Progressive Calendar 07.25.10
From: David Shove (shove001tc.umn.edu)
Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:24:00 -0700 (PDT)
            P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R   07.25.10

1. Conspiracy tour 7.25 6pm Winona MN
2. Full moon walk  7.25 7pm

3. Peace walk      7.26 6pm RiverFalls WI

4. Herman/Peterson - Rwanda & the (DRC) Congo in the propaganda system
5. ed              - Two party hell  (haiku)

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From: info [at] rnc8.org
Subject: Conspiracy tour 7.25 6pm Winona MN

The Conspiracy Tour hits the road in just one week! It's been alleged that
the Tour will include a musical puppet show, a scintillating presentation
on the charges the activists are facing, and various (some would say
nefarious) ways you can join the Conspiracy to support targets of state
repression. In addition to the usual perks of joining a conspiracy,
co-conspirators will be learning ways to strengthen and protect their
communities from future incidences of state repression. You know, just in
case.

Folks going on the Tour have been busy getting ready to cross the
continent to raise support and solidarity for the RNC 8 and Scott DeMuth
(an activist from Minneapolis who's facing conspiracy charges under the
Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act). Don't believe it? Check out the evidence
for yourself!

"We're Getting Ready for Tour" promo video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB5LjnUD7oA

Check out the Tour schedule below and the website (
http://conspiracytour.wordpress.com) for up-to-date info:

July 25: Winona, MN
Location: 578 E. 4th St, next to Chong^Òs Noodle House in the old St. Vincent
thrift store
Time: 6pm potluck, 7pm presentation

July 26: Madison, WI
Location: Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, 426 W. Gilman Street, Madison, WI
53703
Time: 7pm

July 27: Milwaukee, WI
Location: Cream City Collectives, 732 E. Clarke St.
Time: 7pm

July 28: Chicago, IL
Location: DePaul Law School, 25 E. Jackson Blvd., Lewis Center, Rm. #703
Time: 5pm-8pm

[many more, further away - ed]


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From: Sue Ann <seasnun [at] gmail.com>
Subject: Full moon walk 7.25 7pm

Celebrate the Dakota Moon of Middle Summer
Sunday, July 25, 2010

Gather and Walk at 7 PM - It is mesmerizing to watch the dragonflies at
Coldwater graze for mosquitoes above the reservoir. "Mosquito hawks" have
360-degree vision, each of their four wings operates independently,
they've been around since the dinosaurs and are consummate eating
machines.

Traditional group howl!
Sunset 8:47 PM - Moonrise 8:32 PM
Always FREE and Open to the Public
Need directions to Coldwater?
MAP - click
here<http://friendsofcoldwater.org/common/map/map.html?ed=HmSKc.p_0TrSTXyx6Pd2gZGev5ZORTkaEJZ0WQ1bx2CZgDwIVZ3qRg2.zD58N15D&csz=Minneapolis%2C+MN&country=us>


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From: Nancy Holden <d.n.holden [at] comcast.net>
Subject: Peace walk 7.26 6pm RiverFalls WI

River Falls Peace and Justice Walkers. We meet every Monday from 6-7 pm on
the UWRF campus at Cascade Ave. and 2nd Street, immediately across from
"Journey" House. We walk through the downtown of River Falls. Contact:
d.n.holden [at] comcast.net. Douglas H Holden 1004 Morgan Road River Falls,
Wisconsin 54022


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Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System
Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
Excerpted from The Politics of Genocide (Monthly Review Press, 2009).
Monthly Review May 2010

[Ed intro:

In the standard US story about Rwanda, the following are the good guys:
 President Kagame
 Tutsis
 The RPF (Rwanda Patriotic Front)
 President Museveni
 The USA
and the following are the bad guys:
 Hutus
 President Habyarimana
According to Herman and Peterson, the "good guys" are far worse than the
"bad guys". Use this as a guide as you read through a situation
unfamiliar to many Americans.

Additionally, the Tutsis are few but generally well-off or rich, while the
Hutus are many but generally poor. The official story sides with the rich
and blames the poor. Compare eg US support of the few rich in Venezuela
and the hate lauched against the people's Chavez.

Peter Erlinder says Africa is seen by US leaders as the new Latin America,
to be divided and conquered and stripped of resources and independence. US
progressives should be alert to nip this in the bud. (See end of article
for upcoming Erlinder talk. -ed)

From the article:
"The invasions, assassinations, and mass slaughters by which the RPF shot
its way to power in Kigali advanced many objectives, and their support by
the "enlightened" states are regarded by many of the defense teams that
practice before the ICTR as reflecting a quid pro quo between Washington
and the RPF: Washington gains a strong military presence in Central
Africa, a diminution of its European rivals' influence, proxy armies to
serve its interests, and access to the raw material-rich Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC, known as Zaire into 1997); while the RPF renews
Tutsi-minority control of Rwanda, and gains a free hand to kill any
perceived internal rivals, along with a client state's usual immunities,
money, weapons, foreign investment, and a great deal of international
prestige."

Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System
Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
Excerpted from The Politics of Genocide (Monthly Review Press, 2009).
Monthly Review May 2010

Elsewhere we have written that the breakup of Yugoslavia "may have been
the most misrepresented series of major events over the past twenty
years".1 But the far bloodier and more destructive invasions,
insurgencies, and civil wars that have ravaged several countries in the
Great Lakes region of Central Africa over the same years may have been
subjected to even greater misrepresentation.

To a remarkable degree, all major sectors of the Western establishment
swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim
upside-down. In the much-cited 1999 study, "Leave None to Tell the Story":
Genocide in Rwanda, on behalf of Human Rights Watch and the International
Federation of Human Rights in Paris, Alison Des Forges writes that "By
late March 1994, Hutu Power leaders were determined to slaughter massive
numbers of Tutsi and Hutu opposed to [Hutu President Juvnal] Habyarimana,"
and that on April 6, 1994, with the assassination of Habyarimana, "[a]
small group of his close associates...decided to execute the planned
extermination".

