The U.S. and the United Nations have spoken out against Israel’s plan to construct some 900 houses in occupied East Jerusalem. The houses will be built against Palestinian wishes and the U.S. is afraid the plans will hurt peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine. Israel insists East Jerusalem is their territory, but Palestine wishes the area be the capital city of their future state, Voice of America.

Five people have been sentenced to death in Iran after being arrested during post-election protests. The total may include three people who were sentenced to death in October, but it is not clear. 81 of 86 arrested since the June election have received jail sentences ranging from six months to 15 years. Iranian TV reports stated those given the death penalty were convicted for being members of “terrorist and opposition groups,” BBC News.

Two Rwandan Hutu leaders have been arrested in Germany on suspicion of committing crimes against humanity in Congo. The two are suspected members of the FDLR, a group made up of Rwandan refugees who fled to Congo after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which a half million Tutsis were killed, New York Times.

More charges have been filed against six men of the same family in Missouri. Police say at least one of the men forced a child to kill a kidnapped man and held another child, who became pregnant, captive in a basement. The eldest charged, 77-year-old Burrell Mohler Sr., allegedly buried the infant in a box in the basement. The six men were arrested last week and charged with sexually abusing multiple family members, CNN.

Hot Topic: Velvet Revolution’s Roots Obscure 20 Years Later.

In vorkolonialer Zeit gab es in Ruanda und Burundi ein Nebeneinander der Gruppen der Tutsi, Hutu und Twa, deren Sozialstruktur sich in dieser Rangfolge über den sozialen Status ergab. Während die Tutsi überwiegend Viehzüchter waren und die Twa als Jäger und Sammler lebten, betrieben die Hutus vornehmlich Landwirtschaft und stellten die Mehrheit der Bevölkerung. Eine vertikale Durchlässigkeit zwischen den sozialen Gruppen war gegeben; beispielsweise durch den Erwerb von Vieh war sozialer Aufstieg möglich. Alle drei Gruppen sprechen Kinyarwanda.

Erst während der Kolonialherrschaft Deutschlands (bis 1916) und des Völkerbundsmandats Belgiens (ab 1923) über Ruanda entstand eine ethnische Bedeutung der Zugehörigkeit von Menschen zu den Gruppen der Hutu, Tutsi oder Twa. Die Einteilung in Ethnien und das Bilden einer herrschenden Volksgruppe als Oberschicht dienten den Kolonialherren zur Organisation der Kolonialverwaltung im Sinne der von Deutschen und Belgiern praktizierten indirekten Herrschaft. 1934 galt als ein Kriterium für die Zuordnung zu den Hutu oft der Besitz von unter zehn Rindern. Häufig legten die Behörden die Zugehörigkeit zu einer Gruppe auch nach dem Aussehen der Menschen fest.

Im damals vorherrschenden rassistischen Denkmodell wurden die ethnischen Gruppen auch anhand ihrer Phänotypologie unterschieden, wobei diese hier auf die bereits bestehenden sozialen Gruppen übertragen wurden. Die sozial untergeordneten Hutu wurden als negride, „unterwürfige Rasse“ klassifiziert, die Tutsi als überlegene „Rasse mit natürlichen Herrscherqualitäten“. Als Legitimation wurden die Tutsis gemäß der Hamitentheorie als hamitisch-semitische und damit als europide Rasse eingeordnet, deren Herrschaftsanspruch sich daraus ergebe.

Diesem Denkmodell folgend wurden Tutsi seit Beginn der Kolonisation von den Machthabern in Schlüsselpositionen eingesetzt und gefördert. Nach dem Ende der Kolonialherrschaft wurden jedoch die Bevölkerungsmehrheit der Hutu zur herrschenden Gruppe. Diese historische Entwicklung ist eine der mittelbaren Ursachen für ethnische Konflikte in beispielsweise Ruanda, der Demokratischen Republik Kongo und Burundi.

Der Konflikt zwischen Hutu und Tutsi führte 1994 zum Völkermord in Ruanda einschließlich des Massakers von Nyarubuye.

(Quelle: Wikipedia)

Paul Kagame is responsible for the death of Rwandans,Congolese and Ugandans in Millions

Athough the U.S. has been successful in preventing Kagame’s crew from being indicted at the ICTR, other courts have indicted Kagame and members of his retinue. In late 2007, French Judge Bruguiere indicted the assassins of Habyarimana and personally recommended to Kofi Annan that Kagame be prosecuted by the ICTR.[22] And, in February 2008 Spanish Judge Merelles issued a 180-page indictment specifically charging Kagame with: Genocide; War Crimes; Crimes Against Humanity; including the massacres of more than 300,000 civilians.

The Ruhengeri city attack of January 23, 1991:

The RPF staged a night attack on the city of Ruhengeri, resulting in heavy civilian casualties and heavy property damage. The RPF opened the gates of Ruhengeri prison, freeing many prisoners and enrolling them as fighters. The RPF also engaged in heavy looting activity in the city, and a reported 400 people were forced out of their homes to help carry the loot. These 400 civilians were all killed afterwards, along with another 100 civilians around the city as the RPF retreated back into the volcano forest. (Abdul J. Ruzibiza, Rwanda, L’Histoire? Secrete, 2005, p. 132)

The Butaro massacre of May 199

At Rusasa in the commune of Butaro, in the province of Ruhengeri, the RPF attacked displaced people on a small island in the swamps of Rugezi, destroying their shelters and killing their goats and sheep. 150 people were reportedly killed in this attack. (Testimony provided by witnesses, still living)

The notorious Ruhengeri and Byumba massacre of February 8, 1993:

The RPF staged a major attack in several communes of the Provinces of Ruhengeri and Byumba, killing many people and inflicting heavy damage on state and privately-owned property. During this attack, the RPF killed a total of 24,400 people in Ruhengeri, and of15,800 in Byumba. (James K. Gasana, Rwanda: du parti-Etat a l’Etat garnison, 2002, p. 185)

The political assassination of May 18, 1993:

The RPF is reported to have killed Emmanuel Gapyisi, a prominent political leader from the south and vice president of the MDR party. He was one of the most clear-minded and respected leaders of the MDR party. His killing removed a powerful RPF opponent because Gapyisi was very critical of RPF violent methods and practices. But this also was an extremely reckless crime capable of plunging the country into widespread violence between southerners and northerners especially if the former came to believe the latter had killed their man. Gapyisi’s killing was among the first in a wave of assassinations nationwide targeting Hutu political leaders, including businessmen, mayors, parliamentarians, and leading up to the assassination of Gatabazi, Bucyana, and finally President Habyarimana. An investigation is needed to clear the mystery of these assassinations once and for all.

Other crimes and terrorist acts:

Throughout the year of 1993, Rwanda experienced a major spike in acts of armed banditry, grenade attacks and mini-bus taxi explosions in several parts of the country. According to several credible witnesses, among them former RPF officer Lieutenant Abdul Rizibiza now in exile in Norway, the acts were the work of infiltrated RPF hit squad members and spy operatives all belonging to the “RPF Network”, who were assigned to spreading violence and insecurity, thus rendering the country ungovernable in a bid to overthrow the government and seize power by force. (Abdul J. Ruzibiza, Testimony of Abdul Ruzibiza, March 14, 2004)

IV. RPF CRIMES FROM JANUARY 1, 1995 TO PRESENT (NOVEMBER 8, 2006

The gruesome Kibeho massacre of April 17-23, 1995:

An estimated 4000 internally displaced people were reported killed on the orders of Major General Paul Kagame when army units collectively fired on the Kibeho camp that was estimated to shelter about 100,000 people, indiscriminately killing unarmed men, women, children, and many elderly. Paul Kagame, then vice president and minister of defense, reportedly had established his local operations headquarters in nearby Butare to closely supervise the siege and dismantling of the Kibeho camp. It took one full night of non-stop body disposal by truck towards the Nyungwe forest for mass incineration (many areas of the site were cordoned off for supposed “security and military reasons”) before the RPF allowed journalists, independent observers and UN monitors, to access the site. (Paul Jordan, Witness to Genocide – A Personal Account of the 1995 Kibeho Massacre, 1998; Abdul J. Ruzibiza, Rwanda, L’Histoire? Secrete, 2005)

This was a well-publicized massacre brazenly carried out by the RPF government, in the presence of the UN military contingent from Zambia and officials from NGO’s assisting these refugees, and many pictures of which were taken and made public. The simple question, then, is why hasn’t there been any independent inquiry so that the perpetrators can be officially identified and punished?

The deadliest year of 1996:

The year of the infamous mass murder of refugees in Zaïre (currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and forced deportation of refugees: The RPA army carried out perhaps the most brutal and genocidal campaign in modern history by attacking the sprawling refugee camps in Goma and Bukavu in Zaïre, home to an estimated 1 to 2 million Rwandan refugees. There is little doubt that among these refugees were those who had participated in the mass killings inside Rwanda 2 years before. But the RPA army put the guilty and the innocent in the same bag, and indiscriminately fired on the camps and crowds of unarmed fleeing refugees, especially women, children and the elderly who were the weakest and unable to run fast, hunting down many of them like beasts deep into the tropical Zairian forest all the way to Tingi Tingi and Mbandaka. By all accounts, it is estimated this whole operation claimed the lives of 400,000 Rwandan refugees. While this operation was underway, the RPA army undertook one of the biggest deportation campaigns ever, by forcibly (i.e. against their will) airlifting an estimated 700,000 refugees back to their respective original communes in Rwanda. Then the RPF started a long-running criminal process of killing these returnees, as a result of which about 50% of the returnees are not living today. These horrific crimes, both in Zaïre and in Rwanda, were executed with orders received from their leaders. (Testimony provided by witnesses, still living; Marie Beatrice Umutesi, Fuir ou Mourir au Zaire: Le vécu d’une réfugiée Rwandaise, 2000)

The International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development (CIDPDD), in teaming with the African Association for the Defense of Human Rights in DRC (ASADHO), concluded that “It appears pertinently that the Rwandan government can be held accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide” in their document entitled “Report of inquiry by the international non-government commission on human rights violations in DRC (former Zaire) 1996-1998”, 1998, p.78.

The slaughter of the Nyarutovu wedding, January 18-19, 1997:

In the night of January 18-19, 1997, the RPF attacked and killed each and every one of the guests, including the bride and groom and their parents, at a civil wedding in the home of Major Laurent Bizabarimana in Nyarutovu in the northern province of Ruhengeri. 50 peoplewere collectively slaughtered that night. Major Laurent Bizabarimana and his family had recently returned from Zaire during the massive forced deportation by the RPF, and became victims of a brutal RPF nationwide campaign inside Rwanda to eliminate “genocidaire elements” from among these returnees. (Testimony provided by witnesses, still living)

The horrors of the Nyakinama Cave, October 23-28, 1997:

RPA soldiers are reported to have pursued and killed8,000 unarmed civilians, especially women, children and the elderly who were too weak to run who had sought refuge in the cave of Nyakinama, in the commune of Kanama, to escape indiscriminate shootings and bombings by the RPA in the area. RPA soldiers reacted by lobbing grenades and other explosives into the cave, then went on to seal off the entrance of the cave with rocks and gravel so no one would be able to come out. ( Amnesty International, The dead can no longer be counted, report, December 1997)

The Hutu Christmas massacre of Kayonza, December 23-25, 1998:

In the evening hours of December 23, 1998, a passenger on a mini-bus taxi from Kigali got off near Nyagatare, and suddenly fired a gun into the air before running off into the hills of near-by Ngarama. The next day, people woke up to road blocks at Kayonza and Musha, and to military security sweep operations in the surrounding communes of Ngarama, Muvumba, Murambi, Kayonza, and Bicumbi. All taxis to and from Kigali were stopped and carefully screened for Hutus, who were ordered out before the taxis were allowed to resume their journey. These Hutus were then all executed using guns or used up hoes, then loaded up onto trucks and shipped to humming incineration centers in the Mutara region, with the ashes later dispersed into the Akagara National Park. An estimated 5,000 innocent civilians, including the cousin of one witness, perished in this macabre 2-day operation. (Testimony provided by witnesses, still living)

The brutal reprisal campaigns against Abacengezi (1997-2000) and the ethnic cleansing of the Mutara region (1995 and after):

From 1997 to around 2000, the RPF faced an increased number of cross-border raids from Zaire into Rwanda carried out by remnants of the previous army who called themselves “Abacengezi” (or inroad specialists). Each time they attacked, the RPA army responded by unleashing a brutal reprisal campaign targeting the civilian population, especially in the northwestern provinces of Ruhengeri and Gisenyi, in order to break the will of the insurgents, many of whom originated from these provinces. More than 50,000 people were killed in many communes of these 2 provinces from 1997 to 2000. In the meantime, the RPF returned to the Mutara region in the northeast and started where it had left off in cleansing the area of all ethnic Hutus. The RPF decimated native Hutus, as well as other Hutus who had immigrated into this once under-populated area from other parts of the country in search of land and new jobs during the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s. The Mutara region is now the new all-Tutsi land of Rwanda, complete with farms and cattle ranches for the Tutsi herders. There have been reports that these ranching activities, in search of grazing pasture, have led to severe encroachments into the adjacent Akagera National Park, destroying the ecosystem of the area and the natural habitat of many wild animals. (Testimony provided by witnesses, still living)

V. OTHER ALLEGED RPF CRIMES

The crime of denying people their right to seek medical treatment overseas: Since taking power in July 1994, theRPF has put in place a criminal policy of systematic non-issuance of medical treatment exit visas for people it wants to punish for multiple reasons. These are mostly people who have voiced their criticism of the government or the army, or are perceived to be in the political opposition, etc. One of the most glaring cases is that of Father Andre Sibomana,former Editor of the independent newspaper“Kinyamateka”, and a former interim Bishop of the Diocese of Kabgayi after the assassination of Bishop Thaddee Nsengiyumva in June 1994. He was a staunch social justice advocate and human rights activist known for his editorials denouncing the excesses of the RPF regime. He was never allowed to seek expert medical treatment overseas, and succumbed to his illness in Kabgayi at the young age of 43 on March 7, 1998. Dr. Jean Bagiramenshi, a veterinarian who worked for the government and later consulted for the World Bank, was another victim of this policy. He suffered from multiple ailments, including kidney malfunction and gout, and may have had liver problems as well. He was prevented several times from seeking medical treatment out of Rwanda on his own money, and by the time he was allowed to leave, it was too late. He died in Belgium in 2005.Investigations must be carried out to determine how many people have fallen victim to this criminal policy.(Testimony provided by witnesses, still living)

RPF death squads on the trail of opponents inside and outside Rwanda:

On May 5, 1998, former Interior Minister Seth Sendashonga was assassinated in Nairobi, Kenya; on October 6, 1996, Colonel Theoneste Lizinde and businessman Augustin Bugirimfura were assassinated in Nairobi, Kenya; in the night of February 14-15, 1999, former CEO of Rwanda African Continental Bank (BACAR) Pasteur Musabe was assassinated in Yaounde, Cameroon. Inside Rwanda, former Council of State presidentVincent Nsanzabaganwa was assassinated on February 14, 1997; former presidential advisor Assiel Kabera was gunned down on March 5, 2000; on April 7, 2003, parliamentarian Leonard Hitimana was assassinated, and no inquiry has been conducted. Two weeks later on April 23, 2003, Colonel Augustin Cyiza was abducted and killed.Edouard Mutsinzi, former editor of “Le Messager” newspaper in Kigali, was abducted and beaten up, with his ribs broken, his eyes taken out, and his brain damaged so bad that he lives in a vegetative state in Belgium. All the victims were either critics of the government or potential compromising witnesses in possession of top state secrets. These crimes and many others were reported to have been committed by RPF death squad members assigned to do the dirty work against RPF opponents in different world capitals. They must be investigated, and their perpetrators brought to justice.

The cruel and inhumane use of prisoners in de-mining operations: The RPF has been reported sending hundreds to Hutu prisoners to their immediate death by forcing them to run in areas where landmines are suspected of having been planted by the ousted army, especially in the Bugesera region. These allegations must be fully investigated and prosecuted. (Testimony provided by witnesses, still living)

During the Congo war and the occupation of Eastern DRC by the RPA, reports abounded about Rwandan prisoners being sent to die at the forefront of a brutal war of occupation and exploitation of the DRC. There were also numerous reports that hundreds, maybe thousands, of Rwandan prisoners were sent to RPA-occupied areas of the Congo to work as forced labor in the digging of minerals, especially Coltan, gold and diamonds, for the top brass members of the RPA army, starting with President Paul Kagame himself. This was a flagrant violation of international laws governing prisoners and a despicable trampling of human dignity. A full investigation and prosecution of these crimes is warranted. (Testimony provided by witnesses, still living)

VI. FINAL OBSERVATIONS

When this RPF crime compendium is released, I expect the RPF government to hit back with blanket accusations, without any proof, that I am a “revisionist and a negationist of the Rwandan genocide”, and that “I harbor an ideology of genocide and divisionism”. The international community must take a very close and careful look at such character assassination, and in many cases outright persecution, of all real and perceived contrary opinion holders and political opponents, social justice advocates and human rights critics in Rwanda by the RPF government, and find a proper way to address it.

The present compendium was conceived as an effort to document most reported and under-reported crimes by the RPF organization as a predominantly Tutsi rebel group and government with a view to bring to light its apparent share of responsibility in the whole Rwandan tragedy. Even though it places a premium on seemingly forgotten Hutu casualties, this document did not and does not intend to belittle Tutsi and Twa casualties of the Rwandan genocide. All sons and daughters of Rwanda, as well as foreigners who perished in this tragedy were a terrible loss to humanity and must be equally mourned and remembered, regardless of their ethnicity. We need to know with certainty who massacred the Bagogwe Tutsi sub-clan of Gisenyi in 1991 and 1992. We need to know with certainty who butchered the Banyamulenge Tutsis and Bagobwe Tutis sheltered at Mudende camps in August, November, and December 1997. We need to know with certainty who killed the American, British, Australian and New Zealand tourists at Bwindi National Park in Uganda in 1999. Who killed the Spanish volunteers in Rwanda in 1997 and in Congo in the following years? Who abducted, mutilated and killed former Rwandan cabinet minister Juvenal Uwiringiyimana before dumping his body in a Brussels canal in December 2005? Was he or not a victim of the RPF death squad in Europe as widely suspected? The overall goal of this document is to lift the cloud of mystery and secrecy hanging over the Rwandan tragedy. It is to fight impunity and help bring equitable justice to Rwanda: whoever killed a Tutsi must pay, whoever killed a Hutu must pay, whoever killed a Twa must pay, and whoever killed a foreigner must pay.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame is now widely believed to be behind the shooting down of the aircraft carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana on that fateful night of April 6, 1994. In that capacity, he is the suspected triggerman of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the architect of the genocide after 1994. Kagame outright denies these allegations. But a better way to refute the charges and clear his name once and for all is to allow an independent investigation to look into these crimes. Of course Kagame will never request such an independent investigation, because he knows he is guilty. That’s why we ask the UN to mandate the ITCR to investigate these tragedies not covered by the current mandate.

The provinces of Byumba and Ruhengeri did not experience the wave of genocidal killings that engulfed the rest of the country in April 1994, because they were already under RPF control. Yet, the vast majority of families currently living in these regions (about 80% of all inhabitants of these areas) are made up of widows and orphans, who tell stories of their husbands and fathers having been killed by the RPF. International non-government organizations (NGO’s) have been prohibited by the RPF government to go into these areas and assist these widow-run families to move ahead, and to mend the traditional family nucleus and the social fabric which have been completely shattered. Families in these areas with a member in the previous government army have been especially targeted and hit the hardest by the RPF. The simple question is this: why has the international community remained blind in the face of such blatant brutalization of human life? From 1990 to 1994, a reported 400,000 people have died in these areas. Who killed them?

Reports have circulated that many extremist RPF members in Kigali and other cities had large caches of weapons in their residences, and had dug up very deep pits in their backyards a few months before the genocide. What was the purpose of these weapons and pits? There have been reports that in the ceasefire months leading up to April 1994, many RPF youths received extensive fire arms training in the CND parliament building housing the RPF battalion, and at the RPF headquarters in Mulindi. Also, it is no secret that while the ruling MRND party had the Interahamwe militia, the MDR party had the JDR (Democratic Republican Youth) militia, and the PSD party had the Abakombozi militia, the RPF had a youth militia of its own that inflicted as much damage as the other militias. An independent inquiry of these facts is needed, and witnesses are available to testify openly.

The killings in Rwanda in 1994 were called genocide. Today, the killings in Darfur are being denounced as genocide. The killings in Zaire from 1996 to 2001, which took the lives of more than 4 million innocent lives, were called just that: killings. Where is the logic? Some of the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide have been punished, and from all indications the perpetrators of the Darfur genocide will be punished, since the setting up of an International Criminal Tribunal for Darfur is already in the works. That’s all good. But when are we going to have the International Criminal Tribunal for Congo? When will the perpetrators of the Zairian killings be punished? Never mind calling the Zairian killings genocide, can their perpetrators at least be punished? There are countries which do not have a total of 4 million inhabitants. That’s a lot of people to kill and live freely ever after. We all know beyond a doubt that the RPF committed these killings. You, the international community, can you tell us who you hold responsible for these wholesale massacres? For the same crimes, there must be the same punishments.

More than 50% of current inmates in Rwanda have no official criminal charges against them, but continue to be kept in jail and out of active life. The government keeps the inmates on meagre meals that must be supplemented with additional food rations from their families, or they will die from hunger – when they do not succumb to torture so rampant under different forms inside official prisons throughout the country and inside hidden unofficial torture centers. In most cases, women, including those educated, cannot keep a paying job because they need 2 to 3 hours per day to go feed their husbands in jail. No employer will agree to so much time off every day. This means that for the 100,000 married men in prison, there are 100,000 women not working, or a total of 200,000 people not actively contributing to the economy. With an average of 4 children per Rwandan household, that’s a total of 400,000 children nationwide that lack parental guidance and money to attend school. And all of a sudden, the grim picture of the legacy of the RPF regime comes into full focus: the pauperization and illiterate-ization of an entire generation of Rwandans. If this is not slow genocide, then genocide does not exist. Truthfully, there are 5 main factors of genocide: bad leadership, bad media, impunity, poverty, and lack of education. Today, all these 5 genocide factors are in place in Rwanda. The height of injustice in Rwanda can be summed up this way: manyinnocent Hutu civilians are in jail, while all criminal RPF elements are free. Where is the UN while all of this is happening? There cannot be any possible reconciliation in any nation where one part of the population is having a field day at the expense of the other part of the population on its knees.

Joseph Matata, a Rwandan human rights advocate who heads the Brussels-based “Center against Impunity and Injustice in Rwanda”, has reported that about 100 ex-FAR military officers are jailed at the Kibungo military prison since April 1999. An additional 37 or so ex-FAR military officers remain unaccounted for, while many other former comrades have been summarily executed Report of April 14, 1999.The “official” political parties in Rwanda today function under the umbrella of the so-called “Forum of Parties” where the RPF is sole master. In view of all this, the question is this: Does the Arusha Peace Agreement of August 1993, painfully reached between the then-RPF rebels and the then-government, and which called for a merger of the 2 fighting armies and free political activity in Rwanda, have any relevance left?

Contrary to RPF claims, there is no peace in Rwanda. That explains why far too many Rwandans continue to flee overseas and are easily granted asylee or refugee status. How long is the RPF going to use genocide as a pretext to stifle democracy and entrench one of the most predatory dictatorships ever? Political opposition is completely muzzled. How long will the people of Rwanda continue to die a slow death? Former President Pasteur Bizimungu and his collaborators, such as Charles Ntakirutinka, are rotting in jail for having started a political party. In fact, in Rwanda there is no shortage of political prisoners, prisoners of opinion, prisoners of hate, prisoners of race, etc., and Colonel Stanislas Biseruka, reporter Dominique Makeri, and Colonel Patrick Karegeya are only a handful in a long list. You, the ICTR, whose original mandate was to reconcile the Rwandan people among other things, what is going to be your legacy for Rwanda when your time expires?

The recent brutal killing of many businessmen among them Fulgence Nsengiyumva of Gitarama, aged 49, by the RPF government army on August 6, 2006 must be condemned vehemently. His wife is being persecuted for reclaiming the confiscated truck that belonged to him, and their 5 innocent children will be traumatized for the rest of their lives. The recent arrest, search and strip of old women in an open market place by RPF police in broad day light as a way to humiliate and force all old and barefoot women to never set foot in a market place again, is abhorrent and must be condemned vehemently. The on-going campaign to ban bicycles and motorcycles from cities, especially Kigali, as well as the on-going campaign to raze all banana plantations, is an act of economic depredation on the Rwandan population by its RPF government and will result in the starvation of the masses. It must be condemned vehemently. The on-going campaign to expel from Kigali city all the poor, all AIDS orphans, all war widows and war invalids, is criminal. It all started with a seemingly simple desire to take the poor away from the city, then the campaign targeted the bare-foot crowd, then those wearing sandals and slippers, then the pedestrians, then the bicyclists, and finally the motorcyclists. Who is it going to be next? There is clearly a pattern of criminal exclusion that must be condemned. In reality, this whole campaign is an empty attempt by RPF rulers to project to visitors and donors the deceptive impression that Kigali in particular, and Rwanda in general, are well-managed to deserve more financial aid. Chasing all these poor people away from the city without addressing the root cause of their misery is a window dressing, whitened-sepulcher, or sweep-under-the-rug type of approach to development, and it obviously can’t help any poor Rwandan. It can’t fool any foreign donor country either. So the simple question to the United Nations is this: why are the people of Rwanda being so toyed with, persecuted and killed by their own government in this fashion and nothing is being done about it?

Finally, what is Presidential Immunity? It seems to mean that someone can kill all the people he or she wants, and not worry about any consequences as long as he or she is president of a given country! We are in the 21st century, and humanity sure can come up with better laws.

VII. GENERAL CONCLUSION:

The above list of RPF crimes is by no means exhaustive. There are reports of countless RPF crimes before 1994, in 1994, and after 1994 that could not be compiled in this document. For example, in the small eastern town of Muhura as the RPF marched onto Kigali in the Spring of 1994, General Paul Kagame himself is reported not only having given direct orders to fire on crowds of wandering displaced people, but also having personally sprayed bullets into these crowds with his own machine gun. An investigation of this massacre is needed, and witnesses are available to tell the story.

Currently, there is a general, state-sponsored crime being perpetrated by the RPF government against an entire segment of the Rwandan population, specifically Hutus, through the infamous Gacaca Courts. The RPF government is attempting to incriminate the biggest number of Rwandans possible by officially labeling them “killers” or “genocidaires”, thus ostracizing them from public life and creating a caste of second class citizens or “untouchables”. Gacaca trials are an age-old, small-courts-type Rwandan tradition designed to settle only misdemeanors, such as stealing a cow, a goat, or chickens, and minor land disputes between neighbors. By its nature, a Gacaca trial does not require judges and jurors to have law school training and degrees, only common sense. Conversely, the crime of genocide is so grave by nature that it cannot be tried in a Gacaca court, with semi-literate judges and jurors, and with no legal defense, without being diminished and debased.

The justice system in place wants detainees to admit to the crime of killing if they want to be freed. Then, they head to a local Gacaca court where they not only must confess (and explain) their crimes but also reveal and denounce other killers. Anything short of this is a half-confession and not acceptable, and the suspect must go back to jail. In other cases, witnesses are produced from the woodwork to incriminate suspects for crimes they never committed. Very clearly, there is an attempt here on the part of the RPF government to humiliate and exterminate an entire people.
Paul Kagame is the living satan of the great lakes. As long as this butcher is free, the dead will continue to demand for Justice.

JE ME SOUVIENS, nous y étions pour quelques années, car outre la mutation de mon père, mes bronches n’appréciaient pas à sa juste valeur le climat tempéré qui baigne l’Europe, et que “là-bas” est à 1000 mètres d’altitude et pile en dessous du soleil.

