© As International - Community for SurViVors: February 2009

Friday, February 27, 2009

Plainte contre les personnalités responsables des massacres de réfugiés

23 Février 2009
Son Excellence Mr. Luis Moreno-Ocampo
Procureur Général,
Cour Pénale Internationale
Post Office Box 19519
2500 CM The Hague
The Netherlands
Réference: Plainte contre les personnalités responsables des massacres de réfugiés
rwandais regroupés à Kasiki, Lubero, République Démocratique du Congo (RDC).
A- Plainte contre:
1. Le Général Major John Numbi, inspecteur de police de la République
Démocratique du Congo, commandant second des opérations militaires contre les
réfugiés rwandais.
2. Le Général Kabarebe James, chef d’Etat Major de l’Armée Rwandaise.
3. Monsieur Thambwe Mwamba, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères de la République
Démocratique du Congo.
4. Monsieur Sayinzonga, Fonctionnaire rwandais chargé de la commission de
démobilisation.
B- Les Faits:
 Depuis 1996, la coalition des forces dites « Alliance des Forces Démocratiques
de Libération » et l’Armée Rwandaise ont lancé des attaques sur les camps de
réfugiés rwandais à l’Est du Zaïre. Les organisations de défense des droits de
• FEIDAR
Fédération Internationale des Associations Rwandaises (Asbl loi 1901)
B.P. 36535
45065 Orléans Cedex 2
France
• La Société Civile Rwandaise (SOCIRWA)
Centre de Lutte ontre l'Impunité et l'Injustice au Rwanda (CLIIR)
Boulevard Léopold II, n°227
1080 BRUXELLES
l’homme parlent de centaines milliers de réfugiés tués et d’autres disparus.

Le rapporteur spécial des Nations unies pour les droits de l'Homme en RDC,
Monsieur Roberto Garreton, chargé d’enquêter sur le massacre des réfugiés
hutu, a dans son rapport préliminaire, établi que « des massacres de caractère
ethnique ont eté commis, dont les victimes sont en grande partie des hutu,
rwandais, burundais et zaïrois » et conclu que « certaines de ces allégations
pourraient constituer des actes de génocide. »
De 1998 jusqu’en 2002, pour la 2eme fois, l’armée Rwandaise a envahi
militairement la République Démocratique du Congo pour renverser le régime
KABILA et pourchasser, les réfugiés rwandais survivants des massacres de
1996 à 1997. Plusieurs milliers réfugiés furent sauvagement tués. Plus de 5
millions de congolais furent massacrés. Il n’y a jamais eu d’enquête et les
auteurs de ces tueries et massacres sont toujours les mêmes.
Le 26 Mai 2008, dans le souci de résoudre le problème des réfugiés rwandais
sur son territoire, la présidence de la République Démocratique du Congo a
organisé à Kisangani une conférence à laquelle des représentants des réfugiés
rwandais ont pris part. Un programme complet d’action convenu entre le
gouvernment de la RDC and le leadership politique du Congres National pour la
Démocratie (CND) ( une coalition entre le Ralliement pour l’Unité et la
Démocratie - RUD-Urunana et le Rassemblement du Peuple Rwandais- RPR)
fût adopté sous l’appellation « Feuille de Route de Kisangani ».
Au courant du mois de Juillet 2008, le leadership politique du Congres National
pour la Démocratie (CND) a rassemblé 158 refugiés sur le site de Kasiki, Nord-
Kivu, apprêté par les autorités congolaises
Le 31 Juillet 2008, une cérémonie de désarmement volontaire des réfugiés
conduite par Le Ministre des Affaires Etrangères et de la Coopération
internationale de la RDC accompagné du vice ministre de l’intérieur, du viceministre
de la défense, du Gouverneur de la province du Nord Kivu et beaucoup
d’autres personnalités du régime de Kinshasa a eu lieu à Kasiki en territoire de
LUBERO en présence d’une délégation des autorités rwandaises, des
représentants de l’ONU et ceux de la communauté internationale.
Le 6 et le 8 Août 2008, la mission des Nations Unies au Congo (MONUC) a
procédé à l’identification de ces réfugiés.
Le 8 Août 2008, les Ambassadeurs britanniques basés en RDC et au Rwanda
ont visité les 158 refugiés désarmes Kasiki
Le 23 Janvier 2009, une délégation de ces réfugiés rassemblés et désarmés
s’est rendue à Kigali dans le but de s’enquérir des conditions de vie qui les
attendent une fois rapatriés au Rwanda. A l’issue de cette mission, la
délégation des réfugiés a rédigé et publié un rapport de visite ad hoc.
Le 20 Janvier 2009, les troupes rwandaises sont entrées sur le territoire de la
RDC suite aux accords signés entre le Rwanda et la RDC. L’objectif principal :
désarmer, neutraliser militairement ou rapatrier de force les réfugiés rwandais
installés en RDC.
Le 27 Janvier 2009, un accord entre le CND (Congres National pour la
Démocratie) et le gouvernement de la RDC fût signé à Rome. D’après ledit
accord, la zone de Kasiki devrait être déclarée Zone de Paix, où les gens qui ne
veulent pas se battre ou qui fuient les combats devaient être accueillis pour
recevoir protection et aide humanitaire.
Dans la nuit du 7 au 8 Février 2009, le site de Kasiki a été attaquée par des
éléments des forces armées congolaises (FARDC) et rwandaises (RDF).
Les 158 réfugiés composés de femmes, d’enfants et d’hommes de tous âges
désarmés et identifiés par la MONUC ont pris fuite et se sont dispersés dans la
forêt. Ils ont été poursuivis et tués un à un par les troupes coalisées de la RDC
et du Rwanda
Le 10 Février 2009, le Ministre Lambert Menge Omalanda reconnaissait devant
les médias congolais que l’attaque avait été organisée à Kinshasa et au Kivu
par des “extrémistes” et “pécheurs en eau trouble qui se mettent en travers de
ce processus de pacification de l’est du pays.”

C- Accusations:

Nous accusons la coalition militaire rwando-congolaise d’avoir planifié, ordonné, et exécuté
l’attaque de Kasiki et le massacre de réfugiés. Cette coalition était sous la direction de:
1. Général Major John NUMBI en sa qualité de commandant adjoint des opérations
chargées de pourchasser tous les réfugiés rwandais sur le territoire de la RDC,
2. Général James KABAREBE en sa qualité de commandant en chef des opérations
chargées de pourchasser tous les réfugiés rwandais se trouvant sur le sol congolais.
3. Le Général Jean Bosco Ntaganda, du CNDP
4. Le Colonel Mugabo de PARECO.
Nous accusons les personnalités ci-dessous d’avoir attisé la haine envers les réfugiés
rassemblés à Kasiki en véhiculant dans les médias un discours de haine, dans le seul but de
justifier des opérations portant atteinte à la vie de ces réfugiés:
1. Monsieur Thambwe Mwamba ayant qualifié, dans les médias, tous les réfugiés rwandais
en RDC, de cancer qu’il faut extirper par tous les moyens.
2. Monsieur Sayinzoga ayant, sur les ondes de la BBC-Kinyarwanda (la date et l’heure?),
traité d’extrémistes « Intagondwa », d’ennemis du pays, et d’empoisonneurs et de
génétiquement criminels, les membres de la délégation ayant effectué la visite exploratoire au
Rwanda.
Nous suspectons les soldats de la coalition rwando-congolaise sous la direction ci-haut citée
d’avoir organisé une chasse à l’homme contre les réfugiés désarmés rassemblés à Kasiki,
lesquels réfugiés avaient, à l’exception de 3 personnes, réaffirmé leur volonté de rentrer
pacifiquement au Rwanda.
Enfin, nous demandons que des enquêtes approfondies contre les personnalités congolaises
et rwandaises mises en cause soient conduites et, le cas échéant, que les criminels soient
traduits en justice conformément aux articles pertinents des statuts de la Cour Pénale
Internationale (CPI).
Dans l’espoir que notre plainte retiendra votre très haute attention, nous vous prions d’agréer,
Monsieur le Procureur général, l’expression de nos sentiments distingués.
Fait à Bruxelles, le 23 février 2009
Joseph MATATA Jean Marie Vianney NDAGIJIMANA
SOCIRWA c/o CLIIR) FEIDAR (Asbl Loi 1901)
Boulevard Léopold II, n°227 B.P. 36535 45065
1080 BRUXELLES, BELGIQUE Orleans Cedex 2, FRANCE
Tél/Fax : 32.81.60.11.13 Tel: +33659222780
GSM: 32.476.70.15.69
Email : cliir2004@yahoo.fr
feidar.contact@yahoo.fr
Copie pour information à:
Son Excellence Mr Ban Ki-Moon
Secrétaire Général, Nations Unies
Ms. Navanethem Pillay
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Palais des Nations
CH-1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland
M. António Guterres
Haut Commissaraire des Nations Unies pour les Refugies
Case postale 2500
1211 Genève 2
Suisse.
His Excellency Mr. Jonas Gahr
Ministre, Affaires Extérieures, Norway
Dr. Susan Rice
Représentente Permanente à l’ONU, USA
Fax: 212-415-4053
H.E. John Sawers
Représentent Permanent à l’ONU, UK
Fax : 212-745-9316
H.E. Mr. Zhang Yesui
Représentent Permanent à l’ONU, Republique Populaire de Chine
Fax: 212-634-0042
H.E. Jean-Maurice Ripert
Représentent Permanent à l’ONU, France
Fax: 212-421 6889
H.E. Vitaly Churkin
Représentent Permanent à l’ONU, Federation Russe
Fax : 212-628-0252
Msgr Kuye Ndondo
ECC
Msgr Matteo Zuppi
Communauté Sant’Egidio
Kåre Lode
SIK - Norway
Kenneth Roth,
Executive Director, Human Rights Watch
350 Fifth Avenue, 34th floor
New York, NY 10118-3299 USA
Fondation S’Olivar
Mallorca, Espagne
Amigo Ngonde Funsu
Association Africaine de Défense des Droits de l’Homme (ASADHO)
Tel: +243 998246147 , +243 815181707

The Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and Nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a "time", yet It cannot be destroyed. ==> Wolverine

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Critic of murderous Kagame regime in Rwanda killed in crash of Continental Flight 3407 (16.02.09)

The evening before Human Rights Watch expert on Rwanda Alison Des Forges’ critical quote on the secret deal worked out between Rwanda’s murderous U.S.-backed President Paul Kagame and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) President Joseph Kabila appeared in a Washington Post article written by Stephanie McCrummen from Kigali, the Rwandan capital, Des Forges died in a the fiery crash of Continental Flight 3407, en route from Newark to Buffalo, Des Forges’ home town.

Des Forges, an expert on the ethnic violence that has swept Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern DRC, was returning from a trip to Europe on Human Rights Watch business.

Also on Flight 3407 was Beverly Eckert, a 9/11 widow whose husband, Sean Rooney, died on 9/11 while in his Aon Risk Services office in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. On Dec. 19, 2003, Eckert wrote an op ed in USA Today titled “My Silence Cannot be Bought.” She rejected a pay-out offer from the 9/11 victims’ compensation fund and opted for a lawsuit to seek out answers to her many questions about 9/11.

