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
Monday, January 26, 2009
Posted by Bernard Londoni on January 24, 2009 at 12:30am
Four thousands Rwandan troops have just crossed the DRC border in the East by the invitation of the DRC President Joseph Kabila. These troops are forming a joint operation effort with the nonexistent DRC army to root out Rwandan Hutu Militias who operate in the Eastern DRC and whom Kigali has repeatedly claimed to be threat to its security.
To many people who haven’t been following the development of the Eastern DRC conflict, this sounds like a good thing to do to bring about peace. However, the truth is that Kigali’s political calculations are higher and misleading. It is only recently that the UN released a report accusing both the DRC and Rwandan Governments of supporting rebel groups in the Eastern Congo.
The Rwandan President Paul Kagame wants the international community to believe that he is a “good boy”; that he wants to restore peace in the region but unfortunately Kinshasa has been hindering this process from taking place. Today in complicity with the President of the DRC, Paul Kagame has sent his troops to the Eastern to hunt Hutu militias and has arrested his longtime proxy General Kunda in Rwanda.
This political theatre must stop; General Kunda will not be extradited to the DRC for trial of mass atrocity crimes he has committed on civilian populations. As Kagame is looking for a cover up to show the rest of the world that the UN report was unfair, our own president Kabila is joining him in this plot by authorizing Rwandan troops presence in the DRC soil without the approval of the Senate, the General Assembly and the one of the army’s chief of staff.
The Congolese people need a lasting and durable peace and do not need joint military operations. It is clear that there is no possible military solution for the DRC conflict; Rwanda should and must stop any military operations in the Congo immediately.Rwanda is using propaganda of the Hutu militias to justify its presence in the DRC, but on the contrary, it exterminates innocent civilians in the Eastern DRC and loot mineral resources.
As a matter of fact, Rwandan troops occupied the Eastern Congo from 1996-2001. What made it impossible for Rwanda to root out the Hutu militias who were still operating in the occupied territories? Will the joint operation efforts by Kigali and Kinshasa be successful to root out the Hutu militias now? This is another way to perpetrate new mass atrocity crimes and killings of innocent civilians that the Congolese Government will be responsible for this time.We will continue to bow down, and decisions about the fate of the Congo will be made in Kigali by Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president.
That’s why I believe when a government appears to go in a different direction than its people want, that particular government should be ousted by the people. It is up to the Congolese people to keep Kabila in power or ultimately become victims of political manipulations.I denounce these joint operations and I hope the international community understands the political football that is being played by both Kigali and Kinshasa.
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
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Develop skills of critical thinkingAvoid to be lazy and copy/paste journalist.
Pattern: “U.N. says Rwanda-Congo force kills 9 militiamen.” Copy and paste/Repeat all Western media. No more, no less. Whose the first-hand information? What about civilian casualties? Why do they avoid to show up the deeper circle of hell in which Hutus and Hutu refugees live at each RPF attack, assassination and massacre? ?
Infamous Copy/paste journalists motto: spread the word even if you aren’t sure your source of information tells you the truth of event…
Question: Were they able to convince everybody as to who between Hutus and Tutsis the goodies are, and who the baddies?
Two decades after RPF invaded Rwanda, many revelations about RPF motives proved us once more than ever about the fakeness of Western media telling and reports. This becomes dramatic when our copy/paste journalists silence crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes of genocide.
Copy/paste journalists raise criminal issues on Rwanda reports when they spread up second hand information. I know it is an uneasy truce but to copy and paste because of laziness or corruption or propaganda has always raised big issues when there is no mention about casualties and crimes committed by those they are praising.
In these circumstances and under the incentives of the law, it would be prudent for journalists not to take these sorts of risks, particularly when they underestimate the situation and losses of thousands of killed innocent people. It's a terrific crime not to tell the world how Paul Kagame and his RDF conquerors marching on the Congolese soil are killing innocent people only because they seem to be (apparently and physically) or be born Hutus no matter who they are, Congolese or Rwandan refugees.
How many people got killed in the Congo and not reported by those corrupt journalists? Hutu survivors have been subjected to all kind of horrifying ill-treatments compared to what Europeans experienced during the Nazi occupation.
Since 1990 up to now, we are under the same regime and criminals still rule the country, Rwanda. Every single crime gets experimented on the Rwandan and Congolese soils by Paul Kagame against the targeted and hated majority of Rwanda. No word, no report, no mention about IT in most of the Western media. Who's to blame, the Western system of reporting information, or let us avoid generalization and finger out those who are doing so in the interest of RPF criminals?
Be that as it may, and regardless of my effort to draw the world decision makers, those criminal media are larger and have greater scope; they can report news and rumors more rapidly and there’s no problem for them even though millions of people got slaughtered. They will say they did the job, meaning spread up the word they’ve been told to. In short, those stupid or corrupt journalists simply require less effort. They just go into copy-paste mode and, without thinking about consequences, encourage killings of the targeted innocent people through ethnic cleansings.
To sum up, such western journalists actions discredit and dishonor the very concept of Journalism. The one-sidedness and overt RPF and pro RPF media propaganda found some of those countries and on Internet is absolutely unthinkable. It is obviously not possible to present all points of view. However each opinion aired is given as the view of one person or representative of one of the sides involved. The newsreader often recapitulates, but does not add any personal comment or judgment.
And on the subject of criticism, it is worth remembering that copy-paste should NOT fall within the duties of a journalist.
Do they think on the reader’s ability to distinguish truth from lies? Quite honestly I have no great optimism about that when I remember what kind of reports made Christian Amanpour of CNN, Linda from BBC, Collette Braekmann of Le Soir and many other so called journalists shaming the treasured job. They knew and still know they spread views which I consider not true but worth lobbying. The current information we receive from those criminal media remind me the Soviet era which foisted their Truth on everybody.
What is more worrying is that they are well aware (so are we, for that matter) which channels they can change to, which newspapers they can read so as to not hear or read unpalatable opinions.
In any case I have doubts as to whether we can emerge victorious from that information war if we use the same tactics. When you hear more or less the same clichés, slogans and accusations from both sides, then you either believe the first you hear, or make your choice on some other, usually subjective, grounds.
© Jean-Christophe Nizeyimana
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
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
Saturday, January 24, 2009
The Days That Don't Disappear
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
=> Howard Zinn
No one is going to stand up for us, so we must stand up for ourselves.
Our camps and bushes have become a living hell for Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutus. We all need to come together and tell the whole world, and our enemies too, that the Hutu people have a right to live in this, God's world. It is our birth place, just like the rest of the human species.
For the 3rd time, Paul Kagame chooses Genocide : almost two decades-long ethnic cleansing inside and outside Rwanda.
***
PAUL KAGAME RUNOFF AN EARLIER TEST FOR OBAMA'S ADMINISTRATION
- THERE IS NO DOUBT RPF government during the Bushism era has become the world’s latest sovereign to use genocide as a way to solve its problems with the troublesome majority: Hutu ethnic members.
- A Survivor and eyewithness speak out on the RPF horrors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
January, 1997.The majority of Rwandan refugees did not return back to Rwanda: 450,000 at most returned back to their homeland, compared to 1,103,000 refugees. Most of the returnees come from Mugunga and Kibumba camps and the head count is between 300,000 and 400,000 refugees. Given the strategic nature of the repatriation, the media from all over the world were invited to film this "massive repatriation" in order to force the cancellation of the international intervention force, which had been very difficult to obtain.
2. Rwandan refugees are not fleeing combats: they are fleeing massacres. The operation that is taking place in Zaire has all the ingredients of a new genocide. Large mass graves are found all over around Goma.
Women, children lie together with elderly and men, hands attached on their back, a bullet in their head. According to estimates in Goma, several hundreds of thousands of refugees have been killed since the beginning of the conflict: most of them were massacred, others died either by starvation or by exhaustion. Stories of massive massacres are being reported from Masisi and Walikale in particular. For the Tutsi rebels, Rwandan refugees are a military target.
3. Rwandan refugees are not the only ones targeted by these massacres. Zairian Hutu populations are also targeted. Everywhere in eastern Zaire, but particularly in Goma, disappearances are not only common but also on the rise, and every influential person of Hutu background is enlisted on a "red list". In all the Masisi region, massive massacres of civilians are taking place.
INTRODUCTION
On Monday January 26, 1997, two unknowns came at my house near Goma. One of them was in military uniform and was carrying an automatic riffle; the other was wearing a civilian uniform, but was carrying a revolver under his shirt, a fire arm usually reserved for a higher rank officer. They asked to see me in person, referring to me by name, but my guard was smart enough to say that I was absent. They said they will be back in one hour.
There was no time to waste, I assembled a few items in rush, and managed to run away, through a ICRC (Red Cross) vehicle that carried me across the border to Gisenyi. I just escaped an attempt murder. Three Spanish World Doctors were less lucky in Ruhengeri on January 19, 97; they lost their lives.
Like myself, they probably knew more than they should, they had seen with their very eyes a lot, or at least somebody thought they had seen a lot...
