US Role In Rwandan Genocide

Paul Kagame visits Bejamin Netanyahou in Israel, October 1996.

US Role In Rwandan Genocide

2009 http://dailycensored.com/2009/03/04/us-role-in-rwandan-genocide/

Keith Harmon Snow is an independent war correspondent and former genocide investigator for the United Nations and in 2009 he’s a lecturer at UC Santa Barbara. He was interviewed on Flashpoints news magazine KPFA FM, with Dennis Bernstein.
Keith Snow tells reporter Dennis Bernstein the following in his interview:
[Kieth Harmon Snow] “…And as opposed to be sold the idea that Rwanda is this place with all these people victims that were victims of genocide and survivors and we need to help them and all this nonsense. The current government of Rwanda is the one who perpetrated genocide in Rwanda, in 1990 to 1994 and then they went into Congo or went through the government there and stirred up this hornets nests involving all these other corporations…”
Next Snow adds: [Keith Harmon Snow] “…And so are the so called enemies of the Rwandan government who supposedly committed genocide in Rwanda in 1994…And so you’ve got the huge body of deception out there which said that in a sound bite: Genocide occurred in Rwanda in 1994 in one hundred days of killing, 800,000 Tutsis died and the people who committed that genocide fled to Congo. And this is always used for a justification for Rwanda to be involved in the Congo…”
Snow also states: [Keith Harmon Snow] “…What’s very significant, Dennis, is that December 18th, 2008 the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the ICTR, determined that there had been no systematic genocide in Rwanda in 1994. There was no conspiracy to commit genocide. Now this was their finding in December of 2008. They, therefore, cleared the top officials…They did sentence them to life in prison because the ICTR has always been about victor’s justice. Victor’s justice means that “We Won, the United States invaded Rwanda,” 1990 to 1994, the was a coup d’ etat. The United States, the Pentagon took control and put its proxy army in power. That’s the people who are in control today, Paul Kagame, and we blamed all of the killing on the Hutus and accused them of genocide. And that’s just total fiction. And this fiction has been created and propagated by people like Ben Affleck, who goes in and doesn’t tell you any of the truth…But then there was Philip Gourevitch who wrote the book, “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow our Families will be killed,’ and some many people have read this piece of fiction, believing that its non fiction. And that basically was Clinton administration operatives providing information to Gourevitch, who was writing in the New Yorker, and claiming the Kagame and Usemini were the new breed of African leaders, and essentially covering up a Genocide. Most people believe and we all stood around when genocide happened and we should never have let this happen. We should never have that happen again.
Reporter Dennis Bernstein asks the question:
[Dennis Bernstein] “We stood around but France, in a way, was an active player.”
Keith Harmon Snow replies:
[Keith Harmon Snow] “We are led to believe by the massive media propaganda system that United States stood around and let genocide happen. This is total nonsense. The United States invaded Rwanda, it began in October 1990, culminated in 1994, in a coup d’ etat, we assassinated two Presidents. This was CIA work and Paul Kagame. And this led to the invasion of the Congo and the current state of affairs there now. And the fact is France did not play a part in the genocide in Rwanda even though that’s what everyone wants to believe because the easiest thing for Kagame to say today is, this is what he says, he goes around giving speeches: “We’re the victims of genocide.” As Philip Gourevitch says, “The Tutsis are the Jews of Africa.” And this sets up this system of feeling that we have to morally correct what happened. It puts us in a position of not being able to say anything about it because supposedly we let the genocide happen. When, in fact, we created the war. We caused the genocide that happened. And this is all just coming out through these two International Courts.
Dennis Bernstein asks: “And when you say we caused, give me the one liner, on the we and how.”
[Kieth Harmon Snow]: “The Pentagon. The Pentagon invaded Rwanda using Uganda. There were almost no Rwandans involved in the invasion of Rwanda from 1990 to 1994. The idea that there were all these Tutsis in exile who deserted. That’s the whole Jews thing. The Jews are a people without a State. They made this article up about the Tutsis. A people without a State. So the Tutsis have been given this moral currency as being supposedly the victims of genocide. To get away with absolute murder. And we’re talking from 1990 to 1994. Millions and millions of people being killed in Uganda, Rwanda and Congo, because of this relationship. And so Kagame, and Paul Kabarbai, and Lawrence Nkunda and some other top officials are responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes in the history of the world. And this is completely unknown. Because as soon as someone like me and you or anyone, especially a Rwandan comes along and says this they are accused of genocide and they’re accused of being a genocide denier. Because the average listener out there has heard over and over and over again, through the media, through Hollywood, through Philip Gourevitch, through The New Yorker, etc. etc., that there was one hundred days of genocide. 800,000 Tutsis were killed. And the Kagame regime stopped the genocide. Which is completely upside down. And so today you’ve got Kagame, he sent out three hundred agents in the world, they’re tracking down anyone who speaks against the Kagame regime. As they just did with this professor from [Inaudible] College, in West Virginia, in the United States who was just arrested and targeted by the Kagame regime and never involved in genocide. There is no remote connection with this poor fellow, with genocide in Rwanda. And this is how the Kagame machine, with its very tight relationships with Clinton officials and Bush officials.”
Dennis Bernstein asks: “Clinton Officials now in the Obama regime?”
[Keith Harmon Snow] replies: “Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton should be indicted for war crimes. She should be brought up in a criminal tribunal and put on the stand. And we should be told who was involved in the war crimes in Central Africa from 1994 to 2001. And the assassination of all these people and the massive killings. So we can name these officials. Susan Rice is another one. She’s the architect. Susan Rice and a guy named Roger Winter are the architects of genocide in Rwanda. They should not be in the foreign policy establishment in any sense of the word. And, by the way, this is exactly what we’ve seen going down in Sudan. It’s a guerilla war, it’s backed by the Pentagon. It’s using Uganda as a proxy army, and also Chad and also Egypt. And creating this propaganda that the government of Sudan is creating genocide. When, in fact, we are all over it. It doesn’t look like that at all. It’s war. It’s open war.”
You can listen to the interview on KPFA FM by clicking on this link:

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/show/30
Flashpoints – February 24, 2009 at 5:00pm
Hollywood Actors and US Hegemony In Central Africa…
–Bill Gibbons
“I’m A Truth Addict, Aw Shit I got a Head Rush.” –Rage Against the Machine

Rwanda: No Conspiracy, No Genocide Planning ... No Genocide? [US/UN Cover-up]

Rwanda: No Conspiracy, No Genocide Planning ... No Genocide? [US/UN Cover-up]
by Peter Erlinder, Jurist
www.commondreams.org/, December 24,2008

