A Candle For Remembering
May this memorial candle lights up the historical past of our beloved Country: Rwanda, We love U so much. If Tears could build a stairway. And memories were a lane. I would walk right up to heaven. To bring you home again. No farewell words were spoken. No time to say goodbye. You were gone before I knew it And. Only Paul Kagame knows why. My heart still aches with sadness. And secret tears still flow. What It meant to lose you. No one will ever know.
Why did Kagame this to me?
Can't forget. He murdered my mother. What should be my reaction? FYI: the number of orphans in Rwanda has skyrocketed since the 1990's Kagame's invasion. Much higher numbers of orphans had and have no other option but joining FDLR fighters who are identified as children that have Lost their Parents in Kagame's Wars inside and outside of Rwanda.If someone killed your child/spouse/parent(s) would you seek justice or revenge? Deep insight: What would you do to the person who snuffed the life of someone I love beyond reason? Forgiving would bring me no solace. If you take what really matters to me, I will show you what really matters. NITUTIRWANAHO TUZASHIRA. IGIHE KIRAGEZE.If democracy is to sell one's motherland(Africa), for some zionits support, then I prefer the person who is ready to give all his live for his motherland. Viva President Putin!!!
RPF committed the unspeakable
The perverted RPF committed the UNSPEAKABLE.Two orphans, both against the Nazi world. Point is the fact that their parents' murder Kagame & his RPF held no shock in the Western world. Up to now, the Rwandan Hitler Kagame and his death squads still enjoy impunity inside and outside of Rwanda. What goes through someone's mind as they know RPF murdered their parents? A delayed punishment is actually an encouragement to crime, In Praise of the ongoing Bloodshed in Rwanda. “I always think I am a pro-peace person but if someone harmed someone near and dear to me, I don't think I could be so peaceful. I would like to believe that to seek justice could save millions of people living the African Great Lakes Region - I would devote myself to bringing the 'perp' along to a non-happy ending but would that be enough? You'd have to be in the situation I suppose before you could actually know how you would feel or what you would do”. Jean-Christophe Nizeyimana, Libre Penseur
Hutu Children & their Mums
Look at them ! How they are scared to death. Many Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi, Foreign human rights advocates, jounalists and and lawyers are now on Death Row Waiting to be murdered by Kagame and his RPF death squads. Be the last to know.
Almighty God :Justice for US
Hutu children's daily bread: Intimidation, Slavery, Sex abuses led by RPF criminals and Kagame, DMI: Every single day, there are more assassinations, imprisonment, brainwashing & disappearances. Do they have any chance to end this awful life?
Killing Hutus on daily basis
RPF targeted killings, very often in public areas. Killing Hutus on daily basis by Kagame's murderers and the RPF infamous death squads known as the "UNKNOWN WRONGDOERS"
RPF Trade Mark: Akandoya
Rape, torture and assassination and unslaving of hutu women. Genderside: Rape has always been used by kagame's RPF as a Weapon of War, the killings of Hutu women with the help of Local Defense Forces, DMI and the RPF military
The Torture in Rwanda flourishes
How torture flourishes across Rwanda despite extensive global monitoring
Fighting For Our Freedom?
We need Freedom, Liberation of our fatherland, Human rights respect, Mutual respect between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority
Sunday, October 5, 2014
What really happened in Rwanda in 1994
ANTHONY BLACK | October 3rd 2014.
in the Truth is coming out !
Isaiah 42-46:“Hear, you deaf. Look, you blind, and see!
In the evening
of April 6, 1994 a plane carrying the Hutu leaders of both Rwanda and Burundi
was shot down as it approached Kanombe airport.1 The assassins had little trouble targeting the flight as only one of
the two runways was open, the other having been closed two months earlier on
the orders of Canadian General Romeo Dallaire. Simultaneous to the shootdown,
that is on the eve of April 6, a 30,000 RPF (Tutsi) army based in Uganda
invaded from the north. At the same time, hundreds of covert armed RPF cells
came to life in and around Kigali and began attacking Rwandan government forces
(FAR). The population, roughly 85% Hutu, and encompassing at least a million
refugees in and around Kigali displaced by previous RPF incursions from Uganda,
began to panic. A genocide was about to begin.
But it was a
genocide neither against, nor by, the actors cited in the ‘official’ narrative.
Indeed, Rwanda circa 1994, is, in all likelihood, if not the, then certainly
one of the greatest propaganda swindles of all time. This is the story of that
swindle and of the scandalous truth that lies buried beneath it.