The events succinctly related in this chronicle are factual information that I have observed personally. Given the sensitive nature of these facts, the reader will understand that they can only be revealed under the protection of anonymity. I hope everybody will understand that lives are in danger
1- HOW MANY RWANDAN REFUGEES ARE STILL PRESENT IN ZAIRE?
Since the beginning of the conflict, there have been a war in numbers concerning the number of refugees still present in Zaire. The "rebels" state since the beginning that the quasi-totality of refugees returned back home; the only people who failed to return are the "Interahamwe" and the "ex-FAR" and the genociders in Zaire (it is therefore legitimate to chase them); Kigali states that they are more than 500,000 to have crossed the border.
This war of numbers is strategic: one hand, it is aimed at preventing any foreign intervention in favor of the remaining refugees (why intervene if there are no more refugees in Zaire?); one the other hand, it is aimed at attracting the maximum of foreign aid on Kigali, in favor of "reconstruction"...
What is really the number of refugees still present in Zaire? Let us simply use the official numbers of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
a. Refugees of Bukavu region: 316,000 persons distributed among different camps: INERA, KASHUSHA, NYANGEZI, PANZI, KALEHE, KATANA, BIRAVA, IDJWI NORD (Bugarula) et SUD (Kashofu);
b- Refugees from Goma region: 715,991 persons scattered in different camps: MUGUNGALAC VERT, KIBUMBA, KATALE, other camps (MINOVA, SAKE,...)
c- Refugees from Uvira region: 180,144 persons Rwandans: 71,828 Burundians: 117,316
TOTAL GENERAL (Uvira, Bukavu, Goma): 1,221,483.
Let us say: 1,220,000 refugees (Rwandans and Burundians), present in Zaire in October 1996, at the beginning of the war.
Not knowing the whereabouts of 117,000 Burundian refugees, I will retain 1,103,000 Rwandan refugees .
Of 1,103,000 Rwandan refugees, how many did cross the border back to Rwanda?
Since the beginning of the war, there have been only one massive movement of refugees back to Rwanda: the return home from Mugunga refugee camp, located at 7 KM (4.5 miles) from Goma
Mugunga had become the "world largest refugee camp"; I visited Mugunga camp one day before Goma takeover, Wednesday October 30. I saw the arrival of refugees who were fleeing from Kibumba camp. These refugee camps had been shelled the previous day from Rwanda, by the "rebels".
I saw many wounded in a relatively serious condition, some hit by shotguns, others scraped by bomb fragments. It would be impossible to accurately state their number, which was increasing as more refugees were coming, the wounded being sent in different treatment centers of the camp. I saw around 100 wounded refugees, in only one center that I managed to visit. It would be difficult to know how many people were killed in Kibumba camp.
All in all, there were 500,000 persons at the Mugunga site, originating from Mugunga camp itself, and Lac Vert (300,000), and from Kibumba camp (197,000). The refugees who crossed the border on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday November 15, 16 and 17, 1996 came from this group.
I saw a relatively important column of refugees on Friday 15, and in Goma, we estimate that 50,000 persons crossed the border that day. The next day, I saw an extraordinary crowd of refugees on the same road, all day long. That Saturday, on November 16, 200,000 persons probably crossed the border. On Sunday 17, the flow of refugees was again less important, similar to Friday's: we estimate that 50,000 persons crossed the border that day.
All in all, according to our estimates, between 300 and 350,000 refugees returned back home in three days, which is a lot of people, compared to 500,000 who were living in Mugunga refugee camp a few days earlier. This estimate is comparable to the ones produced by a well-known medical NGO.
At this point, four observations must be made:
1. I did not see anybody cross the border but modest families, families of peasants. I did not see any of the intellectual families that I knew in Mugunga. Didn't these educated families walk toward Masisi instead?.2. X, Y, and Z, school teachers in Goma, who fled along with their families toward Matanda, on the Masisi road, during Goma takeover, told me that they saw, "in great numbers", refugees walking across Matanda, from Mugunga camp toward Masisi.
3. The operation "Mugunga Liberation" took place in front of world cameras, as the last dispositions for the then imminent international intervention were being prepared. Journalists, up until then very limited in their action and movement (they were routinely given visas only for 2 to 4 hours) were given free ride to report on this special event, visibly with the goal to impress the international public opinion.
The "massive return of refugees" did in fact cancel out the military intervention.
4. Within the gigantic crowd that crossed back to Rwanda, there were very few people from Katale and Kahindo camps.
They only appeared toward the end of the cortege on Sunday, Nov. 17, 96. They were visibly very much weakened by a very long trip and they were vulnerable. For example, we picked up a young woman who did not weigh more than 30 KG (90 lb.), clearly very exhausted. She died a couple of days later.
The following weeks, very small groups of refugees would be escorted at the border posts of Bukavu (Ruzizi) and Goma ("Grande Barriere") by the High Commission for Refugees (HCR). They were mainly women, children, and elderly. In all, 80,000 refugees were counted
Brief, 450,000 refugees at most crossed the border back to Rwanda, from a total of 1,103,000,000 persons. 653,000 refugees did not go back to Rwanda, and they are therefore in Zaire.
It appears that between 200 and 250,000 refugees have finally made it to the camps of TINGI-TINGI, AMISI, and SHABUNDA.
At least 400,000 Rwandan refugees are missing and other hundreds of thousands have been butchered by RPF (without counting 117,000 Burundians): what did happen to them?
2- ARE THE RWANDAN REFUGEES FLEEING FIGHTING OR MASSACRES
If it was just for fighting, Rwandan refugees wouldn't have any more reason to flee than Zairian populations: Rwandan refugees are fleeing massacres that are specifically targeting them from "Tutsis "rebels", from RPF led by Paul Kagame, known that time for killing Hutus with the aim of decrease their numbers in Rwanda and outside of IT.
For Tutsis "rebels", Hutu refugees constitute a military target.
The "rebels" dialectic goes like this: refugees who did not return back to Rwanda are "genociders". The intellectuals, for example, the staff of the administration, property owners, successful business men, particularly those coming from cities, were afraid to return.
The great number of mass graves attest the systematic intent to annihilate refugees, and the fact that they have been considered as a military target since the beginning of the war. These mass graves are everywhere, but they are always carefully hidden and located in area of difficult access. It is obviously extremely dangerous to be found by "rebels" in area where mass graves are located: it means immediate execution.
I saw near Mugunga, at one hour walking distance in the North, three mass graves of around 10, 12 and 30 bodies each. Bodies included men, women, sometimes holding babies on their back, children and elderly.
Each one of them had a bullet in the head, including the babies.
In Kibumba, I saw at the deep end of the camp, on the Rwandan border, in the small wood which serve as the border line, metric piles of skeletons. There was three such sites, containing fifty (50) to one hundred (100) skeletons each. There too, the bodies had one bullet in the head. A methodical search would surely allow the discovery of other sites, but who would risk his life in such a dangerous place?
On November 26, in the forest North of Sake, on the pathway which goes down the hill, after five days of walk from Kahindo camp, (on the Rutshuru road), I saw a dying man, abandoned on makeshift stretcher. This man had deep wounds of machete all around his head.
Through one open wound, one could see his brain. We asked him who did that to him, and he said, "it is the Tall Men"; we asked him where was his family; and he answered that his wife and all his children had been killed with machetes and aces used a few days earlier in the forest, by the "rebels", who wanted to prevent them from reaching Mugunga.
His brothers, very weak and exhausted, could not carry his stretcher no more, and abandoned him near the road. Farther North, we found the remaining of a camp that appeared to have been abandoned in hurry. A pregnant woman was lying on the ground, a bullet in the head. She must have been unable to run away.
There were bodies scattered all the way along the pathway that leads to Kahindo and Katale camps. On December 24, two "rebels" kidnapped two young Zairian Hutus from village R. They came back two days later, after being severely tortured. They have now became the guides for between 70 and 100 Tutsi "rebels" (one pick-up truck and one big transport troop vehicle) heavily armed.
In one incident, they took them on the site of three little camps hidden in the forest. Result: "Waliwauwa wotw, wale wakimbizi, wote kabis, hakuna hata mmoja aliyepona" (they killed all of them, really all, those refugees, not even one survived), the "guide" told me when he came back
It was probably three little camps of around 100 persons each. Many refugees from Katale are still hidden in the Virunga park forest, blocked at the entry and the exit by the mass graves and the military operations.
One of those operations took place on January 30, 1996. Two hundreds fifty (250) "rebels" soldiers were brought at Katale camp, at the entry of the forest, to have it cleaned up
It is difficult to estimate the number of refugees still hidden there, but there are more than 300.000 refugees between Katale and Kahindo. It is estimated that between 30 and 80.000 among them have been able to reach Rwanda.
Many die in the forest, where they have been feeding themselves for months now with plants and drinking rain water, when it is raining. We met, for example, a young lady absolutely exhausted and dehydrated. She could make it no more, and despite our efforts, she died in our hands.
