Congo Genocide: Obama Knows Real Story

The official October 1st release of the United Nations Report on Human Rights Abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 1993-2003, documenting the Rwandan and Ugandan armies’ massacres of Rwandan Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutus in the Democratic Republic of Congo, should be a defining moment for President Barack Obama.

How will the U.S.’s first African American president respond to the detailed and widely publicized UN documentation of genocide in the heart of Africa, committed by the U.S. longstanding military proxies, the armies of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni?

Few Americans realize that the Rwandan and Ugandan armies are armed and trained by the U.S., or that the U.S. military uses both countries as staging grounds, but they may now. Few realize, either, that the sole piece of legislation that President Obama shepherded into law on his own, as a Senator, was S.B. 2125, the Obama Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006, in which, in Section 101(3), he quoted USAID:

Given its size, population, and resources, the Congo is an important player in Africa and of long-term interest to the United States.

Indeed. In 1982, the Congressional Budget Office’s “Cobalt; Policy Options for a Strategic Mineral” noted that: cobalt alloys are critical to the aerospace and weapons industries; that the U.S. has no cobalt worth mining; that 64 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves are in the Katanga Copper Belt running from southeastern Congo into northern Zambia; and, that control of the region is therefore critical to the U.S.’s ability to manufacture for war.

Congo Genocide: Obama Knows Real Story

The official October 1st release of the United Nations Report on Human Rights Abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 1993-2003, documenting the Rwandan and Ugandan armies’ massacres of Rwandan Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutus in the Democratic Republic of Congo, should be a defining moment for President Barack Obama.

How will the U.S.’s first African American president respond to the detailed and widely publicized UN documentation of genocide in the heart of Africa, committed by the U.S. longstanding military proxies, the armies of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni?

Few Americans realize that the Rwandan and Ugandan armies are armed and trained by the U.S., or that the U.S. military uses both countries as staging grounds, but they may now. Few realize, either, that the sole piece of legislation that President Obama shepherded into law on his own, as a Senator, was S.B. 2125, the Obama Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006, in which, in Section 101(3), he quoted USAID:

Given its size, population, and resources, the Congo is an important player in Africa and of long-term interest to the United States.

Indeed. In 1982, the Congressional Budget Office’s “Cobalt; Policy Options for a Strategic Mineral” noted that: cobalt alloys are critical to the aerospace and weapons industries; that the U.S. has no cobalt worth mining; that 64 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves are in the Katanga Copper Belt running from southeastern Congo into northern Zambia; and, that control of the region is therefore critical to the U.S.’s ability to manufacture for war.

Cobalt is one of the many abundant mineral and other natural resource riches, that involves so much of the rest of the world in the constant, tragic warfare in eastern Congo.

Section 101(5 & 6) of Obama’s 2006 Congo legislation reads:

(5) The most recent war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which erupted in 1998, spawned some of the world’s worst human rights atrocities and drew in six neighboring countries.

(6) Despite the conclusion of a peace agreement and subsequent withdrawal of foreign forces in 2003, both the real and perceived presence of armed groups hostile to the Governments of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi continue to serve as a major source of regional instability and an apparent pretext for continued interference in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by its neighbors. [Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi].

What President Obama identified, as the “real and perceived presence of armed groups hostile to the Governments of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi” was, most of all, the real and perceived presence of “Hutu militias.”  They were indeed the “pretext” for the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army’s massacres of Hutu civilians, Rwandan Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutus, with the help of the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF)—massacres now documented in the UN report which was first leaked to Le Monde on August 26th, then officially released on October 1st.

Since Obama described the militias as “apparent pretext for continued interference” in 2006, we can assume that he understood them as such on his Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009, when Rwandan troops again moved into Congo. On that day, world headlines, alongside those he himself was making, included “Rwandan Troops enter D.R. Congo to hunt Hutu militias” (Telegraph), “Rwandan troops enter Congo to hunt Hutu rebels,” (BBC), “Rwandan troops enter Kivu to hunt Hutu rebels,” (Radio France International).

On the same day, The Christian Science Monitor, in “Rwandan Troops enter Democratic Republic of the Congo,” reproduced the pretext that Obama had identified in S.B. 2125:

“Rwandan troops entered the Democratic Republic of Congo on Tuesday to tackle a Rwandan Hutu militia whose leaders are accused of taking part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide before fleeing to Congo.”

Since Obama understood the pretext in 2006, he no doubt understood it that day and no doubt understands it today, as Rwandan and Ugandan troops are rumored, once again, to be moving into Congo, despite international outcry about the UN report.

Hutu militias and other “rebel militias” in Congo, can no longer serve as the devil, the eternal excuse, or, as Obama said, the “apparent pretext for intervention in the Democratic Republic by Congo’s neighbors.”  Most of all, they can no longer serve as the devil, excuse, and pretext for interventions by Paul Kagame, the general turned president and so long heroized as Rwanda’s saviour, because Kagame’s own army’s massacres of Rwandan and Congolese Hutu civilians has now been documented in the UN report.

The leak and now, the official release, have, finally magnified President –then Senator– Obama’s obscure, still little known revision of the East/Central African story in his 2006 legislation, S.B. 2126, which then became Public Law 109-456.

Obama’s “Rwanda moment”?

John Prendergast and David Eggers, the ENOUGH Project’s tireless advocates for U.S. intervention in Sudan, suggested, in a New York Times Op-Ed that Obama’s “Rwanda moment,” like Bill Clinton’s in 1994, is now, in Sudan, where, they say, Obama has a chance to do what Bill Clinton reputedly failed to do in Rwanda, intervene to stop genocide.

But Obama’s Rwanda, and Congo, moment, is in Rwanda and Congo now, as the world reviews the UN report and Rwandan troops once again advance into Congo. He doesn’t need to intervene, but to stop intervening, by withdrawing the military support, weapons, training, logistics and intelligence, for Kagame; support that has so long equalled intervention.  If he did so, peace and human rights activists all over the world would stand behind him and the narrative revision that he quietly penned three years ago.

An Obama decision to stop supporting Kagame would go up against the last 30 years of Pentagon intervention in the Great Lakes Region of Africa; but the UN Report turns his 2006 narrative revision into an outright reversal, with the weight of the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights, and growing international opinion, behind it.

Obama is the Commander-in-Chief, with absolute executive authority over the U.S. Armed Forces.  Yes, he can stop the destructive U.S. role in Central Africa should he choose to.

Ann Garrison is a US based Independent Journalist. “Speaking Truth To Empower.”

blackstarnews.com

U.S./U.N. cover-up of Kagame’s genocide in Rwanda and Congo

by Juan Carrero

globalresearch.ca

A long-standing code of silence inside the U.N. is coming to an end regarding what is probably the largest genocide ever since the U.N. founding: the genocide committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front since 1990

 

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Paul Kagame’s RPF, in what James Traub describes in Foreign Policy as a “typical episode,” “kidnapped refugees, many of them women and children, and brought them to a camp, allegedly under the pretext of returning them to Rwanda. The refugees were then brought out in small groups. From the report: ‘They were bound and their throats were cut or they were killed by hammer blows to the head. Their bodies were then thrown into pits or doused with petrol and burned. The operation was carried out in a methodical manner and lasted at least one month.’”

 

On Aug. 27, the French daily Le Monde leaked the news that a long report by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay ^[3] of South Africa calls the “systematic, methodical and pre-meditated crimes perpetrated against the Hutu” by the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) in Zaire in 1996-1997 “crimes against humanity, war crimes, and even genocide crimes.” The report has not yet been officially released but is already circulating freely.

The victims were “mostly children, women, the elderly and the sick.” The investigation looks at the crimes perpetrated in Zaire/Congo throughout the decade 1993-2003. Rwanda is not the only country incriminated. But, according to Le Monde’s Jean-Philippe Rémy, the RPF’s systematic extermination of Rwandan Hutu refugees and other Congolese Hutu – either by violent force or by systematically blocking food supplies sent especially to them – could be considered “the crux of the report.” At any rate, it is clear this extensive report is “devastating, especially for Rwanda,” as Christophe Châtelot, in turn, points out in the excellent cover article ^[4].

Nevertheless, both articles end by reaching the same major erroneous conclusion stated by most of the press articles that have appeared since the report was leaked: the need, they say, to establish a tribunal with jurisdictional authority over these crimes. Not only does such a court already exist but, on Feb. 6, 2008, it already issued arrest warrants against 40 RPF top officials who are allegedly responsible for the crimes in Congo referred to in the new U.N. report.

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An elderly Rwandan woman in a refugee camp in Congo in 1997 was one of countless victims of Rwandan forces making repeated forays into United Nations-administered camps that, according to the New York Times, housed roughly a million Hutu who had fled the genocide in Rwanda. – Photo: Roger Lemoyne via Getty Images

This court is Spain’s Audiencia Nacional (National Court) which, pursuant to the principle of universal justice, possesses full jurisdiction to prosecute this kind of crime. It is by virtue of this principle, for example, that the arrest of Augusto Pinochet was possible in London and that today the Interpol and the SIRENE network are acting on the 40 arrest warrants cited above. Let us also remember that the four Spanish Marist clergymen who were accompanying the Hutu refugees and who had previously condemned internationally this huge slaughter were murdered by the RPF in the Nyamirangwe refugee camp in eastern Congo on Oct. 31, 1996.

