The Libya thread

[seemslikeadream]

The US Sponsored "Rwanda Genocide" and its Aftermath
Psychological Warfare, Embedded Reporters and the Hunting of Refugees

by Keith Harmon Snow

Global Research, April 12, 2008

Author's website http://www.allthingspass.com

An investigation has uncovered an asylum system scandal where bogus Rwandan “refugees” infiltrate the U.S. and U.K. and work as undercover agents to hunt down critics of the Rwandan dictatorship and legitimate refugees and drag them back to Rwanda. This is yet the latest revelation on how the dictatorship in Rwanda manufactures and exports terrorism using an ideology of genocide and how the West supports terrorism by backing its Rwanda proxy. Meanwhile, business in Rwanda is booming and the criminal networks of the Kagame military machine continue to plunder the blood-drenched Congo.

In October 1990, the Ugandan army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) led by Major General Paul Kagame invaded Rwanda.1 This action set in motion a course of history that determined the fate of millions of innocent people in Central Africa.

By July 1994, the RPF completed its coup d’etat and consolidated its power in Rwanda. The government of Paul Kagame has since then maintained political power and manipulated public sympathy by promoting a highly politicized ideology of genocide.2

After more than 14 years of systematic disinformation about Rwanda there exists a collective ignorance about what really happened in Rwanda and who is responsible. The so-called “Rwanda Genocide” is one of the most widely misunderstood events in contemporary history, and not because the evidence is lacking or because the truth is obscured by butchery.

According to the official story, extremist Hutus in the government and military committed an orchestrated and pre-planned genocide against the Tutsi minority from April 6 to about July 16, 1994. In this mythology, some 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsi were butchered with hoes, axes, and machetes, over the now infamous “100 days of genocide.”

Anyone who challenges the official story is branded a ‘genocide negationist’ or ‘genocide revisionist’ by the Kagame regime, and they are castigated as ‘killers of remembrance.’3

“Within Rwanda, legislation prevents anyone from questioning the official historical record. Although the constitution already forbids denial of the 1994 killings, the Rwandan government has stepped up moves to combat ‘genocide ideology’. […] A new law is in the making, aimed at criminalizing all ideas that might provoke ethnic division. Under the law, children below the age of 12 will be sent to a rehabilitation centre for a year if found guilty.”4

The real story seems to be that the RPF were the killers to a far greater extent, the majority of the victims were Hutus, and the numbers of dead during those 100 days were far less. The final insult to truth comes in the upside-down assertion that the RPF “stopped the genocide by winning the war.” Also, the RPF typically killed everyone in its path: Major General Paul Kagame did not trust any Tutsis who stayed in Rwanda after pogroms that created the Tutsi exile community prior to the Habyarimana government (1973-1994) and Tutsis were also targeted by the RPF.

Even those experts on “genocide in Rwanda” who do not contest the official story will attest to the myriad complexities that surround accusations and counter accusations about victims and perpetrators in post-1994 Rwanda.5 Under the new power structure there were strong motivations to accuse the stigmatized Hutus of crimes that were never committed.

On April 6, 1994, the governments of Rwanda and Burundi were decapitated when the plane carrying the two presidents and top military staff was shot down over Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. The well-planned assassinations of Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira sparked a massive escalation of warfare that is falsely portrayed as the result of meaningless tribal savagery.

On February 6, 2008, a Spanish court delivered international arrest warrants against forty of the top military officials in the Rwandan regime. President Paul Kagame was investigated but not indicted but only because heads of state have immunity. The arrest warrants charge the RPF officials with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1990 and 2002.6

The Spanish indictments join the November 17, 2006 indictments issued by French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, who concluded that the RPF, under the direct orders of Paul Kagame, carried out the surface-to air-missile attacks on the airplane carrying the two presidents.7

Now, an investigation has uncovered a scandal where fake Rwandan asylum seekers infiltrate the United States (U.S.) and United Kingdom (U.K.) and work undercover to hunt down critics and survivors of the Rwandan dictatorship and bring them back to Rwanda. This scandal revolves around networks of informers and agents and it encapsulates all the machinations of the growing industry around “genocide in Rwanda”.

Prejudged by Western human rights organizations, journalists, and mass media, the Rwanda government’s critics and survivors forced to flee for their lives are falsely accused and publicly branded as genocide perpetrators. Shunned as humanity’s lowest criminals, arrested and imprisoned without trial for months or years, legitimate refugees are framed, extradited and neutralized by a government whose top officials have international arrest warrants against them.

Journalists, human rights defenders, businessmen, and ordinary citizens both inside and outside Rwanda are persecuted and neutralized if they deviate from the falsified “victim” and “survivor” ideology used as a political weapon by the military dictatorship of Paul Kagame and his vast network of propagandists, state agents, and foreign backers.

Innocent Rwandan asylum seekers live under perpetual fear of being hunted down, branded as genocide perpetrators, ostracized, and persecuted by the Kagame regime.8 As examples to follow will show, host governments generally capitulate without investigation or resistance and support the Kagame regime’s requests for arrest and extradition.

Using international legal instruments and institutions, like the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), Western governments—the U.S., Belgium, Canada and Britain in particular—actively assist the Kagame regime in hunting refugees and critics, because all four governments backed the Rwanda Patriotic Front’s guerrilla war, 1990-1994, and the years of terrorism that have followed, 1994-2008.

REFUGEES FRAMED BY THE BBC

Early one morning in the fall of 2006, a Rwandan national who gained U.K. citizenship after a six year asylum process was confronted on the street as he exited the offices of the London-based charity where he worked.

Waiting for Dr. Vincent Bajinya outside on Pott Street in the brisk early morning London air was Fergal Keane, a prominent British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalist known for his extensive reportage in Rwanda during the 1994 cataclysm; Keane has maintained a permanent focus on “the Rwanda genocide” since then and has won many awards for his Rwanda reportage.

Without any appointment or prior warning, Fergal Keane shoved a television camera in Dr. Bajinya’s face and began interrogating him about his alleged role as a “Mastermind” of the Rwandan Genocide.9

The “Mastermind” accusation has been leveled against refugees in Canada, Belgium and the U.S. as well.10

“An investigation by BBC News has revealed that a man—wanted for genocide in Rwanda—is living and working in Britain,” began Fergal Keane’s BBC report of November 6, 2006. “Vincent Bajinya has been working as a doctor and has served on a refugee task force for the government.” 11

“He’s not a voluntary worker,” Keane continues in a short commentary with racist insinuations, as if former refugees who have been granted British citizenship do not deserve to earn an honest wage. “He’s actually paid to the job.”

To whip up the outrage of BBC news consumers, the final insult to truth and freedom—and to the honest, hard-working British consumer who looks to the BBC for impartial reporting—comes when Fergal Keane “exposes” the fact that “much of that money comes from the British taxpayer.” 12

Following the BBC reports by Fergal Keane, Dr. Vincent Bajinya was arrested in December 2006 and has spent fifteen months in detention. Dr. Bajinya’s rights were doubly trampled upon by a government that had already granted him citizenship.

Dr. Vincent Bajinya is considered a “Category One Offender” by Rwandan prosecutors. However, the “Category One Offender” status seems to be reserved for the most educated and astute critics of the Kagame regime; in other words, the intellectuals.

“He is just an intellectual Hutu who managed to have a British citizenship and a good employment,” says Rosalie Brown, Vincent Bajinya’s wife of 19 years. “Every person who is not RPF or who does not share the same opinion with the RPF is the enemy. They did not have to do anything wrong. No way. He has the right to be RPF or not. This detention has been like torture for him, an innocent man. My children and I, we suffer a lot for no good reason. The U.K. government should not have arrested [my husband] before it completed an investigation, but it arrested him just because the Rwanda government said to.”13

The U.S. and U.K. are both signatory to the 1951 United Nations High Commission for Refugees Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.14 Under this convention a refugee is assured the same rights to due process and legal protections as any citizen, and the host government has a legal obligation to protect refugee’s rights. Certainly, the 1951 Convention forbids anyone from hunting and persecuting any asylum seeker in collaboration with the government that the refugees are fleeing.

Within days of Fergal Keane’s first report, the entire Western media was abuzz with stories about Dr. Vincent Bajinya. The articles combined the story of Dr. Vincent Bajinya with the story of three other Rwandan refugees “hiding” in the U.K., and the media framed all four refugees as “Most Wanted” criminals and the “Masterminds” of the Rwanda genocide of 1994.

“Rwanda is seeking extradition of four suspected masterminds of the country's 1994 genocide,” Reuters reported on November 7, 2006, “including a medical doctor, who are living and working in Britain, the Justice Minister told Reuters on Tuesday.”15

“All these fugitives are living a comfortable life in the United Kingdom but are surely key planners of the 1994 genocide,” Reuters quoted Tharcisse Karugarama, Rwanda’s Justice Minister. “The dilemma we have is that most of these fugitives have changed their identities, which makes it difficult for us to track them.”16

“For the fear of being tracked down and wrongly judged in Rwanda or Arusha [ICTR] one of the three mayors had changed his name and applied for asylum as a former teacher, the other one applied for asylum as a Burundian citizen,” says Patrick Mahoro, a Rwandan Hutu and former U.K. asylum seeker who now has citizenship and lives in Coventry, England.17 “This was not because what they might have done but because of the fear of being arrested and accused of genocide as it has happened to many others. This was their explanation in the court hearing last year [2007].”18

“Dr. Bajinya has never hidden himself,” Mahoro continues. “He became a concern to Kigali when he became a member of a task force advising the U.K. government on re-qualification of refugee health professionals. Privately he is known to have strong views about the RPF, and by becoming a member of that particular task force it was thought he might get close to U.K. officials who do not know the truth about the RPF. He also comes from the same village as [former President Juvenal] Habyarimana.”19

According to Rosalie Brown, she and Dr. Vincent Bajinya began fleeing the violence in Rwanda on April 8, 1994. They fled their home in the Rugenge District of Kigali for Gisenyi, where they stayed with extended family until they were forced to flee in July 1994 for fear of persecution by the Kagame regime. Like so many others they flew from the cauldron into the fire: Zaire.20 For two years they lived in the Mugunga refugee camp near Goma, Zaire, and they fled in August 1996, just before the Hutu refugee camps were attacked in contravention of international law.21

The RPF, the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) and the Alliance of Democratic Forces for Congo-Zaire (AFDL-CZ) invaded Zaire in September of 1996 and began massacring Hutu refugees by the tens of thousands. The invasion was backed by the Pentagon through bases in Uganda and Rwanda and U.S. administrators downplayed the killing of Hutu refugees.22 The International Rescue Committee (IRC) reportedly set up at bases nearby and shelled the refugee camps.23 The genocidal campaign against Hutus swung into high gear as the RPF and UPDF—backed by the Pentagon—chased hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees from Goma to Kinshasa—into Zaire’s forests and swamps where they hunted them down and killed them and destroyed the evidence.24

In August 1996, Dr. Vincent Bajinya and his wife Rosalie fled with their two children to Kenya where Dr. Bajinya was employed at the Jomo Kenyatta Hospital; Rosalie Brown went on to London with their two kids (1998) until Dr. Bajinya was able to join them (2000).

Meanwhile, unreported by Fergal Keane and the BBC, are the numerous “refugee” and “asylum” cases of Rwandan nationals who have infiltrated the U.K. and U.S. by working the very same asylum system and benefiting from hundreds of thousands of pounds (and dollars) of taxpayer subsidies.

Amongst the many asylum seekers who arrived in London and claimed to be fleeing the repression in Rwanda are Tony Kavutse, Ignatius Mugabo, Linda Bihire, Vivenie Mugunga and Moses Kaganda, all of whom used the asylum process to eventually gain citizenship in the U.K. Most of these are former RPF soldiers, RDF soldiers or military intelligence agents who today continue to work for the Kagame regime.

Tony Kavutse, Moses Kaganda and Vivenie Mugunga are all currently employed at the embassies of the government they claimed to be fleeing: Rwanda. Each used the asylum process to get free housing, medical assistance, psychological counseling, and higher education at elite colleges in England.

And there are other “asylum seekers” claiming persecution by the Rwanda Government whose insider roles as intelligence agents and secretive businessmen make a horrible joke out of the U.K. asylum system.

THE GENOCIDAIRE BRAND

In October of 2006, Dr. Vincent Bajinya was working for Praxis, a U.K. non-government organization (NGO) that assists refugees in transition, and for Refugee Nurses Task Force, a 24-member task-force set up by the U.K. government to link refugee nurses with U.K. employers.

“Fergal Keane was waiting for Dr. Bajinya in front of the entrance door of his work,” says Rosalie Brown. “He was just in the street very early in the morning without any contact or warning if I can say! Shock and surprise you know? My husband had never meet Fergal Keane before and now he [Keane] was accusing him of genocide in Rwanda!” 25

It was not Fergal Keane’s first visit to the Praxis offices, however, and within a week of the auspicious early morning encounter the BBC aired a major story convicting Dr. Vincent Bajinya a priori of genocide and setting the stage for his public ostracism and imminent arrest by U.K. officials.

The BBC documentary reveals that Fergal Keane (or someone whose voice sounds identical) previously visited Dr. Bajinya’s offices at Praxis and covertly filmed him using a hidden camera. Keane begins the four-minute BBC docudrama “undercover” and he confides in viewers that the initial filming was done in “secret”—the admission of secrecy sensationalizes the report and frames the story so that it will appear that Dr. Vincent Bajinya is a “wanted” criminal on the run. The rising chorus of media reports soon declared that Dr. Bajinya changed his name to avoid being detected as a “genocidaire” hiding in London.26

“I was with [my husband] in the war,” says Rosalie Brown, “everywhere, all the time, he did not do anything. We fled like everyone else, suffered like every Rwandan, we lost many lovers, family members and friends. We went through the asylum process once we got to the U.K. and on our Rwandan names. This Fergal Keane story is all made up.” 27

According to numerous sources, Dr. Vincent Bajinya was completely open about his refugee status during the entire process of gaining U.K. citizenship and changed his name after citizenship was granted and for practicality purposes relating to the dictates of work, and marriage, and living in the U.K.

“Why does the Rwanda government suddenly want my husband now in 2007 [sic] after 13 years of war in Rwanda?” says Rosalie Brown. “We all had different names and for our children’s future as they grow up in this country [U.K.] why can we not all have the same name Brown once the law in this country gives us the full rights to do so?” 28

“Excuse me sir, do you work here?” the voice behind the hidden camera asks Dr. Vincent Bajinya as the short clip opens. Fergal Keane misrepresents the BBC from the start, a telling indication of the misrepresentations to come. He knows that Dr. Bajinya works at the Praxis clinic and he is not interested in the clinic. “Do you know…is the clinic open today? There’s a clinic here…a couple days a week?”29

Fergal Keane discredits his reportage further as the film unfolds because he frames the reportage in such a way that Dr. Vincent Bajinya is accused, tried, and convicted in a four minute documentary. But the BBC reports about Dr. Vincent Bajinya are full of inconsistencies and the various reports raise important questions that should be put to Fergal Keane and his producer, Andrew Head.

Using the low-quality images of Dr. Bajinya snatched in secret during the initial visit, Keane traveled to Rwanda to find witnesses who would testify that Dr. Vincent Bajinya was indeed a genocide perpetrator. In Dr. Bajinya’s home village, so we are told, Keane finds his witness.

“Far from London we’ve uncovered evidence tying Dr. Bajinya to horrific crimes,” Fergal Keane announces. The video begins its Rwanda segment showing dark skies over the land of a thousand hills, but quickly jumps to gruesome images of bodies lying along the road.30 These are the images of gruesome death from 1994 that are recycled over and over in a pornography of African violence that is used to foster the ignorance that has infected the collective consciousness.

“And today in this neighborhood where Dr. Bajinya lived, survivors recall a fanatic who searched for Tutsis at roadblocks,” Fergal Keane continues. “They claim Tutsi civilians, even a three-month old baby, were amongst those killed by militia men he directed.”

Like the fake asylum seekers used by Fergal Keane as sources to frame Dr. Bajinya and pressure Praxis, whom we will soon meet, it seems that his chosen “genocide survivors” also have a lot in common with RPF intelligence agents.

PLANTED SPIES AND AGENTS

In the BBC documentary of November 6, 2006, titled “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” we are introduced to a Rwandan man Keane calls only “Dieudonne”—a “genocide survivor” whom we are told lives in Dr. Bajinya’s former community. The BBC video flashes the man’s name, but the tiny banner is blurry and unreadable.

“Dieudonne is one of several eyewitnesses who told us Bajinya instructed the militia to kill,” says Fergal Keane. “From our photographs Dieudonne identified Dr. Bajinya as the man he saw giving orders for murder.”

The “eyewitness” Dieudonne tells the story of Dr. Bajinya’s supposed crimes in the Kinyarwanda language, while Fergal Keane translates for English viewers. “Bajinya told them, ‘Look, this is not how you kill a man, you're just playing with him. He might survive if you just leave him the way he is.’ So they killed him off. It is an image of Bajinya that stays in my mind.”

However, in the BBC press release of the following day, titled “British Charity Employs Doctor Accused of Crimes Against Humanity,” the article cites a man named Janvier Mabuye to say exactly the same thing that Fergal Keane claims the eyewitness Dieudonne is saying in the film.

“Janvier Mabuye says he heard Dr Bajinya ordering the killers to finish off a taxi driver who had already been attacked with machetes. Janvier says: ‘Bajinya told them look this is not how you kill a person, you’re just playing with him. He might survive if you just leave him the way he is. At that point he called a young man and another neighbor and they came and killed him off. That is one of the images that always lasts each time I remember the genocide. It’s one of the images of Bajinya that remains in my mind.’” 31

The BBC has produced two reports where two different eyewitnesses have made exactly the same accusations, word-for-word, verbatim, against Dr. Vincent Bajinya.

More importantly, the eyewitness Janvier Mabuye, who the BBC uses for their print stories and longer video documentary about Dr. Vincent Bajinya, is identified by Rwandan refugees as an RPF intelligence agent who has worked in the Rwandan Embassies in Uganda, Nairobi and Brussels.

On March 29, 2002 Janvier Mabuye was nominated 2nd Secretary at the Rwandan Embassy in Kampala, Uganda; later in 2002 he worked as 1rst Secretary at the Rwandan Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.32 In October 2003, Janvier Mabuye was based in Brussels as 2nd Secretary and Cultural Attaché, a post he held until at least 2005.33

In December 2004, Mabuye issued a communiqué from the Rwanda Embassy in Brussels to the Rwandan community informing them how, with the support of the Rwandan Embassy in Brussels, they can acquire investment properties in Rwanda.34

Fergal Keane and the BBC have outdone themselves by producing exactly the same accusations by two independent witnesses and by producing a “genocide survivor” who is actually a Rwandan intelligence agent.35

“Janvier Mabuye is not from Dr. Bajinya’s neighborhood and he is not a genocide survivor,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “Like many other young Tutsis he left Rwanda after the October 1990 invasion to join the RPF in Uganda.”

From the BBC video we see that Dr. Bajinya is not an expert English speaker. Keane’s method of confrontation forces the entire life and history of another human being—who has lived a reality few of us can fathom—into Keane’s framework of assumptions and biases about what happened in Rwanda and who is responsible and it leaves no room for Dr. Vincent Bajinya or his unique identity to exist.

Who is the more credible witness to events in Rwanda? Dr. Vincent Bajinya, a Rwandan who grew up in Rwanda, a man who knew the place and the people, and who finally fled with his family in 1996 after years of terror? Or Fergal Keane, a white reporter from England who arrived in Rwanda for the first time in May 1994 and worked with the assistance of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and their intelligence and information warfare departments?

Keane closes his attack with a ten-second media sound bite about genocide that entirely destroys the context of Dr. Vincent Bajinya’s worldview and the history of trauma and devastation he has both witnessed and survived. Dr. Bajinya responds to the arrogance of Fergal Keane with terse summary statements in poor English, and does this standing up for his rights as a British citizen and a human being.

“The doctor says both sides were massacred in Rwanda and refuses to accept Tutsis were victims of genocide,” Keane states as he approaches Dr. Vincent Bajinya on Pott street.36

“You believe there was no genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda?” Keane asks Dr. Vincent Bajinya. In Keane’s tone and manner there is the self-righteous assumption of a higher moral purpose.37

“I believe that, yes,” says Dr. Vincent Bajinya.38

“Because the international community believes there was a genocide.” Keane is now speaking for the nebulous “international community,” obviously pleased with himself for having elicited the response that can be used to figuratively hang Dr. Vincent Bajinya as a genocide negationist.

“Yeah, it’s my belief,” Dr. Bajinya says. Not interested in Fergal Keane’s crusade. “The international community can believe other things. It is my right to believe in what I believe.”39

THE BOGUS ASYLUM OF TONY KAVUTSE

According to legitimate Rwandan refugees in the U.K. the man primarily responsible for orchestrating the branding, arrest, detention and persecution of Dr. Vincent Bajinya is a fake Rwandan asylum seeker who claimed to have fled Rwanda under fear of persecution. The man who tracked down Dr. Vincent Bajinya today works at the Rwandan Embassy in London under the name Tony Kavutse. He was assisted by several other fake asylum seekers also working as Rwandan agents or agents-provocateurs in London.

Legitimate Rwandan refugees in London report that Tony Kavutse is a long-time RPF and RDF soldier and intelligence agent. Kavutse was reportedly born in Uganda. Rwandan refugees in London claim that the Rwandan Embassy staff is 100% Ugandan citizens. Some of them reportedly fought with President-for-Life Yoweri Museveni, an ethnic Hima (a tribe related to the Tutsis), and the National Resistance Army (NRA) during the Ugandan guerrilla wars in the 1980’s and later joined the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF). Many Ugandan citizens hold powerful positions in the Rwanda Government today because they joined the RPA/NRA war machine in its conquest of Rwanda. “The conquering RPF were mainly the English-speaking Ugandans.”40

Legitimate asylum seekers claim that Tony Kavutse continues to work as an RPF intelligence agent for the Rwanda government and that he tracks down any critics or legitimate victims of terrorism that have fled Rwanda.41

Documents obtained by this correspondent show that Tony Kavutse filed for formal protection status under U.K. law and obtained significant resources through the assistance of numerous U.K. charities and quasi-government or government agencies.

In a document dated July 13, 2002, the U.K. Home Office, Immigration and Nationality Directorate, refused asylum status for Tony Kavutse, but, “because of the particular circumstances of [his] case”, granted him informal asylum status in the category “Exceptional Leave to Remain.” 42 According to the Kavutse documents, officials were convinced Kavutse would be in danger if the U.K. returned him to Rwanda.

Kavutse gained assistance through the Medical Foundation in London, an NGO that works with asylum-seeking victims of torture. Medical Foundation trustees include John Le Carre, the accomplished novelist who has taken a serious interest in the events in central Africa.43

The Medical Foundation peddles the standard story about genocide in Rwanda, but also appears to address, at least to some extent, the terrorism of the post-1994 Kagame regime.

Documents dated July 29, 2002, confirm that Kavutse was a “priority need” client of the Medical Foundation “receiving ongoing treatment” for his claims of torture. Kavutse arrived in January 2002 and medical treatment began then. Documents also establish that Kavutse received financial and insurance benefits from the state.44

The Medical Foundation’s Dr. Hamra Yucel apparently assessed Kavutse’s status based on his testimony. “Mr. Kavutse has been subjected to torture,” she opined, “including severe beatings, and, most importantly, witnessed his father being shot in December 2001.”45

According to Rwandan sources in London who know of the particulars of the case, Tony Kavutse’s claims of being tortured by the current government are fabricated (there was no apparent physical evidence of torture). While Dr. Hamra Yucel’s clinical assessments fit the classic psychological profile of a torture survivor, Rwandan sources claim that RPF-allied asylum seekers are coached on how expertly to work the system and gain asylum status by feigning all the proper symptoms of torture.