Historical Context
Prior to the
arrival of Europeans, Rwanda was a feudal kingdom ruled by a Tutsi minority
over a Hutu majority. Following the Berlin Conference of 1885 Rwanda came under
the suzerainty of Germany which was, itself, replaced as colonial overlord
following WW1, by Belgium. Rwanda’s feudal order remained intact, however,
until 1956 when the Belgians finally organized elections. Then, in November
1959, the Hutu majority overthrew the Tutsi monarchy. Many Tutsis fled, the
majority ending up, significantly, in Uganda. It was from this perch in Uganda
that the exiled Tutsi aristocracy launched, between 1960 and 1973, a series of
violent attacks against the Rwandan regime. These were repulsed and for the
next decade and a half Rwanda enjoyed a period of relative peace.
It is worth
noting at this juncture that, though much of the Tutsi aristocracy fled in
1960, those Tutsis who remained were well integrated into Rwandan society and
body politic. Thus, both the government and army contained significant numbers
of Tutsi personnel even through the height of the crisis in April 1994. In
fact, the Rwandan Army (FAR) continued as a multi-ethnic organization even as
it was forced to retreat into the forests of the Congo in July of 1994; this
after having run out of ammunition due to a Western embargo on arms supplies –
an embargo not applied to the RPF.
Up until 1990
there was no further interference in Rwanda from Uganda. Nevertheless, by then
the Tutsis exiles living there had become one of the main elements of the
Ugandan Army. As such, when Museveni came to power – having been handpicked by
the US and Britain to oust the socialist, Milton Obote – a third or more of his
army consisted of Tutsis. Many of these held high office, including Paul
Kagame.
Kagame had been
(and remains) an erstwhile client of Washington from well before he claimed to
have ‘saved Rwanda from further genocide’ in 1994. Not only had he served as
director of Ugandan military intelligence in the 1980s, but he had also
received training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,2 and had been the beneficiary of constant US material and diplomatic
support from the moment he assumed control of the RPF.
Upon the
collapse of the USSR in 1989/90 the US and the UK began a general militarist expansion
which included the targeting of Yugoslavia and Rwanda; Yugoslavia as it was the
last real bastion of working socialism in Europe, and Rwanda as it was a
working model of socialist development in Africa. In addition, the US had
turned against Mobutu (of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) as
he was beginning to ally himself politically with China. The Rwandan president,
Habyarimana, was subsequently approached by Washington to allow his country to
be used as a staging ground for an attack on Zaire (to this day, a cornucopia
of precious resources prized by the West). His refusal caused the US to look to
other agents in furthering its strategic interests. They found the Tutsis in
Uganda, ever thirsting for restoration of their hegemony in Rwanda.
Furthermore, Museveni had begun to feel uneasy about the numbers of Tutsis in
his ranks and was looking to be rid of them. The opportunity to satisfy these
disparate desires soon came.
On October 1,
1990 the self-styled Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) launched a surprise attack
from Uganda. Though calling themselves a force of ‘liberation’ the offensive
was a thinly disguised invasion by Uganda itself. Initially, the justification
for the invasion put out by the RPF was that of attaining the right of return
of Tutsi refugees. This claim, however, was belied by the fact that Rwanda had,
under UN auspices, already agreed a few weeks earlier to the return of all
Tutsis who wished to do so. That accord required Tutsi representatives to
travel to Kigali to determine both the logistics of that population movement
and their subsequent accommodation within Rwanda. The delegation was expected
at the end of September, 1990. They never arrived.
The attack
killed tens of thousands of Rwandan civilians. These crimes, though well
documented, have never been accounted for, nor did the UN or ‘international
community’ ever seek to account for them. Indeed, there was not even a shred of
condemnation of the Ugandan/RPF invasion, this despite the clamour raised only
two months earlier with regard to the advance of Iraqi forces into Kuwait. In
point of fact, the US and its allies supported the aggression against Rwanda
and US Special Forces operated alongside the RPF from the beginning. This
support notwithstanding, the small Rwandan army (with some help from a
Congolese battalion) was eventually able to repel the invading forces.
Following this
attempt using a proxy force to overthrow the state, the United States brought
political and economic pressure to bear upon Rwanda’s one-party socialist state
(MRND). The President, Juvenal Habyarimana, instead of resisting, agreed to
alter the constitution and in 1991 Rwanda became a multi-party democracy.
Though the Rwandan government effected this as an offer of peace, what followed
was anything but peace. Thus, rather than work towards reconciliation, the RPF
turned from the tactics of open warfare to those of guerrilla terrorism.
In 1992, and
whilst RPF forces were busy planting mines, assassinating politicians and
blaming it on the MRND, a coalition government was formed with the front
parties of the RPF. These agents, with US backing, quickly seized control of
key ministries and succeeded in appointing the Prime Minister. They also gained
control of the intelligence services which they then began to dismantle. In
essence, the ‘power sharing’ arrangement had largely given over control of the
country to the very forces long bent on its destruction.
