RWANDA:April 6, 1994 - April 6, 2012 Commemorating More Than 18 years of Terrorism in Central Africa

PENTAGON PRODUCES SATELLITE PHOTOS OF 1994 RWANDA GENOCIDE

keith harmon snow
6 April 2012

Eighteen years after the historic '100 days of genocide' in Rwanda the United States Government has suddenly produced never-before-seen satellite images to support the genocide extradition trial of a former Rwandan now U.S. citizen in New Hampshire (USA). The existence of satellite imagery from 1994 would enable the 'international community' to further explore heretofore hidden facts about the double presidential assassinations of April 6 or massacres committed before, during and after 1994.  As the world commemorates the official Rwanda genocide story on the 18th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide the people of Central Africa continue to suffer under the brutal terrorism of the Kagame military regime.  Instead of celebrating, we should be asking: who are the real victims and who are the real criminals, and what really happened in Rwanda?

                                                             In his opening statements in a Concord, New Hampshire

(USA) courthouse on February 23, 2012, federal prosecutor John Capin launched the U.S. government's trial against a 41 year-old Rwandan 'genocide fugitive' by wielding satellite photographs purportedly showing the road blocks where she "commanded extremist Hutu militia and ordered the rapes and killings of Tutsi" in Rwanda in 1994.

In a remarkable development, this is the first time in the history of the 'Rwanda genocide' trials or related Rwanda asylum hearings where Pentagon satellite photographs have been produced as evidence, and the first time that the existence of satellite photographs taken over Rwanda during the so-called '100 days of genocide' has ever been revealed.

Later in the trial the U.S. prosecutors produced a 'Pentagon analyst' who testified about the satellite photographs.  The name of the Pentagon analyst and the satellite photographs have not been made public.

The existence of satellite reconnaissance and intelligence photographs newly implicates the U.S. government in the mass atrocities of 1994, and raises serious new questions about the coverup of the double presidential assassinations of April 6, 1994 and the atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) commanded by now President Paul Kagame.

The sudden and unexpected revelation of the existence of satellite imagery shot over Rwanda in 1994 also further corroborates claims and evidence that U.S. and Pentagon officials had plenty of satellite evidence of the numbers and whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees massacred by the Kagame war machine in Congo's forests.

Eighteen years after the so-called '1994 Rwanda genocide', Rwanda is today everywhere peddled as an economic miracle of recovery and freedom, once again 'the Switzerland of Africa' and the model homeland for the Tutsi 'Jews of Africa' narrative.  All thanks to His Supreme Majesty President Paul Kagame, who is everywhere applauded for rescuing the Tutsis, stopping the genocide, and rebuilding Rwanda in His own image.

Meanwhile, the real situation for ordinary people in Central Africa is everywhere inhumane and unjust.  The average Ugandan citizen suffers under the brutal dictatorship of Yoweri Museveni.  The people in northern Uganda, already subject to genocide as policy under the Museveni government, now have a new threat: the hysterical KONY2012 movement.

The people of Congo continue to suffer under the terrorist government of Hyppolite Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila), a Tutsi and the nephew of Rwandan Tutsi general James Kabarebe.  Since January 2012 more than 100,000 Congolese have been internally displaced by violence under the occupation of the Kagame regime in the Kivu provinces.

And, as it as been since 1994, both Hutus and Tutsis suffer massive repression under the Kagame regime inside Rwanda.

MILLION DOLLAR MUNYENYEZI TRIAL
On June 24, 2010, Beatrice Munyenyezi (MOON'-yen-yezi) was arrested in Manchester, New Hampshire (USA) and charged, according to U.S. prosecutors, with "procuring U.S. citizenship unlawfully by misrepresenting her activities during the 1994 Rwandan genocide."

Munyeyezi is a U.S. citizen falsely accused of Rwanda genocide rape crimes in yet another case adding up to millions of U.S. taxpayers dollars being used to fund fabricated Rwanda genocide and asylum trials -- and now genocide tourism expeditions in Rwanda.

The U.S. Department of Justice seeks to deport Beatrice Munyenyezi to face genocide charges in Rwanda.  But Ms. Munyenyezi's will be a milestone case: this is the first ever international legal proceeding in the United States involving a woman accused of rape as a genocide and war crime.

According to the government of Rwanda, Beatrice Munyenyezi, 41, allegedly "participated in, committed, ordered, oversaw, conspired to, aided and abetted, assisted in and directed persecution, kidnapping, rape and murder during the Rwandan genocide of 1994."

The Kagame regime makes general accusations that you can arrest and charge any Hutu with.  These are generic genocide charges used by the Rwandan military regime against all people of the Hutu ethnicity.

The fifteen-day trial of Beatrice Munyenyezi in February and March 2012 was concluded with four additional days of deliberations by an all-white jury.  On March 15 the jury delivered a deadlocked decision and the U.S. government declared a 'mistrial'.  The re-trial is set to begin September 10, 2012.

