Edited by Alex Constantine http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2009/05/flight-3407-crash-rwanda-genocidegate.html
"
... On 9 April 1994, three days after the so-called 'mysterious
plane crash' where Burundi's President Cyprien Ntaryamira and
President Habyarimana were assassinated, some 330 U.S. marines
landed at Bujumbura's airport in Burundi, ostensibly to 'rescue
Americans' in Rwanda. More centrally however, Uganda—with U.S.
trained forces and U.S. supplied weaponry—launched its war
against Rwanda as a proxy force for the United States of America
on October 1, 1990." ... Alison Des Forges and Human Rights
Watch (HRW) provided intelligence to the U.S. government at the
time of the 1994 crises. ... In life she did not speak about the
deeper realities of 'genocide in Rwanda,' and she had plenty of
chances. In fact, she is the primary purveyor of the inversion
of truth that covered up the deeper U.S. role in the Rwanda
'genocide,' and she spent the past 10 years of her life
explaining away the inconsistencies, covering up the facts,
revising her own story when necessary, and manipulating public
opinion about war crimes. ... Key to the operation were "former"
Special Operations Forces (Ronco Company) providing military
equipment and ferrying RPA troops from Uganda to Rwanda; the
Pentagon's logistical and communications support; Defense
Intelligence Agency and CIA operatives. Canadian General Romeo
Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in
Rwanda (UNAMIR), was also collaborating with the RPF/A, serving
the Pentagon interest. ... False Narrative: Whitewashing Rwanda Genocide
By Keith Harmon Snow
On 12 February 2009, Alison Des Forges, a senior researcher
with Human Rights Watch (HRW) for more than 20 years, was killed
when Continental Airlines Flight 3407 crashed on route to
Buffalo, New York. Des Forges was widely cited as a staunch
critic of the Rwandan military government controlled by Paul
Kagame and the victors of the war in Rwanda, 1990-1994.
In the ongoing life-and-death struggle to reveal the truth about
war crimes and genocide in Central Africa, competing factions on
all sides have posthumously embraced Alison Des Forges as an
activist challenging power and a purveyor of truth and justice
against all odds. Meanwhile, in March, 2009, based on false
accusations of genocide issued by the Kagame regime—and given
the close relations between Rwanda and the Barack Obama
Administration’s former Clintonite officials—the U.S. Department
of Homeland Security began the process of revisiting all
immigration cases of Rwandan asylum seekers and criminalizing
innocent refugees.
"In May of 1994, a few weeks into the killings of Tutsis in
Rwanda," reported Amy Goodman, posthumously, on Democracy Now,
Alison Des Forges "was among the first voices calling for the
killings to be declared a genocide." Added Goodman: "She later
became very critical of the Tutsi-led Rwandan government headed
by Paul Kagame and its role in the mass killings in both Rwanda
and neighboring Congo after 1994. Last year, she was barred from
entering Rwanda."
To say that Des Forges was "amongst the first voices calling for
the killings to be declared genocide" in 1994 is an Orwellian
ruse. The genocide label applied by Alison Des Forges and
certain human rights bodies in May of 1994 was misdirected, used
to accuse and criminalize only the majority Hutu people and the
remnants of the decapitated Habyarimana government; much as the
genocide and war crimes accusations have been selectively
applied against President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan.
The Clinton Administration refused to apply the genocide label:
to do so might have compromised an ongoing U.S.-backed covert
operation: the invasion of Rwanda by the Pentagon’s proxy force,
the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A).
According to U.S. intelligence insider Wayne Madsen, Des Forges’
criticisms of the U.S.-brokered pact between Rwanda's President
Paul Kagame and the Democratic Republic of Congo's President
Joseph Kabila in December 2008 "earned her some powerful enemies
ranging from the murderous Kagame, who will not think twice
about sending his agents to silence critics abroad, and
international interests who want nothing to prevent them from
looting the DRC’s vast mineral and energy resources."
