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
Friday, July 24, 2020
[Since 1994, the world witnesses the horrifying Tutsi minority (14%) ethnic domination, the Tutsi minority ethnic rule with an iron hand, tyranny and corruption in Rwanda. The current government has been characterized by the total impunity of RPF criminals, the Tutsi economic monopoly, the Tutsi militaristic domination, and the brutal suppression of the rights of the majority of the Rwandan people (85% are Hutus)and mass arrests of Hutus by the RPF criminal organization =>AS International]
Rwandans need your help now than ever
Les gens préfèrent un mensonge bien habillé qui arrange à une vérité nue qui dérange. Un état de fait qui pourrait expliquer une grande part du mutisme et de l’inaction générale face aux dangers qui nous guettent
Quand la vérité croise le mensonge. Une allégorie puissante.
Pourquoi certains mensonges ont-ils plus de succès que la vérité ? La réponse à cette question se cache peut-être dans cette petite légende allégorique qui circule sur internet. " La légende raconte qu'un jour la vérité et le Mensonge se sont croisés. - Bonjour, a dit le Mensonge.
 |
| Ces enfants Hutus n'ont pas le droit au Rwanda de se souvenir des leurs parents, frères et soeurs massacrés par le despote sanguinaire Kagame et son FPR. |
Qui a coupé toutes ces têtes, et à qui appartiennent ces têtes? Pouvez-vous couper la tête de votre Maman et jeter son corps dans les fosses communes? Pouvez-vous couper la tête de votre père et jeter son corps dans des fausses communes?
Pouvez-vous couper la tête de votre frère et de votre soeur et et jeter leurs corps dans des fossess communes?Ma question reste: Qui a donneé l'ordre de couper ces têtes pour les mettre sur des lignes en leur infligeant des exercices du fitness et d'exercer une parade militaire? Qui invite les touritstes à venir admirer la tête coupée de votre Maman, la tête coupée de votre Père, la tête coupée de votre frère, la tête coupée de votre soeur, la tête coupée de votre ami, la tête coupée de votre épouse ou de votre époux? la tête coupée de la mêre de vos enfants, la tête coupée du père de vos enfants?
Who invites worldwide tourists and Western tourists in particular to come and admire your mother's decapitated head, your father's severed head, your brother's decapitated head, your sister's severed head, your friend's decapitated head, your wife's decapitated head or your husband's decapitated head?
Who has severed the head of the mother’s body of your children, who is behind those unspeakable crimes; I mean who is the mastermind of the creation of that infamous museum in Kigali and across the country, ordered the hundreds of thousands severed head of the father of your children?
Who has severed the head of the mother’s body of your children, who is behind those unspeakable crimes; I mean who is the mastermind of the creation of that infamous museum in Kigali and across the country, ordered the hundreds of thousands severed head of the father of your children?
I keep asking myself the following question and I am asking all of you who are reading me.
Better to act than not to act and regret
Why Paul Kagame is not held accountable for crimes he committed against Hutus and interior Tutsis?
My duty: Denunciation of mass crimes and the fight against impunity in Rwanda for the restoration of peace across the country.
I keep asking myself the following question and call on all of you who read my articles.
Rwandan museum by Severed Heads of Hutu women and their children, young and elder men paraded around as war trophies.
Since October 1st, 1990 and from 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 & 1997, 1998 up to now, the severed heads of Hutu women, Hutu children, Hutu elders, were carved, boiled, smoked, oil by Kagame's RPF and then are shown parading around like war trophies covered by the RPF Intsinzi song.
Who cut off these heads? Can you cut off your mother's head and threw her decapitated body into the mass graves? Can you cut off your father's head and threw his beheaded and decapitated body into the mass grave?
Question more: Can you cut off the heads of your mother, father, brother and of the head of your sister and throw their decapitated bodies into mass graves?
Science without consciousness, we have been told enough in schools, is a promise of ruin.
Who cut off these heads t in Rwanda and all over Rwanda?
I keep asking myself the following question and I am asking all of you who are reading this.
Who gave the order to cut off these heads to put them on lines and give them fitness exercises?
Vaut mieux agir et dénoncer que s'abstenir et regretter
Dénonciation des crimes de masse et lutte
contre l'impunité au Rwanda pour la restauration de la paix.
Je ne cesse de me poser la question suivante et je vous interpelle vous tous qui me lisez.