Mark Howard, one of Beatrice Munyenyezi's attorneys, revealed to the press the huge sums of money spent by the U.S Judiciary to try Rwandan genocide suspects.

Howard estimated that U.S. taxpayers paid between US$ 2.5 million and $US 3 million for Munyenyezi's recent prosecution and trial in federal court.  Howard estimates that a retrial is likely to cost an additional US$1 million.

Howard's estimated costs include attorney fees, agent salaries, the "extraordinary expense" of investigating in a foreign country, the costs of bringing some fifteen witnesses to New Hampshire, and the hiring of experts.

Several of the prosecution witnesses brought over from Rwanda in the latest charade staged by the Kagame military regime are described by the U.S. and Rwanda government as "extremist Hutu genocidaires" who were convicted of life in prison. Others are witnesses from a women's genocide survivor organization in Butare, paid by the U.S. government to travel to New Hampshire, whose profits from the traveling and testifying can be used to support their mission in Butare.  Such economic interests play a major role in the official choice and production of 'genocide witnesses' and 'genocide survivors'.

Defense attorneys described the fifteen Rwandan witnesses flown over to the U.S. from Rwanda as "psychopathic killers who never mentioned Munyenyezi in nearly two decades of trials and investigations into the Rwanda genocide."

The cost of bringing Kagame's witnesses to the United States and putting them up -- some under tight security and others at expensive hotels -- for the duration of the trial represents additional massive costs to U.S. taxpayers for what amounts to fraud by the U.S. government.

The credibility of 'witnesses' incarcerated in Rwanda is highly suspect.  First there is the problem of coercion: many people in prison in Rwanda or accused by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) and Gacaca [people's] courts have been framed.  Other 'confessed genocidaires' have been tortured, and some have been coerced by the RPA threat of retaliation against their families. 

Often enough, 'witnesses to killings' and 'genocide survivors' are frauds, sometimes they are people who were not even in Rwanda during the 1994 cataclysm.  Other government plants and handlers have been coached.

In Munyenyezi's case, the press apparently decided that the witnesses brought in to accuse Beatrice Munyenyezi were not credible. 

First, the claim by the RPA that Munyenyezi commanded soldiers to rape Tutsi women in the basement of the hotel is presented as an absolute.  The rape occurred 'in the context of genocide' and so it is believable and believed.  However, no Rwandan woman in the context of Rwandan culture would ever oversee mass rape of other Rwandan women.  In fact, Beatrice Munyenyezi was also pregnant at the time -- making the hypothesis of rape even less plausible. 

Second, we can imagine that any credible testimony on a genocide rape charge against a woman would have provoked an endless barrage of news stories titled 'Hutu genocidaire woman ordered rape of innocent Tutsis in hotel's basement', stories that would have made their way right up to CNN and the New York Times.  But the decision on the rape charges went unmentioned by the New Hampshire press because the credibility of dishonest government witnesses (coached to lie) was easily destroyed.

It is as implausible as the charge by Invisible Children founder Jason Russel that "Joseph Kony forced children to kill their parents and then eat them."

Some so-called 'genocidaires' may be guilty, but others are not, and the Kagame regime uses all kinds of bribery, subterfuge and threats to pull the wool over the eyes of tourists, researchers and other 'guests'.  Many people in Rwanda are forced to spy, tattle and inform on others or else face personal persecution or threats to their families.

Anyone who challenges the officially sanctioned narrative in Rwanda is branded, arrested, exiled, disappeared or -- in the case of pesky American academics, like Dr. Christian Davenport, Dr. Alan Stam or Dr. Susan Thomson, who all asked too many questions of the 'wrong' kind -- barred from Rwanda forever.

INTERNATIONAL WARS OF AGGRESSION

In 1981, Yoweri Museveni and his newly formed National Resistance Army (NRA) launched an invasion of the sovereign country of Uganda.  From 1980 to 1986, the NRA perpetrated massive war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Lowero Triangle and other areas in central and northern Uganda.  These atrocities were universally attributed -- and are so attributed to this day -- to the government forces commanded by then president Milton Obote.

The massive atrocities committed by the NRA set the stage for the rise of Joseph Kony, the Ugandan bogey man used by Museveni, Washington, London and Israel to facilitate a permanent state of insecurity in northern Uganda.  Under permanent emergency, Museveni was able to justify the forcible displacement of millions of indigenous Acholi people and their internment into concentration camps.  Museveni also authored a document attesting to genocidal intent against the Acholis.

One of the 27 guerrillas who took up arms alongside Yoweri Museveni in the illegal NRA invasion of Uganda was Paul Kagame, the future leader of the Rwanda Patriotic Army/Front, the Ugandan guerrilla army that illegally invaded Rwanda on October 1, 1990.

Loyal to Museveni and his bloody guerrilla tactics, Kagame rose through the ranks to become Museveni's director of military intelligence -- a position for which his enemies now claim he was known as 'the butcher'.