She wrote, “I want to know why two 110-story skyscrapers collapsed in less than two hours and why escape and rescue options were so limited.” She added, “I say to Congress, big business and everyone who conspired to divert attention from government and private-sector failures: My husband’s life was priceless, and I will not let his death be meaningless. My silence cannot be bought.”

Much will be written, undoubtedly, about Beverly Eckert and her suspicions about 9/11. But it was Des Forges who had an enemy in the Kagame regime, which has, in the past, used assassinations in Rwanda and abroad as a tool to silence its critics. One such operation was planned against this editor in Tanzania.

On Dec. 3, 2008, WMR reported: “The Rwandan government, through its political and intelligence network in Washington, applied pressure on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, to reject this editor’s testimony on two different occasions about the 1994 plane shoot down [of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi]. On a third occasion, I received word that Kagame’s intelligence team in Arusha would ensure I would “never make it” to my U.N.-arranged guest house on the way from Kilimanjaro International Airport.

Heeding the warning about Kagame’s intentions that were passed on to me by a friendly African intelligence service, I quickly cancelled my trip to Arusha. Members of Rwanda’s regime have been indicted by judges in France and Spain for murder.

Des Forges was quoted in the Post criticizing a deal worked out and signed in Goma, DRC, on Dec. 5, 2008, between Kagame and Kabila that permits Rwandan troops to legally enter the DRC to ostensibly clean out elements of the Rwandan Hutu militia - the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) - operating in the country. However, the FDLR is seen by both Rwanda and the DRC as a spent force that is an internal DRC problem and not a threat to Rwanda.

In return for allowing Rwandan troops into the DRC, Rwanda “arrested” its Tutsi proxy rebel general, Gen. Laurent Nkunda, after he fled the eastern DRC into Rwanda. Nkunda was the head of the Rwandan-sponsored National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), which replaced the former Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD). The RCD was involved in the 1998 second invasion of the DRC by Rwanda, an invasion supported by the Clinton administration. Rwandan troops first invaded the DRC in 1996 to overthrow the then-Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

WMR’s sources in Africa report that Nkunda is not under real arrest in Rwanda because he is not in jail. In addition, Rwanda is ignoring repeated extradition requests from the DRC for Nkunda to be returned, but it appears that these requests are merely “window dressing” attempts by Kabila’s government to show that it is interested in putting the rebel general on trial. Nkunda, a self-declared Christian preacher, is linked to a shadowy U.S.-based Pentecostal group called the “Rebels for Christ.” Nkunda is also an open admirer of George W. Bush.

Kabila, according to WMR’s African sources, is suspected of being an ethnic Burundian Tutsi who was adopted by his father and predecessor as president, Laurent D. Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001, in a plot said to have been engineered by Rwanda with the help of Angolan elements.

Des Forges questioned the Rwandan-DRC pact in her interview with the Post. She said, “Is the FDLR now suddenly on the verge of becoming more militarily powerful? I don’t think we’ve seen that … And if they haven’t, then what you have is Rwanda trotting out an old warhorse of an excuse to go in again. The question is, what is the intent?”

Des Forges obviously knew the answer. With U.S. military forces of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) now backing a joint Ugandan-DRC offensive in the northeastern DRC to wipe out the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), with hundreds of civilian casualties in the DRC and Uganda, and a secret pact worked out between Kabila and Kagame to permit Rwandan troops to occupy the eastern DRC, the target of both operations is securing the vast territory that is rich in commodities that the United States, Britain and Israel - all allies of Uganda and Rwanda - want badly. Those commodities are gold, diamonds, columbite-tantalite (coltan), platinum and natural gas.
And Des Forges’ criticism of the pact between Kagame and Kabila earned her some powerful enemies ranging from the murderous Kagame, who will not think twice about sending his agents to silence critics abroad, and international interests who want to see nothing prevent them from looting the DRC’s vast mineral and energy resources.

Eckert’s criticism of the 9/11 Commission report and her honest skepticism about the events of that day in 2001 also earned her some powerful enemies. The sudden crash of Continental Flight 3407 eliminated two spirited enemies of those who hide in the shadows of government and business around the world.

This story first appeared on WayneMadsenReport.com [4]. Editor Wayne Madsen writes: (T)his online publication tackles the “politically incorrect” and “politically embarrassing” stories and holds government officials accountable for their actions. Contact him at wmreditor@waynemadsenreport.com [5].

[1]
The plane carrying Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down on April 6, 1994, their assassination sparking the Rwandan Genocide.

[2] Continental Airlines Flight 3407 crashed Thursday, Feb. 12, into a house in Clarence Center, N.Y. It dropped 800 feet in 5 seconds. – Photo: David Duprey, AP

[3] Alison Des Forges, Human Rights Watch expert on Rwanda, died Thursday in the crash of Continental Airlines Flight 3407.

The Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and Nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a "time", yet It cannot be destroyed. ==> Wolverine

Le talent d'un écrivain(Péan)

Les remous qui ont entouré la sortie du livre de Pierre Péan, Le monde selon K, consacré à Bernard Kouchner, boostent ses ventes à un niveau rarement atteint dans l'édition française. Le 6 février, Claude Durand, le PDG de Fayard, révélait à LEXPRESS.fr que le tirage initial, de 65 000 exemplaires, avait été augmenté de deux réimpressions en l'espace de 24 heures, pour être porté à 105 000 exemplaires. Trois jours après sa parution, le livre de Péan s'annonce déjà comme le best seller de l'année.

***

Ecrire c'est un art. L'écrivain n'est pas l'homme politique ou journaliste, il défend les valeurs humaines qui reposent sur une idéale et certains principes qu'il défend corps et âme voire au prix de sa vie.

Son esprit veille nuit et jour car souvent les meilleures idées naissent au milieu de la nuit et se réveille très tôt le matin pour relater ce que l'esprit lui a inspiré. Il est le sculpteur de la vérité et l'ennemi du mensonge ou de l'hypocrisie politicienne. Un bon écrivain à l'exemple de Pierre Péan est considéré comme un messie car ces écrits délivrent toute une nation prise sous le joug de l'oppresseur.

C'est un don qui vient de l'au-delà et une récompense éternelle car même après la mort, les écrits d'un écrivain digne de nom restent gravés dans les mémoires de ceux ou celles qui l'ont lu et se transmettent de génération en génération.

Nul doute qu'au ciel, il sera récompensé par le tout puissant car rien n'est fait ou créé au hasard. Il mène un combat pour le bien contre le mal et s'érige en messie ou prophète en dévoilant l'injustice pratiquée à l'encontre des plus faibles dès l'instant même que l'on persifle sa croyance et sa foi.

Le livre " le monde selon K" de Pierre Péan dévoile toutes ces vérités cachées d'un homme dont la personnalité reste pragmatique. Il révèle ce double face d'un homme que le monde a longtemps considéré comme intègre et qui en réalité s'est substitué en une série de rôles et de fonctions dans le but de défendre seulement la minorité en oppressant la majorité, ce qui est contraire aux principes démocratiques et aux attributions des organisations humanitaires..

J'ai préféré étaler quelques passages du livre en vue de susciter votre intérêt à la lecture du livre. Je vous invite par la même occasion à soutenir l'écrivain en achetant son livre qui ne coûte que 19 euros, pas très cher par rapport à son contenu et le message véhiculaire.

A la page 14-15 du livre, l'auteur commence en ces lignes" son narcissisme aussi exacerbé que décomplexé ne serait faire bon ménage avec les valeurs qui m'ont été autrefois inculquées par ma mère qui me recommandait quand j'étais petit de ne pas "faire l'intéressant" et de "rester à ma place".

Ce sont sans doute ces réminiscences de ma propre éducation qui m'ont fait triquer lorsque, à la fin de l'année 1992, on le voit un sac de riz sur l'épaule poser à Mogadiscio devant les caméras. J'ignorais pourtant qu'il avait répété la scène. M'ont aussi choqué son soutien aux deux guerres d'Irak, celle de 1991, comme celle de 2003 et plus généralement son côté "va-t-en- guerre". Fin de citations!

En joignant l'utile à l'agréable, il m'est arrivé à plusieurs reprises de fustiger ces politiciens chez qui l'orgueil pousse à exhiber spectaculairement leurs ébats lascifs en vantant des prouesses qu'ils n'ont jamais réalisées. Ils font preuve d'un "m'as-tu vu ou entendu" au lieu de laisser l'action parler d'elle-même.

Hypocritement ils s'avouent défenseurs d'un groupe minoritaire pour s'attirer la sympathie alors que ce sont leurs propres intérêts qu'ils défendent au détriment de la majorité qui est sauvagement réprimée. Cet état de choses me rappelle ces derniers temps quand un supposé opposant du régime minoritaire de Kigali déclara qu'il participera aux élections de 2010 au Rwanda. Force est de rappeler que le pouvoir actuel à Kigali est dirigé par les criminels qui privent les rwandais le droit de vivre et d'expression.

Pire encore ils sont poursuivis des massacres, du génocide qu'ils ont commis depuis l'attaque du Rwanda en octobre 1990, la situation s'est détériorée avec l'attentat contre l'avion présidentiel au cours du mois d'avril 1994. Plusieurs sources sans ambiguïté affirment que Kagame et ses acolytes l'auraient planifié et tel fut leur dernier recours car d'autres moyens mis en œuvre pour éliminer les leaders hutus n'ont pas porté de fruits.

L'on se souviendra que le FPR en éliminant le leader du parti CDR Bucyana Martin, voulait provoquer des massacres interethniques pour en fait porter le chapeau aux dirigeants du MRND au pouvoir. Malheureusement le génocide comme leur arme médiatique n'a pas eu lieu et de ce fait, il fallait passer par un autre revirement de la situation qui consistait à éliminer physiquement le père de la nation.

En revenant à mon sujet, l'on ne comprend pas comme ces leaders de l'opposition veulent d'une part faire croire au peuple qu'ils luttent contre un pouvoir dictatorial et de l'autre part ils cautionnent les élections dont ils savent préalablement le vainqueur.

On dirait que le parcours politique de l'ambitieux Twagiramungu Faustin ne leur a pas servi de leçons. Son rôle a été de faire croire que les élections se sont passées dans la transparence, son silence également après ces mascarades de jeux démocratiques a plongé le peuple rwandais dans un étonnement total.

Seulement l'histoire retiendra que c'est un aventurier politicien, partisan du m'as-tu-vu et du m'as-entendu à l'exemple de certains leaders de l'opposition qui jouent vaguement leur rôle de leadership sans nullement se soucier du "qu'en-dira-t-on".

Faut-il croire que ces politiciens ont des agendas cachés ou c'est leur faiblesse d'esprit qui les pousse à agir ainsi. Difficile de se prononcer là-dessus sans risque de se tromper, seul le temps nous donnera la réponse.

Seulement il faudra retenir que dans les pays démocratiques, les vrais politiciens opteraient pour une démission si leur personnalité venait d'être mise en cause. Mais comme pas de règles sans exception, très peu sont ceux qui s'accrochent après le scandale.

Ils ont leurs propres motivations qui souvent ne coïncident pas avec les aspirations patriotiques. Ces derniers trahissent les leurs et ne pensent qu'aux intérêts individuels. Dans la plus part des cas leurs vies finissent mal et dans un regret de "si j'avais su".