The RPF itself,
meanwhile, engaged in a ‘talk and fight’ strategy; always agreeing to a
ceasefire, pressing for more power, then launching new attacks on the civilian
population. The most egregious of these assaults was their breaking of the
ceasefire and the launching of a major offensive in February of 1993. Seizing
the town of Ruhengeri, RPF forces murdered some 40,000, mostly Hutu, civilians.
Once again, the ‘international community’ remained dutifully silent.
The Rwandan
army, though hamstrung by the civilian ministries, managed to repulse the RPF
attack. Finally, in August of 1993, the Arusha Accords were signed under
pressure from the United States and its allies, and from which the RPF obtained
major concessions. The Accords dictated the formation of a broad-based
transition government to be followed by general elections.3 But for the RPF – as for the United States – there was a fatal fly in
the electoral ointment. To wit, the RPF knew that they could not win such
elections; this not only because they were unpopular with the majority (85%)
Hutu population, but also because they had precious little support amongst many
of Rwanda’s internal Tutsis whose lives and businesses they had destroyed.
Rather than prepare for elections, the RPF prepared for something different.
 |
| Dr. Rudasingwa Theogène RNC chairman |
The result of
the 1993 RPF offensive was the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of
Hutus from northern Rwanda towards Kigali so that by April, 1994 over a million
refugees were encamped close to the capital and hundreds of thousands more in
camps to the south. The RPF, meanwhile, did all it could to paralyze the
functioning of the government, to exacerbate racial tensions, and to prepare
for war.
<
Who Killed
Habyarimana?
The triggering
event in the ‘Rwandan genocide’ of 1994 is generally agreed to be the shooting
down, on April 6, 1994, of the plane carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, the Hutu
president of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi. The
official story has it that unidentified ‘Hutu rebels’ were the villains who
targeted their own countrymen in some vague attempt to gain power. No evidence
was ever adduced in support of this threadbare thesis, but in any case, even if
so, the official villains failed spectacularly in their objectives as the
country quickly fell to invading Tutsi forces leaving a small minority (Tutsi)
population to rise like the Phoenix to its former position of national
privilege and oligarchical control. No one in the Western mainstream media has
ever commented on the exceeding peculiarity of this bizarre turn of events,
never witnessed before, in which the supposed victims of a genocide end up as
the victors of the conflict.
As in one of
those classic ‘B movie’ plot twists where the bad guys inadvertently hire a
good guy who turns the table on his benefactors, so too did the lead official
of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) hire an investigator
into the crash who turned out to be an honest man. Reporting back to Chief
Prosecutor Louise Arbour in 1996/97, Australian lawyer, Michael Hourigan, found
evidence directly linking the RPF (and the CIA) to the assassination. Far from
pleasing Arbour, however, Hourigan’s diligence was rewarded with censure.
According to Hourigan, Arbour became “aggressive” and “hostile” when informed
of his findings. What Hourigan didn’t know at the time is that Arbour, after
having launched the investigation, had been directed by US Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright (who had handpicked her for the job) to quash the inquiry.
And so she did. Arbour would later (again under the aegis of Albright) be
promoted to Canadian Supreme Court Justice and thence as UN High Commissioner
for Human Rights.
Hourigan’s
report, though suppressed at the time, would, nevertheless, surface many years
later in the hands of one of the defense teams at the ICTR. The report would
also have its findings later corroborated by numerous sources. Thus, the French
anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, having been called in to investigate
the deaths of three French nationals who were aboard Habyarimana’s doomed
flight, launched an exhaustive eight-year investigation. He concluded that the
plane had indeed been destroyed by the RPF and that the assassination was part
and parcel of Kagame et al’s plan to take over Rwanda by force. Bruguiere went
on to issue nine warrants for the arrest of high-ranking members of the RPF
whilst also requesting that the ICTR take up Kagame’s prosecution.
What’s more, not
only have other French – and Spanish – legal officials since confirmed
Bruguiere’s findings, but many highly placed members of the RPF have stepped
forward publicly to implicate Kagame and the RPF in the assassination. All have
suffered the same fate of official international silence and suppression, and
some of the latter have suffered assassination themselves.5
This culture of
suppression and official silence has also plagued the ICTR from its inception.
In particular, it became the explicit policy of the ICTR to forcibly limit its
mandate solely to the investigation of ‘genocidal intent’ by Hutu government
figures, i.e. without any reference whatsoever either to the political context
of the conflict or to the mounting evidence implicating the RPF as invaders and
genocidaires. In short, the ICTR, much like its sister tribunal, the
International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), proved itself
from the outset to be little more than a Washington-sponsored kangaroo court.6
This
transparently politicized policy has continued apace throughout the trials.