In my opinion, there are various other errors in Jean-Philippe Rémy’s article. Rémy is much too quick to endorse some interpretations of the motives behind the crimes that hardly match the facts and are at this point almost untenable today. The most outrageous interpretation states that “the Rwandan intervention sought to prevent the refugees from coming together and, led by the ‘genocidaires,’ rising in revolt to attack Rwanda from their refugee camps at the other side of the border, in the former Zaire. The approach was to empty the entire region. Part of the refugees will return to Rwanda, another will be killed at the camps, others will flee across Zaire where they will be hunted down.”

Could a huge mass of human beings consisting mostly of malnourished women, elderly people and children come together and rise in revolt? Besides, shouldn’t there be a mention of the other goals the RPF pursued with that slaughter – those that many honest analysts actually rank as the main goals? That is,

• controlling the mineral fields in eastern Zaire, exactly where the “annoying” refugee camps were located; putting an end to the presence and diverting the attention of the international community related to those fields, which could derail the plans these criminals and their powerful allies had in Zaire;

• “correcting” as far as possible the demographic imbalance between Hutu and Tutsi which the RPF viewed as excessive, while at the same time averting a big international scandal under the guise of “hunting down the genocidaires”;

• having a submissive and controlled Hutu population, devoid of intellectuals or leaders, repopulate some of the regions in Rwanda that the RPF “operations” had left so deserted that they could potentially become a permanent black mark for the RPF that the international community would readily decry.

Unfortunately, the U.N.’s 14-year silence has had tragic consequences. Thousands of conniving silences have allowed those criminals basking in the bogus moral halo of having allegedly halted the genocide by Hutu extremists in the spring of 1994 to continue causing, with utter impunity, tremendous suffering in Rwanda and Congo!

But the report, whose recent leak has spurred widespread international coverage, could be the beginning of the end for Paul Kagame, who at the time was already head of the RPF and is now also president of Rwanda. True, up to now, it has only been a leak.

But the facts of the report are now in the public domain, above and beyond the sequel of pressures, blackmails and deals about to take place from now on, hushed and behind the scenes of the high political and economic circles of our times, primarily with the purpose of eliminating the word “genocide” from the text. Indeed, at long last more and more analyses are appearing about this situation which some of us had already been analyzing 14 years ago as the incidents themselves were occurring.

Already as early as October 1996 and more pointedly from February 1997 onwards, we condemned the massive massacres of Rwandan and Congolese Hutu being carried out in true genocidal manner, the cremation of tens of thousands of bodies, the extermination through starvation etc. Our documents were signed by some 20 Nobel laureates, as well as by heads of the political groups of the European Parliament.

How could our world leaders not possibly have known of crimes on such scale? How could Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs not have known either?

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As soon as the U.N. report was leaked, Rwanda described the allegations against its soldiers, such as these shown in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as “outrageous.” – Photo: AFP

 

We ourselves had those documents handed to Bill Clinton and others truly and ultimately responsible for this genocide. In addition to the diplomatic channels, Elie Wiesel, survivor of the Nazi extermination camps and Nobel Peace laureate, promised our colleague Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Nobel Peace laureate as well, to personally hand them to Bill Clinton in the meeting he was to have with the president shortly thereafter.

On the other hand, on Feb. 24, 1997, after my 42-day fast at the European Parliament in Brussels, I personally handed these documents to Abel Matutes^{1 [7]}, native of Ibiza, who was Spain’s minister of foreign affairs at the time. Inocencio Arias, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was with him at that meeting. I, in turn, was accompanied by Mercé Amer, Socialist regional/autonomic secretary of Mallorca.

Spanish state television TVE vetoed the news of this meeting, where documents of such serious nature and signed by such prominent people were being presented to the minister. The Brussels correspondent of TVE came over to me and told me how badly she personally felt: She had been following our fast and admired what we were doing together with Commissioner Emma Bonino, but she added that the news had unfortunately been vetoed and that, much to her regret, she wouldn’t be able to film.^{2 [8]}

As it was, heightened tension reigned at the meeting due to the assassination of three Spanish volunteers of Médicos del Mundo merely a few days before. We now know that the RPF perpetrated this crime, even though the strong propaganda machine of the international godfathers of this criminal organization had managed within hours to get the world media to attribute this triple murder to extremist Hutu once again.

Indeed, it’s so true that the U.N. report doesn’t make any major revelations that even now, after its leak, I will hardly be making any changes in the second edition of my book, “África, la madre ultrajada” (“Africa, The Violated Mother”). The news is not the fact that the RPF perpetrated a genocide on such a large scale.^{3 [9]}

In this genocide, the count of ethnic Hutu, both Rwandan and Congolese, violently eliminated by the RPF since 1990 should be estimated at hundreds of thousands at least. The scale of this genocide is even much larger if we consider the millions of victims, not only Hutu but also from other Bantu ethnic groups in Congo – or simply “not Hima-Tutsi,” as the racist RPF elite calls them.

They died not only through violent force but primarily due to starvation and other reasons related to the aggressions inflicted on Zaire/Congo by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi in their genocidal attempt to establish in that region an empire controlled by Hima-Tutsi clans.

The High Commissioner for Human Rights has merely investigated the tip of the iceberg of this genocide, since it has looked at merely 600 violent incidents only in Congo and only from 1993 to 2003. It is a genocide in which already as early as 1997 – that is, one year before the second and deadliest invasion – the report of the U.N. team headed by the Chilean Roberto Garretón ^[10] documented the investigation of around 40 locations in Congo and put the death count at up to 100,000.

A hint of the scale of this genocide can be found in a report by the International Rescue Committee which estimates 5.4 million victims in Congo until 1997 – in excess of the normal mortality figures – due to causes related to the aggressions staged there.

That’s not the news. The real news is something else: namely, that in a move that breaks the code of silence that has reigned within the U.N. for too many years, the High Commissioner for Human Rights reveals that the U.N. Security Council and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan before him – the same parties who less than a year ago accused some of us of financing the genocidaires – have actually spent more than a decade covering up the continuous genocide carried out by the RPF from Oct. 1, 1990, until today, which probably constitutes the largest one since the U.N. was founded!

Jean-Philippe Rémy’s article cited above is entitled, precisely, “A Long Set of Obstacles to Justice and Truth.” As Glen Ford well said in the analysis he wrote shortly after the leak of the report, “Rwandan Crisis Could Expose U.S. Role in Congo Genocide ^[11],”^{4 [12]} we are facing “a political crisis that threatens to disrupt Washington’s plans to dominate the continent.

“At stake is not only the reputation of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, an alumnus of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, but the larger American strategy for militarization of Africa and exploitation of her riches. …

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Former U.S. President Bill Clinton visits Rwandan President Paul Kagame on Kagame’s farm in Muhazi.

“Carnage on such a scale could not have occurred were it not for the connivance of the United States, which has nurtured Kagame at every juncture. …

“The leaked U.N. report cannot be put back in the bottle. Kagame, who labels all critics ‘genocidaires’ or apologists for genocide, is exposed as ‘the greatest mass killer on the face of the earth, today,’ as described by Edward S. Herman, co-author of ‘The Politics of Genocide.’ Kagame’s mentors and funders in the U.S. government, who aided and abetted his genocide in Congo, must be held equally accountable – if not more so, since United States corporations derive the greatest benefit from Congo’s blood minerals, and the U.S. military gains the most advantage from Rwandan and Ugandan services as mercenaries at America’s beck and call in Africa.”

The Rwandan government has reacted by making virulent threats, and the High Commissioner has postponed the report’s release until Oct. 1. The following weeks will be marked by a fierce struggle to delete the word “genocide” from the report, since this classification would require the immediate intervention of the international community.

Nevertheless, something new is happening in this great conflict as a significant movement of pieces appears to be taking place on the board. Another fact also evidences this: The important Gersony report ^{[14]5 [15]}, up until recently eerily unavailable, suddenly surfaced this past Sept. 7. It is another honest report, done as early as 1994, but in this case by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The report has remained suppressed since then and high-ranked U.N. officials even denied it had ever existed. It documents the systematic ethnic cleansing of Hutu, genocidal in nature, carried out by the RPF in the Rwandan interior^{6 [16]} during 1994.

The investigative team led by Gersony examined the assassination of some 30,000 Hutu by the RPF, but only looked at crimes perpetrated during a two-month period and in merely three prefectures. However, similar to the recent report by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, “[T]he massacres condemned in the Gersony report represented only the visible tip of a monumental iceberg consisting of hundreds of thousands of victims butchered by RPF troops since October 1, 1990 in the areas occupied by the military.”

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Rwandan refugees massacred in a camp in DR Congo. – Photo: survivorsnetoworks.blogspot.com

Former Rwandan Foreign Minister Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana makes this statement in his excellent book recently published, “Paul Kagame a sacrifié les tutsi”^{7 [18]} (“Paul Kagame has sacrificed the Tutsi”). Upon receiving a photocopy of the Gersony report, I asked him to confirm its authenticity, which he did, although he added that an annex is missing.

Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana, of mixed Hutu-Tutsi descent, had testified in the lawsuit we filed at the Spanish National Court and is now the person responsible in France for the Intra-Rwandan Dialogue we have been sponsoring since 2004. This extraordinary Rwandan witnessed first hand the wheeling and dealing behind the suppression of the compromising report.

The entire horse-trading took place in the U.S. Department of State in early October 1994 between Hutu Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu from the RPF – albeit always under the watchful eye of “consultant” Charles Muligande – and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs George Moose. Pasteur Bizimungu had actually gone to argue that “a ‘post- genocide’ was going on, while at the same time, the RPF military was getting away with massacring entire groups of people without the international community expressing any disapproval.”

Seeing George Moose’s excessively understanding reaction to the Rwandan president’s case, Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana inferred what was going to happen with the Gersony report, as it indeed turned out: That meeting “sealed the fate of the Gersony report once and for all.”

Vianney Ndagijimana resigned from his post as minister a few weeks later “in order not to be an accomplice of the ethnic cleansing practises” and went into exile “to bear witness of this silent genocide, as disgraceful and reprehensible as the Tutsi genocide, and to publicly condemn it worldwide.”

Others didn’t act with such ethics and integrity: Kofi Annan, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping at the time; Shahryar Khan, U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative to Rwanda; Timothy Wirth, Undersecretary for Global Affairs, including matters of human rights; Brian Atwood, director for Africa of USAID, which had financed the investigation aimed at determining whether the interior of Rwanda was equipped for the return of Hutu refugees.

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“Kagame’s army and allied militias knowingly committed wholesale killings of Hutus, often ‘mostly children, women, old and ill people.’ Indeed, the (leaked U.N.) report goes on to say that some of the attacks could have amounted to a genocide,” according to The Economist.

 

Prior to the meeting of the Rwandan president with the assistant secretary of state, all individuals cited above had met several times with Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana, on one occasion with Robert Gersony present. The former minister described that some of them had spoken very harshly to the Rwandan president. But the fact is that the Gersony report was suppressed and none of the people mentioned above ever condemned the terrible ethnic cleansing that had taken place nor the cover-up of such an important piece of evidence.

Kofi Annan showed the report to Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana and even let him read it but refused to give him a copy. Thus, already back then the future U.N. Secretary-General knew very well that the theory of a double genocide was not wrong. And it is certainly far from being a form of negationism and hence a crime, as Ramón Lobo has dared state in the Spanish daily El País.

Good heavens! – daring to label as criminals Judge Fernando Andreu, who accuses Kagame and 40 top officials from the RPF of committing crimes of genocide, and now High Commissioner Navi Pillay, who signs the recent U.N. report!

Yet this journalist is not alone. Many are the know-it-all analysts, who have no qualms writing about any matter of the moment, even about conflicts as serious and complex as this one – or who, rather, have only listened to the powerful rhetoric of the Manichean official doctrine that resolutely maintains that the story of the genocide is one of genocidaires on the one side and noble liberators on the other.

On the contrary, Kofi Annan and current Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon know that the accusations made by Judge Fernando Andreu Merelles are well-founded: “crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes against individuals and property protected in the event of armed conflict, membership in a terrorist organization, terrorist acts, pillage of natural resources and the assassination of nine Spanish nationals.”

As we suspected and made public at the time, Ban Ki-moon’s efforts to bill genocidaire Paul Kagame as the superhero of the struggle against hunger and other evils plaguing our world have possibly infuriated and mobilized the group of people with integrity still to be found at that big organization which is the U.N. Let’s just hope that Navi Pillay doesn’t end up sacked for the same reasons for which others were ousted in former times: U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali, ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) prosecutor Carla del Ponte, among many others.

Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana spent years wondering why the secretary-general had decided to embargo the Gersony report. In a meeting at the headquarters of the Tribunal of The Hague in November 2002, Carla del Ponte confirmed to him what he had been suspecting all along. The former minister writes in his book:

“[W]ithout avoiding [the subject], she acknowledged that this report was under the jurisdiction of the ICTR and that it should have ordinarily been included in the dossier of crimes perpetrated in Rwanda in 1994 by one of the warring parties. Unfortunately, she added, all efforts to obtain the Gersony report as well as various other U.N. reports providing evidence of the crimes committed by the RPF had proved to no avail up until then. She continued: ‘I sent an official request to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms Ogata,^{8 [20]} asking her for that report, but I ran into a wall. …

“Carla del Ponte admitted that, in despair, she also requested that Robert Gersony be heard by the ICTR prosecutor – again to no avail. Once again the U.S. government expressed its opposition, ruling it inadmissible! As we can see, Paul Kagame enjoys the protection of one or more of the superpowers which have a veto right [in the U.N. Security Council] and are able to dictate its agenda at the heart of the U.N. organizations. You don’t need to be a wizard to know that the Clinton administration, surely embarrassed and ridden with guilt for having opposed the deployment of U.N. troops to stop the genocide, has preferred focusing on the bottom line of the massacres of hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutu civilians.”^{9 [21]}

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A boy in Rwanda passes election posters a few days before the presidential election on Aug. 9, 2010. “Rwandan President Paul Kagame was reelected with 93 percent of the vote in the country’s elections earlier this month, but there were widespread reports that journalists and opposition politicians had been imprisoned or killed. Now a leaked U.N. report suggests that Rwandan troops may have committed war crimes and massacred tens of thousands of people in the late 1990s,” reported Newsweek on Aug. 27, the day the report was leaked. – Photo: Marc Hofer, AP

Let’s hope that the time has come; let us hope that those who pull the strings realize that sustaining this sham, this disgraceful impunity, is untenable at this point. We firmly believe that those of us outside the U.N. should help enable those upright individuals within the organization to keep it from serving the interests of the Trilateral Commission^{10 [23]} and of other powerful and elitist groups instead of serving the interests of peoples. In this respect, we share the views expressed by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mallorquinian Sen. Pere Sampol, who was vice-president of the government of the Balearic Islands and knows well the mazes of political intrigue.

At any rate, what I stated in the preface of my book might begin to prove true: “When this monumental tragedy gets the coverage it deserves in the big media, it will become one of the most embarrassing chapters in the annals of the United Nations, of the entire Western world, in general, and in particular, of José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist government.”

Spain’s prime minister, however, may still be able to change fate. He just needs to continue on the path he started by not meeting with Paul Kagame in Madrid; he just needs to refuse to co-chair together with this criminal the Advocacy Group of the Millenium Development Goals. He just needs to cooperate with Spain’s Audiencia Nacional on the legal proceedings against the 40 top officials of the RPF. He just needs to meet – at long last – with the families of the nine Spanish victims.

Juan Carrera of the International Forum for the Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region, a Nobel Prize nominee, has campaigned for years against impunity there. In 1996, he walked over 600 miles to Brussels and a year later went on a 42-day hunger strike in front of the European Union Council headquarters to persuade the EU to stop the atrocities in the DR Congo. With Spanish Sen. Sampol he successfully pushed for a lawsuit in Spain against members of the Rwandan government on behalf of Spanish victims who died in Rwanda after the genocide. The lawsuit resulted in the indictments of 40 of Rwanda’s current top and former military officials for genocide crimes and other human rights abuses. He can be reached by emailing info@stopimpunityinrwanda.org ^[24].He is currently one of the 12 Spanish members of the Trilateral Commission. [↩ ^[26]]

1. He is currently one of the 12 Spanish members of the Trilateral Commission. [↩ ^[26]]
2. The media, however, were allowed the photo-op de rigueur of that meeting. See Chapter 2 of www.pangea.org/olivar ^[27]. [↩ ^[28]]
3. In the article mentioned above, Jean-Philippe Rémy comments on the statements made by one of the initiators of the report: “[T]here have been too many cases of massacres which have been concealed to the eyes of outside witnesses … These ‘concealed elements’ as well as those ‘things never said should have been brought to light a long time ago,’ the same source said. ‘It was well-known that this was a huge thing,’ the person added.” [↩ ^[29]]
4. Black Agenda Report, translated for Rebelión by Mariola and Jesús María García Pedrajas. [↩ ^[30]]
5. It can be found in “C:\Unearthed ‘Gersony Report’ the U.N. said it never existed ^[31]” at The Proxy Lake. – mht [↩ ^[32]]
6. The RPF first carried out the ethnic cleansing in the areas they were seizing in the spring of 1994, the same spring when the Hutu extremists were carrying out their own genocide of the Tutsi in the areas under their control. Primarily, however, it was the cleansing carried out by the RPF after its full-fledged victory on July 18. [↩ ^[33]]
7. Editorial La Pagaie, pages 134-141. [↩ ^[34]]
8. As I pointed out in my book, Sadako Ogata is also a member of the Trilateral Commission. [↩ ^[35]]
9. Pages 140-141. [↩ ^[36]]
10. Almost everyone who has played a key political role in the Rwandan conflict has been or still is a member of the Trilateral Commission and/or has attended or attends the meetings of the Bilderberg Group: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, Kofi Annan, Madeleine Albright, Bill Richardson, Sadako Ogata, Susan Rice, Raymond Chrétien, Jean Chrétien, Hillary Clinton or Bernard Kouchner. This list does not take into account the higher number of members of the Foreign Relations Council or of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. [↩ ^[37]]

Shocking : Kagame Criminal Confession

Dictator Paul Kagame admits the charges of genocide on Hutu refugees in Congo.

