Nearly a year after being installed in a senior position in the
Congolese armed forces, former rebel-general Bosco Ntaganda has formed with others the Front for the Liberation and Emancipation of the Congo (FLEC).

Bosco Ntaganda

Unlike some other rebel groups in the Congo – including Mr. Ntaganda’s Tutsi-led National Congress for the People Defense (CNDP) who wrecked havoc on the country last year – FLEC does not appear to be built along ethnic lines.

Violence both against and between Hutu and Tutsi in eastern Congo have broiled the region in an on-again-off-again struggle that, over the last fifteen years, has directly and indirectly led to millions dead.

While it remains unclear whether FLEC will be an armed insurgency or just a way to make more money, the emergence of the group is the latest sign that the CNDP is breaking up, and the Congo’s army is unraveling in its year long war against Rwandan Hutu rebels.

“According to local sources who speak with this reporter in Goma town, FLEC was established because of the reported refusal of pro-Nkunda elements and the former political leadership of the party to associate CNDP with the reported Coalition pour la protection et la promotion du
Congo (CPPC).”

Mr. Ntaganda, who became military commander of the CNDP at the beginning of the year when its charismatic Laurent Nkunda was arrested by Rwanda, was supposed to lead the group into integration with the Congolese national army, along with a menagerie of other rebel groups
and splinter factions.

In the United Nations-backed offensive against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda – Hutu rebels accused of orchestrating the 1994 Rwandan genocide – Mr. Ntaganda is accused of playing a senior role.

In South Kivu, where the bulk of the fighting is focused, Ntaganda’s CNDP lieutenants are the ones doing the fighting and the
killing.

But now, he and other CNDP officers are spending their time organizing FLEC and already control some of North Kivu’s most fertile grounds, including large swaths of Masisi territory according to reliable sources.

And there’s no much that can be done, saying that the police in the
region were “neither equipped nor paid” by the Kinshasa government.

For years, Rwanda and Congo have battled over the presence of Rwandan genocide suspects hiding out on Congolese soil, killers that fled after the Rwandan genocide.

Rwanda’s own military has repeatedly invaded the Congo in pursuit and have left behind residual militias to do the fighting for them.

Last year, things began to get out of hand, when one of these
generals, Mr. Nkunda went on a strong offensive in North Kivu, taking important parts of the province and coming within a few kilometers of the capital Goma.

The Congolese military didn’t stand a chance, instead fleeing with civilians from the oncoming rebel group, looting, killing and raping in the process.
It all changed, investigators have argued, when Rwanda and Congo struck a deal that placed Ntaganda in the drivers seat and Mr. Nkunda supposedly behind bars.

Now, the Congolese army was no longer fighting the CNDP, but the Hutu rebels, and in the process Ntaganda and his troops took command of the war.

It’s been a sweet role of reversal for Mr. Ntaganda. According to the
United Nations Panel of Experts report leaked Tuesday, he is making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in illegal tax revenues from the lands he patrols. His elite CNDP that follow him is about 60,000.

But as the atrocities mount, Ntaganda has been losing friends.

The people who put him in power – including Rwanda – have not gone out of their way to keep all the soldiers below him in line and, as the The New York Times has reported, much of the region has descended into ‘warlordism.’

From Mai-Mai generals to FDLR splinters, new groups have sprung and popped, since the beginning of the year, feeding off each other like water wheels.

A spokesperson for the United Nation in Congo said that the latest developments reflected a “possible division within the CNDP itself,” those working with Ntaganda, and those loyal to the arrested Laurent Nkunda, who remains in Rwanda, somewhere.

“He is our man, he always will be,” says Claude Mutebutsi, a Congolese Tutsi originally from South Kivu. He insists Nkunda wasn’t simply sponsored by Rwanda. According to him, “95%” are still faithful to Mr. Nkunda, who has acquired a Che Guevara-like mystique with his constituents.

The political arm of the CNDP – Nkunda had said he was fighting for the protection of Congolese Tutsi – has accomplished little on paper since peace agreement that culminated integration into the army.

Two party members are in parliament.

Mr. Ntaganda’s new group is the latest manifestation in a breakup of the CNDP that has been ongoing for months. The first incarnation was the Coalition for the Promotion and Protection of the Congo.

Initially built around Ntaganda and other CNDP soldiers, it fell apart due to deteriorating support for Mr. Ntaganda.

In saving lifes in Sudan and Zaire. So Far 4.3 million Africans have died in Genocides in sudan and congo while the world Cheers genocide perpertators along.
obama should leave republicans to finish the Middle East nation building project and concentrate on earning his Nobel credentials by stopping and arresting Genociders in Zaire and Sudan.

Otherwise I am more convinced that Afghanistan and Iraq wars are just about American Greed for Oil

Nkunda and Omar Bashir should be place on Pentagon Deck Of cards and taken out

Obama must stop appeasing Genocide Perperators
Embedded video from CNN Video

Niños soldado en la República Democrática del Congo. Foto: child-soldiers.org

MIGUEL MÁIQUEZ
20minutos.es
22.11.2008

- La ONU acaba de aprobar un refuerzo de 3.000 soldados para intentar parar la guerra que está devastando el este de la R. D. del Congo.
- Pese al alto el fuego pactado sigue habiendo muertes, violaciones continuas de los derechos humanos y decenas de miles de desplazados.
- Las claves del conflicto, en 20 preguntas y respuestas.
- Minuteca: Congo, Crisis humanitaria

Apenas seis años después del fin de una brutal guerra civil en la que, directa o indirectamente, murieron más de cinco millones de personas, la República Democrática del Congo vuelve a estar sacudida por la violencia.

La situación en el país centroafricano, que no era precisamente estable, se ha visto agravada desde finales del mes pasado por el avance de los soldados del general rebelde Laurent Nkunda en la zona oriental, ante la impotencia de las tropas gubernamentales.

Después de semanas de atrocidades contra la población civil, éxodos masivos y miles de personas atrapadas en la zona del conflicto, Nkunda aceptó el pasado día 16 iniciar un proceso de paz. Por el momento se mantiene un precario alto el fuego, pero la situación puede volver a estallar en cualquier instante, y las muertes y violaciones de derechos humanos han seguido produciéndose.

Este jueves la ONU aprobó enviar a la zona 3.000 cascos azules más (ya hay desplegados 17.000, la mayor misión de paz de Naciones Unidas en el mundo), en la confianza de acabar con una guerra que hunde sus raíces en la vieja rivalidad entre hutus (responsables del genocidio de Ruanda) y tutsis, que amenaza con internacionalizarse y en la que también el factor económico juega un papel fundamental.

Éstas son, en 20 preguntas y respuestas, las principales claves del conflicto.

1. ¿CUAL ES LA SITUACIÓN GENERAL DEL PAÍS?

Situado en África Central, la República Democrática del Congo, una extensa nación de 2,34 millones de Km. cuadrados (casi cinco veces España), 62,6 millones de habitantes y enormes recursos económicos (diamantes, cobre, café, cobalto, petróleo), trata de recuperarse de un devastador conflicto armado cuyas consecuencias, tanto bélicas como económicas, sigue padeciendo.

La esperanza de vida es de 44 años, la renta per cápita anual, 120 dólares, y, en 2005, unas mil personas morían aún cada día a causa de la guerra, ya fuera directamente o víctimas del hambre y la pobreza que ésta genera.

2. ¿CUÁLES SON LOS ORÍGENES DE LA CRISIS?

La historia del Congo ha estado marcada por la explotación, la guerra y la corrupción. Diezmado salvajemente durante toda la primera mitad del siglo XX por el colonialismo belga, el país obtuvo su independencia en 1960 y cinco años después una primera rebelión acababa con el asesinato del primer ministro y la subida al poder de Joseph Mobutu. Mobutu convirtió el entonces llamado Zaire en un ejemplo de cleptocracia y desastre económico mientras él amasaba una gran fortuna personal al amparo de la guerra fría y el apoyo de EE UU.

El genocidio de los tutsis en la vecina Ruanda, en 1994, provocó un éxodo hutu hacia el país que precipitó la caída del dictador en 1997, en una nueva rebelión. Laurent Kabila fue nombrado presidente, el Zaire fue rebautizado como República Democrática del Congo y la guerra civil volvió a estallar en un conflicto que causó cinco millones de muertos e involucró, entre 1998 y 2002, a seis países de la región: Angola, Zimbabue y Namibia, del lado gubernamental, y Ruanda, Uganda y Burundi, del lado rebelde.

A Kabila, asesinado en enero de 2001, le sucedió su hijo Joseph (actual presidente), elegido en las primeras elecciones democráticas celebradas en el país. Joseph Kabila inició un periodo de transición, manteniendo la paz a duras penas y con las brasas de la guerra ardiendo aún en la zona oriental del país, escenario de los combates actuales.

3. ¿CÓMO Y CUÁNDO EMPEZÓ EL CONFLICTO ACTUAL?

Algunos de los hutus responsables del genocidio de Ruanda (más de un millón de tutsis asesinados en apenas un año) que huyeron hasta la R. D. del Congo permanecieron en la zona oriental de este país y formaron una milicia que, según el nuevo gobierno tutsi ruandés, pretendía perpetrar una nueva masacre.

Ése fue uno de los gérmenes de la guerra civil, que ahora se ha visto reforzado por la acción rebelde de una fuerza tutsi congoleña: Con la excusa de defender a los habitantes de esta minoría, estas milicias, activas desde la toma de Bukavu, en 2004, iniciaron el pasado mes de agosto una ofensiva. Los combates se recrudecieron a finales de octubre, desencadenando la crisis actual.

4. ¿DÓNDE ESTÁ OCURRIENDO?

En la zona oriental del país, y, concretamente, en la provincia de Kivu Norte, fronteriza con Ruanda y Uganda. Kivu Norte, de 59.000 Km. cuadrados y con unos tres millones y medio de habitantes, fue uno de los principales escenarios de la guerra civil (llamada también Segunda Guerra del Congo) de 1998-2002.

Los rebeldes han tomado el control en extensas zonas de esta región, incluyendo el parque nacional de Virunga, Patrimonio de la Humanidad. La ciudad más afectada es la capital, Goma, donde han buscado refugio miles de desplazados por la guerra.

5. ¿POR QUÉ HA RESURGIDO AHORA?

En agosto expiraba el plazo dado al Gobierno para actuar contra los ataques hutus en el interior del territorio congoleño. Según los rebeldes, estas medidas no se produjeron, por lo que, al mando de Laurent Nkunda, iniciaron la ofensiva.

Laurent Nkunda. Foto: Cédric Gerbehaye

6. ¿QUIÉN ES LAURENT NKUNDA?

El auto proclamado general Laurent Nkunda, nacido en 1967, es el líder actual del grupo rebelde (el Reagrupamiento Congoleño para la Democracia) que actúa en el este del país desde 1998.

Perteneciente a la etnia banyamulengue, fue entrenado por el Frente Patriótico Ruandés que dirigía entonces el tutsi Paul Kagame, hoy presidente de Ruanda, país del que Nkunda parece seguir recibiendo apoyo (así lo denuncia el Gobierno congoleño), aunque el Gobierno de Kagame lo niegue.

Nkunda asegura que lucha por defender los intereses de la minoría hutu en el Congo ante la pasividad del Gobierno. Sobre él pesa una orden internacional de busca y captura desde septiembre de 2005 y sus actividades han sido condenadas por EE UU. Se le acusa de ser el responsable de numerosos crímenes de guerra y contra la humanidad. Entre sus aspiraciones se encuentra la división del Congo en estados étnicos.

Nkunda, un cristiano que asegura ser pastor evangélico, dirige a sus entre 7.000 y 8.000 hombres (milicianos tutsis) con una mezcla de fervor revolucionario y mesianismo religioso. Tiene seis hijos.

7. ¿QUÉ OTROS INTERESES HAY EN JUEGO?

La parte oriental de la R. D. del Congo es una zona muy rica en recursos naturales, unos recursos que han sido, al mismo tiempo, parte importante en el origen de la guerra y fuente de financiación para los combatientes en la misma. Concretamente, en el este del país existe una gran abundancia tanto de oro como de un mineral llamado coltán, del cual el Congo posee el 80% de las reservas mundiales.

Según han denunciado numerosas ONG, la exportación de coltán ayudó a financiar a varios bandos durante la Segunda Guerra del Congo y sigue siendo un factor primordial en el conflicto actual. Ruanda y Uganda exportan coltán a Occidente (sobre todo a Estados Unidos).

La explotación del coltán conlleva, por otra parte, serios problemas medioambientales y apenas genera beneficios para la R. D. del Congo. Según datos de la ONU, entre 1998 y 2002 se extrajeron en este país 3,9 millones de kilos de coltán, que alcanzaron en el mundo desarrollado un valor de 793 millones de dólares, ninguno de los cuales se quedó en la nación africana. La ONU llegó a denunciar que el Ejército Patriótico Ruandés supervisaba la actividad minera en el Congo.

8. ¿PARA QUÉ SE UTILIZA EL COLTÁN?

Con el coltán se elaboran los condensadores electrolíticos de tantalio que se usan en la fabricación de teléfonos móviles, consolas, GPS, televisores de plasma, ordenadores portátiles, reproductores de mp3…

9. ¿QUÉ ESTÁ PASANDO CON LA POBLACIÓN?

Ambos bandos han sido acusados de perpetrar crímenes contra civiles, incluyendo asesinatos, actos de pillaje y miles de violaciones. A finales del mes pasado la ONU advirtió de la inminencia de una “crisis humanitaria de dimensiones catastróficas” en el Congo tras la reanudación de los combates, con decenas de miles de civiles atrapados en la zona de guerra y otros tantos desplazados.

10. ¿CUÁNTOS DESPLAZADOS HAY Y CÓMO VIVEN?

Los cerca de tres meses de conflicto en el este del Congo han sumado 250.000 civiles desplazados a los cerca de un millón que ya había previamente en la región de Kivu Norte.

La mayoría han buscado refugio en la capital de la provincia afectada, la ciudad de Goma, donde, no obstante, también se han sucedido los combates. Otros han empezado a huir a la vecina Ruanda.

Muchos de estos refugiados se ven obligados a sobrevivir en tiendas de plástico no más grandes que un coche, en escuelas vacías, en iglesias o a la intemperie. En los campos de refugiados vive una media de entre 900 y 1.000 personas, que comparten unas cinco duchas.

11. ¿QUÉ OTRAS AMENZAS HAY?

La guerra ha traído consigo una situación permanente de hambre y miseria. Se calcula que cada mes mueren en la R. D. del Congo unas 45.000 personas a causa de la malnutrición y enfermedades como la malaria. En el último mes cerca de un millar de refugiados se han visto afectados por una epidemia de cólera.

12. ¿CÓMO LO ESTÁN SUFRIENDO LOS NIÑOS?

Las organizaciones Save The Children y Amnistía Internacional han denunciado que los combates en la R. D. del Congo han provocado un aumento en el secuestro de menores por parte de grupos armados, donde son obligados a pelear, llevar municiones o convertirse, incluso, en esclavos sexuales.

Durante la guerra civil de 1998-2002, la mayoría de las facciones que combatieron en el conflicto utilizaron niños soldado (fueron ‘reclutados’ más de 3.000, según la mencionada organización). Según un informe de UNICEF, el Congo es “el peor lugar del mundo para un niño”.

13. ¿CÓMO HA REACCIONADO LA UNIÓN AFRICANA?

La Unión Africana condenó la ofensiva rebelde e instó a la reanudación del proceso de paz, pero en su Consejo, integrado por 15 Estados miembros que van rotando, se sientan actualmente los dos principales supuestos partidarios de Nkunda, Ruanda y Angola, por lo que su efectividad ha sido puesta en entredicho.

14. ¿Y OCCIDENTE?

Tanto los Estados Unidos como la Unión Europea han llevado a cabo una intensa campaña diplomática para tratar de encontrar una solución al conflicto. El subsecretario de Estado de EE UU para asuntos africanos, Jendai Frazer, se reunió con el presidente congoleño, Joseph Kabila, y tenía previsto viajar a Ruanda.

La UE está considerando enviar tropas para apoyar a las fuerzas de paz de la ONU. El Reino Unido y Francia enviaron a sus respectivos cancilleres a Goma para reforzar los esfuerzos de EE UU.

15. ¿QUÉ ESTÁ HACIENDO LA ONU?

Tras el fracaso de la fuerza de paz de Naciones Unidas que estaba presente en Ruanda cuando ocurrió el genocidio en 1994, la ONU puso especial interés en que masacres semejantes no volviesen a repetirse en la zona. De hecho, el contingente de cascos azules presente actualmente en el Congo (cerca de 17.000 soldados, 714 observadores militares y 1.063 policías de 53 países) constituye la mayor misión de paz del organismo internacional. Esta fuerza, no obstante, ha resultado ser insuficiente, aparte de que muchos congoleños acusan a los cascos azules de pasividad.

El secretario general de la ONU, Ban Ki Moon, mandó sendos enviados especiales a las capitales de Ruanda y de la propia R. D. del Congo, y bajo los auspicios de esta organización internacional se logró que el líder rebelde aceptara un alto el fuego, el pasado día 16.

16. ¿VA A AMPLIAR SU MISIÓN EN LA R. D. DEL CONGO?

Sí. Este jueves, el Consejo de Seguridad aprobó incrementar en 3.000 efectivos (2.785 militares y 300 policías) su presencia en el país africano, con el objetivo de tratar de estabilizar el conflicto y facilitar una salida negociada.

Amnistía Internacional, por su parte, ha pedido a la ONU que el refuerzo se despliegue “lo antes posible”, ya que “seguimos recibiendo informaciones de asesinatos, violaciones y secuestros de niños, y continuaremos recibiendo estas informaciones mientras la protección de los civiles no sea una realidad”.

17. ¿QUÉ ESTÁ HACIENDO ESPAÑA?

La secretaria de Estado de Cooperación Internacional, Soraya Rodríguez, viajó esta semana a la R. D. del Congo para evaluar la situación sobre el terreno, y anunció que España incrementará su ayuda al país africano en 8 millones de euros. Esta cantidad se suma a los 20 millones que España destina ya a la R. D. del Congo (14 millones a través de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo y 6 millones procedentes de las comunidades autónomas).

18. ¿A DÓNDE VA ESTE DINERO?

Esta ayuda adicional española irá a parar al Fondo Central de Respuesta ante la Emergencia de Naciones Unidas (un millón de euros), al Fondo del Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (tres millones), a vuelos humanitarios y actuaciones de emergencia del Programa Mundial de Alimentos de las Naciones Unidas (dos millones) y al llamamiento especial de emergencia realizado por la ONU para la R. D. del Congo (otros dos millones).

19. ¿ESTÁ LLEGANDO LA AYUDA INTERNACIONAL?

Sí, pero con muchos problemas, y no toda. Las ONG que operan en la zona han denunciado que la presencia continua de militares en el terreno hace muy difícil que la ayuda humanitaria procedente del exterior llegue a los afectados.

El pasado 28 de octubre, medio centenar de cooperantes extranjeros tuvieron que ser evacuados por los cascos azules de la ciudad de Rutshuru, que acoge a miles de desplazados, ante el avance de los insurgentes.

20. ¿HAY ESPAÑOLES EN LA ZONA DE GUERRA?

En la zona afectada por el conflicto trabajan actualmente en labores humanitarias entre quince y veinte cooperantes y religiosos españoles, todos ellos localizados y advertidos de la gravedad de la situación, según la Oficina de Acción Humanitaria de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional.

Según datos de 2007 de la Coordinadora de ONGD, en la R. D. del Congo trabajan actualmente 13 organizaciones no gubernamentales españolas, que desarrollan un total de 109 proyectos, con un fondo de 5,1 millones de euros.

El pasado 28 de octubre, la monja misionera y enfermera diplomada María Presentación López Vivar, burgalesa de 64 años, resultó herida por la explosión de una bomba en Rutshuru, en plena zona del conflicto. Los médicos tuvieron que amputarle los dos pies. Lleva trabajando en el Congo 14 años.

Reportaje en 20minutos.es

Artículos relacionados

• Las luchas entre facciones milicianas anuncian una crisis humanitaria en Congo
• Decenas de miles de personas huyen por ofensiva rebelde en Congo
• Kouchner, ministro francés: “La situación en el Congo es verdaderamente desesperada”
• La ONU evacuará a los cooperantes de una ciudad de Congo
• Combates en Congo antes de la reunión entre ONU y rebeldes
• El líder rebelde Nkunda acepta abrir un proceso de paz con el Gobierno congolés
• La religiosa mutilada en el Congo: “Miedo no me da, si puedo ser útil, vuelvo”
• Cooperantes hallan campos de refugiados vacíos en este de Congo
• El olvidado oro gris que llevas en tu bolsillo provoca guerras en el Congo
• El Ejército indio investiga si sus ‘cascos azules’ abusaron de niños en el Congo

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

May 2, 2009

I’m standing at the bottom of a slope in Kahuzi-Biega National Park west of Bukavu in the DRC, dirt splattered all over my pants and for the second time in two months I am  witnessing my car flopping around in the mud. I think back to Nyungwe Forest in April when Martina and I drove to Rwanda to see chimps and just to get away from Burundi. We picked up Sarah from Scotland at the Park Ranger station (some foreshadowing perhaps – I had a ticket to Scotland for the following month). On the downhill drive into the park, we had no problems despite it being rainy season. The park’s tourist numbers confirm that April is the least popular month to visit but I highly recommend it if you want to see new landscapes and gorgeous cloud patterns every five minutes.

Anyway, of course, we didn’t have any issues getting to the park – we just slid downhill on the tire tracks other vehicles had carved into the yellow mud. Coming back uphill was a predictable catastrophe that no one really bothered to think about. The trip had seemed like such a brilliant idea until that point. Then things got cagey. I had run out of candy.

This was how the exit route looked.

We tried putting logs into the tracks, we tried piling leaves under the car. I took out my machete to hack and to dig. We tried a lot of pretty silly things but with only the three of us and the Park Ranger, we didn’t move a yard. Finally, we convinced the Ranger to call his buddies and also to send for help from a nearby village. We waited for about 20 “Rwandan minutes,” which we were shocked to discover was only 15 ‘European minutes’. And then help arrived. Boy, did it arrive. Or I should say: boys. Lots and lots of barefoot giggly boys. We got to see chimps in their natural environement, a rainforest. The boys got to see foreigners in their natural environement, helplessly flailing in the mud. Fair enough. Everyone got to go home happy.

More Rangers arrived. Martina marshalled the whole group by shouting encouragements in a language no one really understood (Italian?) until she was laughing too hard to help push. Half the team pushed the car from behind, the other half pulled it by the grill on the front. The team rocked the car back and forth over each bump until it slowly gained enough momentum and traction to get going. But once it did pick up speed, I didn’t want to stop again so Sarah, Martina and our guide piled into the moving vehicle and I didn’t let up on the gas pedal until we were back on pavement. The car looked like hell. Probably the branches I crashed through did also. And then there was the rescue team:

All this flashes through my mind as I watch my Land Cruiser get a gentle nudge back up the hill so we can leave it on the drier part of the trail and hike toward the gorillas, the eastern lowland silverback gorillas. I love saying that. We’re a total of six hikers, one guide, and at least six Congolese soldier-turned-rangers. I hear some of the soldiers served under the Congolese Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda and had been integrated into the Congolese forces. That’s good, I guess, as all reports suggest they are really effective soldiers. In all, there are actually only three civilians – our guide, Carlos, Martina and me. The other four hikers sheepishly identify themselves as “Information Specialists” for the U.S. further north in Goma. I glance sidways at one in a black cap, impenetrable shades, a black tactical vest and menacing (black) boots. “Information? Oh, are you a writer?” Martina asks.

It’s a really refreshing hike. It’s still early in the morning and the Congolese landscape is awesome. The air’s clean, it’s not too hot – the climate isn’t really the problem for this country. We hike for about an hour when all of a sudden, a guerilla!

Last known photo of the hikers before they see gorillas.

The guerilla helpfully estimates that we are about several more minutes hike from the gorillas. He also tells us that we should always keep seven to ten meters between ourselves and the male or we might offend him. We learn the guerilla’s teammates have been radioing back and forth on the gorillas’ locations so he has seen them. All we have to do is turn right along the trail and hike a bit further. We take literally five steps after the turn when all of a sudden, gorillas!

At first, I don’t understand what is happening. I expected more hiking. I also expected more distance than two meters. When we got our pep talk, we must have already been inside seven meters of the gorillas. What I see is a semicircle trained on a small scene, almost like a stage. I’m confused because on the edges of this scene, just inches from a large female and her kids, are two or three rangers hacking away with sharp machetes, stripping the trees of branches and leaves. Then I realize they are clearing the space for us so we could see the gorillas better. Pretty quickly, we ask about the distance and the disturbance we are causing but Carlos explains that the rangers and gorillas are familiar with each other and if the gorillas were irritated by us, they would let us know. Everyone, gorillas and humans, also know that the law here is Chimanuka, the kingly male off to the left. He is essentially tolerating us because if he really wanted to, he could flatten all of us in a heartbeat. We are the ones that have to be totally respectful. At the moment, I am totally respectful of his eating every leaf around him. That’s about as far as our relationship gets. We don’t share a beer or anything, but he does end up tolerating us for more than an hour as we follow him deeper and deeper into the jungle.

I’ve only uploaded a couple photos of the gorillas because this is ultimately not something I could show you well. Anyone can see images of gorillas anywhere, but there is so much more to it. It’s humbling and majestic and frightening and exciting and even a little sad, all at the same time. I would just muck it up; the experience deserves better than my telling of it. It would be hard to retell the stories we exchange while hiking or describe the flowers we smell. The enormity of Chimanuka’s frame, his fists that are the size of my torso, his commanding grunts. The little ones, interacting with us, dangling from branches, swinging by in the surrounding trees. Putting all of it onto a blog is really not why I went.

What I do support is tourism in the Congo. If you get the chance to visit, I recommend tours led by Carlos from the Co-Co Lodge, located in Bukavu. He has been there for a long time, so he knows the terrain and he knows the people. You can contact him at lodgecoco@kivu-online.com

You might mention Jeff and Martina from Bujumbura said hello, but I can’t be responsible for what happens next. Carlos was the one who had to get my car out of the mud.

