CM/Pers, to find out how to ORDER YOUR COPY OF Simonovic's latest, A NEW WORLD IS POSSIBLE,

CLICK ON THE PHOTO OF THE BOOK'S COVER AT THE TOP OF THE LEFT COLUMN OF SIMONOVIC's POSTERS!

The book is in LIMITED SUPPLY--so ORDER TODAY! -- cm/p   more »

Following the release of the “Mutsinzi Report” on the 6 April 1994 attack which took the lives of 12 fathers from Rwanda, Burundi and France*; we, the family of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, feel an obligation to warn the public of the attempted manipulations of and diversions from the reality of this terrorist act that took our father from us. We want first of all to impeach the objectivity of this “Independent Committee of Experts,” whose use of the word ‘independent’ is a mere embellishment for its desperate need to get across. Everyone knows [or should know—cm/p] that Mr. Jean Mutsinzi, head of the Commission, is a founding member of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF, currently holding state power) and the former Chief Justice of the Rwandan Supreme Court, also under the same RPF regime. His proximity to Paul Kagame is even better known and we do not expect that this Commission he leads is going to cast any suspicion on the party of which he is a founding member or on his colleagues and comrades-in-arms, including Kagame, himself, though they have been found, by international judicial investigations, to be the instigators and commanders of this attack.

We wish to draw the public’s attention to the fact that besides the dubious independence of this Rwandan Commission, it was only conceived in April 2007 and set up by the Rwandan government in November 2007 to begin its work in December of that year, or nearly 14 years after the fact. This is incontrovertible evidence of the indifference of the Rwandan government, since the RPF came to power, on the subject of finding the truth behind this terrorist act. This indifference was even confirmed by Paul Kagame, himself, at the end of 2006 when he stated on the international airwaves (on the BBC’s Hard Talk and on RF1) that he is not at all interested in clearing up the death of President Habyarimana; he said he could not care less about it.   more »

One Response to Oliver Kamm

According to Oliver Kamm, our "Open Letter to Amnesty International's London and Belfast Offices, on the Occasion of Noam Chomsky's Belfast Festival Lecture, October 30, 2009"[1],

"blithely repeated claims that were judged to be defamatory in the High Court in 2000, when ITN successfully sued Living Marxism (LM) magazine. LM had claimed that Ed Vulliamy, along with Penny Marshall and Ian Williams of ITN, had been fraudulent in reporting the Trnopolje camp in Bosnia…."[2]

Kamm is wrong.

Nowhere in the March 2000 verdict in the libel case brought by ITN against LM for publishing Thomas Deichmann's "The Picture that Fooled the World"[3] did the jury reject the specific factual claim by Deichmann and LM that when the first encounter took place between these British reporters and Fikret Alic and the other Bosnian Muslim men on August 5, 1992, it was Marshall, Williams, and Vulliamy who were standing behind the fence through which the interviews were carried out and the film taken. As Deichmann argued, this part chicken-wire, part barbed-wire fence surrounded an agriculture-related compound at a much larger site that included a public school and a community center, but was then serving as a camp for displaced persons and detainees during the civil wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the center of this compound stood a barn, the fence having been erected prior to the civil wars to enclose the barn and objects related to it. But this fence did not surround or enclose the Bosnian Muslim men standing on the opposite side of it from the British reporters, outside the immediate compound in which the British reporters stood.
   more »

On reading parts of the Mutsinzi Report without any historical analysis, the uninformed might find themselves as overwhelmingly convinced as they were with the sensational Jean de Dieu Mucyo Report on France’s involvement in the Rwandan Tutsi genocide of 1994. But readers who are familiar with the methods and strategies of the RPF, especially those used by the commissions created by the current Kigali regime, will notice right away that the Mutsinzi Report is batched testimony that was either made-to-orders or scripted and given to ‘rehearsed witnesses’ to present, a potpourri of tricked-out situations and information and of documents interpreted in such a way as to turn them into disinformation for manipulating public opinion. In short, the Report of the Mutsinzi Commission is a diversion!

My focus will be partly on the Commission, itself, and partly on extracts from certain testimony and documents.


