Hot'L Rwanda Propaganda Gas Bag Bursts--Sickening Entire Planet -- by Mick Collins
Hot’L Rwanda Propaganda Gas Bag Bursts
Sickening Entire Planet
7 April 2005—Eleven years ago last night (6 April 1994 at 8:20 pm) the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, along with several members of their general staffs and the French crew of the Falcon 50 business jet handed down to the Rwandan government by the Socialist President of France, François Mitterand, were brutally assassinated when a SAM 16 missile, fired by a Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ‘rebel’ death squad known as ‘The Network’, at the command of the current Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, and under the supervision of Belgian and US special advisors, blew the plane to bits on its final approach to the only runway at Kigali’s Kayibanda airport left open by the occupying ‘rebel’ forces in their attempts to interdict the resupplying of Rwandan government forces, and dropped it right into the garden of Habyarimana’s presidential estate. This ghastly liquidation of two African (Hutu) heads of state has been deliberately fogged out for more than a decade by the Humanitarian Genocide junkies, who often refer to it as ‘an accident’ or the work of extremists Hutus within the Habyarimana government itself, so as to punch up the bloodbath it supposedly, though not necessarily (see below), unleashed: The Rwandan Genocide of 100 Days (7 April to 4 July 1994) which is supposed to have claimed the lives of 800,000 Tutsis and Moderate Hutus.
The most disgusting irony for us here at CirqueMinime, 10-year-residents of Paris, is how, in covering for the RPF ‘rebels’ and their monstrous exactions since 1 October 1990, the debut of a four-year reign of terror bent on destroying the 30 year Rwandan Revolution with a heavily armed invasion of that densely populated Central African nation from neighboring Uganda, the French public, bringing their national pastime of collaboration with Western gangsterism to new depths of craven servility, have almost proudly taken on the mantle of ‘genocidaires’, and, much as when French pilots, in the name of the Left government of Trotskyite PM Lionel ‘old train’ Jospin, bombed the grave sites of their own war heros in Yugoslavia in 1993-94 and 1999, have turned off their historical memories with regard to all their francophone brothers and sisters who were needlessly murdered by Paul Kagame and his Anglophone, US DoD-equipped and trained ‘maquisards’: the most pitiable example of the RPF’s anti-French revenge for the defeat of their October 1990 invasion being the two French communications officers, Lts Didot and Maier, who were monitoring the radio frequencies at Kayibanda on that April night in 1994, and were, the next morning, brutally murdered, along with their wives and children, by Kagame’s ‘rebels’. . . . But don’t get me started here! This is more for The General’s Book on Rwanda than for this movie review.
Last week, Terry George and United Artists finally unleashed Hot’L Rwanda onto a fully self-loathing Parisian public—and not a minute too soon. I’d been chomping to write about this film since I’d heard that its star, Don Cheadle, and his role model for the film, manager of the Hotel des Milles Collines, Paul Rusesabagina, were making the Stop The Fucking Genocide (STFG) circuit with those other noted ‘fat shithouse rats’ (FSHRs), Harvard’s Samantha Power, the NY Time’s Nicholas Kristof, Canadia’s Cowardly Lion, UN General Romeo Dallaire (quirkily portrayed under a nom de lache [Gen Oliver] by the cinematic flatliner Nick Nolte), to call attention to the dastardly government genocide de jour in Darfur. I was so overwrought with the instrumentalised fallaciousness of yet another Rwandan Genocide propaganda balloon being floated by the Human Rats lobby that I just couldn’t sit idly by while everyone with a cyber soap box—but especially the Trot Left—was putting beaucoup d’mileage on their (digital) mouths behind this first of the last great genocides of the late 20th century.
And this was a week that was fraught with interesting revelations vis à vis designer genocides:
The noted humanitarian and gun-runner Bernie Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Scruples and point man in Kosovo for the French Culture à Gaspillage, confessed in the latest installment of his on going (and on, and on, and on going) autobiography that the late Bosnian president and arm-chair mujahadeen, Alija Izedbegovic, on his death bed, had admitted to trumping and pumping up the whole Bosnian Death and Rape camp furor, as well as the much bally-hooed ‘shellings’ of the two breadlines and the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo (not to mention the whole incident at Srebrenica which Izzy cut to order [at least 5,000 slices] for Bill Clinton—Izedbegovic was the Left’s Pizza Man of massacres: he really delivered), all on the advice of the CIA, DIA and US PR agency Ruder Finn, in order to gain sympathy for his illegal secessionist government from, and to plant the notion of a Bosnia genocide firmly in, the mawkishly sentimental mind of the international community.
So all those photos of Bosnian Muslim concentration camp victims that Clinton and Blair brandished like so many imported Chinese Communist machetes (to get this image you really have to see Hot’L R—or better yet, ask Professor Chossudovsky @ GlobalResearch.com how the imported machetes tipped him that the Hutus had PLANNED the genocide of the Tutsis—I mean, why else would a country, with such dense vegetation, whose chief economic activity is the growing of tea and coffee, have a million machetes lying around if they weren’t planning a genocide, right?)—these brazen images that cudgeled the world public into a murderous hatred of the Serbs (and many of which currently adorn the unbiased walls of The unbiased Hague Tribunal’s unbiased president’s office), captured and cropped by award-winning British tele-journalist, ITN’s Penny Marshall, from inside a barbed wire enclosure at the Trnopolje displaced persons camp, to make it appear that her subjects were on the bad side of the wire, had long ago been discredited.
In fact, it was President Milosevic’s attempt to run the video of the Thomas Deichmann reportage debunking this New Holocaust by the New Serb Nazis marketing doggle that drove the network news media right back to their home offices and put The Trial of the Century back behind the Gardening Sections of the national papers. And this blackout has only grown darker with time and President Milosevic’s expanding exposure of the media lies that underpinned the Western destruction of his country.
So what has been used to cover the Western aggression against—unto the recently completed total irradication of—the state of Yugoslavia? That’s right: The charge of genocide in Bosnia against the Serbs. In fact, the same week that Dr K confessed to touching up the x-rays for his Serb extermination camp diagnosis, and demonstrating that the Historical Record has no bearing on its adjudications, The Hague Tribunal sentenced three Bosnian Serb officials of that mining company turned displaced persons camp at Trnopolje, Mr Kvocka, Mr Radic, and Mr Zigic, to twenty-five years to life for taking part in ‘a joint criminal enterprise’ leading to the crime, stipulated to though never proven, of murder in the context of a genocide. Go figure, huh.
And much of this historical reversal has been written from the Old Writers Annexes of the Hollywood dream factory—turning History inside out like one of those cheap Sears panchos Zappa used to sing about—just for the sake of some Human Rights and National minority lobbies’ money. Hot’L R is just the latest in a long line of propaganda pieces developed on a multi-million dollar commission from the same Humanitarian jackals that are currently trying to turn the whole of Africa into a free trade and free-fire zone.
