Rwanda: President Paul Kagame Nominated for the Time 100 Magazine
Sunny Ntayombya and Agencies
Kigali — His Excellency, President Paul Kagame, has been nominated for the TIME Magazine '100 Most Influential Person of the Year'.
Nominated by Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, a past nominee himself, President Kagame, was lauded for having "helped put an end to the 1994 genocide and is now trying to lure investors to the region, drafting Tony Blair to serve as a business adviser", as put by TIME.
Ranked 24th- the highest ranked African- President Kagame outpolled global luminaries such as Russian Premier Vladimir Putin (35th), Morgan Tsvangarai (32nd), Oprah Winfrey (98th), Australian PM Kevin Rudd (114th), UK's Gordon Brown (132nd), recently elected South African President Jacob Zuma (180th) and, even more surprisingly, US President Barack Obama, who was ranked 37th.
What is the TIME Magazine 100 most influential people in the world list?
The Time 100 is an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, as assembled by TIME. Developed as a result of a debate among several academics, the list has developed into an annual event.
The list was started with a debate at a symposium at Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center on February 1, 1998 with panel participants CBS news anchor Dan Rather, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, former New York governor Mario Cuomo, then-political science professor Condoleezza Rice, neoconservative publisher Irving Kristol and Time managing editor Walter Isaacson.
Those recognized fall in one of five categories: Leaders & Revolutionaries, Builders & Titans, Artists & Entertainers, Scientists & Thinkers, and Heroes & Icons. Within each category, the 20 most influential people (sometimes pairs or small groups) are selected, for a grand total of 100 each year.
Selection criteria
In 2004 Time's editors "identified three rather distinct qualities", when choosing the Time 100 explained TIME's Editor-at-Large Michael Elliott:
First, there were those who came to their status by means of a very public possession of power; President George W. Bush is the pre-eminent example. Others, though they are rarely heard from in public, nonetheless have a real influence on the great events of our time.
Think of Ali Husaini Sistani, the Grand Ayatullah of Iraq's Shi'ites, who in effect has a veto on plans to transfer power from those who occupy his country to its people...Still others affect our lives through their moral example.
Consider Nelson Mandela's forgiveness of his captors and his willingness to walk away from the South African presidency after a single term.
In the 2007 Time 100 list managing editor Richard Strengel explained that the Time 100 was not a list of the hottest, most popular or most powerful people, but rather the most influential, stating:
Influence is hard to measure, and what we look for is people whose ideas, whose example, whose talent, whose discoveries transform the world we live in. Influence is less about the hard power of force than the soft power of ideas and example.
Yes there are Presidents and dictators who can change the world through fiat, but we're more interested in innovators like Monty Jones, the Sierra Leone scientist who has developed a strain of rice that can save African agriculture.
Or heroes like the great chessmaster Garry Kasparov, who is leading the lonely fight for greater democracy in Russia. Or Academy Award winning actor George Clooney who has leveraged his celebrity to bring attention to the tragedy in Darfur.
Controversies
The fact that the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair was excluded from the 2004 list caused mild controversy. Time magazine editor-at-large Michael Elliott defended the decision to consistently exclude Blair:
Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac are not there either. This is a worldwide list. There are no Western European political leaders on it because they are not that powerful or influential at this time.
Although George W. Bush has appeared on the list several times, controversy emerged when he was dropped from the list in 2007 in part because of the Democratic victory in the 2006 congressional election. Former Senator Rick Santorum (R) of Fox News said:
"The fact of the matter is, the president of the United States, I don't care who's in that office, is the most powerful man on the face of the Earth and has more influence over various aspects of lives, not just in this country, but around the world. And for Time magazine to dismiss that just shows you how biased and, I would argue, hateful they are".
"Any U.S. president has a certain built-in influence," explained Adi Ignatius, deputy managing editor at Time, who oversaw the list. "Bush had actually squandered some of that built-in influence. His position on Iraq has cost him support in his own party To a certain point, he sort of reached a lame-duck status,"
The list has generated controversy over who was included in other years as well. In 2005 conservative commentator Ann Coulter was listed causing Salon.com to observe:
When Time magazine named Ann Coulter among its 100 "most influential people" last week, alongside such heavyweights as Ariel Sharon, Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Kim Jong Il and the Dalai Lama the choice produced guffaws online.
Plugging the issue on Fox News last week, Time executive editor Priscilla Painton insisted it was Coulter's use of "humor" that made her so influential, stopping just short of suggesting that Coulter is the conservative Jon Stewart.
But even Fox's Bill O'Reilly wasn't buying it. He pressed Painton: "Do you think people, Americans, listen to Ann Coulter? Do you think she has influence in public opinion?"
While Time magazine defended Coulter on the grounds that she is a best-selling author whose controversial commentary has impacted the discourse of the world's most powerful nation, she was not considered influential enough to make a repeat appearance on the list.
Dr. Rick Warren's recommendation of President Paul Kagame
President Paul Kagame, 51, of Rwanda , is the face of emerging African leadership. His reconciliation strategy, management model, empowerment of women in leadership, and insistence on self-reliance, are transforming a failed state into one with a bright future.
Rwanda 's rapid improvements have impressed the rest of the continent and Kagame's influence is exponentially greater than the size that his small country might warrant.
Paul Kagame is one of few leaders who has successfully modeled the transition from soldier to statesman. During the atrocities of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, the world watched in horror, but did nothing. Kagame, with no outside help, was solely responsible for ending the slaughter that murdered over a million citizens in 100 days.
When his best friend was killed, Kagame was forced to assume the leadership of the Rwandan exiles that ended the killing spree. He was hailed as liberator by his countrymen, but wisely refused the presidency at that point.
"What we needed most was unity", he said, "and I had not been elected,"
After the genocide, the nation was in shambles. Kagame and other began the slow process of rebuilding. But the process moved into hyper drive when he was elected president in 2000.
He launched a series of reforms and reconciliation strategies that have caught the attention of investors worldwide.
He has since taken the small but densely populated African country from division and devastation to unity and stability, fostering a social and economic recovery unimaginable 15 years ago. Even his critics respect his accomplishments.
He has since taken the small but densely populated African country from division and devastation to unity and stability, fostering a social and economic recovery unimaginable 15 years ago. Even his critics respect his accomplishments.
When Stephen Kinzer was writing a biography of Kagame, the president gave him a list of his critics and suggested that Kinzer could discover what the president was really like by interviewing them. Only a humble, yet confident, leader would do that.
Another uncommon characteristic is Kagame's zero tolerance for corruption. Rwanda is one of few countries where I've never been asked for a bribe. Anytime a government worker is caught in corruption, he is publicly exposed and dealt with. It is a model for the entire country - and the rest of the world too.
Some of the highest ranked TIME 100 Nominees
1. Anwar Ibrahim (ranked 2nd) born 10 August 1947 is a Malaysian politician who served as Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister from 1993 to 1998. Early in his career, he became a protégé of the Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, but subsequently emerged as the most prominent critic of Mahathir's administration.
In 1999, he was sentenced to six years in prison for corruption, and in 2000, to another nine years for sodomy. On 26 August 2008, Anwar won the Permatang Pauh by-election with a majority of 15,671, returning to Parliament as leader of the Malaysian opposition. He currently faces new sodomy charges in the Malaysian courts.
2. Rick Warren (ranked 3rd), born 1954 in San Jose, California, is an American evangelical minister and author. He is the founder and senior pastor of Saddleback Church.
He is also a bestselling author of many Christian books, including his guide to church ministry and evangelism, The Purpose Driven Church, which has spawned a series of conferences on Christian ministry and evangelism. He is perhaps best known for the subsequent devotional, The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold over 30 million copies, making Warren a New York Times bestselling author.
3. Baitullah Mehsud ( ranked 4th) born in 1974, he is a leading tribal militia leader in Waziristan, Pakistan and the leader of the Taliban umbrella group, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, formed in December 2007. He is widely believed to be responsible for the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
For the The 2009 TIME 100 Complete list, click
here.
Related Materials:
The US Sponsored "Rwanda Genocide" and its Aftermath: Psychological Warfare, Embedded Reporters and the Hunting of Refugees
By Keith Harmon Snow
Global Research,
April 12, 2008
Author's Website:
http://www.allthingspass.com/
An investigation has uncovered an asylum system scandal where bogus Rwandan “refugees” infiltrate the U.S. and U.K. and work as undercover agents to hunt down critics of the Rwandan dictatorship and legitimate refugees and drag them back to Rwanda. This is yet the latest revelation on how the dictatorship in Rwˇˇanda manufactures and exports terrorism using an ideology of genocide and how the West supports terrorism by backing its Rwanda proxy. Meanwhile, business in Rwanda is booming and the criminal networks of the Kagame military machine continue to plunder the blood-drenched Congo.
In October 1990, the Ugandan army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) led by Major General Paul Kagame invaded Rwanda.[1] This action set in motion a course of history that determined the fate of millions of innocent people in Central Africa.
By July 1994, the RPF completed its coup d’etat and consolidated its power in Rwanda. The government of Paul Kagame has since then maintained political power and manipulated public sympathy by promoting a highly politicized ideology of genocide.[2]
After more than 18 years of systematic disinformation about Rwanda there exists a collective ignorance about what really happened in Rwanda and who is responsible. The so-called “Rwanda Genocide” is one of the most widely misunderstood events in contemporary history, and not because the evidence is lacking or because the truth is obscured by butchery.
According to the official story, extremist Hutus in the government and military committed an orchestrated and pre-planned genocide against the Tutsi minority from April 6 to about July 16, 1994. In this mythology, some 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsi were butchered with hoes, axes, and machetes, over the now infamous “100 days of genocide.”
Anyone who challenges the official story is branded a ‘genocide negationist’ or ‘genocide revisionist’ by the Kagame regime, and they are castigated as ‘killers of remembrance.’[3]
“Within Rwanda, legislation prevents anyone from questioning the official historical record. Although the constitution already forbids denial of the 1994 killings, the Rwandan government has stepped up moves to combat ‘genocide ideology’. […] A new law is in the making, aimed at criminalizing all ideas that might provoke ethnic division. Under the law, children below the age of 12 will be sent to a rehabilitation centre for a year if found guilty.”[4]
The real story seems to be that the RPF were the killers to a far greater extent, the majority of the victims were Hutus, and the numbers of dead during those 100 days were far less. The final insult to truth comes in the upside-down assertion that the RPF “stopped the genocide by winning the war.” Also, the RPF typically killed everyone in its path: Major General Paul Kagame did not trust any Tutsis who stayed in Rwanda after pogroms that created the Tutsi exile community prior to the Habyarimana government (1973-1994) and Tutsis were also targeted by the RPF.
Even those experts on “genocide in Rwanda” who do not contest the official story will attest to the myriad complexities that surround accusations and counter accusations about victims and perpetrators in post-1994 Rwanda.[5] Under the new power structure there were strong motivations to accuse the stigmatized Hutus of crimes that were never committed.
On April 6, 1994, the governments of Rwanda and Burundi were decapitated when the plane carrying the two presidents and top military staff was shot down over Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. The well-planned assassinations of Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira sparked a massive escalation of warfare that is falsely portrayed as the result of meaningless tribal savagery.
On February 6, 2008, a Spanish court delivered international arrest warrants against forty of the top military officials in the Rwandan regime. President Paul Kagame was investigated but not indicted but only because heads of state have immunity. The arrest warrants charge the RPF officials with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1990 and 2002.[6]
The Spanish indictments join the November 17, 2006 indictments issued by French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, who concluded that the RPF, under the direct orders of Paul Kagame, carried out the surface-to air-missile attacks on the airplane carrying the two presidents.[7]
Now, an investigation has uncovered a scandal where fake Rwandan asylum seekers infiltrate the United States (U.S.) and United Kingdom (U.K.) and work undercover to hunt down critics and survivors of the Rwandan dictatorship and bring them back to Rwanda. This scandal revolves around networks of informers and agents and it encapsulates all the machinations of the growing industry around “genocide in Rwanda”.
