Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 15:37:19 +0200
Who was Behind the 1994 Rwanda Genocide?
By <http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/antony-c-black> Antony C. Black
Global Research, October 06, 2014
On the evening of April 6th 1994 a plane carrying the Hutu leaders of both
Rwanda and Burundi was shot down as it approached Kanombe airport. The
assassins had little trouble targeting the flight as only one of the two
runways was open, the other having been closed two months earlier on the
orders of Canadian General Romeo Dallaire. Simultaneous to the shootdown,
that is on the eve of April 6th, a 30,000 RPF (Tutsi) army based in Uganda
invaded from the north. At the same time, hundreds of covert armed RPF cells
came to life in and around Kigali and began attacking Rwandan government
forces (FAR). The population, roughly 85% Hutu, and encompassing at least a
million refugees in and around Kigali displaced by previous RPF incursions
from Uganda, began to panic. A genocide was about to begin.
But it was a genocide neither against, nor by, the actors cited in the
'official' narrative. Indeed, Rwanda circa 1994, is, in all likelihood, if
not the, then certainly one of the greatest propaganda swindles of all time.
This is the story of that swindle and of the scandalous truth that lies
buried beneath it.
Historical Context
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Rwanda was a feudal kingdom ruled by a
Tutsi minority over a Hutu majority. Following the Berlin Conference of 1885
Rwanda came under the suzerainty of Germany which was, itself, replaced as
colonial overlord following WW1, by Belgium. Rwanda's feudal order remained
intact, however, until 1956 when the Belgians finally organized elections.
Then, in November 1959, the Hutu majority overthrew the Tutsi monarchy. Many
Tutsis fled, the majority ending up, significantly, in Uganda. It was from
this perch in Uganda that the exiled Tutsi aristocracy launched, between
1960 and 1973, a series of violent attacks against the Rwandan regime. These
were repulsed and for the next decade and a half Rwanda enjoyed a period of
relative peace.
It is worth noting at this juncture that, though much of the Tutsi
aristocracy fled in 1960, those Tutsis who remained were well integrated
into Rwandan society and body politic. Thus, both the government and army
contained significant numbers of Tutsi personnel even through the height of
the crisis in April 1994. In fact, the Rwandan Army (FAR) continued as a
multi-ethnic organization even as it was forced to retreat into the forests
of the Congo in July of 1994; this after having run out of ammunition due to
a Western embargo on arms supplies - an embargo not applied to the RPF.
Up until 1990 there was no further interference in Rwanda from Uganda.
Nevertheless, by then the Tutsis exiles living there had become one of the
main elements of the Ugandan Army. As such, when Museveni came to power -
having been handpicked by the US and Britain to oust the socialist, Milton
Obote - a third or more of his army consisted of Tutsis. Many of these held
high office, including Paul Kagame.Kagame had been (and remains) an
erstwhile client of Washington from well before he claimed to have 'saved
Rwanda from further genocide' in 1994. Not only had he served as director of
Ugandan military intelligence in the 1980s, but he had also received
training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and had been the beneficiary of
constant US material and diplomatic support from the moment he assumed
control of the RPF.Upon the collapse of the USSR in 1989/90 the US and the
UK began a general militarist expansion which included the targeting of
Yugoslavia and Rwanda; Yugoslavia as it was the last real bastion of working
socialism in Europe, and Rwanda as it was a working model of socialist
development in Africa. In addition, the US had turned against Mobutu (of
Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) as he was beginning to ally
himself politically with China. The Rwandan president, Habyarimana, was
subsequently approached by Washington to allow his country to be used as a
staging ground for an attack on Zaire (to this day, a cornucopia of precious
resources prized by the West). His refusal caused the US to look to other
agents in furthering its strategic interests. They found the Tutsis in
Uganda, ever thirsting for restoration of their hegemony in Rwanda.
Furthermore, Museveni had begun to feel uneasy about the numbers of Tutsis
in his ranks and was looking to be rid of them. The opportunity to satisfy
these disparate desires soon came.
On October 1, 1990 the self-styled Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) launched a
surprise attack from Uganda. Though calling themselves a force of
'liberation' the offensive was a thinly disguised invasion by Uganda itself.
