What are the interests behind the referendum in southern Sudan?

Image via Wikipedia SUDAN

by Keith Harmon Snow

A Brazillian Newspaper sent me the following questions; my replies appended. The US is all over Sudan -- not for the better.

The US and its allies -- especially Israel and UK -- already de facto control the independent territory South Sudan. So this is basically a US protectorate. The South's separation and isolation from the north was achieved through the covert war sponsored by the US/UK and Israel from circa 1991 to 2003. Of course, the war in the South merely shifted to Darfur in 2003. But from 1991 to 2003 -- and to the present -- the US has backed, armed, trained, and supplied the Sudan People's Liberation Army (and then the Sudan Liberation Army, which is the Darfur wing of the SPLA) through one of our leading terrorist "governments" in Africa -- Uganda.

The Referendum would formalize and legalize the issue of "independence" -- leading to all kinds of political advantages and/or leverage for the US and its allies. The US block has covert operatives in South Sudan and large military involvement. We have private military companies --  mercenary firms -- in South Sudan (Dyncorp -- http://www.privateforces.com/content/category/1/85/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=990) under the cover story that they are training SS's police. Other mercenary firms (Lockheed Martic subsidiary Pacifdic Architects and Engineers, ArmorGroup out of England, etc) support the so-called "peacekeeping" forces of the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), and still otheres provide logistics (military) for the so called "relief" organizations. These are all forms of militarizing South Sudan to serve the prerogatives of Washinton, Tel Aviv, London and Brussels. Dyncorp and PAE had contracts worth more than $20 milion at one point, just to "support the African Union" (sic) -- another western military element in teh war for Sudan.

The referendum will help formalize separation from the Muslim north and the Bashir government, which the US does not like.

How the Western powers have been behaving about it? What are their concerns and interests about the subject?

The western powers want Bashir out. That's a major objective, since Bashir is an Arab and has asserted his independence. Of course, if Bashir was cooperative we wouldn't care. But he's problematic.

Why does the US not like Bashir?

[1] He fought in the Yom Kippur war, with Egypt, against Israel;
[2] He has always supported the Palestinians;
[3] He sided with China to exploit the oil in the north and center;
[4] He's maintains an indepednet financial system out side the World Bank, IMF, US monetary system;
[5] He keeps control of the sugar industry in Sudan outside the US sugar industry;
[6] He is friendly with Eritrea;
[7] He is Arab and Moslem and the south is Christian.

Oil, gold, uranium, gum arabic (essential for Coca Cola, Pepsi and {Unilever products like} Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream), large swaths of the most fertile land in the world, and sugar, are some of the main commodities that the US/UK/Israeli block seeks to control. Darfur is one vast oil field/concession (see the map on my web site) and is also home to 2/3rds of world supply of gum arabic and the best quality gum arabic in the world.

Militarily, the control of South Sudan, Darfur and North Sudan are all separate but intertwined issues. Sudan is a problem area between Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and Eritrea. The US already has major AFRICOM and intelligence presence in each of these other countries except Eritrea, and especially in Ethiopia and Uganda and Kenya, where billions of dollars have been converted from "aid" to weaponry. Sudan provides a convenient territory from which to oversee military and economic (plunder) objectives in the Middle East. With Bashir in there we dont have the access we'd like. Sudan also has some ties to arab factions in Somalia, along with Eritrea, which the US/UK/Israel/Kenya/Uganda/
Ethiopia are fighting against.

Basically, this is another "demonstration" election. It is highly manipulated by the outside powers, involving billions of dollars in USAID, DFID, US State department and other western "AID" and "development" funds earmarked for "electioneering".  So there's massive wesetrn meddling in these elections.


Does really the U.S. support the separatist groups in the South? Why?

Answered above. We are supporting numefrous military and political groups, and we have a massive AID system that has been used to further political and cultural and economic objectives,. For example, the years of Christain AID "chairties" shipping everything from Bibles to AK-47s into South Sudan through teh multibillion dollars a year Opertation Lifeline Sudan. SVAE DARFUR and URGENCE DARFUR -- US and French entities -- have backed the so called REBEL factions in Darfur, the Justice & Equality Movemnet and Sudan Liberation Army.

NED, the IRI, NDI etc are all over both North and South Sudan (http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/africa/sudan). This is covert stealth capitalism and control and it will NOT benefit the people in the long run. Its how we buy out what we need, in paralel with how we shoot out what we want. NED played a huge role in the electioneering: they always do. These NED funded institutions are established to BUY OUT the people and coopt any true movements for true independence. All of them are basically intelligence and propaganda fronts.

What are the challenges that Southern Sudanese will have to face after the separation?

The people of South Sudan are pawns in a great game in which we are the puppeteers. The people of SS wil have to face the same kinds of problems that African, Asian, Latin American people have to gface everywhere: Capitalism. This is already happening. Capitalism is based on private profit. What we will see are increasing land grabs, multinational controls, taxes favorable to corp[orations, AID and RELIEF (the misery industry) will continue to prey on people's suffering. Sure, a few schools and churches and other infrastructures will pop up here and there but only superfically, with superficial caring, and especially when it serves some large corporate interests. Which also means: Uganda, Ethiopia, and Kenya, especially, will benefit from certain developments in the "independence" of South Sudan. The people will have to face starvation, lack of potable water, pollution by corporations, and agribusiness theft. They will also have to suffer under the deprivations caused by the SPLA and other militarized factions, who have been brutal to the people of the south, and are also responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
 
How should be the behavior of Khartoum after the separation?

I don't understand your question. If you are asking: what can we expect to see from Khartoum... I imagine the US and Khartoum will continue to secretly duke it out in all kinds of ways. Otherwise, I'm not prepared to speculate on this question.

Who would be the members of the new government of South Sudan and what are their profiles?

That's a question to be answered by time. Also, perhaps better answered by someone else at present. We can be assured they will be pliable allies of the US and NED and etc. Probably all friends of Roger Winter -- the US Committee for Refugees and USAID official and freind of Susan Rice who is responsible for organizing the covert genocide and war in Rwanda, South Sudan and in Darfur.

How do you see the issue of Abyei region?

Abyei is a border zone between north and south and a flashpoint. What is happening there is a theft of lands. People on both sides are scared that they will lose control and lose power and lose land. Its really a mirror for much of the rest of the country. Violence is/has been/will be created / fomented by operatives and provocateurs working secretly who generate violence that can be blamed on teh opposing government/faction. But this is nothing new.

The new country is very poor and its infrastructure is fragile. Do you think there is a danger that foreign governments and transnational corporations would take advantage of this situation to build the infrastructure of the new country and take its oil?

