Bill'nKiller
THE TRUTH ABOUT RWANDA
by Christopher Black
Monday, January 4, 2010
Bill'nKiller
[Here's an antidote to some of the toxic bilge coming out of Anglo-Saxony
these days on the subject of Rwanda. Even quisling frogs like Gérard Prunier
(whose perfect English is perfectly maddening) have joined with their trans-chunnel
and trans-Atlantic kith, like Linda Melvern and Wm Schabas, in pissing in the
information pool which has so recently been refilled with hard information
against their mythic genocide of '800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus carried out
in 100 days by Extremist Hutus in pastel periwigs and weilding Red Chinese
machetes', just so as not to let go of the historical lie that has for so long
been their meal ticket.
Thus, from dankest Canadia, comes our strong comrade, Me Chris Black, with yet
further proof that, no matter what the military humanists bleat, ça ne s'est pas
passé comme ça en Rwanda.
So here, read this--then try and cop a hook at D'Arusha à Arusha, a new French
doc by Chris Gargot--and start demanding that your favorite English-language,
leftish press (I'm thinking Verso, Soft Skull, MR and Pluto, here) start
printing translations of important French works on this history--like those of
Pierre Péan, Ambassador JMV Ndagijimana, Col Jacques Hogard, Faustin Ntilikina,
Charles Onana--and that's just the few lurch forth in my incipient senility.
But this history is key to understanding the thorough privatization of the world
and all dominant state functions--esp the military--from which U.S. President
Obama is (impossibly) charged with saving us. Putin did it for Russia--but
Russia had 70 years of socialism in its history. That vague part of the
socialist history that survived the bloody purges of the late 19th and 20th
Centuries, by the Pinkertons and the FBI, has been driven deep into the denial
reflex of the collective sub-conscious of a nation terrorized into willful
ignorance unto amnesia.
This one's for all those who continue to fight for truth, justice and peace,
against the craven forces of terrorized idiocy--and it's for Obama, too. --mc]
*************************************************
Christopher Black: The Truth About Rwanda (29.12.09)
(Reposted from SaveRwanda, with editions by cm/p)
The reaction of some readers to the publication of the open letter to Paul
Kagame
(http://cirqueminime.blogcollective.com/blog/_archives/2009/5/27/4202188.html)
by the Hutu political prisoners held by the US-controlled Rwanda Tribunal is a
tragic manifestation of the deliberate disinformation fed to the world’s public,
especially the English-language public, since Kagame and his gangsters destroyed
democracy in Rwanda and annihilated millions of people, both Hutu and Tutsi, in
his four-year campaign of terror to install a fascist Tutsi minority junta in
the country.
The public should be aware of the facts before forming and expressing an
opinion. The fact is that Rwanda before 1990 was considered the Switzerland of
Africa, a model of social development. The result of the 1959 social revolution
that threw off the Tutsi monarchy and aristocracy and freed the majority Hutu
population from serfdom and a lifetime of humiliation was the establishment of a
collective society in which both the Hutu and Tutsi, as well as the Twa, lived
together in relative harmony. Tutsis were members of the government, its
administration, were present in large numbers in the education system and the
judiciary, and controlled most of the large private commercial companies in
Rwanda. The Rwandan army was a multiethnic military force composed of both Hutus
and Tutsis, and it stayed a multiethnic force even when the Rwandan Army was
forced to retreat into the Congo forests in July 1994 because of shortages of
ammunition brought about by the western embargo on arms and supplies.
Rwanda descended into chaos in 1990 when the self-described Rwanda Patriotic
Front, or RPF, forces launched a surprise attack on October 1, 1990, from
Uganda. In fact, every one of the officers and men of that invasion force were
members of the Ugandan Army.
The ‘RPF rebel’ invasion was really an invasion by Uganda disguised as an
independent “liberation force.” Liberation from what has never been stated.
Initially, the justification put out by the RPF was the right of return of Tutsi
“refugees” from Uganda to Rwanda. However, the refugee problem had been resolved
by an agreement between the RPF, Uganda, Rwanda, the UNHCR, and the OAU, a few
weeks earlier, in which the Rwandan government agreed to the repatriation of all
those Tutsis in Uganda who wanted to return to Rwanda. That accord required that
Tutsi representatives of the refugees travel to Kigali for a meeting to
determine the mechanics of that population movement, and how to accommodate all
those people in such a small country. They were expected at the end of September
1990. They never arrived.
Instead of civilians returning in peace, Rwandan was viciously attacked on
October 1, 1990, by a force that unleashed murderous savagery. During that
invasion, the RPF forces of the Ugandan Army slaughtered everyone in their path,
Hutu or Tutsi. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the majority Hutu, were
butchered. The RPF’s favorite methods were the bayonet or knife, with which they
disemboweled men and women, or to tie their hands behind their backs and smashed
their skulls with a hoe, the farm tool iconic of the Hutu peasantry. After
several weeks of intense fighting, the RPF forces were destroyed by the small
Rwandan Army, assisted by forces from France and Zaire, and the remnants fled,
on US instructions, back into Uganda to regroup and reorganize.