Although "responsibility for killing Habyarimana is a serious issue,"
writes Des Forges, it pales in comparison to "responsibility for the
genocide. We know little about who assassinated Habyarimana". This is a
false statement, as we show in detail below. "We know more about who used
the assassination as the pretext to begin a slaughter that had been
planned for months" is true enough, but in exactly the opposite sense
reported by Des Forges.2

During testimony at a major trial of four Hutu former military officers
before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Des Forges
acknowledged that by April 1992 (i.e., a full twenty-four months before
"The Genocide" is alleged to have been perpetrated), the "government in
charge of Rwanda [had become] a multiparty government, including Tutsi
representatives, and it is for that reason alone that it is impossible to
conclude that there was planning of a genocide by that government".3

Although Des Forges tried to salvage the Hutu conspiracy model, alleging
plans by individual Hutu members of the coalition government to use their
"official powers" to carry out a preplanned genocide, this model
disintegrated on cross-examination.4 Des Forges could not explain how Hutu
"individuals" used these "powers" without the knowledge of their Tutsi and
Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) associates. Furthermore, she was forced to
admit that pro-RPF ministers were in cahoots with the RPF and its plans
for war (which we describe below), and that after the Habyarimana
assassination, the RPF did not simply respond in self-defense to a
Hutu-organized killing spree, but initiated its own killing spree. In
other words, while the Hutu members of Rwanda's power-sharing government
would have had great difficulty organizing a genocide against the Tutsi,
the Tutsi-led RPF was well-positioned to paralyze any government response
to plans it had developed - and that were implemented - to avoid the
threat of a free election the RPF was destined to lose, to assassinate the
Hutu president, and to take over the country by military force. Yet Des
Forges's dramatic concessions before the ICTR never turned up in the
Western media, and in her public statements thereafter she continued to
repeat the official propaganda line about a Hutu conspiracy to commit
genocide, right up to the very end.5

To accept the standard model of "The Genocide," one must ignore the
large-scale killing and ethnic cleansing of Hutus by the RPF long before
the April-July 1994 period, which began when Ugandan forces invaded Rwanda
under President (and dictator) Yoweri Museveni on October 1, 1990. At its
inception, the RPF was a wing of the Ugandan army, the RPF's leader, Paul
Kagame, having served as director of Ugandan military intelligence in the
1980s. The Ugandan invasion and resultant combat were not a "civil war,"
but rather a clear case of aggression. However, the invasion led to no
reprimand or cessation of support by the United States or Britain - and,
in contrast to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait just two months before, which was
countered in the Security Council by a same-day demand that Iraq withdraw
its forces immediately - the Council took no action on the Ugandan
invasion of Rwanda until March 1993. It did not even authorize an observer
mission (UNOMUR) until late June 1993, the RPF by then having occupied
much of northern Rwanda and driven out several hundred thousand Hutu
farmers.6

It is clear that Museveni and the RPF were perceived as serving U.S.
interests, and that the government of President Habyarimana was targeted
for ouster.7 UN Security Council inaction flowed from this political bias.
In his assessment of the years he spent representing U.S. interests in
Africa, former Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen raised the
question of why, as of October 1, 1990, the "first day of the crisis," as
he calls it, "did [the United States] automatically exclude the policy
option of informing Ugandan President Museveni that the invasion of Rwanda
by uniformed members of the Ugandan army was totally unacceptable, and
that the continuation of good relations between the United States and
Uganda would depend on his getting the RPF back across the border?"8 This
question is naive but revealing - the answer, like that to the question of
why the United States lobbied for the withdrawal of UN forces from Rwanda
as "The Genocide" was getting under way in April 1994, is that the Ugandan
army and RPF were doing what the United States wanted done in Rwanda.

The United States and its allies worked hard in the early 1990s to weaken
the Rwandan government, forcing the abandonment of many of the economic
and social gains from the social revolution of 1959, thereby making the
Habyarimana government less popular, and helping to reinforce the Tutsi
minority's economic power.9 Eventually, the RPF was able to achieve a
legal military presence inside Rwanda, thanks to a series of ceasefires
and other agreements. These agreements led to the Arusha Peace Accords of
August 1993, pressed upon the Rwandan government by the United States and
its allies, called for the "integration" of the armed forces of Rwanda and
the RPF, and for a "transitional," power-sharing government until national
elections could be held in 1995.10 These Peace Accords positioned the RPF
for its bloody overthrow of a relatively democratic coalition government,
and the takeover of the Rwandan state by a minority dictatorship.

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 Juvnal 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 killings followed 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 gnocidaires 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.

Acceptance of this line also requires the suppression of a key verdict in
a December 2008 Judgment by the ICTR.11 This seven-and-a-half year trial
of four former high-ranking Hutu members of the Rwanda military produced
an acquittal of all four defendants on the Tribunal's most serious charge:
participation in a conspiracy to commit genocide against the country's
Tutsi minority. To the contrary, the court ruled unanimously that the
evidence was "consistent with preparations for a political or military
power struggle and measures adopted in the context of an on-going war with
the RPF that were used for other purposes from 6 April 1994".12

Of course, it was the RPF that had been organized to carry out a "military
power struggle" against Rwanda's Hutu majority for several years prior to
April 1994; and with its Tutsi base a numerical minority in the country
(at most 15 percent overall), the RPF recognized that they would suffer an
almost certain defeat in the free elections called for by the Arusha
Accords. But the fact that the RPF itself conspired to assassinate
Habyarimana and to carry out subsequent mass killings remains entirely
beyond the grasp of the ICTR. Although it has failed to convict a single
Hutu of conspiracy to commit genocide, the ICTR has never once entertained
the question of an RPF conspiracy - despite the RPF's rapid overthrow of
the Hutu government and capture of the Rwandan state. This, we believe,
flows from U.S. and allied support of the RPF, reflected in media
coverage, humanitarian intellectuals, and NGO activism, as well as the
ICTR's jurisprudence. Like the International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the ICTR was a creation of the Security
Council.13 Both have served Western, and notably U.S., purposes throughout
their remit, but the ICTR has acted far more uncompromisingly than the
ICTY - which makes this particular Judgment even more striking and
important.14

Paul Kagame and the RPF were creatures of U.S. power from their origins in
Uganda in the 1980s. Allan Stam, a Rwanda scholar who once served with the
U.S. Army Special Forces, notes that Kagame "had spent some time at Fort
Leavenworth - not too far before the 1994 genocide". Fort Leavenworth is
the U.S. Army's "commander general staff college where rising stars of the
U.S. military and other places go to get training as they are on track to
become generals. The training that they get there is on planning large
scale operations. It's not planning small-scale logistic things. It's not
tactics. It's about how do you plan an invasion. And apparently [Kagame]
did very well".