The Movement for Justice and Peace in the Congo (MJPC) and Human Rights Watch recently requested the UN peace keeping force in the Congo MONUC  and the Congolese Government to arrest war criminal General Bosco Ntagandainstead of working with him.  General Ntaganda is a war criminal wanted on a warrant by the International Criminal Court for massacres of hundreds and possibly thousands of innocent Congolese women, men, and children. Bosco Ntaganda also known as “Terminator” is accused of a number of war crimes, crimes against humanity, rape, and the use of child soldiers. Yet, the UN soldiers under MONUC who are in charge of ensuring civilian safety are working along this known war criminal. MONUC officials continue to lie to the world by claiming that the UN is not working with general Ntaganda. However, evidence is not on the UN’s side. MJPC is correct to demand this arrest.

General Ntaganda, currently a senior officer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s army has been seen smiling at the UN troops in Eastern Congo and is currently working along Monuc. Eastern Congo, especially the Kivu area is where Ntaganda has committed most of his recent heinous atrocities. The use of rape against women is one of the biggest weapon in Congo and is not surprising that the Congolese soldiers are currently the biggest perpetrators of this crime. Their present operation dubbed Kimia II is led by Bosco Ntaganda along with the UN. Ntaganda’s troops have mastered this despicable art of using rape. Also, mass massacres as in the case of Kiwanja perpetrated by Ntaganda and his troops are common in the Kivu area of the Congo.

Congolese Refugees Fleeing Ntaganda's Massacre in Kiwanja

It is criminal for the UN to work with a known war criminal instead of arresting him. It is irresponsible for the Congolese government to ignore arresting calls to ignore this war criminal. There is no reason why Ntaganda should be walking among the people whose mothers, sisters, brothers, fathers, relatives and neighbors he has murdered in cold blood. There is no reason why Bosco Ntaganda should be smiling at mothers whose sons he has abducted and trained to become his child soldiers. Bosco Ntaganda along with his Rwanda sponsors in the current Kigali government whom he fought for in Rwanda engaged in the use of child soldiers, rape of thousands of women, massacres of entire villages in Eastern Congo and all the UN can do is work with him. The Congolese people who have been ravaged by Rwandan president Paul Kagame’s troops or his proxies such as general Ntaganda; are made to watch one of these murderers who took away their dignity are promoted into top military posts.

There have been over 5 million, 5 million people killed since Paul Kagame and his Rwandan troops RPA/RDF crossed the border and invaded Congo in 1996. Most of these victims are babies, women, the elderly, and the disabled. Paul Kagame and his troops either directly fought or trained and used mass murderers like Bosco Ntaganda, Laurent Nkunda, and Thomas Lubanga to continue this conflict in the Congo. Meanwhile Rwanda, Uganda and some of the rebel groups operating in Eastern Congo continue to plunder Congo’s mineral and making illegal profit off of it. Reportedly, some of the UN troops who should be in charge of civilians’ safety are also taking part in illegal mining and trading. The death of one person is bad enough but how many more will it take before the UN and the Congolese government do the right thing and arrest these criminals? The least the UN can do for the Congo victims is arrest the criminals. MJPC and Human Rights watch are both correct in asking for his arrest to face charges by the ICC.

Paul Kagame is a War Criminal

The arrest was a surprise because Rwanda ’s military and Kagame, himself, had been supporting Nkunda’s “terror” in the eastern Congo for years. The Times later reported that Nkunda is not actually imprisoned in Rwanda , and that the real reason for the “arrest” may have been that he had become a political liability for Kagame. He simply knows too much about Rwandan crimes in the Congo and during the 1994 Rwandan “genocide” for Kagame to permit him to remain “on the loose.”

And, with good reason.

Over the past two years, many different sources have exposed the ongoing crimes of the Kagame government and military, both before and after Kagame seized power in Rwanda in July 1994. Long a favorite of the Clinton and Bush administrations (U.S. diplomatic recognition was immediate, and U.S. military advisors were in Rwanda within days), Kagame’s crimes are reaching huge proportions that require him, and his U.S. admirers, to do something to divert attention from Kagame’s own responsiblity for Nkunda’s crimes, as well as many, many others, committed over the past two-decades, including “genocide.”

UN and Media Confirm: “Kagame is the Author of Massive Congo Crimes”

In addition to the Times article, in early December Kagame’s Congo crimes were further documented in a December 12, 2008 UN Security Council-commissioned report that describes Rwanda ’s 12-year occupation of a huge part of the Congo 5-times larger than Rwanda , itself. The UN report, which was also widely reported by the international media, makes clear that the Kagame’s Rwandan-elites, and well-connected Ugandans in the north, are getting rich on the resources of the Congo , while killing more than 6-million Africans in the process.

More people are being killed in the Congo every 4-6 months than the 250,000 that have been killed in Darfur in the past 10-years, allegedly by a Sudanese government the U.S. opposes.

A fact that raises disturbing questions about why the international “human rights” community has been relatively quiet about the massive crimes in the Congo , by surrogates the U.S. supports.

But this is not really new information for anyone paying close attention to the tragedy unfolding in the Congo . According to Security Council reports in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2008; reports by third-world “raw-materials watchdog” Global Witness; and, even President Clinton’s former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Herman J. Cohen, (IHT December 13, 2008), Rwandan and Ugandan invasions of the Congo since 1996 have been fueled by the grab for Congo’s raw materials, and that neither Nkunda nor “hutu-militias” are the real reasons for the decades-long war, that again threatens to explode, in a repeat of the1998-2002 “First “World War of Africa.”

Kagame’s “About Face” on Nkunda: A Strategy for His Own Survival

The four UN reports, make clear that Rwanda has used the presence of Rwandan refugees in the Congo as justification for Rwanda ’s “resource grab.” Of the 2-million Rwandans who fled Kagame’s regime, only a small number could possibly have been involved in 1994 crimes and it is their sons and grandsons who are in the camps in the Congo , today. The arrest of Nkunda is yet another fig-leaf to cover the naked plunder that preceded Nkunda’s Congo adventure, and will go on after his “arrest”, at least until Kagame of Rwanda and Museveni of Uganda, are compelled to withdraw from the Congo fields of “blood-diamonds,” “blood-casserite (tin)” and “blood-coltan (cellphones)” that have turned their respective capitals into international trading centers for mineral riches not found in either country….as UN reports over many years have described.

Kagame’s abrupt “about face” in supporting Nkunda does nothing to reduce Rwanda’s long-established resource grab-inspired military dominance of the eastern Congo, but does show that Kagame is being forced to change his tactics, to disguise Rwanda’s actual role in the creating and supporting violence wracking the African Great Lakes region. The most recent invasion to arrest Nkunda is a clever diversionary tactic. But, the UN report and Nkunda’s “bad press” are not Mr. Kagame’s only problems of late.

Kagame’s Problems Deepen as Proof of His Own Crimes Grows

Following the December 2008 UN report, the Netherlands and Sweden cut-off all foreign aid to Rwanda , and others are considering doing so too. Other EU countries are taking their own actions as the true nature of the Kagame regime is being revealed. In early 2008, Spain indicted 40-leading members of Kagame’s government which followed a late 2006 French indictment charging Kagame and his followers with assassinating former Rwandan and Burundian presidents, the crime that triggered 1994 civilian-on-civilian killings in Rwanda.

The Spanish indictment details genocidal-style killings of more than 300,000 civilians by Kagame’s troops during, and after, the 1994 war. Before this indictment, the defendants in the dock at the ICTR had been blamed for all the mass-killings in Rwanda . But, because only the losing-side in the Rwanda war are in the dock, it is clear that the story of the “Rwanda-genocide” will have to be re-examined.

Particularly after it was revealed last year that U.S. Ambassador Pierre Prosper ordered ICTR prosecutor Carla Del Ponte to be removed from office, when she insisted on prosecuting Kagame for the assasination of the former president, the crime that touched-off the “Rwanda genocide” because U.S. policy was to protect Kagame, despite the evidence of his guilt.

In November 2008, Germany also arrested one of Kagame’s retinue under INTERPOL warrants based on the Spanish and French indictment. But, perhaps the least noticed, but potentially most important exposure of the manipulation of the ” Rwanda genocide” story to “cover-up” the crimes of Kagame’s military and government occurred at the UN Tribunal for Rwanda in December 2008.

The UN Rwanda Tribunal December 2008:

“No Genocide Conspiracy or Planning”

On December 18, 2008, a three-judge panel in the Military-1 case at the UN tribunal acquitted the top four military officers of the former Rwandan government of charges of “conspiracy to commit genocide” and “genocide planning”…which completely rejects the whole “Rwanda-story” that has been told by the Kagame regime July 1994, as a way of explaining the massacres that occurred during the 100-assault to seize power that began with Kagame’s assassination of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi on April 6, 1994.

Not only were the four officers acquitted of conspiracy and planning genocide, including “architect of the genocide” Col. Theoneste Bagosora, the highest ranking officer, General Gratien Kabiligi, was acquitted of all charges and was released from more than 10-years of custody. The three-judge panel in the Military-1 case was the first to in the history of the Tribunal to have been presented with long-suppressed UN and US government files that make clear that Kagame and his RPF were the aggressors and Kagame’s military-strategy actually prevented both sides from using troops to stop the massacres the assassination of the two presidents touched off.[2]

The recently revealed documents, and testimony at the UN Tribunal ,confirm that massive civilian-on-civilian violence was predicted to erupt in Rwanda as a consequence of war, because of similar massacres that occurred in neighboring Burundi in late 1993, when the first popularly-elected Burundian president was assassinated by Kagame’s Burundi-military allies. In fact, in late 1993 the US ambassador to Rwanda personally warned Kagame that he would be responsible for the same kind of massive violence, if he resumed the war.

Now evidence ICTR evidence shows that Kagame not only resumed the war, but assassinated two presidents as the opening shot, triggering the same massive killings that had already happened in Burundi six months before.

Previously suppressed UN documents also show that two-weeks after he assassinated Rwandan President Habyarimana…along with a second Burundian president, Kagame told UN General Dallaire that he would not use his troops to stop the massacres because he was winning the war, and the civilian deaths were only “collateral damage for his their war-plan. The April 22, 1994 memo reporting this conversation is in the ICTR evidence.

Kagame also repeatedly refused a ceasefire, proposed by the former military to use troops to stop the massacres touched-off by Habyarimana’s assassination. Documents from the former government repeatedly asking for a ceasefire, and Kagame’s rejections, are also in the ICTR record that the 3-judge panel had before it.

The Unraveling of U.S./UK-Assisted “Cover-up” of Kagame’s Crimes

But, the formerly suppressed documents also reveal that U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher knew of Kagame’s mass-crimes no later than Sept 17, 1994. Other documents confirm a U.S.-engineered “cover-up” of Kagame’s crimes has been going on since that time. UN documents confirm that the UN knew about mass civilian-killings by Kagame’s forces by May 17, 1994, at the latest.

The documents also establish that the UN prosecutor and former Canadian Supreme Court Justice, Louise Arbour, knew that Kagame had assassinated the former President in 1997, but refused to act despite the recommendation a former FBI agent; an Australian Queen’s Prosecutor; and UN Gen. Dallaire’s own Chief of Military Intelligence. First she refused to prosecute, then shut down the investigation team completely. All of this was merely prelude to Bush administration Ambassador Pierre Prosper removing Ms. Del Ponte from office in 2003, because of his usefulness to the U.S.

Now we know that, because Kagame’s Rwanda crimes were covered-up by the U.S. in 1994, and because he was not prosecuted at the ICTR for the assassination of the previous president in 1997 (when Bagosora and other Military-1 defendants were arrested) he has been free to rape the Congo of its riches and to massacre millions. The thousands of pages of UN and U.S. government documents in ICTR evidence, and subsequent events in the Congo will require re-writing the entire story of the “ Rwanda genocide.”

IF Kagame was the “good-guy” in Rwanda (despite the ICTR evidence that the 100-days of hell that his assassination of Habyarimana triggered, and which he told Dallaire in April 1994 was all part of his war-plan), the 2001-08 UN-Security Council reports of Kagame’s crimes in the Congo show that he and his military must have done complete “about-face” of another kind, as soon as they took power in Rwanda in July 1994.

Kagame Has Found Nkunda Expendable – Will President Obama Continue U.S. It “Kagame Impunity” Policy?

Mr. Nkunda must now appreciate the well-known risks of relying on a patron for one’s own power…the patron may no-longer have need of the client’s services. Nkunda has merely found himself in a situation similar to Panama ’s U.S.-sponsored dictator Manuel Noriega, whose arrest was used to justify the invasion of Panama by the Bush-1 administration, when Noriega outlived his Cold War usefulness.

And, this is not even the first time that Rwanda has invaded the Congo remove a “no-longer-useful” leader. In 1996, Congo ’s president for 30-plus “Cold War” years, Mobutu Sese Seko, was removed in a joint Rwanda/Uganda U.S. and U.K.-supported invasion, and replaced by Ugandan-client Joseph Kabila, once Mobutu’s value as an anti-communist “bulwark” was outweighed by the public relations-downside of his well-known criminal rule.

At least Nkunda can be grateful that he didn’t meet the same fate as another leader who ran afoul of U.S. interests in the Congo in an earlier era. In 1961 Patrice Lumumba was assassinated, not arrested. Of course, if Nkunda begins to spill what he knows about Kagame’s crimes in Rwanda and the Congo ….”accidents” can happen.

The most recent Rwandan invasion to throw Nkunda “under the bus” in an effort to shore-up Kagame’s image is actually an admission of the deep trouble in which Kagame finds himself, and the deep embarrassment he is becoming to his U.S. and U.K. patrons, who have protected him for over a decade. The December 2008 UN report; the European indictments; and, the formerly suppressed documents in ICTR evidence, taken together, raise the real possibility that the Obama administration may find that Mr. Kagame has also outlived his usefulness. When that day arrives, Paul Kagame’s name will be added to the long list of former U.S. clients who outlived their usefulness and paid the price, like Noriega and Mobutu, but also, lest we forget….Saddam Hussein.

THE ONLY MORAL U.S.-AFRICA POLICY: END SUPPORT FOR KAGAME

Cutting off all western aid to Rwanda, like the Dutch and the Swedes; arresting Kagame and his henchmen under existing INTERPOL warrants, like the Germans; and prosecuting Kagame at the UN Rwanda Tribunal, or the International Criminal Court, will save far more African lives than any “foreign-aid for Africa” program than President Obama or Secretary of State Clinton could possibly conceive. One difficulty, of course, is that the “cover-up” of Kagame’s 1994 crimes in Rwanda was initiated under her predecessor Warren Christopher….Bill Clinton ’s Secretary of State. Which, in turn, raises difficult questions about Clinton ’s foreign policy in central Africa , as well.

If Mr. Kagame ever does find himself in the dock, after having been “Saddamized” by his former patrons, it will be very interesting to learn what he will have to say about his own crimes in the Congo and in Rwanda…and his “special relationship” with several US administrations that has assisted the “cover-up” of those crimes.…which, may have something to do with why the “Kagame Impunity” policy as continued this long..

On January 24, Rwandan President Paul Kagame sent 4,000 troops into the Congo to arrest rebel “tutsi”-warlord, Laurent Nkunda, and wipe-out the remaining “hutu-genocidaires” lurking in the eastern Congo . As the New York Times reported in early December 2008, Nkunda is a former Rwandan Army officer and many of his troops also came from Rwanda , including child-soldiers recruited with Rwandan assistance.

The arrest was a surprise because Rwanda ’s military and Kagame, himself, had been supporting Nkunda’s “terror” in the eastern Congo for years. The Times later reported that Nkunda is not actually imprisoned in Rwanda , and that the real reason for the “arrest” may have been that he had become a political liability for Kagame. He simply knows too much about Rwandan crimes in the Congo and during the 1994 Rwandan “genocide” for Kagame to permit him to remain “on the loose.”

Prof. Peter Erlinder teaches at the Wm. Mitchell College of Law, St. Paul , MN

[1] Prof. of Law, Wm. Mitchell College of Law, St. Paul, MN; past-President, National Lawyers Guild, NY; President, ICTR-ADAD (Association des Avocats de la Defence), Arusha, TZ; Lead-counsel, ICTR-Military-1 Trial, Ntabakuze Defence. 651-290-6384/ peter.erlinder@wmitchell.edu

[2] In the interests of full disclosure: As Ntabakuze Lead Defence Counsel, these documents were unearthed and put into ICTR evidence for the first time by the author between 2005 and 2007.

Conditions inside Ugandan prisons is appalling; the small jerry cans that the prisoners use to wash in the toilet are the same jerry cans they use for their drinking water. Prisoners sleep on the hard cemented floor without a single bed-sheet to disguise the conditions of the hard cold floor or to use as covers, then they wake up very early in the morning to dry up the paddles of water that always accumulate overnight.

Prisoners use empty tins as toilets and this leaves a terrible smell in the prison rooms during the night and the place is infested with cockroaches which swam over the food dishes and crawl all over the prisoners in their sleep at night.
Minors of fifteen to sixteen years old also imprisoned with a bunch of grown men.

June 24, 2009

Letter to the Ugandan Minister of Justice on Long-Term Detainees

Your Excellency,

Human Rights Watch is writing to draw your attention to the prolonged incarceration of 17 individuals whose cases as a matter of law demand your urgent action. In each case, the individual has been imprisoned for months or years awaiting “Minister’s orders” to be sentenced, released, or placed in the appropriate custodial care. All were convicted for crimes committed as children or were found not guilty by reason of insanity. We are deeply concerned that the Justice Ministry’s failure to appropriately act on these cases is depriving them of their rights under the Uganda constitution and international human rights law.

The 17 imprisoned individuals fall into two groups: 12 were sentenced to death for crimes committed when they were children (under age 18), and five were deemed by the courts to be not guilty by reason of insanity and are now on remand. Several have languished in prison for more than five years as they have awaited a determination of their status by your office. We have enclosed the details of each case.

As you know, Uganda’s Trial on Indictments Act, article 105, requires the Minister of Justice to determine the sentence in cases involving individuals convicted of death-sentence-eligible crimes committed when they were minors. Human Rights Watch is aware of 12 individuals at Luzira prison who are in this situation. They have been awaiting an order from the Minister of Justice regarding their sentence for varying lengths of time – from 18 months to eight years.

One prisoner, HBI[1], has not been informed of his sentence since being convicted of a 1996 robbery 12 years ago, on June 16, 1997, when he was 16 years old. On December 12, 2001, the Fort Portal High Court informed him to await Minister’s orders for a sentence determination. He has awaited a determination of his sentence by the Minister of Justice ever since. He is now 29 years old. Another four individuals, who were 16 and 17 years old when they committed their crimes, are still without a sentence despite convictions in 1999.

The long-term detention without sentencing of children violates Uganda’s commitments under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Uganda is a party. Under article 37(b) of the Convention, the imprisonment of children – defined as those under 18 at the time of the offense – should be a last resort and for the minimum period possible. A central goal of the criminal justice system in relation to children in conflict with the law should be to provide them with rehabilitation.

Human Rights Watch is aware of five additional individuals who are considered by prison and court officials to be insane but who remain on remand. Uganda’s Trial on Indictments Act, article 48, requires that the Minister of Justice order someone who has been found not guilty by reason of insanity during trial to be held in a prison, mental hospital, or other suitable place of safe custody. The individual is on remand until such a determination is made. Once the Minister of Justice has issued this order, the superintendent of the custodial facility where the individual is detained must, according to the law, issue regular reports to the minister regarding the individual’s condition, history, and circumstances. When considering the report, the Minister of Justice may order the prisoner to be discharged.

Unfortunately, without the Minister’s orders, this reporting does not occur, and the individuals are detained on remand indefinitely. Given the particular psychological needs of these individuals, their cases should be handled with the utmost sensitivity. Those so detained are being held contrary to international principles dealing with mental illness. According to the United Nations Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and for the Improvement of Mental Health Care, every patient has the right to receive health and social care appropriate to his or her health needs, and is entitled to care and treatment in accordance with the same standards as other ill persons. Every patient also has the right to be treated in the least restrictive environment and with the least restrictive or intrusive treatment appropriate to the patient’s health needs and the need to protect the physical safety of others.

One individual, AB from Mbarara, was arrested in 1997 on defilement charges and has been awaiting Minister’s orders for nearly nine years, since November 15, 2000. Despite his conviction, Mr. B is legally entitled to an impartial and expeditious resolution of his case and to appropriate psychological assistance.

The prolonged delay in notifying all 17 of these individuals of their legal status is a serious violation of their rights under both Ugandan and international law. Under the Ugandan constitution, article 28(1), all Ugandans have the right to a fair, speedy and public hearing before an independent and impartial court or tribunal established by law. This includes the right to be informed of their sentence in a timely fashion.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Uganda ratified in 1995, sets out the rights of those accused of crimes before the law. Under articles 9(3) and 14(3)(c) of the ICCPR, all defendants have the right to a conclusion of the proceedings against them without undue delay. These 17 cases all involve periods of time well beyond what has been deemed by the Human Rights Committee, the expert body that monitors states’ compliance with the ICCPR, to be a reasonable delay. The Human Rights Committee in McLawrence v. Jamaica held that a delay of 31 months between trial and dismissal of an appeal was not reasonable in a capital case. (UN Doc. CCPR/C/60/D/702/1996, 29 September 1997, para. 5.6).

Below are the relevant details of the 17 cases. We ask that you look into these cases and promptly issue the appropriate orders as required by law so that the defendants can be informed of their legal status as soon as possible. Strong consideration should be given to international standards that discourage the imprisonment of child offenders and that provide individuals with mental health problems the necessary medical and psychological care.

According to information received by Human Rights Watch, the Ministry of Justice has been informed by officials of the Uganda Prison Service of these cases, but there has been no action taken to issue the needed orders. We urge you to take up these cases immediately and ensure that they are handled as required by law. Doing so will be an important step in respecting the basic rights of the individuals concerned and demonstrating Uganda’s commitment to international human rights standards.

We look forward to further dialogue with you and others in the Ministry of Justice and thank you for your attention to this important matter.

Sincerely,

Georgette Gagnon

Africa Director

Human Rights Watch

Fred Rwigyema in 3D

Yoweri Museveni returned six months later after Rwigyema had captured Fort Portal and Kasese. It was the second time the chairman was leaving the frontline for the same period of six months, the first time being in June 1981. While the war raged on for five years, some fighters say their leader was in the bush for only four years. Museveni justifies his long absence by saying that he needed to do diplomatic work, including looking for guns. Some veterans claim that on both occasions, Museveni returned after his brother, Salim Saleh informed him that the fighters had registered tremendous progress. Veterans claim that had Museveni been informed by Saleh that things were bad, probably he would never have returned.

MUHWEZI, KIGONGO
The overall military commander for the NRA’s Western Axis was Fred Rwigyema. The overall political leader was the NRM Vice Chairman, Moses Kigongo.
Jim Muhwezi was the overall intelligence chief, while Chefe Ali who commanded the NRA 11th Battalion, was the military man together with Col. Samson Mande who at the take over of Kampala was Commanding Officer of the 15th Battalion.

Other military and political leaders in this group were Col. Nuwe Amanya Mushega and Col. Tom Butime.
The 5th Battalion, which Brig. Steven Kashaka commanded with Col. Ahmed Kashilingi, escorted Rwigyema and his forces to take them through what was considered dangerous areas like Bukomero, according to veterans. This is when David Musisi, one of the fearless fighters, was killed while the battalion was returning to Luwero after providing back-up for the Rwenzori-bound group.

The Rwigyema group also took away all non-fighters, including those in the sick bay. President Museveni writes very briefly about this Western Axis in his book and some veterans say it is because neither he nor his brother, Salim Saleh, played a key role. Some veterans claim that the President deliberately excluded this part of the “struggle” from his book because he didn’t want to give credit to other people. The trek to the west was long and difficult. The NRA forces would walk during the night and rest in the jungles during the day until they reached their destination in Fort Portal and Kasese. The journey took a whole month. The commanders told their fighters not to touch people’s food and other items on the way, even if they were dying of hunger.

Apart from fearing to bump into patrolling UNLA soldiers, the Western Axis forces walked at night to hide their poor state. They were very dirty, tired and emaciated. When they reached Hoima, in areas with no forest cover, the rebels spent a night in a cassava plantation, and the order was not to touch people’s food. However, because of biting hunger, some fighters, including one commander, stole the cassava.
The owner of the plantation had apparently warned them that his cassava was protected and whoever eats it would fall sick. The following day, the owner who had allowed the rebels stay in his plantation, complained that some of his cassava had been stolen.A parade was quickly organised to identify the culprits. The culprits were asked to come out, lest they are discovered and killed, but none did so. The following day, some fighters including a commander, developed stomach problems and they reported themselves. The owner was called and he reportedly administered witchcraft rituals to set the culprits free.

FIGHTERS KILLED
Another major incident that happened during the NRA operation in Rwenzori areas was the summary execution of fighters who stole goats and sheep from local people. The fighters had violated the standing order, not to steal from the people. So, when the owners of the animals reported them to their commanders, the political head of the Western Axis, Moses Kigongo, presided over a meeting of senior leaders that constituted itself into a court and sentenced two fighters to death. The execution earned the rebels the support and trust of the Batooro and Bakonzo in the area, but the peasants feared to report other cases after witnessing the execution. The rebel commanders had decreed that anybody who stole people’s items using a gun would be executed and they were serious. Some veterans say the rebels never wasted their bullets on such executions but would use a hoe to hit the head of the accused.

The forces that went to Rwenzori, according to veterans, walked with minimum interference. President Apollo Milton Obote was happy that they were walking away from Luwero. He bragged that the rebels were running in disarray towards Congo. He also bragged that their commander, Yoweri Museveni, had run away to Europe. Obote must have awoken from his slumber when the Rwigyema forces overran Rubona Prison where the UNLA soldiers had camped. Museveni says his rebels killed about four dozens of the government soldiers. When he returned from visiting his family in Sweden, Museveni addressed rallies in Fort Portal.

Those who belonged to the Western Axis think their success shaped the determination with which NRA marched to capture Kampala. Kasese and Fort Portal were the first areas to be liberated and became the headquarters of the NRA/M as the rebels pushed on towards Kampala. Open recruitment of more fighters and training, the rebels captured more areas. About 9,000 rebels were trained in Buhweju and Semliki area.
It was the Western Axis that would later attack Mbarara, although Museveni says that they had failed to capture the town until Salim Saleh re-enforced them. The group later captured other areas, including Kabale.

Now exiled in Europe, Samson Mande commanded the operation in which money was grabbed from the Uganda Commercial Bank branch in Kabale. It has been alleged that some officers used part of the money to buy property. Indeed some veterans have said that the practice of grabbing public resources by some NRM officials manifested itself in this action, but the revolutionary spirit was too strong to be derailed by such reports. After consolidating control of Mbarara and Kabale, the Western Axis began matching towards Masaka. Here, they joined other forces that had moved out of Luwero through Mpigi, Kibibi and Masaka.
Some veterans believe that if the Western Axis had flopped, probably the whole armed struggle would have collapsed, especially as Museveni was away in Europe.

