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Thursday, 4 September 2014

[AfricaRealities] Bodies floating in Lake Rweru between Rwanda and Burundi [Includes Audio]

 


Bodies floating in Lake Rweru between Rwanda and Burundi

Submitted by Ann Garrison on Tue, 09/02/2014 - 02:41
01:57
04:06
 
KPFA Evening News, 09.01.2014
The BBC reports perhaps as many as 40 bodies floating in Lake Rweru, between Rwanda and Burundi. Former ICTR defense lawyer Peter Erlinder spoke to KPFA about the precedent. 
 
Transcript: 
KPFA News Anchor Cameron Jones: On Aug. 26, the BBC reported that Burundian officials are investigating to determine why an estimated 40 Rwandan bodies have been found floating in Lake Rweru, on Burundi's border with Rwanda.  Most of the bodies had been wrapped in plastic and many of the victims hands and feet were bound. Burundian officials said that the bodies must have come from Rwanda because they floated down the Akagera River into the lake. KPFA's Ann Garrison filed this report. 
 
KPFA/Ann Garrison: Rwandan bodies have floated down the Kagera River into Lake Rwehu before, as cited In a situation report dated May 17, 1994, written by Mark Prutsalis of the NGO Refugees International. At the time, troops led by General, now President Paul Kagame were engaged in a fierce military offensive that ended two months later when they seized state power in Rwanda. As Kagame's army advanced, Hutu refugees were fleeing across the Rwandan border into Tanzania at the rate of 3000 per day. 
 
Peter Erlinder, a former International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda defense lawyer, quoted the Prutsalis situation reports for KPFA: 
 
Peter Erlinder: Let me quote from the Prutsalis Report to UNHCR. He said, "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 the Rusumo Bridge."  UNQUOTE.
 
These reports were received in areas that the RPF was occupying early in the war, and in the areas that they occupied in the eastern part of Rwanda. Now in addition to that. Prutsalis also wrote that,"The RPF" - his quote now - "comes at five o'clock in the morning, waiting for villagers to open their doors. The villagers are caught and taken away to the river by trucks. No one has ever 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."

Former ICTR defense lawyer Peter ErlinderNow these bodies floating in the Kagera River, many people will remember from the terrible visuals of the Rwandan Genocide, but those visions of the bodies floating in the river were said to be Tutsi bodies. We now know, because of these UNHCR reports that were made public during the Un trial, that those actually were Hutu bodies.
 
KPFA: Erlinder acknowledged that if the bodies are Rwandan, and if they are victims of state execution, it will be difficult to know whether they are Hutu or Tutsi, particularly because President Kagame is now arresting members of the Tutsi elite surrounding him. 
 
Peter Erlinder: Well, that  of course also is the problem. When a person is killed in Rwanda, it's very difficult to to tell who is a Hutu and who is a Tutsi because the identification is very difficult to make. It's easy to mistake one for the other. What we do know is that the people who were killed in 1994 were viewed as being opponents of the RPF military that was taking over that area and the people who are being killed today apparently are viewed as those who are opponents to the current government as well. But of course this is a mystery because it's very difficult to find out what actually is going on in Rwanda because of the control of information coming from Rwanda. And that control of information itself is not secret. The control of information, I think, is acknowledged by most commentators.  
 
KPFA: And that was former International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda defense lawyer Peter Erlinder. Erlinder is the author of The Accidental Genocide, a narrated compendium of evidentiary documents which challenge the received history of the Rwandan Genocide. In Berkeley, for PacificaKPFA and AfrobeatRadio, I'm Ann Garrison.
 
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Saturday, 30 August 2014

Second Genocide in Rwanda? Slow, Silent, and Systematic? | Global Research


Second Genocide in Rwanda? Slow, Silent, and Systematic?

What is happening in Rwanda? And, is the UN turning away?

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What is happening in Rwanda? On Aug. 26, the BBC reported that Burundian officials are investigating to determine why Rwandan bodies have been found floating in Lake Rweru, on Burundi's border with Rwanda.

