A Candle For Remembering
May this memorial candle lights up the historical past of our beloved Country: Rwanda, We love U so much. If Tears could build a stairway. And memories were a lane. I would walk right up to heaven. To bring you home again. No farewell words were spoken. No time to say goodbye. You were gone before I knew it And. Only Paul Kagame knows why. My heart still aches with sadness. And secret tears still flow. What It meant to lose you. No one will ever know.
Why did Kagame this to me?
Can't forget. He murdered my mother. What should be my reaction? FYI: the number of orphans in Rwanda has skyrocketed since the 1990's Kagame's invasion. Much higher numbers of orphans had and have no other option but joining FDLR fighters who are identified as children that have Lost their Parents in Kagame's Wars inside and outside of Rwanda.If someone killed your child/spouse/parent(s) would you seek justice or revenge? Deep insight: What would you do to the person who snuffed the life of someone I love beyond reason? Forgiving would bring me no solace. If you take what really matters to me, I will show you what really matters. NITUTIRWANAHO TUZASHIRA. IGIHE KIRAGEZE.If democracy is to sell one's motherland(Africa), for some zionits support, then I prefer the person who is ready to give all his live for his motherland. Viva President Putin!!!
RPF committed the unspeakable
The perverted RPF committed the UNSPEAKABLE.Two orphans, both against the Nazi world. Point is the fact that their parents' murder Kagame & his RPF held no shock in the Western world. Up to now, the Rwandan Hitler Kagame and his death squads still enjoy impunity inside and outside of Rwanda. What goes through someone's mind as they know RPF murdered their parents? A delayed punishment is actually an encouragement to crime, In Praise of the ongoing Bloodshed in Rwanda. “I always think I am a pro-peace person but if someone harmed someone near and dear to me, I don't think I could be so peaceful. I would like to believe that to seek justice could save millions of people living the African Great Lakes Region - I would devote myself to bringing the 'perp' along to a non-happy ending but would that be enough? You'd have to be in the situation I suppose before you could actually know how you would feel or what you would do”. Jean-Christophe Nizeyimana, Libre Penseur
Hutu Children & their Mums
Look at them ! How they are scared to death. Many Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi, Foreign human rights advocates, jounalists and and lawyers are now on Death Row Waiting to be murdered by Kagame and his RPF death squads. Be the last to know.
Almighty God :Justice for US
Hutu children's daily bread: Intimidation, Slavery, Sex abuses led by RPF criminals and Kagame, DMI: Every single day, there are more assassinations, imprisonment, brainwashing & disappearances. Do they have any chance to end this awful life?
Killing Hutus on daily basis
RPF targeted killings, very often in public areas. Killing Hutus on daily basis by Kagame's murderers and the RPF infamous death squads known as the "UNKNOWN WRONGDOERS"
RPF Trade Mark: Akandoya
Rape, torture and assassination and unslaving of hutu women. Genderside: Rape has always been used by kagame's RPF as a Weapon of War, the killings of Hutu women with the help of Local Defense Forces, DMI and the RPF military
The Torture in Rwanda flourishes
How torture flourishes across Rwanda despite extensive global monitoring
Fighting For Our Freedom?
We need Freedom, Liberation of our fatherland, Human rights respect, Mutual respect between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority
Monday, September 27, 2010
So long as justice and accountability for RPF past and current crimes are ignored and delayed, Peace and Stability will remain illusive and impossible in Rwanda=>ASIF]
Mr. President,
As Commander-in-Chief of all armed forces, Head of State-sworn in to protect the Rwandan constitution, state institutions and Rwandan people, we urgently call upon you to use all your powers and accord immediate justice to many suffering Rwandans in prisons and outside prisons, and also help diffuse the growing political and military tension in the country.
Mr. President, you are very much aware of all the sad events that happened to the Rwandan Opposition Parties before the presidential elections of August 2010, these sad events cannot just be wished away, they need to be addressed thoroughly, so that the nation can move ahead as a whole.
The Democratic Green Party of Rwanda, would like to re-affirm its position that we strive for a fully democratic society in Rwanda: free of injustice, free of poverty, free of sending its sons and daughters into political exile, free from impunity, having a vibrant independent media and independent state institutions, working on the principle of sustainable development and rule of Law.