Initially, the justification for the invasion put out by the RPF was that of
attaining the right of return of Tutsi refugees. This claim, however, was
belied by the fact that Rwanda had, under UN auspices, already agreed a few
weeks earlier to the return of all Tutsis who wished to do so. That accord
required Tutsi representatives to travel to Kigali to determine both the
logistics of that population movement and their subsequent accommodation
within Rwanda. The delegation was expected at the end of September, 1990.
They never arrived.
The attack killed tens of thousands of Rwandan civilians. These crimes,
though well documented, have never been accounted for, nor did the UN or
'international community' ever seek to account for them. Indeed, there was
not even a shred of condemnation of the Ugandan/RPF invasion, this despite
the clamour raised only two months earlier with regard to the advance of
Iraqi forces into Kuwait. In point of fact, the US and its allies supported
the aggression against Rwanda and US Special Forces operated alongside the
RPF from the beginning. This support notwithstanding, the small Rwandan army
(with some help from a Congolese battalion) was eventually able to repel the
invading forces.
Following this attempt using a proxy force to overthrow the state, the
United States brought political and economic pressure to bear upon Rwanda's
one-party socialist state (MRND). The President, Juvenal Habyarimana,
instead of resisting, agreed to alter the constitution and in 1991 Rwanda
became a multi-party democracy. Though the Rwandan government effected this
as an offer of peace, what followed was anything but peace. Thus, rather
than work towards reconciliation, the RPF turned from the tactics of open
warfare to those of guerrilla terrorism.
In 1992, and whilst RPF forces were busy planting mines, assassinating
politicians and blaming it on the MRND, a coalition government was formed
with the front parties of the RPF. These agents, with US backing, quickly
seized control of key ministries and succeeded in appointing the Prime
Minister. They also gained control of the intelligence services which they
then began to dismantle. In essence, the 'power sharing' arrangement had
largely given over control of the country to the very forces long bent on
its destruction.
The RPF itself, meanwhile, engaged in a 'talk and fight' strategy; always
agreeing to a ceasefire, pressing for more power, then launching new attacks
on the civilian population. The most egregious of these assaults was their
breaking of the ceasefire and the launching of a major offensive in February
of 1993. Seizing the town of Ruhengeri, RPF forces murdered some 40,000,
mostly Hutu, civilians. Once again, the 'international community' remained
dutifully silent.
The Rwandan army, though hamstrung by the civilian ministries, managed to
repulse the RPF attack. Finally, in August of 1993, the Arusha Accords were
signed under pressure from the United States and its allies, and from which
the RPF obtained major concessions. The Accords dictated the formation of a
broad-based transition government to be followed by general elections. But
for the RPF - as for the United States - there was a fatal fly in the
electoral ointment. To wit, the RPF knew that they could not win such
elections; this not only because they were unpopular with the majority (85%)
Hutu population, but also because they had precious little support amongst
many of Rwanda's internal Tutsis whose lives and businesses they had
destroyed. Rather than prepare for elections, the RPF prepared for something
different.
UN reports document the massive build-up of men and weapons coming in from
Uganda during this period. In fact, the UN force (UNAMIR) supposedly
deployed to ensure a peaceful transition acted, instead, as a cover for the
US and its allies, i.e. Britain, Belgium, Canada, to assist the illegal
build-up. General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the UN
force, hid this build-up not only from the Rwandan Army and the President,
but also from his immediate superiors, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh and UN
Secretary General Boutros Ghali. These machinations were accompanied by
death threats against Habyarimana, threats made all the more significant by
the murder of the first Hutu president of neighbouring Burundi, Melchior
Ndadaye, by Tutsi officers in October 1993.
The result of the 1993 RPF offensive was the forced migration of hundreds of
thousands of Hutus from northern Rwanda towards Kigali so that by April,
1994 over a million refugees were encamped close to the capital and hundreds
of thousands more in camps to the south. The RPF, meanwhile, did all it
could to paralyze the functioning of the government, to exacerbate racial
tensions, and to prepare for war.
