Monday, 11 January 2016

[AfricaRealities.com] As Rwanda’s totalitarian regime is revealed, sponsors reconsider support.

From The Globe and Mail:
As Rwanda's totalitarian regime is revealed, sponsors reconsider support

Via The Globe and Mail's iPhone app

As Rwanda's totalitarian regime is revealed, sponsors reconsider support

GEOFFREY YORKJOHANNESBURG | The Globe and MailLast Updated: Friday, Jan. 08, 2016 6:00AM EST

Village informers. Re-education camps. Networks of spies on the streets. Routine surveillance of the entire population. The crushing of the independent media and all political opposition. A ruler who changes the constitution to extend his power after ruling for two decades.

It sounds like North Korea, or the totalitarian days of China under Mao. But this is the African nation of Rwanda – a long-time favourite of Western governments and a major beneficiary of millions of dollars in Canadian government support.

The chilling details are from two recent books by researchers who spent years in the country. While the authoritarian nature of the Rwandan regime is already well-known, and The Globe and Mail has already reported evidence of Rwanda's role in attempting to assassinate exiled dissidents, the recent books give a disturbing portrait of a much broader system that puts the entire civilian population under the regime's tight control, through surveillance by spies and neighbourhood informers.

Until now, Rwanda has enjoyed a huge amount of support from foreign governments – mostly because of its ability to dazzle outsiders with its economic reforms, its anti-corruption drives and its clean and tidy streets, and because of the lingering Western feeling of guilt over the 1994 genocide.

Canada has given more than $500-million in aid to Rwanda since the genocide, including about $30-million in 2013 alone. In total, Rwanda gets nearly $1-billion in annual aid from the West, accounting for almost 40 per cent of its government budget.

But this support might finally be starting to change. The United States, while still an ally of Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame, has been increasingly critical of his human-rights abuses and his efforts to manipulate the constitution to stay in power. Under the latest constitutional changes, Mr. Kagame will be able to stay in power until 2034 – giving him a stunning 40 years in control of Rwanda.

A few days ago, the U.S. State Department said it was "deeply disappointed" by Mr. Kagame's announcement that he will seek another presidential term.

"The United States believes constitutional transitions of power are essential for strong democracies and that efforts by incumbents to change rules to stay in power weaken democratic institutions," it said. "We are particularly concerned by changes that favour one individual over the principle of democratic transitions."

With the United States shifting away from its blanket support for Mr. Kagame, and with the growing evidence that the Kagame regime is heavily involved in human-rights violations that include killings and the imprisonment of dissidents, it will be interesting to see if the new government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reconsiders Canada's support for Rwanda.

Already, in recent years, Canada has been moving away from general financial aid for the Rwandan government. Instead, it has preferred to support civil-society groups and independent agencies, especially in areas such as agriculture and rural development.

On its official website for its Rwandan programs, the Canadian government says: "Canada regularly stresses to Rwanda the importance of a pluralist society, respecting commitments on human rights, and seeking concrete solutions to challenges in the region related to peace and security."

But it's not enough to issue gentle reminders to a regime that brutally controls the daily lives of its people; consider the revelations of a newly published book, Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship. The book was written by Anjan Sundaram, who worked as a media trainer in Rwanda, trying to encourage and protect the dwindling band of independent journalists in the country. His book is a glimpse inside an Orwellian society of deep social control.

One by one, the Rwandan journalists in his training program were imprisoned, forced to flee the country, converted into pro-Kagame propagandists or even harassed into madness. The author attended rallies in which Mr. Kagame's obedient subjects sang his praises. He met a mother who denounced her own sons as rebels, allowing one of them to be executed and the other to be "re-educated." He even witnessed a Rwandan family gathering around a photo of Mr. Kagame and praying to him, seeing him as their sole protector.

"The state was highly ordered and controlled," Mr. Sundaram observed. "Every piece of the country was organized into administrative units benignly called 'villages.' Each village … contained about 100 families. Even the capital was but an agglomeration of such villages. Each village had its head, its security officer, and its 'journalist' or informer, all of whom had to approve of one's behaviour if one wanted something from the government – a passport, for example."