The discovery is not only gruesome but also ominous because both East African nations suffer from extremely volatile Hutu-Tutsi ethnic rivalries rooted in centuries of Hutu oppression by a feudal Tutsi aristocracy, which became a colonial elite in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Attempts to institute European democracy, between 1959 and 1961 in Rwanda, and in 1993 in Burundi, turned the existing social order upside down, giving electoral advantage to the Hutu majorities, which the Tutsi minorities refused to accept. War, genocide and massacres ensued and both nations, neither of which is yet 100 years old, are commonly described as tinderboxes awaiting a match.

Rwanda's President Paul Kagame is a Tutsi, Burundi's President Pierre Nkurunziza a Hutu. Despite past alliances of convenience, they are now antagonists. In 1993, Burundi's Tutsi military elite assassinated that country's first democratically elected president, Hutu Melchior Ndadaye, triggering genocidal massacres of both ethnicities in Burundi and escalating fears of the same – which did indeed follow – in Rwanda.

In 1994, near the end of a four year war of aggression, Kagame ordered the assassination of both Rwanda and Burundi's Hutu presidents by shooting their plane out of the sky on April 6, 1994, and then launched a carefully planned, U.S. backed military offensive to seize power and restore Tutsi rule in Rwanda, even as the country sank into chaos and genocidal massacres of both ethnicities.

Any conclusion that the bodies floating in the lake are victims of state execution, genocidal execution or both could be incendiary within the two countries and/or between them. That incendiary potential has been manipulated by both foreign and domestic elites, who are no doubt following this story closely, and most likely attempting to control its outcomes.

These bound and bagged bodies certainly have the look of state execution, genocidal or not, and the simple conclusion that they were state executions has incendiary potential in itself. Rwandan President Paul Kagame arrested three of his own top military officers last week, asresistance continued to rise within his own Tutsi elite.

Rwandan or Burundian bodies?

Burundian official Jean Berchmans Mpabansi told the BBC that, ''The victims are not Burundian citizens because the bodies are coming from Akagera River flowing from Rwanda."

The Voice of Burundi reported, translated here from the French: "In recent days corpses wrapped in plastic bags are found floating on Lake Rweru on the border between Burundi and Rwanda in Muyinga Province.

"More than 40 bodies floating in the Rweru Lake town of Giteranyi have been seen and counted since the month of July by the fishermen, as confirmed by the local administration and police. This week, these fishermen, accompanied by a unit of the Navy, saw two bodies on the mouth of the Akagera."

Rwandan Police said that no one has been reported missing in Rwanda, and Burundian Police said the same about Burundi. Both claims are unlikely because the national police of any country of 10 or 11 million people is sure to have a list of missing persons at any given time.

It's particularly unlikely in the case of Rwanda, because onMay 16, Human Rights Watch reported that "an increasing number of Rwandans have been forcibly disappeared or reported missing" and that some were known to have been forcibly disappeared by Rwanda's army, the Rwandan Defense Force. HRW detailed 14 cases of missing persons.

In mid-July HRW spoke to the anniversary of the murder of Gustave Makonene, coordinator of Transparency International Rwanda's Advocacy and Legal Advice Center in Rubavu, Rwanda:

"The details of Gustave Makonene's death are gruesome. His body was found outside the lakeside town of Rubavu, in northwestern Rwanda, on July 18, 2013. The police medical report indicated he was strangled. Local residents who saw his body gave Human Rights Watch more graphic detail. They believed his body may have been thrown from a car on a road above the lake and ended up twisted around a large tree, which had blocked its fall into the water."

There have been neither investigations nor charges. Another HRW essayist asked, "Why is the whole world still silent on the murder of Rwandan activist Makonene?" On August 1 Transparency International issued a press release saying that the staff of all five of their Rwandan offices are in danger.

President Paul Kagame's plausibility problem

Rwandan President Paul Kagame has never been noted for plausible or consistent explanation. After 18 years of Rwandan invasion, occupation, assassination and resource plunder in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all copiously documented, he continues to tell Western television audiences that he cannot be held responsible for the problems of Congo, that Congo's problems began with colonialism long before his birth.

And, of course, he continues to say that his destiny is to save and forever protect the Rwandan people from genocide, because, as he tells the story over and over, the world abandoned Rwanda in 1994. It's a matter of record that Kagame himself threatened to fire on U.N. troops if they attempted to intervene in Rwanda in 1994, but that's never been of concern to corporate broadcast anchors. Neither has Kagame's U.S-backed invasion of Rwanda, commanding a detachment of the Ugandan army in October 1990. Nor has the four year war that those Ugandan troops waged in Rwanda between October 1990 and July 1994. Nor has the active intervention of the Clinton Administration to prevent the UN from intervening in Rwanda in 1994.

