along with U.S. intelligence operative Roger Winter, we only hear such names when they are receiving awards from Kagame: on July 5, 2010, Roger Winter received an award in Kigali with U.S. Congressman Donald Payne in attendance. Meanwhile, U.S. aerospace and defense contractor Northrup Grumman continues to ‘train’ Rwanda’s military. [43]
On July 14, 2010, the First Vice President of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda, Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, was found dead, his head almost completely severed from his body, in the wetlands of the Makula River near Butare, Rwanda–another clear Kagame regime hit. [44]
The killing in Central Africa and the Horn continues, and along with the bloodshed come the shameless western apologies by academics, media pundits, think tanks and mainstream personalities, all with the aim of whitewashing the bloodbaths organized and committed by US client regimes in Rwanda and Uganda, with support of the US-backed regime in Kinshasa (DRC), and armed, trained, and funded by AFRICOM, with U.S. military on the ground in the region, and United Nations complicity.
________________________________________
[0] See, e.g., Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press, 2010.
[1] See, e.g., Davenport and Stam, "What Really Happened in Rwanda?" Miller-McCune, Oct. 6, 2009, http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture_society/what-really-happened-in-rwanda-1504.
[2] See, e.g., Keith Harmon Snow, "The Rwanda Genocide Fabrications," Dissident Voice, April 13, 2009,http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/the-rwanda-genocide-fabrications/.
[3] "Iwawa Island: Prison Camp or Paradise Vacation Spot?" NGO News Africa, May 1, 2010.
[4] See, e.g., Christopher Black, "The Truth About Rwanda,"SaveRwanda.org, December 29, 2010, http://www.saverwanda.org/index.php?id=74&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=1473&cHash=b9e2f8e89e
[5] See, e.g., Spain’s Feb. 6, 2008, indictments issued by High Court Judge Fernando Andreu charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials with serious crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism, perpetrated over a period of 12 years, from 1990 to 2002, against the civilian population and primarily against members of the Hutu ethnic group.
[6] Editorial, "Rwanda: Mutsinzi Report Finally Puts End to Speculation," AllAfrica.com, January 12, 2010.
[7] 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.
[8] The ADFL (RPF + 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.
[9] 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/.
[10] U.S. lawyer and former lead defense attorney in Military trials at the ICTR, imprisoned in Rwanda in May and early June 2010.
[11] A Spanish lawyer involved with the Spanish court indictments.
[12] French intellectual and author of the book Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs. Rwanda, 1990-1994 (Black Furies, White Liars. Rwanda, 1990-1994).
[13] Cameroonian journalist and author of the book, Les secrets du génocide rwandais (THE SECRETS OF THE RWANDA GENOCIDE), for which he was sued by Kagame in a French court, and won.
[14] Belgian academic and expert on the Great Lakes.
[15] Belgian lawyer and ICTR defense attorney.
[16] The leaked communiqué is summarized above but available upon request.
[17] 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.
[18] Although Rwandan and Ugandan troops warred against each other in Kisangani, DRC, in 2000, and their leaders purportedly hate each other, these criminal networks have links, common interests, and equal culpability for ongoing terrorism in Central Africa, Sudan and Somalia.
[19] 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 Government of Rwanda, and its supporters and allies, who have always maintained some 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed in the "Rwanda genocide".
[20] The comparison of the Tutsis to Jews is nonsensical.
[21] See, e.g., the conclusions of the Genodynamics Project of Dr. Christian Davenport and Dr. Alan Stam or the countless human rights reports documenting RPF atrocities, e.g., Rwanda: Civilians Trapped in Armed Conflict: The Dead Can No Longer Be Counted, Amnesty International, December 19, 1997.
[22] 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.
[23] Kenneth Roth, "The Power of Horror in Rwanda," Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2009.