Next week, we look at the contribution the first Commanding Officers (COs) of the NRA battalions; Samson Mande, Steven Kashaka, Pecos Kuteesa, Julius Kihande, Ahmed Kashilingi, Matayo Kyaligonza and Chefe Ali.

Written by Ssemujju Ibrahim Nganda
ssemujju@observer.ug

This is the best video about rwanda out there.

This video is a travel diary to Rwanda by a Japanese musical icon, Miyazaki Aoin.
The entire video is in Japanese but easy to follow, for a non-Japanese speaker.
However, Its a very long video-Please Give the video, time to download!
You won’t find out there, a great video on rwanda, as this one!!
Enjoy!!!
Joram jojo

Paul Kagame is a War Criminal

He killed both Tutsi and Hutu in Hundreds of Thousands

Justice Hassan B. Jallow
Office of the Prosecutor
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
Arusha, Tanzania

Dear Mr. Prosecutor,
As you prepare to brief the Security Council on June 4 on the progress of the Tribunal, we write to urge you once more to prosecute crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1994. With the ICTR scheduled to complete all trials by the end of this year, we ask that you immediately announce your intention to pursue these cases so as not to leave the Security Council with the false impression that the Tribunal’s core work at the indictment level is completed.
The Tribunal has achieved considerable success in bringing to justice those most responsible for the Rwandan genocide. However, a failure also to address the RPF’s killing of tens of thousands of civilians will result in serious impunity for grave crimes committed in 1994 and would leave many with a sense of one-sided, or victor’s, justice. Such a result would seriously undermine the Tribunal’s legacy.
As you know, a UN Commission of Experts in 1994 documented crimes committed by the RPF and concluded that the RPF had “perpetrated serious breaches of international humanitarian law and crimes against humanity.” The Commission’s report, which was instrumental in establishing the ICTR, “strongly recommend[ed]” that the Security Council ensure that the persons responsible for these crimes be brought to justice before an independent and impartial tribunal. The UN High Commission for Refugees estimated the number of victims to be between 25,000 and 45,000 from April to August 1994. While not of the same nature or scale as the genocide, these serious crimes fall within the ICTR’s jurisdiction and should now be prosecuted.
We understand why the Office of the Prosecutor has waited to prosecute the RPF cases until other cases have been completed. Prioritizing cases against the masterminds of the genocide involved gathering evidence inside Rwanda and having witnesses travel from Rwanda to Tanzania to testify at the Tribunal, all of which required the cooperation of the Rwandan government. When your predecessor, Carla Del Ponte, announced in 2002 that the ICTR would investigate RPF crimes, Rwandan officials prevented witnesses from traveling to the Tribunal, forcing the suspension of several trials for months.
Now that most of the genocide trials have been completed or are drawing to a close, concerns about Rwandan obstruction are not as pressing. Given that your office has investigated RPF crimes for more than ten years now, and based on our own investigations, including with witnesses who have spoken to ICTR investigators, we believe your office has sufficient evidence to request that indictments be issued. Even if Rwanda once again prevented the travel of witnesses from Rwanda to Tanzania to testify at the Tribunal, your office could rely on witnesses from outside Rwanda who are willing to testify. We are aware that some of them have written to you personally, seeking justice for relatives lost at the hands of the RPF in 1994.
We were extremely disappointed by your June 2008 decision to transfer files of RPF suspects from the ICTR to Rwanda for domestic prosecution. We fear the reason was your concern that cases involving RPF crimes are too politically difficult for the Tribunal to adjudicate because of the likely need to indict senior figures in Rwanda’s military or current government.
At the time of your decision, the Tribunal had just denied two requests to transfer indicted génocidaires to Rwandan courts because they would face unfair trials. The Tribunal concluded, among other things, that defense witnesses might be unavailable, thereby jeopardizing suspects’ fair-trial rights. In one of the cases, the Tribunal concluded that the Rwandan judiciary was not independent of political interference.
Since that time, the Tribunal has denied three additional requests for genocide suspects to be transferred to Rwanda. Of the total five cases, three have already been confirmed on appeal. All decisions have emphasized the fear that potential witnesses face, ranging from intimidation and accusations of genocide ideology (a criminal offense in Rwanda involving any act deemed to espouse hatred or lead to violence) to actual violence and death. Foreign jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, have dismissed requests for extradition on similar grounds in the past year.

Despite these decisions by both the ICTR and foreign courts making clear that genocide-related cases would face political interference and unfair adjudication in the Rwandan courts, your office decided to hand over to Rwanda the even more politically sensitive RPF files for domestic prosecution in June 2008. When answering questions by the Security Council on this decision at the time, you stated that your office would monitor the proceedings closely and would recall the case to the ICTR if the trial did not meet international standards.
Within weeks of your decision to transfer the RPF files, a Rwandan military court charged and tried four RPF officers with war crimes for the 1994 killing of 15 civilians, 13 of them clergy. The trial proved to be a political whitewash and a miscarriage of justice, betraying the rights of victims’ families to obtain justice for their loved ones. Both the prosecution and the defense presented the killings as spontaneous reactions by soldiers overcome with grief for their fellow RPF officers who had lost relatives in the genocide. The court heard testimony only from witnesses supporting this version of events, despite evidence you transmitted to Rwanda’s prosecution service indicating that the killings were part of a planned military operation involving more senior officials. Two of the officers confessed to the killings and were sentenced to eight years in prison, reduced to five years on appeal. Two more senior officers were acquitted after a very brief trial.
Despite your commitment to the Security Council to ensure close monitoring of the trial, you sent an observer for only two preliminary detention hearings, one trial day, closing arguments, and the verdict. That cursory presence did not constitute diligent monitoring. Human Rights Watch and several Rwandan nongovernmental organizations and journalists monitored the proceedings.
Since the verdict of the Rwandan trial on October 24, 2008, Human Rights Watch has repeatedly asked for your official assessment of the trial and has urged you to recall the case and try it in accordance with the available evidence. Our most recent discussion was in your office on March 23, 2009. On each occasion, you told Human Rights Watch you were still looking at the file and would provide a final assessment in due course. You have not offered an assessment, and it is now more than seven months since the verdict and three months since the appellate decision.
We call on you to include in your June 4 briefing to the Security Council an assessment of whether the Rwandan trial complied with international fair trial standards and, if you find such standards were not met, to recall the case to the Tribunal. We understand that you have discretion in deciding which cases to pursue, but we call on you to seek indictments against more senior RPF officers in relation to whom we believe your office has gathered substantial evidence and to pursue such cases vigorously. If necessary, we ask that you request the Security Council to extend the Tribunal’s mandate beyond December 31, 2009, to ensure adequate time to prosecute these cases.
We strongly believe that your mandate as Chief Prosecutor will not be fulfilled until you prosecute alleged RPF crimes. Failure to do so will undoubtedly taint perceptions of the Tribunal’s impartiality and undermine its legitimacy in the eyes of future generations. Seeking justice for the victims of these RPF crimes neither denies the genocide nor equates these crimes with genocide. It simply asserts that all victims, regardless of the identity of the alleged perpetrator, have the right to seek redress for the wrongs done to them.
We thank you in advance for your attention to this pressing matter.

Kenneth Roth

Executive Director

Bosco Ntaganda

“Bosco Ntaganga committed crimes in Ituri; he is today in the Kivus. He must be arrested. Like all the other indicted criminals in Uganda and in the Sudan, he must be stopped if we want to break the system of violence. For such criminals, there must be no escape. Then peace will have a chance. Then victims will have hope”,

said Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo as the court unsealed its arrest warrant.

Moreno Ocampo called upon all concerned states, authorities and actors “to contribute to his arrest and surrender him to the court.” The warrant of arrest against Ntaganda is the fourth issued by the Court in the situation of the DRC. Three persons are currently into custody: Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ndgudjolo Chui.

H.E. President Joseph Kabila Kabange
Gombe, Kinshasa
Democratic Republic of Congo

New York

Your Excellency,

Human Rights Watch writes to express its deep concern that your government is considering appointing Bosco Ntaganda to a senior position in the military operations in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), rather than arresting him. Ntaganda, formerly military chief of staff for the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), is currently playing a key role in the integration process of CNDP troops into the FARDC. He was granted the rank of general in the Congolese armed forces in January 2005, though he did not take up the position at the time.

You certainly know that Ntaganda is being sought by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the war crime of enlisting and conscripting children under the age of 15 as soldiers and of using them in hostilities between 2002 and 2003 in the Ituri district of eastern Congo.

As a party to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, Congo has an obligation to assist the court in arresting persons for whom arrest warrants have been issued. In May 2007, Congo recognized that responsibility by asking the United Nations Mission in Congo (MONUC) for assistance in arresting Ntaganda, a request that took great courage and which we applauded at the time.

Despite having an international obligation to arrest Ntaganda, your government has to date made no attempt to do so. On January 16, Ntaganda was in Goma for a joint press conference alongside the Congolese Minister of the Interior and Security, Célestin Mbuyu Kabangu, the Inspector General of the Police, General John Numbi, Rwanda’s Chief of Defence Staff, General James Kabarebe, and other senior Congolese military officers. On January 29, the Minister of Defense, Charles Mwando Simba, and other senior officials were at a ceremony in Rumangabo alongside Ntaganda.

Efforts by Congolese authorities to legitimize Ntaganda as a “partner for peace” reinforces the perception that those who commit heinous crimes against civilians in Congo will be rewarded rather punished. Rather than promote respect for the rule of law, such practices feed the vicious culture of impunity that has ravaged Congo to date.

In your press conference on January 31 in Kinshasa, you said that there was a difficult choice between justice and peace, stability and security in eastern Congo, and that your choice was to prioritize peace. We too want to see peace in eastern Congo and an end to the horrific human rights abuses that the people there have suffered for too long. But sustainable peace rarely comes without justice. Peace and justice should be seen as complementary, not contradictory. Fostering respect for the rule of law is the only solution for ensuring protection for Congolese citizens who suffer the brunt of the human rights violations.

The frequency with which Ntaganda has been accused of terrible abuses against Congolese civilians underlines the importance of his arrest. In addition to the war crimes that form the basis for the ICC arrest warrant against him, charges against Ntaganda include the following:

* On November 4 and 5, 2008, CNDP troops under Ntaganda’s command killed an estimated 150 people in the town of Kiwanja, one of the worst massacres in North Kivu in the past two years.
* As chief of military operations of the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), Ntaganda was in command of combatants who arrested, tortured or killed hundreds of civilians of Lendu and Ngiti ethnicity between August 2002 and March 2003.
* In November 2002 Ntaganda led troops who slaughtered at least 800 civilians on ethnic grounds at Mongbwalu, including the first priest killed in the Ituri conflict, Abbe Boniface Bwanalonga.
* In November 2005 Ntaganda was placed on a UN sanctions list for having violated the arms embargo. He remains on the list.
* According to UN peacekeepers, troops under Ntaganda’s command were responsible for killing a Kenyan UN peacekeeper in January 2004 and for kidnapping a Moroccan peacekeeper later that year.

That forces under Ntaganda’s command continue to commit serious crimes, as demonstrated by the recent massacre in Kiwanja, underscores why it is urgent and essential that Congolese authorities arrest Ntaganda.

Mr. President, you have been a strong advocate for ending the culture of impunity in Congo. Your government has been at the forefront of cooperation with the ICC with the transfer of three Congolese individuals to The Hague to stand trial for charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. You have repeated your commitment to establishing the rule of law in numerous speeches such as those to the Congolese parliament and to the United Nations General Assembly. For these commitments to be realized, we urge you to instruct your judicial authorities to arrest Ntaganda and to transfer him to the jurisdiction of the ICC.

We also believe that Laurent Nkunda should be held responsible for crimes troops under his command committed in Kisangani in May 2002, in Bukavu in June 2004 and in North Kivu between 2006 and 2008. We note that your government is calling for his extradition to Congo to stand trial. We urge you to establish a special judicial mechanism within the Congolese justice system to investigate and hold to account individuals, such as Nkunda, who committed serious violations of international humanitarian law. Such a mechanism should meet international fair trial standards and hold to account not just Nkunda but also individuals from other armed groups and the Congolese army who have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Your government has been strong on denying amnesty for serious crimes. Lasting peace in eastern Congo requires justice for those who have committed atrocities against Congolese people. We hope you will act to arrest Ntaganda and surrender him to The Hague, and to put in place a judicial mechanism that can realize justice for the victims and an end to the culture of impunity.

Yours sincerely,

Kenneth Roth
Executive Director

Cc: His Excellency, Adolphe Muzito, Prime Minister
His Excellency, Charles Mwando Simba, Minister of Defence
His Excellency, Luzolo Bambi Lesa, Minister of Justice
His Excellency, Upio Kakura, Minister of Human Rights
Hon. Vital Kamerhe, President of the National Assembly
Hon. Leon Kengo Wa Dondo, President of the Senate
General John Numbi, Inspector General of the Police

We think that the things said do not take any account of the truth or the reality of the history of our country, but instead, have as a purpose the terrorizing, intimidating and humiliating of the Hutu people of Rwanda, who are globally accused of having planned and committed a “genocide” against the Tutsis. Our reaction is motivated by the fact that the RPF regime wants to wipe from the history of Rwanda the revolutionary period that liberated the people of Rwanda from the yoke of a feudal monarchy and ushered in national construction once the country had achieved its independence. The ultimate objective of the RPF is clearly to erase from the history of Rwanda the benefits of the republican period to better support their false thesis according to which the Hutus only marked the history of the country with barbarism and “genocide” of the Tutsis. It is a false and divisive vision, and clearly, by propagating it, you have abandoned the interests of the Rwandan people

by Mick Collins
[Here's an Open Letter from the UN Political Prisoners in the ICTR's detention unit by that little airport just outside Arusha, Tanzania. I just got it from Chris Black, who translated it from the French.

It's always struck me as sadly ironic that these innocent Rwandan victims of a foreign aggression (1 October 1990), Nuremberg's primal crime against Peace, these representatives of the rational, majoritarian, revolutionary government of mid-1990s Rwanda, led by its duly-elected and grotesquely martyred (6 April 1994) Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, these patriots who, after unsuccessfully defending their homes and loved ones against a proxy military force from the world's most developed and dangerously venal nations (US, UK, Belgium, Israel) on a full-tilt feeding frenzy for the riches of Congo, find themselves cast into a dungeon of UnReason and charged with the genocide of the very people they had committed to defend by the very neo-feudal Sadists who had razed their homes, slaughtered their friends and families, demolished the national infrastructure it had taken them 30 years to build up, and returned their once-thriving African society to a mere shade of its former colonial self: that these profoundly decent people have not been driven hatter mad or madder and continue to petition their pitiless tormentors and executioners, at the UN and in Obama's Washington, with well-tempered and soundly reasoned historical arguments for the innocence of the majority of the Rwandan people and the redemption of the Rwandan nation, makes me shiver with insignificance.

It is not that I envy their tolerance so much as that I am shocked and awed by their patient understanding--their wisdom. They really make Job look like Mr Lucky. So, if you can read their story--the Rwandan story that is all over this blog--without becoming so angry you bleed from the anus, then you'd better double-check you've still got any pulse at all.--mc]

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

Arusha, Tanzania, 12 May 2009

OPEN LETTER TO HIS EXCELLENCY PAUL KAGAME, PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF RWANDA AT KIGALI

OBJECT: The denunciation of the discriminatory actions and intentions of the Rwandan authorities.

Your excellency, President of the Republic,

The detainees of the ICTR, signatories of the present document, have judged it necessary to react to your racist and discriminatory intentions announced by several Rwandan personalities on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan “genocide”, celebrated on Nyanza hill, at Kigali, 11 April 2009. The Rwandan government stated that 5,000 people were taken from the Official Technical School (ETO) at Kicukiro, 11 April 1994, and were then massacred at Nyanza hill. Those who stated this were Charles Muligande, M. Simburudi, president of the IBUKA Association which represents the Tutsi survivors of the “genocide” and the deputy mayor of Kigali, and Dr. Augustin Iyamuremye, senator and former chief of the civilian intelligence services in the Rwandan government of 1994.

1. Pre-colonial and Colonial Rwanda cannot be a model

The deputy mayor of Kigali stated, “We want to change history in order to present another Rwanda that is not that of the period between 1959 and 1994, a Rwanda like it was before; the one we inherited from our ancestors; the Rwanda of children who live without division, without hate, without discrimination.” Thus the RPF regime pretends that in the pre-colonial and colonial periods the ethnicities composing the Rwandan nation lived harmoniously in peace, understanding and solidarity. It is a complete reversal of history.[1]

The feudal-monarchical regime of Rwanda is not a model to propose to Rwandans today. It was a period of social, political, economic and cultural inequality and led to the social revolution of 1959. Many writers, including eminent Tutsis in positions of high authority, have written about this.[2]

We think that in the search for durable solutions for our country, the RPF must stop the manipulation and falsification of Rwandan history. We believe that the remedy is to search for a democratic political compromise in a sincere dialogue between the power and its opponents. Such a step cannot be accommodated with obscurantism of the past. We condemn without reservation all attempts to rewrite the history of Rwanda for propaganda and ideological aims that seek the monopolization of power by the Tutsi ethnic group to the exclusion of the others that make up Rwandan society.

2. The Planning Of The Criminal War by the RPF Is The Essential Cause of the Rwandan Tragedy

Minister Muligande stated that “the ‘genocide’ of the Tutsis was planned by the government defeated in July 1994,” without furnishing the least proof of this alleged planning. Very simply, he stated that the ‘genocide’ was taught over a long time by the MDR/PARMEHUTU and later by the MRND. Such statements are nothing but propaganda. The MDR and MRND parties never practiced racism or discrimination against the Tutsis. It is well known that under the Habyarimana regime, between 5 July 1973 and the war in October 1990, the Hutus and Tutsis lived in symbiosis. The ethnic divisions of 1990-1994 were the consequence of the strategy of destabilization carried out by the RPF to rally the Tutsis of the interior of Rwanda to the cause of the RPF Tutsis from Uganda, who had invaded the country, as a means of attracting sympathy in world opinion.

Following the social Revolution of 1959, a number of Tutsi dignitaries could not accept the democratic changes proclaimed by the people, and fled the country, and, for many years, systematically rejected all offers by the government to return peacefully and participate in the construction of the country as Rwandans. They took the Tutsi refugees hostage and prevented them from returning to Rwanda as long as they were not sure of taking back their former power to exercise to their class advantages. The Tutsi diaspora dominated by these extremists preferred to organize a movement of “liberation” called the INYENZI[3] and conducted several attacks against Rwanda in the 1960s with the aim of taking power by force of arms. It is for this reason that all the calls made by the Rwandan government to the refugees for their peaceful return to the country were made in vain.[4]

The MRND party practiced a policy of peace, national unity and progress, that was enormously beneficial to the Tutsis of the country.[5] It is false and unjust to accuse the MRND of having persecuted Tutsis or having refused the right of return to those Tutsis wishing to come back to Rwanda. Everyone knows today that it was the RPF who torpedoed the Accords signed between Rwanda and Uganda under the auspices of the UNHCR on 31 July 1990. Instead of permitting the delegation of refugees expected in Kigali at the end of September 1990 to go to Rwanda and work under the auspices of that Accord to bring about the mass return of refugees, the RPF launched a surprise attack against Rwanda on 1 October 1990, beginning its war of aggression.

You must have the courage to recognize that this war, launched at the moment when a political solution had been found to the refugee problem, is the origin of the Rwandan tragedy. The RPF sowed desolation and created divisions, a climate of terror and distrust among a population subjected to four years of RPF violence. By these terrorist attacks and subversion, the RPF provoked the total destabilization of Rwanda.[6] The RPF planned and executed the attack of 6 April 1994 that took the lives of Presidents Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, as well as those of their respective entourages and the French flight-crew, knowing full well that the attack would provoke violence in the country. Directly after shooting down the presidents’ plane, they attacked on all fronts, precipitating total chaos throughout the country. It was the RPF that planned the destruction of the country. This is attested to by the inability of the prosecutor at the ICTR to prove that any plan to commit genocide existed. Indeed, all the heavy condemnations of genocide pronounced against the Hutus before the ICTR are founded on the illegal judicial notice ordered by the Appeals Chamber on 16 June 2006.[7] In Rwanda, courts continue to condemn the Hutus, en masse and without evidence, for allegedly planning “genocide,” all the while refusing any debate on the question.[8]

Despite the judicial notice imposed by the Appeals Chamber of the ICTR on 16 June 2006, in order to condemn the accused at the Tribunal for political reasons, the controversy over this issue continues. Conscious of their enormous responsibilities in the Rwandan tragedy, the RPF has not missed a single opportunity to cry about the “genocide of the Tutsis.” So, it was not without some thought that Minister Muligande stated on 11 April at the Nyanza memorial at Kigali: ”We had the chance to win the war to get recognition of the genocide. If not, we would have become the Armenians whose genocide is still contested because they lost the war.” M. Mulgiande is very conscious of the responsibilities born by the RPF, even if he does not have the courage to admit them. The RPF abuses its current position by imposing the “genocide” of the Tutsis and practicing victors’ justice over the vanquished.[9] The leaders of the RPF must stop falsifying history with ideological propaganda and find the courage to recognize their heavy responsibility in the Rwandan drama.

3. The Reality of the Numbers of Dead in the Rwandan Tragedy

Loss of life is always regrettable. Bu the reality of the numbers of dead in the “Rwandan genocide” remains a great mystery fifteen years after the events. Even if public opinion agrees with the figures ‘800,000 to one million’ victims, so many other numbers have been advanced by experts, the UN, NGOs and the RPF, from 250,000 to 2 million, that total confusion reigns. Gerard Prunier recognizes that there is no systematic accounting and that the numbers depend on opinion more than empirical facts.[10] The Rwandan government of the RPF prefers to maintain this confusion. That is why it has refused to reveal the numbers of survivors of the “genocide,” from which it would be easy to evaluate the number of dead Tutsis and dead Hutus. It prefers to keep things blurred so the world does not know the extent of the massacres committed against the Hutus by the RPF, and, thereby, to inflate the number of Tutsi victims. It is necessary to note that the Census of the population organized under the supervision of the UN (UNDP, UNFAP, CEA), with the aid of countries like the USA and Canada, that concluded on 15 August 1991, fixed the total number of Tutsis in the country at 8.4% of the population of 7,099.844. Thus, those numbers that suggest that the entire Tutsi population was massacred between April and July 1994 are simply fantasies. It is no secret to anyone that many Tutsis survived even if the government in Kigali does not want to publish the figures. We contest these numbers, that only create confusion that the regime exploits to manipulate national and international opinion for ideological reasons.

Concerning the dead interred at Nyanza hill in Kigali, Captain Lemaire, commander of the Belgian detachment at the ETO in Kicukiro in April 1994, testified before the ICTR that the refugees there numbered between 1,000 and 2,000[11], and not the 5,000 claimed by the RPF. Given the circumstances prevailing at the time, the extermination of 5,000 people in several minutes, in open terrain, is simply impossible. On the contrary, reliable witnesses state that the majority of those buried at Nyzana hill are Hutu refugees massacred by the RPF on 22 and 23 May 1994, while they attempted to flee the RPF troops who had just captured the garrison at Camp Kanombe.

The deputy mayor of Kigali City presented the Gisozi memorial as a sacred site for pilgrimage and a sad memorial to the “genocide.” According the official declarations of the government, this place holds 250,000 human skulls. However, they cannot be those of the residents of the prefecture of the city of Kigali as is claimed. Indeed, the total population of Kigali City was, according to the census of 15 August 1991, 221,806, of whom 81.4% were Hutu, and 17.9% Tutsi. Using a figure of 3.2% growth per year, the total population of Kigali City would have been no more than about 240,000 inhabitants in 1994, with the Tutsi population estimated at no more than 50,000. This figure does not accord with the 250,000 skulls exhibited at the Gisozi memorial, especially when one recalls that many of the Tutsis in Kigali survived the war.[12] The number of skulls is even more incomprehensible when one considers that the city of Kigali has other memorials, notably that at Nyanza and Rebero, where the remains of thousands of others are on display. This example shows how important the manipulation of numbers is at a national level.

Several witnesses have stated before the ICTR that Gisozi was occupied by the RPA (the army of the RPF) from 8 April 1994. Therefore, it was the RPF that ethnically cleansed the zones of Gisozi-Kagugu and Kabuye in the Rutongo commune, the prefecture of Kigali, and liquidated all the undesirables, including those displaced persons from the refugee camps at Nyacyonga and Rusine, who had fled to the city after their camps were bombarded by the RPF. Several former members of the RPF have denounced the massacres of thousands in these zones.[13] All these people were summarily executed by agents of the DMI (the Directorate of Military Intelligence of the RPF) in the military camp at Kami, which was captured by the RPF in mid-April 1994. These massacres were an essential part of the RPF plan to eliminate as many Hutu intellectuals as possible. Today, the same logic of annihilation of the Hutu elite followed by the RPF is behind their lists of alleged “Hutu genocidaires” that include those already tried and acquitted. This is the same logic followed by the famous law of forced confessions that lead to the denunciation of, and false statements against, the innocent. The “gacaca” trials are part of an extra-judicial system contained in every jurisdiction. They are used by the regime to eliminate all undesirables. We want to insist that you remember that you, yourself, Mr. President, who first suggested this strategy, when, in 1996, at Nyamirambo, in a large meeting organized by your party, you stated that it would be necessary to have the patience “to empty a barrel of water with a coffee spoon.”[14] The damage of your genocidal policies have exceeded all bounds, and we demand that you end them immediately.

4. The Responsibilities of the International Community in the Rwandan Drama

The highest authorities of Rwanda have spoken out critically on the role of the international community in the “genocide.” So, in your speech of 7 April 2009, you castigated the attitude of the UN as “cowardice,” saying: “We are not the ones who abandoned the people who needed protection; they left them to be killed; are they not guilty? I think that too is cowardice; they left before a single shot was fired!”

We are convinced that such stinging speeches vis-à-vis the international community cannot be allowed to pass indefinitely. However, we invite this same international community to react quickly, those who encouraged and supported your criminal project to take power by force of arms; through the disastrous actions of UNAMIR commanding General Roméo Dallaire, to whom you announced the imminent cataclysm on 2 April 1994[15], and who did nothing to stop it; and the no less criminal actions of the successive prosecutors at the ICTR in Arusha, whom you have succeeded in cowing with your reign of terror.