Kagame Criminal Confession, posted with vodpod

 

Former RPA Major pins Kagame on killings

As the Rwandan Government grapples to shake off international uproar over the leaked UN report accusing the Rwandan troops of committing acts of genocide and mass murder in DRC,a former RPA Major has joined the fray, accusing President Kagame of systematic Hutu mass killings since 1990. Major Alphonse Furuma also accuses Kagame of attempting to kill former President Habyarimana at the aborted swearing in ceremony of the broad based government early 1994, and reveals why former MP Evariste Burakari, was assassinated.

In a lengthy statement to The Newsline, Maj. Furuma, a former Rwandese Patriotic Army Political Commissar during the RPA war, and later Aide de Camp (ADC) to the former army Chief of Staff Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa, further accuses his former Commander in Chief, President Kagame, of ordering killings of thousands of innocent civilians during the RPA war and after capture of power.

Maj. Furuma, the first senior officer to fall out with Kagame, details numerous Hutu mass killings, dating from the early days of RPA invasion.
He also accuses Kagame of ordering systematic massacres, laying of mines, looting property,demolishing homes and other building as well as destruction of crops so as to displace the population and create an RPF/RPA controlled territory free of the Hutu.
These crimes, Furuma explains, were carried out between 1992-4 in the Districts of Muvumba, Ngarama, Bwisigye, Kiyombe, Mukarangye and Cyumba. Other districts were Kibali, Kivuye, Cyungo, as well as in Kinigi, Butaro, Cyeru and Nyamugari.
He further says military operations were carried out against known civilian targets, in most cases peasants. ‘Known Refugee Camps and densely populated villages and Towns were routinely shelled with 120 mm motors, 107 mm rocked launchers and 122 mm guns mounted on hill tops overlooking such locations,’ he writes.
Examples of these incidents include the shelling of Rwibare Refugee Camp in Muvumba, Kisaro Refugee Camp in Buyoga as well as Byumba and Ruhengeri towns in 1991 and 1992.
The exiled officer claims that when the Arusha Peace Talks for Rwanda started in 1992, Paul Kagame launched a deliberate policy to create a Tutsiland through Hutu massacres, massive population displacement, property appropriation and land grabbing in the North East, East, South East and in
Central Rwanda. “This is the policy we saw at work in 1993, 1994 and 1995,” Furuma says in the statement.
Furuma also accuses Kagame of assassinating Hutu elites including members of the RPF/RPA like Member of High Command Muvunanyambo who was killed in 1992 as well as many civilian cadres recruited from the demilitarized zone in Northern Rwanda between 1992 and 1994.
‘Once again, the districts most affected include Muvumba, Ngarama, Bwisigye, Kiyombe, Mukarangye, Cyumba, Kibali, Kivuye, Cyungo, Kinigi, Butaro, Cyeru and Nyamugari,” he asserts.
The former officer also claims there were periodic revenge massacres against the Hutu population whenever the regime in Kigali massacred the Tutsi. For example such revenge massacres were carried out in the RPA Offensive of February 1993 covering the entire North of the country, he says.
‘The offensive was launched overnight, by morning several districts had been taken over by the RPA and in the hours and days that followed the Hutu were hunted and shot at sight.

In one location in the District of Ngarama, at least 134 people were massacred and buried in shallow graves’, Furuma writes.
From 1992 up to 1994, Major Furuma alleges politico-military cadres (RPF/A) were infiltrated behind government lines to carry out terrorist activities especially in urban areas.
‘From 28th December 1993 to 6th April 1994, this time using the RPA Unit in Kigali, more people were trained, arms distributed and an urban terrorist campaign launched against civilian targets in Kigali City,’ he adds.
Furuma says these terrorist groups, among others, targeted high profile politicians including the late President Juvenal Habyalimana, former Minister Gatabazi, Gapyisi and Martin Bucyana. ‘For example President Habyalimana had been a target for assassination between January and April 1994 at a swearing ceremony of the Broad Based Transition Government scheduled to have taken place at the Parliamentary Buildings in Kigali’, he says.
Major Furuma also says Kagame ordered counter genocide massacres covering the entire nation immediately the genocide started. ‘All RPA Units were under orders to kill any Hutu on sight and for several months, many soldiers did kill as many Hutu as they could’ the statement adds.
Furuma details the massacres at Rwesero Seminary on April 21, 1994, which included seven priests who had taken refugee there; the massacres at Kabgayi on June 5, 1994, which included three Catholic Bishops and other Church leaders; the massacres by the RPA Kigali Battalion in the hours and daysimmediately following the start of the genocide and, the killing of Hutu families in locations north of Kigali City like Kimihurura and Remera. Others massacres, he contends, were carried out in the Province of Gitarama.

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Rwanda’s Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza speaks to Women’s International News Gathering Service

Globalresearch.ca

Rwanda’s FDU-Inkingi Party leader, peace and social justice activist Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza ^[3], spoke to Ann Garrison for Womens’ International News Gathering Service (WINGS) ^[4] in July 2010, near the close of Rwanda’s 2010 presidential election year, which was really an election stage play complete with election observers from the U.S. and the U.K. Incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame was “re-elected” on Aug. 9, receiving 93 percent of the vote, an implausible victory in any pluralist democracy, though 3 percent less than the 96 percent he received in Rwanda’s 2003 presidential election.

On Aug. 13, President Barack Obama’s National Security Council issued a statement ^[5] expressing concern about disturbing events leading up to the polls, including human rights abuse, suppression of the press and the exclusion of the opposition. NSC spokesman Mike Hammer wrote: “Democracy is about more than holding elections. A democracy reflects the will of the people, where minority voices are heard and respected, where opposition candidates run on the issues without threat or intimidation, where freedom of expression and freedom of the press are protected.”

The statement, notably, did not congratulate President Paul Kagame on his re-election.

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Rwanda President Paul Kagame

Human rights activists and Africa advocates, including the Africa Faith and Justice Network ^[7] and Friends of the Congo ^[8], have called for sustained attention on Rwanda, suspension of all military aid and a freeze on $240 million worth of non-military aid until Kagame releases all political prisoners, lifts bans on the press and opens political space. All the issues that Victoire and I discussed in July and throughout this year remain, including:

• political opponents still missing, in prison, or, like Victoire Ingabire, still indicted under Rwanda’s repressive laws against speech crime
• no response to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and opposition calls for investigation of recent political assassinations
• suppression of the press;
• extreme rural poverty and increasing inequality between the majority rural population and a privileged urban elite;
• mono-cropping that exhausts the soil and leaves Rwandans hungry for the sake of agricultural exports enriching the elite;
• biofuels crops planted on scarce Rwandan agricultural land by a California-based multinational, despite widespread hunger;
• natural gas extraction in Lake Kivu, endangering the populations on both the Rwanda and Congo sides of the lake;
• refugees in Rwanda’s neighbors, DR Congo and Uganda, who are cause and excuse for military incursion by the Rwandan Defense Force.

On Aug. 17, less than one week after Rwanda’s dubious poll results, the Rwandan government issued new security directives in the city of Kigali, requiring that everyone entering a hotel be searched, that hotels be equipped with detectors in one week, that all bars be equipped with power generators to keep lights on in the event of a blackout and that no one drive through the streets with tinted car window glass. Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza and the FDU issued a statement, saying that the atmosphere remains tense and called on the international community to “stay with Rwanda.”

Listen to the broadcast

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here ^[9]. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Transcript

WINGS host Frieda Werden: Rwanda’s Aug. 9, 2010, presidential election had a foregone conclusion: another term for Paul Kagame, the U.S.-backed Tutsi general who led the takeover of 1994. One of Kagame’s most prominent opponents is Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, who chairs the United Democratic Forces. She speaks with Ann Garrison in today’s edition of WINGS. [musical interlude]

Welcome to WINGS, a series of news and current affairs programs by and about women around the world, produced and distributed by the Womens’ International News Gathering Service.

Ann Garrison: In January this year, 2010, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza returned to her native Rwanda, an East African nation of 10 million people. She had been in Europe for 16 years, where she earned degrees in business and commercial law, worked for an international accounting firm, married and had three children, and became the exile leader of the Unified Democratic Forces, a coalition of Rwandan political parties.

Rwanda Trading Co. workers sort coffee beans for sale to Starbucks, Folgers and other buyers in the West. The students who toured the private factory and took this photo as part of ONE Campus Challenge, a friendly competition to determine which university’s student body has the most effective global poverty-fighting campaign, were impressed with what they were told about the coffee farmers’ earnings. They apparently didn’t learn that farm families encouraged to use their small landholdings only for cash crops rather than food often go hungry. – Photo: One.org

She returned to contest Rwanda’s 2010 presidential election, to run against incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Many observers believe that she would have been the leading candidate had she been able to officially enter the race. Instead, she was arrested and forbidden to leave Kigali City to speak to the majority of Rwandans, 90 percent of whom are rural subsistence farmers suffering extreme poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, high infant mortality and low life expectancy.

