A STORY OF HOW RWANDA MANUFACTURES GENOCIDE AND EXPORTS IT TO HUNT INTELLECTUAL HUTU REFUGEES IN U.S.A & U.K PART4
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 terrorismof the RPF kind.[185] ~
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 terrorismof the RPF kind.[185] ~