Who Killed Habyarimana
The triggering event in the 'Rwandan genocide' of 1994 is generally agreed
to be the shooting down, on April 6, 1994, of the plane carrying Juvenal
Habyarimana, the Hutu president of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu
president of Burundi. The official story has it that unidentified 'Hutu
rebels' were the villains who targeted their own countrymen in some vague
attempt to gain power. No evidence was ever adduced in support of this
threadbare thesis, but in any case, even if so, the official villains failed
spectacularly in their objectives as the country quickly fell to invading
Tutsi forces leaving a small minority (Tutsi) population to rise like the
Phoenix to its former position of national privilege and oligarchical
control. No one in the Western mainstream media has ever commented on the
exceeding peculiarity of this bizarre turn of events, never witnessed
before, in which the supposed victims of a genocide end up as the victors of
the conflict.
The paradox is soon resolved, however, if we countenance the much more
likely scenario that the decapitation of the state leadership was the first
stage in a final offensive of a war started four years earlier. That the
assassination was part of an RPF coup d'etat is given further support by the
fact that a 30,000 man RPF force was already marching against Kigali hours
before the plane was destroyed, and that RPF forces inside Kigali were
attacking government positions within hours of the shootdown. The Western
audience, naturally, was, and has never since, been informed of these rather
pertinent contextual facts surrounding the events of April 6, 1994. To boot,
the official response to Habyarimana's assassination was and has remained
one of determined indifference; a strange thing given that it involved the
highest official in the land. Even stranger given that, and according to
virtually every independent expert on the subject, the 'genocide of 1994'
simply would not have happened had Habyarimana not been assassinated.
Nevertheless, though all the circumstantial evidence points towards the
assassination being part and parcel of a US-backed RPF coup d'etat against
the government of Rwanda, it would yet be helpful if there was direct
evidence implicating RPF forces in the murder. There is.
As in one of those classic 'B movie' plot twists where the bad guys
inadvertently hire a good guy who turns the table on his benefactors, so too
did the lead official of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
(ICTR) hire an investigator into the crash who turned out to be an honest
man. Reporting back to Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour in 1996/97, Australian
lawyer, Michael Hourigan, found evidence directly linking the RPF (and the
CIA) to the assassination. Far from pleasing Arbour, however, Hourigan's
diligence was rewarded with censure. According to Hourigan, Arbour became
"aggressive" and "hostile" when informed of his findings. What Hourigan
didn't know at the time is that Arbour, after having launched the
investigation, had been directed by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
(who had handpicked her for the job) to quash the inquiry. And so she did.
Arbour would later (again under the aegis of Albright) be promoted to
Canadian Supreme Court Justice and thence as UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights.
Hourigan's report, though suppressed at the time, would, nevertheless,
surface many years later in the hands of one of the defense teams at the
ICTR. The report would also have its findings later corroborated by numerous
sources. Thus, the French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, having
been called in to investigate the deaths of three French nationals who were
aboard Habyarimana's doomed flight, launched an exhaustive eight-year
investigation. He concluded that the plane had indeed been destroyed by the
RPF and that the assassination was part and parcel of Kagame et al's plan to
take over Rwanda by force. Bruguiere went on to issue nine warrants for the
arrest of high-ranking members of the RPF whilst also requesting that the
ICTR take up Kagame's prosecution.
What's more, not only have other French - and Spanish - legal officials
since confirmed Bruguiere's findings, but many highly placed members of the
RPF have stepped forward publicly to implicate Kagame and the RPF in the
assassination. All have suffered the same fate of official international
silence and suppression, and some of the latter have suffered assassination
themselves.
This culture of suppression and official silence has also plagued the ICTR
from its inception. In particular, it became the explicit policy of the ICTR
to forcibly limit its mandate solely to the investigation of 'genocidal
intent' by Hutu government figures, i.e. without any reference whatsoever
either to the political context of the conflict or to the mounting evidence
implicating the RPF as invaders and genocidaires. In short, the ICTR, much
like its sister tribunal, the International Criminal Court for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY), proved itself from the outset to be little more than a
Washington-sponsored kangaroo court.
