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, June 26, 2009
Les FDLR dénoncent l’entrée massive en RDC de nouvelles troupes du régime de Kigali dans le but de piller les richesses de la RDC , de brûler les villages, de violer les femmes et les filles et tuer tous ceux qui s’opposent au plan macabre de soumettre les populations de l’est de la RDC au dictat du dictateur de Kigali et de ses sponsors.
En complicité avec les autorités de Kinshasa et de la MONUC , des troupes de Kigali sont entrain de retourner massivement en RDC pour tuer tous les Rwandais et les Congolais qui s’opposent à la politique sanguinaire du régime de Kigali et celle de Kabila qui a cédé l’exploitation des richesses de l’est de la RDC aux groupes criminels de Kagame et de ses sponsors.
Les troupes de l’Armée Patriotique Rwandaise (APR/RDF) traversent actuellement la frontière rwando-congolaise en passant par Bunagana et Jomba ainsi que par Kibumba et Rugali. De même, les autorités de Kinshasa ont accepté que des troupes de Kigali habillées en civil passent directement par le poste frontalier de Goma. Ce sont ces mêmes troupes de Kagame qui vont assurer la sécurité des festivités marquant le 49è anniversaire de l’indépendance de la RDC prévues le 30 juin 2009 à Goma.
Selon des informations fiables à notre disposition, plus de 6.000 hommes lourdement armés viennent de traverser la frontière ces derniers jours pour s’ajouter à plus de 8.000 hommes de Kagame qui sont déjà en RDC sous le drapeau du CNDP.
Les autorités de la RDC , de la MONUC et de Kigali se sont entendues pour ne pas parler dans les médias de ce retour massif des troupes de Kigali afin d’éviter des protestations des populations civiles et des élus provinciaux et nationaux qui sont contre l’occupation de leur territoire par des troupes sanguinaires de Kigali comme ils l’ont montré lors de l’opération « Umoja Wetu ».
Ainsi, Kabila espère-t-il que ces nouvelles troupes envoyées par Kigali pourront d’ici peu remporter certaines batailles contre les troupes des FDLR et qu’il pourrait dans ce cas s’approprier ces victoires des troupes de Kigali dans son discours à la nation le 30 juin 2009.
C’est dans cette logique de la guerre que depuis le 23 juin 2009 les troupes de Kigali ont lancé des attaques généralisées contre les éléments des FDLR aussi bien dans le Sud-Kivu que dans le Nord-Kivu et commis des crimes graves contre les populations civiles locales, provoquant ainsi un immense exode de populations.
Les FDLR prennent encore une fois les peuples congolais et rwandais ainsi que la Communauté Internationale à témoin que les va-t-en guerre n’ont pas encore abandonné leur plan diabolique d’achever le génocide qu’ils ont commis contre les peuples rwandais et congolais depuis le 1 octobre 1990.
Les FDLR rappellent à tous les peuples de la Région des Grands Lacs Africains et au monde entier que dans la discipline et l’abnégation, leurs troupes ont, depuis le lancement de l’opération « Umoja Wetu » en janvier 2009 et à maintes reprises, donné des leçons inoubliables aux agresseurs de la coalition composée de l’APR (RDF) et des FARDC.
Les FDLR rassurent que même dans les nouveaux affrontements qui viennent de commencer, leurs troupes continueront à protéger les populations civiles congolaises et les réfugiés rwandais et que la coalition de l’APR (RDF) et des FARDC va en sortir tête baissée.
Les FDLR demandent une fois de plus à la Communauté Internationale , spécialement au Conseil de Sécurité des Nations Unies, à l’Union Africaine et à l’Union Européenne de ne pas continuer à endosser la responsabilité de cette guerre inutile et injuste mais plutôt d’opter clairement pour la négociation directe entre les FDLR et le régime de Kigali.
Les FDLR restent attachées à la paix et rappellent que seuls les régimes de Kigali et de Kinshasa ainsi que leurs sponsors doivent porter la responsabilité de toutes les conséquences de cette guerre qu’ils ont imposée aux peuples épris de paix de la Région des Grands Lacs Africains.
Fait à Paris le 25 Juin 2009
Callixte Mbarushimana
Secrétaire Exécutif des FDLR
(Sé)
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
Thursday, June 25, 2009
******
Click here : Text of Amendment
******
Ref: 66/2009
Date: 21 May 2009
Time: 12:00 GMT
On 19 May, 2009, the Spanish parliament passed a resolution calling on the government to limit Spain’s universal jurisdiction mechanisms. The proposal called for the existing legislation to be modified so that cases may only be pursued if they involve Spanish victims or if the accused is present on Spanish soil.
In light o
f the confusion surrounding this proposal, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) whish to clarify certain issues.The existing law, which grants Spanish courts jurisdiction over genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, has not been modified. The Spanish parliament has agreed to request the government to draft new legislation aimed at amending the existing law. This legislation will have to be drafted, and then accepted by the parliament. Further, it must be found to be compliant with the Spanish constitution and Spain’s international legal obligations.
Current universal jurisdiction cases, which include PCHR’s case against seven senior Israeli officials in relation to the June 2002 Al-Daraj attack in Gaza, currently remain unaffected. However, if the law is changed, Spanish judges will no longer have the jurisdiction necessary to continue their investigations; the victims will be denied judicial remedy.
PCHR wish to emphasize that universal jurisdiction is not merely a Palestinian issue. It is an essential legal tool – a
mechanism of last resort – used when national courts are genuinely unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute those accused of international crimes. As such, it provides a means of judicial remedy to victims throughout the world who suffer at the hands of oppressive regimes. Universal jurisdiction is an essential component in upholding the rule of law. It is a first step on the road towards universal justice, whereby victims’ rights may be ensured through the legal punishment of guilty parties. Victims’ rights to an effective judicial remedy form a core component of international human rights law, and are codified in article 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).All available options will be considered in an effort to ensure that Spain does not succumb to political pressure, and continues to uphold international justice.
PCHR call on lawyers, human rights organizations, civil society, and all concerned parties, to combat any proposed amendment to the law, and to fight to ensure that the interests of justice, and the rights of victims, are upheld. The constitutionality of any proposed amendment to the law will be challenged.
In 2005, following the issuance of an arrest warrant for Israeli Major General Doron Almog, former Prime Minister Tony Blair declared Britain’s intention to modify the United Kingdom’s laws on universal jurisdiction. Four years later, this amendment has not come to pass. Last week, British Justice Secretary Jack Straw embraced the concept of universal jurisdiction, when he noted that he was considering proposing changes to UK law that would allow courts in Britain to try cases where genocide had allegedly been committed elsewhere in the world.
The fight for justice will be continued. PCHR affirm their intention to continue to pursue all available legal mechanisms to ensure that victims’ rights are protected and the rule of law upheld. The fight against impunity cannot be lost.
Click here to see a translation of the proposed amendment.
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
***** -----******
Les députés espagnols ont approuvé jeudi une réduction du mandat du principe de juridiction universelle, qui permet aux magistrats espagnols d'engager des poursuites pour certains crimes particulièrement graves commis dans d'autres pays.
Fait rare, les députés socialistes et les conservateurs (opposition) se sont alliés pour faire voter ce texte à la chambre basse du Parlement. La mesure va désormais être transmise au Sénat, où elle devrait être approuvée.
En vertu de la nouvelle loi, les magistrats espagnols ne pourront plus engager de poursuites dans le cadre de la juridiction universelle que lorsque des Espagnols seront victimes dans les affaires concernées ou lorsque les auteurs présumés des faits se trouveront en Espagne.
La loi ne sera pas rétroactive, les dossiers actuellement en cours ne seront donc pas abandonnés.
Cette réforme fait suite à plusieurs critiques de pays étrangers, dont Israël, qui se sont plaints de faire l'objet de procédures initiées par l'Audience nationale, la plus haute instance judiciaire espagnole, sur la base de cette disposition.
Le principe de juridiction universelle a notamment été utilisé par Baltasar Garzon, le plus célèbre juge d'Espagne, pour ouvrir de nombreuses enquêtes ayant trait aux droits de l'Homme, comme celle qui a visé l'ancien dictateur chilien Augusto Pinochet.
En avril, il avait ouvert une enquête sur les tortures qu'aurait autorisées l'administration Bush dans la prison américaine de Guantanamo, à Cuba.
Fait rare, les députés socialistes et les conservateurs (opposition) se sont alliés pour faire voter ce texte à la chambre basse du Parlement. La mesure va désormais être transmise au Sénat, où elle devrait être approuvée.
En vertu de la nouvelle loi, les magistrats espagnols ne pourront plus engager de poursuites dans le cadre de la juridiction universelle que lorsque des Espagnols seront victimes dans les affaires concernées ou lorsque les auteurs présumés des faits se trouveront en Espagne.
La loi ne sera pas rétroactive, les dossiers actuellement en cours ne seront donc pas abandonnés.
Cette réforme fait suite à plusieurs critiques de pays étrangers, dont Israël, qui se sont plaints de faire l'objet de procédures initiées par l'Audience nationale, la plus haute instance judiciaire espagnole, sur la base de cette disposition.
Le principe de juridiction universelle a notamment été utilisé par Baltasar Garzon, le plus célèbre juge d'Espagne, pour ouvrir de nombreuses enquêtes ayant trait aux droits de l'Homme, comme celle qui a visé l'ancien dictateur chilien Augusto Pinochet.
En avril, il avait ouvert une enquête sur les tortures qu'aurait autorisées l'administration Bush dans la prison américaine de Guantanamo, à Cuba.
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
NDLR: The information released here next does not reflect the SurViVors Edition's position on the way UN and involved parties dealt with the Assassination of President Habyarimana. the reson why this article has been published is among other questions. It's bloody obvious that the assassination was so planed and the killer knew what he was doing. Why RPF Killers remain still at large and worse of that run a country: Rwanda? Does the International Community (Western powers) have minimum respect for Human beings even if they are Africans?*** --***
It is the story of a black box, an orange metal box in the size of a large shoe box. The commercial airliners are equipped with such boxes, which are identified by numbers riveted to the metal. Designed to record flight data and cockpit conversations, black boxes are useful in case of accident.
It is indeed the story of a black box, but a story like no other ones. The one in question was in fact supposed to shelter in her womb the key to the Rwandan genocide in 1994 against the Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
It first appeared on the scene when the French troops involved in Turquoise military operation take their positions in Rwanda, while the genocide continues.