At the time of the October 1990 invasion of Rwanda, Paul Kagame was being trained at the Pentagon's General Staff and Command College at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas (USA).  Kagame returned and led the four year war that resulted in the deaths of perhaps several hundred thousand Hutu people between October 1990 and April 1994 alone.

A prima facie case can be made that each of the invasions of Uganda, Rwanda and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) constitute the supreme crime against humanity, that being the illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.

The United States, Britain and Israel were the strongest backers behind backed Museveni and Kagame in all three of these illegal wars of aggression.

Involved at the highest level in the RPA/F invasion of Rwanda from 1990 to 1994 were United States intelligence agent Roger Winter and Israeli MOSSAD agent David Kimche.  U.S. defense attaches Lt. Colonel Thomas P. Odom and Richard Skow are two more U.S. military intelligence agents who have deep inside knowledge of the Pentagon- and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)-backed invasions of both Rwanda and Congo-Zaire.

The U.S. House of Representative hearings by the Subcommittee on Africa of the Committee on International Relations reveal that the United States knew that the Hutu refugees in Congo-Zaire were being massacred, and it makes clear some of who knew what, where it was happening, and when.

THE 'OFFICIAL' RWANDA GENOCIDE NARRATIVE
Just as Yoweri Museveni and his backers conferred victor status on Museveni after the NRA victory in Uganda, and then charged the NRA's victims and the Obote government with genocide, so too did Museveni and Paul Kagame and their backers confer savior status on Paul Kagame and accuse the Hutu victims of genocide. 

The majority-Hutu government of Juvenal Habyarimana was falsely branded with the genocide label as early as 1993.

Contrary to the official narrative that casts Hutus as killers and Tutsis as victims, the RPA/F plan included the sacrificing of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis.  Given opportunities to negotiate a ceasefire, and even the unconditional surrender by the Hutu government forces soon after the plane was shot down on 6 April 1994, the RPA/F chose to continue the war to achieve absolute military dominance.

The RPA/F leadership was comprised of elite English-speaking Tutsis from Uganda backed by Ugandan generals James Kazini and Salim Saleh, and by Yoweri Museveni himself.  The elite RPA/F Tutsis -- Major General Paul Kagame, General James Kabarebe, etc. -- did not trust French-speaking Tutsis who had stayed behind in Rwanda after the Tutsi guerrilla attacks against the Hutu government of the 1960's and early 1970's provoked retaliatory pogroms against Tutsi.

As the RPA/F invasion continued -- prior to April 6, 1994 -- Tutsis were also killed, both in revenge killings and because of RPA/F attacks.  Claims that the Habyarimana government persecuted Tutsis are highly contested.  Evidence suggests that Kagame and Museveni needed to play the 'homeless and persecuted Tutsi refugee' card to justify invading Rwanda.

After April 6, 1994, the minority Twa population also suffered massive loss of life in what should also be recognized as acts of genocide, at the very least. 

"The continuation of the genocide of the Tutsis was a key part of the [RPA] victory strategy," writes former Rwandan Patriotic Front official Jean-Marie Ndagijimana, in How General Paul Kagame Sacrificed the Tutsis.  "[A] ceasefire and a halt to the genocide risked strengthening his adversaries [Rwandan Armed Forces] by freeing them from their police duties.  Furthermore, a halt to the massacres would have taken from Kagame the sole pretext on which he based his legitimacy.  The government [FAR] army had to be made to appear like a genocidal force the defeat of which no one would regret... Why stop the massacres when they were working to legitimize Kagame and weaken his adversaries?"

Here is how the typical U.S. news agency reporting on the Munyenyezi story story describes the Rwanda genocide.  "The genocide in Rwanda began in April 1994," reads the commentator, in an ominous tone, in a local New Hampshire TV station video clip. "It lasted 100 days.  Up to 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militias and as many as 10,000 people were killed each day.  The Hutu were defeated three months later."

However, the genocide against Tutsis during those 100 days of 1994 cannot be understood out of context, and the true context is never provided by the establishment media, by the U.S. or British governments, by Israel, or by the mercenaries working to clean the blood off the Kagame regime.

Former British prime Minister Tony Blair, Canadian academic Gerald Kaplan, New Yorker magazine writer Philip Gourevitch, former USAID agent Timothy Longman, Somalian mouthpiece Rakiya Omaar, and Rwandan mouthpiece Tom Ndahiro are some of the most prominent propagandists whitewashing the Kagame regime.

Timothy Longman, now director of African Studies at Boston University, is the Rwanda genocide 'expert' that was brought in to testify against Beatrice Munyenyezi.  Longman and Alison Des Forges co-authored the Human Rights Watch (HRW) book on Rwanda Leave None to Tell the Story, and both worked with USAID, the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon; the 790 page tome did not mention a word about Beatrice Munyenyezi.