"With U.S. military forces of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM)
now backing a joint Ugandan-DRC offensive in the northeastern
DRC to wipe out the Lord’s Resistance Army," wrote Madsen on 16
February 2009, "with hundreds of civilian casualties in the DRC
and Uganda, and a secret pact worked out between Kabila and
Kagame to permit Rwandan troops to occupy the eastern DRC, the
target of both operations is securing the vast territory that is
rich in commodities that the United States, Britain and
Israel—all allies of Uganda and Rwanda—want badly.
Those commodities are gold, diamonds, columbium-tantalite (coltan),
platinum and natural gas." Massive oil reserves are also at
stake, with major concessions bifurcated by the international
border. Ongoing petroleum sector investment (exploration and
exploitation) in the region involves numerous western extraction
companies—many being so-called petroleum "minors" likely
fronting for larger corporations—including
Hardman Resources, Heritage Oil
and Gas, H Oil & Minerals, PetroSA, Tullow Oil, Vangold
Resources, ContourGlobal Group, Tower Resources, Reservoir
Capital Group, and Nexant (a Bechtel Corporation subsidiary).
Billed as a "tireless champion" and "leading light in African
human rights," there is much more to this story than the western
propaganda system has revealed:
Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch (HRW) provided
intelligence to the U.S. government at the time of the 1994
crises, and they have continued in this role to the
present. Des Forges also supported the show trials at the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR),
institutionalizing victor’s justice and shielding the Kagame
regime.
Alison Des Forges came across to many people as a wonderful
human being with great compassion and impeccable integrity.
Indeed, this was my impression upon meeting her as well. She is
said to have helped people who were being persecuted—no matter
that they were Hutus or Tutsis—by the Rwandan regime that has
for more than 19 years operated with impunity behind the
misplaced and misappropriated moral currency of victimhood. In
the recent past, Alison Des Forges spoke—to some limited
degree—against the war crimes of the Kagame regime.
In life she did not speak about the deeper realities of
"genocide in Rwanda", and she had plenty of chances. In fact,
she is the primary purveyor of the inversion of truth that
covered up the deeper U.S. role in the Rwanda "genocide", and
she spent the past 10 years of her life explaining away the
inconsistencies, covering up the facts, revising her own story
when necessary, and manipulating public opinion about war crimes
in the Great Lakes of Africa—in service to the U.S. government
and powerful corporations involved in the plunder and
depopulation of the region.
"Alison des Forges is a liar," Cameroonian journalist Charles
Onana told me, in Paris, France, several years ago. Onana is the
author of numerous exposés on war crimes, genocide and crimes
against humanity in Central Africa, and he is the author of the
book "The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide, Investigations on the
Mysteries of a President," published in French in 2001.
Kagame, Rwanda’s one-party president "elected" through rigged
elections, sued Charles Onana for defamation in a French court
in 2002; Kagame lost the original trial and the appeal. Kagame
was the commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A)
and a leading agent—with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and
their U.S., U.K., Belgian and Israeli backers—behind the massive
bloodshed and ongoing terrorism in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi,
Congo, Sudan and Somalia.
In his book, Onana accused Kagame of being the principle
instigator of the missile attack of April 6, 1994 that brought
down the plane carrying Rwanda's President Juvenal Habyarimana
and Burundi's Cyprien Ntaryamira. Unlike the U.N.'s ongoing
high-profile investigation of the murder of Lebanon's former
prime minister Rafik Hariri, no major power has pushed for a
similar probe into the murder of the two African presidents.
Des Forges own death in a plane crash garnered major coverage.
"Leading light in African Human Rights killed in Buffalo Crash,"
reported the Pentagon’s mouthpiece, CNN. "Human Rights Watch,
which is based in New York, said she was ‘best known for her
award-winning account of the genocide, Leave None to Tell the
Story.’ She was truly wonderful, the epitome of the human rights
activist—principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and
to using that truth to protect ordinary people."
Alison Des Forges first worked as a HRW agent in Rwanda in 1992;
in 1993 she helped produce a major international document highly
biased against the Rwandan Government and protective of the RPF/A
invaders: "Report of the International Commission of
Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda since October
1, 1990."