Suddenly, the box is brandished by Paul Barril, the former police officer in the Elysée. On June 28, 1994, Paul Barril reassures the public that he surely possesses the black box of the Falcon 50 of President Juvenal Hab yarimana that was shot down three months ago. This is the attack that triggered the Rwandan genocide.
Paul Barril declared to the international institutions that he now holds the enigmatic black box capable of uncovering the mystery surrounding the genocide. From now on, all regards were turned away from Rwanda, away from the facts and the reality on the ground, to focus on this box comparable to the Holy Grail, which subsequently became the black box of genocide. Alas, a few days later, the blow falls. From July 8, 1994, the French newspaper "Le Monde" alleges that the black box presented by Paul Barril was "not the black box."
According to the article, the black box had been conveyed ten years earlier in New York at the UN headquarters but the UN became disinterested of the box. Conclusion: "If the black box is still there, the UN has for sure a substantial asset for the day when it would like to know what really happened on Apri l 6, 1994, in the night sky of Kigali-City" .
Once again, the revelation was invalidated ten days later. "Last week, a first examination of the black box done at UN headquarters in New York, revealed nothing that would establish that it comes from the Falcon 50 shot down on April 6, 1994", reported Le Monde.
The tape was played over. It contains extracts from the conversation between the control tower and an aircraft on the tarmac of Kigali, but has provided no evidence what so ever. The public will thereafter learn that this was just a montage.
This concludes the second life of the mysterious black box. Nevertheless, there still is a third chapter, which although written and recorded, has not yet been made available to the public. Here it is. It starts exactly from the quote 6 798 of Judge Bruguiere's instructions.
On March 31, 2004, an official representative of Dassault-Aviation Company acknowledges that the Rwandan president's plane was not equipped with a black box. On July 1, 2004, the final UN investigation on the black box discovery in New York was reexamined. It is clearly mentioned that immediately after the attack on the president's aircraft, at 2:45 am, on April 7, 1994 the French military mission in Rwanda has received authorization from Paris to conduct an investigation into this crash.
It also well established that that access to the plane crash area was denied to the United Nations until May 21, 1994. It is also stated that the black box currently in New York was found by the UN on May 27, 1994, abandoned near the crash area. In conclusion, the United Nations confirmed that the black box currently in New York is not from the Falcon 50 that was shot down.
Judge Bruguiere was nonetheless obliged to go ahead and complete the investigation. On November 2 9, 2004, he interviewed an Air France official. Under penalty of perjury, he said that the black box discovered a decade later in UN shelves is from a Concorde aircraft! Specifically, it is from the Air France Concorde 209 Air France, F-BVFC. Records in the maintenance files of Air France Concorde undoubtedly attest its origin. One month later, a second Air France confirmed these findings.
It is indeed the story of a black box, but a story like no other ones. The one in question was in fact supposed to shelter in her womb the key to the Rwandan genocide in 1994 against the Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Suddenly, the box is brandished by Paul Barril, the former police officer in the Elysée. On June 28, 1994, Paul Barril reassures the public that he surely possesses the black box of the Falcon 50 of President Juvenal Hab yarimana that was shot down three months ago. This is the attack that triggered the Rwandan genocide.
Paul Barril declared to the international institutions that he now holds the enigmatic black box capable of uncovering the mystery surrounding the genocide. From now on, all regards were turned away from Rwanda, away from the facts and the reality on the ground, to focus on this box comparable to the Holy Grail, which subsequently became the black box of genocide. Alas, a few days later, the blow falls. From July 8, 1994, the French newspaper "Le Monde" alleges that the black box presented by Paul Barril was "not the black box."
This concludes the first chapter about the mysterious black box, but the story is far from over. The black box will be resurrected and have a second life. This occured in 2004. As the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide approaches, many damning evidences on the foreign policy of Paris in Rwanda have been made public. The date marks a turning point.
On March 10, 2004, the French newspaper, Le Monde, announced that "the black box of the Falcon 50 has been transferred, ten years ago, to the UN Headquarters in New York". The newspaper specifically stated that "according to Judge Bruguiere, the United Nations are currently obstructing the investigation into the attack of April 6, 1994. The accusations were clear: for unknown reaso ns the United Nations retained an important piece of conviction. The public would immediately be flooded of flash news, articles and statements supporting this sudden turn of effects. Once again, the mechanisms of genocide are obscured in favor of a polar well tied.According to the article, the black box had been conveyed ten years earlier in New York at the UN headquarters but the UN became disinterested of the box. Conclusion: "If the black box is still there, the UN has for sure a substantial asset for the day when it would like to know what really happened on Apri l 6, 1994, in the night sky of Kigali-City" .
Once again, the revelation was invalidated ten days later. "Last week, a first examination of the black box done at UN headquarters in New York, revealed nothing that would establish that it comes from the Falcon 50 shot down on April 6, 1994", reported Le Monde.
The tape was played over. It contains extracts from the conversation between the control tower and an aircraft on the tarmac of Kigali, but has provided no evidence what so ever. The public will thereafter learn that this was just a montage.
This concludes the second life of the mysterious black box. Nevertheless, there still is a third chapter, which although written and recorded, has not yet been made available to the public. Here it is. It starts exactly from the quote 6 798 of Judge Bruguiere's instructions.
On March 31, 2004, an official representative of Dassault-Aviation Company acknowledges that the Rwandan president's plane was not equipped with a black box. On July 1, 2004, the final UN investigation on the black box discovery in New York was reexamined. It is clearly mentioned that immediately after the attack on the president's aircraft, at 2:45 am, on April 7, 1994 the French military mission in Rwanda has received authorization from Paris to conduct an investigation into this crash.
It also well established that that access to the plane crash area was denied to the United Nations until May 21, 1994. It is also stated that the black box currently in New York was found by the UN on May 27, 1994, abandoned near the crash area. In conclusion, the United Nations confirmed that the black box currently in New York is not from the Falcon 50 that was shot down.
Judge Bruguiere was nonetheless obliged to go ahead and complete the investigation. On November 2 9, 2004, he interviewed an Air France official. Under penalty of perjury, he said that the black box discovered a decade later in UN shelves is from a Concorde aircraft! Specifically, it is from the Air France Concorde 209 Air France, F-BVFC. Records in the maintenance files of Air France Concorde undoubtedly attest its origin. One month later, a second Air France confirmed these findings.
Upon such new developments, Judge Bruguiere interrupted his investigation without trying to understand the sequence of these amazing facts. Do you imagine how a black box from an Air France Concorde, inadvertently found on the grass near Kigali-City in late May 1994, then ten years later on UN shelves in New York, can be brandished as the missing puzzle piece that is crucially needed to solve the riddle posed by the Rwandan genocide? The question irresistibly evokes the bordereau of the Dreyfus affair.
It is not given to everybody to have a Concorde black box. It is not easy to mount a somewhat credible soundtrack of this box or to drop it on the grass near Kigali-City after the attack of April 6, 1994, when the war was raging throughout the city. It is even more difficult to follow in detail the itinerary of this box all the way to the UN Headquarters in New York.
It is finally very rude to leak out the information at the right time that corresponds to the timing of a useful scandal that will capture the media's attention but also lead to a timely confusion.
Of course, the story of the black box of genocide doesn't tell anything about the genocide. However, it tells everything that people would like it to tell. Who are those people? Why are they doing this? The answer to these questions can only be found in one place: Paris.
It is not given to everybody to have a Concorde black box. It is not easy to mount a somewhat credible soundtrack of this box or to drop it on the grass near Kigali-City after the attack of April 6, 1994, when the war was raging throughout the city. It is even more difficult to follow in detail the itinerary of this box all the way to the UN Headquarters in New York.
It is finally very rude to leak out the information at the right time that corresponds to the timing of a useful scandal that will capture the media's attention but also lead to a timely confusion.
Of course, the story of the black box of genocide doesn't tell anything about the genocide. However, it tells everything that people would like it to tell. Who are those people? Why are they doing this? The answer to these questions can only be found in one place: Paris.
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, June 21, 2009
By Abdoul Aziz AgneWalfadjri
June 5, 2009
DAKAR, Senegal
Fifteen years after the missile attack that killed the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana the mystery continues to surround this terrorist act that triggered the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The Rwandan Youth Movement for Reconciliation, Peace and Truth in Rwanda (MJRPVR) strongly believes that the United Nations, by its inaction, is complicit in the missile attack that destroyed Habyarimana' s aircraft.
The future of Rwanda appears to be linked to this unfortunate event that occurred on April 6, 1994 which tragically cost life to President Juvenal
Habyarimana. The president's jet was shot down by a missile attack as it prepared to land at the Kanombe International Airport. The president and his team had been on a regional peace meeting in Tanzania in an attempt to end the Rwandan civil war between his government and the RPF rebels that had invaded the country from Uganda since October 1990.
Today, fifteen years later, Rwandans want that justice be done by shading the light on the real culprits of this terrorist act. With regard to this issue, the Rwandan Youth Movement for Reconciliation, Peace and Truth in Rwanda (MJRPVR) does not go around the bush to accuse the United Nations of complicity in this crime. The movement which encompasses Rwandan youths who love justice, attests that the missiles used to carry out this terrorist act were launched from an area that was controlled by the UN peacekeepers.
"It is important that the world know that the UN has always hidden the truth about this terrorist attack against the president's plane", asserted these young people during a press conference held at the headquarters of the African Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights (RADDHO).
One may recall that just a few weeks ago, a study in the United States reported that the black box found on the site of the accident was not from Habyarimana' s plane. Instead, it was from a Concorde aircraft, specifically, the Air France Concorde 209, F-BVFC.
This suspicious fact suggests that other factors are indeed involved in this mysterious murder. In addition, members of this youth movement reminded the public that since 1992 the UN, through the UNAMIR, was in charge of the security of Kigali City.
Furthermore, MJRPVR members pointed out the following questions: How were the three missiles used in this attack sent to Rwanda when we all know that at that time Rwanda was under the UN arm embargo? How did these missiles escape the control by the UN peacekeepers?
There are so many unanswered questions which put the UN in the center of such a tragic event that has profoundly marked the Rwandan history. Indeed, the attack against the Rwandan president's plane triggered for the Rwandan genocide of 1994, which claimed nearly two million lives, Tutsis and Hutus included.
This is why, the MJRPVR "begs" the UN "to release the recording from the black box of the aircraft that was shot down". It will be recalled that the incident occurred in a context of peace negotiations to end the Rwandan civil war that began on October 1, 1990.