Kagame has also hired the Racepoint Group, a U.S. lobbying and public relations firm to "build a strong and sustained image campaign communicating the successes of Rwanda with key stakeholders in the political and financial elite communities" and "[o]ffset the negative and factually incorrect information of those parties with vested interests in mis-portraying Rwanda's advancements." 

Racepoint's campaign themes include "Rwanda's Visionary Leader...highlighting President Kagame" and "The Rwandan Miracle: Healing of a Nation."  The company's fees are listed as US$ 50,000 per month plus 2500 to 3500 pounds Sterling per month for "out of pocket expenses."

THE PENTAGON SACRIFICES MILLIONS OF AFRICANS

The double presidential assassination of April 6, 1994 is defined as the trigger for the massive backlash of Tutsi killings by Hutu people.  Since the war began in October 1990, more than 10 million people have died in Central Africa due to Pentagon backed insurgency, with the greatest numbers killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Jean-Marie Ndagijimana was the Rwandan Ambassador to Paris under the Habyarimana government from October 1990 to April 1994, before being removed from his post for speaking out against the mass killings of Tutsis and Hutus. 

On 19 July 1994, Ndagajimana became Minister of Foreign Affairs in what was called the 'Broad-Based National Unity Government' led by Faustin Twagiramungu.  In September 1994, he resigned and went into exile after the report by UNHCR investigator Robert Gersony confirmed that scores of thousands of Hutus were killed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army between July and September 1994.

Robert Gersony was the UNHCR contractor whose report on RPA killings of Hutus was massively denounced at the time and later buried by the United Nations never to be seen again.  Gersony went on to work for the UNHCR in northern Uganda and other places.  Clearly, Gersony's credentials stood the test, and his silence secured his future employment(s).

Jean-Marie Ndagajimana insists that the killings of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis between April 6 and July 1994 was organized, not spontaneous, but that there is no question that there was a double genocide.  He claims Tutsis were systematically killed by militias in areas controlled by the interim government of Jean Kambanda, and that the RPA/F systematically killed Hutus in zones under its control.

Based on research for which they were eventually thrown out of Rwanda, U.S. academics Christian Davenport and Alan Stam insist that the numbers of Tutsis killed in Rwanda during the so-called 100 days could not have been as high as the official narrative claims, and that hundreds of thousands of Hutus were killed during this period and these comprise the difference between the official count of 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis and the actual count of hundreds of thousands less Tutsis.

Defense attorneys from the ICTR are adamant that the record shows that there was no systematic planification of genocide by the Hutu government of Juvenal Habyarimana or its successors.  The ICTR acquitted the so-called 'genocide masterminds' of all conspiracy to commit genocide charges, but some were found guilty of 'acts of genocide' and other crimes against humanity.  The ICTR trials have been politically motivated, one-sided productions, and not one Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front official or soldier has even been indicted.

The conviction of Hutu president Jean Kambanda, the former interim president during the 1994 genocide, on the charge of conspiracy to commit genocide was a complete sham: even proponents of the official Rwanda genocide narrative have confirmed that Kambanda was not afforded proper legal representation or anything close to a fair trial.

The ICTR trials have persecuted and further dehumanized Hutu people, and they have dismissed and ignored every chance to explore the role of Paul Kagame and the RPA/F in provoking, prolonging and supporting the Tutsi genocide during the 100 days of 1994.

Meanwhile, in 2008 the high court in Spain issued indictments and international arrest warrants against the top 40 Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front officials for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire).  The court included Paul Kagame in its consideration of egregious crimes, but is prevented from indicting a sitting head of state.

Business is business: directors of Royal/Dutch Shell Corporation with President Paul Kagame in Kigali.

THE RPA GENOCIDE AGAINST THE HUTU PEOPLE
Beatrice Munyenyezi survived the invasion of Rwanda's Byumba prefecture by the Ugandan troops calling themselves the Rwanda Patriotic Army in 1990.  Munyenyezi then survived the next four years of RPA/F persecution and genocide that saw entire Hutu villages in Byumba razed, massacres of scores of thousands of mostly (but not only) Hutu people, and the internal displacement of some two million Hutus.

Forced into a life-and-death refugee existence inside Rwanda between October 1990 and April 1994, the displaced Hutu people fought back after the plane carrying the Hutu presidents of both Rwanda and Burundi was shot down over Kigali airport on April 6, 1994.

Beatrice Munyenyezi then survived the so-called '100 days of genocide' in Rwanda from April 6 to July 15, 1994.  She fled Rwanda with family members on July 18, 1994, part of the massive exodus of millions of Rwandans, mostly innocent Hutu women and children to eastern Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo).

In Congo-Zaire, Munyenyezi survived the most ruthless and cold-blooded slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilians by the RPA, Ugandan People's Defense Forces and some lesser numbers of Ethiopian, Eritrean, and South African troops.  The RPA-led genocide in Congo-Zaire began in August 1996 when the RPA shelled refugee camps in violation of international law.