We regret that the UN did not help Rwandans peacefully resolve the conflict that you brought to the country in 1994, notably by effectively pressuring Uganda and the RPF and condemning the war of aggression of which Rwanda was the victim. The UN did not even condemn the various violations of ceasefires and peace agreements the RPF had signed. The international community complied with your ultimatum of 12 April 1994 that all foreign forces leave the country in 12 hours or be attacked, which accelerated the retreat of UNAMIR from Rwanda at a time when it was needed most.[16] The vote in the Security Council for a resolution to reduce the UNAMIR forces, an action weighted with consequences, aided your organization in its Machiavellian plans to take power in Kigali as quickly as possible.[17] The UN betrayed the Rwandan government after it had launched anguished appeals for help to stabilize the security situation in the country. The UN was paralyzed by the USA and the United Kingdom; it could not intervene in time to send the 5,500 men of UNAMIR II. The Security Council only decided to take this action after the RPF victory. Those forces arrived in Rwanda after you had seized and consolidate state power. They helped you by not reacting to your massacre of the innocents, including the 4,000 refugees you murdered at Kibeho in April 1995.

Not only do we accuse the RPF of having chased the international community from Rwanda at the moment when they were most needed, but we also believe that the decisions of the UN were gravely prejudicial to the people and government of Rwanda in permitting the bloodbath that brought the military victory of the RPF. These same decisions gave the RPF the legitimacy to continue its massacre of the Rwandan people, while crediting it with having stopped the “genocide” and conferring the authority to judge its real victims.

We note with great disappointment that the presence of UNAMIR II did not deter you from continuing the massacre of the defenseless Hutu population, throughout Rwanda in 1994-95, and we will not forget the silence of the UN in the face of the innumerable atrocities committed by your troops when they attacked the refugee camps in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire) and relentlessly pursued their Hutu prey into the forests of Congo. We want to remind you of the 200,000 Hutu refugees who were horribly massacred by your troops in 1996-97. We think that the complacency of the international community toward your inhuman actions does not exonerate you of your responsibilities in the Rwandan drama. We demand justice for all Rwandans, Tutsi, Hutu and Twa, who were killed or today live with severe trauma because of your criminal policy.

5. The Theory of a Double Genocide

Minister Muligande vilified “those who try to diminish the genocide, to deny it, by inventing the theory of a ‘double genocide,’ arguing that there were the deaths of Hutus during the genocide.” He clarified his thoughts by referring to the Second World War, where “there was a genocide of the Jews, but also of 20 million Russians. However, the genocide is recognized as having been against the Jews. It was the same thing with the high number of German soldier’s deaths which surpassed the number of Jews killed, arguing that the Germans were killed to stop the genocide.”

Your adviser’s words show that the leaders of the RPF admit having massacred hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutus. However, we think that this comparison is nonsense and that the events in Rwanda in 1990-1994 bear no comparison with the history of the Second World War. The launching of World War II in 1939 remains entirely the responsibility of the German government, just as the invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990 remains the responsibility of the state of Uganda and the RPF. Hitler launched his offensive to conquer countries and during that long conquest, the Jews were denounced, arrested, killed or deported to concentration camps, principally in Germany. The Jews did not take up arms against Germany. If it is necessary to make a comparison, it is rather the RPF and its allies that made war against Rwanda and who, in their mad conquest of power, massacred hundreds of thousands of Rwandans.

Your soldiers, Mr. President, conducted a war of extermination; they violated the cease-fire agreements and the Arusha Accords to take power by force of arms without any concern for the security of the population. How can you explain to Rwandans that you were concerned with the protection of the civilian population while you obstinately refused all cease-fire proposals between April and July 1994? And why did you literally depopulate all the regions you seized? What can you say when 4,000 Hutu refugees were massacred by your troops a Kibeho in April 1995? These are the sad realities of the RPF regime that you want to hide behind the abusive charge of “negationism,” and thereby stop the parents of victims from expressing their grief and denouncing the injustices committed against them?

6. Pardon and Reconciliation

It is clear from the present account that the RPF committed crimes and carried out massacres against a defenseless civilian population for the sole reason that they were Hutus.18 Minister Muligande wants to cover up this sad reality by stating the Hutus had to die because the RPF fought to stop the genocide. The coalition of the NRA (Ugandan army) and the RPF did not attack Rwanda in 1990 to stop a genocide. The manhunt conducted against the peasants of Rwanda, throughout the war, was not designed to stop a “genocide” against the Tutsis. It is delusional to try to deny the responsibility of the RPF in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda and the DRC, or to minimize them, arrogating to yourself, alone, the right of inquiry, solely because of your military victory. We think that with such logic, national reconciliation is impossible. So you want to hide the truth of the tragic events that plunged Rwanda into mourning and implicate your closest collaborators, civil and military. Also, we consider that the time has come for your regime to see the reality in front of its face, instead of continuing your indecent ideological propaganda, that has shamefully exploited the unhappiness you have inflicted on the Rwandan people.

The policies of your regime have irremediably alienated the Rwandan people from any hope of national reconciliation, even with the artifice with which you have tried to seduce various visitors to Rwanda, there is no remedy for this very profound evil. The persecution of the Hutus accused of an “ideology of genocide” is a way to criminalize the Hutus forever; not only those who were alive in 1994, but also those yet to be born. It is sufficient to accuse them of the ideology of genocide to oppress the Hutus and justify their oppression to the world. This policy, that has made the vast majority of Rwandans pariahs in their own society, is inescapable, because it has become a force of marginalization and exclusion of the Hutus in order to ensure the domination of the Tutsis. A dialogue between power and its opponents is the only way to get beyond of this impasse. But after having decreed that only the Tutsis were victims of the war that you launched, and that the Hutus do not even have the right to cry for their dead, or, even worse, to bury them with dignity, the prospect of political dialogue with your opponents is not on your agenda, unlike the desire for peace that occupies the other national leaders of the region: in Kenya, Burundi, RDC, Uganda, Central Africa. You installed the gacaca jurisdiction that has the mandate to criminalize all Hutus and to force them into self-denunciation and the denunciation of others. In order to allow your regime to eliminate all your political adversaries, present and future! Such a system bodes ill and bears all the characteristics of fascism; it is the purveyor of unhappiness for your and for the people of Rwanda. This is why we respectfully demand that you end it. Rwanda must face up to a number of deficiencies. The RPF regime cannot make up for them with the humiliation, marginalization and exclusion of the majority of the Rwandan people, for whom you reserve only unjust and degrading treatment. This is why we encourage all the men and women of good will in Rwanda and around the world to join in a sincere and constructive dialogue between the power and its opponents in order to build a solid foundation of Truth and Justice for a real Rwandan national reconciliation. We invite the Rwandan government to consider that there can be no national reconciliation based on manipulation, lies and propaganda, on humiliation, inferiority and intimidation, on an ideology of genocide used to silence Hutus who claim their rights. No power, no foreign force can resolve the political problems of Rwanda. It is the Rwandans, themselves, who must resolve these difficult situations. As head of state it is entirely your responsibility to bring Rwandans to the path of true reconciliation by denouncing all actions and speeches that are as provocative and divisive as those spoken during the ceremonies of the 15th anniversary of the “genocide” by your close collaborators. In any event you must understand that such speeches do not serve your regime insofar as they are contrary to the vital interests of the Rwandan people and are not going to bring peace and national reconciliation. It is not possible to have national reconciliation as long as the RPF continues to refuse to recognize its clear responsibilities in the Rwandan tragedy, by making the Hutus responsible for a drama that the RPF, itself, planned and executed throughout the long war of 1990-1994.

Please accept, Excellency, Mr. President of the Republic, the expression of our high consideration.

Signatories

Joseph Nzirorera
General Augustin Ndindiliyimana
Colonel Tharcisse Renzaho
Colonel Ephrem Setako
Callixte Kahmaanzira
Captain Innocent Sagahutu
Edouard Karamera

Copied to all UN agencies including the Security Council, all judges and prosecutor of the ICTR, news organizations, NGOs and other organizations

English translation by Christopher Black, Barrister, Toronto, Canada
bar@idirect.com

Notes:

1 Many historians, including Tutsis such as Alexis Kagame, wrote about the Rwanda of the colonial period.

2 In the New review, Book XXVIII, no. 12 December 1958, pages 594-597, the Abbe Bushayijia, a Tutsi priest who sat on the supreme counsel of the country, denounced the injustices and inequalities of that epoch in these terms: “The feeling of injustice that is sensed at a given moment, the roman plebiens vis-à-vis the patricians, the serfs vis-à-vis the lords in the old regime, is such that today it distresses the Bahutu compared with the Batutsi. They seek their emancipation, their place in a world free and equal for all.”

3 Journal Kanguka No 52 Anne 1992. In his interview in this journal, M.M. Aloys Ngurumbe, former Inyenzi chief, explained the origin of this term. He stated that it was a nom de guerre for those Tutsi terrorists of the period 1960-67. He explained that this acronym stood for Ingangurarugo Yiyemeje Kuba Ingenzi.

4 Msg. Andre Perraudin, A Bishop In Rwanda, Editions Saint Augustin, 2003, pp 276-77.

5 Valens Kajeguhakwa, From the Land of Peace to the Land of Blood and After, Editions Remi Perrin, 2001.

6 Many credible witnesses, including members of the RPF, have confirmed that terrorist and subversive activities were carried out inside Rwanda by the RPF over the long course of the war.

7 This decision, taken to accommodate the ICTR completion strategy, is against the Statute of the Tribunal since the matter of planning remains a contested issue.

8 The acquittal, on December 18, 2008, of all the accused in the Military I trial, a judgement against which the prosecutor has not appealed, provoked protests in Rwanda. Certain authorities in the RPF are agitated and state that it’s as if someone wanted to place the responsibility for planning the genocide on them. That agitation is justified as they know very well that they are the ones responsible.

9 Carla del Ponte, Confronting Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity, Other Press, New York, 2009, pp 177-192 , 223-241.

10 Gerard Prunier, Rwanda, 1959-1996, History of a Genocide, 1997.

11 Transcripts of September 30, 1997, pp 61, 110, 146-147. It must be noted that this includes Hutus and Tutsis both.

12 Note by translator: General Dallaire states that he saw 14,000 Tutsis being led out of the city by RPF forces in mid-April. Bernard Kouchner on his visit to Kigali in late May stated there were then 20,000 Tutsis still in Kigali, and it is known that many fled the fighting in the city early on after the RPF began its siege of Kigali. The Tutsi prince Antoine Nyetera testified in the Military II trial that he saw thousands of Tutsis alive in the stadium when the RPF rounded up all inhabitants as Kigali fell to their forces and began executing Hutus. Therefore the number of dead Tutsis killed in Kigali cannot be more than 15,000, and must be lower than that, as many escaped the fighting.

13 All this evidence is to be found in the archives of the ICTR, e.g., in the document listed as R0000230 of 9 February 2002.

14 E Ndahayo, Rwanda. Les dessous des cartes, Ed. L’Harmattan, Paris, 2002, p.157.

15 Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands With the Devil, Random House, Canada, 2003, p 279 (French edition).

16 See the Belgian intelligence report no. 940412/305 of 12 April 1994.

17 See the Belgian intelligence report no. 940412/305, 12 April 1994.18 See for example the file established by the Spanish judge Andreu Fernando Merelles and many statements and reports available in the files of the ICTR.

To kill the children without wasting time with the soldiers, one took them by the legs and crashed them on the wall, the child died from the broken head.

TESTIMONY AIMING TO DEMONSTRATE HOW THE RWANDAN GOVERNMENT AND THE RPF ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ERRORS, WHICH MADE POSSIBLE THE GENOCIDE. DID THE FPR COME TO HELP THE TUTSI, AS IT HAS BEEN OFTEN REPORTED TO US?

After the publication of the report of the investigation into the crash landing of the civil aircraft that transported eleven people of which civil and military eminent personalities from Rwanda, Burundi and France, among them two Presidents, Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, the newspapers which one is unaware of how they reached the detailed report of the investigation have largely made the echo these last days. For what relates to me, I will provide my testimony on the operation of the FPR and its armed branch APR because I belonged to these two organizations before taking the direction of the exile. I take this initiative with the idea that the information conveyed by the media was deformed for the profit of the latter by allotting me words, which I did not pronounce, what served the purpose of those who had advantage to continue to deny the truth on what occurred.

LET ME BEGIN WITH DECLINING MY IDENTITE:

My name is RUZIBIZA, baptized Vénuste a few days after my birth. Since the beginning of my commitment to the service of (RPF) Family, they nicknamed me ABDUL as my code name. I kept it to my entry in the army in 1990. The reasons of that it is that at the time of the entry to the army, the members of the Family forwarded to us the ones with the others until our arrival in the zone controlled by the FPR Inkotanyi. The list of these code names preceded us. If at the request of your name, you answered by an unknown name, you were killed using an old hoe. You were taken for one infiltrated in the system of the FPR. By afterwards, when I decided to convert me with Protestantism, I chose the name of Josué. For all these names, I never denied that they belonged to me. With the army, every year that I passed there, I bore the name of RUZIBIZA Abdul. I fled the Country in the night from the 3 to February 4, 2001. I had the rank of second lieutenant, with my number of OP 1920.

I was born in Gitagata, Kanzenze commune in Bugesera. I am of the tutsi ethnic group, resulting from the clan of Abanyiginya, in the family of Abahindiro. My mother is also of the ethnic group of the tutsi of the clan of Abatsobe. I am of tutsi origin on the two sides of my parents, and I am orphan of father and mother. My two parents and my six brothers and sisters were killed, victims of the genocide of 1994. I was eyewitness of the events of which I tell you unfolding; I say it in my membership of the army and the Family of the FPR, as one of the soldiers of the APR which fought for the control of their zone of combat, I also say it like pertaining to the ethno group tutsi. I would like especially that those which will have the occasion to read my writings can know the truth about certain events of great importance, that marked the long walk started by the FPR, but which, arriving at the point where the country had to be released, made the fatal error, which generated the tragedy of the genocide.

THERE ARE PRINCIPLES IN WHICH I BELIEVE AND WHICH NOTHING
COULD QUESTION:

1. I am convinced that it was necessary to engage the war against the Habyarimana regime because it denied certain basic rights to the majority of its fellow-citizens including mainly the Tutsi. I however believe that other ways, which are not the recourse to the war should have been tested before taking the weapons. However, none another country was not laid out to provide us weapons, because the NRA was the only national army of a country able to help us. Personal relations between Rwandan and nationals within the Ugandan army, often enameled contempt with regard to Rwandan in a country for which they had fought, are one of the principal causes which pushed the Rwandan ones to want to leave the Ugandan territory, without counting on patience that could require of long negotiations which could go up to five years.

2. I am convinced that there was premeditation of the genocide of Tutsi, planned by the high leaders of the Country and the levels in charge of safety. It was carried out by the Hutu population, except for some Tutsi, which being transformed into Hutu were taken part in it. I am convinced that this genocide would never have been possible without the elements which started it, because even if the Hutu had been taken of madness, it was not possible that they awake the morning and sharpen their machetes to cut out Tutsi until a million people. I am also convinced that the FPR by its armed branch the APR killed with premeditation, on order and the attentive glance of its Chief Paul Kagame. Moreover, I am convinced that the genocide was the result of the problems raised by the war started in 1990, especially by the behavior of the APR in the areas, which it had conquered. I will explain this later.

3. I am convinced and I affirm that the APR massacred people of all ethnic groups, with the objective to sow anarchy to facilitate its seizure of power, with price even if the price were the extermination of a whole people.

4. I do not believe at all that the FPR and his army, myself including, ever stopped the genocide. Rather, I am convinced that we drove out the army of the FAR, Interahamwe, Impuzamugambi of the CDR and affiliated youth, thus after having broken the forces which supported the Government, we seized the capacity. I will explain that too.

5. I am convinced and I affirm that the exhumed bodies of the common graves are not only those of Tutsi, because I know common graves where Inkotanyi threw mixes bodies with the people which they killed, they were buried together by qualifying them all of Tutsi.

6. I am convinced that if the FPR had wanted it, the genocide should not have taken place. I am convinced that so even if the Government and Interahamwe had planned

to exterminate Tutsi within the framework of the genocide, the APR had just acquired the power, which enabled him to reduce the damage by a million died to less than one hundred thousand.

This means that the FPR did not bring its assistance to the threatened people whereas it had the means of them. I will provide explanations of them.

7. I am convinced that after our seizure of power, which was accompanied by massacres of population, arbitrary acts of arrests and war of aggression against Zaire, it is impossible for the current regime to proceed to the installation of an impartial justice, because the magistrates directly or would be indirectly implied in these horrors under the threat and the pressure of Sir Kagame who dictates its will with all, in its current position with the head of the Country.

8. I believe from the bottom of my heart that the allegations on the responsibility of President Paul Kagame, who gave the order to shot down the plane of Habyarimana, are true. The testimonies, which were given about it, do not all emanate from me, I am not able of it, and I could not be personally attend everywhere all that one tells. Testimonies emanate from several sources, exiled and even of those that did not flee the country. Me I decided to speak with the radios and international televisions, because the means at my disposal allow it. Nobody is unaware of that any individual who not only would try to

speak about the inculpation of Kagame, but which quite simply would be allowed to express its only intention to put it in charge, would expose himself to being killed before he/she did not have time to say anything. International courts or other authorities that will receive competences to act legally will be able to decide if the fact of cutting down the plane took place, while having of the evidence and the reasons which make it possible to designate Kagame as author of this crime or to determine that it is him who gave the order to make it happen. Let us satisfy to leave them time, those who deny these facts and those who affirm them will have the occasion to clash in front of the courts. Me I can speak until the limit about my knowledge, the others will take turns progressively.

9. I am convinced that the Rwandan people has just spent 10 years under the cane of soldiers men from the bush, the Rwandan ones lost confidence one in another, nobody can express himself freely or point finger the responsibility for the FPR in the atrocities of the baptized war of liberation. If information on the unfolding of this war were made available to a greater number of people, much explanation on the origin of the tragedy would be found, and thus the reconciliation could be based on bases of the truth, which would emerge some.

10. I believe of the content of my heart that all those of the leaders of the country who spend their time with the radios and televisions to contradict the results of the survey by describing them as handling of the French State want to divert the attention of the population of the truth on the crimes that they themselves made. As for the President Kagame, who says that these are rumors, which are assembled of left on the right that mean nothing in his eyes. I see the things differently, and it will not be long for him to realize that he knowingly made worse errors that caused the loss of innumerable human lives.

THE CREATION OF THE RPF AND ITS ARMED FORCE BRANCH, THE APR

I do not have time to reconsider the history, but the FPR is a collective of small associations of former Rwandan refugees in the various countries. I will insist on young people of the 15 years old and more, which studied in Burundi, in Tanzania, Zaire and in Uganda. They were seedbeds of recruitment of the army. The first had been made recruit by the NRA, the others joined at the beginning or the war.

The important is that young people had grown by nourishing the conviction that the elder ones who one called Inyenzi, had very badly behaved not to gain the victory for which they had fought. The FPR initially settled in the heads of the young people in the hope that all the problems will be solved by them, i.e. by the army, since they did not consider any other strategy than that to fight for their country. In short, people had prepared to resolve the problem by the military way and thought that all was going to depend on the reports of force. This is why, the Head of State Major of the Army Paul Kagame, was much more powerful than the President of the FPR.

Since the beginning, I personally noted this error because the consequences continued

To worsen the situation and even currently this established fact did not change. They are the soldiers, their hierarchy, and their services of information, which direct the country.

On the question relating to the reasons, which pushed the FPR to be attack immediately after its foundation, without awaiting for the results of the negotiations which Rwanda carried out with Uganda on the problem of the Rwandan refugees, the FPR made a point of ruining them while having found the pretext of attacking.

The President Museveni was shown to have recruited too many Rwandans in the Ugandan army because the Rwandan ones were numerous to occupy most of the of senior officers positions. The examples of those who were indicated as Rwandans that they want it or not were numerous: Major Général Fred Lay Rwigyema, Major Général Mugisha Muntu, Colonel Mateeka, Lt Colonel Adam Wasswa, Major Cris Bayingana, Major Peter Bayingana, Major Samuel Kanyemera Alias Kaka, Major Paul Kagame, Major Ndungutse, Major Kale Kayihura of Bufumbira, and other subalterns of which captains and lieutenants, like Twahirwa Louis, Musitu, Karangwa Bombi, Gashumba, Cyiza,

Bagire, Ngoga, Muhire, Kaddafi, Nyamurangwa, Musana, Bigabiro. One cannot all enumerate them, and the majority of them were commanders of companies or more. What irritated more the Ugandans, it was that the Rwandan ones had seized the important places within the strategic stations: services of information and military finances, presidential guards and that of Rwigyema; the others directed the military operations. That irritated the nationals and caused tensions between the Ugandan and the Rwandan ones. Those who chose the date of October 1, 1990 to start the war did no find other solutions to act as they made.

October 1990 many did not believe that the Rwandans were escaped prisoners of the Ugandan military camps, but really they deserted from the Ugandan army. But this does not want to say that President Museveni was not informed by his services of information. However while following the military procedure, the last that discussed the information to be forwarded to the President Museveni was a Rwandan, as that to whom he entrusted his secrecies. Those who crossed the border the first and second days of the offensive formed a manpower a little higher than 3 000. Nobody wanted to be opposed at the desertion of such people, especially that one said oneself: “Leave quickly so that we can recover our stations”.

Errors made:

Rwigyema was quickly killed by some of his soldiers; those who planned his assassination are abstained to take again the direction of the army not to be discovered; one could immediately suspect them of having thus acted to seize the command of the army. He was killed whereas he was the only one with the knowing of how the war had been planned.

When Kagame was requested by the President Museveni to direct the APR, the soldiers quickly showed it of “Pilato”, and stated that they did not want him at their head. Major Peter Bayingana says to him: “You are physically and mentally inapt, how can you claim to direct men? That he was to turn over to whom had sent him, and that he was inapt and unable to direct people. That if that who had sent him wanted to express contempt towards the other leaders of the military operations, he had only to appoint a Ugandan soldier with the head of the APR. To seize the throne of the command of the army, Paul Kagame returned escorted of more than 10 jeeps, accompanied of the Major general Salim Saleh and soldiers of PPU of the personal guard of Museveni, and it was the same day that Bayingana and Bunyenyezi were assassinated… Since this day, Afande Kagame began the long voyage that continues so far; he has directed with an iron hand people of whom he knew that they did not like him at all.

This had harmful consequences, because the direction of the army was entrusted to somebody who did not have confidence in person, at such point that he was occupied personally of all the details; he divided the army into factions, transformed into agents of denouncement; introduced the reign terror and the least counterpart was sanctioned by the death penalty with the old hoe as if it were a question of killing out of the pigs. Within the framework of the division of this army with a view to ensure its domination, he introduced the designation of people by cataloguing them in “positive 1″, “positive 2″ until the “positive 5″. Positive the 1 was those coming from Uganda, those cover confidence everywhere where they were, 2 was implemented to those coming from Tanzania, 3 with those coming from Burundi, 4 with those coming from Zaîre, 5 with those coming from Rwanda. The latter, even if they were tutsi, were to wait at least two years to deserve the least confidence. It was the same thing to reach the headquarters of the army, because the command was monopolized by those coming from Uganda in the proportion of 95 %. The justifications given to this discrimination were that they were

broken with the martial arts, and that they were the only able ones to direct the engagements. There is nothing truth in all that, they were quite simply pretexts to impose the domination from the “positive 1″.

Most annoying was that the least fault made by a French-speaking recruit was rigorously sanctioned. The capital punishment with the old hoe was inflicted or you were inserted blows of bayonet in the body until death follows from there. To have made suspicion on one’s fault, tiredness when one could not advance any more, the attack dysentery following the bad hygienic conditions: here are defects for which “positive 1″ would said: “Here are somebody who took taste with the easy life, it is a dog to be cut down, which can be of no utility “. When you were not able any more to walk because of the wounds, one gave the order to complete you immediately. These cruel acts of torture decreased following the round that Paul Kagame carried out in Burundi among members of the RPF family where the latter prohibited him from continuing to kill their children with the old hoe as the pigs are killed. That if he did not want any to fight any more, he had only to let them set out again and resume their studies. After this warning, people started to breathe. On the other hand, those who could fight and who came from Uganda could commit the most odious crimes, they did not undergo tough punishment, but a sorrow of imprisonment of short duration, and took again their functions little afterwards.

Reconsidering a little bit the beginning of the war in October 1990, General Rwigyema in his tactic, had planned to attack by the Mutara region by the park of Akagera, localities that were very lightly populated. They were advantageous to people in spite of the difficulties encountered to find water and food. They were also more advantageous, in that they enabled him to save a sufficient time to be able to explain to the population the motivations of the war started by the FPR. By humility, Rwigyema took care not to be at the origin of the causes, which could involve the slaughter of innocent populations in combat, which one could avoid.

It is not what Kagame conceived, because Mutara did not abound in food, because there were no heights to be protected from the heavy weapons, that in the low lands one was exposed to all the shootings; that it was finally advantageous to pass on heights to reduce the number of dead and casualties. It should be noted that except for the volcanoes, all these hills were highly populated by Hutu bakiga, who one said that they were hostile to Inkotanyi that fought for the re-establishment of feudal monarchy. In the area of the Volcanoes, the soldiers perished massively. Because of the hunger, cold, dysentery, each unity lost between 5 and 10 people during the first 5 months. For Kagame, that was of no importance, all that made understand that if one refused to obey his orders, he was going to make use of his gun to be obeyed by force. It was that speech that he did not cease repeating with the soldiers at the time of his visits to the unities.

LET ME SUBDIVIDE THE WAR IN VARIOUS STAGES

The First Stage: November 1990 until July 1991.

This stage corresponds to the tactic of dissemination of the guerrillas in all the directions to cause the dispersion of the governmental troops on all the borders of the country to direct the attacks on less strengthened faces. This strategic advantage was obtained by having recourse to a wild cruelty as I will describe it while referring to me with the geographical configuration of North. Attacks in the localities of Muvumba, Kiyombe, Nkana, Rushaki, Kaniga-Gatuna and in the surroundings were launched with an exceptional violence: for example, to condense the populations in the same place and then use machine gun against them indistinctly, to collectively rape women and the girls and kill them afterwards under the pretext of preventing that they do not throw a bad fate to them during the combat, to drive out the populations and to despoil their goods, to continue in their displacements to make them die from hunger, to destroy their houses and to sell their sheets in Uganda, to shave the dwellings so that the owners do not have to think any more of going back there.