How much did Michael Winterbottom take to turn the first victim of the war in Bosnia from an Othodox Slav to a Roman Catholic Bosnian or Croat wedding guest in his ‘Welcome to Sarajevo’? Or to make it look like it was the Bosnian Serbs, instead of the Muslims, who were barging onto buses to forbid people (esp. children) from leaving the Bosnian capital? Or for changing the name of the little girl who is whisked off to British safety by his teabag journalist-hero from its Slavic original to a mock Muslim equivalent? The situation wasn’t dramatic enough as it was? Or was Hollywood channeling the US’s insensate support for Muslim and Croat anti-Yugoslav aggression (on the bad-faith counseling of George Soros’ International Crisis Group and Ruder Finn) to a dozing international community?
How did that coffee mug emblazoned ‘ALBANIA’ get into Jackie Brown’s cupboard in the eponymous Tarantino film?
Who got to Mamet on ‘Wag the Dog’ so’s he’d confer (a priori) victimhood on the whole sorry Albanian nation and excuse their brutal aggression against the southern Serbian province of Kosovo?
Who signed off on Billy Freidkin’s demonizing of President Milosevic and the Serbian MUP’s anti-terrorist campaign in Kosovo (here the Serb special police kill only old folks and little blonde girls while worshipping at a huge poster of the Yugoslav president) in the teaser to the Tommy Lee Jones/Benny Del Toro snooze-a-thon, ‘The Hunted’?
Anybody pull Mad Albright’s XXL coat to the fact that John Moore kiped all those satellite images of mass graves around Srebrenica she promised to share with all of us for his Gene Hackman/Owen Wilson-Abraham/Isaac fable, ‘Behind Enemy Lines’? (This film was loosely based on the experiences of US Air Force fighter/bomber pilot Scott O’Grady, who admitted he’d been briefed by military intelligence that the Bosnian Muslims had detonated the shell in the Markale marketplace to make it look like the Serbs had fired it, and thus triggered—on the eve of yet another peace deal agreed to by the Bosnian Serbs and scotched by the Muslims—the 14-day, 1994 terror bombing of Srpska that got Scotty shot down in the first place.)
Man, it doesn’t get much boguser than that—unless, maybe, it’s this Spike TV show I saw while visiting the US last XanaXmas. It went on about time-traveling NSA operatives who find themselves in Bosnia trying to rescue two downed American pilots: One of these captured death merchants, a Col Something, is of unusual interest to the US Special Forces rescuers: ‘You know, we better hook ‘em up and save Col Something, ‘cause she’s a woman. And you know how the Serbs treat women!’ Now, can you imagine that sort of thing being said about any other people?
Also this week, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, Kofi Annan’s man in Rwanda (in 1993-94, Annan was head of UN Peacekeeping Operations) and in charge of the UNAMIR troops led by Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, revealed in his new (and somewhat tardy) book, ‘Le patron de Dallaire parle’ (‘Dallaire’s Boss Speaks Out’), the full extent to which Dallaire and the UN, supposedly acting as a neutral mediation force between the two sides in what was known at the time, euphemistically, as the Rwandan civil war, acted, in fact and in deed, to undermine the UN’s mission through the surreptitious gathering (and transmitting to the RPF) of electronic intelligence from bugs in Booh-Booh’s office, and to subvert all efforts on the part of the Rwandan Habyarimana government toward peace and power sharing with the RPF ‘rebels’ within the context of the Arusha Accords. Dallaire is also described by Booh-Booh as having criminally aided and abetted the RPF ‘rebels’ in their seizure of the high-ground in Kigali (facilitating the RPF’s fully-armed encampment on the CND, the site of the Rwanda National Assembly) and the maintenance of a constant and consistent flow or arms and war materiel to the RPF ‘rebels’, against all international sanctions, and including the SAM 16 missiles used to murder the two Hutu presidents and their staffs. Thus, one now has to wonder just who the devil in the title of Dallaire’s monstrously long and cringingly self-important tome (‘Shaking Hands with the Devil’—of which Booh-Booh claims to have been unaware) actually is. I don’t know that he ever shook hands with Kagame, but Dallaire certainly claims to have had enough sleep-overs chez Paul to have shaken more’n one of Kagenstien’s lethal extremities.
So, knowing what I know about Yugoslavia and Rwanda, about the wily charms of the Bosnian Muslim, the KLA, and the You-can’t-be-too-tall,-too-thin,-too-rich-or-too-Tutsi lobbies, I wasn’t expecting much more’n I got from Hot’L Rwanda. In fact, it was pretty much a rehash of the false humanitarian drivel in Elmore Leonard’s ‘Pagan Babies,’ which was, itself, a rehash of the slick New Yorker’s Phillip Gourevich gossipy book, ‘We Wish to Inform You . . .’, or umpteen HBO features (‘Sometime in April’) and independent documentaries (‘Après) that have gobbled up all the story money for Rwanda.
I wasn’t surprised either when our Hot’L manager hero, Paul Rusesabagina, so artfully played by the hardest working man in show bidness since Sammy Jr. Davis, Don Cheadle, slaps down a horse-choking wad of cash money to pay the vile war profiteer comme Super Fly Mac Daddy, Geo RutagUnda (why they changed George’s name from RutagAnda sorta got by me, but then I’m not a lawyer.) for the commodities he needed to comfort his hotel guests, because I knew from something the real George had written that, in fact, each time he dealt with Paul of the Milles Collines, he was paid by check, checks that were, in the grand tradition of Hollywood’s creative bookkeeping, never honored. Just as the real Rusesabagina never honored his promise to testify at the trial of his old boyhood pal, and the real savior of the hotel guests, George Rutaganda.
And I knew all about the ‘Hutu Power Radio’ hate-speech trope which Terry George works way past the limits of credibility—the French make quite a big deal about Hutu hate-speech as it seems to them the cinch dominoe in this genocide game—and all the ‘Chop down the tall trees’ coded mumbo jumbo, and calling the Tutsis ‘cockroaches’ at every possible opportunity (of course, this handle was given by the ex-pat Tutsis to their own invading forces, right after the social revolution of the early 60s drove these feudalists into exile, because they always snuck back into Rwanda at night), and all the paranoid prattling about Tutsi spies everywhere (when it is on the books that by the time of the reinvasion from Uganda in February 1991, there were anywhere from 4,000 to 12,000 Tutsi RPF ‘rebel’ infiltrators throughout Rwanda). Even after President Habyarimana’s plane is shot down by the RPF ‘rebels’ (Irish Trots, please take note: no one in-country EVER suspected the plane came down because of mechanical failure or pilot error!), the ‘Hutu Army’ (as the Rwandan Armed Forces are called in this film) is not given so much as a day-pass to be paranoid about the ‘Enemy Inside Its Gates’ (a riff on the historical revisionist WWII film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, with my old pals Ed Harris, as the totally boss Hugo Boss-clad sniper, and Bob Hoskins, playing Nikki Krouschev as a cross between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd—only in Europe is this film called by its real name, ‘Stalingrad’! History à la H’wood, as in Polanski’s ‘The Pianist’, always colors the defeated Nazis more sympathetically than the victorious and liberating Red Army because the Krauts had sexier uniforms.)
