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last updated by Rwanda 6 years, 6 months ago
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  • #575
    Rwanda

      FPR/APR/RDF ni inganda zayo zicura ibinyoma, urwango

      Ku nshuro ya 23 guhera ku ya 7 mata 2017, i Kigali inganda zicura ibinyoma n’urwangano (IBUKA, CNLG…) zashinzwe na FPR/APR/RDF mu nyungu zayo, bafunguye ibyo nise IMURIKA RYA ABACURUZI BA GÉNOCIDE Y’ABATUTSI bo bita icyunamo.

      Abagize ihuriro ry’abacuruza génocide y’abatutsi ni:

      *FPR/APR/RDF ni inganda zayo zicura ibinyoma, urwango… (IBUKA, CNLG…),

      *Abanyamakuru nka François Soudin, Medhi BA…

      *Abanditsi bibitabo nka (…)

      *L’ONU, USA, EU n’abababoneraho indamuko.

      Bahujwe no kuba barashyize umwakagara mu rugwiro agendera hejuru y’amaraso y’Abanyarwanda aho benshi bakoresha umusambi utukura (tapis rouge).Uwo muco mubi wo gucuruza no kuvangura abacu baguye mu ntambara twatejwe n’Inyenzi-nkotanyi, umaze gushinga umuzi i Kigali.

      Mu minsi ishize numvise Sekibi Paul KAGAME afite za kuki nyinshi ku bwicanyi bwo muri 1994. Hari n’umwiherero w’igabiro uherutse aho uyu mwicanyi Paul Kagama yibazaga akanisubia ngo kuki u RWANDA ari umwihariko ukurikije ibindi bihugu byabayemo intambara.

      Ngiye ku musubiza n’ifashishije ibibazo bitatu buri wese yibaza cyangwa ya kwibaza.

      1. Ubwicanyi bwo mu 1994 bwatewe n’iki?
      2. Bwakozwe na bande?
      3. Bwashobotse gute?

      1. Ku iya 06 mata 1994 nari mfite imyaka 10-11. Intambara ya tangiye ku ya 01 ukwakira 1990 ariho ngitangira amashuri abanza twita primaire.Birumvikana ko imyaka nari mfite icyo gihe ntarinzi amavu n’amavuko y’iyo ntambara. Ariko kuva yatangira ingaruka zayo narazibonaga.

      Aha navuga :

      *** Abanyarwanda bavuye mubyabo bahinduka Impunzi mu gihugu cyabo,

      *** Amamine yaturikaga mu mihanda, mu mamodoka… Ibyo byanteraga ubwoba kandi ntawundi numvaga ubiteza atari Inyenzi-nkotanyi. Ubwo nyakwijyendera Président Juvenal Habyarima yicwaga we n’abo bari kumwe mundege itaha iva Arusha nta wundi muntu natekereje ubikoze utari Inyenzi-nkotanyi.

      Aho nkuriye ngeze muri za 30 na, imyumvire yanjye ntiyahindutse kandi na koze ibyo shoboye kugirango menye ukuri kose kw’ibibazo byacu, twe, abanyarwanda.

      Ukuri n’uko FPR/APR/RDF ariyo yateje ubwicanyi bwo mu 1994 yica président Juvenal Habyarimana avuye gushimangira ko ashaka amahoro ya Arusha.

      Iyo abantu bahagaritse imirwano bakajya kumeza y’ibiganiro baba bashaka ko amaraso y’inzirakarengane atameneka. Nakwibutsa abasoma ko leta yari iyobowe na président Juvenal Habyarimana ntabushobozi bw’amafaranga n’amasasu bwo gukomeza kurwana yari ifite. Habyarimana n’abari inyumaye bagiye mu masezerano ya Arusha babishaka kandi babikeneye. Nibwo buryo bwonyine bwo gutsindwa intambara mu cyubahiro badasebye cyane bari basigaranye. Amahanga yagombaga kubafasha intambara y’amasasu (ZAÏRE, BELGIQUE, FRANCE…) bari barigendeye. Ntanyungu nanke yo gukomeza intambara tuzatsindwa, leta yari igifite.

      Ku rugamba rw’amahoro y’Arusha ho itsinzi yari ihari kuko urupfu rwa Nyakwijyendera Président Melchiol Ndadaye rwazuye président Juvenal Habyarimana muri politique ubwo amashyaka yamurwanyaga yacikagamo ibice amwisunga. Abanzi be babibonye bahitamo kumwica ataragarura ubuyanja.

      2. UBWICANYI BWO MURI 1994 BWAKOZWE NA BANDE ?

      Nyuma y’imyaka 3 gusa intambara ya FPR/APR/RDF itangiye, mugihugu hagati Ibintu n’abantu bari bamaze gushegeshwa n’umwuka mubi w’abashakaga ubutegetsi. Umuntu yavuga nk’impinduka muri guverinoma aho kuva 1991 yari igizwe n’amashyaka atandukanye arwanya MRND na président J. Habyarimana kandi anafitanye amasezerano na FPR-inkotanyi. Mumakomine naho ni uko no mu izindi nzego Za leta byari uko.

      Nu ukuvuga ko kuva 1991 kugeza FPR ifata igihugu yari ifite muri leta abantu bayo
      bayikorera rwihishwa n’abafatanyije nayo muburyo buziguye. Nka première ministre Uwiringiyimana Agathe n’abandi nnkawe. Ntabwo rero ubwicanyi bwo kurimbura abatutsi bwaba bwarateguwe muri icyogihe ngo FPR/APR/RDF inanirwe kubimenya, inatabare cyangwa ibaburire bahunge mu gihe bari kuba babona ko bidashoboka kuzabatabara. Abatutsi nabo nta bwicanyi babonaga ko bazakorerwa kuko benshi bari bafite uburyo bwo guhunga cyangwa guhungisha imiryango ya bo. Ntibabikoze!!!!!! Ari abahutu, abatutsi cga abatwa bose iya 06 Mata 1994 yarabatunguye uretse usibye umwakagara Paul Kagame n’agatiskom ke gusa.

      Na none kandi iyo ubwicanyi buba bwarateguwe mbere yi ya 01 ukwakira 1990 FPR/APR/RDF iba yarateye ivuga ko ije kububurizamo. Ariko yo yaje ivuga ko itashye.
      Iyo Inkotanyi zivuga ko Habyarimana ya gombaga kwicwa kugirango abatutsi bicwe. Ni ikinyoma gisa n’ukuri kubera impmavu zikurikira:

      * Habyarimana koko ntiyashoboraga kwica abatutsi. Ni ukuri.

      * Ariko abatutsi bashoboraga kwicwa Habyarimana atakiriho kandi yishwe n’abatutsi. Nabyo ni ukuri.

      * FPR/APR/RDF yo ivuga ko Habyarimana yishwe n’abahutu kugirango bice abatutsi banagumane ubutegetsi banyuze mu inzira y’amasasu. Ni ikinyoma kinyagisha kuko ibi byasabaga ko abahutu bagira imbaraga zo gutsinda inkotanyi. Nta zari zihari kandi byaragaragaye.

      Ikindi kinyoma gikunze gushyirwa imbere ni; FPR/APR/RDF yishe Président Juvenal Habyarimana izi neza ko abatutsi bazashira :

      ** Ibyo bigamije k’unvisha abantu ko hari umugambi wo kumara abatutsi. Uretse byonyine ko umubare munini wa abantu bishwe mu 1994 ari abahutu na Arusha yabuze uwo mugambi.
      Nguko uko FPR/APR/RDF iyobya amarari ishinja abandi ibyo iba yateguye ikanakora. Iyo intambara irose nyuma y’amasezerano yo kuyikumira uyishoye ni we uba ubaye nyirabayazana. Kugirango FPR/APR/RDF itarebwa nk’uwateje ubwicanyi inishe amasezerano ya Arusha, ivuga ko Habyarimanaa yishwe n’abantu be bari banateguye gutsemba abatutsi.

      Sekibi Paul KAGAME ubwo BBC Hard Talk yamubazaga ku by’indege président Juvena Habyarimana yiciwemo, yavuze ko nta kintu cyari muri iyo ndege cy’agaciro. Iyo umuntu asubije amaso inyuma kubyo abakunzi be biteguye gukora igihe azaba atagitegeka nifuza kumubaza niba agihamya ko nta cyari muri iyo ndege yahanuye ku ya 06 mata 1994. Bamwe mu bantu be bavuga ko bazahunga abandi ko baziyahura…Paul KAGAME amenye rwose ko Habyarimana nawe yari afite abamukunda bigeze aho.

      Aho président Paul KAGAME ahamagarira anigamba kwica abaturage be Habyarimana we yabuzaga abakunzi be bashaka kunyura munzira yo kumena amaraso bamurwanirira (kutagwa mu umutego w’umwanzi nicyo byavugaga) kandi yari azi neza ko abo atari abantu be gusa ahubwo ko n’umwanzi abihishemo. Kubangamira isura y’igihugu n’iye bwite yarazi ko aribyo bagamije abihishe mu bamwiyitiriraga barusha abandi ubukana, ubutoni no gushyanuka. Twavuga nka Boniface RUCAGU wanandikaga muri binyamakuru abaeshya Rubanda ko arwanya Inkotanyi ariko uko ahageze ubu buri wese arabyibonera.

      Abo nibo FPR/APR/RDF yita interahawe, bashyushyaga imitwe y’abaturage b’ubwenge buke bitabiriye kwica bagenzi babo kugirango bizagerekwe ku butegetsi bwa Habyarimana kandi muby’ukuri byarakoze na FPR n’abambari bayo bari barigize intama. Hari abandi bantu bitabiriye ubwicanyi bakabuyobora babukora ku manwa y’ihangu bari bacumbitse muri CND aho ingabo za KAGAME zari zatujwe na Arusha. Aba bantu bavaga muri CND bambaraga imyenda y’abiyitaga interahamwe n’ingabo z’igihugu ubundi si ukwica bakoreka imbaga kumugaragaro bakifotoza kugira ngo amahanga arusheho kwanga ubutegetsi bwarihomu Rwanda. Muri rusange ukurikije abantu ba FPR inkotanyi bishe abatutsi benewabo n’abahutu mu gihugu hose, inyito ya génocide siyo ikwiye guhabwa ubwicanyi bwo mu 1994.

      3.  KUKI UBWICANYI BWO MURI 1994 BWASHOBOTSE?

      Ishingano z’abafite ubutegetsi ni ukurindira abaturage n’ibintu byabo umutekano. Biragoye kwishyira mu mwanya w’undi ariko Leta ya Habyarimana yari yaravangiwe n’inkotanyi bihagije kuburyo ibikorwa byinshi FPR yabaga ibifitemo umuntu wayo.  Paul KAGAME azi kwiyoberanya. Niba mbeshya abavuga ko FPR Inkotanyi yari ifite gahunda nziza inogeye igihugu igihe yateraga u Rwanda, batubwiza ukuri igituma babarizwa muri byabintu umubiri uba utagikeneye. Yarabazubaje!!!!

