Thursday, February 19, 2009

FDLR PRESS RELEASE - FEBRUARY 2009 - STOP KILLING & KIDNAPPING HUTU REFUGEES IN CONGO!!

FDLR PRESS RELEASE - FEBRUARY 2009 - STOP KILLING & KIDNAPPING HUTU REFUGEES IN CONGO!!

[The recent, untimely death of Alison Des Forges, Human Rights Watch's Central Africa hand, in a fiery plane crash, has become the source of a great deal of the acrid smoke now being blown to cover HRW's expedient misreadings of African history--like their long-standing support of the now bankrupt '800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus'-version of the Rwandan genocide. They have long been, in the Dr. Kouchnerian vein, Humanitarians for Hire.

After several appearances at the Rwanda Tribunal in Arusha (ICTR), Prof. Des Forges had several changes of heart--or, at least, changes of testimony under cross examination from the Defense--on what had actually happened in those four terror-filled years from the 1 October 1990 RPF invasion of Rwanda from Uganda to the 6 April 1994 RPF missile strike on Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana's Falcon 50 executive jet (which, with the killings of Burundian presidents Cyprien Ntaryamira, on the plane with Habyarimana, and Melchior Ndadaye, six months earlier in a Tutsi-led military coup in Bujumbura, brought to three the number of sets of Hutu testicles on Paul Kagame's war drum). It would not be crazy to assume that HRW's Des Forges had so disappointed her Kigali sponsors with her testimony in recent genocide trials that that is why the Kagame regime banned her from returning to her thesis country.

And one has to wonder just what her last thoughts might have been, as her commuter jet fell straight down out of an icy Buffalo sky; if she considered how long she had trivialized the double African presidential assassination as a mere 'plane crash--a terrorist act that, along with the simultaneous RPF offensive, indisputably triggered the social chaos and mass killings, '--even while feeding the popular speculation that 'Hutu Extremists', including the President's wife and her 'Little House' inner circle, had killed the popular Rwandan leader. Irony of ironies? Or cynicism of cynicisms?

But further pissing into the information pool, with what might be seen as a perverse sort of tribute to their late, apostate colleague, HRW is now dumping great gobs of toxic nonsense on some of the unhappiest victims of the globalization wars, the Rwandan Hutu refugees in Eastern Congo. Having fled the RPF's murder and mayhem in 1994, only to be hunted like game by these same tormentors in 1996 and 1998, killed in the hundreds of thousands unto millions, led into ambushes and even shot down and blown up by UN forces (MONUC) and Humanitarian NGOs, these bogusly alleged genocidaires, with their genetically genocidal wives and children, and their front group, the FDLR (Forces Democratique pour Liberation du Rwanda), are now being charged with killing Congolese civilians in the hundreds. And why? Who needs reasons? HRW's talking genocidaires here--they're talking Pure Evil.

Well, here below's another Press Release from Callixte Mbarushimana and the FDLR. Remember that the Hutu governments of Burundi and Rwanda that were destroyed by the Tutsi RPF 'rebels' were duly elected--democratically elected majority governments. The only way the interests of a huge majority can be sublated by those of a tiny minority is by the unrestrained and heartless use of unReason. --mc]

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PRESS RELEASE N ° 05/SE/CD/FEBRUARY/ 2009 OF THE FDLR

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The FDLR warn the United Nations against the MONUC's fighting alongside the military coalition RPA / FARDC against Rwandan refugees in the DRC and members of the FDLR.

The Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) inform the public and the media that a helicopter of the United Nations Mission in DRC (MONUC) has participated in an air raid by the coalition of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) and the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) on 12 February 2009 in Gashebere, North Kivu, in DRC.

The record of this unfortunate air raid is two (2) people with minor injuries and hundreds of Rwandan refugees and local civilians displaced. On 13 February 2009, the armed coalition of the RPA / FARDC launched an air raid in Kayanja and Kanyabutsindo, which left no victims, to support its ground forces which were in disarray in the face of the brave troops of the FDLR they had gone to attack.

The FDLR strongly condemn this act of barbarism against innocent civilians and warn the MONUC of a danger resulting from its alignment with the Rwandan-Congolese troops in their campaign against the Rwandan refugees and Congolese civilian populations in Kivu. The FDLR recall that they have always favoured and continue to favour a peaceful solution to the political problem of Rwanda. They point out to MONUC that its mission is not to hunt Rwandan refugees and innocent civilians, but rather to ensure their protection.

The FDLR invite the Security Council of the United Nations and the African Union to condemn unequivocally the use of MONUC forces by some UN officials serving the interests of the gravediggers of the people of the Great Lakes region of Africa.

The FDLR urge, once again, that the Rwandan and Congolese authorities immediately stop the dirty war they have launched against the Rwandan refugees and the FDLR, and engage in dialogue with them. The FDLR reaffirm that they continue to favour the path of peace, but if the armed coalition against them continue to chase and shoot at the Rwandan refugees and other innocent people in Congo, they will have no other choice but to protect Rwandan refugees and the civilian populations, which has been their leitmotiv since their creation.

The FDLR still hope that within the United Nations, Rwanda and the DRC, there are women and men of goodwill who will do everything possible to stop this insane war going on in the DRC.

Filed in Paris on February 17, 2009.

Callixte Mbarushimana
Executive Secretary of the FDLR
(sé)

Sunday, February 08, 2009

THAT JUSTICE BE DONE! Col. Jacques Hogard Interviewed by Alain Chevalérias

THAT JUSTICE BE DONE! Col. Jacques Hogard interviewed by Alain Chevaléria--translated from the French by CM/P

[These early Obama days in France are all abuzz over the new Pierre Péan book pantsing Bernie Kouchner, “Le Monde Selon K.” (kind of a riff on another French journalist’s work, Karl Zero's fucku-Bush-a-mentary, "The World According to W.", or Oliver Stone's cute comedy, just plain 'W'.--W's even pictured caressing K on Péan’s cover.).

The shock in this so-called 'livre de choc' seems to be that Dr. K's double dipping, his conflicts of interest between doctor’s bag and diplomatic portfolio--or maybe it's his private investment portfolio's the rub--that the French Dr. (as PP affectionately refers to K, and not to be confused with my Dr. French in Steppling’s ‘Sea of Cortez’) was working his Humanitarian hustle in order to take money off a bunch of vile African dictators. Think of Lenny dressed up as a priest soliciting donations for a leper colony--only not as funny.

But Paris is really burning over the cheap shots they think Péan has taken at the poor old soixante-retard founder of Medecins Sans Scruples (MSF, MDM and all other similar med groups he may have claimed, at one time or another, were, in fact, founded by others). Questioning the Foreign Minister’s patriotism and the genuineness of his dedication to the emergency health needs of the victims of certain sides in certain wars calls into question the real intentions of the whole Human Rights movement with its innumerable NGOs, of the foreign policy of the Sarkozy government, even of the French national spirit.

As with Péan's previous great book, “Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs,” the French shyster community has gotten its suits and briefs all up in a sweaty bunch over PP's allegations that Kouchner expressed a certain ‘cosmopolitanism’ ('Anglo-Saxone cosmopolitanisme' is how Péan qualifies it) when he refused to stand for the Marseillaise, after having risen for 'God Save the Queen' (and not the Pistols' version, either) at a private screening of a France/England rugby game. All this is in just the 11-page teaser of the 330-some page book. But it is taken to be a suggestion of K’s dual-use as a diplomat/businessman in the service of the highest bidder. It has even been said (in Le Figaro, as I recall) that both Sarko and K are sayyam, homegrown Israeli agents. But you have to be super careful with that kind of insinuation in this country where every other guy is known to be an enemy collaborator by every other guy; where a Vichy functionary, after becoming the Socialist president of the Republic, ordered the extradition, trial and condemnation of a Nazi occupation functionary who had merely followed Pétain’s orders in deporting French Jewish children.

Well, if you'll remember, a want of national pride or respect and the placing of personal gain over national weal were charges made against the Jews back in the day. And since anti-Semitism is in such vogue these days as an instant invalidation of political or historical writings (no critical thought required, and, certainly, no need to read the book), Péan is straight away being sized up for another ‘Hate Speech’ beef.