The media reports of the December 18 judgment of Chamber-1 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. But, as those who have followed the ICTR closely know, convictions of members of the former Rwandan government and military are scarcely newsworthy.
Ever since former ICTR Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte and ICTR Chief Investigative Prosecutor Michael Hourigan went public in 2007-8 exposing US-UK manipulations to grant de facto impunity to current Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his henchmen, between 1997 and the present, convictions of the vanquished in the Rwanda war are a given.
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. And Gen. 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 Rwandan-Tutsi civilians.
This raises the more profound question: if there was no conspiracy and no planning to kill ethnic civilians, can the tragedy that engulfed Rwanda properly be called "a genocide" at all? Or, was it closer to a case of civilians being caught up in war-time violence, like the Eastern Front in WWII, rather than the planned behind-the-lines killings in Nazi death camps? The ICTR judgment found the former.
The Court specifically found that the actions of Rwandan military leaders, both before any after the April 6, 1994 assassination of former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarima, were consistent with war-time conditions and the massive chaos brought about by the four-year war of invasion from Uganda by Gen. Paul Kagame's RPF army, which seized power in July 1994.
Although the Chamber did not specifically mention more recent events, it is worth noting that this is the same government that was named in a UN Security Council commissioned report on December 12, 2008 as having invaded the eastern Congo (with Uganda) in 1996 and again in 1998 and have occupied an area 15-times the size of Rwanda since that time. Similar UN Security Council reports in 2001, 2002 and 2003, make clear that Rwanda and Uganda's economic rape of the eastern Congo, and the resulting 6 million-plus civilian deaths, have long been an "open secret."
As Lead Defense Counsel for Major Aloys Ntabakuze, who was convicted of three specific crimes committed by troops without evidence they were acting under his authority, I would say the judgment was actually a victory. Our defense was based on previously suppressed contemporaneous UN and declassified US documents that showed Kagame's RPF as the war-time aggressor, which was responsible for the assassination of the former President and for preventing military intervention to end the predicted civilian massacres.
The ICTR oral judgment specifically refers to this "alternative" explanation of the tragic events in Rwanda, as being a basis for rejecting the conspiracy and planning charges against the former military leaders. But the documents show more.
As early as May 17, 1994, UNHCR was receiving reports of massive civilian killings by Kagame's RPF in the 1/3 of Rwanda they had occupied since April 22. Other documents from August, September and October 1994 describe a conscious attempt by UN and US government officials to "cover-up" reports of RPF killings, including memos to Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Apparently, US policy to create "impunity" for Kagame began nearly as soon as he took power.
Had the US "impunity policy" not been in place, Kagame might well have been prosecuted along with Military-1 defendants Bagosora and Nsengiumva, as ICTR Prosecutor Michael Hourigan recommended in early 1997. Kagame's responsibility for the assassination of Habyarimana has been known to the ICTR Prosecutor since at least that time, if not early.
Had the US "impunity policy" not been in place, Kagame might well have spent the last decade awaiting trial at the ICTR, rather than getting rich from the resources of the Congo, and the blood of millions of Africans.

Peter Erlinder is a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, St. Paul, MN. He is a past-President of the National Lawyers Guild, a Lead Defense Counsel-UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the President of the ICTR-ADAD (Association des Avocats de la Defense). E-mail peter.erlinder@wmitchell.edu

Rwanda: Current President Kagame confessed ordering predecessor’s plane shot down

Rwanda: Current President Kagame confessed ordering predecessor’s plane shot down

October 1, 2011

Paul Kagame visits Bejamin Netanyahou in Israel, October 1996.

Kagame’s former ambassador to the U.S. makes startling announcement about event that triggered Rwandan Genocide

This interview of Theogene Rudasingwa by Minister of Information JR was broadcast Dec. 8 on KPFA’s Hard Knock Radio

by Theogene Rudasingwa

Now revealing in this article that Paul Kagame (above), who is credited with ending the Rwandan Genocide, confessed that he, in effect, started it is Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa, former secretary general of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), ambassador of Rwanda to the United States and chief of staff for President Kagame.

On Aug. 4, 1993, in Arusha, Tanzania, the government of Rwanda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) signed the Arusha Peace Agreement. The provisions of the agreement included a commitment to principles of the rule of law, democracy, national unity, pluralism, the respect of fundamental freedoms and the rights of the individual. The agreement further had provisions on power-sharing, formation of a single National Army and a new National Gendarmerie from forces of the two warring parties and a definitive solution to the problem of Rwandan refugees.

On April 6, 1994, at 8:25 p.m., the Falcon 50 jet of the president of the Republic of Rwanda, registration number 9XR-NN, on its return from a summit meeting in Tanzania, as it was on approach from Dar-es-Salaam to Kanombe International Airport in Kigali, Rwanda, was shot down. All on board, including President Juvenal Habyarimana, President Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, their entire entourage and flight crew, died.

The death of President Juvenal Habyarimana triggered the start of genocide that targeted Tutsi and Hutu moderates and the resumption of civil war between the RPF and the government of Rwanda. The RPF’s sad and false narrative from that time on has been that Hutu extremists within President Habyarimana’s camp shot down the plane to derail the implementation of the Arusha Peace Agreement and to find a pretext to start the genocide in which over 800,000 Rwandans died in just 100 days. This narrative has become a predominant one in some international circles, among scholars, and in some human rights organizations.

Outside Carnegie Mellon University while President Paul Kagame was speaking inside, Kambale Musavuli, student coordinator for Friends of the Congo, led a demonstration by Rwandan, Congolese and American students denouncing Kagame’s crimes against humanity. – Photo: Lindsay Dill

The truth must now be told. Paul Kagame, then overall commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), the armed wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, was personally responsible for the shooting down of the plane. In July 1994, Paul Kagame himself, with characteristic callousness and much glee, told me that he was responsible for shooting down the plane. Despite public denials, the fact of Kagame’s culpability in this crime is also a public “secret” within RPF and RDF (Rwandan Defense Force) circles. Like many others in the RPF leadership, I enthusiastically sold this deceptive story line, especially to foreigners who by and large came to believe it, even when I knew that Kagame was the culprit in this crime.

The political and social atmosphere during the period from the signing of the Arusha Accords in August 1993 was highly explosive, and the nation was on edge. By killing President Habyarimana, Paul Kagame introduced a wild card in an already fragile ceasefire and dangerous situation. This created a powerful trigger, escalating to a tipping point resumption of the civil war, genocide and the region-wide destabilization that has devastated the Great Lakes region since then.

Gen. Kagame uses his satellite phone from the field. The Rwandan Civil War, culminating in the 1994 genocide, had been raging since Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. By assassinating then Rwandan President Habyarimana, Kagame prevented the Arusha Peace Agreement the president had just signed from taking effect.

Paul Kagame has to be immediately brought to account for this crime and its consequences. First, there is absolutely nothing honorable or heroic in reaching an agreement for peace with a partner and then stabbing him in the back. Kagame and Habyarimana did not meet on the battlefield on April 6, 1994. If they had, and one of them or both had died, it would have been tragic, but understandable, as a product of the logic of war.

By killing President Habyarimana, Paul Kagame … created a powerful trigger, escalating to a tipping point resumption of the civil war, genocide and the region-wide destabilization that has devastated the Great Lakes region since then.

President Habyarimana was returning from a peace summit and, by killing him, Kagame demonstrated the highest form of treachery. Second, Kagame, a Tutsi himself, callously gambled away the lives of innocent Tutsi and moderate Hutu who perished in the genocide. While the killing of President Habyarimana, a Hutu, was not a direct cause of the genocide, it provided a powerful motivation and trigger to those who organized, mobilized and executed the genocide against Tutsi and Hutu moderates.

Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, assassinated by Gen. Paul Kagame – Photo: AP

Third, by killing President Habyarimana, Kagame permanently derailed the already fragile Arusha peace process in a dangerous pursuit of absolute power in Rwanda. Kagame feared the letter and spirit of the Arusha Peace Agreement. As the subsequent turn of events has now shown, Kagame does not believe in the unity of Rwandans, democracy, respect of human rights and other fundamental freedoms, the rule of law, power sharing, integrated and accountable security institutions with a national character, and resolving the problem of refugees once and for all. This is what the Arusha Peace Agreement was all about. That is what is lacking in Rwanda today.

Last, but not least, Kagame’s and RPF’s false narrative, denials and deceptions have led to partial justice in Rwanda and at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, thereby undermining prospects for justice for all Rwandan people, reconciliation and healing. The international community has, knowingly or unknowingly, become an accomplice in Kagame’s systematic and shameful game of deception.

By killing President Habyarimana, Kagame permanently derailed the already fragile Arusha peace process in a dangerous pursuit of absolute power in Rwanda, to which the international community has become an accomplice.

I was never party to the conspiracy to commit this heinous crime. In fact, I first heard about it on BBC around 1:00 a.m. on April 7, 1994, while I was in Kampala, where I had been attending the Pan African Movement conference.

I believe the majority of members of RPF and RPA civilians and combatants, like me, were not party to this murderous conspiracy that was hatched and organized by Paul Kagame and executed on his orders. Nevertheless, I was a secretary general of the RPF, and a major in the rebel army, RPA.

It is in this regard, within the context of collective responsibility and a spirit of truth-telling in search of forgiveness and healing, that I would like to say I am deeply sorry about this loss of life and to ask for forgiveness from the families of Juvenal Habyarimana, Cyprien Ntaryamira, Deogratias Nsabimana, Elie Sagatwa, Thaddee Bagaragaza, Emmanuel Akingeneye, Bernard Ciza, Cyriaque Simbizi, Jacky Heraud, Jean-Pierre Minaberry and Jean-Michel Perrine.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame and former U.S. President Bill Clinton tour Clinton Foundation projects in Rwanda. The two have become close friends, as have the governments of Rwanda and the U.S.