Its already started. Its long in the making. All the groundwork has been laid, and many corporations and private (thieves) developers are already there. But there will, of course, be a huge increase in multinational penetration as South Sudan's non-oil resources are further targeted and more and more contracts are let for "infrastructure" that will service US/UK/Israeli/multinational interests.

 Some people say that the referendum on Sudan could encourage other separatist tendencies on the continent. What do you think about that?

I'd have to address each case on a case by case basis. Clearly, separatist movements BY and FOR the people are something that I might favor and we should all favor. Say, the Ndebele people seeking independence in Zimbabwe or the San Bushman seeking autonomy and control of the lands they are being excluded from (diamonds, oil). Or the Ogoni, Itsekeri and Ijaw peoples, for another example, seeking independence from the centralized racist pro-corporate pro-western government of Nigeria. That's probably a good thing. These borders were created by the west and for the west. Maybe they should be broken down. However, having western military create , foment and control these successions is devastating to Africa and its people.

How do you see the Darfur issue in this context?

Darfur is the same story in a slightly different context. Its about resource grabs and when the so called PEACE ACCORDS were being developed for South Sudan the West needed to shift its foci of attack and Darfur became that point of foci. As I said, Darfur is one vast oil field, but UNDP, USAID, DFID, etc all have massive interest in making sure that big western multinationals control the fertile lands for gum arabic, sugar, ethanol and what ever else WE want to make our profits on.

There will be plenty of additional propaganda (lies, deceptions, stereotypes, distortions and disinformation) generated by people like Dr. Eric Reeves (Smith college state department propgandast) and Gerard Prunier (Urgence Darfur), by John Prendergast and Alex de Waal and George Clooney. These are the Wests primary disinformation operatives on Sudan.

Related articles

• What Does The Future Hold for South Sudan? (humanrights.change.org)
• Obama congratulates South Sudan on independence vote, but what about Abyei? - Christian Science Monitor (news.google.com)
• Analysis: South Sudan must balance foreign relations after split (reuters.com)
• South Sudan vote on course for a resounding 'yes' to independence (telegraph.co.uk)
• North and South Sudan: Challenge of Forming Cooperative Ties - Voice of America (news.google.com)
• The New Republic: Challenges Loom For South Sudan (npr.org)
• Oil and power at center of vote to split Sudan (cnn.com)
• Answering Your Sudan Questions, Take 2 (kristof.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Historic vote ends in south Sudan (bbc.co.uk)
• A border region caught in the middle as Sudan prepares to split (independent.co.uk)

The U.S./U.N. cover-up of Kagame’s genocide in Rwanda and Congo Conference in New York

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Posted By Mary 

[Translate] ^[1]

A long-standing code of silence inside the U.N. is coming to an end regarding what is probably the largest genocide ever since the U.N. founding: The genocide committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front since 1990

End impunity in Rwanda, a discussion with distinguished human rights champions Peter Erlinder, Juan Carrero Sarlegui and Spanish Sen. Pere Sampol, will be held Monday, Sept. 20, 6:30-9 p.m., at Global Information Network, 146 W. 29th St., Suite 7E, New York City – join them!
by Juan Carrero

 

On Aug. 27, the French daily Le Monde leaked the news that a long report by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay ^[3] of South Africa calls the “systematic, methodical and pre-meditated crimes perpetrated against the Hutu” by the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) in Zaire in 1996-1997 “crimes against humanity, war crimes, and even genocide crimes.” The report has not yet been officially released but is already circulating freely.

The victims were “mostly children, women, the elderly and the sick.” The investigation looks at the crimes perpetrated in Zaire/Congo throughout the decade 1993-2003. Rwanda is not the only country incriminated. But, according to Le Monde’s Jean-Philippe Rémy, the RPF’s systematic extermination of Rwandan Hutu refugees and other Congolese Hutu – either by violent force or by systematically blocking food supplies sent especially to them – could be considered “the crux of the report.” At any rate, it is clear this extensive report is “devastating, especially for Rwanda,” as Christophe Châtelot, in turn, points out in the excellent cover article ^[4].
Nevertheless, both articles end by reaching the same major erroneous conclusion stated by most of the press articles that have appeared since the report was leaked: the need, they say, to establish a tribunal with jurisdictional authority over these crimes. Not only does such a court already exist but, on Feb. 6, 2008, it already issued arrest warrants against 40 RPF top officials who are allegedly responsible for the crimes in Congo referred to in the new U.N. report.

This court is Spain’s Audiencia Nacional (National Court) which, pursuant to the principle of universal justice, possesses full jurisdiction to prosecute this kind of crime. It is by virtue of this principle, for example, that the arrest of Augusto Pinochet was possible in London and that today the Interpol and the SIRENE network are acting on the 40 arrest warrants cited above. Let us also remember that the four Spanish Marist clergymen who were accompanying the Hutu refugees and who had previously condemned internationally this huge slaughter were murdered by the RPF in the Nyamirangwe refugee camp in eastern Congo on Oct. 31, 1996.

In my opinion, there are various other errors in Jean-Philippe Rémy’s article. Rémy is much too quick to endorse some interpretations of the motives behind the crimes that hardly match the facts and are at this point almost untenable today. The most outrageous interpretation states that “the Rwandan intervention sought to prevent the refugees from coming together and, led by the ‘genocidaires,’ rising in revolt to attack Rwanda from their refugee camps at the other side of the border, in the former Zaire. The approach was to empty the entire region. Part of the refugees will return to Rwanda, another will be killed at the camps, others will flee across Zaire where they will be hunted down.”
Could a huge mass of human beings consisting mostly of malnourished women, elderly people and children come together and rise in revolt? Besides, shouldn’t there be a mention of the other goals the RPF pursued with that slaughter – those that many honest analysts actually rank as the main goals? That is,
• controlling the mineral fields in eastern Zaire, exactly where the “annoying” refugee camps were located; putting an end to the presence and diverting the attention of the international community related to those fields, which could derail the plans these criminals and their powerful allies had in Zaire;
• “correcting” as far as possible the demographic imbalance between Hutu and Tutsi which the RPF viewed as excessive, while at the same time averting a big international scandal under the guise of “hunting down the genocidaires”;
• having a submissive and controlled Hutu population, devoid of intellectuals or leaders, repopulate some of the regions in Rwanda that the RPF “operations” had left so deserted that they could potentially become a permanent black mark for the RPF that the international community would readily decry.
Unfortunately, the U.N.’s 14-year silence has had tragic consequences. Thousands of conniving silences have allowed those criminals basking in the bogus moral halo of having allegedly halted the genocide by Hutu extremists in the spring of 1994 to continue causing, with utter impunity, tremendous suffering in Rwanda and Congo!
But the report, whose recent leak has spurred widespread international coverage, could be the beginning of the end for Paul Kagame, who at the time was already head of the RPF and is now also president of Rwanda. True, up to now, it has only been a leak.
But the facts of the report are now in the public domain, above and beyond the sequel of pressures, blackmails and deals about to take place from now on, hushed and behind the scenes of the high political and economic circles of our times, primarily with the purpose of eliminating the word “genocide” from the text. Indeed, at long last more and more analyses are appearing about this situation which some of us had already been analyzing 14 years ago as the incidents themselves were occurring.
Already as early as October 1996 and more pointedly from February 1997 onwards, we condemned the massive massacres of Rwandan and Congolese Hutu being carried out in true genocidal manner, the cremation of tens of thousands of bodies, the extermination through starvation etc. Our documents were signed by some 20 Nobel laureates, as well as by heads of the political groups of the European Parliament.
How could our world leaders not possibly have known of crimes on such scale? How could Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs not have known either?