Selon l'auteur, Bernard Kouchner a été le plus ardent promoteur du fameux droit d'ingérence dont il reviendra aux historiens d'établir à quel point il a contribué à dégrader l'art de la diplomatie et les chances de paix dans le monde.

Le talent de Pierre Péan réside dans ses qualités d'un homme simple, ses méthodes de travail qui consistent à chercher et parfois à trouver des documents et ou des témoignages susceptibles d'infléchir, voire d'infirmer les vérités officielles sans laisser de doutes à ceux qui ont lu ses livres.

Avec des preuves à l'appui, l'auteur s'insurge contre le défenseur pugnace de la démocratie et des droits de l'homme, sérieusement écorné par son comportement pratique en Afrique. D'après Péan, l'action de Bernard Kouchner sur le continent noir suscite peu de comptes rendus, de commentaires et d'analyses. L'Afrique est devenue son jardin secret depuis que l'homme prétend agir sur les grands conflits qui écartèlent le monde.

Les propos de l'auteur sur Bernard Kouchner rappellent aux Rwandais le caractère partial sur la tragédie dont a fait montre l'homme qui était appelé à défendre les droits de l'homme dans ce pays déchiré par une rébellion menée par les extrémistes tutsi. Il a joué le rôle de protectionniste de ceux qui venaient de plonger les rwandais dans la pure atrocité, situation qui est devenue incontrôlable juste après l'attentat contre l'avion où deux présidents du Burundi, du Rwanda et son entourage ont trouvé la mort.

Plusieurs sources affirment que c'est Kagame lui-même qui a ordonné l'ordre d'abattre l'avion présidentiel de Juvénal Habyarimana. Bernard Kouchner semble également ignorer que parmi l'équipage, il y avait des Français à bord. Le peuple rwandais a du mal à comprendre les motivations qui poussent l'actuel ministre des affaires étrangères à s'acharner aux victimes d'une tragédie qui a été conçue et mise en marche par les extrémistes tutsi aujourd'hui au pouvoir à Kigali.

Cette injustice ne peut laisser indifférent aucun français animé d'un sentiment de patriotisme car les Français sont diabolisés par ce régime dirigé par les génocidaires. C'est même à propos du Rwanda et de la nouvelle politique que Bernard Kouchner mène à l'égard du Rwanda depuis son arrivée au Quai d'Orsay que l'auteur s'est intéressé à ce personnage.

Cet amer constat est resté vivace quand en 2007, Bernard Kouchner décida de tendre la main à un Chef d'Etat qui non seulement est le maître d'œuvre de désinformation sur la tragédie rwandaise, mais est considéré par la justice française comme un criminel de guerre et par la justice espagnole comme un génocidaire.

Aux pages 70-71, l'auteur laisse entendre aux lecteurs que le traitement réservé aux serbes pendant la guerre des Balkans ressemblent à maints égards à celui qui serait fait au Rwanda et aux Hutus. Dans un cas comme dans l'autre Bernard Kouchner a joué un rôle important dans la stigmatisation de deux peuples assimilés globalement à des Nazis.

Sans que j'entre dans les détails d'un livre qui égaie tout lecteur bien intentionné et avide de connaître certaines vérités longuement dissimulées dans les méandres d'une politique partisane, je vous laisse découvrir vous-même à travers tout le livre le talent d'un auteur incomparable et dont les mérites resteront gravées dans les mémoires des Rwandais et de chaque citoyen qui lutte pour le triomphe de la vérité à travers le monde.

A la page 203 l'auteur s'est en peu attardé en guise de conclusion sur les liens étroits et anciens entre Kagame et Kouchner. Selon lui chacun est convaincu de pouvoir compter sur l'autre en fortes circonstances. C'est dans un même ordre d'idées que Bernard Kouchner en mars 2006 est ainsi allé à Kigali demander le soutien de son ami pour sa candidature à la tête de l'OMS. L'accord acquis, ce sera à Bernard Kouchner de le secourir s'il est effectivement nommé au Quai d'Orsay comme le laissent entendre les rumeurs de plus en plus insistantes.

Si tel est le cas, dans ce monde tout est mystère mais rien n'est fait au hasard. En tout état de causes, la prétention de l'homme ne devrait pas oublier cet adage selon lequel" l'homme propose et Dieu dispose". Heureux les hommes talentueux qui exploitent leurs talents pour sauver ce monde où le mal cherche désespérément à enterrer une fois pour toute le bien.

© Kaburabuza Mose.

The Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and Nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a "time", yet It cannot be destroyed. ==> Wolverine

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The new Rwandan patriotism: a tragic historian phenomenon

RPF or The autocratic regime and the Rwandan genocide architect
Paul Kagame: The real law-maker and law enforcer
**

The autocratic regime and the Rwandan genocide architect is trying to dictate its citizens what to say abroad. In these recent days, the regime and many of this autocratic regime supporters and RPF members as well are involved in hunting down Rwandan refugees, opponents and the likes.

The Rwandan genocide that Paul Kagame wants to be the genocide of Tutsis is Paul Kagame’s last trump card to win support both ethnically (Tutsis extremists) and internationally (corporates and mafia operating in the region).

Paul Kagame, already known as the Rwanda genocide masterminder claims to have stopped IT(!) and is there to fight against Hutu genocidaires and those Hutus that are teaching genocidal ideology. This is another way of justifying uncursions in the Congo, purge of opponents and Hutu intellectuals. Ex: 1994 political assassinations and 1996-97 Maoïst and now Kagamean culture in Rwanda followed by Kagame obscene, hateful and threatening speech of Murambi pledging the spoon policy for ethnic cleansing and the unconditional obedience to Him...

This is done, however, to mainly justify his use of violence and secret police which the international community surprisingly legitimizes at each time murders and mass killings happen.

To reach his goals, Paul Kagame and RPF have created the common enemy: the Genocidaire Hutus no matter how old they are. It’s a recycling phenomenon that will be used indefinetely.

The self-declared patriots are criminals; most of them have participated in rapes, killings of innocent Rwandans and Congolese people. That is patriotism that is getting exported into neighboring countries particularly in the Democratic Republic of The Congo in 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998 then using their envoys, RCD, CNDP and many others through Mutebusi, Bizima karaha, Nyarugabo, Kamanzi, Nkunda, Ntaganda and many others.

Military tracts are already circulating inviting different rebellions to go ahead with crimes in the Congo.

There will be no punishment , the FDLR and Hutu refugees are there to be their first victims and any expedition will be justified. Who doesn’t know what Paul Kagame calls the Tutsi genocide and at the same moment, he declares that a real patriot knows no ethnic differences I n Rwanda.

This is called “football patriotism” particularly when he has to justify his crimes and the illegality of his regime. Kagame manufactures the genocide to protect his regime. It’s undoubtedly a tabloid to denigrate those who are seeking democracy, justice and everlasting peace for all Rwandans.

Their enemies are those who are determined to end the autocracy, despotism and dictatorship. It's bloody obvious that the interest of those Rwandan self-declared patriots is actually to undermine the country and enslave their country men and women. What they do totally negates what they claim to be.

No word can describe the motivations behind the control of the entire telecommunication tools in Rwanda including phone cells and Internet.

Their fight is bitter, tumultuous, bloody, spicy with conspiracies, torture, incarcerations, rapes, betrayals, massacres and ethnic cleansings. After massacring more than 3.5 millions of Rwandans and more that 4 millions of Congolese people;

After terrorizing the whole country, the hated people officially known as "mayibobu" got sent to containers and many others got jailed in different unknown places of imprisonment,

The then Rwandan "heroes" and self-declared patriots (RPF members) have converted their bloody criminal organization into a political party after eliminating the Maoist and now the Rwandan culture revolution that took place in 1995, 1997, 1998 up to 2004 which ended with the imprisonment of the well-experienced Rwandan physicians. Most of them were sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment; the few could escape and flee the country.

Paul Kagame is the hero of the best warlords and every year he's awarded by numerous American and British universities and Colleges. The then self-proclaimed patriots are intimidating the majority of the Rwandans.

Just like the situation was in 2003, elections are nothing else than a "mise en scène". In their desperation, Most of Rwandans declare, "you killed my mom, you killed my pa, you killed my husband and kids, you killed my brothers, you killed my daughter but I will vote for you.

From there, the world is watching how these patriots and crooks are institutionalizing violence as an instrument policy, they are committing crimes, the autocracy has been set, impunity for all protect them. The Rwandan society is already dichotomized into have and have-nots, good and evil. A rampant corruption and a general break down of Rwandan social values are political markers of 15 years Paul Kagame as the Supreme leader just like Caporal Foday Sankon and Charles Taylor.

Actually, Paul Kagame is using Local defense forces (LDF), just like did hunters-kamajors to terrorize the entire nation. Rwanda is actually a country under RPF criminals’ siege. RDF is known to be soldiers by day and unkown killers and terrorists by nights. That’s patriotism. Did you know the notion of patriotism has been used to be tested west Africa before getting fully used in Rwanda?

As the despotic regime in Rwanda continues to hold sway and the use of arms and other forms of terrorism has become more and more attractive and rewarding. The budding democracy is butchered in face of helpless world where the use of force and violence has become the modus operandi of policy.

****

I have no sympathy for people who make others suffer. Nevertheless, I wonder at the International Criminal Court's pick from the assortment of war criminals? Why not beginning with Paul Kagame, and his 40 co-criminals plus Ntaganda and Nkunda?

Do Rwandans must believe that war crimes are charges fobbed off on people demonized by the Western media? Don't get me wrong. I am about facts. I am about the RPF impunity since 1990, they are accused for war crimes, rape, crimes against humanity and genocide.

*****

NO ONE HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO JUSTICE !

*****

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Laurent Nkunda’s “Arrest:” Rwanda’s Latest Shell Game in Response to International Pressure

By January 31st, 2009

[Rwandan Soldiers Are Sought For War Crimes, while Paul Kagame STILL immune !]

Is Laurent Nkunda’s arrest a positive development?

We have reasons to doubt that Laurent Nkunda has been arrested. Rwandan Maj. Jill Rutaremara said that Nkunda was in Rwanda but “not in jail.” If Nkunda has in fact been arrested it would be a positive development but not a massive change as some analysts would like you to believe.

A true marker of the veracity of Rwanda’s claims of arresting Nkunda will be the extradition of Nkunda to the Congo where he committed the crimes against the Congolese people. If Nkunda is not extradited to Congo in short order then that will be a clear sign that this is part of the shell game that Rwanda has been playing for the past 12 years, a period during which they replaced one proxy leader with another while they continued to occupy Eastern Congo.

Even if Nkunda were to be arrested, it would be a fundamental flaw in one’s reasoning to believe that Nkunda was the primary cause of the conflict in the east. In essence, what has happened is that Nkunda’s National Congress for the Defense of the People has been replaced by thousands of Rwandan troops. The problem is Rwanda’s and Uganda’s aggression against the Congo backed primarily by the United States and British governments and corporate interests since 1996.If Rwanda did in fact arrest Nkunda, doesn’t this mean that they never supported him as the December 12th UN Report documented?