When asked how it is possible that an asylum seeker claiming to have been tortured by the Rwandan Government could then end up in their diplomatic corps, Michelle Alexander from the Medical Foundation responded that, “the Medical Foundation is not at liberty to disclose details of any individual’s case and cannot confirm whether the person you refer to is a client of the Medical Foundation.” 46

Tony Kavutse received lodging assistance through the support of the community council of the London Borough of Waltham Forrest.47 In August 2004, Kavutse received full state educational support and attended the University of London’s elite Birbeck School of Management and Organizational Psychology.48 All of Kavutse’s accommodations and tuition for approximately five years were paid for in full by a combination of these non-governmental supporting agencies and the U.K. Government.

Today Tony Kavutse lives in London and is working as a secretary on the diplomatic staff at the Rwandan Embassy.49 Kavutse did not respond to questions.

Tony Kavutse is also a relative of another top RPF cadre: his mother is the sister of Dr. Zac Nsenga, an RPF agent who became the Rwandan Ambassador to the United States.

Zac Nsenga’s wife has been living in the U.K., where she reportedly gained refugee status under false asylum claims under an alias.50 Rwandan refugees in London claim that she travels regularly to Rwanda and Uganda. However, in late March or early April 2008, Madamu Nsenga traveled to Rwanda for a visit and Zac Nsenga reportedly took her refugee asylum documents from her due to a quarrel. Now Madamu Nsenga is caught in the limbo of not being able to return to the U.K., lacking her U.K.-Rwanda asylum papers, and she is trying to go to Uganda to solve the problem, since she is officially not allowed to go to Rwanda—the country she was seeking refuge from.51

“Dr. Zac Nsenga was the Rwandan ambassador in Washington,” says Professor Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, former director of the Rwandan Information Office (ORINFOR). “Before the victory of the RPF, he was in charge of hygiene at a camp set up by the RPF in Gabiro, Rwanda, where the corpses of Hutus killed by the RPF were burnt. Nsenga was in charge of that camp. In other words, he oversaw the suppression of evidence regarding the massacres committed by the RPF. In RPF circles the camp is known as the CDR camp. The CDR was the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic, a political party regarded by the RPF and its supporters as the party of Hutu extremists. So RPF soldiers referred to the camp as CDR camp because all the Hutus who were taken to that camp for execution or the bodies of the Hutus taken to that camp for burning were globally considered as Hutu extremists who espoused the CDR worldview. ”52

“The three primitive one-story barrack blocks, one with its roof being repaired, are basic shelters for the [RPF] men at the Gabiro army camp,” wrote British journalist Nick Gordon. “It all looks devastatingly innocent: a complex that may be an affront to the classic rolling African skyline, but no more than that. There are no tell-tale chimneys, no railway lines leading into the restricted area. Indeed, as I munch my bread and wait for the photographer to snatch his picture, it is hard to believe that this dot on the map is an extermination camp. What goes on inside Gabiro [camp] is truly revolting, and it is not an isolated example. All over the country since the new government took control, Hutus have been killed in the thousands.”53

A Tutsi born in Rwanda, Dr. Zac Nsenga earned a medical degree at Makerere University Medical School in Uganda and a degree in human medicine at the University of Westminster, with an MA in diplomatic studies and a certificate in strategic studies. He practiced medicine both in Uganda and Lesotho before becoming a Major in the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) in December 1990. Later he served as Secretary General in the Ministry of Internal Security (overseeing National Police and Prison Services). Nsenga was also Ambassador to Israel (1995-1996) and the U.K. (1998-2001). As the Rwandan Ambassador in the U.S., Zac Nsenga worked with Paul Kagame and former U.S. President Bill Clinton to oversee and delineate the Clinton Foundation’s AIDS activities in Rwanda.54

Rwandan refugees in the U.S. claim that Major Zac Nsenga has played an active role in hunting down critics and legitimate refugees and having them arrested as fugitives from justice and, of course, branded as genocidaires.

“It is easy to come to the United States and hide,” said Zac Nsenga, the Rwandan ambassador to the United States, quoted in a Chicago Tribune article about a Rwandan named Jean-Marie Vianney Mudahinyuka (arrested in Chicago) and other supposed genocidaires hiding in the U.S. “Americans don’t know that amidst them are people who did very bad things.”55

Nsenga—and the Rwandan Embassy in the U.S.—collaborates with the specially formed Human Rights Violators and Public Safety Unit (HRVPSU) of the office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, formed in 2003, to track down foreigners, take them to court, jail and then deport them for even the slightest infractions of immigration laws.56

Nsenga’s role in the U.S. is to spread the official genocide story, hunt down Rwandan critics, sell the establishment narrative on HIV/AIDS involving big pharmaceutical companies, further the business interests of Rwanda, and suppress any political dissent about the Kagame regime.57

Nsenga is known to be very close to former Ambassador Andrew Young, the Kagame regime’s number one public relations agent whose PR consulting firm Goodworks International whitewashes the regime and its major corporate allies and partners.58 GWI is also tight with the Africa-America Institute, a CIA backed think tank involved in information warfare and subversive activities all over Africa.59 Andrew Young has built a mansion on Rwanda’s Lake Muhazi.60

Zac Nsenga “is a strong endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network (GIN).”61 The Genocide Intervention Network is at the forefront of promoting the official line on genocide in Rwanda as a pivotal tool in the new hegemonic human rights discourse.62 Other GIN endorsers include some of the highest profile official Rwandan genocide storytellers: General Romeo Dallaire, Samantha Power and Gerald Kaplan.

“[Nsenga] was in Ruhengeri killing people also,” says Jean-Christophe Nizeyimana. “As a promotion, he was given the post of Ambassador to Washington D.C.”63

PRESSURING THE U.K. ASYLUM SYSTEM

The BBC’s November 7, 2006, report about Dr. Vincent Bajinya appears to target the charity Praxis for having supported Dr. Bajinya using U.K. taxpayers’ money. By targeting Praxis the BBC set the stage for greater restrictions and controls surrounding the asylum process in England, a process that has since come under strict reform on asylum issues.

The articles about Bajinya and other refugees appeared in the fall of 2006 and by January 2007 the U.K. had issued new formal guidelines about refugees and formal policy had been drastically reformed to meet new U.K. immigration standards. Interestingly, the British asylum and immigration system relies heavily on private security companies noted for rather specious “security” missions.64

The BBC article quoted Reverend Vaughan Jones, the director of Praxis, but the comment by Vaughan Jones suggests that Praxis was the victim of circumstances, not Dr. Vincent Bajinya.

“The director of Praxis, Reverend Vaughan Jones, said if the allegations were true it would represent a betrayal of his organization's trust,” reported Fergal Keane.65

“I had no suspicions and when I saw the allegations I was very shocked,” Reverend Vaughan Jones stated in a subsequent BBC report of November 7, 2006. “If they are true then I would feel betrayed, because we work with people who have come from difficult situations and need proper support. We are aware that there are all kinds of allegations and counter allegations in the community and sorting out the victim from the perpetrator is extremely hard.” 66

When contacted by email at Praxis, Reverend Vaughan Jones replied that “Dr Bajinya was immediately suspended as a result of the allegations. He is no longer our employee.”67

In a follow-up query, Reverend Vaughan Jones replied: “Praxis has never attempted to form a judgment in relation to guilt or innocence that is the responsibility of others and beyond our competency. We are very aware of the complexity of the issues. As an organization which works with vulnerable people we have a duty of care primarily to them and it would not have been responsible to allow someone to work in the organization with such serious allegations having been made. We have always said that this matter should be resolved through the due process of law.”68

However, Praxis fired Dr. Vincent Bajinya based on the campaign spawned by the BBC reports of Fergal Keane. It was enough for Reverend Vaughan Jones that Fergal Keane and the BBC said that Dr. Vincent Bajinya was “accused” of genocide for them to immediately go on the defensive to protect their own good name. This is how the genocide label is used as a brand and a weapon against anyone who deviates from the Rwandan government’s policies or falls out of favor with the elite criminal networks in power.

“How does Praxis protect vulnerable people?” notes U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro, who also benefited from the assistance of Praxis. “And how is it possible that Tony Kavutse, an asylum seeker and “refugee” who claimed to have been tortured by the current government of Rwanda could end up working for the government he was seeking asylum from?”

Mahoro notes that Praxis has been utilizing the volunteer services of another false asylum seeker who is also working at the Rwandan Embassy. This individual is flagged by the Rwandan asylum community as another informant and RPF agent.

“As soon as these reports came out by the BBC, true Rwandan asylum seekers stay away from Praxis for fear that they will be identified and accused of genocide,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “There is a woman Rose Ngabire, a Tutsi who was working at Praxis in Dr. Bajinya’s department, who we know is a Rwanda government informant.”

Rose Ngabire was a volunteer on work placement at Praxis at the same time as Dr. Vincent Bajinya. Ngabire left Praxis and is now the full-time receptionist at the Rwandan Embassy in London.

Ngabire is another Ugandan-Rwandan dual citizen who is accused by legitimate Rwandan refugees of acting as a spy to identify and help separate the legitimate refugees from the fake refugee-agents and insure that the legitimate refugees are sent back to Rwanda and the fake refugees are processed through the asylum system for the benefit of the regime in Kigali.

Fergal Keane’s BBC reports do not identify the RPF agent Rose Ngabire and Keane’s reportage is further discredited with the awareness that one of the “expert” voices chosen by Fergal Keane to buttress the fabricated story about Dr. Bajinya is another fake RPF asylum seeker named Vivenie Niragira Mugunga.

Vivenie Mugunga arrived in the U.K. as an asylum seeker over six years ago and has already gained U.K. citizenship. Mugunga claimed to be a survivor of the Rwanda genocide and gained refugee status by fleeing from the Kagame regime. However, both of her claims are reportedly false. Mugunga was reportedly not in Rwanda during or after 1994. Instead, she came from Burundi, where she was born and raised. After she earned higher education degrees at universities in South England, Mugunga became an agent of the Kagame regime and she promotes Rwanda investments and organizes government-affiliated events.

Fergal Keane has also used Vivenie Mugunga to pull on the heart strings of his BBC viewers and gain sympathy—channeled into outrage to help convict and hang Dr. Vincent Bajinya in the court of public opinion. In one long film clip about the Dr. Vincent Bajinya story, Fergal Keane has Vivenie Mugunga, who is portrayed as a Rwandan genocide survivor, crying that the organization Praxis has extremists on their staff—meaning Dr. Bajinya—and they discriminated against her when she sought services there. Turning truth upside-down as usual, Keane and Mugunga say nothing about the other bogus refugee agents—like the Tutsi agent Rose Ngabire—working at Praxis.

An honest investigation of Dr. Vincent Bajinya’s case would examine Fergal Keane’s role in traveling to Rwanda and producing genocide charges by using the BBC as a political weapon in an obvious collaboration with the selective political agenda of the Kagame government.

According to one U.K. intelligence insider, U.K. news corporations routinely run disinformation planted by U.K. intelligence assets from MI-6. “For example, the Guardian and very occasionally the London Sunday-Times have been seen to have reporters who are assets of the U.K. intelligence services. Incidentally this may also apply to Andrew Gilligan of the BBC…”69

It may also apply to the BBC’s Fergal Keane.

Keane traveled to Rwanda where “evidence” of the crimes of Bajinya was scraped up and delivered to the news consuming Western public in manipulative and highly structured BBC productions.

“This Bajinya [frame-up] was 100% set-up by Kigali and Fergal Keane,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “The spies at the Rwanda Embassy in London informed Keane that they want Dr. Vincent and they arranged for Keane to go to Rwanda to interview ‘witnesses’ and come back here to accuse Dr. Bajinya, who all this time did not know anything was happening.” 70

“Using BBC South East [England] where Vivenie Mugunga was living,” says Patrick Mahoro, “Fergal Keane convinced his producer Andrew Head to fund his investigation into the allegations and accusations by a south east England resident—the fake asylum seeker Vivenie Mugunga—about an U.K. organization—Praxis—harboring genocidaires and extremists—Dr. Vincent Bajinya.”71

“After that Fergal Keane went to Praxis with the hidden camera. Then he traveled to Rwanda funded by the BBC. Of course he had contact with Kigali because he was set up by the Rwandan Embassy here and he met with officials in Kigali. In his ‘investigation’ in Rwanda he shows that he found out that Dr. Bajinya has been issued an arrest warrant. Keane speaks to the prosecutor in Kigali who shows him the file submitted by Kigali to the U.K. And then Keane gets an RPF agent—Janvier Mabuye—to be his eyewitness and claim on the video that Dr. Bajinya committed genocide. And then finally he goes back to London and accuses Dr. Bajinya.” 72

At the end of the day, the BBC makes money by producing a sensationalist TV show where Fergal Keane is supposed to represent everything that is good and Dr. Vincent Bajinya everything that is evil. So it’s the good versus evil story distilled out of the Hutus versus Tutsis mythology about Rwanda.

Curiously indicative of some insider trading and deeper political agenda is the fact that reforms in the asylum process in the U.K. occurred soon after the arrest of Dr. Vincent Bajinya and the other three “Masterminds” of genocide. According to U.K. Home Office documents outlining asylum seeker protocol, prior to granting asylum of Rwandan refugees, U.K. officials are now required to refer to special “lists” provided by the Kagame regime.

On the one hand the documents obtained in the Tony Kavutse case clearly validate the claims of legitimate refugees by formally documenting what the U.K., U.S., and most Western governments deny: That torture and killings do occur in Rwanda and that they are committed by agents of the current government.

On the other hand the documents also clearly establish that RPF-allied false asylum seekers may be claiming to have been tortured in Rwanda to manipulate the system and gain the advantages now being taken away from legitimate asylum seekers.

The U.K. and U.S. governments claim Rwanda is “safe”. Under this classification the U.K. Government has advanced certain refugee and asylum protocols which simultaneously institutionalize infiltration by RPF agents, on one hand, and the persecution of legitimate refugees on the other. The asylum situation in the United States is much the same.

According to the British Home Office of Immigration and Nationality Department statistics, the numbers of Rwandan asylum seekers arriving in Britain have skyrocketed under the Kagame regime, especially since 1999. From 1994 to 1997, Britain received approximately 100 asylum seekers annually. But the numbers increased with increasing repression in Rwanda. In 1999 there were approximately 300; in 1999 and 2000 there were some 800; with 550, 700 and 275 in 2001, 2002 and 2003.73

Harsh conditions in detention centers and human rights violations against asylum seekers in the U.K. mirror those in the United States. Anne Owers, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, has released a series of damning reports on the UK’s detention estate.74

In Britain and the U.S. tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children are jailed for long periods without charges in contravention of the 1951 UNHCR Refugee Convention.75 While none of these people is detained for committing a criminal offense, they are held in prison-like conditions to facilitate government policies of rounding up asylum-seekers in order to deter them from seeking refuge in Britain or the U.S.

There is literally a war on refugees.

In one assessment, the Medical Foundation in 2004 determined that aggressive force effectively constituting torture had been used against individuals during attempts to remove them from the U.K.76 There have been many cases of suicides and mass hunger strikes by asylum seekers in the U.K.77

The Kagame regime is meanwhile ushering bogus “asylum” seekers off to London armed with all the false documentation necessary to gain a positive asylum status and, eventually, citizenship. The regime’s goal is to infiltrate Western countries with more and more Rwandans who have benefited from the current political climate and who do not challenge the inverted victim versus killer ideology or the criminal enterprises and networks of the elites involved.

RWANDA’S GENOCIDE LISTS

According to legitimate Rwandan refugees in London, the Rwandan refugee community is perpetually under surveillance and effectively under attack by fake asylum seekers working as agents; these agents send the names of legitimate refugees to the ever-updated “genocide lists” that Kigali provides to the U.K. Home Office and other governments, and they meanwhile help to build bogus “legal” cases against the legitimate refugees, as happened with Dr. Vincent Bajinya.

The U.K. government regularly arrests asylum seekers (of all nationalities) and holds them in detention pending review of their cases for a “pass” or “fail” of the asylum granting process, but most are almost automatically slated for return to their country of origin. British policies are particularly egregious in the cases of countries where Britain is more actively involved in the ongoing warfare, especially Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan (Darfur), or where it has a deep military and intelligence relationship, especially Congo, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.

While their cases await resolution, asylum claimants are banned from working. Once their cases have been failed, they face total destitution, with no right to work, no benefits, no accommodation, no proper access to health services, and the constant fear of removal. This is on top of the psychological trauma, and in some cases physical injury, that continues to trouble them as a result of their experiences.

In the case of Rwanda, selected asylum seekers are further stigmatized and dehumanized by being branded as genocidaires—a label applied to describe Hutu “extremists” and highly targeted individuals in well-organized frame-ups—in cases like Dr. Vincent Bajinya’s, where the frame-up involved Rwandan intelligence agents and the BBC.

According to Rwandan asylum seekers the Kigali government routinely manipulates the asylum system to get students and intelligence agents into the U.K. asylum system to gain U.K. citizenship at no financial cost for the short- and long-term benefit of the Kigali regime.

In 2007, around 200 Rwandan students arrived in the U.K. as asylum seekers and around 150 of these became stateless after falsely claiming to be Rwandan asylum seekers; about 50 of these were official Rwandan students possessing documents provided by the Rwanda government who had been given educational scholarships from the U.K. government.

After Kigali sends false asylum claimants to the U.K., their asylum claim is either passed or failed like any other refugee. Once the asylum claim has been successful and refugee status granted, these false claimants can access student loans and housing and medical support. To improve the chances of a “passed” asylum claim Kigali sets up fake asylum seekers with fake documents to strengthen their cases: e.g., arrest warrants, prison release documents, and medical reports about being tortured.

Next, Rwandan agents in the U.K.—like Mary Blewitt Kayitesi and Tony Kavutse—assist the false asylum seekers to access U.K. refugee assistance agencies like the Medical Foundation, Praxis, or Survivor’s Fund (SURF). Some enhance their status by claiming to be genocide survivors.

Some asylum claimants “pass” relatively easily, but for those asylum seekers who are “failed” by the U.K. government—which is eager to reject all refugees to meet its goals of low immigration—the Rwandan Embassy is contacted to determine the status of the asylum seeker and the Embassy denies that these clandestine government supported “refugees” are from Rwanda at all. In some cases the U.K. deports the false claimants back to Kigali, even forcibly, where the Rwandan immigration officials again—checking their lists of supported but fake asylum seekers—refuses that the asylum seekers originated from Rwanda. In both cases the fake asylum seekers, disowned by Rwanda, gain a stateless refugee status which under the 1951 UNHCR protections insures that the U.K. cannot deport them (since they are unable to identify their state or origin).

When the U.K. government detains legitimate refugees—obviously not supported by Kigali but rather hunted by them—the Rwandan Embassy is again contacted while they are still in London, or the refugee is deported directly back to Kigali. In either of these cases involving actual refugees, the Kagame regime validates to the U.K. government that these are legitimate refugees, because Kigali is happy to have critics of the regime and other legitimate refugees fleeing state persecution delivered back into their hands.

One legitimate refugee “failed” by the U.K. immigration system and forcibly returned to Rwanda was Rene Murabukira, a Rwandan refugee who fled after his family was killed in 1996.78

Rene Murabukira started a new life in Edinburgh and after 11 years in the U.K. he was a charity worker with the Edinburgh-based Action Group helping physically and mentally disabled adults when the U.K. immigration agents tracked him down and arrested him at work.

When Murabukira arrived in the U.K. in 1996, he was only 17 years old. He was given temporary leave to remain in the U.K. as well as a work permit, and told his case for permanent asylum was under consideration. He built a life in Edinburgh and was engaged to be married to Aneta Jarzmik, a U.K. citizen.

Murabukira’s case was deferred for eleven years, until Rwanda was declared “safe.” But in April 2007, U.K. immigration officials swooped in packed Murabukira off to a detention centre. He was scheduled for extradition in May 2007—readied to be shipped back to Rwanda—but legal intervention won him a temporary stay in the U.K. on the day of the planned flight.

Murabukira claimed that Tutsi rebels killed his parents, sister and cousins, at his home in 1996. He has been unable to work or claim benefits and has relied on friends to survive the past year of asylum limbo.79

Rwandans in London believe there have been about 65 cases of legitimate asylum seekers deported back to Rwanda since 2000.80

Of course there are also those fake refugees who betray Kigali once they have achieved their mission and gained asylum status abroad. It is well known that

“There are certainly some Tutsis who are genuine refugees,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro. “But there is also a deliberate policy on the part of the RPF regime to export [exfiltrate] Tutsis to the U.S., Canada, Belgium and other countries and a deliberate policy to forcibly return Hutus to Rwanda who fled to countries other than the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are worried that Hutu asylum seekers outnumber Tutsis in Belgium and other countries, and that, if nothing is done, in the long run Hutus will be able to have their voice heard.”

Thousands of Hutus refugees remain in countries that border Rwanda and thousands of refugees have recently been forcibly repatriated back to Rwanda by the governments of both Uganda and Tanzania. In October 2007, for example, Uganda deported some 3000 Rwandans, most of them Hutus.81

“The whole idea is to build a strong Tutsi Diaspora that would support the Tutsi clique in power in Rwanda the same way the Jews support Israel,” says Higiro. “With a strong Tutsi Diaspora, Tutsi elites in power can use the tools of negationism, revisionism and the genocide industry to silence Hutus in Rwanda and in the countries where they have sought asylum.”82

U.K. ASYLUMS DIRECTED BY KIGALI

For its part the British Government has adopted a refugee asylum policy that looks to the Kagame regime—the persecuting government—for its decisions about Rwandan asylum cases and refugee returns.

The U.K. asylum system came under “reform” during the Blair government, but not in favor of refugees or asylum seeker’s rights. This is made clear in the case of Rwandan asylum seekers where the immigration and detention shake-up seems to have involved a stripping away of refugees’ legal protections.

By the end of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s term in office, the asylum reform process was in full swing and a special “Ten-Point Plan for Border Protection and Immigration Reform” was launched. Under this plan, the Prime Minister committed the U.K. Government to accelerate and massively increase the removal of both imprisoned and not yet detained foreign asylum seekers. According to the Home Office, it is the biggest shake-up of the immigration system in its history.83

On January 24, 2007—not so long after the British public was sensitized to the infiltration of Dr. Bajinya and the other three supposed “Masterminds” of genocide in Rwanda—the U.K. Home Office issued a special “Operational Guidance Note” on Rwanda that establishes and revises the formal policy for dealing with Rwandan asylum seekers. The guidance notes that all asylum seekers must be considered on a case by case basis, but all case workers must follow the outlines of this operational guidance document.84

The document, meant to educate case workers, opens with a “country assessment” that presents a highly inaccurate version of events in Rwanda. The assessment is heavily based on BBC sources, especially the BBC “Timeline” on Rwanda, and it has a decidedly pro-RPF bias. Some select examples of the bias can be seen in the following excerpts:

[1] CLAIM: “Rwanda is a republic dominated by a strong presidency.”85

REALITY: Rwanda is a one-party dictatorship with a façade of democracy and the consolidation of the dictatorship achieved through highly rigged and manipulated “demonstration elections” that are widely misperceived to have been democratic and fair.86

[2] CLAIM: “In 1985 Tutsi exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Having failed to negotiate their return to the country, the RPF invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990, demanding representation and equality for all Rwandans.87

REALITY: Most of the so-called “Tutsi exiles in Uganda” were Ugandan born citizens and they became battle-hardened guerrillas fighting for Yoweri Museveni and the NRA—a war that Museveni ran out of the Hotel Des Diplomats in Kigali in the mid-1980’s.88 Paul Kagame was Museveni’s Director of Military Intelligence and he was responsible for tortures, massacres and assassinations.89 Museveni had ignored calls by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to downsize his army of approximately 180,000 fighters to 70,000. By mid-April 1994, Museveni had sent some scores of thousands of UPDF soldiers into Rwanda—possibly as many as 70,000.90

To say that these soldiers and the RPF’s political representatives demanded “representation and equality for all Rwandans” is so patently false that it defies any rational attempt to deconstruct it. Working together, Museveni and Kagame utilized terrorist tactics to assign all blame—for atrocities they committed against both their enemies and their own people—on their enemies. They used psychological operations, embedded international reporters, and fabrication of massacres. These tactics have continued to the present.

