Habyarimana Family Rejects Mutsinzi Report (27 Jan 2010)

The Habyarimana Family categorically rejects the Mutsinzi Report! (27 Jan. 2010)

[If US foreign policy were really driven, as my President Obama has contended on a number of occasions, by Americans’ love of Freedom, Justice and Democracy, the privatized military adventures that brought death en masse to Yugoslavia and Rwanda would never have taken place. But because the US—and, really, the rest of the NATO-occupied world—has become a sort of nuclear-militarized ‘Bates Motel,’ where a morbid, narcissistic fantasy is being defended from encroachments by a persistent and unforgiving Reality with mass murder that is post facto charged to its victims, the swelling tide of judicial evidence that is breaking against the US/UK/EU/NATO-version of events has called forth ever-more hysterical and mawkishly sentimental apologias for this consensus false-consciousness.

Now Boris Tadic, the comprador president of Serbia, is trying to get his parliament to pass a resolution acknowledging his country’s responsibility for what he would have as the defining event of the Bosnian war: the 1995 Srebrenica genocide of 8,000 Muslim men and boys. In 2007 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held that Serbia was NOT responsible for this alleged mass crime, which is still legally unproven though all too frequently stipulated to.

And an equally cynical, if slightly less craven, attempt at puttying up the cracks in a steadily disintegrating false history of genocide has been filed by the current Kigali military dictatorship of Paul Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) with their issuing of the Report of the Mutsinzi Commission of Independent Experts on the 6 April 1994 missile strike that took the lives of all aboard the Rwandan president’s Falcon 50 executive jet, including two duly-elected African heads of state, and triggered the so-called genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and ‘moderate’ Hutus in 100 days.

Both these would-be genocides have been the primary concerns of the two UN ad hoc tribunals in The Hague (for Yugoslavia) and Arusha, Tanzania (for Rwanda), which share a single Appeals Chamber. The legal precedents for proving this crime of genocide are dodgy at best (Srebrenica was stipulated to after plea-bargained confessions from alleged collaborators dropped a guilty verdict on the ill-defended Drina Corps Commander, Radislav Kristic), and completely fatuous at worst (as in the ICTR Military 1 trial, where, after acquitting the so-called brains of the Rwandan Tutsi genocide, Col. Théoneste Bagosora, Major Aloys Ntabakuze and Lt-Col. Anatole Nsengiyumva, of any ‘planning or conspiracy’ in the Rwandan genocide, the three FAR officers were convicted of the ‘genocidal crimes of others’ on the basis of a June 2006 Appeals Chamber order to take ‘judicial notice’ of the crime. That is to say, the trial chamber should consider the Rwandan genocide a ‘natural fact of Jesus,’ so widely believed in as to be beyond any need for evidentiary verification.

Here is another refutation of the Mutsinzi Report for you (yeah, you’re welcome.). This one’s from the family of the martyred Rwandan President, Juvénal Habyarimana—from his three sons, Léon, Bernard and Jean-Luc. When one considers the absolute UnReason to which the enemies of Historical Truth and Justice have had to resort—the morally bereft Philip Gourevitch’s racist discounting of the Rwandan revolution under President Habyarimana as a thirty-year (communist) genocide springs to mind here—the future of the thinking world seems truly dank. –mc]

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The Habyarimana Family categorically rejects the Mutsinzi Report! (27 Jan. 2010)

Communiqué from the family of the late Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana concerning the recently issued Rwandan Report by “the Committee of independent experts” on the terrorist attack of 6 April 1994.

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.

The authorities in Kigali claim to have written to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) demanding the establishment of an international commission of inquiry and that their demand was never followed up on. We can just imagine the insistence with which the RPF administration must have made this demand! We believe that if the Kigali government had really wanted an international inquiry, that inquiry would have taken place and Paul Kagame would not be talking about how such an investigation into the death of President Habyarimana did not interest him at all. Moreover, out of respect for the Burundian people, whose president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, also died in the attack and, therefore, on Rwandan soil, this same government would normally have had to recognize its duty to see that such an international investigation were initiated.