By 1994, Kagame's RPF possessed, in addition to the necessary manpower and
material, a sophisticated plan for seizing power in Rwanda that, in its
final execution, Stam says, "looks staggeringly like the United States'
invasion of Iraq in 1991". Stam adds that the RPF launched its final
assault on the Rwandan government almost immediately after the
assassination of Habyarimana, within 60 to 120 minutes of the
shooting-down of his jet, with "50,000 [RPF] soldiers mov[ing] into action
on two fronts, in a coordinated fashion..clearly .a plan that was not
worked out on the back of an envelope".15

So the Hutu conspiracy model, still at the center of establishment belief
even if implicitly rejected by the ICTR, suffers from the RPF-Kagame locus
of responsibility for the triggering event (the shoot-down of
Habyarimana's jet during its approach to Kigali airport) and the
incredible speed and coordinated nature of the RPF's military response,
which again suggest detailed planning, and a different set of
conspirators.

But there is also the fact that the alleged Hutu perpetrators of "The
Genocide" were the ones driven from power, with several million Hutus sent
fleeing from Rwanda by July 4, the date by which the RPF had taken Kigali.
We also see that, before the end of July, Washington withdrew diplomatic
recognition from the ousted government and awarded it to the RPF - the
"entity that exercises effective control in Rwanda," a State Department
spokesman explained. And we see that, at the same time, Washington began
dispatching U.S. troops and large-scale aid to Kigali,16 after having
lobbied and voted at the Security Council on April 21 for a withdrawal of
virtually all UN troops, over the objections of Rwanda's ambassador,17
positively facilitating both the slaughters and the RPF's conquest of
power. If the established narrative about "who used the assassination as a
pretext" were true, then Rwanda would be the first case in history in
which a minority population, suffering destruction at the hands of its
tormentors, drove its tormentors from power and assumed control of a
country, all in the span of less than one hundred days. We find this
incredible in the extreme.

So does a body of important but suppressed research. An investigation in
July and August 1994, sponsored by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) to document Hutu massacres of Tutsis, found instead massacres of
Hutu civilians in RPF-controlled areas of Rwanda on the order of
25,000-45,000. This finding led the UNHCR to take the extraordinary step
of blocking Hutu refugees from returning to Rwanda in order to protect
them. Prepared by Robert Gersony, the report, covered in the New York
Times, "concluded that there was 'an unmistakable pattern of killings and
persecutions' by soldiers of the [RPF]..aimed at Hutu populations..". But
the Gersony report "set off a bitter dispute within the world organization
and led the Secretary General to demand that the United Nations officials
refrain from discussing it," in an effort to placate the RPF and, more
importantly, its Western sponsors.18 Officially, the report "does not
exist' at the United Nations,19 and Gersony was instructed never to
discuss his findings (a ban he has largely respected).20

A memorandum drafted in September 1994 for the eyes of Secretary of State
Warren Christopher reported that the UNHCR team 'concluded that a pattern
of killing had emerged" in Rwanda, the "[RPF] and Tutsi civilian
surrogates [killing] 10,000 or more Hutu civilians per month, with the
[RPF] accounting for 95% of the killing". This memorandum added that "the
UNHR team speculated that the purpose of the killing was a campaign of
ethnic cleansing intended to clear certain areas in the south of Rwanda
for Tutsi habitation. The killings also served to reduce the population of
Hutu males and discouraged refugees from returning to claim their
lands".21 The added significance of this campaign was that the south of
Rwanda shares a border with northern Burundi, where a majority Tutsi
population long has dwelled.

Separately, U.S. academics Christian Davenport and Allan Stam estimated
that more than one million deaths occurred in Rwanda from April through
July 1994,22 concluding that the "majority of victims were likely Hutu and
not Tutsi". Initially sponsored by the ICTR, but later dropped by it, the
Davenport-Stam work shows convincingly that the theaters where the killing
was greatest correlated with spikes in RPF activity (i.e., with RFP
"surges," in their terminology), as a series of RPF advances, particularly
in the month of April 1994, created roving patterns of killing. In fact,
they describe at least seven distinct "surges" by the RFP (e.g., "they
surged forward from the North downward into the Northwest and
middle-eastern part of the country"), and every time, an RPF "surge" was
accompanied by serious local bloodbaths.23 Then, in late 2009,
Davenport-Stam reported what they called the "most shocking result" of
their research to date: "The killings in the zone controlled by the FAR
[i.e., the Hutu-controlled Armed Forces of Rwanda] seemed to escalate as
the RPF moved into the country and acquired more territory. When the RPF
advanced, large-scale killings escalated. When the RPF stopped,
large-scale killings largely decreased".24

With these facts, Davenport-Stam appeared to link the mass killings of
1994 to RPF actions. This work also suggests that the mass killings were
not directed against the Tutsi population. Moreover, a number of
observers, as well as participants in the events of 1994, claim that the
great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two
million.25

Yet Davenport-Stam shy away from asserting the most important lesson of
their work: not only that the majority of killings took place in those
theaters where the RPF "surged," but also that the RPF was the only
well-organized killing force within Rwanda in 1994, and the only one that
planned a major military offensive.26 Clearly, the chief responsibility
for Rwandan political violence belonged to the RPF, and not to the ousted
coalition government, the FAR, or any Hutu-related group. But
Davenport-Stam are inconsistent on the question of likely perpetrators,
with their evidence of probable RPF responsibility contradicted by
assertions of primary responsibility on the part of the FAR.27

In short, their work does not break away from the mainstream camp,
overall. However, they do acknowledge that forms of political violence
took place, other than a straightforward Hutu "genocide" against the
minority Tutsi - in itself, a rarity in Western circles. As with the
suppressed Gersony report, the Davenport-Stam findings caused great dismay
at the United Nations, not to mention in Washington and Kigali. Davenport
and Stam themselves have been under attack and in retreat since they were
expelled from Rwanda in November 2003, upon first reporting that the
"majority of the victims of 1994 were of the same ethnicity as the
government in power" and have been barred from entering the country ever
since.28 The established narrative's 800,000 or more largely Tutsi deaths
resulting from a "preprogrammed genocide" committed by "Hutu Power"
appears to have no basis in any facts, beyond the early claims by Kagame's
RPF and its politically motivated Western sponsors and propagandists.

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,29 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".30

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).31 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 Bruguire, 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.32 Bruguire 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,
Bruguire could not issue an arrest warrant for a head of state.33

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; Bruguire'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.34 Interestingly, the U.S.
media have reported fairly often on Bruguire'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 Bruguire'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.35 The
propaganda system works.

The invasions, assassinations, and mass slaughters by which the RPF shot
its way to power in Kigali advanced many objectives, and their support by
the "enlightened" states are regarded by many of the defense teams that
practice before the ICTR as reflecting a quid pro quo between Washington
and the RPF: Washington gains a strong military presence in Central
Africa, a diminution of its European rivals' influence, proxy armies to
serve its interests, and access to the raw material-rich Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC, known as Zaire into 1997); while the RPF renews
Tutsi-minority control of Rwanda, and gains a free hand to kill any
perceived internal rivals, along with a client state's usual immunities,
money, weapons, foreign investment, and a great deal of international
prestige.