Farther North, under a cabin made of branches, lays the body of a woman, dead of exhaustion, while giving birth. On her feet, the body of a four years old child lays, no doubt hers, dead of loneliness.
Helping those people is considered by the "rebels" as helping the enemy, an active support to the Interahamwe. It has been suggested that the refugees who have stayed in the Zairian forests are after all in their natural milieu. I can testify, for having been there tens of times, that it is false.
The Zairian forests of Goma are established on a volcanic land, where one can not find any source of water, nor animals, nor any kind of food. To condemn those refugees to stay in the forests is to condemn them to death. Mr. Boutros-Ghali has talked of "genocide by hunger"
On December 17, 1996, in the weekly confidential meeting of the responsible of the NGOs, EUB, the local association that is in charge of collecting the dead on the main roads (Goma/Sake; Goma/Rutshuru) announced that it had already collected 6537 dead bodies, among them 2743 for the sole town of Goma.
EUB has not the mandate of searching for bodies in the bush
On the road Kibumba/Rutshuru, after crossing the little forest after Munigi, one is extremely distressed (it is then necessary to close all the windows) by a terrible smell of dead bodies in decomposition.
Days and weeks pass , but the smell doesn't disappear, as if the corpses were "renewed" as the time passes. That road is the only one that goes to Katale. The refugees who take the risk to take that road by foot to go back to Rwanda are diverted to that forest and executed. Soldiers are continually patrolling at that place.
A tutsi "rebel "did not try to hide it; on a road barrage at Rumangabo; he told to me on December 19: "those refugees have the pest, when I meet them in the bushes, I have to eliminate them".
The same day, on December 19, on the road from Tongo, heading to Kalengera, I saw a small pick-up truck carrying refugees, around twenty of them, with four armed "rebels". The refugees were shouting and crying. Our car was following theirs. At the little junction from where the old road goes to right, now cut off by the lava flow, the pick-up went right, to the cul-de-sac.
We took the left, heading toward the asphalted road Rutshuru-Goma: those people were going to the discreet place of their execution; it was about 18 o'clock.
At Katale camp, at the level of the river at the left side, after about 30 minutes of walk past the camp, at the entry of the bush on the West side, I saw many large mass graves
The first contained about 200 persons, all killed with an automatic riffle. The second, a bit further, bigger than the first one, with 300 bodies in it, some rolled in sheeting (for the transport?), followed by 2 more others of the same importance.
Many women and children, all of them shot in the head. Men, killed with a bullet in the head also, have their arms attached on the back. Our guide, a refugee, assures us that two other mass graves were located not far from there, and that much larger mass graves, with "thousands" of dead bodies, were located even further at many hours of walk, in the forest. He offered to lead us there. Unfortunately, we had to refuse, for obvious security reasons.
On the lava plain behind Katale and Kahindo camps, heading to the West, in the opposite direction to the Rwanda side, one can see thousands of skeletons, mowed down with a machine gun while they were fleeing, and covered of sheeting that have been burnt in the attempt to make those remainings disappear.
I met at the hospital a refugee who was being treated from six impacts of bullets in the back. That man had been left for dead among dead bodies; he had been able to scramble up to a NGO car and had been evacuated to Goma. He told me that tutsi "rebels" have rounded his "quarter" in Katale camp; they separated men from women, ordered them to lay down face on the ground, and opened fire with machine guns. How many died, he can not tell, but a quarter in the camps was home to two (2) to three (3) thousand refugees. This happened in the beginning of November.
I met, again at Mugunga, a man was keeping a little diary of his wandering since the attack on Katale camp to that of Mugunga. That testimony has also been collected by a well known medical NGO.
The man tells how they have left Katale under the nourished fire of heavy and light machines guns, how they fled to the forest in the panic. The forest, where again the "rebels" were waiting for them; back to Katale, the "rebels" again, and this up to three times before his refugee group was flown over by a small reconnaissance plane.
We also found North of Mugunga, at about 5 hours walking distance on the road heading in the North to Katale camp, in the forest behind the Nyiragongo volcano, a small camp of about fifty refugees. There were among them 17 persons who survived the massacres at Kahindo camp
The 3500 persons who made up their quarter were rounded by soldiers.
At first, they acted friendly, and offered to escort the refugees back to Rwanda. They indeed escorted them, but lead them in the opposite direction to Rwanda. As soon as they reached the bush, the "rebels" opened fire, killing them all, except those 17 refugees, who were now scared to death, and were not willing to go back in Rwanda.
Among those people was a little boy who had lost his 7 brothers and his parents in that killing
At Tongo, I met a local farmer who told me that one month prior to the beginning of the invasion, Tutsi soldiers were already in Tongo, and were paying, in US dollars, local farmers to dig deep and well hidden ditches (soon to be mass graves) in the bush.
In a Goma health center, I met a young girl 12 years of age, severely burned all around her body, half of the body. She just arrived from Bukavu. During their fleeing, her camp had been attacked: her and her mother were rolled in plastic sheeting to which the assailants put fire. That is how her mother died.
On December 24, I met in Goma another Rwandan young boy, from the group which had fled initially fled to Idjwi island (in lake Kivu), Bugarula camp. They escaped across lake Kivu in a boat toward Nyabibwe shore. Too bad for them: the "rebels" were waiting for them. The "rebels" drowned his parents, brothers, and sisters with their own hands. He is the only one who survived by swimming, and later joining other refugees in Goma. He was on his way back to Rwanda.
We helped repatriate refugees from Bukavu, Sake and Goma. One striking observation that we agreed upon, all the non-governmental agencies present on the field, is that there are only women, elderly, and young girls among these refugees.
Later, it was explained to me that in Nyabibwe, "rebels" separated males from females among the refugees before allowing them out of the forest: all the boys, age 10 and above, were massacred; only women and elderly were granted to leave. This was confirmed by the "Canal Afrique" newspaper which, in its January 23 edition reported that: "among the refugees who went back to Rwanda, only 30% are men (elderly)".
In Bukavu district, at Burhale, in early November, the clergyman Jean-Claude Buhendwa, a young priest Mushi, ordained in August of the same year (1996), was gunned down as he was trying to position himself between "rebels" and a group of refugees, essentially made of families which had fled from Kashusha camp and took Ngweshe direction.
The Red Cross counted 600 victims, but another priest who was at the scene, but managed to hide in a banana plantation, said many more people were killed, probably more than 2000. Local farmers were also requisitioned to bury the maximum number of cadavers in mass graves digged expeditiously, before the arrival of the Red Cross.
I could go on with many more examples: I just wanted to emphasize events which took place under my direct witness. But, I did not have access to all the Masisi district, or Walikale, where the "rebels" had prohibited all form of access to foreigners. Testimonies that are coming from these areas are unanimous: there is a firm resolution from the "rebels" to annihilate refugees.
The most ferocious massacres took place in Walikale, where, according to a reliable witness present at the scene, "several tens of thousands of refugees have been exterminated".
The resemblance of stories and the similarity of experiences are striking. From the North to the South, the same methods are used, systematically, and in a planed manner.
The day following Goma takeover, the UNHCR offices in Goma, at the BDGL (Development Bank for the Great Lakes), were completely emptied of sensitive information, especially the computer equipment and the data that they contained. The lists of all the refugees, and where they were living, and all the confidential information that refugees had agreed to give in order to obtain food were brought to Gisenyi, Rwanda.
On December 20, 96, I talked to a high ranking official of the UNHCR in Goma, I reproached him for doing nothing to denounce the situation of mass killings. He responded: "We know very well that refugees are being murdered by tens of thousands in the forest, but what can we do, we are not an armed force; it was the role of the intervention force to intervene..." Why then this silence?...
REFUGEES MURDERED BY TENS OF THOUSANDS:
It is estimated in Goma that several hundreds thousands refugees have already died, either murdered - most of them -, or died from starvation, exhaustion, sickness... and thirst.
This would explain why, 200 to 250 thousands Rwandan refugees were able to arrive in TINGI-TINGI, AMISI and SHABUNDA, from the 653,000 Rwandan refugees who did not cross the border back to Rwanda. (Again we are excluding 117,000 refugees from Burundi).
With the inexorable advancing of "rebel troops" toward LUBUTU, it is likely that we will have to add 200,000 more refugees to this macabre list, from SHABUNDA town, which has already fallen, and TINGI-TINGI. Humanitarian organizations have already left. The TINGI-TINGI camp, already surrounded by now, will then be "cleaned", to use "rebel" leader Kabila expression.
Will the problem of 1994 "genocidaires" be finally be closed? Nothing is less certain, given that the "genocidaires", most of them Interahamwe, ex-FAR and ex-Presidential Guards, to whom most of the massacres are generally blamed, are both strong and young; They run fast, and disappear quickly in the bush when they are attacked.
The refugees that are being murdered are not the killers: they are families who fled at the pace of their children, and they flee in groups, thinking they are more secure that way.
3- ZAIRIAN HUTU POPULATIONS ARE THREATENED.
As soon as they entered the town of Goma, Friday November 01, 1996 soldiers started hunting down Zairian soldiers and Hutu refugees. Any refugee who was found was shot down. Every refugee was labeled "Interahamwe".