[24] Prosecutor v. Bagosora, 98-41-T, Judgment of 12/18/08, published in full February 9, 2009 (www.ictr.org).
[25] Formerly Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army.
[26] See: keith harmon snow, "AFRICOM Backs Bloodshed in Central Africa," Dissident Voice, April 10, 2010; Congo Rebellion Expanding, United Nations and Media Silent," Conscious Being Alliance (.com), January 14, 2010; and "Belgian Paratroopers to Crush Rising Congo Rebellion?" The African Executive, December 9-16, 2009, http://www.africanexecutive.com/modules/magazine/articles.php?article=4851&magazine=259.
[27] See, e.g., Jean-Piere Mbelu, "Entrée massive de l’armée rwandaise sur le territoire congolais," May 12, 2010,
http://fr.allafrica.com/stories/201005120255.html. See also: UN: Act to End Atrocities in Eastern Congo, Human Rights Watch, December 13, 2009.
[28] Private interviews, keith harmon snow, North and South Kivu, 2005-2007; interview with Air Force Commander John Numbi, Bukavu, 2005.
[29] United Nations: Letter dated Nov. 9, 2009, from the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo addressed to the chairman of the Security Council Committee established pursuant to Resolution 1533 (2004), "leaked" November 2009.
[30] United Nations: Letter dated Nov. 9, 2009, from the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo addressed to the chairman of the Security Council Committee established pursuant to Resolution 1533 (2004), "leaked" November 2009.
[31] See: Ann Garrison, "Questions About Congolese Human Rights Defenders’ Murder," San Francisco Bay View, June 2010, http://www.sfbayview.com/2010/questions-about-congolese-human-rights-defender’s-murder/.
[32] See: "The UN in Congo: Watchdog of the Great Mining Interests," Save Rwanda (.org), November 11, 2009.
[33] The latest ‘Panel of Experts’ report on Congo revealed the true pro-RPF 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.
[34] Onno Ruhl, former World Bank country representative for Dem. Rep. of Congo, admits this in the documentary film by Renzo Martens, Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, 2008.
[35] See the documentary short film by Hubert Sauper, Kisangani Diary, 1998.
[36] See: Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Books, 1999.
[37] Private communications, Kisangani DRC, 2010. Private interview, name withheld, businessman in Kisangani, DRC, whose bulldozers were confiscated by the RPF and UPDF for excavation and covering of mass graves of Hutus.
[38] Grace Matsiko, "Iraq: Ugandan Guards in Iraq Face Abuse," AllAfrica.com, June 10, 2006.
[39] See, e.g., Gerald Caplan, "The Politics of Denialism: The Strange Case of Rwanda," June 17, 2010, Pambazuka News; Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Genocide Denial and Genocide Facilitation: Gerald Caplan and the Politics of Genocide," Monthly Review, July 7, 2010; Gerald Caplan, "Rwanda: Sources and Testimonies–A Response to Herman and Peterson," AllAfrica.com, July 16, 2010; and Adam Jones, "Rwanda: On Genocide Deniers: Challenging Herman and Peterson," AllAfrica.com, 16 July 2010, http://allafrica.com/stories/201007161144.html .
[40] See: keith harmon snow, "U.S. Woman Falsely Accused of Rwanda Genocide Rape Crimes," Dissident Voice, June 29, 2010.
[41] See: Ann Garrison, "Defense Lawyers Condemn Assassination of ICTR Defense Lawyer Mwaikusa," San Francisco Bay View, July 17, 2010.
[42] "Democracy and Genocide Denial Politics in Rwanda," The Atlantic Council, http://www.acus.org/event/democracy-and-genocide-denial-politics-rwanda. On the Atlantic Council’s board of directors are some of Kagame’s chief U.S. supporters, and the agents of western interventions, including Madeleine Albright, Nancy Kassebaum Baker, James Baker, Frank Carlucci, Brent Scowcroft, Condoleeza Rice, Henry Kissinger, Richard Holbrooke, Warren Christopher, Thomas Pickering and Wesley Clark.
[43] "US Firm Wins Contract to Continue Training Rwandan Soldiers," Rwanda News Agency, July 6, 2010.
[44] Ann Garrison, "Rwanda Green Party Leader Assassinated," San Francisco Bay View, July 14, 2010.
[45] Howard W. French, "War Claims Fly in Congo, but What’s Their Basis?" New York Times, August 12, 1998, http://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/africa/081398congo-rebellion.html.
Written by: keith harmon snow
Photography Credits: keith harmon snow

