{"id":125963,"date":"2019-01-21T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2019-01-21T12:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=125963"},"modified":"2019-01-13T13:43:00","modified_gmt":"2019-01-13T13:43:00","slug":"liberte-egalite-imperialisme-vive-la-france-in-black-africa-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/01\/liberte-egalite-imperialisme-vive-la-france-in-black-africa-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Libert\u00e9, \u00c9galit\u00e9, Imp\u00e9rialisme! Vive la France in Black Africa! (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHotel Rwanda\u201d is a touchstone of interventionist ideology. Debunking that script helps show why the closure of the assassination case against Rwanda\u2019s President Paul Kagame serves Western interests.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

10 Jan 2019 – <\/em>Most Westerners believe that the Rwandan Genocide was the simple story of good and evil told in the hugely successful film \u201cHotel Rwanda,\u201d but there is barely a moment of \u201cHotel Rwanda\u201d that is not carefully constructed propaganda. The film was produced to convince the world that demon Hutus murdered a million innocent Tutsis in 100 days in 1994, that the U.S. and its NATO allies failed to intervene, and that their failure obligates them to intervene \u201cto stop genocide\u201d anywhere in the world from hereon.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s foreign policy team\u2014most prominently Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and Samantha Power, a national security advisor\u2014invoked the Rwandan genocide over and over, as did the press, to justify destroying Libya and beginning the aerial bombing war that continues in Syria today. The propaganda has also been used to justify Rwandan President Paul Kagame\u2019s invasions, occupation and resource plunder in the fabulously resource rich Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Western press and governments have portrayed him as Rwanda\u2019s savior and characterized his invasions of DRC as the defense of Rwanda against \u201cHutu genocidaires\u201d who fled into the DRC as he and his army advanced and seized power.<\/p>\n

The late Edward S. Herman and his co-author David Petersen deconstructed these lies in \u201cEnduring Lies: the Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later<\/a>.\u201d So did Robin Philpot in \u201cRwanda and the New Scramble for Africa, from Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction<\/a>;\u201d Marie-Beatrice Umutesi in \u201cSurviving the Slaughter, the Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire<\/a>;\u201d Peter Erlinder in his compendium of primary source documents \u201cThe Accidental Genocide<\/a>;\u201d and most recently Judi Rever in \u201cIn Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front<\/a>.\u201d But none of these books made bestseller lists, and none could come close to the influence of \u201cHotel Rwanda.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Kagame: Helpful U.S. ally. (Chatham House \/ CC BY 2.0)<\/p><\/div>\n

Essential elements left out of the \u201cHotel Rwanda\u201d construction include the 1990-1994 Rwandan War and massacres that concluded in the infamous hundred days. The tragedy happened over four years\u2019 time, not 100 days, and both Hutus and Tutsis were massacred, Hutus by Kagame\u2019s army.<\/p>\n

Unsolved Crime <\/strong><\/p>\n

Another missing element is the unsolved crime that triggered the final bloodletting of the final 100 days: the assassination of Rwanda and Burundi\u2019s Hutu presidents, when a surface-to-air missile downed their plane as it was approaching the airport in \u00a0Rwanda\u2019s capital Kigali on April 6, 1994. No one has ever been convicted of the crime, and there is enormous Western pressure to make sure that no one ever is. Overwhelming evidence implicates Kagame, but he is a key U.S. ally and \u201cmilitary partner\u201d in Africa, and the \u201cHotel Rwanda\u201d story is a key touchstone of Western interventionist ideology.<\/p>\n

Kagame has nevertheless been accused and his inner circle indicted in both French and Spanish courts, where French and Spanish citizens claim jurisdiction because their family members died in the plane shoot-down or the ensuing massacres, but both of those cases have been shut down.<\/p>\n

Last month, geopolitics trumped international justice again\u2014just in time for Christmas. On Dec. 21, a French court closed the long-running case against Kagame and his inner circle for assassinating Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, both of whom were Hutus.<\/p>\n

Nearly 25 years later, there are still no convictions for the assassinations that turned first Rwanda, then DRC, into a vast killing ground. Not in the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, where two investigations of Kagame were shut down, and where a judge told defense attorney Tiphaine Dickson, \u201cWe don\u2019t investigate plane crashes [or Tutsis, only Hutus].\u201d And not in the French or Spanish courts.<\/p>\n

The Subtext: Imperial Competition<\/strong><\/p>\n

The subtext of the Rwandan War and the ensuing Congo Wars was competition between the U.S.\/U.K. and France. France, which was then the dominant power in the region, had been the patron of Habyarimana\u2019s Hutu government; the U.S. and U.K. backed Kagame\u2019s invading Tutsi army, which emerged victorious in 1994, declared that English would from thereon be Rwanda\u2019s international business language, then invaded and occupied French-speaking Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) two years later.<\/p>\n