No, to the contrary, over the past twelve years Rwanda has shuffled different rebel leaders according to its interests. It is in part for this reason there were so many versions of the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD, former rebel militia backed by Rwanda), which Nkunda was a part of in 1998 – 2002 war.

Nkunda’s apparent replacement, Jean-Bosco Ntaganda, also has an arrest warrant out for him issued by the International Criminal Court; one human rights offender has been replaced by another as Bosco now proclaims to head the CNDP.

A systemic and historical analysis is warranted in order to demystify current events in the Congo and arrive at prescriptions that will lead to lasting peace and stability. Unfortunately, the majority of Great Lakes analysts offer Rwanda-friendly analysis and prescriptions as Rwanda represents the US and British foreign policy interests in Central Africa. These analysts’ job is to provide intellectual and advocacy cover for an otherwise disastrous policy across now two US and British administrations that have led to the deaths of millions of Congolese and the systematic looting of Congo’s wealth to the benefit of U.S. allies Rwanda and Uganda as well as Western corporations.

Isn’t the new collaboration between Congo and Rwanda a good sign on the road to peace and stability in the region?
On December 5th, Rwanda and Congo signed a secret pact in Goma that the Congolese people know nothing about (President Kabila is scheduled to speak to his nation on this issue on Saturday, January 31, 2009).

James Kabarebe, Chief of General Staff of the Rwandan Defense Forces and former private secretary and aide-de-camp of Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame was later dispatched to Kinshasa to consummate a deal with President Kabila. Thus, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, James Kabarebe, and President Kabila worked out a deal that resulted in over 5,000 Rwandan soldiers entering Congo.

These are the same characters that collaborated in 1996 when Congo was first invaded by Rwanda during the Clinton administration. During that period they traversed the Congo slaughtering Hutu man, woman and child and anyone else who was in the way. The United Nations says that the killings were so massive and systematic that they can be considered crimes against humanity and possibly genocide. The United Nations investigation into these crimes against humanity by the Rwandan army, Kabarebe and Kabila was blocked and still remains to be resolved (see the UN investigations). Once a responsible and credible government is in place in Congo all these crimes must be investigated and justice must be delivered so that the Congolese people can be made whole. Find out more about the Kagame, Kabarebe, Kabila connection in our January 20th Blog.

The militarization of the region is not the answer. A robust political path must be established in order to lead to peace and stability in the Great Lakes region.

So are you saying that President Kabila allowing Rwandan troops on Congolese soil to hunt down those responsible for the 1994 genocide is not a good thing?

The logic that allowing Rwandan soldiers on Congolese territory to hunt down Hutu rebels will bring about peace is fundamentally flawed. Below are some factors to consider:

1. The deal allowing Rwandan soldiers on Congolese soil was not between the Congolese government and the Rwandan government. It was between the Congolese president Joseph Kabila, whom many suspect is not even Congolese and the Kagame regime in Kigali. Neither the Congolese parliament nor the Congolese people were either consulted or addressed regarding Rwandan troops entering Congolese territory. In fact some Congolese are calling for the impeachment of Kabila. When it comes to matters in Africa, we tend to drop all critical faculties and common sense.

Can you imagine troops entering US territory without the US Congress knowing about it and the president not even addressing the population to explain why? What is even more farcical is that some Congolese government officials are trying to convince the world that thousands of Rwandan soldiers are coming into the Congo as advisers to the Congolese troops. It has even been stated that the Rwandan troops will be under Congolese command. Will they be under the same compromised command that Nkunda chased out of North Kivu?

2. It is beyond imagination that Rwanda is going to do in a few weeks what it was not able to do or interested in doing when it occupied the Congo from 1996–2002. During this period of the occupation of eastern Congo they did not wipe out the so-called Hutu militia. In fact, the biggest battle they had was with their ally Uganda over mining concessions. Also, during this time they systematically looted Congo of its wealth. (See UN Reports from 2001–2003).

It is this looting of Congo’s wealth that spurred the economic miracle that President Clinton and other Western officials wax eloquently about in Rwanda. You will notice that they never mention the degree to which ill-gotten wealth from the Congo contributed to Rwanda’s “economic miracle.” Former Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen says it best when he notes “Having controlled the Kivu provinces for 12 years, Rwanda will not relinquish access to resources that constitute a significant percentage of its gross national product”.

3. What is almost certain is that Rwandan troops on Congolese soil will lead to more suffering of the people of the Congo. Analysts in the West have not fully appreciated the enmity that the average Congolese holds toward Rwanda. Remember, it was the US and British backed Rwandan and Ugandan invasions of 1996 and 1998 that unleashed the deaths of estimated millions of Congolese.

So, for one to say that Rwandan soldiers are now going to make things better for the people of the Congo does not take history into account. One merely has to look at the Congo-Ugandan action against Ugandan rebels inside Congolese territory to see where this latest action is heading. Over 600 Congolese civilians lost their lives as a result of military action against the Lord’s Resistance Army in Congo, which began over a month ago. Moreover, that operation was supposed to take a few weeks and now Uganda is requesting more time on Congo’s soil, while Congo’s gold and timber continue to find its way into Uganda.

What role are great powers playing in what is unfolding in the Congo?

It is key to understand how the game is played to keep Africa dependent and impoverished. Because the West is more powerful than the divided and weak African nations, they have been able to assassinate or systematically sideline leaders who truly serve the interest of the people.

They facilitate the ascension to power of those who demonstrate a proclivity for killing their fellow Africans. Once these feckless leaders are in power and predictably incapable of governing, western diplomats condescendingly intervene on the premise that those they have assisted in acquiring power either through elections or otherwise cannot in fact justly govern. This narrative is buttressed by superficial media coverage of African society, intellectuals for hire by Western powers and the humanitarian industry.

It is in this context that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen, have proposed the balkanization and economic neutering of the Congo. They have made proposals to reward Rwanda and their Western support structure for the systematic looting of Congo, which has resulted in unmatched death and terror for the Congolese people.

Nearly 125 years since Europe gave Congo to King Leopold II of Belgium as his own personal property, the situation is fundamentally the same whereby the affairs of the Congolese people are not determined by themselves; but rather by external forces.So what can be positively drawn from recent events?

Several things can be looked at positively:

1. It is clear that international pressure works. It has moved Rwanda to at least announce the arrest of Nkunda. As was said, the litmus test for whether Nkunda has actually been arrested is his extradition to Kinshasa, otherwise for all intents and purposes he is vacationing in Rwanda at the behest of Kagame while Rwandan troops roam the hillsides of Eastern Congo with the blessing of Joseph Kabila.

The U.S. is finding it increasingly difficult to defend its proxy, Rwanda, as both French and Spanish courts (the same Spanish court that ruled against Pinochet of Chile ) have arrest warrants out on President Kagame’s top officials for commission of war crimes, one of whom, Rose Kabuye, was arrested in Germany in November 2008.

Despite such repeated damning evidence against the Kagame regime, under the auspices of Donald Rumsfeld’s AFRICOM program, the US sent a shipment of military equipment to Rwanda for peace keeping purposes in Western Sudan in early January 2009, coinciding with Rwandan troops intervention in Congo. The military shipment is supposed to be used for peace keeping in Western Sudan.

Both Sweden and the Netherlands suspended aid to Rwanda and of course the damning December 12th UN Report have made it difficult for anyone to defend Rwanda except for some ideologically- driven humanitarian institutions. Even the New York Times editorial board continues to call for international pressure on Rwanda.

2. Kagame felt a necessity to adjust to the new realities in Washington. He could not necessarily count on President Obama to give him carte blanche as he has received from Presidents Clinton and Bush. Rwanda is certainly still a staunch ally of the U.S. However, Kagame cannot be certain that President Obama will fully support him in spite of some of the old guards (Susan Rice at the UN and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State) being in the administration.

The Obama administration can hardly present itself as an administration of change with an old policy for the Great Lakes in particular and Africa in general. The new administration would be best served to implement policies that serve the people and not strongmen like Kagame and Kabila.

3. The US and British baked resource war of aggression is being disrobed on a daily basis. The hunt for the Hutu rebels is an attempt to recast the conflict in an ethnic context. The Hutu rebels, otherwise know as the Interahamwe or Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR in French) need to be dealt with, but not in the manner currently underway.

Remember, it has been the Congolese people who have been the primary victims of the presence of the Hutu rebels in the Congo. Nonetheless, what is happening in Central Africa is a high stakes geo-political battle for precious and strategic resources that are vital to the world’s military, aeronautics, electronics and technology industries. This interview with British Foreign Minister David Miliband provides some insight and perspective on the vital corporate interests in Central Africa.

4. The average person is becoming better informed and more engaged about the root causes of the deadliest conflict in the world since World War Two. They are better equipped to demand action from their elected officials and challenge humanitarian institutions that come to their communities peddling warmed over ethnic explanations for the suffering of the people of Congo.

We are confident that with persistent education, organization and mobilization, the people of Congo will be free from the forces that have her sons and daughters living in absolute misery while we in the West benefit from her riches.

Join the global movement in support of the people of the Congo and strike a blow for justice and human dignity.

The Friends of the Congo (FOTC) is a 501 (c) 3 tax-exempt advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. The FOTC was established at the behest of Congolese human rights and grassroots institutions in 2004, to work together to bring about peaceful and lasting change in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire.

FOTC can be contacted at: http://ca.mc502.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=info@friendsofthecongo.org. Read other articles by Friends, or visit Friends's website.
This article was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 9:00am and is filed under Democratic Rep. Congo, Imperialism, Rwanda, Uganda.

Monday, February 23, 2009

PRESS RELEASE N ° 07/SE/CD/FEBRUARY/2009 OF THE FDLR

The FDLR deny the lies propagated by the spokespersons of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and the Congolese Armed Forces (FARDC) reporting the withdrawal of Rwandan troops from DRC.

The Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) inform the public and the media that the information spread by the coalition RPA/FARDC in the media these last days about the war that it waged in eastern DRC are false and declare the following:

1. The FDLR condemn once again the war initiated by the armed coalition of RPA and FARDC, with the support of MONUC against Rwandan refugees in DRC, the FDLR and the Congolese people of eastern DRC.

2. The FDLR reaffirm once again that this war is dirty, unnecessary, unjust and counter-productive and therefore it must be stopped.

3. The FDLR have never committed any violation of human rights in this unjust war that was imposed by the coalition of RPA and FARDC. However, as we mentioned it in our previous releases, the FDLR have evidence that the coalition of RPA and FARDC supported by MONUC was guilty of serious crimes against humanity against both Rwandan refugees in DRC and against the Congolese peoples accused of being sympathizers of the FDLR.

4. Since 20 January 2009, during this insane, unfair and unnecessary war that the armed coalition of RPA and FARDC has imposed to the FDLR, our Organization deplores five (5) missing, 6 captured by the coalition of RPA and FARDC including two mentally ill persons, 4 brave Abacunguzi fighters who have fallen on the field of honour, and only two dozen of deserters who surrendered either to MONUC or to the warmongers. The number of dependents of Abacunguzi combatants who have returned to Rwanda does not exceed two hundred (200) in the Kivu region. Moreover, the FDLR have counted at least seventy bodies of the armed coalition of RPA and FARDC soldiers, including several officers, who died in the fighting that took place recently in Masisi and Rutshuru territories.