L’arrivée et le voyage ainsi que la raison du départ, ce sont mes parents qui me l’ont racontés.

Par contre, je me souviens de cette route en asphalte, unique trait noir au milieu d’une ville aux artères, couleur terre battue de Roland Garros, les lignes en moins et la poussière en plus, les femmes déambulant d’un bord et de l’autre, droites comme des i, des régimes de bananes ou des bidons d’eau collés sur la tête.
Je me souviens des caméléons et de leurs yeux globuleux que l’on prenait délicatement, les déplaçant d’une feuille verte à une branche noire, puis d’une branche noire à un canna rouge puis retour à nos petits bras roses. Pour les transformer en arc-en-ciel. Je me souviens que cette technique empirique et scientifique mise au point avec ma sœur se révéla un échec. En tout cas …

Je me souviens d’un serpent sous la niche du chien, de la panique dans le jardin. Du crocodile mort au milieu de la pelouse qui avait été capturé et occis par un Je ne sais qui, lui, attirant le monde.
Je me souviens de ce buffle, seul et solitaire, au milieu de la piste, martelant du sabot désignant l’interdiction de passage à une coccinelle blanche. La nôtre. Des girafes, des crocodiles, des hippopotames, honorant leur nom, marchant au fond dans cette eau limpide bordée de joncs… de l’ envol des grues cendrées… De la mouche tsé-tsé, (terreur du guide), des singes (terreurs de ma mère)…

Au lever du jour, je me souviens des éléphants, au point d’eau et du goût du jus d’orange qui y est associé à jamais. (On a chacun sa madeleine. Proust avait raison).

Je ne me souviens pas du Kilimandjaro pointant son nez hors des brumes parce que je trouvais plus intéressant de plonger le mien dans une bande dessinée. Un comics plus comique qu’un volcan éteint.

Je me souviens de cette savane désertée par des lions, qu’en fait, on n’a jamais vus. Personne ne s’en souvient, donc.
Je me souviens, aussi, tous les soirs, il faisait noir, de la même manière. D’une noirceur obscure, dense et évidemment très sombre. Je me souviens de Nairobi ou de Kampala, je ne sais plus laquelle des deux, éclairée de mille feux. Ce jour-là, j’ai compris qu’une ville pouvait être drapée de lampadaires…

Je me souviens de cette jetée en bois, aux planches parallèles brûlées par l’équateur d’où je me suis jeté à l’eau. Dans ce Kivu, aux eaux noires comme de l’encre, je me souviens de mes premières brasses, sans bouées, ni flotteurs, le souffle court.

Je me souviens d’Eugène et je me demande s’il reconnaîtrait mon frère, né là-bas, un beau jour de juillet.
Je me souviens de son visage empli de gentillesse, une banane minuscule dans son immense main. Je me demande si…Il est encore de ce monde. Si… Il était Hutu ou Tutsi.

Je me souviens du retour dans cet avion …

Et puis? J’ai grandi. N’est-ce pas ce que l’on attend d’un enfant ? J’ai grandi avec cette dette de cœur. Immense.

“Je me souviens”

Il nous suffit d’une journée passée et d’être rendu au lendemain pour avoir le droit d’emprunter l’expression… Je me souviens que nul n’a bougé pendant les événements. Que c’était un génocide. Que nous, qui savions, tous, mieux que quiconque… On l’avait promis… Une fois de plus. Que le général Dallaire, (c’est lui qui le dit) a serré la Main du Diable.
Je me souviens que de ce pays aux milles collines, où loge Kigali, est planté au milieu de l’Afrique comme une plantation de bananes…On ne fait guère attention à une plantation de bananes.
Je me souviens que, comme chaque fois, on rapatrie à grands renforts de C130, couleur  camouflage, les ressortissants étrangers, nous les Occidentaux, et puis…on s’en va, tout en se lavant les mains, et puis… on ose et on revient, le sentiment de gêne passé.
Je me souviens que peu importe ce qu’il arrive sur ce continent, le sort de l’Afrique n’intéresse pas Grand Monde, les grandes puissances. Que nous sommes accrochés à nos réflexes post colonialistes ou à défaut ceux de cette supériorité. Oui, le racisme non-dit est latent et existe encore.

On s’en souvient moins car on le sait moins, le gouvernement conservateur et son ministre Harper (car loin de s’en vanter) ferment une à une les ambassades en Afrique… laissant ainsi les organisations et les compagnies canadiennes livrées à elles-mêmes sans support diplomatique auquel elles ont droit, obligées d’œuvrer dans un désœuvrement logistique administratif. Ce qui a fait dire à Jean Chrétien de passage à Paris et honoré par la Reine à Londres : « En Afrique aussi, la voix du Canada est beaucoup moins forte. On a fermé les ambassades. A Ottawa, dans la rue, je rencontre des ambassadeurs de pays qui ont encore des ambassades au Canada alors qu’on n’en a plus dans leur pays. C’est un peu gênant, non?” a-t-il souligné. (1)

En 2004, il nous faut nous souvenir que le Parlement a adopté un projet de loi (connu sous le nom d’Engagement de Jean Chrétien envers l’Afrique) créant le « Régime canadien d’accès aux médicaments » (RCAM).
Je me souviens que son objectif était d’aider à fournir des médicaments aux malades de pays en développement pour des besoins de santé publique. Pour le VIH/sida, la tuberculose, le paludisme et d’autres maladies épidémiques…
Je me souviens que la loi du RCAM a été adoptée par le Parlement canadien avec l’appui de tous les partis politiques et qu’elle est entrée en vigueur en mai 2005. Depuis son adoption, il y a plus de cinq ans, le RCAM n’a été utilisé qu’une seule fois pour une seule livraison d’un seul médicament antisida, au seul Rwanda, si je ne me trompe pas. Dans sa forme actuelle, il est peu probable que le RCAM soit utilisé à nouveau en raison des exigences de procédures qu’il impose aux pays en développement et aux fabricants de médicaments génériques. Pendant ce temps, des gens meurent tous les jours.

Il faudrait se souvenir aussi que pire encore, dans un examen complété en 2007 Ottawa, a conclu sans cynisme qu’il “s’est écoulé trop peu de temps et que les données accumulées depuis l’entrée en vigueur sont insuffisantes pour justifier des modifications législatives au Régime”. Le RCAM a été créé il y a près de cinq ans. Depuis, une seule licence a été demandée, et octroyée; cela n’a conduit qu’à l’envoi d’un lot correspondant à une seule commande d’un médicament, à un seul pays. Cette percée a eu lieu seulement après des années de pressions faites par des ONG et des militants impliqués, grâce à l’engagement d’un fabricant générique, et en présence de soutien et d’encouragement considérables au palier local, au Rwanda.(2)
Les produits génériques leur sont toujours quasiment inaccessibles.

Heureusement, en Belgique les choses paraissent plus simples. Pour une fois. Les conflits linguistiques ou autres BHV n’empêchent pas les initiatives, il faudra s’en souvenir.
Une PME belge, à Courcelles a développé un médicament antipaludéen. Les phases de développement ont duré deux ans et demi. L’antipaludéen ainsi développé, le Trimalarex a reçu récemment l’agrégation de l’Agence fédérale des médicaments et des produits de santé. En clair, cette autorisation va permettre l’exportation du médicament vers l’Afrique, l’Asie ou  l’Amérique latine où le paludisme sévit à grande échelle. (Le paludisme tue un enfant toutes les 30 secondes en Afrique.)
Au point de vue financier, cette commercialisation permettra à cette PME de toucher quelques premiers cents pour la recherche et tout le travail qu’il s’en suivit, qu’elle a assumée seule, sur ses fonds propres.
Les responsables de Propharex n’envisagent pas, du moins ouvertement, de gagner des sommes énormes sur le dos des malades du paludisme. Selon eux, l’idée serait davantage de permettre de produire localement l’antipaludéen, nous dit le journaliste de l’Avenir. (3) Et Pfizer ici ?

Nous ne sommes pas tous, comme le général Dallaire. Face à une impasse.

J’ai une immense dette de cœur.
Jamais je ne pourrais leur rendre ce qu’ils m’ont donné.

Et de mon point de vue, nous, les pays occidents, nous avons plus qu’une dette de cœur. Nous sommes face à des cas de conscience.
Jamais les pays développés ne pourront leur rendre ce qu’ils y ont pris. Excusez l’euphémisme. Les médicaments génériques contre le sida, contre… seraient déjà un premier geste. Un deuxième, revoir leurs dettes, car un tiers du budget est consacré à l’apurement de la dette, a ainsi été souligné par le ministre ivoirien des Finances, Charles Koffi Dybi.

Et pourquoi pas …

Alors, j’essaie par ces lignes d’attirer l’attention, demandez à votre député, demandez-lui de poser la question aux Communes, à notre premier ministre, la raison des fermetures des ambassades du Canada en Afrique. Et la RCAM?
Le Québec et moi n’avons pas les mêmes souvenirs.

Je me souviens est une devise, je l’entends qui appelle notre conscience collective. L’Afrique, toute l’Afrique, a besoin d’un avenir et non de souvenirs.
Car les leurs, avouons-le, ne sont pas les miens.

Thierry De Greef

________________________________________________

Source :

(1) LCN & Presse Canadienne
http://an.capacadie.com/canada/2009/10/19/jean-chretien-deplore-le-recul-du-canada-sur-la-scene-internationale

(2) Réseau juridique canadien VIH/sida – rectifier le régime d’accès aux médicaments (RCAM)
http://www.aidslaw.ca/publications

(3)L’avenir-actu.be-publié le 19 septembre 2009 :
http://www.actu24.be/article/courcelles_6180_un_generique_pour_lafrique/343661.aspx

Well, obviously enough, I’m deciding not only to review new movies, but a variety of them, old and new. Great old films need to be revisited from time to time. I mean, I’m a new film student. There are tons of films I haven’t seen, and I imagine that’s the way it is with a lot of people my age. So in addition to just reviewing it, obviously some historical significance will be discussed and other such things. I just became a member of Netflix, so every DVD that gets shipped to me will be reviewed on here. The one I received and watched yesterday, Hotel Rwanda, is the subject of this post.

Also, for future reference, I’ll probably just review a bunch of movies on here, attempting to go fairly in-depth into them. It’s much less of a review in the sense of pure recommendations for seeing it or not seeing it, but more like a foundation for a discussion. I look into the movie, utilize my knowledge that I’m obtaining in school, and try and provide some thoughts about the movie. What better way to help me learn about film than by watching? I’ll do my best to see one new movie a day (though there might be days wherein I haven’t the free time, so I’ll make up for it somehow), and try even harder to go see a new one in theaters at least once a week.

Alright. You should know the context of me re-watching this movie. I saw it early in high school, I believe. I can’t remember exactly when, but that’s not important. Basically, I couldn’t really appreciate the rich and deep themes of the film. It was a well told story to me, and that was it. It really sucked to be Don Cheadle’s character. That was my initial impression of the film. However, now that I’ve attended some college and started to emerge from the bonds of adolescence, I’m more able to appreciate this film for what it is: a great commentary on imperialism and war.

See, some people might say that this movie demonizes the Hutu and sympathizes with the Tutsi. I would agree, to an extent, but it does so because of the nature of the main character. There’s no doubting that the Hutu could and would be pretty vicious and downright evil at times. Now, just because the Hutu are portrayed as evil doesn’t mean that the Tutsi are automatically good. Sure, they end up being a huge help in the end, but they are indeed involved in the war. In my humble opinion, if you’re involved in a war, regardless of the arguable necessity of it at times, there is some evil in you. You’re taking part in the killing of other humans, something I think most people would agree is a bad thing. It can make sense, like if your country is being invaded, but that doesn’t automatically negate the negativity of killing other people. This movie definitely demonizes the Hutu more, considering it portrays them as the main bad guy, and they’re the majority being incredibly discriminatory toward the minority.

But ultimately, I think it’s just stating that regardless of the reason, war is bad. Killing people is bad. Being mean is bad. Being nice is good. Not killing is good. So on and so forth.

If you think about it, however, the movie really shows how imperialism screwed up Rwanda. The Belgians create this false division in the Rwandan society, and everything goes through extra hell when they leave. They’re the true bad guys in this movie.

Anyway, these sorts of historical themes are things I can appreciate now. Moving on to another huge theme in the movie: the U.N.

People have told me, “Lefty, the moral of this movie is that the U.N. is freakin’ worthless,” usually with more colorful language. However, my argument is that the U.N. isn’t necessarily worthless, just that it needs the support of its members, like any group. You have the peacekeepers, who are far too outnumbered to even think about keeping the peace. Member nations of the U.N. are unwilling to support the U.N. and by extension, support Rwanda. It’s as the cameraman said, they’ll hear the news, think it’s terrible, then go right back to eating their dinners.

On the subject of the movie itself, it’s well made. Good acting on all fronts (of course we can expect that from Don Cheadle, really). It really is an acting movie. It’s not as if the cinematography, editing, etc. weren’t good, it’s just that the acting and writing really steals the show. It’s definitely a must see, but be prepared to cry. I did so multiple times. But I want to know what you think. How do you feel about the film? Do you agree or disagree with me, and why? I’d love to hear your input in the comments section below.

This won’t be a trend, I promise, I’ll go into more technical aspects of movies when I find one where it’s really worth doing so. I mean, Where the Wild Things Are looked and felt great, but everyone was already raving about that. Just looking at the trailer makes you realize that’s the case. It’s the story that’s completely stolen the show in both reviews so far, and I apologize for those of you with an interest in it.

Also, I’ll try and do my reviews a bit closer to when I actually see the movie as to capture more of that immediate reaction to them.

Le président du Rwanda, Paul Kagame, salue le programme d’investissements de la Chine en Afrique. Il critique, en revanche, l’aide occidentale qui “n’a pas fait avancer” le continent.

“Nos ressources ont été exploitées et ont servi à d’autres. Des sociétés occidentales ont pollué l’Afrique à grande échelle et elles continuent à le faire”, déplore Paul Kagame dans un entretien au quotidien économique “Handelsblatt”, à paraître lundi.

En revanche, “les Chinois apportent ce dont l’Afrique à besoin: des investissements et de l’argent pour les gouvernements et les entreprises. La Chine investit dans l’infrastructure, construit des routes”, estime-t-il aussi.

Le président rwandais reconnaît encore “que les Européens posent davantage de questions, notamment sur les droits de l’homme”. Mais “cela a-t-il contribué au développement de l’Afrique?”, demande-t-il.

“Je préfèrerais que le monde occidental investisse au lieu de fournir de l’aide au développement”, dit-il. “L’aide est nécessaire mais elle doit être employée de sorte à faciliter le commerce et à créer des entreprises”, ajoute-t-il.

Il suggère que les pays industrialisés garantissent à l’Afrique les mêmes droits commerciaux qu’ils s’accordent entre eux.

Depuis son lancement en 2006, le fonds de développement chinois pour l’Afrique a investi 400 millions de dollars sur le continent africain.
romandie

Nous connaissons tous la triste histoire du Rwanda, je veux dire par la que ce n’est pas étonnant que ce soit des rwandais qui affirme cela.

Je suis tout de même un peu perplexe sur le rôle ” bénéfique ” de la Chine en Afrique.En même temps après le pillage sans partage des ressources du continent noir pendant 3 siècles, le simple fait de construire des routes et autres infrastructures change tout.

En même temps que dire quand on lit ” Je préfèrerais que le monde occidental investisse au lieu de fournir de l’aide au développement”, dit-il. “L’aide est nécessaire mais elle doit être employée de sorte à faciliter le commerce et à créer des entreprises “.

Bien entendu les médias occidentaux, non content de ne pas faire une auto critique sur les méfaits de la colonisation, attaquent les chinois et leurs pratiques du commerce.
Nous sommes des mauvais perdant.

En gros, nous nous sommes fait damer le pion par les chinois et voila que nous critiquons ce que nous avons fait pendant des siècles.

Les chinois font ce que nous avons fait au début de la colonisation, ils construisent des routes , des chemins de fers, des ports mais ne soyons pas naifs, c’est pour mieux sortir du continent les minerais et autres ressources que ces travaux sont réalisés.

Pauvres africains, espèrons tout de même que les chinois seront moins malsains que nous.

800,000 Rwandans murdered in only 100 days.  If only Rwanda was filled with diamonds and oil.  Either one of those resources would have caught the attention of the US.

Murambi Genocide Memorial Site

This project is centered on the main building in Murambi, a school that has been left vacated since the genocide in 1994. The school classrooms where over eight hundred corpses have been preserved have been left untouched. After the genocide, as mass graves were being discovered around the city, it was decided that a single monument/ burial place should be created, where the victims could be laid to rest with dignity.

"In a barn-like building at the far end of the complex, coarse blue rope has been strung across a cavernous space. Bloodstained clothes have been draped over the rope."

On the ground floor on the main building new walls were constructed to create a space that allowed for the design of the exhibition and burial place. The open hall on the ground floor of the main building now has a pathway, which leads visitors first to an exhibition describing the context of the genocide, then into the burial rooms. The burial rooms allow some of the preserved human remains to be viewed, while at the same time they are also buried with some dignity. Some of the survivors of the genocide have been trained as guides at the centre.

Before beginning my educational endeavor into Rwandan history I had great love and respect for the US.  After learning about the US and UN’s atrocious behavior  I am ashamed and disgusted to have ever respected such a petty, inhumane nation (don’t even get me started on the French).  I have never been a fan of Human Rights, nor the UN.  Why is the United Nations still around?  What good have they actually done?  I see the mass genocide in Rwanda as a direct failure of UN intervention.  What is the UN there for if not to intervene when people are being murdered because of their so-called “race”?  A Beligium-created racial difference that resulted in over a million deaths.  I do not understand.  It takes money, wealth and resources (OIL) to get the worlds attention.  I am taking down the Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations.  The West – you have failed again.

On the other hand…

Special shout-out to Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire – Force Commander of the UN units in Rwanda in 1994.  He might just be the Greatest Canadian EVER.  Making him more awesome: the Honourable Romeo Dallaire is now a Liberal Senator from Quebec.  Two things I personally love: Quebec for its poutine and the Liberal’s for the sharing.  Seriously, this man is a hero and the small group of UN Peacekeepers that were allowed to stay in Rwanda are just as kick-ass.

If you thought Hotel Rwanda was sad then check out Sometimes in April.  Hotel Rwanda is baby food in comparison.

The drama is set in two periods, which unfold concurrently: In April 1994, after the Hutu Army begins a systematic slaughter of Tutsis and more moderate Hutus, Augustin and a fellow Army officer named Xavier, defying their leadership, attempt to get their wives and children to safety. Separated from his wife Jeanne and their two sons (whom he entrusts to the care of his reluctant brother), Augustin gets caught in a desperate struggle to survive. Barely escaping the purge, he’s haunted by questions about what happened to his wife, sons and daughter (who was a student at a local boarding school). In 2004, looking for closure and hoping to start a new life with his girlfriend Martine (who taught at his daughter’s school), Augustin visits the United Nations Tribunal in Arusha, where Honoré awaits trial for the incendiary role he and other journalists played in the genocide. In the end, through an emotional meeting with Honoré, Augustin learns the details of his family’s fate, giving him closure and, perhaps, hope for happiness in the future.

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

The UN is no “friend” to any nation anymore.

There are two hundred and fifty two days left before I board a plan bound for Nairobi, Kenya. There is a hotel room waiting there for me. One night only. The rest of the trip is a mystery. By means unknown I will leave Nairobi and head West to Lake Victoria where I will turn South to Tanzania, then West to Burundi, turn North toward Rwanda and finally Northwest to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is in the DRC that I will meet with members of the FDLR and it is with them that I will spend the duration of the trip. When it is time, I will make my way back to Nairobi where I will board a plane bound for the United States.

The members of the FDLR don’t know that next June they are going to have a tag-a-long in the form of a white, female, American, cultural anthropology student. They don’t know that they are going to let me into their world for two months. They don’t know that they are going to allow me the privilage of learning about  Hutu culture from their perspective as rebels, and I don’t know how I am going to let them know that they want to do this. I also don’t know how I am going to get to the DRC from Nairobi and back again. There are a lot of things I don’t know. The one thing I do know is, I have to go to Africa.

Päähäni ei mahdu Porvoon oikeudenkäynti ruandalaismiehen syytteistä. Kigalissa tai Nairobissa käräjöidä pitäisi.

Muistelen, että EU maat ovat sopineet, että brittiläisen oikeusmallin Kenia hoitaisi EU maissa asuvien syytettyjen oikeudenkäynnit. Kenian Afrikka tuntemus ensinnäkin on suomalaisia parempi. Ei pidä luulla, että porvoolaislaamannille kukaan tutsi tai hutu aidon oikeasti mitään kertoisi. Lienevät ruandalaiset ihmetelleet suomalaisia syyttäjiä ja puolustajia heidän kävellessään Kigalin päällystämättömiä katuja. Toivottavasti etenkin naiset älyävät peittää raajansa ahnailta katseilta. Afrikassa vallitsevat vielä ikävän pitkään Afrikan lait. Kerran kävellessäni Zimbabwen Hararen katuja ajattelin, että pitkä matka kaikkeen kehitykseen. Ruanda on entistä Rhodesiaa vieläkin kehittymättömämpi. Suomi tietty kalleimman mukaan itse haluaa käräjöidä. Itkettää ja naurattaa, kun Vantaan poliisit yrittävät virittää maamme mallin mukaiset teknilliset laitteet syvälle Afrikkaan. Internet yhteydet tietenkään eivät toimineet toivotusti.

Kenties ymmärtäisin virkamiesten halua matkustaa yli 6000km päähän, jos Ruandassa samalla voisi oikeusoppineemme lomaillakin, mutta kun ei. Lomailla siellä ei tohdi. Hienoa olisikin kotimaan kustantama lomamatka ilman syytteitä korruptiosta. Kuvittelen, että makaavat vatsataudissa muutenkin. Verorahoja voi käyttää hyväksi, jos töiden jälkeen privaatisti lentää vaikkapa Safarille tai Mombasaan, kun kerran verorahoin lähellä ollaan. Säästyi itseltä mannerten ylitysten hinta?

Kaikessa maistuu järjetön verorahojemme tuhlaus.

L’ancien président du parlement de 2003 à 2008, M.Alfred Mukezamfura, a été condamné à la prison à perpétuité pour  avoir été reconnu coupable de participation au génocide de 1994. “coupable d’incitation à la haine et au génocide”. C’est le verdict rendu par la juridiction populaire gacaca, à Kigali au Rwanda.

M.Alfred Mukezamfura

Il a été une des personnalités incontournables de la tribu hutu dans le cercle restreint du président de la république Paul Kagame. Actuellement Alfred Mukezamfura vit depuis le printemps 2009 en Belgique et a demandé l’asile politique.

The state security and intelligence networks in Uganda and Rwanda today revolve around terrorism, and state-run “safe” houses proliferate with very little, if any, attention from human rights organizations or western media institutions. Anyone who violates the code of state-orchestrated silence will be silenced, themselves, perhaps by being disappeared.
The Genocide Brand has become the biggest intangible export for Rwanda. War Criminal Paul Kagame with his UK and American minders have made a fortune.

HOW RWANDA MANUFACTURES GENOCIDE AND EXPORTS IT TO HUNT INTELLECTUAL HUTU REFUGEES IN U.S.A and U.K

An investigation has uncovered an asylum system scandal where bogus Rwandan “refugees” infiltrate the U.S. and U.K. and work as undercover agents to hunt down critics of the Rwandan dictatorship and legitimate refugees and drag them back to Rwanda. This is yet the latest revelation on how the dictatorship in Rwˇˇanda manufactures and exports terrorism using an ideology of genocide and how the West supports terrorism by backing its Rwanda proxy. Meanwhile, business in Rwanda is booming and the criminal networks of the Kagame military machine continue to plunder the blood-drenched Congo.

In October 1990, the Ugandan army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) led by Major General Paul Kagame invaded Rwanda.[1] This action set in motion a course of history that determined the fate of millions of innocent people in Central Africa.

By July 1994, the RPF completed its coup d’etat and consolidated its power in Rwanda. The government of Paul Kagame has since then maintained political power and manipulated public sympathy by promoting a highly politicized ideology of genocide.[2]

After more than 18 years of systematic disinformation about Rwanda there exists a collective ignorance about what really happened in Rwanda and who is responsible. The so-called “Rwanda Genocide” is one of the most widely misunderstood events in contemporary history, and not because the evidence is lacking or because the truth is obscured by butchery.

According to the official story, extremist Hutus in the government and military committed an orchestrated and pre-planned genocide against the Tutsi minority from April 6 to about July 16, 1994. In this mythology, some 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsi were butchered with hoes, axes, and machetes, over the now infamous “100 days of genocide.”

Anyone who challenges the official story is branded a ‘genocide negationist’ or ‘genocide revisionist’ by the Kagame regime, and they are castigated as ‘killers of remembrance.’[3]

“Within Rwanda, legislation prevents anyone from questioning the official historical record. Although the constitution already forbids denial of the 1994 killings, the Rwandan government has stepped up moves to combat ‘genocide ideology’. […] A new law is in the making, aimed at criminalizing all ideas that might provoke ethnic division. Under the law, children below the age of 12 will be sent to a rehabilitation centre for a year if found guilty.”[4]

The real story seems to be that the RPF were the killers to a far greater extent, the majority of the victims were Hutus, and the numbers of dead during those 100 days were far less. The final insult to truth comes in the upside-down assertion that the RPF “stopped the genocide by winning the war.” Also, the RPF typically killed everyone in its path: Major General Paul Kagame did not trust any Tutsis who stayed in Rwanda after pogroms that created the Tutsi exile community prior to the Habyarimana government (1973-1994) and Tutsis were also targeted by the RPF.

Even those experts on “genocide in Rwanda” who do not contest the official story will attest to the myriad complexities that surround accusations and counter accusations about victims and perpetrators in post-1994 Rwanda.[5] Under the new power structure there were strong motivations to accuse the stigmatized Hutus of crimes that were never committed.

On April 6, 1994, the governments of Rwanda and Burundi were decapitated when the plane carrying the two presidents and top military staff was shot down over Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. The well-planned assassinations of Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira sparked a massive escalation of warfare that is falsely portrayed as the result of meaningless tribal savagery.

On February 6, 2008, a Spanish court delivered international arrest warrants against forty of the top military officials in the Rwandan regime. President Paul Kagame was investigated but not indicted but only because heads of state have immunity. The arrest warrants charge the RPF officials with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1990 and 2002.[6]

The Spanish indictments join the November 17, 2006 indictments issued by French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, who concluded that the RPF, under the direct orders of Paul Kagame, carried out the surface-to air-missile attacks on the airplane carrying the two presidents.[7]

Now, an investigation has uncovered a scandal where fake Rwandan asylum seekers infiltrate the United States (U.S.) and United Kingdom (U.K.) and work undercover to hunt down critics and survivors of the Rwandan dictatorship and bring them back to Rwanda. This scandal revolves around networks of informers and agents and it encapsulates all the machinations of the growing industry around “genocide in Rwanda”.

Prejudged by Western human rights organizations, journalists, and mass media, the Rwanda government’s critics and survivors forced to flee for their lives are falsely accused and publicly branded as genocide perpetrators. Shunned as humanity’s lowest criminals, arrested and imprisoned without trial for months or years, legitimate refugees are framed, extradited and neutralized by a government whose top officials have international arrest warrants against them.

Journalists, human rights defenders, businessmen, and ordinary citizens both inside and outside Rwanda are persecuted and neutralized if they deviate from the falsified “victim” and “survivor” ideology used as a political weapon by the military dictatorship of Paul Kagame and his vast network of propagandists, state agents, and foreign backers.

Innocent Rwandan asylum seekers live under perpetual fear of being hunted down, branded as genocide perpetrators, ostracized, and persecuted by the Kagame regime.[8] As examples to follow will show, host governments generally capitulate without investigation or resistance and support the Kagame regime’s requests for arrest and extradition.