The Mutsinzi Commission:

Continental Magazine presents The Mutsinzi Commission as an ‘Independent Committee of Experts’ presided over by Jean Mutsinzi, Chief Justice of the African Court of Human Rights and Peoples and the former Chief Justice of the Rwandan Supreme Court. This Committee, composed of members of the RPF, cannot be considered independent, impartial or even credible, since it was created by the RPF, which is a party to the matter that the Commission is charged with investigating. Furthermore, the appointment of an international functionary to head this Commission smacks of chicanery. Since Mutsinzi is Rwandan, the Rwandan government should not have assigned him a mission that conflicts with his functions with the Commission of the African Union. This was done to project greater credibility onto the Report. The Commission is not independent because it answers to the Rwandan government and cannot report its findings to the public, something it has twice tried to do and has twice been thwarted by the Rwandan government. The Commission cannot deliver its findings or judgments, but must convey only the views of the RPF.   more »

The public should be aware of the facts before forming and expressing an opinion. The fact is that Rwanda before 1990 was considered the Switzerland of Africa, a model of social development. The result of the 1959 social revolution that threw off the Tutsi monarchy and aristocracy and freed the majority Hutu population from serfdom and a lifetime of humiliation was the establishment of a collective society in which both the Hutu and Tutsi, as well as the Twa, lived together in relative harmony. Tutsis were members of the government, its administration, were present in large numbers in the education system and the judiciary, and controlled most of the large private commercial companies in Rwanda. The Rwandan army was a multiethnic military force composed of both Hutus and Tutsis, and it stayed a multiethnic force even when the Rwandan Army was forced to retreat into the Congo forests in July 1994 because of shortages of ammunition brought about by the western embargo on arms and supplies.

Rwanda descended into chaos in 1990 when the self-described Rwanda Patriotic Front, or RPF, forces launched a surprise attack on October 1, 1990, from Uganda. In fact, every one of the officers and men of that invasion force were members of the Ugandan Army.

The ‘RPF rebel’ invasion was really an invasion by Uganda disguised as an independent “liberation force.” Liberation from what has never been stated. Initially, the justification put out by the RPF was the right of return of Tutsi “refugees” from Uganda to Rwanda. However, the refugee problem had been resolved by an agreement between the RPF, Uganda, Rwanda, the UNHCR, and the OAU, a few weeks earlier, in which the Rwandan government agreed to the repatriation of all those Tutsis in Uganda who wanted to return to Rwanda. That accord required that Tutsi representatives of the refugees travel to Kigali for a meeting to determine the mechanics of that population movement, and how to accommodate all those people in such a small country. They were expected at the end of September 1990. They never arrived.    more »

First of all, I reiterate my remarks about the alleged massacre at Srebrenica. President Milosevic and others at the Hague tribunal knocked down that American-KLA canard a long time ago. That you keep repeating US-KLA propaganda only shows that you have no interest in the facts or the evidence. As for my representation of President Milosevic, yes, it was an honor to represent such a brave and principled man whose only crime was to continue to fight for socialism against the fascism of the US and its axis. He was completely innocent of those fabricated charges, as was stated in the report I made at the request of the American Association of Jurists after his initial arrest in Belgrade by the DOS regime. In an interview with the Deputy Minister of Justice and the investigating judge, I asked if there was any substance to the charges and they told me, no, it was fabricated, but they were forced to do so as the Americans wanted his head. They told me that if they had refused to charge him, the Americans threatened to resume the bombing of Belgrade. . . .

This is all evidence presented before the trial chamber at the ICTR. I can send you the transcripts if you are interested. One other thing your readers should be told regarding the alleged genocide: The Rwandan Army was a multiethnic force that included in its ranks many Tutsi officers and men. Everyone of them stayed with the army and fought the RPF, and when the Rwandan Army retreated into the Congo, these Tutsi soldiers stayed with the army rather than join the RPF. How on earth can anyone claim that an army partly composed of Tutsis could engage in a genocide of their own people? It’s absurd. . . .   more »

In an editorial published back east in August 1997 I urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign. I opposed the expansion of settlements in Israeli-occupied areas of Palestine and called for an immediate and permanent cessation to the expropriation of Arab lands, a practice still regarded around the world as a blatant provocation and an open invitation to unrest and violence.