But I don’t want you to think that all my STFG and FSHR mockery is meant in any way to diminish the horrors that were visited on Rwanda and Yugoslavia—or any of the other targeted nations, like Iraq or Sudan. It is just that laughs have always been my way of dealing with fear and horror and, especially, hypocrisy. Let no one think that the carnage depicted in Hot’L R was in anyway disproportionate to the slaughter that actually went down—and continues to go down today—in the paving of the great free trade super-slab from the Congo to the White Nile. Millions and millions of lives have been wantonly sacrificed to the malignant reflexes of modern waste capitalism. But the ways in which this very real and fully qualified genocide has been described to the world—its origins and its perpetrators and beneficiaries—have only served to cover up the real nature of this monstrous criminal enterprise, and allowed it to be repeated again and again.
Here’s a list of incidents taken from chapter two of The General’s Book on Rwanda which goes a small way to describe the RPF ‘rebel’ itinerary that was the real source and purpose of the bloodbath in Rwanda between 1 October 1990 and 4 July 1994. I found this in
FRONT PATRIOTIQUE RWANDAIS: VÉRITABLE AUTEUR
DES MASSACRES DES HUTUS ET DES TUTSIS DEPUIS
OCTOBRE 1990
by Cercle rwandais de réflexion
Québec
Septembre 1994
* First of October 1990, tens of thousands of civilians (mostly peasants) were massacred by the RPF ‘rebels’ in and around the Mutara region.
*19 February 1991, attacks by RPF ‘rebels’ from in and around Kinigi and Kigombe all the way to the outskirts of Ruhengeri led to the executions of more than 300 civilians and the sacking and pillaging of their homes and belongings.
*Between 23 January and 226 January 1991, the city of Ruhengeri and its surroundings were attacked and sacked by the RPF ‘rebels’. Tens of thousands of civilians were savagely massacred. More than a hundred thousand people were displaced and their homes systematically pillaged and destroyed. Many civilians were forced into combat—many of them died of cold in the mountains. At this same time, some peaceful Tutsis known as Bagogwe (from the communes of Kinigi and Nkuli) were cold-bloodedly massacred by RPF 'rebels' wearing civilian clothes or disguised as Rwandan Army personnel.
*In March 1991, the RPF 'rebels' attacked a Rwandan refugee camp in the western Tanzanian district of Karagwe (cit., Marchés tropicaux et méditerranéens of 7 June 1991). A dozen people were killed.
*May 1992, RPF 'rebel' infiltrators (again dressed as civilians or as Rwandan Army soldiers) undertook a wave of terrorist bombings, like those in the marketplace in Ruhango (17 dead, May 1, 1992) and the bus station in Kigali (6 dead, May 2, 1992).
*June 1992, the RPF 'rebels' attacked the town of Byumba and killed thousands of innocent civilians. the survivors went to fill the ranks of Rwandans 'internally displaced' by the 'civil war' which by this time numbered some 300,000. In the displaced persons camps where these hapless peasants were herded, fifty or so died every day of illness or hunger.
*At the beginning of September 1992, the RPF 'rebels' attacked Nyabwishongezi and massacred thousands of civilians. This led to the exodus of hundreds of peasants toward the displaced persons camp at Ngarama. (cit., Africa Confidentiel of Monday, October 2, 1992.)
*From the 8th to the 26th of February, 1993, in the prefectures of Byumba, Kigali, and Ruhengeri, several thousand civilians were herded into houses and massacred by the RPF 'rebels' purely and simply because they belonged to certain political parties, the MRND and CDR. These systematic massacres of civilian populations, essentially Hutus, were recorded thusly:
On the 8th of February 1993, at the secondary school in
Musanze (commune of Kigombe, Ruhengeri), 22 Hutu
students were hauled together by the RPF 'rebels' and
killed immediately by grenade.
On the 8th of February 1993, at Nyamagumba (commune
of Kigombe, Ruhengeri), 18 women and babies were
forced into a house and killed with bayonets.
On the 11th of February 1993, in the commune of
Kidaho, more than 1,500 people were forced by
RPF 'rebels' into the courtyard of the city hall and
machine gunned to death.
On the night of the 11-12th of February 1993, in the
commune of Nyarutovu (Ruhengeri), more than 500
people were herded together and massacred by the
RPF 'rebel' Army.
On the 12th of February 1993, at the Health Centre
of Gasiza (the commune of Kinigi, Ruhengeri), the
sick and those who had fled fighting elsewhere, people
of all ages, were massacred by the RPF 'rebels' using
automatic weapons.
Between the 8th and the 15th of February 1993, at the
trading post in the commune of Nyamugali (Ruhengeri),
more than180 civilians were massacred by RPF 'rebels'.
On the 17th of February 1993, in the displaced persons
camp at Rebero in the commune of Bwisige (Byumba),
300 displaced persons were murdered by RPF 'rebels'.
On the 26th of February 1993, at Rwobe in the commune
of Bwisige (Byumba), 5 people were gunned down by RPF
'rebels'.
At Kisaro in the commune of Buyoga (Byumba), a dozen
people were massacred by the 'rebels' of the RPF.
Many thousands of people were wounded by bullets and
died for lack of emergency aid. Along with these
atrocities, it should be noted that disorder, desolation,
hunger and cold struck mercilessly those who fled the
horrors of this war. 5,000 of these people were taken
to Gisoro in Uganda as hostages by the RPF 'rebels' and
their fate remains unknown.
*Another testimonial to the reign of terror carried out by the RPF in February 1993 came from Michel Lefevre in his article entitled '900,000 people suddenly uprooted: A Peace Volunteer recounts the horror of events taking place in Rwanda (OXFAM-QUÉBEC DANS LE MONDE. Montréal, Saturday 27 November 1993). He writes:
'Unfortunately, the 8th of February 1993, the
wind changed. . . . A new, massive attack by the
(Rwandan) Patriotic Front in the north of the
country forced the Rwandan and international
aid workers to flee from their camps. The
warehouses were looted. Care facilities were
destroyed. The temporary shelters were sacked.
All our work had to be reinitiated. In the space
of two weeks, the number of refugees gathered there
rose from 350,000 to 900,000. [. . .] Their homes
burned, their crops destroyed, everyone wept silently
over the death or disappearance of a parent, a child
or a friend.'
The protection of displaced persons was supposed to be assured by the Minister for Social Affairs, but, at the time, this Minister could not hide his sympathies for the RPF 'rebels' and their murderous actions, and he treated with arrogance all those many displaced persons who had escaped this programmed killing.
*April 1993: the assassination of a prominent political party leader, the MDR’s Emmanuel Gapyisi, by the network of RPF ‘rebel’ death squads, which were, at that time, according to certain Rwandan newspapers, under the command of Faustin Twagiramungu, who went on to become the Rwandan Prime Minister during the Genocide of 100 days. (cit., Africa International, June 1994)
*During the night of 17-18 November 1993, the RPF ‘rebels’ massacred the civilian residents of the demilitarized zone [in the north east of the country, this buffer region separated the RPF forces based in Mulundi and the forces of the Rwandan Army] in the communes of Kidaho, Nkumba, Nyamugali and Cycru in the prefecture of Ruhengeri. The total killed: 51 Hutus. A non-exhaustive list of these victims is given in a letter, dated 18 November 1993, to the Secretary General of the UN from the associations for the defense of human rights, ARDEVI-TABARA and MISERICORDIA. Before their deaths, these victims were subjected to all manner of torture and inhumane and degrading treatment.
