{"id":270766,"date":"2024-08-05T12:01:19","date_gmt":"2024-08-05T11:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=270766"},"modified":"2024-08-02T05:37:22","modified_gmt":"2024-08-02T04:37:22","slug":"the-victims-pact-rwanda-and-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/08\/the-victims-pact-rwanda-and-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"The Victims\u2019 Pact: Rwanda and Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>

Rwandan President Paul Kagame addressing AIPAC in 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Rwanda weaponizes the Rwandan Genocide to justify its violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), just as Israel weaponizes the Holocaust to justify its violence in Gaza and the West Bank. <\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

31 Jul 2024 –<\/em> Rwanda is the Israel of Africa. The two nations reinforce one another in a longstanding victims\u2019 pact, while the West reinforces both. The three commonly join forces to promote Western \u201chumanitarian interventions\u201d like those in Libya and Syria, which are in fact wars of aggression. <\/span><\/p>\n

The foundation of Israel and Rwanda\u2019s victims\u2019 pact was laid a year after then General Paul Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) won the 1990-1994 Rwandan Civil War and seized power in July 1994. Robin Philpot, in his book <\/span>Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa, from Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction <\/a> writes:\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Two specific events that often go unnoticed contributed to the official sanctioning of the use of the word \u201cgenocide\u201d to describe the entire Rwandan tragedy. The first was a [<\/span><\/em>1995<\/em> <\/a>] conference held in Kigali organized by the Office of the President of Rwanda attended by Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Michael Berenbaum of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others. Both were invited to make proposals on the memorialization of genocide. Efraim Zuroff then became an advisor to the Rwandan government in its hunt for g\u00e9nocidaires. From that point on Zionists throughout the world were prepared to share the use of the term with Rwandan Tutsis, which has never been the case for the Armenians, largely because of Israel\u2019s strategic alliance with Turkey. [This alliance is no <\/em>more<\/em> <\/a>.] The second event less than a year later was Paul Kagame\u2019s official visit to Israel where he was received with all honors from Benjamin Netanyahu. <\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Zuroff and Berenbaum helped the RPF distill what Philpot calls the \u201csimplistic and simple-minded tale\u201d or, quoting Flaubert, what became \u201cthe right and proper tale.\u201d It is the tale of demon Hutus massacring hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days time, which was later spread around the world by the 2004 Hollywood movie Hotel Rwanda<\/em>. It doesn\u2019t include the four-year war that ended in the infamous 100 days, Kagame\u2019s army\u2019s massacres of hundreds of thousands of Hutus, or the assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents that triggered the bloodbath. Kagame\u2019s former staff, including his army chief, Kayumba Nyamwasa, told the <\/span>BBC <\/a> and other outlets that Kagame ordered the assassinations but he has never been convicted in a court of law. <\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201csimplistic and simple-minded tale\u201d became the received narrative, which Kagame and the rest of <\/span>Rwanda\u2019s ruling Tutsi elite<\/a> have used to justify their violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as Israel uses the Holocaust to justify its violence in Gaza and the West Bank. <\/span><\/p>\n

For nearly three decades, Rwanda has invoked the \u201cgenocide against the Tutsi\u201d and said it\u2019s hunting Hutu “genocidaires” in DRC while in fact seizing Congolese territory and resources and displacing Congolese, possibly even with the goal of <\/span>balkanizing <\/a> DRC. Israel invokes the Holocaust and uses \u201cdestroying Hamas\u201d as an excuse to make Gaza unlivable and ethnically cleanse it of Palestinians. <\/span><\/p>\n

Israel points to Rwanda to reinforce its \u201cNever again!\u201d mantra, and Rwanda does the same in turn. However, the more complex Rwandan narrative does not lend itself to equation of the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2012, Rwanda was one of three of 54 African member states that abstained on <\/span>UN General Assembly Resolution 67\/19 <\/a>, which upgraded Palestine to non-member observer state status in the United Nations General Assembly.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