I further argued that dastardly alliances with jingoist generals, unholy covenants with religious zealots in Brooklyn and in Jerusalem who use ideological extortion to force a theocracy on a largely secular society; the inexplicable compulsion to scuttle peace negotiations, a wrathful disdain toward international censure, a savage antipathy toward the Palestinian people -- all hallmarks of an administration oscillating between clumsiness and aberration – posed grave dangers to peace in the Middle East.

In short, Mr. Netanyahu’s regime, I said, was a calamity and a recipe for disaster.   more »

Just as with anything like a real investigation of 9/11, we're still waiting for the RPF's explanation of what really happened on 4/6. While we were waiting, Kagame and Rwanda have been lavished with an endless array of Humanitarian/Capitalist awards: from Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential list, to a Man of Peace prize from the sectarian pervert Rick Warren of the Saddleback Congregation, to a Global Achievement award from the secular war criminal Bill Clinton; concurrent with the renewal of French/Rwandan diplomatic relations, formerly-Francophone Rwanda was accepted into the British Commonwealth; and, my all time fave of a Rwandan parable because it really tells the story of how fucked up are today's geopolitical values:

--The UNICEF country chief, Joseph Foumbi, has congratulated [the Kigali] government for being the first country in the world to be declared landmine free. Rwanda was declared land mine free last week by the Cartagena Summit on a Mine-Free World in Colombia.--

Of course, all those mines were laid, in the first place, by the current Rwandan government after they invaded from Uganda in October 1990. But is even this joke going to be enough to quiet the questions on 4/6?   more »

David Rohde on Uncovering 7,000 Executed Muslims—Well, One Bone, At Least

The trial of the former Bosnian Serb wartime President Radovan Karadzic that began on October 26, 2009, has unleashed a new wave of propaganda on the alleged Serbian genocide at Srebrenica. This has provided a model case study of focused propaganda that serves Western imperial interests, but which fully captured the liberal and left intellectuals and media. This is one of those cases where closure came early, with highly effective demonization of the Serbs, treatment of the Yugoslav Tribunal as a genuine instrument of justice rather than a NATO-war tool (which it is), and a liberal-left collapse.   more »

Prior to the first Rwandan invasion of Zaire/DRC in 1996, a phalanx of U.S. intelligence operatives converged on Zaire. Their actions suggested a strong interest in Zaire’s eastern defenses. The number-two person at the U.S. Embassy in Kigali travelled from Kigali to eastern Zaire to initiate intelligence contacts with the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL-CZ) rebels under the command of the late President Laurent Kabila. The Rwandan embassy official met with rebel leaders at least twelve times.[2]



A former U.S. ambassador to Uganda - acting on behalf of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) – gathered intelligence on the movement of Hutu refugees through eastern Zaire. The DIA’s second ranking Africa hand, who also served as the U.S. military attaché in Kigali, reconnoitered the Rwandan border towns of Cyangugu and Gisenyi, gathering intelligence on the cross border movements of anti-Mobutu Rwandan Tutsis from Rwanda.[3]



The Defense Intelligence Agency’s African bureau chief established a close personal relationship with Bizima (alias Bizimana) Karaha, an ethnic Rwandan who would later become the Foreign Minister in the Laurent Kabila government. Moreover, the DIA’s Africa division had close ties with Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), an Alexandria, Virginia, private military company (PMC), whose Vice President for Operations is a former Director of DIA.
   more »

Two of the highlights of this weekend's Conference of ICTR Defense attorneys in The Hague were the French investigative writer, Pierre Péan, author of the magnificent history of the Rwandan counter-revolution (1990-1994), "Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs," and the Tutsi Prince, Antoine Nyetera, the source of Péan's controversial four-page aria on the Rwandan (Tutsi) culture of the lie (known in Kinyarwanda as ubwenge) at the very beginning (pp 41-44) of his 500+page tome.  One or the other or both of them smartly pointed out that the 'culture of the lie' is characteristic to all irrational, anti-democratic, neofeudal, monarchic, minoritarian--in a word, Fascist--political cultures.  The ruling ...   more »

Lugan, like so many ‘experts’ seems pretty careless about what he knows and what he thinks we know. He gets names wrong (he has ‘Harbour’ for ‘Arbour’)--or maybe he’s just being anecdotal here, sketchy--but, hey, I don’t wanna nit-pick, piss off another ‘expert’--so let me just fill in a few spaces he left when it came to The General’s case--that’s General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, Chief of the Rwandan National Gendarmerie during the troubles, whose back we’ve had here at CM/P for some time now.