We would also like to request for your attention and provide immediate justice on the following cases:
1. Urgent Investigations into the Assassination of Green Party Vice President, Andre KAGWA RWISEREKA.
Mr. President, you are very much aware that our Vice President went missing on 13th July 2010 and the next day was found decapitated in Butare-Rwanda.
The police arrested one Thomas Ntivuguruzwa a few days later and assumed it was a business dispute, we ruled out that assumption, actually we found that version completely misleading, a few days later we heard that the above mentioned person was released from Police custody.
Our misery now is that ever since that release, we got a feeling that the investigators have adopted a posture of irresponsible passivity in the matter as we have never received any more information about these investigations.
This is why we are appealing to you Mr. President to use all your powers and quicken these investigations, so that justice can be accorded and the criminals be brought to court and be punished. Then we can start having hope that such a thing will never happen again in modern Rwanda.
Mr. President, we are very committed to a peaceful democratization process of our country, but in such circumstances where a political leader is assassinated and justice is delayed, it increases political tensions Mr. President, as much as you promised Rwandans to sleep and not be bothered with insecurity threats, it is very hard for us to sleep and relax when we know that the killers of our Vice President are still out there at large waiting for the next prey to devour. Yet we know that if all security organs joined hands and started hunting down these criminals, they would not fail to arrest them and handle them over to relevant authorities, like they have done before in other cases.
2. Senior Military Officials in Detention need Immediate Justice.
Mr. President, the Rwanda Defense Forces Spokesman, confirmed the arrest of General Karenzi Karake and General Charles Muhire, in April 2010 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8632986.stm). Several months have
B.P. 6334 KIGALI-RWANDA
Tel : + 250 788 563 039, E-mail : info@rwandagreendemocrats.org
Website : www.rwandagreendemocrats.org passed and these two senior Rwandan citizens have not seen justice. We understand that the Military has its own way of doing things, but we are very concerned that they have not even appeared in any court of law and are possibly not held up in official detention facilities.
Recently, we have also heard the case of Lt.Colonel RUGIGANA, whose parents have failed to trace his whereabouts in all official military detention facilities. He has also not appeared in any court of law for over a month now and some Rwandans are very concerned whether this will be the trend of events in your Second Term of Office as President of Rwanda. The Military Spokesperson has confirmed his arrest.
There is also a pending case of a Congolese national, Gen. Laurent NKUNDA, who was arrested in Rwanda on 22nd January 2009, (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7846339.stm), since then he has never appeared in court, his family has expressed serious concerns, your intervention is called for.
In the course of the last few months at the time of the grenade attacks, some people have been arrested and confessed to the Rwandan Police not only to have been responsible but also to have belonged to FDLR- Rebel force based in Congo. However, they have never appeared in court, though later the case of grenades became wider, it now seems to become a new culture for people to be delayed to appear in courts. Who knows, may be they could be innocent or guilty but that is the work of judiciary.
The Constitution of the Republic of Rwanda, which you vowed to protect a few weeks ago,
(http://www.afriqueavenir.org/en/2010/09/06/paul-kagame-sworn-in-for-second-term-as-rwandan-president/) gives these military men and all Rwandans a right to appear in court, we are hopeful that you will take this matter with utmost urgency and importance, as you always do Mr. President, since you are the Commander- in -Chief of all Armed Forces.
3. Opposition Parties Need Immediate Justice
Mr. President, Opposition Parties to your ruling party-RPF, namely: the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda, Parti Sociale Imberakuri (PS Imberakuri) and the United Democratic Forces (FDU Inkingi) have all faced very challenging circumstances beyond any human measure.
- The first opposition party, PS-imberakuri got registered in July 2009 after a long period of serious challenges; it is now divided into two factions and its founding President Maître Bernard NTAGANDA is in prison since 24th June 2010 in all probability on politically motivated charges.
Several PS Imberakuri members are also in prison, they all need justice.
- Mr. President, the Second opposition Party that was born last year is the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda, which was launched officially on 14th August 2009, we have faced so many challenges, we were beaten-up, our people arrested, denied legal papers to have a founding congress and of recent our Vice President was assassinated-in such an alarming manner, we need fair justice and fair standards.