We ourselves had those documents handed to Bill Clinton and others truly and ultimately responsible for this genocide. In addition to the diplomatic channels, Elie Wiesel, survivor of the Nazi extermination camps and Nobel Peace laureate, promised our colleague Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Nobel Peace laureate as well, to personally hand them to Bill Clinton in the meeting he was to have with the president shortly thereafter.

On the other hand, on Feb. 24, 1997, after my 42-day fast at the European Parliament in Brussels, I personally handed these documents to Abel Matutes^{1 [7]}, native of Ibiza, who was Spain’s minister of foreign affairs at the time. Inocencio Arias, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was with him at that meeting. I, in turn, was accompanied by Mercé Amer, Socialist regional/autonomic secretary of Mallorca.
Spanish state television TVE vetoed the news of this meeting, where documents of such serious nature and signed by such prominent people were being presented to the minister. The Brussels correspondent of TVE came over to me and told me how badly she personally felt: She had been following our fast and admired what we were doing together with Commissioner Emma Bonino, but she added that the news had unfortunately been vetoed and that, much to her regret, she wouldn’t be able to film.^{2 [8]}
As it was, heightened tension reigned at the meeting due to the assassination of three Spanish volunteers of Médicos del Mundo merely a few days before. We now know that the RPF perpetrated this crime, even though the strong propaganda machine of the international godfathers of this criminal organization had managed within hours to get the world media to attribute this triple murder to extremist Hutu once again.
Indeed, it’s so true that the U.N. report doesn’t make any major revelations that even now, after its leak, I will hardly be making any changes in the second edition of my book, “África, la madre ultrajada” (“Africa, The Violated Mother”). The news is not the fact that the RPF perpetrated a genocide on such a large scale.^{3 [9]}
In this genocide, the count of ethnic Hutu, both Rwandan and Congolese, violently eliminated by the RPF since 1990 should be estimated at hundreds of thousands at least. The scale of this genocide is even much larger if we consider the millions of victims, not only Hutu but also from other Bantu ethnic groups in Congo – or simply “not Hima-Tutsi,” as the racist RPF elite calls them.
They died not only through violent force but primarily due to starvation and other reasons related to the aggressions inflicted on Zaire/Congo by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi in their genocidal attempt to establish in that region an empire controlled by Hima-Tutsi clans.
The High Commissioner for Human Rights has merely investigated the tip of the iceberg of this genocide, since it has looked at merely 600 violent incidents only in Congo and only from 1993 to 2003. It is a genocide in which already as early as 1997 – that is, one year before the second and deadliest invasion – the report of the U.N. team headed by the Chilean Roberto Garretón ^[10] documented the investigation of around 40 locations in Congo and put the death count at up to 100,000.
A hint of the scale of this genocide can be found in a report by the International Rescue Committee which estimates 5.4 million victims in Congo until 1997 – in excess of the normal mortality figures – due to causes related to the aggressions staged there.
That’s not the news. The real news is something else: namely, that in a move that breaks the code of silence that has reigned within the U.N. for too many years, the High Commissioner for Human Rights reveals that the U.N. Security Council and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan before him – the same parties who less than a year ago accused some of us of financing the genocidaires – have actually spent more than a decade covering up the continuous genocide carried out by the RPF from Oct. 1, 1990, until today, which probably constitutes the largest one since the U.N. was founded!
Jean-Philippe Rémy’s article cited above is entitled, precisely, “A Long Set of Obstacles to Justice and Truth.” As Glen Ford well said in the analysis he wrote shortly after the leak of the report, “Rwandan Crisis Could Expose U.S. Role in Congo Genocide ^[11],”^{4 [12]} we are facing “a political crisis that threatens to disrupt Washington’s plans to dominate the continent.
“At stake is not only the reputation of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, an alumnus of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, but the larger American strategy for militarization of Africa and exploitation of her riches. …

“Carnage on such a scale could not have occurred were it not for the connivance of the United States, which has nurtured Kagame at every juncture. …

“The leaked U.N. report cannot be put back in the bottle. Kagame, who labels all critics ‘genocidaires’ or apologists for genocide, is exposed as ‘the greatest mass killer on the face of the earth, today,’ as described by Edward S. Herman, co-author of ‘The Politics of Genocide.’ Kagame’s mentors and funders in the U.S. government, who aided and abetted his genocide in Congo, must be held equally accountable – if not more so, since United States corporations derive the greatest benefit from Congo’s blood minerals, and the U.S. military gains the most advantage from Rwandan and Ugandan services as mercenaries at America’s beck and call in Africa.”
The Rwandan government has reacted by making virulent threats, and the High Commissioner has postponed the report’s release until Oct. 1. The following weeks will be marked by a fierce struggle to delete the word “genocide” from the report, since this classification would require the immediate intervention of the international community.

The U.S. government must be held equally accountable if not more so, since United States corporations derive the greatest benefit from Congo’s blood minerals, and the U.S. military gains the most advantage from Rwandan and Ugandan services as mercenaries at America’s beck and call in Africa. – Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report

Nevertheless, something new is happening in this great conflict as a significant movement of pieces appears to be taking place on the board. Another fact also evidences this: The important Gersony report ^{[14]5 [15]}, up until recently eerily unavailable, suddenly surfaced this past Sept. 7. It is another honest report, done as early as 1994, but in this case by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
The report has remained suppressed since then and high-ranked U.N. officials even denied it had ever existed. It documents the systematic ethnic cleansing of Hutu, genocidal in nature, carried out by the RPF in the Rwandan interior^{6 [16]} during 1994.
The investigative team led by Gersony examined the assassination of some 30,000 Hutu by the RPF, but only looked at crimes perpetrated during a two-month period and in merely three prefectures. However, similar to the recent report by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, “[T]he massacres condemned in the Gersony report represented only the visible tip of a monumental iceberg consisting of hundreds of thousands of victims butchered by RPF troops since October 1, 1990 in the areas occupied by the military.”