5. In order to inflate the statistics and to lie to the media, the international community and the public particularly to the Congolese people, some elements of the RPA who are members of various militias that the regime of Kigali has put into place in Kivu were presented to the public and to MONUC by the RPA/FARDC coalition as FDLR members returning to Rwanda voluntarily or captured in the fighting.

6. The FDLR have very reliable information that civilians were transported from Rwanda in military trucks to be introduced in North Kivu as dependents of the FDLR members. In addition, Congolese members of the CNDP were used in this misleading campaign and presented to the public as members of the FDLR captured in the DRC; they were sent to Rwanda through the border post of Goma and returned the next day in the DRC through Kibumba.

7. In addition, during the week of 16 to 22 February 2009, Rwanda has infiltrated more than one brigade in Rutshuru via the rwando-Congolese border. That brigade continued its advance northward along the ugando-Congolese border near Lake Edward .

8. The Kigali regime must stop lying to the public that it will withdraw its military from the Kivu region. The reality is that the Kigali regime has brought to the east of the DRC more than 12,000 soldiers including more than 6,000 that are hidden within the CNDP while it officially says to have sent only 2,500 soldiers in the DRC.

9. The largely publicised announcement by the RPA/FARDC coalition of the withdrawal of Rwandan troops from 25 February 2009 is a farce designed to calm the anger of the Congolese people and their representatives who are tired of the abuses committed by elements of the RPA on their territory. Furthermore, Rwanda fears the popular discontent that rises every day within the country against oppression by the RPF-Inkotanyi and its machine i.e. the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) and Rwandese Defence Forces (RDF).

10. To prove its good faith, Rwanda must withdraw at least 12,000 of its soldiers from the DRC under the supervision of neutral international observers, failing to which the statements of the RPA/FARDC armed coalition should be regarded as a masquerade.

11. The FDLR wish to inform the public that mixed Rwando-Congolese structures have been created by some Congolese associated with the Kigali regime and are already operational since 20 January 2009 for the exploitation of immense wealth in the Walikale and Masisi territories. Mixed military units from RPA (CNDP) and FARDC have been created and installed for this purpose to protect holdings in the Kivu region.

12. The FDLR call upon the Congolese people to be vigilant and not be fooled by the statements of the hegemonic Kigali regime and some of their corrupt military officers and politicians who have already mortgaged the Kivu region to operate in connivance with some RPF-Inkotanyi members.
13. The FDLR remain convinced that the Rwandan problem can be solved only on a negotiating table and call upon all peace-loving people to condemn the current war and to favour the holding of an inter-Rwandan dialogue as soon as possible.

Done in Paris on February 23, 2009

Callixte Mbarushimana

Executive Secretary of the FDLR

(Sé)

protect email

The Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and Nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a "time", yet It cannot be destroyed. ==> Wolverine

The victims get all the blame, and their suffering never ends.

***
Three Cheers for Eve Ensler?

Many of the criminals involved were named in the United Nations Panel of Experts reports on illegal extraction of natural resources from Congo. Countless others have been named by numerous independent journalists, including this author, over, and over and over.

***
John Bredenkamp. Billy Rautenbach. George Forrest. Louis Michel. Paul Kagame. Yoweri Museveni. Salim Saleh. James Kabarebe. Walter Kansteiner. Maurice Tempelsman. Philippe de Moerloose. Dan Gertler. Étienne Viscount Davignon. Bill Clinton. Simon Village. Ramnik Kotecha. Jean-Pierre Bemba. Romeo Dallaire.

***
Nothing is ever done. After the production of the United Nations Panel of Experts reports on the plunder of Congo’s natural resources, nothing was done. Criminal syndicates lobbied to have their names cleared and the United Nations bucked under. Emboldened by toothless international legal instruments and spineless international leaders, the corporations and their criminal syndicates stepped up their operations. Plunder, depopulation, rape, sexual slavery—anything goes.

***
A major propaganda front has swept the Western media decrying the unprecedented sexual violence in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. As this story goes to press the war in Congo—claiming 1000 lives a day in the East and more than 7 million people since 1996—is escalating yet again.

More than 1.2 million were reported displaced in June, with at least 8000 additional displaced persons on October 22 after fighting escalated—as Western-backed forces perpetrate genocide and terrorism to depopulate and secure the land for multinational mining interests.

Needing to explain away the failure of the 2006 “elections process” and the “peace” that never was, the propaganda system has embraced the theme of femicide. As always, the white champions of human rights and humanitarian concern in the end blame the black victims for their own suffering. While raising much needed awareness, the propaganda front serves a selective and expedient agenda, a tool used to pressure certain political groups and provide cover for the real terrorists.

On a visit to Eastern Congo in May 2007, Eve Ensler—the playwright and producer of the Vagina Monologues—was witness to the profound human suffering and unprecedented sexual violence.

“I have just returned from hell,” Ensler wrote, in Glamour Magazine in August. “I am trying for the life of me to figure out how to communicate what I have seen and heard in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. How do I convey these stories of atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or feeling too disturbed?”

Ensler came to see what those whose eyes are open cannot deny: the sexual violence and predation in Central Africa is unacceptable, unfathomable, and stoppable. And she has the courage and audacity to write and speak about it.

Three cheers for Eve Ensler!!

Or not?

Through her global campaign to end violence against women, called “V-Day,” and with a nine-page feature article in Glamour magazine in August, Ensler launched a campaign calling for an end to rape and sexual torture against women and girls in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. One of the voices she uses to tell the story is that of Christine Schuler Deschryver, described as a human rights activist in Congo.

Ensler, Deschryver and the campaign have received a lot of press, with stories in Glamour, interviews on the BBC, PBS and Al Jezeera. The New York Times picked up the issue of rape in Eastern Congo in early October, and the Times story was followed the next day with a Democracy Now! interview with Christine Schuler Deschryver.

“Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource, Power To The Women And Girls Of The Democratic Republic Of Congo,” Ensler’s web site explains, “is being initiated by the women of Eastern DRC, V-Day and UNICEF on behalf of United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict. The campaign calls for an end to the violence and to impunity for those who commit these atrocities.”

[1]An end to impunity for those who commit these atrocities?

Ensler’s Glamour article is an apt documentary of human suffering and courage. The doctors working to save and heal the survivors of sexual brutality are heroes. The women and girls who have survived are themselves portraits of courage and human dignity.

The issue demands international condemnation and action. However, in her nine-page portrait of heroism and suffering, there is a single half paragraph that ostensibly addresses the roots of the problem.

“The perpetrators include the Interahamwe,” Ensler writes, “the Hutu fighters who fled neighboring Rwanda in 1994 after committing genocide there; the Congolese army; a loose assortment of armed civilians; even U.N. peacekeepers.”

[2] THE GLAMOUROUS GENOCIDE

Who is responsible for the brutality?

According to Glamour and Vanity Fair, it is always those rag-tag Rwandan genocidaires who fled justice in Rwanda, or those ruthless Congolese soldiers from the heart of darkness, and the loose assortments of obviously “loose” civilians, and even the U.N. peacekeepers who, in the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC), are men from India, Uruguay, Nepal, Pakistan… and in Darfur, Sudan, it is those damned Janjaweed—Arabs on horseback, you know, the usual dark-skinned subjects.

And there is no mention whatsoever of the deeper realities and responsibilities of white people and predatory capitalism. Where is the discussion of the backers behind this warfare? Who sells the weaponry? Who produces it? Who photographs the UNICEF poster children and peddles the images of suffering in the Western press for billion dollar profit-driven campaigns that do not in the end uplift the people who they claim to care about?

Why are there gala UNICEF “fundraising” benefits—the Annual Snowflake Ball—in New York hotels with white-tie U.S. Presidents as honorary ambassadors and state department officials from the National Security Council—and $10,000 tickets—held by and for officials who remain silent about genocide in Ethiopia or northern Uganda or the U.S.-backed coup d’etat that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 or Zaire (Congo) in 1996?

[3] What we know to be true is that Eve Ensler was lucky to get this article in Glamour at all. The magazine is a travesty of violence against women—cosmetics, luxury aids, “health” and “beauty” products, liposuction, breast implants and sexually seductive advertising peddling the “perfect” female body and great American culture of sexual violence—and yet Glamour offers a platform for Ensler’s message about sexual brutality of unprecedented human proportions.
What’s going on here? There is a reason these stories proliferate and it is not about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Glamour’s publishers do not care about the suffering of black people. It is pure Western white supremacist propaganda serving to underscore the accepted narratives of Central Africa and assist in the consolidation of power over the region, but this is neither seen nor appreciated by white “news” consumers.

What Eve Ensler and Glamour have not addressed are the warlords behind the warlords, the corporations and white collar crime which is never—or selectively, now and then expeditiously, if ever—reported on the pages of Glamour, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, or the other promoters of popular propaganda brought to us by the Conde Naste corporate empire.
Behind the warfare always blamed on Africans, behind the warlords’ deadly battles, are other warlords and corporations from Western countries.

The reason people—U.S. and Canadian citizens—are unaware of the issues involved is because of publications like Glamour and the corporations that control them. Ensler’s article begins to look like an advertisement for UNICEF and the so-called “humanitarian” AID industry, which is itself part of the problem, because it remains silent about corporate plunder, “humanitarian” organizations partnering with the corporate exploiters, shared directorships with mining, defense, petroleum and other multinational interests. UNICEF and “not-for-profit” organizations like it are in the business of perpetuating their own survival, the vanguard of transnational capital.

Asked what to do, Ensler points to UNICEF: “Right now, [the best thing to do is] to give to the V-Day UNICEF campaign at vday.org/congo.”

In the end Ensler’s article—like the few racialized articles about rape in Rwanda, Congo and Darfur that have appeared in Ms. Magazine [4]—is a compelling portrait that serves a narrow political agenda of which Ensler appears not to be conscious. Such articles—appearing in gendered white spaces of privilege like Glamour or Ms. or Cosmopolitan—blame the very (African) victims of an international system of oppression that revolves around permanent warfare economies—U.S., Canada, Britain, Belgium, Israel, France, Canada, Australia—and they serve to promote the interests of these by never challenging the perpetrators of chaos and terrorism that are directly aligned with the predominant military-intelligence establishment.

When reporting on rape in Central Africa, articles in Conde Naste group publications—as with almost all publications—have never challenged the governments of either Rwanda or Uganda, soldiers of which have committed massive sexual atrocities, crimes against humanity and other war crimes.

[5] How does it happen that a notorious “dictator” and “cannibal” like Uganda’s legendary dictator Idi Amin could live out his life in splendor in Saudi Arabia? Far more people have suffered terrorism under President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, than under Idi Amin, yet Museveni remains the West’s golden boy in the old Pearl of Africa.

It was Paul Kagame—“the Butcher of Kigali”—who in the early years—circa 1981 to 1988—wielded the iron fist of terror in Uganda. Kagame was Museveni’s director of Military Intelligence and is now President of Rwanda. Taban Amin, Idi Amin’s eldest son, is today in charge of the Uganda’s dreaded Internal Security Organization, the private terror instrument of President Yoweri Museveni.