On the side of Cyumba, Butaro, Nkumba, Kinigi, Mukingo and in the surrounding areas,

military operations were similar to those carried out in Mutara. The important thing in all that was that people understand that Kagame was the only man to plan the course of operation of combat, to indicate the targets to be reached, to ensure of it the follow-up in all its execution so that no other initiative can be carried out apart from his plan. The armed forces of the Habyarimana government had consolidated their defensive positions so that it was very difficult to cross them to enter to the deep country. I can quote some examples.

In Mutara, for the localities of Nyagatare, Rwempasha, Kangoma, Mabare, Mutojo,

Bushara, Kabuga, Nyabihara, Gikagati, Karama, … each Inkotanyi soldier was conscious of the imminence of the danger. In the localities of the Center, Gatonde, Kaniga I, Kaniga 2, Mukono, Kivuye, everyone knew that one could not venture there. In Ruhengeri, the positions best strengthened were in Nyamicucu, Butaro-Runaba, Rwabutama, Kinyababa, Muremure, Kagano, Bisate, and everywhere else as in Ruhengeri, Kinigi, … What I want to show is that each attempt to attack these localities was violently pushed back, we were put in rout. We had to wash the shame of our failures by proceeding to reprisals on the local populations to make transport our casualties and our dead soldiers’ corpses and to make keep and transport the cattle and the goods plundered to them, then they had to make them dig the tombs in which they were going to be buried, times, one ordered them to kill one another until the last of them, who was in his turn killed by an APR soldier. When the things occurred differently, the populations were connected arms to the legs, one will break their cranium with the old hoe, or one will insert into them blows of knives in the coasts until dead follows from there. Pretexts to kill them so atrociously did not miss, they were for example asking people to reveal the secrecies of the MRND, “how do the soldiers prepare to attack us? », justifications were of all this kind.

When all these macabre acts were finished, we folded up ourselves on our back basis in Uganda. The lie of the FPR since then started, the FPR never acknowledges its crimes. We often swore on our honor that we are not on the Ugandan territory. That continued thus until the release of the war of aggression against Zaire, nobody acknowledged that the APR had crossed the Zairean border.

Second stage: from July 1991 in June 1992:

It is at this time that the APR tried to occupy one of the portions of territory along the border with Uganda. And yet, where the occupation was possible, that point was reached only when all the population was exterminated, the survivors were to flee, and the authorities of the Habyarimana regime could only gather them in reduced spaces, where they received insufficient quantities of food, sheeting to build their small shelters.

If the researchers wanted to know the reasons, which made this genocide possible, they should start by studying this situation (1).

The FPR undertook the tactics to attack the enemy by circumventing it, we cut all the ways of provisioning to him behind him. This tactic was advantageous for FPR Inkotanyi which had insufficient equipment, it pushed the enemy to be leave his defensive positions and to move away some. It was a tactic attacks defensive because it was not possible to resort to the traditional tactics. We were fewer, and much less equipped than the governmental forces. Here harmful consequences resulting from this situation:

1. To circumvent the enemy means that one avoided the line of face between the armies to penetrate in the zones inhabited by the civil population behind the positions of the governmental army. This population not relying on us, it denounced our presence near the governmental army, who could attack us after us to have located and have counted. Among this population, that which was suspected of having seen to us was to be killed, because we did not have the means of maintaining it with the secrecy and did not know how long it was necessary to remain on the spot. That wants to say that each time we had to circumvent the enemy, we had received the ORDER TO KILL ALL the POPULATION WITHOUT PITIE.

2. To venture far from the line of face and our positions meant that we had to survive, thanks to the food that we find on the spot. The population had to be killed to plunder its goods and to destroy the houses to seize the cattle: goats, hens, cows, we nourished ourselves. It happened that one has all that in abundance for then wasting it; each one of us cut down his own animal, and took the parties he wanted to then throw the remainder; for 20 soldiers for example 2 cows, 10 hens, 3 goats were killed for them. All of that, for anybody who knows the poverty of Rwandan, the Hutu who was never informed of the ideology of the FPR, that he only saw coming to kill his children, to rape his wife, to despoil his cattle and to plunder the goods for which he had spent all his forces on, to drive out from his house which one destroyed; that is who wants to understand how the genocide was possible could also start here (2).

3. Sign exhaustion, at a certain time it happened that the Advisers of Sector, Burgomasters, Armed forces required of the population under their control to raise dogs on the level of each hearth or each establishment, so that by their sense of smell they bark before the arrival of Inkotanyi soldiers, and that the population has time to run away. These practices made perish a considerable number of citizens; the tactics of skirting of the governmental positions made it possible to avoid the centers of the population, and while believing to flee, fell into the claws from Inkotanyi which killed everyone, thanks to the darkness of the night, without letting some only one escape, under pretext which they were IBIPINGA (adverse) who preferred to die for the MRND. Even if I inserted this paragraph in this stage, each time Inkotanyi had carried out the skirting of the positions of the army, they started by exterminating the local population

To trap with mines, to draw on buses which transported travelers in the frontier areas are acts which were carried out on a daily basis, so much so that mines were trapped in potato fields, to cut the legs to the peasants and definitively to prevent them from returning to their fields. This was sad. Peasants, obliged to leave their grounds, had nothing to eat, or simply corn and beans lived having given up their banana plantation, without being able to return to harvest their manioc (cassava roots), their potatoes, or their vegetables. It had rather to be made so that the moved populations have occasions to return to them. The majority returned to recover clothing. And yet, the forces armed with the FPR had received the order to kill them without another form of lawsuit. What could generate the fact of making die people of hunger, by preventing them from collecting the fruits of their work, if it is not the genocide? Who wants to know why the genocide was possible should once again start by studying this case (3).

4. The camps of people moved by the war had been established in well-known localities as those which I will quote:

Rukomo-Rwebare (Muvumba), this camps I saw it several times of my eyes, was destroyed by heavy weapons like the mortars of 120 mm, that of Rukara, and that of Mutagomwa were destroyed with the Lance Rockets Multiple (LRM) 107 mm, the Katiusha. In Murangira, time with other the Commander Kyakabale of the Ugandan army lent it to Inkotanyi the mortars 23 mm, 33 mm, 14.5 mm to destroy the camps full with displaced people. It happened that we are not able any more to have explanation on the thoughts of our chiefs. We were numerous to note that the sufferings caused to the population were sufficiently atrocious not to have to add of them others by the use of the heavy weapons. This camp like many others, following the example of that of Runaba, Nkumba, Muhambo were used by way to test like fields of drive for the shootings of anti-aircraft missiles. One drew from the missiles flamers over the camps, and those who were involved to fire the transportable missiles with the hand, found a ground of implementation. Often the missiles exploded in the center of the camp to kill the occupants (displaced people). These threats forced the displaced to move again, to go to seek refuge possible further. Some moved arrived at Nyacyonga, close to Kigali, after being dislodged more than 20 times in less than two years. It was impossible that families arrive in their entirety at Nyacyonga, some displaced who fled the camps destroyed with the heavy weapon buried there initially the members of their families killed: a child, a woman, a husband or a brother, before leaving. Here another explanation of the massive participation in the genocide (4).

Third stage: since the attack of Byumba at the beginning of June 1992 to April 6, 1994
The attack of Byumba was launched by way of test. The FPR wanted to know if it were able to occupy at the same time a greater extent of the territory, because with the development of the negotiations, it wanted to make a show of force so that its claims are granted to him by the pressure of its growing military power. I point out that all the times that there were negotiations; Kagame never said to its army that they could lead to something of good. He repeated unceasingly that the arrival in Kigali was not possible unless using the fire of the gun. These attacks of great scale led us until Rukomo, beyond Byumba in direction of Kigali. It was the same thing on the left and on the right: Mukarange, a party of Kinyami, Buyoga, Rushashi, one starts from Ngarama, Cyumba, Kivuye, ; in all these localities, people who had not had the possibility of fleeing these attacks were massacred. This point also constitutes an enigma, because the FPR made a serious error there. It also turned over to Uganda to encourage the populations to come to Rwanda to collect the abundant harvest left by the displaced, and to help them to occupy this vast territory, which RPF had just conquered for them. People answered the appeal massively to return to Rwanda. The news was spread quickly at displaced, what corroborated the propaganda of the government, which taught that Inkotanyi had come to kill, to despoil the properties of their former occupants, to restore feudal monarchy, to forward the Hutu to the tutsi domination and the known slavery of the old tutsi regime. Here is another way by which the hatred of the Hutu was poked until reaching the genocide (5).

During this stage, the FPR realized that it was able to conquer greater extents of the territory and to occupy them. So that it is possible, it was necessary to carry out a second test to increase their territory, but it was necessary to find convincing reasons for them. Firstly, the negotiations and the mechanisms of implementation of cease-fire had been just signed. For the moment, the FPR or rather Kagame and its army planned that in spite of the result of the negotiations on agreements of peace, it was necessary to seek occasions to reopen the hostilities. It is here that it was conceived to create a special squadron, which was under the only orders of Kagame and his closest collaborators: Kayumba Nyamwasa, James Kabarebe and Charles Kayonga. This squadron changed name with the liking of the circumstances, but here the no exhaustive list of the names that it had to carry: NETWORK COMMANDO, or TECHNICIANS, or CDR COMMANDO.

These names adapted to the small groups, instead of the execution of the mission, or with the various objectives. Those, which were assigned to the supervision of the activities of party CDR were baptized CDR Commando. Those which supervised the activities of the men who split the firewood in the army of Habyarimana, boys of city in Kigali, servants of the high personalities in charge for the country, technicians were baptized, etc.

What is important to know is that this squadron was designed in a sophisticated way, so much so that even those who formed part of it did not know, except for those who were formed together or for those who came from the same unity. The creation of this special squadron had as an aim of:A. To sow the disorder and anarchy inside the country to cause occasions to show the government to be responsible for the crimes of assassinations having to be used for the resumption of the hostilities; B. To plant the mines through the country in a more organized way; C. To establish cells of the FPR inside the country, to diffuse its ideology, to recruit accomplices, to poison drinking water consumed by displaced people, spy on the enemy inside his line of face; D. To organize assassinations of the political personalities targeted by the FPR. Meanwhile, there was the attack of February 8 1993, which aimed to test the capacity to go on Kigali, to evaluate the work achieved by Network in the research of the reasons to reopen the hostilities, even if the negotiations were in hand. Atrocities were made at this time, because where I was in certain communes of Ruhengeri, I remember that at “Base” in February, the soldiers who were there killed out of people of which they burned the corpses. Not having been able to be buried, these bodies broke up along the road and of the river “Base”, until the moment when soldiers of the GOMN had suddenly passed. They were indignant at this state of decomposition of the bodies and of allowed to go to ask whether we did not have shame to live with corpses in a state of decomposition. We called the population to help to bury these corpses, but when the GOMN was withdrawn, these people were also killed.

It is at the same time that we began from the cruel acts of destruction of infrastructures like the electric pylons of Ntaruka, attacks of the dwelling houses of the authorities to the grenade; I remember that the houses of Rucagu and Colonel Gasake were thus destroyed, it was in Nyarutovu and Cyeru… Nobody can forget the made atrocities with Ruhengeri when Inkotanyi were found in impossibility of occupying the city. People know what occurred to Musanze, with the ITIRU and Karwasa, Kigombe and Kinigi, the inhabitants of this area will never forget what occurred in this locality. And nobody is unaware of the atrocities made by Inkotanyi in Ngarama, Buyoga and elsewhere.

BIRTH OF THE INTERAHAMWE, IMPUZAMUGAMBI-RTLM

Kagame had planned to put the negotiations in failure and to invade Kigali, while Habyarimana planned how to face what he called his enemies, which we really were. He created an armed militia, which received a military drive of the armed forces, communal police force, gendarmerie, and of the same services of the Presidency. This youth that will make the tragedy was omnipresent in all the country. And yet all were not of equal virulence in their eagerness to kill Tutsi. This point must be made available of the public, because it is an authentic fact. Any individual who lived in Rwanda during this period can attest it.

At the beginning of the attacks of Interahamwe with Bugesera, Kibirira, at Bagogwe, attackers arrived each time in the buses of the ONATRACOM coming from the camps of war displaced people of Ruhengeri or Byumba. These same people knew already the APR persecutions and cruelty. Other youths Hutu from other region did not understand yet the inhuman behavior their comrades who killed people wildly as one kills out of the flies with a great fury. The majority of the attacks identified before the genocide was launched by these young people, whose cruelty is to be sought in two origins: Government and the FPR. That is why who wants to know how the genocide was possible can also think of these facts (6)

For the FPR, the MRND acted without the knowledge in accordance with the wish of the FPR, because when the MRND involved Interahamwe, the FPR found the occasion to plant mines and to reject the responsibility for it on the Government, and found there the justification to take again the hostilities, while the International Community blamed the Habyarimana regime. I do not deny that Interahamwe like the other extremists planted mines. For the FPR, it was also the occasion to train the commandos of Network, because, when the negotiations were going on, RPF took the opportunity to train more troops and to organize sessions of formation. During only 1993, the FPR trained its forces in the following fields:

- It trained two battalions of commandos and other small unities of less importance;

- It formed more than 400 soldiers intended to form part of the gendarmerie;

- It formed more than four groups of instructors. It planned that in the event of war, each unity has its own instructors to form the new recruits quickly;

- It trained all the officers command leadership;

- It sufficiently trained its soldiers with the urban guerrilla warfare, within each unity;

- It trained and trained the soldiers to make long steps, transporting all the individual equipment, each man with his cartridges and of the bombs allowing him to resist during several days while waiting for that the new provisioning arrives;

- It trained the soldiers in what it called the true history of Rwanda, which was not necessarily different, but which was exempted with the objective to insist on the fact that the best remedy for the problem arising lay in the inversion of Habyarimana and its regime and in the need for the seizure of power by the FPR.

The weight of this was very important because the soldiers never thought that peace could come from the agreements of Arusha. On this point, the FPR adopted the same attitude as that of the extremists of the CDR and the MRND and other Power, the difference being that the FPR taught it to its soldiers without making publicity of it while, on its side, the MRND was praised some with the radio and in the newspapers, the refrain being that the agreements of Arusha were paper rags, or that they were like a dog in decomposition.

During this stage of the war, the FPR/APR managed to control the methods of intoxication of the public opinion enabling him to trap the Habyarimana régime, and all the errors it made were easily rejected on Habyarimana and its government. We were in the stage where the agreements of peace had been just signed, but where two men, Habyarimana and Kagame, two enemy Generals who are at war, and who if they met somewhere in the country would not hesitate to draw one mortally over the other.

We were in the stage where the FPR obtained the certainty that, if it wanted, it would sow the disorder to seize the power, but also, where it was ready to yield to the international pressure to enter to the government. He as the extremists of Habyarimana did not want to intend to speak about this way of power sharing as a durable solution with the problems arising. This is why each one planned an alternative solution if they would have been constrained to cohabit with a view to cause the rupture of the agreements concluded between the two protagonists of the conflict.

Here is what was planned on both sides:

- Habyarimana created what it indicated as civil defense, which did not even dissimulate its intention to disseminate weapons within the population, in each cell and each sector of the country that will be used later on to sow disorders.

- It created armed militia to refuse the signed agreements, even those signed by him. They were ready to make anything with the simple signal.

- It imposed on Radio RTLM on Radio Rwanda and other small affiliated newspapers, the same leading line for saying that the agreements of Arusha were not of any utility for the Rwandans.

- It bought new military equipment that was added to the old ones, so that one disseminates them in all the country.

- It made draw up lists of all the people who had children or brothers within the FPR Inkotanyi, those which were suspected of propagating the ideology of the FPR, those which sought financings to him, Hutu which behaved as of Tutsi, I want to say those who supported the fight of the FPR, so that as soon as possible, all are massacred. Nobody knew the day when these massacres were to be carried out.

- This is different from what the FPR propagates which supports that it was established the list of all Tutsi so that they all are killed. It is a lie because if Tutsi were to be killed simultaneously, that supposes that each one of them was to be carried out by its

neighbors, and these neighbors knew each other very well in order not to have to try hard to draw up the list of Tutsi, because even the little children grow up hearing people talking about them at the village.

Here, I would like to stress that even with death of Habyarimana, and even if he had not been killed, the objective was to massacre all the people inventoried on well drawn up lists, and it is what occurred except for some fortunate, all the others whose one had planned death were massacred in the three days that followed the death of Habyarimana.

On the side of the Government, I affirm that Habyarimana in person or on pressure of his entourage, wanted that these lists are elaborated, and he knew that at a convenient period, the people appearing would be carried out there. Another point that I do not want to forget, and which appears serious to me, it is that the human life which usually sacred, had become like the water that runs, especially for Tutsi; I please say that finally Habyarimana and his extremists had sensitized the Hutu of the CDR and Interahamwe that to pour the blood of Tutsi was a banal act. They had been exerted there in Kibirira, in Bugesera, and at Bagogwe, to test that to pour the blood was possible, and that those who did it did not have to tremble. This was serious so much so that, as I announced, the other Hutu of the villages and the sectors, and even those of the MRND, were not killers, they were astonished by the behavior and the projects of Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi; others fought them until generated disorders within the political parties. Nobody is unaware of how the youth of the MDR (Inkuba), PSD (Abakombozi) and PL (liberals) faced Interahamwe. All that occurred until Habyarimana manage to divide them into Power and Amajyogi. In short, the extremists sensitized their youths to give death without being worried. Here another sign that made the genocide possible (8).

On the FPR/APR side, many things were done that prepared the last day for Tutsi.

- For reasons of control of the Ugandan border, the FPR made enter as much as possible of ammunition to Rwanda, for a use of long duration. This was held at the end of September 1993, on three different localities, and for two reasons:

-To take again the hostilities in a decisive way to seize power, in the contrary case, to dissimulate to use them to sow the disorder after our entry in the Government with a view to seize power by the force… For that, who wants to understand Network, here there is a signal. Those who were selected, myself y included, have to dig very large pits. Like where I was, the cavity measured 50 m X 30 m X 7 m. We deposited ammunition there and bombs of various gauges of 7,62 mm, 11.5 mm, 12.7 mm, 14.5 mm, 23 mm, 37 mm, 75 mm, 76 mm, 81 mm, 82 mm, 107 mm, 120 mm, 122 mm. Ugandan citizens transported all this armament. They were more than 1.000 and transported it a whole day.

We who had the load to ensure the guard of it, we were agreed that one among us could result in the death of all with the old hoe if this secrecy escaped. In this place, three among us were shot because they had been to buy cigarettes without the authorization of the commander. What was affirmed to us by Kabarebe and Kayumba Nyamwasa was that even if it were that we enter to the Government, that there was no question for us of remaining there. We were going to be installed very close of the hiding-places of our

equipment on the border between Uganda and Rwanda, that one was going to supply us discreetly, until the moment when it will be possible to make a coup d’etat.

The other hiding-place was in Kirama in Mutara, Bungwe in Cyumba, and between Kaniga and Gatonde. Actually, nothing other was considered if it is not to be able to sow the disorders to seize the power. Very few people were implied in this affair, one counted them at the end of the fingers, it was Kagame himself, Kabarebe his second, Kayumba Nyamwasa, the Chief of the Information, Colonel Ngoga in North, Colonel Bagire in Mutara, Major Jacob called Rubondo who was responsible for military logistics and others who arrived in visit organized by the persons in charge for the military operations or those who were sent to us. The soldiers of the FPR who were selected for this kind of work were to deserve a very great confidence, and it is among them that one recruited those who went spy on the town of Kigali before the assassination of Habyarimana.

- Several soldiers were disseminated everywhere in the country, with mission of posing the mines, to establish the basic structures of the FPR, to involve with the handling of weapons those who could shoulder to us during the war, to know the operation of each political party, to mix with youths of the political parties, and to follow closely those which the FPR decided D ‘ to eliminate.

- The FPR and its frameworks penetrated in the buffer zone, demilitarized zone, where it started to propagate its ideology. For me it was a good deed, only the error that was made was that whoever did not adhere immediately to this ideology was killed with blows of the old hoe. Generally all its family was carried out little time afterwards.

The FPR tested its tactic of intoxication of the public opinion by allotting to the MRND the crimes for which it was the author. For example the FPR assassinated people whom it had in aversion or not, to cause occasions to show the regime. By using the technicians of Network or his enlarged branch officers of the intelligence of the unities or bands of killers, or of young people to which it had taught how to manufacture small bombs, the selection of the targets to be cut down was done according to criteria’s hereafter:

1° The Hutu who discharged its function suitably, who liked Habyarimana and his Government.

2° Any Hutu who made watch of a certain intellectual level (for example Mr. Gapyisi).

3° Any Hutu whose assassination could be easily allotted to the government.

4° Any Hutu which the survey had of the difficulties of locating.

5° Any senior officer if it were possible.

6° No Tutsi born in Rwanda could cause the confidence of the FPR, if its death could easily be allotted to Habyarimana, there was nothing to regret (it is necessary to sacrifice Tutsi of the interior).

7° Intellectual Tutsi who could not adhere spontaneously to the ideology of the FPR like Landoald Ndasingwa whom we missed several times.

8° Tutsi who in general resided in isolated places were assassinated collectively, and this kind of crimes was immediately charged to the MRND, by example the soldiers of the FPR did that in Kabatwa in Gisenyi, under the command of Gashayija Bagirigomwa, Moses Rubimbura of the service of information. These are not rumors, they occurred at the beginning 1994.

9° Even after the war, the FPR did not hesitate to sacrifice Tutsi to find the pretext of go

to plunder minerals and lumber in Zaire:

– It sacrificed the Bagogwe at Mudende, that which in doubt can require the evidence of them, we will provide them to him

- It sacrificed the Banyamurenge at Biura and elsewhere, and that is not a secrecy for anybody.

- The technicians of the Town of Kigali (Network) committed innumerable crimes.

As I said at the beginning, Network is a broad network made up of elements only known by those who select them. For the remainder, each one knew that with which it was affected. If it happened that you meet some share with another, which you suspect of

being your Inkotanyi comrade, there was even no question of making him a wink, because he was achieving a mission different from your. We were involved to occupy us only of what concerned us, each one personally carrying out the received instructions. The criteria of selection were as follows:

1. To be tutsi of father and mother: the examination of this criterion was not to leave any doubt and was not accepted that after a deepened examination, the candidate was to then enjoy greatest confidence.

2. To refer physical or to look like a Hutu was an asset, because it was not necessary for them to be camouflaged, the others that posted the face of Tutsi, it was necessary for us to circulate with motorbikes. Each time one feared to be known, we put the helmet on our heads, and one endorsed the tools of the agronomists, this camouflage enabled you to go to carry out the task for which you had come.

3. To know Rwanda perfectly, especially the town of Kigali was advantageous because there the center of the majority of the activities was.

4. To be a Hutu, of public notoriety, in condition never of not having resided at Rwanda, and to have shown a great hostility towards the Hutu, by disavowing your ethnic membership, and without fear to pour your blood.

5. To be Hutu, born in Rwanda for missions determined very well and isolated from the

others, one took care not to put to you in contact with other missions dispatched at Kigali.

Openly or without your knowledge, you were spun by more than five agents of the services of information of Inkotanyi.

- Personal work was different from that of the others, it happened that one crossed there during the execution of a mission without knowing, but certain secret instructions could enable you to be recognized mutually in the event of need. There were young people who ensured everywhere the services of taxi motorbikes in the country; they furrowed all the places of gatherings of the politicians, taximen, commanders of the military unities or dignitaries Hutu. Boys of street were sent in the streets of Cyimihurura, among the dockers of the markets, some were going to mix with Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi or Bakombozi. Others worked clandestinely, they worked during the night, and others still were engaged as pump assistants at the gasoline stations. Work was diversified so much that when it took again hostilities there, Kagame had all information, which he needed to undertake his last decisive battle.

Each one of those who were considered to be able to involve the others, received the order to recruit the greatest number of accomplices, and often the latter did not know that they had in front of them a Inkotanyi soldier, they had only the impression to have an interlocutor in sympathy with the FPR. We received also instructions to carry out special surveys into personalities, to provide the reports of them by specifying if their assassination could be useful to us, and if it were possible.

- When the negotiations arrived at the conclusion that the FPR Inkotanyi could enter in Kigali with its 600 soldiers, the trap of the FPR was closed again on a new catch. The selection of these soldiers was done with a highly intelligent calculation, because they were not soldiers only we were accustomed to seeing. Here how that occurred:

1. Each unity sent a man of great confidence, a soldier who had eaten the teeth of the heart (pitiless), excessively devoted, who almost did not need a superior, able to draw from complicated situations without being assisted, gunner of elite, an example of courage and easy trigger.

2. The selection went on the best commanders, the best in the services of information, and which had had a drive sufficient for the urban guerrilla warfare, in order to not see any obstacle to be seized Kigali. We had memorized that one dies the come day, that all the risks deserved to be taken, that courage was the mother of all the other values, that in no case, one did not have to give to the enemy the opportunity to gain the victory.

3. According to the usual structures of command of the army, the Sergeants and corporals had troops under their command on the level of the Section. It was not thus with the third battalion of Inkotanyi, the sergeants were mixed with the corporals under the command with a second lieutenant or a sergeant estimated to have competences of the officers. What I want to explain here is that it acted of an autonomous force, which did not need to receive instructions too much, where each soldier could obey his own orders and succeed.

4. In more of the lesson exempted on the situation of the town of Kigali, our soldiers took turns in the convoys of escorts that went to Kigali, so that the greatest number among us have the possibility of looking of their own eyes all the districts of the Town of Kigali and its suburbs.

- Concerning ordinary Network which was under the high command of Mulindi, the structure somewhat changed, after the arrival of the 600 soldiers with Kigali; us all were placed under the command of Lt-Colonel Kayonga. Front, urgent information forwarded by Karake Karenzi who represented the APR in GOMN and at the MINUAR.

It is as from this moment that the things really changed in our heads, us had carried out all that Kigali had fallen between our hands, and that we were going to burst the belly of the Hutu of Habyarimana. That is here what was going to achieve the Apocalypse predicted by Colonel Bagosora, without knowing that the FPR had prepared one of them as well.