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".36

"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".37 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.38 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.39 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.40 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.

Very big lies about Rwanda are now institutionalized and are part of the
common (mis)understanding in the West. In reality, Rwanda's Paul Kagame is
one of the great mass murderers of our time, far surpassing Uganda's
former dictator Idi Amin.41 Yet, thanks to the remarkable myth structure
that surrounds him, he enjoys immense popularity with his chief patron in
Washington, his image of big-time killer transmuted into that of an
honored savior, deserving strong Western support. Philip Gourevitch, one
of Kagame's prime apologists for many years, portrays him as an
emancipator, a "man of action with an acute human and political
intelligence," who "made things happen". He also compares Kagame to
"another famously tall and skinny civil warrior, Abraham Lincoln".42 A
more recent hagiography by Stephen Kinzer portrays Kagame as the founding
father of a New Africa, "one of the most amazing untold stories of the
modern history of revolution," as Kinzer explains it, because Kagame
overthrew a dictatorship, stopped a genocide, and turned Rwanda into "one
of the great stars" of the continent, with Western investment and
favorable PR flowing.43 In fact, what Kagame overthrew was a multiethnic,
power-sharing, coalition government; what Kagame imposed was a
Tutsi-dominated dictatorship; and what Kagame turned Rwanda and the whole
of Central Africa into was a rolling genocide that is ongoing. But it is
true that he is a shining "star" in the Western firmament and its
propaganda system.

According to this same myth structure, "The United States did almost
nothing to try to stop [the Hutu genocide]," in Samantha Power's view, but
instead "stood on the sidelines" as "bystanders to genocide".44 But this
is doubly false. What the United States and its Western allies (Britain,
Canada, and Belgium) really did was to sponsor the U.S.-trained Kagame;
support his invasion of Rwanda from Uganda and the massive ethnic
cleansing prior to April 1994; weaken the Rwandan state by forcing an
economic recession and the RPF's penetration of the government and
throughout the country; and then press for the complete removal of UN
troops. They did this because they didn't want UN troops to stand in the
way of Kagame's conquest of the country, even though Rwanda's Hutu
authorities were urging the dispatch of more UN troops.45

Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali also wanted to increase
UN troop strength,46 and complained bitterly in his memoirs about the
"obstruction" caused by the Clinton administration: "The U.S. effort to
prevent the effective deployment of a UN force for Rwanda succeeded, with
the strong support of Britain," he wrote; the Security Council "meekly
followed the United States' lead".47 (We may recall that Samantha Power
also claimed that the United States "looked away" when Indonesia invaded
East Timor in 1975, when in fact the United States gave Indonesia the
go-ahead, the arms to carry out the invasion, and diplomatic protection in
the United Nations. Whenever the United States colludes in a genocidal
process, Power pretends that U.S. guilt, at worst, comes from remaining a
mere "bystander"; never from acting as an accomplice, let alone a
perpetrator.)

In the Rwanda "genocide" case, the "human rights" community played an
unusually active role in supporting the real aggressors and killers, in
close parallel with their own governments' perspectives and policies. As
in the case of the Western aggressions against Yugoslavia (1999) and Iraq
(2003), Human Rights Watch and other nongovernmental organizations simply
ignored the "supreme international crime" (or "act of aggression by
Uganda," in Herman Cohen's phrase), while conveniently, and in hugely
biased fashion, paying attention to lesser human rights violations.48 They
downplayed or ignored entirely the refugee crisis created by the
Ugandan-RPF invasion and occupation of northern Rwanda and the armed
penetration and de facto subversion of the rest of the country by the RPF.
Every response to these by the Habyarimana government, from October 1990
on, was scrutinized for "human rights" violations and framed as evidence
of unlawful state repression. The NGOs systematically evaded the massive
evidence of RPF responsibility for the April 6, 1994, shoot-down, surely
because the finding conflicts with their deep commitment to the model of a
preplanned Hutu genocide and the RPF's self-defensive rescue of Rwanda -
the twin components of the established perpetrator-victim line. We believe
that their biases played an important role in supporting the RPF's
aggression, its penetration of the country, and the execution of its final
assault on power. Above all, we believe that their biases and propaganda
contributed substantially to the mass killings that followed - all in
accord with the needs of actual U.S. policy.

On March 8, 1993, just days before the Security Council took up the
situation in Rwanda for the first time, a consortium of four human rights
organizations led by Human Rights Watch and calling itself the
International Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Abuses in Rwanda
issued its Report.49 The Commission concluded that, rather than Rwanda's
having suffered an invasion by Uganda, from which the Habyarimana
government had yet to liberate its country, the Habyarimana government was
instead guilty of something very close to a genocidal rampage against the
country's Tutsi minority, with 2,000 dead since October 1990, "systematic
killings," widespread rape, and a "climate of terror".50 Alison Des
Forges, one of the Commission's co-chairs, later commented that this
report "put Rwandan human rights abuses squarely before the international
community".51 But it was only the Habyarimana government's alleged abuses
on which the Commission focused.

The Commission produced its report after its members spent no more than
two weeks on the ground in Rwanda in January of that year, and only two
hours in territory controlled by the RPF. The Commission itself had close
ties to the RPF, its sponsors "either directly funded by the RPF or
infiltrated by it," Robin Philpot reports.52 Prior to her work on this
Commission, Des Forges had worked for the U.S. Department of State and
National Security Council.

William Schabas, a Canadian member of the Commission, issued a press
release at the time the full report was released that bore the title
"Genocide and War Crimes in Rwanda"53.drawing attention to a category of
crime that not even the establishment narrative alleges was to begin for
another thirteen months. Stressing that, in the work of the Commission the
"word genocide has been mentioned on a number of occasions," Daniel
Jacoby, the president of the International Federation of Human Rights
League, stated that the situation in Rwanda "is not simply an ethnic
confrontation. It goes beyond that. Responsibility for the killings can be
placed extremely high".54 Human Rights Watch's annual World Report
covering 1993 noted that, when the RPF launched its major offensive that
year, "it justified the offensive in part by the need to counter human
rights abuses of the Rwanda government" such as those put squarely before
the world by the Commission's report. In short, with the brunt of its
findings coming down against the Habyarimana government, the Commission's
work served to delegitimize the government of Rwanda and enhance the
legitimacy of the armed forces of the RPF. As the RPF quickly used the
Commission's claims to justify a new killing spree, we believe the case
can be made that the overall impact of this report - and of the work of
HRW and its allies with respect to Rwanda over the past two decades - was
to underwrite the mass killings to follow, including the vast numbers in
the DRC, regularly explained as carried out by the benevolent RPF and
Uganda in search of Hutu "gnocidaires".