Former Rwandan Foreign Minister Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana makes this statement in his excellent book recently published, “Paul Kagame a sacrifié les tutsi”^{7 [18]} (“Paul Kagame has sacrificed the Tutsi”). Upon receiving a photocopy of the Gersony report, I asked him to confirm its authenticity, which he did, although he added that an annex is missing.

Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana, of mixed Hutu-Tutsi descent, had testified in the lawsuit we filed at the Spanish National Court and is now the person responsible in France for the Intra-Rwandan Dialogue we have been sponsoring since 2004. This extraordinary Rwandan witnessed first hand the wheeling and dealing behind the suppression of the compromising report.
The entire horse-trading took place in the U.S. Department of State in early October 1994 between Hutu Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu from the RPF – albeit always under the watchful eye of “consultant” Charles Muligande – and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs George Moose. Pasteur Bizimungu had actually gone to argue that “a ‘post- genocide’ was going on, while at the same time, the RPF military was getting away with massacring entire groups of people without the international community expressing any disapproval.”
Seeing George Moose’s excessively understanding reaction to the Rwandan president’s case, Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana inferred what was going to happen with the Gersony report, as it indeed turned out: That meeting “sealed the fate of the Gersony report once and for all.”
Vianney Ndagijimana resigned from his post as minister a few weeks later “in order not to be an accomplice of the ethnic cleansing practises” and went into exile “to bear witness of this silent genocide, as disgraceful and reprehensible as the Tutsi genocide, and to publicly condemn it worldwide.”
Others didn’t act with such ethics and integrity: Kofi Annan, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping at the time; Shahryar Khan, U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative to Rwanda; Timothy Wirth, Undersecretary for Global Affairs, including matters of human rights; Brian Atwood, director for Africa of USAID, which had financed the investigation aimed at determining whether the interior of Rwanda was equipped for the return of Hutu refugees.

Prior to the meeting of the Rwandan president with the assistant secretary of state, all individuals cited above had met several times with Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana, on one occasion with Robert Gersony present. The former minister described that some of them had spoken very harshly to the Rwandan president. But the fact is that the Gersony report was suppressed and none of the people mentioned above ever condemned the terrible ethnic cleansing that had taken place nor the cover-up of such an important piece of evidence.

Kofi Annan showed the report to Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana and even let him read it but refused to give him a copy. Thus, already back then the future U.N. Secretary-General knew very well that the theory of a double genocide was not wrong. And it is certainly far from being a form of negationism and hence a crime, as Ramón Lobo has dared state in the Spanish daily El País.
Good heavens! – daring to label as criminals Judge Fernando Andreu, who accuses Kagame and 40 top officials from the RPF of committing crimes of genocide, and now High Commissioner Navi Pillay, who signs the recent U.N. report!
Yet this journalist is not alone. Many are the know-it-all analysts, who have no qualms writing about any matter of the moment, even about conflicts as serious and complex as this one – or who, rather, have only listened to the powerful rhetoric of the Manichean official doctrine that resolutely maintains that the story of the genocide is one of genocidaires on the one side and noble liberators on the other.
On the contrary, Kofi Annan and current Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon know that the accusations made by Judge Fernando Andreu Merelles are well-founded: “crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes against individuals and property protected in the event of armed conflict, membership in a terrorist organization, terrorist acts, pillage of natural resources and the assassination of nine Spanish nationals.”
As we suspected and made public at the time, Ban Ki-moon’s efforts to bill genocidaire Paul Kagame as the superhero of the struggle against hunger and other evils plaguing our world have possibly infuriated and mobilized the group of people with integrity still to be found at that big organization which is the U.N. Let’s just hope that Navi Pillay doesn’t end up sacked for the same reasons for which others were ousted in former times: U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali, ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) prosecutor Carla del Ponte, among many others.
Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana spent years wondering why the secretary-general had decided to embargo the Gersony report. In a meeting at the headquarters of the Tribunal of The Hague in November 2002, Carla del Ponte confirmed to him what he had been suspecting all along. The former minister writes in his book:
“[W]ithout avoiding [the subject], she acknowledged that this report was under the jurisdiction of the ICTR and that it should have ordinarily been included in the dossier of crimes perpetrated in Rwanda in 1994 by one of the warring parties. Unfortunately, she added, all efforts to obtain the Gersony report as well as various other U.N. reports providing evidence of the crimes committed by the RPF had proved to no avail up until then. She continued: ‘I sent an official request to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms Ogata,^{8 [20]} asking her for that report, but I ran into a wall. …
“Carla del Ponte admitted that, in despair, she also requested that Robert Gersony be heard by the ICTR prosecutor – again to no avail. Once again the U.S. government expressed its opposition, ruling it inadmissible! As we can see, Paul Kagame enjoys the protection of one or more of the superpowers which have a veto right [in the U.N. Security Council] and are able to dictate its agenda at the heart of the U.N. organizations. You don’t need to be a wizard to know that the Clinton administration, surely embarrassed and ridden with guilt for having opposed the deployment of U.N. troops to stop the genocide, has preferred focusing on the bottom line of the massacres of hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutu civilians.”^{9 [21]}

Let’s hope that the time has come; let us hope that those who pull the strings realize that sustaining this sham, this disgraceful impunity, is untenable at this point. We firmly believe that those of us outside the U.N. should help enable those upright individuals within the organization to keep it from serving the interests of the Trilateral Commission^{10 [23]} and of other powerful and elitist groups instead of serving the interests of peoples. In this respect, we share the views expressed by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mallorquinian Sen. Pere Sampol, who was vice-president of the government of the Balearic Islands and knows well the mazes of political intrigue.

At any rate, what I stated in the preface of my book might begin to prove true: “When this monumental tragedy gets the coverage it deserves in the big media, it will become one of the most embarrassing chapters in the annals of the United Nations, of the entire Western world, in general, and in particular, of José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist government.”
Spain’s prime minister, however, may still be able to change fate. He just needs to continue on the path he started by not meeting with Paul Kagame in Madrid; he just needs to refuse to co-chair together with this criminal the Advocacy Group of the Millenium Development Goals. He just needs to cooperate with Spain’s Audiencia Nacional on the legal proceedings against the 40 top officials of the RPF. He just needs to meet – at long last – with the families of the nine Spanish victims.
Juan Carrera of the International Forum for the Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region, a Nobel Prize nominee, has campaigned for years against impunity there. In 1996, he walked over 600 miles to Brussels and a year later went on a 42-day hunger strike in front of the European Union Council headquarters to persuade the EU to stop the atrocities in the DR Congo. With Spanish Sen. Sampol he successfully pushed for a lawsuit in Spain against members of the Rwandan government on behalf of Spanish victims who died in Rwanda after the genocide. The lawsuit resulted in the indictments of 40 of Rwanda’s current top and former military officials for genocide crimes and other human rights abuses. He can be reached by emailing info@stopimpunityinrwanda.org ^[24].