This transparently politicized policy has continued apace throughout the
trials. When, for instance, the more independently-minded Carla Del Ponte
replaced the pliable Louise Arbour, she was quickly terminated as Chief
Prosecutor after calling for a 'Special Investigation' into the actions of
the RPF; this despite making a case for such an investigation with then UN
Secretary-General Kofi Anan. Of course, Anan's refusal to look into the
crimes of the RPF should come as no surprise as it was he who, a) was head
of the peacekeeping operations in 1994, and is thus implicated in the
events, and b) was handpicked by the US to replace his predecessor,
Boutros-Ghali.
Boutros-Ghali, It might be remembered, had come uncomfortably close to
scuttling the entire US/RPF invasion scenario when, in May of 1994, he
acceded to a request by the Rwandan government to send 5500 UN troops to
Rwanda to reinforce the 2500 already stationed there; this so as to
stabilize the country at a time when reports of growing 'chaos' were issuing
forth daily in the world press. These efforts were, however, categorically
thwarted by the Clinton regime which used its influence to remove the
proposal from the UN agenda. Instead, the UN troops already stationed there,
far from being reinforced, were withdrawn. Later, Boutros-Ghali, in
conversation with Rwandan expert Robin Philpot, would expand on these
matters declaring that, "The genocide in Rwanda was 100% the responsibility
of the Americans!" Hardly any wonder, then, that in 1996 US Ambassador to
the UN, the ubiquitous Madeleine Albright, would veto his re-election making
Boutros-Ghali the only UN Secretary General in history not to be granted a
second term in office.
Inconvenient Truths
On August 26, 2010 the French newspaper Le Monde revealed the existence of a
draft UN report detailing the most serious human rights violations in the
Democratic Republic of Congo over an eleven year period (1993 - 2003). The
report described how, following the RPF's takeover of Rwanda in 1994, it
proceeded to carry out "systematic and widespread attacks" against Hutu
refugees who had fled to neighbouring DRC. These attacks it stated, "could
be classified as crimes of genocide."
Save for it having been leaked to Le Monde, it is clear that the report was
well on its way to being buried alive, its cover-up a near certainty. But
this was hardly the first instance of a cover-up of a UN report vis a vis
Rwanda. As early as October 11, 1994, Robert Gersony, an employee of the US
Agency for International Development (USAID), then attached to the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees, made an oral presentation to the UN Commission of
Experts on Rwanda. Gersony had been dispatched to survey the situation
inside Rwanda to determine if conditions were right for return of the Hutu
refugees who had fled the RPF. Instead, he found that the RPF had been
committing massacres of the Hutu population in Rwanda starting in April 1994
through the date of his presentation. On page 4 of the UN record of
Gersony's presentation (a record which surfaced in the defense proceedings
at the ICTR), we read,
"Significant areas.have been the scene of systematic and sustained [emphasis
added] killing and persecution of the civilian Hutu population by the
Rwandan Patriotic Front...These actions were consistently reported to be
conducted in areas where opposition forces of any kind - armed or unarmed,
or resistance of any kind..were absent. Large scale indiscriminate killings
of men, women and children, including the sick and elderly were consistently
reported."
Now, I remind the reader that the killings detailed here were being
perpetrated not, as in the official narrative, i.e. by Rwandan government
troops, but by the supposed saviours of the country, i.e. the RPF.
Though much evidence surfaced early on that the official genocide narrative
was in sharp disagreement with reality, all later independent reports have
continued to corroborate this finding. In a 2004 paper, for instance (and
reinforced in a more recent 2009 report), US academics Christian Davenport
and Allan Stam concluded that, of the many hundreds of thousands of deaths
(possibly as high as two million) that occurred in Rwanda from April through
July of 1994, the "majority of victims [at least two thirds] were likely
Hutu and not Tutsi". Noteworthy is the fact that Davenport and Stam were
initially sponsored by the ICTR - that is until their findings contradicted
the official narrative whence they were sent packing.