I also ask for forgiveness from all Rwandan people, in the hope that we must unanimously and categorically reject murder, treachery, lies and conspiracy as political weapons, eradicate impunity once and for all, and work together to build a culture of truth-telling, forgiveness, healing and the rule of law. I ask for forgiveness from the people of Burundi and France, whose leaders and citizens were killed in this crime. Above all, I ask for forgiveness from God for having lied and concealed evil for too long.

In freely telling the truth before God and the Rwandan people, I fully understand the risk I have undertaken, given Paul Kagame’s legendary vindictiveness and unquenchable thirst for spilling the blood of Rwandans. It is a shared risk that Rwandans bear daily in their quest for freedom and justice for all. Neither power and fame, nor gold and silver, are the motivation for me in these matters of death that have defined our nation for too long.

In freely telling the truth before God and the Rwandan people, I fully understand the risk I have undertaken, given Paul Kagame’s legendary vindictiveness and unquenchable thirst for spilling the blood of Rwandans. But Rwanda cannot rebuild and heal on lies.

Truth cannot wait for tomorrow, because the Rwandan nation is very sick and divided and cannot rebuild and heal on lies. All Rwandans urgently need truth today. Our individual and collective search for truth will set us free. When we are free, we can freely forgive each other and begin to live fully and heal at last.

Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa is a former secretary general of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), ambassador of Rwanda to the United States and chief of staff for President Paul Kagame.

http://sfbayview.com/2011/rwanda-current-president-kagame-confessed-ordering-predecessors-plane-shot-down/

IMPORTANT-Rwanda: Kofi Annan - Carla Del Ponte

Paul Kagame visits Bejamin Netanyahou in Israel, October 1996.

Kofi Annan

Quotes[2010] U.S./U.N. cover-up of Kagame’s genocide in Rwanda and Congo by Juan Carrero  The real news is something else: namely, that in a move that breaks the code of silence that has reigned within the U.N. for too many years, the High Commissioner for Human Rights reveals that the U.N. Security Council and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan before him – the same parties who less than a year ago accused some of us of financing the genocidaires – have actually spent more than a decade covering up the continuous genocide carried out by the RPF from Oct. 1, 1990, until today, which probably constitutes the largest one since the U.N. was founded!
One year after ICTY and ICTR chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte (successor to Louise Arbour) opened what she called the “Special Investigation” of the RPF in 2002, she was terminated as chief prosecutor at the ICTR, despite taking her plea directly to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whom Del Ponte called “inflexible” on the question. In her memoirs, Del Ponte recounts a June 2002 meeting with Kagame at his presidential abode in Kigali, during which Kagame, “fuming,” told her: “If you investigate [the RPF], people will believe there were two genocides….All we did was liberate Rwanda.” This was followed by a May 2003 meeting with Pierre-Richard Prosper, the Bush administration’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes, who, in Del Ponte’s words, “backed the Rwandans,” and “suggested that [she] surrender responsibility for investigating and prosecuting the alleged crimes of the RPF.” By the time Del Ponte was able to meet with Annan in New York in late July 2003, she told Annan, “This will be the end of the Special Investigation,” to which Annan replied: “Yes. I know.”
    “It is clear that it all started when we embarked on these Special Investigations,” Del Ponte told an interviewer after her position with the ICTR ended, “pressure from Rwanda contributed to the non-renewal of my mandate.” 
Doubtless, pressure from other sources with a lot more clout with the Security Council played an even greater role. Former ICTR (and ICTY) spokesperson Florence Hartmann also recounts extensive interference by the United States, Britain, and Kagame’s RPF in every effort by the Office of the Prosecutor to investigate RPF crimes. 
Hassan Jallow, Del Ponte’s successor at the ICTR, has stated on the record that he does not believe the assassination of Habyarimana belongs within the ICTR’s mandate. Under his charge (from September 2003 on), the Office of the Prosecutor systematically dragged its feet when it came to the crimes of the RPF, always pleading a need to carry out “additional inquiries,” without ever bringing a single indictment. Through the end of 2008, 100 percent of the ICTR’s indictments for “serious violations of international humanitarian law” committed during 1994 have been brought against Hutu members of the former government and ethnic Hutus more generally, and none against members of the RPF, despite the ICTR’s Statute, making no distinctions on the basis of ethnicity or political allegiance. Neither the RPF’s violent takeover of Rwanda, its massacre of “10,000 or more Hutu civilians” per month in 1994, nor any of its other numerous postwar slaughters, have ever once been disturbed by criminal charges at the ICTR. [2009] Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
[2008] The Great Rwanda "Genocide Coverup" by Prof. Peter Erlinder   According to sworn affidavits placed in the ICTR record in early 2006, more than 10 years ago, ICTR Lead Investigative Prosecutor, well-respected Australian QC Michael Hourigan, recommended that Kagame, himself, be prosecuted for the assassination of Habyarimana. But, in 1997, then-Chief UN Prosecutor Louise Arbour of Canada ordered him to drop the Kagame investigation; to forget it ever happened; and, to burn his notes ! Hourigan resigned rather than comply and copies of his original notes are now part of the ICTR public record for all to see.
    
The Hourigan affidavit makes clear that the "Rwanda Genocide"-- Cover-up has been going on for at least a decade....but the reasons for the cover-up did not become clear until late 2007, when a senior Clinton Administration diplomat, Brian Atwood, was confronted with UN documents describing a 1994 "cover-up" meeting with the Rwandan Foreign Minister in Kigali and the UN's Kofi Annan. 


According to the UN documents, U.S.-sponsored human rights reports by investigator, Robert Gersony, had documented massive military-style executions of civilians by Kagame's troops, during and after the final 90-days of the four-year Rwanda War.
    The former Rwandan Foreign Minister at the meeting, Jean Marie Ndagiyimana, testified at the ICTR that, rather than participate in the proposed "cover-up," he resigned and went into exile where he remains today. His ICTR testimony confirmed that Clinton's USAID Chief for Africa, Brian Atwood, and the chief of the UN Department of Peace Keeping Operations Kofi Annan, were both in his office in late October 1994 urging him to assist in the "cover-up" the war-crimes committed by Kagame's forces.
    The damning "Gersony Report" included first-hand evidence of tens of thousands of civilians being massacred by Kagame's troops in eastern Rwanda, later confirmed by similar reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The U.N. Document (also in the ICTR record) says that Annan told the Foreign Minister that public knowledge of the Report would be "embarrassing to the UN" and the U.S. Former Clinton-diplomat, Brian Atwood, not only confirmed he was at the meeting, but explained that he had engaged Gersony, and that Gersony's findings of war-crimes being committed by Kagame were "an inconvenient truth" for both the United States and the UN.


[2007] The Gersony Report: It's Findings and more.   In his findings, Mr. Gersony states he believes that the RPA committed genocide against Hutu in Kibungo, Butare, and parts of Kigali and between early April to mid-September 1994, the RPF killed between 25,000-45,000 Rwandans, both Hutu and Tutsi.....The report was so damaging to the UNHCR, RPF and UNAMIR that UN officials covered it up in October 1994, despite the fact UNHCR officials on the ground (on the order of UNHCR head Ms. Sagato Ogata) stopped encouraging Rwandan Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda because of the killings, as reported in the New York Times at the end of September. Mr. Gersony was instructed never to talk about it publicly.......The report was also potentially damaging to the United States, a strong supporter of the new Rwandan government. As described by Mr. Prunier in his book, then Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth was given orders by the State Department to discredit the report. Mr. Wirth travelled to Kigali and several places in New York, spreading disinformation by attacking Gersony's methodology and claiming it was a "Hutu conspiracy." He also delivered carefully crafted propagandic press statements.
......"By not publishing the Gersony report and other information about RPF´s massacres, a blank cheque was issued to continue the murders," said academic Rwandan expert Dr. Filip Reyntjens of the University of Antwerp to Denmark newspaper "Information" writer Gunnar Willum. Dr. Reyntjens went on to say in the article of 28 June 1999, "Publication of the report would have prevented the RPF to commit the massacre of over 200,000 Hutu refugees in Zaire," says Reyntjens. "The RPF has used the genocide to legitimate massacres on this civilian population.
......In his recent book on the Congo, Mr. Gerard Prunier said Kofi Annan told then VP Kagame, the late Seth Sendashonga (then Interior Minister), PM Faustin Twagiramungu, and President Pasteur Bizimungu the UN would withhold the report to allow the RPF government time to consolidate after providing them with a copy of the report.