The RPF still has not justified this aggression and the needless slaughter of
innocent civilians in a peaceful country it brought about. From the early 1960s,
individual Tutsis had been freely allowed to return to Rwanda, and several times
the Rwandan government invited them all to return. However the Tutsi
aristocracy, jealous of its lost power and considering the Hutu as subhuman,
refused to return unless their absolute power was restored. This the people of
Rwanda, even those Tutsis who remained in the country, refused.
In the 1960s and early 1970s various Tutsi groups in Uganda and elsewhere had
organized terrorist raids into Rwanda during which they pitilessly murdered
anyone they caught. These raids were repelled by Rwanda’s tiny armed forces. The
years that followed were a period of development and peace for Rwandans. Even
though one of the smallest and poorest countries in the world, it had the best
road system, healthcare, and education system in Africa. Until the late 1980’s
it prospered and received help from both the socialist countries of the USSR,
North Korea and China, and West Germany, France and Israel, among others.
The Tutsis in Uganda became involved in the civil wars between the socialist
Milton Obote and US-UK puppets like Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni, who were
supported by the West to get rid of socialism in Uganda. By 1990 the Tutsis
composed a large section of the Ugandan Army, and all the senior officers of the
RPF were high-ranking officers in the Ugandan Army, the NRA. Kagame, himself,
was one of the highest-ranking officers in the intelligence services and was
notorious for enjoying the torture of prisoners.
Rwanda until 1990 was a one-party socialist state. The ruling party, the MRND
(roughly, the National Movement For Revolutionary Development), was not
considered a political party as such, but rather a social movement in which
everyone in the society took part through local elections and the mechanisms of
consensus, much like the system in Cuba. The fall of the Soviet Union led to
pressure from the West, notably the United States and France, to dismantle the
one-party state system and permit multi-party democracy. The President, Juvénal
Habyarimana, instead of resisting, agreed to a change in the constitution, and,
in 1991, Rwanda became a multi-party democracy.
The fact the Rwandan government did this in the middle of a war is more than
just remarkable. It was also an offer of peace. The RPF, since its abject
failure in 1990, had changed its strategy from a frontal assault to the tactics
of terrorism. The RPF likes to refer to this phase as ‘the guerrilla.’ However,
it was not the guerrilla of a liberation struggle like the FLN in Vietnam or the
FARC in Colombia. It was instead a mirror image of the Contras’ campaign of
terrorism conducted against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Its purpose was not to
make revolution. Its purpose was to overthrow the revolution. And, like the
Contras, the RPF was supported by the United States.
This was clear from the beginning of the war. When the RPF launched their
attack, President Habyarimana was in Washington, lured out of the way, by the
U.S. State Department. The evidence that the U.S. was aware of and supported the
October surprise attack was the U.S. administration’s offer to Habyarimana of
asylum in the U.S. if he surrendered power to the RPF. Habyarimana refused and
immediately flew home. There was no condemnation of the Ugandan-RPF aggression
by the U.S. or any of its allies, despite the big noise they made at the same
time over the advance of Iraqi forces into Kuwait. Further, the Rwandan
ambassador to the UN, then seated on the Security Council, filed a protest in
the UNSC, but the U.S. had it taken off the agenda.
In fact, the U.S. and its allies supported the aggression against Rwanda from
the beginning, and U.S. Special Forces operated with the RPF from the beginning.
Recently in Toronto, Bill Clinton denied any involvement in Rwanda, but this is
one of the Big Lies of the Century. He and Bush are up to their necks in the
blood of the Rwandan and Congolese people.
The RPF took full advantage of the arrival of multi-party democracy to Rwanda in
1991 and created several front parties to take away support from the popular
MRND. These parties, though claiming to represent different political views, in
fact, were mainly front parties for the RPF. The press was expanded and many of
the new papers were financed by and acted as mouthpieces for the RPF. While
these newly formed political parties were criticizing the Habyarimana
government, the RPF was continuing its terror campaign, planting mines that
killed Hutu and Tutsi alike, assassinating politicians and officials, and, with
the help of various NGOs funded by western intelligence agencies, blaming it all
on the Rwandan government.