      Umwakagara Paul Kagame yarindagije amashyaka yose muri Arusha, arindagiza ingabo ze,  ishyaka rye benshi mubari kurugamba nawe yarabishe abandi barahunga , abatarishwe cyangwa ngo bahunge barafunzwe.

      KAGAME Amaze kwica umukuru w’igihugu cyacu n’uw’Uburundi n’abari kumwe nabo, yihutiye kwiyoberanya avuga ko ari Coup d’Etat ikozwe n’ingabo z’igihugu. Ingaruka z’icyo kinyoma ni uko nta musilikare wa leta cyangwa umu civil washoboraga gufata iyambere, agire icyo akora yemye atisobanura kuri bariyeri ko atakoze Coup d’Etat cyangwa atitwa Inkotanyi kandi na none byahaga urwitwazo FPR-inkotanyi rwo gukomeza imirwano ivuga ko amasezerano ya Arusha ntacyo akivuze. Ikindi ni uko abari abayobozi babuze imyifatiro baribombarika barengera amagara ya bo kuko kuba wagerekwaho kwica Habyarimana ni icyaha gikomeye ku uwariwe wese bara kuramuka babyitiriye. Iyi dossier yari iyo kwitondera.

      Gutabara abaturange hakoreshejwe ingufu za leta ababikoze barishwe bafatwa nk’inkotanyi abandi babikoze rwihishwa kubera ko Inkotanyi zari zaracyengeye ubutegetsi kandi ntizifuzaga ko abaturage batabarwa kubera ko kwicwa kwabo nibyo byaziheshaga insinzi. Hari abibwira ko hari abantu bagiye bagwa kuri za bariyeri bishwe n’abo bita interahamwe nyamara igitangaje izo nyenzi zo, kuri za bariyeri nizo zashinjaga abandi ubukontanyi zinarushana ubukana muburyo bwo guhishira icyo bari cyo. Ibyo nabyo byo kwitwa inkotanyi arizo zibiri inyuma byari bigamije guca intege leta muburyo bwo kuyitembagaza. Kandi byarashobotse kuko abayobozi ba leta barushijeho kwibombarika bamwe bagatinya gufata ibyemezo byo gutabara igihu kandi Atari uko bacyanze.
      Abagerageje kwitanga bagakora ibikenewe ngo barengere abaturage , abatarafuye icyo gihe leta ya Paul KAGAME ya rabafunze ariko ikinyoma cya Kagame n’agatsiko ke ngo bahagaritse genocide ubu hari abakicyemera kandi cyambaye ubusa.

      FPR/APR/RDF n’abayishyigikiye bavuga ko abaturage bahawe imbunda zo kwica abatutsi ariko iki nacyo ni ikinyoma cyambaye ubusa. Hari gahunda yo gutanga intwaro mugihe inkotanyi zubuye imirwano. Uwari ufite mushingano ze gutanga intwaro iyo atazitanga kandi intambara yongeye kwaka byari kuba bivuze ko yifatanyije n’inkotanyi cyangwa yakoze Coup d’Etat, donc urupfu rwari kumurya.

      Gahunda yo gushyiraho milice mu ntambara kwi isi yose ibigamije ibi:

      **** Kuburizamo effet de surprise yu umwanzi (aho ingabo z’igihugu zitari byibura niyo umwanzi ateye ingabo ntizitungurwa kandi ziza zizi aho umwanzi aherereye neza).

      **** Gukerereza umwanzi muri manoeuvres (iyo afashe inzira yerekeza irunaka).

      **** Gufunga inzira y’umwanzi bikamusaba guca inzira yakure ivunannye cyangwa imutura mu mutego.

      **** Gutesha ikizere no gutera umwanzi ubwoba mu inzira aciyemo yose. Ibyo bituma imbaraga z’umuriro arasa unyanyagira ugata icyerecyezo umwanzi yarafite.

      Navuga aha ko ino mitwe ya DASSO, LOCAL DEFENSE, Inkeragutabara bose hashyiriweho kunganira APR/RDF muri runo rwego. Abamilice sibo barwana nyakurwana intambara nyirizina bo bakora contact feu yambere n’uteye.

      Kuki leta yari yarashyizeho iyo gahunda yo guha abaturage intwaro :

      Guteganya ko ingabo za FPR zo muri CND cyangwa mu majyaruguru aho zari
      ziri ziramutse zitsinzwe amatora zigahitamo gusubira mu ntambara zinyanyagiza mubaturage.
      Urugero aha ni Unita ya Savimbi muri 1992 itsindwa amatora, Savimbi n’abe basohotse muri Luanda baburirwa irengero bisubiriye mu mirwano.

      Abdoul Luzibiza atanga mugitabo cye ibishushanyo by’uko inkotanyi zagombaga
      gukora zirokora abatutsi bihura neza n’ibyo uwatekereje guha abaturange intwaro
      yabonaga inkotanyi zishobora gukora.

      Ni kuki iyo gahunda itakoze uko ya gombaga igabinduka icyari cy’abicanyi ? Nko muzindi gahunda n’inzego za leta FPR/APR/RDF yari yarayicengeye ikoreramo ibyo yishakiye. Abayo bayirimo aribo batera ubwoba abayobozi babashinja ubukotanyi n’ubugambanyi. Uburyo bwonyine bwo guhagarika ubwicanyi bwari uguhagarika imirwano nk’uko gouvernement y’abatabazi na ex-FAR babisabaga. Byari kubasubiza autorité mubaturage n’amahanga FPR/APR/RDF ya shakaga ko babura burundu igafata igihugu nk’umucunguzi w’abatutsi. FPR rero byarayihiriye l’ONU, America n’Uburaya biyiha umugisha ifata ubutegetsi mumaraso ayibuza gusinzira.

      Ndasoza ino nyandiko ngira nti iyo FPR inkotanyi ihagarika intambara n’ibikorwa byayo by’ubwicanyi yari gutahurwa ubu ikaba yari kuba ibarizwa muburoko. Ni cyo gituma itakoze ibikorwa byo kurengera abaturange. Mubushakashatsi bwanjye bwite uko ni ko kuri kwanjye. Nta shyaka ndimo cyangwa ingabo mbarizwamo. Ariko nifuza kuba umucunguzi wiryamunyu mu bandi basore  ba FDLR.

      UMWANZURO

      Kwibuka abacu basize ubuzima mu kaga kagwiririye igihugu cyacu ni byiza cyane ariko na none kubona FPR yateje ako kaga ariyo yigira victime ngo irimo irakoresha ibyunamo kandi ari yateje imiborogo ni agashinaguro. Nkuko Paul Kagame n’agatsiko ke babyivugira ko ntawarya umretsi atamenye amagi, Kagame n’agatsiko ke bahisemo kurimbagura abatutsi benewabo n’abahutu batabira kugira ngo bigerere kubutegetsi barye iyo miretsi ivuye mu maraso y’abanyarwanda none mu kinyoma cyambaye ubusa ngo bahagaritse genocide? Ahubwo se iyo bareka kuyiteze yari kuba?

      Ibyabaye mu Rwanda uko bivuga na bene kubiteza aribo FPR siko byagenze. Amateka ya genocide nyarwanda Paul Kagame n’agatsiko ke barimo batekinika bakayita genocide yakorwe abatutsi nk’aho bitazwi ko umubare w’abahutu wayiguyemo atariwo munini, yari akwiye gusubirwamo akandikwa bushyashya kuko ibivuga na Paulo Kagame n’abambari be ni ibinyoma gusa. Abumva igifaransa bashobora kwisomera iyi nyandiko ya Musavuli aha (Rwanda – Génocide : Il faudra réécrire l’histoire du génocide rwandais: http://intabaza.com/?p=2602&lang=fr )

      Muri make abanyarwanda bakwiye kwima amatwi ababeshyi bibumbiye muri FPR kimwe na ba mpatsibihugu bagize uruhari mu mahano yabereye mu Rwanda kuko batifuza ko ukuri kujya ahagaragara. Rubanda ni ukwishakamo ibisubizo kuko umucunguzi ari rubanda.

      #577
      Rwanda

        A rational inquiry into the ”Tutsi Genocide” and its declining currency as an export

        Something of fundamental importance happened last week in the Ethiopian capital Addis Abbeba. At the AU summit of heads of states, the AU peace and security commission’s proposal to send AU peace keepers to Burundi was unwelcome. That’s the basic message. But beneath the rejection lies a hidden message- that the world is waking up to the commercialization and politicization of a legal term “genocide”. This, assuming you know what underpinned the clamor for AU peacekeepers in Burundi, which has been aptly explained on this forum.

        At the center of the trajectory lies a debate- and consequent exporting of it, of a genocide- central of which is what has been referred to as the “Tutsi genocide” of 1994. After the military 1 and 11 trials at the ICTR and the BBC’s untold story, the rejection of the AU PSC’s proposal is yet another indictment of people benefitting from the genocide currency.

        In my earlier submissions, i presented a lot of legal literature on why the events of 1994 leave grey areas subject to a rational, legal inquiry. In this note, I intend to examine the events of 1994 from the RPA/F point of view.

        To get to this; we need to examine the character of the RPA from the onset of the invasion. It is almost a “judicial notice” that prior to RPA invasion, there was already deadly intrigue within the military ranks of the RPF Tutsi exile community in Uganda. It was clan rivalry that would result in the murder of the first commander, Major General Fred Rwigyema at the hands of Maj. Dr. Peter Bayingana and Maj. Chris Bunyenyezi. Why is this important? It is important because, as my good friend Kalyegira put it, if there was this level of bad blood and struggle for power within the RPF and it could result in the murder of their overall commander so soon into the war, what havoc would these ruthless men inflict on the Hutu civilians they encountered in villages as they made their way into Rwanda after October 1990?

        When the RPA invaded Rwanda, they made their rationale very clear. Reported the Uganda government-owned newspaper, the New Vision: “The force which invaded Rwanda on Monday [Oct. 1, 1990] has the prime aim of overthrowing the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana…They say they are not planning an immediate overthrow but a prolonged struggle which would mobilise the people…The RPF has an 8-point programme calling for, among other things, national unity, democracy, a self-sustaining economy and an end to corruption…They said they had no plans as to who should be Rwanda’s president and that the ‘people will choose”. The RPA further said they were prepared for a protracted war: ‘We don’t mind about speed, we mind about getting to the people’” (New Vision, Oct. 4, 1990, p.1, 12).

