Rwanda: The Emperors have no clothes

By: Jennifer Fierberg, MSW

The emperors stand naked in front of the word being exposed for crimes against humanity. But who are these emperors? In an article dated 5 January 2011 entitled, ”US Firm gets contract to train Rwanda Soldiers,” by the government-controlled Rwandan News Agency, it is stated that, “The US State Department has granted a multi-million dollar contract to Northrop Grumman Corporation, a leading global security company to train Rwandan soldiers in peacekeeping operations, the firm announced.” In this capacity Northrop stated Tuesday that “the work to be performed involves peace support operations training, train-the-trainer courses for peacekeeping cadre and enhancing the capacity of all three countries (Rwanda, Kenya and Burundi) to participate in multinational peacekeeping operations.” Yet it seems that Northrop Gruman and the US Government are falling into a trap by failing to recognize how Kagame manipulates international peacekeeping to entrench his absolute rule that is responsible for gross human rights abuses in Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region.

In the latter part of 2010 the UN published its Mapping Report of the DRC. The statements in this report should have been published to the international community years ago. This report has come under much scrutiny by political leaders, journalists and members of society.

Of all the serious atrocities documented by the mapping team, however, the allegation that Rwandan troops and their Congolese allies may have committed genocide against Hutu refugees has stirred up the most controversy, triggering yet another wave of damning press reports against the Rwandan government. This report was “leaked” and after decades of cataclysmic failures by the UN in the region it is hard to see how the international system of democratic relations will follow-through with these egregious violations against humanity.

While the report was published with intentions of exposing injustices in the region and was conducted by credible reporting agencies by credible people, what has it done? There have been absolutely no changes from this report and it has all but been swept into silence under the rug of diplomatic relations based on ongoing intimidation and blackmail from President Kagame to the international community (notably Washington and London) due to their inaction based on the 1994 Genocide and Rwanda’s contribution to peacekeeping operations in Darfur.

The Harvard Law record stated in an article published in October 2010 that the 556-page report describes 617 acts of violence allegedly committed by the armed forces of seven countries and several militias in the DRC between 1993 and 2003. A draft that was leaked to the press on August 26 triggered a massive media storm and strong protests from the countries whose troops stood accused.

In a phone interview with Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa regarding the UN Mapping Report he stated that “Kagame has been protected for too long.” Dr. Rudasingwa further stated that, Kagame has exposed himself by going too far and thus forcing those closest to him to break their silence to his tyrannical regime.” Dr. Rudasingwa is currently awaiting sentencing in Rwanda due on January 14, 2011. He is facing 35 years in a Rwandan prison after being tried in absentia over politically motivated trumped up charges including terrorism, ethnic divisionism and defaming President Kagame. This is a popular mode of operation for Kagame. He is quite well known for his power play of killing and jailing political opponents, forcing people into exile and hunting them there. He has done this time and again since he took power.

Exiled Political leader, John V Karuranga, President of the Rwanda Peoples Party stated in his response to the report, “We have chilling reports of how Rwandan refugees in many parts of the world are being deliberately subjected to horrendous daily attacks by RPF external operatives. There are substantiated evidences of assassinations, kidnappings, mysterious disappearance and harassments by the Rwandan government officials both inside and outside Rwanda.” Again, this fits with Kagame’s destructive regimes, gross human rights abuses in Rwanda and The Democratic Republic of the Congo.

So, which is the emperor who stands before us with no clothes? The answer is not as obvious as it seems. There has been too much preventable suffering in the Great Lakes Region. The international system does not seem to have interest in Africa in the area of conflict or Governments who rule in tyranny. The international community is more concerned with their investments in raw materials and for geo-strategic reasons.

Time and again, "reputable" international organizations have put everything in place for the eruption of bloodshed and then turned around to claim legitimacy and capacity to deescalate the resulting cycle of violence, often downplaying their own role in further worsening the situation. It is time to recognize that no genuine progress in the quest for sustainable peace and justice in the Great Lakes Region of Africa will be achieved as long as international justice remains a one-way street.

President Kagame continues to deny the media, civil society and political parties the freedom to function independently. His belligerent posture to neighboring countries is a source of regional and international destabilization. It is time for the International allies (US and UK) to make a choice. They can continue to support and fund Kagame while he uses the Darfur Peace Keeping mission as a bargaining tool to blackmail the US and UK into silence about his gross human rights abuses and absolute rule. Alternatively, Kagame’s allies and the rest of the international community could support Rwandans in their search for freedom in a peaceful manner. The first path will inevitably lead to endless bloodshed and instability in Rwanda and the Great Lakes region. The latter is the only durable solution to freedom, security, and rule of law, democracy and prosperity.