- Disorder within the governmental army, the absence of protection of the city in spite of the omnipresence of Interahamwe, soldiers and gendarmes gave us desire of us for seizing some. Everyone agreed for saying that it was easy to seize Kigali, but that the consequences would be difficult to manage. All those who worked on the ground near the population, near the political parties, at Interahamwe, to the politicians agreed for saying that the greatest number of Rwandan privileged the way of the agreements of Arusha, but that for the extremists, Arusha remained an illusion. For the two parties in the conflict, it did not remain any more that to consider plan A, who consisted in seeking how to take again the hostilities, because plan B, which was to intervene after the integration of the

two armies in a national army, remained a secrecy suitable for each party. All the predictions affirmed that the hostilities were to begin again without fault, that they would be very violent and that they were going to enormously carry human lives among the civil population.

FPR INKOTANYI HAD JUST PUSHED THE HABYARIMANA REGIME AT THE DERIVE TO TAKE AGAIN THE HOSTILITIES.

It was necessary to specify the reasons of them like the hope to gain the victory quickly, i.e. to seek the shortest distance to go to the victory.

Let me be explained on these points:

- After having poked the tensions, and sown the disorders within the political parties, which were divided into factions, ones to support the FPR and the others to fight it, FPR had just operated a division between the forces of the Hutu and the armed forces.

Even if these last were not authorized to make policy, certain political opinions liked much more them than of the others. From the time the armed forces were also divided by these currents, which crossed the other Rwandans. Some think that these divisions were the work of all alone Habyarimana, it is not true, because its capacity of control was limited, I speak about those that fought him, even if they did not support the FPR. The FPR did not like them and it did not need to be liked by them, it required rather that they make errors being able to justify the resumption of the hostilities.

- After having assassinated the various politicians and having tried to assassinate others without success and having rejected the culpability on the MRND, although the MRND and the CDR assassinated themselves some of them, the Government was condemned by the opinion of the greatest number owing to the fact that it sowed the disorder to prevent the installation of the Government of National Union at basis enlarged in accordance with the agreements of Arusha.

The Government fell thus into the trap from the FPR, this last one keeping the high head.

Really, while reconsidering our activities, us other Inkotanyi in the territories under our control, and inhuman treatment that we inflict the innocent populations originating from the North of the Country, it was difficult to distinguish our behavior from that of

Impuzamugambi. Then extremists of Habyarimana, his/her closer collaborators who were often originating in the North of the Country did not find any reason not to admit the CDR in the Government, whereas the MRND which had created it and which made use of it, was going to take part in it. One cannot understand why the FPR and its armed branch the APR were going to enter to the Government being also criminals of blood like I explained it higher. For the FPR as for Habyarimana, the reasons called upon to refuse to form the government were only pretexts, which ordinary people could not understand. What is regrettable is, that in general, it is difficult to render comprehensible with people how the FPR assassinated people discreetly, to then charge the responsibility for it to the MRND and the Government, which did not find arguments to contradict these false charges.

The difference between the FPR and the Government laid in the fact that the assassinations perpetrated by the FPR was the fact of sufficiently involved professionals, it did them without media din, prevented that the independent observers come to check at the time when the Government assassinated with its Interahamwe after their having given drug and made of it publicity by the radio RTLM, by all the newspapers controlled by Habyarimana.

WHY DID THE CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE FPR REMAIN UNKNOWN?

The first trick of the FPR is to deny in block all the crimes, which it committed until the moment when it notes that its consents cannot no longer carry any damage to him. During all the duration of the war, the FPR accepted the presence of the journalists on his territory only when it was sure that the latter were not hostile with its policy. The others were among those it had appointed as its corrupted journalist like Hussein Abdou Hassan of BBC. Everyone wondered whether he was an Inkotanyi or if he acted as a journalist of a radio worthy of respect like the BBC. When it let the journalists circulate on its territory, the FPR made them come according to its suitability, led where he wanted and said to them according to circumstances’ that the zone to be visited was trapped mines, or that combat violent one were held there. Finally, one walked them only in localities prepared for a long time in advance. Often, one led them along the border instead of their showing the interior of the Country. They traversed long distances thus and slept after having been tired without to have to enter to Rwanda even on 1 km of depth. This trick benefited Inkotanyi, no journalist who has ever been able to arrive where they committed abominable crimes.

Another point where Inkotanyi were more crafty ones than the governmental forces, consisted in killing then to burn the corpses, to scatter of their ashes far from the place of the crime. It was not easy to locate the remainders of the bodies. However, we know each other these places. It was practically impossible to surprise Inkotanyi, because the entry in their zone was subordinated to an authorization, and that who ever received it you took him along where you he wanted.

THE RPF INKONTANYI INFLUENCED THE CRUELTY WITH WHICH THE INTERAHAMWE KILLED.

To die in any manner does not without fear, but I will speak about death as inflicted on the two sides by the protagonists. It is what I saw with my own eyes, that it is at Inkotanyi and in the extremists of the Government or their security services.

AT THE INKOTANYI, which opened the atrocities on the 4-10-1990 after the death of Rwigyema, which has occurred the 02/10/1990. I quote it because the army would never have accepted that it directed its effort to keep the civil population silent:

1. To attach the legs, arms on the back, to draw until the bursting from the chest, to put

the victim with knees, to strike of an old hoe the head; it falls directly into the coma; you crash to pieces the two temples, and the head breaks like a piece of ground.

2. To attach people as I described above, to insert stabs in the coasts, to give bayonet and kick in the belly.

3. To attach somebody, he to put a branch in the head until dead for lack of air follows from there.

4. To attach somebody, he to pour oil in the two ears, he simultaneously to give slaps on the temples, the victim is taken of giddiness that makes him collapse.

5. To attach somebody with chains to the neck and to lay him down with same the ground, to draw until total throttling.

6. To strongly attach somebody arms and legs, to suspend reversed on a beam drawn up horizontally until its blood squirts of the ears, mouth and nose, until dead follows from there.

7. When it was necessary to tap information with somebody before killing it, was tortured it to make it die in small fire: blows of knives on all the body, to burn the body with the juice of the plastic cans heated, to bore the sex with pins. To oblige the child to have sexual intercourse with her father or his mother, to oblige the brothers and sisters to have sexual intercourse before killing them, etc.

8. On several occasions, the victims required being able to be killed with the grenade or the cartridge, but they did not obtain satisfaction. Because the torturers took pleasure to contemplate their long anguish patiently. The only ones which from time to time could be killed with the cartridge were girls who had been violated by Inkotanyi, for to prevent that they do not throw a bad fate to them which would make them perish on the battle field. However, even if this crime (soldier raping) were committed on several occasions, the law repressed it severely. That is who ever was caught, was punished in an exemplary way. However, the violated girls who had not been killed were not informed of the

sanctions inflicted to their violators. Another point that I cannot omit to mention is that of the rape of the women, even if this crime were severely repressed. After violating them, pieces of iron was inserted to them or of wood in the sex and the victims died of vaginal hemorrhage.

9. To kill the children without making waste time with the soldiers, one took them by the legs to crash to pieces them on the wall, the child died from the broken head.

10. I do not know differently than by Radio Rwanda and RTLM who diffused that Inkotanyi had cut up the pregnant women to cause the abortion of the children whom they carried. If these facts took place, I do not know anything about the whole of it. Rather to kill the pregnant women, the soldiers gave them blows of knees to the belly and in the coasts, choked by covering their head with sheets of plastic, because according to the techniques of torture of which I am unaware of how Inkotanyi learned them, the latter affirmed that the pregnant woman resisted the blows of the old hoes or that they put too much time to die.

CONCERNING THE INTERAHAMWE, the methods are not different, with share that the weapons used were not the same ones.

1. They proceeded to the mutilation of the bodies of the head to the feet.

2. They used strengthened bludgeons of nails, which broke cranium more directly.

3. They launched grenades where masses of crowd of people had piled up.

4. They killed the children like Inkotanyi.

5. They killed the girls whom they had just raped.

6. They cut up the pregnant women, and I saw them personally.

7. They obliged the incompatible people for family reasons to make the incest.

8. And other cruel treatments, which they had learned from Inkotanyi.

COMMITMENT OF BOTH ETHNIC GROUPS IN MASSACRES

FOR THE HUTU, it is worrying and sad to see how the Hutu massively answered the appeal to kill. Those that really attended the genocide are those who perpetrated it and us Inkotanyi who traversed the country as a combatant.

Let me get well understood, even if the witnesses able to provide irrefutable evidence of the perished, because even the survivors of the genocide remained hidden, without being able to observe what occurred, but this cannot prevent me from affirming that only the Hutu, of the President of the Republic to smallest of their children, engaged in projects of extermination of Tutsi, in the objective to finish once and for all of them.

To deny this obviousness would concern the bad faith, even for those that think that they do not have anything to be reproached. These rare cases are to be congratulated if they did not engage in the genocide, but they cannot contradict that the Hutu were not baited to make the genocide. To exterminate Tutsi was the work of the authorities of the summit at the basis, they were represented by the concerned with safety units, who implied themselves. It was also the work of all the militia, at such point that it is assimilated to a plan of extermination of the ethnos group, as it is stated and affirmed today.

FOR the TUTSI, never Tutsi did not act in concert or with the intention to exterminate the Hutu, they were not able to if one considers their force and their number. The problem arises differently when it comes to Inkotanyi, those who took pleasure to massacre the population like their Chief Kagame had ordered it. I remember that what pushed him to give such orders, are reports on the military operations, who said that it was impossible for Inkotanyi to enter inhabited zones, because these inhabitants drove out us by the public clamor, and because it had been recommended to them to raise dogs so that they bark before our arrival by alerting the governmental army and while making it possible for the population to evacuate their houses in time. And of saying to him: “the Hutu who is with us with the FPR, affirm that the only use of the leaflets cannot make leave the heads of Bakiga (people of north) the ideology of the MRND, as our sessions of propaganda to which they do not even come to assist “. And to add: “Shave all these idiots. ». Kagame held this speech for the first time, at the time of its visit to the Unity “Yankee combined mobile force” which was based with GIKOBA, in Shonga commune, in Muvumba in December 1991. The unities based in this locality was called: Zulu, Nkrumah, Cheer, Mike, Sierra…. all, with combined mobile forces were upstream and downstream from the site occupied by Yankee.

Thus innocent people should not pay the crimes committed by Inkotanyi, who did not know anything of the creation of the FPR; this is why, I test sorrow to note that the Hutu of all the country were based on this pretext to exterminate a whole ethnos group.

In short, the Hutu, under the direction of the power in place and all its bodies, have

exterminated Tutsi, even the survivor who has escaped them was to die; those that outdistanced genocide are to be congratulated. Tutsi, which formed the branch armed with Inkotanyi, killed the greatest number of possible Hutu, I want to speak about all those which were located or about those whose one could find the means of eliminating. This crime is charged to nearly 23 000 soldiers, the majority made it on order, others made it for their own pleasure, on authorization express of Sieur Kagame.

REASONS, WHICH COULD CAUSE THE RESUMPTION OF THE HOSTILITES ACCORDING TO FPR WISHES.

Understanding this point would make it possible to know why the genocide was possible, and what was made to activate it so that the FPR has the pretext of start again the war, to carry the final victory.

This remained the invariable intention of Kagame; it was the plan that he had conceived in 1992, 1993, and in 1994: to show with the international opinion that the Government massacred innocent populations, that it was unable to adhere to the human rights. It reached that point after having been delivered to the assassination of the politicians or Tutsi, to charge these crimes to the Government. The fast victory was only possible if there were reasons to reduce the number of combatants on the battle field, what implied to divide the Hutu as a preliminary, and to seek the reasons for diversion of the attention of the greatest number of the soldiers in favor of other objectives, at the moment when planned to him in a priority way to seize the power. This required passing by the fastest way, which consisted in sowing the disorders by killing Habyarimana, but while sacrificing in exchange, Tutsi who lived inside the country.

Then, so that this victory is possible, the APR was to implement the plan of Kagame: “Let us make it so that the majority of the soldiers begin in slaughters, in rapes of the girls, but let us keep of all that can divert us our only objective to seize the power, to help the people in danger only where that corresponds to the layout of our course. ». Us, the children who had left Rwanda knowing that we leave our parents there, were shocked by the behavior of Kagame, in what it invited to stop the genocide. We were able to ask to us whether the rumor which one once spread were not true, “that there was no more Tutsi in Rwanda, or that if it there had ones which had the aspect of Tutsi, that their manner of thinking and of acting corresponded to that of the Hutu “.

THE DERNIERE STAGE: The 6-4-1994,

THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT HABYARIMANA

The true FPR of Kagame was not that which one described through Radios. As I said, this FPR, which held its meetings in living rooms, was different from that of Kanyarengwe. This parallel movement of the FPR had the interests to assassinate Habyarimana hereafter:

1. With his death, it was difficult to find the person able to gather and organize people

being able to resist with last energy, with advanced FPR. The reason it was that it was very difficult to find somebody who profits from such a political authority, but especially of a real authority on the armed forces, which they obeyed. It was also impossible to find somebody who is as qualified as Habyarimana. In the field of the negotiations as regards external assistance, because he counted friends among the various Heads of States. Moreover, I do not believe in the remarks of those that support that the population did not like Habyarimana any more, because after his death we attended demonstrations of sympathy of all the population. In short, to replace especially proved to be complicated that the Country was to be plunged in the fire of the engagements, a little everywhere, including the town of Kigali.

2. The death of Habyarimana was going to cause disorders, which were to involve innumerable losses in human lives. Except Habyarimana, all the reports of the agents of Network coming from Kigali stipulated that the assassination of an eminent personage was to involve the immediate extermination of Tutsi. This must be considered by all a plain truth. When we assassinated Katumba, who was only one Interahamwe only known with Gakinjiro, didn’t one avenge it while killing for the thousands of Tutsi? Think that Kagame did not raise the question: “that the assassination of a personality like Habyarimana-Kinani can cause? “When we took again the combat with Muvumba, thousands of Tutsi were massacred in Bugesera, how did he think the consequences of the assassination of Kinani? Who was unaware of the tensions caused by the ssassination of Gatabazi, and he was killed by Inkotanyi, who the following day, also assassinated Bucyana, from where blood was widespread on all the country?

Kagame really expected the consequences that were going to rise from the assassination of Habyarimana. These consequences corresponded to the interests of Kagame, who knew that the initial reaction of the FAR, GP, Interahamwe, CDR and their assistants were to pursue Tutsi and to massacre them, without the latter having to know what had occurred. While they devoted all their energy to kill, to violate Tutsi, and to plunder their goods, we were ready to walk discreetly on Kigali and to seize the power.

3. Assassinating Habyarimana was the most direct way to make the agreements of Arusha inoperative, because nobody was qualified any more to continue the negotiations in

the immediate future, to replace the President deceased.

4. The way in which Habyarimana was assassinated and the testimonies provided by those which know something of it, me including, were largely commented on, even if the media whose I am unaware of the sources in addition, diffused as they liked it. That is

not my work, those who carried out the surveys, those who will be shown and those who will be defended know how they will proceed to show or to defend oneself.

Concerning other massacres made by the FPR, I will make the written denunciation of it in a detailed way, while specifying, according to my memories, the responsibility for each one of those which took share there, because I took part in the launching of this war and its exit, I am unaware of only what occurred where I missed at the time of the

facts. Without drawing aside the information provided by the others. The main part of the testimonies on the assassination of Habyarimana which I did not like at all because I fought it, were provided by people that Kagame and his closest did not suspect. He will be astonished to see himself marked by his accomplices whom he took for the faithful ones, or that he continues to regard as such by error.

5. Acting of people who carried out the orders of Kagame to shot down the plane, or to transport missiles in Kigali and Masaka, and for which I request the protection of the international community so that they are not eliminated from the day at the following day in the intention to make disappear the evidence, I will quote some of them so that one remains vigilant in their connection.

- Major RUZAHAZA, who ensured the direction of the soldiers who convoyed the missiles, at the time of their transport from Mulindi. He had the rank of captain at that time and directed a team of 6 soldiers; they were accompanied by the MINUAR that was made up of soldiers originating from Ghana. The latter did not know that these missiles had been charged in the truck.

- Adjudant 2 demobilized Eugene SAFARI whom one called KARAKONJE for

his exaggerated fresh beer consumption, he drove the truck of transport of the firewood, on which one had charged 2 missiles packed in two large cases slipped

under wood.

- Sgt Moses NSENGA: he had the rank of corporal at this time, he is currently taken refuge in Uganda, he is the brother of Kayonga and among those who were with him at

the time of the loading of the missiles on the truck, there remains only sgt TUMUSHUKURU, others like the adjudant Stanley RWAMAPASI, who was a corporal, is deceased in 1998, the other was adjudant SEROMBA, he had the rank of corporal at the time. Was present also at the time of the loading, the soldier Joseph NZABAMWITA, he is currently Lt Colonel perhaps. There was also the Major BIRASA who had the rank of captain; Kagame assassinated this last one.

- Sgt MAZIMPAKA Didier: he can have the rank of second lieutenant today.

He drove the van Toyota Stout 2002 that transported the two missiles used to cut down the plane of Habyarimana. He transported the gunners of the missiles, left at the place from where they could draw; he is turned over to take them for the CND after having carried out the mission. He was often trapped to be eliminated, and he has escaped by chance, by knowing it or by not knowing it.

- Captain Frank NZIZA: he had the rank of second lieutenant in time; he was marksman of missiles of category SA16, that us, we called SAM 16. It is him who shot down the plane and reduced it in crumbs. Before sending three other soldiers in Uganda, for training, it was only him among Inkotanyi with knowing to fire the missiles. The three others who followed the training are: Sgt NYAMVUMBA Andrew, Sgt TWAHIRWA Steven, Cpl HAKIZIMANA Eric, all belonged to the quotas of the High command which ensured the personal guard of Kagame.

- Cpl Eric HAKIZIMANA obtained the rank of lieutenant today: it is him who carried out the first shooting on the plane, it touched it with its right wing without descending it, it could still land correctly on the airport, it was the second shooting which cut down it definitively.

- Sgt NTAMBARA Potiano, he currently has the rank of lieutenant: he was also installed on board the Toyota which had transported the two missiles, like somebody who was to ensure the safety of it, and was turned over with.

- Sgt Aloys RUYENZI: he is currently taken refuge in Uganda with the rank of second

lieutenant. At this time there, he had replaced lieutenant Silas UDAHEMUKA temporarily, the chief of the services of information of Kagame. Ruyenzi followed very closely the meeting that decided to cut down the plane. Among the participants in the meeting which the Major general Paul Kagame directed and who gave orders, appeared Colonel Kayumba Nyamwasa, Lt-Colonel James Kabarebe, Colonel Charles Lizinde, Major Jacob Tumwine, Captain Charles Karamba. This meeting was held the 31-03-1994, all are still in life except for Lizinde who was assassinated in his exile with the reasons in connection with this affair. At this time, Sgt KARABAYINGA, who currently has the rank of lieutenant, the guard of the conference room went up in company of the Sergeant Peter SEMPA, this one last died in Bukavu in 1996, in still not clarified circumstances.

One could draw up a long list of witnesses, because they are numerous to have been informed on the way in which this plane was cut down, especially among those who worked for Network, the soldiers who constituted the 3rd Battalion of Kigali. What is worrying is that any person who will be suspected of having contributed to the escape of this information will be eliminated by Kagame if no guarantee of protection is brought to him, as it was the case of the Captain Hubert KAMUGISHA who ensured the command in missions of detectives that we carry out in Kigali, in particular at Interahamwe, everyone knows that after having decided to kill him, Kagame organized his assassination in Bugesera and forced the escort which accompanied him to affirm that he intended it to commit suicide while drawing above. That why it is not any more in the good graces of Kagame, or who can be suspected of not being more in measure to keep this secrecy was liquidated or is maintained under high monitoring. So that all the Rwandans understand how these things occurred, I go, in accordance with my memories, to publish soon the list of all the names of those who formed part of the staffs of technicians according to their assignment in Kigali and in the remainder of the country.

WAS THE FPR PREPARED TO ASSUME THE CONSEQUENCES

TO CONTAIN FROM ASSISTING THE TUTSI?

This point is very serious, and the day when the Rwandans will understand it sufficiently, they will express in the streets to request the resignation of Kagame, so that he is transferred in front of the courts following the example other criminals.

Let me show you that the APR had all the means of assisting the people in danger, but that for Kagame this objective did not constitute a priority at all:

1. The soldiers of Inkotanyi were accustomed to carrying out a walk from at least 30 kms with 80 kms per day, and to put itself immediately at the combat. That is not an exaggeration because the 59ème Bataillon, party of Butaro, arrived at Miyove before fallen the night, whereas its progression had been lengthily slowed down by Kagame under pretext which he wanted initially to give of be-saying instructions, whereas he knew perfectly the orders which he had given to his company commanders. The following day this 59ème Bataillon continued its walk towards the CND to arrive the 10/04 during the day. Other battalions like Cheer and Alpha, put only two days, a party of battalion 101 arrived, with the battalions of head, a party of the Military Police force arrived the 3rd day i.e. the 09/04. In these moments, the privates and the corporals transported a loading of 30 kg each one in more of their individual equipment, while going during the night and during the day because one needed sufficient cartridges to break the bolt, which closed the road of Byumba. These examples are sufficient to understand the force that we had to carry out a walk of more than 100 kms for those who had left Butaro, and who had arrived at Kigali in three days, and as a combatant during all the course.

2. As the days passed, many children of Inkotanyi joined the FPR coming from Rwanda, at such point that with the saying of those from Ugandan that there was no more Tutsi alive in Rwanda, that Tutsi who were still there were the greedy ones who had refused to be exiled, or who had adopted the manner of thinking of the Hutu, us, we nourished the firm will to assist our parents who were perishing. What was most painful and which pushed some of our comrades to commit suicide is that they tested too much sorrow to be seen prohibited from bringing help to the people who were killed under their

eyes: comrades took their rifle and gave each other death by saying that they had been mistaken while deciding to join Inkontanyi. Only me I was not mistaken, but I too much suffered to be prevented from assisting our parents whereas we had the means of doing it.

3. We knew the town of Kigali more than its inhabitants, because we had to know the passages that even the rats borrowed. We knew Kigali of day like night, with the capacity to locate without error all the corners and the recesses where could reside all those who needed our assistance. Kigali put aside, it was easy to go everywhere in the country, because of the multiple source of the children (Inkotanyi), and of the great number of those who could indicate their region of origin to us.

4. In Rwanda, the localities where there was a strong density of Tutsi that needed help

were very well known, and they were not very numerous: it was basically the locality of Bugesera, of Kibuye, of Butare, of Rwamagana, …, and those who could intervene in a locality could continue in others in the vicinity.

5. And now let us see how Kagame did not have the least will to help Tutsi than they had just thrown consciously in the claws of an unquestionable death.

Let us start with the only town of Kigali.

- How can one understand, with the examination of our forces, the extent of the long distances we could traverse, that the APR could not help people who perished with the ETO of Kicukiro, if he really had wanted to help these people? This is because he did not know that they were there? This would be because this place which one can reach while crossing the road which carries out to the CND at less than one hour of walk, had moved away from advantage?

- What is the distance to be traversed between Rebero and Rwampara prevented us from assisting from people who perished there?

- How to explain that on the small bridge close to the station of Nyabugogo, in direction of Gatsyata, did Interahamwe install a barrier that made it possible to decimate people in spite of the installation of the Battalion Cheer by Kagame on the Jari mount? How

to understand that people were killed in Gisozi, Kagugu, and Kinyinya which were with less than two kilometers of Inkotanyi?

- Which distance was there between the CND and Kacyiru, Cyimicanga, and even between the CND and the church of the Holy Family so that people do perish without nothing being done to help them?

- How to explain that to Bugesera, in Nyamata which is only with 35 kms of Kigali and which abounds in Inkotanyi, were people decimated without the least reaction? There is couldn’t military camps of greater scale than the military positions of Ruhengeri and Byumba where the soldiers full with rage of Habyarimana prevent us from advancing?

Let us see now apart from Kigali.

- Except Bugesera of which I spoke, which obstacle prevented us from intervening in Kabuga, in Rwamagana? Is this so much far that it was impossible for us to arrive there?

If after we showed with Rwandan and the whole world that we were able to walk until Kinshassa to 4000 kms, because this course was not carried out in the plane whereas we had obliged to make zigzags to lengthen the distance to be traversed, what did not prevent us from arriving at Kinshasa in 150 days, that wants to say that we made 26 kms per day. It was the smallest way since we could traverse 80 kms.

- Concerning the distant areas like Butare, why Tutsi there were massacred, whereas the genocide began only one month later… In Kibuye, who helped these people, who only organized their resistance until the end of June, for finally letting itself cut down like animals without shepherd?

- Without going too far, let us return close from the entry of the CND to 20 meters of

Inkotanyi which loved people: why Kayonga who knew that the plane of the President was going to be cut down, did not order or train the civil ones to close the doors of the

CND so that nobody has to reproach us for having hidden Tutsi with the CND?

- How many corpses of Tutsi on which the vehicles ran one did not see with the roundabout of Kimihurura after their having closed the entry with the CND where these people could save their life? How to sacrifice Tutsi more than that?

I mentioned it above, let me repeat it:

KAGAME PREVENTED US FROM BRINGING ASSISTANCE TO OUR PARENTS WHEREAS WE HAD THE CAPACITY AND THE WILL TO DO IT.

What I can add is that each time that it was a question of helping people, one proceeded to it in three different ways:

1. Somebody whom FPR will need to use after seeing that he will be able.

2. People who could be by chance on the course traced by the FPR, it released them and put them in sure place.

3. The seized commanders of pity took the risk of the initiative without the knowledge of Kagame. To help the population tutsi was not considered by the plan of attack of Kagame.

Then let us see which environment reigned at Inkotanyi installed in Kigali during the Genocide.

In my quality of soldier broken with the art of the war, I have the conviction that the rest of the warriors is necessary to have the fresh troops able to take turns and intervene each time of need. But let us see why there was no plan of help. In Kigali, there were following battalions, some arrived there front, others were on the spot made up because they did not exist. There was Alpha, Cheer, 59ème, 7th; the 3èm, the Military Police force, the battalion of Artillery and air Defense, 5th, 21st. With the exception of the 3rd battalion and Military Police force, the other battalions included several companies of ABC, the smallest battalion was made of 10 companies and each one counted at least 170 people. They were large battalions which counted to 2 000 people, plus thousands of technicians who had infiltrated in Kigali.