Source:

http://kimpavitapress.org/2010/07/apocalypse-in-central-africa-the-pentagon-genocide-and-the-war-on-terror-by-keith-harmon-snow/



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The history of UK involvement in Rwandan war, tragedies and development: from Lynda Chalker to David Cameron

The history of UK involvement in Rwandan war, tragedies and development: from Lynda Chalker to David Cameron

The history of UK involvement in Rwandan tragedies, then Rwandan development started from Lynda Chalker a British Conservative politician who was Member of Parliament for Wallasey from 1974 to 1992. She served as Minister of State for Overseas Development at the Foreign Office, in the Conservative government from 1989 to 1997.

The PM David Cameron visited Rwanda in 2007. He visited Rwanda with 100 people including 43 Tory volunteers, who stayed in Rwanda for one month to work on petty aid projects and to teach English. Andrew Mitchell MP, the current Secretary of State for International Development was part of the group. The only experience he has in international development affairs is Rwanda. He promised Kagame that British aid will double foreign aid to Rwanda if the Conservatives win the elections. Most of British top officials have visited Rwanda since the war ended. The current Kagame presidential campaign has been witnessed and supported by Conservative MPs who have been in Rwanda during this presidential campaign. They justify their presence that they went in the country to distribute 2,000 English dictionaries and computers.

Before the genocide, the British government did not have any economic or diplomatic relations with Rwanda. There was no British Embassy in Rwanda. They just came immediately after the war to continue to provide support to Kagame's regime as they did during Museveni and Kagame’s invasion to Rwanda. There was no project funded by the British government in Rwanda. No single penny was given to the former Rwandan government.

The British have had to wait the arrival of Kagame to help Rwandan people. The UK budget support system was designed mainly for Rwanda and was extended to other countries. Some other countries have been under pressure from DFID to use the budget support system as the effective way of providing aid to developing countries. In Rwanda, the budget support is provided to run Kagame’s government, the Rwanda non-elected parliament, to by new weapons and to run Rwandan military apparatus, to expand the number of Embassies aboard, to send Tutsi children to study in the UK and America, to run quangos and to pay consultancy allocated to each Rwanda ministerial department. Aid given to Rwanda is taken back to UK through various channels including Kagame’s paid advertisements to the Guardian and Financial Times Newspapers. Other funds from British foreign aid return to UK through consultancy.

The controversial genocide law that is being used by Kagame to kill, harass, intimate and oppress his political opponents and journalists was created from scratch by the British consultants. The recent Rwandan government’s report about the assassination of President Habyarimana was sponsored by the British Government. About $135,000 from the budget support to Rwanda was paid to British consultants from United Kingdom’s National Defence Academy ( Cranfield University) to provide a dodgy report to support the Rwandan government claims. The report concludes that the President was assassinated by the Hutus.

http://mutsinzireport.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/DASSR_Report_FINAL_inc_Analysis_130309[1].pdf



As the result of this massive aid, Kagame took Rwanda to Commonwealth and imposed English Language to the Rwandan people. A recent book that I read confirms that British never provide aid for nothing. They support the countries that speak English or willing to abandon the French Language. British argue and wrongly disseminate the propaganda that Rwanda’s economic development started with the arrival of the British in the country. They do not recognise the achievements of Rwanda before the genocide. They deliberately ignore the contributions from former Rwandan development partners ( now replaced by the British) before the genocide and since the independence. The UK media and politicians have been every active in exaggerating Kagame’s achievements to justify British’s generous involvement in Rwanda. Kagame is ‘God’ for the British media and politicians.

Charity starts at home:

While the UK’s Conservative Government is cutting public budget expenditure that could lead to thousands of jobs loss in the public services and increased poverty due to benefits cuts, no budget cuts are planned for the Department of International Development because the whole strategic framework of DFID is based on Rwanda. Because DFID has to keep the level of aid to Rwanda, no cuts should be made on DFID’s budget. Kagame is assured to receive British taxpayer money to keep Kagame’s government running, to pay Rwandan civil servants and military personnel, to run the parliament and to open new embassies abroad. While David Cameron has continued to bully people who are being paid than him in the UK, Kagame’s monthly salary is twice more than the British PM’s salary. Kagame has private jets and ranches in different parts of Rwanda, which David Cameron cannot afford in the UK.


The British royal family’s policy at work: mass death in Rwanda by Linda de Hoyos

Before April, Rwanda had an approximate population of 7.2 million. As of September, up to 1 million people have been killed inside Rwanda. According to estimates supplied by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), 2,576,000 people are displaced inside Rwanda, including 1.3 million in the former French Safe Zone in the southwest corner of the country. Another 2,223,000 people are refugees outside of Rwanda—1,542,000 in Zaire, 210,000 in Burundi, 460,500 in Tanzania, and 10,500 in Uganda. That is, 5,799,000 people, or 80.6% of the population, have been killed or uprooted. The RPF is ruling from the capital city of Kigali over an emptied country. Water arid electricity systems are destroyed. Up to 50% of health employees and teachers have been killed. The Ugandan shilling is now the currency of choice. Food production is at 66% of the normal, with the country receiving less than 75% of its aid requirement. Rwanda has been obliterated, torn to pieces, its traumatized and emaciated population scattered to the winds. As EIR has documented (Aug. 19, 1994), the destruction of Rwanda is the handiwork of Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni and Lady Lynda Chalker.