*February 1994, RPF infiltrators assassinated the Hutu leaders Félicien Gatabazi of the PSD in Kigali, as he was returning from a meeting with Faustin Twagiramungu, and Martin Bucyana of the CDR in Butare.
*March 1994, the director of the tea factory in Cyohoha-Rukeri, his associates and a part of their families were massacred by the RPF ‘rebels’ in the zone above the DMZ controlled by the RPF. The cars that were bringing them home from work were hit by rockets fired from the RPF ‘rebel’ lines. At that very moment, a mass grave containing more than 80 bodies was uncovered in the tea planations under the control of the RPF ‘rebels’.
*In January 1994, in the sub-prefecture of Kirambo in the prefecture of Ruhengeri, the RPF ‘rebels’ massacred several dozen innocent civilians at the very moment that a peace agreement was being signed instituting a definitive cease fire.
*At the resumption of hostilities on 7 April 1994, to the north of Kigali in the commune of Mugambazi (prefecture Kigali), the RPF ‘rebels’ corralled all those who fled the fighting into the classrooms of the main schools of Shagasha and Gipfundo and, after locking them inside, tossed grenades into the classroom, killing hundreds of innocent civilians in a most atrocious fashion.
*A little while before that, the RPF ‘rebels’ set the same scene in the commune of Kanzenze (prefecture of Kigali), to the east of the capital, where several dozen civilians were locked into classrooms and burned alive with grenades
*Between the 7th and the 20th of April 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’ systematically massacred (with machetes, grenades and rockets) several thousand Hutus living in the neighborhoods of Kacyiru, Kimihurura, Remera, Gasyata, and Rugenge (Kigali city).
*From the 10th to the 25th of April 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’ massacred, with machetes and machineguns, more than 200 civilians, mostly Hutus, in the region of Kiziguro (commune of Murambi, Byumba). Similar killings were carried out in the communes of Gikoro, Gikomero and Rubtingo (Kigali). Other large scale massacres of Hutus were carried out by the RPF ‘rebels’ in the region of Kabuga (commune Rubungo) on the pretext of ‘pacification of conquered territory’. The number of dead is estimated at more than 5,000.
*Toward the end of April 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’, aided by troops from Burundi, massacred more than 30,000 people (both Burundian and Rwandan Hutus) in the regions of Sake (Kibungo), Bugesera (Kigali) and Mugina (Gitarama). Next the killing spread into the regions of Ruhango, Nyanza and Gitarama; in these last regions, tens of thousands were killed and those who managed to escape were by then (July 1994) forced to flee toward Bugesera and Kibungo.
*The 30th of April 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’ bombed the operating room of the Central Hospital of Kigali. Hundreds of children were killed on the grounds, while many patients and hospital staff were wounded.
*May 1, 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’ launched six bombs into a group of civilians who had taken refuge at the Parish of Sainte Famille, in the middle of Kigali, killing 13 and wounding hundreds. [this is the often photographed and otherwise cited massacre at the Eglise Sainte Famille--mc]
*3 May 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’ closed the border between Rwanda and Tanzania to stop the Rwandans fleeing the war. The Akagera river was glutted with more than 20,000 corpses. This same day, after having burned 19 vehicles in the Industrial Park and bombing Radio Rwanda, the ‘rebels’ bombed the national brewery and the altar of the Church of the Holy Family [Eglise Sainte Famille again!]: hundreds were killed.
*3 June 1994, the RPF massacred the Archbishop of Rwanda, Vincent Nsengiyumva, the Bishops Joseph Ruzindana and Thaddée Nsengiymva, as well as 13 priests in Kabgayi, all Hutus. This assassination was not an accident. These innocent victims had vowed not to abandon in the Center of Kabgayi the 30,000 displaced and shell-shocked people they had taken in their charge, the majority of whom were Tutsis. These were men of peace who sought dialogue (organized meetings of different parties in the conflict, denounced the aggressors, took strong positions, etc., . . .) and wanted to create a rapproachment between the two warring sides, but, to the RPF ‘rebels’, they were going to put a stop to their planned conquest of Rwanda.
*Previously, in the territory it occupied, the RPF, author of all the above-cited massacres, had savagely murdered Father Joaquim Vallmajo (of Spain) and the Hutu priests, Alexis Havugimana, Athanase Nkundabanyanga, Christian Nkiliyehe, Joseph Hilimana, Ladislas Muhayemungu, Fidèle and Gaspard Mudashimwa (cit., the testimony of Father Guy Theunis and Jef Vleugels in “Le FPR poursuit ses massacres de la population et des religieux”).
So, as you can see, there was plenty enough killing in Rwanda to fill out any director’s Genocide script—be he Terry George or George Romero. In fact, many of these massacres are cited in the Dallaire book, but the morally handicapped Canadian writes them all off to lapses in the otherwise ironclad RPF discipline—seems to me the RPF ‘rebs’ had more lapses than discipline. But the killing was not coming from the Rwandan government or the Rwandan people. The killing was the direct result of a foreign invasion (a 100% US production, according to Boutros-Boutros Ghali), the purpose of which was to seize control of the country and place it very firmly under the domination of Western (Anglophone) Imperialist exploitation. Today, Paul Kagame, the ‘liberator’ of Rwanda, commands the greatest proportion of the export of the strategic mineral coltan from Congo. And with great regularity, President Kagame orders the slaughter of Hutu refugees in Eastern Congo in the name of Rwandan national security against . . . the recurrence of the Hutu Genocide.
In considering the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials, one must recall that while this court had ample evidence of Nazi genocide, it still found that the ‘mother of all war crimes’ is the crime against peace, the initial unprovoked aggression that leads to all the other horrors of war.
Therefore, the next time you hear someone going on about putting an end to genocide, be it Milosevic’s genocide of Kosovo Albanians, Karadzic and Mladic’s genocide of Bosnian Mulsims, Saddam’s genocide of the White Kurds, the ‘Arab’ government of Sudanese president al-Bashir’s genocide of the ‘Africans’ in Darfur, Mugabe’s genocide of his own Zimbabwean people (or is it the White British farmers? a stretch there either way!), or the Extremist Hutus’ genocide of the Tutsis: take a look into the recent history of the targeted nation, and I’ll bet you a carton to a pack you’ll find a Western-backed invasion of that neo-liberally brutalized country that leads directly to an economic and political occupation and reorganization, and an eventual selling-off (privatization) of all national assets.
It’s hard for this old day-player to admit it—no, it’s not and it never has been!—but Hollywood, that old mafia money laundry, is in the vanguard of the Fascist evisceration of History—the victory of the gangsters over the guerillas—that is anaesthetizing an already dreary world into a docile acceptance of the military wasting of all life on this slaveship planet earth. We are soon to be like the extras covering the dirt roads and plugged up the rivers in Hot’L Rwanda.