In late 1992, the International Federation of Human Rights,
Human Rights Watch, the Inter-African Union for Human Rights and
the Rights of Peoples, and the International Center for the
Rights of the Individual and the Development of Democracy
created the International Commission of Investigation on Human
Rights Violations in Rwanda since October 1, 1990. With 10
members from eight countries, the commission reported its
findings in March 1993: Des Forges was co chairperson, one of
the three principal writers, and translator of the French to
English version.
The report noted that "hundreds of thousands" of Rwandans were
made homeless and forced to flee, prior to January 1993, but
these casualties of the RPF/A invasion were not attributed to
international crimes of peace against a sovereign government
committed by an invading army—the RPF/A guerrillas covertly
backed by the U.S., Britain, Belgium and Israel—but instead
merely to "war".
In other words, the initial act of aggression, the RPA/F
invasion, was institutionally protected and the war crimes that
set the stage for the conflagrations in Rwanda and Congo went
unpunished.
Later in 1993, Rwandans Ferdinan d Nanimana and Joseph Mushyandi,
representing four Rwandan organizations under the Rwanda
Associations for the Defense of Human Rights, challenged the
DesForges commission in their 26-page document, "A Commentary on
the Report of the International Commission's Inquiry on the
Violation of Human Rights in Rwanda since October 1990."
"How can an international commission be taken seriously when its
members spent only two weeks extracting verbal and written
evidence on human rights violations for a period of two years?"
the authors wrote. They also pointed out that the commission
spent less than two hours in areas controlled by the RPF/A
rebels and that they could not visit all the 11 prefectures in
the country because of demonstrations that blocked the roads.
"Can there be any objective and credible conclusions in their
report?"
Ferdinand Nanimana was later sentenced to life imprisonment for
genocide. Many members of the Rwandan human rights organizations
he worked with prior to April 1994 were subsequently killed. The
rights and due process of Rwandan Hutus are systematically
violated due to victor’s justice secured by the U.S., Europe,
Israel and the proxy states Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. Bernard
Ntuyahaga, a Major of the former Rwandan army (ex-FAR) accused
of killing 10 Belgian soldiers and Prime Minister Agathe
Uwilingiyimana, surrendered to the ICTR to avoid extradition to
Rwanda; he was tried in Belgium and sentenced to 20 years in
prison on July 4, 2007.
Like other researchers who have endlessly perpetuated the
disinformation, Des Forges made no attempts to correct the
record. In 1992, human rights researchers Rakiya Omaar and Alex
de Waal established the London-based NGO African Rights. In
August 1995, African Rights published Rwanda: Death, Despair and
Defiance, another pivotal "human rights" report that
manufactured the "genocide" fabrications, set the stage for
victor’s justice at the ICTR, and began the process of
dehumanizing millions of Hutu people and protecting the true
terrorists. In 1995, Omaar and de Waal recycled the
disinformation in the left-leaning Covert Action Quarterly under
the title "U.S. Complicity by Silence: Genocide in Rwanda."
Since 2003, Alex de Waal has been one of the primary
disinformation conduits on Darfur, Sudan. "An intensive back and
forth activity between this so-called British human rights
organization, African Rights, and the intelligence services of
the [Kagame] President’s office and the Rwandan military, has
been observed," wrote Paul Rusesabagina, whose heroics was
immortalized in the film Hotel Rwanda. "Her investigators are
very close to the [RPF/A] military intelligence apparatus, and
the modus operandi of both appears to be similar."
Alison Des Forges years-long "investigations" into the bloodshed
of 1994 resulted in the fat treatise on genocide in Rwanda,
"Leave None to Tell the Story," a book co-researched and
co-written by Timothy Longman, now Associate Professor of
Africana Studies and Political Science at Vassar College.
Longman and Des Forges produced numerous documents—based on
field investigations in Congo (then Zaire), Rwanda and Burundi,
from 1995 to 2008—touted as independent and unbiased human
rights documents, all skewed by hidden interests.
According to a recent PBS Frontline eulogy, less than two weeks
into the killing in April 1994 Des Forges met with officials in
the U.S. State Department and National Security Council (NSC)
and lobbied for their help. "We were not asking for U.S.
troops," Frontline quotes her saying, "it was clear to us that
there was no way that the U.S. was going to commit troops to
Rwanda."