The destruction of Rwanda begins not with the April 6,1994 murder of President Juvenal Habyarimana, but with the British-backed invasion of Rwanda by the top echelons of the Uganda Army in October 1990. According to one source in Kampala, 95% of the RPF was in the Uganda Army. And Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA), itself trained by the British, Americans, and North Koreans since Museveni took power in 1986, is the source of supplies and money for the RPF.

The leaders of the RPF are identical to the top echelons of the Ugandan Army: Ugandan minister of state for defense was the RPF’s David Tinyefuza; Paul Kagame, current defense minister of Rwanda Under the RPF, was head of intelligence and counterintelligence in the Ugandan Army; the RPF’s Chris Bunyenyezi was the former commanding officer of the NRA’s 306th Brigade, notorious for the atrocities committed against Uganda’sTeso. Museveni also had a hand in the Oct. 23, 1993 coup against Burundi President Melchior Ndadaye, whose election had ended 31 years of Tutsi military rule in Burundi. According to some sources, Museveni planned the coup in a meeting in Entebbe which included the RPF’s Paul Kagame.

Two coup ringleaders, Major Bucokoza and Lt. Paul Kamana, were in Kampala, openly carousing with Ugandan officers, from late October 1993 to February 1994, and, according to Burundi sources, they are both now with the RPF. The attempted coup in Burundi resulted in the murder of President Ndadaye, and the mass slaughter of up to 100,000 Hutus and Tutsis in fratricidal warfare. Museveni is not acting on his own. His links to the British royal family run through two interlinked personages: Lady Lynda Chalker, Minister of Overseas Development and a favorite of Lady Margaret Thatcher, and Tiny Rowland, chairman of Lonrho, who reportedly introduced Chalker to the higher echelons of London society. The on-the-ground British case officer for Museveni is reportedly one William (Mike) Pike, editor of New Vision, a daily financed by Rowland. Pike is believed to report directly to Chalker. Chalker was the first foreigner to meet Museveni once he took power in Kampala. Museveni and Chalker have been “very luwie-duvvie,” as one British source put it.

A British East Africa expert further complained that Lady Chalker “spends a lot of time, a disproportionate amount of time, in the Horn of Africa and Uganda.” Soon after the RPF victory in Rwanda, Chalker visited Uganda for a four-day tour hosted by Museveni, before tripping over to Goma, Zaire, to view the refugees.
On the latter experience, Chalker told the press, “Of course, when one comes face to face with death . . . in their hundreds, or as in Goma, in their thousands, I feel it. But I don’t allow it to affect my judgment.” Museveni, the marcher lord On Dec. 11,1992, Africa Analysis reported that the minutes of a meeting which took place in late 1992 at the State House in Entebbe had reached Kenyan intelligence. The minutes showed that Ugandan President Museveni was prepared to give full logistical and political support to insurgencies aimed at the governments in Rwanda, Kenya, and Sudan. Attending the meeting were Museveni, Col. John Garang of the S udan People’ s Liberation Army, unidentified commanders of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Ugandan Army), and representatives of the armed wing of the Kenya Democratic Party opposition to Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi. The meeting points to Museveni’s role as the British marcher lord in East and Central Africa.

The immediate goal for the British royal family is to use Uganda, which was first leveled by the British-sponsored barbarian Idi Amin (1972- 40 Special Offprint EIR November 1994 79) and has now become the major British financial and political outpost in the region, as the springboard for recolonization of the region. The gameplan is: Destroy Rwanda and Burundi, turning the remains into satellites of Ugandan (British) domination; destroy Kenya by overthrowing President Moi and instigating tribal warfare; and seize mineralrich eastern Zaire. According to Africa Analysis, “Museveni told the RPF commanders at the Entebbe meeting that he would do his utmost to stall the Arusha peace talks in order to buy time for them to build sufficient firepower to storm Kigali.” That mission has now been accomplished. On Kenya, Lady Chalker has worked to create a tribally based opposition to Moi, with the armed wings of these operations supplied by Museveni. Chalker has repeatedly cut British aid to Kenya, and informed Moi in February 1992, in what she called “very frank, straight talks,” that “the only way to come to grips with the security problem in northern Kenya is to deploy troops under U.N. coordination.” Uganda is arming the rebels in Zaire. The British are now demanding that the troops of the former Rwandan government move deeper into the interior of Zaire, away from the mass of Rwandan refugees. According to an Oct. 2 report of U.N.