Three months after her return, in a speech commemorating the victims of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, President Paul Kagame referred to her as a political hooligan but refused to speak her name:

Rwandan President Paul Kagame (recorded on April 7, 2010): “Some people want to encourage political hooliganism. Some people just come from nowhere, useless people. I see every time in the pictures, you know, some lady, who had her deputy, a genocide criminal, her deputy, talking about, you know, “You know there is Rwanda genocide, but there is another” – so that is politics. And the world says “the opposition leader!” Well, I know those who say it and who support that. They know it is wrong, but it is an expression of contempt these people have for Rwandans and for Africans, that they think Africans deserve to be led by these hooligans. And that’s – to that we say no, a big no. And if anybody wants a fight there, we will give them a fight.”

Ann: Kagame has indeed, since that statement, given Victoire and all his other serious political opponents a big fight, though few would call it a fair one. On June 24, Rwandan police surrounded the house Victoire had been renting in Kigali and threw up roadblocks to prevent her exit or entry. On the same day, police arrested another presidential candidate, Bernard Ntaganda, several of Ntaganda’s party members disappeared, and police arrested dozens of opposition party members who were attempting to protest their exclusion from the presidential election, which was, by then, only six weeks away. Also on the same day, Umuvugizi journalist Jean Leonard Rugambage was gunned down in front of his home in Kigali after he reported that Rwandan President Paul Kagame had ordered the assassination attempt on an exiled Rwandan general in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Reports of arrest, torture and even assassination of opposition politicians and press critical of Kagame have continued since.

On July 11, Victoire Ingabire spoke to WINGS from Kigali, despite the state’s warning that she might be arrested again if she continues to speak to the press. She speaks Dutch, French and her native Kinyarwanda language and, in recent months, she has learned English so as to speak to citizens of the U.S. and the U.K., the powers that have been dominant in the region since the Rwanda genocide.

Ann: Welcome, Victoire, and thank you for agreeing to speak to WINGS, despite the danger that it puts you in.

Victoire: You are welcome and thank you for your interest for the plight of Rwanda people.

Ann: Can you describe the state of your party, the FDU-Inkingi Party, and the opposition parties today? How many remain under arrest? How many have been freed? How many are missing?

Victoire: So far, only two members of opposition arrested on 24 June remain in detention. You know that Bernard Ntaganda, the founder and president of PS Imberakuri [political party] is still in jail. And Alice Muhirwa, who is the treasurer of FDU-Inkingi, you know that she is now still recovering from torture meted against her by police during her detention. And Mr. Luswanga Toba, the secretary of Mr. Ntaganda, who disappeared on 20 June – even till today, we don’t know where he is.

And there are also seven members of PS Imberakuri – we don’t know where they are. And people complained to the court about torture and showed the scars and the other evidence of torture. But the ruling of the judge eluded this issue. It is a kind of blank check to the police to go on torturing people. And I was also shocked to hear that the police tried to corner them into giving false evidence against Bernard Ntaganda and myself.

Ann: Are Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International present?

Victoire: The office of Amnesty International is based in Kampala; they are not every day in Rwanda. And you know that the government of Kagame refused the visa to the person of Human Rights. We don’t have any permanent office for Human Rights or Amnesty International.

Ann: I spoke to Frank Habineza, chair of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda and the African Greens Federation, who said that there are now highly armed military foot patrols with their fingers on the triggers at almost all small roads and paths in the city of Kigali and at road blocks in some places. Is that what you see happening? And if so, how are you encouraging Rwandans to respond?

Victoire: Yes, there is a heavy deployment of security personnel. I encourage Rwandese people to fight for their rights but not to respond to the provocation because it would be playing the game of the regime.

Ann: They want to provoke the population into responding violently so that they can respond violently themselves?

Victoire: Of course. This is why I ask the Rwandese people, “Don’t respond to the provocation.”

Ann: And how would you like the rest of the world to be responding to this now? How would you like the so-called international community to respond?

Victoire: You know, I have called the international community, especially the countries backing the current regime, to realize that they are not doing a service to the people of Rwanda by supporting an uncompromising regime. It is in nobody’s interest to keep on the current standoff.

Ann: Now with regard to your own arrest, indictment and trial. You’re accused of disputing the official history of the Rwanda genocide, which is that extremist Hutus planned genocide against the Tutsis and then killed a million Tutsis within 100 days in 1994, though the phrase is often “Tutsis and moderate Hutus.” How do you understand the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and what would you most like the world to understand about it?

Victoire: First, you have to know that my party and I have never denied the genocide by the U.N. understanding because the Resolution 955 from U.N. says that in Rwanda was genocide against the Rwandan people. And that was, like you say, there was genocide against Tutsis and moderate Hutus. We don’t have to forget that. Yes, there was genocide and all people involved should be brought to the court.

The caption for this photo, appearing in the July-August issue of Foreign Policy, is written by Elizabeth Dickinson: “Rwandan soldiers return home after operations in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they participated in joint operations against rebel militias there. The country’s president, Paul Kagame, himself a former soldier, has helped supercharge the Rwandan economy following the 1994 genocide. Many worry that political repression is setting in, however, as Kagame consolidates power.” – Photo: Lionel Healing, AFP/Getty Images

But before, during and after the genocide, other Rwanda’s people were killed. Hutus and Tutsis were killed. Is this denying genocide? I don’t feel so. We have to remember that before and after the genocide against the Tutsis, there was also crime against humanity.

Ann: One thing seems especially important to understand here: You were saying that the massacres did not end at the end of the famous hundred days, that the killing continued after that, and both Hutus and Tutsis were killed. Is that right?

Victoire: Of course, of course. The killing was not stopped after 100 days from April to July. After this period, there were many killings. And RPF took the power in July 1994, and after they took power, the killing was going ahead until 1997, when they killed the people in the Congo.

Ann: And you say these were both Hutus and Tutsis who were perceived to be enemies of the government?

Victoire: Yes, of course, there were Hutus and Tutsis, because RPF, when they came in the country, they considered the Tutsis in Rwanda as the enemy who accepted to collaborate with the Hutu government. The RPF, they killed also Tutsis; they did not kill only Hutus, but they killed also Tutsis, like the extremist Hutus killed the Hutus and killed the Tutsis.

Ann: So they killed the Tutsis who had been left behind when they left for Uganda.

Victoire: Yes, yes. For the RPF, the Tutsis who stayed in the country, who worked together with the Hutu government – they saw them as the collaborators of this Hutuist regime. And, they considered – most of them were considered as the enemy.

Ann: OK, now with regard to your trial, you found another lawyer, a Rwandan lawyer, Theogene Muhayeyezu. Then he was arrested; now he’s been released. This is all after Minnesota Law Professor Peter Erlinder came to defend you; he was arrested, he was released and then he was unable to defend you because he is accused himself. Is Theogene Muhayeyezu going to be able to defend you despite having been arrested himself?

Victoire: Yes, the government is trying by all means to isolate me and make sure that I don’t have any lawyers. By so doing, the government hopes to overcome the weakness of the case.

Ann: So is he going to be able to defend you?

Victoire: Yes, yes, because the judge finds that there was one police who saw him and said, “You have to arrest this man because he is the lawyer of Victoire.” He was arrested only because he was my lawyer. And now he is freed, so he can go ahead with his job as my lawyer.

Ann: Are there current dates scheduled for your trial?

Victoire: Not at all. The chief prosecutor said on BBC that he’s still waiting for information from foreign countries. If he was not ready, was not it to bar me from contesting the presidential election?

Ann: Have any of the international legal and human rights organizations that protested Professor Erlinder’s arrest protested your arrest for the same alleged speech crime?

Victoire: Yes, yes, they did. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and some individuals did. So did defense lawyers also from the ICTR; they did also.

Ann: Few educated Rwandans with internet access seem to doubt that you were arrested so that the Kagame regime could exclude you from the election, by saying that you cannot contest so long as you are on trial. Do you think that the majority of Rwandans, who are rural subsistence farmers, perceive that this is not a real election?

Victoire: Of course. Although my party has not yet been registered, I have sympathies all over the country. Rural farmers you are talking about are not duped about the coming election.

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The U.S. and European volunteers who traveled to Rwanda to renovate this school, which had been neglected by the government, wrote: “Presently, 597 children are enrolled at the Ntenyo Primary School but there has been a significant decrease in actual attendance because the school’s facilities have severely deteriorated and are not up to government standard. For all of the 597 children at the school there are nine teachers for six classrooms [over 66 children per teacher] with nothing more than a few blackboards, limited benches and scant basic materials. This is clearly not an ideal learning environment. It significantly decreases the chances of children being able to continue their education into high school.” – Photo: Sanejo.org

They are not happy about their dire situation; they are not happy about the way the government handles the refugees issue because the victims are members of their family or neighbors; they are not happy to be denied their rights; they are not happy about administrative harassing, arrest, detention and gacaca. [Rwanda’s gacaca courts are described as an experimental form of community justice to prosecute prisoners accused of genocide and war crimes. – ed.] They want change the same way urban Rwandans do.

Ann: How do you think they will react to the coming election? Do you think that they will go ahead and vote for the only real candidate? Do you think they will try not to vote? Do you think they’ll be forced to vote? What do you think will happen to them on Aug. 9?

Victoire: Of course we know that will be the problem, but we’ll campaign to ask the population, “Don’t vote because you don’t have choice.” Why they will spend time to go to the vote? Of course they fear intimidation.