Using international legal instruments and institutions, like the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), Western governments—the U.S., Belgium, Canada and Britain in particular—actively assist the Kagame regime in hunting refugees and critics, because all four governments backed the Rwanda Patriotic Front’s guerrilla war, 1990-1994, and the years of terrorism that have followed, 1994-2008.

REFUGEES FRAMED BY THE BBC

Early one morning in the fall of 2006, a Rwandan national who gained U.K. citizenship after a six year asylum process was confronted on the street as he exited the offices of the London-based charity where he worked.

Waiting for Dr. Vincent Bajinya outside on Pott Street in the brisk early morning London air was Fergal Keane, a prominent British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalist known for his extensive reportage in Rwanda during the 1994 cataclysm; Keane has maintained a permanent focus on “the Rwanda genocide” since then and has won many awards for his Rwanda reportage.

Without any appointment or prior warning, Fergal Keane shoved a television camera in Dr. Bajinya’s face and began interrogating him about his alleged role as a “Mastermind” of the Rwandan Genocide.[9]

The “Mastermind” accusation has been leveled against refugees in Canada, Belgium and the U.S. as well.[10]

“An investigation by BBC News has revealed that a man—wanted for genocide in Rwanda—is living and working in Britain,” began Fergal Keane’s BBC report of November 6, 2006. “Vincent Bajinya has been working as a doctor and has served on a refugee task force for the government.” [11]

“He’s not a voluntary worker,” Keane continues in a short commentary with racist insinuations, as if former refugees who have been granted British citizenship do not deserve to earn an honest wage. “He’s actually paid to the job.”

To whip up the outrage of BBC news consumers, the final insult to truth and freedom—and to the honest, hard-working British consumer who looks to the BBC for impartial reporting—comes when Fergal Keane “exposes” the fact that “much of that money comes from the British taxpayer.” [12]

Following the BBC reports by Fergal Keane, Dr. Vincent Bajinya was arrested in December 2006 and has spent fifteen months in detention. Dr. Bajinya’s rights were doubly trampled upon by a government that had already granted him citizenship.

Dr. Vincent Bajinya is considered a “Category One Offender” by Rwandan prosecutors. However, the “Category One Offender” status seems to be reserved for the most educated and astute critics of the Kagame regime; in other words, the intellectuals.

“He is just an intellectual Hutu who managed to have a British citizenship and a good employment,” says Rosalie Brown, Vincent Bajinya’s wife of 19 years. “Every person who is not RPF or who does not share the same opinion with the RPF is the enemy. They did not have to do anything wrong. No way. He has the right to be RPF or not. This detention has been like torture for him, an innocent man. My children and I, we suffer a lot for no good reason. The U.K. government should not have arrested [my husband] before it completed an investigation, but it arrested him just because the Rwanda government said to.”[13]

The U.S. and U.K. are both signatory to the 1951 United Nations High Commission for Refugees Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.[14] Under this convention a refugee is assured the same rights to due process and legal protections as any citizen, and the host government has a legal obligation to protect refugee’s rights. Certainly, the 1951 Convention forbids anyone from hunting and persecuting any asylum seeker in collaboration with the government that the refugees are fleeing.

Within days of Fergal Keane’s first report, the entire Western media was abuzz with stories about Dr. Vincent Bajinya. The articles combined the story of Dr. Vincent Bajinya with the story of three other Rwandan refugees “hiding” in the U.K., and the media framed all four refugees as “Most Wanted” criminals and the “Masterminds” of the Rwanda genocide of 1994.

“Rwanda is seeking extradition of four suspected masterminds of the country’s 1994 genocide,” Reuters reported on November 7, 2006, “including a medical doctor, who are living and working in Britain, the Justice Minister told Reuters on Tuesday.”[15]

“All these fugitives are living a comfortable life in the United Kingdom but are surely key planners of the 1994 genocide,” Reuters quoted Tharcisse Karugarama, Rwanda’s Justice Minister. “The dilemma we have is that most of these fugitives have changed their identities, which makes it difficult for us to track them.”[16]

“For the fear of being tracked down and wrongly judged in Rwanda or Arusha [ICTR] one of the three mayors had changed his name and applied for asylum as a former teacher, the other one applied for asylum as a Burundian citizen,” says Patrick Mahoro, a Rwandan Hutu and former U.K. asylum seeker who now has citizenship and lives in Coventry, England.[17] “This was not because what they might have done but because of the fear of being arrested and accused of genocide as it has happened to many others. This was their explanation in the court hearing last year [2007].”[18]

“Dr. Bajinya has never hidden himself,” Mahoro continues. “He became a concern to Kigali when he became a member of a task force advising the U.K. government on re-qualification of refugee health professionals. Privately he is known to have strong views about the RPF, and by becoming a member of that particular task force it was thought he might get close to U.K. officials who do not know the truth about the RPF. He also comes from the same village as [former President Juvenal] Habyarimana.”[19]

According to Rosalie Brown, she and Dr. Vincent Bajinya began fleeing the violence in Rwanda on April 8, 1994. They fled their home in the Rugenge District of Kigali for Gisenyi, where they stayed with extended family until they were forced to flee in July 1994 for fear of persecution by the Kagame regime. Like so many others they flew from the cauldron into the fire: Zaire.[20] For two years they lived in the Mugunga refugee camp near Goma, Zaire, and they fled in August 1996, just before the Hutu refugee camps were attacked in contravention of international law.[21]

The RPF, the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) and the Alliance of Democratic Forces for Congo-Zaire (AFDL-CZ) invaded Zaire in September of 1996 and began massacring Hutu refugees by the tens of thousands. The invasion was backed by the Pentagon through bases in Uganda and Rwanda and U.S. administrators downplayed the killing of Hutu refugees.[22] The International Rescue Committee (IRC) reportedly set up at bases nearby and shelled the refugee camps.[23] The genocidal campaign against Hutus swung into high gear as the RPF and UPDF—backed by the Pentagon—chased hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees from Goma to Kinshasa—into Zaire’s forests and swamps where they hunted them down and killed them and destroyed the evidence.[24]

In August 1996, Dr. Vincent Bajinya and his wife Rosalie fled with their two children to Kenya where Dr. Bajinya was employed at the Jomo Kenyatta Hospital; Rosalie Brown went on to London with their two kids (1998) until Dr. Bajinya was able to join them (2000).

Meanwhile, unreported by Fergal Keane and the BBC, are the numerous “refugee” and “asylum” cases of Rwandan nationals who have infiltrated the U.K. and U.S. by working the very same asylum system and benefiting from hundreds of thousands of pounds (and dollars) of taxpayer subsidies.

Amongst the many asylum seekers who arrived in London and claimed to be fleeing the repression in Rwanda are Tony Kavutse, Ignatius Mugabo, Linda Bihire, Vivenie Mugunga and Moses Kaganda, all of whom used the asylum process to eventually gain citizenship in the U.K. Most of these are former RPF soldiers, RDF soldiers or military intelligence agents who today continue to work for the Kagame regime.

Tony Kavutse, Moses Kaganda and Vivenie Mugunga are all currently employed at the embassies of the government they claimed to be fleeing: Rwanda. Each used the asylum process to get free housing, medical assistance, psychological counseling, and higher education at elite colleges in England.

And there are other “asylum seekers” claiming persecution by the Rwanda Government whose insider roles as intelligence agents and secretive businessmen make a horrible joke out of the U.K. asylum system.

THE GENOCIDAIRE BRAND

In October of 2006, Dr. Vincent Bajinya was working for Praxis, a U.K. non-government organization (NGO) that assists refugees in transition, and for Refugee Nurses Task Force, a 24-member task-force set up by the U.K. government to link refugee nurses with U.K. employers.

“Fergal Keane was waiting for Dr. Bajinya in front of the entrance door of his work,” says Rosalie Brown. “He was just in the street very early in the morning without any contact or warning if I can say! Shock and surprise you know? My husband had never meet Fergal Keane before and now he [Keane] was accusing him of genocide in Rwanda!” [25]

It was not Fergal Keane’s first visit to the Praxis offices, however, and within a week of the auspicious early morning encounter the BBC aired a major story convicting Dr. Vincent Bajinya a priori of genocide and setting the stage for his public ostracism and imminent arrest by U.K. officials.

The BBC documentary reveals that Fergal Keane (or someone whose voice sounds identical) previously visited Dr. Bajinya’s offices at Praxis and covertly filmed him using a hidden camera. Keane begins the four-minute BBC docudrama “undercover” and he confides in viewers that the initial filming was done in “secret”—the admission of secrecy sensationalizes the report and frames the story so that it will appear that Dr. Vincent Bajinya is a “wanted” criminal on the run. The rising chorus of media reports soon declared that Dr. Bajinya changed his name to avoid being detected as a “genocidaire” hiding in London.[26]

“I was with [my husband] in the war,” says Rosalie Brown, “everywhere, all the time, he did not do anything. We fled like everyone else, suffered like every Rwandan, we lost many lovers, family members and friends. We went through the asylum process once we got to the U.K. and onour Rwandan names. This Fergal Keane story is all made up.” [27]

According to numerous sources, Dr. Vincent Bajinya was completely open about his refugee status during the entire process of gaining U.K. citizenship and changed his name after citizenship was granted and for practicality purposes relating to the dictates of work, and marriage, and living in the U.K.

“Why does the Rwanda government suddenly want my husband now in 2007 [sic] after 13 years of war in Rwanda?” says Rosalie Brown. “We all had different names and for our children’s future as they grow up in this country [U.K.] why can we not all have the same name Brown once the law in this country gives us the full rights to do so?” [28]

“Excuse me sir, do you work here?” the voice behind the hidden camera asks Dr. Vincent Bajinya as the short clip opens. Fergal Keane misrepresents the BBC from the start, a telling indication of the misrepresentations to come. He knows that Dr. Bajinya works at the Praxis clinic and he is not interested in the clinic. “Do you know…is the clinic open today? There’s a clinic here…a couple days a week?”[29]

Fergal Keane discredits his reportage further as the film unfolds because he frames the reportage in such a way that Dr. Vincent Bajinya is accused, tried, and convicted in a four minute documentary. But the BBC reports about Dr. Vincent Bajinya are full of inconsistencies and the various reports raise important questions that should be put to Fergal Keane and his producer, Andrew Head.

Using the low-quality images of Dr. Bajinya snatched in secret during the initial visit, Keane traveled to Rwanda to find witnesses who would testify that Dr. Vincent Bajinya was indeed a genocide perpetrator. In Dr. Bajinya’s home village, so we are told, Keane finds his witness.

“Far from London we’ve uncovered evidence tying Dr. Bajinya to horrific crimes,” Fergal Keane announces. The video begins its Rwanda segment showing dark skies over the land of a thousand hills, but quickly jumps to gruesome images of bodies lying along the road.[30] These are the images of gruesome death from 1994 that are recycled over and over in a pornography of African violence that is used to foster the ignorance that has infected the collective consciousness.

“And today in this neighborhood where Dr. Bajinya lived, survivors recall a fanatic who searched for Tutsis at roadblocks,” Fergal Keane continues. “They claim Tutsi civilians, even a three-month old baby, were amongst those killed by militia men he directed.”

Like the fake asylum seekers used by Fergal Keane as sources to frame Dr. Bajinya and pressure Praxis, whom we will soon meet, it seems that his chosen “genocide survivors” also have a lot in common with RPF intelligence agents.

PLANTED SPIES AND AGENTS

In the BBC documentary of November 6, 2006, titled “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” we are introduced to a Rwandan man Keane calls only “Dieudonne”—a “genocide survivor” whom we are told lives in Dr. Bajinya’s former community. The BBC video flashes the man’s name, but the tiny banner is blurry and unreadable.

“Dieudonne is one of several eyewitnesses who told us Bajinya instructed the militia to kill,” says Fergal Keane. “From our photographs Dieudonne identified Dr. Bajinya as the man he saw giving orders for murder.”

The “eyewitness” Dieudonne tells the story of Dr. Bajinya’s supposed crimes in the Kinyarwanda language, while Fergal Keane translates for English viewers. “Bajinya told them, ‘Look, this is not how you kill a man, you’re just playing with him. He might survive if you just leave him the way he is.’ So they killed him off. It is an image of Bajinya that stays in my mind.”

However, in the BBC press release of the following day, titled “British Charity Employs Doctor Accused of Crimes Against Humanity,” the article cites a man named Janvier Mabuye to say exactly the same thing that Fergal Keane claims the eyewitness Dieudonne is saying in the film.

“Janvier Mabuye says he heard Dr Bajinya ordering the killers to finish off a taxi driver who had already been attacked with machetes. Janvier says: ‘Bajinya told them look this is not how you kill a person, you’re just playing with him. He might survive if you just leave him the way he is. At that point he called a young man and another neighbor and they came and killed him off. That is one of the images that always lasts each time I remember the genocide. It’s one of the images of Bajinya that remains in my mind.’” [31]

The BBC has produced two reports where two different eyewitnesses have made exactly the same accusations, word-for-word, verbatim, against Dr. Vincent Bajinya.

More importantly, the eyewitness Janvier Mabuye, who the BBC uses for their print stories and longer video documentary about Dr. Vincent Bajinya, is identified by Rwandan refugees as an RPF intelligence agent who has worked in the Rwandan Embassies in Uganda, Nairobi and Brussels.

On March 29, 2002 Janvier Mabuye was nominated 2nd Secretary at the Rwandan Embassy in Kampala, Uganda; later in 2002 he worked as 1rst Secretary at the Rwandan Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.[32] In October 2003, Janvier Mabuye was based in Brussels as 2nd Secretary and Cultural Attaché, a post he held until at least 2005.[33]

In December 2004, Mabuye issued a communiqué from the Rwanda Embassy in Brussels to the Rwandan community informing them how, with the support of the Rwandan Embassy in Brussels, they can acquire investment properties in Rwanda.[34]

Fergal Keane and the BBC have outdone themselves by producing exactly the same accusations by two independent witnesses and by producing a “genocide survivor” who is actually a Rwandan intelligence agent.[35]

“Janvier Mabuye is not from Dr. Bajinya’s neighborhood and he is not a genocide survivor,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “Like many other young Tutsis he left Rwanda after the October 1990 invasion to join the RPF in Uganda.”

From the BBC video we see that Dr. Bajinya is not an expert English speaker. Keane’s method of confrontation forces the entire life and history of another human being—who has lived a reality few of us can fathom—into Keane’s framework of assumptions and biases about what happened in Rwanda and who is responsible and it leaves no room for Dr. Vincent Bajinya or his unique identity to exist.

Who is the more credible witness to events in Rwanda? Dr. Vincent Bajinya, a Rwandan who grew up in Rwanda, a man who knew the place and the people, and who finally fled with his family in 1996 after years of terror? Or Fergal Keane, a white reporter from England who arrived in Rwanda for the first time in May 1994 and worked with the assistance of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and their intelligence and information warfare departments?

Keane closes his attack with a ten-second media sound bite about genocide that entirely destroys the context of Dr. Vincent Bajinya’s worldview and the history of trauma and devastation he has both witnessed and survived. Dr. Bajinya responds to the arrogance of Fergal Keane with terse summary statements in poor English, and does this standing up for his rights as a British citizen and a human being.

“The doctor says both sides were massacred in Rwanda and refuses to accept Tutsis were victims of genocide,” Keane states as he approaches Dr. Vincent Bajinya on Pott street.[36]

“You believe there was no genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda?” Keane asks Dr. Vincent Bajinya. In Keane’s tone and manner there is the self-righteous assumption of a higher moral purpose.[37]

“I believe that, yes,” says Dr. Vincent Bajinya.[38]

“Because the international community believes there was a genocide.” Keane is now speaking for the nebulous “international community,” obviously pleased with himself for having elicited the response that can be used to figuratively hang Dr. Vincent Bajinya as a genocide negationist.

“Yeah, it’s my belief,” Dr. Bajinya says. Not interested in Fergal Keane’s crusade. “The international community can believe other things. It is my right to believe in what I believe.”[39]

THE BOGUS ASYLUM OF TONY KAVUTSE

According to legitimate Rwandan refugees in the U.K. the man primarily responsible for orchestrating the branding, arrest, detention and persecution of Dr. Vincent Bajinya is a fake Rwandan asylum seeker who claimed to have fled Rwanda under fear of persecution. The man who tracked down Dr. Vincent Bajinya today works at the Rwandan Embassy in London under the name Tony Kavutse. He was assisted by several other fake asylum seekers also working as Rwandan agents or agents-provocateurs in London.

Legitimate Rwandan refugees in London report that Tony Kavutse is a long-time RPF and RDF soldier and intelligence agent. Kavutse was reportedly born in Uganda. Rwandan refugees in London claim that the Rwandan Embassy staff is 100% Ugandan citizens. Some of them reportedlyfought with President-for-Life Yoweri Museveni, an ethnic Hima (a tribe related to the Tutsis), and the National Resistance Army (NRA) during the Ugandan guerrilla wars in the 1980’s and later joined the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF). Many Ugandan citizens hold powerful positions in the Rwanda Government today because they joined the RPA/NRA war machine in its conquest of Rwanda. “The conquering RPF were mainly the English-speaking Ugandans.”[40]

Legitimate asylum seekers claim that Tony Kavutse continues to work as an RPF intelligence agent for the Rwanda government and that he tracks down any critics or legitimate victims of terrorism that have fled Rwanda.[41]

Documents obtained by this correspondent show that Tony Kavutse filed for formal protection status under U.K. law and obtained significant resources through the assistance of numerous U.K. charities and quasi-government or government agencies.

In a document dated July 13, 2002, the U.K. Home Office, Immigration and Nationality Directorate, refused asylum status for Tony Kavutse, but, “because of the particular circumstances of [his] case”, granted him informal asylum status in the category “Exceptional Leave to Remain.” [42] According to the Kavutse documents, officials were convinced Kavutse would be in danger if the U.K. returned him to Rwanda.

Kavutse gained assistance through the Medical Foundation in London, an NGO that works with asylum-seeking victims of torture. Medical Foundation trustees include John Le Carre, the accomplished novelist who has taken a serious interest in the events in central Africa.[43]

The Medical Foundation peddles the standard story about genocide in Rwanda, but also appears to address, at least to some extent, the terrorism of the post-1994 Kagame regime.

Documents dated July 29, 2002, confirm that Kavutse was a “priority need” client of the Medical Foundation “receiving ongoing treatment” for his claims of torture. Kavutse arrived in January 2002 and medical treatment began then. Documents also establish that Kavutse received financial and insurance benefits from the state.[44]

The Medical Foundation’s Dr. Hamra Yucel apparently assessed Kavutse’s status based on his testimony. “Mr. Kavutse has been subjected to torture,” she opined, “including severe beatings, and, most importantly, witnessed his father being shot in December 2001.”[45]

According to Rwandan sources in London who know of the particulars of the case, Tony Kavutse’s claims of being tortured by the current government are fabricated (there was no apparent physical evidence of torture). While Dr. Hamra Yucel’s clinical assessments fit the classic psychological profile of a torture survivor, Rwandan sources claim that RPF-allied asylum seekers are coached on how expertly to work the system and gain asylum status by feigning all the proper symptoms of torture.

When asked how it is possible that an asylum seeker claiming to have been tortured by the Rwandan Government could then end up in their diplomatic corps, Michelle Alexander from the Medical Foundation responded that, “the Medical Foundation is not at liberty to disclose details of any individual’s case and cannot confirm whether the person you refer to is a client of the Medical Foundation.” [46]

Tony Kavutse received lodging assistance through the support of the community council of the London Borough of Waltham Forrest.[47] In August 2004, Kavutse received full state educational support and attended the University of London’s elite Birbeck School of Management and Organizational Psychology.[48] All of Kavutse’s accommodations and tuition for approximately five years were paid for in full by a combination of these non-governmental supporting agencies and the U.K. Government.

Today Tony Kavutse lives in London and is working as a secretary on the diplomatic staff at the Rwandan Embassy.[49] Kavutse did not respond to questions.

Tony Kavutse is also a relative of another top RPF cadre: his mother is the sister of Dr. Zac Nsenga, an RPF agent who became the Rwandan Ambassador to the United States.

Zac Nsenga’s wife has been living in the U.K., where she reportedly gained refugee status under false asylum claims under an alias.[50] Rwandan refugees in London claim that she travels regularly to Rwanda and Uganda. However, in late March or early April 2008, Madamu Nsenga traveled to Rwanda for a visit and Zac Nsenga reportedly took her refugee asylum documents from her due to a quarrel. Now Madamu Nsenga is caught in the limbo of not being able to return to the U.K., lacking her U.K.-Rwanda asylum papers, and she is trying to go to Uganda to solve the problem, since she is officially not allowed to go to Rwanda—the country she was seeking refuge from.[51]

“Dr. Zac Nsenga was the Rwandan ambassador in Washington,” says Professor Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, former director of the Rwandan Information Office (ORINFOR). “Before the victory of the RPF, he was in charge of hygiene at a camp set up by the RPF in Gabiro, Rwanda, where the corpses of Hutus killed by the RPF were burnt. Nsenga was in charge of that camp. In other words, he oversaw the suppression of evidence regarding the massacres committed by the RPF. In RPF circles the camp is known as the CDR camp. The CDR was the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic, a political party regarded by the RPF and its supporters as the party of Hutu extremists. So RPF soldiers referred to the camp as CDR camp because all the Hutus who were taken to that camp for execution or the bodies of the Hutus taken to that camp for burning were globally considered as Hutu extremists who espoused the CDR worldview. ”[52]

“The three primitive one-story barrack blocks, one with its roof being repaired, are basic shelters for the [RPF] men at the Gabiro army camp,” wrote British journalist Nick Gordon. “It all looks devastatingly innocent: a complex that may be an affront to the classic rolling African skyline, but no more than that. There are no tell-tale chimneys, no railway lines leading into the restricted area. Indeed, as I munch my bread and wait for the photographer to snatch his picture, it is hard to believe that this dot on the map is an extermination camp. What goes on inside Gabiro [camp] is truly revolting, and it is not an isolated example. All over the country since the new government took control, Hutus have been killed in the thousands.”[53]

A Tutsi born in Rwanda, Dr. Zac Nsenga earned a medical degree at Makerere University Medical School in Uganda and a degree in human medicine at the University of Westminster, with an MA in diplomatic studies and a certificate in strategic studies. He practiced medicine both in Uganda and Lesotho before becoming a Major in the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) in December 1990. Later he served as Secretary General in the Ministry of Internal Security (overseeing National Police and Prison Services). Nsenga was also Ambassador to Israel (1995-1996) and the U.K. (1998-2001). As the Rwandan Ambassador in the U.S., Zac Nsenga worked with Paul Kagame and former U.S. President Bill Clinton to oversee and delineate the Clinton Foundation’s AIDS activities in Rwanda.[54]

Rwandan refugees in the U.S. claim that Major Zac Nsenga has played an active role in hunting down critics and legitimate refugees and having them arrested as fugitives from justice and, of course, branded as genocidaires.

“It is easy to come to the United States and hide,” said Zac Nsenga, the Rwandan ambassador to the United States, quoted in a Chicago Tribune article about a Rwandan named Jean-Marie Vianney Mudahinyuka (arrested in Chicago) and other supposed genocidaires hiding in the U.S. “Americans don’t know that amidst them are people who did very bad things.”[55]

Nsenga—and the Rwandan Embassy in the U.S.—collaborates with the specially formed Human Rights Violators and Public Safety Unit (HRVPSU) of the office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, formed in 2003, to track down foreigners, take them to court, jail and then deport them for even the slightest infractions of immigration laws.[56]

Nsenga’s role in the U.S. is to spread the official genocide story, hunt down Rwandan critics, sell the establishment narrative on HIV/AIDS involving big pharmaceutical companies, further the business interests of Rwanda, and suppress any political dissent about the Kagame regime.[57]

Nsenga is known to be very close to former Ambassador Andrew Young, the Kagame regime’s number one public relations agent whose PR consulting firm Goodworks International whitewashes the regime and its major corporate allies and partners.[58] GWI is also tight with the Africa-America Institute, a CIA backed think tank involved in information warfare and subversive activities all over Africa.[59] Andrew Young has built a mansion on Rwanda’s Lake Muhazi.[60]

Zac Nsenga “is a strong endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network (GIN).”[61] The Genocide Intervention Network is at the forefront of promoting the official line on genocide in Rwanda as a pivotal tool in the new hegemonic human rights discourse.[62] Other GIN endorsers include some of the highest profile official Rwandan genocide storytellers: General Romeo Dallaire, Samantha Power and Gerald Kaplan.

“[Nsenga] was in Ruhengeri killing people also,” says Jean-Christophe Nizeyimana. “As a promotion, he was given the post of Ambassador to Washington D.C.”[63]

PRESSURING THE U.K. ASYLUM SYSTEM

The BBC’s November 7, 2006, report about Dr. Vincent Bajinya appears to target the charity Praxis for having supported Dr. Bajinya using U.K. taxpayers’ money. By targeting Praxis the BBC set the stage for greater restrictions and controls surrounding the asylum process in England, a process that has since come under strict reform on asylum issues.

The articles about Bajinya and other refugees appeared in the fall of 2006 and by January 2007 the U.K. had issued new formal guidelines about refugees and formal policy had been drastically reformed to meet new U.K. immigration standards. Interestingly, the British asylum and immigration system relies heavily on private security companies noted for rather specious “security” missions.[64]

The BBC article quoted Reverend Vaughan Jones, the director of Praxis, but the comment by Vaughan Jones suggests that Praxis was the victim of circumstances, not Dr. Vincent Bajinya.

“The director of Praxis, Reverend Vaughan Jones, said if the allegations were true it would represent a betrayal of his organization’s trust,” reported Fergal Keane.[65]

“I had no suspicions and when I saw the allegations I was very shocked,” Reverend Vaughan Jones stated in a subsequent BBC report of November 7, 2006. “If they are true then I would feel betrayed, because we work with people who have come from difficult situations and need proper support. We are aware that there are all kinds of allegations and counter allegations in the community and sorting out the victim from the perpetrator is extremely hard.” [66]

When contacted by email at Praxis, Reverend Vaughan Jones replied that “Dr Bajinya was immediately suspended as a result of the allegations. He is no longer our employee.”[67]

In a follow-up query, Reverend Vaughan Jones replied: “Praxis has never attempted to form a judgment in relation to guilt or innocence that is the responsibility of others and beyond our competency. We are very aware of the complexity of the issues. As an organization which works with vulnerable people we have a duty of care primarily to them and it would not have been responsible to allow someone to work in the organization with such serious allegations having been made. We have always said that this matter should be resolved through the due process of law.”[68]

However, Praxis fired Dr. Vincent Bajinya based on the campaign spawned by the BBC reports of Fergal Keane. It was enough for Reverend Vaughan Jones that Fergal Keane and the BBC said that Dr. Vincent Bajinya was “accused” of genocide for them to immediately go on the defensive to protect their own good name. This is how the genocide label is used as a brand and a weapon against anyone who deviates from the Rwandan government’s policies or falls out of favor with the elite criminal networks in power.

“How does Praxis protect vulnerable people?” notes U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro, who also benefited from the assistance of Praxis. “And how is it possible that Tony Kavutse, an asylum seeker and “refugee” who claimed to have been tortured by the current government of Rwanda could end up working for the government he was seeking asylum from?”

Mahoro notes that Praxis has been utilizing the volunteer services of another false asylum seeker who is also working at the Rwandan Embassy. This individual is flagged by the Rwandan asylum community as another informant and RPF agent.

“As soon as these reports came out by the BBC, true Rwandan asylum seekers stay away from Praxis for fear that they will be identified and accused of genocide,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “There is a woman Rose Ngabire, a Tutsi who was working at Praxis in Dr. Bajinya’s department, who we know is a Rwanda government informant.”

Rose Ngabire was a volunteer on work placement at Praxis at the same time as Dr. Vincent Bajinya. Ngabire left Praxis and is now the full-time receptionist at the Rwandan Embassy in London.