France and Rwanda have engaged in a bitter argument off and on for all these years about who was responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Their embassies have often been closed in one another\u2019s capitals, and France pulled out\u00a0<\/a>of the 20th anniversary commemoration in Kigali after Kagame once again accused France of participating in the killing.<\/p>\n

One of the recurring points of contention is Op\u00e9ration Turquoise, France\u2019s emergency relief response, which began on June 23, 1994, several weeks before Kagame, then a general, seized power in Kigali. Some French officials who were in office at the time, most notably former French Foreign Minister Alain Jupp\u00e9, have maintained that Op\u00e9ration Turquoise created a humanitarian corridor for Rwandan Hutus fleeing into Zaire, for fear of being massacred by General Kagame\u2019s advancing Tutsi army. Kagame\u2019s government has claimed that France instead provided an escape route for Hutus guilty of genocide, although the vast majority flooding into Zaire were civilians, including women, children, and the elderly. According to the 2010 UN Mapping Report<\/a> on Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993-2003, Kagame\u2019s troops followed the refugees into Zaire and massacred as many as 250,000.<\/p>\n

In \u201cDying to Live: A Rwandan Family\u2019s Five-Year Flight <\/a>Across the Congo<\/a>,\u201d Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga describes how he and his family and 300,000 more Rwandan Hutus fled Kagame\u2019s advancing army all the way through the Congolese jungle, from east to west, as many more died of hardship or were massacred by Kagame\u2019s troops along the way.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rwandan refugee camp in Zaire, 1994. (Wikimedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

The authors of the UN Mapping Report said that the massacres in Congo would most likely be ruled a genocide if a case were brought to court, but none has been and none ever will be without a major geopolitical shift in power.\u00a0In 2013, in one of his many cynical moments, former President Bill Clinton told BBC journalist Komla Dumor that he would not condemn his friend Paul Kagame for murdering the refugees because \u201cit hasn\u2019t been adjudicated.\u201d (And because it happened on his watch, with his support, as did the 1998 Rwandan and Ugandan invasions of DRC, during which Kagame and Uganda\u2019s President Yoweri Museveni became what another UN report called \u201cthe godfathers of the illegal exploitation of natural resources and the continuation of the conflict in the DRC.\u201d)<\/p>\n

France Wants Its Share<\/strong><\/p>\n

France of course wants its share, and French officials now in power have decided to close the case against Kagame in order to secure access to Congo\u2019s riches, which he significantly controls. The court\u2019s ruling came shortly after Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo became secretary-general of La Francophonie, an international organization similar to the British Commonwealth, in what was widely perceived to be another concession to smooth French-Rwandan relations and ease France\u2019s imperial access in DRC.<\/p>\n

Kayumba Nyamwasa, a former Rwandan general, chief of army staff, and chief of military intelligence, was also named as a defendant in the French indictment. Speaking to Jane Corbin in the BBC video \u201cRwanda\u2019s Untold Story<\/a>,\u201d he said that Kagame most definitely ordered his troops to shoot down the plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Jane Corbin: \u00a0<\/strong>Who do you believe was behind the shooting down of the plane?<\/em><\/p>\n

Kayumba Nyamwasa:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 Paul Kagame undoubtedly.<\/em><\/p>\n

JC:\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>Paul Kagame?<\/em><\/p>\n

KN:\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>Oh yes, oh yes.<\/em><\/p>\n

JC:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 You know that?<\/em><\/p>\n

KN:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 One hundred percent.<\/em><\/p>\n

JC:\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>Were you at meetings where it was discussed?<\/em><\/p>\n

KN:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 Well, I know. I was in a position to know, and he knows I was in a position to know. And he knows that.<\/em><\/p>\n

BBC interjection:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>General Nyamwasa has offered to cut a deal with the French judge to testify.<\/em><\/p>\n

JC:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 If you discuss these matters with the judge and it implicates you yourself, are you willing to do that?<\/em><\/p>\n

KN:\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>Obviously. If it implicated me? Why not? Because I think that truth is what matters.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The French court said they were closing the case for lack of \u201ccredible\u201d and \u201csignificant\u201d evidence despite abundant such evidence. That does not mean, however, that they acquitted Kagame, Nyamwasa, or anyone else who was in Kagame\u2019s inner circle at the time Habyarimana and Ntaryamira were assassinated. As Rwandan American legal scholar Charles Kambanda said, \u201cThis is a political decision which could well be superseded by another political decision to reopen the file when there is additional \u2018credible\u2019 and \u2018significant\u2019 evidence.\u201d In other words, France has mollified Kagame for now, but it\u2019s kept a knife behind its back.<\/p>\n

Read Part 1 Here<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She <\/em>attended Stanford University and is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. In 2014 she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize<\/em> for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at <\/em>@AnnGarrison<\/em> or <\/em>ann@kpfa.org<\/em> <\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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