- Our coordinator for Kigali City, Ms.Seraphine MUKAMANA is suffering in Kigali Maximum prison since November 2009 on trumped up charges of bribing a police officer with 40 USD which had been asked as a fine to release her husband who had been arbitrary arrested. When she appealed her prison sentence of five years after having been denied bail. The court decided to program her hearing in 2012, by that time she will have been in prison for almost three years. Indeed Justice delayed is justice denied. We appeal to you Mr. President to intervene. She is a mother of four and was the main bread earner of the family, her children risk to become street kids.
- Mr. President, during your first media interview after the August Presidential elections, which is also available on (http://www.newtimes.co.rw/index.php?issue=14350&article=32443), you said that we failed to get the 200 signatures and did not follow the procedure to register the party. This was not the case, in our last congress of 30th October 2009 at St.Paul, we had over 1500 delegates and the one of 2nd October 2009 at CANA Conference hall, we had 900 delegates, all much above what the Law requires. We never failed to get the 200 signatures; we fulfilled all the legal requirements but were blocked by different government officials, using different unfair mechanisms.
Mr. President,
we are pleased to inform you that we never fought amongst ourselves, but we were beaten and the names of the people who attacked us were given to police but they have never been arrested.
- Mr. President, you need to personally intervene in this situation, because you had promised on CNN’s Christiane Amanipour’s program on 17th March 2010
(http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/17/rwandan-president-rejects-human-rights-criticism/), that you will let us participate in the elections if we fulfilled all the legal requirements, but this never appened. We never missed out on any legal requirement; actually it’s the District of Gasabo that finally refused to respond to our last quest to have the Congress on 4rd June 2010, details about our registration struggle can be found here (http://rwandagreendemocrats.org/spip.php?article98).
- The Third opposition Party is United Democratic Forces –FDU Inkingi, it was functioning from exile (Netherlands) and in January 2010, its Leader Ms. Victoire INGABIRE decided to come back home and register it as a party under Rwandan Law, so that she could be able to stand in the Presidential elections.
- She has faced a lot of challenges. You are very familiar with her case, but she needs justice, she has been under extended house arrest since April 2010. FDU Inkingi has also tried several times to get registered but faced several stumbling blocks, many of its members are suffering in prison and they need justice.
In Conclusion, all the three opposition parties were not allowed to participate in the August 2010 presidential
elections, Mr. President, this is not something your party can just wish away. These are very serious concerns that you need to address as a Head of State, so that the country can be on the right track towards sustainable peace and development.
There cannot be sustainable economic development without democracy; Rwanda should not be a sample of economic development versus democracy.
Democracy and human rights are not niceties as you said Mr. President on 29th May 2010, in the UK’s Independent Newspaper (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/rwanda-is-not-ready-for-the-medicineof-democracy-says-kagame-1986210.html).
In the same Interview you also said that Rwanda is not ready for the medicine of democracy. We Rwandans are ready for democracy and we need it now. It is part and partial of our sustainable future. Without democracy the future of our country is at risk. It is the medicine we need to heal all our sickness and other problems. You have a role to play.
We would like to once again appeal to you, Mr. President to release all political prisoners, independent journalists especially Ms.Agnes Nkusi Uwimana and Ms.Saidat MUKAKIBIBI, Editors of Umurabyo Newspaper, lift a ban on the Independent media and allow Newspapers critical of Government to work.
All the Opposition Parties have expressed a desire to have an open and honest dialogue with you Mr. President and your ruling RPF and iron out serious issues of national importance. It is your call.
Issued on 27th September 2010
Frank HABINEZA
Founding President
Democratic Green Party of Rwanda
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For immediate contact:
Phone: +46737588927
Email: fhabineza@africangreens.org
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, September 24, 2010
Rwandanet Forum
Tough analysis in "J'accuse"
Thursday, September 23, 2010
(Novum/AP) - Spanje heeft om uitlevering gevraagd van de voormalige Rwandese generaal Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa voor genocide en de moord op drie Spaanse hulpverleners. Dat hebben de autoriteiten woensdag bekendgemaakt.