“Let me give you an example of media manipulation,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, Director of ORINFOR. “In 1994 people took shelter at a mosque in Kabuga near Kigali. After the RPF took control of the location, they killed all the people who had taken shelter there, then called reporters to see what the Interahamwe had done to Tutsis.” 91

[3] CLAIM: “A civil war in the border area ensued. Each incursion by the RPF was followed by reprisal massacres, largely of Tutsis, by government forces. A peace agreement was brokered in 1993, the Arusha Peace Accords, which inter alia provided for a power-sharing arrangement involving all political forces and the RPF.” 92

REALITY: The RPF’s persecution and killings of Hutus and Tutsis in Northern Rwanda went largely unchallenged. Meanwhile the international “human rights” community hammered away at the Habyarimana government following a now common pattern of punishing the victims and accusing them of crimes committed in self defense, but never accusing the perpetrators of the original, and greater, injustices.93

It is interesting that a guerrilla army can invade a sovereign country and attack a sovereign government and commit terrorist acts, driving over a million people before it, and that it could today be summarized as it is above. 94 This exemplifies the hegemonic imperialist bias of the Western human rights establishment and the mantle of genocide carried by the Genocide Intervention Network and its octopus of affiliates.

The rest of the country assessment follows in similar fashion, uttering ridiculous lies that are now so deeply inculcated in the collective insanity of human consciousness as to make them as absolute and unchallengeable as the Ten Commandments. The summary glosses over the human rights record in Rwanda, validates the legitimacy of the institutionalized injustice at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and shamelessly absolves the Kagame regime of its terrorist involvement in extortion, racketeering, war crimes and genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Perhaps the most ludicrous statement in the entire document is this one: “The Rwandan government is strongly committed to national reconciliation and there is no evidence of any state-sponsored or societal discrimination on ethnic grounds that would amount to persecution.”

The source documents which the Operational Guidance on Rwanda relies upon include references to: USAID; U.S. Department of State; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; U.N. and U.K. profiles; and the Economist. Most notably, there are four references to British Broadcasting Corporation reports or documents. Given their relationships to the production and maintenance of the establishment narrative, all of these sources are highly compromised in their capacity to present the true picture of Rwanda or insure refugee protections.

For the purposes of rounding up refugees and dragging them back to Rwanda, the Operational Guidance on Rwanda requires that asylum caseworkers begin the process by checking the names of asylum seekers against several lists maintained by the Kagame government.95

Section 3.5 of the Operational Guidance on Rwanda establishes the hierarchy of protocols for dealing with Rwandan asylum seekers. If “the applicant’s name appears on either of the two published lists maintained by the Rwandan government of those wanted for genocide or where there is any evidence that the applicant was, for example, politically active, employed in any official, religious, media or military capacity at the time of the genocide,” decision-makers are instructed to consider whether to apply one of several special exclusion clauses and must refer such cases to the War Crimes Unit.96

According to the U.K. Home Office, “the War Crimes Unit was formed in March 2004 with the specific remit of introducing screening processes in order to identify people involved in the commission of atrocities in connection with modern day conflict situations.”97

In February 2007, the Israeli Government successfully pressured the U.K. Home Office to water down anti-torture and war crimes legislation.98 The injustices in cases of Rwandan war criminals are amongst the most pronounced.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is today the public relations consultant and economic adviser for the Kagame regime, a position Blair assumed in February, 2008. John Major was prime minister and the Conservative (Tory) Party was in power at the time of the U.S./U.K. backed coup d’etat in Rwanda 1994.

MILKING THE ASYLUM PROCESS

The Rwandan asylum scam allows the Kagame regime to facilitate higher political and economic status for more and more Rwandans by gaining green cards or citizenship abroad.

Moses Kenneth Bugingo Rugema arrived in the U.K. around 2003 on a false asylum claim against Rwanda. Although U.K. citizenship can be granted after five years his citizenship is uncertain.

When asked about his former refugee status and current political appointment with the government he sought asylum from, Rugema responded evasively and aggressively. “I have no time to waste in replying to you in the future,” Rugema replied. “But as a gentleman I just wanted to tell you I exist and your facts are not correct. It’s up to you to prove it.”99

Rugema is another Ugandan-Rwandan, and a former RPF soldier whose “flight” from persecution in Rwanda quickly led to his employment at the Rwanda Embassy in London as a receptionist. From the Embassy, Rugema helped Kigali track down legitimate refugees. Rugema also set up his current business enterprise and continues to operate out of London as an economic agent dealing in the export/import of top quality Rwandan Arabica green bean coffee for the Kagame regime.100

On November 2, 2007, the Rwandan cabinet appointed Rugema to the post of 2nd Counselor at the Rwandan Embassy in New York City.

“It is very interesting that this Rwandan refugee is now working as a business agent for the government he ran away from,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “It is 100% certain that Moses Rugema used the asylum system as a bogus asylum claimant and worked at the Rwanda Embassy in London.”

One of the highest-profile RPF-allied asylum seekers who has milked the system to gain status in the U.K. is Linda Bihire, recently appointed to the RPF’s cabinet under the recent government reshuffling that was advised by Kagame’s new spin doctor, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

On March 13, 2008, Bihire was appointed to Rwandan Cabinet as Minister of Infrastructure. However, Linda Bihire is another Ugandan-born “Rwandan” whose lineage and origins are belied by her inability to speak the native Kinyarwanda language of Rwanda. During her swearing-in ceremony in Kigali, Bihire’s inability to read the Oath of Office forced the organizers to switch to English.101

Bihire’s cabinet selection was engineered by Rwanda’s top intelligence agent, Emmanuel Ndahiro, a feared agent in and out of Rwanda who controls Rwanda’s state daily New Times newspaper and uses it as a political tool to peddle disinformation and attack critics of the RPF. Linda Bihire is Emmanuel Ndahiro’s mistress and they have a 19 year-old son. Lt. Col. Dr. Emmanuel Ndahiro is also a maternal cousin to Paul Kagame and Director General of Rwanda’s dreaded National Security Service.

Bihire is also a close friend of another RPF-allied Rwandan asylum seeker in the U.K., Rose Ngabire, the secretary at the Rwandan Embassy in London. Prior to her cabinet appointment, Bihire milked the U.K. asylum system to get higher education, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in civil engineering and a Master’s Degree in project management from the University of Nottingham and the University of Portsmouth, respectively.

Bihire’s new life apparently began soon after she finished her elementary schooling in Kampala, Uganda, when RPF agent Emmanuel Ndahiro organized her “political asylum” status and facilitated her transfer to London.102 Bihire was soon identified as a Rwandan agent by legitimate Rwandan asylum seekers in England.103

After she arrived in London, Dr. Zac Nsenga, the ambassador to the U.K. at the time, stepped in and landed Bihire a government scholarship for her higher education.

Another U.K. asylum fraud was perpetrated by Joseph Mutaboba, Secretary General of Rwanda’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and former Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In September 2006, Mutaboba co-chaired the United Nations Permanent Advisory Committee on Security Issues in the Central African Region. Since 2003, he has participated in preparatory meetings of the International Conference on Peace and Security in the Great Lakes region and as Coordinator for Rwanda and Head of the Peace and Security Thematic Group. All these “security” posts occurred even while Rwanda continued to plunder Congo. However, Joseph Mutaboba’s wife is another “refugee” living in North London and using the asylum process for personal gain.

Another RPF agent who infiltrated England through the asylum process is Ignatius Mugabo, a naturalized citizen of Uganda who first sought asylum in Denmark but later joined his wife Jacqueline in Britain; Mugabo may by now have gained British citizenship. Mugabo’s wife Jacqueline was reportedly granted full refugee protection under the 1951 UNHCR Convention, which guarantees that any asylum seeker is automatically entitled to be joined by their families.104 According to Rwandan asylum seekers, Mugabo joined is wife in London in 2003.105

Ignatius Mugabo not only worked for the RPF, he became one of Kagame’s top intelligence officials and an active hunter of Kagame’s critics abroad. In March of 2007, just prior to the 13th anniversary of the April 6, 1994 presidential assassinations, Mugabo set up a petition to the British Prime Minister calling on Rwandans in Britain to support his campaign to hunt down and arrest genocidaires. Eighteen people signed the petition, including Ignatius Mugabo.

The petition statement reads:

“We the members of the Rwandan Community resident in the U.K., during the 13th anniversary of the genocide in our country, concerned that many suspected perpetrators of this heinous crime continue to hide in Western countries including U.K., call on the British Prime Minister and his government to increase their support for the delivery of justice to the victims of the Rwandan genocide by tracking and arresting whoever is suspected of having played a role in this tragedy.”106

“Mugabo set up this petition on the U.K. Prime Minister’s web site,” says one Rwandan refugee in London, “but he received too few signatures to get any action from the Prime Minister. All members of the Rwandan community did not sign as they feared their names to be recognized on the list of asylum seekers. Mugabo was disappointed to receive so few supporters.”107

Ignatius Mugabo is also on the management committee of the Rwandan Community Association of the U.K., in charge of organizing events meant to draw out Rwandan refugees, and he is Director of Rwanda Diaspora Investment Ltd., another business front for Kigali.108 Legitimate Rwandan asylum seekers note with curiosity how Mugabo works with the Rwandan Embassy to organize official events while he and his family have reportedly fled the Kagame regime.

Ignatius Mugabo is considered the second most feared intelligence agent of the Kagame regime in London, second only to his associate, James Wizeye. Ignatius Mugabo, Tony Kavutse and Rose Ngabire all work on the Rwanda Embassy staff under the guidance of its two top espionage agents: James Wizeye and Claver Gatete.

James Wizeye was appointed as the 1st Secretary at the Rwanda Embassy in London on June 29, 2005 and today he is also the most feared Rwandan intelligence operative involved in hunting Rwanda’s state enemies, critics and asylum seekers in England and, more widely, in Europe.

A former RPF soldier and current member of Kigali’s intelligence apparatus, Wizeye formerly worked as administrative attaché at the Rwanda Embassy in Kampala, Uganda. However, Wizeye was expelled by the Uganda government in November 2004 after accusations surfaced that Rwanda was training rebels hostile to the Ugandan government: Wizeye was implicated in rebel activities and accused of espionage.109

Wizeye is reportedly wanted today in Uganda and banned from visiting for his role as part of an elite RPF “hit squad” that operated in Uganda to track down enemies of the RPF regime.110 Wizeye set up intelligence cells and purchased information from Ugandan agents who were later arrested.111

“In the U.K. James Wizeye is involved in hunting refugees, weapons dealings and protecting Rwanda’s ‘good image’ by using the media,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “He grew up in Uganda and now he is wanted there because of spying and killings in 2000 and 2001. His success in these [terrorist] operations for the Kagame regime earned him a diplomatic post in London.”112

Rwandan intelligence agent James Wizeye lives inside the Rwanda Embassy compound at 120-122 Seymour Place in London. Wizeye has attended high-level conferences with U.S. officials, including Ambassador Jendayi Frazer.113 According to Rwandans familiar with Wizeye’s activities, he is one of the RPF’s top weapons and minerals agents working in London—possibly a key player in Kigali’s fencing of contraband resources stolen from the Democratic Republic of Congo and arranging of weapons transfers.114

Raised and educated in Uganda, Claver Gatete is the Rwandan Ambassador in London appointed to the Cabinet on September 7, 2005. Gatete is an economist who left Uganda for higher education in Canada. He is known to be an “extremist” RPF official—one of the actual “Masterminds” of RPF strategy to seize and consolidate power in Rwanda—who supported the RPF movement from Canada and the U.S. as a key member of the Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora.115

Gatete organized the RPF campaign abroad, working on funding, lobbying and political alliances, and went on to become a senior Presidential adviser to Paul Kagame. Gatete also worked as Secretary General at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, and he was Steering Committee member as part of President Clinton’s euphemistically named New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), a hegemonic U.S. state department project in neoliberal economics and protectionist trade.116

“Claver Gatete is 500% involved in hunting down Hutus and spreading the genocide ideology of Kigali,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro.

THE GENOCIDE MISERY INDUSTRY

Bogus asylum seekers in the U.K. are also working to raise tens of millions of pounds annually, ostensibly to support genocide survivors and social programs in Rwanda. Instead much of this money reportedly disappears behind the smokescreens of “aid” and “development”.

There are many charities and non-government organizations from the U.S. and U.K. that run large money-making operations that claim to benefit Rwanda. These charities complete the circle of propaganda and seal the doubt of public opinion by legitimizing a terrorist government under the unimpeachable veneer of humanitarianism and goodwill.

These charities work the media system, providing expert spokespeople and framing issues for the mass media. The media system works the charities, using them to institutionalize ideology and further their select political agendas. Like the media, the charities peddle the establishment line throughout, meanwhile claiming that they are “not political.” But it is always the same: like Praxis, they unflinchingly adhere to the upside-down mythology which turns victims into killers and killers into victims with very little middle ground in between.

For example, Fergal Keane is a patron of MSAADA, a “charity based in Dorset, England, that helps surviving orphans and widows of the Rwandan genocide.”117 With the assistance of the British media system, MSAADA advances the standard mythology about genocide in Rwanda.

“In 100 days an estimated one million people were butchered in the Rwandan genocide, while the United Nations refused to intervene to halt the bloodshed,” reads the MSAADA disinformation. “The world turned its back on the people of Rwanda once, and now the country is largely forgotten again.”

RPF agent and false asylum seeker Ignatius Mugabo is on the management committee of IMIZI, a U.K.-based Rwanda charity.118

Vivenie Niragira Mugunga, the RPF agent and false asylum seeker—who served as Fergal Keane’s critic of Praxis—is the director of a Rwanda/U.K. charity called RYICO.119

One of the largest and most influential charities working the Rwanda Genocide for political and economic profit is the big U.K. non-government organization (NGO) Aegis Trust. Aegis works closely with several U.K. government departments on Holocaust and genocide issues and plays a leading role in the Intergovernmental Task Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research established by Bill Clinton, Goran Persson (former Prime Minister of Sweden), and Tony Blair in 1998. Aegis Trust is also the primary financial sponsor of the Genocide Memorial in Gisozi, the largest memorial in Rwanda. Aegis Trust patrons include General Romeo Dallaire, Bob Geldof, Desmond Tutu and Elie Wiesel, and the organization is believed to also be deeply tied to the intelligence community.120

Another high profile charity working in the U.K. is Survivor’s Fund—SURF—a large NGO that “works to improve the lives of the Rwandan Survivors of Genocide.” According to their web site, “SURF was founded by a British Citizen of Rwandan origin (who lost family members and relations during this tragic event) and other Rwandans based in U.K., and concerned British individuals. Although support to survivors dates back to 1995, SURF was formally established and registered in 1997.”121

According to legitimate Rwandan refugees, however, SURF founder Mary Kayitesi Blewitt gained British citizenship after falsely claiming to be both a genocide survivor and a Tutsi from Rwanda. She is also reported to be the first RPF “diplomatic” representative to have arrived in the U.K., and the one who effectively opened the new Rwandan Embassy in London—running RPF operations out of one small room at the Uganda High Commission at Trafalgar Square—after the RPF “victory” of July 1994.122

“She is 100% Ugandan and 100% liar,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “Ask her what village she came from in Rwanda, which prefecture, which commune. Ask her where she lived, where her family lived in Rwanda. She can’t answer. She doesn’t speak the language fluently and she claims she lost 50 members of her family in Rwanda in 1994, but her family was all in Uganda.”

“A year after the genocide in Rwanda, Mary Kayitesi Blewitt returned to her village to dig through a mass grave in search of her family,” reported the U.K.’s Independent on October 12, 2004. “The rains had washed away the topsoil, revealing the bodies of about 200 people… She lost 50 members of her family in the genocide, including her brother John Baptiste, 27, whose leg was hacked off by his killers. He was left to bleed to death in front of his wife and children.”123

According to Rwandan sources Mary Kayitesi Blewitt has used fake genocide survivors and their sympathy stories to perpetrate a massive fundraising swindle—raising millions of pounds for the RPF regime. Like most “humanitarian” NGOs, the fundraising relies on the mass media for brand recognition (brand names like ‘UNICEF’, ‘CARE’, and ‘Save the Children’) and to broadcast images of suffering African ‘survivors’ of genocide. Fortunately, Mary Kayitesi’s Survivor’s Fund benefits from the patronage of Fergal Keane and Lindsay Hilsum—two high-profile storytellers always pressing the establishment’s Rwandan genocide narrative.

In return, and closing the cycle, the media personalities endorse the organization.

“Mary Blewitt is quite a remarkable human being,” said Fergal Keane, “one of the most remarkable I have ever met. Her work has involved extraordinary personal sacrifice. Those of us who witnessed genocide in Rwanda know that Mary Blewitt stands among the bravest of the brave, the kindest of the kind.” 124

“The money goes to the criminal networks in Kigali,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “They are killing each other fighting over the money. That is why you see RPF sometimes falling out with Kagame. They had even arrested Mary Kayitesi in Kigali in 2007; they held her a few days while they were fighting over the money, but of course they had to release her because she is their fundraising source!”

For her sacrifice “to the survivors of the Rwandan genocide in Rwanda and the U.K.,” Mary Kayitesi Blewitt was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Prince Charles on February 28, 2008.125 After the publication of his book, Season of Blood, and for his “services to journalism,” Fergal Keane was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Prince Charles in 1996.

Mary Kayitesi Blewitt is also listed as a member of the U.K. Holocaust Memorial Trust.126

The compromised mission of the Survivor’s Fund—ostensibly an apolitical non-government humanitarian organization—and its true political agenda is further underscored by the false asylum status and sudden financial windfall of its founder, Mary Kayitesi Blewitt.

In early March, 2008, Mary Kayitesi Blewitt resigned her post as the Founder and Director of Survivor’s Fund. According to sources in London, Blewitt has informed her closed friends that she is moving back to Uganda where she has built a big health spa—Ultimate Escape Health Spa—that will operate in the heart of Kampala, Uganda’s capital city.

According to the promotional materials, “Ultimate Escape Health Spa is a social enterprise which will offer holistic healing treatments, health, fitness and beauty regimes in a soothing stress relieving environment. Scheduled to open in 2009, Ultimate Escape Health Spa will offer sanctuary and safe haven. Profit will be donated to survivors of the Rwandan genocide to enable them to escape from their troubles and trauma.”127

“What an interesting move for someone who has spent the last 14 years working for genocide survivors,” notes Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “Moving into business now? And not in Rwanda, but in Uganda? The reason is it is the only country she knows well. She was born in Uganda and lived in Uganda although she falsely represented herself as a Rwanda genocide survivor to raise money. And this is another scam. Making people feel good thinking they will help Rwanda genocide survivors. Scam, scam, scam.” 128

THE MEDIA AS GENOCIDE TRIBUNAL

Prior to confronting Dr. Vincent Bajinya in person, Fergal Keane collaborated with the Kagame regime to collect the “evidence” of genocide crimes. Thus it is important that Fergal Keane make public his connections with the Kagame government and the facts surrounding his sudden interest in Dr. Vincent Bajinya.

Keane’s role as an apologist for the Kagame regime and the Rwanda Patriotic Front began in April of 1994 when Keane contacted the RPF in Belgium, met their agent in Uganda, and traveled with RPF assurance and protection in Rwanda during April and May 1994.129

In 2003, Keane also served as a prosecution witness against Sylvestre Gacumbitsi at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda. According to the ICTR Press Release, Keane “was in Rwanda in the months of May and June in 1994, told the court about the many dead bodies he saw in various parts of the Kibungo prefecture and in particular at Nyarubuye Catholic Church. The witness who has written a book, Season of Blood; the Rwanda Journey, showed a video film about the killings.” 130

The ICTR Press Release does not point out that Fergal Keane set up his visit to Rwanda in 1994 through the Rwandan Patriotic Front office in Belgium; that he met his RPF escort in Uganda at the border, and that he travelled with the assurance of safety from the RPF. Further, it seems the atrocities that occurred at Nyarubuye were staged by the RPF.

Professor Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, former director of ORINFOR, offers the “massacre of Tutsis” at Nyarubuye as another example of how the Kagame regime manufactured and tampered with massacre sites before inviting the media to “witness” and document the evidence of genocide blamed on Hutu extremists.

“In Nyarubuye, the Interahamwe killed Tutsi at a parish in a building used for religious education where Tutsis had sought shelter,” says Higiro. “When the RPF arrived with the Interahamwe they had rounded up in commune Murambi, they took them to the local Catholic Church and executed them and left their bodies there. Then RPF soldiers killed civilians in and around Nyarubuye and brought the bodies to the church. After its victory and to show the world what had happened in Rwanda, the RPF dug up bodies and placed them on stilts outside of churches. But all the people killed by the RPF were blamed on Hutus.”131

Fergal Keane tracked down Sylvestre Gacumbitsi in a refugee camp in Tanzania and accused him on film much as he did with Dr. Vincent Bajinya. The “evidence” for Keane’s charges likely was fabricated by the Kagame regime much as it was fabricated to frame Dr. Vincent Bajinya.

“Sylvestre Gacumbitsi was defended by a Mr. Kouengowa and Ms. Anne Mbattang, both from Cameroon,” says former ICTR defense investigator Phil Taylor. “Hirondelle [news agency] reported that the trial was one of the ‘fastest’ in ICTR history. I have not read his testimony but according to his book Fergal Keane was tight with one of his RPF handlers and it was this man who led him to two people who claimed to be witnesses.132 The massacre occurred mid-April [1994] and Keane went to the site in June.” 133

On June 17, 2004, Sylvestre Gacumbitsi was found “guilty” of crimes against humanity and genocide by the court.

The work of Fergal Keane and the BBC in framing “the Rwanda genocide” story is mirrored by numerous other award-wining journalists. At the top of the list are Lindsay Hilsum of Britain’s Observer newspaper and Channel Four television, and Stephen Kinzer, the New York Times writer who recently published A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It, a shamelessly positive biography of the heroic Paul Kagame.

“Ten years ago, one million Rwandans perished in the worst genocide since the Second World War,” Lindsay Hilsum says. Hilsum was working with the Observer in 1994 and was reportedly the only British journalist in Kigali as the killing began.134 Hilsum echoes the standard tripe about Rwanda. “Rwanda’s genocide could have been prevented.” 135

Instead of reassessing and revising her original analyses, which would be the appropriate thing to do in the face of the rising evidence of the RPF’s crimes, Lindsay Hilsum—like many others—takes the apology for murder a step further to explain away the RPF terrorism in Congo: “Guilt over their failure to stop the killings spurred donors—especially Britain, the U.S. and the Netherlands—to back the Rwandan Government, despite its poor human rights record and involvement in plundering the Congo.”136

Like most of the establishment journalists, Fergal Keane’s reporting has attracted widespread critical acclaim. He was named as overall winner of the Amnesty International Press Awards in 1993 and won an Amnesty television prize in 1994 for his investigation of the Rwandan Genocide, called “Journey Into Darkness.”