Actually, and it not a lie, the only Town of Kigali counted more than 12 000 troops Inkotanyi, and Tutsi continued to be massacred everywhere. After the total capture of Gikondo (Magerwa), it is sad to note that while the blood of our parents continued to be

poured, Afandes affected largest of their troops to the dirty jobs to plunder the department stores, like Magerwa precisely. There was no question for these soldiers of going to the help of people, because Kagame had not specified it in the orders that he had given, and that who was warned to take the initiative of it, to intervene where it had not been sent, ran the risk of imprisonment if he had lost a man.

The Sirs Kaka, Dodo, Ngoga, Bagire, Kayonga were all in the competition for the plundering of greatest number of Cruisers Land, and to transform them into jeeps for their escorts, they acted like soldiers very similar to Interahamwe. In truth, all that will rot starting with the top commanders. There ever were better combatants than those I have just appointed higher, let us add there Kaddafi, Nyamurangwa, Kwikiriza, Kalisa, Rwigamba, Nkubito… and several others for which one admitted that they were qualified. But as they had never received the order to go to the help those who needed help, their soldiers delivered themselves to having sex with women, with the plundering of Nido, with intoxicating themselves by Carlsberg, whisky, Mutzig and Primus.

Thus plundering became an endemic disease; Interahamwe killed and plundered, while the APR continued with plundering in Magerwa and in the Sugar refinery of Kabuye.

After having exterminated innocent people in Byumba, they proceeded to hunting for the survivors of the suburbs, and after they started to plunder and convoy the spoils in Uganda. It is sad. I will write all these facts in a more detailed way.

WHY THEN KAGAME AUTOPROCLAMED HIM AS THE SAVIOR OF TUTSI?

He created here an important trap that he tightened, and he will be the first to fall into it. I have shown how the things evolved in the two camps; how Interahamwe increased their cruelty, and that the first who were characterized for their cruelty in the massacres are these even who had fled the combat of the FPR that decimated the members of their families in Byumba and Ruhengeri: they had become as true animal when they emerged with the entry of Kigali, they were not able any more to distinguish Inkotanyi from Tutsi. The situation worsened by divisive propaganda, the assassination of the President and his dignitaries, whereas it was them who were the Masters of Interahamwe and of the army, and they did not see any other person likely to contain the advance of the FPR. Nothing else could result from this chaos created after the death of the President, if it is not the genocide of Tutsi.

What can be the errors that he could make, in comparison of the massacres, torture and cruel treatments that Hutu Interahamwe inflicted to the Tutsi; Kagame was first of all regarded as the providential man who stopped the genocide. And for him, who likes too much honors, it was easy to inform people of this high fact in its search of legitimacy of the power with a view to reduce to silence the other applicants and to impose his will to them. From now on any unmatched vote was repressed like that of the criminal of the genocide. When the international community advised to him to go slowly, he replied to them that they were to keep silent as well, because people were decimated because of their indifference, whereas the fate of the regime of the killers regulated to him by stopping the genocide, “that has to say about our problems? ». And now, he continuously auto proclaim himself the wise one like he really helped the desperate in time of need. One Rwandan proverb said, “the small bull which decimates the herd of cows is born in this herd”. A Tutsi gave the killers of Tutsi the pretext of exterminating them and forsook them afterwards.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IN OUR WAR

Apart from the known thought that all the wars of national release between the rebels and the national armies are held in the same way, I noted many differences in the war of Inkotanyi and those which want to perpetuate the lie seek their arguments there.

Firstly, the war was launched starting from Uganda and was carried out by young people belonging mainly to the Tutsi ethnic group. These young people came from all the countries: Uganda, Tanzania, Zaire, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya and besides but in small number.

This information is sufficient to understand the implication of each one of these countries in this conflict. On that basis, it is clear that all these countries, except Rwanda, knew or tolerated that the Tutsi young people cross their borders to go to take part in this war.

Certain countries placed at their disposal their services of information to facilitate the passage at the border. More than 300 000 forwarded by the Burundian territory.

All passed by Burundi before gaining Uganda. A greater number forwarded by Uganda, because it was an obliged passage.

Secondly, Rwanda, as Inkotanyi do not have an arms factory, they were all to buy them. Buying means that you have customers on the two sides. Rwanda bought weapons and the ammunition with its money, and it received them from its friendly countries per way of co-operation or credit. Among these countries, there is Belgium, France, China, the Republic of South Africa, Egypt, Russia and well of others. War always requires a modern armament to be able to face that of the enemy that means that one must buy new weapons, which require military instructors generally provided by other countries. Nobody can deny that there were French instructors or Belgians who were involved in the training of the Rwandan armed forces. And for Inkotanyi, nobody can deny that they profited Ugandan instructors, and some even went to follow formations in friendly countries. Nothing can occult this logic.

Among the current questions, Rwanda reproaches the French for having involved Interahamwe, and to have thus a great part of responsibility in the genocide. Me I put the following question: which kind of requirement in high technology for Interahamwe required the suitable instruction of French soldiers?

Interahamwe killed with the machete and the grenade, they also had small rifles which circulated largely in the country and whose training on how to handle could be exempted by the communal police force. That would be comprehensible if one had reproached the French for having come to sow the hatred of Tutsi at Interahamwe, to have come to teach them how to overcome human fear to pour blood unnecessarily, or if they had been placed at the head of their command, except that there is not even interest; to kill simple Tutsi of the hills does not require any contest on behalf of a French expert. The French are not saints, because as we hated Habyarimana, they considered him like one of their dearest friends. This means that for me and all Inkotanyi the friend of our enemy was our enemy. Why this lie remains does it have to spread infinitely? I announced all the places where us, Inkotanyi, massacred populations, is this in so far as Barundi which helped us or the Ugandan who involved us and provided weapons must appear before the courts for crime of genocide? After our victory, we started a war of aggression against Congo-Zaire, is this true step only the Rwandan soldiers profited from the training of the Americans, Israelis, North-Koreans, of the South-Africans, the Ethiopian ones, Eritreans, Russians, or Kenyans, and others which I do not want to name; is this to say that these countries which trained our army are responsible for the massacres which we perpetrated on the Congolese and Hutu refugees in Zaire? Our army included elements of Ugandan nationality and nobody disputes this fact since Kagame even confirmed it, he even organized official ceremonies of good-bye, and these are the Ugandan elements who drew with the heavy weapons, 122 mm, 107 mm, 120 mm. For as much Uganda has to be apprehended to answer of the charges of genocide?

THE RWANDANS NEED TO FREE THEMSELVES WITH THE KNOWLEDGE THAT HABYARIMANA PLANED THE GENOCIDE AND THAT IT IS KAGAME WHO ALLOWED ITS REALIZATION, KINANI IS DECEACED, AND THE OTHER ONE SHOULD MOVE QUICKLY FORWARD IN FRONT OF THE TRIBUNAL TO BE CONDEMNED TO THE CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, TO FOLLOW IT, AND TO LET THE SURVIVORS LIVE ENSEMPBLE IN PEACE.

Finally people will understand that the friends of Habyarimana came to Rwanda to defend their common interests, because it could poison the international community that ran to his help. And yet this finished in 1990. Alerted by Habyarimana which Uganda had attacked Rwanda, Belgium and Zaire hastened to send their troops to Rwanda, when they realized that it acted of Tutsi which regained their country, they were withdrawn immediately, the French in their turn said themselves that their friend Kinani did not have to be given up, they arrived at Rwanda to also deliver to the trade drug produced by the company of the Habyarimana-Mitterand families in the forest of Nyungwe. The markets of the armaments and the ammunition enrich the tradesmen by these goods, and this enrichment is an explanation of the relations between Mitterand and Habyarimana, and the FPR made the refrain of its song of it, to be able to cover the serious crimes that it made, with share, which it cannot be discharged of it.

WHAT IS IT NECESSARY TO MAKE NOW?

The United Nations Organization (UNO) should leave its reserve and reject the opprobrium which one covers it without justifications that it did not bring its assistance to the Rwandan one. Are there orders given by UNO to the Hutu and Tutsi to fight? Have one forgotten Kagame’s speech, which intimated to UNO the order to come at the moment or to give up this step in the contrary case, while launching the challenge that he was going himself to stop the genocide? If UNO had intervened with its troops of naive soldiers on whom one would not have hesitated with shooting at, to which will have one to charge the responsibility for it? Who composes UNO? Why, among the Large ones that are the permanent members of its Security Council, would one among be alone to them with being pointed finger? Was the only one with the power to stop this genocide?

ONE SHOULD UNDERTAKE INVESTIGATIONS ON THE CAUSES WHICH MADE THE GENOCIDE POSSIBLE AND WHY IT WAS CARRIED OUT IN SO LITTLE TIME, AND ON THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR EACH BELLIGERANTS, I PLEASE SAY THE GOVERNMENT AND THE REBELS.

Abdul Ruzibiza

Abdul Ruzibiza

I am Tutsi myself. I fought the war and did a lot to stop the genocide. I agree that the 1994 genocide was planed by selfish politicians in the region as well as some politicians in Europe. If you asked me to tell you why I fell out with Kagame, my simple answer is that I thought Kagame was going to usher in fundamental change. This did not happen.


I wanted him to democratize Rwanda. I wanted him to reduce the powers of the president, I wanted him to go beyond ethnic divisions, I wanted him to unite Rwandans. This he failed. First, it became a principle that any Tutsi army officer who got involved with or married a Hutu lady was either killed or the relationship was frustrated. This was done with Kagame’s approval.

What is interesting is that the game Kagame is playing against the Hutu and Twa is the very game the Hutu will play against the Tutsi when they also reorganize and come to power. You wait, it wont take too long!

It is true there are no identity cards indicating who is Tutsi, Hutu or Twa. But frankly speaking, is there any sober person who has ever lived in Rwanda under Kagame that would say there is no discrimination? True, discrimination in Rwanda is now done secretly unlike before the Genocide. For example, let us mention the two camps that are the masters of appointments in Rwanda namely the James Musoni and the Dr. Ndahiro camps. Who can qualify through either of these camps for appointment if he/she is not Tutsi? No doubt there are some Hutus in “strategic” places. But let us be open, do such people like the Prime Minister, the Speaker of Parliament, the Minister of defense, etc, all of whom are Hutu, make any crucial decision? It is even clear from their facial expression that they are insecure. Some Tutsi young boys are real the controllers of these seemingly strong men. Friends … let us be frank. Kagame regime must change or else, when the Hutu finally take power, the Tutsi should be prepared to be treated the same way.

There is a problem in Kigali under Kagame, every thing that comes up, they will immediately go to their defensive. Every body who tries to say something contrary to the “correct line” is immediately referred to as a killer!

By the way, do you know how many people we as RPA killed in Byumba and in many other places? Why isn’t this also talked about openly? Do you know how many Hutu that were killed by RPA?! Do you know how many Tutsi have been killed by Kagame? Dont just blindly defend Kagame, he is a killer!! This he knows himself. He even ever asked us in some senior officers’ meeting “what will happen when the world comes to know everything we did?” Do you think France and Spain are stupid? Those guys are right. The only mistake they did is that their list of wanted RPA officers is short. Also, the list does not include Tutsi civilians who killed. Otherwise Kagame is a killer!
(The writer is referring to international arrest warrants issued by a Spanish judge. See “Spanish judge issues arrest warrant for 40 Rwandan army officers and men” of 13 Feb 2008 on our front page – Editor)

The common belief that Kagame does not stomach corruption .. wait a moment! All the names of people like Kalegeya and others, whom Kagame allegedly “dealt with” for corruption are simply sacrifices. It is because they disagreed with the guy ( Kagame) on the way forwards for the administration of the state. The real corrupt people who accept to do business for Kagame are never bothered! Consider James Musoni, Dr. Ndahiro, Nziza, among others. The good thing with Kagame, and as some writer refered to him as being good at creating a positive image of himself in public is that when one opposes him, he will get rid of that person under pretext of “fighting corruption”. What about Kagame’s wife? Do you know how corrupt she is? What about the Charles Kayongas, James, etc.. these are extremely corrupt guys.

Just pray that there is a change in Kagame’s approach or let us us pray for a bloodless regime change in Kigali.

Mugisha ( Europe)

The US Sponsored “Rwanda Genocide” and its Aftermath
Psychological Warfare, Embedded Reporters and the Hunting of Refugees

by Keith Harmon Snow

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 Rwanda 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 14 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 on our 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 2^nd 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 2^nd 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 reportedly fought 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 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 2^nd 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 13^th 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 13^th 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 1^st 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 terrorism of the RPF kind.¹⁸⁵ ~

NOTES

¹ The initial invasion was led by the legendary leader and one of the founders of the RPF, Major General Fred Gisa Rwigema, who just a few months before had been the Ugandan Vice-Minister of Defense. Rwigema and his two seconds were murdered reportedly on the orders of Museveni, and Kagame was brought back from the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, to take command. See : Mick Collins, « The General’s Book on Rwanda, » <http://cirqueminime.blogcollective.com/blog/_archives/2005/5/21/877913.html>.

² See Professor Peter Erlinder, “The Great Rwanda ‘Genocide Coverup’,” Global Research. February 20, 2008,
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8137>.

³ See: “Genocide Negationists Head to Canada,” Rwanda News Agency, March 5, 2008,
<http://allafrica.com/stories/200803060958.html>.

⁴ Thijs Bouwknegt, “Rwanda’s Genocide: Remembrance and Ideology,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, April 4, 2008, <http://internationaljustice.rnw.nl/tribunals/ICTR/080403-rwanda-genocide-ideology>.

⁵ Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, International Panel of Eminent Personalities, Section 18.39, <http://www.africa-union.org/Official_documents/reports/Report_rowanda_genocide.pdf >.

⁶ See: International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes of Africa, <www.veritasrwandaforum.org>.

7 The Report by French Anti-Terrorist Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière on the Shooting Down of Rwandan President Habyarimana’s Plane on April 6, 1994.

⁸ Legitimate Rwandan asylum seekers in the U.K. and U.S., several Rwandans who have gained citizenship, and certain Rwandan journalists under threat of persecution who were used as sources for this story cannot be identified.

⁹ Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/newsid_6120000/newsid_6123000/nb_wm_6123042.stm>.

¹⁰ “Rwanda Urges Canada to Extradite ‘Genocide Masterminds’,” CBC News, August 31, 2007.

¹¹ Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Suspect Worked at UK Trust,” BBC. November 6, 2006.

¹² Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Suspect Worked at UK Trust,” BBC. November 6, 2006.

¹³ Private communication, Rosalie Brown, March 2008.

¹⁴ Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, UNHCR 1951.

¹⁵ “Rwanda seeks genocide fugitives from Britain,” Reuters, November 7, 2006.

¹⁶ “Rwanda seeks genocide fugitives from Britain,” Reuters, November 7, 2006.

¹⁷ Private communication, Hutu Rwandan and U.K. citizen “Patrick Mahoro” (pseudonym used for his protection), March 2008.

¹⁸ Private communication, “Patrick Mahoro,” March 2008.

¹⁹ Private communication, “Patrick Mahoro,” March 2008.

²⁰ The Democratic Republic of Congo was renamed Zaire during the reign of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. After the AFDL-CZ overthrew Mobutu the name was changed back to the Democratic Republic of Congo by the short-lived President Laurent Desire Kabila.

²¹ Jean-Christophe Nzeyimana gives an account of life and death at the Mugunga refugee camp in: David Barouski, “Surviving the Rwanda Genocide: An Interview with Jean-Christophe Nzeyimana,” ZNET, June 19, 2007,
<http://www.zmag.org/racewatch/SurvivingtheGenocide.pdf>. 

²² See: keith harmon snow, “Darfurism, Uganda and the U.S. War in Africa,” www.allthingspass.com; see also Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellon Press, 1999.

²³ According to a top United Nations investigator, the IRC moved into bases in eastern Zaire in 1996 and started shelling the refugee camps with heavy weapons. Private interview, name withheld for confidentiality, July 2006.

²⁴ This correspondent has interviewed witnesses to the war crimes committed against Hutu refugees all across the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in Rwanda, Uganda and the United States. See also: Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellon Press, 1999; Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Random House, 2004; and keith harmon snow, Hotel Rwanda: Hollywood and the Holocaust in Central Africa, <www.allthingspass.com>.

²⁵ Private communication, Rosalie Brown, March 2008.

²⁶ The term genocidaire is a French term often used to castigate innocent Hutus as deeply sinister and evil.

²⁷ Private communication, Rosalie Brown, March 2008.

²⁸ Private communications, Rosalie Brown, March 2008.

²⁹ Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/newsid_6120000/newsid_6123000/nb_wm_6123042.stm>.

³⁰ Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/newsid_6120000/newsid_6123000/nb_wm_6123042.stm>.

³¹ “British Charity Employs Doctor Accused of Crimes Against Humanity,” BBC Press Release, November 7, 2006.

³² IBITANGAJWE N’INAMA Y’ABAMINISITIRI YO KUWA 29 WERURWE 2002

³³ http://www.diplomatie.be/nl/pdf/corpsconsulair.pdf

³⁴ Janvier Mabuye, Twiyubakire Mu Rwanda, December 22, 2004, <http://www.ambarwanda.be/pages/contentActual.asp?ActualId=118>.

³⁵ Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/newsid_6120000/newsid_6123000/nb_wm_6123042.stm>.

³⁶ Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/newsid_6120000/newsid_6123000/nb_wm_6123042.stm>.

³⁷ Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/newsid_6120000/newsid_6123000/nb_wm_6123042.stm>.

³⁸ Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/newsid_6120000/newsid_6123000/nb_wm_6123042.stm>.

³⁹ Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/newsid_6120000/newsid_6123000/nb_wm_6123042.stm>.

⁴⁰ Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, International Panel of Eminent Personalities, Section 17.8, <http://www.africa-union.org/Official_documents/reports/Report_rowanda_genocide.pdf >.

⁴¹ Personal interviews with three Rwandan asylum seekers in the U.K. and one source in Rwanda.

⁴² Home Office document, Immigration and Nationality Directorate, Tony Kavutse, July 15, 2002.

⁴³ Medical Foundation, <http://www.torturecare.org.uk/about_us/patrons_and_trustees>.

⁴⁴ Hamra Yucel, MD, Request for Crises Loan RE: Mr. Tony Kavutse, DOB 29/10/76. Previously of Leabridge House, 497-501 Leabridge Road, London, E10 7 EB, Medical Foundation, July 29, 2002.

⁴⁵ Hamra Yucel, MD, Request for Crises Loan RE: Mr. Tony Kavutse, DOB 29/10/76. Previously of Leabridge House, 497-501 Leabridge Road, London, E10 7 EB, Medical Foundation, July 29, 2002.

⁴⁶ Email communication from Michelle Alexander, Medical Foundation, April 1, 2008.

⁴⁷ Sarah Tipton (Housing Advisor), Letter from Waltham Forrest to Dr. Hamra Yucel, August 29, 2002; and Waltham Forest, <http://www.walthamforest.gov.uk/>.

⁴⁸ Jenny Cook (Departmental Administration), Letter from the Birbeck School to Tony Kavutse, August 2004.

⁴⁹ Tony Kavutse did not respond to repeated requests for communication.

⁵⁰ Private communications with Rwandan refugees in London, March and April 2008.

⁵¹ Private communications with Rwandan refugees in London, March and April 2008.

⁵² Private communication, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, March 2008.

⁵³ Nick Gordon, “Return to Hell,” Sunday Express, April 21, 1996,
<http://www.abarundi.org/documents/NGordon_RDA_eng_01.html>.

⁵⁴ The establishment narrative on “AIDS in Africa” offers another example of disinformation suggesting a humanitarian agenda that is merely, in fact, window dressing for multinational corporations and the department of defense. It will not be examined here. I would remove this. It is out of place and deserves its own paper.

⁵⁵ Don Terry, “Suburban America: Hiding place for thousands of war criminals?” Chicago Tribune, July 5, 2005.

⁵⁶ See: “Public Security: ICE Wins Landmark Rwandan Genocide Case,” Inside ICE, Vol. 1, Issue 13, <http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/insideice/articles/insideice_101204_web2.htm?searchstring=rwanda>.

⁵⁷ See e.g.: “Mrs. Bush’s Remarks in Honor of the Visiting Guests from the Mothers to Mothers-To-Be Programme in Capetown, South Africa,” The White House, March 13, 2006, <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/03/20060313-2.html>. 

⁵⁸ Goodworks International has a permanent office in Kigali run by managing director Mary Kamari. The Goodworks promo film Rwanda Rising was showcased on Delta Airlines flights beginning in the fall 2007 (see: Rwanda Convention Association, <http://www.rwandaconvention.org/past-conventions.htm>).

⁵⁹ Africa-America Institute,
<http://www.aaionline.org/About/Board.aspx>.

⁶⁰ Private communications, Rwandan researchers, June 2007.

⁶¹ Clinton Presidential Center, “Rwanda’s Ambassador to the U.S. Zac Nsenga Speaks on the Genocide 12 Years Ago,”
<http://www.clintonpresidentialcenter.org/062806-nr-pc-gn-rwa-pr-rwanda-ambassador-zac-nsenga-speaks.htm>.

⁶² Genocide Intervention Network, <http://www.genocideintervention.net/network/endorsers >.

⁶³ See: David Barouski, “Surviving the Rwanda Genocide: An Interview with Jean-Christophe Nzeyimana,” ZNET, June 19, 2007, <http://www.zmag.org/racewatch/SurvivingtheGenocide.pdf>.

⁶⁴ Several of the Private Military Companies involved in Britain’s immigration detention centres, notably SODEXHO and SERCO, are also contracted to work at the U.S. torture center in Guantanamo Bay.

⁶⁵ “British Charity Employs Doctor Accused of Crimes Against Humanity,” BBC Press Release, November 7, 2006.

⁶⁶ “British Charity Employs Doctor Accused of Crimes Against Humanity,” BBC Press Release, November 7, 2006.

⁶⁷ Private communication, Vaughan Jones, Praxis, March 13, 2008.

⁶⁸ Private communication, Vaughan Jones, Praxis, March 13, 2008.

⁶⁹ Private communication, British Department of Defense insider, March 12, 2008. The same insider has supported the Broken Arrows reports published by Wayne Madsen Report: Wayne Madsen, “Broken Arrows, Lies and the Vice President,” Wayne Madsen Report, April 8, 2007,
<http://www.factivism.com/content/view/94/33/>.

⁷⁰ Private communication, “Patrick Mahoro,” March 2008.

⁷¹ Private communication, “Patrick Mahoro,” March 2008.

⁷² Private communication, “Patrick Mahoro,” March 2008.

⁷³ British Home Office, Immigration and Nationality Department, Numbers of Rwandan Asylum Seekers in U.K. from 1994-2003 (bar graph).

⁷⁴ http://inspectorates.homeoffice.gov.uk/hmiprisons/inspect_reports/irc-inspections.html/

⁷⁵ Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, UNHCR 1951.

⁷⁶ Harm on Removal: Excessive Force against Failed Asylum Seekers, Medical Foundation,
<http://www.torturecare.org.uk/publications/reports/277>.

⁷⁷ Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons:
<http://inspectorates.homeoffice.gov.uk/hmiprisons/inspect_reports/irc-inspections.html/>.

⁷⁸ “Rwandan Man Detained in Edinburgh,” Urgent Action Needed,
<http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/364584>.

⁷⁹ Private communication, April 11, 2008.

⁸⁰ Personal communications with Rwandan asylum seekers in the U.K., March and April 2008.

⁸¹ Uganda Deports 3000 Rwandan Refugees, VOA News, October 5, 2007,
<http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2007-10/2007-10-05-voa38.cfm?CFID=221253244&CFTOKEN=34215106>.

⁸² Private communication, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, April 11, 2008.

⁸³ Home Office News Release (005/2008), Government News Network, January 14, 2008,
http://www.wired-gov.net/wg/wg-news-1.nsf/lfi/156324 (use a uniform font and size for all citations)

⁸⁴ U.K. Home Office, Operational Guidance Note: Rwanda, Rwanda OGN v7.0, Issued 24 January 2007.

⁸⁵ U.K. Home Office, Operational Guidance Note: Rwanda, Rwanda OGN v7.0, Issued 24 January 2007.

⁸⁶ The term “demonstration elections” was coined by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. See, e.g., Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) or The Political Economy of Human Rights: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (1979).

⁸⁷ U.K. Home Office, Operational Guidance Note: Rwanda, Rwanda OGN v7.0, Issued 24 January 2007.

⁸⁸ Private interview, Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana, Laredo TX, October 7, 2007.

⁸⁹ There are many accusations against Paul Kagame for his role as DMI chief under Museveni. See, e.g., Remigius Kintu, The Truth Behind The Rwanda Tragedy (prepared upon request and presented to the ICTR at Arusha, Tanzania), March 20, 2005.

⁹⁰ Private interview, Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana, Laredo TX, October 7, 2007.

⁹¹ Private communication, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, April 9, 2008.

⁹² U.K. Home Office, Operational Guidance Note: Rwanda, Rwanda OGN v7.0, Issued 24 January 2007.

⁹³ The most auspicious one-sided examples come from Africa Watch, a division of Human Rights Watch. See e.g., Rwanda: Talking Peace and Waging War: Human Rights Since the October 1990 Invasion, Africa Watch, Vol. IV, Issue No. 3, February 27, 1992. See also: by Mr. B.W. Ndiaye. Special Rapporteur, on his mission to Rwanda from 8 to 17 April 1993, United Nations Economic and Social Council, E/CN.4/1994/7/Add.1, 11 August 1993; and The Government and Armed Forces Responsible for the Reign of Terror in Rwanda, Press Release, Rights & Democracy, March 8, 1993.

⁹⁴ See: Robin Philpot, Rwanda 1994: Colonialism Dies Hard, The Taylor Report and Robin Philpot, 2003.

⁹⁵ The Operation Guidance on Rwanda refers case workers to the Rwanda lists on two websites:
<www.gov.rw/government/category1.htm > and <www.parquetgeneral.gov.rw>.

⁹⁶ U.K. Home Office, Operational Guidance Note: Rwanda, Rwanda OGN v7.0, Issued 24 January 2007.

⁹⁷ U.K. Home Office 2008.

⁹⁸ See: “Home Office to water down anti-torture/war crime legislation under pressure from Israeli government,” The Guardian, February 7, 2006; and Vikram Dodd, “U.K. considers curbing citizens’ right to arrest alleged war criminals,” The Guardian, February 3, 2006.

⁹⁹ Private communication, Moses Kenneth Bugingo Rugema, April 1, 2008.

¹⁰⁰ The address of Rugewa’s business in London is: Longford Court, Belle Vue Road, London NW4 2BU (move this after ‘England.’ England; Tel: 00 44 [0] 208 201 5722 – Fax: 00 44 [0] 208 202 1616.