Still, Davenport and Stam have refrained from taking the implication of
their own research to its logical conclusion, i.e. that Kagame's forces were
the only agents responsible for committing "systematic" killings in the
areas they overran, or that such systemic violence was part of a
pre-existing plan by the US-backed RPF to invade and overthrow the
legitimate government, the latter in order to install a formerly privileged
minority - and Western comprador elite - to power within Rwanda.
If the academics have been content to sit on the fence, not so one of the
more famous lay figures of the Rwandan debacle. It is ironic in the extreme
that Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the movie Hotel Rwanda - a
film unashamedly promoting the official narrative - has himself, in numerous
interviews, completely gainsaid that narrative. He has, thus, repeatedly
denounced the RPF as the real genocidaires, and has called a Kagame a "war
criminal" and "dictator" who is responsible for mass killings not only
during the takeover of Rwanda in July 1994, but ever since both in Rwanda
and in his US-backed incursions into the Congo. Indeed, so fervent have the
denunciations been that Rusesabagina is now officially listed as a
'terrorist' and 'genocide denier' (a prisonable offence in Rwanda) by the
Kagame regime.
No matter, the movie continues to circulate, sans critique; Rusesabagina's
views and denunciations, do not.
Whose Genocide(s)?
It is something of an embarrassment to the US architects of the ICTR that
the tribunal, though explicitly tasked with indicting only members of the
Hutu government, have failed singularly in successfully prosecuting any of
them. Not only have the most senior members of the Rwandan government -
through the spirited efforts of the various defense teams - been acquitted,
but the mass of evidence so assembled has stood the entire official
narrative on its head, and has implicated, au contraire, the RPF - and its
foreign accomplices - in the genocide.
There was, however, one highly publicized piece of evidence proffered at the
tribunal by prosecutors as they sought to prove a 'planned genocide' by the
Rwandan government. This was the so-called 'genocide fax' allegedly sent to
the New York UN headquarters on the night of January 10th, 1994. That this
was the only piece of documentary evidence claiming direct planning of a
genocide put forward in the trial is, itself, telling. Had there actually
been such a plan, the logistics would have left a paper and/or electronic
trail a mile wide. Instead, there are no orders, minutes of meetings, notes,
cables, faxes, radio intercepts or any other type of documentation
indicating that such a plan ever existed. And then, of course, there are the
actual events on the ground which, as we have seen (and shall see further),
suggest nothing of the sort. Nonetheless, there is the lone sepulchre of the
'genocide fax'. What to make of it?
To make a long story short, the fax is a forgery. There was a fax sent to
the UN headquarters on January 10th, 1994 (a copy of a cable sent by Romeo
Dallaire to another Canadian, General Baril), but this was not the fax that
was entered into evidence in the Military II trial (ICTR vs Ndindiliyimana)
in October, 2005. Ndindiliyimana's defense counsel was able to definitively
establish that the original fax dealt only with 'weapons caches and seeking
protection for an informant', whereas the fax subsequently entered as
evidence, having first had time stamps, dates and paragraphs altered, had
mysteriously sprouted an addendum about government plans to kill Tutsis and
Belgian soldiers. Conflicting testimony both between Dallaire's earlier and
later statements, and between statements made by Dallaire and Lt. Col.
Claeys (a Belgian officer who claims to be one of the authors of the
original cable), further proved the document's inauthenticity. Such was only
reinforced when Dallaire's immediate superior, Jacques Roger Booh-Booh,
stated that he had never seen nor heard of the fax or any of its alleged
inflammatory contents. Eventually, the 'genocide fax' was simply withdrawn
as evidence by the court. Puff! One might wonder, then, why tens of
thousands of MRND personnel are today still in prison, this whilst not one
RPF figure has even been indicted. But so it is.