This schema has often become caricature. A Zairian Hutu family I know very well got itself rid of an eight-year old child very rapidly. This family had adopted him at age six during the Rwandan exodus of 1994. January 06, two soldiers came and threatened the family because it had given shelter to an "Interahamwe".
Very quickly, it is also the hunt of Zairian Hutu that began. These were not "Interahamwe" but "Magrivi". Magrivi is a Hutu organization similar to other organizations other tribes founded after the National Conference. Those organizations defended tribal ideas, especially recently with rising tensions and the Rwandan war.
Kidnapping increased particularly in the Goma area and in the whole northern Kivu in general where the Hutu community is strong with estimates ranging from 500 to 700,000 people
In Goma, every educated person or person with some wealth or anybody with some influence is directly targeted.
Rafael M. is for instance hunted down because he has contacts in Europe where he went to school. His contacts makes him an influential person. He must disappear. Because he cannot be found, it is his wife who is targeted. The military are hunting her down. Friends are hiding her. For how long? The old R. is also hunted down. He was director of a school in Birambizo in Masisi. He is a Hutu. Armed soldiers went to his house three times during the day. In the night of December 17, they came back again. They were seven well armed.
They knocked at the door of his house at midnight and called him by his name. He did not answer and had his children stay silent. Disappointed by this , the military went to his neighbor's house. His neighbor was a nineteen-year old Hutu, owner of a shop. They looted his shop and sent a bullet into his head. R. has moved elsewhere but he lives in fear. What I am saying happened in the district of Mabanga.
M. is a Hutu businessman. His tool for his work is his Toyota pick up. In the afternoon of January 12, soldiers went to his house. They wanted to buy his car and offered him $2,000.00. M. refused because on one hand the price was ridiculously low, on the other without a car M. is with out work. The same day, at eight in the evening, they came back and forced into his house. M. had enough time to escape from a back door. However, they found his twenty-year old son in the kitchen and summarily executed him.
Many people are kidnapped at night, others in broad daylight. In general people disappear for good. However some come back from their detention center after having been beaten up and told to shut up. Some are kidnapped, released, kidnapped again. Then, they disappear. Witnesses who live near the borders report a large number of cars crossing into Rwanda at night when borders are supposed to be closed. Also a number of Hutu are directly killed in Zaire, probably on Rutshuru road, in the bushes of Munigi, on both sides of the road.
In Goma and Rutshuru, the kidnapping have really reached alarming proportions in recent weeks. Even Bukavu is not spared. The last Hutus who are still in hiding are hunted down, be they Zairian or Rwandan, but also Zairians who for instance worked for refugees in an NGO. It is estimated that 4 to 5 persons disappear every night in Bukavu, compared to 40 per week in Goma.
The hunt of Hutu is carried out in cities but it is particularly in Masisi that the man hunt is massive. In fact the Hutu community of Masisi is very important, easily identified because it lives in villages of the same clan. Finally, during the unfortunate war in Masisi, stirred up since the Rwandan exodus of 1994, this population sometimes carried out violent activities against Tutsi and Hunde that led to the departure of all Tutsi who lived in Masisi and sometimes the massacres of Tutsi. (Mokoto for example, April 96)
"Rebels" have therefore carried out systematic and violent massacres at a large scale. In Jomba for example, they entered from Rwanda and killed every person they met. Very often they only met mothers and their children because youths had fled. It is these mothers who were executed, as was the case for the mother and the little sister of R. This wave of executions lasted about three weeks at the beginning of November.
Even the parish Minister, an influential person, known for his moderate opinions was kidnapped with four nuns who run the high school of Jomba, and were taken towards Uganda (customs office of Bunagana). They were never seen again.
In the village of Chanzu, Jomba Parish, people were called to a political meeting where the agenda of the new government was going to be discussed. The meeting started, they closed the doors and killed using a small hoe (Agafuni in Rwandese). Every person was struck once on the front. Remaining villagers counted 207 people. Bodies were tossed, some into mass grave, others into toilets, the head first.
Similar scenarios were repeated in all the sectors of Masisi, Matanda, Nyakariba, Birambizo, Katwe, Bibwe, Rutshuru, Rugari,etc.
In Birambizo, a Hutu fighter injured a "rebel" in early January. Soldiers sealed off the village, called the population to the village square in front of a church. They separated parents from their children. Then, "Rebels" killed all the children in front of their parents, and tossed the bodies behind the church. To retrieve the body and bury it, one had to pay $3.00. The majority of parents are subsistence farmers. They did not have that money.
In many places, massacres went along with the profanity of the sacred.. Thus in Nyakiriba two young Hutu priests were assassinated on December 24, 1996. Days after "rebels" were seen walking around wearing the priests' ceremonial (mass service) cloths. A similar account comes from Bukavu, Panzi. In Jomba, the tabernacle was riddled with bullets.
Everywhere church leaders and their families were targeted because they are influential in society. Thus a nun lost 18 family members in Matanda, and 15 in Nyakariba. Their names are on the top of the lists being circulated in Goma. The existence of those lists was confirmed to me by individuals associated with the new regime in Goma during a confidential conversation on January 23, 1997.
This ethnic cleansing is not just settling scores as it is the case in all war when the victor wipes out his old adversaries. Hutu are systematically targeted, moderates as well as extremists. The evidence of this systematic hunt of Hutu is the existence of lists of names.
4 - HOW TO EXPLAIN THE SILENCE OF THE MEDIA
The reader might wonder how, given the extreme gravity of the elements reported here, the international press has not much reported about this situation
There are many reasons to that:
1. The press has considered as over the question of refugees when they went back to Rwanda in large numbers from Mugunga, on November 15th, 16th, and 17th
Thereafter, there were almost no journalist in Goma and Bukavu. The media attention had shifted to Tanzania, where another massive return of Rwandan refugees was being prepared(engineered)
The competition between different media is at the origin of the inflation in the numbers of refugees returnees that were reported... ones fancier than others. For example, in the evening of November 16, G. Perez, Radio France International (RFI), reported that 400,000 refugees were waiting downtown in the city of Goma to be able to cross to Rwanda the following day on Saturday November 16th; that was twice the population of Goma! I was there; I estimate that there were no more than 25,000 refugees.
2. The " rebels" consider, and they are right, that the war has to be done on the media front the same way it is done on the battle ground, because it is in the West (Europe, North America) where decisive alliances for the victory on the ground are made.
The accesses to the war zones or any other sensitive zone are strictly controlled. For example, on Friday November 1st, all the journalists and organisms present in Goma have been evacuated from UNHCR premises where they had gathered, by Major David of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), while at the same time the fighting was raging in Goma.
There were only a few expatriates remaining in Goma; the town was strewn with corpses (more than 2,500 have been counted). The journalists were all at the border, prevented from entering, until all the corpses were buried, which took four days.
Thereafter, they were allowed to enter the city, CNN at the front line, and were queuing up to take pictures one by one of a decomposing corpse, with a military uniform, forgotten (?) at the Signers traffic circle.
The road to Mugunga has been closed until the " liberation "of the camp, where, as it has been seen, all the cameras from all over the world have been invited to withness the humiliation of Hutu refugees getting massmurdered and survivors getting treated like animals...
The road to Rutshuru has been closed to all Westerners (Zairian could pass) until December 6, 1996. That road leads to the camps of Kibumba, Katale and Kahindo (where 500,000 refugees had been living). No one knows what happened to the refugees in the camps of Katale and Kahindo, all we know is that these camps were heavily bombarded. What did happen of all of those refugees? No body seems to be interested to know.
Not a single journalist has been able to go beyond Sake, and visit Masisi for example, or Walikale, even though everybody knows that the refugees who fled west-ward took those roads on their way to Kisangani.
Until now, journalists are re-transmitting press releases from the military top command, broadcasting them without any verification, for they don't know better. This has already been seen during the Golf war. A war in the 20th century has at first to be on the media. The " rebels "distribute to the editorial staffs very well prepared press releases, with all the statistics already established
3. The eyewitnesses have to keep quiet; or can only speak under the cover of anonymity. If they speak, they risk death or expulsion, or they put in danger their staff working on the field
As for the journalists themselves, the ones who search their information outside the military top command circle, they are closely monitored, feel unsafe, and they do not hesitate to submit their articles to the new authorities for reaction before publication.
The very simple presence of journalists put in great danger eyewitnesses of these situations. When they interview someone in public or in a crowd, in general, someone else in this crowd is in charge of keeping an eye on what is being said: people know that and they prefer to say nothing. It is then difficult to have crucial and reliable information from the population
All these reasons make very difficult to have access to objective information, and impose to the eye witness to be very cautious, despite the high gravity of the situation
During contacts obtained at a very high political level, in Europe, I was surprised to see that, in general, decision makers are very well informed of the situation, also known in their chancelleries and embassies, even if they do not know the exact extent would one believe General Baril when he declared, in mid-December, at Sake, that not one single Rwandan refugee was remaining in Zaire, because after having spent a half-day on the road leading to Masisi, in a vehicle of a " rebel " officer, he had not met one single refugee?