Thousands of rural people were ordered into new "villages" to deepen this control, he wrote. "Directives from the government now could be followed down to the individual. And there was no privacy. Officials and security agents in the villages kept track of visitors and those travelling. Permission was required if someone was to sleep overnight."

Another recent book, by Canadian scholar Susan Thomson and published in 2013, studies the tiny ways in which ordinary Rwandans try to resist the regime's social controls. The book, Whispering Truth to Power, describes a frightening mixture of control tactics by Mr. Kagame's ruling party, including "dense networks of spies" and "near-constant surveillance by local authorities and neighbours alike."

One of the most chilling examples of these control techniques is the system of military-style re-education camps and "solidarity camps." Many Rwandans are obliged or "encouraged" to attend formal lectures in these camps, in barrack-style quarters, for an average of 12 weeks each. At lectures, they are drilled on the regime's version of Rwandan history and government programs. "There is a significant military presence, with armed soldiers monitoring the activities of participants," Ms. Thomson writes.

Ms. Thomson, a professor at Colgate University in New York State, was able to research these camps from the inside – because she herself was ordered to attend a re-education camp. She had been conducting ethnographic research on how ordinary peasant Rwandans were affected by the government's national-unity policies, until the government ordered her to stop her research in 2006. It said the peasants had "filled her head with negative ideas," and she was "too kind to prisoners accused of acts of genocide."

So she was required to attend a Rwandan re-education camp. The government took away her passport until it was satisfied that she had been "re-educated."

In a separate academic article on her 2006 experience, Ms. Thomson described how she and other participants were marched to their lessons in single file and then subjected to hours of non-stop lectures. "No questions were allowed; anyone who stretched his legs or began to nod off was jostled back to attention by one of the six armed military escorts who stood guard around the pitch," she recalled.

One participant, a former physician named Antoine, quietly asked her to "alert the world" about the plight of Hutus under the Tutsi-dominated government. "When one of the ever-present armed soldiers who monitored our lesson witnessed this, he strode up to where we were sitting and slammed Antoine's bare feet with the butt of his rifle," she wrote.

Then the soldier went after the Canadian scholar. "He grabbed me, pulled me close to him and then threw me on the ground, pointing to where I was to sit silently for the rest of the lesson."

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"Hate Cannot Drive Out Hate. Only Love Can Do That", Dr. Martin Luther King.

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Posted by: Nzinink <nzinink@yahoo.com>

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[AfricaRealities.com] Lies About Rwanda Mean More Wars If Not Corrected.

http://worldbeyondwar.org/lies-rwanda-mean-wars-corrected/

Lies About Rwanda Mean More Wars If Not Corrected.

Urge the ending of war these days and you'll very quickly hear two words: "Hitler" and "Rwanda." While World War II killed some 70 million people, it's the killing of some 6 to 10 million (depending on who's included) that carries the name Holocaust. Never mind that the United States and its allies refused to help those people before the war or to halt the war to save them or to prioritize helping them when the war ended — or even to refrain from letting the Pentagon hire some of their killers. Never mind that saving the Jews didn't become a purpose for WWII until long after the war was over. Propose eliminating war from the world and your ears will ring with the name that Hillary Clinton calls Vladimir Putin and that John Kerry calls Bashar al Assad.

Get past Hitler, and shouts of "We must prevent another Rwanda!" will stop you in your tracks, unless your education has overcome a nearly universal myth that runs as follows. In 1994, a bunch of irrational Africans in Rwanda developed a plan to eliminate a tribal minority and carried out their plan to the extent of slaughtering over a million people from that tribe — for purely irrational motivations of tribal hatred. The U.S. government had been busy doing good deeds elsewhere and not paying enough attention until it was too late. The United Nations knew what was happening but refused to act, due to its being a large bureaucracy inhabited by weak-willed non-Americans. But, thanks to U.S. efforts, the criminals were prosecuted, refugees were allowed to return, and democracy and European enlightenment were brought belatedly to the dark valleys of Rwanda.