Depuis le 1er
octobre 1990 et de 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 & 1997, 1998 jusqu'à aujourd'hui,
les têtes coupées des femmes hutues, des enfants hutus, des vieillards hutus ont
été sculptées, bouillies et netoyéess par les Hutu victimes (avant leur assassinat par agafuni, or Akandoyi) supervisés par les soldats et les officiers du FPR de Kagame et sont ensuite ces têtes sont alignées puis montrées défilant comme des trophées de guerre accompagnées par la chanson Intsinzi
du FPR.
Qui a réellement coupé ces
têtes? Pouvez-vous comprendre cette situation si vous étiez victimes ou survivants de ce génocide? Dites-moi sincèrement: Pouvez-vous couper la tête de votre Maman et jeter son corps décapité dans
les fosses communes? Pouvez-vous couper
la tête de votre Père et jeter son corps décapité dans des fosses communes?
Pouvez-vous
couper la tête de votre frère et ou de votre sœur et jeter leurs corps décapités dans
des fosses communes?
Science
sans conscience, on nous l'a assez répété dans les écoles, est promesse de
ruine
Qui a coupé ces
têtes pour en faire un site touristique au Rwanda et partout au Rwanda?
Je ne cesse de me
poser la question suivante et je vous interpelle vous tous qui me lisez.
Qui a donné
l'ordre de couper ces têtes pour les mettre sur des lignes en leur infligeant
des exercices du fitness ?
Qui invite les
touristes à venir admirer la tête de votre Maman, la tête de votre père, la tête de votre frère, la tête de votre
sœur, la tête de votre ami, la tête de votre épouse ou de votre époux? La tête
de la mère de vos enfants, la tête du père de vos enfants?
Je ne cesse de me
poser la question suivante et je vous interpelle vous tous qui me lisez.
Systematic mass killing in gas chambers excavated by the Hutu
victims, young men and men
Walk overlooking the beheaded heads of Hutu women and
children whose bodies lay dead on the ground and or gathered in mass graves.
Just have a look at their eyes glancing ahead at their decapitated bodies.
Everybody knows that systematic mass killings in Nyungwe, Bugesera, Gishwati and Mutara forests in the RPF gas chambers in those caves like Musanze (in Ruhengeri prefecture), Rubare, in Kivu lake (Butotori) where bodies are tied on by Akandoyi (RPF infamous signature) The RPF headed by Kayumba Nyamwasa, Ibingira, Tom Ndahiro, Jack Nziza, Nyamvumba, Karenzi karake, and many other RPF officers under command of major Paul Kagame was promoted from Major to General rank.
By James Kabarebe who also has been promoted by Kagame (the obvious "mise en scène") together for having masterminded the Rwandan genocide by systematically organizing the assassinating, raping Hutu small girls, pregnant mothers had their babies gutted and given to their family members to eat in the eyes of relatives of neighbors, the way how millions of Hutu were assassinated after being gathered in different meetings for mass-murders, murdered and mass-slaughtered ethnic members known to be Interahamwe to make easy their extermination but also the Bagogwe Tutsis known as interior Tutsis killed and mass-murdered as the best omelette to eat or that will allow them to indefinitely seize power in Kigali.
These crimes have been committed with the help of some Western media in which Kagame sponsors and advisers invested in to stereotype and prejudice Hutus as genocidaires and interahamwe whereas it became strategically easier the Hutu extermination in the eyes of the so-called International community.
Everybody knows that systematic mass killings in Nyungwe, Bugesera, Gishwati and Mutara forests in the RPF gas chambers in those caves like Musanze (in Ruhengeri prefecture), Rubare, in Kivu lake (Butotori) where bodies are tied on by Akandoyi (RPF infamous signature) The RPF headed by Kayumba Nyamwasa, Ibingira, Tom Ndahiro, Jack Nziza, Nyamvumba, Karenzi karake, and many other RPF officers under command of major Paul Kagame was promoted from Major to General rank.
By James Kabarebe who also has been promoted by Kagame (the obvious "mise en scène") together for having masterminded the Rwandan genocide by systematically organizing the assassinating, raping Hutu small girls, pregnant mothers had their babies gutted and given to their family members to eat in the eyes of relatives of neighbors, the way how millions of Hutu were assassinated after being gathered in different meetings for mass-murders, murdered and mass-slaughtered ethnic members known to be Interahamwe to make easy their extermination but also the Bagogwe Tutsis known as interior Tutsis killed and mass-murdered as the best omelette to eat or that will allow them to indefinitely seize power in Kigali.
