Kagame’s Hidden War in the Congo

Howard W. French, New York Review of Books

Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
by Gérard Prunier
Oxford University Press, 529 pp., $27.95                                                  
The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa
by René Lemarchand
University of Pennsylvania Press, 327 pp., $59.95                                                  
The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality
by Thomas Turner
Zed Books, 243 pp., $32.95 (paper)                                                  

     

Although it has been strangely ignored in the Western press, one of the most destructive wars in modern history has been going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s third-largest country. During the past eleven years millions of people have died, while armies from as many as nine different African countries fought with Congolese government forces and various rebel groups for control of land and natural resources. Much of the fighting has taken place in regions of northeastern and eastern Congo that are rich in minerals such as gold, diamonds, tin, and coltan, which is used in manufacturing electronics.

Few realize that a main force driving this conflict has been the largely Tutsi army of neighboring Rwanda, along with several Congolese groups supported by Rwanda. The reason for this involvement, according to Rwandan president Paul Kagame, is the continued threat to Rwanda posed by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu militia that includes remnants of the army that carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Until now [2009], the US and other Western powers have generally supported Kagame diplomatically. And in January [2009], Congo president Joseph Kabila, whose weak government has long had limited influence in the eastern part of the country, entered a surprise agreement with Kagame to allow Rwandan forces back into eastern Congo to fight the FDLR. But the extent of the Hutu threat to Rwanda is much debated, and observers note that Rwandan-backed forces have themselves been responsible for much of the violence in eastern Congo over the years.

Rwanda’s intervention in Congo began in 1996. Two years earlier, Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda, defeating the government in Kigali and ending the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. As Kagame installed a minority Tutsi regime in Rwanda, some two million Hutu refugees fled to UN-run camps, mostly in Congo’s North and South Kivu provinces. These provinces, which occupy an area of about 48,000 square miles—slightly larger than the state of Pennsylvania—are situated along Congo’s eastern border with Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi and together have a population of more than five million people. In addition to containing rich deposits of minerals, North and South Kivu have, since the precolonial era, been subject to large waves of migration by people from Rwanda, including both Hutus and Tutsis. In recent decades these Rwandans have competed with more established residents for control of land.

Following Kagame’s consolidation of power in Rwanda, a large invasion force of Rwandan Tutsis arrived in North and South Kivu to pursue Hutu militants and to launch a war against the three-decade-long dictatorship of Congo (then known as Zaire) by Mobutu Sese Seko, whom they claimed was giving refuge to the leaders of the genocide. With Rwandan and Ugandan support, a new regime led by Laurent Kabila was installed in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. But after Kabila ordered the Rwandan troops to leave in 1998, Kagame responded with a new and even larger invasion of the country.

Your World News Interview with Keith Harmon Snow The Politics of Genocide

Interviewed 19 October 2011 in College Park, MD, by Professor Solomon Comissiong of Your World News.

conscious being

Genocide in Rwanda is a complex event that has been reduced to few soundbites:

* 100 Days of Genocide from 6 April to 15 July 1994.
* The Hutu tribe butchered the Tutsi tribe.
* Senseless, mindless, African savagery.
* We knew (Clinton knew) and we did nothing.

Such is the established and official narrative.

The real story is far more complex. The U.S. military was involved. The U.S. proxy forces -- an English-speaking Tutsi elite who invaded from Uganda -- killed Hutus, they killed Tutsis, they facilitated the "genocide" against innocent French-speaking Tutsis, they killed Tutsi recruits who came to join them, and they committed genocide against Hutus from the first day of the invasion, 1 October 1990, and through the so-called 100 days, into the present. The killing continues. The mythology continues. The impunity continues.

Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System

David Peterson and Edward S. Herman

MonthlyReview

 

Excerpted from The Politics of Genocide(Monthly Review Press, 2009)

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

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

16 Years of U.S. Genocide in Congo

Glen Ford
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/16-years-us-genocide-congo

A growing number of voices now charge that the Obama administration, like the Bush and Clinton administrations before it, has “protected” Rwanda and Uganda in their de facto annexation of eastern Congo and its mineral riches. But the actual relationship is more like that between a Mafia Godfather and his murderous henchmen. For 16 years, Uganda and Rwanda have done the bidding of their paymasters and arms suppliers, the American and British governments. If the Nuremburg rules of international justice were in force today, the highest officials in London and Washington would face death by hanging for their monstrous crimes – and only later would Presidents Kagame of Rwanda and Museveni of Uganda take their walk with the executioner.