In 1992, a coalition government was formed, with the RPF or its front parties
seizing control of key Ministries and appointing the Prime Minister. Through
these agents they also controlled the civilian intelligence services that they
then began to dismantle. The RPF engaged in a ‘talk-and-fight’ strategy. Always
agreeing to a ceasefire while pressing for more power, then launching new
attacks on civilians. The most egregious of these crimes against peace was their
breaking of the ceasefire and their major offensive in February 1993, during
which they seized the major town of Ruhengeri and murdered 40,000 civilians,
most of them Hutu. The Rwandan Army, even though hamstrung by the civilian
ministries that were controlled by the RPF, managed to drive the enemy back.
Finally in August 1993, under pressure from the U.S. and its allies, the Arusha
Accords were signed giving the RPF major concessions in return for the formation
of a broad-based transition government to be followed by general elections.
However, the RPF knew they could not win such elections as they were not only
unpopular with the majority Hutu population, but they did not even enjoy the
support of many Tutsis inside Rwanda whose lives and businesses had been
destroyed by a war they had never seen the need for.
Instead of preparing for elections, the RPF prepared a final offensive. As far
back as December 1993, UN reports document the massive build-up of men and
weapons coming into Rwanda from Uganda. The UN force that was deployed
supposedly to ensure a peaceful transition, in fact, was a cover for the U.S.
and its allies to assist in this build-up. General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian
general in charge of the UN force, hid this build-up from the Rwandan army and
the President. The build-up was accompanied by death threats against President
Habyarimana. In October 1993, according to an account of Habyarimana’s last
conversation with Zairian president Mobutu just two days before the Rwandan
president was murdered, U.S. State Dept. representative Herman Cohen told
President Habyarimana that unless he ceded all power to the RPF, they would kill
him and drag his body through the streets. He received the same threat from the
Belgians and the Canadians through General Dallaire. These threats were
punctuated by the murder of the Hutu president of Burundi by Tutsi officers in
October 1993, another assassination in which Kagame and the RPF had a hand. In
the aftermath of that murder, 250,000 Hutus were massacred by the Tutsi army of
Burundi, and hundreds of thousands of Hutus fled to Rwanda.
The result of the February 1993 offensive was that one million Hutus fled the
RPF’s terror in northern Rwanda towards the Rwandan capital. So, by April 1994,
over a million refugees were encamped in or around Kigali, and hundreds
thousands more were in camps in the south, all fleeing RPF terror.
The RPF did all it could in 1994 to paralyze government functions, to exacerbate
racial tensions, and prepare for war. Then, on April 6, 1994, they launched
their final surprise attack by shooting down the presidential plane returning
from a meeting that Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni had arranged in
Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.
In fact, it is known that Museveni’s half-brother, Salim Saleh, was at the final
RPF meeting in Mulindi where the date for the shoot-down was set. The attack on
the plane killed the Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, the
Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, a Hutu, the Rwandan Army chief of
staff, Deogratias Nsabimana, a Hutu, and everyone else on-board.
It was the first massacre of 1994, and it was a massacre of Hutus by the RPF.
The RPF then immediately launched attacks across Kigali and throughout the north
of the country. In the sector of Kigali known as Remera, they killed everyone
living there on the night of the 6th/7th, wiped out the Gendarme camp there,
wiped out the military police camp at Kami, and launched a major attack against
Camp Kanombe, Camp Kigali and the main Gendarme camp at Kacyiru. They
slaughtered everyone in their path.
The Rwandan government and army called for a ceasefire the same night, and again
the next day. The RPF refused. The Rwandan government asked for more UN help to
control the situation. The U.S. arranged, instead, that the main UN force be
pulled out, while they continued to supply the RPF with men and supplies flown
in by C130 Hercules. The Rwandan Army, short of ammunition and unable to contain
the RPF advances, even offered an unconditional surrender on the 12th of April.
Incredibly, the RPF refused it. Instead, they shelled the Nyacyonga refugee camp
where a large part of the one million Hutu refugees were located, provoking
their flight into the capital, Kigali. The effect of one million people flooding
into a small city that itself was under bombardment cannot be described. The RPF
used this flood of people to infiltrate its men behind army lines. This created
panic among the Hutu population, who began killing anyone they did not
recognize, fearing that everyone was an RPF soldier out to cut their throats. It
was clear that the RPF was not interested in saving lives, even Tutsi lives, but
only in seizing total power, and they did not want to negotiate at all.
Dr. Alison Des Forges, in her testimony in the Military II trial at the ICTR in
2006, stated that the RPF’s claim that they attacked to stop a “genocide” was a
myth, mere propaganda to justify their attempt to seize power by force of arms.
She also testified that the Rwandan government did not plan and execute a
genocide. This accords with the testimony of General Dallaire, who also
confirmed that there was no planned genocide by the government. And the deputy
head of Belgian Army Intelligence, Colonel André Vincent, also testified at the
ICTR that the idea of a genocide was a fantasy.