In 2014, Rwanda was one of two African nations then sitting on the UN Security Council that <\/span>abstained <\/a> on a vote to call for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem and recognize a Palestinian state by 2017.\u00a0 (The resolution needed a minimum of nine votes and got only 8, but the US would have vetoed it in any case.) <\/span><\/p>\n

In 2017, Kagame became the <\/span>first African leader <\/a> to address the American\u2013Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual forum.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2019, Israel opened its <\/span>first embassy <\/a>\u00a0 in Rwanda, which Netanyahu described as \u201cpart of the expansion of Israel\u2019s presence in Africa.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The false equation<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

In the decades following the 1995 conference with Rwanda\u2019s Zionist advisors, the Rwandan government relentlessly accused even the mildest dissenters of \u201cgenocide denial,\u201d which, with Zionist help, it likened to Holocaust denial. The government made genocide denial a crime in Rwanda and packed its prisons with alleged perpetrators. <\/span><\/p>\n

It also secured the West\u2019s unflagging support for arrests, prosecutions and deportations of Hutu refugees, especially <\/span>dissenting refugees<\/a> like Dr. L\u00e9opold Munyakazi<\/a>, who gave a lecture <\/a> at the University of Delaware in which he characterized the Rwandan Civil War as a class conflict. Witnesses suddenly come forth to testify against refugees like Dr. Munyakazi decades after their alleged genocide crimes. <\/span><\/p>\n

In 2011, I attended the \u201c<\/span>Third International Genocide Conference <\/a>\u201d at Sacramento State University, where I filed an assault complaint against the Rwandan contingent who surrounded and grabbed hold of me after I dared to ask a few questions and cite a list of UN reports countering their narrative. <\/span><\/p>\n

In November 2012, a UK Parliamentary committee published my <\/span>account of that incident <\/a> when they were reconsidering aid to Rwanda because of its M23 <\/a> militia\u2019s war and atrocities in Congo. The June 2012 Addendum to the 2012 UN Group of Experts on DRC Report, which can be accessed here <\/a>, had concluded that Rwanda \u201cdirectly assisted\u201d in the creation of M23, recruited Rwandan youth to join M23, provided weapons and ammunition to M23, allowed M23 to move in and out of Rwandan territory, and sent Rwandan troops into DRC to reinforce M23. <\/span><\/p>\n

The UK suspended some aid to Rwanda that year, as did the EU, the US, and other European countries, but only briefly. <\/span><\/p>\n

The received narrative about the Rwandan Genocide was also reinforced by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), which was generously <\/span>funded <\/a> and largely controlled by the US, the undisputed global hegemon upon its founding in November 1994. The court assumed it prima facie, then prosecuted only Hutus from its creation in 1994 to its dissolution in 2015, then in the residual legal mechanism created thereafter. At least one Chief Prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, attempted to investigate Kagame\u2019s army for war crimes, but she was summarily fired <\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is not to say that there was no Tutsi genocide. However, there is abundant evidence that there was also a <\/span>Hutu genocide <\/a>. The RPF killed hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutus before, during, and after the final 100 days of the Rwandan Civil War, as documented by Canadian author Judi Rever <\/a> in her book \u201cIn Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front <\/a>,\u201d and her extensively documented Mail & Guardian expos\u00e9 <\/a> written with Benedict Moran. <\/span><\/p>\n

Kagame and his ruling elite so rely on the world\u2019s acceptance of the \u201cgenocide against the Tutsi\u201d narrative that they threatened not only Rever but even her two grammar school age daughters as she was working to finish the book. On a research trip to Belgium, secret service operatives appeared to warn her that Rwandan operatives were in the country to assassinate her and that they would be at her side for the remainder of her trip. She finally developed a stress-induced auto-immune disease, but finished the book nevertheless.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

US Support for the \u201cGenocide against the Tutsi\u201d narrative<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