Prejudged by Western human rights organizations, journalists, and mass media, the Rwanda government’s critics and survivors forced to flee for their lives are falsely accused and publicly branded as genocide perpetrators. Shunned as humanity’s lowest criminals, arrested and imprisoned without trial for months or years, legitimate refugees are framed, extradited and neutralized by a government whose top officials have international arrest warrants against them.
Journalists, human rights defenders, businessmen, and ordinary citizens both inside and outside Rwanda are persecuted and neutralized if they deviate from the falsified “victim” and “survivor” ideology used as a political weapon by the military dictatorship of Paul Kagame and his vast network of propagandists, state agents, and foreign backers.
Innocent Rwandan asylum seekers live under perpetual fear of being hunted down, branded as genocide perpetrators, ostracized, and persecuted by the Kagame regime.[8] As examples to follow will show, host governments generally capitulate without investigation or resistance and support the Kagame regime’s requests for arrest and extradition.
Using international legal instruments and institutions, like the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), Western governments—the U.S., Belgium, Canada and Britain in particular—actively assist the Kagame regime in hunting refugees and critics, because all four governments backed the Rwanda Patriotic Front’s guerrilla war, 1990-1994, and the years of terrorism that have followed, 1994-2008.
REFUGEES FRAMED BY THE BBC
Early one morning in the fall of 2006, a Rwandan national who gained U.K. citizenship after a six year asylum process was confronted on the street as he exited the offices of the London-based charity where he worked.
Waiting for Dr. Vincent Bajinya outside on Pott Street in the brisk early morning London air was Fergal Keane, a prominent British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalist known for his extensive reportage in Rwanda during the 1994 cataclysm; Keane has maintained a permanent focus on “the Rwanda genocide” since then and has won many awards for his Rwanda reportage.
Without any appointment or prior warning, Fergal Keane shoved a television camera in Dr. Bajinya’s face and began interrogating him about his alleged role as a “Mastermind” of the Rwandan Genocide.[9]
The “Mastermind” accusation has been leveled against refugees in Canada, Belgium and the U.S. as well.[10]
“An investigation by BBC News has revealed that a man—wanted for genocide in Rwanda—is living and working in Britain,” began Fergal Keane’s BBC report of November 6, 2006. “Vincent Bajinya has been working as a doctor and has served on a refugee task force for the government.” [11]
“He’s not a voluntary worker,” Keane continues in a short commentary with racist insinuations, as if former refugees who have been granted British citizenship do not deserve to earn an honest wage. “He’s actually paid to the job.”
To whip up the outrage of BBC news consumers, the final insult to truth and freedom—and to the honest, hard-working British consumer who looks to the BBC for impartial reporting—comes when Fergal Keane “exposes” the fact that “much of that money comes from the British taxpayer.” [12]
Following the BBC reports by Fergal Keane, Dr. Vincent Bajinya was arrested in December 2006 and has spent fifteen months in detention. Dr. Bajinya’s rights were doubly trampled upon by a government that had already granted him citizenship.
Dr. Vincent Bajinya is considered a “Category One Offender” by Rwandan prosecutors. However, the “Category One Offender” status seems to be reserved for the most educated and astute critics of the Kagame regime; in other words, the intellectuals.
“He is just an intellectual Hutu who managed to have a British citizenship and a good employment,” says Rosalie Brown, Vincent Bajinya’s wife of 19 years. “Every person who is not RPF or who does not share the same opinion with the RPF is the enemy. They did not have to do anything wrong. No way. He has the right to be RPF or not. This detention has been like torture for him, an innocent man. My children and I, we suffer a lot for no good reason. The U.K. government should not have arrested [my husband] before it completed an investigation, but it arrested him just because the Rwanda government said to.”[13]
The U.S. and U.K. are both signatory to the 1951 United Nations High Commission for Refugees Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.[14] Under this convention a refugee is assured the same rights to due process and legal protections as any citizen, and the host government has a legal obligation to protect refugee’s rights. Certainly, the 1951 Convention forbids anyone from hunting and persecuting any asylum seeker in collaboration with the government that the refugees are fleeing.
Within days of Fergal Keane’s first report, the entire Western media was abuzz with stories about Dr. Vincent Bajinya. The articles combined the story of Dr. Vincent Bajinya with the story of three other Rwandan refugees “hiding” in the U.K., and the media framed all four refugees as “Most Wanted” criminals and the “Masterminds” of the Rwanda genocide of 1994. “Rwanda is seeking extradition of four suspected masterminds of the country's 1994 genocide,” Reuters reported on November 7, 2006, “including a medical doctor, who are living and working in Britain, the Justice Minister told Reuters on Tuesday.”[15]
“All these fugitives are living a comfortable life in the United Kingdom but are surely key planners of the 1994 genocide,” Reuters quoted Tharcisse Karugarama, Rwanda’s Justice Minister. “The dilemma we have is that most of these fugitives have changed their identities, which makes it difficult for us to track them.”[16]
“For the fear of being tracked down and wrongly judged in Rwanda or Arusha [ICTR] one of the three mayors had changed his name and applied for asylum as a former teacher, the other one applied for asylum as a Burundian citizen,” says Patrick Mahoro, a Rwandan Hutu and former U.K. asylum seeker who now has citizenship and lives in Coventry, England.[17] “This was not because what they might have done but because of the fear of being arrested and accused of genocide as it has happened to many others. This was their explanation in the court hearing last year [2007].”[18]
“Dr. Bajinya has never hidden himself,” Mahoro continues. “He became a concern to Kigali when he became a member of a task force advising the U.K. government on re-qualification of refugee health professionals. Privately he is known to have strong views about the RPF, and by becoming a member of that particular task force it was thought he might get close to U.K. officials who do not know the truth about the RPF. He also comes from the same village as [former President Juvenal] Habyarimana.”[19]
According to Rosalie Brown, she and Dr. Vincent Bajinya began fleeing the violence in Rwanda on April 8, 1994. They fled their home in the Rugenge District of Kigali for Gisenyi, where they stayed with extended family until they were forced to flee in July 1994 for fear of persecution by the Kagame regime. Like so many others they flew from the cauldron into the fire: Zaire.[20]
For two years they lived in the Mugunga refugee camp near Goma, Zaire, and they fled in August 1996, just before the Hutu refugee camps were attacked in contravention of international law.[21]
The RPF, the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) and the Alliance of Democratic Forces for Congo-Zaire (AFDL-CZ) invaded Zaire in September of 1996 and began massacring Hutu refugees by the tens of thousands. The invasion was backed by the Pentagon through bases in Uganda and Rwanda and U.S. administrators downplayed the killing of Hutu refugees.[22] The International Rescue Committee (IRC) reportedly set up at bases nearby and shelled the refugee camps.[23] The genocidal campaign against Hutus swung into high gear as the RPF and UPDF—backed by the Pentagon—chased hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees from Goma to Kinshasa—into Zaire’s forests and swamps where they hunted them down and killed them and destroyed the evidence.[24]
In August 1996, Dr. Vincent Bajinya and his wife Rosalie fled with their two children to Kenya where Dr. Bajinya was employed at the Jomo Kenyatta Hospital; Rosalie Brown went on to London with their two kids (1998) until Dr. Bajinya was able to join them (2000). Meanwhile, unreported by Fergal Keane and the BBC, are the numerous “refugee” and “asylum” cases of Rwandan nationals who have infiltrated the U.K. and U.S. by working the very same asylum system and benefiting from hundreds of thousands of pounds (and dollars) of taxpayer subsidies.
Amongst the many asylum seekers who arrived in London and claimed to be fleeing the repression in Rwanda are Tony Kavutse, Ignatius Mugabo, Linda Bihire, Vivenie Mugunga and Moses Kaganda, all of whom used the asylum process to eventually gain citizenship in the U.K. Most of these are former RPF soldiers, RDF soldiers or military intelligence agents who today continue to work for the Kagame regime.
Tony Kavutse, Moses Kaganda and Vivenie Mugunga are all currently employed at the embassies of the government they claimed to be fleeing: Rwanda. Each used the asylum process to get free housing, medical assistance, psychological counseling, and higher education at elite colleges in England. And there are other “asylum seekers” claiming persecution by the Rwanda Government whose insider roles as intelligence agents and secretive businessmen make a horrible joke out of the U.K. asylum system.
THE GENOCIDAIRE BRAND
In October of 2006, Dr. Vincent Bajinya was working for Praxis, a U.K. non-government organization (NGO) that assists refugees in transition, and for Refugee Nurses Task Force, a 24-member task-force set up by the U.K. government to link refugee nurses with U.K. employers.
“Fergal Keane was waiting for Dr. Bajinya in front of the entrance door of his work,” says Rosalie Brown. “He was just in the street very early in the morning without any contact or warning if I can say! Shock and surprise you know? My husband had never meet Fergal Keane before and now he [Keane] was accusing him of genocide in Rwanda!” [25]
It was not Fergal Keane’s first visit to the Praxis offices, however, and within a week of the auspicious early morning encounter the BBC aired a major story convicting Dr. Vincent Bajinya a priori of genocide and setting the stage for his public ostracism and imminent arrest by U.K. officials.
The BBC documentary reveals that Fergal Keane (or someone whose voice sounds identical) previously visited Dr. Bajinya’s offices at Praxis and covertly filmed him using a hidden camera. Keane begins the four-minute BBC docudrama “undercover” and he confides in viewers that the initial filming was done in “secret”—the admission of secrecy sensationalizes the report and frames the story so that it will appear that Dr. Vincent Bajinya is a “wanted” criminal on the run. The rising chorus of media reports soon declared that Dr. Bajinya changed his name to avoid being detected as a “genocidaire” hiding in London.[26]
“I was with [my husband] in the war,” says Rosalie Brown, “everywhere, all the time, he did not do anything. We fled like everyone else, suffered like every Rwandan, we lost many lovers, family members and friends. We went through the asylum process once we got to the U.K. and onour Rwandan names. This Fergal Keane story is all made up.” [27]
According to numerous sources, Dr. Vincent Bajinya was completely open about his refugee status during the entire process of gaining U.K. citizenship and changed his name after citizenship was granted and for practicality purposes relating to the dictates of work, and marriage, and living in the U.K.
“Why does the Rwanda government suddenly want my husband now in 2007 [sic] after 13 years of war in Rwanda?” says Rosalie Brown. “We all had different names and for our children’s future as they grow up in this country [U.K.] why can we not all have the same name Brown once the law in this country gives us the full rights to do so?” [28]
“Excuse me sir, do you work here?” the voice behind the hidden camera asks Dr. Vincent Bajinya as the short clip opens. Fergal Keane misrepresents the BBC from the start, a telling indication of the misrepresentations to come. He knows that Dr. Bajinya works at the Praxis clinic and he is not interested in the clinic. “Do you know…is the clinic open today? There’s a clinic here…a couple days a week?”[29]
Fergal Keane discredits his reportage further as the film unfolds because he frames the reportage in such a way that Dr. Vincent Bajinya is accused, tried, and convicted in a four minute documentary. But the BBC reports about Dr. Vincent Bajinya are full of inconsistencies and the various reports raise important questions that should be put to Fergal Keane and his producer, Andrew Head.