In his earlier book on Rwanda, Péan cites an old Tutsi historian, Antoine Nyetera, who contends that the Tutsi culture of Rwanda was a culture of the lie. That little bit of historical trivia took up all of four pages in this fat book, but the many pro-RPF, pro-genocide survivor organizations, like IBUKA, AVEGA and SOS Racisme (which the Jewish Péan actually helped found) were all over PP with charges of racial discrimination and inciting racial hatred faster than you can say ‘the Bruguière Report.’ He was acquitted of all this humbug, of course, but with the subsequent arrival from Kigali of the Mucyo Commission Report, charging France with aiding and abetting the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus between 6 April and 16 July 1994, one had to start wondering where this tiny, densely populated tea plantation of a country was finding all its surplus vitriol.

Well, our Colonel Jacques Hogard, in this interview with Alain Chevalérias, goes quite a ways to explaining what is really behind the current France-Rwanda feud. And as you should have no problem guessing if you’ve ever glanced at this blog, the answer is the “US and A,” and its culture of criminally insane wastage.

With a steadier hand now on the helm in Washington, can we here in France, and all you all all around the world, hope to get our history in proper enough order to hand off to our kids, and to get the likes of Sarkozy and Kouchner the hell out of it?

Not until President Obama can come to grips with the real history of the decade-long Clintonian crime spree that birthed this Central African bloodbath, the responsibility for which its instigators, the RPF, the Kagame Reich and its Gallic collaborators, are trying to fob off on France. And while French President Sarkozy may have, for some unfathomable reason, lumbered his nation with the toxic offices of the craven narcissist Bernie Kouchner, US President Obama, too, responding to what we can only call The Terror, has taken upon himself that malignant waste product from the Balkan wars of the 1990s that is the visibly deranged and jellied eel-like Richard Holbrooke.

Down with the Occupation! Death to all Collaborators!! Long Live the Resistance and the People’s Struggle for Peace and Justice!!! --mc]

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Interview with Col. Jacques Hogard: That Justice Be Done!

by Alain Chevaléria

27 January 2009

{Alain Chevaléria is the webmaster of the site http://www.recherches-sur-le-terrorisme.com [where the original French version of this interview can be found--cm/p], which regularly publishes analyses of Terrorism as well as information on current international and geopolitical events. He is a professional journalist, author of several books on bin Laden and, most recently, on the Mujahadin of the Iranian People.}


Alain Chevaléria: Colonel Jacques Hogard, who are you?


Jacques Hogard: I was born in 1955 into a family of officers. So I was raised in the military tradition. My father served in the naval infantry [the Marines] and I spent many years of my youth in Africa, following him from post to post. Naturally, I also chose a career in the military. After leaving Coëtquidan [a French military school in Brittany--nb] in 1979, I decided on the infantry, and then I joined the Foreign Legion before being assigned to the 2nd REP [Paratroopers Regiment]. This was in the 80s, with interventions in Lebanon, Chad and the Central African Republic. I spent several great years there as a lieutenant and captain. Then I followed the normal career track. I joined the Army Chief of Staff in Paris as a young superior officer in 1989 to prepare the École de guerre [War College]. Then I found myself stationed in Djibouti from 1992 to 1994. I had a very intense stay there. At that time, the country was experiencing attempts at destabilization from elements originating in Ethiopia, with the routing and collapse of the Eritrean Army, followed by the Afars rebellion which threatened the capital, Djibouti [In Djibouti, beginning in 1991, tensions between Afars and the Issa-dominated government resulted in an Afar rebellion]. I had a great deal of personal sympathy for this ethnic group. Having spent my teenage years in the country and having returned several times as a young officers with the 2nd REP, I knew their characteristics and, especially, their fidelity to France. In Djibouti I also had the opportunity to take part in the spring 1994 intervention in South Yemen, but, also, before that, in 1992/1993, in Somalia at the time of “Operation Restore Hope.” A great show. I was the “Chief of Operations” for the French force “Oryx” sent along with the multinational forces under American command. My tour in Djibouti ended with the intervention in Rwanda in 1994. Then I came back to France, where I continued my career with the Legion before joining the Special Operations Command (COS), created in 1992. Again in 1998-1999, I had the opportunity to command a detachment of Special Forces ordered to open the way for the French Army to enter Kosovo. It was then I got the feeling that I had nothing more to do in the Army, having done everything that really interested me. I took early retirement on 16 December 1999. After attending a seven-month course at the Centre de Perfectionnement des Affaires (CPA)[a Business School in Paris], held at the Chamber of Commerce, on 1 September 2000, I was taken off the active duty rolls of the Army after 26 years of service.


A.C.: Let’s talk about Rwanda! When did you get to Rwanda, or, more precisely, Eastern Zaire, now the DRC?

J.H.: I arrived there at the end of June 1994, coming from Djibouti. We landed in Goma, the Zairean town on the border with Rwanda, which served as the staging point for the forces of the French intervention. Our mission was to put an end, by any means necessary, including force of arms, to the massacres that were taking place on the other side of border in Rwanda. These mass killings had broken out after the attack on 6 April 1994 against the President of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira. We had to reestablish order and security as well as, to whatever extent possible, the necessary agreement to carry on a dialogue between the two communities. Goma is situated on the shores of Lake Kivu and was chosen because it has a hard-surface runway that can accommodate large cargo planes like the Antonovs and Ilushians chartered by the French military from countries of the ex-Soviet Union. Thanks to them, we were able to project a nearly three thousand man force in record time.


A.C.: What flags were these planes flying under?

J.H.: Russian and Ukrainian, I think. They were old military aircraft refurbished by civilian air-charter companies.


A.C.: But why planes from countries of the old USSR?

J.H.: France didn’t have any large strategic transports. At that time, we asked the US to furnish us with the means to fly our troops and equipment into Rwanda. The US refused because they were opposed to any French intervention there. It should be further emphasized that the Clinton Administration did all it could to create serious difficulties for France. The Chief of Staff, with the full support of the government, decided to call on the Russians. We understood that these chartered planes would cost us, but the Russians doubtlessly were pleased to make the deal for this mission because of the sweet irony of the situation.


A.C.: What kind of force did you have to stop the massacres?

J.H.: “Operation Turquoise”, commanded by General Lafourcade, was made up of about 2,800 men in three tactical groups. The first group to arrive, made up of Special Forces, was commanded by Col. Jacques Rosier, the most decorated soldier in France. It included a detachment of the 1st RPIMa [Régiment de Parachutistes d’Infanterie de Marine], a detachment of Navy Commandos and a detachment of Air Force Para-Commandos. It was assigned its own helicopters and C160 cargo plane, and was pre-positioned at the Rwandan border, awaiting the vote on UNSC Resolution 924, which would authorize the French intervention in Rwanda at the head of a multinational coalition force. The second group, commanded by Col. Patrice Sartre, was made up of Navy troops, particularly its prestigious regiment, the RICM (Régiment d’Infanterie de Char de Marine)[Marine Tank Infantry]. I was at the head of the third group, which was composed, essentially, of combat units assigned to regiments of the Legion, stationed in Africa or in France.


A.C.: Isn’t it a little surreal to assign such a small force to stop the massacres?

J.H.: We actually had a ridiculously small body considering the size of the mission at hand. But the units deployed were from the elite of the French Army. And then, we were also reenforced by African troops. So I had in my command the Chadian detachment. One hundred fifty additional men, which made a big difference when we had only 400 to start with! They had a big job to do. We didn’t lack in personnel, but the French soldiers were of the highest quality. They gave a great deal of their time and of themselves. They doubled, maybe even tripled their efforts by giving up their personal time and their sleep.


A.C.: France had signed a defense agreement with Rwanda. What was that?

J.H.: We had a military cooperation agreement with Kigali, signed in 1975 under Giscard d’Estaing, but not a defense agreement in the strictest sense. So some reduced elements of the French Army were in Rwanda as part of that military cooperation agreement in October 1990, when the Tutsi rebels, recruited in Uganda under the supervision of the Ugandan Army, launched an offensive against Rwanda. Just to go back a little: it all began in 1961, at the time of Rwandan independence. The Hutu majority (85% of the population) revolted against the Tutsis, who had, until then, exercised absolute power over them. Many Tutsis chose exile in Uganda. There, they made a home, and many of them became part of the guerilla movement led by the current president, Yoweri Museveni, against the government of Milton Obote in Kampala. When these guerillas took power, many Tutsis were given important jobs in the new Ugandan Army. Some were even made heads of very important departments, like today’s Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, who was the number two man in Military Intelligence. He was a Colonel in the Ugandan Army and was trained in the US. [at Ft Leavenworth, Kansas]


A.C.: So Kagame is a comrade in arms with the current Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni . . .

J.H.: Yes, at a certain moment, all these Rwandans became a little too visible to the Ugandan people, and Museveni decided to encourage them to return, in force, to their nation of origin, counting on this, also, to expand his influence in Central Africa. For me, without any doubt, Museveni already had his eye on the mineral riches of Kivu, today very prominent in the news with all the activities of the warlord Laurent Nkunda.


A.C.: Since August 2008, in Kivu, doesn’t it seem that a reenactment of the invasion of Rwanda is taking place--but this time the invasion is against Congo, the ex-Zaire--and it is coming from Rwanda?

J.H.: Absolutely. This time we see Laurent Nkunda, a Tutsi from Congo, organizing a rebellion against his own country of origin with the help of his Rwandan neighbor. In October 1990, Museveni’s Uganda encouraged the Tutsis, under the banner of the RPF[1], to overthrow the government in Kigali. Rwandan President Habyarimana, seeing his country under attack by a neighbor and finding himself in great difficulty, asked for help from France and Zaire. The Zairean Army, badly trained and undisciplined, was not up to the job. Nevertheless, at that time, French President [François] Mitterand thought he could settle the problem by rushing two companies of paratroopers. On his orders, the first detachment of “Operation Noroît” was sent in October 1990. Renewed every four months, this intervention would last a little more than three years, until October 1993. It was ended right after the Arusha Accords were signed in August 1993, under pressure from Western powers, and especially from France. You have to give Mitterand credit because his supported of the government of President Habyarimana was not unconditional: “I support you militarily,” he said essentially. “So I allow you to stay in power, but you are going to have to open your country up to democracy.”


A.C.: Yes, because this Habyarimana was not a great democrat . . .

J.H.: He was an African head of state of his era, like many others. Authoritarian, paternalistic, his regime was based on a one-party system. It was a sort of ‘enlightened despotism,’ committedly Christian, that practiced the politics of quotas, allocating to the Tutsis 15% of the military posts, the university positions, and even places in the seminaries where priests were trained, as the vast majority of the population, both Hutu and Tutsi, were Catholics.


A.C.: There are many African countries in which the minorities are not represented at all in the power structure.

J.H.: Yes, this is why I can say, without any irony on my part, that Rwanda, under the Habyarimana regime, was a developing country in every sense of the term. It had a real administrative organization, a highway system in good condition, a functioning infrastructure, a medical organization and even health centers in every community. One day each week, the population was invited to give its time to maintain the roads and public spaces. I described the Habyarimana regime as paternalistic and even authoritarian, but it was not a totalitarian regime like today’s Kagame regime is. You didn’t see kidnappings, assassinations, deportations, sessions of political reeducation, people’s courts or arbitrary arrests. All these things are abundantly present in today’s Rwanda. In December 1993, in keeping with the terms of the Arusha Accords, the last French troops left Rwanda and gave way to the UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda), about 2,800 men provided by countries like Belgium, Ghana or Bangladesh.


A.C.: So, the French military was not present in Rwanda at the time of the massacres in 1994 . . .

J.H.: No, there were no longer any French troops on Rwandan territory after December 1993. Only about 17 military advisers were left, if memory serves, who wore Rwandan military uniforms and served as technical assistants. They had no combat mission, but were assigned to give technical instruction and training. It is an important point and one which must be stressed. Because there are the most irresponsible rumors extant accusing France of crimes that were supposed to have been committed during the genocide. While its forces had been gone from the country for several months. So I repeat, on 6 April 1994, the date the genocide began, the only foreign military present in Rwanda was that of the UN. [emphasis in original]


A.C.: So it was wearing Blue Helmets?

J.H.: Yes, wearing Blue Helmets and commanded by a Canadian general, Roméo Dallaire, who, eight days after the genocide began, without protesting, allowed the UN to reduce his troop-strength by 90%. The UNAMIR thus went from 2,800 men to 280, at the order of the UN Security Council. A totally mad decision! If he had been a responsible and courageous man, an officer worthy of the title, General Dallaire would have resigned immediately and returned to his country, to Canada. This is what the Spanish General, Vicente Diaz de Villegas, did last October, in Kivu, when he realized the he did not have the means necessary to end the violence provoked by the attack of Nkunda and his Tutsi rebels.


A.C.: OK, let’s go back to your arrival at the Rwandan border in 1994. As you said, you were part of Operation Turquoise, mounted with the authorization of a UN Resolution . . .

J.H.: Yes, voted with the abstention of the US, which did not, however, use its veto. Madeleine Albright, then Secretary of State, right away described Operation Turquoise as an “abnormal operation.” As if you could call an operation designed to put a stop to these unprecedented massacres “abnormal.”


A.C.: It’s a paradox, France, alone, with some other African countries, stepping in to stop the blood shed, today finding itself in the dock accused of crimes by the government in Kigali.

J.H.: In this context, France was even the first to speak of genocide in Rwanda. It was Alain Juppé, French Foreign Minister at the time, who first mentioned it. The International Community dummied up. Worse yet, the US did everything it could to prevent any intervention.


A.C.: Why didn’t the US want a military intervention to stop the genocide?

J.H.: Here we are at the heart of a problem that is still with us today. Neither Rwanda nor Burundi was a country that particularly interested anyone: both little, overpopulated agricultural countries, whose territories, until today, had not revealed any important resources. On the other hand, they are close to the Congolese provinces of Shaba, the former Katanga, and of Kivu, which scientists agree is a ‘geological scandal,’ as it’s hiding such vast mineral wealth. Recently, interest in Kivu has grown with the discovery of uranium and coltan, a rare metal much appreciated by industrialists for its resistance to corrosion.


A.C.: Are the mineral riches of Kivu being exploited by Congo?

J.H.: Absolutely not. You just have to ask yourself who is interested in this extraordinary mineral potential. Certainly, there is little Rwanda, with Kagame in charge: the pupil of Museveni who is trying to outdo his master. But I can see that behind this downstage player is the upstage shadow of the US, the UK and, I believe, also Israel. These three powers, I learned while on the ground there, have a very clear vision of the possibilities of this region and of the stakes in making this war, which is for the control of the primary resources there.


A.C.: Do you have any evidence for this?

J.H.: Museveni’s Uganda is a totalitarian regime. You also see the US working to build an alliance between Kampala and Kigali, between Museveni and Kagame. For example, after Kagame’s victory in Rwanda, it was the US Army Corps of Engineers that built the highway between these two capitals. Washington also supplied the armored M113s and other military equipment to the victorious Tutsi army. [nb--A huge number of M113 Armored Personnel Carrier variants have been created, ranging from infantry carriers to nuclear missile carriers.]


A.C.: Were you a witness to precisely any of these facts?

J.H.: One incident especially struck me. When I was in charge of the southern part of Turquoise, in the southeast of Rwanda, one beautiful day I watched an unmarked American C130 land. A Jeep Cherokee rolled out of it with an American Army Rangers Lt.-Col. on board. He said his name was James Babbit, if memory serves, and worked as the Defense attaché at the American Embassy in Brazzaville, in Congo. He spoke our language [French] like you and me. He said to me:

“I am assigned as a liaison officer to your tactical Chief of Staff.”

“Liaison Officer, but with whom?” I responded. “Are there any American troops on the ground here?”

I told my boss, General Lafourcade, who commanded the operation.

“Yes, the orders came from the top,” he told me. “You stay close to him and be careful.”

In fact, this strange liaison officer didn’t stop getting information, acting like a spy at the center of our general staff. That became very annoying. I couldn’t get a written message to General Fourcade without his being around it. I had to ask him to keep his distance. Irritated, I wrote on a box of combat rations: “Forbidden to unauthorized persons” and I stuck the note up at the entrance to the part of the HQ used for transmissions.

Mad as hell, he asked me: “Who is this notice intended for?”

Looking him straight in the eyes, I replied: “Who speaks English around here?”

He grumbled that it was not very friendly.