End impunity in Rwanda

Please join us for this late-breaking opportunity to greet three outstanding human rights activists:
• Peter Erlinder,
• Juan Carrero Sarlegui and
• Spanish Sen. Pere Sampol
and for an informal question and answer session on the most recent initiatives toward ending impunity in the Great Lakes Region of Africa.
The panel discussion will be held Monday, Sept. 20, 6:30 – 9 p.m., at the Global Information Network, 146 W. 29th St., Suite 7E, New York City. To RSVP, call (212) 244-3123 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (212) 244-3123      end_of_the_skype_highlighting.
Former National Lawyers Guild president Peter Erlinder, International Forum for the Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region promoter Juan Carrero Sarlegui and Spanish Sen. Pere Sampol will be looking to meet with U.S. counterparts to discuss the latest developments in the Rwanda-Congo region.
“With the strong conviction that the truth is history’s most powerful force and that its might is independent from the smallness of the messenger, we firmly resolve to investigate and analyze what really happened in Rwanda and in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the last 14 years.” – VeritasRwandaForum
Messrs. Carrero and Sampol successfully pushed for a lawsuit in Spain against members of the Rwandan government on behalf of Spanish victims who died in Rwanda after the genocide. The lawsuit resulted in the indictments of 40 of Rwanda’s current top and former military officials, including James Kabarebe and Kayumba Nyamwasa, for genocide crimes and other human rights abuses.
These activists will provide information on their campaign and will discuss the recently leaked draft U.N. report indicating that Rwanda may have committed genocide and crimes against humanity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Since May 2010 and the arrest of Minnesota-based law professor Peter Erlinder in Rwanda, there has been a surge of international attention to Rwanda’s “genocide ideology” and the limits placed on freedom of speech.
Juan Carrera of the International Forum for the Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region – called the soul of the campaign – has been working for years against impunity in the Great Lakes Region, trying to bring Rwandans together to rebuild the country. He was proposed as a candidate for the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize. He has written books, articles, and he went on a hunger strike in Brussels to attract the attention of the European Union and force them to get involved in the DR Congo to stop the atrocities.
Spanish Sen. Pere Sampol i Mas of PSM-Entesa Nacionalita fully supports this campaign and has been very active in demanding official answers from the Spanish government on this issue. He has traveled with Juan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to see the situation and the people’s condition first hand. To learn more, visit http://www.bastadeimpunidadenruanda.org/ ^[25].
Please join us in welcoming these distinguished guests.

1. He is currently one of the 12 Spanish members of the Trilateral Commission. [↩ ^[26]]
2. The media, however, were allowed the photo-op de rigueur of that meeting. See Chapter 2 of www.pangea.org/olivar ^[27]. [↩ ^[28]]
3. In the article mentioned above, Jean-Philippe Rémy comments on the statements made by one of the initiators of the report: “[T]here have been too many cases of massacres which have been concealed to the eyes of outside witnesses … These ‘concealed elements’ as well as those ‘things never said should have been brought to light a long time ago,’ the same source said. ‘It was well-known that this was a huge thing,’ the person added.” [↩ ^[29]]
4. Black Agenda Report, translated for Rebelión by Mariola and Jesús María García Pedrajas. [↩ ^[30]]
5. It can be found in “C:\Unearthed ‘Gersony Report’ the U.N. said it never existed ^[31]” at The Proxy Lake. – mht [↩ ^[32]]
6. The RPF first carried out the ethnic cleansing in the areas they were seizing in the spring of 1994, the same spring when the Hutu extremists were carrying out their own genocide of the Tutsi in the areas under their control. Primarily, however, it was the cleansing carried out by the RPF after its full-fledged victory on July 18. [↩ ^[33]]
7. Editorial La Pagaie, pages 134-141. [↩ ^[34]]
8. As I pointed out in my book, Sadako Ogata is also a member of the Trilateral Commission. [↩ ^[35]]
9. Pages 140-141. [↩ ^[36]]
10. Almost everyone who has played a key political role in the Rwandan conflict has been or still is a member of the Trilateral Commission and/or has attended or attends the meetings of the Bilderberg Group: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, Kofi Annan, Madeleine Albright, Bill Richardson, Sadako Ogata, Susan Rice, Raymond Chrétien, Jean Chrétien, Hillary Clinton or Bernard Kouchner. This list does not take into account the higher number of members of the Foreign Relations Council or of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. [↩ ^[37]] 

Wed February 6, 2008

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Spanish judge indicts 40 Rwandan military officers for genocide

From CNN Madrid Bureau Chief Al Goodman

MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- A Spanish judge Wednesday indicted 40 current or former Rwandan military officers for several counts of genocide and human rights abuses during the 1990s when several million Rwandans died or disappeared.

General James Kabarebe, left, is one of the 40 indicted for several counts of genocide and human rights abuses.

The judge issued international arrest warrants against the 40, including Gen. James Kabarebe, whom the judge said is believed to be the chief of staff of Rwanda's military; Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa, whom the judge said is believed to be Rwanda's ambassador to India; and Lt. Col. Rugumya Gacinya, whom the judge said is believed to be a military attaches at Rwanda's embassy in Washington, according to court documents viewed by CNN
Rwanda does not have an extradition treaty with Spain, a court spokeswoman told CNN.
The indictments against the 40 are for "crimes of genocide, human rights abuses and terrorism," during the 1990s in Rwanda, "when more than four million Rwandans were killed or disappeared under an extermination plan for ethnic and/or political reasons," the court documents said.
The judge, Fernando Andreu, named eight Spaniards who died or disappeared during those tumultuous years in Rwanda. Their plight prompted his investigation at Spain's National Court in Madrid, which previously has investigated human rights violations against Spaniards during past military regimes in Chile, Argentina and elsewhere.

Five of the Spanish victims were missionaries. The bodies of four of them were found in late 1996 after they were tortured, and shot or hacked to death with machetes, the documents said, while a fifth is still missing.

Three other Spaniards were shot to death in early 1997 while working for a non-profit medical group providing aid to Hutu refugees in Rwanda, the documents said.
The majority of the victims during the wave of terror, the documents said, were Hutu Rwandan refugees or Congolese civilians, mainly Hutus as well.
The judge did not indict Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, because he has immunity as head of state, the documents said. But the judge also found evidence of criminal activity by Kagame, based on the testimony of an informant who told the judge he previously worked on Kagame's security detail, the documents said.
In preparing the indictments, the judge heard testimony from 22 people who said they witnessed the horrors in Rwanda in the 1990s. All of them live in exile, mainly in Europe, and all have changed their identity for security reasons, except Maria Beatrice Umutesi, who lives in Belgium and has written a book about the killings, the documents said.
The documents included a 182-page indictment and two accompanying summary documents.