These negotiation efforts had led to the Arusha Peace Agreement signed on August 4, 1993. The agreement mainly focused on three points including power-sharing, recognition of the RPF movement as a political party and the integration of RPF rebels in the Rwandan army.
Actually, the MJRPVR strongly believes that restituting the truth about who killed Habyarimans is a fundamental step in the search for peace and stability in Rwanda. For this reason, MJRPVR members plan to seize the African Union so that the investigation process into the where about of the black box from Habyarimana' s plane can finally find its epilogue.
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 future of Rwanda appears to be linked to this unfortunate event that occurred on April 6, 1994 which tragically cost life to President Juvenal
Habyarimana. The president's jet was shot down by a missile attack as it prepared to land at the Kanombe International Airport. The president and his team had been on a regional peace meeting in Tanzania in an attempt to end the Rwandan civil war between his government and the RPF rebels that had invaded the country from Uganda since October 1990.Today, fifteen years later, Rwandans want that justice be done by shading the light on the real culprits of this terrorist act. With regard to this issue, the Rwandan Youth Movement for Reconciliation, Peace and Truth in Rwanda (MJRPVR) does not go around the bush to accuse the United Nations of complicity in this crime. The movement which encompasses Rwandan youths who love justice, attests that the missiles used to carry out this terrorist act were launched from an area that was controlled by the UN peacekeepers.
"It is important that the world know that the UN has always hidden the truth about this terrorist attack against the president's plane", asserted these young people during a press conference held at the headquarters of the African Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights (RADDHO).
One may recall that just a few weeks ago, a study in the United States reported that the black box found on the site of the accident was not from Habyarimana' s plane. Instead, it was from a Concorde aircraft, specifically, the Air France Concorde 209, F-BVFC.
This suspicious fact suggests that other factors are indeed involved in this mysterious murder. In addition, members of this youth movement reminded the public that since 1992 the UN, through the UNAMIR, was in charge of the security of Kigali City.
Furthermore, MJRPVR members pointed out the following questions: How were the three missiles used in this attack sent to Rwanda when we all know that at that time Rwanda was under the UN arm embargo? How did these missiles escape the control by the UN peacekeepers?
There are so many unanswered questions which put the UN in the center of such a tragic event that has profoundly marked the Rwandan history. Indeed, the attack against the Rwandan president's plane triggered for the Rwandan genocide of 1994, which claimed nearly two million lives, Tutsis and Hutus included.
This is why, the MJRPVR "begs" the UN "to release the recording from the black box of the aircraft that was shot down". It will be recalled that the incident occurred in a context of peace negotiations to end the Rwandan civil war that began on October 1, 1990.
These negotiation efforts had led to the Arusha Peace Agreement signed on August 4, 1993. The agreement mainly focused on three points including power-sharing, recognition of the RPF movement as a political party and the integration of RPF rebels in the Rwandan army.
Actually, the MJRPVR strongly believes that restituting the truth about who killed Habyarimans is a fundamental step in the search for peace and stability in Rwanda. For this reason, MJRPVR members plan to seize the African Union so that the investigation process into the where about of the black box from Habyarimana' s plane can finally find its epilogue.
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 19, 2009
Posted on Jun 14, 2009By Chris Hedges
This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks th
e start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt.
And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.
There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”
It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds.
The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.
I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.
“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”
China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun.
The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.
“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”
The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.
There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits.
- America imports more than it exports. This is trade.
- Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement.
- The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad.
It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.
To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters.
This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.
“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”
The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.
“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”
The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value.
The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic.
There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics.
America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.
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
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Like a freak in bed, Paul Kagame with his trademark fanatical stare dresses up like Hitler.
Check out his look and to ensure you're on the right way, watch this:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW0fRwGKV2I
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02b2V6hK3EQ
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP5LdEE8KIE
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW8j-o3JPrY&NR=1
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1GS-fLuL5A&feature=related
Those who argue that Paul Kagame has stopped genocide don't k
© SurViVors Editions
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
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
U.S. Faces Surprise, Dilemma in Africa
By Lynne Duke
Washington Post
KIGALI, Rwanda
—When Rwandan troops invaded the former Zaire in October 1996, it was a rude jolt for the U.S. officials managing relations with this small central African nation.
Following the 1994 civil war here, during which more than a half-million Rwandans were massacred, the United States had become increasingly close to the Rwandan government and the army that backed it. Rwanda's de facto leader, Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame, was regarded in Washington as a brilliant military strategist. Hoping to build stability in strife-torn central Africa, Washington pumped military aid into Kagame's army, and U.S. Army Special Forces and other military personnel trained hundreds of Rwandan troops.
But Kagame and his colleagues had designs of their own. While the Green Berets trained the Rwandan Patriotic Army, that army was itself secretly training Zairian rebels. Rwandan forces then crossed into Zaire and joined with the rebels to attack refugee camps where exiled Rwandan extremists were holed up. That touched off a war that eventually toppled Africa's longest-reigning dictator, Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko.
Although the United States shared the goals of dismantling the refugee camps and replacing Mobutu, the invasion took Washington by surprise, sources in both countries say. And when the Rwandan forces became involved in massacres and other human rights abuses inside Zaire, now known as Congo, the United States faced a dilemma over how to react that persists to this day.
The story of the U.S. relationship with the Rwandan military illustrates the complications that have occurred when military ties -- and, in particular, hard-to-track training operations by the Pentagon's special operations forces -- have become a prime instrument of American policy. Since the early 1990s, deployments of special operations forces have been rapidly expanding around Africa, part of a worldwide increase in contacts that are not subject to the civilian and congressional oversight that applies to other foreign military aid programs.
Many of the exercises are funded through a 1991 law that allows deployments if the primary mission is to train U.S. troops. How U.S. troops benefit from this training is not readily apparent. But in many cases special operations troops, of which the Army's Special Forces are the largest element, have instructed foreign armies in how to combat their own domestic insurgencies, or pursued U.S. policy objectives ranging from stopping narcotics traffic to preventing genocide.
In the last two years alone, U.S. special operations troops -- mainly Green Berets from the 3rd Special Forces Group based at Fort Bragg, N.C. -- have taught light infantry or other military tactics to troops in Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. An initial exercise with South Africa is planned for the fourth quarter of this year.
U.S. special operations commanders say that among the purposes of the training, called the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program, is to build contacts with foreign military leaders and encourage respect for human rights by foreign armies.
But U.S. access to military officials has not necessarily meant U.S. influence over their actions. In the case of Rwanda, U.S. officials publicly portrayed their engagement with the army as almost entirely devoted to human rights training. But the Special Forces exercises also covered other areas, including combat skills. As a result, U.S. promotion of human rights has been overshadowed by questions about whether Rwandan units trained by Americans later participated in atrocities during the war in Zaire.
A U.N. report released last month charged that elements of the Rwandan army were involved in abuses during the war that "constitute crimes against humanity," including the massacre of unarmed civilians and refugees. Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), chair of the House subcommittee on international operations and human rights, has questioned whether the Pentagon even has tried to find out if Rwandan troops trained by Special Forces were among those who committed the massacres.
In fact, according to Pentagon officials, no such review has been conducted, because none is required by the 1991 legislation. At Smith's request, the Pentagon will provide the names of Rwandan troops trained by Americans since 1994 and after-action reports from their missions. But a Pentagon spokeswoman, Col. Nancy Burt, said that "as a practical matter, it would not be feasible" to vet the Rwandan forces for human rights violations "due to the large number of persons with whom we conduct training."
Despite continued reports of human rights abuses by the Rwandan army, this time inside Rwanda, a new round of Joint Combined Exchange Training between Army Special Forces and Rwandan units is scheduled to begin July 15. It will be the second this year. The Pentagon also plans to send an assessment team to Rwanda in the coming weeks to see whether and how the military training should be further enhanced.
U.S. officials defend the collaboration by arguing that it is wiser to engage with Rwanda to help it develop a human rights culture than to step aside and risk a new descent by the country into chaos.
The effort to support and strengthen the Rwandan military is "a matter of practical policy interests and common sense," a Clinton administration official said. "Assuming diplomacy fails and [ethnic conflict] grows, somebody needs to be in a position to contain it."
Although Rwanda is an impoverished, shattered nation at the far fringes of U.S. national security interests, it is not the prototypical weak client state seeking military help from a powerful patron. Instead, its relationship with Washington is built on a complex mix of history, personal relationships, shared geopolitical objectives, and -- not least, some would say -- guilt.
The origins of the relationship lie in the Rwandan civil war, which began in 1990 when a rebel force led by minority Tutsi exiles invaded Rwanda from Uganda in an attempt to overthrow the government, led by ethnic Hutus. Kagame, a Tutsi who was then a colonel in Uganda's army, was in a training course at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., when the war began. He dropped out of the course to take command of the rebel army, then later participated in talks that led to a 1993 peace accord.
The peace collapsed in April 1994, when an airplane carrying Rwanda's Hutu president was shot down near Kigali, killing all aboard. Extremist Hutus in the government and army subsequently orchestrated massacres of Tutsis around the country. At least 500,000 people were slaughtered while indecisive Western governments and the United Nations debated what to do.
Finally, a revived rebel movement led by Kagame defeated the government army and took power in Kigali in July. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus, fearing retribution, fled to eastern Zaire, and many of the Hutu soldiers and militiamen involved in the massacres took refuge in their midst.
U.S. officials were deeply relieved that the rebels had halted the massacres, thus ending pressure for a U.S.-led intervention. They also said they were greatly impressed by Kagame's leadership. By the end of the war, some U.S. officials had concluded that Kagame was "a brilliant commander, able to think outside the box," as one put it. "He was a fairly impressive guy," added the official, who met Kagame in the early 1990s. "He was more than a military man. He was politically attuned and knew what compromise was."
Immediately after the war, the United States helped mount a humanitarian operation to assist the refugees in Zaire. Then-Secretary of Defense William J. Perry visited the region, and he too was taken by the new Rwandan leaders.
"When Secretary Perry visited the American troops in Kigali, Goma and Entebbe, he was impressed by how, so close [after] the genocide, these people [the new Rwandan army] could be talking about reconstruction and reconciliation instead of revenge and retaliation," the defense official said.
Still, Rwanda's new civilian government was largely a facade. Kagame, who took the posts of vice president and defense minister, remained in charge. With democratic elections nowhere in sight, a diplomat said, the government was, in essence, a "disguised military dictatorship."