In Goma, DRC, at this time, a western war correspondent photographed U.S. Special Forces machine-gunning unarmed refugee men, women and children in what he described as "one of the most horrible examples of mass atrocities I have ever seen."

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) had been stockpiling World Food Program provisions -- that were denied to starving Hutu refugees -- and these provisions were used to feed the invading RPA troops.

After the refugee camps were attacked, Beatrice Munyenyezi fled from Congo to Kenya at the advice of her brother, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, another U.S. citizen also being hunted by the Kagame regime and its political, military and economic partners.

In Tanzania and Kenya, Beatrice Munyenyezi survived RPF agents hunting refugees and assassinating dissidents, including former RPF official Seth Sendashonga, who was minister of the interior in Rwanda from 1994 to 1998.

Jean Marie Vianney Higiro is the real target of the Kagame regime's persecution of Beatrice Munyenyezi: the regime has held a vendetta against Higiro since his refusal to accept a post in the Kagame terrorist government in July 1994.  Higiro was evacuated from Rwanda by U.S. marines around April 8, 1994.

The security apparatus of the Kagame regime has been hunting refugees in Europe and in North America since 1994, and Rwandan dissidents have been assassinated in Europe and Africa.  The hunting down of Rwandan dissidents is backed by the U.S. Government, Britain and Israel to prop up their client regime: the dictatorship of Paul Kagame. 

Rwanda provides a major base for the U.S. Department of Defense military occupation of Africa and for U.S. and allied intelligence and defense operations.  While allied operations involve many NATO countries, Britain and Israel are the main intelligence and defense partners for the U.S. in Central Africa; Germany and Belgium are not far behind them.

There is no freedom of speech in Rwanda today.  There is no freedom of press.  There is no freedom to organize.  There is no freedom of assembly.  The Kagame regime continues to assassinate and disappear critics, journalists, former business associates, former military and former government officials. 

On March 31, 2012, Kagame's former Chief of Staff Theogene Rudasingwa, a Tutsi in exile, announced that Paul Kagame was the instigator of the January 2001 assassination of Congolese president Laurent Desire Kabila. Former defense minister Theogene Rudasingwa is also the former RPF Secretary General and former Ambassador to Washington.

The most recent assassinations include several Rwandan journalists killed in Uganda earlier this year.  Opposition candidate Victoire Ingabire remains imprisoned and subject to a political charade trial because she returned to Rwanda from Belgium and courageously proclaimed the heretical obvious: There was a genocide against Hutus as well as Tutsis.

In July 2010, the body of the deputy leader of the Democratic Green Party was found dumped by a river near the southern town of Butare.  Opposition politician Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, a Tutsi politician, was decapitated for his opposition to the Kagame regime.

Since early April 2012, the RPA/F government has rounded up numerous supposed supporters of opposition parties.  People have routinely been disappeared merely for showing some allegiance to the opposition Green Party or the PS-Imberakuri party. 

"So many Tutsis are also suffering political repression," says 'Ignace', a high level Rwandan dissident who fears retaliation from the U.S. government for speaking out.  "Tutsis who live in Rwanda are silent because they fear repression.  Tutsis who live abroad in exile like Theogene Rudasingwa and Gerald Gahima and General Kayumba Nyamwasa are also living in fear of assassination."

Paul Kagame and former RPA General Kayumba Nyamwasa.

Hutus throughout the country are subject to slavery conditions and millions of people -- Hutus, Tutsis, Twa -- outside the cliques of power are suffering extreme poverty.  Most egregious, the RPA/F genocide against Hutu people continues: there is at present a campaign in Rwanda to forcibly sterilize Hutu males.

"The RPF's reconstruction and reconciliation policies do not represent a sincere attempt to unify and reconcile Rwandans," writes Dr. Susan Thomson.  "Instead, it is a mechanism of state power that presents a self-serving version of history and manipulates the language of ethnicity to justify and maintain policies of exclusion and oppression of ethnic Hutu in maintaining the appearance of peace and security...  In practice, the government approaches post-genocide justice through the maximal prosecution of all Hutu."

A U.S. academic who worked in Rwanda and experienced the indoctrination camps run by the Kagame regime, Dr. Susan Thomson is persona non grata in Rwanda today.  (And so is this correspondent.)

THE RWANDA GENOCIDE TOURISM INDUSTRY

After the arrest of Beatrice Munyenyezi in 2010, agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) traveled to Rwanda to gather evidence to support the charges against her. 

It is unknown which, if any, of the U.S. prosecutors also traveled to Rwanda, but there were two investigative missions sent there for the Munyenyezi 'discovery'.  Because Beatrice Munyenyezi was indigent, both of her defense attorneys traveled to Rwanda all expenses paid by U.S. taxpayers; it is likely that the two primary U.S. prosecutors also traveled there.

