{"id":180245,"date":"2021-03-01T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2021-03-01T12:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=180245"},"modified":"2021-03-01T07:21:12","modified_gmt":"2021-03-01T07:21:12","slug":"rusesabaginas-show-trial-and-shooting-deaths-of-a-rwandan-dissident-and-an-italian-ambassador","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/03\/rusesabaginas-show-trial-and-shooting-deaths-of-a-rwandan-dissident-and-an-italian-ambassador\/","title":{"rendered":"Rusesabagina\u2019s Show Trial and Shooting Deaths of a Rwandan Dissident and an Italian Ambassador"},"content":{"rendered":"

24 Feb 2021 –\u00a0 Is there any limit to how far the West will go to cover for Rwandan President Paul Kagame\u2019s Crimes?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Paul Rusesabagina under arrest after his rendition to Rwanda<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWith every war, kidnapping, and murder on foreign soil, Kagame\u2019s critics ask if he\u2019s finally gone too far, while the US is still Rwanda\u2019s top bilateral donor.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Paul Rusesabagina, the Rwandan whose heroic story is told in the Hollywood Movie “Hotel Rwanda,” went on\u00a0trial <\/a>\u00a0for terrorism last week in Rwanda. Then, on Sunday, February 21, a prominent member of Rwanda\u2019s dissident diaspora was murdered in Capetown, South Africa. The next day, Italy\u2019s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was murdered while traveling to observe the World Food Program\u2019s work at a school in Rutshuru Territory, on DRC\u2019s Rwandan border. All three events warrant attention in the US, given US implication as the top bilateral donor to the government of Rwandan Pesident Paul Kagame, a longstanding US military partner and proxy in the region.<\/p>\n

Rusesabagina\u2019s trial<\/strong><\/p>\n

Paul Rusesabagina is probably the most famous Rwandan in the country\u2019s diaspora, due to his portrayal by Don Cheadle in the Hollywood film \u201cHotel Rwanda,\u201d which tells the story of how, as manager of the H\u00f4tel des Mille Collines, he sheltered more than 1000 Rwandan Tutsis from harm at the hands of genocidal militias during the final days of the 1990-1994 Rwandan Civil War. Rusesabagina is himself an ethnic Hutu married to an ethnic Tutsi who has advocated for ethnic reconciliation and democracy in Rwanda and against the totalitarian regime led by Kagame.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last year Rusesabagina boarded a plane in Dubai, which he believed was bound for Burundi, a country neighboring Rwanda and sharing Rwanda\u2019s ethnic composition. He soon found himself instead in handcuffs in Rwanda, where he was charged with terrorism, along with 20 co-defendants identified as members of a rebel militia. This week he appeared in court with his Rwandan lawyer Gatera Gashabana, who has also represented opposition leader Victoire Ingabire in Rwandan courts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to insist on the fact that Rusesabagina is in Rwanda illegally,\u201d Gashabana said. \u201cHe did not come as a result of an extradition. He didn\u2019t even come of his own free will. He found himself in Rwanda against his will.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0New York Times<\/em> <\/a>,\u00a0Guardian<\/em> <\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0CNN <\/a>,\u00a0Voice of America <\/a>,\u00a0NPR <\/a>, and the\u00a0BBC <\/a>\u00a0have all published sympathetic reports of Rusesabagina\u2019s case. A bipartisan coalition of\u00a0<\/strong>30 US Senators and Representatives wrote a\u00a0letter <\/a>\u00a0urging President Kagame to release him\u00a0<\/strong>and accusing Kagame of violating US deportation and extradition law by snatching him. Kitty Kurth of the Hotel Rwanda\/Rusesabagina Foundation said, \u201cWe drafted the letter, and the offices crafted and added and massaged until it was language that everyone could agree on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThirty US Senators and Representatives wrote a letter urging President Kagame to release Rusesabagina.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Does this mean that Rwandan President Paul Kagame is tumbling from Western grace in any real way? For nearly two decades after the outset of the 1990-1994\u00a0Rwandan Civil War <\/a>, General, then President Kagame was a darling of Western media and officialdom, credited with stopping genocide, then guiding the country\u2019s rise from its ashes. All that began to change in 2010, when\u00a0Victoire Ingabire <\/a>,\u00a0Bernard Ntaganda <\/a>, and\u00a0Frank Habineza <\/a>\u00a0all attempted to\u00a0run <\/a>\u00a0for president against Kagame but weren\u2019t even able to register their opposition parties. By the end of that year Victoire Ingabire and Bernard Ntaganda\u00a0were both in prison and Frank Habineza had fled to Europe after the vice president of his party was found\u00a0dead <\/a>\u00a0with his head cut off. Rwandan journalist Jean-L\u00e9onard\u00a0Rugambage <\/a>\u00a0and even Jwani\u00a0Mwaikusa <\/a>, a renowned International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda defense\u00a0attorney <\/a>\u00a0and Tanzanian law professor, were shot dead. Rwandan operatives attempted to assassinate former Rwandan GENERAL Kayumba\u00a0Nyamwasa <\/a>\u00a0in Johannesburg\u2014\u201cright in the middle of the\u00a0World Cup <\/a>\u201d in the words of former Rwandan Intelligence Chief Patrick Karegeya, who was also living in exile in Johannesburg. Four years later, on New Year\u2019s Day,\u00a0Karegeya <\/a>\u00a0himself was found dead by strangulation in a Johannesburg hotel.<\/p>\n

