Centre for Monitoring Democratic Processes «Quorum»

—“The genocide in Rwanda was 100 percent the responsibility of the Americans!” Those are not the words of a political leader who has been marginalized like Robert Mugabe or a Fidel Castro. Nor are they the words of a nostalgic African activist bewailing the fall of the Soviet block. Former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali made that statement in July 1998, and he repeated it to me in November 2002. People in the White House liked to call Boutros-Ghali “Booboo Ghali”, or “Frenchie”, in preparation for and during his firing from the United Nations conducted by the then United States’ Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright, who vetoed his re-election on November 19, 1996.—

Later in what was for me a seminal book on Africa, Philpot goes on do describe the plotting of Clinton’s first Secretary of State—and the former dairyman-mayor of San Francisco—Warren Christopher:

—In spring 1993, the United States Secretary of State Warren Christopher declared to the African-American Institute that “The people of Africa know where their future lies: not with corrupt dictators like Mobutu, but with courageous democrats in every part of the continent. From Senegal to Benin, from Madagascar to Mali, African nations are building strong democratic institutions.”

What was Warren Christopher’s real message? First, the United States was staking out the areas it targeted. These just happened to be all countries with close ties to France - note that every country mentioned is a member of the Francophone Summit. Secondly, Washington had decided that Mobutu, who had faithfully served the United States for thirty years as an anti-Communist strongman, was now on his way out, and that the Africans’ desire for change and their revolt against Mobutu would be used to advance American pawns in Africa.—

At this same time (i.e., the early 1990s), the same plan was in play with the private military invasions and commercial and financial occupation of what preemptively became known as ‘the former'-Yugoslavia. And Bernard Kouchner surely must have sensed the demoralization (or maybe not) of turning against France’s former allies in the heroic victories in the two Great Wars of the 20th Century, as he rubbed glands with devils like the UCK’s (KLA’s) Hakim Thaci and ‘the visibly demented’ NATO General Wesley Clark in celebration of the 78-day terror bombing of Serbia (still, at the time, known as Yugoslavia) for the amputation of its southern province of Kosovo. After having been elevated to ‘Viceroy’-status in Bosnia, and then Kosovo, by his Amis-requins idols, the French Dr. was completely cut out of the game when it came to divvying up the Monopoly booty of this decade-long US/UK/EU war on Europe.

Now Les Deux Nains d’Élysée were courtsying, hand-in-sweaty-little-hand, and lispingly begging for mo’ mayo as they slarved after the great Rwandan black-snake of ‘the world’s bloodiest war criminal since Hitler’ (to sample a rather hackneyed allusion from the article below). But maybe they weren’t hip to Kagame’s long-term intentions for his Ugandan- (read: NATO)-sponsored 1990 invasion of Rwanda—maybe it really was all about ‘stopping the fucking genocide’—the genocide that they were going to make sure happened four years thence, though it had been encoded in the neo-feudal Tutsi-revanchist mythology since 1959, when Kagame’s family lost their throne to a lot of Hutu rabble (read: UN-sanctioned majority rule).

What better way to become the hero who stopped the genocide than to be the asshole who started it in the first place—the one who refused all offers of ceasefire from the Rwandan government and the military he had targeted for elimination and then ordered all foreign troops out of the country so as to free his hand to displace as many Rwandans as he couldn’t exterminate.

And, bienfuckingsûr, France made some political errors, violated some of Kagame’s rules of terrorist enragement—like by coming to the aid of a ‘francophone’ Rwanda under foreign invasion in October 1990 (and repelling Kagame and his RPF/Ugandan NRA aggressors in thirty days), or by gaining UN approval for its Operation Turquoise and, at the height of the mass killings that resulted from the RPF’s final military push to take Kigali begun on 6 April 1994, ordering a small unit of its Armée into western Rwanda to guarantee safe passage into Congo for the tidal wave of refugees displaced by Kagame’s most heinous mass-crime against the Peace of his putative homeland.