Sure, the Tribs are all about false witnesses giving scripted and rehearsed testimony as part of some plea deal with the DAs in Arusha or Kigali--and the rules of evidence and procedure (like the bad Joint Criminal Enterprise joke) are pretty much cooked down to allow the Prosecutor, who is indistinguishable from the Court, which is indistinguishable from NATO (which is indistinguishable from al Qaeda), to have it his way without breaking a sweat. But to be complicit in this shit, to dignify this grotesquery with your participation, is not without lethal side effects--Milosevic turned out so many prosecution witnesses in his court that Judge Richard May got brain cancer and died. So to see all these Canadian shysters in Arusha actually organize to fight against the essential injustice at the stinking heart of International Justice is a singularly gratifying surprise.   more »

Killings by the Tutsi

But there is another side to the story. Lemarchand talks of the studied disregard of the narratives of the Hutu refugees about the massive persecution and killings inflicted on Hutus by the RPF, "all of these add up to a devastating commentary on the conspiracy of silence surrounding one of the biggest ethnic cleansing operations that followed in the wake of the genocide" (p. 11)[1]. So, briefly, the RPF, closely associated with Museveni's regime in Uganda (having helped him to overthrow Obote's government), planned to capture Rwanda, assisted by Uganda. President Habyarimana's regime in Rwanda was somewhat shaky and was forced into a process of democratisation[2]. Among its new policies was the repatriation of the Rwandese refugees in Uganda, set for November 1990. Gérard Prunier, the distinguished historian of the Great Lakes Region, writes, "this new development augured ill for the RPF militants who were now in danger of losing their support among the refugees if the latter felt that their return to Rwanda could be achieved without fighting. Accordingly, they accelerated their preparations to beat the November deadline"[3]. Prunier says that the RPF was goaded into action for another reason: intellectual circles in Rwanda were busy preparing to launch political parties, as Habyarimana, now under pressure also from the French, "could not long delay the acceptance of a multiparty system— which would deprive the RPF of one its best public relations points, i.e., that it was fighting a totalitarian single-party dictatorship." (p. 91).    more »

Israeli capitalists have long been keen on exploiting Africa's mineral wealth. They have a high interest in African diamonds and process them in Israel, which is already the world's second largest processor of diamonds. Israel is also interested in African uranium, thorium and other radioactive elements used to manufacture nuclear fuel. Many retired army officers are on the lookout for job opportunities as trainers of African militias.

Israeli concerns with Iran also feature high on the agenda of the Zionist state. Israel has been keeping a close eye on the Iranian drive in Africa, where Tehran, following in Beijing's footsteps, has become involved in a number of major economic projects using very cheap African workers. The Israeli ruling class is very wary of Tehran's ambitions in a continent so rich in the raw materials for producing nuclear fuel. It hopes to forge a network of strategic relations in order to check the expansion of Iranian influence in Africa. Israel also wants to remove the influence of the Lebanese communities in West Africa, whom Israel suspects of helping Hezbollah. Working to its advantage are its close ties with Washington.   more »

[This is a Press Release (a French version follows the English) from the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) condemning the recent crimes against Rwandan refugees in eastern Congo committed by the combined militaries of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FADRC) and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), known as the Rwandan Patriotic Army or Rwandan Defense Forces (RPA/RDF)--the latter being the powerful armed forces built-up in the 1980s and 90s in Rwanda/Burundi/Uganda at great expense by the US (AFRICOM), the UK and Israel, to further the militarized wastage of the African continent while facilitating the theft of its vast natural resources by private Western multinational corporations. Much of the social and political chaos one sees in sub-Saharan Africa is instigated by off-the-books military units with roots in the several major US bases in Rwanda/Burundi. And, of course, when it occurs in eastern Congo, this deadly chaos (which has taken upward of 6 million lives since 1990) is blamed on its victims, the FDLR. --mc]   more »