I shot back: “What’s really not very friendly is the manner in which you’re acting.”


A.C.: How did this affair end up?

J.H.:Two days after this incident, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a sergeant of the 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment on watch at the HQ. He had discovered the American liaison officer going through my desk. As a precaution, I kept all important documents with me in a brief case. He wasn’t going to find much! Nevertheless, I asked him what he was doing in there. He said he couldn’t sleep, and that he was “just looking for some magazines to amuse himself with.” This incident allowed me to get him moved out of there the next morning. It struck me, because some friends of the special operations commander’s had warned me: “With the Tutsis, there are always some US or British Special Forces.” I made the connection.


A.C.: How did this American officer work and, above all, with whom was he in liaison?

J.H.: He was all over the radio equipment and obviously in contact with Kigali, where the Staff Offices of the UNAMIR and its chief, General Dallaire, were located. But, Dallaire, as is well known to the public, worked very closely with Kagame. Logically, he was also in liaison with elements of the American forces present throughout the region. The real question is what were these American forces doing there and who was directing them on the ground? If you consider all these little indictations, you can see that what has been happening in Kivu since last August is just a continuation of the American offensive in the region to which I was a witness in 1994. It’s really like a Russian doll. In Kivu, you have Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi and a puppet of Kagame, the president of Rwanda. Above them, pulling the strings, you have Museveni, the Ugandan and his tribe, the Himas of Ankole, cousins of the Rwandan Tutsis. One floor up are the US and Great Britain. In their immediate perimeter there is Israel, which is very interested in the region. You know, too, that Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, has recently become an official adviser to Paul Kagame. This is not by chance. If you have the opportunity, read the excellent novel, “The Mission Song,” by John Le Carré. This sympathetic writer, despite coming out of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, describes exactly, in this book which came out in 2006, what is going on in Kivu today. This is not from some kind of premonition, but because of a real understanding of the situation on the ground.


A.C.: Many people believe that the election of Barack Obama is going to change American policies. Do you think that will be the case in Africa, in the Great Lakes region?

J.H.: I think after we get past the Obamania, we will discover that Obama is an American who defends American interests, above all and without scruple, whatever might be the finer qualities of the individual himself. Anecdotally, it is interesting to note that President Obama’s father was a Kenyan Luo, a Nilotic East African tribe relatively close to the Tutsis. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton, the new Secretary of State, is still the wife of Bill Clinton, who, as President, actively supported Museveni. I don’t think that things are going to stop, but, on the contrary, that they are just getting started. The Clinton Administration is back!


A.C.: Do you have any tangible evidence of an Israeli intervention in this conflict?

J.H.: Nothing tangible, but the presence of Israelis is prominent. They have military advisers with the Ugandan and Rwandan Armies. They express a remarkable determination to install themselves in the Francophone zone, in the Central African Republic, for example.


A.C.: And in Côte d’Ivoire [Ivory Coast] . . .

J.H.: You’re right to mention Côte d’Ivoire. They have installed themselves there and not for any philanthropic reasons.

A.C.: Along these lines, you know that Nkunda, the Tutsi from Kivu, is a convert to evangelism. He is what is called a “born again.” He says he has converted his men to this version of Christian fundamentalism. He wears an insignia on his uniform which carries the inscription, in English: “Rebels for Christ.”

J.H.: Yes, that doesn’t surprise me and it typifies the problem posed by these Christian sects that originate in America. They are very active in Central Africa and in Western Africa, like in Ivory Côte d’Ivoire, where Laurent Gbagbo and, especially, his wife, Simone, are themselves converts to this movement. I see in this form or evangelism a vector for American penetration to take control of Africa, more specifically, of Francophone Africa. Returning to Rwanda, under the Habyarimana government, a minority faction of Hutus, very active, formed the opposition. They are now called “moderate Hutus” and they accompanied the Tutsis on their rise to power. But, many of them belonged to these Protestant churches close to evangelism. I don’t think that this is a coincidence. Also, the RPF assassinated a significant number of Rwandan Catholic bishops, expressing a hatred for Rome that was impossible to hide. This caused about forty Rwandans close to Kagame and Kagame, himself, to be investigated by a Spanish Judge and named on international arrest warrants for assassinations committed, in particular, against Spanish churchmen. We can easily see how the Catholic church interfered with Kagame’s bigger plans.


A.C.: When did you leave Rwanda?

J.H.: I only stayed 60 days during the summer of 1994. That’s all in the title of the little book I wrote on the subject.


A.C.: We watched France try to bring peace to Rwanda by supporting the Arusha Accords. So, why is Kagame making all these accusations of genocide against France?

J.H.: In my opinion, the Franco-Rwandan feud is principally the result of the hatred engendered against our country by one man, the current Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame. When he was the leader of the RPF and the chief of the rebellion, he came to France, in 1992 or 1993, to meet with political leaders. Paul Dijoud, the director of the Africa desk at the Quai d’Orsay, called attention to this meeting at the Hilton Hotel on the Avenue Suffren in Paris. Kagame was accused of carrying illegal arms. He spent 48 hours in custody, and was questioned by the French police in a manner judged to be less than diplomatically correct. Humiliated, Kagame has obviously hung onto this bad memory. Recently, he related the story to President Sarkozy when the two met at the UN General Assemby in New York last October.


A.C.: Aren’t there also reasons of a strategic nature?

J.H.: Some strategic reason, perhaps. But I believe that, first and foremost, the French interfered with Kagame on his way to seizing power. Apparently, he played along with the Arusha negotiations in 1994, but this kind of political discussion was not at all this style. He could not bring himself to play second fiddle in a Rwanda reconciled and at peace. He wanted absolute power, and he has made that very clear today.


A.C.: The war had to continue . . .

J.H.: Yes, in his eyes, the war had to continue. It was out of the question for him to accept a role in the opposition. He knew he could not gain power through elections, him being a Tutsi in a country that is 85% Hutu. He needed an event to trigger the renewal of hostilities that would allow him to change the direction of history. That’s why he ordered the assassination of President Habyarimana, his predecessor. He knew very well that it would provoke a cataclysm.


A.C.: Leading to a genocide of his own ethnic group, you believe?

J.H.: I don’t know if his plan, if his cynicism, went that far. He did know, however, that this event had a high symbolic value and would trigger widespread massacres that would, in turn, legitimate his intervention, the return of the war, his seizure of power and his long-term installation as head of the country, without the international community being able to raise a single objection. His legitimacy was cinched when he presented himself as the one who put an end to the abomination of the massacres, but also as a member of the victim ethnic group. At the same time, in this very cynical way, he was able to get rid of the Tutsis from inside Rwanda, those Tutsis he mistrusted because the had stayed in Rwanda after 1961 and lived under majority Hutu rule. To him, these unfortunate brothers from inside the country were just renegades and traitors to the cause of Tutsi greatness! Kagame is, at once, a strategist, which he has well demonstrated, and a cynic, of which there can no longer be any doubt.


A.C.: Allow me to find that a little fantastic: we have a military leader using the genocide of his own people, in full view of the international community, to extend his power and influence with the support of the Anglo-Saxons, the Americans and the British united. For that, he reignites the war and stokes its murderous fires because the end of hostilities would mark the end of the expansion of his power and territory. That seems a lot like something else . . .

J.H.: Yes, that does very much resemble something else. In fact, it is quite a well-known and simple scheme.


A.C.: A condition putting in place a propaganda campaign meant to . . .

J.H.: Yes, a condition that would bring about good propaganda, that he had the intelligence to create.


A.C.: All this so he could drive his foot soldiers toward Zaire . . .

J.H.: Yes, this plot, intended to establish a ‘Tutsi Empire,’ is not just a dream, but also a reality that is still taking shape.


A.C.: What are the accusations being made against you?

J.H.: The Mucyo Commission, ordered by the Rwandan authorities, is supposed to have established proof of crimes allegedly committed by the French in Rwanda in the course of the genocide of 1994. Some members of this commission came secretly to France in 2007. Strangely, they never sought to contact us, neither me, nor most of the other people charged. The report issued by this commission is accompanied by a communiqué from the Rwandan Attorney General. To it is attached a list of 33 names of French personalities, “those most implicated in the Rwandan genocide,” to use their words. Besides 20 military officers, there are 13 civilians, including François Mitterand, ex-Prime Ministers Edouard Balladur, Alain Juppé, Dominique de Villepin, and several French ambassadors. My name appears among those of the 20 accused officers. What’s funny is, as you know, I didn’t get there with the French troops until the end of the genocide, on a UN mandate, and only to put a stop to the killing. Before that I had never set foot in Rwanda.