While Ugandan troops are perpetrating atrocities in Eastern Congo at this writing, no one says anything about them. Uganda remains near the top of the list for AID to ARMS scandals, even as Museveni visits with George W. Bush at the White House (October 30). Similarly, the Kagame government always gets away with murder because Kagame has friends in high places.
An end to impunity for those who commit these atrocities?

Indeed, it turns out that Eve Ensler is collaborating with certain powerful interests whose involvement in Central Africa has never come under scrutiny. In a September 17, 2007 interview with Ms. Magazine journalist Michele Kort, broadcast by PBS, Ensler was joined in a dialog about sexual violence in Eastern Congo by Christine Schuler Deschryver, described by PBS as “from Bukavu in the Congo, who is an activist against the sexual violence.” [6] This is the same “human rights activist from Congo” interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

Who is Christine Schuler Deschryver?

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF RAPE REPORTING

Jumping on the bandwagon, on October 8, 2007, Democracy Now! ran an interview between Amy Goodman and Christine Schuler Deschryver about sexual violence in Congo. [7] Deschryver claimed that studies were done that show that sixty percent of the sexual violence in Eastern Congo is committed by “these people who did the genocide in Rwanda, by Hutu’s who made the genocide in their country.”

Christine Schuler Deschryver describes the process where militias enter a village, kill all the men, and sexually assault and brutalize the women. [8]

This is “femicide” says Deschryver, a charge repeated by Eve Ensler and echoed by Amy Goodman. “People can help me first of all being an Ambassador and talking about the problem going on in Congo because it’s a silent war. They are killing, they are raping babies… It’s like Darfur: Darfur started four years ago. But Congo started almost eleven years ago and nobody’s talking about this femicide, this holocaust. It’s a femicide because they are just destroying the female species…”

Femicide? Congolese women sexually traumatized, Congolese men killed? It is a process of depopulation and ethnic cleansing.
Speaking from the Democracy Now! studios in New York City, Christine Schuler Deschryver describes a war involving African countries outside Congo, but she does not name Western interests involved.

Christine Schuler Deschryver describes her personal sacrifice to help the victims of Congo’s wars. She states that she works in “administration, in her office…” Until 2002, at least, Christine Schuler Deschryver was known for gorilla conservation, not human rights, in Congo.

Christine Schuler Deschryver is married to Carlos Schuler, a Swiss German working for decades in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in South Kivu. Carlos Schuler and Christine Schuler Deschryver both work for GTZ— Deutsche Gesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit—a “German technological cooperation agency.” Carlos negotiates with warlords for “conservation.” Because of his gorilla conservation interests, Schuler has been described as “Dian Fossey’s successor.” Schuler has maintained very private relations with all military forces in the region, and there are questions about mineral plunder and military collaboration and GTZ’s role in structural violence and warfare in Congo.

GTZ is a German government institution with a corporate structure. The GTZ Supervisory Board has representatives of four Federal [German] Ministries: the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Federal Foreign Office, Federal Ministry of Finance, and Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour. Since 1998 the Supervisory Board Chairman has been State Secretary Erich Stather from the BMZ.

GTZ’s involvement in Eastern Congo is notable, given the German links to the Lueshe mine in North Kivu, and the German embassy’s role in exploitation, depopulation and genocide in Congo. One top GTZ executive appears to be linked to German corporate interests seeking to control the Lueshe mine, now controlled by their U.S./German competitors (see below).

The German government has been understandably mute about plunder in Congo, and the presentation of Christine Schuler Deschryver’s—a GTZ agent in Bukavu—as a champion of human rights is a perfect example of the twisted “charity” and “philanthropy” dumped on the Congolese people.
Like the rest of Congo, Kahuzi-Biega is rich in minerals coveted by corporations and governments that include German multinationals like Bayer—subsidiary H.C. Starck—involved in coltan in Congo.

But the interests of Carlos Schuler and Christine Deschryver run much deeper than “gorilla conservation” and “human rights” activism in Eastern Congo. The Deschryver family is one of the elite families in Belgium. Christine’s father, Adrian Deschryver, was one of the first “rangers” of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park. [9] The Deschryver family worked with the Mobutu dictatorship. The great patriarch was August Deschryver, Belgium’s Minister to the Congo at transition, in 1960, a likely candidate involved in undermining and destroying the Patrice Lumumba government, and assassinating the man, in the twilight of Congo’s Independence.

The Kahuzi-Biega National Park began as a Zoological and Forest Reserve gazetted in 1937 after over-hunting threatened to wipe Congo’s big game off the map. Adrien Deschryver helped found the Kahuzi-Biega Park in 1970. [10] One of the first actions was to forcibly displace the huge pygmy population from the park. The pygmies were consulted only to find locations of elephants and gorillas, and then they were removed: they were lured, tricked, forcibly driven out, and some died refusing to leave.

This is exactly what is happening in other parts of Congo today, involving USAID, GTZ, and big “conservation” and “humanitarian” interests like CARE International. [11] Five pygmy groupements—groups of villages spread over large geographical areas—were destroyed. GTZ and UNESCO, the United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization, got involved in the 1980s, after UNESCO designated Kahuzi-Biega a “World Heritage Site”—clearly another mechanism designed by Western interests to establish cultural and geographic control over people and landscapes. When the GTZ sought to implement “community development” they did not consult with the pygmies to determine their true needs, or wants.

The result was armed violence and death. There was no compensation, and the pygmies—forced out of their universe of knowing, the forest—were left homeless and destitute in a world they did not understand. In 2000 era discussions involving some “440 stakeholders” under the new mantra of participatory involvement, there were only two people of pygmy origin, but these were lauded as representation of all the pygmy peoples.

As one Congolese consultant wrote, “Over the two-month period of research into the situation of the Bambuti Pygmies and the protected areas in North and South Kivu—the Kahuzi-Biega National Park—none of the indigenous Bambuti, Barwa, Batwa and Babuluko [people] displayed any enthusiasm for or awareness of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park conservation project. This project has left them worse off than before it was introduced and implemented. The Pygmies have been expelled and driven out with neither indemnity nor other compensation. They have been cast aside. They belong nowhere.” [12]
This is genocide.

Genocide is the congregation of femicide and homocide, the destruction of an entire people, and that is what is happening to people in Central Africa, regardless of their ethnicity.

The human rights of the pygmies in Eastern Congo are the most violated of the most violated on earth, thanks to the Belgian family Deschryver, UNESCO and the GTZ.
The Amy Goodman report ends with a plea by Christine Schuler Deschryver for funds to put a roof on a house for survivors of sexual violence. How to help? Give to UNICEF, she says, or to Eve Ensler’s international organization “V-Day”.

The Democracy Now! report about rape in Congo followed in rather interesting coincidence with a New York Times feature. Goodman opens her report noting that she interviewed Deschryver “last month” [September] in New York. But the Democracy Now! report appeared on October 8, 2007.

On October 7, 2007, in “Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War,” Jeffrey Gettleman reported on rape in Congo for the New York Times.

If Amy Goodman was shocked and horrified about Christine Schuler Deschryver’s descriptions of the scale and nature of sexual violence in Congo, why did she wait so long to run the interview? Why did the Democracy Now! report follow one day after the New York Times feature? Coincidence? Or is the Democracy Now! report just another expedient piece of a coordinated propaganda strategy?

The Gettleman report was a travesty of deception in classic New York Times form. “Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence,” Gettleman writes, “and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here.”
In fact, the situation in Central Africa has been one steady “convulsion of violence” since, at least, the Rwandan Patriotic Front invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990.

Zaire exploded in 1996, and the killing and raping has never stopped. This author has consistently and repeatedly reported on massive rape, sexual mutilation, and slavery as weapons of war and depopulation in Central Africa since at least 2001, and these were widely reported by others before that. Now, barely a year after the “historic national elections” that brought President Joseph Kabila to power in October 2006, The New York Times is doing damage control.

“The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over,” wrote Gettleman. “Last year, this country of 66 million people held a historic election that cost $500 million and was intended to end Congo’s various wars and rebellions and its tradition of epically bad government.”

Things don’t just fall apart in Congo. “Epically bad government” and “chaos” are typically manufactured to serve powerful interests—the “shock doctrine” defined by Naomi Klein [13]—and are the result of epically bad reporting and the impunity that is insured by Western disinformation and propaganda campaigns. Hundreds of millions of dollars pumped into the 2006 electoral process, and much was stolen.

But the elections exercise was not even a band-aid on the festering war in Congo. To describe the ongoing warfare in Eastern DRC as the most recent convulsion of violence is to feed the Western stereotype of the hopeless African condition and run cover for multinational plunder and depopulation, backing warlords, on and on.
Gettleman’s choice of sources and experts is very interesting. One of these, also referenced by Amy Goodman, is Sir John Holmes, a British diplomat with a long history of support for predatory imperialism.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, to the New York Times.
Holmes provides a tidy commentary about African savagery. What we don’t learn from the New York Times is that Holmes previously worked for the British security firm Thomas De La Rue, one of the top companies in the world that prints money, security documents (e.g. passports) and postage stamps for 150 countries; currency instruments are used to entrench and maintain structural violence.

Thomas De La Rue prints money for the Isle of Man, an offshore tax haven connected to money laundering and mercenaries Tony Buckingham and Simon Mann, and they have printed special currency notes for war-torn Sierra Leone. More significantly perhaps, Holmes was the British Ambassador in Lisbon, Portugal from 1999 to 2001, the period of war in Congo where Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba, partnered with Uganda, a close British ally, launched the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) rebellion.

Bemba has a villa in Portugal, and his criminal syndicate involves his brother-in-law, blood diamonds and mercenary partner Antony Teixeira, a Portuguese tycoon living in South Africa. Bemba’s troops committed massive rape and sexual violence in DRC, and the Effacer Le Tableau campaign was a genocide campaign against pygmies, but Bemba has never been held to account.[14] U.N. Under Secretary General John Holmes is selectively used by the New York Times to legitimize their propaganda, but Holmes himself should be deposed about his role as an economic hit-man supporting plunder and money laundering.

“The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling,” says John Holmes, in empty platitudes.

A PORNOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE

Jeffrey Gettleman goes on to attribute violence to “one of the newest groups to emerge” called “the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.”

In fact, the Rastas have been operating in Eastern Congo for at least three years, have previously committed atrocities, and are not a “new group to emerge.” Gettleman has to explain away the violence in African terms, never the white multinational corporations, arms dealers, criminal Western syndicates or “conservation” organizations (they fund) occupying the soils of North or South Kivu provinces on vast tracts of land.

Further, these feature articles express some very white supremacist thinking about rape in Congo. “Because there has been no justice,” Eve Ensler states, “because so few perpetrators have been held accountable for the crimes that they're committing, it's becoming as Christine [Schuler Deschryver] said to me when we were there, like a country sport: rape.”

So, according to this description, Congolese men are universally castigated for “rape as sport,” no matter that this is committed by armed forces backed, armed, and licensed by the West to commit massive sexual atrocities, or that Congolese men are killed outright when militias enter villages. As shown below, the Congolese militias and National Army serve a deeper, hidden, Western corporate agenda: organized white-collar crime. They are paid in kind for services provided to maintain and insure natural resource plunder and the acquisition and control of vast tracts of Congolese territory.