Het Spaanse kabinet kondigde vrijdag aan om de uitlevering van Nyamwasa te zullen vragen. Een Spaanse rechter veroordeelde hem en 39 andere leden van het Rwandese leger in 2008 voor massamoord nadat ze in Rwanda aan de macht kwamen en de Hutu's verdreven die in 1994 meer dan vijfhonderdduizend Tutsi's en gematigde Hutu's vermoordden. Nyamwasa en andere hooggeplaatste Tutsi's worden beschuldigd van het voeren van een uitroeiingscampagne tegen Hutu's.
Spaanse rechtbanken kunnen schenders van mensenrechten vervolgen, ook als die misdrijven in een ander land gepleegd zijn. Er dient wel een link met Spanje te zijn. De drie Spaanse hulpverleners werden in 1997 vermoord.
© Trouw
Spain asks SAfrica to extradite ex-Rwanda general
JOHANNESBURG – Spain is seeking the extradition of a former Rwandan general on genocide charges but Rwanda said Wednesday it should have priority in prosecuting him.
Gen. Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa has been in South Africa since reportedly falling out with Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Nyamwasa's wife says Kagame was behind the shooting of her husband in Johannesburg in June that left him hospitalized with a bullet wound in the stomach. Rwanda's government denies involvement.
State prosecutor Malose Samuel Monene said there was a second plot to kill Nyamwasa while he was in the hospital. A total of 10 suspects have been arrested in the shooting and the second alleged plot. One of the suspects planned to strangle Nyamwasa with string in the hospital but the attack was never carried out, The Star newspaper reported.
A magistrate on Wednesday suspended a bail hearing until Oct. 7 for Pascal Kanyandekwe, a Rwandan who is the sole suspect charged both with the shooting of Nyamwasa and the conspiracy to kill him in the hospital.
A Spanish judge in 2008 charged Nyamwasa and 39 other members of the Rwandan military with the mass killings of civilians after they seized power in Rwanda and pushed out Hutus who in 1994 killed more than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a genocide.
Nyamwasa and other senior Tutsis are accused of waging a subsequent extermination campaign against Hutus.
Spanish courts can prosecute human rights crimes even if they are alleged to have occurred in other countries so long as there is a clear link to Spain. Three Spanish aid workers were killed East Africa in 1997 — homicides for which Nyamwasa has also been charged in Spain.
Rwanda has accused Nyamwasa of trying to destabilize Kagame's government and asked South Africa to send the general home on charges linked to grenade attacks in Rwanda's capital earlier this year.
Rwanda's Foreign Affairs Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said in an interview with the Associated Press Wednesday on the sidelines of a U.N. anti-poverty summit in New York that the country was hopeful South Africa would complete its investigation and respond soon to the government's request to return Nyamwasa.
She again vehemently rejected allegations that the Rwandan government assassinated Nyamwasa.
"We cannot want General Nyamwasa to be extradited and to want him dead," Mushikiwabo stressed, "so we definitely are not the kind of government that engages in assassination.
"We want him to answer to the justice system, and also as a Rwandese citizen to have his day in court," she said.
Associated Press Writer Edith M. Lederer contributed to this report from the United Nations.
© Associated Press -AP
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, September 19, 2010
September 17, 2010
By Juan CarreroTaylor-Report.com
Juan Carrero
A long-standing code of silence inside the U.N. is coming to an end regarding what is probably the largest genocide ever since the U.N. founding: the genocide committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front since 1990impunity in Rwanda, a discussion with distinguished human rights champions Peter Erlinder, Juan Carrero Sarlegui and Spanish Sen. Pere Sampol, will be held Monday, Sept. 20, 6:30-9 p.m., at Global Information Network, 146 W. 29th St., Suite 7E, New York City – join them!
by Juan Carrero
Paul Kagame’s RPF, in what James Traub describes in Foreign Policy as a “typical episode,” “kidnapped refugees, many of them women and children, and brought them to a camp, allegedly under the pretext of returning them to Rwanda. The refugees were then brought out in small groups. From the report: ‘They were bound and their throats were cut or they were killed by hammer blows to the head. Their bodies were then thrown into pits or doused with petrol and burned. The operation was carried out in a methodical manner and lasted at least one month.’”