It is well known that the Rwandan genocide was triggered by the 6 April 1994 attack. For 15 years, Paul Kagame and his forces have been unwilling to shed any light on this terrorist act, without which Rwanda and, doubtlessly, the whole of the Great Lakes region would never have descended into chaos. This paralysis due to the indifference of the Rwandan government has shown that the RPF wants to avoid, at all costs, that its responsibility in the genocide be revealed in any definitive way. Since 1998, a French anti-terrorist court has been investigating this attack. Contrary to what is stated in the Mutsinzi Report and by those who would deny the truth, the French investigation was begun in response to a complaint filed by one of the families of a French victim in the attack and not ordered by the French authorities. The independence, objectivity and professionalism with which the French judiciary led this investigation could only be questioned by those who were directly involved in this attack or those who want the history of the Rwandan genocide to continue as a perversion of reality. The French investigation, in which we took part as plaintiffs, is to this day the only credible judicial investigation into this attack. To ridicule and minimize more than 11 years of work by men and women who specialize in such investigations, and the struggle against international terrorism, would be an insult to the victims as well as to the justice after which we all strive.

We must remember that the French judges were not the only ones to have demonstrated and substantiated the involvement of Paul Kagame and the RPF in this attack. Well before the French, Mr. Michael Hourigan, an Australian investigator assigned to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), filed a report in May 1997 with the UN and the ICTR. This report clearly assigned responsibility for, and named Paul Kagame and the RPF as the authors of, the 6 April 1994 attack. As soon as the new rulers of Kigali were found to be responsible, Hourigan and his team were ordered to halt their investigation.

After years spent in charge of the investigations of the ICTR and feeling the impossibility of getting to the truth while charging only Hutus, Mme Carla Del Ponte revealed her desire to investigate the crimes committed by the RPF. She was especially interested in shedding light on the attack of 6 April 1994 and aligned herself with those who believed that this attack fell within the mandate of the ICTR. She said: “If it turns out the RPF was behind this attack, the whole history of the genocide would have to be rewritten.” This expressed intention to bring justice for all the victims cost her her job as Chief Prosecutor at the ICTR after pressure from Paul Kagame was applied to the UN.

The Spanish justice system, which also investigated the genocidal crimes committed in Rwanda and the DRC, likewise designated Paul Kagame and the RPF as the instigators of this attack. The Mutsinzi Report assigns responsibility for the attack to the government forces at that time (ex-FAR), particularly to superior officers [Col. Théoneste] Bagosora, [Major Aloys] Ntabakuze and [Lt-Col. Anatole] Nsengiyumva. These officers were being prosecuted at the ICTR and are being held in Arusha. It must be noted that throughout their trial, these officers diligently demanded that the ICTR open an investigation into the assassination of the Rwanda head of state so that the responsibility for the genocide could be brought to light. Their conscientiousness was never respected!

We wondered, therefore, how people already being tried for genocide and after fighting for years to prove their innocence, could put the rope around their own necks by demanding that the ICTR investigate a crime that they, themselves, were alleged to have committed? We believe that if these officers had actually been responsible for this terrorist act, the event that triggered such a monstrous tragedy, the ICTR would immediately have taken up the case.

The number of witnesses heard by the Mutsinzi Commission (557 of them) does not give any credibility to its conclusions. Any informed person knows that Rwanda is a country where personal freedoms are violated on a daily basis and disappearances have become banal. To have a difference of opinion or to point a finger is enough to wind one up in prison or dead. The International Organizations in Defense of Human Rights that never cease to challenge the RPF regime can testify to this. Under these conditions, how can we ignore the pressure and fear that these different witnesses, ex-FAR for the most part, suffered through to give testimony clearing the RPF and incriminating their brothers in arms?

We also must recall that within our family there are two direct witnesses to the attack who were at our home in Kanombe at the time it took place. They are both absolutely positive: The missiles were fired from the hill in Masaka (or from the valley next to it). These eye-witnesses were facing the hill in Masaka at the moment the presidential plane was making its final approach, and Camp Kanombe was to their right and just behind them. Obviously, neither one was interviewed by the Mutsinzi Commission. So, unless the geography or topography of this part of Rwanda has changed since April 1994, the conclusions of the Mutsinzi Report on this subject are nothing but brazen lies.

The Mutsinzi Report produces as evidence some photographs of the wreckage of the president’s plane, photos taken by one of the president’s sons who was an eye-witness to the attack, and yet it does not include his testimony. We recall that this witness, Jean-Luc Habyarimana, gave his version of the facts while testifying before the “Bruguière” investigation and twice to the ICTR.

But what is completely unbearable for us is to have our mother accused of being responsible for the murder of her husband. The Mutsinzi Report indicates that at the end of March 1994, President Mobutu of Zaire (today’s Democratic Republic of Congo) informed Mme Habyarimana of preparations for an attack on her husband and that she did not convey this information to the President despite the insistence of the Zairian president. Even if absurdity cannot kill, it is difficult to imagine anything more cynical. Did this Commission question Presidents Mobutu and Habyarimana before their deaths? Was this information unexpected by Mme Habyarimana? Why did President Mobutu choose to inform his Rwandan counterpart through his wife when he knew he would be meeting with President Habyarimana in Gbadolité on 4 April 1994?