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
Sickening Entire Planet
7 April 2005—Eleven years ago last night (6 April 1994 at 8:20 pm) the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, along with several members of their general staffs and the French crew of the Falcon 50 business jet handed down to the Rwandan government by the Socialist President of France, François Mitterand, were brutally assassinated when a SAM 16 missile, fired by a Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ‘rebel’ death squad known as ‘The Network’, at the command of the current Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, and under the supervision of Belgian and US special advisors, blew the plane to bits on its final approach to the only runway at Kigali’s Kayibanda airport left open by the occupying ‘rebel’ forces in their attempts to interdict the resupplying of Rwandan government forces, and dropped it right into the garden of Habyarimana’s presidential estate. This ghastly liquidation of two African (Hutu) heads of state has been deliberately fogged out for more than a decade by the Humanitarian Genocide junkies, who often refer to it as ‘an accident’ or the work of extremists Hutus within the Habyarimana government itself, so as to punch up the bloodbath it supposedly, though not necessarily (see below), unleashed: The Rwandan Genocide of 100 Days (7 April to 4 July 1994) which is supposed to have claimed the lives of 800,000 Tutsis and Moderate Hutus.
The most disgusting irony for us here at CirqueMinime, 10-year-residents of Paris, is how, in covering for the RPF ‘rebels’ and their monstrous exactions since 1 October 1990, the debut of a four-year reign of terror bent on destroying the 30 year Rwandan Revolution with a heavily armed invasion of that densely populated Central African nation from neighboring Uganda, the French public, bringing their national pastime of collaboration with Western gangsterism to new depths of craven servility, have almost proudly taken on the mantle of ‘genocidaires’, and, much as when French pilots, in the name of the Left government of Trotskyite PM Lionel ‘old train’ Jospin, bombed the grave sites of their own war heros in Yugoslavia in 1993-94 and 1999, have turned off their historical memories with regard to all their francophone brothers and sisters who were needlessly murdered by Paul Kagame and his Anglophone, US DoD-equipped and trained ‘maquisards’: the most pitiable example of the RPF’s anti-French revenge for the defeat of their October 1990 invasion being the two French communications officers, Lts Didot and Maier, who were monitoring the radio frequencies at Kayibanda on that April night in 1994, and were, the next morning, brutally murdered, along with their wives and children, by Kagame’s ‘rebels’. . . . But don’t get me started here! This is more for The General’s Book on Rwanda than for this movie review.
Last week, Terry George and United Artists finally unleashed Hot’L Rwanda onto a fully self-loathing Parisian public—and not a minute too soon. I’d been chomping to write about this film since I’d heard that its star, Don Cheadle, and his role model for the film, manager of the Hotel des Milles Collines, Paul Rusesabagina, were making the Stop The Fucking Genocide (STFG) circuit with those other noted ‘fat shithouse rats’ (FSHRs), Harvard’s Samantha Power, the NY Time’s Nicholas Kristof, Canadia’s Cowardly Lion, UN General Romeo Dallaire (quirkily portrayed under a nom de lache [Gen Oliver] by the cinematic flatliner Nick Nolte), to call attention to the dastardly government genocide de jour in Darfur. I was so overwrought with the instrumentalised fallaciousness of yet another Rwandan Genocide propaganda balloon being floated by the Human Rats lobby that I just couldn’t sit idly by while everyone with a cyber soap box—but especially the Trot Left—was putting beaucoup d’mileage on their (digital) mouths behind this first of the last great genocides of the late 20th century.
And this was a week that was fraught with interesting revelations vis à vis designer genocides:
The noted humanitarian and gun-runner Bernie Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Scruples and point man in Kosovo for the French Culture à Gaspillage, confessed in the latest installment of his on going (and on, and on, and on going) autobiography that the late Bosnian president and arm-chair mujahadeen, Alija Izedbegovic, on his death bed, had admitted to trumping and pumping up the whole Bosnian Death and Rape camp furor, as well as the much bally-hooed ‘shellings’ of the two breadlines and the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo (not to mention the whole incident at Srebrenica which Izzy cut to order [at least 5,000 slices] for Bill Clinton—Izedbegovic was the Left’s Pizza Man of massacres: he really delivered), all on the advice of the CIA, DIA and US PR agency Ruder Finn, in order to gain sympathy for his illegal secessionist government from, and to plant the notion of a Bosnia genocide firmly in, the mawkishly sentimental mind of the international community.
So all those photos of Bosnian Muslim concentration camp victims that Clinton and Blair brandished like so many imported Chinese Communist machetes (to get this image you really have to see Hot’L R—or better yet, ask Professor Chossudovsky @ GlobalResearch.com how the imported machetes tipped him that the Hutus had PLANNED the genocide of the Tutsis—I mean, why else would a country, with such dense vegetation, whose chief economic activity is the growing of tea and coffee, have a million machetes lying around if they weren’t planning a genocide, right?)—these brazen images that cudgeled the world public into a murderous hatred of the Serbs (and many of which currently adorn the unbiased walls of The unbiased Hague Tribunal’s unbiased president’s office), captured and cropped by award-winning British tele-journalist, ITN’s Penny Marshall, from inside a barbed wire enclosure at the Trnopolje displaced persons camp, to make it appear that her subjects were on the bad side of the wire, had long ago been discredited.
In fact, it was President Milosevic’s attempt to run the video of the Thomas Deichmann reportage debunking this New Holocaust by the New Serb Nazis marketing doggle that drove the network news media right back to their home offices and put The Trial of the Century back behind the Gardening Sections of the national papers. And this blackout has only grown darker with time and President Milosevic’s expanding exposure of the media lies that underpinned the Western destruction of his country.
So what has been used to cover the Western aggression against—unto the recently completed total irradication of—the state of Yugoslavia? That’s right: The charge of genocide in Bosnia against the Serbs. In fact, the same week that Dr K confessed to touching up the x-rays for his Serb extermination camp diagnosis, and demonstrating that the Historical Record has no bearing on its adjudications, The Hague Tribunal sentenced three Bosnian Serb officials of that mining company turned displaced persons camp at Trnopolje, Mr Kvocka, Mr Radic, and Mr Zigic, to twenty-five years to life for taking part in ‘a joint criminal enterprise’ leading to the crime, stipulated to though never proven, of murder in the context of a genocide. Go figure, huh.
And much of this historical reversal has been written from the Old Writers Annexes of the Hollywood dream factory—turning History inside out like one of those cheap Sears panchos Zappa used to sing about—just for the sake of some Human Rights and National minority lobbies’ money. Hot’L R is just the latest in a long line of propaganda pieces developed on a multi-million dollar commission from the same Humanitarian jackals that are currently trying to turn the whole of Africa into a free trade and free-fire zone.