The fighting in Kigali was intense. UN officers, corroborating the testimony of
Rwandan and RPF officers, state that the RPF was launching hundreds of Katyusha
rockets every hour, around the clock, while the Rwandan Army ran out of hand
grenades in the first few days and was reduced to fighting the RPF with
artisanal explosives. Even so, the vaunted RPF could not take Kigali. The siege
of Kigali lasted three months and only ended when the Rwandan Army literally ran
out of ammunition and ordered a general retreat into the forests of Congo.
During that fighting, the RPF killed anyone in their path. RPF officers have
stated that their troops killed up to 2 million Hutus during those 12 weeks in a
deliberate campaign to eliminate the Hutu population. The Akagera River, the
length of which was under RPF control throughout, ran red with the blood of the
Hutus massacred on its banks. The RPF claimed these were Tutsis, but there were
no Tutsis in that area, and only they had access to that area. Robert Gersony,
of USAID, in a report to the UNHCR in October 1994, filed as an exhibit at the
ICTR, stated that the RFP carried out a systematic and planned massacre of the
Hutu population.
As the Rwandan Army, including its Tutsi officers and men, retreated into the
Congo forest, the Hutu population in the millions, fearing for their lives, fled
along with them. In local villages, Hutu neighbors attacked Tutsis in revenge
for the murder of Hutus or fearing death at their hands. And Tutsis attacked
Hutus. It was total war—just as the RPF had wished. Then, in 1996-1998, the RPF
pursued the Hutus through the Congo forests and killed hundreds of thousands
unto millions of unarmed refugees. They were shelled, machine gunned, raped, and
cut to pieces with knives. Accounts of that trek are difficult to bear.
The RPF was directly assisted in this offensive by the U.S., which set up the UN
Rwanda Emergency Office in Nairobi, manning it with U.S. Army officers and
acting as the operational headquarters of the RPF to give them intelligence on
Rwandan Army troop movements, actions and directions. Prudence Bushnell, Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under Ambassador George Moose,
telephoned the Rwandan Army chief of staff in May 1994 and told him that, unless
he surrendered, he must know that he would be fighting the United States of
America and would be defeated. U.S. Special Forces fought along side the RPF.
There is also evidence of the Belgian UN forces involvement from an intercepted
radio message sent by Kagame to his forces in the field and referring to the
help the RPF had received from the Belgians.
There is also evidence that Canadian forces were involved, and Antoine Nyetera,
a Tutsi prince, who was in Kigali during that period, testified for the defense
in the Military II trial and stated that not only were there no massacres
committed against Tutsis by the Rwandan Army, but that it was the RPF that began
the massacres against Hutus after taking Kigali. He also testified that despite
the claim by the RPF of being a Tutsi liberation group, when he saw their long
columns enter the capital, he recognized that most of them were Sudanese,
Eritrean, Ethiopian, Tanzanian, and that others were speaking Swahili or
Sudanese languages: In other words, they were mercenaries.
Several RPF officers have testified at the ICTR and stated that they fled the
Kagame regime because they had been promised that they were fighting for the
liberation of the Tutsis. However, when they wanted to take to the streets of
Kigali to stop reprisals against Tutsis by Hutu civilians, the junior officers
were forbidden to do so, putting the lie to Kagame’s claim that he attacked to
save Tutsis. These officers testified that Kagame wanted (Tutsi) deaths to
justify his war. The RPF could have controlled large parts of Kigali as they had
at least 15,000 men in or near the capital opposed to 5,000 Rwandan Army forces.
Instead he used his men to ethnically cleanse the rest of the country of its
majority Hutu population.
The Rwanda War was a total war. All means were used to destroy the country and
the Hutu people. The ultimate objective was the resources of Congo—then Zaire.
The U.S. agreed to support the RPF in return for the RPF acting as a U.S. proxy
force to invade Congo and seize its resources. The U.S. now has several military
bases in Rwanda, and Rwanda is now nothing more than a U.S.-UK colony run by
thugs who control the majority of the people through intimidation,
disinformation and murder. None of this could have happened if those in the UN,
like Kofi Anan, then in charge of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, had
done their jobs. None of this could have happened without the connivance of the
NATO countries and Uganda. But the prime responsibility rests with the United
States of America and, in particular, the regimes of Bill Clinton and George W.
Bush--and now with Mr. Obama. As Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN Secretary General
at the time, stated to Canadian historian Robin Philpot in 2004, “The United
States is one hundred percent responsible for what happened in Rwanda.”
Christopher Black
Barrister, International Criminal Lawyer
Lead Counsel, General Augustin Ndindiliyimana
Chief of Staff, Rwandan Gendarmerie
International Crimin
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