Rwanda Plane crash

Paul Kagame visits Bejamin Netanyahou in Israel, October 1996.

Plane crash

[The airplane carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali, Rwanda.]
[1997] Hourigan Report
Jean-Louis Bruguiere report
[2011 Oct] Rwandan President Kagame 'sparked 1994 genocide'[2011] Rwanda: Current President Kagame confessed ordering predecessor’s plane shot down
[2006] Who Killed Agathe? The Death of a Prime Minister by Christopher Black   It is now known that the missiles used to shoot down the aircraft came from stockpiles the Americans had seized in their first war against Iraq. It was in a warehouse at Kigali airport, rented by a CIA Swiss front company, that the missiles were assembled. In fact, the French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, who has spent several years investigating the shoot down on behalf of the families of the French flight-crew, told Boutros-Boutros Ghali, the Secretary-General of the UN in 1994, that the CIA was involved in the shoot down, adding strength to Boutros-Ghali's earlier statement that the Americans are 100% responsible for what happened in Rwanda.
    There is strong direct and circumstantial evidence that the Belgian and Canadian contingents of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda in 1993-94, known as UNAMIR, were involved in the shoot down and assisted the RPF in their final offensive launched with the decapitation strike on the President and the Army Chief of Staff.
'The United States invaded Rwanda, it began in October 1990, culminated in 1994, in a coup d’ etat, we assassinated two Presidents. This was CIA work and Paul Kagame. And this led to the invasion of the Congo and the current state of affairs there now.' ---[2009 Interview] US Role In Rwandan Genocide

Perished in the plane:

Juvénal HABYARIMANA, Head of State of Rwanda;
Cyprien NTARYAMIRA, Head of State of Burundi;
Déogratias NSABIMANA, Chief of Staff of Rwandan Armed Forces (R.A.F.);
Elie SAGATWA, Colonel and Chief of the Military Cabinet of the Rwandan president;
Thaddée BAGARAGAZA, Major and executive officer in the ‘maison militaire’ of the Rwandan president;
Juvénal RENZAHO, foreign affairs adviser to the Rwandan president;
Emmanuel AKINGENEYE, personal physician to the Rwandan president;
Bernard CIZA, Minister of Planning in the government of Burundi;
Cyriaque SIMBIZI, Communications Minister of Burundi;
and members of the French flight crew:
Jacky HERAUD, pilot;
Jean-Pierre MINABERRY, co-pilot; and ,
Jean-Michel PERRINE, flight engineer.
QuotesIn 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. [2010] THE TRUTH ABOUT RWANDA by Christopher Black
1) In his book, Abdul Ruzibiza states that he was one of the men involved in the shootdown as part of the shootdown team. He was an officer in the RPF. He is dues to testify at the ICTR in the coming weeks if his security can be assured. He is presently in hiding in Norway.
2) Hourigan Report.
 3. Jean Piere Mugabe the former head of RPF intelligence who also fled the regime also stated in 2001 that Kagame and the RPF shot down the plane.
4. French investigative judge Brugiere investigating the shootdown on behalf of the families of the French crew leaked (or someone in his office did) a copy of the report to a French journalist with the English name Steven Smith last year who published its findings in Le Monde that it was the RPF who shot it down with the assistance of others.
5. Former Secratery General Boutros-Boutros Ghali stated this year that he had met Brugiere at a conference and was told by the French judge that the CIA was "heavily implicated" in the shootdown.
6. The RPF was the only force in Rwanda which had anti-aircraft missiles to the knowledge of the Force Commander Dallaire. Dallaire arranged for the closure of the western approach to the runway at the request of the RPF. This made it easier for the RPF and others to track the plane as it came in from the east. The Belgian contingent of the UN force was in control of the airport area and the area from which the missiles were fired. A Belgian unit (later killed at Camp Kigali) were the only people caught by the army coming out of the firing area after the shootdown when the army threw up a cordon to try to catch the culprits.
7. Wayne Madsen a former US intel officer who wrote, CIA Covert Operations in the Great Lakes Area, 1990-93, states that (and testified to this before the US Congress in 2001 when hearings were held by Cynthia McKinney into the Rwanda and Congo wars) that the CIA, using a Swiss front company used that company to rent a hangar at the Kigali airport in which they assembled the missiles. He also states that the US hoped to kill at the same time Mobutu of Zaire and Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya all in in one fell swoop (they were supposed to attend the same meeting and be on the same flight) in order to seize control of all central and east Africa. At that time the US 6th fleet was cruising off Mombasa and there were 600 US Rangers on stand-by to assist the RPF in Burundi.
8. Charles Onana a well-know journalist writing on this subject wrote about his investigations and that it was the RPF, as did Canadian author Robin Philpot in his book It Didn't Happen That Way In Kigali (loose translation of the French title).
7. Honore Ngambo, Mobutu's former chief of security published a book earlier this year in France in which he recounts the last meeting between Mobut and the Hutu president two days before he was killed in which the President stated that he was told by Herman Cohen he was basically a dead man and that he heard from his agents in the RPF camp that they were going to shootdown the plane. He confronted Dallaire with this and that he knew Dallaire was involved and Dallaire just replied "No one will believe you".
8. The author possesses a radio intercept of a message sent by Kagame to his forces in the field the night of the shootdown stating that the "Target is hit" and encouraging his forces to take to the field and that they would be in Kigali and were receiving support from their friends in the south, that is from Burundi—US and Burundian forces the latter of which actually invaded Rwanda in May to link up with the RPF coming form the north. Other radio messages were intercepted referring to the fact the RPF had the assistance of the Belgians in the UN forces who were fighting alongside them. The Belgians deny this of course. [2009] The Dallaire Genocide Fax by Christopher Black
  As we have already suggested, the established perpetrator-victim line requires suppression of the crucial fact that the April 6 shooting-down of the government jet returning Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprian Ntaryamira to Kigali, that killed everyone onboard, was carried out by RPF commandos (as discussed below), and had been regarded by RPF planners as an essential first strike in its final assault on the government. Although the mass killingsfollowed this assassination, with the RPF rapidly defeating any military resistance by the successor to Habyarimana’s coalition government and establishing its rule in Rwanda, these prime génocidaires were, and still are today, portrayed as heroic defenders of Rwanda’s national unity against Hutu “extremists” and the Interahamwe militia, who were the RPF’s actual victims.
.......We also know a lot more about “who assassinated Habyarimana.” In one of the most important, and also suppressed, stories about “The Genocide,” former ICTR investigator Michael Hourigan developed evidence as far back as 1996-1997, based on the testimony of three RPF informants who claimed “direct involvement in the 1994 fatal rocket attack upon the President’s aircraft,” and “specifically implicated the direct involvement of [Kagame]” and other members of the RPF. But in early 1997, when Hourigan hand-delivered his evidence to the ICTR’s chief prosecutor Louise Arbour, the latter was “aggressive” and “hostile,” Hourigan recounts in a 2006 affidavit, and advised him that the “investigation was at an end because in her view it was not in [the ICTR’s] mandate.” This decision, which “astounded” Hourigan, was rejected by former ICTR chief prosecutor Richard Goldstone, who told a Danish newspaper that the assassination was “clearly related to the genocide,” as it was the “trigger that started the genocide.”
    Suppressing evidence of the assassination’s perpetrator has been crucial in the West, as it seems awkward that the “trigger” for “The Genocide” was ultimately pulled, not by the officially designated Hutu villains, but by the Tutsi victors in this conflict, the RPF, long-supported by the United States and by its close allies (who very possibly aided the assassins in the shoot-down). It has also been important to suppress the fact that the first Hutu president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, had been assassinated by Tutsi officers in his army in October 1993, an action celebrated by the RPF and arousing fears among Rwanda’s Hutu.
    A far more comprehensive eight-year investigation by the French magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, who had been asked to rule on the deaths of the three French nationals operating the government jet that was shot down in April 1994, concluded that the assassination followed from Kagame’s rejection of the Arusha power-sharing accords of August 1993, and that for Kagame, the “physical elimination” of Habyarimana was therefore essential to achieving the goal of an RPF-takeover in Rwanda. Bruguière issued nine arrest warrants for high-ranking RPF members close to Kagame, and requested that the ICTR itself take up Kagame’s prosecution, as under French law, Bruguière could not issue an arrest warrant for a head of state.
    As best we can tell, the existence of Hourigan’s evidence has been reported only once in two U.S. newspapers (the Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times), and never in the New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal; Bruguière’s findings were mentioned in several U.S. newspapers (sixteen that we have found), including three short items in the Washington Post, a major report in the Los Angeles Times (reprinted in the Seattle Times), and one blurb apiece in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, which totaled ninety-four words. Interestingly, the U.S. media have reported fairly often on Bruguière’s work as a “counterterrorism” specialist in France, including several dozen items in the New York Times,Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. But when we checked the U.S. media for Bruguière’s eight-year inquiry into mass killings in Rwanda—a case where his focus was on a U.S. client-agent as the primary villain—their interest declines to almost zero. The propaganda system works. [2009] Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
-------------------------------------------------------