A.C.: Why did the Rwandan authorities get themselves all off into such a fantastic set up?

J.H.: It’s a political deal, a kind of tit for tat after the accusations made by Judge Bruguière against people close to Kagame in his report on the investigation of the assassination of President Habyarimana. This report provoked the breaking off of diplomatic relations between Rwanda and France two year ago. It issued nine international arrest warrants. A tenth could not be issued because it was intended for Kagame, himself, and, as a sitting head of state, he has immunity. The nine people accused are implicated in the terrorist attack that cost the life of the Rwandan President, his Burundian counterpart, their entourages, as well as the French flight crew of the Falcon 50 presidential jet.


A.C.: It really was a terrorist act, and not just an act of war, because the assassination of President Habyarimana, of his Burundian opposite number and their companions, took place after the signing of the Arusha Accords. Besides, if my memory serves, the RPF, Kagame’s party, had gained representation inside the Rwandan political structure . . .

J.H.: Exactly right. As prescribed by the accords that had just been signed, a battalion of the RPF was installed in Kigali, at the CND, the site of the former Parliament. Kagame took advantage of this to introduce the surface-to-air SAM 17 missiles that his commandos would use to carry out the attack. Judge Bruguière is not the only one to know this. Michael Hourigan, assistant prosecutor at the ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda), an Australian, had already reported it. He was dismissed from his functions at the ICTR for it. Kagame could not forgive France for proclaiming loud and clear a truth that greatly embarrassed him.


A.C.: How did the French authorities react to these accusations against their political leaders and military officers?

J.H.: I took part in two meetings a the Élysée, a few months ago. It should be first acknowledged that Kagame’s principal objective is to obtain the withdrawal of the Bruguière report and the quashing of the arrest warrants issued against his close collaborators. He is on his way to getting this done by promising in exchange to forget all about the Mucyo Commission Report: a compilation of false accusations and horrors, of gratuitous murders, of acts of torture, and of sordid rapes. The rapes hold an important place in the report. To answer your question, we, the officers charged, have asked the President of the French Republic, Chief of the Army, to clearly condemn this document. We were assured that President Sarkozy would do it publicly at the beginning of November. It’s the beginning of December now and nothing has come out yet.


A.C.: Is this why you have decided to speak to the press?

J.H.: Not entirely. We have witnessed a rapid and unexpected rekindling of French-Rwandan diplomatic relations at the instigation of Bernard Kouchner. It must be recognized that our Foreign Minister is an old friend of Kagame’s. He met him in the maquis in 1992. I think that a certain Third World sensibility plays an important part in the fascination that the military chief Kagame holds for him. I can see it because the man has charisma. Whatever else, though it may seem incredible, Kagame is Kouchner’s friend. Kouchner, who defends Human Rights, has closed his eyes to the exactions being committed in Rwanda today.


A.C.: How do you explain the arrest of Rose Kabuyé, implicated in the assassination of President Habyarimana, according to the Bruguière report?

J.H.: We are in the middle of a thoroughly staged operation. Lt.-Col. Rose Kabuye currently holds the position of Kagame’s chief of protocol. She was sent to Europe on a mission, with full knowledge of its purpose. The Germans had warned her that coming to their country on private business, without diplomatic cover, would oblige them to arrest her on the international warrant that had been issued in her name. After more than a month of round trips to the Old Continent, she was stopped at the Frankfurt airport last November 9th [2008]. She was extradited to France but not jailed, as should have been expected, but held in a large Paris hotel, then in a very comfortable apartment! She even had a visit from her husband and children, and, seemingly to avoid a growing scandal, was quickly authorized to return to Rwanda to celebrate the Christmas holidays! I don’t have the slightest doubt that Bernard Kouchner intervened to get her this favorable treatment[2]. Proof of the arrangement is that she was traveling on a normal passport and not a diplomatic passport, which would have protected her from arrest.


A.C.: How did Kouchner manage to maintain credibility considering his relations to Kagame and his avowed friendship with François Mitterand, when the former French president is, himself, charged in the Rwandan [Mucyo] report?

J.H.: I can’t answer that, but we must not tolerate these accusations against the French State. I am not a fierce defender of François Mitterand, but I know that he was never a cause of the genocide.

He said: “I am going to rein in my friend Habyarimana to create more democracy, and we will come to an arrangement for peace and civil accord.”

This seems to me to be based on fundamentally good intentions. To accuse him today of having contributed to the planning of a genocide is indecent. I really wish the French authorities had the courage to take a clear position vis-à-vis the Rwandan government and its leader, to reject these abominable charges and let Justice do its job. We hear a lot about independent Justice, but it’s now or never if we’re going to make our actions conform to our principles. Don’t forget that the crew of President Habyarimana’s Falcon 50 were French. Their families, who filed a legitimate complaint with the court, should be able to see Justice done! I don’t think we have the right to deny them this, even under the pretext of international diplomacy.


Notes:

[1] Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Tutsi rebel party of Paul Kagame.

[2] On 23 December 2008, Rose Kabuye was authorized to leave French territory so she could return to Rwanda to celebrate the holidays. According to her lawyer, she was ordered to return to France no later than 10 January (2009). This is extraordinary leniency toward someone charged with multiple murders.


[Translated from the French by CM/P]

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Sunday, February 01, 2009

The Critique of The Mucyo Commission Report--by the Political Prisoners of the UN in Arusha

The Critique of The Mucyo Commission Report--by the Political Prisoners of the UN in Arusha

[It’s The Terror that’s descending on the new Obama administration, making them hesitate, equivocate, compromise with real evil, morally neutralizing their best intentions. Close Gitmo and stop torture? Great! But what about the ad hoc Tribunals and the secret gulag of renditions sites? What happens if the Obama government tries to address the state criminality of the illegal imprisonment and unjustified prosecution of political detainees from Israel to Iraq and Afghanistan to Holland and EEurope to Tanzania and Rwanda? What happens is The Terror.

Think back to the look on Eliot Spitzer’s face: the popularly elected Democratic governor of New York forced by the FBI to resign his public office over some private dalliance with a young, overpriced tartlette--and all that just as “the Sheriff of Wall St.” was bringing regulatory heat down on the bandits of The Street--that’s The Terror.

And remember Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s public hounding for political corruption (‘patronage’ if your guy’s doing it; ‘payola’ if it’s the other side’s DJ) by Federal Attorneys (fresh from some ‘short-eyes’ stings in Florida?) wielding recordings of bugged private conversations--and all that just a day after Blago’d applied his gubernatorial authority to pressuring Bank of America, one of the big winners on Bail Out Bingo Night, to do the right thing by striking Illinois glass workers. That, too, is The Terror--or as J. Edgar Hoover used to call it, ‘just another day at the COINTELPRO office.’

The Terror is how the powers that be--the real institutional and unelected powers that drive, and thrive on, the globalized crime that is advanced Waste Capitalism--get to be (and stay) the powers that be. Just ask Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic or Juvénal Habyarimana or Rafik Hariri or 1,200+ Gazans and their duly elected Hamas leaders about The Terror. Oh, yeah, right, too late.

Sure, ding, dong, the wicked Bush is gone--at last! But The Terror lingers on, like the stink of stale beer-soaked snouts after an eight-year kegger. The unwholesomeness of the former government has wafted away with the speed of a departing moving van, leaving our new president to deal with that older residual putrescence, the ungodly pung of The Terror that has soaked deep into Washington carpets and woodwork, fear from Watergate, the Afghan Bear Trap, Iran/Contra, The Savings & Loan debacle, all grown even more foul with the horrors of the craven, class-collaborationist Clinton years. Now the deathly stench seems to be getting absorbed through the pores of the new administration.