But the U.S. military was heavily backing the RPF/A tactically
and strategically already. Key to the operation were "former"
Special Operations Forces (Ronco Company) providing military
equipment and ferrying RPA troops from Uganda to Rwanda; the
Pentagon's logistical and communications support; Defense
Intelligence Agency and CIA operatives. Canadian General Romeo
Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in
Rwanda (UNAMIR), was also collaborating with the RPF/A, serving
the Pentagon interest.
Genocide in Rwanda became a massive psychological operation
directed against media consumers using ghastly images—produced
by RPA-embedded photographers like James Nachtwey and Gilles
Peres—to infer that all cadavers were Tutsi victims of an
orchestrated Hutu genocide; meanwhile the text was racist
disinformation produced by Joshua Hammer. Newsweek, June 20,
1994.
ICTR defense attorney Christopher Black reports that reliable
sources confirm that US Special forces were with the RPF all the
way through the war. "My client testified in June that U.S.
Hercules [C-130 military aircraft] were seen dropping troops in
support of the RPF…"
Further, on 9 April 1994, three days after the so-called
"mysterious plane crash" where Burundi's President Cyprien
Ntaryamira and President Habyarimana were assassinated, some 330
U.S. marines landed at Bujumbura's airport in Burundi,
ostensibly to "rescue Americans" in Rwanda.
More centrally however, Uganda—with U.S. trained forces and U.S.
supplied weaponry—launched its war against Rwanda as a proxy
force for the United States of America on October 1, 1990.
The result was a coup d’état: we won. The 2003 Frontline
interview with Alison Des Forges exemplifies her continuing role
in whitewashing U.S. involvement in war crimes and genocide in
Central Africa. "Kagame received his military education under
the Pentagon's Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) at the
Command and General Staff College of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,
beginning in 1990," wrote John E. Peck of the Association of
African Scholars (2002). "His sidekick, Lt. Col. Frank Rusagara,
got his JCET schooling at the U.S. Naval Academy in Monterey,
California. Both were dispatched to Rwanda in time to oversee
the RPF's takeover in 1994. Far from being an innocent
bystander, the Washington Post revealed on July 12, 1998 that
the United States not only gave Kagame $75 million in military
assistance, but also sent Green Berets to train Kagame's forces
(as well as their Ugandan rebel allies) in low intensity
conflict (LIC) tactics. Pentagon subcontractor Ronco,
masquerading as a de-mining company, also smuggled more weapons
to RPF fighters in flagrant violation of UN sanctions. All of
this U.S. largesse was put to lethal effect in the ethnic
bloodbath that is still going on."
"This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern
elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power," Des
Forges wrote, blaming "Hutu Power". However, her assertions
about a "planned" Hutu genocide—"They seized control of the
state and used its machinery and its authority to carry out the
slaughter"—collapse under scrutiny.
From 1990 to 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), comprised
most heavily of Ugandan soldiers led by Ugandan citizens like
Paul Kagame, committed atrocity after atrocity as they forced
their way to power in Kigali, always falsely accusing their
enemies—the power-sharing government of then President Juvenal
Habyarimana—of genocide.
"Kagame assigned some people to work with Alison Des Forges,"
says Ugandan Human Rights activist Remigius Kintu, "and also to
assist her in fabricating and distorting stories to suit Tutsi
propaganda plans."
According to the International Forum for Truth and Justice in
the Great Lakes Region of Africa, whose discoveries resulted in
the high courts of Spain issuing international indictments
against 40 top RPF/A officials: "Between 1990 and 1994, the RPA
waged a systematic, pre-planned, secretive but highly organized
terrorist war aimed at eliminating the largest number of Rwandan
people possible—bodies were hacked to pieces and incinerated en
masse.
From 1994, once the RPA violently seized power, a terror regime
was created, and developed, and a criminal structure parallel to
the state was set up to pursue pre-determined kidnappings;
torturing and raping of women and young girls; terrorist attacks
(both directly and by simulating that the same had been
perpetrated by the enemy); illegal detention of thousands of
civilians; selective murdering; systematic elimination of
corpses either by mass incineration or by throwing them into
lakes and rivers; indiscriminate attacks against civilians based
on pre-determined ethnic categories for the elimination of the
predominant ethnic group; and also to carry out acts of war in
Rwanda and Congo."