Herman Cohen

[Jewish, served as the United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 1989 to 1993.]
[2010] THE TRUTH ABOUT RWANDA by Christopher Black  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.

Mass Rape & Genocide in Rwanda, 1994

Paul Kagame visits Bejamin Netanyahou in Israel, October 1996.

Mass Rape & Genocide in Rwanda, 1994

The Untold Story of How the Western Press both Ignored and Manipulated the Issue of Rape of Women and Girls During the 1994 Cataclysm in Rwanda, and Why.

by Keith Harmon Snow
April 2004

April 15, 2004:  This story is excerpted from a longer article, “Rape As A Weapon of War,” published March 1997 by PEACEWORK, the magazine of the American Friends Service Committee. In that article, the role of the Rwandan Patriotic Front as US proxy army was misunderstood. The article has been adjusted, therefore, to reflect the appropriate history and role of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in the “Rwanda Genocide.” See numerous other Rwanda/DRC articles on this site for further analyses of the hidden history of the Rwanda Genocide.

March 28, 2005:  The question and scale of “genocide” in Rwanda has been greatly misunderstood by this writer, based on the overwhelming disinformation and pro-US / RPF flak produced before, during and since the 1994 cataclysm in Rwanda.  This feature remains therefore highly problematic – from the author’s own point of view. The RPF position is appropriately delineated, but the rest remains in need of additional and serious revision. Those parts needing significant attention have therefore been bolded herein for the short term solution.

From April to November 1994, the US media was blanketed with daily front-page features on Rwanda, hundreds of stories, text and photos revealing the "hopeless" African propensity to "mindless slaughter" and "tribal massacres." [1] The articles vary little in the scope of their reportage, and never provide any investigation, but regurgitate new and old themes, ever reassembling the facts to serve the desired result of saying everything while really saying nothing at all. In fact, the more you read, chronologically, in any given paper, the less you will understand, and that is no accident.

Media representations depicted the "indiscriminate" killing and "orgies of bloodletting" as ostensibly anathema to the West. No rapid and sophisticated deployment of troops to "secure" Western interests here (e.g. as in Iraq; Panama; Grenada), "[t]he main option," wrote Joshua Hammer, for Newsweek, "seems to be to wait out the slaughter and hope to survive." [2]

Indeed, "[m]adness descends periodically onto the verdant and overpopulated hills of Burundi and Rwanda," Hammer wrote, in The New Republic, (quite a different article) which later editorialized the "pointless" nature of intervention in Rwanda.[3] (That is a very telling editorial position.)

In his 1998 speech to genocide survivors in Rwanda, President Clinton suggested that the US did not respond because the government did not know what was happening at the time. This theme has become the standard nonsense on the “Rwanda Genocide,” and it is repeated by both progressive and conservative sources. Indeed, throughout the media blitz one theme ever chimed was that of the hopelessness of a conflict in which the US had no role. Through the systematic and persistent use of symbols, stereotypes, and images, the media ever reinforced the peculiar nature of African "tribal" and "ethnic" violence. Contrary to the media's "deep-seated ethnic and tribal animosities," is evidence that ethnicity is not the root cause of civil strife in Rwanda.[4]

More important however, is the evidence that the US administration knew perfectly well what was going on¾because the US was involved in the invasion of Rwanda, and may have been privy to the plans for the presidential assassinations that sparked the conflagration¾and that the media served its function as the propaganda corps for the world’s corporate and military elite.

As early as 1990 the alarms were sounding on Rwanda. They were ignored, and it was no oversight. The “Rwanda Genocide” – as the pro-US / pro-RPF position would have us believe – was organized within a close circle surrounding Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana (1973-1994), and 1990 to 1994 saw massacres of his opposition increase, with executive sanction, and with complete impunity.[5]

Habyarimana was a reluctant participant in the Arusha Accords (1993): evidence attests to the regime's persistent provocation of violence.[6]

In 1993, two close associates of Habyarimana (a brother-in-law and a son-in-law) set up the private radio station, Radio Mille Collines, that subsequently propagandized hate and violence against opponents of the regime.[7]

The Bush Administration's 1992 Annual Report to Congress stated that Rwanda's "relations with the US are excellent," with "no evidence of any systematic human rights abuses by the military." [8]

Even as the April 6, 1994, assassination of Habyarimana sparked the "final solution" by Hutu extremists, the media continued to extol his virtues. "Mr. Habyarimana excelled at strengthening ties to the West...at a time when a number of other African leaders were being accused of running corrupt and inefficient governments," wrote the New York Times in an "obituary" (4/7/94). "In 1990 he sought to make a major break with the past, but his efforts to reach a peaceful settlement were not successful." [9]  A later editorial called Habyarimana a "peace-seeking" president.[10]

The international community both ignored and supported preparations for the Rwanda genocide. French intervention from 1990-1993 included deployment of its elite Rapid Action Force and, by 1993, some 55 million French francs (US$ 10 million) in military aid to the Habyarimana regime. In January 1994, Human Rights Watch published a lengthy report, ignored by the US media, which detailed egregious responsibility for the ongoing international proxy war.[11]

Rwanda's Paul Kagame was trained at Ft. Leavenworth (Kansas) under the International Military Education Training Program (IMET), where $769,000 trained 35 Rwandan officers at US military schools from 1980 to 1992, and $120,000 was earmarked for Rwanda for both 1994 and 1995. Further military assistance was provided by the US to 1994, while the bulk of the arms and logistical support came from US client states (France, South Africa, Egypt, Uganda and Zaire).[12]

On January 11, 1994, after communicating details of the coming cataclysm, Major General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of U.N. peacekeeping forces in Rwanda (UNAMIR), requested U.N. authorization to confiscate arms caches.

Authorization denied, Dallaire was ordered to expose his intelligence sources to the Habyarimana regime. The genocide unfolded soon after a delegate from the extremist "Hutu" government rotated onto the exclusive U.N. Security Council, and subsequently worked, with complete legitimacy, and not in any minority, to manipulate or block all actions toward "humanitarian" intervention.