Then the Report specifies that Mme Habyarimana confessed all this over the telephone to French President Mitterand on 6 April at 9:30 pm, when the French president called to express his condolences! Mme Habyarimana never spoke to President Mitterand that night.

Such baseness on the part of this Commission and its false witnesses can only reinforce the negative view we have of it.

To us, the conclusions of the Mutsinzi Report were known in advance because its authors could not stray from the mission, to whitewash the RPF and its chief, assigned them by the Rwandan government.

We will renew our confidence in French justice to shed light on this act of terrorism and continue to deplore the International Community’s foot-dragging on this issue, now 15 years down the road from the event.

Without a serious and credible elucidation of the attack of 6 April 1994, the Rwandan genocide will continue to be instrumentalized by those who have no interest in the truth’s ever being known. We take this opportunity to remind the International Community that it has a duty to aid all the victims in obtaining real justice. This will permit all the people of Rwanda to begin to work for the sort of remembrance that will bring them true reconciliation.

--Paris, 25 January 2010--

For the family of Juvénal Habyarimana:

Léon Habyarimana Bernard Habyarimana Jean-Luc Habyarimana

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* List of the victims of the 6 April 1994 terrorist attack:

1. Major-General Juvénal HABYARIMANA, President of the Republic of Rwanda;

2. Mr. Cyprien NTARYAMIRA, President of the Republic of Burundi;

3. Mr. Bernard CIZA, Burundian Minister of Planning, Development and Reconstruction;

4. Mr. Cyriaque SIMBIZI, Burundian Minister of Communication and government spokesman;

5. Major-General Déogratias NSABIMANA, Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army;

6. Ambassador Juvénal RENZAHO, Diplomatic Adviser to the Rwandan President;

7. Colonel Elie SAGATWA, Personal Secretary and Chief of Security to the Rwandan President;

8. Doctor Emmanuel AKINGENEYE, Personal Physician to the Rwandan President;

9. Major Thaddée BAGARAGAZA, Aide de Camp to the Rwandan President and Second in Command of the Presidential Guard;

10. Major Jacky HERAUD, Pilot of the Presidential Falcon 50 aircraft;

11. Commander Jean-Pierre MINABERRY, Copilot of the Presidential plane;

12. Chief Adjutant Jean-Michel PERRINE, Navigator/Flight Engineer on the Presidential plane.

DisInformation Will Not Die! - by Ed Herman, David Peterson and Gareth Porter

DisInformation Will Not Die! - by Ed Herman, David Peterson and Gareth Porter

[There are none so morally putrescent as The Holocaust pushers with their slobbering journalistic pit bulls. From the historically disfiguring Mutsinzi and Mucyo Reports blaming a martyred, majoritarian Rwanda (and its French parrain) for its own bloody return to neo-feudal bondage; to the vacuous geopolitical jive over Muslim victims of neo-Nazi Slavs from Serbia (in Bosnia and Kosovo) and Russia (in Chechnya); to axis-of-evil-grinding over Iran’s potential for becoming a nuclear-armed Muslim fundamentalist and Holocaust-negationist state: soulless guilt-junkes like Philip Gourevitch (The New Yorker online) and Oliver Kamm (The Times online), dizzy on the fumes from their long-decaying product, an anti-factual narrative so cut with racism and anti-democratic (fascist) bias as to be terminally toxic to those sadly naïve enough to indulge them even in passing, continue to attack their critics with a buffoonish, limping, blind and staggering reversion to anti-Semitic insults—Holocaust Denial. Their indecent defenses of unspeakable criminals, like Paul Kagame, Tony Blair, George Bush and Dick Cheney, have turned them into caricatures on a par with Lenny’s old Jewish shut-in, who daily screams out the window: “Gestapo! Gestapo!” And hears back: “What Gestapo? I’m the mailman.”

Below you’ll find a couple of entries: The first from Ed Herman and David Petersen is a response to Ollie Kamm’s vain attempts to dam the flood of information that continues to demonstrate just how bereft of anything like good faith or good will he really is. I like to think that it was I who first suggested to Kamm (a tiny allusion he dutifully refused to post or credit) that his fey attacks on Noam Chomsky, Ed and David, as well as those against our own dear friends, Chris Black and Neil Clark, were reminiscent of ITN’s Penny Marshall and Ed Vulliamy’s beating their heads against the brick wall of video evidence Thomas Diechmann presented to thoroughly debunk their Serbian Nazi Death Camp stories—which so overwhelming contributed to the intensification of crimes against peace in Yugoslavia as to qualify all these Brit propagandists for war criminal jackets.