U.S. officials nevertheless focused on the Kagame leadership as one with which they could work to restore order in Rwanda, eastern Zaire and neighboring areas of central Africa.
For its part, the new Rwandan government felt it held the upper hand in its relations with Washington, because its army alone had put an end to the massacres while the West dithered. Analysts here say the Rwandans have played on Washington's sense of guilt about the genocide of 1994, and its stated objective of preventing a recurrence. In deciding how to deal with the lingering problem of the Rwandan refugees and militant exiles in Zaire, for example, "we were [diplomatically] stronger because nobody could argue against us," said Patrick Mazimhaka, a minister to Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu.
Said a diplomat here, "I think the Americans were terribly manipulated by this government and now are almost held hostage by it."
Lt. Col. Frank Rusagara, secretary general of the Rwandan Defense Ministry and the top policymaker for military development, described the army as a reflection of Rwandan society: in flux as it tries to establish a brand new set of core social values. "Among us there are orphans of genocide victims," Rusagara said. "Among us there are sons and daughters whose parents actively were in the genocide."
"Over a period of time, we've got to establish democratic institutions and values for the military to protect," said Rusagara, who returned in April from three months of defense resource management training at the U.S. Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, Calif. "So I think in Rwanda, we're evolving."
Rusagara presides over a military administration that started from scratch in 1994 as a national entity. The army inherited little from the Hutu-led armed forces that was worth saving. After all, much of the old army, especially the presidential guard, perpetrated the genocide against the Tutsis, or stood by.
The U.S. military engagement here began in 1995 as an effort to help the Rwandan army with its task of reinvention, both of itself and of the nation's power structure. U.S. officials said they wanted the former rebel army to become a professional force that would support the principles of the democracy that Rwandan officials say they aspire to create.
Hundreds of soldiers and officers were enrolled in U.S. training programs, both in Rwanda and in the United States. Rwandan officers went to the United States to study military justice, defense resource management and law of war and human rights. Scores of Rwandans were trained for land-mine detection and disposal under the U.S.-funded National De-mining Office, which was up and running in early 1996.
When asked in a December 1996 congressional hearing about the kinds of training the United States provided to Rwanda, Ambassador Richard Bogosian, the Clinton administration's coordinator for Rwanda, said the training dealt "almost exclusively with the human rights end of the spectrum as distinct from purely military operations."
But some Rwandan units were getting U.S. combat training, as well. In a JCET program conducted by U.S. Special Forces, Rwandans studied camouflage techniques, small-unit movement, troop-leading procedures, soldier-team development, rappelling, mountaineering, marksmanship, weapon maintenance and day and night navigation.
And while the training went on, U.S. officials were meeting regularly with Kagame and other senior Rwandan leaders to discuss the continuing military threat faced by the government from inside Zaire.
Hutu militia forces driven into Zaire had regrouped and by late 1995 were launching raids across the border into Rwanda from the camps in eastern Zaire, where more than 1 million Rwandan refugees still languished. Efforts by the United Nations to send the refugees back home were repeatedly blocked by the Hutu militants, who depended on U.N.-supplied food and fuel.
U.S. officials agreed that the camps were a problem requiring a solution, and had discussed several options with Kagame, including air strikes to hit at the extremist bases, sources said. Information about the camps was exchanged between the two countries, a Western military analyst said.
Kagame himself visited Washington in early August 1996 to discuss the situation with senior Clinton administration officials. He later said that he had been seeking solutions from Washington, but left disappointed. U.S. officials said Kagame had warned that the camps in Zaire had to be dismantled and had hinted that Rwanda might act if the United Nations did not. They said they expected that Kagame might try something, but did not know when he would do it and what form it would take.
Meanwhile, from July 17 to Aug. 30, a U.S. Army Special Forces team from Fort Bragg instructed Rwandan army soldiers in small-unit leader training, rifle marksmanship, first aid, land navigation and tactical skills, such as patrolling. In September, dozens of other Rwandan soldiers received training under the International Military Education program.
Clearly, the focus of Rwandan-U.S. military discussion had shifted from how to build human rights to how to combat an insurgency. In 1995, a diplomatic observer said, Kagame's attitude seemed to be, "I want [the army] to get rid of that bush mentality. I want to teach them by sending them" for training.
"But then," the diplomat said, "when the infiltration [from the Zaire camps] started and you have the [Zaire] war, it got all out of hand."
Kagame's alliance with the Pentagon was not the only one he nurtured after 1994. He also remained in close touch with Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni, a longtime comrade. With Museveni's support, Kagame conceived a plan to back a rebel movement in eastern Zaire. He hoped to clear out the Rwandan refugee camps, crush the exiled Hutu militias and deal a blow to Mobutu, one of Africa's most corrupt rulers. Uganda contributed some troops and materiel to the war effort, and Angola, Zambia and several other African states later joined in. Laurent Kabila, an aging former Marxist revolutionary, was recruited to head the rebels, who tried to keep their connections to Rwanda and Uganda hidden.
The operation was launched in October 1996, just a few weeks after Kagame's trip to Washington and the completion of the Special Forces training mission. But according to sources in both governments, the Clinton administration did not learn of the infiltration by Rwandan troops and officers or the extent of their ambitions until the fighting was well underway. Two sources in Kigali described the United States as angry and embarrassed at being surprised.
"I wouldn't say they pulled the wool over our eyes," a U.S. defense official said. "They acted in what they perceived to be their national interest." He compared it to Israel's frequent incursions into neighboring countries without advance U.S. knowledge.
Once the war started, the United States provided "political assistance" to Rwanda, a Western diplomat said. An official of the U.S. Embassy in Kigali traveled to eastern Zaire numerous times to liaise with Kabila. Soon, the rebels had moved on. Brushing off the Zairian army with the help of the Rwandan forces, they marched through Africa's third-largest nation in seven months, with only a few significant military engagements. Mobutu fled the capital, Kinshasa, in May 1997, and Kabila took power, changing the name of the country to Congo.
U.S. officials deny that there were any U.S. military personnel with Rwandan troops in Zaire during the war, although unconfirmed reports of a U.S. advisory presence have circulated in the region since the war's earliest days. Rwandan officials also bristle at the suggestion that they would have needed any U.S. military support.
Still, U.S. military training continued inside Rwanda during the war. A small contingent of Special Forces land-mine-removal trainers was in the country even as Rwandan troops were moving into Zaire in early October. Small Mobile Training Teams in military civil affairs and public information were in Rwanda in early November 1996. Another contingent of mine-removal trainers was in the country for much of December.
Another mobile training team and a mine-removal mission came to Rwanda in early 1997 as well, although the mobile training mission was aborted because no Rwandan troops were available. Rwandan army "operational requirements precluded training," according to a Pentagon chronology. The mission was to have begun on March 15 -- the day that Rwandan-led forces captured Kisangani, Zaire's second-largest city, in one of the few actual battles of the war.
The United States favored Mobutu's overthrow. But the Rwandan campaign inside Zaire was often brutal. Although Rwandan and Congolese officials have said their only targets were former Rwandan soldiers and gunmen, U.N. investigators, private human rights groups and journalists have collected considerable evidence, including first-hand accounts from witnesses and soldiers, that Rwandan officers and troops participated in massacres of civilians. For example, rebel soldiers and witnesses have said that two Rwandan officers commanding Zairian rebels ordered the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed Rwandan refugees who had gathered near Mbandaka, a town in northwestern Zaire, on May 13, 1997, near the end of the war.
The U.N. commission later formed to investigate wartime abuses was thwarted by Kabila's government and eventually abandoned its probe in frustration. Nevertheless, its members did gather testimony about the Mbandaka massacres. Its report concluded that "these killings violate international humanitarian law and, to the extent that Rwandan officers were involved, Rwanda's obligations under international human rights law."
of the Rwandan army's human rights record say its abuses did not end with the war in Zaire. They cite periodic revenge killings in Rwanda, directed against Hutus suspected of participating in the 1994 massacres. Other observers cite evidence that the human rights record is improving, including a recent slackening in violence against civilians and the prosecution of military figures for abuses.
Now conflict appears to be rising again as the Hutu extremist militants who have returned to Rwanda following the war in Zaire mount a low-grade insurgency that has spread from Ruhengeri prefecture in the northwest -- the extremists' traditional heartland -- to areas close to Kigali.
The conflict is variously described as a low-grade civil war or a terrorist threat. A diplomat here said the conflict has sent the Rwandan army back to some of its harsh ways. In the northwest region where the insurgents had been strongest, the army's strategy is to "systematically reduce the male population," the diplomat said, speaking anonymously.
Despite the concerns, a Pentagon team will travel to Rwanda in the coming weeks to assess how the army is coping with the insurgents and what kind of assistance the military may need, a U.S. defense official said. The range of possibilities being considered includes combat and counterinsurgency training, conducted by U.S. Special Forces or by private contractors, administration officials say.
U.S. officials clearly still see Kagame and his army as a partner, in spite of all that has happened in the last two years. "In terms of determination, you can't underestimate them," the diplomat said. "In terms of discipline, they're very disciplined. In terms of human rights? It's a good-weather project. They apply it in peacetime, but now they have a war."
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
U.S. Faces Surprise, Dilemma in Africa
By Lynne Duke
Washington Post
KIGALI, Rwanda
—When Rwandan troops invaded the former Zaire in October 1996, it was a rude jolt for the U.S. officials managing relations with this small central African nation.
Following the 1994 civil war here, during which more than a half-million Rwandans were massacred, the United States had become increasingly close to the Rwandan government and the army that backed it. Rwanda's de facto leader, Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame, was regarded in Washington as a brilliant military strategist. Hoping to build stability in strife-torn central Africa, Washington pumped military aid into Kagame's army, and U.S. Army Special Forces and other military personnel trained hundreds of Rwandan troops.
But Kagame and his colleagues had designs of their own. While the Green Berets trained the Rwandan Patriotic Army, that army was itself secretly training Zairian rebels. Rwandan forces then crossed into Zaire and joined with the rebels to attack refugee camps where exiled Rwandan extremists were holed up. That touched off a war that eventually toppled Africa's longest-reigning dictator, Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko.
Although the United States shared the goals of dismantling the refugee camps and replacing Mobutu, the invasion took Washington by surprise, sources in both countries say. And when the Rwandan forces became involved in massacres and other human rights abuses inside Zaire, now known as Congo, the United States faced a dilemma over how to react that persists to this day.