French Experts Wind Up Plane Crash Probe in Kigali

AFP20100918670008 Paris AFP (World Service) in English 1524 GMT 17 Sep 10

["French experts wind up plane crash probe in Kigali" -- AFP headline]

KIGALI, Sept 17, 2010 (AFP) - French experts probing the 1994 downing of a plane carrying Rwanda's then president Juvenal Hbyarimana on Friday wound up their task of hearing witness testimonies and visiting key Kigali sites.

The five-member team including two anti-terrorism judges -- Marc Trevidic and Nathalie Poux -- surveyors, ballistics, explosives and fire experts sought to determine the origin of missiles that downed the plane.

Pre-genocide Hutu extremists and Tutsi rebels are both suspected of being behind the April 6, 1994 shooting of the Falcon 50 craft.

The French team, which arrived in Kigali on Saturday, suspects a commando unit of Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels of infiltrating the Rwandan Hutu army and firing two missiles from Masaka hill east of the runway where the plane was coming in to land.

However, the RPF government now in power in Kigali blames the attack on Hutu extremists within the FAR seeking to eliminate Habyarimana in order to launch a coup.

According to a Rwandan report, backed up by a ballistic survey conducted by British experts, the missiles were fired from the Kanombe military camp, a big army base adjoining the airport and the presidential residence.

Rwandan Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama handed text documents, pictures and audio recordings to the expert team on Friday and said they had been given a free hand during the probe.

"Rwanda has nothing to hide and ready to help whoever wants to reveal the truth. What we do not like are people who reach decisions without carrying out investigations and questioning those concerned," Karugarama told reporters.

Karugarama explained that the experts requested free access to all the documents, sites and to question people.

"They requested that we guarantee that they work in peace and without interference... that was done," he said.

Leon-Lef Forster, a defence lawyer for three Rwandan officials targeted in the probe, told AFP the team "could not reach any conclusions at this stage because they gathered a lot of information throughout the week which they will have to analyse."

The killing of Habyarimana, who was travelling with his Burundian counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira, is believed to have triggered the 1994 genocide which claimed the lives of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The two were returning from a summit in neighbouring Tanzania to revamp a 1993 peace deal aimed at setting up a transitional government and integrate the RPF rebels.

The French team is expected to present its report to the two judges before March 2011.


[Description of Source: Paris AFP (World Service) in English -- world news service of the independent French news agency Agence France Presse]

Spain wants Rwanda general extradited for genocide

Fri Sep 17, 2010 3:16pm GMT

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain requested on Friday that South Africa extradite an exiled Rwandan general who it wants on charges including genocide and killing four Spaniards in Rwanda in the 1990s, the Justice Ministry said.

The Spanish High Court has charged Lieutenant-General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa with genocide and with the murder of a Spanish missionary in 1994 and three Spanish aid workers in 1997.
"He took part in systematic and planned attacks on the civilian population, in forced disappearances and crimes against international law, also, organising and executing terrorist attacks," a ministry statement said.
Nyamwasa fled to South Africa this year after falling out with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and later accused him of using an anti-corruption campaign to frame opponents.
The general fought alongside Kagame to end the 1994 genocide in the central African nation. During and after that war he held a number of key positions, including army chief of staff and head of the country's intelligence services.
Nyamwasa was shot in the stomach in June in what his wife called a Rwandan-backed assassination attempt. South African police arrested four people for the attack.

Obama implores minister to call off Quran burning

 

AP – President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the economy,Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2010, at Cuyahoga Community …

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is exhorting a Florida minister to "listen to those better angels" and call off his plan to engage in a Quran-burning protest this weekend.
Obama told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview aired Thursday that he hopes the Rev. Terry Jones of Florida listens to the pleas of people who have asked him to call off the plan. The president called it a "stunt."
"If he's listening, I hope he understands that what he's proposing to do is completely contrary to our values as Americans," Obama said. "That this country has been built on the notion of freedom and religious tolerance."
"And as a very practical matter, I just want him to understand that this stunt that he is talking about pulling could greatly endanger our young men and women who are in uniform," the president added.
Said Obama: "Look, this is a recruitment bonanza for Al Qaida. You could have serious violence in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan." The president also said Jones' plan, if carried out, could serve as an incentive for terrorist-minded individuals "to blow themselves up" to kill others.
"I hope he listens to those better angels and understands that this is a destructive act that he's engaging in," the president said of Jones.
Obama has gotten caught up in the burgeoning controversy surrounding the practice of Islam in America, saying at one point that he believed that Muslims had a right to build a mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New York City.
Earlier, several members of his adminstration, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, had denounced the Quran-burning plan.
Also, Army Gen. David Petraeus, the ground commander in Afghanistan, has said the act of burning the Quran could endanger troops fighting there.
On Wedneday, the State Department has ordered U.S. embassies around the world to assess their security ahead of the planned weekend demonstration in Florida.
Officials said U.S. diplomatic posts have been instructed to convene "emergency action committees" to determine the potential for protests over the congregation's plans to burn the Quran to commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The posts are to warn American citizens in countries where protests may occur.

Africa’s Failing Democracies

Africa’s Failing Democracies

When human rights Watch criticized the results of Ethiopia’s May elections, in which the ruling coalition “won” an improbable 545 out of 547 seats, leaders in Addis Ababa didn’t ignore the influential NGO. Instead, they paid tens of thousands of demonstrators to gather in the capital and denounce the report.

Ethiopia’s political shenanigans are emblematic of a growing trend away from democracy in Africa. The swing includes not only pariah states like Eritrea and Sudan, but also U.S. allies like Rwanda, where President Paul Kagame is up for reelection and seems set to duplicate the improbable 95 percent victory he posted seven years ago. Rights groups have already cried foul: a general who criticized Kagame was shot, charges have been brought against a top opposition leader, and a dissident journalist was killed. In Gabon and Togo, the deaths of long-serving autocrats have meant elections in which power was smoothly -transferred—to their sons, that is. Mauritania, Guinea, Madagascar, and Niger have all suffered coups in the past two years. Freedom House, a nonprofit that tracks democratic trends, dropped three African countries from its list of “electoral democracies” last year, and reported declines in political freedom in 10 others. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation—which offers a lucrative prize to African leaders who both help their countries and peacefully leave office—decided not to offer an award last year.

Why the backsliding? It’s partly thanks to the rise of China, which provides cheap loans and investment to resource-rich countries while asking no hard questions about human rights, thus strengthening the hold of authoritarian governments. The West is to blame, too. The Obama administration and its European allies have turned a blind eye to autocratic trends in -places like Uganda, Burundi, and Ethiopia because of those countries’ role in -battling Islamists.