The second is an article from Gareth Porter from June 2009 about falsified intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program. The Porter article really shows who is behind this ‘third force’ that is driving today’s private wars. And the use of The Holocaust as a moral measure is a mere dodge to distract the public eye from focusing on the real beneficiaries of today’s terrorism. The only right these Victims’ Advocates claim for their clients is the right to give up all the decency they have in exchange for an illusory sense of revenge. –mc]



UPDATE: There are two points I should probably make clearer than I did when I wrote this post.

The first relates to my point that Chomsky's politics are not those - as Caldwell's were - of support for monstrous totalitarian regimes, but are sophistry driven by reflexive anti-Americanism. The corollary of that position, however, is that Chomsky is instinctively indulgent of, and impressed by, the writings of those who in the name of anti-imperialism defend terrible regimes and deny documented war crimes. Consider Chomsky's treatment of Gareth Porter's contemptible apologetics for the Khmer Rouge, and his praise ("an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition") for a book by Diana Johnstone that disputes the massacre at Srebrenica.

Secondly, I don't criticise Chomsky for writing a letter to a newspaper. My point is rather his extreme sensitivity, expressed at a length far beyond the comment he's responding to, when a writer draws attention to his polemical record. The best one can say is that it's more rational behaviour than that of his sometime co-author Edward Herman, the Srebrenica-denier.

Herman recently had an article of his hastily deleted from the Media Lens site after its editors belatedly realised that the piece made claims against the Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy that had already been found to be defamatory in the High Court. Having thus lost a platform at a small sub-Chomskyite pressure group, Herman and his associate David Peterson demanded that they receive their own blog, to make the same claims, at - of all places - The Times. They maintained they were entitled to this because "The Times's Oliver Kamm has taken to insulting, smearing, and libeling us on a serial basis". Quite, quite, bizarre. [#####]


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.


As Deichmann wrote:

"When Marshall, Williams and Vulliamy entered the compound next to the camp, the barbed wire was already torn in several places. They did not use the open gate, but entered from the south through a gap in the fence. They approached the fence on the north side [of this compound], where curious refugees quickly gathered inside the camp, but on the outside of the area fenced-in by barbed wire. It was through the barbed wire fence at this point that the famous shots of Fikret Alic were taken….[4]

Even Justice Morland of the British High Court of Justice described the positioning of the British reporters as follows:

"Clearly Ian Williams and Penny Marshall and their TV teams were mistaken in thinking they were not enclosed by the old barbed wire fence, but does it matter?"[5]

The question "but does it matter?" was an allusion to British libel law, under which the "defendant carries the burden of proof," as Britain's Libel Reform Coalition reports, and "is asked to prove the truth of their statement," which is "always presumed [to be] false" until proven otherwise. The effect of such an onerous condition is that Britain's "libel law has been used to protect the rich and powerful from criticism and has come to be associated with money rather than justice. The high costs involved and the scale of potential damages have chilled free speech."[6]

Thus the March 2000 libel case argued by ITN against LM did not establish that it was the Bosnian Muslim men who stood behind the fence during this encounter, and it did not establish that the famous images of Fikret Alic and the other Bosnian Muslim men faithfully represented the reality of this encounter, but LM could not stand on these facts in its defense against the libel charge: LM had to prove not only that Marshall and Williams and ITN's editors were mistaken in representing the Bosnian Muslim men as standing behind the fence, but also that they deliberately or knowingly misrepresented this encounter. With the wealth of resources and witnesses ITN could utilize, LM stood little chance of prevailing. But ITN's ability to stack-the-deck against LM followed from Britain's libel law, not from the lack of soundness of Deichmann's and LM's claim.

Nevertheless, Justice Morland's assertion that the British reporters "were mistaken in thinking they were not enclosed" (i.e., were wrong in representing the Bosnian Muslim men as standing behind the fence, rather than the reporters themselves) is indistinguishable from the basic claim by Deichmann, by LM, and by Phillip Knightley in the affidavit he prepared on behalf of LM's defense but which was not allowed into the evidence at trial—and by us in our "Open Letter to AI."