We are rapidly bearing down on two anniversaries of pre-Bush, pre-911 Western-forced orgies of state terrorism: the 10th of the 78-day and night NATO bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo in March, and, April thru July, the 15th of the Rwandan bloodbath over the anglophone globalization of Congo’s riches--which, by all accounts, is still going strong. The attached document, which deals in depth with Rwanda, but also bears direct evidence on the Balkans tragedy, and all the rest of the US/NATO’s criminal insanity, from Afghanistan through Gaza and Lebanon to Zimbabwe, might give a good shove to the young, bright constitutional scholar now occupying the Oval Office. This rational illumination of the consensus mythology of machete-wielding tribesmen acting out age-old ethnic and racial hatreds, which is the popular media version of history, might just be what it takes to coax Mr. President Obama, himself the son of such a tribesman, toward a more accurate and honest understanding of the historically malignant policies he has inherited from his intellectually flaccid and morally devolved Democratic predecessors.

So here’s CM/P’s translation of the Critique by the Political Prisoners at the UN detention unit in Arusha, Tanzania, of the Kagame regime’s [Jean de Dieu] Mucyo Commission Report on France’s role in the 1994 Rwanda Genocide.

After the 2004 publication of the report by French antiterrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière (another CM/P translation on this blog), which called for the arrests of several high officials in the current Rwandan [Kagame] government for their involvement in the shooting down, on 6 April 1994, of the Rwandan presidential plane carrying two democratically elected, sitting African heads of state, both Hutus, Burundi’s Cyprien Ntaryamira and Rwanda’s Juvénal Habyarimana, along with their entourages, including the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan military, General Deogratias Nsabimana, and the three members of the French flight crew: the government in Kigali, first, broke off diplomatic relations with France; then, in tight goose-step with the pro-RPF propagandists and Tutsi survivor organizations, like IBUKA and AVEGA, started a tarantella of distraction unto delirium to cover their lurid history of Western-backed war crimes, crimes against humanity and mass exterminations, all in their violent pursuit of political power, by blaming the targeted Habyarimana regime and its European ally, France, for, what amounts to, destroying themselves and their country to the advantage of the foreign military forces that had invaded them, and clearing Rwanda of a goodly part of its people to make land available for returning member of the former [Tutsi] aristocracy.

Just think of Israel’s blaming Hamas and Hezbollah, along with their sponsor nations, Syria and Iran, for the carnage in Lebanon and Gaza, because these indigenous movements born of resistance to Israeli occupation recklessly tried to defend their homes by firing on the invading armies. Because these parallels between recent atrocities in the Middle East and Central Africa are as creepily close as those between the Bush and Obama administrations are fast becoming.

Though in wide use for some time, the reference to the Tutsis as “The Jews of Africa,” was recently explained in a very sympathetic and historically misinformed article in the August 19, 2004, British business periodical, The Economist. The term “Rwanda: The Israel of Africa” is a headline on the 20 January 2009 BBC online site. Since the latest Palestinian pogrom in Gaza, Israel is protesting rather too much against these analogies.

The IDF’s monstrous three-week rampage in the Gaza Strip has been a giant step toward the realization of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s prediction: that Israel would ERASE ITSELF from the map of the Middle East by wiping out its neighbors. The ever-growing military belligerence of the putative Jewish State has squandered vast amounts of international public sympathy, and it currently finds only weak and cringingly insincere moral support, even from those Western political leaders the AIPAC and other Zionist lobbies have so thoroughly terrorized that for these bought-off flunkies merely to suggest criticism of the US/UK/Israeli criminal cabal would be tantamount to their committing not just political suicide, but actually begging a Mossad agent to put a couple behind their ear. In the case of our new president, suggesting the IDF might be abusing all that US-donated ordnance would be like his going back to Kenya, walking into a Mau Mau meeting and spitting on the witch doctor.

This association of the Tutsis with the Jews has long been part of a colonialist strategy to separate the grand, royal, “Hamitic” herding people from the other more common, dwarfish, flat-nosed African field hands, and to justify their long-standing (neo)feudalist pretensions--i.e., to rationalize the tyranny of a tiny majority over the basic interests of an important majority. Though traditionally the Jews have been associated with popular, majoritarian, anti-fascist, liberal democratic movements--like the AFofL/CIO or the ACLU or the USSR (why the Nazis got so pissed at them)--it was the majority Hutus who were, in the 1930s, accused by the Bishop of Kigali of being under the intellectual influence of Russian Communism. But since the early 1950s, when the virus of anti-communism (read Big Business or Fascism) infected so many of the once progressive Left movements, including, most markedly, the State of Israel, the Jewish identity has been instrumentalized as a victimating mechanism to create sympathy for otherwise aggressive, militaristically expansionist, elitist groups, much as the Tutsis have done with their claim to having suffered a genocide at the hands of the communist [majoritarian] Hutu masses since being deposed as the Rwandan monarchy in the social revolution of 1959-62. Ultimately, this victimating is used to justify the Tutsi/RPF invasion of Rwanda from Uganda on 1 October 1990, and the bloody and ecumenically murderous onslaught that has eliminated anywhere from 5 to 9 millions people from the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa to make way for a free-trade zone from the Congo to the Nile river basins and the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.

I first learned about Rwanda's Mucyo Commission Report, the 500-page, 2.5-kilo, so-called inquiry into France's so-called role in the so-called 1994 genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis, right after it came out in autumn 2008, from Col. Jacques Hogard, a former Legionnaire, who had worked in and written about France's lifesaving “Operation Turquoise.” Then Chris Black, General Ndindiliyimana’s lead counsel in the Military II case and a strong contributor to the decolonization of African history (and this blog), sent me the UN Political Prisoners’ response to Kagame’s obese piece of bovine moral wriggling, and said the detainees wanted me to translate it.

Then the judgement on the Military I case came in. And though the defendants were all found guilty of allowing or failing to prevent the commission of “individual genocidal acts” by others in their charge and sentenced to life in prison (actually one defendant, who is very tight with the RPF, was cut loose on all charges), they were all found NOT GUILTY of any PLANNING or CONSPIRACY in the commission of genocide. That is to say--since genocide requires a preconceived or premeditated plan to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, if there’s no pre-planning or conspiracy, there no genocide--unless, of course, you decide to drive around all the legal hassle of having to prove genocide and just stipulate to it, like calling for the court to “take judicial notice of the fact of genocide,” as the ad hocs in The Hague and Arusha, and the national judiciary in Rwanda, have done. (See on this blog:
NO Conspiracy? NO Planning? NO Genocide? NO Problem! at
http://cirqueminime.blogcollective.com/blog/_archives/2008/12/23/4033400.html)

This Military I verdict congrued perfectly with the UN prisoners critique of Muyco--in fact, the Critique drew much of its evidence from the Military I trial--but sadly neglects some important evidence discovered in the Military II trial, like the total fabrication of the so-call Dallaire Genocide Fax [see Me Blacks article here at
http://cirqueminime.blogcollective.com/blog/_archives/2005/12/6/1437840.html]. No planning, no training of civilians and militias, no distribution of Red Chinese-made machetes, no lists of Tutsis to be killed, no government ordered rapes of Tutsi girls, and no French involvement in any of these non-happenings--in short, NO GENOCIDE, just lots of nasty killing, like everywhere else the Imperialist are trying to prolong their moribund wastage of our world’s life energies.

So how do we get this important information to President Obama? How do we make sure he sits down and really gets into this material with his new people? Especially the really dirty ones: Secry of State Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice, a Harvard colleague of that noted Genocide Industrialist Samantha Power. Because they are among those Clinton-era Humanitarian Militarists who know all too well the real story of who did what and with which and for whom in early-90s Rwanda: they must know better than most that, to paraphrase former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali from an interview with Robin Philpot, The Rwandan Genocide is a 100% US production.