Eve Ensler’s privilege and white supremacy here is illuminated by her feminist perspective, her feminist crusade, and it becomes acceptable for Eve Ensler—and Ms., Glamour, PBS, The Washington Post, Newsweek, etc.—to label all Congolese men as sexual predators. This, of course, is the chorus of the Western media to begin with—Africans are sexually licentious, they copulate like monkeys—only it transcends boundaries and becomes an African condition. Isn’t that why they [those savages] are all HIV/AIDS positive?

Jeffrey Gentleman took it a step further with a direct quote by a Congolese doctor that describes men in Congo as primates. “There used to be a lot of gorillas in there,” he said. “But now they’ve been replaced by much more savage beasts.” Such language would not be tolerated by the New York Times to describe rape elsewhere. Rape as a weapon of war is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, committed by US soldiers, but the depiction of savagery would never be applied. But here the propaganda system knowingly reduces the issue to sub-human animal behavior by black savages.

There are extensive case studies analyzing and exploring the systematization of sexual violence and the wounds it inflicts in warfare in Eastern Congo. [15] Institutions like Columbia and University of Denver have studied rape and war in eastern Congo for years—funded by private foundations and the euphemistically named United States Institute for Peace.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNIFEM and other UN agencies have huge budgets dedicated to “humanitarian” reporting and research. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), alone, has a 2007 budget of $US 686,591,107, “roughly the same level as in 2006,” with an additional $40,000,000 infusion announced by MONUC on October 22, 2007. OCHA merely coordinates 126 organizations, including 10 United Nations agencies and 50 international agencies.

The “humanitarian” misery industry is part of a system perpetuating, supporting, and facilitating a permanent state of emergency in Eastern Congo.
People know about sexual atrocities in Congo and they have known about it at the highest levels for years. The New York Times shares culpability in the proliferation of war in Central Africa; the Western media merely generates war propaganda.

WHERE IS ANDERSON COOPER (360)?

It is well known that orders come from military officers. The orders given call for mass rape and sexual violence as a means of terrorizing and destroying communities, with permanent psychological and physical effects on survivors. The chain of command determines what soldiers do and don’t do. There are hierarchies, and soldiers include young boys and men conscripted into terror networks.

To disobey orders is certain death in these militias, and escape is a deadly proposition. For thousands of men and boys in Central Africa the “least dangerous place to be” is in the military—be it a militia or national army. For thousands of women and girls in Central Africa the “least dangerous place to be” is wedded to a soldier or taken “captive” by him. Becoming a soldier, or “marrying” one, is a necessary and positive choice for many people. [16]

The agency of Congolese men and boys and women and girls is therefore rendered invisible and neutralized by such generalizations and stereotypes pronounced by western elites both in and out of the “humanitarian” business sector.

Further, by castigating all Congolese men, or all soldiers, the blame and responsibility are shifted away from officers and civil authorities who run these criminal networks, and who give orders to rape and plunder as policy. All of the rape stories in the recent propaganda front characterize rape as wanton sexual chaos, rather than weapons and instruments of warfare and social disintegration.

It is the standard message: African chaos, savagery, sexual licentiousness, and primitive, sub-human brutalization. This is the heart of darkness, after all, a place in the “middle of nowhere, a primeval jungle landscape where it is every man for himself, every woman for any man.

Eve Ensler further demonstrates the arrogance of whiteness and ignorance of events by effectively stating that the United States has said nothing about rape in Congo, because we are allies with Rwanda and Uganda, who suffered genocide and saw the so-called genocidaires flood into Congo, who graciously accepted them. In fact, the U.S. overthrew the government of Rwanda in 1994, and the when Rwandan and Ugandan forces shelled refugee camps in Eastern Congo (1996) they followed this with a campaign of extermination where hundreds of thousands of women and children were hunted, raped, and massacred.

This genocide has not been named. Howard French, New York Times bureau chief in Nairobi in the 1990’s, tried to name it, and he comes close in his lukewarm treatise on Western plunder—Africa: A Continent for the Taking—but his efforts were too little. French moved on to become bureau chief in China, leaving Africa behind, with no commitment to act on what he learned. Everyone has tried to bury the truth with the skeletons. The recent thrusts by the Clinton Foundation in Rwanda—dumping millions of dollars into “humanitarian” programs—are a perfect example.

The U.S. factions—the Rwanda Patriotic Front and Uganda People’s Defense Forces that backed their invasion of Rwanda—committed massive rapes in Rwanda as well. From 1990 to 1994 the Ugandan/RPF invaders in Rwanda raped as policy, and Human Rights Watch covered it with their reports of mass rape attributed, universally and solely, to the Hutu genocidiares. This is the political economy of rape and genocide.

Eve Ensler and Christine Schuler Deschryver regurgitate the accepted narratives and blame the victims of corporate and military plunder aligned with Anglo-American-Israeli interests. To her credit, Eve Ensler mentions SONY Playstation and cellphones as culprits, and she suggests action should be taken against corporations, but she blames the illegal mineral trade on the genocidal murderers from Rwanda, the Interahamwe (just as all violence in Darfur is blamed on Janjaweed, and all violence in Afghanistan is blamed on Taliban).

But she states that “we don’t know who” is involved behind or beside these. This cultural reductionism feeds the mainstream media discourses that perpetuate oppressions and consolidate Western power.
Many of the criminals involved were named in the United Nations Panel of Experts reports on illegal extraction of natural resources from Congo.

Countless others have been named by numerous independent journalists, including this author, over, and over and over.
John Bredenkamp. Billy Rautenbach. George Forrest. Louis Michel. Paul Kagame. Yoweri Museveni. Salim Saleh. James Kabarebe. Walter Kansteiner. Maurice Tempelsman. Philippe de Moerloose. Dan Gertler. Étienne Viscount Davignon. Bill Clinton. Simon Village. Ramnik Kotecha. Jean-Pierre Bemba. Romeo Dallaire.

Nothing is ever done. After the production of the United Nations Panel of Experts reports on the plunder of Congo’s natural resources, nothing was done. Criminal syndicates lobbied to have their names cleared and the United Nations bucked under. Emboldened by toothless international legal instruments and spineless international leaders, the corporations and their criminal syndicates stepped up their operations. Plunder, depopulation, rape, sexual slavery—anything goes.

And the media provided its smokescreens: Anderson Cooper “360”.
Eve Ensler has no idea what she is talking about and, on a certain level, like all the rest of us, Eve Ensler is another Mazungu whitey who has no business being in Central Africa at all, because she has no idea what has happened, or is happening, or why.

Her white skin and feminist crusade act as a badge of credibility and insures her privileged access to Western media corporations that benefit from “chaos” and depopulation. When “peace” is discussed it revolves around Western “charity” and “goodwill,” yet more than 100 years of Western involvement in Africa have culminated in permanent slaughter and depopulation across the continent. The raw materials continue to leave.

Christine Schuler Deschryver represents another face of privilege. When times got hard in 1996 she packed her suitcase and left with her two children for Belgium. She flies to New York and is interviewed on Democracy Now!

Listeners in the U.S. believe she is a Congolese native, but she is a Belgian expatriate whose family is a mainstay of colonialism and neocolonialism in Congo. And the Congolese women are never allowed to fly to New York or to tell the deeper story of deracination in “the middle of nowhere,” in Congo. What is the Deschryver family relationship to Philippe De Moerloose or Louis Michel or Étienne Viscount Davignon or the other principal interlocutors in the Belgian money and power syndicates involved behind the scenes in Congo today?

To get a sense of what Glamour does not report—what the New York Times, Ms., Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, The Nation, BBC, National Public Radio and CNN’s Anderson Cooper “360” will not tell us—take a look behind the scenes in eastern Congo and juxtapose the unreported realities with the personal stories of trauma and recovery told by Eve Ensler in Glamour magazine. While the mainstream corporate media always reduces these stories to a few simple facts, and a panoply of supposedly unfathomable black-on-black violence, there are always some skeletons to be found lurking in the shadows of white society.

THERE’S GOLD IN THEM (BLOODY) HILLS

The North and South Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo remain awash in blood. Over the past decade hundreds of thousands of women have suffered sexual violence in these provinces as a weapon of war meant to terrorize local populations and gain control of natural resources. Sexual violence includes mutilations, rape and other forms of torture.
Rwandan-backed General Laurent Nkunda has occupied eastern DRC for several years, and was involved in atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Congo during the first (1996-1997) and second (1998-2004) Congo occupations by Uganda and Rwanda.

The United Nations Observers Mission in DRC (MONUC) makes possible the occupation of Congo by General Laurent Nkunda today. Nkunda is backed by the military regime of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda and by the baby-faced Jean-Pierre Bemba, the rebel warlord from DRC’s Equateur province whose interests and ties in DRC go back to his dark alliance with the dictator Joseph Mobutu and his Western backers.

The U.S. and European interests backing General Laurent Nkunda run deeper than the blood in the fields and rivers of eastern Congo. The German Embassy in the Democratic Republic of Congo is involved in shady business deals, backing militias and plundering raw materials from Congo, and behind them is U.S. involvement.

This has partially occurred through the military control of a mine called Lueshe, located in a village called Lueshe, in North Kivu, some 170 kilometers northwest of Goma. But it also involves coltan, cassiterite, diamonds and gold, and the economic benefits that accrue to those who control land and taxes.

One gold mining firm with vast landholdings in South Kivu province is Canada’s Banro Corporation. Banro has control of four major properties, 27 exploration permits and 5730 square kilometers of gold mining concessions. [17] Banro operates only in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the blood-drenched South Kivu province.

Look at the size of their landholdings: <http://www.banro.com/s/Properties.asp>.

When we talk about International Criminal Tribunals, who are the real war criminals?

What about Simon Village, Peter Cowley, Arnold Kondrat, John Clarke, Bernard van Rooyen, Piers Cumberlege and Richard Lachcik—the directors of Banro Corporation? [18] What is the definition of “white collar” crime? How does a company of white executives like Banro from Canada gain control of such vast concessions? Through bloodshed and depopulation with black people pulling the triggers.
What has changed since King Leopold’s era?

NIOBIUM & THE POLITICS OF SCARCITY

In North Kivu province the Lueshe mine provides a well-documented example of the kinds of nefarious activities that all Western governments are involved with in Congo, and in Africa more generally, and these activities certainly apply to Banro and other corporations—this is how the system works, and who works it. The Lueshe Niobium mining scandal merely provides an excellent case study where the thief has been caught red-handed with his hands in the illegal minerals pot.

The Lueshe Niobium mine has been under the control of pro-Rwandan forces for the past eight to ten years, first under the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) rebels allied with Rwanda and Uganda and Jean-Pierre Bemba, and now under the “protection” of General Laurent Nkunda. But Lueshe’s history is deeply rooted in the controlling interests of the German government and its U.S. and European partners.

The rare earth metal, niobium or “niob” for short, formerly also known as Columbium, is found there, together with tantalum, in the mineral Pyrochlore. Niobium became extremely important within the last twenty years because of its enlarged range of application for aerospace and defense purposes.