The story of the U.S. relationship with the Rwandan military illustrates the complications that have occurred when military ties -- and, in particular, hard-to-track training operations by the Pentagon's special operations forces -- have become a prime instrument of American policy. Since the early 1990s, deployments of special operations forces have been rapidly expanding around Africa, part of a worldwide increase in contacts that are not subject to the civilian and congressional oversight that applies to other foreign military aid programs.
Many of the exercises are funded through a 1991 law that allows deployments if the primary mission is to train U.S. troops. How U.S. troops benefit from this training is not readily apparent. But in many cases special operations troops, of which the Army's Special Forces are the largest element, have instructed foreign armies in how to combat their own domestic insurgencies, or pursued U.S. policy objectives ranging from stopping narcotics traffic to preventing genocide.
In the last two years alone, U.S. special operations troops -- mainly Green Berets from the 3rd Special Forces Group based at Fort Bragg, N.C. -- have taught light infantry or other military tactics to troops in Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. An initial exercise with South Africa is planned for the fourth quarter of this year.
U.S. special operations commanders say that among the purposes of the training, called the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program, is to build contacts with foreign military leaders and encourage respect for human rights by foreign armies.
But U.S. access to military officials has not necessarily meant U.S. influence over their actions. In the case of Rwanda, U.S. officials publicly portrayed their engagement with the army as almost entirely devoted to human rights training. But the Special Forces exercises also covered other areas, including combat skills. As a result, U.S. promotion of human rights has been overshadowed by questions about whether Rwandan units trained by Americans later participated in atrocities during the war in Zaire.
A U.N. report released last month charged that elements of the Rwandan army were involved in abuses during the war that "constitute crimes against humanity," including the massacre of unarmed civilians and refugees. Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), chair of the House subcommittee on international operations and human rights, has questioned whether the Pentagon even has tried to find out if Rwandan troops trained by Special Forces were among those who committed the massacres.
In fact, according to Pentagon officials, no such review has been conducted, because none is required by the 1991 legislation. At Smith's request, the Pentagon will provide the names of Rwandan troops trained by Americans since 1994 and after-action reports from their missions. But a Pentagon spokeswoman, Col. Nancy Burt, said that "as a practical matter, it would not be feasible" to vet the Rwandan forces for human rights violations "due to the large number of persons with whom we conduct training."
Despite continued reports of human rights abuses by the Rwandan army, this time inside Rwanda, a new round of Joint Combined Exchange Training between Army Special Forces and Rwandan units is scheduled to begin July 15. It will be the second this year. The Pentagon also plans to send an assessment team to Rwanda in the coming weeks to see whether and how the military training should be further enhanced.
U.S. officials defend the collaboration by arguing that it is wiser to engage with Rwanda to help it develop a human rights culture than to step aside and risk a new descent by the country into chaos.
The effort to support and strengthen the Rwandan military is "a matter of practical policy interests and common sense," a Clinton administration official said. "Assuming diplomacy fails and [ethnic conflict] grows, somebody needs to be in a position to contain it."
Although Rwanda is an impoverished, shattered nation at the far fringes of U.S. national security interests, it is not the prototypical weak client state seeking military help from a powerful patron. Instead, its relationship with Washington is built on a complex mix of history, personal relationships, shared geopolitical objectives, and -- not least, some would say -- guilt.
The origins of the relationship lie in the Rwandan civil war, which began in 1990 when a rebel force led by minority Tutsi exiles invaded Rwanda from Uganda in an attempt to overthrow the government, led by ethnic Hutus. Kagame, a Tutsi who was then a colonel in Uganda's army, was in a training course at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., when the war began. He dropped out of the course to take command of the rebel army, then later participated in talks that led to a 1993 peace accord.
The peace collapsed in April 1994, when an airplane carrying Rwanda's Hutu president was shot down near Kigali, killing all aboard. Extremist Hutus in the government and army subsequently orchestrated massacres of Tutsis around the country. At least 500,000 people were slaughtered while indecisive Western governments and the United Nations debated what to do.
Finally, a revived rebel movement led by Kagame defeated the government army and took power in Kigali in July. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus, fearing retribution, fled to eastern Zaire, and many of the Hutu soldiers and militiamen involved in the massacres took refuge in their midst.
U.S. officials were deeply relieved that the rebels had halted the massacres, thus ending pressure for a U.S.-led intervention. They also said they were greatly impressed by Kagame's leadership. By the end of the war, some U.S. officials had concluded that Kagame was "a brilliant commander, able to think outside the box," as one put it. "He was a fairly impressive guy," added the official, who met Kagame in the early 1990s. "He was more than a military man. He was politically attuned and knew what compromise was."
Immediately after the war, the United States helped mount a humanitarian operation to assist the refugees in Zaire. Then-Secretary of Defense William J. Perry visited the region, and he too was taken by the new Rwandan leaders.
"When Secretary Perry visited the American troops in Kigali, Goma and Entebbe, he was impressed by how, so close [after] the genocide, these people [the new Rwandan army] could be talking about reconstruction and reconciliation instead of revenge and retaliation," the defense official said.
Still, Rwanda's new civilian government was largely a facade. Kagame, who took the posts of vice president and defense minister, remained in charge. With democratic elections nowhere in sight, a diplomat said, the government was, in essence, a "disguised military dictatorship."
U.S. officials nevertheless focused on the Kagame leadership as one with which they could work to restore order in Rwanda, eastern Zaire and neighboring areas of central Africa.
For its part, the new Rwandan government felt it held the upper hand in its relations with Washington, because its army alone had put an end to the massacres while the West dithered. Analysts here say the Rwandans have played on Washington's sense of guilt about the genocide of 1994, and its stated objective of preventing a recurrence. In deciding how to deal with the lingering problem of the Rwandan refugees and militant exiles in Zaire, for example, "we were [diplomatically] stronger because nobody could argue against us," said Patrick Mazimhaka, a minister to Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu.
Said a diplomat here, "I think the Americans were terribly manipulated by this government and now are almost held hostage by it."
Lt. Col. Frank Rusagara, secretary general of the Rwandan Defense Ministry and the top policymaker for military development, described the army as a reflection of Rwandan society: in flux as it tries to establish a brand new set of core social values. "Among us there are orphans of genocide victims," Rusagara said. "Among us there are sons and daughters whose parents actively were in the genocide."
"Over a period of time, we've got to establish democratic institutions and values for the military to protect," said Rusagara, who returned in April from three months of defense resource management training at the U.S. Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, Calif. "So I think in Rwanda, we're evolving."
Rusagara presides over a military administration that started from scratch in 1994 as a national entity. The army inherited little from the Hutu-led armed forces that was worth saving. After all, much of the old army, especially the presidential guard, perpetrated the genocide against the Tutsis, or stood by.
The U.S. military engagement here began in 1995 as an effort to help the Rwandan army with its task of reinvention, both of itself and of the nation's power structure. U.S. officials said they wanted the former rebel army to become a professional force that would support the principles of the democracy that Rwandan officials say they aspire to create.
Hundreds of soldiers and officers were enrolled in U.S. training programs, both in Rwanda and in the United States. Rwandan officers went to the United States to study military justice, defense resource management and law of war and human rights. Scores of Rwandans were trained for land-mine detection and disposal under the U.S.-funded National De-mining Office, which was up and running in early 1996.
When asked in a December 1996 congressional hearing about the kinds of training the United States provided to Rwanda, Ambassador Richard Bogosian, the Clinton administration's coordinator for Rwanda, said the training dealt "almost exclusively with the human rights end of the spectrum as distinct from purely military operations."
But some Rwandan units were getting U.S. combat training, as well. In a JCET program conducted by U.S. Special Forces, Rwandans studied camouflage techniques, small-unit movement, troop-leading procedures, soldier-team development, rappelling, mountaineering, marksmanship, weapon maintenance and day and night navigation.
And while the training went on, U.S. officials were meeting regularly with Kagame and other senior Rwandan leaders to discuss the continuing military threat faced by the government from inside Zaire.
Hutu militia forces driven into Zaire had regrouped and by late 1995 were launching raids across the border into Rwanda from the camps in eastern Zaire, where more than 1 million Rwandan refugees still languished. Efforts by the United Nations to send the refugees back home were repeatedly blocked by the Hutu militants, who depended on U.N.-supplied food and fuel.
U.S. officials agreed that the camps were a problem requiring a solution, and had discussed several options with Kagame, including air strikes to hit at the extremist bases, sources said. Information about the camps was exchanged between the two countries, a Western military analyst said.
Kagame himself visited Washington in early August 1996 to discuss the situation with senior Clinton administration officials. He later said that he had been seeking solutions from Washington, but left disappointed. U.S. officials said Kagame had warned that the camps in Zaire had to be dismantled and had hinted that Rwanda might act if the United Nations did not. They said they expected that Kagame might try something, but did not know when he would do it and what form it would take.
Meanwhile, from July 17 to Aug. 30, a U.S. Army Special Forces team from Fort Bragg instructed Rwandan army soldiers in small-unit leader training, rifle marksmanship, first aid, land navigation and tactical skills, such as patrolling. In September, dozens of other Rwandan soldiers received training under the International Military Education program.
Clearly, the focus of Rwandan-U.S. military discussion had shifted from how to build human rights to how to combat an insurgency. In 1995, a diplomatic observer said, Kagame's attitude seemed to be, "I want [the army] to get rid of that bush mentality. I want to teach them by sending them" for training.
"But then," the diplomat said, "when the infiltration [from the Zaire camps] started and you have the [Zaire] war, it got all out of hand."
Kagame's alliance with the Pentagon was not the only one he nurtured after 1994. He also remained in close touch with Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni, a longtime comrade. With Museveni's support, Kagame conceived a plan to back a rebel movement in eastern Zaire. He hoped to clear out the Rwandan refugee camps, crush the exiled Hutu militias and deal a blow to Mobutu, one of Africa's most corrupt rulers. Uganda contributed some troops and materiel to the war effort, and Angola, Zambia and several other African states later joined in. Laurent Kabila, an aging former Marxist revolutionary, was recruited to head the rebels, who tried to keep their connections to Rwanda and Uganda hidden.
The operation was launched in October 1996, just a few weeks after Kagame's trip to Washington and the completion of the Special Forces training mission. But according to sources in both governments, the Clinton administration did not learn of the infiltration by Rwandan troops and officers or the extent of their ambitions until the fighting was well underway. Two sources in Kigali described the United States as angry and embarrassed at being surprised.