There’s no easy solution. Making aid conditional on meeting democratic or human-rights standards would mean a halt to programs that help the poor. Criticizing military allies risks disrupting the war against radical Islamists. But as long as Western countries stay the course, more Africans will grow skeptical of the West’s declared support for the rule of law. “If this is their representation of democracy and human rights, they shouldn’t talk about it anymore,” says Hailu Shawel, an Ethiopian opposition leader. “They should shut up.” The Obama administration and its allies could win back credibility by taking a tougher line on Kagame and his fellow leaders—but they seem more likely to keep looking away.

Rwandans 'desperate,' US and UK silent

Rwandans 'desperate,' US and UK silent Special
By Ann Garrison.
+
Embattled Rwandan presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza reported that officers of her FDU-Inkingi Party are being tortured in a Rwandan prison and that Kagame has now arrested and tortured Theogene Muhayeyezu, her Rwandan lawyer.
It seems that no lawyers, neither Rwandan nor foreign, will be able to defend Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza without themselves facing arrest by the Kagame regime, which arrested and incarcerated William and Mitchell Law Professor and international criminal lawyer Peter Erlinder for alleged "genocide ideology," after he
FDU-Inkingi Party
Presidential candidate Victoire Ingabiré Umuhoza, in court, at a bail hearing, six hours after being arrested in Kigali, Rwanda.
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traveled to Rwanda to defend presidential candidate Ingabire against the same charge. "Genocide ideology" is a vague Rwandan statutory crime, which means disagreeing with the official history of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, or, it often seems, disagreeing with the Kagame regime.
Erlinder, is back in the United States, after three weeks incarceration in Kigali, speaking out about Rwandan President Paul Kagame, whom he accuses of ordering the political assassinations that triggered the Rwanda Genocide, costing a million Rwandan lives, then racketeering to control the mineral wealth of neighboring D.R. Congo, at a cost of more than six million more lives.
Rwanda News Agency
American Law Professor Peter Erlinder and Rwandan presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza together at Erlinder's June 14th bail hearing. She is under house arrest and he is in prison, after traveling to Rwanda to defend her.
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Erlinder addressed the Chicago Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild on Wednesday, and on Thursday, back in Rwanda, Ingabire reported that officers of her FDU-Inkingi Party are being held and tortured in a Rwandan prison and that Kagame has now arrested and tortured the Rwandan lawyer who took Erlinder's place.
Umuvugizi journalist Jean Leonard Rugembage was gunned down outside his home on the day of last week's arrests, right after reporting that Kagame had ordered the attempted assassination of Rwandan exile General Kayumba Nyamwasa in Johannesburg, South Africa. Rugembage's Umuvugizi Editor, Jean Bosco Gasasira, who fled to Uganda, accuses Rwandan President Paul Kagame of using violence, assassination, arrest and torture to remain in power, and says that the US and UK are
Jean Bosco Gasasiras, Umuvugizi Editor
Slain Rwandan journalist Jean Leonard Rugembage.
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the leading donors supporting his regime.
"The US and the UK are the main donors to Rwanda, but unfortunately, they are quiet," Gasasira said. "We are really desperate and we are really disappointed by their silence."
Rwandan Police Chief Eric Kayiranga denied the allegations of torture and said that those who remain in prison are visited regularly because the prison does not provide food for them, which means that they have been getting food from those who visit them every day.

Erlinder released as Kagame cracks down on his own

Erlinder released as Kagame cracks down on his own
June 27, 2010
[Translate]

by Ann Garrison
American law professor Peter Erlinder returns

Peter Erlinder’s Kenyan lawyer Otachi Gershom, who, like Erlinder, is a defense lawyer at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda and opposition politician Victoire Ingabire left a Kigali courtroom relieved after a Rwandan judge agreed to release Erlinder on medical grounds.
U.S. law professor Peter Erlinder returned from three weeks imprisonment, from May 28 to June 17, in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, where he had traveled to act as defense counsel for embattled presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza. Ingabire remains under house arrest, unable to leave the country, and faces a possible 20-year prison sentence. Both she and Erlinder are still accused of violating Rwanda’s unique “genocide ideology” speech crime, which means disagreeing with the official history of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide.

A Rwandan judge agreed to release Erlinder but only on medical grounds, not in response to the argument that his free speech rights and thus, by extension, the free speech rights of Victoire Ingabire and other Rwandans are guaranteed by the international human rights covenants that Rwanda has signed or by Rwanda’s membership in the British Commonwealth.

In his press conference at William and Mitchell College of Law in Minneapolis-St. Paul on Wednesday, June 23, following his return, Professor Erlinder thanked all the people around the world who had called for his release, and said that he owed his life to them and to the Internet. He called it a triumph for people power, but he also said that it would not have occurred if he had not been a white American lawyer with friends, family and allies capable of organizing and lobbying relentlessly for his release.

In Kigali, Ingabire said that Professor Erlinder’s arrest demonstrated the nature of the Rwandan regime. She called on all those who supported him to support Rwandans now.

She said, as Sen. Russ Feingold, chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Africa, has in the Feingold Statement on the Fragility of Democracy in Africa, that the U.S should insist on democracy in Rwanda as a condition of its donor nation support.

However, with Rwanda’s 2010 election now only seven weeks away, and neither the FDU-Inkingi nor the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda allowed to contest the election, more and more Rwandans are losing hope and some have even concluded that only military invasion could unseat the Kagame regime, a possibility that President Kagame has attempted to circumvent by force repatriating refugees who might join a rebel army.
Assassins go after Rwandan exile Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa

On Saturday, June 25, an unidentified gunman attempted to assassinate Rwandan exile Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa, an outspoken critic of President Kagame and a potential leader of a rebel army invading to overthrow him. The gunman opened fire on Kayumba as he returned home from a grocery store in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Rwandan police arrested P.S. Imberakuri presidential candidate Bernard Ntaganda in his home on the morning of Thursday, June 24, to prevent him from leaving for a protest he had called at the National Electoral Commission. Meanwhile, Rwandan President Paul Kagame was registering his “candidacy” in the faux election that Ntaganda and the other viable candidates have been excluded from.
Ingabire condemned the assassination attempt as another example of Kagame’s favored method of eliminating exiled dissidents and called once again for nonviolent political, not military, solutions.

Rwandan exile and Ingabire supporter Jean Manirarora, now a microbiological research scientist in Louisville, Kentucky, also called for political solutions but said that Gen. Kayumba has become the greatest threat to President Kagame because he is a Tutsi general popular with both Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis and could thus lead a Hutu and Tutsi army into Rwanda, with credible claim to being a national liberation army, not an army of genocidaires.

“There is no sign of an army organizing to invade Rwanda,” Manirarora said, but if there were and if Kayumba were to lead it, no one could say that he had come to finish off the Tutsi because he himself is a Tutsi.