Special Representative to Rwanda Shahryar Khan, this may require “an international operation under Chapter 7 of MAP 6 Rwanda invasion routes the U.N. Charter—which allows for use of force”—on Zairean soil. Strongman behind the SPLA Uganda is the major source of supply for John Garang’s SPLA. The remaining SPLA stronghold in Sudan is Nimuli, near the Ugandan border, which is supplied from the Nimuli park on the border with Sudan and Kidepo Valley park in northern Uganda. Kidepo is also the site for SPLA training and the SPLA headquarters. According to Ugandan sources, food, gasoline, and supplies are stored for Garang at the Mbuya military barracks, and the supplies are delivered by the NRA 4th Division. Museveni has attempted to procure sophisticated weapons for Garang. In August 1992, Museveni’s private secretary, Innocent Bisangwa-Mbuguje, and Ugandan Ambassador to the United States Stephen Kapimpina Katenta-Apuuli were arrested in Orlando, Florida, for illegally attempting to buy 400 TOW anti-tank missiles and 34 TOW launchers for $18 million.

The weapons were bound for the SPLA, through the border towns of Nimule or Kaya in northern Uganda. In spring 1994, a Nigerian commercial plane developed engine trouble at Lanark, Cyprus, while carrying missiles reportedly from Israel to Uganda. Museveni and Garang are old school buddies, both trained KEY TO MAP 6 The 1990 RPF/Ugandan army invasion of Rwanda was staged in the Gorilla park of Uganda on the border of Rwanda and Zaire 1. It proceeded through the Volcans park in Rwanda 2, directly opposite the Gorilla park in Uganda. The Akagera park in Rwanda 3, bordering Kenya and within a few miles of the Ugandan border, was the other invasion route. Although the 1990 invasion failed, the Uganda military and RPF continued to control large areas of the Volcans park of Rwanda, and used that park as a base for raids farther into Rwanda. The RPF also held parts of the Virunga park in Zaire 4, which borders both the Volcans park of Rwanda and the Gorilla park of Uganda. Periodic efforts by the Rwandan military to flush out the Uganda guerrillas through shelling both parks were unsuccessful, and vehemently condemned by international conservation agencies including the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF manages the “Gorilla protection program” within the tri-border Virunga, Gorilla, and Volcans parks.

The WWF program was initiated just months before the 1990 Ugandan invasion. The Uganda/RPF invasion of April 1994 came largely through the Akagera park. o EIR November 1994 Special Offprint 41 at Dar Es Salaam University in Tanzania, where the curriculum had a definite Maoist bent. Tiny Rowland is a mutual friend. Speaking on a British Broadcasting Corp. newscast in Nairobi, Kenya in March 1993, Rowland declared that he is a member of Garang’s SPLA and had been since 1984, reported the South African Weekly Mail. As the Weekly Mail explained, “Southern Sudan has an undeveloped oil industry and Lonrho is interested in a project to bring oil out in a pipeline leading through Kenya— where Rowland has important interests—to Mombasa, instead of through the Red Sea port of Port Sudan as the Khartoum government has planned.” The SPLA is advised by Dr. Mansur Khalid, a former foreign minister of Sudan, who is now employed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Nairobi, Kenya. The UNDP officer in Uganda, who is also reportedly involved in support operations for Garang, is one Hans Farelius, a former Protestant missionary. Farelius is reported to have moved to Kampala in 1989 from Uppsala, Sweden. In Uppsala, he aided Museveni, who came to Sweden for retooling in 1985-86, before taking power in Entebbe. Unlike the rest of Africa’s leaders, Museveni has not come under pressure to democratize.