However, during the years when the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana was under attack by the RPF, the documentation produced by international human rights bodies decidedly took the side of the RPF.137 This pattern has continued, and it should come as no surprise that Fergal Keane and Lindsay Hilsum are the chosen recipients of the Amnesty International Press Award and Television prizes.

According to his own testimony Keane gained access to Rwanda’s killing fields in partnership with the Rwanda Patriotic Front. In late May and early June of 1994, as the killings in Rwanda were drawing to a close—but as pockets of Tutsis were still being hunted down—Keane traveled for several weeks with the advancing Tutsi RPF forces.138

“By the time we got to the border with Rwanda through Uganda, we had made contact with the RPF in Brussels,” Keane stated in PBS Frontline’s “Ghosts of Rwanda”. “And they had, by that stage, become relatively organized about linking up and giving people safe passage down through the country. It was the most organized guerilla army I had ever come across. And I’d been with the rebels in Eritrea, and they have a name for being very strict and highly organized. But the RPF were certainly in a class of art in terms of organization.”139

To set up the false dichotomy between savage killers—Hutus—and organized saviors—the RPF—journalists like Fergal Keane and Philip Gourevitch—and like Donatella Lorch and Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Gary Streiker of CNN—hammered the point home over and over: The RPF is highly disciplined and organized.140 The RPF’s crimes were not reported because virtually every western journalist was embedded with the RPF.

“We met a very helpful and friendly young lieutenant,” continues Fergal Keane, describing his foray into the killing fields in May of 1994. Keane innocuously introduces “a guy called Frank Ndore who guided us down through the country.”141

Fergal Keane’s contact and escort, arranged through Brussels in advance, was an RPF soldier. Lieutenant Frank Ndore was born in Uganda to Rwandan Tutsi parents who fled in 1959. He was a veteran of Museveni’s National Resistance Army and the RPF offensive in 1990.142

“And the most striking thing about driving in through Rwanda at that stage was the emptiness,” Keane continues. “I was used to an Africa of crowded villages, of people working in the fields—a vibrant, living Africa. And this place, it was like somebody had got a Hoover [vacuum cleaner] and placed it over the country and just sucked all of the life, hoovered the life up out of the place. There was nothing. Just emptiness.”143

“In Byumba—where the RPF first invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990—Kagame went to a market and committed so many atrocities,” says Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana, a Rwandan medical doctor practicing in Laredo, Texas, whose father, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, was judged, tried and convicted by “journalist” Philip Gourevitch in his fictitious book.144

“More than a million people fled to Kigali,” says Eliel Ntakirutimana. “All their farms had been taken, all their goats killed, they were living on the streets. When these people heard that the RPF is coming to Kigali, what do you think they are going to do? They are going to fight!” 145

Philip Gourevitch shares the dubious honor of being one of Kigali’s premier bounty hunters for framing, accusing, judging, and convicting Hutus in his New Yorker features and his fictional [sic] award-winning book, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.146

Philip Gourevitch’s book is “completely one-sided” says Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life subject of the film Hotel Rwanda. “His book took very much the RPF side. He was more or less like an RPF advocate.”147

Gourevitch is known for fabricating a New Yorker story called “The Genocide Fax” in alliance with Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Undersecretary James Rubin—Philip Gourevitch’s brother-in-law.”148

According to Gourevitch and the New Yorker, the fax, sent by Major General Romeo Dallaire, the U.N. force commander in Rwanda, to peacekeeping headquarters in New York, “reported in startling detail the preparations that were under way to carry out the [Hutu] extermination campaign [against Tutsis].”149 In the official Rwanda genocide mythology, the imaginary fax reportedly sent by U.N. force commander General Romeo Dallaire would have had to have existed prior to April 6, 1994.

But there was no fax sent by General Romeo Dallaire, and the “genocide fax” was a fabricated document meant to divert attention and mislead—and to fill in the gaping hole of a complete absence of documentary proof of planning of a genocide in the official ‘planned genocide’ theory. The ‘genocide fax’ was sent by Colonel R. M. Connaughton of the British Army, based at Camberly, Surrey, England, and the home of the British Military Academy, Sandhurst, and several other British Army establishments.150 Colonel Connaughton also sent a copy of his fabricated fax to British journalist Lindsay Hilsum at the Observer.151 The ‘genocide fax’ was placed in U.N. files in New York on November 28, 1995, and it never existed before that date.152

Gourevitch’s Rwanda ‘genocide’ project was funded by the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP), a euphemistically named think-tank that has been very aggressive in peddling the official Rwandan genocide story.153 The USIP has also funded propaganda films and reports on the “genocide in Rwanda,” such as one authored by National Security insider John Prendergast of the International Crises Group, a flack-producing U.S. intelligence group fronting as a “humanitarian” NGO.154

Philip Gourevitch also peddled the fiction that the Tutsis are “the Jews of Africa” and he often speaks about his firsthand experience with “genocide in Rwanda” at Jewish religious events.155

Gourevitch helped facilitate journalist Michela Wrong’s book, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, which was funded by London’s Financial Times, and is another whitewash of the RPF invasions of Zaire in 1996, the killing of Hutu refugees, and the role of the West in supporting Mobutu and terrorizing the people of Congo/Zaire.156

But the Gourevitch connection to the information warfare against the people of Congo—and trusting Western “news” consumers back home—doesn’t end there. James Rubin, Gourevitch’s brother-in-law and Madeleine Albright’s Undersecretary of State, also primed his future wife, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, to cover up the criminal racketeering and plunder, and the Hutu genocide committed by the RPF and UPDF and their backers from the Western defense and intelligence establishment.157

“Philip Gourevitch came to my house,” says Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana. “I should have listened to my lawyer. I didn’t know this guy was working with the [U.S.] State Department. I completely believe that Philip Gourevitch accused, tried and convicted my father in his book. Gourevitch set up my father and consistently lied about him. The stories [Gourevitch] tells about the maid and the stories about Genny, my wife, were all fabricated.”158

Philip Gourevitch is known to be a very close friend of Paul Kagame and had the support of the Kagame regime, and the backing of the U.S. State Department, from the start. Gourevitch’s fictional treatise on genocide in Rwanda was funded by the euphemistically named U.S. Institute for Peace, a U.S. establishment think-tank known for the production of disinformation in service to select agendas.

“Several attempts were made to take the Tutsi workers and hide them by Gerard and Pastor Elizaphan but they declined the offer,” says Eliel Ntakirutimana, speaking about his father and brother’s true actions in Rwanda in 1994. “People stayed at the churches because their Tutsi sons who were in the RPF were telling them to stay there, we will come for you. But Kagame refused to allow RPF soldiers leave to go to the churches to protect their families. He wanted victims, something big to use to gain power. Kagame wanted dead bodies.”159

After inciting hatred and fear and driving millions of people into flight, Kagame got exactly what he wanted and this formed the pillars of the genocide ideology successfully used to silence both critics and truth.

Gerard and Elizaphan Ntakirutimana were framed by the Rwanda government, and Philip Gourevitch played the central role in furthering the fabrications in his prize-winning U.S. state department novel.

Elizaphan Ntakirutimana was found guilty of ‘aiding and abetting genocide’ and sentenced to 10 years in prison.160 On December 6, 2006, after serving 10 years in arrest or prison, he was released. The 83 year-old pastor died just over a month later, on January 22, 2007. Gerard Ntakirutimana was convicted genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

“Gerard Ntakirutimana was a good doctor with no politics who returned from abroad to help his community in Rwanda in 1993,” says former ICTR defense investigator Phil Taylor. “One year later disaster struck with the assassination of the President and a brutal war. I believe that both Dr. Gerard and his father Elizaphan are innocent and victims of political hysteria.”161

THE BIG BUSINESS OF GENOCIDE

The war that rocked Rwanda in the early 1990’s set the stage for a complete reorganization of power and control in the tiny landlocked country. The role of Rwanda in plundering Congo has been highly censored by the establishment press, but greatly illuminated by certain independent journalists. Even the U.N. Panel of Experts reports remain apt testimonials to the plunder which continues, no matter the denials and public relations statements to the contrary, under the watchful eyes of the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC) and the so-called international “human rights” community.

On February 8, 2008, for one egregious example of politically motivated disinformation, Kemal Saiki, MONUC’s Chief Public Information officer, gave a public interview in which he stated that Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) were not present or involved in Congo.162 This is an outright lie and it is not the first lie that Kemal Saiki has told.163

Rwanda continues to pull the purse strings in eastern Congo and strangle all hope for truth, liberty, justice and life for millions of Congolese people. Congo’s gold, coltan, niobium, oil and diamonds continue to pass through Rwanda and Uganda in transit to international markets. General Laurent Nkunda routinely travels freely back and forth from Congo to Rwanda.164

By depopulating Rwanda, rich land was opened up for new multinational corporate exploitation and the war brought about new ownership and means of control. Excluding the profits from the extractive industries in Rwanda and Congo, Rwanda’s top money makers are tea, coffee and gorilla tourism. Close on the heels of these are the HIV/AIDS scams involving the Clinton and Pangea Foundations, and their pharmaceutical backers like Pfizer.

In the past six to eight years USAID has invested over US$ 10 million in the coffee sector in Rwanda, which was radically reconfigured—in terms of plantations, landholders, and market dominance—due to the power shift that occurred between 1989, when world coffee prices crashed, and 2006, when USAID, the Kagame government and Starbucks—a major promoter of the Hollywood film King Kong and Kong paraphernalia—announced huge economic gains in the international coffee market. Starbucks provided coffee expertise and training in Rwanda, and their ‘superior’ specialty ‘award-winning’ Rwandan coffee was highlighted in 5,000 Starbucks coffee outlets during March and April 2006. 165

USAID and its business partners have estimated that the coffee sector could generate at least US$ 117 million in export revenues per year for Rwanda by 2010. The tea industry has potential to generate US$ 91 million in export revenues by 2010. The goal for the tourism industry is to attract 70,000 tourists to visit Rwanda and to generate US$ 99 million in revenues by 2010.166 Huge development projects are underway.

All of these require land cleared of people. Enter USAID, Africa Wildlife Fund, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, Conservation International, Royal/Dutch Shell, Jane Goodall Institute, Starbucks, Green Mountain Coffee—and Goodworks International, putting a happy face on it all.

“The more you consume coffee from Rwanda, the more you give Rwanda hope,” said Rwanda’s Ambassador Zac Nsenga. “It’s the quality and the story behind it that makes it special.”

The genocide business and the depopulation behind it is a special story indeed.

HUNTING AND KILLING HUTUS

The state security and intelligence networks in Uganda and Rwanda today revolve around terrorism, and state-run “safe” houses proliferate with very little, if any, attention from human rights organizations or western media institutions. Anyone who violates the code of state-orchestrated silence will be silenced, themselves, perhaps by being ‘disappeared.’

Said one source working in Central Africa: “By the ‘undercover iron hand’ in Rwanda I mean that people are whisked away by government operatives into ‘safe houses’ or [unidentified] torture houses. Nobody knows the whereabouts of these houses but they exist, for some of those who have been taken there can reveal their horrendous experiences.”167

But the true history or terrorism in the region is well- hidden by the media propaganda system, the public relations, and the official Rwanda genocide story.

“We now know that the Rwandan Patriotic Front operated 36 active clandestine cells in Rwanda when it invaded on October 1, 1990, and that these cells worked through human rights groups,” writes Canadian author Robin Philpot in his book, “Colonialism Dies Hard.”168

In 1988, Rwandan multi-millionaire Assinapol Rwigara financed a 1988-1989 bicycling tour of Rwanda in which Paul Kagame and other RPF agents secretly toured the country in a support van belonging to the Ugandan cycling team. Such people as Assinapol Rwigara create inconvenient truths that challenge the establishment narrative about “Hutu extremists planning and organizing genocide” in Rwanda: Rwigara was a Tutsi businessman and close associate of Juvenal Habyarimana, whom he betrayed by financing the RPF. 169

In a situation report (SITREP) dated May 17, 1994, Mark Prutsalis of Refugees International (RI), a U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) linked non-government organization (NGO), described the situation of Hutu refugees arriving at the rate of 3000 people per day and crossing the Tanzanian border from Rwanda. Some 70,000 refugees had already crossed three major crossing points and the presence of the RPF at the border was noted and described. The document provided “incident” excerpts from a UNHCR protection report made on May 14 and 15, 1994.170

In the Kigarama Sector of the Rusumo Commune, “The RPF came and called for a ‘peace meeting.’ Those who did not participate voluntarily were forced to the meeting. At the school people were tied together three by three—men/women/children—and stabbed. The bodies were put on trucks and thrown into the Kagera River, north of Rusumo Bridge.”171

In the Nyamugari, Gisenyi, and Nyarubuje sectors of the Rusumo Commune, “The RPF comes at 05h00 waiting for villagers to open their doors. The villagers are caught and taken away to the river by trucks. No one has returned. Refugees of the area have seen people being tied together and thrown into the river. It seems as if guns are only used if somebody tries to escape.”172

At Rusumo commune, sector Muzaza, Gasarabwayi Village (four kms from the Kagera River): “The RPF launched several attacks on the village and its population. On [May 13] 40 RPF soldiers came at 07h00. They surrounded the village. Villagers were gathered in houses, which were burned down. An eyewitness saw 20 people being killed this way. Eight villagers were thrown into a latrine, and the latrine was filled with soil. Asked by a UNHCR field officer, the refugee said that the RPF did not care whether the victims were Hutu or Tutsi villagers.”173

At the Mugoma border crossing: “The refugees report that on 15 May as many as 100 refugees (maybe more) were killed by the RPF on a hill opposite the closest crossing point [Mugoma].”174

The report cites only RPA/F soldiers involved in killing and the conclusion section includes comments by an International Rescue Committee (IRC) staff member sent to the IRC offices. “Things are getting very bad at the border here… Someone really needs to do something about all of the killing and torture on the other [Rwandan] side. Each day there are more and more bodies in the river and most of them without their heads; the count is between 20 to 30 [bodies] each thirty minutes.”175

If Fergal Keane were working as an unbiased journalist he could have taken the opportunity to interview refugees in the Tanzanian camps about the RPF slaughter they witnessed. Instead, Keane was on a personal crusade to the Tanzanian camps to track down and convict a supposed Hutu genocidaire named Sylvestre Gacumbitsi.

Similarly, CNN’s Gary Streiker reported from the Tanzanian border during this period—in the first two weeks of May—but the RPF involvement in killing was hidden from the world: like everyone else, Streiker was embedded with the RPF.

“The rapidly moving water of the [Kagera] River,” wrote Thomas Lang in the Columbia Journalism Review, ten years later (2005), in remembrance of Gary Streiker’s reportage of May 9, 1994, “carrying with it hundreds of Rwandan bodies, slaughtered and dumped in the river, creating a picture not seen since the Nazi death camps of the 1940s. An image of almost unimaginable horror. Will the world react to these pictures and do anything? […] Simply put, if you watched CNN in the summer of 1994, you were made aware of a genocide taking place on a nationwide scale—and you were given a working understanding of what triggered it.” 176

According to a U.N. cable dated October 14, 1994, UNHCR special investigator Robert Gersoni gave a detailed verbal briefing (from his notes) on his findings and conclusions after completing an investigation in Rwanda during August and September of 1994. The meeting was attended by Kofi Annan, then the Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, by UNAMIR II Force Commander Major General Guy Tousignant, and by several others. Annan had attended a previous meeting with Gersoni on September 14 and warned high-level officials that if Gersoni’s findings were correct they would be very damaging to Kagame’s government and to the United Nations.177

Robert Gersoni was not known for making mistakes. He was a professional investigator of high-repute known for 25 years of well-documented work for UNHCR, USAID and other bodies. According to UNHCR, Gersoni’s report was based on a five-week investigation that interviewed 300 Rwandans in 41 of Rwanda’s 145 communes and at 9 refugee camps. The secret cable was designed to mitigate the repercussions of the Gersoni charges and institute damage control.178

“We are now engaged in a damage limitation exercise,” wrote Shaharyar Khan, Special Representative to Kofi Annan from the U.N. Assistance Mission to Rwanda II (UNAMIR II).179

According to the cable: “In a two hour briefing, Gersoni put forward evidence of what he described as calculated, pre-planned, systematic atrocities and genocide against Hutus by the RPF, whose methodology and scale, he concluded (30,000 massacred), could only have been part of a plan implemented as a policy from the highest echelons of the [Kagame] government. In his view these were not individual cases of revenge and summary trials but a pre-planned, systematic genocide against the Hutus. Gersoni staked his 25 year reputation on his conclusions which he recognized were diametrically opposite to the assumptions made, so far, by the U.N. and international community.”180

The document noted Gersoni’s claim that the RPF traveled around committing a genocide against Hutus with hoes, clubs and machetes.181

The above excerpts come from a huge cache of official documents, some of which have been seen only by attorneys at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.182 These documents and the many more that remain secret provide a substantial body of incontrovertible evidence about who knew what, and when, and about what really happened in Central Africa in the 1990’s, and about how the RPF orchestrated and carried out a highly coordinated and calculated program of depopulation and terror.

“Scratch the surface, the red earth of Rwanda, and you will, it appears, find one vast cemetery,” wrote British journalist Nick Gordon in a shocking 1996 expose. “The people who passed me the document know it will be hard to investigate. Many areas are no-fly zones. The government has exhumed graves, dried the skeletons and burned them. Some graves have been used more than once: they contain bodies from both the first genocide and the counter-genocide. Often the people who have buried the dead, the creusers, are themselves killed so they cannot bear witness.”183

After 14 years this correspondent has slowly but surely come to the conclusion that if anyone planned genocide in Rwanda, it was the RPF, and only the RPF. If I must accept that a pre-planned genocide was committed by the Interahamwe and “extremist Hutus” as defined by the official Rwanda genocide narrative that is now deeply instilled in the public mind in what can only be considered a collective insanity, then I must insist that the same people who make this claim acknowledge the genocide planned and committed by the RPF.

“Every April, Rwandans remember the 1994 genocide during a week of national mourning,” wrote Dutch journalist Thijs Bouwknegt on April 4, 2008 in an article which explores ‘genocide negationism’. “This year’s official motto is ‘Let us commemorate genocide while fighting against genocide ideology; render assistance to survivors while working for development’. The crimes of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), however, will be officially forgotten.”184

In the lastest show of military and political support for terrorist partners serving the U.S. military expansion and natural resource plundered from Africa, the Pentagon in late 2007 extended the Kagame government a military training package worth $7-12 million. When President Bush was in Kigali in 2008, the Pentagon extended another $12 million ‘aid’ package for ‘peacekeeping’ training in Darfur—a euphemism for exporting terrorism of the RPF kind.185 ~

Ben Affleck, Rwanda, and Corporate Sustained Catastrophe

FUBAR in Central Africa

by Keith Harmon Snow / January 23rd, 2009

Backed by the Obama Administration and its former Clinton allies, Rwandan troops have marched into Congo, ostensibly to save the day, yet again, barely a month after a scathing United Nations report revealed that they were already there. Meanwhile, the recent UNHCR Gimme Shelter campaign uses the iconic Rolling Stones song and Hollywood star Ben Affleck’s video of suffering in Congo as a propaganda tool to peddle the international catastrophe of western AID, intervention and plunder in Central Africa. A look behind the scenes reveals the hidden interests of the misery industry, the obliviousness of do-gooder celebrities, and actor Ben Affleck’s personal patronage of Paul Kagame and the perpetrators of genocide in Central Africa.
Tears run down the face of a humble Congolese man grieving his wife’s death at the hands of a militia in North Kivu, DRC. He is one of millions of innocent people struggling to survive amidst the ongoing and sustainable catastrophe in Congo. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2007.

Tears run down the face of a humble Congolese man grieving his wife’s death at the hands of a militia in North Kivu, DRC. He is one of millions of innocent people struggling to survive amidst the ongoing and sustainable catastrophe in Congo. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2007.

On December 17, 2008, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) unveiled their latest fundraising campaign in pursuit of charity donations ‘for Congo War Victims’. Set to the iconic song by Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, the four-minute Gimme Shelter video filmed and produced by Hollywood star Ben Affleck is an advertisement for UNHCR.1 The UNHCR logo appears at least ten times in the short film, serving the modern day advertising technique of ‘product placement’ to inspire charitable giving to the UNHCR enterprise.

“When awareness is raised, when constituencies start to pay attention, they are more likely to pay attention to that one thing than another,” director Ben Affleck told Voice of America. “What I can do is care about something. What I can do is make it important to my elected officials. Diplomacy is free.”

Diplomacy is free? Is Ben Affleck a ‘free’ agent working to help the people of Congo? Or is Affleck enhancing and trading in moral currency in the arena of international public opinion?

Since 2007, Ben Affleck has repeatedly traveled to Rwanda and Congo. While presenting himself as an independent agent on a humanitarian mission in Congo, Ben Affleck, simultaneously, has closely affiliated himself with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his military government—the people responsible for perpetrating and perpetuating war crimes in Congo and Rwanda.

Considering his relationships to powerful people directly involved in war in Africa’s Great Lakes, one wonders if Ben Affleck is playing his actor’s role both on stage and off. In any case, Ben Affleck is not the first Hollywood celebrity to be fronted as the Great White Hope for the Congo, and many of the same Hollywood actorvists have been similarly used by the NGO industry in Haiti.

Actress Jessica Lange has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2003; her first mission was into the Congo. Covering Congo and Sudan, Actor George Clooney has starred as a UN Messenger of Peace since January 2008, a role actor Michael Douglas has played since 1998.

Since 2001, actress Angelina Jolie has been UNHCR’s ‘Goodwill Ambassador,’ a role that took her to eastern Congo in 2003 and 2004.2 Jolie traveled in eastern Congo with intelligence insider and International Crisis Group agent John Prendergast, who is aligned with a growing army of ‘Save Darfur’ cloned organizations that deploy state-of-the-art media technologies to undermine and co-opt any true grass roots movement to legitimately empower African people.3 ,4

Jolie also starred as a ‘selfless’ hero working as a UNHCR official in Hollywood’s Beyond Borders, a film that peddles the necessity of mixing Central Intelligence Agency gun-running operations with humanitarian missions—because it is ostensibly for the ‘right’ cause: Western sponsored covert interventions.

Hollywood stars from the film Ocean’s Thirteen formed another ‘humanitarian’ organization that inevitably throws celebrity raised funds at the western structural violence and white power economies focused on sustaining disaster in Africa. The governing board of Not On Our Watch includes Ocean’s Thirteen stars George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, and Matt Damon—Ben Affleck’s buddy ‘Will’ from the film Good Will Hunting—and producers Jerry Weintraub and David Pressman.5

Clooney recently joined John Prendergast, a U.S. National Security apparatus insider, and Hollywood producer David Pressman to pen a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, opining all the usual trite platitudes—but absent a single recommendation of substance—about how President Obama can help Congo.6 Prendergast, who is billed as a ‘leading American human rights activist’, has previously boasted of traveling around Sudan and Central Africa with President Paul Kagame, and he is named as one of the early architects of the RPA coup d’etat in Rwanda.7

The entire exercise of appointing and fronting Hollywood celebrities as United Nations ‘Messengers for Peace’ and ‘Goodwill Ambassadors’ is a further means by which the establishment whitewashes the war-making and plunder of multinational corporations, and the individuals responsible for carnage the world over, and to more deeply institutionalize the structural violence. Described as ‘helping to shine light on the world’s trouble spots’, celebrity actorvism is more like a cop shining a bright light in your eyes so that you are disoriented, confused and blinded.