Using the low-quality images of Dr. Bajinya snatched in secret during the initial visit, Keane traveled to Rwanda to find witnesses who would testify that Dr. Vincent Bajinya was indeed a genocide perpetrator. In Dr. Bajinya’s home village, so we are told, Keane finds his witness.
“Far from London we’ve uncovered evidence tying Dr. Bajinya to horrific crimes,” Fergal Keane announces. The video begins its Rwanda segment showing dark skies over the land of a thousand hills, but quickly jumps to gruesome images of bodies lying along the road.[30] These are the images of gruesome death from 1994 that are recycled over and over in a pornography of African violence that is used to foster the ignorance that has infected the collective consciousness.
“And today in this neighborhood where Dr. Bajinya lived, survivors recall a fanatic who searched for Tutsis at roadblocks,” Fergal Keane continues. “They claim Tutsi civilians, even a three-month old baby, were amongst those killed by militia men he directed.”
Like the fake asylum seekers used by Fergal Keane as sources to frame Dr. Bajinya and pressure Praxis, whom we will soon meet, it seems that his chosen “genocide survivors” also have a lot in common with RPF intelligence agents.
PLANTED SPIES AND AGENTS
In the BBC documentary of November 6, 2006, titled “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” we are introduced to a Rwandan man Keane calls only “Dieudonne”—a “genocide survivor” whom we are told lives in Dr. Bajinya’s former community. The BBC video flashes the man’s name, but the tiny banner is blurry and unreadable.
“Dieudonne is one of several eyewitnesses who told us Bajinya instructed the militia to kill,” says Fergal Keane. “From our photographs Dieudonne identified Dr. Bajinya as the man he saw giving orders for murder.”
The “eyewitness” Dieudonne tells the story of Dr. Bajinya’s supposed crimes in the Kinyarwanda language, while Fergal Keane translates for English viewers. “Bajinya told them, ‘Look, this is not how you kill a man, you're just playing with him. He might survive if you just leave him the way he is.’ So they killed him off. It is an image of Bajinya that stays in my mind.”
However, in the BBC press release of the following day, titled “British Charity Employs Doctor Accused of Crimes Against Humanity,” the article cites a man named Janvier Mabuye to say exactly the same thing that Fergal Keane claims the eyewitness Dieudonne is saying in the film.
“Janvier Mabuye says he heard Dr Bajinya ordering the killers to finish off a taxi driver who had already been attacked with machetes. Janvier says: ‘Bajinya told them look this is not how you kill a person, you’re just playing with him. He might survive if you just leave him the way he is. At that point he called a young man and another neighbor and they came and killed him off. That is one of the images that always lasts each time I remember the genocide. It’s one of the images of Bajinya that remains in my mind.’” [31]
The BBC has produced two reports where two different eyewitnesses have made exactly the same accusations, word-for-word, verbatim, against Dr. Vincent Bajinya.
More importantly, the eyewitness Janvier Mabuye, who the BBC uses for their print stories and longer video documentary about Dr. Vincent Bajinya, is identified by Rwandan refugees as an RPF intelligence agent who has worked in the Rwandan Embassies in Uganda, Nairobi and Brussels.
On March 29, 2002 Janvier Mabuye was nominated 2nd Secretary at the Rwandan Embassy in Kampala, Uganda; later in 2002 he worked as 1rst Secretary at the Rwandan Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.[32] In October 2003, Janvier Mabuye was based in Brussels as 2nd Secretary and Cultural Attaché, a post he held until at least 2005.[33]
In December 2004, Mabuye issued a communiqué from the Rwanda Embassy in Brussels to the Rwandan community informing them how, with the support of the Rwandan Embassy in Brussels, they can acquire investment properties in Rwanda.[34]
Fergal Keane and the BBC have outdone themselves by producing exactly the same accusations by two independent witnesses and by producing a “genocide survivor” who is actually a Rwandan intelligence agent.[35]
“Janvier Mabuye is not from Dr. Bajinya’s neighborhood and he is not a genocide survivor,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “Like many other young Tutsis he left Rwanda after the October 1990 invasion to join the RPF in Uganda.”
From the BBC video we see that Dr. Bajinya is not an expert English speaker. Keane’s method of confrontation forces the entire life and history of another human being—who has lived a reality few of us can fathom—into Keane’s framework of assumptions and biases about what happened in Rwanda and who is responsible and it leaves no room for Dr. Vincent Bajinya or his unique identity to exist.
Who is the more credible witness to events in Rwanda? Dr. Vincent Bajinya, a Rwandan who grew up in Rwanda, a man who knew the place and the people, and who finally fled with his family in 1996 after years of terror? Or Fergal Keane, a white reporter from England who arrived in Rwanda for the first time in May 1994 and worked with the assistance of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and their intelligence and information warfare departments?
Keane closes his attack with a ten-second media sound bite about genocide that entirely destroys the context of Dr. Vincent Bajinya’s worldview and the history of trauma and devastation he has both witnessed and survived. Dr. Bajinya responds to the arrogance of Fergal Keane with terse summary statements in poor English, and does this standing up for his rights as a British citizen and a human being.
“The doctor says both sides were massacred in Rwanda and refuses to accept Tutsis were victims of genocide,” Keane states as he approaches Dr. Vincent Bajinya on Pott street.[36]
“You believe there was no genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda?” Keane asks Dr. Vincent Bajinya. In Keane’s tone and manner there is the self-righteous assumption of a higher moral purpose.[37] “I believe that, yes,” says Dr. Vincent Bajinya.[38]
“Because the international community believes there was a genocide.” Keane is now speaking for the nebulous “international community,” obviously pleased with himself for having elicited the response that can be used to figuratively hang Dr. Vincent Bajinya as a genocide negationist.
“Yeah, it’s my belief,” Dr. Bajinya says. Not interested in Fergal Keane’s crusade. “The international community can believe other things. It is my right to believe in what I believe.”[39]
THE BOGUS ASYLUM OF TONY KAVUTSE
According to legitimate Rwandan refugees in the U.K. the man primarily responsible for orchestrating the branding, arrest, detention and persecution of Dr. Vincent Bajinya is a fake Rwandan asylum seeker who claimed to have fled Rwanda under fear of persecution. The man who tracked down Dr. Vincent Bajinya today works at the Rwandan Embassy in London under the name Tony Kavutse. He was assisted by several other fake asylum seekers also working as Rwandan agents or agents-provocateurs in London.
Legitimate Rwandan refugees in London report that Tony Kavutse is a long-time RPF and RDF soldier and intelligence agent. Kavutse was reportedly born in Uganda. Rwandan refugees in London claim that the Rwandan Embassy staff is 100% Ugandan citizens. Some of them reportedlyfought with President-for-Life Yoweri Museveni, an ethnic Hima (a tribe related to the Tutsis), and the National Resistance Army (NRA) during the Ugandan guerrilla wars in the 1980’s and later joined the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF). Many Ugandan citizens hold powerful positions in the Rwanda Government today because they joined the RPA/NRA war machine in its conquest of Rwanda. “The conquering RPF were mainly the English-speaking Ugandans.”[40]
Legitimate asylum seekers claim that Tony Kavutse continues to work as an RPF intelligence agent for the Rwanda government and that he tracks down any critics or legitimate victims of terrorism that have fled Rwanda.[41]
Documents obtained by this correspondent show that Tony Kavutse filed for formal protection status under U.K. law and obtained significant resources through the assistance of numerous U.K. charities and quasi-government or government agencies.
In a document dated July 13, 2002, the U.K. Home Office, Immigration and Nationality Directorate, refused asylum status for Tony Kavutse, but, “because of the particular circumstances of [his] case”, granted him informal asylum status in the category “Exceptional Leave to Remain.” [42] According to the Kavutse documents, officials were convinced Kavutse would be in danger if the U.K. returned him to Rwanda.
Kavutse gained assistance through the Medical Foundation in London, an NGO that works with asylum-seeking victims of torture. Medical Foundation trustees include John Le Carre, the accomplished novelist who has taken a serious interest in the events in central Africa.[43]
The Medical Foundation peddles the standard story about genocide in Rwanda, but also appears to address, at least to some extent, the terrorism of the post-1994 Kagame regime.
Documents dated July 29, 2002, confirm that Kavutse was a “priority need” client of the Medical Foundation “receiving ongoing treatment” for his claims of torture. Kavutse arrived in January 2002 and medical treatment began then. Documents also establish that Kavutse received financial and insurance benefits from the state.[44]
The Medical Foundation’s Dr. Hamra Yucel apparently assessed Kavutse’s status based on his testimony. “Mr. Kavutse has been subjected to torture,” she opined, “including severe beatings, and, most importantly, witnessed his father being shot in December 2001.”[45]
According to Rwandan sources in London who know of the particulars of the case, Tony Kavutse’s claims of being tortured by the current government are fabricated (there was no apparent physical evidence of torture). While Dr. Hamra Yucel’s clinical assessments fit the classic psychological profile of a torture survivor, Rwandan sources claim that RPF-allied asylum seekers are coached on how expertly to work the system and gain asylum status by feigning all the proper symptoms of torture.
When asked how it is possible that an asylum seeker claiming to have been tortured by the Rwandan Government could then end up in their diplomatic corps, Michelle Alexander from the Medical Foundation responded that, “the Medical Foundation is not at liberty to disclose details of any individual’s case and cannot confirm whether the person you refer to is a client of the Medical Foundation.” [46]
Tony Kavutse received lodging assistance through the support of the community council of the London Borough of Waltham Forrest.[47] In August 2004, Kavutse received full state educational support and attended the University of London’s elite Birbeck School of Management and Organizational Psychology.[48] All of Kavutse’s accommodations and tuition for approximately five years were paid for in full by a combination of these non-governmental supporting agencies and the U.K. Government.
Today Tony Kavutse lives in London and is working as a secretary on the diplomatic staff at the Rwandan Embassy.[49] Kavutse did not respond to questions.
Tony Kavutse is also a relative of another top RPF cadre: his mother is the sister of Dr. Zac Nsenga, an RPF agent who became the Rwandan Ambassador to the United States.
Zac Nsenga’s wife has been living in the U.K., where she reportedly gained refugee status under false asylum claims under an alias.[50] Rwandan refugees in London claim that she travels regularly to Rwanda and Uganda. However, in late March or early April 2008, Madamu Nsenga traveled to Rwanda for a visit and Zac Nsenga reportedly took her refugee asylum documents from her due to a quarrel. Now Madamu Nsenga is caught in the limbo of not being able to return to the U.K., lacking her U.K.-Rwanda asylum papers, and she is trying to go to Uganda to solve the problem, since she is officially not allowed to go to Rwanda—the country she was seeking refuge from.[51]
“Dr. Zac Nsenga was the Rwandan ambassador in Washington,” says Professor Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, former director of the Rwandan Information Office (ORINFOR). “Before the victory of the RPF, he was in charge of hygiene at a camp set up by the RPF in Gabiro, Rwanda, where the corpses of Hutus killed by the RPF were burnt. Nsenga was in charge of that camp. In other words, he oversaw the suppression of evidence regarding the massacres committed by the RPF. In RPF circles the camp is known as the CDR camp. The CDR was the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic, a political party regarded by the RPF and its supporters as the party of Hutu extremists. So RPF soldiers referred to the camp as CDR camp because all the Hutus who were taken to that camp for execution or the bodies of the Hutus taken to that camp for burning were globally considered as Hutu extremists who espoused the CDR worldview. ”[52]
“The three primitive one-story barrack blocks, one with its roof being repaired, are basic shelters for the [RPF] men at the Gabiro army camp,” wrote British journalist Nick Gordon. “It all looks devastatingly innocent: a complex that may be an affront to the classic rolling African skyline, but no more than that. There are no tell-tale chimneys, no railway lines leading into the restricted area. Indeed, as I munch my bread and wait for the photographer to snatch his picture, it is hard to believe that this dot on the map is an extermination camp. What goes on inside Gabiro [camp] is truly revolting, and it is not an isolated example. All over the country since the new government took control, Hutus have been killed in the thousands.”[53]
A Tutsi born in Rwanda, Dr. Zac Nsenga earned a medical degree at Makerere University Medical School in Uganda and a degree in human medicine at the University of Westminster, with an MA in diplomatic studies and a certificate in strategic studies. He practiced medicine both in Uganda and Lesotho before becoming a Major in the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) in December 1990. Later he served as Secretary General in the Ministry of Internal Security (overseeing National Police and Prison Services). Nsenga was also Ambassador to Israel (1995-1996) and the U.K. (1998-2001). As the Rwandan Ambassador in the U.S., Zac Nsenga worked with Paul Kagame and former U.S. President Bill Clinton to oversee and delineate the Clinton Foundation’s AIDS activities in Rwanda.[54]
Rwandan refugees in the U.S. claim that Major Zac Nsenga has played an active role in hunting down critics and legitimate refugees and having them arrested as fugitives from justice and, of course, branded as genocidaires.