In mid-July, the NY Times reported that the Obama administration had selected Stephen Rapp to replace Pierre Prosper, the Bush administration’s Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes. A former Iowa U.S. Attorney, and Democrat politico, Rapp began his international career at the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2001, while Carla Del Ponte was Chief Prosecutor. In Del Ponte’s 2008 memoir, Madam Prosecutor: Confronting Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity, translated into English in early 2009, Del Ponte explains how she was removed from her ICTR position in 2003 by U.S. Ambassador Prosper, himself, because she refused to cooperate with a U.S.-initiated “cover-up” of war crimes committed by the current Rwandan government during the 1994 “Rwandan Genocide.”

According to Del Ponte, the ICTR Prosecutor had the evidence long before 2003 to prosecute Kagame for “touching-off” the Rwanda Genocide by ordering the assassination of Rwanda’s sitting President Juvenal Habyarimana. Her book also details dozens of massacre sites involving thousands of victims for which the Kagame government and military should be prosecuted. The well-publicized canard, that “the identity of the assassins is unknown” is a bald-faced lie, known to all ICTR senior prosecutors, according to Ms. Del Ponte.   more »

Here is where your crimes become 'unspeakable.' Because your idea of regime change in Serbia went well-beyond the man, Milosevic, who, after all, was just that, one man, a man who had served his country lawfully, loyally and in the best traditions of revolutionary socialism. He could not be allowed to continue in Serbian/Yugoslav politics, especially as leader of the opposition, because that would have validated that country's socialist democracy, and it was that absolute need to destroy socialist democracy everywhere, that forced you not only to 'bring down' the politician Milosevic, along with his Socialist Party of Serbia (as your ilk has subsequently done with Vojslav Seselj and his Radical Party of Serbia), but you had, in the great tradition of non-violence, to put this decent, majoritarian leader to death.   more »

There are many problems with the Campaign for Peace and Democracy's "Question & Answer on the Iran Crisis," issued by the CPD on July 7, and widely circulated since then.[1] 

The CPD adopted this format, it tells us, because "some on the left, and others as well, have questioned the legitimacy of and the need for solidarity with the anti-Ahmadinejad movement," and the CPD believes "those questions need to be squarely addressed." 

We believe, on the contrary, that the CPD's 13 questions-and-answers do little to clarify issues related to Iran's June 12 presidential election and its tumultuous aftermath, and even less to help leftists and "American progressives" decide how they should respond to them. 

As we try to show below, when stripped of its didactic format, this Q&A amounts to little more than an emotional plea to its target audience to surrender what remains of their leftist instincts (long under siege in the States, and shrinking rapidly), and join its authors[2] for a ride on the "green wave" of yet another color-coded campaign that fits well with one of their government's longest-running programs of destabilization and regime-change. We believe that any "confusion" felt by the left and "American progressives" towards these events is a confusion that has been sown by our would-be instructors.[3]    more »

Deep Delusions, Bitter Truth
(The Trial of a Rwandan General)

[A Courtroom Drama in Two Acts]

[COMPILED BY CM/P FROM THE ACTUAL TRIAL TRANSCRIPTS OF 24 & 25 JUNE, 2009]

THE SET: The stage is empty but for a small table with a lectern on it around CS. On the Cyclorama is a large ‘Big Brother’ screen on which are projected images, still and moving pictures, appropriate to what is being said on stage.

*********

MR Black:
Why do you--so why does the Prosecution mislead--try to mislead the Court in this argument? Why? Because they are protecting the RPF, and if they don't put out this false story, then the context in which they accuse these men here doesn't make any sense. Because if the world knew that there was not just an explosion on April 6th, there was an ongoing war for four years in which the RPF assassinated people, committed acts of terrorism every day, created millions of refugees and murdered tens and tens of thousands of people, all mainly Hutus, but their attitude is that the only good Hutu is a dead Hutu. That's obviously their attitude.   more »