        That was their first formal statement. Even the pro-RPF New Vision admitted that “its aim is to overthrow the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana.” There was no mention or allegation that the Habyarimana regime was massacring or planning to massacre the Tutsi. From there, we realize that had the RPF surely uncovered any plan by Habyarimana to exterminate the Tutsi, it would have been the number one point among the eight. Yet here was the summary of the RPF’s philosophy and goals and there was no single point on averting a genocide or even anything remotely to do with human rights.

        Where then does genocide and death at a grisly, monumental level start, since we now know that at the time the RPF invaded Rwanda, there was no plan by the Hutu to massacre the Tutsi? Asks Kalyegira?

        In late April 1994, a Kampala radio station, 91.3 Capital FM invited the long-serving Rwandese ambassador to Uganda, Claver Kanyarusoke as a guest on their Sunday evening programme, Desert Island Discs. Kanyarusoke, a Hutu, arrived on a Thursday afternoon for the recording, dressed in a dark brown business suit. At the time, the Rwanda genocide was underway and bodies were floating down the River Kagera from Rwanda into Lake Victoria in Uganda and during the interview, William Pike, then New Vision MD and co-Managing Editor of 91.3 Capital FM, asked Kanyarusoke to explain the massacre of innocent Tutsi civilians.

        Kanyarusoke reminded Pike that under the 1993 Arusha peace accords between the Habyarimana government and the RPF guerrillas, Rwanda had been divided into two geographical areas of control, one for the Tutsi and the other for the Hutu. Since the world believed that the Tutsi-dominated RPF was a both a strong and disciplined force, fully in control of its area, Kanyarusoke asked, how were we to explain the fact that all the bodies floating down the river, without exception, were from the RPF-controlled region of Rwanda?

        What happened in April 1994?

        Stephen Kinzer, in his book about Rwandan President Paul Kagame, writes that the Habyarimana regime started killing opposition members and presumed RPA sympathizers; indiscriminately. May be or may be not. But the truth of the matter is that in early 1994, as Kalyegira aptly puts it, Kigali saw a sudden rise in violence and insecurity, with many people being killed. Leaders of the opposition Social Democrat Party and Liberal Party, as well as 2,300 other people, were gunned down in the months before April 6, 1994.

        The Ugandan newspsper, The Monitor published an interview on March 25, 1994, with Justin Bahunga, who was the Second Counsel at the Rwanda Embassy in Kampala. Bahunga’s answers give us a clue to what the world might be missing as to what happened in 1994. “In whose interests would the government of Habyarimana cause insecurity in Kigali”?

        Bahunga further added: “If you want to rule, you can’t rule by insecurity…So the only person who can cause insecurity is the one who wants to make a government fail.”Less than two weeks later, President Habyarimana was dead in an assassination after a surface-to-air missile was fired on the presidential jet. Fighting broke out in Kigali and in many other parts of Rwanda.

        Let us read the news reports of the time, starting with the French news agency AFP, in a report from Kigali by Annie Thomas: “Wednesday 13 April 1994, KIGALI – Tutsi rebels fought their way into the Rwandan capital yesterday, sending the government, foreigners and thousands of residents fleeing in fear of a new wave of tribal bloodletting. Below is the whole story:

        Intense fighting rocked several parts of the city.

        The Hutu-dominated interim government fled its headquarters in the Hotel des Diplomates in the city centre ‘for a more secure place’, a Rwandan soldier in the hotel said. Unconfirmed reports said the week-old government had moved to the town of Gitarama, south-west of the city. As the rebels closed, residents emerged from hiding and tried to escape an expected wave of revenge killings by the Tutsi forces. ‘It’s going to be carnage,’ predicted a Nairobi-based Rwandan diplomat.

        The last foreign residents seeking to leave the city were escorted to the airport by French and Belgian paratroopers. France, Russia, Germany and the United States said they had evacuated virtually all their nationals from Kigali.

        In Kampala, Christine Umutoni, spokeswoman for the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), said its forces had entered Kigali and were about to join a battalion of 600 fellow rebels camped outside the city under a UN-sponsored peace plan approved by the government and the rebels in August.

        She said RPF forces were awaiting instructions to seize the capital, where she said ‘government forces had dispersed, many of them surrendering with their arms to the RPF’. The rebels’ entry into the city was later confirmed by the UN in New York.

        The RPF has around 20,000 soldiers, against an estimated 30,000 government troops. RPF radio said advancing rebel forces had signed an agreement with UN officials yesterday guaranteeing the evacuation of foreign nationals.”At this juncture, we pause to reflect.

        Over the years, President Paul Kagame has railed against the UN and the world community for failing Rwanda in its time of great danger. “Where was the UN?” is a refrain we have heard countless times from Kagame in person and many of the top RPF leadership over the last 15 years.

        …………………………………End of the story…………………………………………..

        We now see, in the report, that the RPF’s own radio station broadcast a news item saying they had “signed an agreement with UN officials yesterday guaranteeing the evacuation of foreign nationals.” The UN was cooperating with the RPF, not standing by indifferently as we have been told.

        Secondly, the first paragraph of this AFP report states that “Tutsi rebels fought their way into the Rwandan capital yesterday, sending the government, foreigners and thousands of residents fleeing in fear of a new wave of tribal bloodletting.”In other words, as the RPF advanced on Kigali, the former Habyarimana government fled. The second paragraph shows the government, still in disarray, fleeing to a “more secure place.”

        Clearly the RPF was in a stronger position and was rapidly gaining the upper hand in the days following Habyarimana’s assassination.Thirdly, the AFP report said “In Kampala, Christine Umutoni, spokeswoman for the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), said its forces had entered Kigali and were about to join a battalion of 600 fellow rebels camped outside the city…” The RPF was in Kigali, according to its spokeswoman, within a week of Habyarimanas death.

        These news reports were written in the fast-moving atmosphere of the day, and so nobody can claim that because the AFP is a French state news agency, it was somehow doctoring its reports. However, just in case some detractors might dismiss the AFP report, is there any other we can turn to for an alternative angle to this story? Indeed there is.

        The Monitor, founded by Kevin Aliro, Wafula Oguttu, James Serugo, Teddy Seezi Cheeye, Richard Tebere, Davi Ouma Balikowa, and Charles Onyango-Obbo was a decidedly pro-RPF Kampala newspaper. There can be no question about it for those who know its history.

        Certainly there was a pro-RPF mood in Uganda in 1994, especially in central and western Uganda. So we can now go to a lead story in The Monitor of April 12, 1994, just six days after the shooting down of the Habyarimana plane. The story was written by Monitor reporters Steven Shalita and Dismas Nkunda:

        …………………………..the he story here………………………….

        “As the looting, indiscriminate killing by the Presidential Guard, regular troops and rampaging Hutu vigilantes went from bad to worse, there were indications that Kigali is about to fall to the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA).

        Information reaching The Monitor from Kigali said an advance RPA force which had been infiltrated into the capital earlier were poised to take the Post Office and the Central Bank…The RPA, which said it was going into the city to restore order and rescue the battalion of its 600 soldiers who had gone into Kigali as part of the peace process, had ben giving out a call for all foreigners to leave within 12 hours if they could…

        Truckloads of reinforcements for RPA rebels could be seen moving to Kigali from their northern stronghold.

        By day break [April 11] RPA had easy prey of the Rwanda army. The RPA commander-in-chief Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame told Voice of America (VOA) that his troops had overrun government positions in Mutara, formerly a stronghold for the government forces…

        In another interview with the BBC Swahili, Maj. Gen. Kagame boasted ‘We are in Kigali and we have had very little resistance to get here.’

        Hundreds of Rwanda government forces are said to be deserting to the RPA to secure positions in the subsequent government when the RPA topples the current interim government under the leadership of Theodore Sindikubwabo which was installed a few days ago. A member of the RPF Poliical Bureau (Maj.) Christine Umutoni yesterday told journalists at Speke Hotel [in Kampala] that the RPA will advance to ‘crush’ any forces which stand in defence of the ‘hoax government’ headed by Theodore Sindikubwabo, whether thos forces are local or foreign.

        “If any foreign force comes our way, while we are advancing, we shall regard them as the enemy,’ she said. ‘We are going to crush them.” Though Umutoni could not commit herself to actual distances, she said the RPA forces are ‘very, very close.’ So far, RPA has faced minimal resistance and has reported 3 casualties and no deaths.

        Reports from Kigali say that rampant massacres by Habyarimana loyalists have narrowed to specific targets, killing whole families of people opposed to their government. The targets include nearly every Tutsi and what has been described as ‘moderate Hutus.’ Umutoni however told journalists that Kigali remains a horror town and condemned the United Nations for their passive role. ‘The situation about massacres in Kigali now is very horrific,’ she said. ‘The UN has failed to control the situation.’ Maj. Umutoni boasted that the RPA had been capable of taking power as far back as February 8. ‘It was capable long ago…even February 8 when we were 30km from the town [Kigali].

        Umutoni said the RPA was recruiting several more forces as it advanced to beef up its more than 20,000 strong man army. Commenting on the military strength of the RPA, she said their main source of armament is the Rwandese forces. “Habyarimana has always been our quarter master. Even now we are going to use those very weapons he bought.”

        Once again, we stop and reflect on this story by the Monitor. It is even more revealing than the AFP story.

        The reports by AFP and the Monitor showed :

        1) The RPF in a position of increasing strength, advancing on Kigali and at various stages of taking control or having already taken control.

        2) Hutu government troops either fleeing or surrendering to the RPF and the government in disarray.

        The RPF is reported to be at 20,000-strong while the rapidly crumbling government army, the FAR, is at 30,000, so the two armies are at nearly the same strength.

        We see, in fact, Christine Umutoni, the RPF spokesperson, “boasting” that the RPF was in a position to capture Kigali as far back as February 1994.

        Take a careful look at this Monitor news story: “The overall RPF/RPA commander, Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame talks of the RPF overrunning government bases and positions and, according to the Monitor, boasting to the BBC World Service Kiswahili service that (in his own words) “We are in Kigali and we have had very little resistance to get here.”And then, we have the strange turnabout from Umutoni.

        She was the first RPF official to accuse the UN of doing nothing, and yet all other reports, including one by the RPF’s own radio, were speaking of an agreement between the RPF and the UN to ease the humanitarian crisis. Umutoni’s comments at Speke Hotel in Kampala were the first indications of the dishonesty of the RPF. This is why it is so important for research and investigation to become a part of our societies. So much history is distorted and allowed to remain so, because we are not bothered about re-reading and re-searching what we have been told.

