Authors: Mickey Huff
Second, the evidence that the Rwandan army commanded by Rwandan President Paul Kagame is guilty of genocide undermines the false equation of the Rwanda Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust, said to create the same “Never Again” imperative, which is a pillar of the US and its allies’ foreign policy in Africa.
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Third, the US and its allies, who backed Rwandan Patriotic Army General Kagame and his army’s invasion of Rwanda and then Congo to establish dominance in the region, would be implicated as well. International Criminal Defense Attorney Christopher Black’s response to the call for an international tribunal was: “They’re never going to charge the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front], because it would be too dangerous. If you start charging the RPF, RPF officers, to save their necks, are going to start talking about others. And then you’re going to get up to the Americans and the British and the Canadians and the Belgians. The whole thing would fall apart. They don’t dare do that.”
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And finally, Rwanda and Uganda’s armies continue to be of such service to the US/UN Security Council agenda on the African continent. Both Kagame and Museveni threatened to withdraw their “peacekeepers” from Sudan in response to the leaked report, and the threat to the UN Security Council’s sense of “global security” was so serious that UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-Moon was immediately dispatched to assuage and appease.
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When the Mapping Report was formally released, on October 1, 2010, the US State Department issued a perfunctory statement calling
for accountability, but no international court has been convened, and the report is now gathering dust, as have seventeen years of reports exposing the crimes of Rwandan President Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.
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One of those ignored reports, the 2001 UN Report on Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, noted that the World Bank ignored Rwanda and Uganda’s increasing exports of resources that didn’t exist in their countries, meaning resources plundered from Congo, and declared both countries success stories, rewarded them with debt relief, and even seemed to financed their war in Congo:
In the case of Uganda and its exploitation of the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the World Bank never questioned the increasing exports of resources and in one instance a staff member even defended it. During the Panel’s visit to Uganda, the representative of the Bank dismissed any involvement of Uganda in the exploitation of those resources. The Bank not only encouraged Uganda and Rwanda indirectly by defending their case, but equally gave the impression of rewarding them by proposing these countries for the Highly Indebted Poor Countries debt relief initiative. The Bank’s shadow on the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is even more apparent on the budget. The balance of payments of both Uganda and Rwanda shows a significant increase in long-term borrowing in support of the budget. The defence budget however has increased in absolute terms, allowing Uganda and Rwanda to continue the conflict.
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One World Bank staffer warned that the Bank’s silence would blow up in its face. But these UN reports are of even less interest to the corporate press than they are to the Pentagon, so there have been no noteworthy “explosions” in the Bank’s face.
And, though the 2001, 2002, and 2003 UN reports on illegal resource exploitation in Congo all clearly demonstrate that Uganda and Rwanda plundered the Congo, and that foreign interests
benefitted mightily, only a very few Ugandans and Rwandans did. Most continue to struggle as subsistence farmers, much of the public sector has been privatized, and inequality has increased.
People have asked me whether or not the Pentagon sees the irony in this, but no, this is real and its proponents are dead serious, not only at the Pentagon but also at Harvard. Drones are one of a number of proposals in a new publication,
Mass Atrocities Response Operations: A Military Planning Handbook
, produced by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute:
In a MARO [Mass Atrocity Response Operation] situation, transparency or witness can be a particularly important alternative or adjunct to using force. It is also a capability that retains utility before and throughout an intervention. For these reasons, witness deserves special attention from political and military leaders.
ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] provided by satellites, aircraft, or drones is the most flexible and lowest risk form of witness available to military planners.
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General Atomics happened to have a product ready to go when MARO was conceived at Harvard in 2007. Its Predator Drones were designed to be unmanned surveillance aircraft, but, beginning in 2000, President Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush had the Predators outfitted to drop Hellfire missiles, as they have in at least five countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and now Libya. In 2008 General Atomics began producing the much larger Reaper Drones, which carry up to two tons worth of bombs—ten times more than the Predators—cruise at higher altitudes and at three times the speed, and have more surveillance capability thanks to advances in computer technology.
In December 2010, the military tech section of San Francisco’s trendy,
techno lifestyle magazine,
WIRED
, reported that the US Air Force was phasing out the Predators in favor of the Reapers, and accepting the last of its order of 268 Predators in the early months of 2011.
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Though General Atomics had held onto the combat market with its Reaper Drones, this meant they needed a new market for the Predators, in which they had invested so much research and development. On February 10, 2011,
WIRED
, an ever willing marketing tool for US weapons manufacturers, published “Pentagon: Drones Can Stop the Next Darfur,” an editorial advocating the use of Predator Drones to stop genocide, like that in Darfur and Rwanda.
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WIRED
’s advocacy was posted to the website of Operation Broken Silence, a stop-genocide organization that gives Martin Luther King’s “break the silence” phrase a military configuration similar to Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom (in Afghanistan).
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It was also posted to STAND, the student division of Genocide Intervention Network, an organization identified with humanitarian hawk Samantha Power, Harvard professor and Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs on the staff of President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. Samantha Power is the foreign policy advisor who persuaded Obama to drop Hellfire missiles from drone bombers on Libya by insisting that genocide would be on America’s conscience if he did otherwise.