Privatizing the ‘humanitarian’ sector through media celebrities or through entertainment and publicity extravaganzas—like ‘Food AID’ and ‘Band AID’ and ‘Not on Our Watch’—that falsely claim to benefit African people, simultaneously lets governments off the hook, obscures the true intent of predatory capitalism, and creates personality cults that further entrench white ‘society’ pathologies of obliviousness, ignorance, goodness and supremacy.8

“I’m not an expert in international affairs or diplomacy,” Affleck is quoted everywhere as saying, “but it doesn’t take that to see the tremendous suffering here. It’s not something that we as human beings can, in good conscience, ignore.”

What does it take to see and understand the nature of systemic exploitation? We might question Affleck’s good conscience, given what he is ignoring. The short Gimme Shelter video produced by Ben Affleck ignores the realities and players fueling the bloodshed. Is this the same creative genius that brought us the award-winning film Good Will Hunting?

“My hope in being here is primarily to bring attention to the fact that there’s a real lack of (aid agencies) here,” Affleck said, according to public relations productions about his visit. “There’s a real lack of money going to these folks.”

In eastern Congo, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) coordinates 126 organizations, including 10 UN agencies and 50 international NGOs, and scores of state and national NGOs. OCHA also works with Congolese governmental officials and donors.

The annual OCHA budget alone hovers around $US 680-700 million. The 2008 budget for the World Food Program in DRC was about $430 million, with 56% of all food resources designated for North Kivu.9 And while such organizations each year project more than they are able to actually raise, their incomes and their expenditures rise annually: their operating behaviors are identical to that of multinational corporations.

From 2000 to 2007 the UNHCR global expenditures grew from $US 800 million to $US 1.2 billion—and UNHCR delineates $US hundreds of millions annually for DRC and Uganda, where they count some 1.1 million and 1.6 million internally displaced people (IDPs) respectively.10 Indeed, while UNHCR uses the media to plead poverty and peddle hope in the public limelight, the agency applauds its fundraising success in private—where UNHCR statements indicate that UNHCR considers ‘fundraising’ as a profitable business opportunity in its own right. The market—in this case the welfare of millions of people of color—is irrelevant to their goals.

“Following a period of strong income growth,” reads a UNHCR executive job posting, “the UN Refugee Agency has decided to increase its investment in private sector fundraising through the recruitment of an experienced fundraising management professional… This fundraising strategy is implemented through a network of nine UNHCR National Associations and Country Offices (Australia, Canada, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, US, Spain, UK). As part of its new investment strategy the UN Refugee Agency is currently carrying out various new market entry studies and plans to launch fundraising programs in several new markets in the coming years.”11

The salary for the UNHCR’s chief fundraising executive ranges from $US 127,104 to $US 151,446—after deductions, per annum, tax exempt, plus additional major benefits.11

Food AID is also being siphoned off the massive ‘humanitarian’ mission in eastern Congo and being sold in markets.12 The criminal aspects of the ‘humanitarian’ enterprise are well established.13

“These international NGOs are all here for the same reason as every other foreigner in Congo—to make money,” reports a newly arrived NGO volunteer from eastern Congo. “I came here to help the folks and seek work, but the more I learn the more FUBAR this place appears to be. It has evolved into a highly efficient corrupt system.”14

Ben Affleck’s statements about “a real lack of (aid agencies) here” and “a real lack of money going to these folks” are demonstrably false. There is no lack of agencies, no lack of money, and these are not ‘folks’—they are highly politicized institutions, part of an industry that perpetuates and institutionalizes deracination, and they use and abuse ‘innocent’ but nihilistic celebrities like Ben Affleck.

“I was thinking there was some thing wrong with him,” reports a Congolese insider, who said that UN officials were telling Congolese people that Ben Affleck wants to build a hospital in North Kivu. “He was not really interested by the position of Congolese people and his heart was in Rwanda during all the time he was here.”15

When George Clooney visited the war zone in eastern Congo the ‘peacekeepers’ played some basketball with him. Did MONUC roll out its marching bands to meet Ben Affleck?

Affleck traveled into to the bush to meet with the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR)—the militia that Paul Kagame and the western press falsely cite, ad nauseam, as the cause of Rwanda and Congo’s woes. Why did Affleck meet with the FDLR? Was Affleck secretly scouting FDLR positions for Rwandan officials? He also met with Rwandan General Laurent Nkunda, a bonafide war criminal named by the United Nations.

“He didn’t want people to know he came from Rwanda,” the Congolese insider said, after learning about Affleck’s relations with Rwandan officials. “Our problem will never reach an end.”16

Affleck’s visits coincided with protests by Congolese people fed up with MONUC, due to the unchallenged war lords and impunity for war crimes and massive suffering. People everywhere were pelting MONUC vehicles with stones and Affleck’s UN convoy was also reportedly pelted.

Ben Affleck has been defended for “not being guilty of being a celebrity.”17 But given the unsurpassed mortality, sexual atrocities, depopulation and war crimes in Central Africa, and given the extent to which the root causes of these wars have been articulated by certain independent journalists and certain organizations, can one morally or ethically plead ‘innocence’ about the white power interests one is peddling or protecting?

No matter the political intrigues and hidden agendas—which we have only just begun to unpack—the Affleck-Jagger Gimme Shelter campaign is billed as ‘not a political, but a humanitarian’ gesture. However, Ben Affleck is now a highly political actor in the Congo warfare and exploitation arena, as this article will show, and this raises questions about culpability, responsibility and ethics.

Is Ben Affleck seriously concerned about suffering in Congo? Why doesn’t he name any of the white exploiters like Banro Corporation or PricewaterhouseCoopers? What is Ben Affleck’s relationship to the protagonists in this war? Is Ben Affleck being paid for his silence? Or is he just another victim being used by, and benefiting from, a hopelessly corrupt system?
Pakistani troops in kilts play the bagpipes in a marching band attached to MONUC 'peacekeeping' operations in South Kivu, DRC. Photo copyright Keith Harmon Snow, July 2005.

Pakistani troops in kilts play the bagpipes in a marching band attached to MONUC 'peacekeeping' operations in South Kivu, DRC. Photo copyright Keith Harmon Snow, July 2005.

SHATTERED, SHATTERED, THIS TOWN’S IN TATTERS

A new United Nations Development Program (UNDP) study released December 17, 2008, reports that nearly half the population in the DRC may not live to 40 years of age, that 75% of the population lived below the poverty line—on less than one dollar a day—while more than half the population (57%) had no access to drinking water or to basic health care (54%), and three out of every 10 children are malnourished.

At the beginning of the Gimme Shelter video, we are told that “In Eastern Congo, the AK-47″—which flashes across the screen strapped to a Congolese soldier’s back—”is known as the Congolese Credit Card.”

Characterizing the Kalashnikov AK-47 as “the Congolese Credit Card” is overtly racist, because it casts Congolese people—and males in particular—as pathological gun-toting thugs. It is the same type of characterization of Congolese men that is made by Eve Ensler and the V-Day Congo lobby about ‘femicide’ in Eastern Congo. ‘Femicide’ is an inaccurate description for a situation where males are usually killed outright, as in Congo. The combination of femicide and homocide amounts to mass murder and, in the case of RPA operations in Rwanda and Congo, genocide.18

Comparing an AK-47 in the hands of a Congolese male to a credit card is doubly racist because it is premised on a blame the victim mentality (by whites) that further ridicules black African males who have no possibility of upward mobility, no possibility of obtaining a Master Card or VISA or American Express—symbols of excessive materialism, western privilege, selective financial access and financial gate-keeping.

Similarly, Affleck’s four minute video of black African faces—who are suffering the indignities of homelessness and beggary—deliberately whites out any images of, or references to, the raw materials leaving the eastern Congo through Uganda and Rwanda, or arriving at ports and factories in Europe, Japan, China and the USA. Affleck’s short film also unquestionably serves the misery industries and the so-called ‘peacekeeping’ professionals that profit from the massive suffering.

After the ‘Congolese Credit Card’ image we are told “there are twenty-two recognized armed groups” in Congo, but nothing at all about their ties to the organized crime networks run by Uganda or Rwanda and their western allies. There is nothing about the proliferation of AK-47s, landmines or other weaponry, or the many white merchants of death behind Central Africa’s woes.

We are told: “UNHCR transports refugee families fleeing from the violence,” but any and all reasons why millions of brutalized people have been forced to flee homes and villages are omitted.

UNHCR senior media officer Tim Irwin said that Gimme Shelter is “designed to inform and mobilize people all around the world to bring relief to hundreds of thousands of Congolese victims who have been uprooted from their homes because of the violence between Hutu militias, ethnic Tutsi rebels, and Congolese soldiers.”

What are the differences between ‘Hutu militias’ and ‘ethnic Tutsi rebels’? Why are Hutus described as ‘militias’ while Tutsis are described as ‘rebel’? What makes ‘ethnic Tutsi rebels’ ethnic, while ‘Hutu militias’, apparently, are not ‘ethnic Hutu’? The same distortions of reality were applied to the establishment narrative of genocide in Rwanda: 100 days of killing; Hutus killing Tutsis and ‘moderate Hutus’… What is a ‘moderate Hutu’?

In establishment narratives, war is peace, slavery is freedom, and language is used to criminalize the innocent, just as it is in the so-called ‘war on terror’. Thus ‘Hutu militias’ has come to mean ‘the genocidal Interahamwe’.19 ‘Tutsi rebels’ means ‘those victimized minority guerrillas who stopped the genocide and are now seeking justice by hunting down every last genocidaire‘—whether man, woman or child. A ‘moderate Hutu’ is one who sided with the minority Tutsi RPA guerrillas—the real terrorists—against the supposed ‘extremist’ government of Juvenal Habyarimana.

As indicated above, mainstream ‘news’ stories are frequently whitewashed by simplistic racial stereotypes: racially tainted sound bites meant to confuse and mislead western ‘news’ consumers. These racial markers serve to distance western populations, especially but not only Caucasians, and they underscore and further inculcate false beliefs about the superiority of both western civilization and white people.

Similarly, the Affleck production whitewashes the chaos created by foreign interventions, covert operations and white-collar organized crime by reducing a complex imperialist invasion to ‘ethnic warfare’. (This is called essentializing.) The structural factors that insure this war will continue, and the huge salaries, adventurous lifestyles and special privileges of white expatriates working in the so-called ‘humanitarian’ aid sector are rendered equally invisible. Multinational corporations, involved in the exploitation, are obliterated without a trace of their ever being there, and, in many cases, they are offered up as the perfect, as yet untried, solution.

Consider just one company, Banro, a Canadian-based gold exploration company with four wholly owned properties, each with mining licenses along a major gold belt of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.20 Banro Corporation operates only in eastern DRC, where they are projecting massive gold profits—in the billions of dollars.

Banro was ‘awarded’ gold concessions comprising 5,730 square kms (2,212 square miles), and Banro personnel are ferried over the remote and blood-drenched South Kivu landscape by private helicopters. From December 31, 2005, to September 31, 2008, Banro—always declaring a loss due to exploration—increased its assets from $US 100 to $US 121 million. In the same period, more than 1000 Congolese people died every day—roughly 1,000,000 victims.

Banro Corporation has identified 4.68 million ounces of gold on ‘their’ properties, and they have inferred another 4.87 million ounces. Banro’s gold prospects are today valued at some $US 3.74 billion (identified) and $US 3.89 billion (inferred), for a total of $US 7.63 billion dollars—and this is just one of the many foreign companies pillaging Congo.

Perhaps Ben Affleck can tell us something we can’t, in good conscience, ignore. How does a Canadian mining company come to ‘wholly-own’ land in blood drenched eastern Congo? And why are Banro Corporation directors—Simon Village, Michael Prinsloo, Arnold Kondrat, Peter Cowley, John Clarke, Bernard van Rooyen, Piers Cumberlege and Richard Lachcik 21 —not under the spotlight for their obvious involvement in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide?

Banro advertises themselves as one of Congo’s great benefactors “well-positioned to benefit from the timely economic, social and political recovery of the DRC.”22 Hello? To benefit from the timely economic, social and political recovery of the Congo? Hello! The ongoing white-collar business operations of Banro Corporation amidst the killing in eastern Congo are crimes against humanity.

“The principle thing for me, over the course of this last year, has been learning,” Affleck said, prior to a primetime ABC Nightline broadcast—Ben Affleck in Congo—in June 2008. “I needed to learn and I’m still learning. It’s not as if I’m some expert or I’m presenting myself as a person with answers—and I’m not an advocate of a particular organization.”

Affleck’s independence didn’t last long. Before his December 2008 deal with UNHCR, Affleck signed on with Save the Children, a Connecticut based corporate enterprise whose massive profits earned from the chaos of war and suffering in Africa have been sufficiently documented.13

In May 2008, Ben Affleck visited with former child soldiers, as part of Save the Children’s global Rewrite the Future campaign. According to Save the Children PR, the campaign “helps to provide quality education” to children in conflict countries, such as kids in Goma, DRC.23
A Congolese child suffering from malnutrition waits to die in a clinic in North Kivu, DRC. Such images are perpetually used to provoke western media spectators to donate to corporate relief operations. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2005.

A Congolese child suffering from malnutrition waits to die in a clinic in North Kivu, DRC. Such images are perpetually used to provoke western media spectators to donate to corporate relief operations. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2005.

Can anyone honestly provide a single example of ‘quality education’ available to children in all of Congo?24 White westerners think that a dilapidated cement shell with a tin roof and some wooden benches qualifies as ‘education’ of a higher standard in Africa.

More importantly, Save the Children’s sponsors include Starbucks and Credit Suisse, two multinational corporations that are deeply enmeshed in the geopolitical plunder of Central Africa. However, such relationships between corporate ‘donors’ and so-called ‘non-government’ organizations (NGOs) billed as apolitical humanitarian charities are obscured by the propaganda of white power interests and the obliviousness of its beneficiaries, like Ben Affleck.

President Paul Kagame gave a corporate endorsement at Starbuck’s annual shareholder meeting in Seattle in March 2007. “Starbucks and Rwanda are extended family, very closely linked by the business we do together and the passion we share,” Kagame said.25

THE UPSIDE DOWN GENOCIDE

The Kagame military machine—backed by the US, U.K., Canada, Germany and Israel—is one of Congo’s greatest enemies. Kagame was one of the original 27 soldiers to launch the guerrilla war in Uganda, 1980, alongside now president-for-life Yoweri Museveni. Kagame soon became the head of Museveni’s dreaded Internal Security Organization, and he was directly involved in tortures, massacres and other human rights atrocities during the Museveni regime’s consolidation of power.

In October 1990 Kagame returned from training at the US Army base at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to lead the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) illegal invasion of Rwanda. The US military and its partners backed the invasion, just as they backed the invasion of Congo in 1996, and the recent invasion of Congo launched this week.

From 1990 to 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), comprised most heavily of Ugandan soldiers led by Ugandan citizens like Paul Kagame, committed atrocity after atrocity as they forced their way to power in Kigali, always falsely accusing their enemies—the power-sharing government of then President Juvenal Habyarimana—of genocide.26

On December 18, 2008, after the protracted ‘Military I’ trial, the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) ruled that there was no conspiracy to commit genocide by former Rwandan military leaders affiliated with the Habyarimana government. It was a war, and the actions—far from a calculated genocide—were found by the ICTR judges to be ‘war-time conditions’.27

“The media reports of the December 18 judgment [Military I] at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda focused primarily on the convictions of three of four former top military leaders, who were the supposed ‘masterminds’ of the Rwandan genocide,” wrote ICTR defense lawyer Peter Erlinder. “But, as those who have followed the ICTR closely know, convictions of members of the former Rwandan government and military are scarcely newsworthy.”27

Since the inception of the ICTR its decisions have been decisively biased—victor’s justice—in favor of the Kagame regime and to protect it and its backers. Thus it is no surprise that the former top military leaders of the Habyarimana government—Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, Major Aloys Ntabakuze and General Gratien Kabiligi—were sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.28

“The real news was that ALL of the top Rwandan military officers, including the supposedly infamous Colonel Bagosora, were found not guilty of conspiracy or planning to commit genocide,” writes Erlinder. “And General Gratien Kabiligi, a senior member of the general staff was acquitted of all charges! The others were found guilty of specific acts committed by subordinates, in specific places, at specific times—not an overall conspiracy to kill civilians, much less Tutsi civilians.”27

Now, after more than fifteen years of massive western propaganda proclaiming an organized, systematic elimination of the Tutsi people by the Hutu leaders of the former Rwandan government, the official Rwanda genocide story has finally collapsed.

While the western media has consistently covered up the Rwandan occupation in Congo over the past decade, with a complete denial of Rwandan presence from circa 2005 to 2008, the imminent changing of the Presidential guard in the US provoked a recent rash of articles stating the obvious: Rwanda is all over Congo. In mid December the UN released a report further documenting what independent journalists have maintained and reported all along: the Rwandan government is directly backing rebel factions, criminal networks and mining operations in eastern Congo.

The euphemistically named guerrilla army—National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP)—lorded over by General Laurent Nkunda, has maintained direct personal communications with the office of the Rwandan President, Paul Kagame. The Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) have dispatched military personnel into Congo, recruited and armed child soldiers, and they are involved in minerals plunder, racketeering, extortion and war crimes.29

Now the Kagame government, immunized against prosecution thanks to their connections to top former Clinton and Bush officials, who now sit on high in the Obama administration, has openly sent more than 1500 troops into North Kivu using weapons recently delivered to Rwanda for their equally illegal terrorist operations in Darfur, Sudan.

The Kagame government, with its foreign backers, has pursued an identical strategy in Congo as they did in Rwanda, 1990-1994. The goal is to destabilize the region, manufacture chaos, sue for peace while pursuing war, and use the UN ‘peacekeeping’ mission to aid the predatory agenda. The final solution is to permanently criminalize the Hutu majority, entrench economic and political relations between the Kivus and Rwanda, and between Ituri and Uganda, and balkanize Congo—exactly as proposed by president Clinton’s national security insider Walter Kansteiner (1996).30

The ‘surprising’ arrest of General Laurent Nkunda, on January 22, 2009, by the troops of the joint FARDC and Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) operation is merely damage control, with General Laurent Nkunda being the latest Fall Guy arrested to recover some sense of credibility for the international police forces—the Pentagon and its proxy armies in Rwanda and Uganda—and to enable the Kagame military cabal to distance itself from the recent exposés documenting Rwanda’s machinations in eastern Congo.

THE MISERY INDUSTRY

The Gimme Shelter campaign set out to raise $23 million for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) for so-called “emergency humanitarian assistance” to help displaced persons in the DRC, and now it has spawned an industry unto itself.

“The Rolling Stones are very happy to contribute to Gimme Shelter in support of Ben’s efforts to raise the profile of the conflict in the Congo,” one UN public relations agency quotes Mick Jagger as saying. “We all need to stand up and support the work of organizations like UNHCR who are on the ground offering protection and working hard to ensure the rights and wellbeing of refugees.”31

Does UNHCR insure the rights and well being of refugees? The Gimme Shelter film has been distributed worldwide via Internet, television, mobile phones, cinemas and hotel chains.

Hollywood actorvist Mia Farrow—the Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF—also jetted into Congo for the festivities. Farrow made a three-day visit to the DRC in December, 2008, and then made a plug for the corporate AID industry by “urging all armed groups in North Kivu to allow aid organizations to provide life-saving assistance to women and children.”31

The structural violence that allows for white actorvist jet-setters like Mia Farrow to zoom into and out of such complex emergencies as Congo or Darfur, to make films in refugee camps or hold press conferences in war zones, and to urge armed groups to stop fighting so that business operations can be transacted, is never explored.

UNHCR’s headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland and there are 262 field offices in 116 countries: this is a big business operation dependent on insecurity, population displacements, and warfare.32

The current head of the UNHCR is António Guterres, who started as UN High Commissioner for Refugees on June 15, 2005, after Rudd Lubbers, the former UNHCR chief, resigned amidst a sex scandal.33 Guterres served as Portuguese prime minister from 1996 to 2002. Jean-Pierre Bemba, a Congolese warlord with deep ties to Portugal, was at the time a warlord in Congo backed by Uganda and its western allies.34
Western expatriates take a break from humanitarian relief operations to practice 'aquatic yoga' at a plush club swimming pool off limits to ordinary Congolese people. Just one of the many perks of relief work in 'exotic' foreign war zones. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2007.

Western expatriates take a break from humanitarian relief operations to practice 'aquatic yoga' at a plush club swimming pool off limits to ordinary Congolese people. Just one of the many perks of relief work in 'exotic' foreign war zones. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2007.

The UNHCR’s interests in Congo are not only about sustained employment for its highly paid workers—where white people get the best jobs—and lucrative procurement contracts for other corporations. UNHCR also takes a highly politicized, corporate stance in host countries.

In Benin, in 1997, the UNHCR openly collaborated with Royal/Dutch Shell Corporation officials after Shell set up offices immediately behind the UNHCR headquarters in Cotonou. UNHCR was at the time responsible for several thousand indigenous Ogoni refugees who fled persecution by Royal/Dutch Shell and the Nigerian military in the oil-devastated Niger River Delta.35

In Gambella, Ethiopia, during the genocidal pogroms against the Anuak people (2005-2006), UNHCR operations were openly affiliated with the perpetrators and UNHCR never spoke out against atrocities committed by the government of President Meles Zenawi, with his approval.36

According to a Refugees International situation report of May 17, 1994, at the height of RPA war crimes in Rwanda, the UNHCR ‘Ngara’ Protection report documented atrocities committed by the RPA at the Tanzanian border—cold-blooded massacres of men, women and children, burned alive in huts, countless war crimes that were attributed to the ‘organized Hutu genocide.’37

“Asked by [a] UNHCR field officer, refugees said the RPF [sic] did not care whether victims [killed by RPA] were Hutu or Tutsi.”37

“Each day there are more and more bodies in the river and most of them without their heads.”37

Commenting on RPA massacres at other border points: “The people of Rwanda have nowhere else to go and we cannot expect them to stay and be slaughtered in their homes.”37

Further, and more devastating to the establishment’s portrayal of the RPA as a ‘disciplined’ rebel force that ‘stopped the genocide,’ it was a consultant named Robert Gersony, contracted by UNHCR, who staked his 25 year career on his findings from his investigation in Rwanda—”what he described as calculated, preplanned, systematic atrocities and genocide against Hutus by the RPA … a plan implemented as a policy from the highest echelons of [the Kagame] government.”38

The United Nations buried the Gersony Report, and it remains buried. When the Gersony report came out, the UNHCR suspended their support for voluntary repatriation of refugees to Rwanda because of RPA massacres. In response, the Rwandan government and many others in the UN turned on the UNHCR. Since that time (1995), UNHCR has accepted the establishment narrative about genocide in Rwanda.

The euphemistically named Refugees International (RI)—like the US Committee for Refugees—is tight with the US intelligence community and uses a ‘humanitarian’ front to project American power and nationalist interests through hegemonic pressure tactics and direct interventions. However, RI’s support for expanded militarization and global domination is easily unveiled.1

Indeed, the UNHCR has a much more incestuous relationship with the massive ongoing catastrophe on the ground in eastern Congo. One of the multinational corporations affiliated with UNHCR is PricewaterhouseCoopers International (PWC), an ‘accounting’ firm whose business revolves around balancing the books, financial audits and advising tax write-offs and other forms of financial shuffling for multinational corporations. Head-quartered in New York City, PWC earned $US 28.2 billion in revenues in 2008.