“It is easy to come to the United States and hide,” said Zac Nsenga, the Rwandan ambassador to the United States, quoted in a Chicago Tribune article about a Rwandan named Jean-Marie Vianney Mudahinyuka (arrested in Chicago) and other supposed genocidaires hiding in the U.S. “Americans don’t know that amidst them are people who did very bad things.”[55]
Nsenga—and the Rwandan Embassy in the U.S.—collaborates with the specially formed Human Rights Violators and Public Safety Unit (HRVPSU) of the office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, formed in 2003, to track down foreigners, take them to court, jail and then deport them for even the slightest infractions of immigration laws.[56]
Nsenga’s role in the U.S. is to spread the official genocide story, hunt down Rwandan critics, sell the establishment narrative on HIV/AIDS involving big pharmaceutical companies, further the business interests of Rwanda, and suppress any political dissent about the Kagame regime.[57]
Nsenga is known to be very close to former Ambassador Andrew Young, the Kagame regime’s number one public relations agent whose PR consulting firm Goodworks International whitewashes the regime and its major corporate allies and partners.[58] GWI is also tight with the Africa-America Institute, a CIA backed think tank involved in information warfare and subversive activities all over Africa.[59] Andrew Young has built a mansion on Rwanda’s Lake Muhazi.[60]
Zac Nsenga “is a strong endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network (GIN).”[61] The Genocide Intervention Network is at the forefront of promoting the official line on genocide in Rwanda as a pivotal tool in the new hegemonic human rights discourse.[62] Other GIN endorsers include some of the highest profile official Rwandan genocide storytellers: General Romeo Dallaire, Samantha Power and Gerald Kaplan.
“[Nsenga] was in Ruhengeri killing people also,” says Jean-Christophe Nizeyimana. “As a promotion, he was given the post of Ambassador to Washington D.C.”[63]
PRESSURING THE U.K. ASYLUM SYSTEM
The BBC’s November 7, 2006, report about Dr. Vincent Bajinya appears to target the charity Praxis for having supported Dr. Bajinya using U.K. taxpayers’ money. By targeting Praxis the BBC set the stage for greater restrictions and controls surrounding the asylum process in England, a process that has since come under strict reform on asylum issues.
The articles about Bajinya and other refugees appeared in the fall of 2006 and by January 2007 the U.K. had issued new formal guidelines about refugees and formal policy had been drastically reformed to meet new U.K. immigration standards. Interestingly, the British asylum and immigration system relies heavily on private security companies noted for rather specious “security” missions.[64]
The BBC article quoted Reverend Vaughan Jones, the director of Praxis, but the comment by Vaughan Jones suggests that Praxis was the victim of circumstances, not Dr. Vincent Bajinya.
“The director of Praxis, Reverend Vaughan Jones, said if the allegations were true it would represent a betrayal of his organization's trust,” reported Fergal Keane.[65]
“I had no suspicions and when I saw the allegations I was very shocked,” Reverend Vaughan Jones stated in a subsequent BBC report of November 7, 2006. “If they are true then I would feel betrayed, because we work with people who have come from difficult situations and need proper support. We are aware that there are all kinds of allegations and counter allegations in the community and sorting out the victim from the perpetrator is extremely hard.” [66]
When contacted by email at Praxis, Reverend Vaughan Jones replied that “Dr Bajinya was immediately suspended as a result of the allegations. He is no longer our employee.”[67]
In a follow-up query, Reverend Vaughan Jones replied: “Praxis has never attempted to form a judgment in relation to guilt or innocence that is the responsibility of others and beyond our competency. We are very aware of the complexity of the issues. As an organization which works with vulnerable people we have a duty of care primarily to them and it would not have been responsible to allow someone to work in the organization with such serious allegations having been made. We have always said that this matter should be resolved through the due process of law.”[68]
However, Praxis fired Dr. Vincent Bajinya based on the campaign spawned by the BBC reports of Fergal Keane. It was enough for Reverend Vaughan Jones that Fergal Keane and the BBC said that Dr. Vincent Bajinya was “accused” of genocide for them to immediately go on the defensive to protect their own good name. This is how the genocide label is used as a brand and a weapon against anyone who deviates from the Rwandan government’s policies or falls out of favor with the elite criminal networks in power.
“How does Praxis protect vulnerable people?” notes U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro, who also benefited from the assistance of Praxis. “And how is it possible that Tony Kavutse, an asylum seeker and “refugee” who claimed to have been tortured by the current government of Rwanda could end up working for the government he was seeking asylum from?”
Mahoro notes that Praxis has been utilizing the volunteer services of another false asylum seeker who is also working at the Rwandan Embassy. This individual is flagged by the Rwandan asylum community as another informant and RPF agent.
“As soon as these reports came out by the BBC, true Rwandan asylum seekers stay away from Praxis for fear that they will be identified and accused of genocide,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “There is a woman Rose Ngabire, a Tutsi who was working at Praxis in Dr. Bajinya’s department, who we know is a Rwanda government informant.”
Rose Ngabire was a volunteer on work placement at Praxis at the same time as Dr. Vincent Bajinya. Ngabire left Praxis and is now the full-time receptionist at the Rwandan Embassy in London.
Ngabire is another Ugandan-Rwandan dual citizen who is accused by legitimate Rwandan refugees of acting as a spy to identify and help separate the legitimate refugees from the fake refugee-agents and insure that the legitimate refugees are sent back to Rwanda and the fake refugees are processed through the asylum system for the benefit of the regime in Kigali.
Fergal Keane’s BBC reports do not identify the RPF agent Rose Ngabire and Keane’s reportage is further discredited with the awareness that one of the “expert” voices chosen by Fergal Keane to buttress the fabricated story about Dr. Bajinya is another fake RPF asylum seeker named Vivenie Niragira Mugunga.
Vivenie Mugunga arrived in the U.K. as an asylum seeker over six years ago and has already gained U.K. citizenship. Mugunga claimed to be a survivor of the Rwanda genocide and gained refugee status by fleeing from the Kagame regime. However, both of her claims are reportedly false. Mugunga was reportedly not in Rwanda during or after 1994. Instead, she came from Burundi, where she was born and raised. After she earned higher education degrees at universities in South England, Mugunga became an agent of the Kagame regime and she promotes Rwanda investments and organizes government-affiliated events.
Fergal Keane has also used Vivenie Mugunga to pull on the heart strings of his BBC viewers and gain sympathy—channeled into outrage to help convict and hang Dr. Vincent Bajinya in the court of public opinion. In one long film clip about the Dr. Vincent Bajinya story, Fergal Keane has Vivenie Mugunga, who is portrayed as a Rwandan genocide survivor, crying that the organization Praxis has extremists on their staff—meaning Dr. Bajinya—and they discriminated against her when she sought services there. Turning truth upside-down as usual, Keane and Mugunga say nothing about the other bogus refugee agents—like the Tutsi agent Rose Ngabire—working at Praxis.
An honest investigation of Dr. Vincent Bajinya’s case would examine Fergal Keane’s role in traveling to Rwanda and producing genocide charges by using the BBC as a political weapon in an obvious collaboration with the selective political agenda of the Kagame government.
According to one U.K. intelligence insider, U.K. news corporations routinely run disinformation planted by U.K. intelligence assets from MI-6. “For example, the Guardian and very occasionally the London Sunday-Times have been seen to have reporters who are assets of the U.K. intelligence services. Incidentally this may also apply to Andrew Gilligan of the BBC…”[69]
It may also apply to the BBC’s Fergal Keane.
Keane traveled to Rwanda where “evidence” of the crimes of Bajinya was scraped up and delivered to the news consuming Western public in manipulative and highly structured BBC productions.
“This Bajinya [frame-up] was 100% set-up by Kigali and Fergal Keane,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “The spies at the Rwanda Embassy in London informed Keane that they want Dr. Vincent and they arranged for Keane to go to Rwanda to interview ‘witnesses’ and come back here to accuse Dr. Bajinya, who all this time did not know anything was happening.” [70]
“Using BBC South East [England] where Vivenie Mugunga was living,” says Patrick Mahoro, “Fergal Keane convinced his producer Andrew Head to fund his investigation into the allegations and accusations by a south east England resident—the fake asylum seeker Vivenie Mugunga—about an U.K. organization—Praxis—harboring genocidaires and extremists—Dr. Vincent Bajinya.”[71]
“After that Fergal Keane went to Praxis with the hidden camera. Then he traveled to Rwanda funded by the BBC. Of course he had contact with Kigali because he was set up by the Rwandan Embassy here and he met with officials in Kigali. In his ‘investigation’ in Rwanda he shows that he found out that Dr. Bajinya has been issued an arrest warrant. Keane speaks to the prosecutor in Kigali who shows him the file submitted by Kigali to the U.K. And then Keane gets an RPF agent—Janvier Mabuye—to be his eyewitness and claim on the video that Dr. Bajinya committed genocide. And then finally he goes back to London and accuses Dr. Bajinya.” [72]
At the end of the day, the BBC makes money by producing a sensationalist TV show where Fergal Keane is supposed to represent everything that is good and Dr. Vincent Bajinya everything that is evil. So it’s the good versus evil story distilled out of the Hutus versus Tutsis mythology about Rwanda.
Curiously indicative of some insider trading and deeper political agenda is the fact that reforms in the asylum process in the U.K. occurred soon after the arrest of Dr. Vincent Bajinya and the other three “Masterminds” of genocide. According to U.K. Home Office documents outlining asylum seeker protocol, prior to granting asylum of Rwandan refugees, U.K. officials are now required to refer to special “lists” provided by the Kagame regime.
On the one hand the documents obtained in the Tony Kavutse case clearly validate the claims of legitimate refugees by formally documenting what the U.K., U.S., and most Western governments deny: That torture and killings do occur in Rwanda and that they are committed by agents of the current government.
On the other hand the documents also clearly establish that RPF-allied false asylum seekers may be claiming to have been tortured in Rwanda to manipulate the system and gain the advantages now being taken away from legitimate asylum seekers.
The U.K. and U.S. governments claim Rwanda is “safe”. Under this classification the U.K. Government has advanced certain refugee and asylum protocols which simultaneously institutionalize infiltration by RPF agents, on one hand, and the persecution of legitimate refugees on the other. The asylum situation in the United States is much the same.