When the RPF launched their attack, President Juvenal Habyarimana was in Washington, lured out of the way, by the US State Department. The evidence that the US was aware of and supported the October surprise attack was the US Administration’s offer to Habyarimana of asylum in the United States if he surrendered power to the RPF. Habyarimana refused and immediately flew back home. There was no condemnation of the Ugandan-RPF aggression by the United States--a matter France raised at the United Nations--or any of its allies despite the big noise they made at the same time about the advance of Iraqi forces into Kuwait. Further, the Rwanda ambassador to the UN, then on the Security Council, filed a protest with the UNSC, but the US had it taken off the agenda. In fact the US and its allies supported the aggression against Rwanda from its onset, and US Special Forces operated with the RPF from the beginning. Recently, while former president Bill Clinton was in Toronto, he denied any involvement in Rwanda--this is one of the Big Lies of the century. Clinton and George W. Bush are up to their necks in the blood of the Rwandan and Congolese people.   more »

It's always struck me as sadly ironic that these innocent Rwandan victims of a foreign aggression (1 October 1990), Nuremberg's primal crime against Peace, these representatives of the rational, majoritarian, revolutionary government of mid-1990s Rwanda, led by its duly-elected and grotesquely martyred (6 April 1994) Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, these patriots who, after unsuccessfully defending their homes and loved ones against a proxy military force from the world's most developed and dangerously venal nations (US, UK, Belgium, Israel) on a full-tilt feeding frenzy for the riches of Congo, find themselves cast into a dungeon of UnReason and charged with the genocide of the very people they had committed to defend by the very neo-feudal Sadists who had razed their homes, slaughtered their friends and families, demolished the national infrastructure it had taken them 30 years to build up, and returned their once-thriving African society to a mere shade of its former colonial self: that these profoundly decent people have not been driven hatter mad or madder and continue to petition their pitiless tormentors and executioners, at the UN and in Obama's Washington, with well-tempered and soundly reasoned historical arguments for the innocence of the majority of the Rwandan people and the redemption of the Rwandan nation, makes me shiver with insignificance.   more »

There has recently been some--though not much--ado about US/NATO terrorist attacks against civilians in western Afghanistan and Pakistan. Cynical and pathetic explanations for this butchery, like ‘The bad guys used these women and kids as human shields!’ or ‘From the looks of the mess, the bad guys did most of the killing with grenades!’ or ‘Wow, looks like we musta screwed the pooch on this one. But we’re NOT the bad guys. Sorry!’ come straight out of the NATO/Mossad terror handbook. Along with, ‘If anybody asks any questions, they’re just anti-Semit--fuck ‘em!’

This is all too reminiscent of the early days of the last US Democratic administration, when $3 Bill Clinton, as his first foreign policy gesture, ordered the bombing of Baghdad and killed a world-renowned artist--a woman--yet none dared call Clinton a ‘femmocidaire’. And Bill was no novice at remote controlled murder, having taken time out of his busy 1991 presidential campaign to sign the death warrant on an auto-lobotomized black man, Ricky Lee Rector--a man so removed from reality that, before entering the infamous Arkansas execution protocol, he stuck a piece of pie, the dessert from his last meal, under his bunk for later, and vowed to fully support his killer’s presidency.

Then, of course, Clinton--in fact, Mr & Mrs Clinton--went on to collaborate on the mass murders of innumerable Middle Easterners, Slavs and Africans, in Palestine, Iraq, Russia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda/Burundi/Congo--just off the top of my addled pate.    more »

L'enquête du juge français fut initiée en 1998 suite à une plainte contre X déposée initialement par la fille d'un des membres de l'équipage du Falcon présidentiel, plainte à laquelle se sont joints ensuite d'autres membres des familles. Fin novembre 2006, le juge Bruguière, Premier vice-président du Tribunal de grande instance de Paris en charge de la coordination antiterroriste, rend une ordonnance par laquelle il demande que neuf mandats d'arrêt internationaux soient décernés à l'encontre de proches collaborateurs de Paul Kagame. En ce qui concerne le président en exercice du Rwanda, couvert par son immunité de chef d'Etat, le juge se tourne vers le Secrétaire Général de l'ONU et préconise que le Tribunal pénal international pour le Rwanda (TPIR), compétent en la matière, prenne le relais des poursuites.