"I wouldn't say they pulled the wool over our eyes," a U.S. defense official said. "They acted in what they perceived to be their national interest." He compared it to Israel's frequent incursions into neighboring countries without advance U.S. knowledge.
Once the war started, the United States provided "political assistance" to Rwanda, a Western diplomat said. An official of the U.S. Embassy in Kigali traveled to eastern Zaire numerous times to liaise with Kabila. Soon, the rebels had moved on. Brushing off the Zairian army with the help of the Rwandan forces, they marched through Africa's third-largest nation in seven months, with only a few significant military engagements. Mobutu fled the capital, Kinshasa, in May 1997, and Kabila took power, changing the name of the country to Congo.
U.S. officials deny that there were any U.S. military personnel with Rwandan troops in Zaire during the war, although unconfirmed reports of a U.S. advisory presence have circulated in the region since the war's earliest days. Rwandan officials also bristle at the suggestion that they would have needed any U.S. military support.
Still, U.S. military training continued inside Rwanda during the war. A small contingent of Special Forces land-mine-removal trainers was in the country even as Rwandan troops were moving into Zaire in early October. Small Mobile Training Teams in military civil affairs and public information were in Rwanda in early November 1996. Another contingent of mine-removal trainers was in the country for much of December.
Another mobile training team and a mine-removal mission came to Rwanda in early 1997 as well, although the mobile training mission was aborted because no Rwandan troops were available. Rwandan army "operational requirements precluded training," according to a Pentagon chronology. The mission was to have begun on March 15 -- the day that Rwandan-led forces captured Kisangani, Zaire's second-largest city, in one of the few actual battles of the war.
The United States favored Mobutu's overthrow. But the Rwandan campaign inside Zaire was often brutal. Although Rwandan and Congolese officials have said their only targets were former Rwandan soldiers and gunmen, U.N. investigators, private human rights groups and journalists have collected considerable evidence, including first-hand accounts from witnesses and soldiers, that Rwandan officers and troops participated in massacres of civilians. For example, rebel soldiers and witnesses have said that two Rwandan officers commanding Zairian rebels ordered the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed Rwandan refugees who had gathered near Mbandaka, a town in northwestern Zaire, on May 13, 1997, near the end of the war.
The U.N. commission later formed to investigate wartime abuses was thwarted by Kabila's government and eventually abandoned its probe in frustration. Nevertheless, its members did gather testimony about the Mbandaka massacres. Its report concluded that "these killings violate international humanitarian law and, to the extent that Rwandan officers were involved, Rwanda's obligations under international human rights law."
of the Rwandan army's human rights record say its abuses did not end with the war in Zaire. They cite periodic revenge killings in Rwanda, directed against Hutus suspected of participating in the 1994 massacres. Other observers cite evidence that the human rights record is improving, including a recent slackening in violence against civilians and the prosecution of military figures for abuses.
Now conflict appears to be rising again as the Hutu extremist militants who have returned to Rwanda following the war in Zaire mount a low-grade insurgency that has spread from Ruhengeri prefecture in the northwest -- the extremists' traditional heartland -- to areas close to Kigali.
The conflict is variously described as a low-grade civil war or a terrorist threat. A diplomat here said the conflict has sent the Rwandan army back to some of its harsh ways. In the northwest region where the insurgents had been strongest, the army's strategy is to "systematically reduce the male population," the diplomat said, speaking anonymously.
Despite the concerns, a Pentagon team will travel to Rwanda in the coming weeks to assess how the army is coping with the insurgents and what kind of assistance the military may need, a U.S. defense official said. The range of possibilities being considered includes combat and counterinsurgency training, conducted by U.S. Special Forces or by private contractors, administration officials say.
U.S. officials clearly still see Kagame and his army as a partner, in spite of all that has happened in the last two years. "In terms of determination, you can't underestimate them," the diplomat said. "In terms of discipline, they're very disciplined. In terms of human rights? It's a good-weather project. They apply it in peacetime, but now they have a war."
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
Monday, June 15, 2009
I don't care! ==> Kagame says and repeat.
What do you know about President Kagame?
Rwanda genocide: What if Kagame killed Habyarimana?
Kagame responsible of more than 8 millions of Rwandan and Congolese people.
Watch the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVOwBMnHYDw
Paul Kagame, THE BIGGEST KILLER ALIVE
The ICTR has failed to shed light on all the crucial details one needs to understand how the genocide was all planned and how the orders for its execution were given. But much is
known about the detailed planning of the extremists in power in Kigali and their long preparation for the cruellest episode ever in African history. Enough to place guilt where it belongs.
Recently, press reports, quoting prominent experts of the Great Lakes region, raised again the issue of impunity of president Kagame, with regard to the war crimes that he committed or ordered for. The main point of this paper is to expose one of the hitherto unveiled faces of his crimes.
Indeed, some of the crimes which were indiscriminately attributed to Interahamwe were in actual facts carried out by none other than Kagame and his henchmen. In their sinister plans, they would disguise as the notorious militia Interahamwe. This should however not be misconstrued to mean that the latter did not kill.
This is not a hearsays, I am ready to produce evidence and call other people who witnessed the crimes that occurred in the following places. => 2nd Lt. Aloys RUYENZI
Mr Kagame may have the blood of President Habyarimana, his Burundian counterpart and the airplane's partly French staff at his hands. This would however make him guilty of just another coup d'état in Africa in the 1990s. And - if interpreted very widely - of a terrorist attack; if interpreted more conservatively, of a political assassination that saw civilian victims. History and today's world is full of such, and although they should not be approved of, they are not prosecuted if not being part of systematic war crimes. =>Rainer Chr. Hennig
What do you do when indicted war criminals lead a country? Paul Rusesabagina
If President Paul Kagame had any semblance of love for Her Majesty the Queen and the Brish people, he would have called for an independent international investigation into the Bwindi massacre of 1999 in Uganda where British, Australian, and New Zealander tourists were butchered by unknown assailants. Instead, using torture, his forces engaged in the blatant framing of innocent suspects who now have been cleared by American courts. Many believe that Kagame's men carried out this heinous butchery.
If President Paul Kagame were innocent and had nothing to hide, he would have called for an independent international investigation into the shooting down of President Juvenal Habyarimana's jet, the criminal act that started the genocide, and let justice exonerate him in the eyes of the world. He has decided not to.
If President Kagame had any coherence to his actions, he would have allowed such an independent investigation to validate his claims that Hutu extremists are the ones who downed Habyarimana's aircraft. He has chosen not to.
If President Kagame had any decency and humanity left in him, he would not have gone on the air and asserted with much contempt when asked who shot down Habyarimana's airplane: "I don't know and in fact to risk sounding cynical, I don't care" (Paul Kagame's interview with Reuters New Agency on November 29, 2006). After all, a Rwandan President and other Rwandan officials, a Burundian President and his collaborators, as well as French nationals, were killed on that doomed flight. From his own admission, he does not care.=> Paul Rusesabagina
© SurViVors Editions
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What do you know about President Kagame?
Rwanda genocide: What if Kagame killed Habyarimana?
Kagame responsible of more than 8 millions of Rwandan and Congolese people.
Watch the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVOwBMnHYDw
Paul Kagame, THE BIGGEST KILLER ALIVE
The ICTR has failed to shed light on all the crucial details one needs to understand how the genocide was all planned and how the orders for its execution were given. But much is
known about the detailed planning of the extremists in power in Kigali and their long preparation for the cruellest episode ever in African history. Enough to place guilt where it belongs.Recently, press reports, quoting prominent experts of the Great Lakes region, raised again the issue of impunity of president Kagame, with regard to the war crimes that he committed or ordered for. The main point of this paper is to expose one of the hitherto unveiled faces of his crimes.
Indeed, some of the crimes which were indiscriminately attributed to Interahamwe were in actual facts carried out by none other than Kagame and his henchmen. In their sinister plans, they would disguise as the notorious militia Interahamwe. This should however not be misconstrued to mean that the latter did not kill.
This is not a hearsays, I am ready to produce evidence and call other people who witnessed the crimes that occurred in the following places. => 2nd Lt. Aloys RUYENZI
Mr Kagame may have the blood of President Habyarimana, his Burundian counterpart and the airplane's partly French staff at his hands. This would however make him guilty of just another coup d'état in Africa in the 1990s. And - if interpreted very widely - of a terrorist attack; if interpreted more conservatively, of a political assassination that saw civilian victims. History and today's world is full of such, and although they should not be approved of, they are not prosecuted if not being part of systematic war crimes. =>Rainer Chr. Hennig
What do you do when indicted war criminals lead a country? Paul Rusesabagina
If President Paul Kagame had any semblance of love for Her Majesty the Queen and the Brish people, he would have called for an independent international investigation into the Bwindi massacre of 1999 in Uganda where British, Australian, and New Zealander tourists were butchered by unknown assailants. Instead, using torture, his forces engaged in the blatant framing of innocent suspects who now have been cleared by American courts. Many believe that Kagame's men carried out this heinous butchery.
If President Paul Kagame were innocent and had nothing to hide, he would have called for an independent international investigation into the shooting down of President Juvenal Habyarimana's jet, the criminal act that started the genocide, and let justice exonerate him in the eyes of the world. He has decided not to.
If President Kagame had any coherence to his actions, he would have allowed such an independent investigation to validate his claims that Hutu extremists are the ones who downed Habyarimana's aircraft. He has chosen not to.
If President Kagame had any decency and humanity left in him, he would not have gone on the air and asserted with much contempt when asked who shot down Habyarimana's airplane: "I don't know and in fact to risk sounding cynical, I don't care" (Paul Kagame's interview with Reuters New Agency on November 29, 2006). After all, a Rwandan President and other Rwandan officials, a Burundian President and his collaborators, as well as French nationals, were killed on that doomed flight. From his own admission, he does not care.=> Paul Rusesabagina
© SurViVors Editions
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 12, 2009
Le Parti pour la Démocratie au Rwanda (PDR-Ihumure), fermement déterminé à tout mettre en oeuvre pour assurer au peuple rwandais un meilleur avenir, pertinemment convaincu que seul un régime issu d’élections démocratiques pourra non seulement garantir la paix et le développement de toute la population rwandaise, mais aussi restaurerla cohabitation pacifique entre le Rwanda avec ses pays voisins, mais constatant que les conditions minimales d’élections justes, libres et transparentes sont actuellement inexistantes au Rwanda, porte à la connaissance de toute la population rwandaise et de la communauté internationale qu’il voudrait bien participer aux prochaines élections présidentielles de 2010, mais que celles-ci doivent au préalable être conjointement préparées par le gouvernement actuel du FPR et son opposition.Le PDR-Ihumure demande donc aussi à la communauté internationale de donner la
chance à la paix dans la région des Grands Lacs Africains et à la réconciliation du peuple rwandais en contribuant à la mise en place des conditions propices à une véritabledémocratie au Rwanda.
