On Kagame and other “disinterested” observers of Kenya

Published February 5, 2008 Crimes Against Humanity , International Pressure , Mediation , Uncategorized

A number of Kenyans in the blogosphere approvingly cite Rwandan Major General Paul Kagame’s opinion that a military intervention might be the best solution to Kenya’s crisis after Kagame expressed his concern about the killing taking place in Kenya in a recent interview. Kagame said,

“This is a case of emergency where certain things have to be done very quickly to stop the killings that are going on. There’s no time to go into niceties and debates when the killings are taking place.

“It starts with five deaths, then 10, then 50, shortly it grows to 100, then it goes to thousands … By the time you realise, it has a dimension that is wiping out life in villages and communities and is getting out of control and the whole political situation is in a mess.

What Kagame doesn’t know about genocide is not worth mentioning. The rehabilitation of Paul Kagame from genocidaire to peace-maker and receiver of honorary doctorates from universities in the West has been achieved by the international media and G8 governments sweeping his crimes under the carpet. This has been easy to do because grasping what happened in Rwanda is a gargantuan task. Once you move beyond the Hotel Rwanda frame you begin to uncover an evil so unspeakable and so complex, it shatters all your media-fed illusions.

Some years ago I met a Congolese journalist who began to educate me on President Kagame’s role in the destabilisation of eastern Congo. What I heard was so disturbing and so opposite to the UK media’s representation of the situation in Rwanda that at first I refused to accept it. Today there is no doubt in my mind that Kagame and his cohort, Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni are war criminals who should be tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity. This is not likely to happen as they are instruments of the US.

And where the US goes, the UK will follow closely behind clinging tightly to the imperial master’s coat-tails. It has just been announced that another well known war criminal, Tony Blair, is offering his services to Rwanda as a consultant, impressed with the progress that Rwanda has made after years of civil war. No word has been uttered about Kagame’s bloody past nor is it likely to gnaw on the conscience of Blair who bolstered Rwanda with foreign aid even as he was killing, torturing and executing his internal enemies.

So I read with creeping alarm that the first person to congratulate Mwai Kibaki on his supposed re-election was Ugandan war criminal and dictator Yoweri Museveni. Kibaki then sent out a call for help to Museveni who duly turned up in Nairobi to discuss how to resolve the situation. An envoy was swiftly dispatched to Kingala, Rwanda with a message from Kibaki for Kagame explaining the Kenyan situation which begs the question, why does Kagame need an explanation from Kibaki? South Africa’s Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu’s offers of mediation were rejected as were the then head of the African Union and Ghanaian president, John Kufuor. Add to this Kibaki’s rejection of South African Cyril Ramaphosa, a man widely respected for the role he played in the South African democratic process and Irish peace negotiations. This speaks volumes.

As instruments of US policy in Africa, Museveni and Kagame’s utterances should be paid close attention to, as they give pointers to US intentions in the region. Museveni is “America’s darling” and strongman. Kagame was trained by the US Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, USA and served as head of Museveni’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. Kagame visits the US frequently, speaks at Harvard University and has the ear of the White House and the Pentagon. Both men recognise Kibaki’s government.

It must be remembered Kagame has been accused of ordering Rwandan President Habyarimana’s to be shot down. At the time Habyarimama was involved in talks that aimed at sharing power with Kagame’s Revolutionary Patriotic Front (RPF) but he was not pleased with the pace at which the talks were moving and decided to kill Habyarimana.
This event became the catalyst for the Rwanda’s civil war which led to a million people being killed. Kagame did this knowing full well what the consequences would be and to secure control of power for himself. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported that from April to August in 1994, the rebel RPF headed by Paul Kagame systematically killed between 25,00 and 45,000 Hutus and others as it made its way to the capital city of Kigali. That was just the beginning.

When it was reported that the bodies of Hutu victims were being found washed up on the shores of Lake Victoria, Kagame, a consummate liar, scoffed that those were Tutsis and the killings continued with fury. (See the Taylor Report - COMPENDIUM OF RPF CRIMES - OCTOBER 1990 TO 1996 *pdf). There was no one to speak for the victims because the killings were sanctioned in the west as a necessary evil.

The RPF was made up of Tutsi exiles who had fled an earlier genocide instigated by Rwanda’s departing embittered Belgian colonial masters in the 1950’s. They had found refuge in Uganda and many had ended up in the military. Kagame headed the RPF who received financial and military backing from Washington while Habyarimana’s forces were supported by France.
Both Hutus and Tutsis engaged in atrocities but it was primarily a proxy war between the US and France for control of the Congo. The US wanted to establish itself as a neo-colonial power in the region and France desperately tried to hold on. Iraq ravaged by war became the center for illegal arms deals which supplied both sides of the conflict. Uganda became the conduit. Ethnic rivalries were stoked deliberately. The loss of a million lives did not matter to Kagame nor to Washington.

The RPF invasion of Rwanda led to 1.5 million Rwandan and Burundians fleeing into neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. Paul Kagame as newly installed head of Rwanda then led an invasion together with Uganda’s People’s Defense Force (UPDF) and Laurence Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL) into eastern Congo ostensibly to capture Hutus.

Kagame’s reasons for invading eastern Congo quickly disappeared as the the army linked up with the Hutus and used them to gain control of the region, particularly the diamond city of Kisangani which is 1500 miles away from the border Rwanda shares with Congo. According to the UN, “With minor exceptions, the objective of [its] military activity is to secure access to mining sites or ensure a supply of captive labour.”