Before former President Habyarimana’s assassination on 6 April
1994, Des Forges, and the organizations she worked with, blamed
the whole war crimes show on President Habyarimana and his
government, they dismissed the illegal invasion and atrocities
of the RPF/A, and they began calling it genocide against the
Tutsis as early as 1992.
"In the Military II case Alison Des Forges admitted that she was
funded by USAID when she was part of that so-called
International Commission condemning the Rwandan Government
[under Habyarimana] for human rights violations," reports
Canadian Chris Black, a defense attorney at the ICTR, "and she
admitted that she just took the word of the RPF and pro-RPF
groups and that she did not deal with RPF atrocities, as she did
not have the time."
Chris Black notes that Des Forges presented reports to the ICTR
in certain legal cases that were decidedly doctored from the
original reports presented in previous cases against other
accused Hutu genocidaires, and that it was necessary to
cross-examine Des Forges "very forcefully" to get her to agree
that changes had been made to the reports presented as evidence
in the case being tried.
"In her expert report in the 2006 Military II trial against
General Ndindiliyimana," Chris Black adds, "she removed all the
positive things she had said about him in her book and in her
previous expert report in the [Colonel Théoneste] Bagasora case.
When asked by me why she deleted the positive view of him at his
own trial, and why she tried to hide the fact that he saved a
lot of Tutsis, among other things, she had no explanation. It
was a cheap, low thing to do and I can tell you even the judges
here at the ICTR were not too happy about it."
On December 18, 2008, after the protracted ‘Military I’ trial,
the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda
ruled that there was no conspiracy to commit genocide by former
Rwandan military leaders affiliated with the former Habyarimana
government. It was war, and the actions—far from a calculated
genocide—were found by ICTR judges to be "war-time conditions".
"The media reports of the December 18 judgment [Military I] at
the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda focused primarily
on the convictions of three of four former top military leaders,
who were the supposed ‘masterminds’ of the Rwandan genocide,"
wrote ICTR defense lawyer Peter Erlinder. "But, as those who
have followed the ICTR closely know, convictions of members of
the former Rwandan government and military are scarcely
newsworthy."
Since the inception of the ICTR its decisions have been
decisively biased—victor’s justice—in favor of protecting the
Kagame regime and its backers. Thus it is no surprise that the
former top military leaders of the Habyarimana
government—Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and Major Aloys Ntabakuze—were
sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of genocide, war crimes
and crimes against humanity.
"The real news was that all of the top Rwandan military
officers, including the supposedly infamous Colonel Bagosora,
were found not guilty of conspiracy or planning to commit
genocide," writes Erlinder. "And General Gratien Kabiligi, a
senior member of the general staff, was acquitted of all
charges! The others were found guilty of specific acts committed
by subordinates, in specific places, at specific times—not an
overall conspiracy to kill civilians, much less Tutsi
civilians."
Now, after more than 15 years of massive western propaganda
proclaiming an organized, systematic elimination of the Tutsi
people by the Hutu leaders of the former Rwandan government, the
official Rwanda genocide story has finally collapsed.
In contradistinction to the establishment narrative accusing the
"Hutu leadership" of an "organized" and "planned" genocide were
the countless acts of genocide committed through a spontaneous
uprising of the Hutu masses—people who had been brutalized,
disenfranchised, uprooted and forced from homes; people who had
witnessed massacres and rapes of family members; people who were
themselves the victims of brutal atrocities.
These were more than a million internally displaced Rwandan
Hutus, people who had been terrorized by the Rwandan Patriotic
Army from October 1990 to April 1994, as it butchered its way
into Rwanda; and possibly a million Burundian refugees, Hutus
who suffered massive reprisals in Burundi after the first
civilian President, Melchior Ndadaye, a democratically elected
Hutu, was assassinated by the Tutsi military in October 1993.