The missile attack that downed the plane carrying Rwanda and Burundi Presidents was shrouded in secrecy, but revelations have consistently suggested that this double assassination was planned and executed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, with probable US intelligence or military knowledge, if not support. Most notable is that the United States has worked to block every attempt to investigate the fatal plane crash. At the time, the commander of the initial ill-fated "peacekeeping" UN Observer Mission to Rwanda (UNOMIR I), Canadian General Romeo Dallaire was reportedly “prevented by Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) soldiers from investigating the crash cite.” However, this story is not an expose on the plane crash, the details of which will be addressed in a future article, but an expose on the media’s coverage of rape during the explosion of violence and the implications of this in terms of their support of the US proxy war and RPF invasion.

While U.N. Security Council Resolution 872 (11/93) authorized the UNAMIR force of 2500 soldiers from 23 countries (with no US soldiers), Resolution 912 cut troops to 270, with neutered mandate, at the height of the genocide (4/21/94). The US repeatedly blocked Resolution 917 on intervention; Resolution 918 (5/17/94) authorized a force of 5000 (UNAMIR II), but it delayed until August and then only fleetingly deployed. US Presidential Decision Directive 25, designed to thwart US action in situations like Rwanda, was also promulgated during the early stages of “the genocide” (5/5/94).[13]

Through the smokescreen of "Operation Turquoise," France protected, armed and fought for Hutu forces, but "Turquoise" was sold by the unquestioning and disingenuous US media as a "humanitarian intervention"¾with only oblique references to true French interests and involvement.[14]

Ronco Company, authorized by the US to do "de-mining work" in Rwanda in 1995, was importing armored vehicles and explosives in violation of the U.N. embargo on Rwanda: with Pentagon approval, this equipment was turned over to the Rwandan military (RPF). Halliburton subsidiary Brown and Root was also reported to be in Rwanda after 1994. [15]

US involvement in Rwanda includes "counterinsurgency" training, "psychological operations" and tactical Special Forces. [16] (Special Operations Command oversees Navy Seals, Army Rangers and Delta Force, elite units deployed as special operatives in covert operations.) [17]

The media painted the Rwandan conflict as a "sudden unexplainable convulsion of violence." [18]

Slaughter was attributed to mindless, machete-wielding masses, while mass executions committed with machine-guns were disproportionately revealed. Like modern structures indicative of "civilization," the sophisticated weaponry deployed -- helicopters and artillery and perhaps tanks -- in Rwanda (and Zaire) was (is) never revealed in the media's select "African" photos. White expatriates were evacuated quickly: U.N., embassy or relief agencies abandoned virtually all local African personnel.

Amongst the many examples of systematic US media propaganda on 1994 Rwanda however, consider reportage on rape. The 1994 genocide saw mass rape, torture, mutilation, enslavement and execution of women. While human rights and humanitarian relief workers, journalists and military observers all knew that mass rape was the rule, the US media selectively excluded it. It was not reported at all.

Almost.

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW)¾whose reportage and analyses on the “Rwanda genocide” virtually exonerate the Rwanda Patriotic Front from its major role in committing acts of genocide, crimes against humanity and other human rights violations, in its their right, against hundreds of thousands of people, minimum, in 1994¾in the years preceding the genocide extremist propaganda which exhorted "Hutu" to commit the genocide "specifically identified the sexuality of Tutsi women as a means through which the Tutsi community sought to infiltrate and control the Hutu community." Propagandists portrayed Tutsi women -- considered more beautiful than Hutu women -- as "calculated seductress spies bent on infiltrating Hutu ranks." Some observers believe that almost every woman and adolescent girl who survived the genocide was raped¾though the perpetrators have since been subsequently misidentified in many cases. Ages ranged from two to over fifty. Testimonies of survivors confirm that thousands of women were individually raped, gang-raped, raped with objects such as sharpened sticks or gun barrels, held in sexual slavery, or sexually mutilated. Many victims were subsequently killed. Citing the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Rwanda, HRW reported that rape was the rule and its absence the exception, that the number of pregnancies caused are estimated at 2000 to 5000, that there may have been at least 250,000 rapes -- perhaps 500,000.[19]

Witnessing the widespread slaughter¾which the RPF was almost certainly expecting, and even counting on¾Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) stepped up their invasion of Rwanda and quickly mobilized against the French-backed Rwandan government forces and their highly-trained civilian militia.

Faced with the prospect of dynamic but uncertain geopolitical change, the New York Times dispatched Raymond Bonner, whose reportage on Rwanda won him a prestigious Overseas Press Club award¾most likely because of what he never said. Bonner consistently implied that the RPF invasion and the ongoing civil war had “sparked an explosion of tribal violence,” and, hence, the subsequent refugees crises. This is not what happened.

In the context of Bonner's prolific and often front-page reportage from June 1994 to January 1995, however, the subject of rape was almost entirely omitted. There was no suggestion or inference that rape -- indiscriminate or systematic -- may have occurred.

As in two then contemporary New York Times articles by Donatella Lorch, rape was mentioned twice by Raymond Bonner, each time in the context of "unverified" atrocities allegedly committed by the "invading" RPF rebels. Further, all of these reports, mentioning rape almost in passing, occurred in the later stages of the April to August conflict. [20]

Bonner and Lorch both reported on the theme of the RPF army being "remarkably disciplined." [21]

But the genocidal mass rapes were first reported by the Christian Science Monitor on March 27, 1995.[22]

Donatella Lorch then followed with "Wave of Rape Adds New Horror to Rwanda's Trail of Brutality" on May 15, 1995.[23]

Again on September 23, 1996, the New York Times ran "Legacy of Rwanda Violence: Thousands Born of Rape." [24]

Here is the prevailing question: Why was the rape of hundreds of thousands of women selectively unreported amidst blanket international media coverage of the Rwanda genocide? Whether it was Hutu’s raping Tutsis, or Tutsis raping Hutus, why was the subject of mass rape was off the agenda?

According to human rights workers, it was obvious as early as May 1994 that rape was the rule, not the (rebel) exception. AID workers knew it, human rights workers knew it, military observers knew it, and the New York Timesjournalists certainly knew it. As one human rights worker said, "it's not surprising that the rapes weren't reported. Rape has never been considered a war crime." [25]

That Raymond Bonner and Donatella Lorch did report on rape, however, but only in the context of alleged atrocities by rebel forces, reveals that different journalistic standards, or some political expediency, were applied to the coverage of rape: the supposed infrequent and few rapes perpetrated by the RPF were reported, the genocidal mass rapes were not.

The New York Times' invocation of rape was designed to influence public opinion. Rape was presented as an injustice, but one that was perpetrated only infrequently, and then only by RPF rebels. The New York Times went out of its way, comparatively, to cite (supposed) professional discipline and self-control exercised (reportedly) by invading rebel forces¾closely allied to the United States¾armed and trained and funded by the US ¾and advised by the Pentagon.[26]

Reportage on Rwanda, and rape in particular, was manufactured in service to Western mass psychology.[27] In effect, both Raymond Bonner and Donatella Lorch were defending US interests, and thereby deflecting attention from the US proxy (RPF) army.

Had the New York Times reporters covered mass rape across the board, their attention to reported rapes by RPF troops¾a handful of renegade troops from an otherwise orderly and disciplined army¾would not be so remarkably obvious.

Given that the forces opposed to the US /RPF invasion were the actual “Hutu” genocidiares¾ responsible for hundreds of thousands of rapes and killings of women¾it would seem reasonable to assume that the media, serving the prerogatives of the Pentagon, would go out of their way to demonize the opposition, and amplify the specter of mass rape. The mass rapes then would appear to have offered the US media the perfect opportunity of high propaganda value. However, as noted, the rapes by opposition forces committing genocide were entirely ignored for almost a year.

So there is one question: why were rapes committed by forces in military opposition to the US proxy army completely ignored?

The answer is that rape is an outrage, and it is particularly outrageous to women, and a series of news articles in the US that had legitimately drawn attention to the mass rape under way after April 6, 1994, would most likely have provoked greater outpourings of sympathy, with concomitant demands for intervention, from the US public.

Noting the resistance of the US government to use the word “genocide” throughout the early stages of the conflict, or to allow the word “genocide” to be used, we can postulate that the US resisted the word genocide¾not because of the so-called “Somalia syndrome”¾because it likely would have forced unwanted meddling and probable intervention into a US covert operation.