Ngabire is another Ugandan-Rwandan dual citizen who is accused by legitimate Rwandan refugees of acting as a spy to identify and help separate the legitimate refugees from the fake refugee-agents and insure that the legitimate refugees are sent back to Rwanda and the fake refugees are processed through the asylum system for the benefit of the regime in Kigali.

Fergal Keane’s BBC reports do not identify the RPF agent Rose Ngabire and Keane’s reportage is further discredited with the awareness that one of the “expert” voices chosen by Fergal Keane to buttress the fabricated story about Dr. Bajinya is another fake RPF asylum seeker named Vivenie Niragira Mugunga.

Vivenie Mugunga arrived in the U.K. as an asylum seeker over six years ago and has already gained U.K. citizenship. Mugunga claimed to be a survivor of the Rwanda genocide and gained refugee status by fleeing from the Kagame regime. However, both of her claims are reportedly false. Mugunga was reportedly not in Rwanda during or after 1994. Instead, she came from Burundi, where she was born and raised. After she earned higher education degrees at universities in South England, Mugunga became an agent of the Kagame regime and she promotes Rwanda investments and organizes government-affiliated events.

Fergal Keane has also used Vivenie Mugunga to pull on the heart strings of his BBC viewers and gain sympathy—channeled into outrage to help convict and hang Dr. Vincent Bajinya in the court of public opinion. In one long film clip about the Dr. Vincent Bajinya story, Fergal Keane has Vivenie Mugunga, who is portrayed as a Rwandan genocide survivor, crying that the organization Praxis has extremists on their staff—meaning Dr. Bajinya—and they discriminated against her when she sought services there. Turning truth upside-down as usual, Keane and Mugunga say nothing about the other bogus refugee agents—like the Tutsi agent Rose Ngabire—working at Praxis.

An honest investigation of Dr. Vincent Bajinya’s case would examine Fergal Keane’s role in traveling to Rwanda and producing genocide charges by using the BBC as a political weapon in an obvious collaboration with the selective political agenda of the Kagame government.

According to one U.K. intelligence insider, U.K. news corporations routinely run disinformation planted by U.K. intelligence assets from MI-6. “For example, the Guardian and very occasionally the London Sunday-Times have been seen to have reporters who are assets of the U.K. intelligence services. Incidentally this may also apply to Andrew Gilligan of the BBC…”[69]

It may also apply to the BBC’s Fergal Keane.

Keane traveled to Rwanda where “evidence” of the crimes of Bajinya was scraped up and delivered to the news consuming Western public in manipulative and highly structured BBC productions.

“This Bajinya [frame-up] was 100% set-up by Kigali and Fergal Keane,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “The spies at the Rwanda Embassy in London informed Keane that they want Dr. Vincent and they arranged for Keane to go to Rwanda to interview ‘witnesses’ and come back here to accuse Dr. Bajinya, who all this time did not know anything was happening.” [70]

“Using BBC South East [England] where Vivenie Mugunga was living,” says Patrick Mahoro, “Fergal Keane convinced his producer Andrew Head to fund his investigation into the allegations and accusations by a south east England resident—the fake asylum seeker Vivenie Mugunga—about an U.K. organization—Praxis—harboring genocidaires and extremists—Dr. Vincent Bajinya.”[71]

“After that Fergal Keane went to Praxis with the hidden camera. Then he traveled to Rwanda funded by the BBC. Of course he had contact with Kigali because he was set up by the Rwandan Embassy here and he met with officials in Kigali. In his ‘investigation’ in Rwanda he shows that he found out that Dr. Bajinya has been issued an arrest warrant. Keane speaks to the prosecutor in Kigali who shows him the file submitted by Kigali to the U.K. And then Keane gets an RPF agent—Janvier Mabuye—to be his eyewitness and claim on the video that Dr. Bajinya committed genocide. And then finally he goes back to London and accuses Dr. Bajinya.” [72]

At the end of the day, the BBC makes money by producing a sensationalist TV show where Fergal Keane is supposed to represent everything that is good and Dr. Vincent Bajinya everything that is evil. So it’s the good versus evil story distilled out of the Hutus versus Tutsis mythology about Rwanda.

Curiously indicative of some insider trading and deeper political agenda is the fact that reforms in the asylum process in the U.K. occurred soon after the arrest of Dr. Vincent Bajinya and the other three “Masterminds” of genocide. According to U.K. Home Office documents outlining asylum seeker protocol, prior to granting asylum of Rwandan refugees, U.K. officials are now required to refer to special “lists” provided by the Kagame regime.

On the one hand the documents obtained in the Tony Kavutse case clearly validate the claims of legitimate refugees by formally documenting what the U.K., U.S., and most Western governments deny: That torture and killings do occur in Rwanda and that they are committed by agents of the current government.

On the other hand the documents also clearly establish that RPF-allied false asylum seekers may be claiming to have been tortured in Rwanda to manipulate the system and gain the advantages now being taken away from legitimate asylum seekers.

The U.K. and U.S. governments claim Rwanda is “safe”. Under this classification the U.K. Government has advanced certain refugee and asylum protocols which simultaneously institutionalize infiltration by RPF agents, on one hand, and the persecution of legitimate refugees on the other. The asylum situation in the United States is much the same.

According to the British Home Office of Immigration and Nationality Department statistics, the numbers of Rwandan asylum seekers arriving in Britain have skyrocketed under the Kagame regime, especially since 1999. From 1994 to 1997, Britain received approximately 100 asylum seekers annually. But the numbers increased with increasing repression in Rwanda. In 1999 there were approximately 300; in 1999 and 2000 there were some 800; with 550, 700 and 275 in 2001, 2002 and 2003.[73]

Harsh conditions in detention centers and human rights violations against asylum seekers in the U.K. mirror those in the United States. Anne Owers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, has released a series of damning reports on the UK’s detention estate.[74]

In Britain and the U.S. tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children are jailed for long periods without charges in contravention of the 1951 UNHCR Refugee Convention.[75] While none of these people is detained for committing a criminal offense, they are held in prison-like conditions to facilitate government policies of rounding up asylum-seekers in order to deter them from seeking refuge in Britain or the U.S.

There is literally a war on refugees.

In one assessment, the Medical Foundation in 2004 determined that aggressive force effectively constituting torture had been used against individuals during attempts to remove them from the U.K.[76] There have been many cases of suicides and mass hunger strikes by asylum seekers in the U.K.[77]

The Kagame regime is meanwhile ushering bogus “asylum” seekers off to London armed with all the false documentation necessary to gain a positive asylum status and, eventually, citizenship. The regime’s goal is to infiltrate Western countries with more and more Rwandans who have benefited from the current political climate and who do not challenge the inverted victim versus killer ideology or the criminal enterprises and networks of the elites involved.

RWANDA’S GENOCIDE LISTS

According to legitimate Rwandan refugees in London, the Rwandan refugee community is perpetually under surveillance and effectively under attack by fake asylum seekers working as agents; these agents send the names of legitimate refugees to the ever-updated “genocide lists” that Kigali provides to the U.K. Home Office and other governments, and they meanwhile help to build bogus “legal” cases against the legitimate refugees, as happened with Dr. Vincent Bajinya.

The U.K. government regularly arrests asylum seekers (of all nationalities) and holds them in detention pending review of their cases for a “pass” or “fail” of the asylum granting process, but most are almost automatically slated for return to their country of origin. British policies are particularly egregious in the cases of countries where Britain is more actively involved in the ongoing warfare, especially Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan (Darfur), or where it has a deep military and intelligence relationship, especially Congo, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.

While their cases await resolution, asylum claimants are banned from working. Once their cases have been failed, they face total destitution, with no right to work, no benefits, no accommodation, no proper access to health services, and the constant fear of removal. This is on top of the psychological trauma, and in some cases physical injury, that continues to trouble them as a result of their experiences.

In the case of Rwanda, selected asylum seekers are further stigmatized and dehumanized by being branded as genocidaires—a label applied to describe Hutu “extremists” and highly targeted individuals in well-organized frame-ups—in cases like Dr. Vincent Bajinya’s, where the frame-up involved Rwandan intelligence agents and the BBC.

According to Rwandan asylum seekers the Kigali government routinely manipulates the asylum system to get students and intelligence agents into the U.K. asylum system to gain U.K. citizenship at no financial cost for the short- and long-term benefit of the Kigali regime.

In 2007, around 200 Rwandan students arrived in the U.K. as asylum seekers and around 150 of these became stateless after falsely claiming to be Rwandan asylum seekers; about 50 of these were official Rwandan students possessing documents provided by the Rwanda government who had been given educational scholarships from the U.K. government.

After Kigali sends false asylum claimants to the U.K., their asylum claim is either passed or failed like any other refugee. Once the asylum claim has been successful and refugee status granted, these false claimants can access student loans and housing and medical support. To improve the chances of a “passed” asylum claim Kigali sets up fake asylum seekers with fake documents to strengthen their cases: e.g., arrest warrants, prison release documents, and medical reports about being tortured.

Next, Rwandan agents in the U.K.—like Mary Blewitt Kayitesi and Tony Kavutse—assist the false asylum seekers to access U.K. refugee assistance agencies like the Medical Foundation, Praxis, or Survivor’s Fund (SURF). Some enhance their status by claiming to be genocide survivors.

Some asylum claimants “pass” relatively easily, but for those asylum seekers who are “failed” by the U.K. government—which is eager to reject all refugees to meet its goals of low immigration—the Rwandan Embassy is contacted to determine the status of the asylum seeker and the Embassy denies that these clandestine government supported “refugees” are from Rwanda at all. In some cases the U.K. deports the false claimants back to Kigali, even forcibly, where the Rwandan immigration officials again—checking their lists of supported but fake asylum seekers—refuses that the asylum seekers originated from Rwanda. In both cases the fake asylum seekers, disowned by Rwanda, gain a stateless refugee status which under the 1951 UNHCR protections insures that the U.K. cannot deport them (since they are unable to identify their state or origin).

When the U.K. government detains legitimate refugees—obviously not supported by Kigali but rather hunted by them—the Rwandan Embassy is again contacted while they are still in London, or the refugee is deported directly back to Kigali. In either of these cases involving actual refugees, the Kagame regime validates to the U.K. government that these are legitimate refugees, because Kigali is happy to have critics of the regime and other legitimate refugees fleeing state persecution delivered back into their hands.

One legitimate refugee “failed” by the U.K. immigration system and forcibly returned to Rwanda was Rene Murabukira, a Rwandan refugee who fled after his family was killed in 1996.[78]

Rene Murabukira started a new life in Edinburgh and after 11 years in the U.K. he was a charity worker with the Edinburgh-based Action Group helping physically and mentally disabled adults when the U.K. immigration agents tracked him down and arrested him at work.

When Murabukira arrived in the U.K. in 1996, he was only 17 years old. He was given temporary leave to remain in the U.K. as well as a work permit, and told his case for permanent asylum was under consideration. He built a life in Edinburgh and was engaged to be married to Aneta Jarzmik, a U.K. citizen.

Murabukira’s case was deferred for eleven years, until Rwanda was declared “safe.” But in April 2007, U.K. immigration officials swooped in packed Murabukira off to a detention centre. He was scheduled for extradition in May 2007—readied to be shipped back to Rwanda—but legal intervention won him a temporary stay in the U.K. on the day of the planned flight.

Murabukira claimed that Tutsi rebels killed his parents, sister and cousins, at his home in 1996. He has been unable to work or claim benefits and has relied on friends to survive the past year of asylum limbo.[79]

Rwandans in London believe there have been about 65 cases of legitimate asylum seekers deported back to Rwanda since 2000.[80]

Of course there are also those fake refugees who betray Kigali once they have achieved their mission and gained asylum status abroad. It is well known that

“There are certainly some Tutsis who are genuine refugees,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro. “But there is also a deliberate policy on the part of the RPF regime to export [exfiltrate] Tutsis to the U.S., Canada, Belgium and other countries and a deliberate policy to forcibly return Hutus to Rwanda who fled to countries other than the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are worried that Hutu asylum seekers outnumber Tutsis in Belgium and other countries, and that, if nothing is done, in the long run Hutus will be able to have their voice heard.”

Thousands of Hutus refugees remain in countries that border Rwanda and thousands of refugees have recently been forcibly repatriated back to Rwanda by the governments of both Uganda and Tanzania. In October 2007, for example, Uganda deported some 3000 Rwandans, most of them Hutus.[81]

“The whole idea is to build a strong Tutsi Diaspora that would support the Tutsi clique in power in Rwanda the same way the Jews support Israel,” says Higiro. “With a strong Tutsi Diaspora, Tutsi elites in power can use the tools of negationism, revisionism and the genocide industry to silence Hutus in Rwanda and in the countries where they have sought asylum.”[82]

U.K. ASYLUMS DIRECTED BY KIGALI

For its part the British Government has adopted a refugee asylum policy that looks to the Kagame regime—the persecuting government—for its decisions about Rwandan asylum cases and refugee returns.

The U.K. asylum system came under “reform” during the Blair government, but not in favor of refugees or asylum seeker’s rights. This is made clear in the case of Rwandan asylum seekers where the immigration and detention shake-up seems to have involved a stripping away of refugees’ legal protections.

By the end of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s term in office, the asylum reform process was in full swing and a special “Ten-Point Plan for Border Protection and Immigration Reform” was launched. Under this plan, the Prime Minister committed the U.K. Government to accelerate and massively increase the removal of both imprisoned and not yet detained foreign asylum seekers. According to the Home Office, it is the biggest shake-up of the immigration system in its history.[83]

On January 24, 2007—not so long after the British public was sensitized to the infiltration of Dr. Bajinya and the other three supposed “Masterminds” of genocide in Rwanda—the U.K. Home Office issued a special “Operational Guidance Note” on Rwanda that establishes and revises the formal policy for dealing with Rwandan asylum seekers. The guidance notes that all asylum seekers must be considered on a case by case basis, but all case workers must follow the outlines of this operational guidance document.[84]

The document, meant to educate case workers, opens with a “country assessment” that presents a highly inaccurate version of events in Rwanda. The assessment is heavily based on BBC sources, especially the BBC “Timeline” on Rwanda, and it has a decidedly pro-RPF bias. Some select examples of the bias can be seen in the following excerpts:

[1] CLAIM: “Rwanda is a republic dominated by a strong presidency.”[85]

REALITY: Rwanda is a one-party dictatorship with a façade of democracy and the consolidation of the dictatorship achieved through highly rigged and manipulated “demonstration elections” that are widely misperceived to have been democratic and fair.[86]

[2] CLAIM: “In 1985 Tutsi exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Having failed to negotiate their return to the country, the RPF invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990, demanding representation and equality for all Rwandans.[87]

REALITY: Most of the so-called “Tutsi exiles in Uganda” were Ugandan born citizens and they became battle-hardened guerrillas fighting for Yoweri Museveni and the NRA—a war that Museveni ran out of the Hotel Des Diplomats in Kigali in the mid-1980’s.[88] Paul Kagame was Museveni’s Director of Military Intelligence and he was responsible for tortures, massacres and assassinations.[89] Museveni had ignored calls by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to downsize his army of approximately 180,000 fighters to 70,000. By mid-April 1994, Museveni had sent some scores of thousands of UPDF soldiers into Rwanda—possibly as many as 70,000.[90]

To say that these soldiers and the RPF’s political representatives demanded “representation and equality for all Rwandans” is so patently false that it defies any rational attempt to deconstruct it. Working together, Museveni and Kagame utilized terrorist tactics to assign all blame—for atrocities they committed against both their enemies and their own people—on their enemies. They used psychological operations, embedded international reporters, and fabrication of massacres. These tactics have continued to the present.

“Let me give you an example of media manipulation,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, Director of ORINFOR. “In 1994 people took shelter at a mosque in Kabuga near Kigali. After the RPF took control of the location, they killed all the people who had taken shelter there, then called reporters to see what the Interahamwe had done to Tutsis.” [91]

[3] CLAIM: “A civil war in the border area ensued. Each incursion by the RPF was followed by reprisal massacres, largely of Tutsis, by government forces. A peace agreement was brokered in 1993, the Arusha Peace Accords, which inter alia provided for a power-sharing arrangement involving all political forces and the RPF.” [92]

REALITY: The RPF’s persecution and killings of Hutus and Tutsis in Northern Rwanda went largely unchallenged. Meanwhile the international “human rights” community hammered away at the Habyarimana government following a now common pattern of punishing the victims and accusingthem of crimes committed in self defense, but never accusing the perpetrators of the original, and greater, injustices.[93]

It is interesting that a guerrilla army can invade a sovereign country and attack a sovereign government and commit terrorist acts, driving over a million people before it, and that it could today be summarized as it is above. [94] This exemplifies the hegemonic imperialist bias of the Western human rights establishment and the mantle of genocide carried by the Genocide Intervention Network and its octopus of affiliates.

The rest of the country assessment follows in similar fashion, uttering ridiculous lies that are now so deeply inculcated in the collective insanity of human consciousness as to make them as absolute and unchallengeable as the Ten Commandments. The summary glosses over the human rights record in Rwanda, validates the legitimacy of the institutionalized injustice at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and shamelessly absolves the Kagame regime of its terrorist involvement in extortion, racketeering, war crimes and genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Perhaps the most ludicrous statement in the entire document is this one: “The Rwandan government is strongly committed to national reconciliation and there is no evidence of any state-sponsored or societal discrimination on ethnic grounds that would amount to persecution.”

The source documents which the Operational Guidance on Rwanda relies upon include references to: USAID; U.S. Department of State; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; U.N. and U.K. profiles; and the Economist. Most notably, there are four references to British Broadcasting Corporation reports or documents. Given their relationships to the production and maintenance of the establishment narrative, all of these sources are highly compromised in their capacity to present the true picture of Rwanda or insure refugee protections.

For the purposes of rounding up refugees and dragging them back to Rwanda, the Operational Guidance on Rwanda requires that asylum caseworkers begin the process by checking the names of asylum seekers against several lists maintained by the Kagame government.[95]

Section 3.5 of the Operational Guidance on Rwanda establishes the hierarchy of protocols for dealing with Rwandan asylum seekers. If “the applicant’s name appears on either of the two published lists maintained by the Rwandan government of those wanted for genocide or where there is any evidence that the applicant was, for example, politically active, employed in any official, religious, media or military capacity at the time of the genocide,” decision-makers are instructed to consider whether to apply one of several special exclusion clauses and must refer such cases to the War Crimes Unit.[96]

According to the U.K. Home Office, “the War Crimes Unit was formed in March 2004 with the specific remit of introducing screening processes in order to identify people involved in the commission of atrocities in connection with modern day conflict situations.”[97]

In February 2007, the Israeli Government successfully pressured the U.K. Home Office to water down anti-torture and war crimes legislation.[98] The injustices in cases of Rwandan war criminals are amongst the most pronounced.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is today the public relations consultant and economic adviser for the Kagame regime, a position Blair assumed in February, 2008. John Major was prime minister and the Conservative (Tory) Party was in power at the time of the U.S./U.K. backed coup d’etat in Rwanda 1994.

MILKING THE ASYLUM PROCESS

The Rwandan asylum scam allows the Kagame regime to facilitate higher political and economic status for more and more Rwandans by gaining green cards or citizenship abroad.

Moses Kenneth Bugingo Rugema arrived in the U.K. around 2003 on a false asylum claim against Rwanda. Although U.K. citizenship can be granted after five years his citizenship is uncertain.

When asked about his former refugee status and current political appointment with the government he sought asylum from, Rugema responded evasively and aggressively. “I have no time to waste in replying to you in the future,” Rugema replied. “But as a gentleman I just wanted to tell you I exist and your facts are not correct. It’s up to you to prove it.”[99]

Rugema is another Ugandan-Rwandan, and a former RPF soldier whose “flight” from persecution in Rwanda quickly led to his employment at the Rwanda Embassy in London as a receptionist. From the Embassy, Rugema helped Kigali track down legitimate refugees. Rugema also set up his current business enterprise and continues to operate out of London as an economic agent dealing in the export/import of top quality Rwandan Arabica green bean coffee for the Kagame regime.[100]

On November 2, 2007, the Rwandan cabinet appointed Rugema to the post of 2nd Counselor at the Rwandan Embassy in New York City.

“It is very interesting that this Rwandan refugee is now working as a business agent for the government he ran away from,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “It is 100% certain that Moses Rugema used the asylum system as a bogus asylum claimant and worked at the Rwanda Embassy in London.”

One of the highest-profile RPF-allied asylum seekers who has milked the system to gain status in the U.K. is Linda Bihire, recently appointed to the RPF’s cabinet under the recent government reshuffling that was advised by Kagame’s new spin doctor, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

On March 13, 2008, Bihire was appointed to Rwandan Cabinet as Minister of Infrastructure. However, Linda Bihire is another Ugandan-born “Rwandan” whose lineage and origins are belied by her inability to speak the native Kinyarwanda language of Rwanda. During her swearing-in ceremony in Kigali, Bihire’s inability to read the Oath of Office forced the organizers to switch to English.[101]

Bihire’s cabinet selection was engineered by Rwanda’s top intelligence agent, Emmanuel Ndahiro, a feared agent in and out of Rwanda who controls Rwanda’s state daily New Times newspaper and uses it as a political tool to peddle disinformation and attack critics of the RPF. Linda Bihire is Emmanuel Ndahiro’s mistress and they have a 19 year-old son. Lt. Col. Dr. Emmanuel Ndahiro is also a maternal cousin to Paul Kagame and Director General of Rwanda’s dreaded National Security Service.

Bihire is also a close friend of another RPF-allied Rwandan asylum seeker in the U.K., Rose Ngabire, the secretary at the Rwandan Embassy in London. Prior to her cabinet appointment, Bihire milked the U.K. asylum system to get higher education, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in civil engineering and a Master’s Degree in project management from the University of Nottingham and the University of Portsmouth, respectively.

Bihire’s new life apparently began soon after she finished her elementary schooling in Kampala, Uganda, when RPF agent Emmanuel Ndahiro organized her “political asylum” status and facilitated her transfer to London.[102] Bihire was soon identified as a Rwandan agent by legitimate Rwandan asylum seekers in England.[103]

After she arrived in London, Dr. Zac Nsenga, the ambassador to the U.K. at the time, stepped in and landed Bihire a government scholarship for her higher education.

Another U.K. asylum fraud was perpetrated by Joseph Mutaboba, Secretary General of Rwanda’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and former Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In September 2006, Mutaboba co-chaired the United Nations Permanent Advisory Committee on SecurityIssues in the Central African Region. Since 2003, he has participated in preparatory meetings of the International Conference on Peace and Security in the Great Lakes region and as Coordinator for Rwanda and Head of the Peace and Security Thematic Group. All these “security” posts occurred even while Rwanda continued to plunder Congo. However, Joseph Mutaboba’s wife is another “refugee” living in North London and using the asylum process for personal gain.

Another RPF agent who infiltrated England through the asylum process is Ignatius Mugabo, a naturalized citizen of Uganda who first sought asylum in Denmark but later joined his wife Jacqueline in Britain; Mugabo may by now have gained British citizenship. Mugabo’s wife Jacqueline was reportedly granted full refugee protection under the 1951 UNHCR Convention, which guarantees that any asylum seeker is automatically entitled to be joined by their families.[104] According to Rwandan asylum seekers, Mugabo joined is wife in London in 2003.[105]

Ignatius Mugabo not only worked for the RPF, he became one of Kagame’s top intelligence officials and an active hunter of Kagame’s critics abroad. In March of 2007, just prior to the 13th anniversary of the April 6, 1994 presidential assassinations, Mugabo set up a petition to the British Prime Minister calling on Rwandans in Britain to support his campaign to hunt down and arrest genocidaires. Eighteen people signed the petition, including Ignatius Mugabo.

The petition statement reads:

“We the members of the Rwandan Community resident in the U.K., during the 13th anniversary of the genocide in our country, concerned that many suspected perpetrators of this heinous crime continue to hide in Western countries including U.K., call on the British Prime Minister and his government to increase their support for the delivery of justice to the victims of the Rwandan genocide by tracking and arresting whoever is suspected of having played a role in this tragedy.”[106]

“Mugabo set up this petition on the U.K. Prime Minister’s web site,” says one Rwandan refugee in London, “but he received too few signatures to get any action from the Prime Minister. All members of the Rwandan community did not sign as they feared their names to be recognized on the list of asylum seekers. Mugabo was disappointed to receive so few supporters.”[107]

Ignatius Mugabo is also on the management committee of the Rwandan Community Association of the U.K., in charge of organizing events meant to draw out Rwandan refugees, and he is Director of Rwanda Diaspora Investment Ltd., another business front for Kigali.[108] Legitimate Rwandan asylum seekers note with curiosity how Mugabo works with the Rwandan Embassy to organize official events while he and his family have reportedly fled the Kagame regime.

Ignatius Mugabo is considered the second most feared intelligence agent of the Kagame regime in London, second only to his associate, James Wizeye. Ignatius Mugabo, Tony Kavutse and Rose Ngabire all work on the Rwanda Embassy staff under the guidance of its two top espionage agents: James Wizeye and Claver Gatete.

James Wizeye was appointed as the 1st Secretary at the Rwanda Embassy in London on June 29, 2005 and today he is also the most feared Rwandan intelligence operative involved in hunting Rwanda’s state enemies, critics and asylum seekers in England and, more widely, in Europe.

A former RPF soldier and current member of Kigali’s intelligence apparatus, Wizeye formerly worked as administrative attaché at the Rwanda Embassy in Kampala, Uganda. However, Wizeye was expelled by the Uganda government in November 2004 after accusations surfaced that Rwanda was training rebels hostile to the Ugandan government: Wizeye was implicated in rebel activities and accused of espionage.[109]

Wizeye is reportedly wanted today in Uganda and banned from visiting for his role as part of an elite RPF “hit squad” that operated in Uganda to track down enemies of the RPF regime.[110] Wizeye set up intelligence cells and purchased information from Ugandan agents who were later arrested.[111]

“In the U.K. James Wizeye is involved in hunting refugees, weapons dealings and protecting Rwanda’s ‘good image’ by using the media,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “He grew up in Uganda and now he is wanted there because of spying and killings in 2000 and 2001. His success in these [terrorist] operations for the Kagame regime earned him a diplomatic post in London.”[112]

Rwandan intelligence agent James Wizeye lives inside the Rwanda Embassy compound at 120-122 Seymour Place in London. Wizeye has attended high-level conferences with U.S. officials, including Ambassador Jendayi Frazer.[113] According to Rwandans familiar with Wizeye’s activities, he is one of the RPF’s top weapons and minerals agents working in London—possibly a key player in Kigali’s fencing of contraband resources stolen from the Democratic Republic of Congo and arranging of weapons transfers.[114]

Raised and educated in Uganda, Claver Gatete is the Rwandan Ambassador in London appointed to the Cabinet on September 7, 2005. Gatete is an economist who left Uganda for higher education in Canada. He is known to be an “extremist” RPF official—one of the actual “Masterminds” of RPF strategy to seize and consolidate power in Rwanda—who supported the RPF movement from Canada and the U.S. as a key member of the Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora.[115]

Gatete organized the RPF campaign abroad, working on funding, lobbying and political alliances, and went on to become a senior Presidential adviser to Paul Kagame. Gatete also worked as Secretary General at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, and he was Steering Committee member as part of President Clinton’s euphemistically named New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), a hegemonic U.S. state department project in neoliberal economics and protectionist trade.[116]

“Claver Gatete is 500% involved in hunting down Hutus and spreading the genocide ideology of Kigali,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro.

THE GENOCIDE MISERY INDUSTRY

Bogus asylum seekers in the U.K. are also working to raise tens of millions of pounds annually, ostensibly to support genocide survivors and social programs in Rwanda. Instead much of this money reportedly disappears behind the smokescreens of “aid” and “development”.

There are many charities and non-government organizations from the U.S. and U.K. that run large money-making operations that claim to benefit Rwanda. These charities complete the circle of propaganda and seal the doubt of public opinion by legitimizing a terrorist government under the unimpeachable veneer of humanitarianism and goodwill.