Niobium is mainly used as an alloying addition in the production of high quality steel used in the aircraft and space industries, as well as in medicine. It is also widely used in basic applications of machinery and construction and in quite large quantities in the production of stainless steel. Niob, like tantalum and columbium-tantalite or “coltan,” is also coveted for the emerging and secretive “nanotechnology” sector—also pivotal to state-of-the-art and futuristic aerospace, defense, communications and biotechnology applications.

There are three principal niobium deposits in the world, all controlled by a company named Arraxa: one in Brazil, one in Canada and the Lueshe mine in DRC. The owner of Arraxa is the U.S. based company Metallurg Inc., N.Y. Mettalurg Inc. is itself a subsidiary of Mettalurg Holdings of Wayne, Pennsylvania, and Mettalurg Holdings is one of many companies in the investment portfolio of Safegaurd International Investment Fund of (Philadelphia) Pennsylvania, Frankfurt and Paris.

[19]In 1982 Metallurg signed a mining convention with the Republic of Zaire, enabling them to exclusively extract all Pyrochlore at the Lueshe niobium deposit for the next twenty years. A company named SOMIKIVU (Societè Miniere du Kivu) was established. Metallurg ´s 100% subsidiary, the German company GfE Nuremberg (Gesellschaft fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH), became a 70 % shareholder.

By 1990, SOMIKIVU stopped all production, which was never much at all, because it was apparently insured by HERMES AG, backed by the German Government, to prevent production from the Lueshe mine in order to drive up and control the price of niobium mined and processed at the other sites outside of Congo/Zaire. It was also important to prevent any competitive venture from acquiring the mining rights and subsequently from actually operating the Lueshe mine.

According to available documents, employees of the German Embassy have personally benefiting from, and are involved in, the business of GfE/Metallurg. This involvement has included complicity in extortion, assault, murder, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This involvement includes complicity in sexual atrocities committed by the paid agents of white, Western corporations.

In 1999, after years of inactivity and lost incomes to the Congolese state—a very minority partner manipulated into a position of exploitation as usual—the Lueshe niobium mine was expropriated from its owners by Congo’s new president Laurent Kabila and turned over to the firm E. Krall Investment Uganda (Edith Krall), under a Congolese subsidiary company E. Krall Metal Congo. Nonetheless, with the military backing of Rwanda, RCD rebels operated the mine from 1999-2005 with the help of German Embassy (Kinshasa) affiliate Karl Heinz Albers, also a close business partner of the Rwandan Patriotic Front Government of Paul Kagame. It is also alleged that mercenaries have been involved in securing the mine.

The new owners of E. Krall Metal Congo reportedly tried to visit their new mine in 2000, amidst some of the most serious and brutal fighting in the entire war. The officials were arrested by RCD military who immediately called Karl Heinz Albers, then a permanent resident in Kigali, Rwanda.

According to documents provided by Krall, Albers explained that the RCD should not ask questions but “eliminate” the Krall group—kill them on the spot. The RCD Goma secret service chief apparently refused to execute this order and released the people of the Krall group. This action helped the Krall delegation to escape to Uganda but made the RCD secret service chief in Congo subject to assassination attempts by killers from Kigali. The RCD chief only saved his life by immediate emigration to Uganda, where he was nonetheless also subject to several assassination attempts reportedly ordered by Karl Heinz Albers.

Albers was reportedly selling coltan from the Krall concessions to the German firm H.G. Starck. From August 2000 to October 2001 Somikivu shipped some 669 tons of Pyrochlore concentrate to Rotterdam harbor in Amsterdam. After October 2001 shipments went to A&M Minerals in London, a company on the U.N. Panel of Experts blacklist who are alleged to have purchased illegally some 2,246 tons of Pyrochlore concentrate before 2004.

Dr. Johannes Wontka, German citizen and technical director of SOMIKIVU, informed the members of Krall Métal that while Krall may have the legal titles from Kinshasa to operate Lueshe, the SOMIKIVU (Karl Heintz Albers) gang had the power to do so, therefore they should in their own physical interest “disappear”. Dr. Wontka reportedly requested a Major of the RCD army to kill the chief of the “Syndicate Global” the labor union leader of the workers in Lueshe who were on strike due to months of non-payment of salaries.

Dr. Wontka reportedly requested that the RCD Major shoot the “whites” that would come soon to Lueshe—the technical delegation of Krall Métal who were on their way—and promised money for the job. By chance the RCD Major was the brother-in-law of the trade union leader whom he was tasked to shoot and therefore he neither shot him nor the ”whites” he was meant to kill, but reported the case to the police. The general prosecutor of North Kivu eventually confiscated the passport of Dr. Wontka, and Wontka, who tried to flee Congo with his family, was arrested at the border and brought to Goma, DRC. And then the German Embassy in Kinshasa cranked into gear.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AMBASSADORSHIPS

The German Ambassador to Kinshasa, Mrs. Doretta Loschelder, informed the public by giving press statements that German investors will not invest in Congo projects and that economic support by Germany will not be transferred to Congo if the authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo are going to treat investors in the way authorities in Goma were treating the SOMIKIVU agent Dr. Wontka. Under this pressure, Dr. Wontka was released from prison and within 30 minutes fled Congo against orders of the police and immigration officials.

Mrs. Johanna König, employed at the ministry of foreign affairs of Germany until 2001, and serving at the German embassy in Kigali as Ambassador of Germany in Kigali, was until February 2004 a member of the board of KHA International AG, the holding parent company of the Karl Heinz Albers companies. Konig apparently visited the Lueshe mine with Rwandan military protection. The RCD were also operating the Lueshe mine under forced labor conditions, at one time reportedly involving prisoners from Rwanda accused of genocide by the Kagame regime.

The Krall complaints—well documented—have been brought to officials in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, England and the U.S., all of which have some financial interest or some link in the chain of exploitation. No action has been taken anywhere, and officials of the German Embassy in Kinshasa reportedly continue to benefit from the illegal exploitation of the Lueshe mine. The multinational firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is also invested in the companies exploiting Lueshe and profiting from war, slavery and depopulation in Congo.

At this time, the Karl Heinz Albers may have transferred his “rights” to Lueshe to one Julien Boilloit, a businessman in Kigali who has a big office in Goma and operates behind militias in the Kivus. Julien Boillot’s partners reportedly include Mode Makabuza—a Congolese businessman with multiple interests in Goma. The governor of North Kivu has certainly been paid off.
The recent spate of “news” reports and broadcasts on sexual violence in Eastern Congo are part of a coordinated campaign. It is interesting that sexual violence became an issue when it did. Sexual violence is off the charts, but the appearance, slant, framing and timing of reportage suggests is being used to manipulate public sentiment to serve the interests of certain powerful actors at the expense of others.

It is certainly a lever used against the Congolese government of President Joseph Kabila, and it may be that it is coordinated in response to Kabila’s recent deals with China. After all, it has now been reported by the BBC that the Kabila government is working with the Hutu genocidaires, the FDLR—Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda—the ultimate evildoers. It doesn’t matter that the Paul Kagame government’s military and corporate machine has dealt with FDLR all along, when it serves their interests, to import terror and export raw materials. This is all very well-documented.

The Western public is unaware of these greater readings, and merely gobble up the news reports as examples of an equitable and humane Western media system that is attuned to tragedies, even if they were late to decry and report them. Western feminists are all over the rape story, but where should the outrage be directed?

Rape was off the agenda at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) until Hillary Clinton showed up in Arusha, Tanzania—the city that became the economic beneficiary of the lucrative ICTR boondoggle—and pledged $600,000 to be paid after the first ICTR rape conviction. And then they had to find someone to pin rape charges on—but the RPF who committed the rapes were never at risk. It was Bill and Hillary’s blood money, and another financial incentive used to whitewash the Clinton’s role in genocide and covert operations in Central Africa.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame committed massive sexual atrocities from 1990 to 1994 in Rwanda, and throughout the RPF campaign in Congo, but these were covered up by Western reporters at the time and later blamed, universally, on the Hutus. [20] The establishment narrative on rape in Rwanda was dictated from the start by Human Rights Watch with their pro-RPF treatise Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwanda Genocide, published in 1996.

[21]Who should help the victims of sexual violence in Congo? How about the German multinational corporation Bayer AG—whose subsidiary H.C. Starck was directly involved in the coltan plunder by the RPF.

How about GTZ, involved in Congo (Zaire) since 1980 and the expropriation and exclusion of the pygmy’s way of life. How about Nokia. Intel. Sony. Barrick Gold Corporation. Anglo-American Corp. Banro. Moto Gold. Belgian Philippe de Moerloose and his Damavia Airlines. Bill and Hillary Clinton and their diamond buddy, Maurice Tempelsman, and De Beers. Tempelsman and DeBeers have plundered Congo for more than fifty years. And how about Royal/Dutch Shell, another backer of the Kagame regime.

Add sexual violence to the list, sure, but Eve Ensler and the Western media propaganda campaign for “an end to sexual violence in Congo” must be placed in its proper context: white supremacy and the shock doctrine of global corporate plunder. In this context rape and depopulation are permanent conditions, the real killers get away with murder, and there is endless, brutal revenge by the victors.

***

The victims get all the blame, and their suffering never ends.
***

The Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and Nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a "time", yet It cannot be destroyed. ==> Wolverine

A Candle For Remembering

Rwanda: Cartographie des crimes

Let us remember Our People

You can't stop thinking

Welcome to Home Truths

Everybody Hurts

KAGAME - GENOCIDAIRE

Paul Kagame admits ordering...

Why did Kagame this to me?

RPF committed the unspeakable

Inzira ndende

Search

Hutu Children & their Mums

Rwanda-rebranding

Ways To Get Rid of Kagame

Almighty God :Justice for US

Killing Hutus on daily basis

RPF Trade Mark: Akandoya

The Torture in Rwanda flourishes

Fighting For Our Freedom?

KAGAME VS JUSTICE

Plainte contre les personnalités responsables des massacres de réfugiés

Critic of murderous Kagame regime in Rwanda killed in crash of Continental Flight 3407 (16.02.09)

Le talent d'un écrivain(Péan)

The new Rwandan patriotism: a tragic historian phenomenon

Laurent Nkunda’s “Arrest:” Rwanda’s Latest Shell Game in Response to International Pressure

PRESS RELEASE N ° 07/SE/CD/FEBRUARY/2009 OF THE FDLR

The victims get all the blame, and their suffering never ends.

AS International

Profile

Genocide masterminded by RPF

Human and Civil Rights

Rwanda: A mapping of crimes

KIBEHO: Rwandan Auschwitz

Mass murderers C. Sankara

Stephen Sackur’s Hard Talk.

Prof. Allan C. Stam

Prof. Christian Davenport

The killing Fields - Part 1

The killing Fields - Part II

Daily bread for Rwandans

The killing Fields - Part III

Time has come: Regime change

Drame rwandais- justice impartiale

Sheltering 2,5 million refugees

Latest videos

Rwanda's Untold Story

Rwanda, un génocide en questions

Nombre de Visiteurs

Pages

Popular Posts - Last 7 days

Archives

Everything happens for a reason

Hutus didn't plan Tutsi Genocide

Your comment if you LIKE IT. All for Human rights