En appui à sa position, le PDR-Ihumure soumet à l’attention du public les quelques
éléments ci-après:
1. Le gouvernement du Front Patriotique Rwandais (FPR) actuellement au pouvoir à
Kigali s’est jusqu’à présent montré incapable d’organiser des élections tout en
assurant la sécurité des candidats de l’opposition et de leurs supporteurs.
Comme en témoignent les observateurs indépendants et des organismes de défense des
droits de la personne, il n’hésite pas à recourir aux assassinats, aux emprisonnements et aux intimidations de toutes sortes pour réduire à néant ses opposants. Ainsi, lors des précédentes élections présidentielles du 25 août 2003, la Mission électorale de l’union Européenne s’est dite « préoccupée par les disparitions, arrestations et convocations d’opposants à la police »
Amnesty internationale a également abondé dans le même sens en déclarant que « Le FPR se livre à une stratégie d’intimidation de ses adversaires politiques, arrêtant les opposants, embrigadant les gens de force dans ses propres rangs et n’hésitant pas à recourir à la violence (menaces de mort, notamment) pour saper le soutien dont pourrait bénéficier l’opposition. La campagne électorale du candidat du FPR, l’actuel président Paul Kagamé, consiste essentiellement, depuis quelques jours, à accuser les autres prétendants à la présidence de divisionnisme ethnique».
2. Le gouvernement du FPR s’est jusqu’à présent montré incapable d’organiser des
élections honnêtes et transparentes. En 2003, les élections présidentielles et
législatives ont été marquées par des bourrages d’urnes3, et cinq ans après, le
reflexe de manipulation des résultats des urnes a encore resurgi lors des élections
législatives de 2008.
À titre illustratif, il y a lieu de mentionner les observations de l’organisme américain de défense des droits de la personne Human Rights Watch (HRW) selon lequel « Quand les élections parlementaires qui se sont déroulées en septembre dernier se sont soldées par une victoire écrasante avec 92% des votes pour le parti au pouvoir de Kagamé, les preuves collectées par les observateurs rwandais et de l'Union européenne ont suggéré que le gouvernement avait en fait gonflé le pourcentage des votes de l'opposition afin d'éviter l'impression embarrassante d'un pseudo-plébiscite de type soviétique ».
3. La presse indépendante qui constitue l’un des piliers de la démocratie est fortement réprimée, ce qui place le Rwanda parmi les 16% des pires pays au monde en matière de liberté de presse5. Le président Paul Kagame figure parmi les prédateurs de la liberté de presse et réprime systématiquement non seulement la presse nationale indépendante, mais aussi les agences de presse étrangères. La dernière de ses victimes est la BBC dont les émissions en Kinyarwanda ont été suspendues en avril dernier.
4. Les dirigeants des partis politiques non inféodés au FPR continuent d’être harcelés et privés de leurs droits, et ne peuvent pas tenir publiquement la moindre activité politique. La plus récente manifestation des violations des droits politiques des partis d’opposition s’est produite le 1er juin 2009, lorsque la police rwandaise a empêché les leaders du parti PS Imberakuri de tenir une conférence de presse et a procédé immédiatement à leur arrestation.
5. Les criminels au sein du FPR continuent de bénéficier d’une totale impunité, alors qu’ils entrent dans la catégorie des personnes qui doivent être jugées par le Tribunal Pénal International pour le Rwanda (TPIR) selon la résolution 955 du Conseil de sécurité des Nations Unies. Cette justice partiale du TPIR qui l’a transformé en « Tribunal des vaincus » et qui a déjà encouragé le FPR à commettre d’autres crimes contre l’humanité continue à faire peser un énorme risque d’extermination sur une partie de la population rwandaise.
6. Des millions de réfugiés rwandais dispersés à travers le monde ne peuvent pas exercer leurs pleins droits civiques et politiques, ni en tant que citoyens électeurs,ni en tant que citoyens candidats, étant maintenus en exil par le régime actuel qui les considère collectivement comme des « génocidaires » et va jusqu’à menacer leur progéniture. À ce sujet, les déclarations du président Paul Kagame sont sans équivoque: «Des enfants de génocidaires, élevés dans l’idéologie du génocide, sont potentiellement aussi dangereux que leurs parents….. En tout état de cause, nous avons un devoir de prévention à leur égard ».
7. Le PDR-Ihumure ne peut pas tolérer qu’une partie aussi importante de la population rwandaise soit continuellement exclue, maintenue en exil et privée de ses droits politiques. Il ne peut pas non plus supporter que le pouvoir du peuple rwandais soit continuellement usurpé par un gouvernement qui n’ose pas soumettre son bilan à l’appréciation souveraine de tous les citoyens et affronter son opposition sur un terrain véritablement démocratique.
8. Les prochaines élections présidentielles doivent être une occasion de donner un nouvel élan au peuple rwandais, de mettre fin à la guerre de pillage imposée au peuple frère de la République Démocratique du Congo et de résoudre définitivement le problème des réfugiés qui doivent d’abord rentrer dignement pour se faire prévaloir, eux-aussi, de leurs droits civiques et politiques. C’est pourquoi, le PDR-Ihumure invite le gouvernement du FPR à faire preuve, cette fois-ci, de courage politique et de s’assoir avec son opposition pour mettre sur pied les conditions gagnantes pour de véritables élections démocratiques.
9. Étant donné que le prochain gouvernement doit bénéficier de la confiance de tout le peuple rwandais, de la crédibilité et d’une autorité morale sans faille pour relever les multiples défis qui l’attendent, le PDR-Ihumure demande que tous les candidats à la magistrature suprême soient des gens irréprochables, ne faisant l’objet d’aucune poursuite judiciaire.
10. Le PDR-Ihumure demande à la communauté internationale, et plus particulièrement aux plus grandes Puissances Occidentales qui soutiennent le régime de Paul Kagame et au Conseil de Sécurité des Nations Unies de donner une chance à la paix dans la région des Grands Lacs Africains et de participer à la mise sur pied des conditions favorables à une véritable démocratie au Rwanda.
Aussi, il joint sa voix à celles de Human Rights Watch8, des universitaires et des défenseurs des droits de la personne9 pour réclamer que les criminels au sein du FPR soient rapidement traduits devant la justice.
Le PDR-Ihumure pose la traduction en justice des criminels au sein du FPR comme l’un des préalables à sa participation aux prochaines élections présidentielles, parce que l’impunité qui leur a été jusqu’à présent garantie par le TPIR constitue un dangereux signal selon lequel le monopole du pouvoir constitue la meilleur protection contre toute poursuite judiciaire. Ces criminels n’hésiteront donc pas à rééditer leurs tristes exploits d’extermination d’une partie de la population rwandaise pour anéantir la moindre velléité de démocratie et conserver le pouvoir.
Le PDR-Ihumure est également fermement convaincu que, tant qu’il n’y aura pas de justice pour toutes les victimes et tant que la vérité sur la tragédie rwandaise ne sera pas établie, la réconciliation du peuple rwandais ne restera qu’un rêve.
11. Les éléments ci-haut mentionnés et bien d’autres encore montrent à suffisance que
les prochaines élections présidentielles doivent être minutieusement et conjointement préparées par tous les acteurs politiques rwandais appuyés par la communauté internationale si l’on veut éviter une réédition de la mascarade électorale de 2003 ainsi que les remous sociaux et politiques graves qui risquent fortement de s’en suivre.
12. Enfin, advenant que la mise en place des conditions propices à une véritable démocratie requiert des délais qui dépassent la date préalablement fixée pour les prochaines élections, le PDR-Ihumure recommande que celles-ci soient reportées à une date ultérieure, pour l’intérêt supérieur de la nation et du peuple rwandais. Fait à Washington DC le 11 juin 2009.
Pour le PDR-Ihumure
Jérôme NAYIGIZIKI
Secrétaire Général
Sé
jnayigizik@aol.com
+1 956 337 7665
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
Monday, June 8, 2009
Let us speak out:
By Musema Janvier
June 8, 2009
Hutu children are abused. they have no right to free education. They did not choose to be street children, they were forced to do so. The rare lucky children have arrived in Congo (DRC) and joined the FDLR.
As many of Rwandans know, detestable and abominable crimes have been committed before, during and after 1994.
Those crimes are STILL committed by RPF leadership and members against those young Hutu children. It's no secret that young Hutu children are sent to the Tutsi families for forcible adoptions. Some of them have been programmed to first hate and then kill their biological parents and relatives or any other Hutu citizens. Hutu girls were and are sold to Uganda by Rwandan Tutsi women, RPF members, a neighbouring and ally country involved in the Rwanda Genocide.
From 1994 up to 1998, most of Hutu survivors, women and their daughters were taken for slavery and sex abuse in Banyamurenge hills in south Kivu. Many of Hutu women are forced to work for Tutsi farmers in Thee and Coffee plantations. We got witnesses who, in very difficult condtions, could escape those criminals and now are refugees here in Europe. This abominable practice is engaged in by RPF Terrorists, criminals, RPF proxy armies in congo, Tutsi pedophiles and neo-Nazis.
We urge whoever is reading my current writing to denounce the shameful and criminal practice. At the same time We urge the international community to take swift and decisive action to end impunity enjoyed by RPF leadership who continue to abuse Hutu children through the so called "genocidal ideology" without further delay.
Let us not divert responsibility. What about the Security Council Resolution 1612? Does not this resolution concern the Rwandan bloody dictatorship?
Paul Kagame and his bloody government are subjected to international treaty regimes, which include the Convention on the Rights of the Child, its protocols and core human rights covenants. Let us not fail to the Rwandan Suvivors Quest to ensure a safe and secure Rwanda for Hutu children.
© SurViVors Editions
By Musema Janvier
June 8, 2009
Hutu children are abused. they have no right to free education. They did not choose to be street children, they were forced to do so. The rare lucky children have arrived in Congo (DRC) and joined the FDLR.