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Professor Ed Herman, coauthor (with Noam Chomsky) of
Manufacturing Consent
and (with David Peterson) of
The Politics of Genocide
,
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responded in his essay “Samantha Power, Libya, and Selective Memory of Genocide”:
In her 2002 book
A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
, Power called for greater U.S. intervention to prevent major human rights violations and genocide. She never suggests that this might require LESS intervention (e.g., Vietnam; the “sanctions of mass destruction” in Iraq) or reduced support for killers (e.g., Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Israel). She also finds that we inappropriately “just stood by” and failed to intervene in cases where we actually gave positive support to the mass murderers (e.g., Indonesia in East Timor; Kagame and Museveni in Rwanda and the Congo).
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Professor Herman and David Peterson are two of the dissident scholars of the Rwanda Genocide. Professors Christian Davenport and Allan Stamm are two more. They began their investigation believing essentially the Wikipedia version of Rwanda’s 1994 massacres, which was that the dominant, ruling ethnic group—the Hutu—targeted the minority ethnic group known as the Tutsi for eradication; that the Western community—especially the United States—had dropped the ball by failing to intervene; that eight hundred thousand or more Tutsis and moderate Hutus who tried to defend them died; and that the Rwandan Patriotic Front, now the ruling party in Rwanda, had stopped the genocide by ending the civil war and taking control of the country. This is not only the Wikipedia version, but also that of Samantha Power, in her
Atlantic Monthly
account, “Bystander to Genocide.”
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It’s also codified in the Pentagon/Harvard Carr Center Mass Atrocity Response Handbook.
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After ten years of research, Stamm and Davenport wrote that “our views are completely at odds with what we believed at the outset, as well as what passes for conventional wisdom about what took place.”
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This is the summary that Professor Allan Stamm now displays on a screen when he gives a lecture about how radically their conclusions changed:
Most likely 1,000,000,000 + people died Vast majority who were killed were Hutu US, French, Belgians, British all knew what was happening
Current President of Rwanda
Others who have come to different conclusions about how the Rwanda Genocide happened—who died, why, and what the aftermath was—include journalist and human rights investigator Keith Harmon Snow,
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Rwandan American Law Professor Charles Kambanda,
International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda defense lawyer Christopher Black, and Law Professor Peter Erlinder. Erlinder published his eighty-five-page analysis of the Rwanda Genocide, supported by original documents,
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after being arrested and nearly disappearing in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2010 for traveling there to defend the leading dissident, Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza. Ingabire, in June 2011, remained in a maximum security prison in Kigali, charged with terrorism and disagreeing with the official history of the Rwanda Genocide.
The stakes in Ingabire’s trial and in establishing the truth of the Rwanda Genocide story are very high, as Jean Nepo, a Rwandan microbiologist and immunologist, explained at KPFA Radio in May 2011.
JEAN MANIRARORA:
First of all, Victoire Ingabire has never denied the Tutsi Genocide. But, when she returned to Rwanda in January last year to run for president, she visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial and asked why it commemorates only the Tutsi victims. She asked when the Hutu victims would be commemorated as well. Just saying this is a statutory crime called genocide ideology in Rwanda.
KPFA:
What would be the consequence of acknowledging that Hutus were also killed, by extremist Tutsis, because they were Hutus during the 1994 Genocide?
JEAN MANIRARORA:
If it were acknowledged that Hutu people were massacred because they were Hutus, then the collective guilt for the genocide would no longer be forced on Hutu people. There would no longer be any justification for packing Hutu people into prisons or forcing them to make restitution to Tutsis by surrendering their property or by indentured servitude to Tutsis. Hutus would finally be allowed to mourn the dead they lost in the genocide, and the bones in the memorial sites would finally be buried in dignity.
KPFA:
People from all over the world go to these genocide memorial sites and photograph the bones in these memorial sites. Could you explain what you mean about finally burying them?
JEAN MANIRARORA:
It is not normal in the Rwandan culture to display the bodies, bones, or body parts of loved ones, no matter how they died. Foreigners come with their fancy cameras and take photos of these bones, assuming that this is part of our culture, but it is not. Many of these bones are the bones of Hutu people; that is why they are allowed to be on display, although they are presented to the world as the bones of Tutsi victims. Hutu people need to be able to bury and publicly mourn their dead.
KPFA:
Could you explain the importance of establishing the truth of the Rwanda Genocide to achieving peace in Rwanda’s eastern neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has, since 1996, been the site of the deadliest conflict since World War II?
JEAN MANIRARORA:
If it is established that Kagame’s troops committed atrocities in Rwanda during the Rwanda Genocide, then Kagame would no longer be justified in pursuing the former Rwandan army of Juvenal Habyarimana, the president of Rwanda whose assassination by Kagame’s troops in April 1994 triggered the genocide. Kagame refers to the former Rwandan soldiers who took refuge in Congo as “genocidaires.” He says he is going after them every time he invades the Congo and he has used them as his excuse to occupy and plunder Congo’s resources, with the blessing of the international community.
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What if the story of the Rwanda Genocide, as told in the Harvard/Pentagon
Mass Atrocity Response Operations: A Military Planning Handbook
, is wrong? What if that’s not at all what happened? Where might General Atomics find its next market for the Predator Drones that have been invested with so much research and development? An African friend of mine suggested that “we”—the US—bomb ourselves to stop mass atrocities.
The common term for this is “gender-based violence,” which usually seems to mean sexual violence against women, and this is of course an appealing humanitarian cause. In August 2009 Hillary Clinton traveled to eastern Congo to “address gender-based violence,” met some victims, listened to some horrendous stories, and promised $17 million in aid.
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