These charities work the media system, providing expert spokespeople and framing issues for the mass media. The media system works the charities, using them to institutionalize ideology and further their select political agendas. Like the media, the charities peddle the establishment line throughout, meanwhile claiming that they are “not political.” But it is always the same: like Praxis, they unflinchingly adhere to the upside-down mythology which turns victims into killers and killers into victims with very little middle ground in between.

For example, Fergal Keane is a patron of MSAADA, a “charity based in Dorset, England, that helps surviving orphans and widows of the Rwandan genocide.”[117] With the assistance of the British media system, MSAADA advances the standard mythology about genocide in Rwanda.

“In 100 days an estimated one million people were butchered in the Rwandan genocide, while the United Nations refused to intervene to halt the bloodshed,” reads the MSAADA disinformation. “The world turned its back on the people of Rwanda once, and now the country is largely forgotten again.”

RPF agent and false asylum seeker Ignatius Mugabo is on the management committee of IMIZI, a U.K.-based Rwanda charity.[118]

Vivenie Niragira Mugunga, the RPF agent and false asylum seeker—who served as Fergal Keane’s critic of Praxis—is the director of a Rwanda/U.K. charity called RYICO.[119]

One of the largest and most influential charities working the Rwanda Genocide for political and economic profit is the big U.K. non-government organization (NGO) Aegis Trust. Aegis works closely with several U.K. government departments on Holocaust and genocide issues and plays a leading role in the Intergovernmental Task Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research established by Bill Clinton, Goran Persson (former Prime Minister of Sweden), and Tony Blair in 1998. Aegis Trust is also the primary financial sponsor of the Genocide Memorial in Gisozi, the largest memorial in Rwanda. Aegis Trust patrons include General Romeo Dallaire, Bob Geldof, Desmond Tutu and Elie Wiesel, and the organization is believed to also be deeply tied to the intelligence community.[120]

Another high profile charity working in the U.K. is Survivor’s Fund—SURF—a large NGO that “works to improve the lives of the Rwandan Survivors of Genocide.” According to their web site, “SURF was founded by a British Citizen of Rwandan origin (who lost family members and relations during this tragic event) and other Rwandans based in U.K., and concerned British individuals. Although support to survivors dates back to 1995, SURF was formally established and registered in 1997.”[121]

According to legitimate Rwandan refugees, however, SURF founder Mary Kayitesi Blewitt gained British citizenship after falsely claiming to be both a genocide survivor and a Tutsi from Rwanda. She is also reported to be the first RPF “diplomatic” representative to have arrived in the U.K., and the one who effectively opened the new Rwandan Embassy in London—running RPF operations out of one small room at the Uganda High Commission at Trafalgar Square—after the RPF “victory” of July 1994.[122]

“She is 100% Ugandan and 100% liar,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “Ask her what village she came from in Rwanda, which prefecture, which commune. Ask her where she lived, where her family lived in Rwanda. She can’t answer. She doesn’t speak the language fluently and she claims she lost 50 members of her family in Rwanda in 1994, but her family was all in Uganda.”

“A year after the genocide in Rwanda, Mary Kayitesi Blewitt returned to her village to dig through a mass grave in search of her family,” reported the U.K.’s Independent on October 12, 2004. “The rains had washed away the topsoil, revealing the bodies of about

200 people… She lost 50 members of her family in the genocide, including her brother John Baptiste, 27, whose leg was hacked off by his killers. He was left to bleed to death in front of his wife and children.”[123]

According to Rwandan sources Mary Kayitesi Blewitt has used fake genocide survivors and their sympathy stories to perpetrate a massive fundraising swindle—raising millions of pounds for the RPF regime. Like most “humanitarian” NGOs, the fundraising relies on the mass media for brand recognition (brand names like ‘UNICEF’, ‘CARE’, and ‘Save the Children’) and to broadcast images of suffering African ‘survivors’ of genocide. Fortunately, Mary Kayitesi’s Survivor’s Fund benefits from the patronage of Fergal Keane and Lindsay Hilsum—two high-profile storytellers always pressing the establishment’s Rwandan genocide narrative.

In return, and closing the cycle, the media personalities endorse the organization.

“Mary Blewitt is quite a remarkable human being,” said Fergal Keane, “one of the most remarkable I have ever met. Her work has involved extraordinary personal sacrifice. Those of us who witnessed genocide in Rwanda know that Mary Blewitt stands among the bravest of the brave, the kindest of the kind.” [124]

“The money goes to the criminal networks in Kigali,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “They are killing each other fighting over the money. That is why you see RPF sometimes falling out with Kagame. They had even arrested Mary Kayitesi in Kigali in 2007; they held her a few days while they were fighting over the money, but of course they had to release her because she is their fundraising source!”

For her sacrifice “to the survivors of the Rwandan genocide in Rwanda and the U.K.,” Mary Kayitesi Blewitt was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Prince Charles on February 28, 2008.[125] After the publication of his book, Season of Blood, and for his “services to journalism,” Fergal Keane was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Prince Charles in 1996.

Mary Kayitesi Blewitt is also listed as a member of the U.K. Holocaust Memorial Trust.[126]

The compromised mission of the Survivor’s Fund—ostensibly an apolitical non-government humanitarian organization—and its true political agenda is further underscored by the false asylum status and sudden financial windfall of its founder, Mary Kayitesi Blewitt.

In early March, 2008, Mary Kayitesi Blewitt resigned her post as the Founder and Director of Survivor’s Fund. According to sources in London, Blewitt has informed her closed friends that she is moving back to Uganda where she has built a big health spa—Ultimate Escape Health Spa—that will operate in the heart of Kampala, Uganda’s capital city.

According to the promotional materials, “Ultimate Escape Health Spa is a social enterprise which will offer holistic healing treatments, health, fitness and beauty regimes in a soothing stress relieving environment. Scheduled to open in 2009, Ultimate Escape Health Spa will offer sanctuary and safe haven. Profit will be donated to survivors of the Rwandan genocide to enable them to escape from their troubles and trauma.”[127]

“What an interesting move for someone who has spent the last 14 years working for genocide survivors,” notes Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “Moving into business now? And not in Rwanda, but in Uganda? The reason is it is the only country she knows well. She was born in Uganda and lived in Uganda although she falsely represented herself as a Rwanda genocide survivor to raise money. And this is another scam. Making people feel good thinking they will help Rwanda genocide survivors. Scam, scam, scam.” [128]

THE MEDIA AS GENOCIDE TRIBUNAL

Prior to confronting Dr. Vincent Bajinya in person, Fergal Keane collaborated with the Kagame regime to collect the “evidence” of genocide crimes. Thus it is important that Fergal Keane make public his connections with the Kagame government and the facts surrounding his sudden interest in Dr. Vincent Bajinya.

Keane’s role as an apologist for the Kagame regime and the Rwanda Patriotic Front began in April of 1994 when Keane contacted the RPF in Belgium, met their agent in Uganda, and traveled with RPF assurance and protection in Rwanda during April and May 1994.[129]

In 2003, Keane also served as a prosecution witness against Sylvestre Gacumbitsi at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda. According to the ICTR Press Release, Keane “was in Rwanda in the months of May and June in 1994, told the court about the many dead bodies he saw in various parts of the Kibungo prefecture and in particular at Nyarubuye Catholic Church. The witness who has written a book, Season of Blood; the Rwanda Journey, showed a video film about the killings.” [130]

The ICTR Press Release does not point out that Fergal Keane set up his visit to Rwanda in 1994 through the Rwandan Patriotic Front office in Belgium; that he met his RPF escort in Uganda at the border, and that he travelled with the assurance of safety from the RPF. Further, it seems the atrocities that occurred at Nyarubuye were staged by the RPF.

Professor Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, former director of ORINFOR, offers the “massacre of Tutsis” at Nyarubuye as another example of how the Kagame regime manufactured and tampered with massacre sites before inviting the media to “witness” and document the evidence of genocide blamed on Hutu extremists.

“In Nyarubuye, the Interahamwe killed Tutsi at a parish in a building used for religious education where Tutsis had sought shelter,” says Higiro. “When the RPF arrived with the Interahamwe they had rounded up in commune Murambi, they took them to the local Catholic Church and executed them and left their bodies there. Then RPF soldiers killed civilians in and around Nyarubuye and brought the bodies to the church. After its victory and to show the world what had happened in Rwanda, the RPF dug up bodies and placed them on stilts outside of churches. But all the people killed by the RPF were blamed on Hutus.”[131]

Fergal Keane tracked down Sylvestre Gacumbitsi in a refugee camp in Tanzania and accused him on film much as he did with Dr. Vincent Bajinya. The “evidence” for Keane’s charges likely was fabricated by the Kagame regime much as it was fabricated to frame Dr. Vincent Bajinya.

“Sylvestre Gacumbitsi was defended by a Mr. Kouengowa and Ms. Anne Mbattang, both from Cameroon,” says former ICTR defense investigator Phil Taylor. “Hirondelle [news agency] reported that the trial was one of the ‘fastest’ in ICTR history. I have not read his testimony but according to his book Fergal Keane was tight with one of his RPF handlers and it was this man who led him to two people who claimed to be witnesses.[132] The massacre occurred mid-April [1994] and Keane went to the site in June.” [133]

On June 17, 2004, Sylvestre Gacumbitsi was found “guilty” of crimes against humanity and genocide by the court.

The work of Fergal Keane and the BBC in framing “the Rwanda genocide” story is mirrored by numerous other award-wining journalists. At the top of the list are Lindsay Hilsum of Britain’s Observer newspaper and Channel Four television, and Stephen Kinzer, the New York Times writer who recently published A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It, a shamelessly positive biography of the heroic Paul Kagame.

“Ten years ago, one million Rwandans perished in the worst genocide since the Second World War,” Lindsay Hilsum says. Hilsum was working with the Observer in 1994 and was reportedly the only British journalist in Kigali as the killing began.[134] Hilsum echoes the standard tripe about Rwanda. “Rwanda’s genocide could have been prevented.” [135]

Instead of reassessing and revising her original analyses, which would be the appropriate thing to do in the face of the rising evidence of the RPF’s crimes, Lindsay Hilsum—like many others—takes the apology for murder a step further to explain away the RPF terrorism in Congo: “Guilt over their failure to stop the killings spurred donors—especially Britain, the U.S. and the Netherlands—to back the Rwandan Government, despite its poor human rights record and involvement in plundering the Congo.”[136]

Like most of the establishment journalists, Fergal Keane’s reporting has attracted widespread critical acclaim. He was named as overall winner of the Amnesty International Press Awards in 1993 and won an Amnesty television prize in 1994 for his investigation of the Rwandan Genocide, called “Journey Into Darkness.”

However, during the years when the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana was under attack by the RPF, the documentation produced by international human rights bodies decidedly took the side of the RPF.[137] This pattern has continued, and it should come as no surprise that Fergal Keane and Lindsay Hilsum are the chosen recipients of the Amnesty International Press Award and Television prizes.

According to his own testimony Keane gained access to Rwanda’s killing fields in partnership with the Rwanda Patriotic Front. In late May and early June of 1994, as the killings in Rwanda were drawing to a close—but as pockets of Tutsis were still being hunted down—Keane traveled for several weeks with the advancing Tutsi RPF forces.[138]

“By the time we got to the border with Rwanda through Uganda, we had made contact with the RPF in Brussels,” Keane stated in PBS Frontline’s “Ghosts of Rwanda”. “And they had, by that stage, become relatively organized about linking up and giving people safe passage down through the country. It was the most organized guerilla army I had ever come across. And I’d been with the rebels in Eritrea, and they have a name for being very strict and highly organized. But the RPF were certainly in a class of art in terms of organization.”[139]

To set up the false dichotomy between savage killers—Hutus—and organized saviors—the RPF—journalists like Fergal Keane and Philip Gourevitch—and like Donatella Lorch and Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Gary Streiker of CNN—hammered the point home over and over: The RPF is highly disciplined and organized.[140] The RPF’s crimes were not reported because virtually every western journalist was embedded with the RPF.

“We met a very helpful and friendly young lieutenant,” continues Fergal Keane, describing his foray into the killing fields in May of 1994. Keane innocuously introduces “a guy called Frank Ndore who guided us down through the country.”[141]

Fergal Keane’s contact and escort, arranged through Brussels in advance, was an RPF soldier. Lieutenant Frank Ndore was born in Uganda to Rwandan Tutsi parents who fled in 1959. He was a veteran of Museveni’s National Resistance Army and the RPF offensive in 1990.[142]

“And the most striking thing about driving in through Rwanda at that stage was the emptiness,” Keane continues. “I was used to an Africa of crowded villages, of people working in the fields—a vibrant, living Africa. And this place, it was like somebody had got a Hoover [vacuum cleaner] and placed it over the country and just sucked all of the life, hoovered the life up out of the place. There was nothing. Just emptiness.”[143]

“In Byumba—where the RPF first invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990—Kagame went to a market and committed so many atrocities,” says Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana, a Rwandan medical doctor practicing in Laredo, Texas, whose father, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, was judged, tried and convicted by “journalist” Philip Gourevitch in his fictitious book.[144]

“More than a million people fled to Kigali,” says Eliel Ntakirutimana. “All their farms had been taken, all their goats killed, they were living on the streets. When these people heard that the RPF is coming to Kigali, what do you think they are going to do? They are going to fight!” [145]

Philip Gourevitch shares the dubious honor of being one of Kigali’s premier bounty hunters for framing, accusing, judging, and convicting Hutus in his New Yorker features and his fictional [sic] award-winning book, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.[146]

Philip Gourevitch’s book is “completely one-sided” says Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life subject of the film Hotel Rwanda. “His book took very much the RPF side. He was more or less like an RPF advocate.”[147]

Gourevitch is known for fabricating a New Yorker story called “The Genocide Fax” in alliance with Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Undersecretary James Rubin—Philip Gourevitch’s brother-in-law.”[148]

According to Gourevitch and the New Yorker, the fax, sent by Major General Romeo Dallaire, the U.N. force commander in Rwanda, to peacekeeping headquarters in New York, “reported in startling detail the preparations that were under way to carry out the [Hutu] extermination campaign [against Tutsis].”[149] In the official Rwanda genocide mythology, the imaginary fax reportedly sent by U.N. force commander General Romeo Dallaire would have had to have existed prior to April 6, 1994.

But there was no fax sent by General Romeo Dallaire, and the “genocide fax” was a fabricated document meant to divert attention and mislead—and to fill in the gaping hole of a complete absence of documentary proof of planning of a genocide in the official ‘planned genocide’ theory. The ‘genocide fax’ was sent by Colonel R. M. Connaughton of the British Army, based at Camberly, Surrey, England, and the home of the British Military Academy, Sandhurst, and several other British Army establishments.[150] Colonel Connaughton also sent a copy of his fabricated fax to British journalist Lindsay Hilsum at the Observer.[151] The ‘genocide fax’ was placed in U.N. files in New York on November 28, 1995, and it never existed before that date.[152]

Gourevitch’s Rwanda ‘genocide’ project was funded by the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP), a euphemistically named think-tank that has been very aggressive in peddling the official Rwandan genocide story.[153] The USIP has also funded propaganda films and reports on the “genocide in Rwanda,” such as one authored by National Security insider John Prendergast of the International Crises Group, a flack-producing U.S. intelligence group fronting as a “humanitarian” NGO.[154]

Philip Gourevitch also peddled the fiction that the Tutsis are “the Jews of Africa” and he often speaks about his firsthand experience with “genocide in Rwanda” at Jewish religious events.[155]

Gourevitch helped facilitate journalist Michela Wrong’s book, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, which was funded by London’s Financial Times, and is another whitewash of the RPF invasions of Zaire in 1996, the killing of Hutu refugees, and the role of the West in supporting Mobutu and terrorizing the people of Congo/Zaire.[156]

But the Gourevitch connection to the information warfare against the people of Congo—and trusting Western “news” consumers back home—doesn’t end there. James Rubin, Gourevitch’s brother-in-law and Madeleine Albright’s Undersecretary of State, also primed his future wife, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, to cover up the criminal racketeering and plunder, and the Hutu genocide committed by the RPF and UPDF and their backers from the Western defense and intelligence establishment.[157]

“Philip Gourevitch came to my house,” says Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana. “I should have listened to my lawyer. I didn’t know this guy was working with the [U.S.] State Department. I completely believe that Philip Gourevitch accused, tried and convicted my father in his book. Gourevitch set up my father and consistently lied about him. The stories [Gourevitch] tells about the maid and the stories about Genny, my wife, were all fabricated.”[158]

Philip Gourevitch is known to be a very close friend of Paul Kagame and had the support of the Kagame regime, and the backing of the U.S. State Department, from the start. Gourevitch’s fictional treatise on genocide in Rwanda was funded by the euphemistically named U.S. Institute for Peace, a U.S. establishment think-tank known for the production of disinformation in service to select agendas.

“Several attempts were made to take the Tutsi workers and hide them by Gerard and Pastor Elizaphan but they declined the offer,” says Eliel Ntakirutimana, speaking about his father and brother’s true actions in Rwanda in 1994. “People stayed at the churches because their Tutsi sons who were in the RPF were telling them to stay there, we will come for you. But Kagame refused to allow RPF soldiers leave to go to the churches to protect their families. He wanted victims, something big to use to gain power. Kagame wanted dead bodies.”[159]

After inciting hatred and fear and driving millions of people into flight, Kagame got exactly what he wanted and this formed the pillars of the genocide ideology successfully used to silence both critics and truth.

Gerard and Elizaphan Ntakirutimana were framed by the Rwanda government, and Philip Gourevitch played the central role in furthering the fabrications in his prize-winning U.S. state department novel.

Elizaphan Ntakirutimana was found guilty of ‘aiding and abetting genocide’ and sentenced to 10 years in prison.[160] On December 6, 2006, after serving 10 years in arrest or prison, he was released. The 83 year-old pastor died just over a month later, on January 22, 2007. Gerard Ntakirutimana was convicted genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

“Gerard Ntakirutimana was a good doctor with no politics who returned from abroad to help his community in Rwanda in 1993,” says former ICTR defense investigator Phil Taylor. “One year later disaster struck with the assassination of the President and a brutal war. I believe that both Dr. Gerard and his father Elizaphan are innocent and victims of political hysteria.”[161]

THE BIG BUSINESS OF GENOCIDE

The war that rocked Rwanda in the early 1990’s set the stage for a complete reorganization of power and control in the tiny landlocked country. The role of Rwanda in plundering Congo has been highly censored by the establishment press, but greatly illuminated by certain independent journalists. Even the U.N. Panel of Experts reports remain apt testimonials to the plunder which continues, no matter the denials and public relations statements to the contrary, under the watchful eyes of the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC) and the so-called international “human rights” community.

On February 8, 2008, for one egregious example of politically motivated disinformation, Kemal Saiki, MONUC’s Chief Public Information officer, gave a public interview in which he stated that Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) were not present or involved in Congo.[162] This is an outright lie and it is not the first lie that Kemal Saiki has told.[163]

Rwanda continues to pull the purse strings in eastern Congo and strangle all hope for truth, liberty, justice and life for millions of Congolese people. Congo’s gold, coltan, niobium, oil and diamonds continue to pass through Rwanda and Uganda in transit to international markets. General Laurent Nkunda routinely travels freely back and forth from Congo to Rwanda.[164]

By depopulating Rwanda, rich land was opened up for new multinational corporate exploitation and the war brought about new ownership and means of control. Excluding the profits from the extractive industries in Rwanda and Congo, Rwanda’s top money makers are tea, coffee and gorilla tourism. Close on the heels of these are the HIV/AIDS scams involving the Clinton and Pangea Foundations, and their pharmaceutical backers like Pfizer.

In the past six to eight years USAID has invested over US$ 10 million in the coffee sector in Rwanda, which was radically reconfigured—in terms of plantations, landholders, and market dominance—due to the power shift that occurred between 1989, when world coffee prices crashed, and 2006, when USAID, the Kagame government and Starbucks—a major promoter of the Hollywood film King Kong and Kong paraphernalia—announced huge economic gains in the international coffee market. Starbucks provided coffee expertise and training in Rwanda, and their ‘superior’ specialty ‘award-winning’ Rwandan coffee was highlighted in 5,000 Starbucks coffee outlets during March and April 2006. [165]

USAID and its business partners have estimated that the coffee sector could generate at least US$ 117 million in export revenues per year for Rwanda by 2010. The tea industry has potential to generate US$ 91 million in export revenues by 2010. The goal for the tourism industry is to attract 70,000 tourists to visit Rwanda and to generate US$ 99 million in revenues by 2010.[166] Huge development projects are underway.

All of these require land cleared of people. Enter USAID, Africa Wildlife Fund, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, Conservation International, Royal/Dutch Shell, Jane Goodall Institute, Starbucks, Green Mountain Coffee—and Goodworks International, putting a happy face on it all.

“The more you consume coffee from Rwanda, the more you give Rwanda hope,” said Rwanda’s Ambassador Zac Nsenga. “It’s the quality and the story behind it that makes it special.”

The genocide business and the depopulation behind it is a special story indeed.

HUNTING AND KILLING HUTUS

The state security and intelligence networks in Uganda and Rwanda today revolve around terrorism, and state-run “safe” houses proliferate with very little, if any, attention from human rights organizations or western media institutions. Anyone who violates the code of state-orchestrated silence will be silenced, themselves, perhaps by being ‘disappeared.’

Said one source working in Central Africa: “By the ‘undercover iron hand’ in Rwanda I mean that people are whisked away by government operatives into ‘safe houses’ or [unidentified] torture houses. Nobody knows the whereabouts of these houses but they exist, for some of those who have been taken there can reveal their horrendous experiences.”[167]

But the true history or terrorism in the region is well- hidden by the media propaganda system, the public relations, and the official Rwanda genocide story.

“We now know that the Rwandan Patriotic Front operated 36 active clandestine cells in Rwanda when it invaded on October 1, 1990, and that these cells worked through human rights groups,” writes Canadian author Robin Philpot in his book, “Colonialism Dies Hard.”[168]

In 1988, Rwandan multi-millionaire Assinapol Rwigara financed a 1988-1989 bicycling tour of Rwanda in which Paul Kagame and other RPF agents secretly toured the country in a support van belonging to the Ugandan cycling team. Such people as Assinapol Rwigara create inconvenient truths that challenge the establishment narrative about “Hutu extremists planning and organizing genocide” in Rwanda: Rwigara was a Tutsi businessman and close associate of Juvenal Habyarimana, whom he betrayed by financing the RPF. [169]

In a situation report (SITREP) dated May 17, 1994, Mark Prutsalis of Refugees International (RI), a U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) linked non-government organization (NGO), described the situation of Hutu refugees arriving at the rate of 3000 people per day and crossing the Tanzanian border from Rwanda. Some 70,000 refugees had already crossed three major crossing points and the presence of the RPF at the border was noted and described. The document provided “incident” excerpts from a UNHCR protection report made on May 14 and 15, 1994.[170]

In the Kigarama Sector of the Rusumo Commune, “The RPF came and called for a ‘peace meeting.’ Those who did not participate voluntarily were forced to the meeting. At the school people were tied together three by three—men/women/children—and stabbed. The bodies were put on trucks and thrown into the Kagera River, north of Rusumo Bridge.”[171]

In the Nyamugari, Gisenyi, and Nyarubuje sectors of the Rusumo Commune, “The RPF comes at 05h00 waiting for villagers to open their doors. The villagers are caught and taken away to the river by trucks. No one has returned. Refugees of the area have seen people being tied together and thrown into the river. It seems as if guns are only used if somebody tries to escape.”[172]

At Rusumo commune, sector Muzaza, Gasarabwayi Village (four kms from the Kagera River): “The RPF launched several attacks on the village and its population. On [May 13] 40 RPF soldiers came at 07h00. They surrounded the village. Villagers were gathered in houses, which were burned down. An eyewitness saw 20 people being killed this way. Eight villagers were thrown into a latrine, and the latrine was filled with soil. Asked by a UNHCR field officer, the refugee said that the RPF did not care whether the victims were Hutu or Tutsi villagers.”[173]

At the Mugoma border crossing: “The refugees report that on 15 May as many as 100 refugees (maybe more) were killed by the RPF on a hill opposite the closest crossing point [Mugoma].”[174]

The report cites only RPA/F soldiers involved in killing and the conclusion section includes comments by an International Rescue Committee (IRC) staff member sent to the IRC offices. “Things are getting very bad at the border here… Someone really needs to do something about all of the killing and torture on the other [Rwandan] side. Each day there are more and more bodies in the river and most of them without their heads; the count is between 20 to 30 [bodies] each thirty minutes.”[175]

If Fergal Keane were working as an unbiased journalist he could have taken the opportunity to interview refugees in the Tanzanian camps about the RPF slaughter they witnessed. Instead, Keane was on a personal crusade to the Tanzanian camps to track down and convict a supposed Hutu genocidaire named Sylvestre Gacumbitsi.

Similarly, CNN’s Gary Streiker reported from the Tanzanian border during this period—in the first two weeks of May—but the RPF involvement in killing was hidden from the world: like everyone else, Streiker was embedded with the RPF.

“The rapidly moving water of the [Kagera] River,” wrote Thomas Lang in the Columbia Journalism Review, ten years later (2005), in remembrance of Gary Streiker’s reportage of May 9, 1994, “carrying with it hundreds of Rwandan bodies, slaughtered and dumped in the river, creating a picture not seen since the Nazi death camps of the 1940s. An image of almost unimaginable horror. Will the world react to these pictures and do anything? […] Simply put, if you watched CNN in the summer of 1994, you were made aware of a genocide taking place on a nationwide scale—and you were given a working understanding of what triggered it.” [176]

According to a U.N. cable dated October 14, 1994, UNHCR special investigator Robert Gersoni gave a detailed verbal briefing (from his notes) on his findings and conclusions after completing an investigation in Rwanda during August and September of 1994. The meeting was attended by Kofi Annan, then the Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, by UNAMIR II Force Commander Major General Guy Tousignant, and by several others. Annan had attended a previous meeting with Gersoni on September 14 and warned high-level officials that if Gersoni’s findings were correct they would be very damaging to Kagame’s government and to the United Nations.[177]

Robert Gersoni was not known for making mistakes. He was a professional investigator of high-repute known for 25 years of well-documented work for UNHCR, USAID and other bodies. According to UNHCR, Gersoni’s report was based on a five-week investigation that interviewed 300 Rwandans in 41 of Rwanda’s 145 communes and at 9 refugee camps. The secret cable was designed to mitigate the repercussions of the Gersoni charges and institute damage control.[178]

“We are now engaged in a damage limitation exercise,” wrote Shaharyar Khan, Special Representative to Kofi Annan from the U.N. Assistance Mission to Rwanda II (UNAMIR II).[179]

According to the cable: “In a two hour briefing, Gersoni put forward evidence of what he described as calculated, pre-planned, systematic atrocities and genocide against Hutus by the RPF, whose methodology and scale, he concluded (30,000 massacred), could only have been part of a plan implemented as a policy from the highest echelons of the [Kagame] government. In his view these were not individual cases of revenge and summary trials but a pre-planned, systematic genocide against the Hutus. Gersoni staked his 25 year reputation on his conclusions which he recognized were diametrically opposite to the assumptions made, so far, by the U.N. and international community.”[180]

The document noted Gersoni’s claim that the RPF traveled around committing a genocide against Hutus with hoes, clubs and machetes.[181]

The above excerpts come from a huge cache of official documents, some of which have been seen only by attorneys at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.[182] These documents and the many more that remain secret provide a substantial body of incontrovertible evidence about who knew what, and when, and about what really happened in Central Africa in the 1990’s, and about how the RPF orchestrated and carried out a highly coordinated and calculated program of depopulation and terror.