The victims were “mostly children, women, the elderly and the sick.” The investigation looks at the crimes perpetrated in Zaire/Congo throughout the decade 1993-2003. Rwanda is not the only country incriminated. But, according to Le Monde’s Jean-Philippe Rémy, the RPF’s systematic extermination of Rwandan Hutu refugees and other Congolese Hutu – either by violent force or by systematically blocking food supplies sent especially to them – could be considered “the crux of the report.” At any rate, it is clear this extensive report is “devastating, especially for Rwanda,” as Christophe Châtelot, in turn, points out in the excellent cover article.
Nevertheless, both articles end by reaching the same major erroneous conclusion stated by most of the press articles that have appeared since the report was leaked: the need, they say, to establish a tribunal with jurisdictional authority over these crimes. Not only does such a court already exist but, on Feb. 6, 2008, it already issued arrest warrants against 40 RPF top officials who are allegedly responsible for the crimes in Congo referred to in the new U.N. report.
An elderly Rwandan woman in a refugee camp in Congo in 1997 was one of countless victims of Rwandan forces making repeated forays into United Nations-administered camps that, according to the New York Times, housed roughly a million Hutu who had fled the genocide in Rwanda. – Photo: Roger Lemoyne via Getty Images
In my opinion, there are various other errors in Jean-Philippe Rémy’s article. Rémy is much too quick to endorse some interpretations of the motives behind the crimes that hardly match the facts and are at this point almost untenable today. The most outrageous interpretation states that “the Rwandan intervention sought to prevent the refugees from coming together and, led by the ‘genocidaires,’ rising in revolt to attack Rwanda from their refugee camps at the other side of the border, in the former Zaire. The approach was to empty the entire region. Part of the refugees will return to Rwanda, another will be killed at the camps, others will flee across Zaire where they will be hunted down.”
- controlling the mineral fields in eastern Zaire, exactly where the “annoying” refugee camps were located; putting an end to the presence and diverting the attention of the international community related to those fields, which could derail the plans these criminals and their powerful allies had in Zaire;
- “correcting” as far as possible the demographic imbalance between Hutu and Tutsi which the RPF viewed as excessive, while at the same time averting a big international scandal under the guise of “hunting down the genocidaires”;
- having a submissive and controlled Hutu population, devoid of intellectuals or leaders, repopulate some of the regions in Rwanda that the RPF “operations” had left so deserted that they could potentially become a permanent black mark for the RPF that the international community would readily decry.
But the report, whose recent leak has spurred widespread international coverage, could be the beginning of the end for Paul Kagame, who at the time was already head of the RPF and is now also president of Rwanda. True, up to now, it has only been a leak.
But the facts of the report are now in the public domain, above and beyond the sequel of pressures, blackmails and deals about to take place from now on, hushed and behind the scenes of the high political and economic circles of our times, primarily with the purpose of eliminating the word “genocide” from the text. Indeed, at long last more and more analyses are appearing about this situation which some of us had already been analyzing 14 years ago as the incidents themselves were occurring.
Already as early as October 1996 and more pointedly from February 1997 onwards, we condemned the massive massacres of Rwandan and Congolese Hutu being carried out in true genocidal manner, the cremation of tens of thousands of bodies, the extermination through starvation etc. Our documents were signed by some 20 Nobel laureates, as well as by heads of the political groups of the European Parliament.
How could our world leaders not possibly have known of crimes on such scale? How could Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs not have known either?
We ourselves had those documents handed to Bill Clinton and others truly and ultimately responsible for this genocide. In addition to the diplomatic channels, Elie Wiesel, survivor of the Nazi extermination camps and Nobel Peace laureate, promised our colleague Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Nobel Peace laureate as well, to personally hand them to Bill Clinton in the meeting he was to have with the president shortly thereafter.
On the other hand, on Feb. 24, 1997, after my 42-day fast at the European Parliament in Brussels, I personally handed these documents to Abel Matutes1, native of Ibiza, who was Spain’s minister of foreign affairs at the time. Inocencio Arias, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was with him at that meeting. I, in turn, was accompanied by Mercé Amer, Socialist regional/autonomic secretary of Mallorca.