Thomas Deichmann's "The Picture that Fooled the World" was and remains a solid debunking of the Fikret Alic imagery recorded at Trnopolje by the British reporters on August 5, 1992, with the images of these Bosnian Muslim men almost immediately fed to the world as standing behind barbed-wire, and Alic an iconic figure for the "living dead" at Trnopolje, proof of Nazi-era brutality resurrected on European soil after 50 years by ethnic Serbs, exactly as the British reporters dispatched to northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina expected to find there. As Knightley explained in his affidavit on behalf of LM:

"The barbed wire turns out to be only symbolic. Were all the inmates starving? No. Fikret Alic was an exception. Even in Marshall’s report other men, apparently well-fed, can be seen, and the out-takes reveal at least one man with a paunch hanging over his belt. Phil Davison, a highly-respected correspondent who covered the war from both sides for The Independent says, 'Things had gone slightly quiet. Suddenly there were these death camps/concentration camps stories'.….

"When…the ITN report was hailed as a great image, should the team have stood up and publicly said, 'Hey, hang on a minute. It wasn’t quite like that'. In an ideal world, yes…. But given the commercial pressures of modern TV and the fact that to have spoken out would hardly endear the ITN crew to their employers and might even have endangered their jobs, it is understandable but not forgivable that no one chose to do so."[7]


Not only did none of the British reporters stand-up and say "Hang on a minute." But eleven days after they first visited Trnopolje and misrepresented Fikret Alic and the other Bosnian Muslim men as standing behind the fence, Penny Marshall boasted in the Sunday Times about the power of these images "to move world opinion." After her August 6 report on Trnopolje for ITN, "British newspapers were calling for military intervention," she maintained; "within 20 minutes of the [ITN] report being re-broadcast on American television, George Bush promised to press for a United Nations resolution authorising use of force."[8]

Now more than 17 years later, it is less forgivable than ever that Oliver Kamm still clings to and defends this early, yet decisive, falsehood in the dismantling of Yugoslavia, and misrepresents the verdict in the 2000 libel trial of ITN v. LM.


Edward S. Herman, Philadelphia, USA
David Peterson, Chicago, USA


---- Endnotes ----

[1] Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Open Letter to Amnesty International's London and Belfast Offices, on the Occasion of Noam Chomsky's Belfast Festival Lecture, October 30, 2009," MRZine, November 22, 2009, . Also see our "The Dismantling of Yugoslavia," Monthly Review, October, 2007, esp. section 10, "The Role of the Media and Intellectuals in the Dismantlement," .

[2] Oliver Kamm, "The anatomy of war crimes denial," The Times Online, December 21, 2009, .

[3] Thomas Deichmann, "The picture that fooled the world," LM97, February, 1997, . Also see Deichmann's "'Exactly as it happened'?" LM100, May, 1997, .

[4] Deichmann, "The picture that fooled the world," . When reading Deichmann's analysis, be sure to study the diagram titled "Site plan of Trnopolje, based on US satellite photo, 2 August 1992, three days before British journalists arrived." The part of this diagram you want to focus on is in the lower right-hand corner, (a) "Position of the Refugees with Fikret Alic," (b) "Position of the ITN News Team with Penny Marshall," and of course (c) "Compound Fenced-In with Barbed Wire," the building identified as a "Barn" in the center of this little enclosure, and the line denoting the part chicken-wire, and part barbed-wire fence which stands immediately between (a) where the British reporters stood, and (b) where the Bosnian Muslim men gathered.

[5] In David Campbell, "Atrocity, memory, photography: imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia—the case of ITN versus Living Marxism, Part 1," Journal of Human Rights, March, 2002, p. 21, .—We should add that Campbell's lengthy analysis over two different issues of this Journal rejects the obvious: That it was the British reporters who stood behind the fence when their first encounter with Fikret Alic and the Bosnian Muslim men occurred. For Campbell, the fact that the fence that once surrounded the barn was then dilapidated and incomplete makes it impossible to claim that the British reporters stood inside an "enclosure" or "compound," much less "behind the fence." Remarkably, Campbell does not apply this reasoning to the Bosnian Muslim men. Throughout his two-part analysis, Campbell repeatedly refers to the Bosnian Muslim men as standing "behind the fence." How these men can be accurately described as standing "behind the fence" while the British reporters cannot be accurately described this way, because the "'enclosure' was anything but completely or fully enclosed" and the British reporters cannot be "on 'the inside' and Alic and the others on 'the outside'" (pp. 18-21) defies rational explanation—but Campbell repeats it often and at great length. Campbell's entire analysis boils down to little more than a reaffirmation that the Bosnian Serbs (or ethnic Serbs as such) did very bad things during the civil wars over the fate of the former Yugoslavia; therefore, Deichmann's successful debunking of "The Picture that Fooled the World" must be wrong, as it advances the wrong political script. With the exception of his treatment of Margaret Bourke-White's famous photo "The Living Dead at Buchenwald, April 1945" (pp. 4-6), the rest of Campbell's two-part analysis fails miserably.
[6] Jo Glanville et al., Free Speech Is Not For Sale, A Report by the English PEN and Index on Censorship, Libel Reform Coalition, November 10, 2009, .