        Having now seen, both from the AFP and the pro-RPF Monitor, that the RPF was in a position of rising strength and the remnant of the Habyarimana army and government was in disarray and either fleeing or surrendering, we come to the all-important question: What then happened? Remember, the RPF stalwarts Gerald Gahima and Claude Dusaidi had just penned an ultimatum to the UN with a clear threat: There are no Tutsis left to save and there is no need for additional UNAMIR troops to Rwanda (this writer is in possession of their letter to that effect).

        It is clear that the RPF was in control, or gaining control, of Kigali and other towns and was unchallenged by the fleeing FAR government army. If, as we have seen too, the Hutu-dominated government was fleeing Kigali, the army also fleeing or surrendering, how then was this government, falling apart and fleeing, able to orchestrate a genocide that claimed more than 800,000 lives, with the 20,000-man RPF army in control or about to be, but not doing anything about it?

        If Christine Umutoni told that Speke Hotel press conference that the RPF was strong enough to take power as far back as Feb. 8, 1994, what then prevented the RPA from stopping the genocide, if, as they claim, they knew of a plan by Habyarimana to exterminate the Tutsi minority? The answer begins to appear when we go to the next news excerpt from 1994.

        Here once again is the The Monitor’s lead story in its April 15, 1994 edition, headlined: “RPA in trouble?”, written by Steven Shalita and Dismas Nkunda:

        ————————————–The story by The pro-RPF Monitor——————————–

        “What is happening? Eleven days have gone and Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA) is still in a bloody battle with Rwandese government troops for Kigali.”

        Parts of the Rwandese capital remain in the hands of The Presidential Guard, regular troops and paramilitary forces to former president Juvenal Habyarimana who was assassinated in a rocket attack on his plane April 6…Anxiety has gripped supporters of the RPA/F cause who view their ‘delay’ to capture Kigali as a sign of trouble.

        On Wednesday afternoon an RPF official told a Monitor reporter at Mulindi, the RPF headquarters, that Kigali would fall in 12 hours, but it did not happen. The rebels have besieged Kigali for almost a week now but have failed to take full control.

        There is an estimated force of 18,000 RPA men laying siege to Kigali on three fronts. Latest reports say that some strategic hills around Kigali such as Nyamirambo, are in the hands of RPF.

        According to a military analyst, the RPF is being cautious about destroying down-town Kigali. The Monitor was told that RPA was surrounding Kigali leaving only one outlet through Gitarama that could be used by fleeing soldiers.

        RPF spokesman Shaban Rutayisire told the journalist at Mulindi that “It is a question of time and tactics so that we rout the murderous Rwanda army.” ‘The puzzlement that Kigali has not fallen is only deepened, because the entire interim cabinet fled Kigali on Tuesday. Interim President Theodore Sindikubwabo and 19 of his ministers fled to Gitarama, 50km, south west of Kigali.

        A Uganda military expert told The Monitor yesterday that with the murders of civilians estimated about 20,000 so far, most of them suspected to be pro-RPF and Tutsi, RPA has a political obligation to go in to stop the bloodletting…

        Another source watching developments said “The RPA was militarily ready to enter Kigali and there is no doubt they will win the fight within the week, but they were not politically ready.

        But, on the face of it, the death of Habyarimana and the blood that flowed the Kigali streets was an ‘opportune time’ for the RPF to enter Kigali.

        He said that while RPA had support, it was not clear whether they had the majority of the people on their side; and now that they were bogged down in Kigali, the Hutu hardliners have been given time to mobilise the people with fears of Tutsi massacring them.”

        There we have it. The story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in crystal clear light at last. There is no question that the RPF held the upper hand militarily by the beginning of 1994.

        That much Christine Umutoni was able to tell a public press conference at Kampala’s Speke Hotel. And in case we might want to dismiss her observation as that from a junior official, we have Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame’s own direct and unambiguous words to the BBC Kiswahili service that “‘We are in Kigali and we have had very little resistance to get here.

        “Crucially, according to this Monitor news report, the RPF was so comfortably in control of Kigali a week after Habyarimana’s death that they even left the road to Gitarama open so that it “could be used by fleeing soldiers.”

        Far from the FAR government army embarking on a mass murder of Tutsi, they were fleeing Kigali, as we have already seen and, in fact, even being helped by the RPF to escape. The comments by the Ugandan military expert to the Monitor fill in all the remaining blanks.

        Here is the critical passage in the story by the Monitor on April 15, 1994: “Another source watching developments said ‘The RPA was militarily ready to enter Kigali and there is no doubt they will win the fight within the week, but they were not politically ready.’

        But, on the face of it, the death of Habyarimana and the blood that flowed the Kigali streets was an ‘opportune time’ for the RPF to enter Kigali.

        He said that while RPA had support, it was not clear whether they had the majority of the people on their side…”It confirms that the RPF was militarily victorious but, being a minority ethnic group, moreover from a foreign, English-speaking country Uganda, they could have walked into Kigali, taken control, but how would they have governed politically?

        They had to develop their political standing. How? By resorting to the sinister tactics their mentor President Yoweri Museveni had employed so successfully in Luwero in central Uganda — commit atrocities against the population and then blame them on your adversary and by that make the population believe it was your enemy who carried out the massacre, so that you gain the population’s support, some have argued.

        And they are not entirely wrong. Many a times have I expounded Yoweri Museveni’s under-graduate thesis at the university of Dar-El-Salaam where he dwelt on Franz Fanon’s theory of violence. If you have been following, then you know what is being talked about here.

        Enter Museveni Yoweri- The mentor

        A simple question can answer all this: If Museveni used the tactics of causing havoc in Luwero, dressing his NRA men up in UNLA uniform, in order to convince the population that it was the UNLA killing them, and it worked, leading many Baganda to support the NRA, and we read that Paul Kagame was deeply influenced by the tactics and success of the NRA in Luwero, would the RPF, made up of commanders who had served under Museveni in Luwero, not resort to the tactics they had seen work so well in Luwero when it came to Rwanda?

        Let’s get a panoramic view of events: the RPF advances on Kigali and is within distance of gaining power by early February. When Habyarimana is killed on April 6, the government and the Hutu-majority army start to fall apart as the RPF rapidly moves in.

        The RPF moves in, takes control or near control, then…..silence. It does nothing. It allows the Hutu soldiers to flee by way of the Kigali-Gitarama road.

        It cooperates with the UN in evacuating all foreign nationals. They leave. The RPF is now in charge of Rwanda. But they sit….and do nothing.

        For three months from April to July 1994, the RPF is in total charge of Rwanda, including the capital Kigali. A genocide starts to take place.

        Bodies are scatterd everywhere. Tens of thousands float down the Kagera River into Uganda.

        But this force of Tutsi exiles, most of them born in Uganda, away for 30 years, this force which says it knew of a plan by the Hutu government to massacre hundreds of thousands of Tutsi, is in full control of Kigali, as its own Paul Kagame and Christine Umutoni publicly boast, but it watches…and does nothing.

        It is obvious, given all this evidence, given the fact that the RPF was part of the NRA that fought in the central Ugandan region of Luwero in the 1980s, that what was going on from April to July 1994 may prolly have been war crimes by the RPF against the Rwandans so as to have it blamed on the Hutu to acquire the much needed legitimacy.

        Don’t rush. Let us cast an eagle’s eye on this.

        Where have we heard of this guerrilla tactic before? Certainly in Luwero Triangle in central Uganda during the NRA war.

        In the aforementioned book, A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s rebirth and the man who dreamed it, the American journalist Stephen Kinzer described Kagame’s formative years as a guerrilla in Luwero:

        “Central Uganda is a good place to wage guerrilla war. Its heartland, known as the Luweero Triangle, comprises 3,000 square miles of savannah and tropical forests. Enough people live there to provide a social base for rebels, but there are also vast empty areas where fighters can move and hide…This was Paul Kagame’s home for five years. The way the NRA fought made a deep impression on Kagame. It decisively shaped his idea of what a guerrilla force should be and do. The lessons he learned proved invaluable to him when he began to forge, and later emerged to lead, the force that would liberate his homeland.”

        So if “The way the NRA fought made a deep impression on Kagame” and it “decisively shaped his idea of what a guerrilla force should be and do” and furthermore “it proved invaluable to him when he began to forge, and later emerged to lead, the force that would liberate his homeland,” we must then go to Luwero to examine what these vital lessons were that left such a mark on Kagame that he would use years later in Rwanda.

        For the answer to that, we go — ironically (given his fanatically pro-RPF stance) — to an interview published on April 15, 2005 in the Daily Monitor by its then Political Editor Andrew Mwenda with the former President Milton Obote as he explained the Luwero killings. Said Obote, speaking in Lusaka, Zambia in Oct. 2004:

        “Museveni has for the last twenty three years [2004] fought different enemies in different parts of Uganda…In all these wars, the adversaries are different, the theatre of war different, the period different. There are only two elements that are constant: Museveni on the one hand and massive atrocities on the other….It is Museveni who employs atrocities against civilians to achieve military victory, but in a more subtle way by ensuring that his adversary instead takes blame for Museveni’s atrocities.”

        This method of fighting, where you commit the atrocities in order to blame them and have them blamed on your adversary, was the central plank of the NRA war in Luwero.

        A report on this was published by the Shariat newsletter, a Kampala publication edited in the mid 1990s by Haruna Kanaabi and the late Musa Hussein Njuki.

        Said the Shariat, Jan. 24, 1995: “On 6 February, 1981, Yoweri Museveni and a gang of his Rwandese cousins launched a war on the Republic of Uganda. They knew quite well that the people of Ankole where Museveni comes from could never support them in their madness which was a result of Museveni’s insatiable lust for power. They went to Luwero which was a good choice because they knew it had more Rwandese than any other part of Uganda……

        A few days ago through Capital Radio’s “Desert Island Program”, Lt. Col. Pecos Kutesa, Museveni’s aide de camp in Luwero, revealed that they killed thousands and thousands of Obote’s soldiers in Luwero. It is also true that they killed thousands and thousands of non-Baganda and some Baganda who could not support them. They blew up buses killing many civilians who were passing through Luwero…

        …[Museveni] kept the skulls of those he killed or caused to be killed to use in his campaigns…He knew that if he could keep on telling Baganda that the skulls are the creation of Milton Obote, he could remain a hero for as long as he showed the skulls of UNLA soldiers which he now claims to be of innocent civilians — something he calls ‘heroes’”.

        Obote put it more succinctly to Andrew Mwenda:

        “At the burial of [UPC stalwart] Adonia Tiberondwa recently [on December 28, 2004], Maj. Gen. Kahinda Otafiire, for example, revealed that the National Resistance Army rebels used to wear UPC colours and then go into villages in Luwero and kill people in order to make the people think these were actions of the UPC government. Otafiire was boasting of the “tricks” NRA employed to win support in Luwero, but was also revealing the sinister side of Museveni and his insurgents… Each time there was a reported case of mistreatment of civilians by the army, we arrested those responsible and punished them severely.