How much did Michael Winterbottom take to turn the first victim of the war in Bosnia from an Othodox Slav to a Roman Catholic Bosnian or Croat wedding guest in his ‘Welcome to Sarajevo’? Or to make it look like it was the Bosnian Serbs, instead of the Muslims, who were barging onto buses to forbid people (esp. children) from leaving the Bosnian capital? Or for changing the name of the little girl who is whisked off to British safety by his teabag journalist-hero from its Slavic original to a mock Muslim equivalent? The situation wasn’t dramatic enough as it was? Or was Hollywood channeling the US’s insensate support for Muslim and Croat anti-Yugoslav aggression (on the bad-faith counseling of George Soros’ International Crisis Group and Ruder Finn) to a dozing international community?
How did that coffee mug emblazoned ‘ALBANIA’ get into Jackie Brown’s cupboard in the eponymous Tarantino film?
Who got to Mamet on ‘Wag the Dog’ so’s he’d confer (a priori) victimhood on the whole sorry Albanian nation and excuse their brutal aggression against the southern Serbian province of Kosovo?
Who signed off on Billy Freidkin’s demonizing of President Milosevic and the Serbian MUP’s anti-terrorist campaign in Kosovo (here the Serb special police kill only old folks and little blonde girls while worshipping at a huge poster of the Yugoslav president) in the teaser to the Tommy Lee Jones/Benny Del Toro snooze-a-thon, ‘The Hunted’?
Anybody pull Mad Albright’s XXL coat to the fact that John Moore kiped all those satellite images of mass graves around Srebrenica she promised to share with all of us for his Gene Hackman/Owen Wilson-Abraham/Isaac fable, ‘Behind Enemy Lines’? (This film was loosely based on the experiences of US Air Force fighter/bomber pilot Scott O’Grady, who admitted he’d been briefed by military intelligence that the Bosnian Muslims had detonated the shell in the Markale marketplace to make it look like the Serbs had fired it, and thus triggered—on the eve of yet another peace deal agreed to by the Bosnian Serbs and scotched by the Muslims—the 14-day, 1994 terror bombing of Srpska that got Scotty shot down in the first place.)
Man, it doesn’t get much boguser than that—unless, maybe, it’s this Spike TV show I saw while visiting the US last XanaXmas. It went on about time-traveling NSA operatives who find themselves in Bosnia trying to rescue two downed American pilots: One of these captured death merchants, a Col Something, is of unusual interest to the US Special Forces rescuers: ‘You know, we better hook ‘em up and save Col Something, ‘cause she’s a woman. And you know how the Serbs treat women!’ Now, can you imagine that sort of thing being said about any other people?
Also this week, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, Kofi Annan’s man in Rwanda (in 1993-94, Annan was head of UN Peacekeeping Operations) and in charge of the UNAMIR troops led by Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, revealed in his new (and somewhat tardy) book, ‘Le patron de Dallaire parle’ (‘Dallaire’s Boss Speaks Out’), the full extent to which Dallaire and the UN, supposedly acting as a neutral mediation force between the two sides in what was known at the time, euphemistically, as the Rwandan civil war, acted, in fact and in deed, to undermine the UN’s mission through the surreptitious gathering (and transmitting to the RPF) of electronic intelligence from bugs in Booh-Booh’s office, and to subvert all efforts on the part of the Rwandan Habyarimana government toward peace and power sharing with the RPF ‘rebels’ within the context of the Arusha Accords. Dallaire is also described by Booh-Booh as having criminally aided and abetted the RPF ‘rebels’ in their seizure of the high-ground in Kigali (facilitating the RPF’s fully-armed encampment on the CND, the site of the Rwanda National Assembly) and the maintenance of a constant and consistent flow or arms and war materiel to the RPF ‘rebels’, against all international sanctions, and including the SAM 16 missiles used to murder the two Hutu presidents and their staffs. Thus, one now has to wonder just who the devil in the title of Dallaire’s monstrously long and cringingly self-important tome (‘Shaking Hands with the Devil’—of which Booh-Booh claims to have been unaware) actually is. I don’t know that he ever shook hands with Kagame, but Dallaire certainly claims to have had enough sleep-overs chez Paul to have shaken more’n one of Kagenstien’s lethal extremities.
So, knowing what I know about Yugoslavia and Rwanda, about the wily charms of the Bosnian Muslim, the KLA, and the You-can’t-be-too-tall,-too-thin,-too-rich-or-too-Tutsi lobbies, I wasn’t expecting much more’n I got from Hot’L Rwanda. In fact, it was pretty much a rehash of the false humanitarian drivel in Elmore Leonard’s ‘Pagan Babies,’ which was, itself, a rehash of the slick New Yorker’s Phillip Gourevich gossipy book, ‘We Wish to Inform You . . .’, or umpteen HBO features (‘Sometime in April’) and independent documentaries (‘Après) that have gobbled up all the story money for Rwanda.
I wasn’t surprised either when our Hot’L manager hero, Paul Rusesabagina, so artfully played by the hardest working man in show bidness since Sammy Jr. Davis, Don Cheadle, slaps down a horse-choking wad of cash money to pay the vile war profiteer comme Super Fly Mac Daddy, Geo RutagUnda (why they changed George’s name from RutagAnda sorta got by me, but then I’m not a lawyer.) for the commodities he needed to comfort his hotel guests, because I knew from something the real George had written that, in fact, each time he dealt with Paul of the Milles Collines, he was paid by check, checks that were, in the grand tradition of Hollywood’s creative bookkeeping, never honored. Just as the real Rusesabagina never honored his promise to testify at the trial of his old boyhood pal, and the real savior of the hotel guests, George Rutaganda.
And I knew all about the ‘Hutu Power Radio’ hate-speech trope which Terry George works way past the limits of credibility—the French make quite a big deal about Hutu hate-speech as it seems to them the cinch dominoe in this genocide game—and all the ‘Chop down the tall trees’ coded mumbo jumbo, and calling the Tutsis ‘cockroaches’ at every possible opportunity (of course, this handle was given by the ex-pat Tutsis to their own invading forces, right after the social revolution of the early 60s drove these feudalists into exile, because they always snuck back into Rwanda at night), and all the paranoid prattling about Tutsi spies everywhere (when it is on the books that by the time of the reinvasion from Uganda in February 1991, there were anywhere from 4,000 to 12,000 Tutsi RPF ‘rebel’ infiltrators throughout Rwanda). Even after President Habyarimana’s plane is shot down by the RPF ‘rebels’ (Irish Trots, please take note: no one in-country EVER suspected the plane came down because of mechanical failure or pilot error!), the ‘Hutu Army’ (as the Rwandan Armed Forces are called in this film) is not given so much as a day-pass to be paranoid about the ‘Enemy Inside Its Gates’ (a riff on the historical revisionist WWII film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, with my old pals Ed Harris, as the totally boss Hugo Boss-clad sniper, and Bob Hoskins, playing Nikki Krouschev as a cross between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd—only in Europe is this film called by its real name, ‘Stalingrad’! History à la H’wood, as in Polanski’s ‘The Pianist’, always colors the defeated Nazis more sympathetically than the victorious and liberating Red Army because the Krauts had sexier uniforms.)