In a study we conducted for The Politics of Genocide, we found that the
1994 mass killings in Rwanda were referred to as "genocide" more
frequently than in any other theater of atrocities.i.e., 3,199, or nearly
triple the number for Darfur.55 This, we believe, follows from the
successful framing of the Hutus as the villains, executing a preplanned
"genocide" against the Tutsis (a nefarious and mythical bloodbath at one
and the same time) and Kagame's RPF as the defender-savior of the Tutsis
and of Rwanda and Central Africa as a whole, with the RPF unexpectedly
finding itself one day the new power in the country. But it also cleared
the ground for Kagame and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni - Kagame's ally and the
two staunchest U.S. clients in the region - to invade and occupy the DRC
and beyond periodically, without opposition from the "international
community".

The Pentagon has very actively supported these invasions of the DRC, even
more heavily than it supported the RPF's drive to take Kigali. This
support led to the killing of many thousands of Hutu refugees in a series
of mass slaughters (ca. 1994-1997), and also provided cover for a greater
series of Kagame-Museveni assaults on the DRC that have destabilized life
in this large country of perhaps sixty million people, with millions
perishing in the process.56 In his letter of resignation to Chief
Prosecutor Hassan Jallow, Filip Rentjens, a Dutch academic and one-time
expert witness before the ICTR, took issue with the "impunity" that
protects the RPF leadership from prosecution. "[RPF] crimes fall squarely
within the mandate of the ICTR," he wrote. "[T]hey are well documented,
testimonial and material proof is available, and the identity of the RPF
suspects is known..It is precisely because the regime in Kigali has been
given a sense of impunity that, during the years following 1994, it has
committed massive internationally recognized crimes in both Rwanda and the
DRC".57

This again has been compatible with Western interests and policy, as it
contributed to the replacement of Mobutu with the more amenable Laurent
Kabila (and later his son Joseph), and the opening up of the DRC to a new
surge of ruthless exploitation of precious gems, rare industrial minerals,
and timber by Western companies in a different kind of "resource war" - a
fine illustration of "shock therapy" with murderous human consequences for
the Congolese people. This plunder is the equivalent of "one tsunami every
six months" for more than a decade,58 but with large gains for a small
business and military elite. In a series of UN reports, which coined the
phrase "elite networks" to denote the "politically and economically
powerful groups involved in the exploitation activities" that lie at the
heart of the DRC genocide, we read that "The war economy controlled by the
three elite networks [Kinshasa, Kigali, and Kampala] operating in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo dominates the economic activities of much
of the Great Lakes region..Years of lawlessness and a Government incapable
of protecting its citizens have allowed the armed groups to loot and
plunder the country's resources with impunity..They have built up a
self-financing war economy centered on mineral exploitation" and sales to
the transnationals that manufacture the personal computers and cell phones
of our everyday lives.59

The U.S.-supported leaders Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni have undeniably
been key actors in the terrible bloodbaths of the DRC. Considering their
U.S. support, these were benign bloodbaths, in contrast with killings in
Darfur or Kosovo. In research for our book, we found that in only
seventeen items in the large number of newspapers we surveyed did someone
refer to deaths in the DRC as "genocide". This amounted to one "genocide"
reference for every 317,647 deaths (based on an estimated 5,400,000 deaths
for the period under consideration). When we contrast this with how the
same newspapers treated, say, the nefarious bloodbath of the Kosovo
Albanians that was attributable to an official enemy, where only twelve
deaths were necessary to receive one "genocide" reference,60 the basic
outline of the politics of genocide could not be made more stark or clear.

Notes
1.. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, .The Dismantling of Yugoslavia,.
Monthly Review 59, no. 5 (October 2007), 1.

2.. Allison Des Forges, .Leave None to Tell the Story.: Genocide in Rwanda
(New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), 5-6, 185.

3.. See Prosecutor v. Augustin Ndindiliyimana (or Military II)
(ICTR-00-56-I), Transcript, September 19, 2006, 4, lines 13-22. Here we
note that, in contrast to the trials and related courtroom activity before
the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY),
which transcribes and archives to its official website virtually
everything (except for redacted materials), virtually none of the trial
and related courtroom activity before the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda (ICTR) is archived on the ICTR.s official website. In
consequence, we are unable to provide Web links to much of the ICTR.s
material.

4.. For the extended testimony of Prosecution witness Alison Des Forges,
see Prosecutor v. Augustin Ndindiliyimana, September 18, 2006, through
October 16, 2006, which produced a total of seventeen days of testimony.
Given that Rwanda.s civilian intelligence services were in the hands of a
pro-Rwandan Patriotic Front minister, three consecutive prime ministers
under a power-sharing accord had been either pro- or subsidized by the
RPF, and Rwanda.s .integrated. military then combined the armed forces of
the Tutsi-led RPF that was seeking the overthrow of the government
alongside the government.s regular army, the cross-examination of Des
Forges from September 21 on shows her failing to support the standard
model of the .Rwandan genocide..

5.. Alison Des Forges died in a commuter plane crash on February 12, 2009,
while returning to her home in Buffalo, New York. An obituary written by
Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth praised his longtime
colleague for .her central role in the prosecution of the Hutus. (.A
Heroine for Human Rights,. Huffington Post, February 15, 2009). It is true
that Des Forges acted energetically on behalf of the Prosecution at the
ICTR and in similar venues against the Hutu in general, but the perception
of her .expertise. flowed less from her knowledge of Rwanda, than her
tirelessness as an advocate for the standard model of the .Rwandan
genocide,. and the thoroughness with which this model has been
institutionalized in the United States and Britain. In 1991, Des Forges
went to Rwanda on behalf of the U.S. government, and in her own words,
.attempted to put my knowledge into a policy-oriented framework.. .What
was new was the relationship to the United States government,. she
explained. Later, .I went to Rwanda in July of .92 as a consultant to the
United States government, again for the same democracy project. Then I
went back in the first part of January .93 as the co-chair of an
international commission to investigate human rights abuses in Rwanda..
(Here quoting Des Forges.s testimony in Prosecutor of the Tribunal Against
Jean Paul Akayasu (ICTR-96-4), Transcript, February 12, 1997, 112-14.) As
the real policy of the U.S. government from at least 1990 on was
regime-change in Rwanda, namely, the ouster of the Hutu government by the
RPF, as well as the ouster of France from the region (France had backed
the Hutu government), we can easily see how Des Forges.s work beginning in
1991 helped provide cover for the U.S. takeover of as many as four
countries via its proxies in Uganda and the RPF in Rwanda. In short,
Alison Des Forges.s career is best understood in terms of the services she
performed on behalf of U.S. power-projection in Central Africa, with this
policy-oriented work couched in the rhetoric of .human rights.. In the
process, Des Forges badly misinformed a whole generation of scholars,
activists, and the cause of peace and justice.