If documents supporting a pre-meditated plan by the Rwandan government have
failed to materialize, not so it turns out when it comes to the RPF. In the
same trial that saw the outing of the fraudulent 'genocide fax', evidence
was presented suggesting nothing other than a master plan by Kagame and "our
Belgian, British and American collaborators" for the taking not only of
Rwanda, but of Zaire. In a letter from Kagame to fellow Tutsi, Jean-Baptiste
Bagaza of Burundi, dated August 10, 1994, Kagame thanks Bagaza for his help
in "taking Kigali". He then relates his communications with "our big brother
Yoweri Museveni" and talks of "some modifications of the plan" noting that:
"We have found that the presence of large numbers of Rwandan refugees at
Goma, and the international community, can cause our plan for Zaire
[emphasis added] to fail. We cannot occupy ourselves with Zaire until after
the return of these Hutus..In any case, our external intelligence services
continue to crisscross the east of Zaire, and our Belgian, British and
American collaborators [emphasis added] the rest of Zaire. The action
reports are expected in the next few days."
Now, what this letter seems to indicate is that the attack on Rwanda (from
1990 onward) was not the prime objective of Kagame and crew after all, but
was, rather, merely the gateway to an attack on Zaire/Congo. The
significance of the
latter became apparent when, on November 1, 1996, the aforementioned Goma
was, in fact, attacked and taken by the RPA (the re-named RPF) along with
Burundian and Ugandan forces. This assault was heavily backed by the United
States and eyewitness accounts tell of large American cargo planes filled
with arms landing in Kigali in the last two weeks of October, 1996. The
taking of Goma was, it is pertinent to note, the prelude to the ensuing
genocidal carnage that has overtaken the Democratic Republic of the Congo
ever since. To properly understand this last statement we need to backtrack
a bit to April 6, 1994, and look at the events that unfolded immediately
following the assassination of Habyarimana.
* * *
Once the plane had been shot down, an RPF army, as noted earlier, invaded
from the north whilst armed RPF cells began attacks inside Kigali itself.
These cells represented some 15,000 or so troops that the RPF had illegally
secreted into Kigali under Dallaire's watch [As the UNAMIR force commander
he was charged with the responsibility of allowing, under the Arusha
Accords, no more than 600 RPF into the city]. In the sector of Kigali known
as Remera the RPF killed everyone on the night of the 6th and 7th, wiped out
the gendarme camp there, wiped out the military police camp at Kami and
launched major attacks against Camp Kanombe, Camp Kigali, and the main
gendarme camp at Kacyriu.
The Rwandan government and army called for a ceasefire that same night and
the next day. The RPF rejected the call. The Rwandan government then asked
for UN help to control the situation. Instead, the US arranged that the main
UN force be pulled out whilst flying in men and supplies to the RPF using
C130 Hercules aircraft. The Rwandan Army, short of ammunition and unable to
contain the RPF advances offered an unconditional surrender on April 12th.
The RPF rejected this offer and began shelling the Nyacyonga refugee camp,
where the one million Hutu refugees were located, so provoking their flight
into the capital.
The effect of one million people flooding into a small city that itself was
under bombardment caused mayhem and panic. To make matters worse, the RPF
used this flood of people to infiltrate its men behind FAR lines. This
heightened to fever pitch the panic amongst the Hutu population who then
began killing anyone they did not recognize. The late Dr. Alison Des Forges
(a noted expert on Rwanda), in her testimony before the Military II trial at
the ICTR in 2006 stated that the RPF claim that they attacked to stop a
'genocide' was a myth; just propaganda to justify their attempt to seize
power by force of arms. She also testified that the Rwandan government did
not plan and execute genocide. This accords with the (early) testimony of
Romeo Dallaire who confirmed the same thing. In addition, the deputy head of
Belgian Army intelligence, Col. Vincent, similarly testified that the idea
of a government-backed genocide was a complete fantasy.
The fighting in Kigali was intense. UN officers - confirming testimony made
by FAR and RPF officers before the ICTR - state that the RPF was launching
hundreds of Katyusha rockets every hour around the clock whilst the Rwandan
Army ran out of grenades in the first few days and were reduced to fighting
with hand-made explosives. Nevertheless, the siege of Kigali lasted three
months and only ended when the Rwandan Army literally ran out of all
ammunition and thence ordered a general retreat into the forests of the
Congo.