Spanish state television TVE vetoed the news of this meeting, where documents of such serious nature and signed by such prominent people were being presented to the minister. The Brussels correspondent of TVE came over to me and told me how badly she personally felt: She had been following our fast and admired what we were doing together with Commissioner Emma Bonino, but she added that the news had unfortunately been vetoed and that, much to her regret, she wouldn’t be able to film.2
As it was, heightened tension reigned at the meeting due to the assassination of three Spanish volunteers of Médicos del Mundo merely a few days before. We now know that the RPF perpetrated this crime, even though the strong propaganda machine of the international godfathers of this criminal organization had managed within hours to get the world media to attribute this triple murder to extremist Hutu once again.
Indeed, it’s so true that the U.N. report doesn’t make any major revelations that even now, after its leak, I will hardly be making any changes in the second edition of my book, “África, la madre ultrajada” (“Africa, The Violated Mother”). The news is not the fact that the RPF perpetrated a genocide on such a large scale.3
In this genocide, the count of ethnic Hutu, both Rwandan and Congolese, violently eliminated by the RPF since 1990 should be estimated at hundreds of thousands at least. The scale of this genocide is even much larger if we consider the millions of victims, not only Hutu but also from other Bantu ethnic groups in Congo – or simply “not Hima-Tutsi,” as the racist RPF elite calls them.
They died not only through violent force but primarily due to starvation and other reasons related to the aggressions inflicted on Zaire/Congo by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi in their genocidal attempt to establish in that region an empire controlled by Hima-Tutsi clans.
The High Commissioner for Human Rights has merely investigated the tip of the iceberg of this genocide, since it has looked at merely 600 violent incidents only in Congo and only from 1993 to 2003. It is a genocide in which already as early as 1997 – that is, one year before the second and deadliest invasion – the report of the U.N. team headed by the Chilean Roberto Garretón documented the investigation of around 40 locations in Congo and put the death count at up to 100,000.
A hint of the scale of this genocide can be found in a report by the International Rescue Committee which estimates 5.4 million victims in Congo until 1997 – in excess of the normal mortality figures – due to causes related to the aggressions staged there.
That’s not the news. The real news is something else: namely, that in a move that breaks the code of silence that has reigned within the U.N. for too many years, the High Commissioner for Human Rights reveals that the U.N. Security Council and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan before him – the same parties who less than a year ago accused some of us of financing the genocidaires – have actually spent more than a decade covering up the continuous genocide carried out by the RPF from Oct. 1, 1990, until today, which probably constitutes the largest one since the U.N. was founded!
Jean-Philippe Rémy’s article cited above is entitled, precisely, “A Long Set of Obstacles to Justice and Truth.” As Glen Ford well said in the analysis he wrote shortly after the leak of the report, “Rwandan Crisis Could Expose U.S. Role in Congo Genocide,”4 we are facing “a political crisis that threatens to disrupt Washington’s plans to dominate the continent.
“At stake is not only the reputation of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, an alumnus of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, but the larger American strategy for militarization of Africa and exploitation of her riches. …
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton visits Rwandan President Paul Kagame on Kagame’s farm in Muhazi.
“Carnage on such a scale could not have occurred were it not for the connivance of the United States, which has nurtured Kagame at every juncture. …
“The leaked U.N. report cannot be put back in the bottle. Kagame, who labels all critics ‘genocidaires’ or apologists for genocide, is exposed as ‘the greatest mass killer on the face of the earth, today,’ as described by Edward S. Herman, co-author of ‘The Politics of Genocide.’ Kagame’s mentors and funders in the U.S. government, who aided and abetted his genocide in Congo, must be held equally accountable – if not more so, since United States corporations derive the greatest benefit from Congo’s blood minerals, and the U.S. military gains the most advantage from Rwandan and Ugandan services as mercenaries at America’s beck and call in Africa.”
The Rwandan government has reacted by making virulent threats, and the High Commissioner has postponed the report’s release until Oct. 1. The following weeks will be marked by a fierce struggle to delete the word “genocide” from the report, since this classification would require the immediate intervention of the international community.
The U.S. government must be held equally accountable if not more so, since United States corporations derive the greatest benefit from Congo’s blood minerals, and the U.S. military gains the most advantage from Rwandan and Ugandan services as mercenaries at America’s beck and call in Africa. – Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report
Nevertheless, something new is happening in this great conflict as a significant movement of pieces appears to be taking place on the board. Another fact also evidences this: The important Gersony report5, up until recently eerily unavailable, suddenly surfaced this past Sept. 7. It is another honest report, done as early as 1994, but in this case by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
The report has remained suppressed since then and high-ranked U.N. officials even denied it had ever existed. It documents the systematic ethnic cleansing of Hutu, genocidal in nature, carried out by the RPF in the Rwandan interior6 during 1994.