6.. See Jonathan Clayton, .Rwanda to appeal to UN Security Council on
rebel invasion,. Reuters, October 15, 1990; UN Security Council Resolution
812 (S/RES/812), March 12, 1993; and UN Security Council Resolution 846
(S/RES/846), June 22, 1993.

7.. For compelling evidence on this point, see Robin Philpot, Rwanda 1994:
Colonialism Dies Hard (E-Text as posted to the Taylor Report Website,
2004), esp. Chap. 1-7.

8.. Herman J. Cohen, Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a
Troubled Continent (New York: St. Martin.s Press, 2000), 177-78.

9.. See Philpot, Rwanda 1994, esp. the Conclusion.

10.. See the Peace Agreement between the Government of the Republic of
Rwanda and the Rwandese Patriotic Front, signed at Arusha on 4 August 1993
(A/48/824-S/26915) U.N. General Assembly, December 23, 1993. A total of
seven documents were gathered together as the .Arusha Peace Accords,. the
earliest the N.Sele Cease-fire Agreement dating from 1991.

11.. See Judgment, The Prosecutor v. Thoneste Bagosora et al.
(ICTR-98-41-T), International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, December 18,
2008. The four defendants in this case were .Colonel Thoneste Bagosora,
the directeur de cabinet of the Ministry of Defence, General Gratien
Kabiligi, the head of the operations bureau (G-3) of the army general
staff, Major Aloys Ntabakuze, the commander of the elite Para Commando
Battalion, and Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva, the commander of the Gisenyi
operational sector. (para. 1).

12.. Ibid., para. 13, quoting from the Oral Summary of the case read in
court the day the verdict was delivered. For the Judgment.s full
discussion of the acquittal on this charge, see Sect. 2.1, .Conspiracy to
Commit Genocide,. para. 2084-2112.

13.. See UN Security Council Resolution 827 (S/RES/827), May 25, 1993,
which established the ICTY to .prosecut[e] persons responsible for serious
violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of
the former Yugoslavia between 1 January 1991 and a date to be determined
by the Security Council upon the restoration of peace.. (para. 2); and see
UN Security Council Resolution 955 (S/RES/955), November 8, 1994, which
established the ICTR to .prosecut[e] persons responsible for genocide and
other serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in
the territory of Rwanda and Rwandan citizens responsible for genocide and
other such violations committed in the territory of neighbouring States,
between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 1994. (para. 1).

14.. For criticisms of the ICTY, see Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away
with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes Against Humanity
(Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004); and John Laughland Travesty: The Trial
of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice (New
York: Pluto Press, 2007). For criticisms of the ICTR, see Hans Kchler,
Global Justice or Global Revenge: International Criminal Justice at the
Crossroads (New York: Springer-Verlag Wien, 2003); and Charles Onana, Les
Secrets de la Justice Internationale: Enqutes truques sur le gnocide
rwandais (Paris: Editions Duboiris, 2005).

15.. Allan C. Stam, .Coming to a New Understanding of the Rwanda
Genocide,. a lecture before the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy,
University of Michigan, February 18, 2009, our transcription.

16.. .Rwandan embassy closed, U.S. seeks to remove Rwanda from UN
Council,. Agence France Presse, July 15, 1994; .Clinton Orders Nonstop Aid
Flights for Rwandan Victims,. Associated Press, July 22, 1994; .U.S.
recognizes new government in Rwanda,. Reuters, July 29, 1994; .200 U.S.
troops going into Kigali to open airport,. Reuters, July 29, 1994.

17.. See UN Security Council Resolution 912 (S/RES/912), April 21, 1994,
para. 8. The force levels of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda were
reduced to a target of 270 infantry, down from 1515 on April 20, and 2,165
as of April 6. In the words of Rwandan UN Ambassador Jean-Damascne
Bizimana: .[T]he international community does not seem to have acted in an
appropriate manner to reply to the anguished appeal of the people of
Rwanda. This question has often been examined from the point of view of
the ways and means to withdraw [UNAMIR], without seeking to give the
appropriate weight to the concern of those who have always believed,
rightly, that, in view of the security situation now prevailing in Rwanda,
UNAMIR.s members should be increased to enable it to contribute to the
re-establishment of the cease-fire and to assist in the establishment of
security conditions that could bring an end to the violence..The option
chosen by the Council, reducing the number of troops in UNAMIR.is not a
proper response to this crisis.. .The situation concerning Rwanda,. UN
Security Council (S/PV.3368), April 21, 1994, 6.

18.. Raymond Bonner, .U.N. Stops Returning Rwandan Refugees,. New York
Times, September 18, 1994. Also see Chris McGreal and Edward Luce, .Death
Threats Force Out Aid Workers,. The Guardian, October 3, 1994; Jean-Michel
Stoullig, .UN spotlights claims of summary Rwandan reprisal killings,.
Agence France Presse, October 4, 1994.

19.. See the treatment of the Gersony Report in Des Forges, .Leave None to
Tell the Story,. specifically .The Gersony Mission,. 726-732, which
reproduces the UNHCR letter stating that the Gersony Report .does not
exist. (727).

20.. See the recollection of a meeting with Robert Gersony in Grard
Prunier, Africa.s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making
of a Continental Catastrophe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009),
15-16; and n.59-62, 373. As Prunier describes it: .Gersony.s conclusion
was that between early April and mid-September 1994 the RPF had killed
between 25,000 and 45,000 people, including Tutsis. The UNHCR, which had
commissioned the study for quite a different purpose, was appalled. (16).

21.. George E. Moose, .Human Rights Abuses in Rwanda,. Information
Memorandum to The Secretary, U.S. Department of State, undated though
clearly drafted between September 17 and 20, 1994. This document was
called to our attention by Peter Erlinder, the director of the Rwanda
Documents Project at William Mitchell College of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota,
ICTR Military-1 Exhibit, DNT 264.