RPF officers testifying before the ICTR have stated that the RPF killed up
to two million Hutus in those 12 weeks in a deliberate campaign to eliminate
the Hutu population. The Akager River, the length of which was under RPF
control throughout, ran red with the blood of Hutu victims massacred on its
banks. It is here that Robert Gersony's report, filed as an exhibit before
the ICTR, lends support to this testimony and to the fact of a systematic
and planned RPF massacre of the Hutu population.
As the Rwandan Army (including its Tutsi officers) retreated into the Congo
forest, the Hutu population, in fear for their lives, fled with them in
their millions. Meanwhile, in local villages, Hutu neighbours attacked
Tutsis either in revenge for the murder of Hutus or fearing death at their
hands. Tutsis also attacked Hutus. It was total war, though a war clearly
fuelled and instigated by the US-backed RPF invasion.
The RPF later pursued the Hutus through the Congo forest and, between 1996
and 1998, killed hundreds of thousands and possibly millions. All the while
the RPF was assisted by the United States. Thus, the US cynically thwarted
plans (in November 1996) devised by the French and the European Union to
send a 10,000 man UN force to assist and guarantee the safe return of the
refugees; a plan which if it had been effected would likely have forestalled
the ensuing multi-million death toll in the Congo. Moreover, the UN Rwanda
Emergency office in Nairobi was, in fact, manned by US Army officers and
acted as the operational headquarters of the RPF. Finally, not only did US
Special Forces fight alongside the RPF during this period, but intercepted
radio messages from Kagame to his forces in the field suggest that both
Belgian and Canadian forces were involved as well.
Operating, then, under the Orwellian pretext of 'hunting for genocidaires',
Kagame & Co. conducted a decade long invasion/occupation of Zaire/Congo. The
overall strategic thrust of this assault was threefold. First, it was an
attack on French interests in Africa, interests that were immediately taken
over by the United States. Second, the assault was part and parcel of the
overthrow of Mobutu (toppled in May of 1997). Ultimately, however, the
capture of the Congo was about booty. As such, this single treasure chest
contains not only large deposits of diamonds, gold, copper, uranium and
tantalum (used in computers and cell phones), but also much of the world's
reserves of chrome, platinum and cobalt.
To the question then, 'Whose genocides were they?', the answer yet resounds
through the din of propaganda, 'They were ours'.
Shaking Hands With The Devil
In assessing responsibility for the tragedy of Rwanda - and the ensuing
events in Zaire/Congo - we must not stop at those already indicted in this
essay. For none of this could have happened without the overt complicity of
numerous 'humanitarian' NGOs including especially, Human Rights Watch,
which, in the early days prior to the RPF's final solution, headed up a
totally bogus, unsubstantiated report (issued March 6, 1993) condemning (and
so de-legitimizing in advance) the Rwandan government for a 'genocide' that,
in fact, had yet to take place - and which would, in the event, be committed
by the very agents it conspired to defend, i.e. the RPF. And, naturally,
none of this could have happened without the willing complicity of the
Western mass media who swallowed hook, line and sinker every piece of
propaganda issued by the Clinton Administration.
As Canadians we are more than ordinarily complicit as it was the Canadian
government (under Jean Chretien) that worked hand-in-glove with the
Americans throughout this period. In particular, of course, three Canadians,
Louise Arbour, General Maurice Baril and General Romeo Dallaire played
leading roles in the 'affair'. For services rendered they were, all three,
handsomely rewarded: Arbour, as already mentioned, with promotion as Supreme
Court Justice and thence as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Baril
with promotion to Chief of Staff of the Canadian Armed Forces (in Sept.
1997), and Dallaire with appointment as Canadian Senator for life.
Of the three, however, Dallaire's role is particularly noteworthy, for it is
he who has, ever since, been portrayed, and portrayed himself, as a hero in
the Rwandan tragedy; and who has, as such, been pre-eminently involved in
spreading and maintaining the Big Lie with respect to it. Dallaire's 2003
epic, Shake Hands With the Devil, an ironically named Faustian tract, fails
spectacularly to elucidate the author's otherwise well documented actions
during the events.