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Open Letter To United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon

Excellency,  I write to request your assistance in having an independent investigation in connection with the death of my father, Andre Kagwa Rwisereka which took place on July 13th, 2010,  in the city of Butare, Rwanda. I am the eldest son of the late Rwisereka and  I am responsible for speaking on behalf of my family.

One week before his death my father told me he was concerned that he might be harmed for his political views and activities. It is because of these reasons that I believe his assassination was politically motivated. I have concerns
over the medical autopsy and investigation done by Rwandan police to date and would like an independent investigation done by independent foreign experts.

To our knowledge the Rwandan authorities have stopped all investigations into his death. Suspects implicated in my father’s
assassination have been released from custody without court appearance. Eyewitnesses report having seen dozens of marks on my father’s body, suggesting torture, but the Rwandan Police has denied such allegations.

Your Excellency, I sincerely believe an independent investigation will determine whether my father was a victim of politically motivated assassination so that those responsible for this heinous crime can be brought to justice. Furthermore, such an investigation and its findings will provide a much needed closure to a tragic chapter our lives. I would greatly
appreciate any assistance that you may provide to me and my family.

Cc: Human Rights Watch Amnesty International

Note: Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, a Vice President of The Democratic Green Party of Rwanda was beheaded by assassins who have yet to be brought to book

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Obama’s Congo Moment: Genocide, the U.N. Report and Senate Bill 2125

Source: www.global research.ca

Obama’s Congo Moment: Genocide, the U.N. Report and Senate Bill 2125

13 November 2010 Comments (0)  Print This Post

The official Oct. 1 release of the U.N. Report on Human Rights Abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 1993-2003, documenting the Rwandan and Ugandan armies’ massacres of Rwandan Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutus in the Democratic Republic of Congo, should be a defining moment for President Barack Obama. How will the USA’s first African American president respond to the detailed and widely publicized U.N. documentation of genocide in the heart of Africa, committed by the USA’s longstanding military proxies, the armies of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni?
Few Americans realize that the Rwandan and Ugandan armies are armed and trained by the U.S. or that the U.S. military uses both countries as staging grounds, but they may learn about it now.
Few realize either that the sole piece of legislation that President Obama shepherded into law on his own, as a Senator, was S.B. 2125, the Obama Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006, in which, in Section 101(3), he quoted USAID:
“Given its size, population, and resources, the Congo is an important player in Africa and of long-term interest to the United States.”
Indeed. In 1982, the Congressional Budget Office’s “Cobalt: Policy Options for a Strategic Mineral” noted that cobalt alloys are critical to the aerospace and weapons industries, that the U.S. has no cobalt worth mining, that 64 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves are in the Katanga Copper Belt running from southeastern Congo into northern Zambia and that control of the region is therefore critical to the U.S. ability to manufacture for war.
Foreign powers and corporations’ determination to control Congo’s cobalt and the rest of its dense mineral resources has made the Congo conflict the most lethal since World War II.
Section 101(5) and (6) of Obama’s 2006 Congo legislation reads:
“(5) The most recent war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which erupted in 1998, spawned some of the world’s worst human rights atrocities and drew in six neighboring countries.
“(6) Despite the conclusion of a peace agreement and subsequent withdrawal of foreign forces in 2003, both the real and perceived presence of armed groups hostile to the Governments of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi continue to serve as a major source of regional instability and an apparent pretext for continued interference in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by its neighbors [Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi].”
What Obama identified as the “real and perceived presence of armed groups hostile to the Governments of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi” was, most of all, the real and perceived presence of “Hutu militias.” They were indeed the “pretext” for the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army’s massacres of Hutu civilians, Rwandan Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutus, with the help of the Ugandan People’s Defence Force – massacres now documented in the U.N. report leaked to Le Monde on Aug. 26, then officially released Oct. 1.
Since Obama described the militias as “apparent pretext for continued interference” in 2006, we can assume that he understood them as such on his Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009, when Rwandan troops again moved into Congo. On that day, world headlines, alongside those he himself was making, included “Rwandan Troops enter D.R. Congo to hunt Hutu militias” (Telegraph), “Rwandan troops enter Congo to hunt Hutu rebels” (BBC) and “Rwandan troops enter Kivu to hunt Hutu rebels” (Radio France International).
On the same day, the Christian Science Monitor, in “Rwandan Troops enter Democratic Republic of the Congo,” reproduced the pretext that Obama had identified in S.B. 2125:
“Rwandan troops entered the Democratic Republic of Congo on Tuesday to tackle a Rwandan Hutu militia whose leaders are accused of taking part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide before fleeing to Congo.”
Since Obama understood the pretext in 2006, he no doubt understood it that day and no doubt understands it today, as Rwandan and Ugandan troops are rumored, once again, to be moving into Congo, despite international outcry about the U.N. report.
Hutu militias and other “rebel militias” in Congo can no longer serve as the devil, the eternal excuse or, as Obama said, the “apparent pretext for intervention in the Democratic Republic by Congo’s neighbors.” Most of all, they can no longer serve as the devil, the excuse and pretext for interventions by Paul Kagame, the general turned president and so long heroized as Rwanda’s savior, because Kagame’s own army’s massacres of Rwandan and Congolese Hutu civilians has now been documented in the U.N. report.
The leak and now the official release have finally magnified President, then-Senator, Obama’s obscure, still little known revision of the East-Central African story in his 2006 legislation, S.B. 2125, which then became Public Law 109-456.
Obama’s ‘Rwanda moment’?
John Prendergast and David Eggers, the ENOUGH Project’s tireless advocates for U.S. intervention in Sudan, suggested, in a New York Times op-ed that Obama’s “Rwanda moment,” like Bill Clinton’s in 1994, is now in Sudan, where, they say, Obama has a chance to do what Bill Clinton reputedly failed to do in Rwanda, intervene to stop genocide.
But Obama’s Rwanda, and Congo, moment is in Rwanda and Congo now, as the world reviews the U.N. report and Rwandan troops once again advance into Congo.
He doesn’t need to intervene but to stop intervening, by withdrawing the military support, weapons, training, logistics and intelligence for Kagame, support that has so long equaled intervention. If he did so, peace and human rights activists all over the world would stand behind him and the narrative revision that he quietly penned three years ago.
An Obama decision to stop supporting Kagame would go up against the last 30 years of Pentagon intervention in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, but the U.N. Report turns his 2006 narrative revision into an outright reversal – with the weight of the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights and growing international opinion behind it.
And Obama is the commander-in-chief, with absolute executive authority over the U.S. armed forces. Yes, he can, should he choose to.
This article was previously published in Global Research.
Written by Ann Garrison