There is evidence that the RPA/F pursued
"pseudo-operations"—death squads committing atrocities disguised
as government soldiers—and evidence that at least some of the
infamous Interahamwe militias pursued their campaigns of terror
in the pay of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army.
"She concealed the fact that from 1990 the war caused an
unprecedented economic poverty and that the one million
internally displaced people tore the social fabric apart!" wrote
Dr. Helmut Strizek, a former German official who had called for
Des Forges’ resignation from HRW.
"And these people knew that Tutsi rebels caused their misery.
They did not wait for ‘instructions’ in order to revenge, once
no one was able to maintain public order after the April 6
assassination and resumption of hostilities by the RPF."
"Alison Des Forges is no longer," writes Charles Onana. "Peace
be with her soul! She nonetheless leaves behind her many victims
of injustice, who she painstakingly accused, using false
testimony, before the International Criminal Tribunal Court for
Rwanda (ICTR)." Alison Des Forges provided expert testimony in
11 genocide trials before the ICTR, including the ‘Military I’
trials that condemned Col. Theoneste Bagosora and two others on
December 18. Des Forges also testified in genocide trials in
Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada.
Charles Onana continues: "Among her victims there is Jean-Paul
Akayesu, the first to be condemned to life imprisonment for
genocide. This man, who Alison Des Forges had accused without
any proof against him, was even defended by a Tutsi from the
Patriotic Rwandan Army [RPA] who had been party to the
fabrication of the ‘incriminating’ evidence against him in
Rwanda. The Tribunal never listened to this witness, but they
did listen to Alison Des Forges."
"I have also discovered during the course of my investigations
into the ICTR that, at the start of the trial in 1997, she
introduced a forged fax that was purported to be written by
General Dallaire in 1994. This fax, maintained Des Forges,
concerned the 'planning of genocide’."
New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch spread the mythology
of "The Genocide Fax" far and wide. Gourevitch’s first pro-RPF/A
disinformation piece appeared in the New Yorker in December
1995; in May 1998 the New Yorker published Gourevitch’s "The
Genocide Fax," a charade fed to him by Madeleine Albright’s
undersecretary of state James Rubin.
Gourevitch’s fictional book "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow
We Will Be Killed With Our Families" was funded by the
euphemistically named U.S. Institute for Peace and written in
league with the Kagame regime.
It is certainly possible that Alison Des Forges was unaware of
the original fabrication, but she and Human Rights Watch never
changed their tune, and they never denounced the fabrication.
Charles Onana continues: "It was on the basis of this false
document that she called for the condemnation of Jean-Paul
Akaseyu. To lend credibility to this first trial process, the
ICTR, with astonishing lightness and irresponsibility, condemned
this man to life. The Tribunal had no proof. The judicial
dossier is slapdash and skimpy, but that has no importance. This
was Alison Des Forges first great victory."
"She then decided to pursue a Rwandan refugee living in Canada:
an ideal target," Onana adds, referring to Leon Mugesera. "He
had the misfortune to be Hutu. For her, this man was a ‘planner
of genocide’. But where is the proof? Alison Des Forges has
none, but she wants to see this man in prison. Having deciphered
or seen through Alison Des Forge’s arguments, the Judge of the
Canadian Federal Tribunal concluded witheringly and without
pity: ‘I note above all the relentlessness with which Mme Des
Forges launched her diatribe against M. [Leon]Mugesera, and am
astonished by the lack of care she has demonstrated in drawing
up the report for the International Commission of Enquiry and in
her Expert Assessment.’"
"The Canadian judge did not hesitate to qualify Mme. Des Forges
as partisan, demonstrating ‘a prejudice or preconceived position
against Léon Mugesera’. He concluded that she could not be
considered an objective witness, adding that no correctly
informed tribunal could take her allegations seriously.
Nevertheless it was on the basis of the same arguments, and of
the same fantasy report published in 1999, that she accused
numerous Rwandans, all Hutu."
"CONTINENTAL SHIFT," one of Philip Gourevitch’s pivotal
disinformation essays that appeared in the New Yorker, outlined
the "new brand of African leader" exemplified by Yoweri Museveni
and Paul Kagame: it is a whitewash of U.S.-backed terrorism. "It
was thus that she devoted the penultimate day of her
examination, during the process against the military, to
presenting Colonel Bagosora, Hutu, as the king pin in the
genocide.