In their most recent sympathetic reports of Rusesabagina, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, CNN, Guardian, and Voice of America all reported President Kagame\u2019s history of assassinations, attempted assassinations, and threats to Rwandans in diaspora.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0wrote, \u201cNow, Rwanda is also known as an authoritarian state where Mr. Kagame exerts total control, his troops are accused of plunder and massacres in neighboring Congo, and political rivals are imprisoned, subjected to sham trials or die in mysterious circumstances at home and abroad.\u201d \u201cAccused\u201d is putting it mildly, given that \u201cthe plunder and massacres in neighboring Congo\u201d have been evidenced in reports produced by the\u00a0UN Group of Experts on DRC <\/a>\u00a0for more than 20 years, and by the\u00a0UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of Congo <\/a>.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0implied that it would not have been unreasonable for Paul Rusesabagina to have given up on political solutions in Rwanda. Who wouldn\u2019t? It even acknowledged that \u201cA quarter century on, the genocide still casts a long shadow inside Rwanda, where the truth about how it unfolded is bitterly contested.\u201d\u00a0Part of the \u201cbitterly contested\u201d truth includes abundant evidence that Kagame\u2019s forces massacred Hutu people during and after the final hundred days of the Rwandan Civil War that came to be known as the Rwandan Genocide. At no point in its article on Rusesabagina did the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0identify the genocide as \u201cthe genocide against the Tutsi,\u201d the description that Kagame has managed to legally codify not only in Rwanda but also in Belgium.<\/p>\n

They did report, \u201cIn 2014 Kizito Mihigo, a popular gospel singer, was accused of treason over a song that drew attention to the death of all Rwandans, including moderate Hutus, since 1994 \u2014 challenging an official narrative of a \u2018Tutsi genocide.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2020, after four years in prison, Mihigo attempted to escape from Rwanda into Burundi, but Rwandan police apprehended him at the border, then reported that he had\u00a0hung<\/a>\u00a0himself in a cell.<\/p>\n

Kagame\u2019s most powerful and longstanding defenders, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Tony Blair, and the Clintons have all remained silent, speaking out neither for Paul Rusesabagina nor for Kagame\u2019s case against him.<\/p>\n

The shooting death of Seif Bamporiki<\/strong><\/p>\n

On Sunday morning, February 21,\u00a0unofficial reports\u00a0that Rwandan agents had killed Seif Bamporiki, a Rwandan dissident living in exile in South Africa, began appearing on social media. The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and South African outlets\u00a0confirmed <\/a>\u00a0the story the next day. Kagame supporters scoffed that Bamporiki was killed in Capetown, a notoriously dangerous neighborhood, and South African police thus far say that they are operating on the assumption that he was killed during a robbery.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t, however, discount the possibility of political motivation, saying only that they haven\u2019t seen any evidence of that yet. Bamporiki\u2019s Rwandan allies say the murder had all the\u00a0markings <\/a>\u00a0of an assassination ordered by President Kagame. And the fact that former Rwandan intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya was found strangled in Johannesburg and former Rwandan General Kayumba Nyamwasa survived three assassination attempts on South African soil was enough to inspire the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0headline \u201cRwanda Opposition Figure Is Killed in South Africa <\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The shooting death of Italian Ambassador\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

On February 22, Luca Attanasio, Italy’s ambassador to the DRC since 2017, was shot dead along with an Italian soldier and a Congolese driver while traveling on a road just outside Goma, along DRC\u2019s Rwandan border. They were on their way to visit a World Food Program distribution site at a school in Rutshuru Territory. The Congolese Interior Ministry immediately released a\u00a0statement <\/a>, without evidence and before an investigation could have been done, blaming it on the\u00a0Forces d\u00e9mocratiques de lib\u00e9ration du Rwanda <\/a>(FDLR), but the FDLR immediately released a\u00a0statement <\/a>\u00a0in which they denied responsibility, as reported by the\u00a0Associated Press <\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018The FDLR declares that there is nothing to implicate it in the attack that resulted in the death of the Italian ambassador and asks that Congolese authorities and MONUSCO to do all they can to shed light on those responsible for this ignoble assassination,\u2019\u201d rebel spokesman Cure Ngoma said in a statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rebel group noted the attack took place in the ‘three antennas’ area near Goma and the border of Rwanda and close to Congolese and Rwandan military positions. It blamed the killings on those forces.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the FDLR, murdering a European ambassador and his entourage would have been as stupid as dropping chemical weapons on its own people would have been for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.\u00a0<\/strong>What more could one do to inspire the rage and retribution of the West? The allegation against Assad has been thoroughly\u00a0discredited <\/a>,\u00a0and this allegation against the FDLR should be studied with equal skepticism and scrutiny.<\/p>\n