But they could not have been ignorant of Kagame’s post genocide machination, when he was still using Hutu ‘beards’ in his first post-genocide government: like Pasteur Bizimungu as president and Faustin Twagiramungu as PM—guys whose careers were real short even by Hutu standards. Here’s a letter from Pilate Kagame to one of his Belgian ‘backers,’ written during that period of ‘peaceful coexistence between Hutu and Tutsi’ that permitted the New Rwanda to kick the ecumenical shit out of everybody in eastern Congo. I got this from my mainest lawyer, Chris Black, so I’d guess it must be lying around somewhere in the file room at Quai d’Orsay so S & K could get at it too:

{This is a cm/p translation, but the French original is attached}

FRONT PATRIOTIQUE RWANDAIS
RWANDESE PATRIOTIC FRONT

Rwandese Patriotic Front
3, av. de l’Observatoire, Box 8
1180, Brussels, Belgium

Kigali, 10 August 1994

Dear brother Jean Baptiste Bagaza,

We have the greatest honor to express our sincere gratitude for your financial and technical support to our struggle, which has just concluded with our taking the capital city of Kigali.

Be assured that our plan continues along the lines we discussed during our last meeting in Kampala. Last week I was in contact with our big brother, Yoweri Museveni, and decided to make some changes to our plan. In effect, as you noticed, the taking of Kigali quickly created a panic among the Hutus who hit the road for Goma and Bukavu. We found that the presence of a large number of Rwandan refugees in Goma, and especially from the International Community, could cause our plan for Zaire to fail. We can only take care of Zaire after the Hutus have been returned. Every means must be used to bring about this return as quickly as possible. At any rate, our foreign intelligence services continue to criss-cross Eastern Zaire, while our Belgian, British and American collaborators are covering the rest of the country. Their activity reports are expected in the next few days.

Concerning the Burundi Plan, we are very happy with your work to stymie the policies of FRODEBU [Front for Democracy in Burundi--nb]. We have to continue to neutralize the power of the FRODEBU until the whole situation putrefies so as to justify your actions which must not miss their mark. Our troops will be deployed, this time, not only in Bujumbura but in other places you think are strategic. Our forces stationed at Bugesera are ready to intervene at a moment’s notice. The plan for Burundi must be executed as soon as possible before the Hutus of Rwanda can reorganize.

Hoping to see you soon in Kigali, we hope you, dear brother, will accept our fondest greetings.

Rwego
for General Paul Kagame
Rwandan Minister of Defense.

So when Sarkozy mentioned in his effete apology for French heroism that he had exerted his brand of courageous authority by refusing asylum of ‘a Rwandan {widow?} living in France,’ did he really think Kagame was going to break him off a high-five? Or was this just some sort of Napoleonic Business negotiation whereby the agents of the French Art-collecting class trade some poor African illegal immigrant for permission to join the global energy-resource shopping spree full-tilt-boogying in Congo—where the world’s riches rest uneasily under the world’s poorest.

But all that Congo uranium France seems to be trading President Habyarimana’s widow for is going to be even harder to chew and swallow with all the threats Sarkozy and Kouchner have been making to their Middle Eastern clients in Iran. And, as I’m sure the French magistrate told Mme Habyarimana as he cut her loose on the humbug Kigali genocide charges: It’s nothing personal, madam—just Business comme d’hab. –mc]

Sarkozy Trades President Habyarimana’s Widow for the Wealth of Congo
(2 March 2010)

Less than a week after the French President’s visit to Kigali, the widow of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana was arrested in Paris[2]. This gesture reinforces the sense that the reconciliation between France and Rwanda was not achieved to make one country look good in the eyes of the other, but rather so that France could get its slice of the Congo cake of which Kagame has lately been showing himself more and more to be the owner.

Possibility of extradition to Rwanda

The most troubling part of this arrest is the way the media has covered it. In fact, there is much that seems to suggest that Mme Habyarimana will be extradited to Rwanda. But, adjudication of genocide and its ancillary crimes remains in the purview of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which, let’s not forget, has never implicated the President’s widow in any crime whatsoever.

What’s more, until now no democracy worthy of the name has agreed to turn anyone over to a country (like Rwanda) where the justice system is independent in name only and where Human Rights don’t exist at all. And the ICTR has consistently refused to turn over any files or prisoners to its iniquities, despite the insistent demands of the Kigali regime.