PWC is also a shareholder in the corporations involved in the niobium/tantalum (pyrochlore) mine at Lueshe, North Kivu, at the heart of Rwanda’s ‘Tutsi rebel’ occupation in eastern DRC.2 ,3

The mining ores from the Lueshe mine have previously been moved into international commerce through Rotterdam harbor, Netherlands, involving the following firms affiliated with PricewaterhouseCoopers International (US): Alfred K. Knight International (UK); Masingiro GmbH (Germany); Helvetia Transport (Germany); Gesellschaft fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH (Germany); HSBC Bank (UK); A&M Minerals (UK); Mettalurg NY (US).

PWC was the dominant majority shareholder of Somikivu s.c.a.r.l., a company established in Congo (Zaire) in 1984, and controlled in North Kivu for numerous years past by troops under the command of Rwandan warlords Laurent Nkunda and Jules Mutebusi, both wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.4

“The crimes and war crimes committed by the management of the PricewaterhouseCoopers company Somikivu since the year 2000 up until now will not be quoted here,” wrote the authors of a 2006 letter calling on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to address PWC for violations of OECD guidelines for multinational corporations.5

In budget year 2008, PWC offices worldwide collectively ‘donated’ $US 1,511,982 to UNHCR.6

Affleck’s affiliation with Save the Children is equally problematic given their sponsorship by the giant Swiss multinational corporation Credit Suisse Group (CSG).

One CSG director is Peter F. Weibel, a CEO and executive of PricewaterhouseCoopers AG, Zurich since 1988, member of PWC’s Global Oversight Board from 1998 to 2001, and CEO of PWC Zurich until mid 2003—a period when PWC continued to intervene in Congo—militarily and politically—through the Lueshe mine.7

Interestingly, PricewaterhouseCoopers has also served as the ‘Chartered Accountants’ for Banro Corporation from September 1996—the date of the first RPA/UPDF invasion of Congo—until November 2002, and was listed as such again for 2005 (at least).8

Another CSG director is Thomas W. Bechtler, also the Chairman of the Zurich Committee of Human Rights Watch. Of course, HRW ‘researcher’ Alison Des Forges wrote the HRW tome on genocide in Rwanda—Leave None to Tell the Story—the book that turned genocide in Rwanda upside down and set the stage for the total falsification of international consciousness.9

“This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power,” Des Forges wrote. Her assertions about a ‘planned’ Hutu genocide—”They seized control of the state and used its machinery and its authority to carry out the slaughter”—are now completely discredited.9

In contradistinction to the establishment narrative accusing the ‘Hutu leadership’ of an ‘organized’ and ‘planned’ genocide were the countless acts of genocide committed through a spontaneous uprising of the masses—people who had been brutalized, disenfranchised, uprooted and forced from homes; people who had witnessed massacres and rapes of family members; people who were themselves the victims of brutal atrocities. These were more than a million people, mostly Hutus, who had been terrorized by the Rwandan Patriotic Army from October 1990 to April 1994, as it butchered its way into Rwanda.

“She [Des Forges] concealed the fact that from 1990 the war caused an unprecedented economic poverty and that the one million internally displaced people tore the social fabric apart!” wrote Dr. Helmut Strizek, a former German official who has called for Alison Des Forges’ resignation from Human Rights Watch.10 “And these people knew that Tutsi rebels [RPA] caused their misery. They did not wait for ‘instructions’ in order to revenge, once no one was able to maintain public order after the April 6 [1994] assassination [sic] and resumption of hostilities by the RPF.”11

At one Harvard University lecture on October 14, 1998, Alison Des Forges proposed a hypothetical ‘decapitation’ scenario whereby military intervention by a team of elite operatives could have ‘stopped the genocide’. “The scenario calls for elite troops to enter Rwanda in the first 2 to 5 days of the genocide and kill or capture the 20 or so extremist leaders who were primarily responsible for mobilizing the genocide.”12

However, this is regime change, and it is in keeping with the new ‘humanitarian’ warfare paradigm, and it licenses special operations forces to commit human rights atrocities and acts of terror legitimized by one state (US) over its ‘enemies’. And, in any case, there was no regime in Kigali to change as the state had already been decapitated by the double presidential assassinations of April 6, 1994. Des Forges’ role has been to hide the US backed coup d’etat in Rwanda and to obscure the involvement of the United States military and its western military partners.
Allison Des Forges, senior adviser to Human Rights Watch, presents a lecture on 'genocide in Rwanda' at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2007.

Allison Des Forges, senior adviser to Human Rights Watch, presents a lecture on 'genocide in Rwanda' at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2007.

Between 1990 and 1994, the RPA waged a systematic, pre-planned, secretive but highly organized terrorist war aimed at eliminating the largest number of Rwandan people possible—bodies were hacked to pieces and incinerated en masse. From 1994, once the RPA violently seized power, a terror regime was created, and developed, and a criminal structure parallel to the state was set up to pursue pre-determined kidnappings; torturing and raping of women and young girls; terrorist attacks (both directly and by simulating that the same had been perpetrated by the enemy); illegal detention of thousands of civilians; selective murdering; systematic elimination of corpses either by mass incineration or by throwing them into lakes and rivers; indiscriminate attacks against civilians based on pre-determined ethnic categories for the elimination of the predominant ethnic group; and also to carry out acts of war in Rwanda and Congo.13

Ben Affleck has met with Rwandan ministers and he is investing in Rwanda. However, his ties to Paul Kagame run deeper than mere investments supported by Rwanda’s organized crime cartel.

A SUSTAINABLE CATASTROPHE

The 1996 Rwandan Patriotic Army invasion of eastern Congo—then Zaire—began with military attacks against refugee camps in the North and South Kivu provinces where more than two million Rwandan refugees were amassed. These death camps were created by the so-called international community—the ‘humanitarian’ business sector—and they revolved around massive profits for the corporate agencies involved, including Refugees International, Save the Children, World Food Program and UNHCR—all connected to the western military intelligence apparatus and integrated with multinational corporate plunder.

Refugees International’s operations during their involvement in the Rwandan refugee camps in Congo (Zaire), 1995-1996, were funded in part by Credit Swiss (CS) First Boston, a subsidiary of the Credit Suisse Group.14 Robert Weisenthall, a strategic advisor at CS First Boston in the same period, counted as clients Cox Communications, Time Warner and the New York Times—all involved in the big Rwanda genocide cover-up. Wiesenthall is today an executive with Sony Corporation, whose PlayStations depend upon columbium tantalite, one of the rare earth metals being plundered from eastern Congo.15

The Rwandan refugee camps were reportedly first shelled in a military operation involving the International Rescue Committee (IRC), one of the UNHCR’s main partners today.16 The IRC is an agency that does not work directly with refugees and has been criticized for its direct involvement in military operations.17

“Humanitarian organizations operating among the Hutu refugees in eastern Zaire and Belgian newspapers accused some US refugee non-governmental organizations, especially the [IRC] of being covers for CIA operations,” reported intelligence insider Wayne Madsen. “Two Belgian newspapers, Antwerp Gazette and De Standaard, reported that the IRC was actually engaged in ‘military operations and military support operations’ in support of [Laurent] Kabila’s rebels in eastern Zaire.”18

According to UNHCR documentation, IRC agents are allowed to move freely in and out of UNHCR and other UN field operations. It almost need not be stated, so obvious a conclusion is it, that so-called ‘humanitarian’ organizations are routinely and unquestioningly used for intelligence gathering and for identifying both friendly and hostile members of certain populations.

With the support of his friends in the RPA, Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani traveled to the Kivus shortly after the 1996 invasion of Congo (Zaire). Mamdani and RPA backer Jacques Depelchin produced a report that documented the genocidal RPA campaign against Hutus, and the devastating effects of the AID enterprise on eastern Congo.19 Mamdani described the ‘dollarization’ that destroyed the local economy; how rents were driven up by the influx of an army of ‘AID’ workers; how local people found basic needs increasingly beyond their reach.20

“To talk to civil society leaders in Kivu about the experience of hosting two million plus refugees resourced through international NGOs,” Mamdani reported, “is to listen to a litany of troubles—criminality, ill health, increased prices, lowered production, mounting insecurity—all traced to that single experience.”20

The eastern Congo never recovered from the combined devastation wrought by the post-1994 Rwandan Patriotic Army terror regime in combination with the Rwandan refugee influx. Then as now, the enterprise spawned one disaster after another and the situation today can only be explained as a manufactured disaster.
In Congo they call it MONUC AIR. Seen here is a jetliner leased by MONUC on a flight from Bujumbura, Burundi to Kinshasa, Congo's capital city, filled to about 10% capacity. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2005.

In Congo they call it MONUC AIR. Seen here is a jetliner leased by MONUC on a flight from Bujumbura, Burundi to Kinshasa, Congo's capital city, filled to about 10% capacity. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2005.

The Ben Affleck Gimme Shelter film is part of an ongoing propaganda campaign to whitewash the international catastrophe created, and sustained, in eastern Congo, by the conflux of so-called ‘humanitarian aid’ operations and so-called ‘international peacekeeping’ operations with multinational corporate plunder.

“Ordinary people in Goma, DRC, struggling with economic consequences of war have accused rebel leader, Laurent Nkunda of waging a war that is beneficial to the whites,” reported Zimbabwe News. “Deniece who runs a vegetable stall in north Kivu, said the conflict is good for the well-paid members of the 18-nation MONUC peacekeeping force, aid agencies and news organizations.”21

What is obvious to peasant vegetable sellers is that the Democratic Republic of the Congo offers a very clear example of a corporate sustained catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions.

THE OBTUSE MONUC MISSION

The United Nations Observers Mission for Congo (MONUC) supported Ben Affleck’s visit to eastern Congo. This mission is increasingly seen as a boondoggle, and it appears more and more likely that MONUC’s ‘failure’ is by design. How do we measure the overall failure or success of the MONUC peacekeeping mission?

Any discussion of the role of MONUC in Congo is absent from Affleck’s film. Instead we only see a few passing images of MONUC blue helmets, armed Pakistanis or Indian troops, suggestive of an efficacious and honorable security force selflessly defending the Congolese people.

The MONUC Public Information Office (PIO), responsible for disseminating information about the MONUC mission, might best be described as a ‘disinformation’ office for the false information that they have provided, on many occasions, regarding MONUC realities.

“In La Potentiel today,” wrote Great Lakes analyst David Barouski, in January 2008, “UN civilian sector spokesman Mr. Kemal Saiki reported that the [Rwanda Defense Forces] is not present in Congo. This is not the truth and I cannot imagine that Mr. Saiki is so poorly informed that he honestly does not know they are there. Such an act degrades MONUC’s credibility with the Congolese people and the international community, who already know the RDF is there.”22

This was not the first time that Public Information Officer (PIO) Kemal Saiki clouded the truth with intentional disinformation. At the beginning of 2007, MONUC troops opened fire on angry civilians who rushed a MONUC vehicle: people were shot dead. When asked about the incident, Saiki denied that MONUC has opened fire on the crowd and insisted that the MONUC forces only ‘shot into the air.”23

MONUC PIOs have also supported the establishment claims about Ugandan military (UPDF) withdrawals, and they have refused to report UPDF incursions in the Orientale region.

Not only does MONUC makes it possible for western mining companies to loot Congo, but MONUC contingents have also participated in illegal minerals plunder from DRC.24

On October 17, 2007, MONUC spokesperson Kemal Saiki told journalists that the MONUC mission categorically denied recent reports in the Congolese press that the peacekeepers were in any way supporting the factional forces loyal to Rwanda’s in-country agent, General Laurent Nkunda.25

Can MONUC PIOs be believed? Can MONUC press reports be trusted?

While certain political actors, including FARDC troops, have sometimes played a hand in civilian protests against the MONUC ‘peacekeeping’ mission in Congo, civilian attacks have become routine as the besieged Congolese people wage frustration battles against the forces of intervention that many believe—based on their personal experiences—are both contributing to and profiting from chaos in the region. The Congolese FARDC army also distrusts the mission: a MONUC convoy moving militia soldiers was recently stopped by FARDC forces and the militia soldiers forcibly removed.26

December 28, 2008 saw fresh allegations that MONUC blue helmets were involved in sexual violence and other abuse against civilians in North Kivu.27 Simple investigations in Bunia, capital of Orientale, found at least five cases of young women who had been raped by MONUC personnel; in one case, the young girl killed her baby and went to prison, but the civilian MONUC official, unpunished, was apparently transferred to another post.28 Is this an example of MONUC’s ‘zero tolerance policy’ against sexual violence by MONUC personnel?

“The Congolese people no more have trust in MONUC. We think that they are supporting the rebels,” North Kivu resident Adili Amani Romauld is reported to say. “And there is a rumor that MONUC profits from the business of the rebels because people have seen soldiers of MONUC saying that ‘no Nkunda, no jobs.’ This is what the Congolese say they saw soldiers of MONUC saying… but from the time they say MONUC came to this country, nothing has changed. So we no more expect anything good from them.”29

The annual MONUC budget is $US 1.13 billion, of which approximately 40% is annually spent on air transport in and between DRC, Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.30 The air transport system therefore provides massive incomes to foreign companies involved in aviation, for fixed wing and helicopter leasing.31 Meanwhile, the leased jumbo jetliner oil burners traveling the long transnational air routes for MONUC are at times over 80% empty.

The MONUC air transport infrastructure maintains structural violence by diverting funds that should be available, and used, for development of Congo’s national transportation infrastructure (especially an appropriate road or light rail system) to the private profits of foreign corporations and governments.

MONUC also rents properties and facilities in Rwanda, Uganda and South Africa (approx. $US 370,000 annually) and pays some $US 93 million annually to oil companies.31 One of the primary providers of air support services for MONUC is Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE), a subsidiary of the U.S. aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin Corporation. Most importantly, the MONUC air transport system is highly exclusive, unavailable to most Congolese people, but open to many highly paid white personnel working for the NGO sector.

Evidence of the structural violence against the Congolese people is prolific, seen with the swimming pools and water yoga classes filled with white expatriate AID professionals—where 99% of blacks are excluded due to their economic (slavery) status—and with the MONUC mission’s expenditures on entertainment infrastructure.

MONUC’s Pakistani and Indian brigades, for example, constructed cricket and soccer (football) facilities. The MONUC cricket games, soccer matches, marching bands, bagpipes and kilts on Sundays and special celebrations are very curious: the construction of athletic facilities and provision of leisure activities are seen by some as examples that MONUC is in it for the long term. Is this a serious ‘peacekeeping’ mission? Or part of a prolonged and lucrative sustainable catastrophe?

UN Messenger for Peace George Clooney, appointed January 31, 2008 due to his high profile role in Darfur, Sudan, also visited the MONUC Indian brigades in DRC’s Kivu provinces, where he painted a picture of MONUC troops as selfless soldiers for good. “We were in Congo and met with the Indian Kivu brigade in January,” he said, in October 2008. “We saw the incredibly important and tough work they are doing every day.”32

Isn’t the MONUC military mission just another faction involved in Congo’s conflagration, a faction of foreign mercenaries backed by multinational corporations? Like the United Nations itself, the MONUC mission is compromised at the highest levels, and the hands of the good people in the mission are tied and their voices silenced.

According to MONUC staff in Kinshasa, the Special Representative of the Secretary General to the DRC, current MONUC Head of Mission Alan Doss, a US citizen, has violated MONUC mission protocol prohibiting family members from joining mission employees. Doss brought his wife to DRC, against regulations, and she is reportedly provided a personal maid, a MONUC 4×4 Toyota SUV with a MONUC driver, for personal use, all paid for by the MONUC mission.

“Everybody cannot believe that Doss is so corrupt,” says one MONUC insider. “He knows nothing about Congo… he is breaking rules every day. Mrs. Doss gave a big reception in Kinshasa to receive George Clooney at the Grand Hotel. It was paid for by MONUC and Doss didn’t even clear the party with the Chief of Division [according to protocol]. People are very angry but they cannot say anything and morale is very low, because everyone sees that the MONUC mission they are part of is a failure.”33

What constitutes success or failure of a United Nations ‘peacekeeping’ mission of MONUC’s stature? What about the failure to displace Rwanda’s guerrilla forces from eastern Congo? What about the failure to intervene and/or halt the ongoing minerals plunder?

Does the involvement of MONUC soldiers in sex trafficking or minerals smuggling constitute the mission’s failure? What about millions of people dead and millions more displaced during the years of MONUC’s involvement in DRC, circa 2001 to 2009?

To his credit, on December 17, 2008, MONUC Chief Alan Doss publicly announced that the MONUC ‘peacekeeping’ mission with its 17,000 soldiers and its $US one billion annual budget “was not equal to the task.”34

Alan Doss inherited a catastrophe from his predecessor, William Lacy Swing—a US State Department official who’s diplomatic career spanned some 40 years including five postings as Ambassador to African countries each under long term organized assault by white collar crime, corporate plunder and covert military interventions: South Africa, Nigeria, Liberia, Zaire (now DRC), and the former People’s Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville); Swing is also deeply tied to the malaise in Haiti.

At this writing, MONUC staff in Congo are dealing with labor violations due to inequitable treatment and poor working conditions: the promises made by MONUC officials after MONUC in-country staff organized a stop-work strike more than a year ago have been entirely ignored.35

On December 18, 2008, President Bush released $US 6 million in “AID” funds for Congo from the United States Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund, ostensibly to ‘aid refugees’.

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME

After one of Ben Affleck’s promotional visits to Rwanda, Francis Gatare, Director General of Rwanda Investment and Export Promotion Agency, quoted the Oscar winner as saying: “When you are cheated in a place like Seattle in the US, it’s very easy to think that Rwanda you saw on CNN in 1994 is still the same. Seeing is believing, and I am happy to have come to Rwanda to witness how the peace and security in the country is real and should be communicated to the world.”36
A MONUC financed cricket and football (soccer) field constructed by the Pakistani MONUC brigade near the Bukavu airport, South Kivu. Indian and Pakistani troops regularly hold competitions complete with marching bands. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2005.

A MONUC financed cricket and football (soccer) field constructed by the Pakistani MONUC brigade near the Bukavu airport, South Kivu. Indian and Pakistani troops regularly hold competitions complete with marching bands. Photo Keith Harmon Snow, 2005.

However, Rwanda’s ‘peace’ has come about through a campaign of absolute terror against the people and depopulation of the Rwandan countryside.37

But Rwanda pimps its sanitized image through numerous celebrities. In 2007, actress Natalie Portman joined other global celebrities to name baby mountain gorillas for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Virunga National Park; actress Daryl Hannah has also played that role. Actress Sigourney Weaver is officially tied to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. William Taliaferro Close, the father of actress Glen Close was for many years the personal physician for Zaire’s president Joseph Mobutu.38 Ewan McGregor also boosts Rwanda’s image by traveling there in league with the regime.

The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Jane Goodall Institute are two big profit-based ‘conservation’ NGOs directly tied to militias involved in extortion, land theft and other organized crime in North Kivu province.39 Jane Goodall is currently a United Nations Messenger of Peace but she is so busy giving “Save the Chimp” lectures worldwide that she doesn’t know what she is talking about, and is blind to the crimes that the Jane Goodall Institute is committing, in her name, in Congo.40

A number of other big international names, including Quincy Jones, and the CEOs of Starbucks, Microsoft, Google and CISCO, have previously visited Rwanda on business missions. Kagame’s strategy of surrounding himself with big business to shield his regime against criticisms or indictments for war crimes and acts of genocide has paid off. Big business leaders, business web sites and public relations campaigns the world over describe Paul Kagame as ‘The Entrepreneur President.’41

President Obama’s Christian right evangelist fanatic Rick Warren has also gotten in on the Kagame game. “In 2005 Rwanda became, at the request of its president Paul Kagame, the initial testing ground for Rick Warren’s P.E.A.C.E Plan and the first nation in the world to implement Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life and Leadership training program” on a national level. Warren has made at least ten separate trips to Rwanda and has been photographed multiple times with Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame.”42

It seems that birds of a feather flock together. Former US President George W. Bush has also had his image buffed by spotlight celebrities. In February 2008, soon after Bush departed Kagame and Rwanda on Air Force One, Bob Geldof—another of Africa’s Great White Hopes—praised Bush as one of the greatest humanitarian Presidents, due to Bush’s supposed concern for Africa —measured in big business financial allocations ostensibly for African people.

Andrew Young, the former US Ambassador to the UN and former Mayor of Atlanta has promoted Rwanda through his corporate consulting firm Goodworks International; Young is also a close sponsor and partner of the US-Uganda Friendship Council, a multinational corporate organization involving and protecting Yoweri Museveni. In 2007, Young’s perception management firm produced the pro-Kagame whitewash titled Rwanda Rising. Billed as a documentary and entered into film festivals, the promo starred Paul Kagame, William Jefferson Clinton and musician Quincy Jones.

Andrew Young is reportedly building a mansion on Lake Muhazi in Rwanda, where Kagame also owns a mansion, and next to exclusive multi-million dollar lakeside resorts and golf courses. Quincy Jones has bought an island on Lake Muhazi.

In 2005, Kagame was awarded the annual Andrew Young Medal for Capitalism and Social Progress by Georgia State University. In 2007 Kagame received the “Abolitionist of the Year Award” after Rwanda abolished the death penalty, a rather ironic result given Kagame’s role in mass death in Congo and Rwanda. But Kagame’s award for being a capitalist couldn’t be more apropos, given the predatory nature of western capitalism as practiced by Kagame’s gang in the Great Lakes region.

Operating in Rwanda and Uganda is the Canadian company Vangold Resources, connected to Robert and Eric Friedland, two of the Friends of Bill Clinton linked to the bloodletting in Congo, Uganda and Rwanda through their multiple interlocking companies and offshore holdings.43

Vangold copper, cobalt and gold mining operations proceed in Uganda’s western border districts.44 The West Nile district mining occurs near the sites of the massive Ugandan government backed atrocities and concentration camps that confine some 1.2 million indigenous Acholi people. Vangold has interests in Kenya, and holds a 1,631 square km (630 sq. mi) petroleum concession bordering Congo in northeastern Rwanda.45
A Vangold Corporation map showing the extent of gold concessions in northeastern Congo, with an arrow denoting the Vangold property on the DRC-Uganda border, making it clear why there is so much bloodshed in DRC's Orientale Province. Image from Vangold web site.

A Vangold Corporation map showing the extent of gold concessions in northeastern Congo, with an arrow denoting the Vangold property on the DRC-Uganda border, making it clear why there is so much bloodshed in DRC's Orientale Province. Image from Vangold web site.

Tony Blair, Britain’s Prime Minister (1997-2007) at the time of the first and second Anglo-American invasions of Congo, led by the proxy forces of Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, has been a personal advisor to President Kagame since January 2008.

Another high profile mover and shaker who helps legitimize the Kagame regime is Harvard University doctor Paul Farmer, who moved his family to Rwanda in 2008 and became a citizen there. Farmer’s Partner’s in Health project has received millions of dollars from the Clinton Foundation and Clinton HIV/AIDS programs—money rinsed from the blood diamonds and indigenous genocides in Botswana, Sierra Leone, Angola, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa and Congo.46 Maurice Tempelsman, the Clinton/Kennedy family diamond broker, Democratic Party sponsor and an architect of covert operations in Africa, is the Chairman of the board of Harvard University’s euphemistically named AIDS Institute; HAI is partnered with the US Military HIV Research Program.47 ,48

Paul Farmer is also linked to the Kagame regime’s network in Boston, where agent’s of the Kagame regime operate an intelligence cell used to identify, repress and criminalize any Rwandan people who in any way challenge the criminality or injustice of the current regime.49

Paul Farmer wrote an excellent book on structural violence titled Pathologies of Power. In the introduction, Farmer discusses Rwanda and, for example, he comments on the ‘blinkered analyses’ by aid workers in “most settings where massive human rights violations are about to occur.”