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Kayumba, Karegeya vs Kigali’s brainless propagandists

From Thenewsline

Prof. Nshuti Manasseh, the so-called advisor to the President, and one of the dormant partners (read shareholder) in Kagame’s companies around the world recently treated the world to a new revelation in one of the many propagandist articles he writes in the state sponsored, The New Times. The former Finance minister insinuated that the exiled former director of external security in Rwanda, Col. Patrick Karegeya aided wanted genocide suspect, Felicien  Kabuga to escape.

Gen Kayumba Nyamwasa

 The professor was a few days later, supplemented by two other military officers, Brig. Richard Rutatina, Kagame’s security advisor and Jill Rutaremara, the defence spokesman who in a joint statement said thus; “At one time when the security agencies were closing in on Kabuga in Kenya, it was Karegeya who tipped him off to escape in return for large sums of money,"

The two who have been instrumental in the campaign to smear the two exiled generals, Kayumba Nyamwasa, the former army Chief of Staff and Patrick Karegeya, added that Karegeya was connected to Kabuga through his daughter. Kabuga is Kigali’s most wanted man for his connection to the 1994 tutsi genocide and is believed to be in Kenya.

Now, while, it’s logical for the honourable generals and the professor to defend the regime that feeds them, the behaviour and utterances of some of Kagame’s aides and many of Kigali’s propagandists these days, begs serious questions;

For the record, I’m not any way a spokesperson of the accused Karegeya, much as I’m not one of Kigali’s blind supporters and propagandists; I only want to see people giving us factual information or else, they give us a break;