        “The truth is that most of the soldiers in the army who were committing atrocities were Museveni’s people. And whenever we zeroed in on them, they would run to join him in the bush in Luwero. Take the example of [Colonel] Pecos Kutesa. He had an interview with William Pike on Capital Radio in Kampala in [January] 1995 in a programme called Desert Island Discs. He told Pike that he was in UNLA but as an NRA infiltrator whose mission was to undermine the credibility of the army from within.

        “Pecos Kutesa’s testimony is instructive of how Museveni personally orchestrated the killings of innocent people and the harassment of civilians not just in Luwero but other parts of Uganda as well during the 1980s. His testimony is also important because it fits very well with what Otafiire and Lt. Gen. Elly Tumwine have confessed. Let us listen to Pecos Kutesa, whose interview on Capital Radio Tim has kept as evidence. He told Pike that he used to be at a roadblock in Konge. As a lieutenant, he was the man in charge of that roadblock. According to Pecos Kutesa’s own testimony on Capital Radio, Konge roadblock was the most notorious in harassing civilians, robbing them of their money and killing some. Kutesa says reports reached army headquarters of his harassment of the civilians and Oyite Ojok summoned him to Kampala for disciplinary action. He ran to the bush.” (Daily Monitor, April 15, 2005).

        From all the above quotes, we must ask ourselves the all-important question: If this is the way Museveni’s NRA conducted itself in Luwero and according to Stephen Kinzer’s admiring book on Kagame, the methods of guerrilla warfare in Luwero we have just read about left a “deep impression on Kagame”, is there anything more to be said about the way the RPF fought its war under the command of the now Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame between 1990 and 1994?

        According to the Citizen newspaper in Jan. 1991, this is late Dec. 1990 and what do we already see, long before the 1994 genocide? Reports of bodies floating down the Kagera River from the RPF-held areas.

        Why do the international media, governments, historians, the ICTR in Arusha, and others not want to listen to this side of the story? Why are the Hutu being persecuted when this report plus the one on today’s cover story clearly point to who it was who orchestrated that 1990-94 genocide in order to have it blamed on the Hutu?

        Keith Harmon Snow, a controversial war correspondent who has worked in 16 African countries, including conflict areas in Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and Sudan and a former genocide and war crimes investigator for Genocide Watch, Survivor’s Rights International and the United Nations, who has worked at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, provides an insight in his essay in Global Research:

        “The New York Times led the charge into Rwanda, and the Western media continued to beat the ‘Tutsis as victims’ drum roll. There was, after all, a lot of money to be made. Wall Street vultures began drooling. Military and intelligence operatives like David Kimche (Israel) and Roger Winter (USA) jockeyed for position – organizing logistics, maintaining supply chains, arranging weapons shipments – to support ‘our’ man Kagame and our proxy guerrilla army, the RPF. The Washington Post, Boston Globe, CNN, the Observer all described the RPF guerrillas as a highly ‘disciplined’ army: if any woman was raped or civilian massacred, it was an accident, a rogue soldier, and said soldier would be duly punished (of course, they never were).

        Continues Keith: Paul Kagame put into practice what his teachers, the military strategists at the US Army Command and Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (USA), taught him: psychological operations and how to overthrow a country. “As the English-speaking ‘Tutsis’ marched into Rwanda they conscripted and lured ‘Tutsi’ youth to the ‘freedom’ cause. These were young French-speaking Tutsis who were also subjected to Kagame’s ruthless modus operandi: many of them were tortured, killed, disappeared, but many survived the initiation into the RPF. Kagame and his elite Ugandan comrades didn’t trust Tutsis who had stayed behind, and they clearly sacrificed the French-speaking Tutsis of Rwanda for the cause of absolute military power.”

        Just as Museveni had infiltrated, massacred and terrorized Uganda (1980-1985), the RPF infiltrated soldiers disguised as civilians into Hutu villages, Hutu political parties, even into Hutu youth groups organized to defend Rwanda from the invading terrorist guerrillas. While the RPF used the airwaves to terrorize the people, scapegoat and stereotype enemies real and perceived, and whip up fear of ‘Hutu power’ – the same kinds of nasty propaganda, often sexualized, used by the Kagame regime to demonize its detractors from the West even today – we only even hear about ‘Hutu power’ hate radio, not extremist Radio Muhabura.

        Keith concludes: “No such planning or organization of genocidal intent has been proven against the Hutu government of Juvenal Habyarimana – which, in any case, was decapitated on April 6, 1994 – or against the Interim Hutu government that briefly held sway after April 6, 1994, and the judges at the ICTR have found as such. There were indeed hundreds of thousands of French-speaking Tutsis raped, brutalized and massacred in what amount to very real acts of genocide in Rwanda, and these occurred over the now sacred ‘100 days of genocide’. But there were also hundreds of thousands of Hutus killed, and far more Hutu than Tutsi.”

        Don’t remind me that Keith is a genocide denier. I have already heard of that. But how about Jonathan Cook- an award winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism whose latest books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East(Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books)?

        According to him, Paul Kagame, the hero of the official story of Rwanda’s genocide, was almost certainly the biggest war criminal to have emerged from those horrifying events. Kagame led the Tutsis’ main militia, the RPF. He almost certainly ordered the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s plane, the trigger for a civil war that quickly escalated into a genocide; on the best estimates, his RPF was responsible for killing 80% of the 1 million who died inside Rwanda, making the Hutus, not the Tutsis, the chief victims; and his subsequent decision to extend the civil war into neighbouring Congo, where many Hutu civilians had fled to escape the RPF, led to the deaths of up to 5 million more.

        From his own experience covering Israel-Palestine, he says: “I can guess what happened. The reporters on the ground feared straying too far from the consensus in their newsrooms. Rather than telling their editors what the story was (the model of news production most people assume to be the case), the editors were creating the framework of the story for the reporters, based on the official narrative being promoted in political and diplomatic circles. Correspondents who cared about their careers dared not challenge the party line too strongly, even when they knew it to be a lie.”

        Are we still in doubt at what happened?

        The Hutus have pleaded innocence but world opinion refuses to believe them. May be the world is right. I don’t claim to be right or wrong but rather making a rational inquiry.

        In Dec. 2005, a British-based team of investigators, the Sanders Research Associates, published a report that questioned the basis for apportioning blame for the 1994 Rwandan genocide. We already discussed the Stam and Davenport report about the numbers of the dead; supported by the 1991 government census that clearly make the numbers of the Tutsi dead an impossibility.

        But there is as well the Sanders report, which stated thus: “There is a stunning lack of documentary evidence of a [Habyarimana] government plan to commit genocide”.

        There were no orders, minutes of meetings, notes, cables, faxes, radio intercepts or any other type of documentation that such a plan ever existed. The ICTR, needless to say, confirmed this in military trials 1 and 11. In fact, the documentary evidence establishes just the opposite.” (View from Rwanda: The Dallaire Genocide Fax: A Fabrication, Sanders Research Associated Ltd., December 1, 2005).

        Of paramount importance is not only the fact that this story is being revisited but the fact that its export base is declining, as we saw last week in Addis Abbeba. But how about for the sake of historical clarity for the sake of a genuine co-existence between Rwanda’s bi-polar divide? Unless the right questions are asked, the past is blurred and the future is constructed on lies. It’s nigh that right questions should be asked at 10 Downing Street and the Pentagon. Till then!

        Didas Gasana

        #595
        Rwanda

          Umugore warokotse Jenoside yishwe

          Christine Iribagiza wishwe uyu munsi bamusanze iwe ku KicukiroChristine Iribagiza wishwe uyu munsi bamusanze iwe ku Kicukiro


          Umugore warokotse Jenoside yishwe bamusanze mu cyumba cye
           

          *Bamusanze mu cyumba cye bamwica bamunigishije imigozi
          *Bamaze kumwica bamushyizeho za bougie zaka iruhande rwe
          *Umuzamu we babanje kumutera ibyuma bagira ngo bamwishe
          *Umwana we uri hanze yaherukaga kumusura mu byumweru 2 bishize

          Mu murenge wa Niboye mu karere ka Kicukiro hishwe umugore witwa Christine Iribagiza wacitse ku icumu rya Jenoside n’abantu bataramenyekana bakoresheje umugozi baramuniga bamusanze iwe. Aya makuru yamenyekanye kuri uyu wa kane ahagana saa tanu n’igice. Birakekwa ko yishwe ahagana saa mbili za mugitondo bikamenyekana bitinze gato nk’uko umunyamakuru w’Umuseke ugezeyo ubu abyemeza.

          Uyu mugore w’imyaka 58  yishwe bamusanze iwe mu mudugudu wa Gakeke mu mu kagari ka Niboye Umurenge wa Niboye.

          Umunyamakuru w’Umuseke uriyo avuga ko yamenye ko uyu mugore yabaga mu nzu wenyine, afite n’umuzamu. Ngo yari afite umwana umwe ariko ubu ntiyari ari mu rugo kuva mu byumweru bibiri bishize. Abahaturiye bavuga ko umwana we ashobora kuba yari yaragiye mu biruhuko ahandi hatari mu rugo.

          ACP Theos Badege, umuvugizi wa Police y’u Rwanda yabwiye Umuseke ko batangiye iperereza ku rupfu rw’uyu mugore.

          Umwe mu bantu batabaye mbere utifuje gutangazwa yabwiye Umuseke ko yitambukiraga agiye hafi aho akumva umuzamu ataka maze we n’abandi benshi bagatabara bagasanga amerewe nabi cyane.

          Uyu avuga ko umuzamu abagizi ba nabi bamujombaguye ibyuma mu buryo bukabije bashaka kumwica maze bagakomeza bagasanga nyirabuja mu nzu.

          Iribagiza ngo bamusanze mu cyumba cye, baramuzirika ubundi bamuniga bakoresheje umugozi kugeza apfuye.

          Uyu mutangabuhamya wageze ku mubiri wa nyakwigendera ati “Twamusanze ku buriri bwe yapfuye anizwe, kandi bamutamirijeho za bougie zaka, ntabwo twamenye impamvu yabyo.”

          Uyu muzamu ngo yabanje guterwa ibyuma n’abagizi ba nabi baje mu gitondo ahagana saa mbili. Uyu muzamu ubu akaba ari kwa muganga amerewe nabi kuko ngo abagizi ba nabi bagize ngo nawe bamwishe.

          Hari amakuru y’abahageze mbere avuga ko abagizi ba nabi bishe Iribagiza baje ari batatu barimo n’umugore umwe.

          Amakuru aravuga ko Iribagiza yari aherutse kugaruka kuba mu Rwanda avuye mu Bubiligi.