ICTR defense attorney Christopher Black, who won the groundbreaking acquittal and release of General Augustin\u00a0Ndindili <\/a>yi <\/a>mana <\/a>\u00a0in 2014, responded, \u201cYes, the rush to blame the FDLR makes me think this hit was done by Kagame or [Congolese President] Kabila to justify calling for international help to crush the FDLR. The FDLR would never do something that stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n

For many years Rwanda has counted on the world believing that the FDLR are subhuman Hutu killers who committed genocide against the Tutsi and can’t be expected to behave rationally, much as those who fabricated Assad\u2019s chemical weapons attacks have counted on the world to believe the same about him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe FDLR would never do something that stupid.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rwanda has occupied this territory since 2009 when the CNDP, a Rwandan trained, armed, and commanded militia, was \u201cintegrated into the Congolese army\u201d in a de facto concession of territory. In 2012-2013, these troops broke away from the Congolese army and rampaged through the North Kivu Provinces, massacring civilians as they went, complaining that they had not been given all they\u2019d been promised on March 23, 2009, and therefore calling themselves the\u00a0M23 <\/a>\u00a0militia.<\/p>\n

The great and beloved Congolese Colonel\u00a0Mamadou Mustafa\u00a0Ndala\u00a0 <\/a>reportedly led Congolese forces to victory in the M23 war, driving the militia back into Rwanda and Uganda, but then, strangely, the international community required the victors to negotiate with the losers in a showy, much ballyhooed process in Uganda.<\/p>\n

So far as I have ever been able to tell, I\u2019m still the only reporter who studied the ensuing document and reported that the \u201cDeclaration\u2019 would contract DRC to concede to M23 <\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m still open-mouthed remembering, and I\u2019m not saying it took a genius to figure this out, even from a great distance. All I did was follow the \u201cnegotiations\u201d and read a PDF of the document they produced, the \u201cFinal Communique of the Kampala Dialogue <\/a>,\u201d which promised all members of M23 release, amnesty, and \u201cthe implementation of the conclusions of the review of the implementation of the M23 agreement of March 23, 2009.\u201d\u00a0There was no consequence whatsoever for President Paul Kagame, even though the final report of the UN experts investigation submitted in January 2014 demonstrated that M23 was trained and equipped by Rwanda, and directly commanded by the Rwandan Defense Minister, and that elements of M23 were also reporting to top Ugandan officials.<\/p>\n

In my 12\/11\/2013 report, I quoted Paul Rusesabagina, whom I\u2019d spoken to for Pacifica\u2019s KPFA Radio:<\/p>\n

\u201cUganda has been accused many times by the international community, including the United Nations and the Congolese government, as one of the perpetrators, with Rwanda, supporting M23.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, Uganda positions itself as, now, a mediator. How can one, in history, be a perpetrator and a mediator at the same time? Can one be a perpetrator and a judge? It can\u2019t be. So, you can see, this is why all that is taking place in Uganda, in Kampala today is just a kind of facade.\u201d<\/p>\n

Congo\u2019s hero, Colonel Mamadou Ndala, died in an ambush during the first week of January 2014, which was blamed on the phantom\u2014many say fake\u2014Islamist militia, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).<\/p>\n

Is it finally time for a change?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Can we expect anything different in response to the latest rash of violence in Johannesburg and DRC territory occupied by Rwanda? Or in response to the hijacking of Paul Rusesabagina? With every war, kidnapping, and murder on foreign soil, Kagame\u2019s critics ask if he\u2019s finally gone too far, while the US is still Rwanda\u2019s top bilateral donor, with the UK not far behind. Multiple strategic and military alliances deploy Rwandan troops in service to US\u2014or putatively UN\u2014interests in Africa.<\/p>\n

Renowned British journalist Ian Birrell\u00a0wrote <\/a>\u00a0this week that \u201cthe show trial of the hero of Hotel Rwanda must be a wake-up call to the West,\u201d and indeed it should, but the West has had so many “wake-up calls” for the 27 years since Kagame seized power in Rwanda that it\u2019s hard to imagine that this will be the last.<\/p>\n

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

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She 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 @AnnGarrison<\/em>, ann@kpfa.org,<\/em><\/a> ann@anngarrison.com.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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

24 Feb 2021 – Is there any limit to how far the West will go to cover for Rwandan President Paul Kagame\u2019s Crimes? \u201cWith every war, kidnapping, and murder on foreign soil, Kagame\u2019s critics ask if he\u2019s finally gone too far, while the US is still Rwanda\u2019s top bilateral donor.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":110030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[237,867,2388,2397,1412,70],"class_list":["post-180245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-africa","tag-anglo-america","tag-paul-kagame","tag-paul-rusesabagina","tag-rwanda","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}