The story of four years of war and mass killing in Rwanda has instead been shortened and simplified into a 100-day morality play about genocide ending with "Never again!"  And, Kagame has been allowed to trump all evidence and reason by playing the genocide card for so long that he feels in no way compelled to offer a plausible or consistent explanation of anything.

Nearly 50,000 people reported missing in Rwanda this year

Although Rwandan officials denied, on August 26th, that anyone is missing, the government has, on other days, acknowledged that nearly 50,000 people have disappeared this year. The government says they're missing, but dissident Rwandan refugees and exiles say they're dead – and that they are Hutu victims of Kagame's slow, silent, systematic Hutu genocide – genocide by exclusion, poverty, starvation, sterilization and execution.

Rwandans whom the government acknowledges are missing include 16,000 Hutu villagers from the country's northwestern Ngororero District. Rwandan Interior Minister James Musoni acknowledged, in the country's Kinyarwanda language, that these villagers are missingbut said that the government has no idea where they've gone and fears they may have crossed Rwanda's border with DR Congo to join the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).

Rwandan refugee Ambrose Nzeyimana translated the English into Kinyarwanda and posted "Kigali acknowledges the disappearance of 16,000 of its citizens" to his British-based blog, The Rising Continent. Rwandans in exile write that these people have been massacred by the Kagame regime as part of its program to slowly, quietly, and systematically eliminate the Hutu population. Their belief is based on their own experience, their contact with extended family in Rwanda, and their attention to the Kinyarwanda press.

Rwandan prison authorities acknowledge that 30,000 Hutu prisoners sentenced to "community service" (hard labor) have also disappeared, Rwandan exiles, again, write that they've been executed by Kagame's genocidal government.

It's difficult to imagine how a government with one of the best trained, best equipped African military and security forces, including local forces everywhere, in one of the most tightly controlled, dictatorial regimes in the world, could lose track of 30,000 state prisoners. However, the government, again, and the Ibuka Tutsi survivors' group, claim to fear that these people may have escaped across the border to join the FDLR in DR Congo, where they now constitute a threat to genocide survivors.

As with so much in Rwanda, including the history of the 1990-1994 war and genocide, there is a Tutsi version of the truth and a Hutu version, but the Tutsi version is legally enforced and championed worldwide by rich and powerful people, including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Rev. Rick Warren and Howard Buffett. Despite wholesale de facto discimination against Hutu people, they join Kagame in proclaiming that truth and reconciliation have been achieved in Rwanda, and ethnicity is no longer important.

Prisoners incinerated?

More Rwandan Hutu prisoners may have perished in a fire on June 5, 2014, in Rwanda's largest prison, Muhanga Central Prison in Gitarama, and then in a second prison fire at Nyakiriba Prison in Rubavu (Gisenyi) on July 7.

Rwandan exiles write that prisoners in both Muhanga Central Prison and Nyakiriba Prison were intentionally incinerated in their cells, once again as part of a slow, silent, systematic Hutu genocide.

Is it likely that two, geographically distant Rwandan prisons would be destroyed or badly damaged by fire in barely more than one month? All we know is what Rwandan authorities say, and all they say is that there were two prison fires but no prisoners died.

Muhanga Prison, formerly known as Gitarama Central Prison, was known to be one of the most hellish prisons on earth. In 1995, a London Independent headline about it read, "Hutus held in 'worst prison in world': 7,000 suspects of Rwanda massacre are kept in jail built for 400."

On June 6, the International Red Cross reported that "the accommodations" of 3,500 prisoners went up in flames in Gitarama but that the Rwandan government said no prisoners were in their cells at the time.

Hard evidence?

There will be no hard evidence of the truth behind any of these missing persons reports, except perhaps those few filed by Human Rights Watch, unless the U.N. Security Council deems the situation in Rwanda so dangerous to international security and stability that an independent U.N. investigative team must be allowed in, as when U.N. investigator Hans Blix's team was allowed into Iraq before the 2003 U.S./U.K. invasion.

Of course, the U.S. and U.K. ignored Blix's conclusion that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as the U.S. and allied states will ignore any evidence counter to the security interests now defined by their executive corporate, military and foreign policy elites, not by popular democracy.