This declaration, which sealed off the end of the multinational force, will have been the cause of the deaths of thousands among them. Could he ignore that? Diplomatic calculations prevent people from doing anything, the same way, paradoxically, the silence of the media does
Finally, everybody knows, but everybody keeps silent. And the refugees continue to die, women and children first.
© Published in Europe, February 19, 1997
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
Friday, January 23, 2009
A genocide protected by the silence of the world
'No good deed goes unpunished' => Oscar Wilde
Stop Genocide in the Congo. Why the Silence? Break the silence and speak out for North Kivu inhabitants and Rwandan Hutu refugees' peace. Wy would you accept to lieve in shame and fear? There is power in speaking out, so use your voice and start talking!
Troops have been trained by US green berets and US military personnel have worked to coordinate SPLA and RPF/UPDF/RCD military campaigns. Actually, they've been trained to intervene in the so called "Save Darfur"! And arms given to them are used to kill Rwandans and Congolese people!
Shame on You who claim " Save Darfur". A VERY BIG LIE.
Rose Kabuye herself said that if she is given opportunity to make her tribe (tutsi)majority she would do that in one month => Rose Kabuye
Rwanda surViVors are calling for support of a multinational intervention to stop the ongoing genocide in Democratic Republic of the Congo where RPF and his RDF/FPR/CNDP are mass-murdering the remaining Hutu refugees in the Congo. Nothing short of an international intervention will stop the genocide until Paul Kagame remains in large.
What is happening in the Eastern Region of the Congo is truly horrible, we would not be able to ignore it.
Join Rwanda SurViVors in writing and calling the world leaders and Tell them not to let Paul Kagame the genocidaire slaughtering Hutus. They have to act decisively to end the genocide in the Congo and in Rwanda as well.
Kagame continues: "To be honest, I don't care.
Mortars are raining down on the Hutu refugees assimulated to the Interahamwe.Urgent action is required to stop genocidal practices currently being carried out in the DRC.
The message that this sends is right up the alley of the self-same internationalists, International organizations for Human Rights advocacy who will not lift one finger to stop an on-going genocide If anyone has to be held responsible for the genocide in Rwanda, it is the Western Human Rights Organizations, it is the United Nations, It is the European Union.
Put yourself in Hutu mans and women shoes and tell me if you wouldnt be full of anger after a white man left your country and had used the Tutsi to treat you as a dog in your own country even though you represent 85% of the majority in your country.
I belive its normal that Hutus got angry as they still had the anger of being mistreated and unfortunately, the west are the ones who created that rubbish, as they usually do. When I say the west(I mean their colonists).
Put yourself in both Hutu and Tutsi shoes before answering any Rwandan question.
If therei is no justice for all who committed crimes they will still war between Rwandans.My recomandation is that those Spanish, Canadian Rwandans and Rwandans who were massacred by RPF in refugge camps in DR Congo should 'nt be taken to court there is no good fruits which will be shown in Rwanda.
I always say that no good deed goes unpunished. 19 years old silence since 1990!
The world International community's silence is AIDING genocide in the Congo.
The world must stop the ongoing genocide. The International community must protect Rwandans who are not Tutsis in that country of Rwanda. Earlier in the 90's up the world community failed to the end miserably the genocide or stop it. The world must act now to stop the war of terror, impoverishment and humiliation waged by RPF and Paul Kagame.
Are you ready to join the worldwide peacemakers interacting, informing and inspiring Rwanda peace?
Another thing if you want to understand our problems you should first know that Tutsis oppressed Hutus for over 500 years until when hutus got independence thru a referandum sponsored by UN in 1960s. Tutsis were not happy with it becoz they are the minority and decided to attack Rwanda in 1990s with aim to topple the hutu rule. They killed two Hutu president in a plane downed on 6th april 1994. The first one was killed in october 1993, the president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, elected democratically after 30 years of oppression by the minority Tutsis.
This attack on the plane was sponsored by USA coz the missile used was donated by US army. the orgine of hatred between hutus and tutsis is becoz tutsis believe that they were born to rule and hutus are born to serve tutsis. Hutus didnt plan to kill tutsis as alleged but they reacted after being pushed to the wall. Here in Kigali one day we shall revolt and reclaim our right as the majority. We are only waiting until when USA will become weak and china takes over the supremacy then we shall reclaim our basic right.
We are always forced to go and exhume our fathers bones to show to the internation community that those bones belong to Tutsis but in true sense those bones belong to (Hutus. I remember one day a young man was exhuming bones to wash and display as it is our custom here in Rwanda, then the guy discovered that the arm bone was still wearing the watch that his father had when he went missing and this guy is a Hutu.
Kagame has a chance to reconcile the nation now but if he does not do that. we shall chase him away one night and he wont be remembered any more. Kagame claims that hutus killed 500,000 Tutsis but he forgets that he has killed more than 4 million Hutus so far and he is still doing so.
Kamugisha, Lagos, Nigeria.
Ladies and Gents:
- Your support can help Rwanda surViVors to obtain justice, peace and security in their country.
- Work to ensure that Paul Kagame and RPF perpetrators are held to account their genocide perpetrated against Hutu ethnic members.
- Campaign for ending the world community’s silence about RPF and Paul Kagame’s genocide against Hutus only because they happen to be the majority in their country and to be born Hutus.
- Take action and join our campaigns to ensure that the UN, the European Union, US and international bodies uphold international human rights standards and protect victims' rights in Rwanda.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny,And in this judgement there is no partiality.So arm in arms, with arms, well fight this little struggle,cause thats the only way we can overcome our little trouble.
Brother, youre right, youre right,Youre right, youre right, youre so right!We gon fight (we gon fight), well have to fight (we gon fight),We gonna fight (we gon fight), fight for our rights!
The Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda condemn the ongoing war that enemies of peace have just imposed to the peaceful peoples of the Great Lakes region of Africa .
The Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) strongly condemn the ongoing war that the enemies of peace, prosperity and democracy are once again about to impose to peaceful peoples of the African Great Lakes region.
The FDLR inform the public and the International Community that the first contingent of the Rwanda Patriotic Army comprising more than 4,000 heavily armed soldiers have crossed the Congolese border since January 19 2009 and will soon begin their dirty work of exterminating the Rwandan Hutu refugees, the few survivors of the genocide committed by the RPF-Inkotanyi and its allies against them in the years 1996- 1998 in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo..
The FDLR urge the International Community to strongly condemn this new war and immediately take severe sanctions against the Rwandan government which is the primarily responsible for this new war.
The FDLR inform the public and the International Community that this new war is not only senseless but also unnecessary and risks to engulf the entire Great Lakes region of Africa . Moreover, those who conceived and implemented the plan to exterminate the peoples of the African Great Lakes Region, whoever they may be, must understand that their acts will not go unpunished and that they will sooner or later have to answer before the law for all the serious consequences that will result from that war.
The FDLR recall that they have repeatedly extended a hand to the regime of Kigali in order to peacefully resolve the political problem of Rwanda and that Rwanda has always refused this offer and preferred the logic of armed confrontation.
The FDLR call upon all women and all men of good will and peace-loving nations around the world to condemn in the strongest terms this logic of war in a region already scarred by years of fratricidal and endless wars.
The FDLR reaffirm their commitments made in Rome as stated in their Declaration of 31 March 2005, and urge once again the Kigali regime to sit on the same table, under the Rome process, to find a peaceful solution to the political problem of Rwanda .
The FDLR call upon the Rwandan and Congolese people, and the members of the FDLR to remain calm and united in order to foil the macabre plan of the dictatorial regime in Kigali and its sponsors aimed at exterminating the peoples of the Great Lakes region of Africa .
Done in Paris on 21 January 2009.
Callixte Mbarushimana
Executive Secretary of the FDLR
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
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Professor and Constitutional Criminal Lawyer Peter Erlinder is interviewed by host Karen Redleaf.Watch this video to understand:
Rwanda: obscuring the truth about the genocide
Far from being radical, the attacks on France for its role in the 1994 war are designed to whitewash Western intervention more broadly.Last week, the Rwandan government published the findings of its commission of inquiry into the role France played in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. It found French diplomats, military leaders and politicians – including former president François Mitterand – complicit in the genocide.
A moral analysis like this is compelling because it provides a clear pathway through a maze of complicating factors. For journalists, this moral signposting of the Rwandan genocide leads the way to great copy about the bravery of the heroes and the moral turpitude of the villains. For governments, it provides the crucial element of legitimacy that is the essential underpinning of their right to rule. The Rwandan regime under Paul Kagame depends on this version of events for its support and survival. And so do its principal sponsors, the United States and Great Britain.
As the force that relieved Rwanda from genocide, the RPF - whose leadership currently runs Rwanda - has exploited this version of events to remind Western governments that they failed to live up to the ‘Never Again’ principle that was the driving force behind the passing of the Genocide Convention at the United Nations in 1948. While they battled the genocidaires in 1994, the Western world simply looked on. Except France, that is. But as a supporter of the former, pre-RPF regime, France’s motives for intervening were highly questionable.