Ann: And do you think there are likely to be reprisals against those who don’t vote?

Victoire: We know that the government, the military or the police will use violence against them but, as I say, we have to fight for our rights. There is no reason to vote if you don’t have the choice.

Ann: And what about the election observers who were supposed to come? The EU decided not to send election observers. They gave 5.3 million euro to this National Electoral Commission, even though there’s no real election pending. And now the U.S. and the U.K., actually the Commonwealth, are planning to send observers. Do you want them to come?

Victoire: My question is why they will come, if they know. Everybody knows that Kagame will be elected; he will be the next president for next seven years. Everybody knows it. Why U.K. and U.S. will send the observers if they know that there will be not really the free election in Rwanda. Why they send money? What they do, they [do] not help Rwandese people. This is why I ask them, “Don’t come,” because there is no election in Rwanda. And I don’t see why people would spend time, money and coming here for masquerade election.

Ann: Well, this is a very extreme situation, but I know you haven’t had much chance to talk about your issues because you keep being forced to talk about ethnicity and the history of the genocide. Let’s step back from the current danger and talk about your vision for Rwanda.

In a recent study, Dr. Ann Ansoms of the University of Antwerp reported that 90 percent of Rwandans are rural subsistence farmers who speak only their native Kinyarwanda language and that the majority live in poverty and that the poverty has increased since the 1994 Rwanda genocide, despite all the claims about Rwanda being a development miracle. She reports export mono-crops produced on land concentrated in a few hands, Kagame virtually abandoning the rural population to build a shimmering modern city, Kigali, and educate a privileged technical elite.

The Rusesabagina Foundation says, quote, that “one third of Rwanda’s population suffers from malnutrition, that life expectancy is only 44 years, and that wealth and power is all concentrated in the cities, leaving 92 percent of the poor in underrepresented rural areas.” Does that sound like an accurate picture of Rwanda to you and what do you think needs to be done?

Victoire: The most urgent action is to review agriculture policy and enhance forest management. The rural population in Rwanda has been neglected for the last 16 years and, instead of the Singapore model of development, which gives the lion’s share to an urban privileged elite, I would invest in agriculture, I would invest in rural roads and health network, I would review the land management and I would give priority to the subsistence food crop, rather than cash crops which benefit mostly to traders from urban areas.

Ann: OK, we’ve touched on this a number of times, that the vast majority of Rwandans eat what they’re able to grow on their land. But this is so fundamental to what most Rwandans experience that I’m going to ask you to make it very simple.

Victoire: For example, ask people to cultivate only maize – if you ask them to cultivate only maize for export – but what they will eat? This is why I will give priority to enough food for my people.

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With high hopes, Rwandan women plant jatropha, promoted as a miracle biofuel crop that would thrive on marginal land, thus not displacing food crops. Yields on less fertile land, however, have proven meager. – Photo: ProjectRwanda.org

Ann: And what about this jatropha biofuels planting project? This was undertaken, I know, by Eco-Fuel Global, a multinational corporation headquartered just across San Francisco Bay from where I’m speaking to you, in Walnut Creek. And before returning to Rwanda, you and your party published a very critical essay about the government’s decision to engage with Eco-Fuel Global to plant fuel crops for export, despite widespread hunger and a shortage of land for food crops.

Victoire: Yes, this is an example of the lack of vision by the current regime. How you can complain about food shortage and give land for biofuel plants? And now the people there, they fight against this project. Everybody knows that in many countries in Africa, like Mozambique, these projects have been turned down, but they are welcome in Rwanda. I cannot understand it.

Ann: Biofuels planting has been turned down in Mozambique?

Victoire: Turned down in Mozambique, in Burkina Faso, in many countries in Africa.

Ann: What about the natural gas in Lake Kivu? There’s said to be $20 billion worth of natural gas in Lake Kivu, but the lake is very dangerously C02 dense. If it’s drilled carelessly, it could explode C02 and asphyxiate people on either side.

Victoire: Yes, we know that it’s dangerous to exploit the gas in Lake Kivu, but we know also that there are some companies outside who can exploit this gas without danger. This is why we say, the project we have now, we have to stop it and look if we can find a company who can exploit this gas without danger to the population who live in the area of Kivu.

Ann: As i understand it, there is a plan for drawing off the C02 so that the natural gas can be drilled, but the Kagame regime has said they’re not responsible for that; they don’t have to bother.

Victoire: This shows that the government of Kagame doesn’t have any responsibility about the people. Of course Rwanda needs money, but if we have a project where we can get money, but it is dangerous for your people, you have to choose. And the government of Kagame chose the money.

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Natural gas extraction from Lake Kivu. – Photo: Xan Rice, The Guardian

It is the duty to protect people before you find money. If you have money but your people are killed, what you will do with this money?

Ann: Lake Kivu often seems like a metaphor for Rwanda, because the C02 is so dangerously dense that it needs to be drawn off before there’s a lethal explosion, perhaps like the political tension in Rwanda needs to be released by reconciliation?

Victoire: Reconciliation. Mmm-hmm, go ahead.

Ann: You have a plan for a truth and reconciliation commission, don’t you?

Victoire: Yes, of course. I take the example of South Africa, where there is a commission about truth and reconciliation and this commission helped people not to revenge, but to talk about what happened, who was involved, what really happened and how together we can go ahead. And that’s what we need in Rwanda.

But we have to let the people be free to talk about what they saw, what happened with them, to talk with the killers, to accept, to give forgiveness. But you cannot push people to give forgiveness, and you cannot push the people, [telling them] don’t talk about the crime committed by the neighbor against the family that they lose.

Ann: One of your supporters in the United States told me that an important part of the healing process is that Hutus need to be able to mourn and bury their dead, which they can’t do publicly because the official version of the genocide doesn’t allow them to acknowledge their loss.

Victoire: Yes, there are many people in Rwanda who see Hutus as killers. For them, Hutus, they are killers. But that is not true. Everybody knows that not all Hutus were involved in the killing of the Tutsis. We cannot take this picture that the Hutus, they are killers, and the Tutsis, they are victims. That is not true.

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The large lake shown in this map of Rwanda is Lake Kivu, shared by Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There are extremists by both ethnic groups. There are extremists in the Tutsis group. There are extremists in the Hutus group; they were involved in the killing of the people. And these extremists have to be brought to the court. And some members of RPF killed people, and that is the problem that the Kagame regime cannot resolve.

Ann: OK, let’s talk about politics and the press for a moment. The independent Kinyarwanda language newspapers Umuseso and Umuvugizi have both been shut down. The editors have fled to Uganda and now the editor and staff of Umurabyo have been arrested and imprisoned. On June 24, Umuvugizi journalist Jean Leonard Rugambage was gunned down in the streets of Kigali outside his home.

This leaves only the state controlled media outlets and perhaps the Rwanda News Agency, which seems to be under a lot of state pressure. The police were calling you in for interrogation several times a week before they finally arrested you and forbade you to leave the city of Kigali. So, without independent press and without freedom to travel, have you had any way to make contact with the rural population who are the majority of Rwandans?

Victoire: Yes, we know the agenda of the government is to sever links between me and the population. Despite government harassment, the party had managed to gather the number of signatures we need. I was ready to register my political party. People all over the country know my fight for change and want to hear more from me, but I have been denied any contact via public or private media. But the Rwanda people should know that so long as I breathe, I will keep on my combat.

Ann: I’ve heard that Rwanda has quite an oral tradition, that even if there isn’t any published media that the word travels from village to village.

Victoire: Of course. They can hear the radio. There are different Rwandese radios in the country, but we use BBC and Voice of America because we cannot use the public or private radios. But the majority of Rwandese people, they cannot read. You tell your story to your neighbor and your neighbor tells the story to the other, and in two days the whole country is informed about it. It is why, if I don’t have access to the media but we have representation in different areas in the country and we give them the information, in two days, the whole country knows the information we need to give to the population.

Ann: So they know who you are; they know what has been happening.

Victoire: Of course. They don’t need media to know who I am. Everybody knows who I am. Now all Rwandans in the country and outside, they know who is Victoire. And this is why the regime of Kagame does everything to prevent that I participate in the election, because they know that if I will participate, they will lose the election. Kagame will lose the election.

Ann: How would you change Rwanda’s relationship to its neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 6 million war dead have been reported since 1996, largely consequent to Rwanda and Uganda’s invasions beginning in that year?

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Rwandan Green Party Vice President Andre Kagwa Rwisereka

Victoire: The stumbling block is the refugees issue. For the last 16 years or so, the current regime has attempted to settle this refugee problem through military invasion. It is this problem which poisoned the relation between Rwanda and Congo – DRC – and Uganda. And we have to resolve this problem, not militarily, but through dialogue.

Ann: My internet telephonic connection with Victoire began to crack and became almost unintelligible at this point and I wasn’t able to reconnect and sustain a stable connection, but I had asked her whether there was anything else she’d like to say.

Victoire: [Ann reading:] I want to be a leader of all Rwandans seeking political change which can help us overcome ethnic division and embrace a new vision where people are judged on the basis of what they contribute to the welfare of their country and not which party, racial or ethnic group they belong to.