The US backed the Tutsi army that prevailed in the four-year Rwandan Civil War. Shortly after its victory, President Bill Clinton\u2019s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake made it clear that the US was prepared to embrace its \u201cgenocide against the Tutsi\u201d narrative even before it was further crafted, with Zionist help, at the 1995 Kigali conference. <\/span><\/p>\n

During a July 29, 1994 <\/span>press conference <\/a> about new US military operations in Rwanda, Lake was asked whether Tutsis and Hutus would both welcome US troops arriving to secure the Kigali Airport, and he responded, \u201cMy understanding is that the RPF, who are, as I said, in control of Kigali and who were the apparent victors in the conflict, have said that they would welcome this. The rump Hutu government we are not in touch with and in my view we should not be because, as we have said before, many of them were responsible for genocidal acts in Rwanda and we do not consider them to be in a position of authority in Rwanda and indeed, in a physical sense, they are not now.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Two years later, in 1996, Rwanda invaded Congo, which was then Zaire, pursuing Hutu refugees, then joined a coalition of forces that drove out Mobuto Sese Seko, the dictator that the US and Belgium had installed after assassinating Congo\u2019s first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Newsweek described the conclusion of that campaign in a report titled <\/span>Washington\u2019s Africa Move <\/a>, which said that the US had used Rwandan and coalition proxy forces to establish its primacy in Congo, which was then Zaire, and Central Africa.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stopping \u201cthe next Rwanda\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

The West also, in supreme irony, made Israel and Rwanda <\/span>cornerstones <\/a> of its Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine even as Israel committed ever escalating atrocities in Gaza and Rwanda did the same in DRC.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the run-up to the 2011 US\/NATO wars on Libya and Syria, the corporate press was filled with exhortations to \u201cstop the next Rwanda.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

While the war on Libya was underway, Obama produced his <\/span>Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities <\/a>, which read, \u201cSixty six years since the Holocaust and 17 years after Rwanda, the United States still lacks a comprehensive policy framework and a corresponding interagency mechanism for preventing and responding to mass atrocities and genocide.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In November 2011, just over a month after the assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Susan Rice flew first to Libya, then to Rwanda. There, in a <\/span>speech <\/a> at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, she likened the danger that Qaddafi would have committed genocide to the danger that Rwanda had faced 17 years earlier, when the world failed to intervene. \u201cMany of us heard strong echoes of 1994 when Muammar Qaddafi promised he would root out the people of Benghazi and go house to house killing innocents like \u2018rats\u2019 as he called them.<\/span><\/p>\n

In May this year Rwanda and Germany presented a <\/span>resolution <\/a> to the UN General Assembly to create an international day of remembrance for the Srebrenica Genocide, helping shore up another cornerstone of the West\u2019s Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Though no one, including Serbia, disputes that a mass atrocity was committed at Srebrenica, many dispute <\/a> its characterization as genocide. The resolution passed with 84 in favor, 19 against, 68 abstaining, and 22 not present. Some voted no because they disagree with the genocide characterization of Srebrenica and\/or because the ongoing genocide in Gaza is unacknowledged. DRC\u2019s ambassador voted no because Rwanda had submitted the resolution while, he said, committing genocide in DRC.<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\"\"<\/a> Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/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>ann@anngarrison.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

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

31 Jul 2024 – Rwanda (Kagame) weaponizes the Rwandan Genocide to justify its violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, just as Israel (Netanyahu) weaponizes the Holocaust to justify its violence in Gaza and the West Bank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":110030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[237,101,100,865,1988,88,767,2388,1412,99],"class_list":["post-270766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-africa","tag-cultural-violence","tag-direct-violence","tag-genocide","tag-holocaust","tag-israel","tag-middle-east","tag-paul-kagame","tag-rwanda","tag-structural-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270766","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=270766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270769,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270766\/revisions\/270769"}],"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=270766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}