These crimes have been committed with the help of some Western media in which Kagame sponsors and advisers invested in to stereotype and prejudice Hutus as genocidaires and interahamwe whereas it became strategically easier the Hutu extermination in the eyes of the so-called International community.
I
know these words are true for me; I would not have come up with them on my own
consciously but they reverberate
UN Accuses Rwanda of Genocide in Congo
Goma, Democratic Republic Of The Congo (CNN) --
The Rwandan military and an allied rebel group massacred ethnic Hutus in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo in the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda, says a
leaked draft report commissioned by the United Nations.
The
report states that it is not making a definitive conclusion on whether the
slayings in Congo amounted to genocide, and that a competent judiciary would
have to try the cases.
Commissioned
by the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, the report says
"tens of thousands" of Hutu civilians were slaughtered with knives,
bludgeoned with hammers and burned alive as the Rwandan army and the Allied
Democratic Liberation Forces swept across Congo -- then called Zaire -- leading
to the toppling of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
The
report, titled "Mapping Exercise," documents crimes against humanity
throughout the Congo between 1993 and 2003.
The
Rwandan government blasted the report as "malicious, offensive and
ridiculous."
"It
is immoral and unacceptable that the United Nations, an organization that
failed outright to prevent genocide in Rwanda and the subsequent refugees
crisis [and] is the direct cause for so much suffering in Congo and Rwanda, now
accuses the army that stopped the genocide ... in the Democratic Republic of
Congo," government spokesman Ben Rutsinga said in a statement.
The
final version of the report will be officially published Monday. Its most
controversial parts are accusations against the Rwandan government of
"systematic attacks, in particular, killings and massacres perpetrated
against members of the Hutu ethnic group."
"There
is no denying that ethnic massacres were committed and that the victims were mostly
Hutus from Burundi, Rwanda and Zaire," the report states. "The joint
mission's preliminary opinion is that some of these alleged massacres could
constitute acts of genocide."
It
adds, "The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people
and the sick, who posed no threat to the attacking forces."
The
Rwandan government said the report's "extremely serious allegations"
are "based on questionable methodology, sourcing and shockingly low
standard of proof."
"Given
the gravity of its mission, the Mapping Team's failure to consult with Rwanda
even though they found time to meet with over 200 [non-governmental]
representatives is shocking and shows complete disregard for fundamental
fairness," Rutsinga said.
More
than 1 million Rwandans fled to neighboring eastern Congo when the Rwandan
genocide ended in 1994 -- most of them Hutu. In 1996, Rwanda invaded Congo in
pursuit of the genocide orchestrators, who were living amid hundreds of
thousands of other refugees.
The
stated goal of Rwanda during that time was to end the refugee crisis in eastern
Congo. But the United Nations report says that the Rwandan military did not
discriminate between fugitives and refugees, nor did it discriminate by age or
gender.
"The
majority of the incidents reported indicate that the Hutus were targeted as
such, with no discrimination between them," the report says. "The
numerous attacks against the Hutus in Zaire, who were not part of the refugees,
seem to confirm that it was all Hutus, as such."
The
report says people who convinced soldiers that they were Tutsi were let go,
while the Hutus were massacred.
"People
who were able to persuade the aggressors that they belonged to another ethnic
group were released just before the massacres," the report says.
The
report says tens of thousands of Hutus were massacred in particular areas with
an intent to commit genocide.
"Even
if only a part of the Hutu population in Zaire was targeted and destroyed, it
could nonetheless constitute a crime of genocide, if this was the intention of
the perpetrators," the report says.
Although
independent researchers have documented the crimes against humanity committed
by the Rwandan government, the United Nations report is the most official and
forthcoming accusation made so far.
Rwanda
indicated that it could withdraw from U.N. peacekeeping operations if the
report is published. The country is a major contributor to the peacekeeping
force in Darfur, and has sent troops to Haiti.
The
report is publicly humiliating for recently re-elected President Paul Kagame,
who earned praise for helping heal Rwanda after the genocide.
In
recent years, the nation has developed dramatically, with a reputation as one
of the safest, cleanest, least-corrupt and most organized countries in Africa.
The fallout of the scathing report is unclear, but it is sure to have an
impact.