[7] For a partial copy of Phillip Knightley's affidavit, see Alexander Cockburn, "Storm Over Brockes' Fakery," CounterPunch, November 5/6, 2005, .

[8] Penny Marshall, "ITN's Penny Marshall tells how she made the world wake up," Sunday Times, August 16, 1992. [#####]

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Report Ties Dubious Iran Nuclear Docs to Israel

by Gareth Porter
IPS
June 5, 2009


A report on Iran’s nuclear programme issued by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month generated news stories publicising an incendiary charge that U.S. intelligence is underestimating Iran’s progress in designing a “nuclear warhead” before the halt in nuclear weapons-related research in 2003.

That false and misleading charge from an intelligence official of a foreign country, who was not identified but was clearly Israeli, reinforces two of Israel’s key propaganda themes on Iran – that the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is wrong, and that Tehran is poised to build nuclear weapons as soon as possible.

But it also provides new evidence that Israeli intelligence was the source of the collection of intelligence documents which have been used to accuse Iran of hiding nuclear weapons research.

The Committee report, dated May 4, cited unnamed “foreign analysts” as claiming intelligence that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because it had mastered the design and tested components of a nuclear weapon and thus didn’t need to work on it further until it had produced enough sufficient material.

That conclusion, which implies that Iran has already decided to build nuclear weapons, contradicts both the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, and current intelligence analysis. The NIE concluded that Iran had ended nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because of increased international scrutiny, and that it was “less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005″.

The report included what appears to be a spectacular revelation from “a senior allied intelligence official” that a collection of intelligence documents supposedly obtained by U.S. intelligence in 2004 from an Iranian laptop computer includes “blueprints for a nuclear warhead”.

It quotes the unnamed official as saying that the blueprints “precisely matched” similar blueprints the official’s own agency “had obtained from other sources inside Iran”.

No U.S. or IAEA official has ever claimed that the so-called laptop documents included designs for a “nuclear warhead”. The detailed list in a May 26, 2008 IAEA report of the contents of what have been called the “alleged studies” – intelligence documents on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons work — made no mention of any such blueprints.

In using the phrase “blueprints for a nuclear warhead”, the unnamed official was evidently seeking to conflate blueprints for the reentry vehicle of the Iranian Shehab missile, which were among the alleged Iranian documents, with blueprints for nuclear weapons.

When New York Times reporters William J. Broad and David E. Sanger used the term “nuclear warhead” to refer to a reentry vehicle in a Nov. 13, 2005 story on the intelligence documents on the Iranian nuclear programme, it brought sharp criticism from David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security.

“This distinction is not minor,” Albright observed, “and Broad should understand the differences between the two objects, particularly when the information does not contain any words such as nuclear or nuclear warhead.”

The Senate report does not identify the country for which the analyst in question works, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff refused to respond to questions about the report from IPS, including the reason why the report concealed the identity of the country for which the unidentified “senior allied intelligence official” works.

Reached later in May, the author of the report, Douglas Frantz, told IPS he is under strict instructions not to speak with the news media.
After a briefing on the report for selected news media immediately after its release, however, the Associated Press reported May 6 that interviews were conducted in Israel. Frantz was apparently forbidden by Israeli officials from revealing their national affiliation as a condition for the interviews.

Frantz, a former journalist for the Los Angeles Times, had extensive contacts with high-ranking Israeli military, intelligence and foreign ministry officials before joining the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. He and co-author Catherine Collins conducted interviews with those Israeli officials for “The Nuclear Jihadist”, published in 2007. The interviews were all conducted under rules prohibiting disclosure of their identities, according to the book.

The unnamed Israeli intelligence officer’s statement that the “blueprints for a nuclear warhead” – meaning specifications for a missile reentry vehicle – were identical to “designs his agency had obtained from other sources in Iran” suggests that the documents collection which the IAEA has called “alleged studies” actually originated in Israel.