^[17]

On July 14, amid escalating election violence and repression, Democratic Green Party of Rwanda Vice President Andre Kagwa Kwisereka was found beheaded, with a machete left nearby, in the wetlands of the Makula River in Rwanda’s Butare Province, his grisly murder reminiscent of the Rwanda genocide, in which upwards of a million people were killed, many with machetes.

I dream of a Rwanda where people gather around ideas and not ethnicity, a country respected for its value and not its military might.

Ann: Rwanda is indeed the most formidable African military power in East and Central Africa, and the other opposition parties, the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda and the Parti Social Imberakuri, have joined Victoire in calling for a shift away from military expense and adventure.

After my conversation with her, on July 11, the vice president of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda was found beheaded with a machete left near the body in southern Rwanda, and International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda defense lawyer Jwani Mwaikusa was gunned down in Dar es Salaam, where he lived and taught at the law school at the University of Dar es Salaam.

^[18]On July 24, Victoire reported that Rwandan police entered the courtyard of the house that she and her party staff had been renting in Kigali and beat and arrested two of her FDU-Inkingi Party members. She vowed to continue her struggle even after incumbent President Paul Kagame declared victory in what much of the world perceived as an election masquerade, complete with election observers from the U.S. and the Commonwealth.

For Women’s International News Gathering Service, this has been Ann Garrison interviewing Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza.

Atrocities in Congo could be “genocide” – UN report

(Reuters) – Crimes committed by Rwanda’s army and Congolese rebels in Congo during the 1990s could be classified as genocide, a leaked draft U.N. report says, a charge that will stir tensions between Kigali and the U.N.

A Congo expert said diplomats were wrangling over whether to include the highly sensitive genocide accusation in the final version of the document.

The report details crimes committed in the former Belgian colony between 1993 and 2003, a period that saw the fall of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and a five-year conflict involving six foreign armies, including Rwanda’s Tutsi-led force. Millions of people died, most from hunger and disease rather than violence.

After quashing the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda, Kigali’s army invaded Congo, ostensibly to hunt down Hutu fighters who had taken part in the killings and then fled into the east of Congo, known then as Zaire.

In the process, Rwandan forces swept the Congolese AFDL rebels of Laurent Kabila to power in Congo. Both forces have been accused of a string of rights abuses against Hutu soldiers and civilians across the country.

“The systematic and widespread attacks (against Hutus in Congo) described … reveal a number of damning elements that, if proven before a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide,” said the report, seen by Reuters on Thursday.

“The extensive use of edged weapons … and the systematic massacres of survivors after (Hutu) camps had been taken show that the numerous deaths cannot be attributed to the hazards of war or seen as equating to collateral damage.”

France’s Le Monde newspaper said Kigali had threatened to withdraw peacekeepers from Sudan over the charges, but Rwandan officials were not available for comment to Reuters.

A spokesman for the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR), which drafted the 545-page report, said the leaked document was a draft, and had some errors.

ROCKING RWANDA ?

The report details some 600 serious crimes committed by various forces from a number of nations but Congo expert and author Jason Stearns said Rwanda comes off worst.

“The allegation that the Rwandan army could be guilty of acts of genocide against Hutu refugees will greatly tarnish the reputation of a government that prides itself of having brought to an end the genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda,” he said.

The final report is due to be presented next week by the UNHCHR, but Stearns said that there was still debate over the inclusion of the genocide accusation, which risked hurting Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who has just won re-election but faces unprecedented dissent within the Tutsi elite.

“While most of the dissenting officers were also involved in these alleged massacres in the Congo, this report could further rock the regime,” he said.

The report was intended as a mapping exercise of the most serious crimes committed in Congo, which is still seeking political stability, battling economic woes and debating the future role of U.N. peacekeepers ahead of elections next year.

Congo’s President Joseph Kabila, who took over when his father Laurent was assassinated, wants U.N. troops out of the country next year but also regularly calls on them to help his weak army face down local and foreign rebels still active there.

It is intended as a historical document to detail the most serious crimes and provide the Congolese authorities with information that they can use to seek justice.

Congo’s last main war, which ran from 1998-2003 and at times turned into a scrap for the vast nation’s minerals, inflicted so much damage it became known as Africa’s World War.

(Additional reporting by John Irish in Paris and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva); editing by Andrew Roche)

Rwanda protests new US mineral policy

EABW REPORTER

KIGALI, RWANDA- The short period the US has given countries to prove their minerals are not from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will disrupt supply and hurt economies, a Rwandan geologist has said.

On July 20, 2010, the US President passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

A key provision in the law requires companies to disclose whether they use minerals from DRC or neighbouring countries within nine months.

The aim is to cut the source of funding that allowed rebel groups to terrorize communities, use sexual violence as a weapon of war and cause millions of deaths in Eastern DRC.

Tantalum is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices. Tungsten creates vibrations in cell phones, tin goes into circuit boards and gold is used to coat wiring.

This new law affects companies like IBM, Intel, Motorola, Apple and HP, but there is fear these companies may source their suppliers from other mineral producing countries to avoid being associated with conflict minerals and to costs involved in carrying out private audits.

These companies are large consumers of Tin, tungsten tantalum, 3T’s and gold from the DRC and neighbouring countries.

Now they will have to submit annual detailed report on supply chains, backed by independent audits are to be reported to the US Congress.

The speculation is rife that the companies may chose to avoid the expenses of dealing with DRC’s neighbours. “It is easy for the producers of electronics destined for the US to obtain their “conflict minerals” from other sources,” a commentator in Kigali said.

Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania are bound to be affected by this law in the short run.

In an interview with Dr. Michael Biryabarema, Director General Rwanda Geology and Mines Authority believes many countries have no capacity and resources to implement the certification process within the required nine months as the US Congress wants.

He argues that enough time is required for companies to put the mineral tracing processes in place since the legislation implies that even minerals produced in countries neighbouring DRC have to be certified.

“This calls for the mineral sector in Rwanda to strengthen its capacity in documentation and be in position to satisfy the consumer community. The timing for implementation should be clearly studied to avoid hurting the industry that has no connection to the conflict source whatsoever,” Biryabarema says in a statement.

Rwanda has started a certification process where mining companies in the country that comply with internationally accepted standards are to be graded and issued with a certificate of compliance by the end of this year in an effort to improve the performance of the sector.

As Congo Marks 50th Anniversary of Independence, Human Rights Abuses Rise in Congo and Neighboring Rwanda

Tomorrow marks the fiftieth anniversary of Congolese independence from colonial Belgian rule. On June 30, 1960, the new prime minister of the independent Congolese government, Patrice Lumumba, declared an end to the slavery of colonialism and a new beginning for the country and the liberation of the entire continent of Africa. But today, jubilee independence celebrations in the Democratic Republic of Congo are marred by ongoing violence and increasing political repression, in particular the recent murder of Congo’s leading human rights activist Floribert Chebeya. Meanwhile, repression is on the rise in neighboring Rwanda, as well, ahead of scheduled elections this August, which incumbent president Paul Kagame is widely expected to win.

Guests:

Peter Erlinder, American attorney who was arrested in Rwanda last month, held for nearly three weeks, and released on health grounds. He is a lawyer at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. He was jailed shortly after arriving in Rwanda to help with the legal defense of an opposition presidential candidate charged with “genocide ideology.” Erlinder himself stands accused of violating laws barring the denial of the Rwandan genocide.

Alafuele Kalala, Congolese pro-democracy activist who ran for president in his country in 2006.

AMY GOODMAN: Tomorrow marks the fiftieth anniversary of Congolese independence from colonial Belgian rule. On June 30th, 1960, the new prime minister of the independent Congolese government, Patrice Lumumba, declared an end to the slavery of colonialism and a new beginning for the country and the liberation of the entire continent of Africa.

But today jubilee independence celebrations in the Democratic Republic of Congo are marred by ongoing violence and increasing political repression, in particular the recent murder of Congo’s leading human rights activist Floribert Chebeya. He was found dead in his car earlier this month, a day after being called to meet the national police chief. The Joseph Kabila government has announced several investigations and suspended the police chief, but no charges have been filed, and the cause of Chebeya’s death remains unknown.

Meanwhile, repression is on the rise in neighboring Rwanda, as well, ahead of the scheduled elections this August, which incumbent President Paul Kagame is widely expected to win. Two opposition leaders have been arrested. Dozens of opposition party members have been detained. Last week a critical journalist was murdered, a case in which Rwandan authorities deny any involvement.

American attorney and law professor, Peter Erlinder, was also arrested in Rwanda last month, and he was held for nearly three weeks and released on health grounds. Peter Erlinder is a lawyer at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. He was jailed shortly after arriving in Rwanda to help with the legal defense of an opposition presidential candidate charged with “genocide ideology.” Erlinder himself stands accused of violating laws barring the denial of the Rwandan genocide. We turn now to Peter Erlinder, who joins us from the Twin Cities, from Minneapolis.

Peter, welcome to Democracy Now! How are you felling? What happened to you?