Rwanda's
reconciliation policy is governed by anti-genocide laws that human rights
organizations have called intentionally vague. The laws make it virtually
impossible to accuse the Rwandan government of human rights violations, crimes
against humanity or war crimes.
Accusing
Rwanda of crimes against humanity committed in the Congo would break those
laws.
In
April, presidential aspirant Victoire Ingabire was arrested in Kigali for
saying that Hutus were killed by the Rwandan government, both in Rwanda and in
neighboring Congo.
Ingabire
was charged with 'genocide ideology' for those comments, and could face up to
25 years in prison. Her American lawyer was arrested on similar charges, but
was later released.
Col.
Patrick Karegeya, who was a senior member of the Rwandan army and a key actor
in the wars in the Congo before fleeing to South Africa in 2008, said Rwanda
never set out to commit genocide against the Hutu, but war crimes were
committed.
"Civilians
died, politicians died," Karegeya said earlier this month before Rwanda's
presidential election. "They died in the Congo, they died in other
places."
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, June 26, 2020
[Since 1994, the world witnesses the horrifying Tutsi minority (14%) ethnic domination, the Tutsi minority ethnic rule with an iron hand, tyranny and corruption in Rwanda. The current government has been characterized by the total impunity of RPF criminals, the Tutsi economic monopoly, the Tutsi militaristic domination, and the brutal suppression of the rights of the majority of the Rwandan people (85% are Hutus)and mass arrests of Hutus by the RPF criminal organization =>AS International]
hen Rwandan-backed rebels recently took Goma, the biggest city in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Paul Kagame had every reason to think the world would give him a pass. That, after all, has been the pattern for years.
Frequently lauded by people such as Bono, Tony Blair, and Pastor Rick, the Rwandan president enjoys some extraordinary backing in the West—support that is particularly remarkable given his alleged hand in ongoing regional conflicts believed to have killed more than 5 million people since the mid-'90s.
On the aid and awards circuit, Kagame is known as the man who led Rwanda from the ashes of the 1994 genocide—one of the late 20th century's greatest atrocities—to hope and prosperity: a land of fast growth and rare good economic governance with enviable advances in health care, education, and women's rights. Bestowing his foundation's Global Citizen Award on Kagame three years ago, Bill Clinton said: "From crisis, President Kagame has forged a strong, unified, and growing nation with the potential to become a model for the rest of Africa and the world."
But that model narrative seems to be shifting in the aftermath of the Goma takeover. After a United Nations report found that Rwanda created and commands the rebel group known as M23, important European friends such as Britain and Belgium partially suspended aid donations to Rwanda, and President Obama called Kagame to warn him against any continued military adventurism.
Leading observers say the reevaluation of Kagame and his legacy is long overdue. Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian scholar whom many consider the world's foremost expert on Rwanda, describes Kagame as "probably the worst war criminal in office today." In an interview, Reyntjens told me that Kagame's crimes rank with those perpetrated by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein or Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Washington and London have long supported Kagame as a bulwark of stability in a volatile region. But a recent U.N. report accused his government of instigating trouble across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Meanwhile, specialists in African affairs say a regime like Kagame's, an ethnic dictatorship built along unusually narrow lines, represents a political dead end. And international human-rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, have raised serious questions about violence committed against journalists and opposition figures. Kagame has generally been dismissive of such accusations of abuse.
Tall, gaunt, and almost professorial in manner, Kagame cuts an unusual figure for a former African guerrilla leader. His rise to power began in 1990, when as head of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, an exiled movement made up primarily of Tutsis, he launched a war to take over his native country from bases in neighboring Uganda.
Four years later, the course of history took a dramatic turn: on April 6, 1994, an airplane carrying Rwanda's president, Juvénal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu, was mysteriously shot down on its approach to the capital, Kigali, unleashing the murder spree that became known as the Rwandan genocide. In the space of 100 days, about 800,000 people—most of them members of the Tutsi minority—were killed at the instigation of Hutu extremists. As Kagame and his army gained control of the country, ending the genocide, the Hutu extremists, along with hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, fled to neighboring states, in particular Zaire, as it was then known.
Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu, was named president in what seemed an effort at providing representation for the roughly 84 percent Hutu majority in Rwanda's new national unity government. However, Kagame, a Tutsi and the nominal vice president, kept control of the Rwandan Army, becoming the country's de facto leader. And by 2000, after numerous cases of forced exiles, disappearances, and assassinations of politicians, Bizimungu resigned the presidency, bringing a definitive end to the illusion of ethnic balance in high office. (The government now prohibits the use of ethnic labels.)