The investigative team led by Gersony examined the assassination of some 30,000 Hutu by the RPF, but only looked at crimes perpetrated during a two-month period and in merely three prefectures. However, similar to the recent report by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, “[T]he massacres condemned in the Gersony report represented only the visible tip of a monumental iceberg consisting of hundreds of thousands of victims butchered by RPF troops since October 1, 1990 in the areas occupied by the military.”
Rwandan refugees massacred in a camp in DR Congo.
– Photo: http://survivorsnetoworks.blogspot.com/
Former Rwandan Foreign Minister Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana makes this statement in his excellent book recently published, “Paul Kagame a sacrifié les tutsi”7 (“Paul Kagame has sacrificed the Tutsi”). Upon receiving a photocopy of the Gersony report, I asked him to confirm its authenticity, which he did, although he added that an annex is missing.
Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana, of mixed Hutu-Tutsi descent, had testified in the lawsuit we filed at the Spanish National Court and is now the person responsible in France for the Intra-Rwandan Dialogue we have been sponsoring since 2004. This extraordinary Rwandan witnessed first hand the wheeling and dealing behind the suppression of the compromising report.
The entire horse-trading took place in the U.S. Department of State in early October 1994 between Hutu Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu from the RPF – albeit always under the watchful eye of “consultant” Charles Muligande – and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs George Moose. Pasteur Bizimungu had actually gone to argue that “a ‘post- genocide’ was going on, while at the same time, the RPF military was getting away with massacring entire groups of people without the international community expressing any disapproval.”
Seeing George Moose’s excessively understanding reaction to the Rwandan president’s case, Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana inferred what was going to happen with the Gersony report, as it indeed turned out: That meeting “sealed the fate of the Gersony report once and for all.”
Vianney Ndagijimana resigned from his post as minister a few weeks later “in order not to be an accomplice of the ethnic cleansing practises” and went into exile “to bear witness of this silent genocide, as disgraceful and reprehensible as the Tutsi genocide, and to publicly condemn it worldwide.”
Others didn’t act with such ethics and integrity: Kofi Annan, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping at the time; Shahryar Khan, U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative to Rwanda; Timothy Wirth, Undersecretary for Global Affairs, including matters of human rights; Brian Atwood, director for Africa of USAID, which had financed the investigation aimed at determining whether the interior of Rwanda was equipped for the return of Hutu refugees.
“Kagame’s army and allied militias knowingly committed wholesale killings of Hutus, often ‘mostly children, women, old and ill people.’ Indeed, the (leaked U.N.) report goes on to say that some of the attacks could have amounted to a genocide,” according to The Economist.
Prior to the meeting of the Rwandan president with the assistant secretary of state, all individuals cited above had met several times with Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana, on one occasion with Robert Gersony present. The former minister described that some of them had spoken very harshly to the Rwandan president. But the fact is that the Gersony report was suppressed and none of the people mentioned above ever condemned the terrible ethnic cleansing that had taken place nor the cover-up of such an important piece of evidence.
Kofi Annan showed the report to Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana and even let him read it but refused to give him a copy. Thus, already back then the future U.N. Secretary-General knew very well that the theory of a double genocide was not wrong. And it is certainly far from being a form of negationism and hence a crime, as Ramón Lobo has dared state in the Spanish daily El País.
Good heavens! – daring to label as criminals Judge Fernando Andreu, who accuses Kagame and 40 top officials from the RPF of committing crimes of genocide, and now High Commissioner Navi Pillay, who signs the recent U.N. report!
Yet this journalist is not alone. Many are the know-it-all analysts, who have no qualms writing about any matter of the moment, even about conflicts as serious and complex as this one – or who, rather, have only listened to the powerful rhetoric of the Manichean official doctrine that resolutely maintains that the story of the genocide is one of genocidaires on the one side and noble liberators on the other.
On the contrary, Kofi Annan and current Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon know that the accusations made by Judge Fernando Andreu Merelles are well-founded: “crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes against individuals and property protected in the event of armed conflict, membership in a terrorist organization, terrorist acts, pillage of natural resources and the assassination of nine Spanish nationals.”