But I don’t want you to think that all my STFG and FSHR mockery is meant in any way to diminish the horrors that were visited on Rwanda and Yugoslavia—or any of the other targeted nations, like Iraq or Sudan. It is just that laughs have always been my way of dealing with fear and horror and, especially, hypocrisy. Let no one think that the carnage depicted in Hot’L R was in anyway disproportionate to the slaughter that actually went down—and continues to go down today—in the paving of the great free trade super-slab from the Congo to the White Nile. Millions and millions of lives have been wantonly sacrificed to the malignant reflexes of modern waste capitalism. But the ways in which this very real and fully qualified genocide has been described to the world—its origins and its perpetrators and beneficiaries—have only served to cover up the real nature of this monstrous criminal enterprise, and allowed it to be repeated again and again.
Here’s a list of incidents taken from chapter two of The General’s Book on Rwanda which goes a small way to describe the RPF ‘rebel’ itinerary that was the real source and purpose of the bloodbath in Rwanda between 1 October 1990 and 4 July 1994. I found this in
FRONT PATRIOTIQUE RWANDAIS: VÉRITABLE AUTEUR
DES MASSACRES DES HUTUS ET DES TUTSIS DEPUIS
OCTOBRE 1990
by Cercle rwandais de réflexion
Québec
Septembre 1994
* First of October 1990, tens of thousands of civilians (mostly peasants) were massacred by the RPF ‘rebels’ in and around the Mutara region.
*19 February 1991, attacks by RPF ‘rebels’ from in and around Kinigi and Kigombe all the way to the outskirts of Ruhengeri led to the executions of more than 300 civilians and the sacking and pillaging of their homes and belongings.
*Between 23 January and 226 January 1991, the city of Ruhengeri and its surroundings were attacked and sacked by the RPF ‘rebels’. Tens of thousands of civilians were savagely massacred. More than a hundred thousand people were displaced and their homes systematically pillaged and destroyed. Many civilians were forced into combat—many of them died of cold in the mountains. At this same time, some peaceful Tutsis known as Bagogwe (from the communes of Kinigi and Nkuli) were cold-bloodedly massacred by RPF 'rebels' wearing civilian clothes or disguised as Rwandan Army personnel.
*In March 1991, the RPF 'rebels' attacked a Rwandan refugee camp in the western Tanzanian district of Karagwe (cit., Marchés tropicaux et méditerranéens of 7 June 1991). A dozen people were killed.
*May 1992, RPF 'rebel' infiltrators (again dressed as civilians or as Rwandan Army soldiers) undertook a wave of terrorist bombings, like those in the marketplace in Ruhango (17 dead, May 1, 1992) and the bus station in Kigali (6 dead, May 2, 1992).
*June 1992, the RPF 'rebels' attacked the town of Byumba and killed thousands of innocent civilians. the survivors went to fill the ranks of Rwandans 'internally displaced' by the 'civil war' which by this time numbered some 300,000. In the displaced persons camps where these hapless peasants were herded, fifty or so died every day of illness or hunger.
*At the beginning of September 1992, the RPF 'rebels' attacked Nyabwishongezi and massacred thousands of civilians. This led to the exodus of hundreds of peasants toward the displaced persons camp at Ngarama. (cit., Africa Confidentiel of Monday, October 2, 1992.)
*From the 8th to the 26th of February, 1993, in the prefectures of Byumba, Kigali, and Ruhengeri, several thousand civilians were herded into houses and massacred by the RPF 'rebels' purely and simply because they belonged to certain political parties, the MRND and CDR. These systematic massacres of civilian populations, essentially Hutus, were recorded thusly:
On the 8th of February 1993, at the secondary school in
Musanze (commune of Kigombe, Ruhengeri), 22 Hutu
students were hauled together by the RPF 'rebels' and
killed immediately by grenade.
On the 8th of February 1993, at Nyamagumba (commune
of Kigombe, Ruhengeri), 18 women and babies were
forced into a house and killed with bayonets.
On the 11th of February 1993, in the commune of
Kidaho, more than 1,500 people were forced by
RPF 'rebels' into the courtyard of the city hall and
machine gunned to death.
On the night of the 11-12th of February 1993, in the
commune of Nyarutovu (Ruhengeri), more than 500
people were herded together and massacred by the
RPF 'rebel' Army.
On the 12th of February 1993, at the Health Centre
of Gasiza (the commune of Kinigi, Ruhengeri), the
sick and those who had fled fighting elsewhere, people
of all ages, were massacred by the RPF 'rebels' using
automatic weapons.
Between the 8th and the 15th of February 1993, at the
trading post in the commune of Nyamugali (Ruhengeri),
more than180 civilians were massacred by RPF 'rebels'.
On the 17th of February 1993, in the displaced persons
camp at Rebero in the commune of Bwisige (Byumba),
300 displaced persons were murdered by RPF 'rebels'.
On the 26th of February 1993, at Rwobe in the commune
of Bwisige (Byumba), 5 people were gunned down by RPF
'rebels'.
At Kisaro in the commune of Buyoga (Byumba), a dozen
people were massacred by the 'rebels' of the RPF.
Many thousands of people were wounded by bullets and
died for lack of emergency aid. Along with these
atrocities, it should be noted that disorder, desolation,
hunger and cold struck mercilessly those who fled the
horrors of this war. 5,000 of these people were taken
to Gisoro in Uganda as hostages by the RPF 'rebels' and
their fate remains unknown.
*Another testimonial to the reign of terror carried out by the RPF in February 1993 came from Michel Lefevre in his article entitled '900,000 people suddenly uprooted: A Peace Volunteer recounts the horror of events taking place in Rwanda (OXFAM-QUÉBEC DANS LE MONDE. Montréal, Saturday 27 November 1993). He writes:
'Unfortunately, the 8th of February 1993, the
wind changed. . . . A new, massive attack by the
(Rwandan) Patriotic Front in the north of the
country forced the Rwandan and international
aid workers to flee from their camps. The
warehouses were looted. Care facilities were
destroyed. The temporary shelters were sacked.
All our work had to be reinitiated. In the space
of two weeks, the number of refugees gathered there
rose from 350,000 to 900,000. [. . .] Their homes
burned, their crops destroyed, everyone wept silently
over the death or disappearance of a parent, a child
or a friend.'
The protection of displaced persons was supposed to be assured by the Minister for Social Affairs, but, at the time, this Minister could not hide his sympathies for the RPF 'rebels' and their murderous actions, and he treated with arrogance all those many displaced persons who had escaped this programmed killing.
*April 1993: the assassination of a prominent political party leader, the MDR’s Emmanuel Gapyisi, by the network of RPF ‘rebel’ death squads, which were, at that time, according to certain Rwandan newspapers, under the command of Faustin Twagiramungu, who went on to become the Rwandan Prime Minister during the Genocide of 100 days. (cit., Africa International, June 1994)
*During the night of 17-18 November 1993, the RPF ‘rebels’ massacred the civilian residents of the demilitarized zone [in the north east of the country, this buffer region separated the RPF forces based in Mulundi and the forces of the Rwandan Army] in the communes of Kidaho, Nkumba, Nyamugali and Cycru in the prefecture of Ruhengeri. The total killed: 51 Hutus. A non-exhaustive list of these victims is given in a letter, dated 18 November 1993, to the Secretary General of the UN from the associations for the defense of human rights, ARDEVI-TABARA and MISERICORDIA. Before their deaths, these victims were subjected to all manner of torture and inhumane and degrading treatment.