On Thursday, June 24, hundreds of Rwandan opposition leaders and members, including P.S. Imberakuri Party leader and presidential candidate Bernard Ntaganda, were assaulted and arrested because of a protest planned at Rwanda’s National Electoral Commission that morning, as President Paul Kagame registered his candidacy and all the viable opposition was excluded. On the same day, the deputy editor of Rwanda’s Umuvugizi newspaper, Jean Leonard Rugambage, was shot dead on the way into his home in Kigali.

Shocked and grief stricken, Umuvugizi editor Jean Bosco Gasasiras, now in exile in Uganda, accused Rwandan President Paul Kagame of ordering his security operatives to assassinate Rugambage. Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa’s wife Rosette continues to accuse Kagame of sending operatives to assassinate her husband, and Rwandan journalist Godwin Agaba, also in exile in Uganda, said that Rugambage had just written a story revealing a plot to poison Kayumba in his sickbed in South Africa, where he is recovering from last week’s attempt on his life.
In the shadow of AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command

Africa’s oil rich Gulf of Guinea
These arrests and intrigue in Rwanda create urgencies that distract from an AFRICOM (U.S. Africa Command) conference that concluded in Kigali at the same time Professor Erlinder was being released. The conference was called to plan an August military “exercise” in Accra, Ghana, on the Gulf of Guinea, which is critical to the control of West African oil and gas and oil and gas transport corridors in the Gulf of Guinea and the rivers flowing into it.

On May 16, 2001, the Office of Vice President Richard Cheney produced a document titled “West African Oil: a Priority for U.S. National Security and African Development,” a “National Energy Policy Report.” For whatever reason, the policy report’s Web URL is http://www.israeleconomy.org/strategic/africawhitepaper/pdf.

The Rwanda News Agency (RNA) reported on the conclusion of the AFRICOM conference in a story with the headline “U.S. military not intending to control Africa” – says Army chief.” The RNA report quoted a senior Rwandan military chief saying, “A new U.S. military program training African armies including Rwanda is not a U.S. move to dominate the African continent.”

Many Africans, not only Rwandan and Congolese, and Americans, especially African Americans, seemed to believe that this statement reduced the credibility of the Kagame government, which also insists that it had nothing to do with the latest round of assassinations and assassination attempts in Rwanda and surrounding nations.

San Francisco writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Digital Journal, Examiner.com, OpEdNews, Global Research, Colored Opinions and her blog, Plutocracy Now. She can be reached at anniegarrison@gmail.com.
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Clinton questions Rwanda’s democracy

Kampala

The US Secretary of State, Ms Hilary Clinton, has said that recent political developments in Rwanda threaten to undermine its young democracy and its path development. The former US First Lady stressed this at her Diplomacy Briefing on Sub-Saharan Africa countries on Monday where she talked about her country’s relationship with countries in the Sub-Saharan countries.

“Recent events in Rwanda threaten to undermine its own remarkable progress by beginning to move away from a lot of the very positive actions that undergirded its development so effectively,” Ms Clinton said in a statement that was sent to Daily Monitor from the Africa Media Hub based at the US Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa.

Officers arrested
She added: “The US remains very supportive of Rwanda, however, and is in discussion with Rwanda’s government to see steps taken to reverse those actions.” Recently, senior army officers in Rwanda have been arrested while some like former Chief of Staff Lt. Gen.Kayumba Nyamwasa have fled to exile.

Opposition leader Victoire Ingobire is facing charges of allegedly participating in the 1994 genocide. The head of the country’s football governing body Brig. Gen. Jean Bosco Kazura was also arrested for travelling to South Africa to watch World Cup football without clearance.

Rwanda: Detained Lawyer's Wife To Speak With U.N. Security Council Members

Masako Usui, the wife of the U.S. Professor and Attorney Peter Erlinder, is traveling to New York City this week on a mission to visit United Nations Security Council members.

Her husband, Peter Erlinder was arrested by Rwanda Police in Kigali on May 28, 2010. She plans to ask for their assistance in urging Rwanda to free Professor Erlinder and drop all charges.

Professor Erlinder is a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law, lead defense attorney for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (I.C.T.R.), and President of the I.C.T.R. defense lawyers association. The I.C.T.R. which was set up by the United Nations Security Council in 1994 to prosecute war criminal for events that happened in 1994.

Erlinder faces charges of genocidal ideology and threatening Rwandan national security. These charges are directly related to the vigorous defense of his clients. He successfully proved to the I.C.T.R. that the genocide had not been planned or executed by the persons he represented, Aloys Ntabakuze.

According to the Rwanda prosecutor and court, the basis for the charges against him are that he: Publicly wrote, outside of Rwanda, in defense of his clients through articles, press releases and open letters to public officials calling for a deeper examination of the events that happened in 1994 and suggests that there could be a different narrative based on factual evidence; and, he filed wrongful death lawsuit against Paul Kagame in the Oklahoma Federal court under the Alien Tort Claims

Act on behalf of his client, Agathe Habyarimana, the widow of the former Rwandan president.

Erlinder continues to be held, now in Kigali Central Prison, after he received a judgment on Monday, June 7, 2010, denying him bail or any type of release.

The spokesman of “United Nations-backed tribunal for Rwanda," Roland Amoussouga, stated, in a New York Times June 13, article: “I.C.T.R. will not allow anyone to be prosecuted for the work that it has done for it.”

The same New York Times article also reported, “Despite assurances from Rwanda that Mr. Erlinder was not arrested for his work at the tribunal, officials at the tribunal say they also believe there is a connection. They have asked Rwanda for clarification and may bring the case in front of the United Nations Security Council."

Among many human rights and legal organizations that have called for Erlinder’s release, the American Bar Association points to the U.N. Basic Principals on the Role of Lawyers, which state that lawyers “shall not be identified with their clients or their client's causes as a result of discharging their functions” and that “governments shall ensure that lawyers are able to perform all of their functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper influence.” These principals also provided that “lawyers like other citizens are entitled to freedom of expression, belief, association and assembly.”

The International Criminal Defense Attorneys Association (ICDAA) denounced and condemned Peter Erlinder’s continued detention in the strongest possible terms and urged all concerned to demand his immediate release.

In a joint statement to the court and the UN security council, many defense lawyers have demanded Erlinder's immediate release: "We hereby resolve to postpone all activities, other than those which strictly conserve the interests of our mandates, until such time as the minimum conditions of the normal exercise of our missions have been restored by the removal of threats," the statement says.

This continued detention has prompted other defense lawyers at the ICTR to refuse to participate in proceedings. Five defense teams before the ICTR have filed motions saying it was too dangerous to represent an accused, ICTR responded by launching contempt proceedings against another American defense lawyer, Peter Robinson, when Robinson stated his intention to withdraw from the case due to Erlinder's detention.