When, for instance, the more independently-minded Carla Del Ponte replaced the
pliable Louise Arbour, she was quickly terminated as Chief Prosecutor after calling
for a ‘Special Investigation’ into the actions of the RPF; this despite making
a case for such an investigation with then UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan. Of
course, Anan’s refusal to look into the crimes of the RPF should come as no
surprise as it was he who, a) was head of the peacekeeping operations in 1994,
and is thus implicated in the events, and b) was handpicked by the US to
replace his predecessor, Boutros-Ghali.
Boutros-Ghali,
It might be remembered, had come uncomfortably close to scuttling the entire
US/RPF invasion scenario when, in May of 1994, he acceded to a request by the
Rwandan government to send 5500 UN troops to Rwanda to reinforce the 2500
already stationed there; this so as to stabilize the country at a time when
reports of growing ‘chaos’ were issuing forth daily in the world press. These
efforts were, however, categorically thwarted by the Clinton regime which used
its influence to remove the proposal from the UN agenda. Instead, the UN troops
already stationed there, far from being reinforced, were withdrawn. Later,
Boutros-Ghali, in conversation with Rwandan expert Robin Philpot, would expand
on these matters declaring that, “The genocide in Rwanda was 100% the
responsibility of the Americans!”7Hardly any wonder, then, that in 1996 US Ambassador to the UN, the
ubiquitous Madeleine Albright, would veto his re-election making Boutros-Ghali
the only UN Secretary General in history not to be granted a second term in
office.
Inconvenient
Truths
On August 26,
2010 the French newspaper Le Monde revealed
the existence of a draft UN report detailing the most serious human rights
violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo over an eleven year period (1993
– 2003). The report described how, following the RPF’s takeover of Rwanda in
1994, it proceeded to carry out “systematic and widespread attacks” against
Hutu refugees who had fled to neighbouring DRC. These attacks it stated, “could
be classified as crimes of genocide.”
Save for it
having been leaked to Le Monde, it is
clear that the report was well on its way to being buried alive, its cover-up a
near certainty. But this was hardly the first instance of a cover-up of a UN
report vis a vis Rwanda. As early as October 11, 1994, Robert Gersony, an
employee of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), then attached
to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, made an oral presentation to the UN
Commission of Experts on Rwanda. Gersony had been dispatched to survey the
situation inside Rwanda to determine if conditions were right for return of the
Hutu refugees who had fled the RPF. Instead, he found that the RPF had been
committing massacres of the Hutu population in Rwanda starting in April 1994
through the date of his presentation. On page 4 of the UN record of Gersony’s
presentation (a record which surfaced in the defense proceedings at the ICTR),
we read:
Significant areas…have been the scene of systematic
and sustained [emphasis added] killing and persecution of the civilian Hutu
population by the Rwandan Patriotic Front…..These actions were consistently
reported to be conducted in areas where opposition forces of any kind – armed
or unarmed, or resistance of any kind….were absent. Large scale indiscriminate
killings of men, women and children, including the sick and elderly were
consistently reported.
Now, I remind
the reader that the killings detailed here were being perpetrated not, as in
the official narrative, i.e. by Rwandan government troops, but by the supposed
saviours of the country, i.e. the RPF.
Though much
evidence surfaced early on that the official genocide narrative was in sharp
disagreement with reality, all later independent reports have continued to
corroborate this finding. In a 2004 paper, for instance (and reinforced in a
more recent 2009 report), US academics Christian Davenport and Allan Stam
concluded that, of the many hundreds of thousands of deaths (possibly as high
as two million)8 that occurred in Rwanda from April through July of 1994, the “majority
of victims [at least two thirds] were likely Hutu and not Tutsi”. Noteworthy is
the fact that Davenport and Stam were initially sponsored by the ICTR – that is
until their findings contradicted the official narrative whence they were sent
packing.
Still, Davenport
and Stam have refrained from taking the implication of their own research to
its logical conclusion, i.e. that Kagame’s forces were the only agents
responsible for committing “systematic” killings in the areas they overran, or
that such systemic violence was part of a pre-existing plan by the US-backed
RPF to invade and overthrow the legitimate government, the latter in order to
install a formerly privileged minority – and Western comprador elite9– to power within Rwanda.
No matter, the
movie continues to circulate, sans critique; Rusesabagina’s views and
denunciations, do not.10
Whose Genocide(s)?
It is something
of an embarrassment to the US architects of the ICTR that the tribunal, though
explicitly tasked with indicting only members of the Hutu government, have
failed singularly in successfully prosecuting any of them.11Not only have the most senior members of the MRND - through the spirited
efforts of the various defense teams – been acquitted, but the mass of evidence
so assembled has stood the entire official narrative on its head, and has
implicated, au contraire, the RPF – and its foreign accomplices – in the
genocide.