Since then, former Rwandan officials say, almost every position of meaningful power in the country has been held by a Tutsi. In 2001, when Bizimungu began organizing a political party in order to run for president, it was outlawed on charges of being a radical Hutu organization. The following year, Bizimungu was arrested on charges of endangering the state, and later he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
(Bizimungu, whom Amnesty International called a prisoner of conscience, was pardoned by Kagame in 2007, but the methods used to sideline him have been applied broadly ever since, with critics of the regime of all stripes being prosecuted for promoting "genocide ideology," which has become an all-purpose charge.)
Theogene Rudasingwa, a Tutsi who was appointed Rwanda's ambassador to Washington after serving as an officer in Kagame's army, puts it bluntly: "If you differ strongly with Kagame and make your views known from the inside, you will be made to pay the price, and very often that price is your life."
Rudasingwa, who now lives in exile in the United States, describes Kagame as an extreme control freak who has concentrated power in the hands of a select group of Tutsis who, like Kagame himself, returned to Rwanda from years of exile in Uganda after the genocide.
"When you look at the structure of key parts of government, leadership is occupied almost entirely by Tutsis from the outside, and this is especially true in the military," Rudasingwa says. "As for the Hutus, they are completely marginalized, and things [for them] have never been as bad as they are today. Almost the entire Hutu elite that was built up since 1959 is either outside the country or dead. They are marginalized and banished, forced into exile when they haven't simply been killed."
Kagame tightly controls the country and its citizens through the Tutsi-
dominated Army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the country's dominant political party. Throughout Rwanda—in every town and tiny village—the RPF is present, not unlike the Stasi in East Germany during the Cold War. While a town may have a Hutu mayor, under Kagame's system government officeholders have little authority compared with the RPF representatives who work in parallel to them and often pull rank.
RPF regulations—enforced by local commissars with vigor and steep fines—govern almost every aspect of daily life. There are laws requiring peasants to wear shoes and good clothes when not working their fields and prohibition of drinking banana wine from shared straws—a traditional gesture of reconciliation—and myriad other rules, generally resented as gratuitous and insulting.
"The RPF saturates every aspect of life in Rwanda," said Susan Thomson, a longtime Rwanda expert at Colgate University. "They know everything: if you've been drinking, if you've had an affair, if you've paid your taxes." Everything is reported on, Thomson says, and there is no appeal.
From the beginning, Kagame's legitimacy was founded on his image as the man who had halted the genocide committed by the Hutu-led government and extremist militias. While the vast majority of the 800,000 people killed in the frenzy were Tutsis and moderate Hutus, there are profound flaws in what is usually a rather simplistic telling of the country's history.
Pointing to the origins of the war and its bloody aftermath, Scott Straus, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, said: "An honest analysis ... would show that the reasons for what happened were much more complicated than the idea that the Hutus hate the Tutsis and want to wipe them out."
For one thing, there is abundant evidence that Kagame's forces in the early days carried out targeted executions of the Hutu elite, followed later by much larger extermination campaigns that killed tens of thousands of people.
A year after the genocide had ended, blood was still being spilled, recalls Timothy Longman, then the country director for Human Rights Watch. "People would take me around and say, 'There's mass grave right over here,' and you would ask, 'From when?' And they would say, 'Just from a few weeks ago—not from the genocide,'" says Longman, who now directs the African Studies Center at Boston University.
One of the earliest investigations was undertaken by a U.N. team led by the American Robert Gersony in the fall of 1994. The team conducted research by interviewing people in refugee camps and the countryside. In a report later suppressed by the U.N., partly as a result of American political pressure aimed at supporting the new RPF government, Gersony's team concluded that four provinces had seen "systematic and sustained killing and persecution of their civilian Hutu populations by the RPA," the armed wing of the RPF.
Furthermore, the report estimated that the RPA killed between 15,000 and 30,000 people in just four of its survey areas in the summer of 1994. Years later a key member of Gersony's team told me that the real number of Hutus killed during this period was likely much higher, but that a low estimate had been published because of fears of a political backlash within the U.N. so soon after its failure to stop the larger-scale killing of Tutsis. "What we found was a well-organized military-style operation, with military command and control, and these were military-campaign-style mass murders," the team member told me.