L'instruction couvre donc une période de huit ans. Le moins que l'on puisse dire est qu'elle fut menée en dehors de toute précipitation. Les autorités gouvernementales rwandaises se rendirent parfaitement compte de la portée réelle de la procédure en cours et réagirent bien avant que l'ordonnance ne soit rendue. En 2005 elles menacèrent à différentes reprises la France de poursuites judiciaires pour complicité de génocide. Effectivement des plaintes furent déposées en ce sens à Paris, par des rescapés rwandais, contre l'armée française. Ensuite, en avril 2006, une commission (dite Mucyo du nom de son président) fut mise sur pied pour enquêter sur "le rôle de la France avant, pendant et après le génocide".   more »

It is enlightening and sometimes even amusing to see how the treatment of the shooting down of civilian planes is politicized, and how in this area, as in so many others, the media propagandize in the service of the government’s agenda and party line. On the humorous side, consider the following New York Times editorial statements: On the Soviet shooting down of Korean Airlines flt.007 on August 31, 1983: “There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner.” This is “cold blooded mass murder,” and the editors ask “whether the Kremlin accepts its responsibility for a minimally decent international order” (ed., “Murder in the Air,” Sept. 2, 1983). On the Israeli shooting down of Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973: “No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner on the Sinai peninsula last week” (ed., “After Sinai,” March 1, 1973). On the shooting down of Iranian Airbus 655 by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf in July 1988, the New York Times editors found that in this case, “while horrifying, it was nonetheless an accident. On present evidence [i.e., on the claims in the immediate official account], it’s hard to see what the navy could have done to avoid it” (ed., “In Captain Rogers Shoes,” NYT, July 5, 1988).   more »

It is as if the French national proclivity for SnM humiliation under the polished jackboot of the Fascist juggernaut du jour, has become its last marketable asset in the global hawk shop of ideas. My adopted concitoyens REALLY seem to prendre leur pied (get off) on dressing up in ass-less Hugo Boss chaps and leather blinders, with that hard-rubber ball firmly strapped between their Gaulois-tainted teeth, and trying to croon, with a leitmotif suggesting The Marseillaises, 'Nous somme tous les genocidaires--tra-la, la, la, la, . . . oh-la-la!'--and all on Canal+. But the philosophical convergence of the Fascist and the Business Cultures should not be discounted in this analysis: If French public intellectuals choose to trivialize, even criminalize, the relatively honorable conduct of their government and military in regard to 1990s Rwanda (actually heroic when compared to that of its anglophone counterparts), it is only because there is so much more money to be made by French chatterers and scribblers from work under contract to the Holocaust Industry than from anything driven by ethical commitment to Historical Truth and International Justice.    more »

Today, in the post-Soviet era, NATO is the command center for the endless wars to globalize Western Waste Culture by militarily occupying and commercially and financially dominating those spheres of influence that were formerly Russian and Chinese. And its favored tactic in its terrorist trick-bag is the murderous false flag or friendly fire black provocation--with the sort of 'Plausible Deniability' it offers allowing NATO to transfer the full responsibility for its crimes onto its victims. As with the Alliance's implications in the so-called 'Islamic expansionist' uprisings in 1970s-1980s Afghanistan or 1990s Chechnya, Bosnia, and Kosovo, with their consequent atrocities, like the massacres in the Moscow theatre or the bombing of the Moscow apartment blocks, the slaughter of school children at Beslan, attacks on Bosnia breadlines and marketplaces, and various and sundry 'civil aviation incidents,' NATO's tacit involvement in this global reign of terror is vividly laid out even in the Business pages of the NY Times. So whether the unspeakable horror involves the slaughter of 800,000 Black Africans by their machete-wielding neighbors, or the commandeering of phantom airliners to be used as missiles in an elaborate DoD PR/AIG insurance scam, the beneficiaries are always the same: The Warlords of Global Finance Capital. Just tote up the number of Islamic military bases erected in these Muslim expansionist zones, and compare it to the number of NATO/US (permanent) bases that have come out of these same conflicts: Even the most sclerotic of imaginations should have little trouble getting itself around the fact that the perpetrators of these crimes are the same, too.   more »

We are just back from an all-too-short stay in Belgrade (we being my son Max and I), where a truncated version of this text was presented at an anti-NATO/EU/Fascism rally in Republic Square on Tuesday night the 24th.