There was,
however, one highly publicized piece of evidence proffered at the tribunal by
prosecutors as they sought to prove a ‘planned genocide’ by the MRND government.
This was the so-called ‘genocide fax’ allegedly sent to the New York UN
headquarters on the night of January 10th, 1994. That this was the only piece
of documentary evidence claiming direct planning of a genocide put forward in
the trial is, itself, telling. Had there actually been such a plan (by the
MRND), the logistics would have left a paper and/or electronic trail a mile
wide. Instead, there are no orders, minutes of meetings, notes, cables, faxes,
radio intercepts or any other type of documentation indicating that such a plan
ever existed. And then, of course, there are the actual events on the ground
which, as we have seen (and shall see further), suggest nothing of the sort.
Nonetheless, there is the lone sepulchre of the ‘genocide fax’. What to make of
it?12
To make a long
story short, the fax is a forgery. There was a fax sent to the UN headquarters
on January 10th, 1994 (a copy of a cable sent by Romeo Dallaire to another
Canadian, General Baril), but this was not the fax that was entered into
evidence in the Military II trial (ICTR vs Ndindiliyimana)13 in October, 2005. Ndindiliyimana’s defense counsel was able to
definitively establish that the original fax dealt only with ‘weapons caches
and seeking protection for an informant’, whereas the fax subsequently entered
as evidence, having first had time stamps, dates and paragraphs altered, had
mysteriously sprouted an addendum about government plans to kill Tutsis and
Belgian soldiers.14 Conflicting testimony both between Dallaire’s earlier and later
statements, and between statements made by Dallaire and Lt. Col. Claeys (a
Belgian officer who claims to be one of the authors of the original cable),
further proved the document’s inauthenticity. Such was only reinforced when
Dallaire’s immediate superior, Jacques Roger Booh-Booh, stated that he had
never seen nor heard of the fax or any of its alleged inflammatory contents.
Eventually, the ‘genocide fax’ was simply withdrawn as evidence by the court.
Puff! One might wonder, then, why tens of thousands of MRND personnel are today
still in prison, this whilst not one RPF figure has even been indicted. But so
it is.
If documents
supporting a pre-meditated plan by the MRND have failed to materialize, not so
it turns out when it comes to the RPF. In the same trial that saw the outing of
the fraudulent ‘genocide fax’, evidence was presented suggesting nothing other
than a master plan by Kagame and “our Belgian, British and American
collaborators” for the taking not only of Rwanda, but of Zaire. In a letter
from Kagame to fellow Tutsi, Jean-Baptiste Bagaza of Burundi, dated August 10,
1994, Kagame thanks Bagaza for his help in “taking Kigali”. He then relates his
communications with “our big brother Yoweri Museveni” and talks of “some
modifications of the plan” noting that:
We have found
that the presence of large numbers of Rwandan refugees at Goma, and the
international community, can cause our plan for Zaire [emphasis added] to fail.
We cannot occupy ourselves with Zaire until after the return of these Hutus….In
any case, our external intelligence services continue to crisscross the east of
Zaire, and our Belgian, British and American collaborators [emphasis added] the
rest of Zaire. The action reports are expected in the next few days.
******
Once the plane
had been shot down, an RPF army, as noted earlier, invaded from the north
whilst armed RPF cells began attacks inside Kigali itself. These cells
represented some 15,000 or so troops that the RPF had illegally secreted into
Kigali under Dallaire’s watch [As the UNAMIR force commander he was charged
with the responsibility of allowing, under the Arusha Accords, no more than 600
RPF into the city]. In the sector of Kigali known as Remera the RPF killed
everyone on the night of the 6th and 7th, wiped out the gendarme camp there,
wiped out the military police camp at Kami and launched major attacks against
Camp Kanombe, Camp Kigali, and the main gendarme camp at Kacyriu.
The Rwanda
government and army called for a ceasefire that same night and the next day.
The RPF rejected the call. The Rwandan government then asked for UN help to
control the situation. Instead, the US arranged that the main UN force be
pulled out whilst flying in men and supplies to the RPF using C130 Hercules
aircraft. The Rwandan Army, short of ammunition and unable to contain the RPF
advances offered an unconditional surrender on April 12th. The RPF rejected
this offer and began shelling the Nyacyonga refugee camp, where the one million
Hutu refugees were located, so provoking their flight into the capital.
The effect of
one million people flooding into a small city that itself was under bombardment
caused mayhem and panic. To make matters worse, the RPF used this flood of
people to infiltrate its men behind FAR lines. This heightened to fever pitch
the panic amongst the Hutu population who then began killing anyone they did
not recognize. The late Dr. Alison Des Forges (a noted expert on Rwanda), in
her testimony before the Military II trial at the ICTR in 2006 stated that the
RPF claim that they attacked to stop a ‘genocide’ was a myth; just propaganda
to justify their attempt to seize power by force of arms. She also testified
that the Rwandan government did not plan and execute genocide. This accords
with the (early) testimony of Romeo Dallaire who confirmed that there was no
planned genocide by the MRND. In addition, the deputy head of Belgian Army
intelligence, Col. Vincent, similarly testified that the idea of an MRND-backed
genocide was a complete fantasy.