There is also the possibility that the violence¾including mass rapes of hundreds of thousands¾was sanctioned by the United States military and intelligence insiders as a way to further destabilize and, quite reasonably, depopulate, the region.

Attempting to reorganize the political base on the ground in Rwanda, and to further expand the US sphere of influence from its foothold in Uganda, the US wanted to be sure that the RPF had complete freedom to operate without political restriction or geographical limitations. The specter of mass rape would have provided unwanted attention.

Other questions arise in consideration of Raymond Bonner and Donatella Lorch having provided media attention regarding the supposed “misbehavior” of a few rogue RPF soldiers.

One is: where did they get their facts? Were they handed press releases fabricated by the Pentagon? By the RPF itself? Did they operate behind RPF lines, under the relative security of the RPF, thereby insuring that the RPF would remain immune from any investigative rigor? Reports have surfaced that indicate that the RPF was responsible for egregious massacres, and that killings by RPF were attributed to the Hutu “genocide.” Said differently, exactly how many RPF soldiers were involved in the mass killings and rapes that occurred, killing and rapes that were otherwise attributed to the Hutu genocidiares?

Politicized by the perpetrators of sexual violence in Rwanda in 1994, rape was also politicized by the US media. In the case of alleged rebel atrocities, rape was selectively invoked in service to US military and political interests. The unfolding saga of the systematic (genocidiares) and incidental (RPF) rapes of perhaps hundred of thousands of innocent women and girls¾orchestrated by the entrenched and oppressive clients of the western political establishment¾went entirely and intentionally unreported.

~end.

Writer’s Note: What lessons can we extrapolate from this story about the widespread and horrific sexual violence subsequently committed in the former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo?

[1] This author researched and read virtually everything.
[2] Joshua Hammer, "Rwanda: Situation Is Desperate," Newsweek, June 20, 1994: 44-46.
[3] Joshua Hammer, "Darkness Visible," The New Republic, May 9, 1994: 9; and "Why Not Rwanda," The New Republic, May 16, 1994: 7.
[4] See Tony Waters, "Tutsi Social Identity in Contemporary Africa," Journal of Modern African Studies, 33, 2 (1995):343-347; and Alain Destexhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, NYU Press, 1995: 36-47.
[5] See Alain Destexhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, New York University Press, 1995: 28, 45-47.
[6] Ibid: 28-29.
[7] Ibid: 30.
[8] Human Rights Watch, Arming Rwanda: The Arms Trade and Human Rights Abuses in the Rwandan War, Vol. 6, Issue 1, January 1994.
[9] Ronald Sullivan, "Juvenal Habyarimana, 57, Ruled Rwanda for 21 Years," New York Times, April 7, 1994: 10.
[10] Editorial, "Double Tragedy in Africa," New York Times, April 10, 1994.
[11] Human Rights Watch, Arming Rwanda: The Arms Trade and Human Rights Abuses in the Rwandan War, Vol. 6, Issue 1, January 1994.
[12] See US Department of Defense, Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales, and Military Assistance Facts, (US Doc D1.2, F76, 996) 1997; Stephen D. Goose and Frank Smyth, "Arming Genocide in Rwanda," Foreign Affairs, September/October 1994: 86; Human Rights Watch, Arming Rwanda, Vol. 6, Issue 1, January 1994; Frank Smyth, "Blood Money and Geopolitics," The Nation, May 2, 1994: 585.
[13] Presidential Decision Directive: Clinton Administration Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations, Washington, Department of State Publication 10161, May 1994. See also testimony of Holly Burkhalter, Physicians for Human Rights, Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Operations, May 5, 1998; and Hearings of House International Relations Committee, July 16, 1997.
[14] See Keith Richburg, "New Tide of Refugees Heads Out of Rwanda," Washington Post, August 20, 1994: 1.
[15] Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Books, 1999.
[16] See testimony by Kathi Austin, Hearing of the House International Relations Committee, July 16, 1997.
[17] Africa Research Bulletin, August 1997.
[18] William E. Schmidt, "Troops Rampage in Rwanda," New York Times, April 8, 1994.
[19] See HRW: Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwandan Genocide, Human Rights Watch, 1996.
[20] Donatella Lorch: "Rwanda Rebels: Army of Exiles Fights for a Home," New York Times, June 9, 1994: 10; and "Rwanda Rebels' Victory Attributed To Discipline," New York Times, July 19, 1994: 6. Raymond Bonner: "How Minority Tutsi Won the War," New York Times, September 6, 1994: 6; and "Rwandan Refugees Flood Zaire as Rebel Forces Gain," New York Times, July 15, 1994: 1.
[21] Ibid, at 19.
[22] Judith Matloff, "Rwanda Copes With Babies of Mass Rape," Christian Science Monitor, March 27, 1995: 1.
[23] Donatella Lorch, "Wave of Rape Adds New Horror to Rwanda's Trail of Brutality," New York Times, May 15, 1995.
[24] James C. McKinley Jr., "Legacy of Rwanda Violence: The Thousands Born of Rape," New York Times, September 23, 1996: 1.
[25] Private conversation with Human Rights Watch investigator, February 1997.
[26] See Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999.
[27] See Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.

http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/html-87Rape%20and%20Genocide%20in%20Rwanda.htm

American Mind Control in Baghdad, in Africa

American Mind Control in Baghdad. Spooks use technology "proved" on one-million dead Africans
http://www.vialls.com/subliminalsuggestion/mindcontrol.html
Copyright Joe Vialls, 29 May 2003