“Scratch the surface, the red earth of Rwanda, and you will, it appears, find one vast cemetery,” wrote British journalist Nick Gordon in a shocking 1996 expose. “The people who passed me the document know it will be hard to investigate. Many areas are no-fly zones. The government has exhumed graves, dried the skeletons and burned them. Some graves have been used more than once: they contain bodies from both the first genocide and the counter-genocide. Often the people who have buried the dead, the creusers, are themselves killed so they cannot bear witness.”[183]

After 14 years this correspondent has slowly but surely come to the conclusion that if anyone planned genocide in Rwanda, it was the RPF, and only the RPF. If I must accept that a pre-planned genocide was committed by the Interahamwe and “extremist Hutus” as defined by the official Rwanda genocide narrative that is now deeply instilled in the public mind in what can only be considered a collective insanity, then I must insist that the same people who make this claim acknowledge the genocide planned and committed by the RPF.

“Every April, Rwandans remember the 1994 genocide during a week of national mourning,” wrote Dutch journalist Thijs Bouwknegt on April 4, 2008 in an article which explores ‘genocide negationism’. “This year’s official motto is ‘Let us commemorate genocide while fighting against genocide ideology; render assistance to survivors while working for development’. The crimes of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), however, will be officially forgotten.”[184]

In the lastest show of military and political support for terrorist partners serving the U.S. military expansion and natural resource plundered from Africa, the Pentagon in late 2007 extended the Kagame government a military training package worth $7-12 million. When President Bush was in Kigali in 2008, the Pentagon extended another $12 million ‘aid’ package for ‘peacekeeping’ training in Darfur—a euphemism for exporting terrorismof the RPF kind.[185] ~

What happened to Hutu Refugees in the DRC in 1997?

One has to keep in mind that by 1996 Laurent Kabila, who toppled Mobutu, a one-time rebel leader who was once visited in the mountainous forest of western Congo by the Argentinean-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara in the mid-1960s, was a refugee hawker in Tanzania when he was recruited to be a spokesman of the outfit of opportunist exile Congolese politicians Paul Kagame had set up as figureheads in his design of doing away with the Mobutu regime in neighboring Congo. In several interviews, the Rwandan President had publicly acknowledged the fact the operational planning of the “Congolese revolution” was carried out in Kigali. Mobutu was dying from prostrate cancer and had allowed armed gangs of defeated Hutu militiamen to run refugee camps at the border of Congo with Rwanda and thus gave ample justification for the retaliatory three-pronged response from Kagame: 1) dismantling of refugee camps; 2) destruction of the structure of the remnants of the Rwandan army and militias in those camps; and 3) toppling of Mobutu.

Faced with a country destroyed by 32 years of graft that had squandered the military might built up for over two decades by American and European military cooperation during the Cold War, Kagame could have achieved these objectives without the participation of his Congolese “lackeys,” but he was aware that the rest of the international community wouldn’t take kindly to any such brazen takeover of another country. The new Rwandan regime was riding a huge international surf of sympathy and guilt after the rest of the world had just stood idly by as one of the most horrific genocides of modern times was taking place. And the new Rwandan authorities weren’t foolish enough to waste this sizable amount of capital of goodwill. So Kabila was deemed important in the scheme being hatched in Kigali and recruited accordingly.

Also, the United States, as other nations-states for that matter, operates in its foreign policy with the only compass of its “interests.” At one point, it was in the interest of the U.S. to prop up the dictatorship of Mobutu in the Congo as a proxy in the African theater of the Cold War. With the fall of the former Soviet Union, and the emergence of new alliances America was actively creating in the African Great Lakes Region under the aegis of “African Renaissance,” the United States determined that it was in its national “interest” to dump Mobutu and the Congolese.

There was, however, a fourth and far more nefarious objective in Kagame’s mind that one is at a loss to determine whether Kagame’s allies—Kabila and the U.S. that is—were privy to the revenge, indiscriminate, and incremental killings of unarmed Hutu refugees that amounted to a de facto counter-genocide with the minimal estimation of 300,000 dead in the first half of 1997. As James C. McKinley and Howard W. French of The New York Times had it on their November 14, 1997 report entitled “Hidden Horrors: Uncovering the Guilty Footprints Along Zaire’s Long Trail of Death”: “more and more evidence has emerged suggesting that Mr. Kabila and the Rwandans who backed him were also fighting a war of revenge, one deeply intertwined with the ethnic conflicts between Hutu and Tutsi groups that have tormented this region. The Tutsi troops from Rwanda and Congo who made up the core of Mr. Kabila’s army had a powerful motive for vengeance, since thousands of Hutu refugees in the camps had taken part in the slaughter of more than half a million Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994.”

And no amount of forensics in the field would ever ascertain whether the U.S. had prior knowledge of this criminal scheme; though one can certainly assert that the U.S. served as accessory after the commission after these most horrendous crimes. As for Laurent Kabila, after his falling out with his one-time ally, he had this to say in a November 19, 1998 interview with the Belgian daily Le Soir: “Victims were in the thousands. Never did we expect these people to be so cruel, so bloody, it was revolting. Our fellow citizens were shocked as the [Rwandan] soldiers were asking for their help, to put bodies into bags, to throw them into mass graves. They had to promise not to reveal where they had buried them. We didn’t authorize these massacres, we weren’t even informed.” Well, one would object, that’s what you get when you undertake your “revolution” with foreign troops that had but contempt for you and your indigenous troops. Furthermore, as Laurent Kabila represented Congo in this grim alliance and the atrocities occurred on Congolese soil, with the damning eyewitness documentation of the participation of his own troops (albeit to a lesser extent), even after Koffi Annan was decrying the “slow extermination” of Hutu refugees, and even after the European Union Commissioner on Humanitarian Affairs had accused him on May 6, 1997 of transforming eastern Congo into a “slaughterhouse,” Kabila denied that any massacre was being carried out on his watch and ordered the refugees be removed from the Congo within 60 days—thus violating, as the Congolese rights group ASADHO denounced in June 1998, the 1949 Geneva Convention and the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol.

Modus Operandi of the Counter-genocide: “the best game were the women and children”

At first, the destruction of the Hutu refugees, which started in early 1997, was carried out in small incremental killings, and then it gathered its own momentum, culminating in one single mass disappearance of more than 80,000 children, women, and men. But throughout, the modus operandi was a simple one: drive off aid workers; seal off refugee camps; fire in the air, thus driving off refugees into the jungle; then hunt them down there like game. Their fellow Rwandan pursuers had so much instilled the fear of God in these Hutu that they walked non-stop; and the fittest among crossed the whole expense of the Congo within two weeks, with some crossing the River Congo to Congo-Brazzaville and others reaching as far north as Gabon! (These two countries were also in violation of international conventions as they forcibly repatriated these refugees to Rwanda, from which some of these later escaped to find refuge in the mountainous forests of eastern Congo.) You had to power-walk or die, as stragglers were systematically “mopped up.”

William Shawcross, in his book Deliver us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001, pages 247-248) captures the methodology of the counter-genocide of Hutu in the Congo—from the in-the-spur-of-the-moment killing envy to well-planned mass murders, as well as the dubious role played by the U.S. and other governments with the notable exception of France. He writes:

“In April [1997], Mike McCurry, the White House spokesman, declared that ‘Mobutuism is about to become a creature of history,’ thus nailing U.S. colors more publicly than ever before to [Laurent] Kabila’s alliance’s. Emboldened, Kabila and the Rwandan government both made personal attacks on [Kofi] Annan for his expressions of concern over the plight of the refugees.

In April the UN Commission on Human Rights requested an investigation into the allegations of mass killings and other gross violations of human rights. This followed a report from the UN special rapporteur on Zaire,Roberto Garreton, that the alliance had ‘undoubtedly’ committed massacres. He named forty sites.

The commission was set up, but Kabila made it clear he did not intend to cooperate with it. Mrs. [Sadako] Ogata, the high commissioner, wrote to Annan to say that representations ‘do not appear to have had any effect. The Alliance leadership continues to deny that such gross abuses are occurring… I realize that with the innocent victims there are those not deserving of international protection. But such considerations must not be allowed to excuse inaction, still less to indirectly sanctions summary killings.’

The atrocities continued. Early one morning in late April about twenty Rwandans and or alliance troops entered Lwiro hospital north of Bukavu in Zaire. They seized about fifty children who were there for therapeutic feeding and flung them brutally into the back of a truck. They also took away about sixty adults, including members of the children’s families and caregivers.

At Kasere at the end of April, 80,000 people were waiting for planes. None came. Every night 200 or so people died. The rebels deliberately drove the aid workers away for a week. When they were able to return the place was empty. ‘Nobody. All gone,’ said [Kilian] Kleinschmidt [of UNCHR]. ‘The once full cholera station abandoned. Stretchers, but nobody on them. Even the smell of death had gone, the smell we had worked with all those weeks. A feeling of being manipulated as part of a buildup to something evil.’

The refugees had been killed or were now being hunted through the forests, ‘and the best game were the women and children who had no chance to defend their lives.’

[…]

And so it went on all year long; one reason after another was found to block the team’s access to alleged massacres sites.

“Month after month went by, and it became clearer that most governments just did not want to know what had really happened in the jungles of eastern Zaire in the first half of 1997. UNHCR might say that 230,000 Hutu were still unaccounted for, but the U.S had always disputed these numbers.”

But the end of 1997, the situation of the UNHCR had become so untenable in the Congo that Kofi Annan decided to call it quit while, according to a report by Howard W. French of The New York Times, “At the United States Embassy in Kinshasa (…) diplomats were bending over backward to shift the blame for the investigators’ troubles to the United Nations. A senior diplomat in Kinshasa, for example, castigated the team for its rejection of the Government’s insistence that their inquiry be carried out only in the east.”

Two sites of interest: Mbandaka (Equateur Province) and Tingi Tingi (near Kisangani, the capital of Oriental Province)

The new forensic teams should pick up where the 1997 team left out: near and at the provincial capital of Mbandaka, which was at the time the freshest sites of mass killings (May 13, 1997) and where there is at least an identified Westerner as eyewitnesses: the Belgian plantation owner Antoine de Klerk, who was arrested at the time by Rwandan soldiers in a lame attempt to have him not talk to the UN forensic team, and who can’t be accused of “Hutu propaganda” by Kigali. In Wendji and Mbandaka, Rwandan troops sealed off the area for four days to carry out indiscriminately killings of at least 2,000 Hutu refugees in front of the local population with one instance of a small child’s skull smashed against a tree because one Congolese villager, who had found him playing dead under his dead parents, wanted to take him home.

There are also Western identifiable eyewitnesses of the Tingi Tingi massacres. According to the same New York Times report by McKinley and French cited earlier : “On March 2, [1997], according to relief officials, Western diplomats and Hutu refugees, Rwandan-backed units of Mr. Kabila’s army launched a full-scale assault on the refugee camp at Tingi Tingi, sending the population, which had swollen to well over 150,000, fleeing westward yet again.”

At those sites, eyewitnesses have reported that Rwandan troops had tried to dispose of the evidence, and in once instance, in Tingi Tingi, about 200 kilometers southeast of Kisangani, even attempted to cremate some of the bodies. But with the help of the local communities, investigators will still be able to find and access sites of mass graves, as the ones uncovered this year in eastern Congo—though there were countless victims that drowned or whose bodies were dumped into the Congo River.

One hopes that this new UNHCR investigation will not only reestablish the historical records of one of the most systematic ethnic cleansings on African continent but also result in practical follow-ups at the International Criminal Court with indictments at the rulers of the ethno-fascist dictatorship in Rwanda (incidentally, the exact mirror of the previous regime in that country) and their proxies in the DRC for these crimes against humanity—as well as lay bare to its gruesome skeleton the morally cynical travesty of the punctual indignations the Rwandan government voice whenever rights organizations would voice their rightful concerns over these still unpunished atrocities. As one Western aid worker still active in the African Great Lakes region this past week told a reporter of the London daily The Guardian in an article dealing with this renewed UN probe in the Congo: “To this day I have a hard time stomaching the Rwandan genocide propaganda and those who hold up the current regime as a model for all of central Africa”

THE NAMES OF RWANDAN REFUGEES DEPORTED BY UNHCR FROM GABON AND TORTURED BY RPF TO DEATH

Majority of these refugees who were deported by force by the UNHCR agency could not see the next millenium because of the brutal torture they had to undergo in the hands of RPF. The UNHCR sent its staff to Franceville headed by a lady known by only one name of Louise of a camerron origin. Since she was presumably given some cash to sell the Rwandan Hutu Refugees, she went and sensibilized them saying I quote “Je ne peux pas vous repatrier au Rwanda car le Rwanda sous la leadership de Mr.Kagame est devenu un pay de l’holocauste” end of the quote. Meaning that she could not want to repatriate us back to Rwanda because Rwanda under Kagame’s leadership has become a country of holocaust. All hutu refugees in Franceville were very happy hoping the best from her hypocrasy. But she was playing the tactic to catch all Hutu Refugees in Gabon without any hint that she wanted to take them back for butchery in Kagame’s Abattoirs.

The whole of July of 1997. The UNHCR hired a malian airplane which was taking Hutu Refugees from Franceville town of Gabon to Kigali International Airport. On their arrival, therse refugees could be taken to triage chambers where all young people could be taken to torture chambers at Gikondo Industrial area. This people underwent inhumane treatment. According to my fomer schoolmate who were among this Hutu refugees repatriated by force by UNHCR, he told me that they were degraded to the level that they were fed on the human waste because of hunger.He told as the tears were freely flowing on his both chicks, “Man,it is like apocalypse inside the Godowns of Gikondo.

The RPF soldiers could come and start squeezing our male genital parts, to the ladies they could rape them and put red pepper in their private parts. It was a harrowing moment, only God,my mother and I could believe what I am telling you, otherwise”….then he stopped as he was interrupted by tears which were flowing like water slops from Mt Karisimbi. I continued carrying out some amateur research since I wanted to unveil what happened to these people who were given out as sacrifices by the people who were supposed to protect them,mainly UNHCR,the International Communiy,and the Gabon Governemnt, which used to claim to be friends of the late President Habyalimana. I came across a mother of one of the people who lost their lives in the Gikondo torture chambers. She was from Gisenyi Prefecture which is in the Northwest of Rwanda. This list contained around 50 names of different young men and women who died from torture of all nature. Some of these name are as follow:

1. Iyaremwe Daniel (Gaseke-Gisenyi) died the 14.01.1998
2. Uwimana Evariste (Kivumu-Kibuye) died the 03.02.1998
3. Nzarora Theogene (Kibali-Byumba) died the 09.02.1998
4. Sadiki Ntawumenya (Rubavu-Gisenyi) died the 14.02.1998
5. Niyindora Laurent (Musebeya-Gikongoro) died the 18.02.1998
6. Sindikubwabo Innocent (Maraba-Butare) died the 18.02.1998
7. Bigilimana Bernard (Shyanda-Butare) died the 06.03.1998
8. Singirankabo Oswald (Bulinga-Gitarama) died the 06.03.1998
9. Rwaheru Felicien (Kiyombe-Byumba) died the 08.03.1998

A Tale of Atrocity, Nightmare and Hope: Once Upon a Time in Rwanda

By Matthew Dewald

Once upon a time there was a kingdom ruled by an evil monarch. One day the long-suffering people rose up against him and drove him and his clan from the land.

Once upon a time there was a kingdom ruled by a benevolent monarch. One day base and evil people rose up against him and drove him and his clan from the land.

Once upon a time there was a girl, 8 years old, roused in the middle of the night and sent by her mother into the darkness with her two older brothers. She dodged bullets and bombs and stepped over the mutilated bodies of her neighbors, bodies cut by machetes and smashed by nail-studded cudgels wielded by other neighbors in a methodical slaughter fueled by ideas about power and race, history and revenge.

Once upon a time, there was such a time and such a place and such a little girl. This time was April 1994. The place was and still is Rwanda. The girl is names Clémentine Igilibambe. This is her story.

Clémentine lived in a big house with her parents and brothers and sisters. Her father was an international businessman who traded in building materials. Her mother was director of a school for seamstresses and helped sell building materials at the family store.

The family lived in Gisenyi, near the shores of Lake Kivu, a resort area in northwestern Rwanda. “We went often,” she said. “We went and sat at the beach. I loved looking at the water and walking in the water. A lot of white people came there too.”

The new house was one of five her family owned. Inside its walled compound there was a warehouse, a store for selling building supplies, a plot of sugar cane and an outdoor kitchen. There were houses for the maids, and they had many. One for cooking, one for cleaning, one for tending the cows and the chickens, others for other tasks. Clémentine’s parents paid for their education.

At the back of the family’s compound was the refugee house.

Refugees were common in Rwanda in the early 1990s. They were driven from one place to another by a conflict that had raged hot and cold since 1959, when an army dominated by one ethnic group, the Hutu, overthrew a monarchy and ruling class dominated by another ethnic group, the Tutsi. The monarchy and tens of thousands of refugees fled Rwanda, others were slaughtered and the victorious Hutu established a government and gained independence from Belgium in 1962.

What for the refugees was a loss of life, wealth and nation was for the new leaders a revolution. Thus were borne divergent tales of one kingdom that parents told their children, one of an oppressive Tutsi regime brought down by the long-suffering Hutu people, another of a good Tutsi king brought down by the treacherous Hutu. One nation, two tales.

Many Rwandans told neither tale but wished simply to live their lives free of hunger and flight, politics and war, repression and violence.

Over the next decades, refugees, mostly Tutsis, formed insurgent armies and fought unsuccessfully to retake the country. The Hutu leadership of the Rwandan government responded with reprisals against Tutsis and Hutu political opponents within the country.

In 1990, the Rwanda Patriotic Front, an insurgent army of refugees, launched a new invasion from Uganda, and a Tutsi refugee named Paul Kagame soon after became the RPF’s leader. The fighting displaced and killed more than 600,000 until a tenuous peace agreement was signed in Arusha, Tanzania, in 1993. It was this fighting that refugees comeing to Clémentine’s home were fleeing.

That is a bit much to explain to an 8-year-old girl like Clémentine. When refugees arrived at the gates at her family’s home simply said, “Your uncles and their families are coming to stay.”

“We believed them,” Clémentine said, “because our families are so huge.”

She did not always welcome them.

“I was a little selfish kid,” she said. “We had all of this money and I could have whatever I wanted. Then five families showed up and they had all of these kids and all of a sudden I had to share my stuff. The families would come and go, come and go.”

Then one evening, in one moment, in the crash of one small plane, everything in Clémentine’s life changed. The plane had been hit by two rockets over Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, about 60 miles from Clémentine’s home. Among the 11 killed was Juvénal Habyarimana, a Gisenyi native and the Hutu president of Rwanda who seized power in 1973. He was returning from negotiations on the implementation of the Arusha Accords in Tanzania.

The plane went down on the evening of April 6, 1994. Who shot it down is a matter of international dispute. It may have been Tutsi rebels. It may have been Hutu extremists within the government who opposed the president’s concessions. It may have been Hutu moderates planning a coup d’etat. There are many accusations, but there is no international consensus.

What is known with certainty is that by the morning of April 7, the most massive, efficient and lethal campaign of genocide since the mid-century Nazi regime was under way. It would last 100 days and kill an estimated 800,000. Within hours of the president’s death, ordinary citizens suspected of being Tutsi were being killed at makeshift roadblocks. Roving army units using prepared lists assassinated political opponents. By midday, the dead included Rwanda’s prime minister, the president of Rwanda’s highest court, the minister of agriculture, the minister of labor and community affairs, and the minister of information.

In his memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil, Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, head of the U.N. peace-keeping forces writes, “By noon on April 7 the moderate political leadership of Rwanda was dead or in hiding, the potential for a future moderate government utterly lost.”

The violence spread quickly from Kigali. Targeted killings of Tutsi and Hutu moderates began occurring all over the country. By the evening of April 7, the RPF had launched an invasion of Kigali and warned the U.N. to stay out of its way.

This was the new world in which 8-year-old Clémentine found herself after the president’s plane went down.

“For me, it fell apart just like that,” she said, snapping her fingers. “I knew there were Hutus and Tusis, but I didn’t know there were problems between them until then. We intermarried. We had Tutsis and Hutus as best friends. This is when I learned that these two people are different.”

Being Clémentine is complicated. Her father is Hutu. Her mother is mixed Hutu and Tutsi. At a recent dinner honoring scholarship donors and students, a video was shown that included her—she is now a UD student on scholarship—as a smiling girl in Nairobi, Kenya, where her family lived for several years after fleeing Rwanda. She wears a red top and a leopard print fabric wrapped around her skirt. A white strand of beads around her neck compliments the white band keeping the hair out of her eyes. She sways her body in rhythm as she dances with other girls her age dressed like her. All are refugees, all have broad smiles on their faces like hers. The sun shines brightly.

The video does not show her dance teacher, Cyprien Kagorora, nor does it show the famous Rwandan pop singer under whom Kagorora once studied, Simon Bikindi. Bikindi is now on trial at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha. He is charged with using his fame and talent to indoctrinate and incite members of the Interahamwe militias, one of the chief agents of the genocide. Bikindi has pled not guilty.

Clémentine’s father was out of the country on business those days in early April 1994, so she remained secluded within the walled compound of her home with her mother, who was pregnant, and her siblings. She saw trucks coming and going on the road outside, bringing people with machetes and wooden bats studded with nails.

She heard repeated cries. “Kill him. Kill him.”

“One day I climbed a ladder to see what’s going on. I saw bodies right outside. Their heads were chopped off.”

The wall was about 8 feet high. The ladder she climbed was made of wood.

“I didn’t even cry. I remember my reaction. I went up and I looked around for about 10 seconds. After that I climbed down slowly and went and sat on the veranda and looked into space. I didn’t know what I thought. I didn’t know what to think.”

After about two weeks, a maid awoke Clémentine one night and said, “We have to go now.” The RPF was advancing on Gisenyi, and the genocide was about to be compounded by civil war.

“My dad…had taken our big truck. We only had a small car. My mom, pregnant, got into the car with my younger siblings. The car was full, so me and my brothers walked alongside. There were bombs exploding everywhere. There were bullets everywhere. People were dying. And then a bomb went off near us. My two brothers and I dove for cover and when we got up, my mother’s car was gone.

“We walked for two days. I think it was two days. We stopped to rest at a clearing once. We thought our mother and brothers and sisters had been killed. When I went to sleep it was dark and when I woke up it was dark. I don’t know if I woke up that same night or the next. We were just following this line of children, maybe 20 of them. I knew a couple of them from before. There were other vehicles on the road and bodies everywhere. We jumped over them. On the first day, it was like, ‘Whoa,’ but then we got used to it. It wasn’t like, ‘There’s a body!’ It was ‘Just keep going.’

“We were walking toward the border (at Goma, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). I was thinking, ‘If I could just get across that little stick (the barrier at the border crossing), I will be safe. I will be out of Rwanda.’ We were begging the border guards to let us go through. There were five or six of them with guns holding back the crowd. They robbed everyone. I had a little bag my mother had given me when we left. I don’t even know what was in it, but they took it at the border. I was relieved. It was getting heavy.”

“I feel like I stayed there an hour begging. For anyone in that situation, five minutes feels like forever.”

Finally, she crossed the border into Goma with her brothers, Epaphrodite and Marcellin, ages 10 and 12, respectively. Clémentine did not know it, but she was part of one of the largest mass movements of refugees in human history. Roughly 2 million Rwandans fled the country, mostly to camps just across the border. Another 1.7 million were internally displaced. More than half of Rwanda’s 7.5 million were uprooted or dead.

After crossing the border into Goma with her two older brothers, “we were just walking,” Clémentine said. “We didn’t know where we were going. We knew we were out of Rwanda and we just kept going. Finally, we got to an abandoned house, and we stayed there for three weeks with about 40 other kids.

“We hadn’t eaten in two days. We saw a couple of kids get some food out and we all tackled them. We ate snails, grass. Once or twice other refugees passing by gave us some food.

“My brothers would always say, ‘Eat faster and you’ll feel full.’ My parents had made me go to church by I had never prayed. I thought my parents were dead. I prayed all the time then. Today, I think that’s what brought my parents back.

“I would sit outside crying and praying. One day I was there, sitting on a rock watching the road, praying and crying, and my parents drove up. I’ve never seen anything as awesome as that in my life.”

Her mother pregnant, her family with nowhere to go, Clémentine and her family went into the city and rented an apartment for three months. It was their bad luck that someone with an expensive jeep had a habit of parking it in front of their building. One night, when her father was in Kenya trying to find a way to move the family there, the Congolese police decided they wanted the jeep.

“They came and knocked at our house and demanded the keys,” she said. “My mom told them, ‘It’s not my car.’ They threatened to kill her. I got out of bed and went under it where I could see what was going on…I’m under the bed trying not to cry so they wouldn’t come in our room. I was thinking, ‘I’m gonna die. I’m only 8. I have so many dreams.’ I don’t know why, but I had always wanted to marry a white person.

“They took everything we had and finally left. Three days later, my dad came home and we moved to a refugee camp.”

The family, including a new baby brother was born in Goma, spent two months in Makumba Camp in Congo. Millions of refugees were crowded into similar camps.

“Some people had tents,” she said. “Those are the fortunate people. People were laying in the dirt. They would just take a piece of clothing and lay down on it. There was a lot of smoke from people cooking. Wives were crying. Husbands were frustrated and beating their wives. People were dying every day of cholera.

“I used to pray a lot. I thought that my little brother was going to die. My mother had no milk for him. She refused to eat so we could.”

Her father continued to travel to Kenya and eventually found place for the entire family. They stayed in Nairobi fiver years and applied annually for visas to the United States.

“During my stay in Kenya, I started growing up. …That’s when I started to realize something serious was going on. I realized my parents lost weight. They weren’t eating for a week at a time, only drinking water so we could eat. …That’s one thing I’ll never forget in my whole life, the way my parents sacrificed.”

Money was always running out, and the family lived in six different homes in five years. Then one Tuesday, here family received a letter saying they would leave for the United States in two days. Her uncle, a UD staff member at the time, was sponsoring them, and they would come to Dayton. The family sold its possessions and took a taxi to the airport.

“I thought, ‘I’ve always dreamed of marrying a white person, and now I’m going to the U.S. There are a lot of white people there.”

After waiting in the airport and fearing her family would not be allowed to board, she finally took her seat on the plane and looked out the window as Nairobi got smaller and then disappeared.

“In my whole life, from ’94 to ’99, I feel like that was the first time I took a deep breath and thought, ‘I’m going to be OK. It’s over. I lost a lot of friends in the war but I’m going to be OK.’ That’s when I thought, ‘I’m going to do humanitarian work.’ That’s when the passion of what I’m doing now came to me.”

Clémentine today is beginning her junior year at UD. She is a human rights and international studies major who speaks six languages. She is co-founder and president of UD’s Afrika Club and a member of the Student Leadership Council, the World Youth Alliance and the U.N. Agents of Change. She sees law school and work with refugees in her future. Clémentine is also working to raise money for scholarships so that orphans in Rwanda can attend UD after high school.

Being Clémentine remains complicated. In the West, the Rwandan rebel leader turned Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, is widely celebrated. President George W. Bush presented him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2005. Kagame’s victory is generally credited with stopping the genocide while the West turned its back. He has introduced reforms to reduce ethnic divisions; passports and other identity cards no longer define the bearer’s ethnicity, for example. Rwanda’s currency now depicts its natural beauty and resources, not its leaders. The government is an aggressive critic of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, arguing that its trials of the genocide’s leaders are too slow.

Clémentine is also a critic of the ICTR, though she believes it is biased against Hutus. She believes that RPF leaders, many of whom now lead Rwanda’s current government, should also stand trial for war crimes. The RPF and its successor, the RPA, summarily executed genocide suspects and massacred innocent civilians as it established control of the country in 1994, according to a U.N. commission and several human rights groups. “If the ICTR completes its trials without providing justice to victims of crimes committed by both sides in Rwanda, the tribunal’s legacy will be at risk,” Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth wrote in an open letter to the United Nations in June 2006.

She also distrusts the gacaca, the village court system set up to try the tens of thousands of ordinary people accused of participating in the genocide. The rules of evidence are too informal, Clémentine believes, and Hutu are sometimes convicted on the word of a single witness. Supporters point out that often only a single witness remains.