The fighting in
Kigali was intense. UN officers – confirming testimony made by FAR and RPF
officers before the ICTR – state that the RPF was launching hundreds of
Katyusha rockets every hour around the clock whilst the Rwandan Army ran out of
grenades in the first few days and were reduced to fighting with hand-made
explosives. Nevertheless, the siege of Kigali lasted three months and only
ended when the Rwandan Army literally ran out of all ammunition and thence
ordered a general retreat into the forests of the Congo.
RPF officers
testifying before the ICTR have stated that the RPF killed up to two million Hutus
in those 12 weeks in a deliberate campaign to eliminate the Hutu population.
The Akager River, the length of which was under RPF control throughout, ran red
with the blood of Hutu victims massacred on its banks. It is here that Robert
Gersony’s report, filed as an exhibit before the ICTR, lends support to this
testimony and to the fact of a systematic and planned RPF massacre of the Hutu
population.
As the Rwandan
Army (including its Tutsi officers) retreated into the Congo forest, the Hutu
population, in fear for their lives, fled with them in their millions.
Meanwhile, in local villages, Hutu neighbours attacked Tutsis either in revenge
for the murder of Hutus or fearing death at their hands. Tutsis also attacked
Hutus. It was total war, though a war clearly fuelled and instigated by the
US-backed RPF invasion.
The RPF later
pursued the Hutus through the Congo forest and, between 1996 and 1998, killed
hundreds of thousands and possibly millions. All the while the RPF was assisted
by the United States. Thus, the US cynically thwarted plans (in November 1996)
devised by the French and the European Union to send a 10,000 man UN force to
assist and guarantee the safe return of the refugees; a plan which if it had
been effected would likely have forestalled the ensuing multi-million death
toll in the Congo. Moreover, the UN Rwanda Emergency office in Nairobi was, in
fact, manned by US Army officers and acted as the operational headquarters of
the RPF. Finally, not only did US Special Forces fight alongside the RPF during
this period, but intercepted radio messages from Kagame to his forces in the
field suggest that both Belgian and Canadian forces were involved as well.
Operating, then,
under the Orwellian pretext of ‘hunting for genocidaires’, Kagame & Co. conducted
a decade long invasion/occupation of Zaire/Congo. The overall strategic thrust
of this assault was threefold. First, it was an attack on French interests in
Africa, interests that were immediately taken over by the United States.
Second, the assault was part and parcel of the overthrow of Mobutu (toppled in
May of 1997). Ultimately, however, the capture of the Congo was about booty. As
such, this single treasure chest contains not only large deposits of diamonds,
gold, copper, uranium and tantalum (used in computers and cell phones), but
also much of the world’s reserves of chrome, platinum and cobalt.
To the question
then, ‘Whose genocides were they?’, the answer yet resounds through the din of
propaganda, ‘They were ours’.
Shaking Hands with
the Devil
In assessing
responsibility for the tragedy of Rwanda – and the ensuing events in
Zaire/Congo – we must not stop at those already indicted in this essay. For
none of this could have happened without the overt complicity of numerous
‘humanitarian’ NGOs including especially, Human Rights Watch, which, in the
early days prior to the RPF’s final solution, headed up a totally bogus,
unsubstantiated report (issued March 6, 1993) condemning (and so
de-legitimizing in advance) the Rwandan government for a ‘genocide’ that, in
fact, had yet to take place - and which would, in the event, be committed by
the very agents it conspired to defend, i.e. the RPF. And, naturally, none of
this could have happened without the willing complicity of the Western mass
media who swallowed hook, line and sinker every piece of propaganda issued by
the Clinton Administration.15
As Canadians we
are more than ordinarily complicit as it was the Canadian government (under Jean
Chretien) that worked hand-in-glove with the Americans throughout this period.
In particular, of course, three Canadians, Louise Arbour, General Maurice Baril
and General Romeo Dallaire played leading roles in the ‘affair’. For services
rendered they were, all three, handsomely rewarded: Arbour, as already
mentioned, with promotion as Supreme Court Justice and thence as UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights; Baril with promotion to Chief of Staff of the
Canadian Armed Forces (in Sept. 1997), and Dallaire with appointment as
Canadian Senator for life.