22.. Christian Davenport and Allan Stam, Rwandan Political Violence in
Space and Time, unpublished manuscript, 2004 (available at Christian
Davenport.s personal website, .Project Writings.). For all of Rwanda from
April through July 1994, these authors report a total of 1,063,336 deaths
(28), based on their analysis of a minimum of eight different mortality
estimates for the relevant period.

23.. Ibid., see esp. 30-33.

24.. Christian Davenport and Allan C. Stam, .What Really Happened in
Rwanda?. Miller-McCune, October 6, 2009.

25.. In 1999, former RPF military officer Christophe Hakizimana submitted
a letter to the UN Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of the United
Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda (S/1999/1257). In his letter,
which detailed the RPF.s military strategy from 1990 on, Hakizimana
claimed that the RPF was responsible for killing as many as two million
Hutu in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and he informed the
Commission that by indicting Hutu, the ICTR was focusing on the wrong side
in the conflict. We base this on personal communications with the
international criminal lawyer Christopher Black of Toronto, who, since
2000, has served as defense counsel before the ICTR on behalf of the Hutu
General Augustin Nindiliyimana, a former Chief of Staff of the Rwanda
Gendarmerie (or National Police).

26.. For a more critical discussion of these issues, see Stam, .Coming to
a New Understanding of the Rwanda Genocide,. and our discussion of this
above.

27.. See Davenport and Stam, Rwandan Political Violence in Space and Time,
2004. Davenport-Stam organize their work according to three
.jurisdictions. that we find deeply flawed: Namely, territory controlled
by the Rwandan government and army, by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and
territory that falls along the lines of battle between the two. They write
that .the actor with the greatest monopoly of coercion within a specific
locale is generally held to be responsible for violent behavior in that
locale. (25). (Also see Figure 1, .1994 Rwandan Political Violence: Total
Deaths by Troop Control,. 29.) On the basis of this problematic
assumption, Davenport-Stam contend that as .the majority of deaths took
place within areas under the control of [the Rwandan government and
army].totaling 891, 295,. the government and army are responsible for
these deaths, which .could be classified. as genocide, among other
possible crimes (28). But as the RPF in fact moved rapidly and decisively
from battlefield success to battlefield success to control of the entire
country, it is frankly counterintuitive to treat the badly out-gunned,
out-maneuvered, and ultimately routed government forces as in control of
anything. On the contrary, the chief responsibility for Rwandan political
violence in 1994 lay with the RPF and its project of driving the coalition
government from power and seizing the Rwandan state.

28.. Davenport and Stam, .What Really Happened in Rwanda?.

29.. Affidavit of Michael Andrew Hourigan, International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda, November 27, 2006. For other sources that discuss the
suppression of the Hourigan memorandum, see Philpot, Rwanda 1994, esp.
Chap. 6, .It shall be called a plan crash.; Mark Colvin, .Questions
unanswered 10 years after Rwandan genocide,. PM, Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, March 30, 2004; Mark Doyle, .Rwanda .plane crash probe
halted.,. BBC News, February 9, 2007; and Nick McKenzie, .UN .shut down.
Rwanda probe,. The Age, February 10, 2007.

30.. Richard Goldstone.s remarks were reported by the Danish newspaper
Berlingske Tidende. We are taking them from .ICTR/Attack.April 6th 1994
Attack Fits the ICTR.s Mandate (Goldstone),. Hirondelle News Agency,
December 13, 2006.

31.. See Philpot, Rwanda 1994, Chap. 6, .It shall be called a plane
crash..

32.. See Jean-Louis Bruguire, Request for the Issuance of International
Arrest Warrants, Tribunal de Grande Instance, Paris, France, November 21,
2006, 15-16 (para. 100-103).

33.. Andrew England, .Rwanda president faces arrest,. Financial Times,
November 22, 2006; Chris McGreal, .French judge accuses Rwandan President
of assassination,. The Guardian, November 22, 2006; Fergal Keane, .Will we
ever learn the truth about this genocide?. The Independent, November 22,
2006.

34.. Findings based on both Factiva (tnwp) and NewsBank searches from
January 1, 2000 through December 31, 2008. The sole truly serious effort
in a U.S. newspaper to report and analyze both Michael Hourigan.s and
Judge Bruguire.s work was Sebastian Rotella, .French Magistrate Posits
Theory on Rwandan Assassination,. Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2007
(later reprinted in the Seattle Times).

35.. Findings based on both Factiva (tnwp) and NewsBank searches from
January 1, 2000 through December 31, 2008. Using the Factiva database to
search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post for
mentions of the name .Bruguire,. we found approximately 100 items; but
when we narrowed this search down to Bruguire.s work in relation to
Rwanda, we found only five items in all. Likewise with the NewsBank
database for all U.S. newspapers: Bruguire.s work was reported in well
over 400 items, but his work in relation to Rwanda in only 17.

36.. Carla Del Ponte, with Chuck Sudetic, Madame Prosecutor:
Confrontations with Humanity.s Worst Criminals and the Culture of
Impunity: A Memoir (New York: Other Press, 2009), esp. Chap. 9,
.Confronting Kigali: 2002 and 2003,. 223-241. Also see Steven Edwards,
.Del Ponte says UN caved to Rwandan pressure,. National Post, September
17, 2003.

37.. .Interview with Carla Del Ponte..If I Had Had the Choice, I Would
Have Remained Prosecutor of the ICTR.,. Hirondelle News Agency, September
16, 2003.

38.. See Florence Hartmann, Paix et Chatiment: Les Guerres Secretes de la
Politique et de la Justice Internationales (Paris: Flammarion, 2007),
261-75.

39.. .ICTR/Military I.Dallaire Wanted Americans to Investigate on
Presidential Plane Crash,. Hirondelle News Agency, February 9, 2004. In
one illustration of Jallow.s foot-dragging, he told the UN Security
Council in December 2005 that the .allegations made against the Rwandan
Patriotic Front have also been under consideration. Following the
evaluation of the results of earlier investigations, it has become
necessary to carry out additional inquiries into these allegations.. (UN
Security Council (S/PV.5328), December 15, 2005, 14.) But Jallow.s
.additional inquiries. were strictly pro forma, and the same delaying
tactics served him through the end of 2008, at which date, no member of
the RPF had ever been indicted by the ICTR, notwithstanding the chief
prosecutor.s .additional inquiries..

40.. For the ICTR.s founding Statute, see the Annex to UN Security Council
Resolution 955 (S/RES/955), November 8, 1994. For a complete list of every
case ever to have been indicted by the ICTR, see .Status of Cases..