According to the British Home Office of Immigration and Nationality Department statistics, the numbers of Rwandan asylum seekers arriving in Britain have skyrocketed under the Kagame regime, especially since 1999. From 1994 to 1997, Britain received approximately 100 asylum seekers annually. But the numbers increased with increasing repression in Rwanda. In 1999 there were approximately 300; in 1999 and 2000 there were some 800; with 550, 700 and 275 in 2001, 2002 and 2003.[73]
Harsh conditions in detention centers and human rights violations against asylum seekers in the U.K. mirror those in the United States. Anne Owers, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, has released a series of damning reports on the UK’s detention estate.[74]
In Britain and the U.S. tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children are jailed for long periods without charges in contravention of the 1951 UNHCR Refugee Convention.[75] While none of these people is detained for committing a criminal offense, they are held in prison-like conditions to facilitate government policies of rounding up asylum-seekers in order to deter them from seeking refuge in Britain or the U.S.
There is literally a war on refugees.
In one assessment, the Medical Foundation in 2004 determined that aggressive force effectively constituting torture had been used against individuals during attempts to remove them from the U.K.[76] There have been many cases of suicides and mass hunger strikes by asylum seekers in the U.K.[77]
The Kagame regime is meanwhile ushering bogus “asylum” seekers off to London armed with all the false documentation necessary to gain a positive asylum status and, eventually, citizenship. The regime’s goal is to infiltrate Western countries with more and more Rwandans who have benefited from the current political climate and who do not challenge the inverted victim versus killer ideology or the criminal enterprises and networks of the elites involved.
RWANDA’S GENOCIDE LISTS
According to legitimate Rwandan refugees in London, the Rwandan refugee community is perpetually under surveillance and effectively under attack by fake asylum seekers working as agents; these agents send the names of legitimate refugees to the ever-updated “genocide lists” that Kigali provides to the U.K. Home Office and other governments, and they meanwhile help to build bogus “legal” cases against the legitimate refugees, as happened with Dr. Vincent Bajinya.
The U.K. government regularly arrests asylum seekers (of all nationalities) and holds them in detention pending review of their cases for a “pass” or “fail” of the asylum granting process, but most are almost automatically slated for return to their country of origin. British policies are particularly egregious in the cases of countries where Britain is more actively involved in the ongoing warfare, especially Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan (Darfur), or where it has a deep military and intelligence relationship, especially Congo, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.
While their cases await resolution, asylum claimants are banned from working. Once their cases have been failed, they face total destitution, with no right to work, no benefits, no accommodation, no proper access to health services, and the constant fear of removal. This is on top of the psychological trauma, and in some cases physical injury, that continues to trouble them as a result of their experiences.
In the case of Rwanda, selected asylum seekers are further stigmatized and dehumanized by being branded as genocidaires—a label applied to describe Hutu “extremists” and highly targeted individuals in well-organized frame-ups—in cases like Dr. Vincent Bajinya’s, where the frame-up involved Rwandan intelligence agents and the BBC.
According to Rwandan asylum seekers the Kigali government routinely manipulates the asylum system to get students and intelligence agents into the U.K. asylum system to gain U.K. citizenship at no financial cost for the short- and long-term benefit of the Kigali regime.
In 2007, around 200 Rwandan students arrived in the U.K. as asylum seekers and around 150 of these became stateless after falsely claiming to be Rwandan asylum seekers; about 50 of these were official Rwandan students possessing documents provided by the Rwanda government who had been given educational scholarships from the U.K. government.
After Kigali sends false asylum claimants to the U.K., their asylum claim is either passed or failed like any other refugee. Once the asylum claim has been successful and refugee status granted, these false claimants can access student loans and housing and medical support. To improve the chances of a “passed” asylum claim Kigali sets up fake asylum seekers with fake documents to strengthen their cases: e.g., arrest warrants, prison release documents, and medical reports about being tortured.
Next, Rwandan agents in the U.K.—like Mary Blewitt Kayitesi and Tony Kavutse—assist the false asylum seekers to access U.K. refugee assistance agencies like the Medical Foundation, Praxis, or Survivor’s Fund (SURF). Some enhance their status by claiming to be genocide survivors.
Some asylum claimants “pass” relatively easily, but for those asylum seekers who are “failed” by the U.K. government—which is eager to reject all refugees to meet its goals of low immigration—the Rwandan Embassy is contacted to determine the status of the asylum seeker and the Embassy denies that these clandestine government supported “refugees” are from Rwanda at all. In some cases the U.K. deports the false claimants back to Kigali, even forcibly, where the Rwandan immigration officials again—checking their lists of supported but fake asylum seekers—refuses that the asylum seekers originated from Rwanda. In both cases the fake asylum seekers, disowned by Rwanda, gain a stateless refugee status which under the 1951 UNHCR protections insures that the U.K. cannot deport them (since they are unable to identify their state or origin).
When the U.K. government detains legitimate refugees—obviously not supported by Kigali but rather hunted by them—the Rwandan Embassy is again contacted while they are still in London, or the refugee is deported directly back to Kigali. In either of these cases involving actual refugees, the Kagame regime validates to the U.K. government that these are legitimate refugees, because Kigali is happy to have critics of the regime and other legitimate refugees fleeing state persecution delivered back into their hands.
One legitimate refugee “failed” by the U.K. immigration system and forcibly returned to Rwanda was Rene Murabukira, a Rwandan refugee who fled after his family was killed in 1996.[78]
Rene Murabukira started a new life in Edinburgh and after 11 years in the U.K. he was a charity worker with the Edinburgh-based Action Group helping physically and mentally disabled adults when the U.K. immigration agents tracked him down and arrested him at work.
When Murabukira arrived in the U.K. in 1996, he was only 17 years old. He was given temporary leave to remain in the U.K. as well as a work permit, and told his case for permanent asylum was under consideration. He built a life in Edinburgh and was engaged to be married to Aneta Jarzmik, a U.K. citizen.
Murabukira’s case was deferred for eleven years, until Rwanda was declared “safe.” But in April 2007, U.K. immigration officials swooped in packed Murabukira off to a detention centre. He was scheduled for extradition in May 2007—readied to be shipped back to Rwanda—but legal intervention won him a temporary stay in the U.K. on the day of the planned flight.
Murabukira claimed that Tutsi rebels killed his parents, sister and cousins, at his home in 1996. He has been unable to work or claim benefits and has relied on friends to survive the past year of asylum limbo.[79]
Rwandans in London believe there have been about 65 cases of legitimate asylum seekers deported back to Rwanda since 2000.[80]
Of course there are also those fake refugees who betray Kigali once they have achieved their mission and gained asylum status abroad. It is well known that
“There are certainly some Tutsis who are genuine refugees,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro. “But there is also a deliberate policy on the part of the RPF regime to export [exfiltrate] Tutsis to the U.S., Canada, Belgium and other countries and a deliberate policy to forcibly return Hutus to Rwanda who fled to countries other than the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are worried that Hutu asylum seekers outnumber Tutsis in Belgium and other countries, and that, if nothing is done, in the long run Hutus will be able to have their voice heard.”
Thousands of Hutus refugees remain in countries that border Rwanda and thousands of refugees have recently been forcibly repatriated back to Rwanda by the governments of both Uganda and Tanzania. In October 2007, for example, Uganda deported some 3000 Rwandans, most of them Hutus.[81]
“The whole idea is to build a strong Tutsi Diaspora that would support the Tutsi clique in power in Rwanda the same way the Jews support Israel,” says Higiro. “With a strong Tutsi Diaspora, Tutsi elites in power can use the tools of negationism, revisionism and the genocide industry to silence Hutus in Rwanda and in the countries where they have sought asylum.”[82]
U.K. ASYLUMS DIRECTED BY KIGALI
For its part the British Government has adopted a refugee asylum policy that looks to the Kagame regime—the persecuting government—for its decisions about Rwandan asylum cases and refugee returns.
The U.K. asylum system came under “reform” during the Blair government, but not in favor of refugees or asylum seeker’s rights. This is made clear in the case of Rwandan asylum seekers where the immigration and detention shake-up seems to have involved a stripping away of refugees’ legal protections.
By the end of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s term in office, the asylum reform process was in full swing and a special “Ten-Point Plan for Border Protection and Immigration Reform” was launched. Under this plan, the Prime Minister committed the U.K. Government to accelerate and massively increase the removal of both imprisoned and not yet detained foreign asylum seekers. According to the Home Office, it is the biggest shake-up of the immigration system in its history.[83]
On January 24, 2007—not so long after the British public was sensitized to the infiltration of Dr. Bajinya and the other three supposed “Masterminds” of genocide in Rwanda—the U.K. Home Office issued a special “Operational Guidance Note” on Rwanda that establishes and revises the formal policy for dealing with Rwandan asylum seekers. The guidance notes that all asylum seekers must be considered on a case by case basis, but all case workers must follow the outlines of this operational guidance document.[84]
The document, meant to educate case workers, opens with a “country assessment” that presents a highly inaccurate version of events in Rwanda. The assessment is heavily based on BBC sources, especially the BBC “Timeline” on Rwanda, and it has a decidedly pro-RPF bias. Some select examples of the bias can be seen in the following excerpts:
[1] CLAIM: “Rwanda is a republic dominated by a strong presidency.”[85]
REALITY: Rwanda is a one-party dictatorship with a façade of democracy and the consolidation of the dictatorship achieved through highly rigged and manipulated “demonstration elections” that are widely misperceived to have been democratic and fair.[86]
[2] CLAIM: “In 1985 Tutsi exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Having failed to negotiate their return to the country, the RPF invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990, demanding representation and equality for all Rwandans.[87]
REALITY: Most of the so-called “Tutsi exiles in Uganda” were Ugandan born citizens and they became battle-hardened guerrillas fighting for Yoweri Museveni and the NRA—a war that Museveni ran out of the Hotel Des Diplomats in Kigali in the mid-1980’s.[88] Paul Kagame was Museveni’s Director of Military Intelligence and he was responsible for tortures, massacres and assassinations.[89] Museveni had ignored calls by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to downsize his army of approximately 180,000 fighters to 70,000. By mid-April 1994, Museveni had sent some scores of thousands of UPDF soldiers into Rwanda—possibly as many as 70,000.[90]
To say that these soldiers and the RPF’s political representatives demanded “representation and equality for all Rwandans” is so patently false that it defies any rational attempt to deconstruct it. Working together, Museveni and Kagame utilized terrorist tactics to assign all blame—for atrocities they committed against both their enemies and their own people—on their enemies. They used psychological operations, embedded international reporters, and fabrication of massacres. These tactics have continued to the present.
“Let me give you an example of media manipulation,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, Director of ORINFOR. “In 1994 people took shelter at a mosque in Kabuga near Kigali. After the RPF took control of the location, they killed all the people who had taken shelter there, then called reporters to see what the Interahamwe had done to Tutsis.” [91]
[3] CLAIM: “A civil war in the border area ensued. Each incursion by the RPF was followed by reprisal massacres, largely of Tutsis, by government forces. A peace agreement was brokered in 1993, the Arusha Peace Accords, which inter alia provided for a power-sharing arrangement involving all political forces and the RPF.” [92]
REALITY: The RPF’s persecution and killings of Hutus and Tutsis in Northern Rwanda went largely unchallenged. Meanwhile the international “human rights” community hammered away at the Habyarimana government following a now common pattern of punishing the victims and accusingthem of crimes committed in self defense, but never accusing the perpetrators of the original, and greater, injustices.[93]
It is interesting that a guerrilla army can invade a sovereign country and attack a sovereign government and commit terrorist acts, driving over a million people before it, and that it could today be summarized as it is above. [94] This exemplifies the hegemonic imperialist bias of the Western human rights establishment and the mantle of genocide carried by the Genocide Intervention Network and its octopus of affiliates.