The initial intention of this writing was to convey in English the essence of a statement made for the Commemoration Conference at the Sava Center, by French General Pierre-Marie Gallois, one of Serbia's oldest and best friends in France, and the man who accepted the unconditioned release of two French NATO pilots downed over Bosnia in December 1995, from his Yugoslav Army homologue, General Radko Mladic. Both these men are venerated by their peoples as great war heros, though Mladic has been turned by NATO expedience and cowardice into a most-wanted war crimes suspect unto genocidaire.

But Max's presence at my side in Belgrade changed a lot. Just as this visit to Serbia, to Slobodan Milosevic's grave in Pozarevac, and to the prison where Dragoljub Milanović, the chief of RTS, is currently stepping off a dime bid--a 'reckless endangerment' beef so humbug it'd bend Lady Justice double and choke her with her own vomit--this whole trip has racked focus on the Western wars for commercial and financial domination against small independence-minded nations, revealing them for the hideous campaigns of global terror and victim-blaming they really are.   more »

Time, personal and professional preoccupations dulled the memory of my unforgivable affront. But they did not erase it. It kept surging in my mind like a recurring abscess, and every time it did, fresh pangs of conscience filled me with regret and remorse.

I am now 71 and semi-retired. I will not dwell on the partisan politics that continue to cleave that region. I will not comment on the hegemonic objectives that doggedly retard the prospects for peace in a land bloodied by years of hatred and violence.

I have family in Israel and I wish that nation well. But in the name of decency and justice, as a human being and a journalist, I cannot silently watch the continued dismantlement, expropriation, marginalization and, yes, dehumanization of a people who have just as much right to selfhood and dignity and peace as does the state of Israel.

As for the recent actions by Jewish "settlers" in Hebron, I join those who characterized their obscene behavior as nothing short of a "pogrom," something worthy of Hitler's thugs. As a Jew, I, too, am deeply ashamed that Jews could do such a thing.

What I did nearly a lifetime ago in a Times Square souvenir shop may seem trivial to some. I have been haunted by it ever since. Call it a matter of scruples, of conscience, of principles.

It is with sincere good wishes for a brighter, secure and prosperous future that I offer my most sincere apologies to the people of Palestine, in their homeland and in exile, for the stupidity and cruelty of idle, unreasoned words.

Palestine exists. In body and soul. I hope the young man, and by extension the people I once insulted, read this letter and find it in their hearts to forgive.
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PRESS RELEASE - STOP KILLING & KIDNAPPING HUTU REFUGEES IN CONGO!!
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The FDLR warn the United Nations against the MONUC's fighting alongside the military coalition RPA / FARDC against Rwandan refugees in the DRC and members of the FDLR.

The Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) inform the public and the media that a helicopter of the United Nations Mission in DRC (MONUC) has participated in an air raid of the coalition of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) and the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) on 12 February 2009 in Gashebere, North Kivu in DRC.

...   more »

A.C.: The war had to continue . . .

J.H.: Yes, in his eyes, the war had to continue. It was out of the question for him to accept a role in the opposition. He knew he could not gain power through elections, him being a Tutsi in a country that is 85% Hutu. He needed an event to trigger the renewal of hostilities that would allow him to change the direction of history. That’s why he ordered the assassination of President Habyarimana, his predecessor. He knew very well that it would provoke a cataclysm.


A.C.: Leading to a genocide of his own ethnic group, you believe?

J.H.: I don’t know if his plan, if his cynicism, went that far. He did know, however, that this event had a high symbolic value and would trigger widespread massacres that would, in turn, legitimate his intervention, the return of the war, his seizure of power and his long-term installation as head of the country, without the international community being able to raise a single objection. His legitimacy was cinched when he presented himself as the one who put an end to the abomination of the massacres, but also as a member of the victim ethnic group. At the same time, in this very cynical way, he was able to get rid of the Tutsis from inside Rwanda, those Tutsis he mistrusted because the had stayed in Rwanda after 1961 and lived under majority Hutu rule. To him, these unfortunate brothers from inside the country were just renegades and traitors to the cause of Tutsi greatness! Kagame is, at once, a strategist, which he has well demonstrated, and a cynic, of which there can no longer be any doubt.   more »