“How, one wonders incredulously,” Farmer asked, “could anyone working on behalf of the Rwandan poor [before 1994] have failed to anticipate the oncoming cataclysm?”50

How, one wonders incredulously, could anyone working on behalf of the Rwandan poor today have failed to challenge or distance themselves from Kagame’s Rwanda and its terrorist enterprises, in Congo at the very least, and instead works with the regime and its agents?

Farmer cites the work of Samantha Power, about how the Clinton administration knowingly let genocide in Rwanda happen, as opposed to playing the active role it did in backing a covert coup d’etat and Hutu genocide.51 This fabricated ‘bystanders to genocide’ thesis, intentionally obtuse, won Samantha Power—a founder-director of Harvard’s highly biased Carr Center for Human Rights—a Pulitzer Prize.52 Farmer’s additional references and citations regarding ‘genocide in Rwanda’ are equally misinformed, examples of propaganda that intentionally blinds people.53

Michael Porter, a Harvard professor and ‘intellectual entrepreneur’ from Brookline, Massachusetts, also has close ties to Kagame, both in Massachusetts and in Rwanda. Porter is one of Paul Kagame’s primary economic advisers, “helping that nation craft an economic plan, develop the private sector and build relationships around the world.”54

Ben Affleck’s hometown is Boston, Massachusetts, and this is the stage for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s film Good Will Hunting. Boston, it turns out, is also Paul Kagame’s most important power base in the United States, and Cambridge (Harvard University) and Brookline are two influential suburbs.

On January 27, 2009, Democracy Now host Amy Goodman will moderate a panel about Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partner’s In Health mission in Haiti. Panelists will include Paul Farmer and Matt Damon and the panel will be held at Kennedy Library in Boston.

Paul Kagame and his wife Jeanette are regular visitors to Boston, where they have wooed many business leaders, including Mayor Thomas Menino, and where they are tight with the Jewish community. The Tutsis, after all, are the ‘Jews of Africa’ and Rwanda the ‘Israel of Africa’, according to the efficacious mythology perpetuated in part by New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch, in part by Israeli officials.55 Of course, Israel is also fueling the holocaust in the Congo.56

Kagame has given numerous “we the poor victims of genocide” speeches at Boston area colleges. Such speeches usually provoke guilt about the moral failure of us in the west, and all dissent is stillborn for fear of being accused of genocide denial. The result is a hysterical western ‘news’ consuming public—a hysteria amplified by visits to skeleton ‘memorials’ in Rwanda.57

At Boston College in 2005, Kagame was joined by Pierre-Richard Prosper, the US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues. Prosper is a member of Boston College Board of Trustees and has repeatedly visited Rwanda since 1995. Prosper played a major role in neutralizing the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and in derailing the attempts by ICTR prosecutor Carla Del Ponte to prosecute the RPA for war crimes.58 Prosper echoed the big Rwanda deception about a systematic genocide committed by the Hutus, and he followed with the usual coup de grace on truth: he criticized the international community for ‘failing to act’ and, completely inverting reality, said that the US media “did nothing to explore the genocidal machine that was under full operation in Rwanda.”59 In reality, the US ‘news’ system facilitated the RPA coup d’etat.

Kagame followed with the typical speech filled with the usual platitudes about ’100 days of killing’, with ’800,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsis slaughtered’—the language that the propaganda system has, by constant repetition, cemented into the minds of western ‘news’ consumers, thus fostering a sort of mass hysteria about Rwanda that is echoed, mindlessly—even self-righteously, by everyone from the miseducated masses to over educated intellectuals—everywhere. As usual, Kagame turned reality on its head, falsely stating that “the genocide was engineered by the government” of Juvenal Habyarimana.

“It was deliberate, calculated, and cold-blooded,” Kagame said. Indeed it was, as Paul Kagame knows only too well.

Although Paul Kagame has criticized western society and pontificated on the importance of Rwandans being educated in Rwanda, his children attend school in Boston, where they are sheltered by an extensive network, and Ben Affleck—Congo’s new hero and an avid Red Sox fan—has taken the Kagame youth to Boston Red Sox baseball games.60

This is the kind of hidden interest, according to Congolese who have now learned about Affleck’s Kagame and Rwanda connections, that one cannot, in good conscience, ignore. While it might seem endearing that Affleck takes Kagame’s children out to the ball game, it exemplifies Affleck’s close relationship to an internationally renowned war criminal and his conflict of interest in Congo.

The Gimme Shelter campaign is but the latest smokescreen by the western propaganda systems deployed to protect private profits, hidden agendas, and white-collar war crimes in Central Africa. In this equation, the actors and actresses themselves are being used like brand names. UNHCR has the Angelina Jolie brand. UNICEF has the Mia Farrow brand. Save the Children and UNHCR share the Ben Affleck brand name.

Such smokescreens immunize people in North America, Europe, South Africa, Israel and Australia against our own waking up. Using words like ‘humanitarian’ and ‘AID’ and ‘relief’ and ‘peacekeeping’ to misname what are otherwise profitable white operations that are reliant purely on markets—where the commodities are people of color who have been uprooted and displaced, physically and sexually traumatized, and murdered en masse—is another way to justify the exploitation that proceeds both in plain site (refugee operations, peacekeeping interventions, media productions) and behind the scenes (extractive industries, weapons proliferation, multinational dumping, covert operations).

In eastern Congo, it is clear that the goal is to create chaos, to mobilize and dispossess millions of people of their lands and their agency, to herd them and intern them in ‘refugee’ concentration camps, where they die of starvation and disease, where they become test populations for pharmaceutical corporations, where every justification is used—by the white people who serve them—before we go off to the swimming pool or take a vacation.

But most of all, the goal is to create a hopeless and destitute people, who don’t know if they are coming or going, who are traumatized, shattered, apathetic, afraid of everyone and everything, where even the most vile forms of corporate exploitation can appear, almost magically, as promising solutions.

The Gimme Shelter video—like so much of the western capitalist communications apparatus—allows whites to justify our ignorance, to inculcate and nurture our apathy, and to simultaneously hide behind our ‘innocence’. Ben Affleck offers a stellar performance of the ostensibly innocent white man, the latest white savior for Africa, taken to the extreme.

“But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent,” wrote African American James Baldwin. “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”61

[JackRiddler]

.

Click onna link to give TT some love, damn you!

http://www.credoaction.com/comics/2011/ ... ssey-dawn/



.

[JackRiddler]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/apr20 ... -a11.shtml

World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org


European Union prepares to send ground troops to Libya

By Chris Marsden

11 April 2011

The European Union is seeking to utilise the humanitarian cover of the fate of the besieged city of Misrata to send ground troops to Libya under its command. The operation could be mounted within a matter of days. In a reversal of previous policy, the German government of Angela Merkel has offered to play the leading military role.


The EU set up a military mission (EUFOR) ostensibly to back humanitarian aid efforts in Libya on April 1, giving the United Nations a four-month window to call on it to intervene. Misrata, or Misurata, Libya’s third largest city, looks set to be the initial focus of an operation that can then be easily expanded. The city has suffered heavy shelling for several weeks, though last week it received more than 600 tons of World Food Program food—enough to feed over 40,000 people for a month—and Turkey has already mounted efforts to evacuate civilians.


The €7.9 million EUFOR operation has its headquarters in Rome, under the command of Italian Rear Admiral Claudio Gaudosi. The EU has two battle groups, contingents of about 1,500 troops, ready to deploy at a few days’ notice.


EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has officially requested a go-ahead from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The German Press Agency DPA reported that Ashton wrote to Ban on April 7 “telling him about the EU’s readiness to act.”


“It’s an encouragement” for the UN to ask the EU to get involved, a diplomatic source said.


Another official said, “Everybody is aware that something has to be done… You can expect that there will be a mobilization of the international community in the coming days.”


A meeting of EU foreign ministers will take place as early as Tuesday in Luxembourg to discuss the plan, to be followed by a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Berlin.


The UN has called for a “temporary cessation of hostilities” to allow it to evacuate foreign workers and Libyans who want to leave. If this does not materialise, it will likely accuse the regime of Col. Muammar Gaddafi of defying the “international community” and utilize this alleged defiance as a casus belli for military intervention.


UN Security Council resolution 1973, which authorized the US-NATO air war against Libya, bans “foreign occupation,” but it allows for military forces to be despatched by the major powers on the grounds of an asserted “right to protect” civilians from harm. It also sanctions the use of “all necessary measures” to this supposed end.


France has cited the same “right to protect” to justify its ongoing operations in the Ivory Coast, where French troops and helicopters are fighting directly on the side of Paris’s chosen leader, Alassane Ouattara, to dislodge the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo. France played a leading role in advancing UN Resolution 1973, alongside the United States and Britain. It also secured UN authorisation and the participation of a UN force in the Ivory Coast.


German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert told a news conference Friday that German forces would be available for such a European Union “humanitarian” mission. “If there was a request from the United Nations, we would naturally not shirk our responsibility,” Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told the Bundestag (parliament) on Friday.


Defence Ministry spokesman Christian Dienst said that if Germany did take part in the EU mission “it’s clear that German troops would then have their boots on the ground in Libya.”


The Tagesspiegel newspaper also reported that plans were in process to send German ships back to Libya. Germany is part of European Battlegroups I/2011, which is commanded by the Netherlands. It contributes 990 troops—giving it two-thirds of the manpower of the entire nominally EU combat force.


Germany had joined with China, Russia, India and Brazil in abstaining in the United Nations Security Council vote authorising military action and even withdrew its ships from the NATO mission to enforce the UN-mandated arms embargo on Libya.


What is essential in this shift is Germany’s determination not to be excluded from the re-division of oil contracts that will inevitably follow the planned installation of the opposition Transitional National Council (TNC). To date, this body is dominated by forces close to Washington and London, and Germany fears it could be deprived of a significant share of the spoils of war.


The Economist commented pointedly on the implications of German military involvement, asking, “So are we about to see the return of German troops to North Africa for the first time since the defeat of Erwin Rommel’s Afrikakorps in the Second World War?”


The magazine continued: “The EU has felt sidelined in the military phase of the Libya crisis (it has been the main forum to discuss sanctions). It has long wanted to develop more muscular military capabilities, but has been repeatedly thwarted, especially by Britain. Now it thinks that, precisely because it has a softer and less martial reputation, it may be ideally placed to help out in Misrata. ‘Until recently everybody thought European defence was dead,’ says one senior source, ‘But now it may be rising from the ashes.’”


The United States’ response to the EU initiative could be to seek direct involvement as a means of bypassing President Barack Obama’s pledge that US ground troops would not be sent to Libya. But it feels constrained in its actions and is keen not to be seen as openly dominating the war against Libya, so it can conceal its imperialist war aims.


Unlike France, Italy and Qatar, Washington has not officially recognized the opposition as the legitimate government of Libya, and has to date rejected arming it. Since transferring operational command to NATO, the US has cut its naval presence from eleven to three warships and the number of its planes involved from 170 to 90.


Last week, in his testimony to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Gen. Carter Ham, commander of the US Africa Command and leader of the Libyan military operation until it was transferred to NATO, warned of the hostility generated in Africa by the attack on Libya.


“There is an impact and there will be an impact in the region,” he said.


There is a widespread sense in Africa that the war on Libya has nothing to do with humanitarianism and everything to do with oil. Even hitherto pliant bourgeois heads of state are worried that the eruption of neo-colonial militarism in Libya and now the Ivory Coast bodes ill for their own future.


The head of the African Union, Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, has voiced open support for Gaddafi and demanded an end to foreign interference into an internal Libyan conflict.


“I believe that the problems in Libya should be resolved in an internal fashion and not through an intervention that could appear to resemble a humanitarian intervention. We have already seen this in Iraq,” he said.


Referring to the French/UN intervention in Ivory Coast, Nguema said that it should not “imply a war, an intervention of a foreign army.”


This weekend, the African Union sent a high-level diplomatic mission to meet with both the Libyan opposition forces and the government to urge a ceasefire. The mission was headed by South African President Jacob Zuma and included leaders from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Mauritania and Uganda.


The Saudi journal Arab News published a comment Sunday by Syed Rashid Husain entitled “Geopolitics Rears Its Ugly Head in Libya’s Turmoil.” The article begins: “‘So it was all about oil.’ Skeptics had a heyday, as the Liberian-flagged oil tanker departed the northeastern Libyan port of Marsa Al-Hariga, carrying one million barrels of oil. The shipment marked the first sale of oil by the rebel government since the uprising that began on Feb. 17.


“Traders said they believed that the payments for the sale will be made via an offshore bank account. ‘The value of this first shipment is around $112 million and will be made in a bank account outside of Libya that the rebels would have access to,’ one of the traders was quoted as saying.”


Recognition of the TNC by “several governments, including some in Europe” meant there “would be no legal obstacle to buying oil from it or even paying it directly,” said J. Peter Pham, Africa director of the US think tank Atlantic Council.


After noting that the first cargo from rebel-held areas is heading for China, Arab News quoted former Libyan energy minister Omar Fathi Ben Shatwan, who has since fled to Malta. Shatwan led the opening up of Libyan oil contracts to the major oil conglomerates for Gaddafi. He said that in the long term, Russia and China will have lost the chance to take part in developing oil and gas fields in Libya by not supporting the rebels. “The new democracy will be good for those who helped it,” he said, such as France and Italy.


Copyright © 1998-2011 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

[8bitagent]

No mention of France? So many of both the mainstream and alternative press articles I've read on Rwanda point toward a deep French government complicity.
Also, I don't get the haggling over numbers. People take issue with the body count estimates over the Holocaust, Balkans in the 90's, Armenian genocide denial; to me it's not about numbers but who ultimately gained and was actually involved/financed it. People find it offensive to dare point fingers at China for having any responsibility on Darfur, again where people claim the "numbers are inflated". But often times, we find corporate interests behind most these conflicts, from the Congo to Darfur.

[seemslikeadream]

Was Obama Stampeded Into War?
by Patrick J. Buchanan, April 13, 2011

“NATO is moving very slowly, allowing Gadhafi forces to advance,” said rebel leader Abdul Fattah Younis, as the Libyan army moved back to the outskirts of Ajdabiya, gateway city to Benghazi.

“NATO has become our problem.”

Younis is implying that if NATO does not stop Libyan soldiers from capturing Ajdabiya, the rebels may be defeated—and NATO will be responsible for that defeat.

And who is Abdul Fattah Younis?

Until six weeks ago, he held the rank of general and interior minister and was regarded as the No. 2 man in Moammar Gadhafi’s regime.

Yet his military assessment does not appear too far off.

Last week, Gadhafi’s forces were again on the offensive, after having been driven by U.S. air and missile strikes all the way back to his hometown of Sirte.

What gave the Libyan army its new lease on life?

The Americans handed off the war to NATO and moved to the sidelines, restricting U.S. forces to supporting roles.

As of today, however, it appears that if the U.S. military does not re-engage deeply and actively in this war, the Libyan uprising could go down to defeat. And we will be blamed.

How did Barack Obama get us into this box?

Last week, Sen. Jim Webb questioned Gen. Carter Ham, head of the U.S. Africa Command.

As neither the United States, nor its citizens, nor any U.S. ally had been attacked or imperiled, Webb asked, what was the justification for the U.S. attack on Libya, whose government, Gadhafi’s government, the State Department still recognizes as the legitimate government of Libya?

“To protect lives,” was Ham’s response.

Yet, as last week brought news of the slaughter of 1,000 civilians by gunfire and machete by troops loyal to Alassane Ouattara, the man we recognize as the legitimate president of the Ivory Coast, a question arises: Why was a real massacre in West Africa less a casus belli for us than an imagined massacre in North Africa?

Was Obama stampeded into war by hysterical talk of impending atrocities that had no basis in fact?

That is the issue raised by columnist Steve Chapman, that ought to be raised by a Congress that was treated almost contemptuously, when Obama launched a war without seeking its authorization.

On March 26, over a week after he ordered the strikes on Libya, hitting tanks, anti-aircraft, radar sites, troops, and Gadhafi’s own compound in Tripoli, 600 miles away from Benghazi, Obama told the nation he had acted to prevent a “bloodbath” in Benghazi.

“We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi—a city nearly the size of Charlotte—could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

White House Middle East expert Dennis Ross reportedly told foreign policy experts: “We were looking at ‘Srebrenica on steroids’—the real or imminent possibility that up to 100,000 people could be massacred, and everyone would blame us for it.”

A hundred thousand massacred! And our fault? But that is seven times the body count of Katyn, one of the Stalinist horrors of World War II. Was Benghazi truly about to realize the fate that befell Carthage at the hands of Scipio Africanus, at the close of the Third Punic War?

How did the White House come to believe in such a scenario?

In this low-scale war, the cities of Zwara, Ras Lanuf, Brega, and Ajdabiya have changed hands, some several times. Misrata, the only rebel-held city in the west, has been under siege for seven weeks.

Yet in none of these towns has anything like the massacre in the Ivory Coast taken place, let alone Srebrenica. The Guardian‘s Saturday report read, “Fierce fighting in Ajdabiya saw at least eight people killed.”

Yemeni President Saleh’s security forces killed six times that many civilians just to break up one rally in his central square.

True, on March 17, Gadhafi said he would show “no mercy.” But as Chapman notes, he was referring to “traitors” who resisted him to the end. And Gadhafi added, “We have left the way open to them.”

“Escape. Let those who escape go forever.” Gadhafi went on to pledge that “whoever hands over his weapons, stays at home without any weapons, whatever he did previously, he will be pardoned, protected.”

Perhaps Gadhafi is lying.

But there is, as yet, no evidence of any such slaughter in any town his forces have captured. Nor do the paltry forces Gadhafi has mustered to recapture the east—Ajdabiya was attacked by several dozen Toyota trucks—seem capable of putting a city of 700,000 to the sword.

With the Libyan war now seemingly a stalemate, and pressure building for the United States to renew air and missile strikes, and train and equip rebel forces, Congress needs to learn how we got into this mess.

Was Obama stampeded into this war by the panic and hysteria of his advisers? Because, quite clearly, he did not think this thing through.

[8bitagent]

Well this was quite a fuckup.

Maybe the US is letting Ghadafy win, so they can say "well, we tried...now its time to bring in the troops!" I mean whats the goal here?

[seemslikeadream]

Pentagon Says It Has Kept Up Some Strikes on Libya
By THOM SHANKER
Published: April 13, 2011

WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials disclosed Wednesday that American warplanes had continued to strike targets in Libya even after the Obama administration said the United States was stepping back from offensive missions and letting NATO take the lead.

Although American officials had said that no aircraft would fly offensive strike missions, unless officially approved in Washington, 11 warplanes have flown 97 sorties intended to electronically jam or otherwise suppress Libyan air defenses since April 4, when command of the mission was handed over to NATO and the United States publicly said it was stepping back to a supporting role.

The number of actual missile strikes during those missions was only three; all were against Libyan air defense systems, whether radars, command-and-control sites or surface-to-air missiles. Two of them were to destroy hard-to-find and hard-to-strike mobile targets.

In explaining the gap between public statements and operational details, officials said the trio of strikes on Libyan targets since April 4 were classified as defensive, not offensive.

The distinction was that these attacks were intended to incapacitate Libyan radars, antiaircraft batteries or command centers in order to protect NATO strike aircraft, and were not offensive actions against Libyan government forces threatening civilians.

Pentagon officials had to scramble Wednesday to explain the latest nuance about the American mission in Libya.

The administration has expended enormous effort calibrating its explanation of the intervention there to a variety of audiences: the American public, Libyans still loyal to the government or rebel sympathizers, and people in Europe and the Arab world.

At a minimum, the disclosure of strikes dating back several days — on April 4, 6 and 7 — revealed a tin ear for how the facts of daily combat operations would compare to public statements that left the impression that the United States had ceased dropping bombs and missiles on Libya.

The continued operation of American warships and warplanes in both supporting and attacking roles is evidence that, while NATO is in command, the United States military remains the partner with specific capabilities that are required for the alliance to operate effectively.

American officials had said that only support aircraft — like refueling, reconnaissance and command-and-control planes — would be part of the daily operation. Any NATO desire for American strike aircraft, in particular the A-10 tank-buster and the AC-130 flying gunship — would have to be requested formally and approved in Washington.

But the 11 American warplanes assigned to a mission called Suppression of Enemy Air Defense are flying as part of the NATO-led mission.

“It is a purely defensive mission,” the Pentagon said in an official statement. Later, the Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, added, “It is completely consistent with how we have described our support role ever since the transition to NATO lead.”

The American aircraft assigned to suppressing Libyan air defenses are six F-16CJ aircraft and five E/A-18G warplanes, according to Pentagon officials. Working together, they can detect and jam adversary air defense systems and attack them with missiles, some specifically designed to home in on radar emissions.

The disclosure came one day after fissures opened among the allies over the scope and the intensity of attacks against Libyan government forces. Britain and France, in particular, called on NATO and its partners to intensify strikes.

The Pentagon on Wednesday released a full tally of all the American military ships and aircraft participating in the Libyan mission: one guided-missile destroyer; one P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft; one EP-3E signals reconnaissance aircraft; 22 KC-135 tankers; six F-16CJ aircraft; five EA-18G attack aircraft; two E-3 command and control aircraft; two EC-130 signals and communications aircraft; two RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft; one U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft; one E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System; two MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicles; and one RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle.

[vanlose kid]

interesting, to say the least.

Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking?
Wednesday 13 April 2011
by: Ellen Brown, Truthout


Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank - this before they even had a government. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:

I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.

Alex Newman wrote in the New American:

In a statement released last week, the rebels reported on the results of a meeting held on March 19. Among other things, the supposed rag-tag revolutionaries announced the "[d]esignation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi."

Newman quoted CNBC Senior Editor John Carney, who asked, "Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era."

Another anomaly involves the official justification for taking up arms against Libya. Supposedly it's about human rights violations, but the evidence is contradictory. According to an article on the Fox News web site on February 28:

As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body's Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of praise for Libya's human rights record.

The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a "priority" and for bettering its "constitutional" framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens - who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal.

Whatever might be said of Qaddafi's personal crimes, the Libyan people seem to be thriving. A delegation of medical professionals from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus wrote in an appeal to Russian President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin that after becoming acquainted with Libyan life, it was their view that in few nations did people live in such comfort:

[Libyans] are entitled to free treatment and their hospitals provide the best in the world of medical equipment. Education in Libya is free, capable young people have the opportunity to study abroad at government expense. When marrying, young couples receive 60,000 Libyan dinars (about 50,000 US dollars) of financial assistance. Non-interest state loans and as practice shows, undated. Due to government subsidies the price of cars is much lower than in Europe and they are affordable for every family. Gasoline and bread cost a penny, no taxes for those who are engaged in agriculture. The Libyan people are quiet and peaceful, are not inclined to drink and are very religious.

They maintained that the international community had been misinformed about the struggle against the regime. "Tell us," they said, "who would not like such a regime?"

Even if that is just propaganda, there is no denying at least one very popular achievement of the Libyan government: it brought water to the desert by building the largest and most expensive irrigation project in history, the $33 billion GMMR (Great Man-Made River) project. Even more than oil, water is crucial to life in Libya. The GMMR provides 70 percent of the population with water for drinking and irrigation, pumping it from Libya's vast underground Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System in the south to populated coastal areas 4,000 kilometers to the north. The Libyan government has done at least some things right.