The rest of the country assessment follows in similar fashion, uttering ridiculous lies that are now so deeply inculcated in the collective insanity of human consciousness as to make them as absolute and unchallengeable as the Ten Commandments. The summary glosses over the human rights record in Rwanda, validates the legitimacy of the institutionalized injustice at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and shamelessly absolves the Kagame regime of its terrorist involvement in extortion, racketeering, war crimes and genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Perhaps the most ludicrous statement in the entire document is this one: “The Rwandan government is strongly committed to national reconciliation and there is no evidence of any state-sponsored or societal discrimination on ethnic grounds that would amount to persecution.”
The source documents which the Operational Guidance on Rwanda relies upon include references to: USAID; U.S. Department of State; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; U.N. and U.K. profiles; and the Economist. Most notably, there are four references to British Broadcasting Corporation reports or documents. Given their relationships to the production and maintenance of the establishment narrative, all of these sources are highly compromised in their capacity to present the true picture of Rwanda or insure refugee protections.
For the purposes of rounding up refugees and dragging them back to Rwanda, the Operational Guidance on Rwanda requires that asylum caseworkers begin the process by checking the names of asylum seekers against several lists maintained by the Kagame government.[95]
Section 3.5 of the Operational Guidance on Rwanda establishes the hierarchy of protocols for dealing with Rwandan asylum seekers. If “the applicant’s name appears on either of the two published lists maintained by the Rwandan government of those wanted for genocide or where there is any evidence that the applicant was, for example, politically active, employed in any official, religious, media or military capacity at the time of the genocide,” decision-makers are instructed to consider whether to apply one of several special exclusion clauses and must refer such cases to the War Crimes Unit.[96]
According to the U.K. Home Office, “the War Crimes Unit was formed in March 2004 with the specific remit of introducing screening processes in order to identify people involved in the commission of atrocities in connection with modern day conflict situations.”[97]
In February 2007, the Israeli Government successfully pressured the U.K. Home Office to water down anti-torture and war crimes legislation.[98] The injustices in cases of Rwandan war criminals are amongst the most pronounced.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is today the public relations consultant and economic adviser for the Kagame regime, a position Blair assumed in February, 2008. John Major was prime minister and the Conservative (Tory) Party was in power at the time of the U.S./U.K. backed coup d’etat in Rwanda 1994.
MILKING THE ASYLUM PROCESS
The Rwandan asylum scam allows the Kagame regime to facilitate higher political and economic status for more and more Rwandans by gaining green cards or citizenship abroad.
Moses Kenneth Bugingo Rugema arrived in the U.K. around 2003 on a false asylum claim against Rwanda. Although U.K. citizenship can be granted after five years his citizenship is uncertain.
When asked about his former refugee status and current political appointment with the government he sought asylum from, Rugema responded evasively and aggressively. “I have no time to waste in replying to you in the future,” Rugema replied. “But as a gentleman I just wanted to tell you I exist and your facts are not correct. It’s up to you to prove it.”[99]
Rugema is another Ugandan-Rwandan, and a former RPF soldier whose “flight” from persecution in Rwanda quickly led to his employment at the Rwanda Embassy in London as a receptionist. From the Embassy, Rugema helped Kigali track down legitimate refugees. Rugema also set up his current business enterprise and continues to operate out of London as an economic agent dealing in the export/import of top quality Rwandan Arabica green bean coffee for the Kagame regime.[100]
On November 2, 2007, the Rwandan cabinet appointed Rugema to the post of 2nd Counselor at the Rwandan Embassy in New York City.
“It is very interesting that this Rwandan refugee is now working as a business agent for the government he ran away from,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “It is 100% certain that Moses Rugema used the asylum system as a bogus asylum claimant and worked at the Rwanda Embassy in London.”
One of the highest-profile RPF-allied asylum seekers who has milked the system to gain status in the U.K. is Linda Bihire, recently appointed to the RPF’s cabinet under the recent government reshuffling that was advised by Kagame’s new spin doctor, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
On March 13, 2008, Bihire was appointed to Rwandan Cabinet as Minister of Infrastructure. However, Linda Bihire is another Ugandan-born “Rwandan” whose lineage and origins are belied by her inability to speak the native Kinyarwanda language of Rwanda. During her swearing-in ceremony in Kigali, Bihire’s inability to read the Oath of Office forced the organizers to switch to English.[101]
Bihire’s cabinet selection was engineered by Rwanda’s top intelligence agent, Emmanuel Ndahiro, a feared agent in and out of Rwanda who controls Rwanda’s state daily New Times newspaper and uses it as a political tool to peddle disinformation and attack critics of the RPF. Linda Bihire is Emmanuel Ndahiro’s mistress and they have a 19 year-old son. Lt. Col. Dr. Emmanuel Ndahiro is also a maternal cousin to Paul Kagame and Director General of Rwanda’s dreaded National Security Service.
Bihire is also a close friend of another RPF-allied Rwandan asylum seeker in the U.K., Rose Ngabire, the secretary at the Rwandan Embassy in London. Prior to her cabinet appointment, Bihire milked the U.K. asylum system to get higher education, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in civil engineering and a Master’s Degree in project management from the University of Nottingham and the University of Portsmouth, respectively.
Bihire’s new life apparently began soon after she finished her elementary schooling in Kampala, Uganda, when RPF agent Emmanuel Ndahiro organized her “political asylum” status and facilitated her transfer to London.[102] Bihire was soon identified as a Rwandan agent by legitimate Rwandan asylum seekers in England.[103]
After she arrived in London, Dr. Zac Nsenga, the ambassador to the U.K. at the time, stepped in and landed Bihire a government scholarship for her higher education.
Another U.K. asylum fraud was perpetrated by Joseph Mutaboba, Secretary General of Rwanda’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and former Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In September 2006, Mutaboba co-chaired the United Nations Permanent Advisory Committee on SecurityIssues in the Central African Region. Since 2003, he has participated in preparatory meetings of the International Conference on Peace and Security in the Great Lakes region and as Coordinator for Rwanda and Head of the Peace and Security Thematic Group. All these “security” posts occurred even while Rwanda continued to plunder Congo. However, Joseph Mutaboba’s wife is another “refugee” living in North London and using the asylum process for personal gain.
Another RPF agent who infiltrated England through the asylum process is Ignatius Mugabo, a naturalized citizen of Uganda who first sought asylum in Denmark but later joined his wife Jacqueline in Britain; Mugabo may by now have gained British citizenship. Mugabo’s wife Jacqueline was reportedly granted full refugee protection under the 1951 UNHCR Convention, which guarantees that any asylum seeker is automatically entitled to be joined by their families.[104] According to Rwandan asylum seekers, Mugabo joined is wife in London in 2003.[105]
Ignatius Mugabo not only worked for the RPF, he became one of Kagame’s top intelligence officials and an active hunter of Kagame’s critics abroad. In March of 2007, just prior to the 13th anniversary of the April 6, 1994 presidential assassinations, Mugabo set up a petition to the British Prime Minister calling on Rwandans in Britain to support his campaign to hunt down and arrest genocidaires. Eighteen people signed the petition, including Ignatius Mugabo.
The petition statement reads:
“We the members of the Rwandan Community resident in the U.K., during the 13th anniversary of the genocide in our country, concerned that many suspected perpetrators of this heinous crime continue to hide in Western countries including U.K., call on the British Prime Minister and his government to increase their support for the delivery of justice to the victims of the Rwandan genocide by tracking and arresting whoever is suspected of having played a role in this tragedy.”[106]
“Mugabo set up this petition on the U.K. Prime Minister’s web site,” says one Rwandan refugee in London, “but he received too few signatures to get any action from the Prime Minister. All members of the Rwandan community did not sign as they feared their names to be recognized on the list of asylum seekers. Mugabo was disappointed to receive so few supporters.”[107]
Ignatius Mugabo is also on the management committee of the Rwandan Community Association of the U.K., in charge of organizing events meant to draw out Rwandan refugees, and he is Director of Rwanda Diaspora Investment Ltd., another business front for Kigali.[108] Legitimate Rwandan asylum seekers note with curiosity how Mugabo works with the Rwandan Embassy to organize official events while he and his family have reportedly fled the Kagame regime.
Ignatius Mugabo is considered the second most feared intelligence agent of the Kagame regime in London, second only to his associate, James Wizeye. Ignatius Mugabo, Tony Kavutse and Rose Ngabire all work on the Rwanda Embassy staff under the guidance of its two top espionage agents: James Wizeye and Claver Gatete.
James Wizeye was appointed as the 1st Secretary at the Rwanda Embassy in London on June 29, 2005 and today he is also the most feared Rwandan intelligence operative involved in hunting Rwanda’s state enemies, critics and asylum seekers in England and, more widely, in Europe.
A former RPF soldier and current member of Kigali’s intelligence apparatus, Wizeye formerly worked as administrative attaché at the Rwanda Embassy in Kampala, Uganda. However, Wizeye was expelled by the Uganda government in November 2004 after accusations surfaced that Rwanda was training rebels hostile to the Ugandan government: Wizeye was implicated in rebel activities and accused of espionage.[109]
Wizeye is reportedly wanted today in Uganda and banned from visiting for his role as part of an elite RPF “hit squad” that operated in Uganda to track down enemies of the RPF regime.[110] Wizeye set up intelligence cells and purchased information from Ugandan agents who were later arrested.[111]
“In the U.K. James Wizeye is involved in hunting refugees, weapons dealings and protecting Rwanda’s ‘good image’ by using the media,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “He grew up in Uganda and now he is wanted there because of spying and killings in 2000 and 2001. His success in these [terrorist] operations for the Kagame regime earned him a diplomatic post in London.”[112]
Rwandan intelligence agent James Wizeye lives inside the Rwanda Embassy compound at 120-122 Seymour Place in London. Wizeye has attended high-level conferences with U.S. officials, including Ambassador Jendayi Frazer.[113] According to Rwandans familiar with Wizeye’s activities, he is one of the RPF’s top weapons and minerals agents working in London—possibly a key player in Kigali’s fencing of contraband resources stolen from the Democratic Republic of Congo and arranging of weapons transfers.[114]
Raised and educated in Uganda, Claver Gatete is the Rwandan Ambassador in London appointed to the Cabinet on September 7, 2005. Gatete is an economist who left Uganda for higher education in Canada. He is known to be an “extremist” RPF official—one of the actual “Masterminds” of RPF strategy to seize and consolidate power in Rwanda—who supported the RPF movement from Canada and the U.S. as a key member of the Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora.[115]
Gatete organized the RPF campaign abroad, working on funding, lobbying and political alliances, and went on to become a senior Presidential adviser to Paul Kagame. Gatete also worked as Secretary General at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, and he was Steering Committee member as part of President Clinton’s euphemistically named New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), a hegemonic U.S. state department project in neoliberal economics and protectionist trade.[116]
“Claver Gatete is 500% involved in hunting down Hutus and spreading the genocide ideology of Kigali,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro.
THE GENOCIDE MISERY INDUSTRY
Bogus asylum seekers in the U.K. are also working to raise tens of millions of pounds annually, ostensibly to support genocide survivors and social programs in Rwanda. Instead much of this money reportedly disappears behind the smokescreens of “aid” and “development”.
There are many charities and non-government organizations from the U.S. and U.K. that run large money-making operations that claim to benefit Rwanda. These charities complete the circle of propaganda and seal the doubt of public opinion by legitimizing a terrorist government under the unimpeachable veneer of humanitarianism and goodwill.