While prosecutors John Capin and Aloke Chakravarthy may or may not have traveled to Rwanda, independent investigations in Rwanda are impossible.  The U.S. government does not send unbiased investigators to Rwanda: it sends agents intent on collecting the information and documentation provided by their client regime to protect their client regime.

It is especially easy to manipulate tourists or students or researchers who arrive in Rwanda for their first visit to Africa.  White people are taken to the genocide memorials and the shock of these staged-managed productions -- all these Hutu and Tutsi skeletons piled up and labeled 'Tutsi victims of genocide' -- strikes deep into the psyche of the spectator.  People don't arrive with clean slates: the mass media has deeply conditioned western news and entertainment consumers to see Africa through a racist and exploitative lens.

The viewing of skeletons and skulls in Rwanda has become a lucrative spectator sport and the conditioning by the white systems of power in western countries has created naive and racially conditioned spectators who are easily fooled.  Once they have seen the 'horrors' of the genocide memorials the average white and even non-white western spectators (e.g. African Americans) are often horrified into a subconscious shock and disbelief where reason and common sense are no longer accessible. 

Foreigners take the skeletons and skulls as the unassailable truth -- it does not cross their minds that there might be some other interpretation of the art project they see before them.  It doesn't occur to people that the truth has been distilled down -- essentialized -- into piles of skeletons, or shoes, or scattered clothing, or machetes that no longer appropriately re-present the original circumstances and context..

Victims of mass atrocities in in Bogoro, DRC. c. keith harmon snow, DRC, 2007.

However, the fact is that virtually everyone in Rwanda owns a machete.  Ditto in Burundi, Congo and rural Tanzania.  They are as common a personal item as a wallet or purse or ball point pen is to a western consumer.  The entire machete narrative -- Hutus butchering Tutsis in 100 days, blah, blah, blah -- is deeply problematic, since the RPA routinely killed people with machetes both to disguise (normalize) the means of death such that the perpetrators and the victims could not be distinguished and so that the RPA narrative of 'bloodthirsty Hutus killing Tutsis with machetes' could easily be advanced.  The RPA also wanted to save on bullets.

There is a genocide economy in Rwanda that serves foreign visitors who spend millions of dollars annually to travel to Rwanda, stay in fancy hotels, eat at restaurants, visit the mountain gorillas in Rwanda's national parks, hire cars, and drivers, and interpreters, and purchase souvenirs -- or 'free trade' coffee produced on lands stolen from the Hutu masses.  There is a whole industry that revolves around the production and maintenance of the official Rwanda genocide story about Hutus killing Tutsis in 100 days of horror.

The U.S. government pays all the travel and per diem expenses of genocide 'investigators', and everything is covered at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.  Rwandan 'victims' and 'survivors' who are brought to the United States are also fully paid.

"This is genocide tourism," says 'Ignace'.  "They are not investigative.  They stay at fancy hotels, they visit some locations, they see the skeletons and skulls at 'genocide memorials', they meet President Kagame, and they are assigned government handlers who make sure they get what Kagame and people in Washington want.  They drink a lot of wine and swim in the swimming pools.  They don't know anything about Rwanda and everything looks very romantic.  Then they come back and accuse innocent people of genocide."

PENTAGON SATELLITE PHOTOS EXPOSED

The existence of satellite reconnaissance photographs has not been revealed even during the 18 years of very high profile genocide trials held at the ICTR.

During his entire three-plus years in Rwanda from 1990 to November 1993, former U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda Robert Flatten's requests for Pentagon-DIA spy satellite photographs showing the progress of the war in the Rwandan countryside were turned down -- because of "clouds over Rwanda" they told him.

The authenticity of the satellite images has not been established and there is good reason to assume that the satellite images may be completely fraudulent.

Alternately, the satellite photos may have been produced during a different time period than is claimed by the prosecutors.

There is also substantial reason to believe that the satellite photographs may be exactly what the Pentagon described them as.

If Washington had the capability to monitor events from a satellite platform they certainly were doing so.  And Washington had that capacity indeed.

In 1994, the U.S. intelligence and defense establishment was flying two older versions of the LANDSAT remote sensing satellite platforms in outer orbit.  LANDSAT-4 and LANDSAT-5 had both exceeded their design lifetimes but were operational and had the capability to capture accurate and detailed imagery of what was happening in Rwanda during the 100 days of genocide.

There was also the NASA Space Shuttle.

One direct witness to events in Rwanda leading up the 1994 genocide was a researcher connected to a foreign NGO who knows something about satellite images collected over Rwanda but who has never gone public.  Witness GOR-2 worked closely with the Juvenal Habyarimana regime prior to April 1994 and again closely with the new Kagame government after 1994. 

Witness GOR-2 had regular contact with the Rwandan Ministry of Defense, the office of President Kagame, and with former RPA Secretary General Theogene Rudasingwa.  According to GOR-2, there were NASA space shuttle flights over Zaire and Rwanda in April and September of 1994, on U.S. government-sponsored research under contract NAS7-1260.