It is well established, for instance, that Dallaire knew of - and,
effectively, facilitated - the build-up of RPF forces inside Kigali prior to
Habyarimana's assassination. It is well established that Dallaire, rather
than reporting to and receiving orders from the UN, as was his mandate, was,
instead, reporting and receiving instructions from American military
commanders. It is also a fact that Dallaire, only two months prior to the
assassination of Habyarimana, closed down one of the only two runways into
Kigali airport - upon request of the RPF. It is also the case that Dallaire
covered up the massacre by the RPF of MRND people elected in by-elections in
the north of Rwanda in November, 1993. Evidence presented at the ICTR
further implicates Dallaire in supplying intelligence to Kagame and the RPF
forces throughout the period leading up to April 6, 1994.
Whenever Dallaire has faced formal questioning regarding his actions in
Rwanda his testimony has been strictly managed and censored. Attempts by
independent journalists and investigators to interview and question him have
met with refusal and/or silence. And those questions are many and serious.
Apart from the items already listed, they include:
How did the lady prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, come to be murdered
at the UN development compound (the morning after Habyarimana had been
assassinated) just a short time after he, Dallaire, arrived there? Why did
he do nothing to save the lives of the Belgian UN soldiers - suspected of
being the team that shot down Habyarimana's plane - who were subsequently
killed at Camp Kigali?
Why, and under whose command, did Belgian army units in certain strategic
positions in Kigali abandon them and all their weapons to the RPF?
Why did UN army units attack FAR army units, but never the RPF? Why did he
fail to report that US forces, using Hercules C-130 aircraft, were supplying
men and weapons to the RPF?
Why, when Dallaire had his headquarters at Amahoro stadium in Kigali after
April 6 through the rest of the month, did he allow RPF forces to enter and
subsequently murder Hutu refugees who had fled there for safety? And, of
course, why did he lie about the 'genocide fax' of January 11, 1994?
Still, all in all, Dallaire was merely a bit player in a much larger drama,
a drama written and produced in Washington, D.C.
Of Credibility and Credulity
In the two decades that have elapsed since the overthrow of the Rwandan
government - and the subsequent killing of millions of it's peoples, and
those millions more killed in the Congo - the Big Lie has flourished
virtually unabated. Though the likes of Robin Philpot ('Rwanda and the New
Scramble for Africa'), and Ed Herman and David Peters ('The Politics of
Genocide') have, of late, lent this revised narrative a slightly higher
profile, more generally - and notably amongst the Left - the 'official'
narrative of Rwanda circa 1994 continues to hold sway. So much so that
Rwanda has become, in Philpot's resonant phrasing, "a useful imperial
fiction", i.e. a shining example of the 'need for intervention' that is
deployed whenever and wherever 'humanitarian imperialism' seeks to invade
and destroy nations opposed to it.
It need not be so. At the very least amongst the Left, it should never have
been so. In the early days of the Rwandan debacle, one anomalous event
stands out like the proverbial sore thumb transparently pointing the way to
what was really 'going down' in the beleaguered nation. That event was the
majority withdrawal in May of 1994 of the UN troops stationed in Rwanda,
i.e. essentially clearing the way for the unobstructed overthrow of the
government. This one item alone, irrespective of the fact that the corporate
media habitually lies about virtually all matters of significant political
import, should have tipped off observers of the Great Game to the idea that
something rotten was taking place in the state of Rwanda. But it didn't. And
that, given what subsequently transpired in Yugoslavia and later Libya -
where again, significant sectors of the Left bought into the official
narrative - and given what is today transpiring in Syria and Ukraine, is
problematic.
If there is one lesson, then, that we can take from the tragic events
adumbrated herein - and, though hardly new, is a notion that bears
vigorously reinforcing - it is that whatever information is fed us by the
state and by the corporate mass media with regard to fundamental global
strategic happenings, the only historically consistent and logical stance to
take is to assume that the truth lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
This should be our default position, until proof is rendered otherwise, in
every instance.
In the meantime, to bear witness to the truth of what really happened in
Rwanda falls to you. As Noam Chomsky once wrote with regard to an earlier
suite of imperial crimes, 'For yours is an historic mission, and one you
should not soon forget.'
Antony Black tal2_at_cogeco.ca
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rwanda victimes
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