These charities work the media system, providing expert spokespeople and framing issues for the mass media. The media system works the charities, using them to institutionalize ideology and further their select political agendas. Like the media, the charities peddle the establishment line throughout, meanwhile claiming that they are “not political.” But it is always the same: like Praxis, they unflinchingly adhere to the upside-down mythology which turns victims into killers and killers into victims with very little middle ground in between.
For example, Fergal Keane is a patron of MSAADA, a “charity based in Dorset, England, that helps surviving orphans and widows of the Rwandan genocide.”[117] With the assistance of the British media system, MSAADA advances the standard mythology about genocide in Rwanda.
“In 100 days an estimated one million people were butchered in the Rwandan genocide, while the United Nations refused to intervene to halt the bloodshed,” reads the MSAADA disinformation. “The world turned its back on the people of Rwanda once, and now the country is largely forgotten again.”
RPF agent and false asylum seeker Ignatius Mugabo is on the management committee of IMIZI, a U.K.-based Rwanda charity.[118]
Vivenie Niragira Mugunga, the RPF agent and false asylum seeker—who served as Fergal Keane’s critic of Praxis—is the director of a Rwanda/U.K. charity called RYICO.[119]
One of the largest and most influential charities working the Rwanda Genocide for political and economic profit is the big U.K. non-government organization (NGO) Aegis Trust. Aegis works closely with several U.K. government departments on Holocaust and genocide issues and plays a leading role in the Intergovernmental Task Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research established by Bill Clinton, Goran Persson (former Prime Minister of Sweden), and Tony Blair in 1998. Aegis Trust is also the primary financial sponsor of the Genocide Memorial in Gisozi, the largest memorial in Rwanda. Aegis Trust patrons include General Romeo Dallaire, Bob Geldof, Desmond Tutu and Elie Wiesel, and the organization is believed to also be deeply tied to the intelligence community.[120]
Another high profile charity working in the U.K. is Survivor’s Fund—SURF—a large NGO that “works to improve the lives of the Rwandan Survivors of Genocide.” According to their web site, “SURF was founded by a British Citizen of Rwandan origin (who lost family members and relations during this tragic event) and other Rwandans based in U.K., and concerned British individuals. Although support to survivors dates back to 1995, SURF was formally established and registered in 1997.”[121]
According to legitimate Rwandan refugees, however, SURF founder Mary Kayitesi Blewitt gained British citizenship after falsely claiming to be both a genocide survivor and a Tutsi from Rwanda. She is also reported to be the first RPF “diplomatic” representative to have arrived in the U.K., and the one who effectively opened the new Rwandan Embassy in London—running RPF operations out of one small room at the Uganda High Commission at Trafalgar Square—after the RPF “victory” of July 1994.[122]
“She is 100% Ugandan and 100% liar,” says U.K.-Rwandan Patrick Mahoro. “Ask her what village she came from in Rwanda, which prefecture, which commune. Ask her where she lived, where her family lived in Rwanda. She can’t answer. She doesn’t speak the language fluently and she claims she lost 50 members of her family in Rwanda in 1994, but her family was all in Uganda.”
“A year after the genocide in Rwanda, Mary Kayitesi Blewitt returned to her village to dig through a mass grave in search of her family,” reported the U.K.’s Independent on October 12, 2004. “The rains had washed away the topsoil, revealing the bodies of about 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]
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Notes:
[1] The initial invasion was led by the legendary leader and one of the founders of the RPF, Major General Fred Gisa Rwigema, who just a few months before had been the Ugandan Vice-Minister of Defense. Rwigema and his two seconds were murdered reportedly on the orders of Museveni, and Kagame was brought back from the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, to take command. See : Mick Collins, « The General’s Book on Rwanda, » .
[2] See Professor Peter Erlinder, “The Great Rwanda ‘Genocide Coverup’,” Global Research. February 20, 2008, .
[3] See: “Genocide Negationists Head to Canada,” Rwanda News Agency, March 5, 2008, .
[4] Thijs Bouwknegt, “Rwanda’s Genocide: Remembrance and Ideology,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, April 4, 2008, .
[5] Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, International Panel of Eminent Personalities, Section 18.39, .
[6] See: International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes of Africa, .
[7] The Report by French Anti-Terrorist Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière on the Shooting Down of Rwandan President Habyarimana’s Plane on April 6, 1994.
[8] Legitimate Rwandan asylum seekers in the U.K. and U.S., several Rwandans who have gained citizenship, and certain Rwandan journalists under threat of persecution who were used as sources for this story cannot be identified.
[9] Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006. .
[10] “Rwanda Urges Canada to Extradite ‘Genocide Masterminds’,” CBC News, August 31, 2007.
[11] Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Suspect Worked at UK Trust,” BBC. November 6, 2006.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Private communication, Rosalie Brown, March 2008.
[14] Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, UNHCR 1951.
[15] “Rwanda seeks genocide fugitives from Britain,” Reuters, November 7, 2006.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Private communication, Hutu Rwandan and U.K. citizen “Patrick Mahoro” (pseudonym used for his protection), March 2008.
[18] Private communication, “Patrick Mahoro,” March 2008.
[19] Ibid.
[20] The Democratic Republic of Congo was renamed Zaire during the reign of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. After the AFDL-CZ overthrew Mobutu the name was changed back to the Democratic Republic of Congo by the short-lived President Laurent Desire Kabila.
[21] Jean-Christophe Nzeyimana gives an account of life and death at the Mugunga refugee camp in: David Barouski, “Surviving the Rwanda Genocide: An Interview with Jean-Christophe Nzeyimana,” ZNET, June 19, 2007, .
[22] See: keith harmon snow, “Darfurism, Uganda and the U.S. War in Africa,” www.allthingspass.com; see also Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellon Press, 1999.
[23] According to a top United Nations investigator, the IRC moved into bases in eastern Zaire in 1996 and started shelling the refugee camps with heavy weapons. Private interview, name withheld for confidentiality, July 2006.
[24] This correspondent has interviewed witnesses to the war crimes committed against Hutu refugees all across the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in Rwanda, Uganda and the United States. See also: Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellon Press, 1999; Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Random House, 2004; and keith harmon snow, Hotel Rwanda: Hollywood and the Holocaust in Central Africa, .
[25] Private communication, Rosalie Brown, March 2008.
[26] The term genocidaire is a French term often used to castigate innocent Hutus as deeply sinister and evil.
[27] Private communication, Rosalie Brown, March 2008.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006. .
[30] Ibid.
[31] “British Charity Employs Doctor Accused of Crimes Against Humanity,” BBC Press Release, November 7, 2006.
[32] IBITANGAJWE N’INAMA Y’ABAMINISITIRI YO KUWA 29 WERURWE 2002
[33] http://www.diplomatie.be/nl/pdf/corpsconsulair.pdf
[34] Janvier Mabuye, Twiyubakire Mu Rwanda, December 22, 2004, .
[35] Fergal Keane. “Rwanda Genocide Suspect in UK,” BBC News. November 6, 2006.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, International Panel of Eminent Personalities, Section 17.8, .
[41] Personal interviews with three Rwandan asylum seekers in the U.K. and one source in Rwanda.
[42] Home Office document, Immigration and Nationality Directorate, Tony Kavutse, July 15, 2002.
[43] Medical Foundation, .
[44] Hamra Yucel, MD, Request for Crises Loan RE: Mr. Tony Kavutse, DOB 29/10/76. Previously of Leabridge House, 497-501 Leabridge Road, London, E10 7 EB, Medical Foundation, July 29, 2002.
[45] Hamra Yucel, MD, Request for Crises Loan RE: Mr. Tony Kavutse, DOB 29/10/76. Previously of Leabridge House, 497-501 Leabridge Road, London, E10 7 EB, Medical Foundation, July 29, 2002.
[46] Email communication from Michelle Alexander, Medical Foundation, April 1, 2008.
[47] Sarah Tipton (Housing Advisor), Letter from Waltham Forrest to Dr. Hamra Yucel, August 29, 2002; and Waltham Forest, .
[48] Jenny Cook (Departmental Administration), Letter from the Birbeck School to Tony Kavutse, August 2004.
[49] Tony Kavutse did not respond to repeated requests for communication. [50] Private communications with Rwandan refugees in London, March and April 2008.
[51] Ibid.
[52] Private communication, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, March 2008.
[53] Nick Gordon, “Return to Hell,” Sunday Express, April 21, 1996, .
[54] The establishment narrative on “AIDS in Africa” offers another example of disinformation suggesting a humanitarian agenda that is merely, in fact, window dressing for multinational corporations and the department of defense. It will not be examined here. I would remove this. It is out of place and deserves its own paper.
[55] Don Terry, “Suburban America: Hiding place for thousands of war criminals?” Chicago Tribune, July 5, 2005.
[56] See: “Public Security: ICE Wins Landmark Rwandan Genocide Case,” Inside ICE, Vol. 1, Issue 13, .
[57] See e.g.: “Mrs. Bush's Remarks in Honor of the Visiting Guests from the Mothers to Mothers-To-Be Programme in Capetown, South Africa,” The White House, March 13, 2006, .
[58] Goodworks International has a permanent office in Kigali run by managing director Mary Kamari. The Goodworks promo film Rwanda Rising was showcased on Delta Airlines flights beginning in the fall 2007 (see: Rwanda Convention Association, ).
[59] Africa-America Institute, . [60] Private communications, Rwandan researchers, June 2007.
[61] Clinton Presidential Center, “Rwanda’s Ambassador to the U.S. Zac Nsenga Speaks on the Genocide 12 Years Ago,” .
[62] Genocide Intervention Network, .
[63] See: David Barouski, “Surviving the Rwanda Genocide: An Interview with Jean-Christophe Nzeyimana,” ZNET, June 19, 2007, .
[64] Several of the Private Military Companies involved in Britain’s immigration detention centres, notably SODEXHO and SERCO, are also contracted to work at the U.S. torture center in Guantanamo Bay.
[65] “British Charity Employs Doctor Accused of Crimes Against Humanity,” BBC Press Release, November 7, 2006.
[66] “British Charity Employs Doctor Accused of Crimes Against Humanity,” BBC Press Release, November 7, 2006.
[67] Private communication, Vaughan Jones, Praxis, March 13, 2008.
[68] Ibid.
[69] Private communication, British Department of Defense insider, March 12, 2008. The same insider has supported the Broken Arrows reports published by Wayne Madsen Report: Wayne Madsen, “Broken Arrows, Lies and the Vice President,” Wayne Madsen Report, April 8, 2007, .
[70] Private communication, “Patrick Mahoro,” March 2008.
[71] Ibid.
[72] Ibid.
[73] British Home Office, Immigration and Nationality Department, Numbers of Rwandan Asylum Seekers in U.K. from 1994-2003 (bar graph).
[74] http://inspectorates.homeoffice.gov.uk/hmiprisons/inspect_reports/irc-inspections.html/
[75] Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, UNHCR 1951.
[76] Harm on Removal: Excessive Force against Failed Asylum Seekers, Medical Foundation, .
[77] Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons: .
[78] “Rwandan Man Detained in Edinburgh,” Urgent Action Needed, .
[79] Private communication, April 11, 2008.
[80] Personal communications with Rwandan asylum seekers in the U.K., March and April 2008.
[81] Uganda Deports 3000 Rwandan Refugees, VOA News, October 5, 2007, .
[82] Private communication, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, April 11, 2008.
[83] Home Office News Release (005/2008), Government News Network, January 14, 2008, http://www.wired-gov.net/wg/wg-news-1.nsf/lfi/156324 (use a uniform font and size for all citations)
[84] U.K. Home Office, Operational Guidance Note: Rwanda, Rwanda OGN v7.0, Issued 24 January 2007.