Says one London source: “The British are very much behind this government. You know there is no condition at all on democratization. The President doesn’t even pretend [to be] for this, and he is still a darling of the West Chronology Rwanda-Uganda genocide 1986: Yoweri Museveni comes to power in Uganda, after a five-year guerrilla war. Museveni’s benefactors during the guerrilla war included Tiny Rowland, chairman of the London- Rhodesia Corp. (Lonrho), and Moshood Abiola, the Nigeria magnate operating on behalf of ITT. 1989: Leaders of the Ugandan Army, including the current vice president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, are sent to Fort Leavenworth U.S. Army Command and Staff College. August-September 1990: Rwandans of Uganda Army group in southwestern Uganda are led by Ugandan Maj.- Gen. Fred Rwigyema in preparation for invasion of Uganda. Oct. 1,1990: Rwandan Patriotic Front section of Ugandan Army invades Rwanda through Akagera Park. Oct. 27,1990: Cease-fire, as RPF is repelled by French paratrooper force from the outskirts of Kigali. 1991: RPF invades again, coming through Virunga Park, seizing the town of Ruhengeri, causing mass exodus of over 200,000 refugees.

RPF then pulls back, occupying the entire eastern portion of the Virunga Park, from where it sends continual artillery barrages onto the Rwandan plain. 1992: As RPF incursions continue, Habyarimana government begins organizing militias in the countryside; begins to raise military from 5,000 troops to 40,000. February 1993: RPF invades Rwanda, taking control of a chunk of territory in the north, killing 40,000 Hutus. Mass exodus of refugees from the area. June 1, 1993: Melchior Ndadaye is elected first Hutu President in Burundi, in first national elections. August 1993: Arusha Accords, negotiated between Habyarimana government and RPF, under U.S. and British auspices, grant RPF 50% of commander and officer posts in Army and 40% of the troops, and seven cabinet posts. September 1993: U.N. sends peacekeeping force to Rwanda to oversee implementation of Arusha Accords. Oct. 23, 1993: Attempted coup in Burundi by Tutsidominated military. Ndadaye is murdered, with up to 100,000 Hutus.

More than 700,000 Hutus flee Burundi. International press gives no notice. December 1993: RPF moves 600 troops into Kigali under Arusha Accords. January 1994: British Defense Department African strategists are reportedly moved off their concentration on Angola and put on Rwanda. March 1994: Another slaughter of Hutus in Burundi, up to 40,000 killed. April 6, 1994: Plane carrying Rwandan President Habyarimana and Burundi President Ntaryamira is brought down by three rockets, killing all on board. Mass killings by Rwandan government troops erupt in Kigali; RPF begins invasion from Virunga and Akegera Parks. April 19, 1994: U.N.

peacekeeping troops (2,500 Belgian forces) withdraw. May 1994: U.N. imposes arms embargo on Rwandan government, as mass slaughter continues throughout the country. June 21, 1994: France gains U.N. approval to send troops to Rwanda. French troops set up Safe Zones, nearly clashing with RPF forces. July 12,1994: 1 million Rwandans flee to Zaire. July 15, 1994: RPF is in effective control of Rwanda, with exception of French Safe Zones. July 22-27,1994: Lady Lynda Chalker, British Minister of Overseas Development, visits Uganda. July 29, 1994: President Clinton pledges U.S. humanitarian aid operation to Rwandan refugees, to be carried out by U.S. military. A survey taken by the group Doctors without Borders in the first week of August shows that 80,000 people, at least, had died in the Zaire camps since mid-July—8% of those in camps. Aug. 22,1994: French troops leave protected zone. Sept. 29, 1994: Relief workers from U.N. High Commission on Refugees, Doctors without Borders, the German Red Cross, Oxfam, Concern, Assist, and Care Australia, and from Sweden and South Korea begin to pull out of the Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire. 42 Special Offprint EIR November 1994
Lynda Chalker, Baroness Chalker of Wallasey PC (née Bates; born 29 April 1942) is a British Conservative politician who was Member of Parliament for Wallasey from 1974 to 1992. She served as Minister of State for Overseas Development at the Foreign Office, in the Conservative government from 1989 to 1997

http://news.jonzu.com/z_tag/linda


Rwanda Fake Report: A Rebuttal of the Mutsinzi Commission Report, By: Kanyarwanda Veritas on: Sun 17 of Jan., 2010 09:14 GMT
http://freeuganda.org/article91-Rwanda-Fake-Report


Bloodshed and whitewash: Britain and the Rwanda genocide

by Mark Curtis
published in Red Pepper, March 2004

The invasion of Iraq and the Hutton report are two sides of the same coin: the former shows that policies are made by a tiny cabal of people around the prime minister, impervious to public influence; the latter shows that this cabal is protected from serious accountability. Britain's political system, clearly more totalitarian than democratic, can enable policy-makers to get away with murder, as the events of ten years ago show.

