In 2013, Newsweek published a surprisingly critical story on the effective dictator of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, who was also responsible for the Rwandan genocide.
Already in 1997, the U.N. estimated that Rwandan forces had caused the deaths of 200,000 Hutus in Congo. French expert Gérard Prunier estimated that the toll is closer to 300,000. According to the U.N. report, "
The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who were often undernourished and posed no threat to the attacking forces".
The UN report concluded that the systematic and widespread attacks, "
if proven before a competent court, could be characterized as crimes of genocide".
Filip Reyntjens states that Kagame's crimes rank with those perpetrated by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein or Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
In April 1995, the RPA attacked an internally displaced people's camp in Kibeho using automatic weapons, grenades, and mortars. A team of Australian medics listed more than 4,000 dead when the RPA stopped the count.
According to Gérard Prunier, at least 20,000 more people from the camp "disappeared" after the massacre.
In 2000, after numerous cases of forced exiles, disappearances, and assassinations of politicians, Pasteur Bizimungu resigned as president. Since then, almost every position of meaningful power in the country has been held by a Tutsi.
In 2001, when the Hutu Bizimungu tried to start a political party to run for president, it was outlawed on charges of being a "radical" Hutu organisation. In 2002, Bizimungu was arrested, and later was sentenced to 15 years in prison for "endangering the state" (pardoned by Kagame in 2007).
As early as 2000, some estimated that Rwanda was making $80 million to $100 million annually from Congolese coltan alone, roughly the equivalent of the entire defense budget.
Kagame's former lieutenant, Theogene Rudasingwa, said:
After the first Congo war, money began coming in through military channels and never entered the coffers of the Rwandan state. It is RPF money, and Kagame is the only one who knows how much money it is—or how it is spent. In meetings it was often said, 'For Rwanda to be strong, Congo must be weak, and the Congolese must be divided.'
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In the run-up to the 2010 election, in which Kagame remained president, several journalists and opposition politicians were attacked and/or killed, including a politician who was beheaded.
In Africa, Rwanda has become a prime example of a surveillance state, as "civilised" as the developed world or Communist China. In every Rwandan town and tiny village the RPF is present. Even when a town has a Hutu mayor, it are really Kagame's RPF representatives that call the shots.
RPF regulations govern almost every aspect of daily life and are enforced by local commissars through steep fines. Peasants are obligated to wear shoes and good clothes when not working their fields, are prohibited to drink banana wine from shared straws (a traditional gesture of reconciliation), and myriad other degrading rules.
Rwanda expert Susan Thomson said that everything is reported to the authorities:
The RPF saturates every aspect of life in Rwanda. They know everything: if you've been drinking, if you've had an affair, if you've paid your taxes.
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While our wonderful media are often reporting that Kagame made Rwanda great again, including an impressive annual growth rate of 5% since 2005, in reality it are only the lucky few that profit, while poverty is soaring in the countryside:
There is a real increase in misery. When you speak of Rwanda as a volcano, that's what's involved.
https://archive.is/u4G0a
I wouldn't rate the following looong New York Times piece as good, but there some genuinely interesting information can be found in it.
Paul Kagame’s tidy little Rwanda, has become one of the most straitjacketed in the world. Few people inside Rwanda dare to ciritcise president Kagame. Many Rwandans feel that Big Brother is watching them all the time: “
It’s like there’s an invisible eye everywhere, Kagame’s eye”.
Many aspects of Rwandan (open prison) life are dictated by the government, including an “eradication campaign” of all grass-roofed huts. In some areas, it's prohibited to dress in dirty clothes or share straws when drinking from a traditional pot of beer.
There are no large slums in Kigali anymore, because the government won’t allow them. Kagame has also made an end to homeless youth sleeping on the sidewalks.
Rwandan young vagrants and petty criminals have been arrested and sent to a youth “rehabilitation center” on an island in the middle of Lake Kivu that some people in Kigali compare to Alcatraz.
Kagame’s government has reportedly reduced child mortality by 70%; by reducing the amount of children being born.
Kagame has explained that he will make an end to overpopulation, by stopping (prohibiting?) women having many children: “
We educated the woman both in school and generally in society to say: ‘No, go for something else. You deserve better'”.
In the early 1990s, the Congolese government tried to help Rwanda’s Hutu-led government to fight back against Kagame’s genocidal RPA. After the RPF took control of Rwanda, many of the army officers of the Hutu army fled and continued to fight against the dictatorial RPA rule in Rwanda from refugee camps just inside Congo.
Kagame is known to have orchestrated many murderous acts over the years, including hunting down Hutu civilians in Rwanda and massacring Hutu families, who had fled into Congo’s jungles in the 1990s.
Kagame’s has made an end to Rwanda’s independent media.
Rwandan journalist Agnes Uwimana Nkusi was sentenced to a prison term of 4 years for "insulting the president and endangering national security" after she edited a series of articles critical of Kagame. Another journalist, Jean-Leonard Rugambage, was shot in the head on the day he published a story about Kagame’s government trying to kill Kayumba Nyamwasa.
In 2010, Kagame won 93% of the vote after his government effectively banned major opposition parties from running.
In 2010, after criticising Kagame, Nyamwasa was warned that he was about to be arrested. He swam across a river to escape from Rwanda and eventually made his way to Johannesburg, where he thought he would be safe.
A few months later, Nyamwasa was shot in the stomach and but couldný finish him off, because the gun jammed. Nyamwasa responded that “
Kagame was trying to kill me, I have no doubt about it”.
After the presidential election in 2010, even though Western officials knew that Rwanda is a one-party state, the aid to Kagame continued. Support from the USA has remained about $200 million a year in direct bilateral aid.
The NYT argues that it really doesn't understand why the dictator or Rwanda Kagame continues to be supported. Here's my 5-letter explanation - CONGO.
Kagame is a regular at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and friendly with the rich and corrupt, like Clinton, Bill Gates and Bono:
https://archive.is/sLBxt
The hypocritical Bono (of U2 fame, KBE) has been supporting the mass murdering dictator of Rwanda, Paul Kagame.
See Kagame with Bono, 2015.
In 2002, Drummond and Bono were among the founders of the publicity seeking, do nothing DATA – Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa – that later became One. Bono and Co., in support of Kagame, "so far raised almost €290 million" in partnership with organisations like Apple, Bank of America and Starbucks. The money went to the Geneva-based not-for-profit organisation Global Fund, with close ties the genocide-supporting UN and the World Health Organisation.
From 2001 to 2013, Ireland contributed €163 million to the Global Fund. The fund has spent more than €700 million in Rwanda, of which €70 million came from Red. Most of the €700 has been spent to fight Rwandans with AIDS:
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-sty ... -1.2340451
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Firestarter wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 9:18 pm
Maybe my "favourite" Rhodes Scholar in the Biden administration, is Susan Rice, who in the 1990s in the Clinton administration orchestrated the Rwandan genocide for which Paul Kagame was used, who was later made into the hero for "stopping" the genocide and installed as de facto dictator of Rwanda.
Rice has continued to cover up what happened to this very day. She later became Obama's Ambassador to the UN before being promoted to National Security Advisor from 2013-2017.
From 2002 to 2009, Rice was a Brookings Institution fellow.
During the 2004 presidential campaign, Rice served as a foreign policy adviser to Bonesman John Kerry.
Rice is also a member of the CFR.
See the genocidal Susan E. Rice (then State Department official) shaking hands with Paul Kagame (not yet crowned president), 1998.
viewtopic.php?p=69776#p69776