As many of Rwandans know, detestable and abominable crimes have been committed before, during and after 1994.
Those crimes are STILL committed by RPF leadership and members against those young Hutu children. It's no secret that young Hutu children are sent to the Tutsi families for forcible adoptions. Some of them have been programmed to first hate and then kill their biological parents and relatives or any other Hutu citizens. Hutu girls were and are sold to Uganda by Rwandan Tutsi women, RPF members, a neighbouring and ally country involved in the Rwanda Genocide.
From 1994 up to 1998, most of Hutu survivors, women and their daughters were taken for slavery and sex abuse in Banyamurenge hills in south Kivu. Many of Hutu women are forced to work for Tutsi farmers in Thee and Coffee plantations. We got witnesses who, in very difficult condtions, could escape those criminals and now are refugees here in Europe. This abominable practice is engaged in by RPF Terrorists, criminals, RPF proxy armies in congo, Tutsi pedophiles and neo-Nazis.
We urge whoever is reading my current writing to denounce the shameful and criminal practice. At the same time We urge the international community to take swift and decisive action to end impunity enjoyed by RPF leadership who continue to abuse Hutu children through the so called "genocidal ideology" without further delay.
Let us not divert responsibility. What about the Security Council Resolution 1612? Does not this resolution concern the Rwandan bloody dictatorship?
Paul Kagame and his bloody government are subjected to international treaty regimes, which include the Convention on the Rights of the Child, its protocols and core human rights covenants. Let us not fail to the Rwandan Suvivors Quest to ensure a safe and secure Rwanda for Hutu children.
© SurViVors Editions
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, June 7, 2009
Condamnation des tueries de réfugiés Hutu rwandais par la coalition militaire APR (RDF)/FARDC dans plusieurs localités des territoires de WALIKALE et MASISI en RDC.
***
Les Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda ( FDLR ) condamnent avec énergie les crimes de guerre et les crimes graves contre l’humanité commis contre les réfugiés Hutu rwandais à l’Est de la RDC dont des viols collectifs et des massac
res aveugles de plusieurs centaines d
e réfugiés rwandais dans plusieurs localités du territoire de Walikale dont Shariyo, Maroke, Bunyarwanda, Bunyamwasa ainsi que dans plusieurs zones frontalières avec le territoire de Masisi.
Tous ces crimes abominables furent commis par les forces de la coalition formée de l’Armée Patriotique Rwandaise (APR/RDF) actuellement cachée sous la bannière du CNDP et des Forces Armées Congolaises (FARDC) qui étaient déployées dans les zones de BUSURUNGI et MIANGA spécialement entre début Avril 2009 et début
Mai 2009.
En effet, les réfugiés rwandais ont été soumis à des feux nourris à l’arme lourde entre Avril et début Mai 2009 dans l’opération baptisée KIMYA II de ladite coalition. Plusieurs centaines de réfugiés rwandais surtout des femmes et des enfants furent tués ou portés disparus. Les blessés se comptent par centaines.
Pendant cette période, un Major de la coalition du nom de Zikito, Commandant du 203ème Bataillon d’I
nfanterie spéciale, a été vu à BUSURUNGI entrain de brandir un bras entier d’une femme rwandaise réfugiée qu’il venait de tuer à la machette et de démembrer.
Dans la localité de SHARIYO dans le territoire de WALIKALE, plusieurs civils réfugiés Hutu rwandais ont été pendus dont un certain Uwihoreye Richard, d’autres ont été enterrés vi
vants après avoir été capturés par les militaires de la coalition du 203ème Bataillon.
Une équipe des FDLR arrivée à Shariyo le 1er Mai 2009 a découvert un immense charnier avec des corps de réfugiés rwandais fraîchement tués par les soldats de la coalition APR(RDF)/FARDC qui venaient de se retirer de cette localité. Aussi des milliers de préservatifs utilisés par les soldats de cette coalition dans les viols collectifs organisés contre les femmes et filles réfugiées étaient éparpillés partout sur le site qu’ils venaient d’abandonner le 29 avril 2009.
Les FDLR dénoncent le silence complice de la MONUC , de la Communauté Internationale , des Organisations qui se disent « des droits de l’homme », des médias et des autorités de la RDC sur ces massacres odieux de réfugiés rwandais.
Il est absolument scandaleux que, malgré les appels répétés des FDLR afin que des enquêtes indépendantes puissent être diligentées sur tous les crimes commis dans la région et que leurs auteurs soient traduits en justice, il n’y ait pas eu une seule réaction ni des dignitaires congolais, ni de la MONUC , ni de la Communauté Internationale (voir les communiqués des FDLR dont celui du 17 Avril 2009 faisant état du massacre de 67 réfugiés Hutu rwandais à Mianga). Au contraire, tous ces divers responsables n’ont montré que du mépris envers les réfugiés Hutu rwandais comme s?il ne coulait pas de sang rouge dans leurs veines.
Les FDLR mettent en garde la Communauté Internationale contre une possible répétition des désastres humanitaires de 1996, 1997 et 1998 qui ont emporté sous ses yeux complaisants plus d’un million de réfugiés rwandais et plus de 5 millions de Congolais.
Devant de tels crimes restés impunis commis contre les réfugiés rwandais sans défense et devant le mépris et le silence de ceux qui étaient censés les protéger, les FDLR répètent qu’elles défendront par tous les moyens les réfugiés rwandais attaqués, les membres de leurs familles ainsi que les populations congolaises contre tous les criminels quels qu’ils soient et d’où qu’ils viennent.
Les FDLR restent attachées à la paix et sont convaincues que la guerre ne peut pas résoudre le problème politique rwandais mais que seul un dialogue franc et direct entre le régime de Kigali et son opposition peut conduire à une solution définitive de la crise des Grands Lacs Africains.
Les FDLR appellent encore une fois l’Union Africaine en collaboration avec le Conseil de Sécurité de l’ONU et de l’Union Européenne d’initier un processus de dialogue sans exclusive de tous les acteurs de la crise dans la Région des Grands Lacs Africains.
Fait à Paris le 25 Mai 2009
Callixte Mbarushimana
Secrétaire Exécutif des FDLR
(Sé)
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
***
Les Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda ( FDLR ) condamnent avec énergie les crimes de guerre et les crimes graves contre l’humanité commis contre les réfugiés Hutu rwandais à l’Est de la RDC dont des viols collectifs et des massac
res aveugles de plusieurs centaines d
e réfugiés rwandais dans plusieurs localités du territoire de Walikale dont Shariyo, Maroke, Bunyarwanda, Bunyamwasa ainsi que dans plusieurs zones frontalières avec le territoire de Masisi.Tous ces crimes abominables furent commis par les forces de la coalition formée de l’Armée Patriotique Rwandaise (APR/RDF) actuellement cachée sous la bannière du CNDP et des Forces Armées Congolaises (FARDC) qui étaient déployées dans les zones de BUSURUNGI et MIANGA spécialement entre début Avril 2009 et début
Mai 2009.En effet, les réfugiés rwandais ont été soumis à des feux nourris à l’arme lourde entre Avril et début Mai 2009 dans l’opération baptisée KIMYA II de ladite coalition. Plusieurs centaines de réfugiés rwandais surtout des femmes et des enfants furent tués ou portés disparus. Les blessés se comptent par centaines.
Pendant cette période, un Major de la coalition du nom de Zikito, Commandant du 203ème Bataillon d’I
nfanterie spéciale, a été vu à BUSURUNGI entrain de brandir un bras entier d’une femme rwandaise réfugiée qu’il venait de tuer à la machette et de démembrer.Dans la localité de SHARIYO dans le territoire de WALIKALE, plusieurs civils réfugiés Hutu rwandais ont été pendus dont un certain Uwihoreye Richard, d’autres ont été enterrés vi
vants après avoir été capturés par les militaires de la coalition du 203ème Bataillon.Une équipe des FDLR arrivée à Shariyo le 1er Mai 2009 a découvert un immense charnier avec des corps de réfugiés rwandais fraîchement tués par les soldats de la coalition APR(RDF)/FARDC qui venaient de se retirer de cette localité. Aussi des milliers de préservatifs utilisés par les soldats de cette coalition dans les viols collectifs organisés contre les femmes et filles réfugiées étaient éparpillés partout sur le site qu’ils venaient d’abandonner le 29 avril 2009.
Les FDLR dénoncent le silence complice de la MONUC , de la Communauté Internationale , des Organisations qui se disent « des droits de l’homme », des médias et des autorités de la RDC sur ces massacres odieux de réfugiés rwandais.
Il est absolument scandaleux que, malgré les appels répétés des FDLR afin que des enquêtes indépendantes puissent être diligentées sur tous les crimes commis dans la région et que leurs auteurs soient traduits en justice, il n’y ait pas eu une seule réaction ni des dignitaires congolais, ni de la MONUC , ni de la Communauté Internationale (voir les communiqués des FDLR dont celui du 17 Avril 2009 faisant état du massacre de 67 réfugiés Hutu rwandais à Mianga). Au contraire, tous ces divers responsables n’ont montré que du mépris envers les réfugiés Hutu rwandais comme s?il ne coulait pas de sang rouge dans leurs veines.
Les FDLR mettent en garde la Communauté Internationale contre une possible répétition des désastres humanitaires de 1996, 1997 et 1998 qui ont emporté sous ses yeux complaisants plus d’un million de réfugiés rwandais et plus de 5 millions de Congolais.
Devant de tels crimes restés impunis commis contre les réfugiés rwandais sans défense et devant le mépris et le silence de ceux qui étaient censés les protéger, les FDLR répètent qu’elles défendront par tous les moyens les réfugiés rwandais attaqués, les membres de leurs familles ainsi que les populations congolaises contre tous les criminels quels qu’ils soient et d’où qu’ils viennent.
Les FDLR restent attachées à la paix et sont convaincues que la guerre ne peut pas résoudre le problème politique rwandais mais que seul un dialogue franc et direct entre le régime de Kigali et son opposition peut conduire à une solution définitive de la crise des Grands Lacs Africains.
Les FDLR appellent encore une fois l’Union Africaine en collaboration avec le Conseil de Sécurité de l’ONU et de l’Union Européenne d’initier un processus de dialogue sans exclusive de tous les acteurs de la crise dans la Région des Grands Lacs Africains.
Fait à Paris le 25 Mai 2009
Callixte Mbarushimana
Secrétaire Exécutif des FDLR
(Sé)
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.