A U.S.-based nuclear weapons analyst who has followed the “alleged studies” intelligence documents closely says he understands that the documents obtained by U.S. intelligence in 2004 were not originally stored on the laptop on which they were located when they were brought in by an unidentified Iranian source, as U.S. officials have claimed to U.S. journalists.

The analyst, who insists on not being identified, says the documents were collected by an intelligence network and then assembled on a single laptop.

The anonymous Israeli intelligence official’s claim, cited in the Committee report, that the “blueprints” in the “alleged studies” collection matched documents his agency had gotten from its own source seems to confirm the analyst’s finding that Israeli intelligence assembled the documents.
German officials have said that the Mujahedin E Khalq or MEK, the Iranian resistance organisation, brought the laptop documents collection to the attention of U.S. intelligence, as reported by IPS in February 2008. Israeli ties with the political arm of the MEK, the National Committee of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), go back to the early 1990s and include assistance to the organisation in broadcasting into Iran from Paris.

The NCRI publicly revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in August 2002. However, that and other intelligence apparently came from Israeli intelligence. The Israeli co-authors of “The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran”, Yossi Melman and Meir Javeanfar, revealed that “Western” intelligence was “laundered” to hide its actual provenance by providing it to Iranian opposition groups, especially NCRI, in order to get it to the IAEA.

They cite U.S., British and Israeli officials as sources for the revelation.

New Yorker writer Connie Bruck wrote in a March 2006 article that an Israeli diplomat confirmed to her that Israel had found the MEK “useful” but declined to elaborate.

Israeli intelligence is also known to have been actively seeking to use alleged Iranian documents to prove that Iran had an active nuclear weapons programme just at the time the intelligence documents which eventually surfaced in 2004 would have been put together.

The most revealing glimpse of Israeli use of such documents to influence international opinion on Iran’s nuclear programme comes from the book by Frantz and Collins. They report that Israel’s international intelligence agency Mossad created a special unit in the summer of 2003 to carry out a campaign to provide secret briefings on the Iranian nuclear programme, which sometimes included “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere”.

The “alleged studies” collection of documents has never been verified as genuine by either the IAEA or by intelligence analysts. The Senate report said senior United Nations officials and foreign intelligence officials who had seen “many of the documents” in the collection of alleged Iranian military documents had told committee staff “it is impossible to rule out an elaborate intelligence ruse”.


*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

A Rebuttal to the Mutsinzi Commission Report - by Kanyarwanda Veritas

A Rebuttal to the Mutsinzi Commission Report - by Kanyarwanda Veritas

[In Philip Gourevitch’s post to The New Yorker of 8 January 2010, he describes the just-released Mutsinzi Commission Report on the 6 April 1994 missile strike against the Rwandan presidential jet that killed two duly-elected Hutu heads of state, the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army, and their entourages, as well as the French flight crew, as ‘remarkable’ and ‘an extraordinary historical and political document.’ There’s a certain ‘last days of Bernie Madoff’ tone to Gourvitch’s writing—like he can hear History's Five-O coming up his back stairs and he’s got to put out this one last ‘the check is in the mail’ pitch rationalizing his long since debunked historical pyramid scheme on the Rwanda genocide of April-July 1994 before they book ‘im, Dano.

Even the ‘Dallaire fax,’ which is the source of the title to Gourevitch’s On the Town in Kigali gossip-novel, ‘We Wish to Inform You . . .’ has been shown by our own Chris Black to be a fabrication, long after the fact, of British MI6. His The New Yorker (sl)easy style, which glosses over historical irrationalities with bathos and lurid sentimentality, is not enough to hide just how bereft of any decent concern for the real victims his ‘victims justice’ agit-prop really is. His evidence-free insinuation that Mme Habyarimana aided and abetted in the murder of her husband, the President, and the others on board the Falcon 50, if not actionable, is certainly unspeakable.

Gourevitch gave away his essential anti-democratic (fascistic) yearning early in his Rwandan melodrama, when he cited a warning by the Archbishop of Kigali to the Rwandans of the 1930s that if they continued to allow the majority Hutu intellectuals to propagate their anti-monarchic, even communistic ideas, like majority rule, that Rwanda would become a Bolshevik enclave in Africa. This same sclerotic anti-majoritarian vein pops out again in this latest post with his identification of the martyred Habyarimana as ‘dictator’ and his constant references to an ‘Extremist Hutu Power’ faction—a term coined and used exclusively by the RPF and its lobby to describe those forces within Rwanda who were defending the country against a foreign invasion by troops of the Ugandan National Resistance Army, strongly backed by the US, on 1 October 1990, beginning a four year occupation and reign of terror by the so-call Tutsi rebels of Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front. And his racist condescension toward and patronization of Africans, in general, and Rwandans, in particular—not unlike Mamdami’s or Melvern’s, in their glib acceptance of ‘these peoples’’ irrational resort to murderous violence for settling political and ethnic matters—can only be understood as an expression of his helpless desperation in clinging to a now bankrupt version history—and a morally vacuous career.