It may be the most widely told story of Rwanda, but this version of events is deeply flawed. While the US may have been embarrassed by this account, appearing less than heroic during the months of Rwanda’s greatest torment, it is far easier for it to live with this embarrassment than to be confronted with the facts of how it did intervene in this region of Africa in the early 1990s and since Kagame came to power.
The ‘plane crash’ debate
The Kagame government’s latest salvo against France, in the shape of its commission report fingering the French for their support for the genocide, is in fact part of an increasingly desperate search for political legitimacy. The weakest point of the Rwandan moral parable is the question of what caused the re-eruption of the war in 1994 and the subsequent descent into mass slaughter. The start of the bloodiest stage of the war is far more complicated than the moral storytellers – who blame it on the then evil government’s determination to secure Hutu domination – would have us believe.
It was an act of international terrorism that triggered the return to war. In early April 1994, an aeroplane carrying Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana was blown out of the sky by a missile attack that had been planned for several months. Apologists for the RPF have tried hard to blame the attack upon hardline Hutu conspirators, but they have produced nothing of substance to back up this claim. Rather, there is an accumulating amount of evidence that the RPF was responsible for the missile attack – and it is this evidence that has put the current RPF government, led by Kagame, on the back foot. It is the government’s defensiveness on this issue that lies at the heart of the current France-bashing.
These inconvenient truths threatened to muddy the clear waters of moral certainty that the Rwandan parable provides. The Rwandan regime has lived behind the shield of international powers which have worked hard to keep the matter of the plane shooting off the agenda. For all of its 13 years of operation, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), whose brief is to establish the truth of what happened in 1994, has ruled that the matter of the President Habyarimana’s assassination (which it chooses to refer to simply as a plane ‘crash’) is not within its remit. When one of the ICTR’s chief prosecutors, Carla Del Ponte, expressed her desire to dust off the investigation into the allegations against the RPF, stating that ‘if it is the RPF that shot down the plane, the history of genocide must be rewritten’ (2), she was abruptly relieved of her position and moved to The Hague.
Del Ponte’s successor at the ICTR, the Gambian Hassan Bubacar Jallow, subsequently confirmed that the shooting down of the aircraft is ‘not a case that falls within our jurisdiction’ (3). It is ironic that the ICTR’s first chief prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, has expressed his view that the plane attack does fall within the remit of the court and ought to be investigated. ‘It is clearly related to the genocide, by all accounts [it was] the trigger that started the genocide and it would have been very, very important from a justice point of view, from victims’ point of view, to find out.’ (4)
However, the ICTR’s deputy prosecutor, Bernard Muna, felt cavalier enough about the issue to tell the ICTR’s legal adviser, Kingsley Moghalu, that ‘after all, there was a state of war, and Habyarimana could be considered a legitimate target’ (5). This is an extraordinary statement from such a senior figure. The missile attack was, among other things, a deliberate violation of Article 1 of the Arusha Accords of 4 August 1993, which stated: ‘The war between the Government of Rwanda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front is over.’
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general of the UN at the time of the Rwanda tragedy, is also emphatic about the cover-up of the investigation into the plane shooting: ‘It is a very mysterious scandal. Four reports have been made on Rwanda: the French Parliament Report, the Belgian Senate Report, Kofi Annan’s UN report, and the Organization of African Unity report. All four say absolutely nothing about the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s plane. That just goes to show the power of the intelligence services that can force people to be quiet.’ (6)
Building upon the evidence received by the UN investigator Michael Hourigan, the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière conducted his own enquiry on behalf of the family of the French pilot who died in the missile attack, along with the presidents of both Rwandan and Burundi and senior government and military figures. Bruguière’s report is thoroughgoing and detailed. I have interviewed one of the several RPF dissidents who briefed the judge: Aloys Ruyenzi.
Yet there is more than the legitimacy of the Rwandan government at stake in this latest retelling of the moral parable on Rwanda. The RPF would not have sustained its war without diplomatic support from Washington. The US intervened to legitimise the RPF’s war, even though the justifications for it had by that time proven to be baseless. The first invasion in 1990 was timed, not to force a reluctant Rwandan government to allow refugees to return, but to disrupt arrangements already in place to accommodate returning refugees.
Rather than being a desertion from the Ugandan military (the RPF leadership were in top positions in the Ugandan state), the invasion of Rwanda in 1990 was a joint Ugandan-RPF venture. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda was keen to have an ally in power south of the border. More importantly, he wanted to be rid of his Rwandan refugee ‘problem’. The issues of land occupation by Rwandans, and suspicions about the leverage that Rwandans in top official positions enjoyed in the Ugandan government, had generated Museveni’s first political crisis since he took power in 1986.
Of course, it takes more than a constitution to bring about democracy, but it was a promising start and presented another opportunity for the US to tell its Ugandan ally Museveni to pull the plug on the RPF or face the end of the privileged ‘New African Leader’ status that it had bestowed upon him.
How human rights lobbyists boosted the RPF
But France, too, played a vital role in prodding the Rwandan government to reach a political settlement with the RPF. According to the French writer Agnes Callamard, it was not just pressure from the US that was applied to get Habyarimana to sign the Arusha Accords in 1993 – ‘it is doubtful if Habyarimana would have signed the peace accords, which gave heavy concessions to the RPF, without pressure and guarantees from the Elysée through François Mitterand’s personal emissaries, and possibly from representatives of the Military Mission of Cooperation, specifically Général Huchon, Colonel Cussac – the French military attaché and head of the French military Assistance Mission in Rwanda, and his assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Maurin.’ (8)
Having secured a virtual coup in the 1993 negotiations – the RPF had won 50 per cent command of the envisaged unified army and enough seats in the proposed transitional government to block anything that was against its interests – the RPF had emerged as the strongest party. The problem it now faced was the scheduled elections where its unpopularity would have been exposed. Local elections in the demilitarised zone that was created in the wake of the February 1993 offensive pointed the way – the RPF was massively defeated at the hands of the former ruling party.
Faced with the prospect of being downsized to a small party by the Rwandan electorate, and with clear support from the US and Belgium, it would appear that the RPF’s interests could only be further advanced with a return to the battlefield. With the promised departure of French forces from Kigali in December 1993, the military path to the capital was clear. What was needed by the RPF was a justification for resuming the war.
Peter Erlinder, the lead defence council for the ICTR, stated categorically in a letter to the Canadian prime minister in 2006 that the final offensive of the RPF was ordered by Kagame within minutes of learning of the successful missile attack, ‘long before any retaliatory, civilian killings had occurred anywhere in Rwanda’ (9).
Three years of mounting fear, insecurity and material deprivation (much of Rwanda was by this time in the grip of famine) came to a head. Rwanda’s hastily (but constitutionally) appointed government of surviving ministers fled the capital. The army was pinned down in one losing encounter with the RPF after another.
Even greater numbers were still to die. The new Rwandan regime’s invasion of various refugee camps and its forced repatriation of refugees, the massacre of internally displaced people in Kibeho in April 1995, and two invasions of what became the Democratic Republic of Congo by the ruling RPF – all of this has brought the death toll of civilians to a level that is the highest of any conflict since the Second World War.
The truth behind the moral parable
In The Times last week, Linda Melvern wrote about ‘a large room in the French Embassy in Kigali filled floor to ceiling with shredded documents. This was probably the paper trail that might have revealed the depth of involvement between the Elysée Palace and the Hutu faction responsible for massacring hundreds of thousands of Tutsi and opposition Hutu’ (10).
Barrie Collins reported from the waiting room of the Rwandan genocide tribunal. Tara McCormack criticised the indictment of Sudanase President Omar al-Bashir for genocide. Julie Hearn looke at Kenya and the myth of Afrian barbarism Brendan O’Neill said Somalia is a case study of the dangers of moralism in international affairs, and that Darfur has been damned by pity. Or read more at spiked issue Africa.
(1) ‘French Policy in Rwanda’, A Callamard included in The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaïre, H Adelman and A Suhurke, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999, p. 178, note 19
Rwanda SurViVors Heart Hero : Peter Erlinder
Rwanda: obscuring the truth about the genocideby Barrie Collins
Far from being radical, the attacks on France for its role in the 1994 war are designed to whitewash Western intervention more broadly.Last week, the Rwandan government published the findings of its commission of inquiry into the role France played in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. It found French diplomats, military leaders and politicians – including former president François Mitterand – complicit in the genocide.
Considering that the current Rwandan leadership has vilified France ever since it launched its bid to seize power in Rwanda in October 1990, eventually winning power in July 1994, it is not surprising that it should now up the stakes against its long-time enemy. The new strongman of Rwanda, President Paul Kagame, is fortunate that he has unswerving support from the United States, Britain and Belgium, and a cheerleading media in these countries which can be counted upon to give his report into France’s role in the genocide maximum impact.