Something like this myth is in the minds of those who shout for attacks on Libya or Syria or the Ukraine under the banner of "Not another Rwanda!" The thinking would be hopelessly sloppy even if based on facts. The idea that SOMETHING was needed in Rwanda morphs into the idea that heavy bombing was needed in Rwanda which slides effortlessly into the idea that heavy bombing is needed in Libya. The result is the destruction of Libya. But the argument is not for those who pay attention to what was happening in and around Rwanda before or since 1994. It's a momentary argument meant to apply only to a moment. Never mind why Gadaffi was transformed from a Western ally into a Western enemy, and never mind what the war left behind. Pay no attention to how World War I was ended and how many wise observers predicted World War II at that time. The point is that a Rwanda was going to happen in Libya (unless you look at the facts too closely) and it did not happen. Case closed. Next victim.

Edward Herman highly recommends a book by Robin Philpot called Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa: From Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction, and so do I. Philpot opens with U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's comment that "the genocide in Rwanda was one hundred percent the responsibility of the Americans!" How could that be? Americans are not to blame for how things are in backward parts of the world prior to their "interventions." Surely Mr. double Boutros has got his chronology wrong. Too much time spent in those U.N. offices with foreign bureaucrats no doubt. And yet, the facts — not disputed claims but universally agreed upon facts that are simply deemphasized by many — say otherwise.

The United States backed an invasion of Rwanda on October 1, 1990, by a Ugandan army led by U.S.-trained killers, and supported their attack on Rwanda for three-and-a-half years. The Rwandan government, in response, did not follow the model of the U.S. internment of Japanese during World War II, or of U.S. treatment of Muslims for the past 12 years. Nor did it fabricate the idea of traitors in its midst, as the invading army in fact had 36 active cells of collaborators in Rwanda. But the Rwandan government did arrest 8,000 people and hold them for a few days to six-months. Africa Watch (later Human Rights Watch/Africa) declared this a serious violation of human rights, but had nothing to say about the invasion and war. Alison Des Forges of Africa Watch explained that good human rights groups "do not examine the issue of who makes war. We see war as an evil and we try to prevent the existence of war from being an excuse for massive human rights violations."

The war killed many people, whether or not those killings qualified as human rights violations. People fled the invaders, creating a huge refugee crisis, ruined agriculture, wrecked economy, and shattered society. The United States and the West armed the warmakers and applied additional pressure through the World Bank, IMF, and USAID. And among the results of the war was increased hostility between Hutus and Tutsis. Eventually the government would topple. First would come the mass slaughter known as the Rwandan Genocide. And before that would come the murder of two presidents. At that point, in April 1994, Rwanda was in chaos almost on the level of post-liberation Iraq or Libya.

One way to have prevented the slaughter would have been to not support the war. Another way to have prevented the slaughter would have been to not support the assassination of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi on April 6, 1994. The evidence points strongly to the U.S.-backed and U.S.-trained war-maker Paul Kagame — now president of Rwanda — as the guilty party. While there is no dispute that the presidents' plane was shot down, human rights groups and international bodies have simply referred in passing to a "plane crash" and refused to investigate.

A third way to have prevented the slaughter, which began immediately upon news of the presidents' assassinations, might have been to send in U.N. peacekeepers (not the same thing as Hellfire missiles, be it noted), but that was not what Washington wanted, and the U.S. government worked against it. What the Clinton administration was after was putting Kagame in power. Thus the resistance to calling the slaughter a "genocide" (and sending in the U.N.) until blaming that crime on the Hutu-dominated government became seen as useful. The evidence assembled by Philpot suggests that the "genocide" was not so much planned as erupted following the shooting down of the plane, was politically motivated rather than simply ethnic, and was not nearly as one-sided as generally assumed.

Moreover, the killing of civilians in Rwanda has continued ever since, although the killing has been much more heavy in neighboring Congo, where Kagame's government took the war — with U.S. aid and weapons and troops — and bombed refugee camps killing some million people. The excuse for going into the Congo has been the hunt for Rwandan war criminals. The real motivation has been Western control and profits. War in the Congo has continued to this day, leaving some 6 million dead — the worst killing since the 70 million of WWII. And yet nobody ever says "We must prevent another Congo!"

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