PETER ERLINDER: Good morning, Ms. Goodman. Of course, I’m feeling much better now that I’m out of detention, but it strikes me that the earlier piece with Pilger is actually an introduction to this piece, because the reality is that most people in the United States don’t know about the US support for the Kagame dictatorship or the US responsibility for about ten million deaths in the eastern Congo, most of which have been the result of the invasions of the Congo by Rwanda and Uganda in the 1990s and the continued occupation of the Congo today. There’s been a massive disservice done to the American people regarding the truth of their government’s involvement in Central Africa. And unfortunately, until we’re able to find the documents in the UN files that tell the other story, the entire world has been misled with respect to what happened in Rwanda in 1994.

AMY GOODMAN: Why were you arrested? Peter Erlinder, why were you arrested?

PETER ERLINDER: Well, you’ll have to ask that of the Rwandan government, wouldn’t you? I was having breakfast and a croissant, finishing a document that I was working on for my client, and six large men surrounded me and took me away from the hotel. As to why that happened, I suspect that only the Rwandan leaders know.

AMY GOODMAN: They claim that you tried to commit suicide. Is that true?

PETER ERLINDER: Well, it seems to me that there are so many more important issues to talk about, like the ten million people that have been killed in the Congo. The state of my health and getting through that issue, it seems—or that circumstance, seems to me to be not the most important question to talk about. And because it was necessary for me to go public in court, with all of the various ills that I have as a guy who’s getting older, I think I’ve made a complete record of all that up until now, and I’m not talking about that in the media. I’d rather talk about the conditions of the US support for the military dictatorships in Central Africa, which I think is the much larger question.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don’t you talk about who you were representing there and what is the situation in Rwanda today—

PETER ERLINDER: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: —and as it relates to Congo, as well.

PETER ERLINDER: OK, thanks a lot. Yeah, I went there to represent Madame Victoire Ingabire, who had left Rwanda before 1994 to study in Europe. She returned at the beginning of this year with the idea of running for the presidency against the current president, Paul Kagame. Within a few hours after she arrived in Kigali, she went to the memorial for the Tutsis who were killed in the genocide, and she raised the question as to why it was that there were only Tutsis that were memorialized, when even the government says that moderate Hutus and Tutsis were the victims. And based on her questioning of the Tutsi being the only victims, she herself was charged with genocide ideology.

When I arrived in Rwanda, she had been charged. And I went there to consult with her to see if there was anything I could do. And five days later, I was arrested myself, based on, we later found out, my writings, written in the United States that were published on the web in English, which is both a medium that most Rwandans don’t have access to and a language that they don’t understand. It would have to be translated into Kinyarwandan in order for the ordinary Kinyarwandan to—only ordinary Rwandan to know what my articles were about at all.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined from Washington, DC by the Congolese pro-democracy activist Alafuele Kalala, who ran for president in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! on this eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of the Democratic Republic of Congo under Patrice Lumumba. Your thoughts today about where your country is?

ALAFUELE KALALA: That’s a very—thank you. It’s a very difficult question. I think that the country is nowhere. It’s completely destroyed. In fact, it’s a nightmare for most Congolese, and they don’t know what fifty years of independence, formal independence, I should say, means. So, people are suffering. The country is completely bankrupted, at all levels. I say it’s a quintuple bankruptcy: political, economic, social, military, cultural. So, the country is nowhere. It’s completely destroyed. That’s what I can say in a few words.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the death of the human rights activist Floribert Chebeya?

ALAFUELE KALALA: Yeah, as I said it in my—just to summarize how I view it, it’s that this is a horrible murder that reveals the nature of the regime. It was shocking, but I was not surprised, because a couple of months ago I spoke with someone close to the Congolese government who told me, making a comparison between the Mobutu regime and the Kabila regime in the way they were treating human rights activists or human rights pro-democracy movement in the Congo. He said, during the Mobutu years, Mobutu was very cautious with human rights activists. Here we are dealing with people who don’t care, who arrest, torture and even kill pro-democracy activists and human rights activists. So that was told to me just a couple of months ago. And when this happened, I was shocked, but I was not surprised.

In fact, they tried to send a shockwave throughout the Congolese community, the Congolese society, in general, because if they can kill a leading human rights activist, a standing, leading human rights activist, respected in the world, what can they do of ordinary Congolese? And they are trying to frighten the human rights activists in the Congo not to take the ordinary tough stand against them.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, there—

ALAFUELE KALALA: So it’s a sad day for Congelese and for the world, I should say.

AMY GOODMAN: Eve Ensler and other women’s rights activists have been trying to shine the spotlight on what’s been happening in the eastern Congo, the massive number of rapes by soldiers and others there. People hear, and they think, what can we do? It’s so far away. Can you talk about the US role in the Democratic Republic of Congo?

ALAFUELE KALALA: Yeah. I should say, the past, the present and the future. What is happening in the Congo now, I summarize it saying that it’s fifty years of American foreign policy at work. The Americans played a role in the assassination of Lumumba; it’s a secret for no one. They put Mobutu in power and supported him unconditionally, allowing him to destroy an otherwise wealthy country. They knew everything that was happening. I would refer, if I had some time, to an editorial that Jim Hoagland put in the Washington Post in 1993 saying briefly that successive American administration knew everything that Mobutu was doing in the Congo, but they considered it to be a small Cold War tax on Zairians, as it was called at that time. So now, I am—OK, that was explained with the Cold War. I don’t think that it’s a complete explanation of the American role in the Congo. In my opinion, it shows the power and the influence of mining companies on the American foreign policy in the Congo, in particular.

Unfortunately, I thought that after the Cold War, the American administration was going to amend its act and allow the people of the Congo to chart a new course. Unfortunately, in the 2006 elections, they imposed—they worked with other Western countries to impose Kabila on the Congo. It was a sham election. And now we are witnessing a total collapse, deliquency of the country, because we are dealing with a widespread corruption on top of the violence that they use against even ordinary people, political activists, human rights activists. So, so far, to date, the US administration has—

AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds.

ALAFUELE KALALA: —played a negative role in the Congo. Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have—

ALAFUELE KALALA: They also supported Rwanda in its invasion of Congo. So, so far, it has been a totally negative role in the Congo.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we will continue the discussion. Alafuele Kalala, Congolese pro-democracy activist, former presidential candidate in Democratic Republic of Congo, and Peter Erlinder, thank you so much.

DemocracyNow

New Colonialism: Pentagon Carves Africa Into Military Zones

Last year the commander of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), General William Ward, said the Pentagon had military partnerships with 35 of the continent’s 53 nations, “representing U.S. relationships that span the continent.” [1]

That number has increased in the interim.

As the first overseas regional military command set up by Washington in this century, the first since the end of the Cold War, and the first in 25 years, the activation of AFRICOM, initially under the wing of U.S. European Command on October 1, 2007, then as an independent entity a year later, emphasizes the geostrategic importance of Africa in U.S. international military, political and economic planning.

Africa Command’s area of responsibility includes more nations – 53, all African states except Egypt, which remains in U.S. Central Command, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (Western Sahara), which is a member of the African Union but which the U.S. and its NATO allies recognize as part of Morocco, which conquered it in 1975 – than any of the Pentagon’s other Unified Combatant Commands: European Command, Central Command, Pacific Command, Southern Command and Northern Command (founded in 2002).

The U.S. is alone in maintaining regional multi-service military commands in all parts of the world, a process initiated after World War Two as America pursued its self-appointed 20th century manifest destiny as history’s first worldwide military superpower.

Until October 1, 2008 Africa was overwhelmingly in the European Command’s area of responsibility, with all African nations assigned to it except for Egypt, Seychelles and the Horn of Africa states (Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan) overseen by Central Command, and three island nations and a French possession off the continent’s eastern coast (Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius and Reunion) placed under Pacific Command.

The month before AFRICOM began its one-year incubation under U.S. European Command in 2007, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
Ryan Henry said, “Rather than three different commanders who have Africa as a third or fourth priority, there will be one commander that has it as a top priority.” [2]

The Pentagon official also revealed that Africa Command “would involve one small headquarters plus five ‘regional integration teams’ scattered around the continent” and that “AFRICOM would work closely with the European Union and NATO,” particularly France, a member of both, which was “interested in developing the Africa standby force”. [3]

The Defense Department official identified all the key components of Africa Command’s role and adumbrated what has transpired in the almost three-year interim: By subsuming nations formerly in the areas of responsibility of three Pentagon commands under a unified one, the U.S. will divide the world’s second most populous continent into five military districts, each with a multinational African Standby Force trained by military forces from the United States, NATO and the European Union.

Later the same month, the Pentagon confirmed its earlier disclosure that AFRICOM would deploy regional integration teams “to the northern, eastern, southern, central and western portions of the continent, mirroring the African Union’s five regional economic communities….”

The Defense News website detailed the geographic division described in Defense Department briefing documents issued in that month:

“One team will have responsibility for a northern strip from Mauritania to Libya; another will operate in a block of east African nations – Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar and Tanzania; and a third will carry out activities in a large southern block that includes South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola….

“A fourth team would concentrate on a group of central African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Congo [Brazzaville]; the fifth regional team would focus on a western block that would cover Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Niger and Western Sahara, according to the briefing documents.” [4]

The five areas correspond to Africa’s main Regional Economic Communities, starting in the north of the continent:

-Arab Maghreb Union: Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.

-East African Community (EAC): Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

-Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS): Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.

-Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS): Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa), Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda and Sao Tome and Principe.

-Southern Africa Development Community: Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.