For those who have already forgotten, and those who do not know, Karegeya was the Director of External Security between 1994 and 2004. After that, he was briefly appointed the Director of corporate affairs, shortly before he was arrested, released and arrested again-serving an 18-month sentence, for the charges of desertion and insubordination. That, we know.
He fled on November, 22, 2007, after serving his sentence. The professor and the two RDF officers loyal to Kagame say, Karegeya accepted Kabuga’s money and sabotaged his arrest in 2003.
Now, six years after he left the office which he is alleged to have used to tip off Kabuga in return of money and three after he fled Rwanda after being charged with insubordination and desertion, we are told that he committed such a high profile crime of treason by aiding a wanted man to escape.
The primary questions here are; why wasn’t Karegeya charged with this crime? How could Karegeya have been charged with insubordination (disrespecting the orders of the Chief of General Staff) and desertion, when he had committed such a high profile crime that could have kept him in jail for good in Kigali?
But before that, how did Karegeya manage to stay in the position of chief spy (until 2005), when in 2003, he helped a man he should have captured to escape? Was the Kagame in charge or he wasn’t? How do the generals and the respected Professor expect any sober human being to believe that Karegeya was kept in there after committing the crime that we are being told now? And then, six years later, who is Kabuga’s informer? Kagame? He surely should have been arrested now, he has no informer!
Those are questions that the Kigali propagandists should expect people to ask; but at worst, people won’t ask, but will just see how some of Kagame’s aides have gone so low and/or brainless in trying to defend the Kigali regime that is on the ropes after the UN report and the revelations of the exiled former RDF officers. Indeed, the deficiency of logic about the connection between Karegeya and Kabuga also leave room for serious doubt about the allegations that the two officers are in touch with FDLR.
As usual, the allegations seem to be aimed at diverting the international community notably the US and UK from the accusations levelled at the Kigali government. At first, the two generals were linked to grenade attacks in Kigali, with Kigali issuing arrest warrants for them. But a day before Kayumba left Rwanda, the grenades had been linked to FDLR, with the police announcing that, some culprits have been arrested and confessed. But, we were later told that, the two dissident officers were behind the attacks.
Besides the Kabuga  issue that raises all those questions, a few more revelations from Nshuti made me take a step of even questioning his ‘professorship’; in his serialised article in the New Times, he questions Karegeya’s nationality; yes, that he is not Rwandese. Now, what does nationality have to do with the bigger picture here?
Karegeya fought for Rwanda’s liberation and thats the most important thing, isn’t it? Look, Prof, Che Guevara was not Cuban, Bolivian or Congolese but Argentine; has it stopped him from being a hero to the people of these countries? It certainly hadn’t. With all respect, such reasoning casts doubt on your ‘professorship’, Mr. Nshuti. And indeed, it’s been questioned by some genuine professors, in some reactions I have read; which Universty awarded it? And a couple of other questions have been raised; we can live that for another day.
It only reminds me that Mannasseh came to Rwanda to be a minister, and now he has the audacity to question the credibility of those who made it work for him.
In the absence of logic and facts in the accusations against the generals, one cannot help but conclude that the allegations are just another of the fabrications by the Kigali regime on potential critics. The revelations from Kigali only come after the two officers together with other key former RPF officers stated that, there was a dire need for governance reforms in Rwanda, challenging the autocracy of President Kagame, in a higly publicised document, titled ‘Rwanda briefing’. 
The document proved to be a real ‘kick in the teeth’ to the Kagame regime from the RPF founders, and the regime has been out and out to smear the generals, as it looks. But, the fabrications and the apparent lack of substance and reality in the defence of Kigali is a reason for Rwandans to worry about the strength and credibility of the Kagame regime.
It’s clear that it’s all about diverting people from the reality that the exiled officers wanted the world to see-and the usual motive of wanting to destroy critics of the escalating authoritarianism in Kigali.
It is especially true when you consider the many times the Kigali government has tried to smear its critics accusing them of denying genocide, working with FDLR and other sorts of rubbish. Lady Victoire Ingabire is in jail on the charges of facilitating FDLR; that she funded them with USD 1000; imagine such an allusion? If it was the reverse, that Ingabire received that much from FDLR, I would be tempted to accept, but as it is, it’s a joke.
 I mean, Ingabire funding FDLR or vice-versa? Next is Paul Rusesabagina, of the Hotel Rwanda fame, who the Kigali government says is also on the list of FDLR supporters-and then all of Kagame’s critics are genocide deniers and FDLR activists-sheer stupidity as Karegeya put it when asked by the writer about it.
 He (Karegeya) actually said, he considers challenging those making such utterances in a court-yes, may be, it’s time such they were challenged to substantiate their claims, but the very notion of fabricating accusations against critics of the despotic regime in Kigali is getting old-fashioned, isn’t it? I only hope the exiled officers won’t be deterred by the fabrications from continuing to expose Kagame’s autocracy. 
They have realise that they (Karegeya, Kayumba, Gahima and Rudasingwa) raised national issues of importance to Rwandans, and the Kigali ‘backing dogs’ are only responding with native and fabricated issues that shouldn’t stop a worthy cause. Rwandans, however silenced they are, are able to make a distinction between a cockroach and a grasshopper, don’t they?

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