Of the three,
however, Dallaire’s role is particularly noteworthy, for it is he who has, ever
since, been portrayed, and portrayed himself, as a hero in the Rwandan tragedy;
and who has, as such, been pre-eminently involved in spreading and maintaining
the Big Lie with respect to it. Dallaire’s 2003 epic,Shake
Hands With the Devil,16 an ironically named Faustian tract, fails spectacularly to elucidate
the author’s otherwise well documented actions during the events.
It is well
established, for instance, that Dallaire knew of – and, effectively,
facilitated – the build-up of RPF forces inside Kigali prior to Habyarimana’s
assassination. It is well established that Dallaire, rather than reporting to
and receiving orders from the UN, as was his mandate, was, instead, reporting
and receiving instructions from American military commanders. It is also a fact
that Dallaire, only two months prior to the assassination of Habyarimana,
closed down one of the only two runways17 into Kigali airport - upon request of the RPF.
It is also the case that Dallaire covered up the massacre by the RPF of MRND
people elected in by-elections in the north of Rwanda in November, 1993.
Evidence presented at the ICTR further implicates Dallaire in supplying
intelligence to Kagame and the RPF forces throughout the period leading up to
April 6, 1994.
Whenever
Dallaire has faced formal questioning regarding his actions in Rwanda his
testimony has been strictly managed and censored. Attempts by independent
journalists and investigators to interview and question him have met with
refusal and/or silence. And those questions are many and serious. Apart from
the items already listed, they include:
How did the lady
prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, come to be murdered at the UN
development compound (the morning after Habyarimana had been assassinated) just
a short time after he, Dallaire, arrived there? Why did he do nothing to save
the lives of the Belgian UN soldiers - suspected of being the team that shot
down Habyarimana’s plane - who were subsequently killed at Camp Kigali? Why,
and under whose command, did Belgian army units in certain strategic positions
in Kigali abandon them and all their weapons to the RPF? Why did UN army units
attack MRND army units, but never the RPF? Why did he fail to report that US
forces, using Hercules C-130 aircraft, were supplying men and weapons to the
RPF? Why, when Dallaire had his headquarters at Amahoro stadium in Kigali after
April 6 through the rest of the month, did he allow RPF forces to enter and
subsequently murder Hutu refugees who had fled there for safety? And, of
course, why did he lie about the ‘genocide fax’ of January 11, 1994?
Still, all in
all, Dallaire was merely a bit player in a much larger drama, a drama written
and produced in Washington, D.C.
Of Credibility and
Credulity
In the two
decades that have elapsed since the overthrow of the Rwandan government – and
the subsequent killing of millions of it’s peoples, and those millions more
killed in the Congo – the Big Lie has flourished virtually unabated. Though the
likes of Robin Philpot (‘Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa’), and Ed
Herman and David Peters (‘The Politics of Genocide’) have, of late, lent this
revised narrative a slightly higher profile, more generally – and notably
amongst the Left – the ‘official’ narrative of Rwanda circa 1994 continues to
hold sway. So much so that Rwanda has become, in Philpot’s resonant phrasing,
“a useful imperial fiction”, i.e. a shining example of the ‘need for
intervention’ that is deployed whenever and wherever ‘humanitarian imperialism’
seeks to invade and destroy nations opposed to it.
It need not be
so. At the very least amongst the Left, it should never have been so. In the
early days of the Rwandan debacle, one anomalous event stands out like the
proverbial sore thumb transparently pointing the way to what was really ‘going
down’ in the beleaguered nation. That event was the majority withdrawal in May
of 1994 of the UN troops stationed in Rwanda, i.e. essentially clearing the way
for the unobstructed overthrow of the government. This one item alone,
irrespective of the fact that the corporate media habitually lies about
virtually all matters of significant political import, should have tipped off observers
of the Great Game to the idea that something rotten was taking place in the
state of Rwanda. But it didn’t. And that, given what subsequently transpired in
Yugoslavia and later Libya – where again, significant sectors of the Left
bought into the official narrative – and given what is today transpiring in
Syria and Ukraine, is problematic.
If there is one
lesson, then, that we can take from the tragic events adumbrated herein – and,
though hardly new, is a notion that bears vigorously reinforcing – it is that
whatever information is fed us by the state and by the corporate mass media
with regard to fundamental global strategic happenings, the only historically
consistent and logical stance to take is to assume that the truth lies 180
degrees in the opposite direction. This should be our default position, until
proof is rendered otherwise, in every instance.
In the meantime,
to bear witness to the truth of what really happened in Rwanda falls to you. As
Noam Chomsky once wrote with regard to an earlier suite of imperial crimes,
‘For yours is an historic mission, and one you should not soon forget.’