41.. Conservative estimates of the number of Ugandans killed under the Idi
Amin dictatorship (1971-1979) are 100,000 victims, with high-end estimates
of some 300,000. See Richard H. Ulmann, .Human Rights and Economic Power:
The United States Versus Idi Amin,. Foreign Affairs, April, 1978. As
Ulmann noted at the time, .In any contemporary lexicon of horror, Uganda
is synonymous with state-become-slaughterhouse.. This is manifestly not
true of Rwanda or the Democratic Republic of Congo in the areas under
Kagame-RPF control: No matter how many lives Kagame and the RFP have
taken, and these number many times the Idi Amin toll, their reign of
terror has never entered the contemporary lexicon of horror.

42.. Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be
killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998),
225. Gourevitch concludes: .Kagame had proven himself quite effective at
getting what he wanted, and if Kagame truly wanted to find an original
response to his original circumstances, the only course open to him was
emancipation. That was certainly how he presented it, and I didn.t doubt
that that was what he wanted.. 226.

43.. Stephen Kinzer, A Thousand Hills: Rwanda.s Rebirth and the Man Who
Dreamed It (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008). Here we are quoting
Kinzer.s own words from a two-minute promotional video that his publisher
circulated in 2008. (See .Kinzer speaks about the President Kagame,. as
posted to YouTube.) At the hagiographic extreme for the literature on Paul
Kagame and Rwanda, every chapter of Kinzer.s book is introduced by quotes
from Kagame (.For me, human rights is about everything. (Chap. 18)).
.Kagame is the man of the hour in modern Africa,. Kinzer writes. .The eyes
of all who hope for a better Africa are upon him. No other leader has made
so much out of so little, and none offers such encouraging hope for the
continent.s future.. 337.

44.. Samantha Power, .A Problem from Hell.: America and the Age of
Genocide (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 334-335. Also see Power,
.Bystanders to Genocide,. The Atlantic, September, 2001.

45.. See the statement by the Rwandan UN Ambassador Jean-Damascne Bizimana
at n.17, above.

46.. See Special Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations
Assistance Mission for Rwanda (S/1994/470), April 20, 1994, specifically
.Alternative 1,. para. 13-14, which Boutros-Ghali himself endorsed.

47.. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga (New York:
Random House, 1999), 129-41; here 138, 135. According to Robin Philpot,
Boutros-Ghali told him on the record that .The genocide in Rwanda was 100
percent the responsibility of the Americans!. See the Introduction to
Philpot, Rwanda 1994.

48.. See Edward S. Herman, David Peterson, and George Szamuely, .Human
Rights Watch in Service to the War Party,. Electric Politics, February 26,
2007.

49.. See Report of the International Commission of Inquiry into human
rights violations in Rwanda since October 1, 1990 (New York, March, 1993).
Besides Africa Watch (Human Rights Watch, USA), the other NGOs behind this
Commission were the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues
(France), the Inter-African Union for Human Rights and the Rights of
Peoples, and the International Center for Human Rights and Democratic
Development (Canada).

50.. Ibid. In a section titled .The Question of Genocide,. after laying
out Article II of the Genocide Convention, the Commission concluded that
.many Rwandans have been killed for the sole reason that they were Tutsi,.
although it added that .casualty figures.may be below the threshold
required to establish genocide,. 29. Besides Africa Watch (Human Rights
Watch, USA), the other NGOs behind this Commission were the International
Federation of Human Rights Leagues (France), the Inter-African Union for
Human Rights and the Rights of Peoples, and the International Center for
Human Rights and Democratic Development (Canada).

51.. Des Forges, .Leave None to Tell the Story,. 93.

52.. Philpot, Rwanda 1994, Chap. 4, .Scouts at Her Majesty.s Service..

53.. Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda.s
Genocide (New York: Zed Books, 2000), 56.

54.. .Rwanda: Report blames government for mass slayings,. Inter Press
Service, March 8, 1993.

55.. See Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), Table 1: .Differential
attributions of .genocide. to different theaters of atrocities,. 35.

56.. See Benjamin Coghlan et al., Mortality in the Democratic Republic of
Congo: An Ongoing Crisis, International Rescue Committee-Burnet Institute,
January, 2008, ii. Also see the accompanying Press Release, January 22,
2008.

57.. Filip Reyntjens. January 11, 2005 letter of resignation to Hassan
Jallow is quoted in John Laughland, A History of Political Trials: From
Charles I to Saddam Hussein (New York: Peter Lang Ltd., 2008), 211. The
Reyntjens letter continued: .Article 6(2) of the [ICTR.s] Statute
explicitly rules out immunity, including for Heads of state or government
or for responsible government officials. This principle is contravened
when, as is currently the case, a message is sent out that those in power
need not fear prosecution,. 211-12.

58.. The phrase .one tsunami every six months. was used in reference to
the eastern Congo by then-head of the UN Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland, based on the belief at the time that the
December 26, 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean had taken 300,000 lives.
Hence, in Egeland.s words: .In terms of the human lives lost.this is the
greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today and it is beyond belief
that the world is not paying more attention.. In Peter Daou, .Congo
Crisis: .One Tsunami Every Six Months,.. AlertNet, March 17, 2005.

59.. See the final two reports by Mahmoud Kassem et al. of the UN Panel of
Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms
of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo: S/2002/1146, October 8,
2002 (para. 152-153, 12); and S/2003/1027, October 15, 2003. Also see Bjrn
Aust and Willem Jaspers, From Resource War to .Violent Peace.: Transition
in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bonn International Center for
Conversion, Paper No. 50, 2006. These authors note that approximately
one-third of the earth.s known cobalt deposits, and two-thirds of its
known columbo tantalite (coltan) deposits, are to be found in the DRC
(Appendix 2, 149).

60.. Based on an estimated 4,000 deaths for the period under
consideration.

==end==

Now that you have some idea of recent history, here's a chance to be
filled in on events since late April (when the May MR was published.)

"Rwanda NOW - Prospects for the Rwanda August 9 Election: What Are the
Stakes in Central Africa for US Progressives?"

Speaker - Peter Erlinder:
Professor of Law at William Mitchell College of Law
Lead Defense Counsel at the UN Tribunal for Rwanda
Past National President (93-97) of the National Lawyers Guild
Recently released from a Rwanda prison

Friday July 30 3-5pm
Blue Moon Coffee House
39th & EAST Lake Mpls
About 1.5 miles west of the river
Lots of free on-street parking. Bus line.
612-721-9230

Contact: Gena Berglund gena [at] bergberg.net 651-208-7964


--------5 of 5--------

 In hell there are just
 two parties. That's how and why
 it got to be hell.


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