Another explanation for the assault on Libya is that it is "all about oil," but that theory, too, is problematic. As noted in the National Journal, the country produces only about 2 percent of the world's oil. Saudi Arabia alone has enough spare capacity to make up for any lost production if Libyan oil were to disappear from the market. And if it's all about oil, why the rush to set up a new central bank?

Another provocative bit of data circulating on the net is a 2007 Democracy Now! interview of US Gen. Wesley Clark (Ret.). In it he says that about ten days after September 11, 2001, he was told by a general that the decision had been made to go to war with Iraq. Clark was surprised and asked why. "I don't know!" was the response. "I guess they don't know what else to do!" Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.

What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers' central bank in Switzerland.

The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr., writing on Examiner.com, noted, "[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept Euros instead of dollars for oil and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency and its dominion as the petrodollar."

According to a Russian article titled "Bombing of Lybia - Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar," Qaddaffi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Qaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. During the past year, the idea was approved by many Arab countries and most African countries. The only opponents were the Republic of South Africa and the head of the League of Arab States. The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Qaddafi was not swayed and continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.

As right-wing attacks on our basic rights and services are growing louder than ever, it's essential to keep independent journalism strong. Support Truthout by clicking here.

And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:

One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned.... Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.

Libya not only has oil. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), its central bank has nearly 144 tons of gold, in its vaults. With that sort of asset base, who needs the BIS, the IMF and their rules?

All of which prompts a closer look at the BIS rules and their effect on local economies. An article on the BIS web site states that central banks in the Central Bank Governance Network are supposed to have as their single or primary objective "to preserve price stability." They are to be kept independent from government to make sure that political considerations don't interfere with this mandate. "Price stability" means maintaining a stable money supply, even if that means burdening the people with heavy foreign debts. Central banks are discouraged from increasing the money supply by printing money and using it for the benefit of the state, either directly or as loans.

In a 2002 article in Asia Times titled "The BIS vs National Banks," Henry Liu maintained:

BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. The BIS does to national banking systems what the IMF has done to national monetary regimes. National economies under financial globalization no longer serve national interests.

... FDI [foreign direct investment] denominated in foreign currencies, mostly dollars, has condemned many national economies into unbalanced development toward export, merely to make dollar-denominated interest payments to FDI, with little net benefit to the domestic economies.

He added, "Applying the State Theory of Money, any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation." The "state theory of money" refers to money created by governments rather than private banks.

The presumption of the rule against borrowing from the government's own central bank is that this will be inflationary, while borrowing existing money from foreign banks or the IMF will not. But all banks actually create the money they lend on their books, whether publicly owned or privately owned. Most new money today comes from bank loans. Borrowing it from the government's own central bank has the advantage that the loan is effectively interest free. Eliminating interest has been shown to reduce the cost of public projects by an average of 50 percent.

And that appears to be how the Libyan system works. According to Wikipedia, the functions of the Central Bank of Libya include "issuing and regulating banknotes and coins in Libya" and "managing and issuing all state loans." Libya's wholly state-owned bank can and does issue the national currency and lend it for state purposes.

That would explain where Libya gets the money to provide free education and medical care and to issue each young couple $50,000 in interest-free state loans. It would also explain where the country found the $33 billion to build the GMMR project. Libyans are worried that NATO-led airstrikes are coming perilously close to this pipeline, threatening another humanitarian disaster.

So, is this new war all about oil or all about banking? Maybe both - and water as well. With energy, water and ample credit to develop the infrastructure to access them, a nation can be free of the grip of foreign creditors. And that may be the real threat of Libya: it could show the world what is possible. Most countries don't have oil, but new technologies are being developed that could make non-oil-producing nations energy independent, particularly if infrastructure costs are halved by borrowing from the nation's own publicly-owned bank. Energy independence would free governments from the web of the international bankers and of the need to shift production from domestic to foreign markets to service the loans.

If the Qaddafi government goes down, it will be interesting to watch whether the new central bank joins the BIS, whether the nationalized oil industry gets sold off to investors and whether education and health care continue to be free.

http://truthout.org/libya-all-about-oil ... 1302678000

*

[anothershamus]

[eyeno]

I am attempting to be afraid, very afraid, just as my government demands. This puts the correct ^^^ perspective on the matter and is interrupting my fear!

[eyeno]

Col. Gaddafi is the Perfect Target

By Jack A. Smith

The official story about the attack on Libya is that the purpose is to save civilian lives, stop "madman" Gaddafi from killing civilians, and to bring democracy to the MENA. But this is fiction — variations on well worn themes frequently employed by Washington in recent decades against the leadership of small countries the White House decides to invade or crush for geopolitical or resource reasons, such as Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The USNATO decision to attack came after the National Libyan Council (or Transitional Council), mainly headquartered in Benghazi in the anti-Gaddafi eastern region, began publicly calling on Washington and its European allies earlier in March to take economic, political and military action to topple the Libyan government and install a new leadership composed mainly of itself.

We assume USNATO instructed the National Council to make the public plea, to which it would then respond under the UN's "responsibility to protect" clause. As far as we know this is the only instance where those who sought to conduct an uprising in MENA asked the leading western countries to militarily pave the way for them.

Col. Gaddafi is the perfect target, having been demonized by the West for decades as an authoritarian, and at times displaying character traits suggesting megalomania and instability. The American people were indoctrinated to hate him many years ago, so U.S. public opinion was already prepared for regime change. It was the same with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2003, or Yugoslav President Slobodan Miloseviç in 1999, among many others. Demonize first, exaggerate second, attack third.

The UN Security Council's March 17 approval of Resolution 1973 called for a cease fire, a no-fly zone over Libya, an arms ban, and a freeze of Libyan assets owned by government officials. It authorizes all necessary means to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas, but does not permit a "foreign occupation force." The U.S. added a loophole that specified arms might be made available and other actions taken if they would "protect civilians."

The resolution could have been defeated had Russia or China voted "no," since a negative vote cast by a permanent member of the Security Council amounts to a veto. Both countries expressed qualms about the resolution but abstained, as did three non-permanent members — Brazil, India and Germany. The 10 other non-permanent votes were all "yes," including the only Arab member of the Council, Lebanon. (See sidebar below: "China and Russia Abstain."

A few days later, abstainers China, Russia, India, and Brazil, which account for some 40% of the world population (2.9 billion people out of 6.8 billion) expressed dismay that the resolution was interpreted by the U.S. and NATO to mean destroying Libya's entire air defense system and most of its air force, bombing tanks and soldiers on the ground, and military installations as well as roads and sectors of civilian infrastructure. So far (April 7) NATO reports conducting over 1,000 bombing operations that have destroyed more than 30% of Libya's military force.

The Arab members of the Security Council later issued similar objections, as did a number of other countries, but USNATO's predictable excesses continue, and no action will be taken.

Since there's always far more than meets the eye in these affairs, often kept secret for many years, mull over this information from Pepe Escobar, a journalist who has been writing almost on a daily basis about the uprisings for Asia Times Online. On April 2 he wrote:

"You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck between the Barack Obama administration and the House of Saud [which controls Saudi Arabia]. Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a 'yes' vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya...."

There are probably many Libyans who seek democratic change after four decades of governance by the Gaddafi family, but this government also has many supporters. At no time has it been indicated a majority of Libyans support overthrowing Col. Gaddafi, much less back a USNATO war to install a western-aligned government in Tripoli — especially one about which considerable questions are being asked.

The U.S., Britain and France quickly supported the idea of building a coalition around the National Libyan Council including pro-monarchists, disaffected tribes in this tribal society, several former leading members of the government, some high ranking military officers and émigrés, including a few who have been in touch with various intelligence services for years.

USNATO attacks have coordinated with the anti-government political and military leaders, who are working in concert with their benefactors in Washington, Paris and London. U.S. CIA agents and Special Forces soldiers, joined by their opposite numbers from several NATO states, are operating in Benghazi and other areas not occupied by loyalist troops. They are training the anti-government troops, supplying weapons and sophisticated military hardware and communications equipment.

In the latest disclosure April 7, the "unarmed civilians" Resolution 1973 was supposed to protect have about 20 tanks at their command as well as other heavy military equipment. The information surfaced when a NATO bomber pilot thought the tanks were part of the loyalist arsenal and blew up a few of them, with their crews.

The Security Council did not authorize arming the civilians. At this point, the resolution seems little more than permission for USNATO to destroy the loyalist army and arm the anti-government forces to install a new government in Tripoli.

However, USNATO's plan "for the political future of Libya was undermined by the growing military doubts over the make-up of the rebel groups," according to The Telegraph (UK) March 29. "'We are examining very closely the content, composition, the personalities, who are the leaders of these opposition forces,' Admiral [James] Stavridis, [NATO'S Supreme Allied Commander, Europe] said in testimony yesterday to the U.S. Senate."

Then on April 3, longtime analyst Michel Chossudovsky wrote on the Global Research website:

"There are various factions within the Libyan opposition: Royalists, defectors from the Gaddafi regime including the Minister of Justice and more recently the Foreign Minister, Moussa Moussa, members of the Libyan Armed Forces, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) and the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (NCLO) which acts as an umbrella organization.

"Rarely acknowledged by the Western media, the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG - Al-Jamaa al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi Libya), is an integral part of the Libyan Opposition. The LIGF, which is aligned with al-Qaeda, is in the frontline of the armed insurrection."

Chossudovsky, an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Ottawa University, and director of Montreal's Centre for Research on Globalization, notes that the paramilitary LIFG was founded in Afghanistan by veteran Libyan Mujahedeens of the Soviet-Afghan war.... There are contradictory reports as to whether the LIFG is part of Al Qaeda or is acting as an independent jihadist entity. One report suggests that in 2007 the LIFG became 'a subsidiary of al Qaeda, later assuming the name of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).'"

During its lifetime, "The LIFG was supported not only by the CIA and The British Secret Intelligence Service but also by factions within Libya's intelligence agency, led by former intelligence head and Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa, who defected to the United Kingdom in late March 2011." The full article is at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=24096

There is a chance USNATO may prefer a longer, drawn out struggle than their overwhelmingly superior fire power may suggest, perhaps for as least as long as the various uprisings manage to sustain themselves. Fighting for "democracy" in Libya absolves the U.S. from the accusation that is against the uprisings in its subordinate countries. At the same time, of course, the western war against Libya grabs most of the headlines and often pushes the other struggles to the background.

USNATO did not launch a war against Libya as a humanitarian gesture. If/when it removes the Gaddafi family from leadership and installs a replacement the allied military coalition will exercise decisive influence for many years to come, especially in oil concessions, privatizations and building contracts that enhance multinational corporations, air and military bases, a solid vote in the UN and other world organizations, and more.

The historic Arab uprisings of 2011 will inspire multitudes of people around the world for many years to come, even if imperialism — in league with repressive monarchies, and violent dictatorships — may crush some of the rebellions, contain others with small concessions, and perhaps implement limited democracy in Tunisia and Egypt.

What matters is that the struggle is taking place, has the support of the masses of people, and that the people are courageous and determined. There is still a chance for more immediate triumphs.

What has been happening in recent months is the "1848" of the 21st century. Most of the great European rebellions of the time were defeated, but out of those struggles came victories. Out of the great uprisings of the Arab World of 2011, and hopefully longer, will come many victories.

The author is editor of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter and is former editor of the (U.S.) Guardian Newsweekly. He may be reached at
jacdon@earthlink.net or http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/

[eyeno]

The international contact group on Libya has agreed to set up a temporary "trust fund" to help channel assets to the opposition Transitional National Council in Benghazi.

But there is a video at the link that insures it will be done with "transparency".


http://english.aljazeera.net/news/afric ... 63347.html

[Byrne]

Friday, 15 April 2011
Lockerbie and Libya: Hide & Seek

Alex Salmond says that Moussa Koussa, formerly Gaddafi’s head of intelligence, is merely a “potential witness” in the (still live) Lockerbie investigation, but not a suspect. Dear me, no.
As the First Minister explains it, had Moussa Koussa been a suspect, he would have been arrested. Since he has not been arrested...
This is almost as good, if you are in the mood, as William Hague’s assurance that at no time was the non-suspect offered immunity from prosecution after his defection. After all, if there was never any real intention to prosecute, why bother to talk about immunity?

Better still is the decision, at Britain’s prodding, to remove the non-immune non-suspect from the so-called EU watch list. This means he will henceforth be free to travel as his pleases, and that his assets will no longer be frozen.
Since Moussa Koussa is not suspected of anything, we can therefore conclude that assets lodged in Europe or the US were in no sense stolen from the Libyan people. Since he is free as a bird, it must also follow (forgetting Lockerbie) that he had no hand in arming the IRA, or in endorsing threats against the lives of exiled Libyans, or in the commission of a single crime during decades in Gaddafi’s service.
Brilliant. The Colonel is promised the International Criminal Court for numberless heinous acts, but his most notable henchman, a man with various bloodcurdling nicknames, did nothing at all.
For his reward, he gets to lay hands on enough money to enjoy his retirement in the pleasant climes of his choice, no questions – none whatsoever – asked.
Those climes will not include Britain, if reports (the Telegraph and others) are to be believed. As a British “official” has explained, since Moussa Koussa was never detained – no suspicion, no immunity, ergo no crimes – “It’s up to him”. There goes Salmond’s “potential witness”, delighted to have been of service.
Think of it this way. Let’s say a Mr X turns up in London. “Oh, yes,” he admits. “Member of al Qaeda I was, man and boy. Quite important I was, too, though I do say so myself. Some said I was bin Laden’s right-hand man. Not that I killed anyone, you understand, not personally. Now, are you sure there’s nothing you’d like to ask me?”
Meanwhile, our old friend Mustafa Abdul Jalil is back in business with a “sworn statement” – worth all the paper it was written on – to (oddly) the English Bar’s Human Rights Committee. Once again he offers to prove that, as to Lockerbie, Gaddafi did it, with Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi as his one and only instrument.
No proof as yet – yet again – however. Instead, the assertion, hardly a secret in any case, that the Colonel recompensed al-Megrahi with quantities of money. In Jalil’s previous version, as I recall, this was “a slush fund”, offered up not for lawyers and such, but under the threat that the lone agent would spill the beans.
If I follow Magnus Linklater in the Times, the unwitting folk from the Bar of England and Wales did not ask Libya’s former justice minister to reconcile his claims with problems – six of them – encountered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review (SCCRC) Commission. Strange how that slips everyone’s mind.
But then, if the First Minister of Scotland hasn’t wondered why Moussa Koussa is not being detained for a view on the discrepancy, and if Hague is happy for the non-suspect to keep his memories of events and files to himself, the rest of us can only guess what the SCCRC was on about.
That seems to be the general idea.

[seemslikeadream]

What's Really Going on in Libya?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

It looks as though eastern Libya will slide into the Mediterranean under the sheer weight of western journalists assembled in Benghazi and Misrata. A tsunami of breathless reports suggests that Misrata is enduring travails not far short of the siege of Leningrad in World War 2. The reports have been seized on by Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy to raise the ante on Mission Odyssey Dawn. In their joint newspaper column published both sides of the Atlantic they now say that to leave Gaddafi in power would be an "unconscionable betrayal" and speak of Misrata as enduring “a medieval siege.” Not yet, surely. A medieval siege was something that usually lasted at least a year, in which the city’s inhabitants were reduced to eating rats, then each other, and the besiegers all succumbed to plague.

Maybe it will turn out that way, with reporters eying each other from a gastronomic perspective and wiring Ferran Adria, seeking recipes for preparing Haunch of Hack sous vide. "So long as Gaddafi is in power, Nato and its coalition partners must maintain their operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the regime builds," write the three leaders. This is not Mission Creep but, once again, Mission Leap, way beyond the UN mandate.

On closer inspection, the reports suggest something less than a medieval siege or Leningrad. Reuter’s man in Misrata could only come up with this: “A local doctor told Al Jazeera at least eight people died and seven others were wounded in the second day of intense bombardment of Misrata, a lone rebel bastion in western Libya.” The UK Independent’s Kim Sengupta did better: “The attacks started early in the morning as the residents of this besieged and battered city were starting their hours of queuing for bread…. Even by the grim standards of Misrata, the most violent battleground of this savage civil war, what happened yesterday was a cause of deep shock….At least 16 people died, and 29 were injured, almost all of them civilians – including a mother and her two young daughters.”

It’s always a cause for dismay that any civilians die in such conflicts but again, 16 fatalities fall well short of medieval catastrophe. Sengupta noted that NATO is simultaneously bombing Tripoli, though no journalists seemed to be available to report what sort of damage or casualties had been inflicted. Meanwhile the hated leader appeared to have no qualms in touring the city in an open jeep.

It seems that the rebels might actually be under the overall supervision of the international banking industry, rather than the oil majors. On March 19 they announced the “[d]esignation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.’”

CNBC senior editor John Carneyasked, “Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era.”

Ellen Brown, author of the terrific Web of Debt: the Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, wrote recently about the rebels’ sophisticated financial operations in the following terms:

“According to a Russian article titled “Bombing of Lybia – Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar,” Gadaffi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Gadaffi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. During the past year, the idea was approved by many Arab countries and most African countries. The only opponents were the Republic of South Africa and the head of the League of Arab States. The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union, with French president Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Gaddafi was not swayed and continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.

“And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed: ‘One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned. . . . Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.’”

I’d really like to see an objective account of Qaddafi’s allocation of oil revenues versus the US’s, in terms of social improvement.

KFF -- Killed by ‘friendly fire’

The Libyan rebels are learning that 'no-fly zone' can translate in practice into lethal onslaughts in which Nato planes have killed or wounded their comrades. Civilians in Tripoli have also died in large numbers from aerial onslaughts by Nato planes.

There's no evidence that the missions flown by Nato planes have been anything other than a plus for Gaddafi. As always, bombardment swiftly engenders loathing for the bombardiers. Relatives of the slain in Tripoli shake their fists at the sky; the rebels proclaim that they have been "betrayed" by their supposed protectors.

The tiny number of planes now deployed by France and Italy, after the Americans withdrew their attack aircraft and handed off the mission, displays the half-hearted nature of the intervention. (This could be the reason why the Pentagon is now saying that U.S. aircraft are again flying missions over Libya.)

As the leader of the A-10 and F-16 design teams, Pierre Sprey, points out to me, "Thirty-three French and 17 British planes is a laughably miniscule force - the inevitable consequence of designing and buying $100 million hyper-complex fighters. In October of 1935, the Italians deployed 595 airplanes to launch their gallant invasion of Ethiopia."

The deputy commander of Nato's operation in Libya caused further outrage among the rebels by bluffly refusing to say he was sorry for the screw-ups.

Rear Admiral Russ Harding, a British officer, said: "It would appear that two of our strikes yesterday may have resulted in [rebel] deaths. I am not apologising. The situation on the ground was and remains extremely fluid and until yesterday we did not have information that [rebel] forces are using tanks."

It turns out that 'friendly fire' is one of war’s really big killers. An amazing essay on 'friendly fire by Lt Col Michael J. Davidson ran in the Naval War College Review this last winter. Davidson was chiefly concerned with the performance (lamentable) of the military justice system in connection with episodes of friendly fire, which he defines as the accidental killing in a combat setting of one soldier by another of the same or an allied force".

He notes that the concept of friendly fire is similar in many respects to the accidental killing of civilians, but such accidental killings appear to be treated differently and are often referred to as "civilian casualties" or by more sterile terms like "collateral damage".

The colonel adds dryly: "Reported cases of courts-martial involving the accidental deaths of civilians are rare." He notes: "The most famous court-martial involving an accidental attack on civilians occurred during World War II, and its fame was generated less by the nature of the alleged misconduct than by the identity of the president of the court - a movie star, Col Jimmy Stewart."

Davidson cites some numbers which could swiftly instruct the Libyan rebels that the deaths of their comrades at the hands of Nato planes is nothing out of the ordinary: "The number of casualties [ie. killed and wounded] associated with friendly fire has often been stunning. One French general estimated that approximately 75,000 French casualties in World War I were caused by French artillery fire.

"An estimated five per cent of [US] Vietnam casualties were attributed to friendly fire. During the first Persian Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, 23–24 per cent of US fatalities and 77 per cent of American vehicle losses were attributed to friendly fire."

Another military military scholar, Kenneth K. Steinweg, wrote a paper, Dealing Realistically with Fratricide (Parameters, Spring 1995), estimating that 10 to 15 per cent of US casualties during the 20th century were caused by friendly fire, which equates to between 177,000 and 250,000 casualties.

Historical examples of friendly fire are so prevalent as to be characterized as normal rather than exceptional. In some cases, friendly fire was the result of inexperience and inadequate training.

For example, in 1643, during the English Civil War, poorly trained and inexperienced parliamentary infantry organised in three lines attacked a heavily fortified building held by royalist troops. Instead of the forward line firing first and then retiring to the rear to re-load while the next line in turn fired, all three fired simultaneously, effectively eliminating the front rank.

A particularly bitter case came right at the end of World War Two when RAF pilots flying Typhoons attacked four German ships in the Bay of Lubeck in the Baltic Sea, believing them to be carrying escaping SS officers.

The Typhoons sank the ships and then, under orders to spare no one, spent an hour strafing the survivors in the water, only to find later that they had machine-gunned about 10,000 Jews from the Neuengamme Camp in northern Germany.

A Medal for Shaukat

On March 11 the New York Times gave top billing to a story by Jane Perlez and Ismail Khan, headed “Pakistan Tells U.S. It Must Sharply Cut C.I.A. Activities. The second paragraph told NYT readers that “Pakistani and American officials said in interviews that the demand that the United States scale back its presence was the immediate fallout from the arrest in Pakistan of Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. security officer who killed two men in January during what he said was an attempt to rob him.”

The story was interesting but would have been somewhat familiar to readers of this site. Our intrepid correspondent in Lahore, Brigadier Shaukat Qadir (late of the Pakistan armed forces) had an infinitely better and more detailed story on March 22, detailing the deal struck between the top military officers of the US and Pakistan, to prompt Davis’ release.

[Nordic]

http://news.antiwar.com/2011/04/15/obam ... stalemate/

Obama Admits Libyan War a 'Stalemate'

NATO Prepares for 'Long War' in Libya
Reports: Gadhafi Forces Using Cluster Bombs
NATO Mission in Disarray as Criticisms Mount
Libya University Students Injured by NATO Air Strike
Cameron, Obama, Sarkozy Vow to Keep Bombing Until Gadhafi Is Gone

President Barack Obama admitted on Friday that the war in Libya has reached a “stalemate,” something analysts have been saying for weeks, but insisted the war would not end. Rather, he promised it would continue until it ousts Moammar Gadhafi.

“My expectation is that if we continue to apply that pressure and continue to protect civilians, which NATO is doing very capably, then I think over the long term Gadhafi will go and we will be successful,” noted Obama. He gave no indication of what he meant by “long term,” but with officials terming a prospective exit after a decade in Afghanistan “hasty” it could be an extremely long time.

The pledge puts the war on a particularly awkward footing, as the UN mandate is explicitly not a call for regime change, and NATO continues to insist that the war will not be fought with the aim of his ouster.

Rather it seems President Obama and other hawkish elements in NATO (notably French President Sarkozy) have set up a “victory condition” only tangentially related to the war itself. With no expectation that the war could conceivably chase Gadhafi out, it will continue until he either happens to leave or dies of old age. What happens after is anyone’s guess.

Definitely cross-posting in the "fuck Obama" thread.