          Yari atuye hafi y’umuhanda wa kaburimbo uva Kicukiro – Sonatubes werekeza nk’ahitw akuri Duhamic-Adri hafi neza y’ahakorera NPD-Cotraco.

          Christine ngo yari ari kubaka inzu ya etage i Gikondo,

          Urugo Christine yari atuyemoUrugo Christine yari atuyemo

          Umwana umwe afite w’umukobwa ubu ari mu Bubiligi akaba yari amaze ibyumweru bibiri avuye gusura nyina.

          Umunyamakuru wacu uriyo avuga ko mu rugo rwe ubu hari abapolisi benshi bari mu iperereza n’abayobozi mu karere n’Umurenge hamwe n’abayobozi ba IBUKA.

          Iribagiza Christine yabaga munzu wenyine kuko umwana we ubu ari mu BubiligiIribagiza Christine yabaga munzu wenyine kuko umwana we ubu ari mu Bubiligi

          #596
          Rwanda

            Inkuru Ndonse Ubunyene Nuko Kumipaka Yose Urwanda Ruhana N’ Uburundi Abasirikare Bahahora Bongerejwe Kuburyo Ubiravye Harikintu Biteguriye, Amakuru Nkura Mu Rwanda Nuko Mu Bugande Na Kongo Hari Uturwi Twabasuma Bashaka Kwinjira Kwiba Inzahabu Mu Burundi. Cibitoke, Kirundo, Ngozi, Kayanza Na Bubanza Mukizure Ijoro Numutaga Uruja Nuruza Rwabantu Mutazi Aho Iwanyu.

            #718
            Rwanda

              Paul Kagame is a dangerous Parasite

              Paul KagamePaul Kagame loves acting like he’s the only victim of what happened in Rwanda. But he forgets that, what happened in Rwanda -was mainly caused by him and selfish politicians. That’s why he has created fear among Rwandans so that, he can continue to steal the little they have! The truth will always be that; Rwanda belongs to all Banyarwanda and not Paul Kagame and his foreign mercenaries disguised as friends of Rwanda, but are mere parasites.

              #1141
              Rwanda

                America’s secret role in the Rwandan genocide

                The violence that shocked the world in 1994 did not come from nowhere. While the CIA looked on, its allies in the Ugandan government helped to spread terror and fuel ethnic hatred


                by Helen C Epstein
                 
                 Between April and July 1994, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were murdered in the most rapid genocide ever recorded. The killers used simple tools – machetes, clubs and other blunt objects, or herded people into buildings and set them aflame with kerosene. Most of the victims were of minority Tutsi ethnicity; most of the killers belonged to the majority Hutus.
                The Rwanda genocide has been compared to the Nazi Holocaust in its surreal brutality. But there is a fundamental difference between these two atrocities. No Jewish army posed a threat to Germany. Hitler targeted the Jews and other weak groups solely because of his own demented beliefs and the prevailing prejudices of the time. The Rwandan Hutu génocidaires, as the people who killed during the genocide were known, were also motivated by irrational beliefs and prejudices, but the powder keg contained another important ingredient: terror. Three and a half years before the genocide, a rebel army of mainly Rwandan Tutsi exiles known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF, had invaded Rwanda and set up camps in the northern mountains. They had been armed and trained by neighbouring Uganda, which continued to supply them throughout the ensuing civil war, in violation of the UN charter, Organisation of African Unity rules, various Rwandan ceasefire and peace agreements, and the repeated promises of the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni.

                During this period, officials at the US embassy in Kampala knew that weapons were crossing the border, and the CIA knew that the rebels’ growing military strength was escalating ethnic tensions withinRwanda to such a degree that hundreds of thousands of Rwandans might die in widespread ethnic violence. However, Washington not only ignored Uganda’s assistance to the Rwandan rebels, it also ramped up military and development aid to Museveni and then hailed him as a peacemaker once the genocide was underway.

                The hatred the Hutu génocidaires unleashed represents the worst that human beings are capable of, but in considering what led to this disaster, it is important to bear in mind that the violence was not spontaneous. It emerged from a century or more of injustice and brutality on both sides, and although the génocidaires struck back against innocents, they were provoked by heavily armed rebels supplied by Uganda, while the US looked on.

                The RPF rebel army represented Tutsi refugees who had fled their country in the early 1960s. For centuries before that, they had formed an elite minority caste in Rwanda. In a system continued under Belgian colonialism, they treated the Hutu peasants like serfs, forcing them to work on their land and sometimes beating them like donkeys. Hutu anger simmered until shortly before independence in 1962, then exploded in brutal pogroms against the Tutsi, hundreds of thousands of whom fled to neighbouring countries.

                In Uganda, a new generation of Tutsi refugees grew up, but they soon became embroiled in the lethal politics of their adoptive country. Some formed alliances with Ugandan Tutsis and the closely related Hima – Museveni’s tribe – many of whom were opposition supporters and therefore seen as enemies by then-president Milton Obote, who ruled Uganda in the 1960s and again in the early 1980s.

                After Idi Amin overthrew Obote in 1971, many Rwandan Tutsis moved out of the border refugee camps. Some tended the cattle of wealthy Ugandans; others acquired property and began farming; some married into Ugandan families; and a small number joined the State Research Bureau, Amin’s dreaded security apparatus, which inflicted terror on Ugandans. When Obote returned to power in the 1980s, he stripped the Rwandan Tutsis of their civil rights and ordered them into the refugee camps or back over the border into Rwanda, where they were not welcomed by the Hutu-dominated government. Those who refused to go were assaulted, raped and killed and their houses were destroyed.

                My journey back to Rwanda: confronting the ghosts of the genocide 21 years later
                In response to Obote’s abuses, more and more Rwandan refugees joined the National Resistance Army, an anti-Obote rebel group founded by Museveni in 1981. When Museveni’s rebels took power in 1986, a quarter of them were Rwandan Tutsi refugees, and Museveni granted them high ranks in Uganda’s new army.

                Museveni’s promotion of the Rwandan refugees within the army generated not only resentment within Uganda, but terror within Rwanda where the majority Hutus had long feared an onslaught from Tutsi refugees. In 1972, some 75,000 educated Hutus – just about anyone who could read – had been massacred in Tutsi-ruled Burundi, a small country neighbouring Rwanda with a similar ethnic makeup. During the 1960s, Uganda’s Tutsi refugees had launched occasional armed strikes across the border, but Rwanda’s army easily fought them off. Each attack sparked reprisals against those Tutsis who remained inside Rwanda – many of whom were rounded up, tortured and killed – on mere suspicion of being supporters of the refugee fighters. By the late 1980s, a new generation of refugees, with training and weapons supplied by Museveni’s Uganda, represented a potentially far greater threat. According to the historian André Guichaoua, anger and fear hung over every bar-room altercation, every office dispute and every church sermon.

                By the time Museveni took power, the plight of the Tutsi refugees had come to the attention of the west, which began pressuring Rwanda’s government to allow them to return. At first, Rwanda’s president,Juvénal Habyarimana, refused, protesting that Rwanda was among the most densely populated countries in the world, and its people, dependent upon peasant agriculture, needed land to survive. The population had grown since the refugees left, and Rwanda was now full, Habyarimana claimed.

                Although he did not say so publicly, overpopulation almost certainly was not Habyarimana’s major concern. He knew the refugees’ leaders were not just interested in a few plots of land and some hoes. The RPF’s professed aim was refugee rights, but its true aim was an open secret throughout the Great Lakes region of Africa: to overthrow Habyarimana’s government and take over Rwanda by force. Museveni had even informed the Rwandan president that the Tutsi exiles might invade, and Habyarimana had also told US state department officials that he feared an invasion from Uganda.

                One afternoon in early 1988 when the news was slow, Kiwanuka Lawrence Nsereko, a journalist with the Citizen, an independent Ugandan newspaper, stopped by to see an old friend at the ministry of transport in downtown Kampala. Two senior army officers, whom Lawrence knew, happened to be in the waiting room when he arrived. Like many of Museveni’s officers, they were Rwandan Tutsi refugees. After some polite preliminaries, Lawrence asked the men what they were doing there.

                Pictures of the victims of the genocide, donated by survivors, inside the Gisozi memorial in Kigali, Rwanda. Photograph: Radu Sigheti/Reuters
                “We want some of our people to be in Rwanda,” one of them replied. Lawrence shuddered. He had grown up among Hutus who had fled Tutsi oppression in Rwanda before independence in 1962, as well as Tutsis who had fled the Hutu-led pogroms that followed it. Lawrence’s childhood catechist had been a Tutsi; the Hutus who worked in his family’s gardens wouldn’t attend his lessons. Instead, they swapped fantastic tales about how Tutsis once used their Hutu slaves as spittoons, expectorating into their mouths, instead of on the ground.

                The officers went in to speak to the transport official first, and when Lawrence’s turn came, he asked his friend what had transpired. The official was elated. The Rwandans had come to express their support for a new open borders programme, he said. Soon Rwandans living in Uganda would be allowed to cross over and visit their relatives without a visa. This would help solve the vexing refugee issue, he explained.

                Lawrence was less sanguine. He suspected the Rwandans might use the open borders programme to conduct surveillance for an invasion, or even carry out attacks inside Rwanda. A few days later, he dropped in on a Rwandan Tutsi colonel in Uganda’s army, named Stephen Ndugute.

                “We are going back to Rwanda,” the colonel said. (When the RPF eventually took over Rwanda in 1994, Ndugute would be second in command.)

                Many Ugandans were eager to see Museveni’s Rwandan officers depart. They were not only occupying senior army positions many Ugandans felt should be held by Ugandans, but some were also notorious for their brutality.Paul Kagame, who went on to lead the RPF takeover of Rwanda and has ruled Rwanda since the genocide, was acting chief of military intelligence, in whose headquarters Lawrence himself had been tortured. In northern and eastern Uganda, where a harsh counterinsurgency campaign was underway, some of the army’s worst abuses had been committed by Rwandan Tutsi officers. In 1989, for example, soldiers under the command of Chris Bunyenyezi, also an RPF leader, herded scores of suspected rebels in the village of Mukura into an empty railway wagon with no ventilation, locked the doors and allowed them to die of suffocation.

                Lawrence had little doubt that if war broke out in Rwanda, it was going to be “very, very bloody”, he told me. He decided to alert Rwanda’s president. Habyarimana agreed to meet him during a state visit to Tanzania. At a hotel in Dar es Salaam, the 20-year-old journalist warned the Rwandan leader about the dangers of the open border programme. “Don’t worry,” Lawrence says Habyarimana told him. “Museveni is my friend and would never allow the RPF to invade.”