But the truth is that France’s major mistake was to find itself on the wrong side of the moral parable that has been imposed by Western observers on Rwanda’s recent tragic history. A war that was complicated by considerable international intervention has become over-simplified into a morality tale of good versus evil, in which France has been branded as part of the ‘evil side’. Such a simplification further obscures the truth about what happened in Rwanda in 1994, and whitewashes the role of Western intervention more broadly.
According to the moral parable of Rwanda, the good guys were the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which invaded Rwanda in 1990 because it had no other means of protecting the persecuted minority of ethnic Tutsis inside Rwanda and of making the then Hutu-led government accept the right of return of Rwandan Tutsis living abroad as refugees. The bad guys were in the Rwandan government and armed forces. When the international community had helped Rwandans achieve a negotiated settlement, the worst elements among the bad guys drew up a plan to secure Hutu domination once and for all by planning and then implementing genocide against Rwandan Tutsis.
By the time the good guys – the RPF – had fought them off, their evil mission had been largely completed. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis were dead. Genocide had occurred, and the Western world had simply looked on passively. The United States refused to label the war that took place as a genocide in order to resist the clamour for international intervention to save lives. France was the only force on the United Nations Security Council to respond by sending in French forces under Operation Turquoise. But France’s real motivation was not to save lives, but to shore up its erstwhile allies: the bad guys. The French helped them escape Rwanda so that they would not have to answer for their crimes.
A moral analysis like this is compelling because it provides a clear pathway through a maze of complicating factors. For journalists, this moral signposting of the Rwandan genocide leads the way to great copy about the bravery of the heroes and the moral turpitude of the villains. For governments, it provides the crucial element of legitimacy that is the essential underpinning of their right to rule. The Rwandan regime under Paul Kagame depends on this version of events for its support and survival. And so do its principal sponsors, the United States and Great Britain.
As the force that relieved Rwanda from genocide, the RPF - whose leadership currently runs Rwanda - has exploited this version of events to remind Western governments that they failed to live up to the ‘Never Again’ principle that was the driving force behind the passing of the Genocide Convention at the United Nations in 1948. While they battled the genocidaires in 1994, the Western world simply looked on. Except France, that is. But as a supporter of the former, pre-RPF regime, France’s motives for intervening were highly questionable.
It may be the most widely told story of Rwanda, but this version of events is deeply flawed. While the US may have been embarrassed by this account, appearing less than heroic during the months of Rwanda’s greatest torment, it is far easier for it to live with this embarrassment than to be confronted with the facts of how it did intervene in this region of Africa in the early 1990s and since Kagame came to power.
The ‘plane crash’ debate
In fact, the three most influential Western players in Rwanda at this time – the US, France and Belgium – all intervened in ways that created the conditions that made mass slaughter inevitable. Contrary to the prevailing version of events, after its initial deployment of troops defending Rwandan leaders against the RPF’s October War in 1990, by means of Operation Noroît, France recognised that the US and Uganda were behind the RPF and had no desire to become isolated as the sole defender of the Rwandan government. So it increasingly made its military support conditional upon the government’s commitment to serious negotiations with the RPF. According to an informant from the French Ministry of Cooperation, France’s decision to disengage was already evident in 1990: ‘We did not want to remain alone…there were great powers behind the RPF. Uganda could send 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers.’ (1)
The Kagame government’s latest salvo against France, in the shape of its commission report fingering the French for their support for the genocide, is in fact part of an increasingly desperate search for political legitimacy. The weakest point of the Rwandan moral parable is the question of what caused the re-eruption of the war in 1994 and the subsequent descent into mass slaughter. The start of the bloodiest stage of the war is far more complicated than the moral storytellers – who blame it on the then evil government’s determination to secure Hutu domination – would have us believe.
It was an act of international terrorism that triggered the return to war. In early April 1994, an aeroplane carrying Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana was blown out of the sky by a missile attack that had been planned for several months. Apologists for the RPF have tried hard to blame the attack upon hardline Hutu conspirators, but they have produced nothing of substance to back up this claim. Rather, there is an accumulating amount of evidence that the RPF was responsible for the missile attack – and it is this evidence that has put the current RPF government, led by Kagame, on the back foot. It is the government’s defensiveness on this issue that lies at the heart of the current France-bashing.
The UN’s own investigator, Michael Hourigan, first came across compelling evidence of the RPF’s responsibility for assassinating President Habyarimana and the other unfortunate occupants of his plane. However, it appears that under pressure from Washington, the UN agreed to shut down its investigation into the missile attack. Another UN investigator, Robert Gersony, came across evidence of RPF atrocities and was also silenced; the UN even stated that his report ‘did not exist’.
These inconvenient truths threatened to muddy the clear waters of moral certainty that the Rwandan parable provides. The Rwandan regime has lived behind the shield of international powers which have worked hard to keep the matter of the plane shooting off the agenda. For all of its 13 years of operation, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), whose brief is to establish the truth of what happened in 1994, has ruled that the matter of the President Habyarimana’s assassination (which it chooses to refer to simply as a plane ‘crash’) is not within its remit. When one of the ICTR’s chief prosecutors, Carla Del Ponte, expressed her desire to dust off the investigation into the allegations against the RPF, stating that ‘if it is the RPF that shot down the plane, the history of genocide must be rewritten’ (2), she was abruptly relieved of her position and moved to The Hague.
Del Ponte’s successor at the ICTR, the Gambian Hassan Bubacar Jallow, subsequently confirmed that the shooting down of the aircraft is ‘not a case that falls within our jurisdiction’ (3). It is ironic that the ICTR’s first chief prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, has expressed his view that the plane attack does fall within the remit of the court and ought to be investigated. ‘It is clearly related to the genocide, by all accounts [it was] the trigger that started the genocide and it would have been very, very important from a justice point of view, from victims’ point of view, to find out.’ (4)
However, the ICTR’s deputy prosecutor, Bernard Muna, felt cavalier enough about the issue to tell the ICTR’s legal adviser, Kingsley Moghalu, that ‘after all, there was a state of war, and Habyarimana could be considered a legitimate target’ (5). This is an extraordinary statement from such a senior figure. The missile attack was, among other things, a deliberate violation of Article 1 of the Arusha Accords of 4 August 1993, which stated: ‘The war between the Government of Rwanda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front is over.’
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general of the UN at the time of the Rwanda tragedy, is also emphatic about the cover-up of the investigation into the plane shooting: ‘It is a very mysterious scandal. Four reports have been made on Rwanda: the French Parliament Report, the Belgian Senate Report, Kofi Annan’s UN report, and the Organization of African Unity report. All four say absolutely nothing about the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s plane. That just goes to show the power of the intelligence services that can force people to be quiet.’ (6)
Building upon the evidence received by the UN investigator Michael Hourigan, the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière conducted his own enquiry on behalf of the family of the French pilot who died in the missile attack, along with the presidents of both Rwandan and Burundi and senior government and military figures. Bruguière’s report is thoroughgoing and detailed. I have interviewed one of the several RPF dissidents who briefed the judge: Aloys Ruyenzi.
A former member of Kagame’s guard, Ruyenzi states categorically that he was in the room when Kagame gave the order to shoot down the president’s plane, and names all those who were present.
The meeting was between 2pm and 3pm on 31 March 1994 (7). The Kagame government reacted in its customary fashion to these revelations about the shooting down of the plane: it launched a character assassination of all the Rwandan contributors to Bruguière’s report, and condemned Bruguière for being, well, French.
Western complicity: what about the US?
Western complicity: what about the US?
Yet there is more than the legitimacy of the Rwandan government at stake in this latest retelling of the moral parable on Rwanda. The RPF would not have sustained its war without diplomatic support from Washington. The US intervened to legitimise the RPF’s war, even though the justifications for it had by that time proven to be baseless. The first invasion in 1990 was timed, not to force a reluctant Rwandan government to allow refugees to return, but to disrupt arrangements already in place to accommodate returning refugees.
Rather than being a desertion from the Ugandan military (the RPF leadership were in top positions in the Ugandan state), the invasion of Rwanda in 1990 was a joint Ugandan-RPF venture. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda was keen to have an ally in power south of the border. More importantly, he wanted to be rid of his Rwandan refugee ‘problem’. The issues of land occupation by Rwandans, and suspicions about the leverage that Rwandans in top official positions enjoyed in the Ugandan government, had generated Museveni’s first political crisis since he took power in 1986.
Behind Uganda was its closest international ally and sponsor, Washington. It was US intervention, in the person of secretary of state for African affairs Herman Cohen, which chose not to condemn the RPF’s invasion and Uganda’s support for it, but rather to support the military recovery of the RPF upon its initial defeat. Cohen coerced President Habyarimana not only to negotiate a ceasefire with the RPF, but to enter negotiations with it in order that a stake for the RPF in a new government be agreed.
By July 1992, Rwanda no longer had a single-party regime but a coalition government and a new democratic constitution. The constitution guaranteed freedom of political organisation and prohibited discrimination on any grounds, ethnic or otherwise.