[85] Ibid.
[86] The term “demonstration elections” was coined by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. See, e.g., Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) or The Political Economy of Human Rights: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (1979).
[87] U.K. Home Office, Operational Guidance Note: Rwanda, Rwanda OGN v7.0, Issued 24 January 2007.
[88] Private interview, Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana, Laredo TX, October 7, 2007.
[89] There are many accusations against Paul Kagame for his role as DMI chief under Museveni. See, e.g., Remigius Kintu, The Truth Behind The Rwanda Tragedy (prepared upon request and presented to the ICTR at Arusha, Tanzania), March 20, 2005.
[90] Private interview, Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana, Laredo TX, October 7, 2007.
[91] Private communication, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, April 9, 2008.
[92] U.K. Home Office, Operational Guidance Note: Rwanda, Rwanda OGN v7.0, Issued 24 January 2007.
[93] The most auspicious one-sided examples come from Africa Watch, a division of Human Rights Watch. See e.g., Rwanda: Talking Peace and Waging War: Human Rights Since the October 1990 Invasion, Africa Watch, Vol. IV, Issue No. 3, February 27, 1992. See also: by Mr. B.W. Ndiaye. Special Rapporteur, on his mission to Rwanda from 8 to 17 April 1993, United Nations Economic and Social Council, E/CN.4/1994/7/Add.1, 11 August 1993; and The Government and Armed Forces Responsible for the Reign of Terror in Rwanda, Press Release, Rights & Democracy, March 8, 1993.
[94] See: Robin Philpot, Rwanda 1994: Colonialism Dies Hard, The Taylor Report and Robin Philpot, 2003.
[95] The Operation Guidance on Rwanda refers case workers to the Rwanda lists on two websites: and .
[96] U.K. Home Office, Operational Guidance Note: Rwanda, Rwanda OGN v7.0, Issued 24 January 2007.
[97] U.K. Home Office 2008.
[98] See: “Home Office to water down anti-torture/war crime legislation under pressure from Israeli government,” The Guardian, February 7, 2006; and Vikram Dodd, “U.K. considers curbing citizens' right to arrest alleged war criminals,” The Guardian, February 3, 2006.
[99] Private communication, Moses Kenneth Bugingo Rugema, April 1, 2008.
[100] The address of Rugewa’s business in London is: Longford Court, Belle Vue Road, London NW4 2BU (move this after ‘England.’ England; Tel: 00 44 [0] 208 201 5722 - Fax: 00 44 [0] 208 202 1616.
[101] “President Kagame’s New Cabinet Stung by Allegations of Spy Chiefs Ménage a Trios,” Radio Katwe, Kampala, March 12, 2008.
[102] “President Kagame’s New Cabinet Stung by Allegations of Spy Chief’s Ménage a Trios,” Radio Katwe, Kampala, March 12, 2008.
[103] Private communications, Rwandan asylum seekers in the U.K., March and April 2008.
[104] Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 1951.
[105] Private communications, Rwandan asylum seekers in the U.K., March and April 2008.
[106] 10 Downing Street, E-Petitions, Rwanda Petition, .
[107] Private communication, Rwandan refugee in London, March 2008.
[108] Rwanda Diaspora Investment Ltd., .
[109] Frank Nyakairu, “Rwanda Speaks on PRA Training Bases,” The Monitor, November 28, 2004.
[110] Private communication, Rwandan asylum seekers in England, March and April 2008.
[111] Thomas Ofcansky, Rwanda: Recent History, and .
[112] Private communication, “Patrick Mahoro,” April 1, 2008.
[113] Africa Partnership Forum, October 4-5, 2005, .
[114] Private communications, Rwandan refugees in England, March and April 2008.
[115] Private communications, Rwandan refugees in England and U.S.A., and Rwandan journalists in Kigali.
[116] Rwanda NEPAD Magazine, Issue 002, November 2004: .
[117] MSAADA, .
[118] IMIZI: .
[119] RYICO: .
[120] Aegis Trust, . Notably, Rock star and Africa champion Bob Geldof sits on the board of Ten Alps television production company alongside Tim Hoare, the head of Canaccord Adams, the advisers that re-launched Energem, the shady diamond and mercenary company, on the London Stock Market in December 2007. See: Ben Laurance, “Energy firm link to blood diamonds,” The Sunday Times, December 30, 2007; and keith harmon snow, “Gertler’s Bling Bang Torah Gang: Israel and the Holocaust in Congo,” All Things Pass, February 7, 2008, .
[121] Survivor’s Fund, History of SURF, .
[122] Private communications, Rwandan refugees in England, March and April 2008.
[123] Terri Judd, “Honour for Women Who Dedicated Her Life to Genocide Survivors,” The Independent, October 12, 2004.
[124] Ibid.
[125] Surf Founder Receives OBE from Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace Ceremony, February 29, 2008, . [126] Holocaust Memorial Day, .
[127] Ultimate Escape Health Spa, .
[128] Private communication, “Patrick Mahoro,” April 8, 2008.
[129] Fergal Keane, Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey, Penguin Books, September 1997.
[130] Trial of Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, ICTR Press Release, ICTR/INFO-9-2-353.EN, Arusha, 28 July 2003. (1 date format)
[131] Private communication, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, April 9, 2008.
[132] Probably RPF soldiers Lt. Frank Ndore or his bodyguard Valence, both of whom worked with Fergal Keane.
[133] Private communication, Phil Taylor, April 3, 2008.
[134] Lindsay Hilsum, “Rwanda's genocide could have been prevented. The UN let people die and now it watches as the survivors die,” The Observer, March 28, 2004.
[135] Ibid.
[136] Ibid.
[137] Again, the most auspicious one-sided examples come from Africa Watch, a division of Human Rights Watch. See e.g., Rwanda: Talking Peace and Waging War: Human Rights Since the October 1990 Invasion, Africa Watch, Vol. IV, Issue No. 3, February 27, 1992. See also: by Mr. B.W. Ndiaye. Special Rapporteur, on his mission to Rwanda from 8 to 17 April 1993, United Nations Economic and Social Council, E/CN.4/1994/7/Add.1, 11 August 1993; and The Government and Armed Forces Responsible for the Reign of Terror in Rwanda, Press Release, Rights & Democracy, March 8, 1993.
[138] Fergal Keane, “Ghosts of Rwanda,” PBS Frontline, March 19, 2004.
[139] Ibid.
[140] Donatella Lorch, “Rwanda Rebels: Army of Exiles Fights for a Home,” New York Times, June 9, 1994: 10; and “Rwanda Rebels’ Victory Attributed To Discipline,” New York Times, July 19, 1994: 6. Raymond Bonner: “How Minority Tutsi Won the War,” New York Times, September 6, 1994: 6; and “Rwandan Refugees Flood Zaire as Rebel Forces Gain,” New York Times, July 15, 1994: 1.
[141] Fergal Keane, “Ghosts of Rwanda,” PBS Frontline, March 19, 2004.
[142] Ibid.
[143] Ibid.
[144] Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, 1998.
[145] Private interview, Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana, Laredo, TX, October 2007.
[146] Philip Gourevitch, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda, Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, 1998.
[147] keith harmon snow, “The Grinding Machine: Terror and Genocide in Rwanda,” Toward Freedom, April 20, 2007.
[148] See, e.g., Robin Philpot, “The New Yorker's Congo Distortions: An Open Letter to Philip Gourevitch,” Counterpunch, June 7, 2003. See also Philip Gourevitch, “Annals of Diplomacy: The Genocide Fax,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2998, p. 42: .
[149] Philip Gourevitch, “Annals of Diplomacy: The Genocide Fax,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2998, p. 42: .
[150] See: Chris Black, “View From Rwanda: The Dallaire Genocide Fax: A Fabrication,” SCOOP, December 7, 2005.
[151] Private communication, Chris Black, ICTR Lead Counsel, April 11, 2008.
[152] Ibid.
[153] “Genocide in Our Time,” United States Institute for Peace, .
[154] John Prendergast and David Smock, Post-Genocidal Reconstruction: Building Peace in Rwanda and Burundi, United States Institute for Peace, September 15, 1999, .
[155] See, e.g., Kane Yerbu (monthly newsletter of the Congregation Baith Israel Anshei Emes), November 10, 2006.
[156] See: Michela Wrong, In The Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, Fourth Estate, 2000: p. ix.
[157] See e.g., Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999.
[158] See the case of Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana as elaborated by Philip Gourevitch in We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda, Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, 1998.
[159] Private interview, Eliel Ntakirutimana, Laredo, TX, October 7, 2007.
[160] “Rwanda Pastor Found Guilty by U.N. Tribunal,” Adventist News Network, February 19, 2003, .
[161] Private communication, Phil Taylor, April 6, 2008.
[162] Louis-Pual Eyenga Sana, La Monuc nie la présence de l’armée rwandaise à l’Est de la RDC, Le Potentiel, February 8, 2008; .
[163] Kemal Saiki has issued false MONUC press releases to cover for the actions of MONUC troops, some of which involved criminal activities in intent and nature. False statements have also been made directly to this correspondent. See also: David Barouski, “Press Release,” World News Journal, February 8, 2008
[164] See: David Barouski, “Press Release,” World News Journal, February 8, 2008
[165] “USAID and Rwanda Ambassador Celebrate Rwandan Coffee,” USAID Press Release 0411-06-032, April 11, 2006, <http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2006/pr060411_1.html >.
[166] Development Management Solutions, The East and Central Africa Global Competitiveness Trade Hub: Development of National AGOA Export Strategies, USAID, 5 October 2005,
< http://www.ecatradehub.com/reports/rp.downloads/2005.AGOA.Strategy.Rwanda.pdf>.
[167] Private communication, Eastern Congo. 2007.
[168] Robin Philpot, Rwanda 1994: Colonialism Dies Hard. The Taylor Report and Robin Philpot, 2003; on the RPF cells, Robin Philpot cites: Reed, William Cyrus, “Exile, Reform and the Rise of the RPF/A,” in Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3, 1996, p. 496.
[169] Private interview, Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana, Laredo, TX, October 7, 2008.
[170] Mark Prutsalis, Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania, Refugees International, SITREP #10. May 17, 1994.
[171] Ibid.
[172] Ibid.
[173] Ibid.
[174] Ibid.
[175] Ibid.
[176] Thomas Lang, “CNN: Amnesia at Age 25,” Columbia Journalism Review, June 3, 2005, .
[177] United Nations Outgoing Code Cable. “The Gersoni ‘Report’ Rwanda,” October 14, 1994.
[178] Ibid.
[179] Ibid.
[180] Ibid.
[181] Ibid.
[182] Official and formerly secret documents were obtained due to the perseverance of Professor Peter Erlinder, lead defense lawyer at the ICTR; some were recovered from United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UN-DPKO); most were first brought to the public sphere by Prof. Erlinder in the ‘Military I’ trial of Aloys Ntabakuze.
[183] Nick Gordon, “Return to Hell,” Sunday Express, April 21, 1996, .
[184] Thijs Bouwknegt, “Rwanda’s Genocide: Remembrance and Ideology,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, April 4, 2008, .
[185] Rock star Bob Geldof dropped into Rwanda while President Bush was there to show his support for the humanitarianism of G.W. Bush. Geldof praised Bush for his work in delivering billions to fight disease and poverty in Africa, and blasted the U.S. press for ignoring the achievement. “’Mr. Bush,’ said Mr. Geldof, ‘has done more than any other president so far.’” See: “Bob Geldof in Rwanda Gives Bush his Props,” Washington Times, February 19, 2008.
Keith Harmon Snow is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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