Footnotes
2. The US Army’s
elite, commander general staff college devoted to the high-level planning of
invasion scenarios.↩
3. This despite
Museveni never having held an election from the time he shot his way into power
in the mid 80s up to the present day.↩
4. Ndadaye had won
the country’s first free elections, and in the aftermath of his murder, 250,000
Hutus were massacred by the Tutsi army of Burundi, and hundreds of thousands
fled to Rwanda.↩
5. Assassinations
by RPF agents of opponents to the regime have been many. Of note, however, two
priests from Quebec, Claude Simard and Guy Pinard, were murdered Oct. 94 and
Feb. 97 respectively. In addition, and rather chillingly, it is a matter of
public record that a very long ‘hit list’ targeting opponents is, to this very
day, sponsored by the Kagame regime.↩
6. Unlike the
famous Nuremberg tribunal, the ICTR omits any reference to wars of aggression
or foreign intervention (the ‘supreme international crime’ according to
Nuremberg), and so, effectively, condones them. Moreover, the refusal to
consider who instigated the war essentially runs cover for the instigators.↩
7. More fully,
“The genocide in Rwanda was 100% the responsibility of the Americans….The
United States, with the energetic support of Great Britain, did everything they
could to prevent the UN from sending troops to Rwanda to stop the fighting. And
they succeeded”.↩
8. The exact
numbers have never been definitively established. Initial reports claiming
800,000 were mostly pulled out of a hat. Still, later research (including
testimony before the ICTR from former RPF officers themselves) seem to indicate
that in the months following Habyarimana’s assassination, the numbers were, at
the least, in the many hundreds of thousands, and possibly as high as two
million. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus were also forced back to Rwanda at
gunpoint starting in November of 1996, and hundreds of thousands more (possibly
more than a million) were subsequently pursued and killed in the forests of the
Congo. The Congolese themselves, of course, have suffered many millions (i.e. 5
to 10) killed in the US-backed RPF/Ugandan invasion and plundering of the east
of the country since 1996.↩
9. Evidence of
this can be witnessed in the bilateral agreement that Rwanda, under Kagame,
signed with the United States in 2003, giving each other immunity from
prosecution; the former before the ICTR, and the latter before the
International Criminal Court. Rwanda was also the only African country to back
the US invasion of Iraq that same year. Moreover, much of the plunder of the
Congo has since been funneled to the West through Kigali.↩
10. For an
interview of Rusesabagina (by Keith Harmon Snow) go to:http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/html-191The%20Grinding%20Machine%20interview%20with%20Paul%20Rusesabagina%20FINAL.htm.↩
11. That is, no
government minister or military officer has, of the time of writing, been
convicted of conspiracy to commit genocide. Of the 60 or so high-ranking
members of the government that have been indicted, roughly a dozen have been
acquitted, whilst the rest remain – twenty years after the event – on trial.
Ordinary Hutu prisoners have been, through various legally illegitimate means,
i.e. duress, threat, deception etc, induced to plead guilty. But again, no
convictions bearing on the crime of ‘genocide’ has ever taken place. Moreover,
the full extent of the criminality of the court setup and proceedings at the
ICTR (even to the extent of assassinations of witnesses under UN custody) is
worthy of an essay in and of itself. Indeed, the latter can be had (by
contacting the author) vis a vis a paper, currently in manuscript, by ICTR
defense lawyer Christopher C. Black (the ‘Rhodes Address’), and soon to be
delivered in Rhodes, Greece.↩
12. The case of
the ‘genocide fax’ occupies a particularly important place in the ‘official’
narrative in as much as this was the only purported document, skimpy as it was,
testifying to some measure of MRND conspiracy to a planned genocide. So
important to the official storyline, in fact, that the ‘fax’ continues -
despite having been exposed as a forgery before the ICTR - to be trotted out
and adduced as ‘evidence’ to this very day.↩
13. Specifically,
‘The ICTR vs General Augustin Ndindiliyimana’. Christopher C. Black was the
lead defense counsel for Ndindiliyimana, the latter, having occupied the role
of Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Gendamerie during the period in question.
Ndindiliyimana was, just recently, acquitted of all charges at the ICTR.↩
14. It was proved
that this fake fax was put in UN files (to replace the original fax) by British
Army Colonel, R.M. Connaughton, on November 28, 1995.↩
15. Though special
‘commendation’ should go to Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker, who was
instrumental in propagandizing on behalf of the Clinton Administration and the
RPF. Gourevitch was also the brother-in-law of Jamie Rubin, the right-hand man
of, then, US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.↩
16. Dallaire
published his book three years after another Canadian author, Carol Off,
published her hagiography (‘The Lion, The Fox and The Eagle’) on Dallaire,
Arbour and Lewis Mackenzie. Both Dallaire and Off, it turns out, relied on the
same ghostwriter / researcher, Sian Cansfield, whence the existence of passages
of the first volume lifted straight into the second. Both belong on the fiction
list. ↩
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