Eastern Congo is one of the most minerally rich places in the world, minerals which are highly sought after by US and EU corporations. Here he set up the ‘Congo desk‘ which was manned by his soldiers. Its purpose was to funnel out of DRC diamonds, gold, cobalt and coltan, an expensive mineral used in the manufacture of mobile phones.

Sixty to seventy per cent of the coltan exported from the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Nations reported in 2002, has been mined “under the direct surveillance” of the Rwandan army. Most of the rest was produced by subcontractors and companies answerable to the army or to other departments of the Rwandan government.3 Kagame’s people, in other words, had a near-monopoly on global coltan production.

After fighting off the Ugandan army in June 2000, the Rwandan forces managed “to funnel all the diamonds in Kisangani [in eastern DRC] through the Congo Desk”. Local diamond traders were forced to sell to the contractor nominated by the Rwandan army, and at prices set by the desk. The Rwandans appear to have been stealing about $2 million worth of diamonds a month. (Monbiot C.)
The army also managed to capture most of eastern Congo’s public funds, seizing its revenues for water electricity, airports and roads. By 1999 the ‘Congo desk’ was generating 80% of the Rwandan army’s budget, some $320 million a year. The Rwandan elites new found wealth and prosperity is fruit borne from the Congo’s fields of blood. This is the reason why Rwanda has made progress since its civil war, the Congolese have been paying tribute to Kagame. And this is the dark underbelly of neo-liberalism which avaricious Blair admires.

Horrifyingly, the displacements caused by the people fleeing the army who burned and razed to the ground Congolese villages led to more people dying than were killed by the Interhamwe in Rwanda. From the invasion in 1999 to when the Rwandan army pulled out in 2002, the UN suggests that over 3.5 million deaths in excess of previous levels of mortality “occurred from the beginning of the war up to September 2002. These deaths are a direct result of the occupation by Rwanda and Uganda.” The figure today stands at 5 million. That’s 45,000 people a month since the troubles began in the region. This barely raises a flicker of interest in the international press.

The war in DRC might have officially ended but the plundering carries on. The Rwandan Patriotic Army soldiers at the ‘Congo Desk’ exchanged their uniforms for civilian clothing and the plunder continued under close management by the army in Kigali. Rwanda continues to use the excuse of rebel soldiers to invade and to arm rebel Tutsi forces that have been fighting to annex eastern Congo.

Kagame’s soothing comment, “I tend to believe that the Kenyan army is professional and has been stable,” should be viewed with extreme suspicion. It is widely known that Kenya’s army harbours the same ethnic rivalry tearing the country apart. Many of those in the army are sympathetic to Odinga who is aware that there is a danger the army could split along ethnic lines.

It is Odinga who has poured cold water on using Kenyan troops to contain the violence that is ripping Kenya apart while Kibaki will not dare involve the army. Which then leaves only outside military intervention by the AU or UN. If the AU or UN take this route what would that look like? Which countries would send troops and given the behaviour of Ugandan troops in Nyanza who killed Luos indiscriminately, would Kenyans welcome them? Would the army stay in their barracks if that happened? Proof of how destabilising this will be to Kenya can be seen in neighbouring Sudan and if you have the courage to look, Congo.
So-called humanitarian missions such as United Nations Observer Mission in Congo (MONUC) are merely cloaks for the theft at gun-point of DRC’s wealth. MONUC members sit on the boards of many of the corporations that have interests in DRC. This reflects the growing trend to privatise humanitarian missions.

I don’t think the solutions to the political crisis are going to come from Messrs Kagame, Museveni, Brown or Bush who will probably opt for military intervention if Kibaki and Odinga can not reach agreement. Further, Kenya’s upheaval is not being viewed in the west as a political crisis but as a ‘tribal war’ which is impeding the extraction and safe passage of central Africa’s wealth out of the region.
The Central Lakes region is land-locked and relies on Kenya’s transport links. Following the destruction of the section of Kenya’s railway line that passed through the slum of Kibera there are plans afoot to rebuild the railway along a new route to the tune of $12.8 million that will by-pass Kibera. This will take nine months.

In contrast there are no plans to resolve the abject poverty that 60% of Kenyans hoped desperately to overturn by voting for Raila Odinga, a million Kenyans living in Kibera alone. It is hoped that a power-sharing deal between the key players will defuse their anger and frustration.
Oil interests are also threatened by the instability. Presently a pipeline worth billions of dollars is being constructed to carry oil from Lake Albert to a refinery in Mombasa and there are plans to link this with pipelines which will carry oil from the other Great Lakes.

In Eastern DRC, petroleum under Lake Albert is being tapped on the Ugandan side by Canada’s Heritage Oil & Gas, Tullow Oil and Hardman Resources, supported by the organized crime syndicates involved with the Uganda “government,” which is itself another syndicated crime ring run by the Ugandan military, General James Kazini, and Museveni’s half-brother Salim Saleh. Further south near Goma and Bukavu, Lake Kivu is targeted by U.S. companies, working through the current dictatorship in Rwanda, for its massive methane reserves.
FURTHER READING:

The war that did not make the headlines
Hotel Rwanda: Hollywood and the holocaust in Africa
Operation Iron Fist
GenoDynamics: Understanding Rwandan Violence
Rwandan ex-minister who cooperated with UN Tribunal found dead in Brussels - 2005
UPDATE: 07.02.08

The Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a "time", yet it cannot be destroyed. ==> Wolverine