                Habyarimana was bluffing. The open border programme was actually part of his own ruthless counter-strategy. Every person inside Rwanda visited by a Tutsi refugee would be followed by state agents and automatically branded an RPF sympathiser; many were arrested, tortured, and killed by Rwandan government operatives. The Tutsis inside Rwanda thus became pawns in a power struggle between the RPF exiles and Habyarimana’s government. Five years later, they would be crushed altogether in one of the worst genocides ever recorded.

                On the morning of 1 October 1990, thousands of RPF fighters gathered in a football stadium in western Uganda about 20 miles from the Rwandan border. Some were Rwandan Tutsi deserters from Uganda’s army; others were volunteers from the refugee camps. Two nearby hospitals were readied for casualties. When locals asked what was going on, Fred Rwigyema, who was both a Ugandan army commander and the leader of the RPF, said they were preparing for Uganda’s upcoming Independence Day celebrations, but some excited rebels let the true purpose of their mission leak out. They crossed into Rwanda that afternoon. The Rwandan army, with help from French and Zairean commandos, stopped their advance and the rebels retreated back into Uganda. A short time later, they invaded again and eventually established bases in northern Rwanda’s Virunga mountains.

                Presidents Museveni and Habyarimana were attending a Unicef conference in New York at the time. They were staying in the same hotel and Museveni rang Habyarimana’s room at 5am to say he had just learned that 14 of his Rwandan Tutsi officers had deserted and crossed into Rwanda. “I would like to make it very clear,” the Ugandan president reportedly said, “that we did not know about the desertion of these boys” – meaning the Rwandans, not 14, but thousands of whom had just invaded Habyarimana’s country – “nor do we support it.”

                Tutsi rebels near Kigali during the civil war in Rwanda. Photograph: Patrick Robert/Corbis/Sygma via Getty Images
                In Washington a few days later, Museveni told the State Department’s Africa chief, Herman Cohen, that he would court martial the Rwandan deserters if they attempted to cross back into Uganda. But a few days after that, he quietly requested France and Belgium not to assist the Rwandan government in repelling the invasion. Cohen writes that he now believes that Museveni must have been feigning shock, when he knew what was going on all along.

                When Museveni returned to Uganda, Robert Gribbin, then deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Kampala, had some “stiff talking points” for him. Stop the invasion at once, the American said, and ensure no support flowed to the RPF from Uganda.

                Museveni had already issued a statement promising to seal all Uganda–Rwanda border crossings, provide no assistance to the RPF and arrest any rebels who tried to return to Uganda. But he proceeded to do none of those things and the Americans appear to have made no objection.

                When the RPF launched its invasion, Kagame, then a senior officer in both the Ugandan army and the RPF, was in Kansas at the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, studying field tactics and psyops, propaganda techniques to win hearts and minds. But after four RPF commanders were killed, he told his American instructors that he was dropping out to join the Rwandan invasion. The Americans apparently supported this decision and Kagame flew into Entebbe airport, travelled to the Rwandan border by road, and crossed over to take command of the rebels.

                For the next three and a half years, the Ugandan army continued to supply Kagame’s fighters with provisions and weapons, and allow his soldiers free passage back and forth across the border. In 1991, Habyarimana accused Museveni of allowing the RPF to attack Rwanda from protected bases on Ugandan territory. When a Ugandan journalist published an article in the government-owned New Vision newspaper revealing the existence of these bases, Museveni threatened to charge the journalist and his editor with sedition. The entire border area was cordoned off. Even a French and Italian military inspection team was denied access.

                In October 1993, the UN security council authorised a peacekeeping force to ensure no weapons crossed the border. The peacekeepers’ commander, Canadian Lt-Gen Roméo Dallaire, spent most of his time inside Rwanda, but he also visited the Ugandan border town of Kabale, where an officer told him that his inspectors would have to provide the Ugandan army with 12 hours’ notice so that escorts could be arranged to accompany them on their border patrols. Dallaire protested: the element of surprise is crucial for such monitoring missions. But the Ugandans insisted and eventually, Dallaire, who was much more concerned about developments inside Rwanda, gave up.

                The border was a sieve anyway, as Dallaire later wrote. There were five official crossing sites and countless unmapped mountain trails. It was impossible to monitor. Dallaire had also heard that an arsenal in Mbarara, a Ugandan town about 80 miles from the Rwanda border, was being used to supply the RPF. The Ugandans refused to allow Dallaire’s peacekeepers to inspect that. In 2004, Dallaire told a US congressional hearing that Museveni had laughed in his face when they met at a gathering to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the genocide. “I remember that UN mission on the border,” Museveni reportedly told him. “We manoeuvred ways to get around it, and of course we did support the [RPF].”

                US officials knew that Museveni was not honouring his promise to court martial RPF leaders. The US was monitoring Ugandan weapons shipments to the RPF in 1992, but instead of punishing Museveni, western donors including the US doubled aid to his government and allowed his defence spending to balloon to 48% of Uganda’s budget, compared with 13% for education and 5% for health, even as Aids was ravaging the country. In 1991, Uganda purchased 10 times more US weapons than in the preceding 40 years combined.

                The 1990 Rwanda invasion, and the US’s tacit support for it, is all the more disturbing because in the months before it occurred, Habyarimana had acceded to many of the international community’s demands, including for the return of refugees and a multiparty democratic system. So it wasn’t clear what the RPF was fighting for. Certainly, negotiations over refugee repatriation would have dragged on and might not have been resolved to the RPF’s satisfaction, or at all. But negotiations appear to have been abandoned abruptly in favour of war.

                At least one American was concerned about this. The US ambassador to Rwanda, Robert Flaten, saw with his own eyes that the RPF invasion had caused terror in Rwanda. After the invasion, hundreds of thousands of mostly Hutu villagers fled RPF-held areas, saying they had seen abductions and killings. Flaten urged the George HW Bush’s administration to impose sanctions on Uganda, as it had on Iraq after the Kuwait invasion earlier that year. But unlike Saddam Hussein, who was routed from Kuwait, Museveni received only Gribbin’s “stiff questions” about the RPF’s invasion of Rwanda.

                “In short,” Gribbin writes, “we said that the cat was out of the bag, and neither the United States nor Uganda was going to rebag it.” Sanctioning Museveni might have harmed US interests in Uganda, he explains. “We sought a stable nation after years of violence and uncertainty. We encouraged nascent democratic initiatives. We supported a full range of economic reforms.”

                A memorial to the more than 11,000 Tutsi men, women and children murdered at Kibuye. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer
                But the US was not fostering nascent democratic initiatives inside Uganda. While pressuring other countries, including Rwanda, to open up political space, Uganda’s donors were allowing Museveni to ban political party activity, arrest journalists and editors, and conduct brutal counterinsurgency operations in which civilians were tortured and killed. And far from seeking stability, the US, by allowing Uganda to arm the RPF, was setting the stage for what would turn out to be the worst outbreak of violence ever recorded on the African continent. Years later, Cohen expressed regret for failing to pressure Uganda to stop supporting the RPF, but by then it was far too late.

                For Habyarimana and his circle of Hutu elites, the RPF invasion seemed to have a silver lining, at least at first. At the time, Hutu/Tutsi relations inside Rwanda had improved. Habyarimana had sought reconciliation with the Tutsis still living in Rwanda by reserving civil service jobs and university places for them in proportion to their share of the population. This programme was modestly successful, and the greatest tensions in the country now lay along class, not ethnic, lines. A tiny educated Hutu clique linked to Habyarimana’s family who called themselves évolués –the evolved ones – was living off the labour of millions of impoverished rural Hutus, whom they exploited just as brutally as the Tutsi overlords of bygone days.

                The évolués subjected the peasants to forced labour and fattened themselves on World Bank “anti-poverty” projects that provided jobs and other perks for their own group, but did little to alleviate poverty. International aid donors had pressured Habyarimana to allow opposition political parties to operate, and many new ones had sprung up. Hutus and Tutsis were increasingly united in criticising Habyarimana’s autocratic behaviour and nepotism, and the vast economic inequalities in the country.

                When Rwanda’s ethnic bonfires roared back to life in the days after the RPF invasion, Habyarimana and his circle seem to have sensed a political opportunity: now they could distract the disaffected Hutu masses from their own abuses by reawakening fears of the “demon Tutsis”, who would soon become convenient scapegoats to divert attention from profound socioeconomic injustices.

                Shortly after the invasion, all Tutsis – whether RPF supporters or not – became targets of a vicious propaganda campaign that would bear hideous fruit in April 1994. Chauvinist Hutu newspapers, magazines and radio programmes began reminding Hutu audiences that they were the original occupants of the Great Lakes region and that Tutsis were Nilotics – supposedly warlike pastoralists from Ethiopia who had conquered and enslaved them in the 17th century. The RPF invasion was nothing more than a plot by Museveni, Kagame and their Tutsi co-conspirators to re-establish this evil Nilotic empire. Cartoons of Tutsis killing Hutus began appearing in magazines, along with warnings that all Tutsis were RPF spies bent on dragging the country back to the days when the Tutsi queen supposedly rose from her seat supported by swords driven between the shoulders of Hutu children. In December 1993, a picture of a machete appeared on the front page of a Hutu publication under the headline “What to do about the Tutsis?”

                Habyarimana knew that the RPF, thanks to Ugandan backing, was better armed, trained and disciplined than his own army. Under immense international pressure, he had agreed in August 1993 to grant the RPF seats in a transitional government and nearly half of all posts in the army. Even Tutsis inside Rwanda were against giving the RPF so much power because they knew it could provoke the angry, fearful Hutus even more, and they were right. As Habyarimana’s increasingly weak government reluctantly acceded to the RPF’s demands for power, Hutu extremist mayors and other local officials began stockpiling rifles, and government-linked anti-Tutsi militia groups began distributing machetes and kerosene to prospective génocidaires. In January 1994, four months before the genocide, the CIA predicted that if tensions were not somehow defused, hundreds of thousands of people would die in ethnic violence. The powder keg awaited a spark to set it off.

                That spark arrived at about 8pm on 6 April 1994, when rockets fired from positions close to Kigali airport shot down Habyarimana’s plane as it was preparing to land. The next morning, frantic Hutu militia groups, convinced that the Nilotic apocalypse was at hand, launched a ferocious attack against their Tutsi neighbours.

                Few subjects are more polarising than the modern history of Rwanda. Questions such as “Has the RPF committed human rights abuses?” or “Who shot down President Habyarimana’s plane?” have been known to trigger riots at academic conferences. The Rwandan government bans and expels critical scholars from the country, labelling them “enemies of Rwanda” and “genocide deniers”, and Kagame has stated that he doesn’t think that “anyone in the media, UN [or] human rights organisations has any moral right whatsoever to level any accusations against me or Rwanda”.