Next month is the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide that killed a million people. There has been astounding silence on one aspect of this slaughter - the culpability of British policy-makers.

A planned campaign of slaughter was launched by extremist Hutus in April 1994 to eliminate members of the Tutsi ethnic group and political opponents. The UN security council, instead of beefing up its peace mission in Rwanda and giving it a stronger mandate to intervene, decided to reduce the troop presence from 2,500 to 270. This decision sent a green light to the killers showing that the UN would not intervene.

It was Britain's ambassador to the UN, Sir David Hannay, who proposed that the UN reduce its force; the US agreed. Both were concerned over a repetition of the events in Somalia seven months before when the UN peace mission had spiralled out of control. The Nigerian ambassador pointed out that tens of thousands of civilians were dying and pleaded to reinforce the UN presence. But the US and Britain objected, suggesting that only a token force of 270 be left behind.

The Rwandan government was sitting on the security council at the time, as one of ten non-permanent members. So British and US policy was reported back to those directing the genocide.

General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN force in Rwanda, was pleading for reinforcements and later spoke of "inexcusable apathy by the sovereign states that made up the UN, that is completely beyond comprehension and moral acceptability". He complained that "my force was standing knee deep in mutilated bodies, surrounded by the guttural moans of dying people, looking into the eyes of dying children bleeding to death with their wounds burning in the sun and being invaded by maggots and flies".

The following month, with perhaps hundreds of thousands already dead, there was another UN proposal - to despatch 5,500 troops to help stop the massacres. This deployment was delayed by pressure mainly from the US ambassador, but with support from Britain. Dallaire believes that if these troops had been speedily deployed, tens of thousands more lives could have been saved. The US also ensured that this plan was watered down so that troops would have no mandate to use force to end the massacres.

The US and Britain also argued that before these troops could be deployed, there needed to be a ceasefire, even though one side was massacring innocent civilians. The Czech republic's ambassador confronted the security council saying that wanting a ceasefire was "like wanting Hitler to reach a ceasefire with the Jews". He later said that British and US diplomats quietly told him that he was not to use such inflammatory language outside the security council.

Britain and the US also refused to provide the military airlift capability for the African states who were offering troops for this force. The RAF, for example, had plenty of transport aircraft that could have been deployed.

Britain also went out of its way to prevent the UN using the word "genocide" to describe the slaughter. Accepting this would have obliged states to "prevent and punish" those guilty under the Geneva Convention. In late April, Britain, the US and China, secured a resolution rejecting use of the term genocide. A year after the slaughter, the Foreign Office sent a letter to an international inquiry saying that it still did not accept the term genocide, seeing discussion on whether the massacres constituted genocide as "sterile".

All this information is in the public domain and has been brilliantly pieced together by journalist Linda Melvern in her book Rwanda: A People Betrayed. There has been virtual complete silence by the media and academics. An article just published in the journal African Affairs, by Melvern and Paul Williams of the University Birmingham, is the only academic analysis of Britain's role in the slaughter.

Parliament has never been too bothered either. A debate in the House of Commons only took place two months after the slaughter began and there have been no parliamentary reports or even serious questions posed to the Ministers involved: Prime Minister John Major, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and Overseas Development Minister Lynda Chalker. Many of these figures continue to be happily interviewed by the media on their view of the moral and military issues involved in invading Iraq.

The British role in the genocide was more than turning a blind eye - Whitehall went out of its way to ensure the international community did not sufficiently act, and thousands more died as a result. Ten years on, Britain's secretive and elitist political system continues to protect a previous generation of policy-makers like Hutton is protecting the current one. The public is not allowed even to have sufficient scrutiny over decision-making, let alone influence. Without fundamentally democratisating policy-making, and discarding its totalitarian features, what future horrors lie in stall?

Mark Curtis is author of Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World (Vintage, 2003). His website is www.markcurtis.info


http://www.medialens.org/articles/the_articles/rwanda/mc_rwanda.html

Rwanda: After elections, what next ?

Rwanda: After elections, what next ?

Rwanda: Facing life in jail, the woman who dared to take on Paul Kagame

Stability in Rwanda is based on political repression, opposition leader Victoire Ingabire tells Daniel Howden


Victoire Ingabire had expected to spend this weekend campaigning.

Instead, she will spend it under house arrest in Kigali, preparing her defence for a trial that could end with a life sentence. Ms Ingabire returned to Rwanda in February to contest Monday's presidential election. She had not expected to win against Paul Kagame, the soldier who has run Rwanda since 1994, but she did think she would at least be able to stand against him.