When Congolese women and children screamed in agony,

Hotel Rwanda Revisited: an Interview with Paul Rusesabagina

by DANIEL KOVALIK

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/11/hotel-rwanda-revisited-an-interview-with-paul-rusesabagina/

With the takeover of the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (“Congo”) last year by M23 rebels, and with Rwanda receiving a seat on the UN Security Council last year as well, I wanted to talk to Rwanda’s most famous son, Paul Rusesabagina, about Rwanda’s role in supporting the M23 militia.   Paul Rusesabagina was famously portrayed in the movie Hotel Rwanda by Don Cheadle.

My first question to Paul was about the criminal charges brought against him in 2010 by the Rwandan government for his questioning the role of Paul Kagame (now Rwandan President) and his RPF forces in the Rwandan civil war and in the Congo.   The government accused him of allegedly advocating a “double genocide” theory.  

PR:  This is what happens to any person who has really been advocating about the genocide that happened in 1994.   I was on the inside and I sensitized the whole world.  I called for help. I tried to help people during that period of time.  And afterward, I still fought for the truth to come out until I noticed that that was not what the Rwandan government wanted to do.  They wanted power — not shared — and they wanted to demonize the rest of the population so that the army appeared to be the only nice people.  For that I was not considered a nice guy.  I had no choice but to go into exile.  In exile, I was the one who spoke real loudly about the Rwanda genocide—the Rwandan genocide; not two genocides.  . . .  If we Rwandans don’t reconcile, and sit down honestly and talk, then we might see history repeating itself because the Rwandan government as of now also has been involved in many massacres.  This is what I talk about.  The Tutsi government has been involved in many massacres.  And they are still doing it.  So that’s what they have been doing in the Congo.  If you look at the situation as it has been analyzed, for example, in the Mapping Report which you may be aware of.  People analyzing that are recording a genocide. (1)

Paul Kagame: “Our Kind of Guy”

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
http://www.zcommunications.org/paul-kagame-our-kind-of-guy-by-edward-herman-1

Back in 1995, a senior Clinton administration official, commenting on Indonesian President Suharto, then on a state visit to Washington, referred to him as “our kind of guy.”[

1] He was speaking about a brutal and thieving dictator and double-genocidist (first in Indonesia itself, then East Timor), but one whose genocide in Indonesia terminated any left threat in that country, aligned Indonesia militarily as a Western ally and client state, and opened the door to foreign investment, even if with a heavy bribery charge. The first segment of the double-genocide (1965-1966) was therefore serviceable to U.S. interests and was so recognized by the political and media establishment. Indeed, following the mass murders in Indonesia proper, Robert McNamara referred to the transformation as a “dividend” paid by the U.S. military investment there,[2] and in the New York Times, James Reston called Suharto's rise a “gleam of light in Asia.”[3]

Rwanda's President Paul Kagame clearly is another “our kind of guy”: Like Suharto, Kagame is a double-genocidist, and one who ended any social democratic threat in Rwanda, firmly aligned Rwanda with the West as a U.S. client, and opened the door to foreign investment. Later, and far more lucratively, Kagame helped carve out resource-extraction and investment opportunities for his own associates and the U.S. and other Western investors in neighboring Zaire, the massive, resource-rich Central African country renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1997 during the First Congo War (ca. July 1996 - July 1998).

Rwanda: at last we know the truth

Linda Melvern
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/10/rwanda-at-last-we-know-truth
 

Few events have been the subject of as many rumours and lies as the assassination on 6 April 1994 of Rwanda's President Juvénal Habyarimana. We may never know the identity of the assassins who fired the two missiles that blew his jet apart as it came in to land at Kigali International Airport; yet this one key event signalled the targeted elimination of Rwanda's political opposition, and triggered the genocide of the Tutsi people.

Since that night there has been a ceaseless propaganda war, with each side blaming the other for what happened. One version is that the rebel Tutsi RPF assassinated the Hutu president in a cynical bid to oust his regime; another version blames Hutu extremists who, faced with the possibility of power-sharing with the Tutsi minority, carried out a coup d'etat in order to create a "pure Hutu" state.

This is why the publication of an expert investigation into the aircraft crash in Paris today will have such tremendous repercussions. After 18 years it has essentially settled the central question of who was morally responsible for triggering the genocide.