However, that's no reason not to call for investigation. It's better that Hans Blix's team was allowed into Iraq than not, for the sake of history and global consciousness, and we can continue to work for just outcomes. Independent U.N. investigations should be undertaken, post haste, into each instance of individual and mass disappearances in Rwanda, and into why bound, bagged bodies were found floating in Lake Rweru between the shores of Rwanda and Burundi.

Why has the U.S. renewed support for Kagame's Rwanda?

Why did the U.S. renew its political and military support of Rwandan President Paul Kagame's dictatorship at the U.S.-Africa Summit? Why is the U.S. threatening the Hutu refugees organized as the FDLR with military action if they refuse to disarm and surrender unconditionally?

The FDLR may be armed in self-defense, but Special Envoy to the Great Lakes Region Russ Feingold has acknowledged that they pose no credible threat to Rwanda. The majority of Rwandan Hutu refugees in eastern Congo are simply that – refugees – who dare not return to Rwanda for fear of having their names added to these long lists of missing persons that the Rwandan government says it's unable to explain.

Rwandan opposition leaders, Hutu and Tutsi alike, and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete have all called upon the Rwandan government to negotiate with the FDLR for safe repatriation to a Rwanda in which they will not be a de facto Hutu underclass threatened with elimination. ,

On January 4th, former Rwandan General Kayumba Nyamwasa told KPFA: "I understand the guiltiness that maybe some could be feeling about their failure to stop the genocide. But you don't support somebody who's in the process of creating another genocide. And I think they should be able to examine their consciences, look at what is happening in Rwanda, and see exactly what is taking place."

Many Rwandan Hutus, refugees and exiles believe that if the regime now headed by Paul Kagame remains in power for another 50 years, there will be no Hutu people left in Rwanda.

Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay ViewCounterpunchGlobal ResearchColored OpinionsBlack Agenda Report, and Black Star News, and produces radio news and features for Pacifica'sWBAI-NYCKPFA-Berkeley and her own YouTube Channel. She can be reached atanniegarrison@gmail.com. If you want to see Ann Garrison's independent reporting continue, please contribute on her website, anngarrison.com.

[AfricaRealities] Fw: *DHR* The Independent - UK - 1 hour ago: Assassins linked to Kagame regime.

 


From: "Jean Bosco Sibomana sibomanaxyz999@gmail.com [Democracy_Human_Rights]" 
Subject: *DHR* The Independent - UK - 1 hour ago: Assassins linked to Kagame regime.

 
Assassins linked to Kagame regime.

The Independent - UK - 1 hour ago.
By Ian Birrell
Friday 29 August 2014

Rwandan president is implicated in funding hit squad of four men
convicted of trying to kill his exiled army chief in South Africa.
Yet Western countries, including Britain, continue to pander to the
murderous despot


Six men charged with attempting to kill Rwanda's former army chief
Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa sit in court in Johannesburg. Four of them
were convicted of attempted assassination yesterday

Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa had only been in South Africa for a few
months when, returning home from a shopping trip with his wife and
children, a gunman tried to kill him.

The Rwandan general, exiled after falling out with President Paul
Kagame, survived after being rushed to intensive care. Yesterday he
saw four men convicted of trying to assassinate him.

"The magistrate has correctly observed that the conspiracy to kill me
was politically motivated," said Mr Nyamwasa, after the verdict in
Kagiso, near Johannesburg.

The resolution of this 2010 case is a landmark moment. It is the first
time a Rwandan hit squad has been caught and convicted after leaving a
trail of blood and terror around the world.

Army chief of staff Mr Nyamwasa fled to South Africa after joining in
opposition with three other former close allies of Kagame. Another was
Patrick Karegeya, an ex-spy chief found strangled in a Johannesburg
hotel this year.

Stanley Mkhair, the magistrate, said it was clear the four convicted
men – one Rwandan and three Tanzanians – met several times to plan the
Nyamwasa assassination attempt and were paid 80,000 Rand (£4,540) in
cash by "people in Rwanda". A 33-year-old Rwandan businessman named
Pascal Kanyandekwe was cleared of offering big bribes to South African
police after they arrested him. Items found in his possession proved
his links to the plot but there was insufficient evidence to convict
him, said Mr Mkhair.