The Tribunal in the long-running ‘Military I’ trial did not
accept the ‘planning of genocide’ that Alison Des Forges never
ceased to hammer on about by means of her pseudo-fax of 11
January 1994. She lied, lied and lied again. She tried a
come-back or to recover her credibility by criticizing her
‘hero’ Paul Kagame, the organizer of the 6 April 1994
assassination of two presidents."
"Alison Des Forges finally dared to speak of the crimes
committed by the Tutsi rebels of the RPF/A: the great taboo. It
was a bit late but it assuaged her conscience. For those who
were condemned by the ICTR, deliberately and unjustly recorded
by her, there will be no justice for them. Can Alison Des Forges
still hear their suffering and their pain? She who has done them
so much harm—along with their families? She who claimed to
defend the Rights of Man has without doubt violated the rights
of many Rwandans, who will undoubtedly never forget her. Their
homage to Mme. Des Forges would have been different, very
different, to what her many friends in the media have to say."
Timothy Longman and Des Forges, the co-authors of the HRW
treatise, "Leave None To Tell The Story," both worked with USAID,
the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. Des Forges was a
member of the HRW board from 1988 and was "principal researcher"
on Rwanda and Burundi, 1991-1994.
In this period Des Forges also consulted for USAID, and
collaborated with the State Department, Pentagon, and National
Security Council. Simultaneously, Des Forges worked with,
informed and influenced U.S. Congress-people, Permanent
Representatives at the United Nations, the U.N. Under-Secretary
General, and U.N. Special Rapporteur for Rwanda and Special
Rapporteur for Summary and Arbitrary Executions. Des Forges also
pumped the disinformation into the academic world through her
high-level ties to human rights committees, African and Africana
Studies departments and the elite African Studies Association.
In the same period, Des Forges constantly influenced the U.S.
media through special briefings to the editorial boards and
reporters of the New York Times, Washington Post, National
Public Radio, and Associated Press, and she was frequently
presented as an "expert" on genocide in Rwanda for CNN, 60
Minutes, Nightline, All Things Considered, BBC, Radio France
Internationale, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
Such relations explain the mass media’s consistency in producing
the monolithic disinformation about Rwanda that shielded the
illegal U.S.-backed and covert RPF/A- Ugandan guerrilla
insurgency. The blanket media coverage falsely situated the
"Rwanda genocide" as it is now widely misunderstood: 100 days of
genocide, 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed with machetes;
the "highly disciplined" RPF/A stopping the genocide.
Such is the disinformation that indoctrinated the
English-speaking media consumers and created a mass
psychological hysteria about Rwanda that persists to this day.
Timothy Longman worked with Des Forges in Rwanda in 1994 and has
worked regularly with both USAID and HRW on contracts in Congo,
Burundi and Rwanda, throughout the late 1990’s and into the
present; Longman worked in Rwanda on one USAID contract for
Management Systems Incorporated, a firm whose clients include
the Pentagon. Longman also worked as a consultant for HRW in the
spring of 2000 conducting field research in eastern Democratic
Republic of Congo and producing "a detailed report on human
rights conditions in rebel-controlled areas."
The Des Forges and Longman position vis-à-vis their whitewashing
of the Tutsi-led RPF/A organized genocide in Rwanda certainly
explains the sanitation of HRW reports, and it raises questions,
for example, about how Human Rights Watch "researchers" navigate
their "work" in rebel (read: Rwandan and Ugandan) controlled
areas in DRC.
It also raises questions about how, why and when HRW does or
doesn’t expose the western operatives, non-government
organizations and multinational corporations: a singular example
is the Human Rights Watch report that mildly exposes the
criminal operations of Anglo-Gold Ashanti—a company partnered
with the George H.W. Bush connected Barrick Gold Corporation—in
eastern DRC.