The prosecutors in the Munyenyezi case are claiming that Munyenyezi was present at a road blocks just outside the Hotel Ihuliro in Butare.  This hotel was probably destroyed by the RPA towards the end of June. It seems that the RPF took Butare after June coming from Burundi. Hotel Ihuliro was still standing on May 25, 1994, when Munyenyezi is accused of commanding Hutu extremists to kill Hutu men and rape Hutu women.

According to sources present at the Munyenyezi trial, the satellite pictures are taken over a time period and show clear changes from day to day.  For example, the photos showed people and cars moving towards Burundi.  "When they zoom in on a given location you can see the buildings, you can see people.  It's not a video, it's a snapshot."

"They first showed the hotel, which doesn't exist any more.  They tried to show that somehow there was a road block that [Munyenyezi] was at.  The pictures were also supposed to show a mass grave a few feet from the hotel and another mass grave near the Episcopal church nearby  The defense attorney was able to prove that there was no road block shown in the pictures, and there were no mass graves."

While reputed to be photo-shopped photo, Congolese experts insist that this photo is authentic: Hyppolite Kanambe alias Jospeh Kabila was a military officer attached to Paul Kagame during the 1996-1997 invasion and conquest of Congo-Zaire.

THE GREAT LAKES GENOCIDE COVER-UP

The existence of satellite images raises questions about what the Pentagon knows and what they are hiding.  For example, satellite imagery would clearly show the wreckage of the presidential plane crash site, and photos would show who was in control of the crash site immediately after the April 6 assassinations, and who controlled the site over the next weeks and months. 

The United States has blocked every bonafide investigation into the double presidential assassinations since 1994. The Kagame regime has produced several reports (e.g. Mucyo Report), but these self-interested productions are easily discredited. 

Former RPA/F official Theogene Rudasingwa claims that Paul Kagame and an elite RPA hit squad are behind the shooting down of the presidential plane, and thus the RPA sparked the genocide of Tutsis, knowing Tutsis would be massacred everywhere, and these claims are backed up by other former RPA/F soldiers.

Satellite imagery would also show the locations, strengths and activities of RPA troops, government (FAR) troops and militias.  It is well known that the RPA infiltrated the Interahamwe militias, and therefore RPA are believed to have controlled some road blocks, and it is very curious that no satellite photos have previously been produced to show where road blocks and bridges were occupied, and who occupied them. 

Probably this is because the RPA was in control of areas like the Kagera National Park, and RPA were dumping dead Hutus (and some French speaking Tutsis) in the Kagera RIver.  The infamous mythology about Tutsi bodies floating down the Kagera River is completely contradicted by the declassified memo from Mark Prutsalis of the NGO Refugees International. 

In a May 17, 1994 situation report (SITREP #10: Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania) to Refugees International headquarters in Washington D.C., Mark Prutsalis described documented RPA atrocities on the Tanzania-Rwanda border.  The document details gruesome and egregious war crimes, crimes against humanity and the indiscriminate killing of both Hutus and Tutsi civilians by RPA soldiers. 

For example:

"The following are excerpts from a UNHCR-Ngara protection report on border crossing points from an assessment made on 14 and 15 May:"

"At RUSUMO commune, sector KIGARAMA, 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..."

"At RUSUMO commune, sectors NYAMUGARI, GISENYI, NYARUBUJE, 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 from the area have seen people being tied together and thrown into the river.  It seems as if guns are used only if somebody tries to escape..."

At RUSUMO commune, sector MUZAZA, village GASARABWAYI (4 kms from the river), the RPF launched several attacks on the village and its population.  On the 13.05 [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 killedthis way.  8 villagers were thrown into a latrine, and the latrine was filled with soil.  Asked by UNHCR field officer refugees said that the RPF did not care whether victims were Hutu or Tutsi villagers."  

An IRC [International Rescue Committee] staff person wrote top their office," the Refugees International SITREP concluded.  "Things are getting very bad at the border here... Someone really needs to do something about all of the [RPA] killing and torture on the other [Rwanda] side.  Each day there are more and more bodies in the river and most of them without their heads.; the count is between 20 and 30 each 30 minutes."

"The people of Rwanda have nowhere else to go and we cannot expect them to stay and be slaughtered in their homes," Mark Prutsalis wrote.  "This remote inaccessible part of Tanzania cannot continue to receive thousands of refugees per day.  We will soon be overwhelmed here unless someone takes action to end the bloodshed, the atrocities, the massacres in Rwanda."

The genocide against Tutsis and Hutus continued after 1994 and there has never been a U.S. investigation into the roles of the Pentagon, CIA and DIA in the cataclysms in Rwanda and Congo-Zaire.

Soldiers of the first FARDC integrated brigade. c. keith harmon snow, South Kivu, DRC, 2006.