The general's driver was also cleared after prosecutors failed to
prove beyond doubt he was involved.

Significantly, Mr Mkhair concluded the plot to kill Mr Nyamwasa came
"from a certain group of people from Rwanda". Clearly he was pointing
at the regime of Kagame, who holds his nation in a vice-like grip.

Yet still this repressive ruler remains the darling of many Western
admirers, despite never hiding his lethal contempt for critics.

Days after Karegeya's killing, the Rwandan Defence Minister –
referring to the strangling – said: "When you choose to be a dog, you
die like a dog, and the cleaners will wipe away the trash so that it
does not stink for them."

The following day President Kagame himself came close to condoning the
murder. "Whoever betrays the country will pay the price, I assure
you," he told a rally. "Whoever it is, it is a matter of time."

The tragedy of Rwanda is how this deluded despot sees himself as the
embodiment of his nation – and how he is egged on by fawning Western
advisers such as Tony Blair and aid donors who prop up his murderous
regime by providing 40 per cent of its budget.

"This is a significant case because the victim was such a high-profile
opponent," said Carina Tertsakian, senior researcher on Rwanda at
Human Rights Watch. "It fits a well-documented pattern against
opponents and critics that has gone on as long as this government has
been in power."

Of course Rwanda denied involvement in the attempt on Mr Nyamwasa's
life, just as it always does when dissidents die in mysterious
circumstances. "The Rwandan government does not go around shooting
innocent citizens," said Louise Mushikiwabo, the Foreign Minister.

But such claims look absurd when a steady succession of critics,
judges and journalists have been threatened, harassed and murdered
after crossing Kagame. Victims have been beaten, beheaded, shot,
stabbed and strangled both at home and abroad.

Even Paul Rusesabagina, whose brave stance during the 1994 genocide
saved so many lives and led to the film Hotel Rwanda, was intimidated
after speaking out against Kagame's misrule.

Human Rights Watch has documented arbitrary arrests, detentions,
killings, torture and enforced disappearances since Kagame took power.
Many cases are similar in style.

In 1998 a former Minister of Interior who criticised human rights
abuses was shot dead in Kenya, having survived a previous murder
attempt. A high court judge in Nairobi found the killing was political
– but Rwanda frustrated investigations by refusing to waive diplomatic
immunity for a suspect working at its embassy.

Latest victims include Kagame's former bodyguard Joel Mutabazi, who
survived both assassination and abduction attempts before being
snatched from Uganda and put on trial for "terrorism" in Kigali.
Prosecutors are demanding a life sentence.


South Africa has refused a French request to extradite Mr Nyamwasa to
answer questions over Kagame's alleged order to shoot down a plane
carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, which sparked the 1994
genocide.

After another attempt on Mr Nyamwasa's life in March, South African
Justice Minister Jeff Radebe warned Rwanda that his nation "will not
be used as a springboard to do illegal activities". This led to a
spate of tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.

Even the US, for so long turning a blind eye to Kagame's atrocities
and his pillaging of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has hit out at
"politically motivated murders of prominent Rwandan exiles".

Yet Britain welcomed this war criminal into the Commonwealth and
continues to pump huge sums of aid into his country – nearly £400m
over the course of the coalition – while hypocritically talking of
promoting democracy and human rights.

Even a warning from Scotland Yard in 2011 that a Rwandan hit squad had
been sent to murder two exiles living in Britain failed to stop the
torrent of aid into this regime's pocket.

"This is a very important verdict," said Rene Mugenzi, a Liberal
Democrat activist who was one of the targets. "Anyone opposed to
Kagame and doing anything to raise awareness about what is happening
in Rwanda has a death sentence put on them."

The Independent
2 Derry Street London W8 5TT
© independent.co.uk

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/assassins-linked-to-kagame-regime-9700529.html

--
SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
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-“The root cause of the Rwandan tragedy of 1994 is the long and past historical ethnic dominance of one minority ethnic group to the other majority ethnic group. Ignoring this reality is giving a black cheque for the Rwandan people’s future and deepening resentment, hostility and hatred between the two groups.”

-« Ce dont j’ai le plus peur, c’est des gens qui croient que, du jour au lendemain, on peut prendre une société, lui tordre le cou et en faire une autre ».

-“The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.”

-“I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.

-“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

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