Of course, it takes more than a constitution to bring about democracy, but it was a promising start and presented another opportunity for the US to tell its Ugandan ally Museveni to pull the plug on the RPF or face the end of the privileged ‘New African Leader’ status that it had bestowed upon him.
There was nothing to prevent the RPF from campaigning for support inside Rwanda alongside the other opposition parties. Nothing except the fact that the RPF was feared and loathed by the majority of Rwanda’s population. And yet, Washington was happy for the RPF to intensify its war. In February 1993, the RPF violated the Arusha ‘peace process’ with its heaviest offensive to date.
It is arguably the case that if there had not been French forces around the capital Kigali, the RPF may have succeeded in seizing power at that time. The offensive resulted in thousands of deaths and the displacement of nearly a million people, living in miserable conditions in makeshift camps. This offensive did more than anything else to generate hatred for the RPF and, tragically, for the local Tutsi population who were assumed to be in league with the overwhelmingly Tutsi RPF.
How human rights lobbyists boosted the RPF
The RPF had violated the negotiations process with another round of death and destruction. But thanks to coordinated human rights lobbying, the RPF returned to the negotiating table unapologetic about its own conduct and full of moral indignation at the evils of the Rwandan government. A suspiciously well-timed human rights report was published in 1993, accusing the Rwandan government of gross violations of human rights. Some of its authors even accused it of genocide.
The government had been responsible for atrocities against civilians in response to the RPF’s initial invasion, and had admitted to them. It objected to the report’s bias: the investigators had made only a token effort to investigate allegations of atrocities committed by the RPF, spending only a few hours interviewing people in the presence of RPF soldiers.
Thanks in large measure to the impact of this report, the RPF was able to take the moral high ground and use the negotiations as a vehicle for translating its military gains into political gains. RPF intransigence and military strategy was facilitated in no small measure by the human rights crusade that was launched against the Habyarimana-led coalition government.
But France, too, played a vital role in prodding the Rwandan government to reach a political settlement with the RPF. According to the French writer Agnes Callamard, it was not just pressure from the US that was applied to get Habyarimana to sign the Arusha Accords in 1993 – ‘it is doubtful if Habyarimana would have signed the peace accords, which gave heavy concessions to the RPF, without pressure and guarantees from the Elysée through François Mitterand’s personal emissaries, and possibly from representatives of the Military Mission of Cooperation, specifically Général Huchon, Colonel Cussac – the French military attaché and head of the French military Assistance Mission in Rwanda, and his assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Maurin.’ (8)
Having secured a virtual coup in the 1993 negotiations – the RPF had won 50 per cent command of the envisaged unified army and enough seats in the proposed transitional government to block anything that was against its interests – the RPF had emerged as the strongest party. The problem it now faced was the scheduled elections where its unpopularity would have been exposed. Local elections in the demilitarised zone that was created in the wake of the February 1993 offensive pointed the way – the RPF was massively defeated at the hands of the former ruling party.
Faced with the prospect of being downsized to a small party by the Rwandan electorate, and with clear support from the US and Belgium, it would appear that the RPF’s interests could only be further advanced with a return to the battlefield. With the promised departure of French forces from Kigali in December 1993, the military path to the capital was clear. What was needed by the RPF was a justification for resuming the war.
The Rwandan war re-erupts
The assassination of President Habyarimana by means of the missile attack upon his plane set off a round of killings of opposition political figures by elements of Habyarimana’s Presidential Guard on one hand, and killings of members of the former ruling party by the RPF on the other. Massacres of Tutsi civilians by Hutu militia soon followed in Kigali, and then spread across the country. But, contrary to the conventional story, RPF forces were on the march long before any massacres occurred.
Peter Erlinder, the lead defence council for the ICTR, stated categorically in a letter to the Canadian prime minister in 2006 that the final offensive of the RPF was ordered by Kagame within minutes of learning of the successful missile attack, ‘long before any retaliatory, civilian killings had occurred anywhere in Rwanda’ (9).
Three years of mounting fear, insecurity and material deprivation (much of Rwanda was by this time in the grip of famine) came to a head. Rwanda’s hastily (but constitutionally) appointed government of surviving ministers fled the capital. The army was pinned down in one losing encounter with the RPF after another.
In these anarchic conditions, Rwanda’s defenceless Tutsi population bore the brunt of murderous hatred generated by an ethnically polarising war.
The RPF won the war and took power in July 1994. Africa then witnessed the largest mass exodus in its history. Over two million Rwandans voted with their feet and moved to former Zaïre and Tanzania. The United States, Britain and Belgium in particular rushed to recognise the new regime in Kigali.
The RPF won the war and took power in July 1994. Africa then witnessed the largest mass exodus in its history. Over two million Rwandans voted with their feet and moved to former Zaïre and Tanzania. The United States, Britain and Belgium in particular rushed to recognise the new regime in Kigali.
Even greater numbers were still to die. The new Rwandan regime’s invasion of various refugee camps and its forced repatriation of refugees, the massacre of internally displaced people in Kibeho in April 1995, and two invasions of what became the Democratic Republic of Congo by the ruling RPF – all of this has brought the death toll of civilians to a level that is the highest of any conflict since the Second World War.
The number of ministers leaving the new government and later dying in mysterious circumstances continues to rise. Accountability on the part of the Rwandan regime for these violations is waived by its sponsors in Washington, London and Brussels. Whenever challenged on these matters, officials from these capitals will reply that this was the force that liberated Rwanda from genocide, and continued Western backing for it is necessary to ensure that the genocidaires never return to power.
The truth behind the moral parable
But facts are stubborn things. Bruguière’s charges will not go away. The matter of the assassination of two heads of state is the Achilles heel of the Rwandan government. If the RPF’s responsibility for the plane shooting as a planned move towards reigniting the war in Rwanda is proven, what can be said about the diplomatic protection given to the RPF by the US and other Western powers? How can the leader of the ‘war against terror’ – America – explain its suppression of the facts about the assassination of two heads of state? What do we make of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s brief to foster reconciliation by establishing the truth and ending a culture of impunity?
In The Times last week, Linda Melvern wrote about ‘a large room in the French Embassy in Kigali filled floor to ceiling with shredded documents. This was probably the paper trail that might have revealed the depth of involvement between the Elysée Palace and the Hutu faction responsible for massacring hundreds of thousands of Tutsi and opposition Hutu’ (10).
Holding on to the moral parable of Rwanda and endorsing Kigali’s invective against France may work for now. But facts – about the start of the war, the actions of the RPF, and the role of Western intervention more broadly in pushing Rwanda to the brink – are stubborn things…
Barrie Collins is a writer on African affairs and author of Obedience in Rwanda: A Critical Question published by Sheffield Hallam University Press in 1998.
Barrie Collins is a writer on African affairs and author of Obedience in Rwanda: A Critical Question published by Sheffield Hallam University Press in 1998.
Previously on spiked
Barrie Collins reported from the waiting room of the Rwandan genocide tribunal. Tara McCormack criticised the indictment of Sudanase President Omar al-Bashir for genocide. Julie Hearn looke at Kenya and the myth of Afrian barbarism Brendan O’Neill said Somalia is a case study of the dangers of moralism in international affairs, and that Darfur has been damned by pity. Or read more at spiked issue Africa.
(1) ‘French Policy in Rwanda’, A Callamard included in The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaïre, H Adelman and A Suhurke, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999, p. 178, note 19
(2) Interview with Carla Del Ponte, Aktuelt, 17 April 2000. Cited in Le drama rwandais : Les aveaux accablants des chefs de la Mission des Nations Unies pour l’Assistance au Rwanda, E Karemera, Editions Sources du Nil, 2006
(3) Bush and Other War Criminals Meet in Rwanda: The Great “Rwanda Genocide” Coverup, P Erlinder, Global Research, 20 February 2008
(4) April 6th 1994 Attack Fits ICTR Mandate – Goldstone, Hirondelle News Agency, accessed 12 December 2006
(5) Rwanda’s Genocide: The Politics of International Justice, K Moghalu, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 p.52
(7) ‘Major General Paul Kagame behind the shooting down of late Habyarimana’s plane: an eye witness testimony, 2nd Lt. Aloys Ruyenzi Press release, 18 January 2005 (Ruyenzi re-affirmed his statement to the author in an interview in Paris)
(8) ‘French Policy in Rwanda’, A Callamard included in The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaïre, H Adelman and A Suhurke, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999, p.163
(9) Open letter to Prime Minister Harper: Regarding state visit of current President of Rwanda, P Erlinder, 6 April 2006 (Copy passed on to author by Erlinder. Emphasis in the original) (10) The murky truth about France and genocide, L Melvern, The Times, 8 August 2008
Global Research Articles by Barrie Collins
Global Research Articles by Barrie Collins
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
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SurViVors SPEAK OUT - Rights of Victims Seeking Justice and Compensation for the RPF Genocide. This is an Exciting Collaborative Project launched by The AS International Founder Jean-Christophe Nizeyimana, Economist and Human Rights Activist. Join US and Be the First to know about the Mastermind of the Rwandan Genocide Still At large and enjoing Impunity.