"When I came back the plan was to register my party and participate," she told The Independent in a telephone interview from the Rwandan capital.
But the authorities have stopped that from happening. "I have no freedom, the police follow me wherever I go. I cannot leave Kigali, they have taken away my passport," she said.

As Rwanda goes to the polls on Monday the international community is being asked to look again at a country fêted for its miraculous recovery from a genocide remembered as one of humanity's great collective failures. Sixteen years ago, the world stood by while 800,000 people were butchered in 100 days in what the United Nations says was a planned extermination campaign of one ethnic group, the Tutsis, by ethnic Hutu extremists.
Mr Kagame's Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) has controlled the country since it invaded and ended the genocide. It has missed few opportunities to remind the rest of the world of their failure to act in 1994.

Ms Ingabire and other dissidents are now warning that the international community is in danger of failing Rwanda once again, with its unquestioning support of a president she says has become a dictator. "I don't understand the attitude of Rwanda's allies and donors," said Ms Ingabire.
"They see the growing tension and they do nothing. We have a big crisis brewing inside the country and this sham election won't resolve it."
The election campaign has been marred by murders, kidnappings, media closures, unexplained grenade attacks and a series of assassinations of Rwandan dissidents and their supporters abroad. Opposition parties without links to the ruling RPF party have been refused registration, their members have been harassed, intimidated and, in several cases, jailed.

There is little doubt Mr Kagame, who has spent £2m during a one-sided campaign, will win by a landslide. The only candidates standing against him are ruling party "stooges", according to critics. Foreign donors – who provide more than half of Rwanda's budget – have been wrongfooted by the apparently sudden instability in what is held up as an African model.

In a region hobbled by endemic graft, Rwanda is the exception. It has far less corruption than its neighbours, according to the recent East Africa corruption index from Transparency International. Its gross domestic product has doubled since 1994 and the president is hailed by outsiders for his "vision" and "dynamism".
However, a report by independent experts on Rwanda's bid to join the Commonwealth said that Mr Kagame had become an expert at manipulating Western guilt over the genocide and was running "an army with a state".

"People say there's stability in Rwanda but this stability is based on repression," said Ms Ingabire. "We need stability based on freedom.
"I don't understand how democratic countries can remain friends with a government that doesn't allow democracy. The democratic UK is supporting a dictatorship."
The President's would-be rival has been charged with genocide denial under a law criminalising those who spread genocide ideology. The law has been condemned by independent experts as a tool for silencing anyone who disagrees with the official account of what happened 16 years ago.
A Hutu, Ms Ingabire lived outside the country for 16 years and worked as an accountant in The Netherlands, where she set up the United Democratic Forces party. She is accused of channelling funds during that time to the FDLR, an armed Hutu group operating in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). She is said to have met FDLR officials in Spain in 2006.

She doesn't deny this, but says the meeting was attended by many groups from the Rwandan diaspora, including officials from the governing RPF.
"This doesn't mean that we collaborate with the FDLR," she said. She's also accused of twice meeting Hutu genocidaires in the DRC capital – this she does deny, insisting she was in Kinshasa to meet government officials.

The Rwandan government has cited a UN report last year that found diaspora members of Ms Ingabire's party had been in phone contact with FDLR military leaders. But it didn't specify the nature of this contact or suggest she herself had made contact.

"I don't have any links to the FDLR," she insisted. "I don't believe in violence and war is not the solution to the problems that face this country."
Her first speeches upon her return were controversial because she asked for an investigation into Tutsi reprisal killings during and after the genocide.
"I agree that there was a genocide by Hutu extremists against the Tutsis, that is the reality. The people who did this need to be jailed. But there were also other crimes against humanity, including the killing of Hutus." The mother of three does not expect a fair trial. A US attorney who came to Kigali to lead her defence was also jailed briefly and accused of genocide denial. She has appealed for an international inquiry into the murder of a journalist critical of the government and the assassination of the deputy leader of Rwanda's Green Party – killings the government now says were carried out by disaffected members of the diaspora. "Rwanda's history is a cycle of violence," said Ms Ingabire. "I understand the [Tutsis'] fear of the Hutus but not all Hutus were killers.

"We have to stop fear among Rwandan people, to make sure no one can lose their life because of their ethnicity or their political beliefs."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/facing-life-in-jail-the-woman-who-dared-to-take-on-paul-kagame-2045908.html