HRW says nothing about Moto Gold, Mwana Africa, Banro Resources,
Hardmann Oil, Tullow Oil, De Beers, H Oil & Minerals, OM Group,
Metalurg, Kotecha, International Rescue Committee—and the many
proxy armies, militias, gun-runners and other organized white
collar war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Congo.
The role of HRW as an intelligence conduit to the U.S.
Government is incidentally confirmed by Samantha Power in her
book "A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide"—a
whitewash of U.S. and allied war crimes for which she was
rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize.
While Power’s "bystanders to genocide" thesis about Rwanda is a
total inversion of the facts, she notes in passing that "Human
Rights Watch supplied exemplary intelligence to the U.S.
Government and lobbied in one-on-one meetings" in April and May
1994, and that Alison Des Forges and other HRW staff visited the
White House on April 21, 1994. Samantha Power is currently a
member of the National Security Council in the Obama
Administration.
The mass media was flooded with "Rwanda genocide" disinformation
between April and July of 1994, and advertising that served up
subliminal seduction and white supremacy often surrounded these
"news" clips.
Alison Des Forges continued to remain silent about Western
corporate and military interests in the Great Lakes region to
her death. A perfect example of this silence is the very
unrevealing March 2008 interview by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum titled "Alison Des Forges: The Impact of Rwandan Genocide
in Congo."
Timothy Longman also produces significant pro-US propaganda
about Sudan. Thus it is important to note that amongst the key
USAID conduits for disinformation and covert operations in Sudan
today is Roger Winter, one of the primary architects of the RPF/A
guerrilla war, organized from Washington in 1989, that led to
the loss of millions of lives in the Great Lakes of Africa since
October 1990.
Alison Des Forges, of course, never mentioned Roger Winter or
his colleague in covert operations, Susan Rice, the Obama
Administration’s Ambassador to the U.N. Of Roger Winter,
Remigius Kintu, the Ugandan Human Rights activist says "he was
the chief logistics boss for the RPF until their victory in
1994…."
"Roger Winter was with the RPA on the front lines in Rwanda and
he regularly briefed the Clinton Administration of the RPA’s
military achievements," says Jean Marie Vianney Higiro, former
Rwandan official. "Alison Des Forges contributed to the RPF/A
takeover of Rwanda. I have no doubt about that… I met her three
times, first in 1995, and in 2004 she encouraged me to testify
at the ICTR. I said 'no way: I will only testify if RPF
officials are arrested.' She insisted I should testify, she was
confident that the RPF were going to be arrested. I think she
did not realize that the U.S. government would never accept
that. She was something of an opportunist."
The zeal displayed by Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch
in the pursuit of justice and human rights appears in sharp
contradistinction to their absence of zeal in pursuing the
architects of the criminal invasion of Rwanda on October 1,
1990, by Uganda, the double presidential assassinations of April
6, 1994, and all kinds of other murderous corporate conspiracies
in Central Africa where foreign-financed wars are used as cover
for illegal extraction of resources, particularly in the Congo.
Ironically, as the world this week commemorated the 15th
Anniversary of the terrible mass murders that followed the
assassination of the presidents, Rwandan asylum seekers that are
critics of the Kagame regime live under perpetual fear of being
hunted down, branded as genocide perpetrators, ostracized, and
persecuted by an illegitimate dictatorship. Forty of the
regime's military officials have been indicted for war crimes,
crimes against humanity and genocide by two international
courts.
Kagame’s ruthless Directorate of Military Intelligence has
dispatched agents to Europe to eliminate RPF opponents; some of
these agents are operating under cover as bogus asylum-seekers
in Europe and North America.
As of January 20, 2009 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
began reopening all cases of Rwandan asylum seekers, and is
criminalizing and threatening to deport legitimate refugees to
Rwanda, actions that violate the 1951 United Nations High
Commission for Refugees Convention and Protocol Relating to the
Status of Refugees.
(Keith Harmon Snow is the 2009 Regent's Lecturer in Law &
Society at the University of California Santa Barbara,
recognized for over a decade of work, outside of academia,
contesting official narratives on war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide while also working as a genocide
investigator for the United Nations and other bodies.)
http://www.ethiopianreview.com/content/2009/04/genocide-and-new-speak/