In her mistrust of the current government, Clémentine has company. Paul Rusesabagina became famous when his story was told in the film Hotel Rwanda. He has criticized the current government in speeches and his autobiography. Now he “is being denounced by some in his country as a traitor and a criminal,” Terry George, the film’s co-writer, director and producer, wrote in a Washington Post editorial in May. Resesabagina, Rwanda’s hero, no longer travels there out of fear for his safety.

As there was once a large, unsettled Tutsi diaspora, so there is now a large Hutu one living uneasily in exile. Subsequent battles between Rwanda’s new government and remnants of the old Hutu regime who fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo have brought years of war that continues today. In these battles, Kagame faces a Gordian knot he hasn’t yet cut: defeating a Hutu insurgency while reassuring ordinary Hutu refugees that he is not their enemy. In the ruins of Rwanda, in refugee camps and in rebel bases in the bush, the two tales of Rwanda continue to be told.

Such talk concerns Julius Amin, chair of UD’s department of history and an expert in African history.

“One of the fundamental questions is not being asked: How did it get to this situation?” he said. “The crisis is still there. Some of the fundamental issues still have not been addressed. Only by asking and answering this can Rwanda move forward. Families have been shattered. Communities have been shattered. Those things cannot be shelved. They must be dealt with. Kagame ended the genocide. Were Hutus killed in the process? Sure, but a point is being missed by trying to focus all of the attention on the president.”

Clémentine doubts she will ever return to Rwanda. She fears more mass killings lie in Rwanda’s future.

“What happened was genocide, but other things happened too. We have to give respect to all who died in the war, not just the Tutsis killed by the Hutu, not just the Jutu killed by the RPF, but also the Twa. No one ever talks about them.”

The Twa, hunter-gatherers indigenous to Africa’s Great Lakes region, numbered about 30,000 inside Rwanda before the genocide. The United Nations estimates that 10,000 were killed.

Clémentine now focuses on helping refugees, like those her family once took in and she herself once was. There were nearly 15 million refugees and internally displaced persons worldwide at the beginning of 2005, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The people of Rwanda no longer rank in the top 10 in either category.

“My role is to help those who have suffered because they’re not as fortunate as I am now. I don’t want to concentrate on the political side of it. I want to help the victims, whether Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. I want to concentrate on the education of orphans. By educating the people, maybe one day they’ll go back to Rwanda and use their education to make a better country. …The big issue is that so many people lost their lives. Whether it was genocide or a civil war, I just know a lot of people were killed.”

She hopes for peace and reconciliation. Rwanda is by most accounts a country of breathtaking beauty, a land of mist-covered mountains and rolling green countryside. It is the place where God comes to sleep at night, according to a Rwandan saying. It hurts Clémentine that her country is now synonymous with genocide.

“I want to have children,” she said. “I want them to be proud of being from Rwanda.”

She may one day tell them a story of her country, one that begins, “Once upon a time, there was a kingdom and a hose by a lake and a little girl, 8 years old…”

KIGALI PERPETUALLY PUT HUTU REFUGEES UNDER THREATS IN LONDON

According to legitimate Rwandan refugees in London, the Rwandan refugee community is perpetually under surveillance and effectively under attack by fake asylum seekers working as agents; these agents send the names of legitimate refugees to the ever-updated “genocide lists” that Kigali provides to the U.K. Home Office and other governments, and they meanwhile help to build bogus “legal” cases against the legitimate refugees, as happened with Dr. Vincent Bajinya.

The U.K. government regularly arrests asylum seekers (of all nationalities) and holds them in detention pending review of their cases for a “pass” or “fail” of the asylum granting process, but most are almost automatically slated for return to their country of origin. British policies are particularly egregious in the cases of countries where Britain is more actively involved in the ongoing warfare, especially Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan (Darfur), or where it has a deep military and intelligence relationship, especially Congo, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.

While their cases await resolution, asylum claimants are banned from working. Once their cases have been failed, they face total destitution, with no right to work, no benefits, no accommodation, no proper access to health services, and the constant fear of removal. This is on top of the psychological trauma, and in some cases physical injury, that continues to trouble them as a result of their experiences.

In the case of Rwanda, selected asylum seekers are further stigmatized and dehumanized by being branded as genocidaires—a label applied to describe Hutu “extremists” and highly targeted individuals in well-organized frame-ups—in cases like Dr. Vincent Bajinya’s, where the frame-up involved Rwandan intelligence agents and the BBC.

According to Rwandan asylum seekers the Kigali government routinely manipulates the asylum system to get students and intelligence agents into the U.K. asylum system to gain U.K. citizenship at no financial cost for the short- and long-term benefit of the Kigali regime.
In 2007, around 200 Rwandan students arrived in the U.K. as asylum seekers and around 150 of these became stateless after falsely claiming to be Rwandan asylum seekers; about 50 of these were official Rwandan students possessing documents provided by the Rwanda government who had been given educational scholarships from the U.K. government.

After Kigali sends false asylum claimants to the U.K., their asylum claim is either passed or failed like any other refugee. Once the asylum claim has been successful and refugee status granted, these false claimants can access student loans and housing and medical support. To improve the chances of a “passed” asylum claim Kigali sets up fake asylum seekers with fake documents to strengthen their cases: e.g., arrest warrants, prison release documents, and medical reports about being tortured.

Next, Rwandan agents in the U.K.—like Mary Blewitt Kayitesi and Tony Kavutse—assist the false asylum seekers to access U.K. refugee assistance agencies like the Medical Foundation, Praxis, or Survivor’s Fund (SURF). Some enhance their status by claiming to be genocide survivors.

Some asylum claimants “pass” relatively easily, but for those asylum seekers who are “failed” by the U.K. government—which is eager to reject all refugees to meet its goals of low immigration—the Rwandan Embassy is contacted to determine the status of the asylum seeker and the Embassy denies that these clandestine government supported “refugees” are from Rwanda at all. In some cases the U.K. deports the false claimants back to Kigali, even forcibly, where the Rwandan immigration officials again—checking their lists of supported but fake asylum seekers—refuses that the asylum seekers originated from Rwanda. In both cases the fake asylum seekers, disowned by Rwanda, gain a stateless refugee status which under the 1951 UNHCR protections insures that the U.K. cannot deport them (since they are unable to identify their state or origin).

When the U.K. government detains legitimate refugees—obviously not supported by Kigali but rather hunted by them—the Rwandan Embassy is again contacted while they are still in London, or the refugee is deported directly back to Kigali. In either of these cases involving actual refugees, the Kagame regime validates to the U.K. government that these are legitimate refugees, because Kigali is happy to have critics of the regime and other legitimate refugees fleeing state persecution delivered back into their hands.

One legitimate refugee “failed” by the U.K. immigration system and forcibly returned to Rwanda was Rene Murabukira, a Rwandan refugee who fled after his family was killed in 1996.78
Rene Murabukira started a new life in Edinburgh and after 11 years in the U.K. he was a charity worker with the Edinburgh-based Action Group helping physically and mentally disabled adults when the U.K. immigration agents tracked him down and arrested him at work.

When Murabukira arrived in the U.K. in 1996, he was only 17 years old. He was given temporary leave to remain in the U.K. as well as a work permit, and told his case for permanent asylum was under consideration. He built a life in Edinburgh and was engaged to be married to Aneta Jarzmik, a U.K. citizen.
Murabukira’s case was deferred for eleven years, until Rwanda was declared “safe.” But in April 2007, U.K. immigration officials swooped in packed Murabukira off to a detention centre. He was scheduled for extradition in May 2007—readied to be shipped back to Rwanda—but legal intervention won him a temporary stay in the U.K. on the day of the planned flight.

Murabukira claimed that Tutsi rebels killed his parents, sister and cousins, at his home in 1996. He has been unable to work or claim benefits and has relied on friends to survive the past year of asylum limbo.79
Rwandans in London believe there have been about 65 cases of legitimate asylum seekers deported back to Rwanda since 2000.

80 Of course there are also those fake refugees who betray Kigali once they have achieved their mission and gained asylum status abroad. It is well known that “There are certainly some Tutsis who are genuine refugees,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro. “But there is also a deliberate policy on the part of the RPF regime to export [exfiltrate] Tutsis to the U.S., Canada, Belgium and other countries and a deliberate policy to forcibly return Hutus to Rwanda who fled to countries other than the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are worried that Hutu asylum seekers outnumber Tutsis in Belgium and other countries, and that, if nothing is done, in the long run Hutus will be able to have their voice heard.”

Thousands of Hutus refugees remain in countries that border Rwanda and thousands of refugees have recently been forcibly repatriated back to Rwanda by the governments of both Uganda and Tanzania. In October 2007, for example, Uganda deported some 3000 Rwandans, most of them Hutus.

81 “The whole idea is to build a strong Tutsi Diaspora that would support the Tutsi clique in power in Rwanda the same way the Jews support Israel,” says Higiro. “With a strong Tutsi Diaspora, Tutsi elites in power can use the tools of negationism, revisionism and the genocide industry to silence Hutus in Rwanda and in the countries where they have sought asylum.”

82 U.K. ASYLUMS DIRECTED BY KIGALI

For its part the British Government has adopted a refugee asylum policy that looks to the Kagame regime—the persecuting government—for its decisions about Rwandan asylum cases and refugee returns.

The U.K. asylum system came under “reform” during the Blair government, but not in favor of refugees or asylum seeker’s rights. This is made clear in the case of Rwandan asylum seekers where the immigration and detention shake-up seems to have involved a stripping away of refugees’ legal protections.

By the end of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s term in office, the asylum reform process was in full swing and a special “Ten-Point Plan for Border Protection and Immigration Reform” was launched. Under this plan, the Prime Minister committed the U.K. Government to accelerate and massively increase the removal of both imprisoned and not yet detained foreign asylum seekers. According to the Home Office, it is the biggest shake-up of the immigration system in its history.

83 On January 24, 2007—not so long after the British public was sensitized to the infiltration of Dr. Bajinya and the other three supposed “Masterminds” of genocide in Rwanda—the U.K. Home Office issued a special “Operational Guidance Note” on Rwanda that establishes and revises the formal policy for dealing with Rwandan asylum seekers. The guidance notes that all asylum seekers must be considered on a case by case basis, but all case workers must follow the outlines of this operational guidance document.

84 The document, meant to educate case workers, opens with a “country assessment” that presents a highly inaccurate version of events in Rwanda. The assessment is heavily based on BBC sources, especially the BBC “Timeline” on Rwanda, and it has a decidedly pro-RPF bias. Some select examples of the bias can be seen in the following excerpts:
[1] CLAIM: “Rwanda is a republic dominated by a strong presidency.”

85 REALITY: Rwanda is a one-party dictatorship with a façade of democracy and the consolidation of the dictatorship achieved through highly rigged and manipulated “demonstration elections” that are widely misperceived to have been democratic and fair.

86 [2] CLAIM: “In 1985 Tutsi exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Having failed to negotiate their return to the country, the RPF invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990, demanding representation and equality for all Rwandans.

87 REALITY: Most of the so-called “Tutsi exiles in Uganda” were Ugandan born citizens and they became battle-hardened guerrillas fighting for Yoweri Museveni and the NRA—a war that Museveni ran out of the Hotel Des Diplomats in Kigali in the mid-1980’s.

88 Paul Kagame was Museveni’s Director of Military Intelligence and he was responsible for tortures, massacres and assassinations.

89 Museveni had ignored calls by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to downsize his army of approximately 180,000 fighters to 70,000. By mid-April 1994, Museveni had sent some scores of thousands of UPDF soldiers into Rwanda—possibly as many as 70,000.

90 To say that these soldiers and the RPF’s political representatives demanded “representation and equality for all Rwandans” is so patently false that it defies any rational attempt to deconstruct it. Working together, Museveni and Kagame utilized terrorist tactics to assign all blame—for atrocities they committed against both their enemies and their own people—on their enemies. They used psychological operations, embedded international reporters, and fabrication of massacres. These tactics have continued to the present.

“Let me give you an example of media manipulation,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, Director of ORINFOR. “In 1994 people took shelter at a mosque in Kabuga near Kigali. After the RPF took control of the location, they killed all the people who had taken shelter there, then called reporters to see what the Interahamwe had done to Tutsis.”

91 [3] CLAIM: “A civil war in the border area ensued. Each incursion by the RPF was followed by reprisal massacres, largely of Tutsis, by government forces. A peace agreement was brokered in 1993, the Arusha Peace Accords, which inter alia provided for a power-sharing arrangement involving all political forces and the RPF.”

92 REALITY: The RPF’s persecution and killings of Hutus and Tutsis in Northern Rwanda went largely unchallenged. Meanwhile the international “human rights” community hammered away at the Habyarimana government following a now common pattern of punishing the victims and accusing them of crimes committed in self defense, but never accusing the perpetrators of the original, and greater, injustices.

93 It is interesting that a guerrilla army can invade a sovereign country and attack a sovereign government and commit terrorist acts, driving over a million people before it, and that it could today be summarized as it is above. 94 This exemplifies the hegemonic imperialist bias of the Western human rights establishment and the mantle of genocide carried by the Genocide Intervention Network and its octopus of affiliates.

The rest of the country assessment follows in similar fashion, uttering ridiculous lies that are now so deeply inculcated in the collective insanity of human consciousness as to make them as absolute and unchallengeable as the Ten Commandments. The summary glosses over the human rights record in Rwanda, validates the legitimacy of the institutionalized injustice at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and shamelessly absolves the Kagame regime of its terrorist involvement in extortion, racketeering, war crimes and genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Perhaps the most ludicrous statement in the entire document is this one: “The Rwandan government is strongly committed to national reconciliation and there is no evidence of any state-sponsored or societal discrimination on ethnic grounds that would amount to persecution.”
The source documents which the Operational Guidance on Rwanda relies upon include references to: USAID; U.S. Department of State; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; U.N. and U.K. profiles; and the Economist.

Most notably, there are four references to British Broadcasting Corporation reports or documents. Given their relationships to the production and maintenance of the establishment narrative, all of these sources are highly compromised in their capacity to present the true picture of Rwanda or insure refugee protections.

For the purposes of rounding up refugees and dragging them back to Rwanda, the Operational Guidance on Rwanda requires that asylum caseworkers begin the process by checking the names of asylum seekers against several lists maintained by the Kagame government.95
Section 3.5 of the Operational Guidance on Rwanda establishes the hierarchy of protocols for dealing with Rwandan asylum seekers.

If “the applicant’s name appears on either of the two published lists maintained by the Rwandan government of those wanted for genocide or where there is any evidence that the applicant was, for example, politically active, employed in any official, religious, media or military capacity at the time of the genocide,” decision-makers are instructed to consider whether to apply one of several special exclusion clauses and must refer such cases to the War Crimes Unit.96
According to the U.K. Home Office, “the War Crimes Unit was formed in March 2004 with the specific remit of introducing screening processes in order to identify people involved in the commission of atrocities in connection with modern day conflict situations.”

97 In February 2007, the Israeli Government successfully pressured the U.K. Home Office to water down anti-torture and war crimes legislation.98 The injustices in cases of Rwandan war criminals are amongst the most pronounced.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is today the public relations consultant and economic adviser for the Kagame regime, a position Blair assumed in February, 2008. John Major was prime minister and the Conservative (Tory) Party was in power at the time of the U.S./U.K. backed coup d’etat in Rwanda 1994.

MILKING THE ASYLUM PROCESS

The Rwandan asylum scam allows the Kagame regime to facilitate higher political and economic status for more and more Rwandans by gaining green cards or citizenship abroad.
Moses Kenneth Bugingo Rugema arrived in the U.K. around 2003 on a false asylum claim against Rwanda. Although U.K. citizenship can be granted after five years his citizenship is uncertain.

When asked about his former refugee status and current political appointment with the government he sought asylum from, Rugema responded evasively and aggressively. “I have no time to waste in replying to you in the future,” Rugema replied. “But as a gentleman I just wanted to tell you I exist and your facts are not correct. It’s up to you to prove it.”

99 Rugema is another Ugandan-Rwandan, and a former RPF soldier whose “flight” from persecution in Rwanda quickly led to his employment at the Rwanda Embassy in London as a receptionist. From the Embassy, Rugema helped Kigali track down legitimate refugees. Rugema also set up his current business enterprise and continues to operate out of London as an economic agent dealing in the export/import of top quality Rwandan Arabica green bean coffee for the Kagame regime.

100 On November 2, 2007, the Rwandan cabinet appointed Rugema to the post of 2nd Counselor at the Rwandan Embassy in New York City.
“It is very interesting that this Rwandan refugee is now working as a business agent for the government he ran away from,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “It is 100% certain that Moses Rugema used the asylum system as a bogus asylum claimant and worked at the Rwanda Embassy in London.”

One of the highest-profile RPF-allied asylum seekers who has milked the system to gain status in the U.K. is Linda Bihire, recently appointed to the RPF’s cabinet under the recent government reshuffling that was advised by Kagame’s new spin doctor, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
On March 13, 2008, Bihire was appointed to Rwandan Cabinet as Minister of Infrastructure. However, Linda Bihire is another Ugandan-born “Rwandan” whose lineage and origins are belied by her inability to speak the native Kinyarwanda language of Rwanda. During her swearing-in ceremony in Kigali, Bihire’s inability to read the Oath of Office forced the organizers to switch to English.

101 Bihire’s cabinet selection was engineered by Rwanda’s top intelligence agent, Emmanuel Ndahiro, a feared agent in and out of Rwanda who controls Rwanda’s state daily New Times newspaper and uses it as a political tool to peddle disinformation and attack critics of the RPF. Linda Bihire is Emmanuel Ndahiro’s mistress and they have a 19 year-old son. Lt. Col. Dr. Emmanuel Ndahiro is also a maternal cousin to Paul Kagame and Director General of Rwanda’s dreaded National Security Service.

Bihire is also a close friend of another RPF-allied Rwandan asylum seeker in the U.K., Rose Ngabire, the secretary at the Rwandan Embassy in London. Prior to her cabinet appointment, Bihire milked the U.K. asylum system to get higher education, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in civil engineering and a Master’s Degree in project management from the University of Nottingham and the University of Portsmouth, respectively.

Bihire’s new life apparently began soon after she finished her elementary schooling in Kampala, Uganda, when RPF agent Emmanuel Ndahiro organized her “political asylum” status and facilitated her transfer to London.

102 Bihire was soon identified as a Rwandan agent by legitimate Rwandan asylum seekers in England.103 After she arrived in London, Dr. Zac Nsenga, the ambassador to the U.K. at the time, stepped in and landed Bihire a government scholarship for her higher education.
Another U.K. asylum fraud was perpetrated by Joseph Mutaboba, Secretary General of Rwanda’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and former Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In September 2006, Mutaboba co-chaired the United Nations Permanent Advisory Committee on Security Issues in the Central African Region. Since 2003, he has participated in preparatory meetings of the International Conference on Peace and Security in the Great Lakes region and as Coordinator for Rwanda and Head of the Peace and Security Thematic Group. All these “security” posts occurred even while Rwanda continued to plunder Congo. However, Joseph Mutaboba’s wife is another “refugee” living in North London and using the asylum process for personal gain.

Another RPF agent who infiltrated England through the asylum process is Ignatius Mugabo, a naturalized citizen of Uganda who first sought asylum in Denmark but later joined his wife Jacqueline in Britain; Mugabo may by now have gained British citizenship. Mugabo’s wife Jacqueline was reportedly granted full refugee protection under the 1951 UNHCR Convention, which guarantees that any asylum seeker is automatically entitled to be joined by their families.104 According to Rwandan asylum seekers, Mugabo joined is wife in London in 2003.

105 Ignatius Mugabo not only worked for the RPF, he became one of Kagame’s top intelligence officials and an active hunter of Kagame’s critics abroad. In March of 2007, just prior to the 13th anniversary of the April 6, 1994 presidential assassinations, Mugabo set up a petition to the British Prime Minister calling on Rwandans in Britain to support his campaign to hunt down and arrest genocidaires. Eighteen people signed the petition, including Ignatius Mugabo.

The petition statement reads:

“We the members of the Rwandan Community resident in the U.K., during the 13th anniversary of the genocide in our country, concerned that many suspected perpetrators of this heinous crime continue to hide in Western countries including U.K., call on the British Prime Minister and his government to increase their support for the delivery of justice to the victims of the Rwandan genocide by tracking and arresting whoever is suspected of having played a role in this tragedy.”

106 “Mugabo set up this petition on the U.K. Prime Minister’s web site,” says one Rwandan refugee in London, “but he received too few signatures to get any action from the Prime Minister. All members of the Rwandan community did not sign as they feared their names to be recognized on the list of asylum seekers. Mugabo was disappointed to receive so few supporters.”

107 Ignatius Mugabo is also on the management committee of the Rwandan Community Association of the U.K., in charge of organizing events meant to draw out Rwandan refugees, and he is Director of Rwanda Diaspora Investment Ltd., another business front for Kigali.108 Legitimate Rwandan asylum seekers note with curiosity how Mugabo works with the Rwandan Embassy to organize official events while he and his family have reportedly fled the Kagame regime.

Ignatius Mugabo is considered the second most feared intelligence agent of the Kagame regime in London, second only to his associate, James Wizeye. Ignatius Mugabo, Tony Kavutse and Rose Ngabire all work on the Rwanda Embassy staff under the guidance of its two top espionage agents: James Wizeye and Claver Gatete.

James Wizeye was appointed as the 1st Secretary at the Rwanda Embassy in London on June 29, 2005 and today he is also the most feared Rwandan intelligence operative involved in hunting Rwanda’s state enemies, critics and asylum seekers in England and, more widely, in Europe.

A former RPF soldier and current member of Kigali’s intelligence apparatus, Wizeye formerly worked as administrative attaché at the Rwanda Embassy in Kampala, Uganda. However, Wizeye was expelled by the Uganda government in November 2004 after accusations surfaced that Rwanda was training rebels hostile to the Ugandan government: Wizeye was implicated in rebel activities and accused of espionage.

109 Wizeye is reportedly wanted today in Uganda and banned from visiting for his role as part of an elite RPF “hit squad” that operated in Uganda to track down enemies of the RPF regime.110 Wizeye set up intelligence cells and purchased information from Ugandan agents who were later arrested.

111 “In the U.K. James Wizeye is involved in hunting refugees, weapons dealings and protecting Rwanda’s ‘good image’ by using the media,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “He grew up in Uganda and now he is wanted there because of spying and killings in 2000 and 2001. His success in these [terrorist] operations for the Kagame regime earned him a diplomatic post in London.”

112Rwandan intelligence agent James Wizeye lives inside the Rwanda Embassy compound at 120-122 Seymour Place in London. Wizeye has attended high-level conferences with U.S. officials, including Ambassador Jendayi Frazer.

113 According to Rwandans familiar with Wizeye’s activities, he is one of the RPF’s top weapons and minerals agents working in London—possibly a key player in Kigali’s fencing of contraband resources stolen from the Democratic Republic of Congo and arranging of weapons transfers.114
Raised and educated in Uganda, Claver Gatete is the Rwandan Ambassador in London appointed to the Cabinet on September 7, 2005. Gatete is an economist who left Uganda for higher education in Canada. He is known to be an “extremist” RPF official—one of the actual “Masterminds” of RPF strategy to seize and consolidate power in Rwanda—who supported the RPF movement from Canada and the U.S. as a key member of the Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora.

115 Gatete organized the RPF campaign abroad, working on funding, lobbying and political alliances, and went on to become a senior Presidential adviser to Paul Kagame. Gatete also worked as Secretary General at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, and he was Steering Committee member as part of President Clinton’s euphemistically named New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), a hegemonic U.S. state department project in neoliberal economics and protectionist trade.

116 “Claver Gatete is 500% involved in hunting down Hutus and spreading the genocide ideology of Kigali,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro.

I går satt jeg og mannen og så filmen Hotel Rwanda. Det er en av de verste og beste filmene jeg har sett. Verst fordi den er så utrolig trist på alle måter. Historien som fortelles er så grusom at det er vanskelig, om ikke umulig å tro at det har hendt i virkeligheten. Best fordi det viser enkeltmenneskers utrolige evne til å vise medmenneskelighet i en brutal verden. Historien viser at et menneske kan bety stor forskjell med sine handlinger.

Filmen handler om Paul Rusesabagina som arbeider som vert i et hotell. Midt under krigen tilbyr han hundrevis av flyktninger (både tutsier og hutuer) et oppholdssted på hotellet. Filmen bygger på Rusesabaginas bok An Ordinary Man.

VG nett skrev om filmen:

Basert på den virkelige historien om en samvittighetsfull mann som gjorde det resten av verden unnlot: å gripe inn og redde liv under folkemordet i Rwanda.

Filmen «Hotel Rwanda» er som en kniv i samvittigheten til en samlet, vestlig verden, som i 1994 lot folkemordet i Rwanda få utspille seg uten inngripen. I stedet for å stoppe galskapen ble FN-styrkene beordret ut. Etter hundre dager lå én million maltrakterte lik igjen i gater og på veier, på jorder og i grøftekanter.

Hotellmannen Paul Rusesabagina var hutu, og kunne ha reddet seg selv da hutuopprøret utartet til massakre og folkemord i 1994. Men hans kone og hennes familie var tutsier. Som hotellmann var han vel bevandret i diplomatiets og de gjensidige gavers og tjenesters kunst. Det var kunnskaper han brukte til siste, dyrebare dollar og whiskydråpe da han med ett befant seg som bestyrer av den fredede oase Les Mille Collines – hotellet som han i en kombinasjon av mot og desperasjon omgjorde til ly for vettskremte, forfulgte mennesker av alle raser og aldrer.

Denne filmen er så viktig å se. Den minner oss om at det finnes mennesker i verden i dag som lever under forferdelige forhold. Det finnes barn som ikke har foreldre. Det finnes kvinner som blir voldtatt. Det finnes barn som blir opplært til å drepe. Det finnes mennesker som sulter.

Jeg får så lyst til å gjøre noe, men vet ikke hva!

Samtidig vet jeg at jeg snart glemmer. Det er nettopp det som er det tragiske!

Les Quartiers Nord in Bujumbura, Burundi (foto Lidewyde Berckmoes)

In oktober 1993, drie maanden na de presidentiële verkiezingen in Burundi, werd de president vermoord. In het kleine Afrikaanse land begon toen een burgeroorlog die anderhalf decennium zou duren. Anno 2009 is er geen oorlog in Burundi. Of er vrede is, is een kwestie van interpretatie. Of de oorlog tot de verleden tijd behoort, is speculatie.

Hoewel het eerste vredesakkoord dateert uit het jaar 2000, heeft de bevolking van Burundi tot dit jaar moeten wachten voordat de laatste rebellengroep zich omvormde tot een politieke partij. Dat was een paar maanden geleden. De meeste rebellen zijn inmiddels gedemobiliseerd en velen hebben een klein bedrag ontvangen om een nieuwe start te maken met hun leven. De oorlog is dus voorbij. Maar daarmee is de kous niet af. Onder de gedemobiliseerde rebellen bevinden zich veel ontevreden mensen, onder wie vele ontevreden jongeren. De vraag die nu vaak gesteld wordt is of hun onvrede een bedreiging vormt voor duurzame vrede.

De onvrede wijten de jonge voormalige rebellen aan veel verschillende gronden. Ten eerste zijn velen uiteindelijk nooit officieel gedemobiliseerd en zijn dus met lege handen naar huis gegaan. Ze waren of vertrokken voor de demobilisatieprogramma’s startten, of vonden een andere naam ingevuld op hun plek op de lijst van begunstigden. Daarnaast, waar de internationale gemeenschap het bedrag dat de gedemobiliseerde troepen krijgen ziet als een aansporing voor een nieuwe start, zien vele ex-rebellen het als een compensatie voor hun ‘werk’ de afgelopen jaren. Maar wat is een compensatie van 50 dollar op jarenlang afzien en vechten in de bossen? Bovendien, een nieuwe start, hoe kan dat met maar 100 dollar? Diegenen die het geluk hebben geïntegreerd te worden in het regeringsleger of de politie, zij die, met andere woorden, een baan krijgen, uiten onvrede over de lage rang die ze krijgen ‘terwijl ze zelfs een schooldiploma hebben!’.