                Be that as it may, several lines of evidence suggest that the RPF was responsible for the downing of Habyarimana’s plane. The missiles used were Russian-made SA-16s. The Rwandan army was not known to possess these weapons, but the RPF had them at least since May 1991. Two SA-16 single-use launchers were also found in a valley near Masaka Hill, an area within range of the airport that was accessible to the RPF. According to the Russian military prosecutor’s office, the launchers had been sold to Uganda by the USSR in 1987.

                Since 1997, five additional investigations of the crash have been carried out, including one by a UN-appointed team, and one each by French and Spanish judges working independently. These three concluded that the RPF was probably responsible. Two Rwandan government investigations conversely concluded that Hutu elites and members of Habyarimana’s own army were responsible.

                A 2012 report on the crash commissioned by two French judgessupposedly exonerated the RPF. But this report, although widely publicised as definitive, actually was not. The authors used ballistic and acoustic evidence to argue that the missiles were probably fired by the Rwandan army from Kanombe military barracks. But they admit that their technical findings could not exclude the possibility that the missiles were fired from Masaka Hill, where the launchers were found. The report also fails to explain how the Rwandan army, which was not known to possess SA-16s, could have shot down the plane using them.

                Soon after the plane crash, the génocidaires began their attack against the Tutsis, and the RPF began advancing. But the rebels’ troop movements suggested that their primary priority was conquering the country, not saving Tutsi civilians. Rather than heading south, where most of the killings were taking place, the RPF circled around Kigali. By the time it reached the capital weeks later, most of the Tutsis there were dead.

                When the UN peacekeeper Dallaire met RPF commander Kagame during the genocide, he asked about the delay. “He knew full well that every day of fighting on the periphery meant certain death for Tutsis still behind [Rwanda government forces] lines,” Dallaire wrote in Shake Hands With the Devil. “[Kagame] ignored the implications of my question.”

                In the years that followed, Bill Clinton apologised numerous times for the US’s inaction during the genocide. “If we’d gone in sooner, I believe we could have saved at least a third of the lives that were lost,” he told journalist Tania Bryer in 2013. Instead, Europeans and Americans extracted their own citizens and the UN peacekeepers quietly withdrew. But Dallaire indicates that Kagame would have rejected Clinton’s help in any case. “The international community is looking at sending an intervention force on humanitarian grounds,” Kagame told Dallaire. “But for what reason? If an intervention force is sent to Rwanda, we,” – meaning the RPF – “will fight it.”

                ‘Rwanda is like a pretty girl with a lot of makeup, but the inside is dark and dirty’
                 
                Read more
                As the RPF advanced, Hutu refugees fled into neighbouring countries. In late April, television stations around the world broadcast images of thousands upon thousands of them crossing the Rusumo Bridge from Rwanda into Tanzania, as the bloated corpses of Rwandans floated down the Kagera river beneath them. Most viewers assumed that all the corpses were Tutsis killed by Hutu génocidaires. But the river drains mainly from areas then held by the RPF, and Mark Prutsalis, a UN official working in the Tanzanian refugee camps, maintains that at least some of the bodies were probably Hutu victims of reprisal killings by the RPF. One refugee after another told him that RPF soldiers had gone house to house in Hutu areas, dragging people out, tying them up and throwing them in the river. The UN estimated later that the RPF killed some 10,000 civilians each month during the genocide.

                Lawrence Nsereko was among the journalists on the Rusumo Bridge that day and as the bodies floated by, he noticed something strange. The upper arms of some of them had been tied with ropes behind their backs. In Uganda, this method of restraint is known as the “three-piece tie”; it puts extreme pressure on the breastbone, causing searing pain, and may result in gangrene. Amnesty International had recently highlighted it as a signature torture method of Museveni’s army, and Lawrence wondered whether the RPF had learned this technique from their Ugandan patrons.

                In June 1994, while the slaughter in Rwanda was still underway, Museveni travelled to Minneapolis, where he received a Hubert H Humphrey public service medal and honorary doctorate from the University of Minnesota. The dean, a former World Bank official, praised Museveni for ending human rights abuses in Uganda and preparing his country for multiparty democracy. Western journalists and academics showered Museveni with praise. “Uganda [is] one of the few flickers of hope for the future of black Africa,” wrote one. The New York Times compared the Ugandan leader to Nelson Mandela, and Time magazine hailed him as a “herdsman and philosopher” and “central Africa’s intellectual compass.”

                Museveni also visited Washington on that trip, where he met with Clinton and his national security adviser, Anthony Lake. I could find no record of what the men discussed, but I can imagine the Americans lamenting the tragedy in Rwanda, and the Ugandan explaining that this disaster only confirmed his long-held theory that Africans were too attached to clan loyalties for multiparty democracy. The continent’s ignorant peasants belonged under the control of autocrats like himself.

                Main image: Human skulls arranged at the Murambi genocide memorial, near Butare, Rwanda. Photographed by Jose Cendon for AFP
                Source : http://www.theguardian.com

                #1142
                Rwanda

                  Cas de Madame Diane Shima Rwigara, malmenée au Rwanda

                  Bruxelles, le 31 août 2017

                  Son Excellence Antonio Guterres
                  Secrétaire  Général de l’ONU
                  UN Headquarters
                  First Avenue at 46th Street
                  New York, NY 10017
                  USA

                  Objet : Cas de Madame Diane Shima Rwigara, malmenée au Rwanda

                  Monsieur le Secrétaire  Général,

                  Le  RifDP  est  fortement préoccupé par  la  situation très  délicate   dans   laquelle  se trouve  Mme   Diane   Shima   Rwigara,  situation  qui   risque   l’altérer   son   intégrité physique.

                  Nous   nous   permettons de  vous  interpeler parce  qu’un  de  vos  Etats  membres, à savoir  le Rwanda, est entrain de  piétiner les objectifs mondiaux de  développement durable tels qu’adoptés lors du 70ème  anniversaire de votre Institution.

                  En 2015, vous  vous  étiez  engagés notamment en faveur de  la Paix,  en  ces termes :
                  « Nous  sommes déterminés à favoriser l’avènement de sociétés  pacifiques, justes et inclusives,  libérées   de   la  peur   et  la  violence.   En  effet,   il  ne  peut   y  avoir   de développement durable sans paix ni de paix sans développement durable ».

                  Dans  le cas que  nous  vous  exposons, le Rwanda est  loin  de  favoriser l’avènement d’une société  pacifique, juste et inclusive, libérée  de la peur  et la violence  car Mme Shima  Rwigara est malmenée juste parce  qu’elle est une  candidate malheureuse aux dernières élections  présidentielles. Elle a subi  des violences  vis-à-vis  de son intimité, elle avait  assuré ne pas  avoir  peur…  mais  aujourd’hui l’Etat rwandais a prouvé au monde entier  qu’il est résolu  à continuer à cultiver le climat de peur  et de violence  en mettant aux arrêts  Madame Diane Shima Rwigara et toute  sa famille.

                  Il sied  de rappeler que  Feu Rwigara, père  de Diane,  est décédé en 2015 au Rwanda, dans  des circonstances plus que floues.

                  Nous  sommes très préoccupées par  le non-respect de deux  objectifs en particulier – les objectifs  5 et  16 -, même  si nous  pouvons émettre des  observations quant aux autres objectifs.

                  L’objectif 5 exhorte les pays  à « parvenir à l’égalité des  sexes  et autonomiser toutes les femmes  et les filles ». Le gouvernement rwandais se targue d’avoir le plus  grand nombre en Afrique, sinon  au monde, de femmes  parlementaires. Dès lors, comment un tel pays  ne peut-il pas tolérer  l’émergence d’autres femmes,  juste parce qu’elles ne sont  pas en phase  avec le pouvoir ? Madame Diane  Rwigara rejoint la liste, déjà très longue, de  femmes   n’ayant  pas  le  droit   d’exercer  leurs  droits politiques, la  plus célèbre d’entre elles étant  Mme Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza.

                  L’objectif 16, quant à lui, vise à « Promouvoir l’avènement de sociétés  pacifiques et ouvertes à  tous  aux  fins  du  développement durable, assurer l’accès  de  tous  à  la justice et mettre en place, à tous les niveaux, des institutions efficaces, responsables et ouvertes à tous ». Le Rwanda est loin de promouvoir une  société  pacifique dès qu’il ne   permet  pas   une   société   plurielle,  où   chacun  de   ses  habitants  est   libre   de s’exprimer.  Les  institutions sont  loin  d’être  ouvertes à  tous  du  moment que  l’on risque  la prison dès qu’on aspire  à une fonction suprême.

                  Monsieur le Secrétaire  Général,

                  Vous  vous  êtes  engagés, vis-à-vis  de  l’Humanité,  à «… à éliminer la pauvreté et la faim, sous toutes leurs  formes  et dans  toutes leurs  dimensions, et à faire en sorte que tous  les êtres  humains puissent réaliser  leur  potentiel dans  des conditions de dignité et d’égalité et dans  un environnement sain ».
                  Nous  vous  interpelons afin que vous  puissiez rappeler au Rwanda ses engagements, chaque être humain ayant  le droit  de réaliser  son potentiel et dans  des conditions de dignité et d’égalité acceptables.

                  Par  ailleurs, vous  vous  êtes  engagés à « … un  suivi  et un  examen systématiques à différents niveaux, selon les modalités prévues dans  le [présent] Programme et dans le Programme d’action d’Addis-Abeba. Agissant sous les auspices de l’Assemblée générale et du Conseil  économique et social, le forum politique de haut  niveau jouera un rôle central  dans  le contrôle du suivi et de l’examen au niveau mondial ».

                  Nous   vous   exhortons  donc   à  user   des  pouvoirs  vous   conférés   par   l’Assemblée générale afin  de  faire  respecter ces  objectifs  au  niveau du  Rwanda. Nous   osons espérer que  vous  n’attendrez  pas  quinze ans  avant   d’évaluer  la  réalisation et  le respect  des prérogatives de ces objectifs par les pays membres.

                  L’avenir  de  la planète est entre  nos  mains.  « Il est aussi  entre  les mains  des  jeunes d’aujourd’hui, qui transmettront le flambeau aux générations futures ». Monsieur le Secrétaire  général, faites en sorte  que Madame Diane  Shima  Rwigara fasse partie de ces jeunes qui transmettront le flambeau de la liberté  aux générations futures.

                  Veuillez agréer,  Monsieur le Secrétaire  Général, toute  notre  considération.

                  Perpétue Muramutse, RifDP au Canada (sé)
                  Marcelline Nyiranduwamungu, RifDP  en Belgique (sé)
                  Gloria Uwishema, RifDP aux Pays-Bas (sé)

                  Copie pour information

                  – Commission de l’Union européenne
                  – Missions  diplomatiques et consulaires à Kigali, Rwanda
                  – Femmes  parlementaires et sénatrices rwandaises à Kigali, Rwanda

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