Now that a UN Report on Rwanda’s criminal exploitation of resources in Eastern Congo has seemingly turned The Terror on Rwandan President Kagame, who responded on 23 January, the day after his forces, yet again, invaded Eastern Congo to cap some more genocidaire refugee women and children, ordered the arrest of his fellow-Tutsi warlord and proxy Hutu refugee exterminator, Laurent ‘slaughterhouse’ Nkunda, it might be just the right moment to get our new African-American Commander-in-Chief up to speed on the real history of his fatherland--or his father’s land. -- mc]

Attachments:
The Mucyo Commission Report.pdf (421KB)

Rwanda Invades Congo!!--AGAIN!!!--Press Release by the FDLR

Rwanda Invades Congo!!--AGAIN!!!--Press Release by the FDLR

[Here is the headline from the New Zealand Herald:

Rwandan troops enter Congo to help oust Hutu rebels
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10552877&ref=emailfriend

Before being distracted by the spectacle of 'the enthronement of Barack Obama', as the French foppishly referred to the 20 January 2009 swearing-in of the 44th US president before the largest audience, on-scene and worldwide, in the history of audiences, we witnessed a three-week IDF dynamite-fishing expedition into the brackish waters of Gaza--with 1,300 dead and the Strip reduced to dusty rubble, this latest example of modern Hebraic humanism was more intensely murderous than previous Israeli/US joint criminal ventures, like the 2006 'war with Hezbollah' (which, after killing only 1,200 people and doing billions in structural damage, Israel 'strategically lost', so it could try again, fail again, fail bloodier!) or any of the dozens of diabolical destruction derbies inside the refugee camps of this blighted region.

Now we are being presented a parallel nightmare, with the 'Jews of Africa', the Rwandan Tutsis, currently running a thoroughly corrupted Rwandan USAID-based government ('the Israel of Africa'--nb: 16% of Rwanda's aid money goes to the Tutsi-dominated military sector, while only 3% goes to the impoverished, predominantly Hutu agricultural sector--so Rwanda IS a real model . . . of neoliberal wastage.), seeking revenge against ( 'the Palestinians of Africa'?), the (still) majoritarian Rwandan Hutus, a great many of whom were dispossessed, displaced and just straight-up run off out of their country, mostly into neighboring Zaire (now DRC) in 1994, after a four-year reign of terror that eventuated in the assassination of the sitting Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, and some top military officials, including the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army (the FAR) at the hands of the RPF ('the IDF of Africa'), all of this leading to the final and bloody seizure of political power by Paul Kagame's Western proxy forces and the subsequent, highly ecumenical slaughter of millions of refugees in Eastern Congo.

Just as each Israeli onslaught against the Palestinians is serialized for our moral and (anti-)intellectual protection--so we don't have to remember all the past episodes, each liquifactionist paroxysm, with its incumbent hypocritical apologias, is a self-contained and easilydigested informational meal in itself--thus this latest invasion of Congo by AFRICOM-backed Rwandan forces is presented as an ahistorical 'current event', garnished with a lot of unresearched, soporific slop about tribes and ethnicities, confusing victims with villains.

But look around--even if it's just around this blog!--and you'll see that what's going down with these 'righteous acts of national self defense' is really just another assault on the majoritarian interests of a nation and/or a people. The only way elitist governments like Israel's and Rwanda's can continue is by sowing terror and grisly death among the great general mass of the population. The great achievement of the Obama victory is that a great majority of the American people, a mass with its roots in popular movements from Abolition, to Universal Suffrage, to Civil Rights, to Black Power, to various antiwar movements, has demanded its rights be recognized and its interests served.

Just as with Paul Robeson and the Tuskegee Airmen and the Scotsboro Boys and Huey Newton and Bobby Seal and Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and Eldrige Cleaver and Bobby Hutton and George and Jonathan Jackson and Malcolm X and, the most recognized of all, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King; like all those Black men who knew they had a responsibility to protect the great mass of the world's poor and powerless from theirs, the most powerful and wasteful country in the world: so Barack Obama is more than just an African American, for his roots are deeper than just his race--and he reflects the sort of class allegiances that defy the bourgeois nonsense definitions of class as lifestyle--Obama is a paid-up member of that great Union of Workers of the World, a passionate advocate for the suffering of the Surplus Army of the Unemployed, and he is one of what we here like to call the International Proletariate. He is one of us.

So President Obama must see this tortured history of his homeland. If and when he does, he will surely join us in supporting, in every way we can, the struggle of the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda. Not to recognize this continuing, bloody aggression against the people of Africa is to permit the spread and continuation of this threat against all of us--the perpetuation of this, yet another, mortal injury to human dignity and decency.--mc]

***********************


FDLR PRESS RELEASE No. 02/SE/CD/JANUARY/2009



The Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda condemn the ongoing war that enemies of peace have just imposed to the peaceful peoples of the Great Lakes region of Africa.


The Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) strongly condemn the ongoing war that the enemies of peace, prosperity and democracy are once again about to impose to peaceful peoples of the African Great Lakes region.


The FDLR inform the public and the International Community that the first contingent of the Rwanda Patriotic Army comprising more than 4,000 heavily armed soldiers have crossed the Congolese border since January 19, 2009, and will soon begin their dirty work of exterminating the Rwandan Hutu refugees, the few survivors of the genocide committed by the RPF-Inkotanyi and its allies against them in the years 1996-1998 in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo..


The FDLR urge the International Community to strongly condemn this new war and immediately take severe sanctions against the Rwandan government which is the primarily responsible for this new war.



The FDLR inform the public and the International Community that this new war is not only senseless but also unnecessary and risks to engulf the entire Great Lakes region of Africa. Moreover, those who conceived and implemented the plan to exterminate the peoples of the African Great Lakes Region, whoever they may be, must understand that their acts will not go unpunished and that they will sooner or later have to answer before the law for all the serious consequences that will result from that war.


The FDLR recall that they have repeatedly extended a hand to the regime of Kigali in order to peacefully resolve the political problem of Rwanda and that Rwanda has always refused this offer and preferred the logic of armed confrontation.


The FDLR call upon all women and all men of good will and peace-loving nations around the world to condemn in the strongest terms this logic of war in a region already scarred by years of fratricidal and endless wars.



The FDLR reaffirm their commitments made in Rome as stated in their Declaration of 31 March 2005, and urge once again the Kigali regime to sit on the same table, under the Rome process, to find a peaceful solution to the political problem of Rwanda.


The FDLR call upon the Rwandan and Congolese people, and the members of the FDLR to remain calm and united in order to foil the macabre plan of the dictatorial regime in Kigali and its sponsors aimed at exterminating the peoples of the Great Lakes region of Africa.


Done in Paris on 21 January 2009.


Callixte Mbarushimana
Executive Secretary of the FDLR

NO Conspiracy? NO Planning? NO Genocide? NO Problem!--Professor Peter Erlinder's Commentary in 23 December 2008, JURIST

NO Conspiracy? NO Planning? NO Genocide? NO Problem!--Professor Peter Erlinder's Commentary in 23 December 2008, JURIST

[The December 18, 2008, announcement of the convictions of three of the four defendants in what has come to be known as the Military I trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda made the headlines on all the major Western news media.

On CNN-International, the bloated and ghoulish Jim Clancy, whose very career slithered from the piles of decomposing corpses left behind by the rampaging Western liquifactionists in their aggressions against the popular (majoritarian) revolutions in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, was joined on-air by a similarly flaccid, a lifeless but for his moral squirming, David Scheffer, Clinton's 'Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes' (theirs, not ours), in some anile clucking over yet another victory for International Justice in the never-ending struggle to 'Stop the Fucking Genocide' (theirs, not ours). The acquittal on all charges of one Defendant and his immediate release (former Rwandan Armed Forces Gen. Gratien Kabiligi is known to stand in good stead with the ruling RPF, and will probably join in seasonal festivities with his compatriot, RPF Col. Rose Kubaye, Rwandan President Paul Kagame's chief of protocol, recently arrested in Frankfurt on a warrant issued by French anti-terrorist judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, for the murders of all on board the Rwandan presidential jet, including the three French crew members, on 6 April 1994, extradited to France, and then cut loose at the insistence of a craven collaborator, French Foreign Minister, Bernie Kouchner); and the fact that ALL Defendants were acquitted of having planned the systematic killing of Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians, or of having taken part in any sort of conspiracy to commit genocide (which is sine qua non for this chic crime), are being written off as evidence of the Tribunal's independence and objectivity, or as mere judicial oversights that will be corrected on appeal.

(Scheffer showed not the slightest shame or even self-consciousness when, while referring to Theoneste Bagosora et al, the Defendants, as the brains and the instigators of the Rwandan genocide, the very crimes of which they had just be absolved, he suggested the Prosecution might file an appeal on the great victory that he and Clancy had just been fondling one another over).

Below, Professor Peter Erlinder describes just how 'NON-victorious' was this, yet another, shabby hit-and-run against real History and the rule of law.