(In one notorious incident in April 1995, the RPA attacked an internally displaced people's camp in Kibeho using automatic weapons, grenades, and mortars. A team of Australian medics listed more than 4,000 dead when the RPA forced them to stop counting. France's leading researcher on the region, Gérard Prunier, estimates that at least 20,000 more people from the camp "disappeared" after the massacre.)
Many people inside the country know this history well but have been prevented from talking about it as the political space has narrowed.
In the run-up to the 2010 election in which Kagame was declared the winner, there was widespread violence, with several journalists and figures from the opposition attacked or killed, including a politician who was beheaded. Amnesty International condemned the violence and the "killings, arrests, and the closure of newspapers and broadcasters [which] reinforced a climate of fear."
The case of Victoire Ingabire, a politician from the opposition, was instructive. When she returned to Rwanda that year, having lived 16 years in exile, to prepare a run for president, her first stop was at the official genocide memorial. "We are here honoring at this memorial the Tutsi victims of the genocide. There are also Hutu who were victims of crimes against humanity and war crimes, not remembered or honored here," she said in a prepared statement. "Hutu are also suffering. They are wondering when their time will come to remember their people. In order for us to get to that desirable reconciliation, we must be fair and compassionate towards every Rwandan's suffering."
Ingabire was promptly arrested and accused of "genocide ideology." During her trial, President Kagame publicly declared that she was guilty.
Tiny Rwanda is called the land of a thousand hills because of its verdant, rolling countryside of strikingly fertile farmland. It is a land of beauty and unrelenting order. But unlike its much larger neighbor Congo, it is not endowed with any mineral wealth to speak of. Yet Rwanda's economy depends on the exploitation of Congolese resources.
Through mafialike networks reportedly run by the Rwandan Army and the RPF, huge quantities of Congo's minerals are siphoned out of the country, experts say.
As early as 2000, Rwanda was believed to be making $80 million to $100 million annually from Congolese coltan alone, roughly the equivalent of the entire defense budget, according to Reyntjens, the Belgian expert.
Pillaging the Congo obscures Rwanda's giant military budget from foreign donors who provide as much as 50 percent of the country's budget every year. It also provides a rich source of income to the urban elites, especially returnees from Uganda, who form the regime's core.
"After the first Congo war, money began coming in through military channels and never entered the coffers of the Rwandan state," says Rudasingwa, Kagame's former lieutenant. "It is RPF money, and Kagame is the only one who knows how much money it is—or how it is spent. In meetings it was often said, 'For Rwanda to be strong, Congo must be weak, and the Congolese must be divided.'"
Congo looms large in the story of Kagame in other ways as well. For years Rwandan government forces and their proxies have operated in Congo. Twice Rwanda has invaded the country outright, in September 1996, when with U.S. acquiescence it successfully waged war to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko, and again beginning in August 1998, when it mounted a repeat operation to depose Laurent-Désiré Kabila. This second operation, to replace the very man Kagame installed to replace Mobutu, ended in failure but established a pattern of intervention and meddling aimed at undermining its much larger neighbor. The ensuing war, involving several African nations, is believed to have cost the lives of 5 million people.
As early as 1997, the U.N. estimated that Rwandan forces had caused the deaths of 200,000 Hutus in Congo; Prunier, the French expert, has since estimated that the toll is closer to 300,000. According to the U.N. report, these deaths could not be attributed to the hazards of war or to collateral damage. "The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who were often undernourished and posed no threat to the attacking forces." The report concluded that the systematic and widespread attacks, "if proven before a competent court, could be characterized as crimes of genocide."
Two years ago, Kagame delivered a lecture in London on "The Challenges of Nation-Building in Africa: The Case of Rwanda." When confronted with a U.N. report that was then making headlines with the suggestion that his forces had committed genocide in Congo, he dismissed such allegations as "baseless" and "absurd." Clearly he was keener to talk about economic indicators and repeat the oft-told success story of his country.
But even that is a truth with modification. Social inequality in Rwanda is high and rising, experts say. Despite an average annual growth rate of about 5 percent since 2005, poverty is soaring in the countryside, where few Western journalists report without official escort.
"The rural sector has suffered enormous extraction under the post-genocide government, far more than what had happened before," said one longtime researcher who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There is a real increase in misery. When you speak of Rwanda as a volcano, that's what's involved."
Will Rwanda explode again? The big, looming issue is whether Kagame will leave office in 2017, as the Constitution calls for. With so much to answer for, few expect a straightforward exit.
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