Witness GOR-2 described how the RPA/F used the Volcanoes National Park as a military base to launch Congo-Zaire operations after 1994. 

GOR-2 said that white soldiers driving tanks were seen inside the park heading to Zaire in September 1996.  GOR-2 said that the United Nation's IRIN report described this as U.S. soldiers going into Goma but that the IRIN report was quickly removed from the Internet.  GOR-2 explained how the RPA?F would close the Volcanoes National Park for days at a time while involved in military operations and 'clean-ups': "The Rwandan Patriotic Army would just close the park for days at a time and we didn't know what was going on in there."

GOR-2 explained how the Volcanoes National Park was flooded with thousands of Rwandan refugees returning from Zaire after the U.S.-backed invasion by Kagame and Museveni forces in 1996, and that the park became an RPA 'killing zone'. 

"We had a massive clean-up operation to remove bodies in 1999," GOR-2 said, "trying to get out all the dead bodies, and all the rags and pots and pans."

GOR-2 was always in close personal contact with Major Richard Skow, the U.S. military attache' from the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, and Robert E. Gribbon, the U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda at the time.

GOR-2 described airborne remote sensing flyovers using a new state-of-the-art technology involving hyper-spectral analysis where flights were made over Rwanda and eastern Congo. 

GOR-2 claims that some 22 CDs of raw data were delivered by Claire Richardson, the head of the Dian Fossey Gorrilla Fund, to Theogene Rudasingwa at the Rwandan Ministry of Defense. 

GOR-2 said the flyovers were coordinated by the National Geographic Society and DFGF and were supposedly for gorilla conservation -- habitat mapping -- but were actually meant to locate mineral resources that the RPA could exploit.

Satellite imagery was almost certainly collected over the four years of warfare in Rwanda by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), one of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.  The NRO designs, builds and operates U.S. government spy satellites and coordinates the analysis of aerial surveillance and satellite imagery from several intelligence and military agencies, including the Defense Investigative Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Before April 6, 1994 the RPF occupied the large portions of the prefectures of Byumba and Ruhengeri: American satellite pictures may shed light on the destruction caused by the RPF offensive from 1990 to the 1993 ceasefire.

"I spent 3 months in the demilitarized zone resettling internally displaced people," says another unnamed Rwandan genocide survivor GOR-3. "Based on what I saw, the RPF policy was to kill people, destroy buildings, destroy houses, destroy archives. Doors, iron sheets and corrugated metal covering the roofs of houses, furniture, toilets -- everything had  been removed and taken to Uganda to be sold. We need the pictures taken by the Pentagon to show the brutality of the RPA invasion and occupation."

Hordes of NGO workers and humanitarian relief workers involved in millions of dollars of private profit come and go from Rwanda, always advertising their effectiveness in "peace" and "reconciliation" programs. 

Tutsis and Hutus alike inside and outside Rwanda are increasingly speaking about military confrontation as more and more people become alienated and disaffected by the elite Tutsis in the Kagame regime.

RWANDA'S ONGOING PLUNDER OF CONGO
The U.S. Department of Defense also oversees and supports plunder and depopulation in the Eastern Congo, where Rwanda and Uganda maintain economic, political and military control.

Under the cover of military operations to capture and kill supposed Rwandan "genocidaires" in Congo (Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda) and supposed Ugandan terrorists (including Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army) western mining companies have been stripping and shipping Congolese minerals without oversight or regulation since the Pentagon-backed invasion of September 1996.

Canadian Banro Corporation is one of the most secretive corporations operating in Congo, and they have established and maintained their control through very tight relations with the Kagame regime. Banro has taken over thousands of hectares of South Kivu province by manipulating the local mwamis (chiefs), by bribing officials and by infiltrating officials onto power who are friendly to Banro and Kagame's interests.

Banro describes its operations as 'stable' and 'community-aligned' but local human rights groups paint a very different picture, one of terrorism all over the region.  Banro's secutrity manager is from the private military company Erinys International, a British mercenary firm 'registered' in the British Virgin Islands.  Banro works exclusively with Erinys International, a firm that also operates in Iraq. 

The areas around Banro concessions (e.g. Shabunda, Fizi, Walungu) have seen some of the worst bloodshed in all of the Congo, often perpetrated by Rwandan forces conected to Paul Kagame and then blamed on Congolese Mai Mai or the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). 

The Banro concessions can be seen in the map below, where total territory under Banro exploration is almost as big as the entire countries of Rwanda or Burundi.

Written by: keith harmon snow

Photography Credits: keith harmon snow where noted

Categories: Congo, Immigration & Refugees, Militarism, Pentagon Africa Command, Rwanda, United States

Tags: 18th anniversary of Rwanda genocide, Banro, central africa, commemoration of rwanda genocide, Congo, Hutu genocide, Kabarebe, Kabila, Kagame, Kanambe, refugees international, Sahbunda, Tutsi genocide, Zaire