But, with all due respect—and I certainly hope Professor Erlinder knows in what high regard I hold him and his excellent work—in twice referring to the martyred president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, as the 'FORMER-Rwandan president' at the moment he was torn to shreds by one of Paul Kagame's US-supplied SAM missiles, he makes the sort of telltale misstatement more commonly used by the purveyors of RPF propaganda to minimize the significance of the events that led to the 100-day liquidation of the majoritarian Rwandan government by the neo-feudal Tutsi militarists.

Since President Habyarimana was the sitting civilian head of state at the time of his murder, and would doubtlessly have been returned to the Rwandan presidency had the democratic elections called for by the 1993 Arusha Accords been duly carried out, the only way Kagame & the RPF could effectively take power in that already war-ravaged country was by a brutally and brazenly murdering the highly-popular Habyarimana as the signal for their final assault and seizure of state power by taking the capital city of Kigali (and emptying the country of an important part of its Hutu majority, to be gruesomely eliminated later in Congo), referring to Habyarimana as the 'former president' or the 'ex-president' of Rwanda—like referring to the RPF’s missile strike of 6 April 1994 that brought down the Falcon 50 presidential jet as a 'plane crash', or worse still, 'an accident', sufficiently minimizes this terrorist act and trivializes the culpability of its perpetrators, and allows the ever-more mawkish plaints over a generations-old 'genocide against Tutsis' to continue unquestioned. And those who dare criticize this feeble orthodoxy are tagged as ‘negationists’ or even ‘Holocaust deniers’.

Professor Erlinder also leaves out a much earlier admission by the Prosecution that it had no case on the genocide charges. Some time ago the ad hoc Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda abandoned any genuine efforts to establish the legal or historical reality of the Genocide Charge. Expert supporters of this illegal or extralegal system have even stated that the nature of the crime, itself, makes it impossible to prove—like the existence of God or of extra-terrestrial interventions or of Sharon Stone’s intelligence, a Genocide Charge is based more on intuition or faith (or political expediency) than rational evidence.

So, exacerbating the already inherent presumption of guilt in all these victims' (victors') justice proceedings, the Appeals Chamber of the ICTR instructed the Trial Chamber on 16 June 2006, in the case of the Prosecutor v Édouard Karemera, Mathieu Ngirumpatse, and Joseph Nzirorera (Case No. ICTR-98-44-AR73[C]) to ‘TAKE JUDICIAL NOTICE’ of the 'FACT OF GENOCIDE’.

Dr. John Laughland, in his otherwise excruciatingly careless book, The History of Political Trials from Charles I to Saddam Hussein (Peter Lang, Oxford, 2008), explains this para-legal shuck thus:

<
procedure by which the need for proof is waived when
the facts in question are uncontested and uncontroversial,
and usually when they do not bear on the matter in hand.
Examples of the kinds of things of which judicial notice can
be taken include the location of a place or the day of the week
on which a certain date falls. When judicial notice is taken of
a fact, it means that that fact can no longer be disputed in court.

To instruct the Trial Chamber to take judicial notice of the fact
of genocide, however, is to remove from defendants the right to
plead that genocide did not occur. (p. 212)>>


And it also creates a sort of hard-wired, simultaneous Double Jeopardy, allowing the court to acquit the Defendants of genocide while convicting them of individual ‘acts of genocide’ ALLEGEDLY COMMITTED BY OTHERS and condemning them to perpetual imprisonment.

But because of the tenaciously committed work of lawyers like Erlinder and Chris Black and Tiphaine Dickson, the ICTR has turned into its sponsors' and minders' worst nightmare: a livid recording of the unwholesome political manipulation of History and the degradation of International Justice.

This is exactly the record that a constitutional scholar like President-elect Obama should be made to listen to—and should insist his so-far thoroughly reactionary foreign policy team (especially where Africa is concerned) rigorously study and learn to dance to.

Let the Obama team's master class begin here. —mc]

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JURIST Commentary, December 23, 2008:
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2008/12/rwanda-no-conspiracy-no-genocide.php


Rwanda: No Conspiracy, No Genocide Planning ... No Genocide?

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JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Erlinder of William Mitchell College of Law and a Lead Defense Counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), says that if - as the ICTR recently ruled in the "Military I" trial - alleged "masterminds" Colonel Theoneste Bagosora and fellow top Rwandan military officers engaged in no conspiracy and no planning to kill ethnic civilians, the tragedy that engulfed Rwanda in 1994 may not properly be called a "genocide" at all...

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The media reports of the December 18 judgment of Chamber-1 at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda focused primarily on the convictions of three of four former top military leaders, who were the supposed “masterminds” of the Rwandan genocide. But, as those who have followed the ICTR closely know, convictions of members of the former Rwandan government and military are scarcely newsworthy.

Ever since former ICTR Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte and ICTR Chief Investigative Prosecutor Michael Hourigan went public in 2007-8 exposing US-UK manipulations to grant de facto impunity to current Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his henchmen, between 1997 and the present, convictions of the vanquished in the Rwanda war are a given.

The real news was that ALL of the top Rwandan military officers, including the supposedly infamous Colonel Bagosora, were found not guilty of conspiracy or planning to commit genocide. And Gen. Gratien Kabiligi, a senior member of the general staff was acquitted of all charges! The others were found guilty of specific acts committed by subordinates, in specific places, at specific times - not an overall conspiracy to kill civilians, much less Rwandan-Tutsi civilians.

This raises the more profound question: If there was no conspiracy and no planning to kill ethnic (i.e., Tutsi) civilians, can the tragedy that engulfed Rwanda properly be called “a genocide” at all? Or, was it closer to a case of civilians being caught up in war-time violence, like the Eastern Front in WWII, rather than the planned behind-the-lines killings in Nazi death camps? The ICTR judgment found the former.

The Court specifically found that the actions of Rwandan military leaders, both before and after the April 6, 1994, assassination of former-Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarima ('sic'--he was the seated head of state at the time of his murder--nb), were consistent with war-time conditions and the massive chaos brought about by the four-year war of invasion from Uganda by Gen. Paul Kagame's RPF army, which seized power in July 1994.

Although the Chamber did not specifically mention more recent events, it is worth noting that this is the same government that was named in a UN Security Council-commissioned report on December 12, 2008, as having invaded (with Uganda) the eastern Congo in 1996 and again in 1998 and having occupied an area 15-times the size of Rwanda since then. Similar UN Security Council reports in 2001, 2002 and 2003, make clear that Rwanda and Uganda's economic rape of the eastern Congo, and the resulting 6 million-plus civilian deaths, have long been an “open secret".

As Lead Defense Counsel for Major Aloys Ntabakuze, who was convicted of three specific crimes committed by troops without evidence they were acting under his authority, I would say the judgment was actually a victory. Our defense was based on previously suppressed contemporaneous UN and declassified US documents that showed Kagame's RPF to be the war-time aggressor responsible for the assassination of the former (sic) President and for preventing military intervention to end the predicted civilian massacres.

The ICTR oral judgment specifically refers to this “alternative” explanation of the tragic events in Rwanda as being a basis for rejecting the conspiracy and planning charges against the former military leaders. But the documents show more.

As early as May 17, 1994, UNHCR was receiving reports of massive civilian killings by Kagame's RPF in the 1/3 of Rwanda they had occupied since April 22. Other documents from August, September and October 1994, describe a conscious attempt by UN and US government officials to “cover-up” reports of RPF killings, including memos to Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Apparently, US policy to create “impunity” for Kagame began nearly as soon as he took power.

Had the US “impunity policy” not been in place, Kagame might well have been prosecuted along with Military-1 defendants Bagosora and Nsengiumva, as ICTR Prosecutor Michael Hourigan recommended in early 1997. Kagame's responsibility for the assassination of Habyarimana has been known to the ICTR Prosecutor since at least that time, if not early.

Had the US “impunity policy” not been in place, Kagame might well have spent the last decade awaiting trial at the ICTR, rather than getting rich from the resources of the Congo, and the blood of millions of Africans.

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Peter Erlinder is a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, St. Paul, MN. He is a past-President of the National Lawyers Guild, a Lead Defense Counsel-UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the President of the ICTR-ADAD (Association des Avocats de la Defense).

E-mail peter.erlinder@wmitchell.edu

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