Ideologisch is er ook niet veel gewonnen. Sommigen vertellen gedesillusioneerd geraakt te zijn in de beweging die zogenaamd als één van de weinigen werkelijk hart had voor haar zaak – het lot van de Hutu bevolking. In de omvorming tot politieke partij heeft de beweging haar naam moeten veranderen en daarmee, zo vinden velen, haar missie moeten verloochenen. Palipehutu-FNL heet nu simpelweg FNL. Daarnaast lijkt zij in het onderhandelingsproces haar ‘basis’ vergeten. Jonge mannen en vrouwen die jarenlang financiële steun hebben gegeven of de wapens hebben opgepakt, voelen zich in de steek gelaten. Zij zijn nog net zo slecht af als voorheen: geen geld, baan of toekomst. Ook deze beweging bleek voor hen een partij met mooie praatjes die uiteindelijk alleen voor het eigen gewin ging. Tenslotte verklaarde een van de jonge ex-rebellen: ‘Ik ging bij de beweging toen ik 9 was omdat mijn vader was vermoord door de regering. Maar ik heb mijn vader niet teruggekregen. Ik ben alleen maar heel veel vrienden verloren.’

Vrede hebben deze jongeren niet. In de volksmond wordt het vaak als oorzaak gezien van ‘de oorlog van de diefstal’, die de plaats van de voorbije oorlog lijkt te hebben ingenomen. De vele kleine wapens nog in omloop spelen daarin een rol.

Of de onvrede zal betekenen dat de oorlog weer hervat zal worden is voor iedereen onduidelijk. Met de verkiezingen in het zicht heerst er grote onzekerheid. De spanning tussen verschillende partijen loopt hoog op. Maar de jeugd lijkt zich wel bewust van het feit dat zij ‘gemanipuleerd’ zijn om te vechten door de mensen in hogere posities. Een probleem is echter dat er weinig goede alternatieven zijn om een leven op te bouwen buiten de macht van deze ‘politici’.

Vincent, een jongen van 23, stelt: “Alles is politiek in Burundi. Naar school gaan, een baan vinden, een huis huren… alles”. Hij speelt het spel daarom mee door nu zijn banden aan te sterken met een nieuwe politieke partij die belooft (welke niet?) mensen in Burundi aan een baan te helpen. Daarnaast werkt Vincent aan een ontsnapping aan dit leven via de Green Card loterij van de Verenigde Staten. Als een herinnering aan zijn hoop en angst sluit hij ieder sms-je af met de handtekening “Time will tell”.

Door Lidewyde Berckmoes, promovendus aan de afdeling Sociale en Culturele Antropologie (VU). Ze doet onderzoek naar de rol van jeugd in de wederopbouw van post-conflict Burundi. Ze zit nu in Bujumbura, de hoofdstad van Burundi, voor haar eerste veldwerkperiode.

Zie ook Lidewyde’s vorige bericht vanuit Burundi: “bakstenen en wantrouwen”.

Ellen Bal schreef eerder een bericht voor Standplaats Wereld over de in ontwikkelingslanden gekoesterde hoop om naar het westen te migreren: “Nederland is vol (of was het nou de wereld?)”.

Ci sediamo e Ascanio (mi piace chiamarlo per nome dopo anni di conoscenza artistica) inizia la sua lettura, performance o meglio la sua sempre perfetta oratoria.

Il tema a differenza della altre volte non è più solo l’Italia e suoi mille problemi ma uno stato lontano da noi di cui però tutto il mondo conosce la terribile storia.

Letture sul Rwanda è la ricostruzione aspra e fiabesca allo stesso tempo del genocidio avvenuto nel 1994 contro l’etnia Tutsi che viveva nel territorio.

Forse sarà meglio tratteggiare una piccola ricostruzione storica dell’accaduto in modo che tutti possano ricordare di cosa stiamo parlando.

Il 6 aprile 1994 l’aereo presidenziale dell’allora presidente Juvénal Habyarimana, al potere con un governo dittatoriale dal 1973, venne colpito da un missile terra-aria, mentre il presidente era di ritorno insieme al collega del Burundi Cyprien Ntaryamira da un colloquio di pace. Il giorno seguente a Kigali, capitale del Rwanda iniziarono gli scontri o meglio gli attacchi mirati verso la popolazione Tutsi, accusata dell’attentato, e contro tutti gli Hutu imparentati con questi o schierata su posizioni più moderate. Il segnale dell’inizio delle ostilità fu dato dall’unica radio non sabotata, l’estremista RTLM che incitava attraverso lo speaker Kantano, a seviziare e ad uccidere gli “scarafaggi” Tutsi (scarafaggi, non uomini o persone, ma scarafaggi!).

Da aprile a luglio le vittime furono quasi un milione di persone uccise a colpi di pistola di machete e di bastone chiodato (la maggior parte di questa armi furono venduto dal governo Cinese).

Questa è solo la reportistica fredda e numerica di un massacro di cui nessuno all’inizio volle occuparsi e di cui tutt’ora pochi parlano per la vergogna di non sapere o di non voler diffondere.

Diffondere una notizia è simbolo di libertà e di democrazia e in questa storia di libertà e di democrazia nessuno ne sa nulla.

Nel 2004 esce nelle sale cinematografiche il film Hotel Rwanda il primo film sul genocidio ed è subito nomination agli Oscar (gli Stati Uniti vogliono premiare loro stessi per la loro assenza nel conflitto…mi piace vederla in questo modo.)

La serata di Ascanio ha aperto la mente a ricordi e a pensieri e ha voluto dare una mano a chi in Rwanda c’è ancora e vuole aiutare la causa.

La serata è stata organizzata con l’aiuto dell’associazione Progetto Rwanda, un’associazione umanitaria no profit che lavora in Rwanda dal 1997, al fine di promuovere e realizzare progetti di autosviluppo per gli orfani, gli adolescenti capifamiglia e le donne.

Vorrei chiudere con una frase di Ascanio che mi ha colpito particolarmente: La memoria è come le chiavi…se le perdi non puoi più entrare da nessuna parte.

The world today is a gloomy vault because it overshadows reality. The innocent man and woman is the bearer of all political leaders’ vices. There are but very few courageous persons to shine in defence for the innocent. The innocent therefore dies and their life is valueless. The world evolves but with aggravating realities. Our children will ask our graves when we will be no more what we meant to leave the world in such a mess. They will desire to die before their days. They will ask our graves why we failed to teach them the right way. The world will be messy and will be like a forest of sharp thorns in which everyone will fear to tread.

Human persons have lived in tunnels of different realities. In all their life history, human beings have survived in organised communities with leaders to direct, to rule and to guide. Leaders have reigned over their subjects in all communities tyrannically, democratically and divisively in some states or communities. Leadership is not a yesterday or today phenomenon. They date as far back as before Christ. Everyone is familiar with kings in the holy Bible, chiefs, priests and other church or religious leaders in their respective communities of all kinds. Leaders are as old as the human race is and so is leadership. Their characteristics are not different although they may vary from one leader to the other. In the world of politics, the common person, the innocent one, who lives one day at a time, bears all the iniquities of their leaders. The “I” and “my” are the driving forces in all the leadership activities. There is little consideration for the “other”. Wealth is key and takes the first place in leadership affairs. The human person is of no value in the face of leaders. The good person outside leadership is contaminated once they join the leadership world. He who remains good will have to pay the cost for it. They are like the torch in the gloomy vault. They have little to do like a torch may not satisfactorily shine in the gloomy wide vault. In fact the darkness might overshadow the torch.

The world today is a gloomy vault because it overshadows reality. The innocent man and woman is the bearer of all political leaders’ vices. There are but very few courageous persons to shine in defence for the innocent. The innocent therefore dies and their life is valueless. The world evolves but with aggravating realities. Our children will ask our graves when we will be no more what we meant to leave the world in such a mess. They will desire to die before their days. They will ask our graves why we failed to teach them the right way. The world will be messy and will be like a forest of sharp thorns in which everyone will fear to tread.

I realise the need to save our graves from being dug by our grand children to ask our bones all those questions. Obama, the American president of our time, one of the shining torches of his time in his speech called upon the nationals of America and the entire world to realise the need for every people in their successive generations to be willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of our time.

I have a dream which will have to be realised through people of my own, people of the Ugandan origin, the children and grand children of my own who I share the same nationality with. Uganda my homeland, the land of resources that cannot be found in many world’s lands, a country whose people have seen days of struggle in the political arena, a country that has been typified by tyrannical, selfish and corrupt leaders will be made better. Time will come when the bondage in which the Ugandan nationals sail will be no more when there will be a torch that will overpower the gloom in the vault. It will be a time when everyone will be really human and all human rights will be so. The courts of law will have to serve their purpose, the top leaders will feel for the nationals and the resources that have been in the hands of a few conceited leaders will be for all.

The cost of achieving this is high but in our reach. Today the sun shines but there is only darkness that we can see. The moon at night is like a candle in the stadium while the stars cannot be recognised at all. Theft is a type of employment today, lawlessness is the only means to achieve an end, and “courts of law” are mere words while the good is very far from our reach.
I chose to write about this situation in my country at this moment in history to call upon fellow states men and women to join hands because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.
Uganda must change. The change must be worked for. The initiators of this change must be among us because what is good is clear and distinct in our minds and can be found. However, only a brazen man or woman will dare to stand for the idea herein. The coward will leave it to God while he who has no meaning in life will take the situation normal and fated.
I am the son of a Ugandan man who worked for the country and survived death in the early times before I came to see what the world looks like. He never taught me to love my country but he talked of a better Uganda he desired to see. I studied in one of the poorest schools of Uganda as well as in the best institutions for higher learning. I have lived in one of Uganda’s poorest villages where life meant a lot to me yet I learnt there to analyse situations and to object to what is not justice. I have befriended a simple but open minded lady who I think is best for me during the rest of my lifetime. She has a dream that Uganda will be a better place one day. I have grand parents, biological and foster parents, consanguine brothers and sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins upon whom my narrative bases whose miserable life has coerced them to hate their country but cannot do anything. They have witnessed all the grief of belonging to a poor family. I have friends who I have struggled with to make ends meet whose desire has remained to see a changed and a better Uganda for every national.
This is a yarn that tries to remind the fellow Ugandans of the need to throw aside our bedspreads and wake up from the long been unending snooze of cowardness. Conservatism should be shown a path and embrace a liberal mind ready to help us focus ourselves for a better nation. The yearn herein should provoke every Ugandan who loves to see his coming generations live a dignified life. It calls for a wide-eyed liberal state made of people ready to defend their fellow nationals that cannot raise their voices in the polluted political environment as it is in our day. The narrative is not an incendiary tool for violence but rather a voice that calls upon those in fear, bewilderment and hopelessness to stand up and bring back that hope that has for long been lost.
As such, my expression of grief should not be divisive with regard to the leaders of the time and we who suffer the consequences of their seemingly inadvertent actions. It is a means to call them to mind the reality in place, the undesirable situation in the country that they have caused by themselves. It is the time we need them to hearken the voices of those who cry for a unified state where everyone is human. The story reveals the fact that it is the time now to come together to solve a set of enormous troubles: the Northern war of Joseph Kony, a deteriorated economic standard of our nation, regional imbalances, corruption, stealing the property of the poor especially land, a chronic health care crisis, the potentially devastating climate change and tyrannical rule among other outstanding troubles of our time. It is no work for one tribe- the Baganda or the Banyankole, the Karimajong or the Bakiga. It is a task for all Ugandans who love a changed state for the better. Every national should be a torch that shines to overcome the gloom in the vault to be able to make a difference that is positive.
The words in the narrative are based on my moral stand, my professed values and principles, which I believe will not go unexamined by those who will find them worthy of examination. While I bear in mind that many will laugh me to scorn and while I realise that there will be many that will not see sense in the story and those who will be offended, I stand to defend what I think is important not only for me but also for those who are open minded. He who declines to understand the reality in place and the other who fails to understand it will never be put on the same platform. Surely there will be those who will refuse or decline to understand what is conveyed herein while there are those who might fail to comprehend it but seek to find its meaning. However few the former will be we shall have a made a step.
What has not been clear in the last and present regimes that need to be explained for slow analysts to understand? What is not clear about the land issues, the recent issue of our time that I need to elaborate upon so that everyone can see the significance of my story? Who was deaf to hear the Ttemangalo issues and their resolutions? Who did not know about the lives of our beloved brothers and sister that perished in the hands of Kibwetere yet the murderer never got what he deserved? Who was too young to read and or hear the stories of those who perished in the thickets of Luwero and Northern Uganda that needs a story teller to recount for him the whole story to understand what is being advocated in here? Who has not experienced the pinch of corruption in all the public institutions to the very homes where we stay? Who has been blind that has not seen the tear gases in the city of Kampala when people have always tried to raise their voices? Who did not read or hear or even see innocent people being arrested with no offence committed? How clear should I be for one to heed the call for a change that I advocate herein? I think clarity lies in the mind that is clear.
I continue to dream of a day when my hope will come to reality. People will talk about me and my offsprings who will be agents and in fact torches that will shine in gloom of the vault. I will make stories of their time. Radios will broadcast news about me drawing from what I write today herein. Every Ugandan should be aware that everyone that has suffered physically, mentally, or psychologically, everyone whose blood spilled to the ground because of our leaders’ misdeeds was our own brother and the blood shed was our own the tears our own tears. Everyone who passed away because of the inattentive actions of our leaders will rise to be close at hand when we shall stand up to defend our state for the better. Every one of them will be ready to support us in the struggle to restore our rights and dignity from the grave where they are buried. The story must extend to all the generations of our time and those to be after we will have departed. Our struggles to overcome the present reality and our triumphs after the peaceful but focussed battle will become at one time real and widespread.
There is no way we can deny our Ugandan citizenship and nationality by origin. We belong to Uganda and she is our motherland who we should rebuild, take care of, and love with all our whole being. Understanding the reality upon which I base myself to advocate a change that is real requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point of suffering. However, it will provoke callous actions that will result in an objectionable state of being since many have had harder days than I have had which they may not wish to revisit even in a mere story like this since the past remains new in the minds of he who experienced it. William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history the suffering Ugandans have passed through, the injustices in this country that have been and are still a reality, and the many inhuman activities that have been witnessed by many of you. Nevertheless we need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the Ugandan community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery, tyrannical, self-centred and happy-go-lucky leadership regimes that have been vivid realities to the present day.
“Deliberated discrimination” in the job market where the so-called “technical know-who” is the method for awarding job posts must come to an end so that the children of the poor who have no one to recognise them in the competitive market can have a chance of getting better employment opportunities. Shadow investors in whose name people’s property is destroyed to create space for their arcades instead of serious investments should come to an end. The misuse of power to keep in a political position even when the majority or the minority do not see the reason for it should be condemned and brought to an end. Time will come when elections will be free and fair- where Ugandans will be able to say YES to mean YES that will from their own free will without coercion.
I dream of a new Uganda where lack of economic opportunity among men and women, among tribes, and among regions and among individuals and shame and frustration that comes from inability to raise and look after family members will come to a close. I hope for a state where the leaders will be able to provide for those who may not be able to meet their basic needs because there will be proper accountability and transparency. Moreover, there will be enough resources to cater for the nationals because corruption will be no more while human rights defence will take precedence over any other issues.
We should be aware that there are quite a number of possibilities that can lead to our failure to achieve this. But still for all those who will unite and claw their way to get a piece of the dream I promulgate herein will have started the battle. However, he who will block the move towards the realisation of the dream will be like a ferocious beast that devours every creature and forgets about its survival tomorrow and that of its little ones. In the end it devours itself.
I have asserted a firm conviction of the realisation of my dream based on my belief in change and God’s care for us all. I also assert my conviction basing on the trust I have in my fellow Ugandans who have experienced the pinch and I am sure they will see it necessary to change for the better. Together we can move beyond what we expect today in view of attaining that which we think is better for us and for our generations.
I call upon every Ugandan to be firm and advocate the change we want our children and grand children to see. What we begin today may fail to be realised tomorrow but the other day, through our children and grand children, our real blood who we shall have taught to continue with the struggle, it will be realised and the mission will be accomplished leaving us or them the responsibility to maintain it to the end. Our hope should be placed in ourselves as well as those to come after we shall have parted.

POVERTY AND CORRUPTION
We are gathered to share ideas, to provoke ourselves and learn to question the status quo with the aim of making our mother Uganda a better place for you and for your grand children. Lamentations should be considered historical while action with determination should be embraced. I want to remind each one of you that if I fail to acknowledge the good things my leaders have done for my country, then I would not be realistic. However, when I raise you about that which needs change, I should not be blamed because the good must be advocated. In my first speech which most of you based to call upon me to join the political arena I asserted the need for a change which must be worked for. Tonight, am advocating the need to realise the goodness of combined efforts towards achieving a specific goal.
Tonight am calling upon members to tread where I wand us all to tread for a better Uganda. It is time to wake up from sleep and become bold to pour scorn on those who have toppled our nation through corruption which has lead to unending poverty. This poverty you experience, will extend to your forth generation and it will be worse compared to what you see today. Poverty the fourth generation will experience will force them to bear children for commercial affairs because the goods for sale will not be other than their fellow human beings. This is the reality. You have already savoured this when you have heard about child sacrifice. It is now on a smaller scale, later it will expand if we do not stand up today and set up strategies through active participation with a patriotic spirit.
Corruption in the government institutions, corruption which is knocking at the doors of religious institutions and even on the doors of our churches, corruption which is seen as a new way of earning a living has let down so many of our friends and has rendered them poor because they have failed to fight it. We should acknowledge the fact that, those to fight corruption and those who perpetuate it are equally corrupt. Now who will deliver the state from such chaos? It is the time now to start and change our mentality and develop some love for our mother Uganda.
My audience today, ladies and gentlemen, children and youth, here is the moment to convey to you a message that must enkindle in each of us a fire of hope, a fire that will bring light to see what has been invisible, a fire that will never die unless it brings us to a new Uganda- a changed Uganda. Each of us here is a national, each of us here is aggrieved by the state in which we live today because of corruption, lawlessness, injustice, political instability that is the order of the day since 1966, poverty which has its roots in careless and lack of concern for the nationals by their leaders and aimless taxes that you pay hopping to get better services in your country. We have seen and heard of accidents, in fact fatal accidents on highways; people have lost their life while others have lost their dear ones on Uganda roads. Death today is no issue to discus yet it claims productive nationals who would liberate our state. The education today from the grass root level is a complete mess; high school drop out rate is no phenomenon to wonder about. This results in quite a number of problems such high way robbery, rebel activities, insecurity in our local areas and moreover uneducated generations will rarely educate their children- we are adding injuries to insults. Poverty is a song today but the annual budget shows different things. People die today of poverty in a state that is not desirable for human beings. The rich continue to grow richer and richer while you the poor like me continue to grow poorer and poorer. Even the little we have is taken away through purposeless taxes imposed upon us. Yes, we must pay taxes because we are nationals who love to see our Uganda develop, but should we leave things to God when even the little we sacrifice to develop our mother Uganda benefits only a few nationals? What is wrong with the Uganda of today? Land theft is an issue you all know today, child sacrifice is nearly a song, and unexplainable murder here and there fills the news papers every day.

Am not in favour of blaming those who lead us, but I want to bring to your awareness that of which you seem to have already been aware but have not been able to react to it. I am not calling upon a violent reaction but rather a rational reaction that will reawaken our minds to embark of developmental activities. This call is meant to provoke each of you to wake up from the sleep you have been in since the country started to go astray. This call is meant to mind the need to rebuild Uganda my mother country, to make it better for ourselves and the children of our own that will live after we shall be no more. On the other hand, you need not to look at me as one who appreciates no work done by those who have led you and me. Surely they have brought us to this point which cannot fail to notice. However, we must stand together and challenge them for the many mistakes they have done for quite a number of years which have led our country to be a lair for corrupt citizens. It is the time to revitalise our patriotism spirit which we ought to pass on to our children and grandchildren. We must educate our children to love and work for their country. We should teach them to respect each other and also teach them to respect what they write down to direct their country. It is time now to revisit the early ages which we, who think are modern, call primitive ages of our grand parents. They lived a harmonious and respectful life with regard to one another. They shared the few resources that they could access and worked hard to preserve them for us who are the present generations. This they did through creating proverbs, fables, songs, poems and legends. In fact they played their part. They did not go for the education we go for today but they were more educated than we are. They seem to not to have reached the level of civilisation we think we have reached yet they were more civilised than we are, they seem not have studied moral ethics the way we do it to day, yet they were more ethical than we are today. Life to them was a gift from God and so was revered but today life means nothing compared to wealth. Who is more civilised, them or you and me?

The time is now when you and I have to stop slumbering. Time is now when we should say NO to what degrades our human nature. Uganda is among the third world countries, yet it has lots of resources. Our leaders have sold those resources which we would have used to develop ourselves. They have shared our country amongst themselves without consulting us. For we are only saying: God will see them on the last day. God played his part and the rest is left to you and me because he endowed us with reason, the capacity to differentiate the good from the bad. The work is for you and me. It should be a collective effort. We must be bold enough to challenge our leaders without sparing any of them. You are very aware of the situation in government hospitals where we all go and find no medicine, or where we go and find no personnel or where we are treated as though we were not taxpayers. You know very well of our transport systems in the country where we suffer as if there were no people to defend us. Christmas comes and everyone hikes the transport fares when our leaders are just seated in their offices. We are aware of the so-called road repairs which are done today and tomorrow pot holes are back in the roads. We are very much aware of the buildings under which many Ugandans, your brothers and sisters have perished and the constructors have gone unquestioned. We are all aware of the traffic lights that function only when there is an important person from outside coming in the country. We have heard of theft cases which have been reported in the courts of law but the laws have not been observed. I think we have seen and heard of many events which call each one us to get angry and start up a battle that will change the situation.

The 10th July 2008 is a very remarkable day in my life. It is the day I first stood before a person who was said to be a lawyer/judge in Lukaya trading centre on Masaka Kampala High way. The case that was reported against me was over speeding. I acknowledged it. But one thing that made me uncomfortable was the amount of money the gentleman and his co-worker a lady asked for as a penalty. They took 500,000/= which in fact they shared amongst themselves. The lawyer was an aged man with grey who seemed to be sane and in fact a man of integrity. To my surprise, he did not act to my expectations based on the way I negotiated with him to be able to leave the place. This is the Uganda that we must liberate. It is a task for us all which we must do collectively with a spirit of love for our state. Children have suckled corruption, theft, shamelessness and duplicity from their mothers’ breasts. It is because of this that you have been able to hear or witness different outrageous events such the embezzlement of the NSSF money, the Global Fund saga, and many other scandalous events of our time that have been silenced. We the Ugandans have kept quiet and no one dares to stand up to call for justice. On the other hand, justice is just a word. It makes no meaning within our country. It is today that we should stand up to give justice meaning and teach it to our children and grand children.

I believe, the so-called developed states have reached where they are because the nationals therein have the love for their states. It is a result of the efforts of the parents who instil in their children that patriotic spirit which I advocate now. Dying intestate should not be heard of anymore because we all have what we can put in our will: the reminder to our children and grand children to be patriotic, to grow with a spirit of upholding their mother state-Uganda. In fact this is a task for each of us. Before one should entrust his/her material property to his/her children or and grand children, one must begin his will by calling upon them to love their nation and protect it jealously. It is through this that Uganda will be one day a country where every citizen will desire to be. We do not need to purchase arms to do this, but words, action, determination and focus will prove what I advocate herein.

When I advocate the need to join hands and work for a better Uganda, am not asking for charity but rather there is a genuine cause that needs your attention. The cause that I talk about here is the preservation of our mother Uganda through hard work.

Rick Harris brings it to our awareness that the America Spirit was conceived when the American founding fathers embraced their highest vision of what their country could be. They formed these ideals so all Americans could have a level playing field in which to pursue happiness and to find fulfilment in life. They knew all humans were created equal, and so have the right to share equal opportunities wherever they are. This should inform us of the fact that we are the founding fathers of a habitable Uganda which our children and grand children will live to enjoy. We therefore need to devise a system that recognizes our creative potential and create an environment which provides freedom for us and our children to express our individual talents and unique differences.

we should aim to work for a peaceful country free from corruption and where rational freedom will flourish. It is that we the founding fathers want our children and grand to have because Uganda in Africa was a peaceful country free tyrants, corruption, tribalism and class struggle. Our country will stand strong because of people like you and myself who have a vision. It will stand strong because we the founding fathers will have kindled a light that will not die for the centuries to come.

My words today are meant for you who listen to me. You possess a patriotic spirit for Uganda. I who am a staunch catholic hail the forefathers in my faith, the Uganda martyrs, who are our ancestors in faith. Every catholic honours them and cherishes their brave actions of choosing what they though was the right path. We should emulate them not on spiritual grounds though. We should lay a foundation for a better Uganda as they did for the Catholic Church in Uganda for me who am a catholic. They made history, history that is still stand so long as the church stands. They made sensible and memorable history which we should make for our ourselves and our grand children to come.

we have leaders who have no idea of what was sacrificed to make our fore fathers who shaped our Uganda to the time we have spoiled it. Whatever culture we are from comes next and not the other way round.

we need to move from a tribal or cultural mentality to a collective culture. However, there is no way we shall have that collective culture unless we educate ourselves and erase that mentality of “you are a Muganda and you are a Munyankole or Karimajong” among other tribes. I believe, ladies and gentlemen that we can aspire to be whatever we are capable of being so long as we are united. I am hopeful that from the talk we read now all listen to we have started to feel the pressing need to pass on to the younger generation an appreciation and a love for this country.

it is time ladies and gentlemen to learn to say NO to corruption, dictatorship and unlawful governance which prevail in your offices and homes. It is time to see value in my fellow human being and learn to respect him or her. It is time now to learn to be shameful for any malpractice in our areas of work.
We should work for a better Uganda bearing in mind that even if we do not enjoy the fruits of our sweats, we shall be remembered even on the national calendar for the work done to liberate our mother Uganda. I have already started my part by calling upon you all to join the march on the way to a better Uganda through speech and boring talks which may be meaningless to many of my dear friends I share ideas with but who cannot say “stop” because they fear to lose the bread they get from me or because they are cowards. Surely, I am not here to amuse any one of you but to agitate you so that you wake leave here with a changed mind and ready to embark on the task.

Memorial Day represents a day of national awareness and reverence, honouring those Americans who died defending our Nation and its values. And while we should honour these heroes everyday for the profound contribution they have made securing our Nation’s freedom, we should honour them most especially on this day.

Memorial Day solemnly reaffirms from year to year a national act of faith, determination, and will of the American people. It embodies in the most impressive form our belief that to act with strength, courage, and faith is the condition for acting with greatness.

As I said earlier, the condition of the American family is the condition of our country, just as the health of our individual cells determines the health of our bodies. I can remember when there was a time in our family discussions to talk about our country, “the land of the free and the home of the brave” and that patriotic spirit would be passed along to young and enthusiastic listeners.

it is only in Ugandans, be they immigrant but working to develop Uganda, that the spirit of Uganda lives. We are the liberators or betrayers of our mother country.

If we do not pass on to the younger generation an understanding and appreciation for the principles upon which our grand fathers founded Uganda, we might eventually lose our country. Uganda may end up slowly sinking, and that is the stated goal of our enemies.

To me, as I look to the future, I want to serve the spirit of Uganda. I want to know the spiritual intent of our founding fathers ad understand the values and principles they used to construct the Constitution that guided them to live humanly free from corruption, aimless wars, tyranny and terrorism. I should not be held wrong to believe that our founding fathers and mothers knew the value of personal freedom and felt that humans were endowed by God with certain rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is what we have lost and now in the struggle to get back.
God bless us and help us know the good and give us the strength to distinguish it from the evil. For God and my country.

By
Jude M.DK