¹⁰¹ “President Kagame’s New Cabinet Stung by Allegations of Spy Chiefs Ménage a Trios,” Radio Katwe, Kampala, March 12, 2008.

¹⁰² “President Kagame’s New Cabinet Stung by Allegations of Spy Chief’s Ménage a Trios,” Radio Katwe, Kampala, March 12, 2008.

¹⁰³ Private communications, Rwandan asylum seekers in the U.K., March and April 2008.

¹⁰⁴ Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 1951.

¹⁰⁵ Private communications, Rwandan asylum seekers in the U.K., March and April 2008.

¹⁰⁶ 10 Downing Street, E-Petitions, Rwanda Petition,
<http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/rwandagenocide/>.

¹⁰⁷ Private communication, Rwandan refugee in London, March 2008.

¹⁰⁸ Rwanda Diaspora Investment Ltd., <www.investinrwanda.co.uk>.

¹⁰⁹ Frank Nyakairu, “Rwanda Speaks on PRA Training Bases,” The Monitor, November 28, 2004.

¹¹⁰ Private communication, Rwandan asylum seekers in England, March and April 2008.

¹¹¹ Thomas Ofcansky, Rwanda: Recent History, <www.europaworld.com> and
<http://www.zacharykaufman.com/pub/2007_book_chapter_rwanda_recent_history.pdf>.

¹¹² Private communication, “Patrick Mahoro,” April 1, 2008.

¹¹³ Africa Partnership Forum, October 4-5, 2005,
<http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/2/38983282.pdf>.

¹¹⁴ Private communications, Rwandan refugees in England, March and April 2008.

¹¹⁵ Private communications, Rwandan refugees in England and U.S.A., and Rwandan journalists in Kigali.

¹¹⁶ Rwanda NEPAD Magazine, Issue 002, November 2004:
<http://www.nepad.gov.rw/docs/Rwanda_NEPAD_magazine_issue_2.pdf >.

¹¹⁷ MSAADA, <www.msaada.org>. 

¹¹⁸ IMIZI: <www.imizi.org>.

¹¹⁹ RYICO: <www.ryico.org/index.html>.

¹²⁰ Aegis Trust, <http://www.aegistrust.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=35&Itemid=66>.
Notably, Rock star and Africa champion Bob Geldof sits on the board of Ten Alps television production company alongside Tim Hoare, the head of Canaccord Adams, the advisers that re-launched Energem, the shady diamond and mercenary company, on the London Stock Market in December 2007. See: Ben Laurance, “Energy firm link to blood diamonds,” The Sunday Times, December 30, 2007; and keith harmon snow, “Gertler’s Bling Bang Torah Gang: Israel and the Holocaust in Congo,” All Things Pass, February 7, 2008, <www.allthingspass.com>.

¹²¹ Survivor’s Fund, History of SURF,
<http://www.survivors-fund.org.uk/about/history.php >.

¹²² Private communications, Rwandan refugees in England, March and April 2008.

¹²³ Terri Judd, “Honour for Women Who Dedicated Her Life to Genocide Survivors,” The Independent, October 12, 2004.

¹²⁴ Terri Judd, “Honour for Women Who Dedicated Her Life to Genocide Survivors,” The Independent, October 12, 2004.

¹²⁵ Surf Founder Receives OBE from Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace Ceremony, February 29, 2008, <http://www.survivors-fund.org.uk/assets/docs/pr/surf_founder_receives_obe.pdf>.

¹²⁶ Holocaust Memorial Day, <http://www.hmd.org.uk/files/1157734432-106.pdf>.

¹²⁷ Ultimate Escape Health Spa,
 <http://www.ultimate-escape.com/>.

¹²⁸ Private communication, “Patrick Mahoro,” April 8, 2008.

¹²⁹ Fergal Keane, Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey, Penguin Books, September 1997.

¹³⁰ Trial of Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, ICTR Press Release, ICTR/INFO-9-2-353.EN, Arusha, 28 July 2003. (1 date format)

¹³¹ Private communication, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, April 9, 2008.

¹³² Probably RPF soldiers Lt. Frank Ndore or his bodyguard Valence, both of whom worked with Fergal Keane.

¹³³ Private communication, Phil Taylor, April 3, 2008.

¹³⁴ Lindsay Hilsum, “Rwanda’s genocide could have been prevented. The UN let people die and now it watches as the survivors die,” The Observer, March 28, 2004. 

¹³⁵ Lindsay Hilsum, “Rwanda’s genocide could have been prevented. The UN let people die and now it watches as the survivors die,” The Observer, March 28, 2004.

¹³⁶ Lindsay Hilsum, “Rwanda’s genocide could have been prevented. The UN let people die and now it watches as the survivors die,” The Observer, March 28, 2004.

¹³⁷ Again, the most auspicious one-sided examples come from Africa Watch, a division of Human Rights Watch. See e.g., Rwanda: Talking Peace and Waging War: Human Rights Since the October 1990 Invasion, Africa Watch, Vol. IV, Issue No. 3, February 27, 1992. See also: by Mr. B.W. Ndiaye. Special Rapporteur, on his mission to Rwanda from 8 to 17 April 1993, United Nations Economic and Social Council, E/CN.4/1994/7/Add.1, 11 August 1993; and The Government and Armed Forces Responsible for the Reign of Terror in Rwanda, Press Release, Rights & Democracy, March 8, 1993.

¹³⁸ Fergal Keane, “Ghosts of Rwanda,” PBS Frontline, March 19, 2004.

¹³⁹ Fergal Keane, “Ghosts of Rwanda,” PBS Frontline, March 19, 2004. Add website link to his interview

¹⁴⁰ Donatella Lorch, “Rwanda Rebels: Army of Exiles Fights for a Home,” New York Times, June 9, 1994: 10; and “Rwanda Rebels’ Victory Attributed To Discipline,” New York Times, July 19, 1994: 6. Raymond Bonner: “How Minority Tutsi Won the War,” New York Times, September 6, 1994: 6; and “Rwandan Refugees Flood Zaire as Rebel Forces Gain,” New York Times, July 15, 1994: 1.

¹⁴¹ Fergal Keane, “Ghosts of Rwanda,” PBS Frontline, March 19, 2004.

¹⁴² Fergal Keane, “Ghosts of Rwanda,” PBS Frontline, March 19, 2004.

¹⁴³ Fergal Keane, “Ghosts of Rwanda,” PBS Frontline, March 19, 2004.

¹⁴⁴ Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, 1998.

¹⁴⁵ Private interview, Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana, Laredo, TX, October 2007.

¹⁴⁶ Philip Gourevitch, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda, Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, 1998.

¹⁴⁷ keith harmon snow, “The Grinding Machine: Terror and Genocide in Rwanda,” Toward Freedom, April 20, 2007.

¹⁴⁸ See, e.g., Robin Philpot, “The New Yorker’s Congo Distortions: An Open Letter to Philip Gourevitch,” Counterpunch, June 7, 2003. See also Philip Gourevitch, “Annals of Diplomacy: The Genocide Fax,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2998, p. 42: 
<http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1998/05/11/1998_05_11_042_TNY_LIBRY_000015508>.

¹⁴⁹ Philip Gourevitch, “Annals of Diplomacy: The Genocide Fax,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2998, p. 42: <http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1998/05/11/1998_05_11_042_TNY_LIBRY_000015508>.

¹⁵⁰ See: Chris Black, “View From Rwanda: The Dallaire Genocide Fax: A Fabrication,” SCOOP, December 7, 2005.

¹⁵¹ Private communication, Chris Black, ICTR Lead Counsel, April 11, 2008.

¹⁵² Private communication, Chris Black, ICTR Lead Counsel, April 11, 2008.

¹⁵³ “Genocide in Our Time,” United States Institute for Peace, 
<http://www.usip.org/peacewatch/1998/1298/profile.html >.

¹⁵⁴ John Prendergast and David Smock, Post-Genocidal Reconstruction: Building Peace in Rwanda and Burundi, United States Institute for Peace, September 15, 1999, <http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr990915.html>.

¹⁵⁵ See, e.g., Kane Yerbu (monthly newsletter of the Congregation Baith Israel Anshei Emes), November 10, 2006.

¹⁵⁶ See: Michela Wrong, In The Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, Fourth Estate, 2000: p. ix.

¹⁵⁷ See e.g., Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999.

¹⁵⁸ See the case of Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana as elaborated by Philip Gourevitch in We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda, Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, 1998.

¹⁵⁹ Private interview, Eliel Ntakirutimana, Laredo, TX, October 7, 2007.

¹⁶⁰ “Rwanda Pastor Found Guilty by U.N. Tribunal,” Adventist News Network, February 19, 2003, <http://news.adventist.org/data/2003/1045672278/index.html.en>.

¹⁶¹ Private communication, Phil Taylor, April 6, 2008.

162 Louis-Pual Eyenga Sana, La Monuc nie la présence de l’armée rwandaise à l’Est de la RDC, Le Potentiel, February 8, 2008;
<http://www.lepotentiel.com/afficher_article.php?id_article=59209&id_edition=4242>.

¹⁶³ Kemal Saiki has issued false MONUC press releases to cover for the actions of MONUC troops, some of which involved criminal activities in intent and nature. False statements have also been made directly to this correspondent. See also: David Barouski, “Press Release,” World News Journal, February 8, 2008

¹⁶⁴ See: David Barouski, “Press Release,” World News Journal, February 8, 2008

¹⁶⁵ “USAID and Rwanda Ambassador Celebrate Rwandan Coffee,” USAID Press Release 0411-06-032, April 11, 2006,
< http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2006/pr060411_1.html >.

¹⁶⁶ Development Management Solutions, The East and Central Africa Global Competitiveness Trade Hub: Development of National AGOA Export Strategies, USAID, 5 October 2005,
< http://www.ecatradehub.com/reports/rp.downloads/2005.AGOA.Strategy.Rwanda.pdf >.

¹⁶⁷ Private communication, Eastern Congo. 2007.

¹⁶⁸ Robin Philpot, Rwanda 1994: Colonialism Dies Hard. The Taylor Report and Robin Philpot, 2003; on the RPF cells, Robin Philpot cites: Reed, William Cyrus, “Exile, Reform and the Rise of the RPF/A,” in Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3, 1996, p. 496.

¹⁶⁹ Private interview, Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana, Laredo, TX, October 7, 2008.

¹⁷⁰ Mark Prutsalis, Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania, Refugees International, SITREP #10. May 17, 1994.

¹⁷¹ Mark Prutsalis, Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania, Refugees International, SITREP #10. May 17, 1994.

¹⁷² Mark Prutsalis, Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania, Refugees International, SITREP #10. May 17, 1994.

¹⁷³ Mark Prutsalis, Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania, Refugees International, SITREP #10. May 17, 1994.

¹⁷⁴ Mark Prutsalis, Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania, Refugees International, SITREP #10. May 17, 1994.

¹⁷⁵ Mark Prutsalis, Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania, Refugees International, SITREP #10. May 17, 1994.

¹⁷⁶ Thomas Lang, “CNN: Amnesia at Age 25,” Columbia Journalism Review, June 3, 2005,
<http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/cnn_amnesia_at_age_25.php>.

¹⁷⁷ United Nations Outgoing Code Cable. “The Gersoni ‘Report’ Rwanda,” October 14, 1994.

¹⁷⁸ United Nations Outgoing Code Cable. “The Gersoni ‘Report’ Rwanda,” October 14, 1994.

¹⁷⁹ United Nations Outgoing Code Cable. “The Gersoni ‘Report’ Rwanda,” October 14, 1994.

¹⁸⁰ United Nations Outgoing Code Cable. “The Gersoni ‘Report’ Rwanda,” October 14, 1994.

¹⁸¹ United Nations Outgoing Code Cable. “The Gersoni ‘Report’ Rwanda,” October 14, 1994.

¹⁸² Official and formerly secret documents were obtained due to the perseverance of Professor Peter Erlinder, lead defense lawyer at the ICTR; some were recovered from United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UN-DPKO); most were first brought to the public sphere by Prof. Erlinder in the ‘Military I’ trial of Aloys Ntabakuze.

¹⁸³ Nick Gordon, “Return to Hell,” Sunday Express, April 21, 1996,
<http://www.abarundi.org/documents/NGordon_RDA_eng_01.html>.

¹⁸⁴ Thijs Bouwknegt, “Rwanda’s Genocide: Remembrance and Ideology,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, April 4, 2008,
<http://internationaljustice.rnw.nl/tribunals/ICTR/080403-rwanda-genocide-ideology>.

¹⁸⁵ Rock star Bob Geldof dropped into Rwanda while President Bush was there to show his support for the humanitarianism of G.W. Bush. Geldof praised Bush for his work in delivering billions to fight disease and poverty in Africa, and blasted the U.S. press for ignoring the achievement. “’Mr. Bush,’ said Mr. Geldof, ‘has done more than any other president so far.’” See: “Bob Geldof in Rwanda Gives Bush his Props,” Washington Times, February 19, 2008.

AFP, 22 May 2009

KIGALI (AFP) — A Rwandan high court has rejected a bid by the wife of Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda to release him, a rights group said Friday.

The High Court of Rwanda said on Thursday that Elisee Nkunda’s appeal “did not respect the law” and ordered her to pay legal costs, the League for Human Rights in the Great Lakes Region (LDGL) reported on its website.

Elisee Nkunda’s lawyer said earlier this month she had filed legal papers demanding for her husband’s release, after he was arrested by Rwandan forces on January 22 and held in a secret location.

The former general’s wife had launched an appeal to the High Court after a Rwandan tribunal had earlier dismissed her case.

One of the lawyers for Nkunda, who had led the Tutsi rebel group the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), Richard Rwihandagaza vowed Thursday to track down the person responsible for his client’s arrest.

Nkunda’s arrest was a dramatic turnaround, with Rwanda accused only weeks earlier by Democratic Republic of Congo of backing the cashiered Congolese general.

Nkunda had claimed to be protecting local Tutsis from Rwandan rebels from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), some of whom participated in the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda.

He accused Kinshasa and pro-government Mai Mai militia of backing the Rwandan rebels, while the Congolese authorities in turn accused Kigali of backing Nkunda.

avocats de Nkunda,perplexes mais sans broncher

Une responsable d’un cyber café à Kigali vient de confirmer qu’elle détient la clé (flash disc) de l’avocat du général Laurent Nkunda.

« Il a oublié ici son flash disc contenant tous ses dossiers juridiques. Je lui ai écrit car le disc contenait son adresse e-mail mais il n’a pas voulu venir le prendre. Je l’attends toujours. » a-t-elle annoncé ce lundi 18 mai.

Entretemps, la haute cour de la république du Rwanda aurait accepté de recevoir le recours de l’avocat du général et le proces est attendu aujourd’hui 21 mai.L’avocat, rejette  la décision du tribunal de base de Rubavu qui s’était déclaré incompétent, selon la LDGL.

BBC News, 07 May 2009

MPs in the Democratic Republic of Congo have passed a law granting amnesty to militias in the east of the country.

It is the culmination of various deals to bring peace to the North Kivu and South Kivu provinces, a BBC correspondent in Kinshasa says.

It will include “acts of war” committed since 2003 but does not offer amnesty to those accused of war crimes such as rebel leader Laurent Nkunda.

Gen Nkunda remains in detention in Rwanda since his arrest in January.

DR Congo has applied for his extradition.

A Tutsi like Rwanda’s leaders, Gen Nkunda had guarded Rwanda’s western flank against attacks ethnic Rwandan Hutu rebels – the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) – some of whose leaders have been linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Government spokesman Lambert Mende told the BBC the amnesty would only to apply to Congolese militia and would not cover crimes committed by foreign rebel groups.

Read more.

Rwanda Genocide

Some of us that were in Rwanda at the time and survived those killers, have never recovered. Believe me…, you cannot recover from the death of your entire family, friends, relatives, neighbors and other familiar faces like the old woman(umuchechuru) of the village, the mad man, the shop attendant of the shop you used to buy water..etc.
However, you cannot just seat there and keep quite when you see the same thing happening in Northern Uganda, DR Congo,Palestine,etc. You cannot!!

I felt very saddened when Paul Kagame’s regime conspired with Yoweri Museveni to kill innocent Hutus and Congolese in the Kivu and Ituri regions of Democratic Republic of Congo, on the pretext of fighting the perpetrators of the Rwanda genocide in DR Congo.

I can swear on my life that all those Western compradors (local puppets) running Rwanda today never lost a single relative during the 1994 genocide. Today, our people continue to die in Kivu-both Hutu and Tutsi, because of a divide and rule mindset of Paul Kagame.

For sure, what sort of Banyarwanda can have such a short memory?

rwanda genocide

kigali

Rwanda Patriotic Army

The Kigali regime is not doing any justice to the victims but creating more hatred against the tutsi that will surface and target them again, in a couple of years to come. Please try and think on a long-term basis and not a short-term one, because the colonialists in London and Washington are forcing you to dance to their tune. Gashahurwe, Mukomereeeee cyaneee, banyarwanda na banyarwandakazi!!!

Joram jojo

Editors comment:

Paul Kagame is a Known Killer in Uganda and his spree of killing in Rwanda and Congo does not surprise many Ugandans. Kagame is a hardcore fascist that has no problem killing a tutsi man for loving a hutu woman.
Of course Paul Kagame would never have achived his killing frenzy without the help of his genocidal mentor in uganda, Yoweri Museveni.
What the world should understand is that in private when you ask Paul kagame about whether he sleeps at night with all those innocent rwandans he ordered his killing squards within RPA (Rwanda Patriotic Army-killing squards never wore uniforms) to Kill?
He just smiles and says that, he became a soldier to kill and not protect life because he’s not a doctor!!
When He defends himself in public by arrogantly saying that the genocide against the Tutsi had been planned years before, its utterly nonsensical because many Tutsi and Hutu always lived in harmony with each other till 1994. And if you look at many of the bodies of the genocide victims, their hands are tied to their back. This is a common way of killing in Uganda and was introduced by NRA, now UPDF-Uganda Army of which Paul Kagame was a founder and Chief military Intelligency officer and is known as Kandoya. Kandoya was never known to Interahamwe nor Rwandan Army at the time.

Definitely Hutu Youths-Many of them where internally displaced after being ethnically cleansed from their homes in North-Eastern parts of Rwanda by Kagames’ killing frenzy) killed people they suspected to be allies with RPA(Rwanda Patriotic Army). However, their capture on camera killing was not accidental, it was a planned footage by the western media.

This is how Paul Kagame was behaving publicly before he captured power.

1. The RPF/Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) had a 3-4/1 military-force advantage, which was known to then-General Kagame at least as of February 1993 when the RPF/RPA broke the Arusha ceasefire and nearly captured the capital, that the RPF/RPA had the military power to take power in Rwanda at will. It was the 1,000,000-plus displaced, brutalized refugees who became an ungovernable force that later engaged in civilian-civilian massacres.

2. Between February 1993 and April 1994, while pretending to negotiate a power-sharing agreement set out in the Arusha Accords, Gen. Kagame openly declared to RPA troops that they should prepare for war and he also threatened war repeatedly when speaking with UN and international delegations in early 1994, as reflected in contemporary UN documents.

3. During this same period, hundreds of tons of weaponry and ammunition were illegally brought into Rwanda in preparation for the final assault to seize power and stored in numerous “weapons caches” around the country.

4. By March 1994, UN documents show that the Rwandan Government Forces (RGF) had been decimated by the four-year war of invasion by elements of the Ugandan military, supported by the Ugandan government and military, and lacked the military capacity to fight an invading army AND use military force to stop civilian massacres by other civilians.

5. The former U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda, Hon. Robert Flaten, testified in June 2005 that he personally warned Gen. Kagame and Pres. Habyarimana that if either resumed war by breaking the Arusha Accords cease fire, they would be responsible for thousands of civilian casualties from retaliatory killings that U.S. State Department documents predicted should the war resume…similar to killings that swept Burundi/Rwanda in 1988.

6. On March 9-10, 2006 and again on April 3-6, 2006 the President of the ICTR heard testimony, with supporting U.N. and other documents, that Gen. Kagame ordered the assassination of President Habyarimana to de-stabilize his enemy, and that he ordered the final assault within minutes after learning of the successful missile attack….long BEFORE any retaliatory, civilian killings had occurred anywhere in Rwanda.

7. The evidence, confirmed in original UN documents, also shows that, between April 6, 1994 and the RPF military victory in mid-July 1994, the Rwandan Government and the RGF repeatedly asked for an unconditional cease-fire to permit its few, battle-hardened troops to use force to stop the massacres. When the RGF stated that it lacked the means to stop the massacres without a ceasefire, UN documents confirmed that this was known to be true by Gen. Dallaire and Gen. Kagame in March 1994, before the assassination of President Habyarimana.

8. Canadian General Dallaire testified in January 2004 that: (a) there were only about 5,000 dependable RGF troops; (b) the first obligation of all armies, including the Canadian Army and the RGF, is to defend the “security of the homeland;” (c) and, it was militarily impossible for the RGF/Gendarmes to fight a war of invasion AND stop long-predicted, retaliatory, civilian-civilian massacres.

9. Between April 1994 and July 1994, the RPF was the only military force in Rwanda which was militarily capable of stopping the massacres, with or without a cease-fire, however, on numerous occasions Gen. Kagame specifically ordered field officers NOT to use troops “to save civilians while RPF soldiers are dying” and, as Gen. Dallaire testified under oath, Gen. Kagame told him that civilian killings are “collateral damage” for his war plan.

10. According to sworn ICTR testimony, Gen. Kagame specifically ordered the creation of particular units responsible for “cleansing” civilians from areas controlled by the RPF and was personally present as tens of thousands of civilians were lured to Byumba Stadium in late April 1994 and massacred by RPF troops under his command, among other atrocities.

11. Much of this information can be found in: The Secret History of Rwanda by former RPF Officer Abdul Joshua Ruzibiza, recently published in Paris; the Report of Serge Desouter to the ICTR, an historian of the Belgian “White Fathers” century-old mission in Rwanda; the public and closed transcripts at the ICTR; and, original UN documents introduced as exhibits in the Military 1 case (Bagasora et al) at the ICTR.

12. In July 2003, then-ICTR Prosecutor Carla del Ponte announced that she had discovered enough evidence to prosecute BOTH sides in the Rwandan War. However, shortly thereafter, Pres. Kagame called for her resignation, as did Colin Powell and Kofi Annan. She was replaced two months later and, to this date, not ONE person associated with Gen. Kagame’s successful seizure of power has been called to account at the ICTR (unlike the ICTY in which leaders associated with all major actors have been indicted).

13. In light of the evidence now in the public record of the Tribunal, a formal Motion is being prepared which requests the President of the Tribunal, and the Office of the Prosecutor, to draft the Indictment of Paul Kagame for Murder, Conspiracy to Commit Murder, various War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity and Conspiracy to commit such crimes, all committed by him, and the troops he commanded in Rwanda in 1994.

14. Motions to dismiss charges presently pending against former RGF Officers for actions properly attributed to the victors of the 1994 RPF War of Accession to Power.

Now, the Paul Kagame ideologist would quickly rubbish anything written here as being some Tutsi genocide revisionism. Utterly nonsense because these are all facts and not some fiction. Its Kagame who has killed more tusti and not the interahamwe, visa-vi.
Rwanda and the entire Region will never be stable till Killers like Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni are arrested and brought before justice.

Have you seen the imperialism Art that has invaded Uganda?

Uganda has become an Art destination for lousy European Artists that run Crappy Art projects with the aim of distorting black people’s confidence.


Our resistance to Art imperialism will be through educational pathway to Skill sharing.

We shall use New media content (3d,Animation,Graphics,Photography,audio,video and Comics) to deploy our Art.

The first Art will be Avatars-Africans can also design multicultural avatars.

I’m trying to design as many multicultural avatars as possible because Africa is the cradle of Humanity.

uganda art

uganda art

uganda art

uganda art

uganda art

uganda art

uganda art

uganda art

uganda art

uganda art

Still writing this Post

L'avocat de la famille Nkunda perplexe(Photo Eric Kayihura)

Le tribunal de grande instance de Rubavu(Gisenyi) vient de se déclarer incompétent pour recevoir et  juger l’affaire Nkunda. Le juge avance la raison que le tribunal n’a pas eu suffisamment de preuves que Nkunda est détenu dans le ressort de son tribunal et que la partie plaignante n’a pas fourni les raisons de la détention du général.

La loi Nº 13/2004 du 30 juillet2004 stipule que :

« Lorsqu’une personne a été détenue illégalement, tout juge de la juridiction la plus proche du lieu de la détention et qui est compétente pour les mêmes infractions que celle dont la personne détenue est accusée peut, sur demande de toute personne intéressée, ordonner à l’auteur de la détention illégale, de comparaître devant lui en compagnie du détenu pour expliquer les motifs et les circonstances de la détention ».

Cependant les mandataires de l’état affirment que cet article a été modifié par l’article 19 qui stipule qu’il incombe au plaignant de fournir les raisons de détention  de la personne détenue illégalement pour que la plainte soit reçue.

Le rebelle congolais Laurent Nkunda intente des poursuites contre le Rwanda pour arrestation arbitraire.  Il a ete arrete par les autorites rwandaises en janvier apres la decision du Congo et du Rwanda de travailler ensemble pour mettre fin aux problemes des rebelles hutus rwandais des Forces démocratiques pour la libération du Rwanda (FDLR)en echange de l’arret de Nkunda qui avait trouver l’abri au Rwanda.  Il a ete recherche par les autorites congolaises pour crimes de guerre, notamment pour massacres, viols et recrutement d’enfants soldats, au cours de cinq années d’insurrection dans l’Est congolais.  Le Rwanda va extrader Nkunda au Congo.  Lire l’article: http://fr.news.yahoo.com/4/20090417/twl-rwanda-rdc-nkunda-bd5ae06.html

Le gouvernement congolais et le CNDP parlent du sort à réserver aux ex-rebelles du CNDP, qui ont signé un accord de paix le mois dernier.  On discute de la possibilité d’amnistier Laurent Nkunda, l’ex-chef des rebelles du CNDP.  Mais comment est-ce possible?!  Il est responsable de tant de crimes contre l’humanité, de viols, de torture, de violations de droit de l’homme, etc.  Pourtant, on dit que “les personnes reconnues coupables des faits de génocide, des crime de guerre ou des crimes contre l’humanité, ne bénéficieront pas de cette amnistie.”  On espère bien…  Lire l’article: http://fr.news.yahoo.com/34/20090402/tfr-rdc-laurent-nkunda-peut-il-etre-amni-2d8b7e3.html