Kigali want to buy back its virginity

General Kagame, current head of state in Rwanda, finding himself the principal suspect in the terrorist attack that took the life of his predecessor and triggered the genocide, has redoubled his efforts to buy back his political virginity and to disguise the role he played throughout the genocide that took the lives of nearly one million Rwandans. Even though he declared a while back on the BBC’s ‘Hard Talk’ that he didn’t give a good goddam about Habyarimana’s death because he wasn’t one of his bodyguards, his chosen political strategy has led him to set up an investigation of this attack 16 years after the event.

The commission charged with conducting this inquiry was headed by Jean Mutsinzi, a close associate of Kagame’s and a founding member of the RPF, the politico-military movement suspected of having carried out the attack against President Habyarimana. Unlike all serious investigations (by the French judiciary, the Spanish judiciary, and the investigations and reports of the ICTR) that have been undertaken so far, the Mutsinzi Report “unequivocally” exonerates General Kagame’s regime and plunges to new depths of cynicism by accusing the President’s widow of complicity in her husband’s murder.

Planning the genocide is still on the table

Since its creation, the ICTR has searched tirelessly for evidence of planning by the Habyarimana regime for the genocide, but the reality continues to be that, after 15 years and more than a billion dollars, all roads lead to Kagame (just as in the investigations of Spanish judge Fernando Andreu Merelles and French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière). The reason Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte was relieved of her duties at the ICTR was that she seriously displeased the Americans by becoming way too interested in the role played by Kagame in the genocide. And since the Tribunal has not succeeded in any way to prove that there was planning for the genocide on the part of President Habyarimana’s regime, and what with the reversal of the conviction of Mme Habyarimana’s brother by the Appeals Chamber and the ICTR’s acquittal of Colonel Bagosora, depicted by Kigali as the brains of the genocide, the crime of genocide and the intent to commit genocide have suffered serious set backs in Kigali’s version of the events and have brought forth great anger from Kagame. By demanding the French arrest and extradite Mme Habyarimana to Rwanda, Kagame is trying to make sure that she does not gain access to a fair trial (which would risk completely exonerating her, as well, especially since the ICTR has never implicated her in anything) and that she is condemned by a Rwandan court under his control for planning the genocide.

France genuflecting before a war criminal . . . begging for the wealth of Congo!

Since he came to power, General Kagame has incessantly used the genocide, despite the troubling role he played in it, as a sort of national epic to obscure and rationalize all the crimes he has committed against other Rwandans (especially the massacres of half a million Hutu refugees in Congo) and the people of Congo (more than 6 million dead and counting). Kagame used this same genocide to gain advantage over France, the only major power to intervene in the 1994 massacres and contribute to saving the lives of millions of the Rwandans Kagame would have preferred to liquidate. He reiterated this intention in a speech in Murambi on 6 April 2007, saying: “What hurts worst is when I think of all those millions of people who were able to flee the country without our punishing them.”

Similarly, since Kagame took power in Kigali and in Kinshasa, by imposing his puppet Kabila, France has little by little lost its presence and influence in a region that is acknowledged to be more and more strategically important to the economic growth of the world’s Great Powers. But this was before the arrival of Bernard Kouchner, close personal friend of Kagame’s, as French Minister of Foreign Affairs. Since then, Dr. Kouchner, always true to his code of ‘realpolitik,’ has done everything he can to bring about a rapprochement between presidents Sarkozy and Kagame, while never bringing up the crimes committed by the RPF commander.

It is abundantly clear that the reconciliation between France and Rwanda has no other justification than the return of France to the African Great Lakes region (and especially to Congo, where AREVA[3] has already garnered exclusive control over Congolese uranium) and its realignment with the disastrous policies of the US and England. It is sad to see a great nation like France fall so low, and its president shamelessly shaking the hand of the greatest war criminal since Hitler . . . just for the money. But with President Nicholas ‘bling-bling’ Sarkozy, we should expect no less!

Arthur Ngenzi/SaveRwanda
[translated from the French by cm/p]

******************
Notes:

[1] Found on Phil Taylor’s site at http://www.taylor-report.com/Rwanda_1994/

[2] At the time of this writing [11 pm Tuesday 2 March 2010] word has come to us from her son Léon that Mme Habyarimana has been freed by the French judiciary due to the lack substance in the charges from Kigali.

[3] AREVA, real name: Société des participations du Commissariat à l'énergie atomique, is a French industrial group specializing in the fields of energy. This company is present on the international scene with commercial networks in 43 countries.