*February 1994, RPF infiltrators assassinated the Hutu leaders Félicien Gatabazi of the PSD in Kigali, as he was returning from a meeting with Faustin Twagiramungu, and Martin Bucyana of the CDR in Butare.
*March 1994, the director of the tea factory in Cyohoha-Rukeri, his associates and a part of their families were massacred by the RPF ‘rebels’ in the zone above the DMZ controlled by the RPF. The cars that were bringing them home from work were hit by rockets fired from the RPF ‘rebel’ lines. At that very moment, a mass grave containing more than 80 bodies was uncovered in the tea planations under the control of the RPF ‘rebels’.
*In January 1994, in the sub-prefecture of Kirambo in the prefecture of Ruhengeri, the RPF ‘rebels’ massacred several dozen innocent civilians at the very moment that a peace agreement was being signed instituting a definitive cease fire.
*At the resumption of hostilities on 7 April 1994, to the north of Kigali in the commune of Mugambazi (prefecture Kigali), the RPF ‘rebels’ corralled all those who fled the fighting into the classrooms of the main schools of Shagasha and Gipfundo and, after locking them inside, tossed grenades into the classroom, killing hundreds of innocent civilians in a most atrocious fashion.
*A little while before that, the RPF ‘rebels’ set the same scene in the commune of Kanzenze (prefecture of Kigali), to the east of the capital, where several dozen civilians were locked into classrooms and burned alive with grenades
*Between the 7th and the 20th of April 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’ systematically massacred (with machetes, grenades and rockets) several thousand Hutus living in the neighborhoods of Kacyiru, Kimihurura, Remera, Gasyata, and Rugenge (Kigali city).
*From the 10th to the 25th of April 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’ massacred, with machetes and machineguns, more than 200 civilians, mostly Hutus, in the region of Kiziguro (commune of Murambi, Byumba). Similar killings were carried out in the communes of Gikoro, Gikomero and Rubtingo (Kigali). Other large scale massacres of Hutus were carried out by the RPF ‘rebels’ in the region of Kabuga (commune Rubungo) on the pretext of ‘pacification of conquered territory’. The number of dead is estimated at more than 5,000.
*Toward the end of April 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’, aided by troops from Burundi, massacred more than 30,000 people (both Burundian and Rwandan Hutus) in the regions of Sake (Kibungo), Bugesera (Kigali) and Mugina (Gitarama). Next the killing spread into the regions of Ruhango, Nyanza and Gitarama; in these last regions, tens of thousands were killed and those who managed to escape were by then (July 1994) forced to flee toward Bugesera and Kibungo.
*The 30th of April 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’ bombed the operating room of the Central Hospital of Kigali. Hundreds of children were killed on the grounds, while many patients and hospital staff were wounded.
*May 1, 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’ launched six bombs into a group of civilians who had taken refuge at the Parish of Sainte Famille, in the middle of Kigali, killing 13 and wounding hundreds. [this is the often photographed and otherwise cited massacre at the Eglise Sainte Famille--mc]
*3 May 1994, the RPF ‘rebels’ closed the border between Rwanda and Tanzania to stop the Rwandans fleeing the war. The Akagera river was glutted with more than 20,000 corpses. This same day, after having burned 19 vehicles in the Industrial Park and bombing Radio Rwanda, the ‘rebels’ bombed the national brewery and the altar of the Church of the Holy Family [Eglise Sainte Famille again!]: hundreds were killed.
*3 June 1994, the RPF massacred the Archbishop of Rwanda, Vincent Nsengiyumva, the Bishops Joseph Ruzindana and Thaddée Nsengiymva, as well as 13 priests in Kabgayi, all Hutus. This assassination was not an accident. These innocent victims had vowed not to abandon in the Center of Kabgayi the 30,000 displaced and shell-shocked people they had taken in their charge, the majority of whom were Tutsis. These were men of peace who sought dialogue (organized meetings of different parties in the conflict, denounced the aggressors, took strong positions, etc., . . .) and wanted to create a rapproachment between the two warring sides, but, to the RPF ‘rebels’, they were going to put a stop to their planned conquest of Rwanda.
*Previously, in the territory it occupied, the RPF, author of all the above-cited massacres, had savagely murdered Father Joaquim Vallmajo (of Spain) and the Hutu priests, Alexis Havugimana, Athanase Nkundabanyanga, Christian Nkiliyehe, Joseph Hilimana, Ladislas Muhayemungu, Fidèle and Gaspard Mudashimwa (cit., the testimony of Father Guy Theunis and Jef Vleugels in “Le FPR poursuit ses massacres de la population et des religieux”).
So, as you can see, there was plenty enough killing in Rwanda to fill out any director’s Genocide script—be he Terry George or George Romero. In fact, many of these massacres are cited in the Dallaire book, but the morally handicapped Canadian writes them all off to lapses in the otherwise ironclad RPF discipline—seems to me the RPF ‘rebs’ had more lapses than discipline. But the killing was not coming from the Rwandan government or the Rwandan people. The killing was the direct result of a foreign invasion (a 100% US production, according to Boutros-Boutros Ghali), the purpose of which was to seize control of the country and place it very firmly under the domination of Western (Anglophone) Imperialist exploitation. Today, Paul Kagame, the ‘liberator’ of Rwanda, commands the greatest proportion of the export of the strategic mineral coltan from Congo. And with great regularity, President Kagame orders the slaughter of Hutu refugees in Eastern Congo in the name of Rwandan national security against . . . the recurrence of the Hutu Genocide.
In considering the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials, one must recall that while this court had ample evidence of Nazi genocide, it still found that the ‘mother of all war crimes’ is the crime against peace, the initial unprovoked aggression that leads to all the other horrors of war.
Therefore, the next time you hear someone going on about putting an end to genocide, be it Milosevic’s genocide of Kosovo Albanians, Karadzic and Mladic’s genocide of Bosnian Mulsims, Saddam’s genocide of the White Kurds, the ‘Arab’ government of Sudanese president al-Bashir’s genocide of the ‘Africans’ in Darfur, Mugabe’s genocide of his own Zimbabwean people (or is it the White British farmers? a stretch there either way!), or the Extremist Hutus’ genocide of the Tutsis: take a look into the recent history of the targeted nation, and I’ll bet you a carton to a pack you’ll find a Western-backed invasion of that neo-liberally brutalized country that leads directly to an economic and political occupation and reorganization, and an eventual selling-off (privatization) of all national assets.
It’s hard for this old day-player to admit it—no, it’s not and it never has been!—but Hollywood, that old mafia money laundry, is in the vanguard of the Fascist evisceration of History—the victory of the gangsters over the guerillas—that is anaesthetizing an already dreary world into a docile acceptance of the military wasting of all life on this slaveship planet earth. We are soon to be like the extras covering the dirt roads and plugged up the rivers in Hot’L Rwanda.
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
posted by CirqueMinime/Paris at 4:32 AM
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