  During the late afternoon of 6 April 1994, a hail of cannon shells tore through the fuselage of a commercial airliner flying overhead central Rwanda. Several seconds later the blazing plane exploded on impact with the ground, killing President Habyarimana of Rwanda, President Ntaryamira of Burundi, and most of their senior government officials. In that fatal millisecond of time, the entire political command structure of central Africa was decapitated,  leaving the way open for “Operation Crimson Mist”,  the most obscene terminal mind control experiment ever mounted by the United States of America against a sovereign nation. That “Crimson Mist” has been used again recently on a smaller scale in Iraq, is now beyond doubt.
            As Habyarimana and his colleagues made their death dive, a small group of American men and women lounged around in a large hut at the edge of a discreet gravel airstrip a few miles from the Rwandan capital Kigali, temporary home for their three unmarked C-130 Hercules transport planes. All crewmembers carried forged credentials showing them as  “atmospheric researchers” employed by an authentic civilian American agency, but these were only for emergency identification if one of the aircraft was forced to make an unscheduled landing on unfriendly territory. For all practical security purposes, neither they nor their three large aircraft were even in Africa.
            When news of the presidential crash came in over the VHF radio, one of the Hercules planes was swiftly prepared for take off. The flight engineer checked the attachment of the RATO [Rocket Assisted Takeoff] packs, while the scientists made final adjustments to a large microwave dish mounted on the rear loading ramp of the aircraft. It was this strange and esoteric piece of equipment alone that would directly contribute to the deaths of more than one million African civilians during the hundred days that followed. Though completely silent in operation, the single microwave dish had more killing potential than a whole squadron of AC-130 Spectre gunships armed with fifty Gatling cannons.
            Though officially tagged an “experiment”, none of those present had any doubt that this was merely a cosmetic cover for the gruesome operational work ahead.  Each member had been carefully vetted and then vetted again by US Intelligence to ensure they had the “right stuff”, and were philosophically committed to two objectives. First was the evolving need to control or eliminate political dissent by remote means in the run up to the 21st Century, and second was the need to stem or reverse massive population increases across the world, which threatened to overwhelm existing natural resources, especially water and food. Intrinsically this required a willingness to commit mass murder, and everyone present had passed this critical test with flying colors.
            As the Hercules’ engines started with a roar, American agents in Kigali were working alongside local civil servants and members of the Rwandan security service, ramping up public suspicion about foul play in the presidential air crash. Urged on by corrupt officialdom, Hutu tribesmen started marching on Tutsi tribesmen and threw a few rocks at them. Innocent enough at the outset, although with a few nasty machete cuts here and there. But then the C-130 Hercules made a carefully-calculated pass directly over the advancing Hutu, and they suddenly went berserk.  Eyes glazed, the mood of the Hutu crowd went from simple anger to uncontrollable rage, and within minutes, hundreds of assorted Tutsi body parts were flying through the air.
     What the Hercules crew had just achieved has been an open secret since the late fifties, when researchers accidentally discovered that there is a precise “control” brain wave for literally everything we do, and for everything we feel. The problem back then was that each of these control brain waves [rage, fear, panic, lethargy, vomiting and so on] had to be transmitted with an accuracy taken out to three decimal places, or they simply did not work at all. But as the years rolled by, and with the advent of transistors and microprocessors, the operational application of precise control brain waves became practical reality.
            It is important to note here that the lethal trick repeated hundreds of times by the C-130 Hercules in Rwanda during April – July 1994,  was not “classic mind control” in the ultimate conspiratorial meaning of the term, i.e. where people claim to hear complicated messages inside their heads, or where it is feared that the NSA [or similar] intend to turn everyone into helpless Zombies by implanting electronic chips in their arms or necks. What the C-130 crew were actually engaged in was “electromagnetically augmenting” a preexisting state. Remember that the agents and security service personnel first had to point the Hutu tribesmen in the direction of the Tutsi, induce reasonable anger, and make sure they were appropriately armed. Only then could the C-130 go to work with the precise control brain wave of “rage”, augmenting and thus upgrading crowd behavior from that of angry demonstrators to uncontrollable genocidal maniacs. Although not “classic”, this was and is unquestionably mind control, for the simple reason that external means were being used to force an irresistible change in behavior.
            For those who really want to know how governments or agencies change public behavior on a whim, the explanation is not too complicated, though obtaining details of the classified control brain frequencies is all but impossible. Various academics have actually demonstrated some of these effects quasi-publicly over the years, which provides hard reality for skeptics.
             One of the leading lights in this field is Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher-Bise, who was a nuclear scientist and researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at Stanford Research Institute, Professor of Physics at John F. Kennedy University of California, research consultant to NASA and the U.S. Navy, and a member of IEEE, APS, AAAS, MAA, ANA, AAMI. Elizabeth Rauscher-Bise identified specific frequency effects to induce nausea, happiness and many other behavioral states decades ago. Clearly, Dr. Rauscher-Bise is an enthusiast: "Give me the money and three months", she boasts, "and I'll be able to affect the behavior of 80 per cent of the people in this town without their knowing it. Make them happy - or at least they'll think they're happy. Or aggressive."
            Unlike many researchers in this field, Elizabeth Rauscher-Bise tends to be open about her work, has demonstrated the effects many times in quasi-public forums, and claims to experiment only on fully informed people. Many years ago during one memorable demonstration in California, she turned a specific brain wave on all students in the left-side of her auditorium, whereupon their teeth started chattering collectively and uncontrollably. When the unaffected students on the right-side of the auditorium suggested this might be some sort of trick, Elizabeth Rauscher-Bise calmly turned  the specific brain wave on them instead. The right-side now suffered exactly the same fate, watched by the stunned but no longer affected students on the left-side.
            The main problem lies in the delivery of the these brain waves to the target, because  they all lie in the extremely low spectrum, between 0.1 and 25 Hertz [Cycles], with all control brain waves in an even narrower central band between 0.6 and 10.2 Hertz. These are effectively the same as “earth” frequencies, meaning that they are very hard to direct via conventional radio transmission. Remember that in order to be effective in selective crowd behavior augmentation, you must be able to restrict delivery to clearly defined crowds in clearly defined areas.  This is achieved by using an extremely high frequency microwave beam, which is then amplitude modulated at exactly the same rate as the desired control brain wave. This is much easier to explain with pictures, so take a good look at the diagram below.

    Microwaves in the 1.0 to 3.0 Gigahertz range travel in perfectly straight lines, like light, making them easy to control in terms of direction, and regardless of power output. In most cases microwaves are transmitted by a dish aerial of the sort you frequently see located low down on a tall television transmitter mast. These are designed to transfer high volume electronic data between the television studio and transmitter, and vice versa.  Where the American “Mind Controllers” score with their airborne and truck mounted equipment is by using microwave aerials that can be adjusted, in exactly the same way as you would adjust the focus on a variable beam flashlight. How this is done is shown in the second diagram below.

 In the Rwandan Hutu tribesmen example shown at the start of this report, the crew of the C-130 Hercules only needed to know the width of the target crowd on the ground, and the width of their own microwave beam at any given true altitude in feet [as read directly from the radar altimeter]. With those two values available, it is then a simple matter to adjust beam width to  accurately bracket the target crowd from any altitude chosen.
            But this equipment is not just deployed in large lumbering Hercules transport planes. During recent weeks, European security experts have concluded that smaller versions of Crimson Mist were recently deployed on the street of Baghdad, designed in part to augment the media propaganda line that  Iraqi citizens are dangerous savages, all badly in need of direct supervision by “democratic” American authorities. One classic example of this was the “looting” of the Baghdad Museum, apparently by a crowd of undisciplined rabble, but video footage tells a very different story.
            To pull off this stunt the American authorities needed to assemble a crowd, managed quite easily with a promise of free food. Then they needed to place the crowd outside the museum, which again was easy because they located the free food outside the museum itself. Next up,  the attention of the crowd had to be drawn to the museum itself, which was achieved in spectacular fashion by firing two 120-mm shells from an Abrams tank gun straight through the main doors.
            Fine so far, but how to get them inside? The video shows two soldiers gesticulating to the crowd, urging them to go in and help themselves, thereby clearly identifying the target “Rwanda-style”.  Then it starts to get really interesting! The two soldiers rapidly withdraw, leaving the Iraqis standing leaderless outside the open doors, and  then CLICK, just like flicking a light switch, the entire crowd goes nuts absolutely simultaneously, which never happens in real life. In the real world there is always a leader visibly stirring up the crowd and preparing them for action, but not outside the Baghdad Museum. One second these folk are dull hungry Iraqis, next second they are instant uncontrollable maniacs streaming in though the museum doors.
            It is also suspected that the same equipment was used to augment the “looting attacks” on various hospitals around central Baghdad, though this claim seems to be based as much on logic as it is on video footage. These so-called “looters” are Iraqi citizens who received essentially free health care in the hospitals under Saddam Hussein. Not only that, but their wives and children are being bombed and shot by Americans, meaning that their free hospitals are absolutely essential to them, and thus the very places they would normally defend in the first instance. Bearing this logic in mind, it seems likely that the European security experts are also correct in this claim.

  While there is unlikely to be very much concern in America,  Britain and Australia for the plight of Iraqis on the streets of Baghdad, it may be time to examine what is likely to happen in our own “democratic” countries if things get more out of control than they are at present. Remember that the 2.2-million-strong demonstration in London just before the illegal invasion of Iraq, had little if anything to do with English folk liking Saddam Hussein.  Iraq was merely an excuse for this unprecedented mass of human beings to migrate to London waving banners that mostly read “Not in Our Name” at corrupt politicians.
            The bottom line is that the next time 2.2 million British citizens descend on the capital to have a go at the politicians [their real targets], they might be carrying something far more dangerous than banners. Every policeman and military man knows very well that a 2.2 million strong mass with hostile intent, simply cannot be stopped by standard riot control techniques, and they cannot be stopped by bullets fired by soldiers on the streets. Even if British soldiers could be persuaded to open fire on their own neighbors [most unlikely],  the entire Army would be powerless to act. So what then?
            Across the Atlantic in America, and in Australia, things are really no better. As I write, the American dollar is heading straight for basement levels, which in turn will lead to a depression and increased anger on the part of all Americans, aimed largely at corrupt politicians on Capitol Hill. Naturally the politicians will try to put the people down as usual, but what if this time it is a step too far. What if a few hundred or few thousand of the 260 million private weapons in American hands are brought into play, what then?
            The chances are that in all affected western countries, politicians and their real masters will try to invoke the use of highly unconventional weapons in order to try and save their own worthless hides.  How successful they might be when that day comes, as it surely will, is largely up to you.