As we suspected and made public at the time, Ban Ki-moon’s efforts to bill genocidaire Paul Kagame as the superhero of the struggle against hunger and other evils plaguing our world have possibly infuriated and mobilized the group of people with integrity still to be found at that big organization which is the U.N. Let’s just hope that Navi Pillay doesn’t end up sacked for the same reasons for which others were ousted in former times: U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali, ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) prosecutor Carla del Ponte, among many others.
Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana spent years wondering why the secretary-general had decided to embargo the Gersony report. In a meeting at the headquarters of the Tribunal of The Hague in November 2002, Carla del Ponte confirmed to him what he had been suspecting all along. The former minister writes in his book:
“[W]ithout avoiding [the subject], she acknowledged that this report was under the jurisdiction of the ICTR and that it should have ordinarily been included in the dossier of crimes perpetrated in Rwanda in 1994 by one of the warring parties. Unfortunately, she added, all efforts to obtain the Gersony report as well as various other U.N. reports providing evidence of the crimes committed by the RPF had proved to no avail up until then. She continued: ‘I sent an official request to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms Ogata,8 asking her for that report, but I ran into a wall. …
“Carla del Ponte admitted that, in despair, she also requested that Robert Gersony be heard by the ICTR prosecutor – again to no avail. Once again the U.S. government expressed its opposition, ruling it inadmissible! As we can see, Paul Kagame enjoys the protection of one or more of the superpowers which have a veto right [in the U.N. Security Council] and are able to dictate its agenda at the heart of the U.N. organizations. You don’t need to be a wizard to know that the Clinton administration, surely embarrassed and ridden with guilt for having opposed the deployment of U.N. troops to stop the genocide, has preferred focusing on the bottom line of the massacres of hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutu civilians.”9
A boy in Rwanda passes election posters a few days before the presidential election on Aug. 9, 2010. “Rwandan President Paul Kagame was reelected with 93 percent of the vote in the country’s elections earlier this month, but there were widespread reports that journalists and opposition politicians had been imprisoned or killed. Now a leaked U.N. report suggests that Rwandan troops may have committed war crimes and massacred tens of thousands of people in the late 1990s,” reported Newsweek on Aug. 27, the day the report was leaked. – Photo: Marc Hofer, AP
Let’s hope that the time has come; let us hope that those who pull the strings realize that sustaining this sham, this disgraceful impunity, is untenable at this point. We firmly believe that those of us outside the U.N. should help enable those upright individuals within the organization to keep it from serving the interests of the Trilateral Commission10 and of other powerful and elitist groups instead of serving the interests of peoples. In this respect, we share the views expressed by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mallorquinian Sen. Pere Sampol, who was vice-president of the government of the Balearic Islands and knows well the mazes of political intrigue.
At any rate, what I stated in the preface of my book might begin to prove true: “When this monumental tragedy gets the coverage it deserves in the big media, it will become one of the most embarrassing chapters in the annals of the United Nations, of the entire Western world, in general, and in particular, of José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist government.”
Spain’s prime minister, however, may still be able to change fate. He just needs to continue on the path he started by not meeting with Paul Kagame in Madrid; he just needs to refuse to co-chair together with this criminal the Advocacy Group of the Millenium Development Goals. He just needs to cooperate with Spain’s Audiencia Nacional on the legal proceedings against the 40 top officials of the RPF. He just needs to meet – at long last – with the families of the nine Spanish victims.
Juan Carrera of the International Forum for the Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region, a Nobel Prize nominee, has campaigned for years against impunity there. In 1996, he walked over 600 miles to Brussels and a year later went on a 42-day hunger strike in front of the European Union Council headquarters to persuade the EU to stop the atrocities in the DR Congo. With Spanish Sen. Sampol he successfully pushed for a lawsuit in Spain against members of the Rwandan government on behalf of Spanish victims who died in Rwanda after the genocide. The lawsuit resulted in the indictments of 40 of Rwanda’s current top and former military officials for genocide crimes and other human rights abuses. He can be reached by emailing info@stopimpunityinrwanda.org.
End impunity in Rwanda
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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AS International
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.