But, I guess, since the great White hunters are still writing History, the rest of us small gamers will have to get by on those few, meager visitation from Truth and hope that the eventually overwhelming weight of our facts and figures will bury these foppish clowns. What follows is just such a visitation—if not particularly brief—from Truth: a rebuttal of that part of the Mutsinzi Report that was recently leaked to Continental Magazine—and quickly glommed onto by the Belgian RPF flack Collette Braeckman. The full report—after a couple of false starts—has come out in French, and I’ll attach it. Gourevitch claims he has his hands on—though he has not yet ‘absorbed’ (you think that means read?)—an English version.

[Such a version can be found here: http://mutsinzireport.com/?page_id=47]

But, as with the Muyco Report before it, our translation from the French of this rebuttal of Mutsinzi should serve. Though from the looks of his body of knowledge on these events, I wouldn’t expect Gourevitch to pick up on it. Hell, I guess if The New Yorker’s got your back, you don’t have to get it right—ever. –mc]

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A Rebuttal of the Mutsinzi Commission Report


The 6 April 1994 Attack: Focusing on elements of the Jean Mutsinzi Report

by Kanyarwanda Veritas


Rwanda/Attack of 6 April 1994—The investigation that accuses Extremist Hutus:
Continental Magazine
Friday, 4 December 2009

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.

The Rwandan government should have asked either the UN or the African Union to create a truly independent Commission, one that the Rwandan government would not have been able to control, made up of foreign investigators, including, especially, representatives of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the insurers of the presidential Falcon 50 executive jet. The report of such a Commission would not need to be modified in any way, nothing added or deleted or touched up, by the Rwandan government. Such a Commission would not only be independent but also, and more importantly, impartial. It would be able, for example, to look in foreign countries for witnesses who hold important positions of responsibility that provide them the opportunity to know of situations and possess information the likes of which a simple soldier, or non-com or any other kind of officer, like those available to the Mutsinzi Commission, would not have access.

It should have been a Commission free from that prejudice that considers all Rwandan refugees to be people with something to hide or for which to be condemned. These people fled death at the hands of the RPF. If the FAR had surrendered, all their officers would have been executed on the battlefield, and the current debate would never have taken place because ‘no witnesses would have survived.’ The proof of this is that many ex-FAR officers who turned themselves over to the RPF or those who returned to the country or were repatriated, were killed along with their families. For details on this go to http://www.virungavision.com/, and look at the document
“Situation des Ex-FAR” to see the names of those killed by the RPF. So it is tendentious to assume that those witnesses who are in exile cannot bear fair witness and, on the basis of such prejudice, cast suspicion on the investigation of French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière.

The RPF makes false accusations against these potential witnesses in exile to discredit them. Yet these are the very people whom a truly independent investigatory commission should contact, paying no attention to the false accusations from Kigali. Furthermore, it should be understood that people living inside Rwanda cannot even discuss the idea that the RPF, often referred to just as Paul Kagame, were implicated in the assassination of President Habyarimana, making them responsible for the catastrophe of April 1994, at a time when one cannot even accuse an individual RPF soldier of having killed a parent or a close relative.

Continental Magazine reproaches Judge Bruguière for having issued arrest warrants against Rwandan suspects without having heard their side of the story. However, all the prisoners of the ICTR have been subjects of arrest warrants without trying to locate them, bring them before investigatory commissions or hear their stories before issuing these warrants. Even Kigali makes up lists of ‘suspects’ that are used like arrest warrants without ever bringing them before an investigatory commission. Kigali has even convicted certain refugees of contempt without ever going to their countries of asylum to depose them. Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and Major Aloys Ntabakuze are cited in the Mutsinzi Report though no one from this investigation ever went to the UN prison in Arusha where they have been held for almost ten years to interview them.

To wrap up this subject, the Rwandan government of the RPF, being a party to the events under investigation, has no moral authority to create any kind of commission whatsoever to investigate the Rwandan drama, especially one composed solely of members of the RPF. At the very least, members of the victims’ families should have been included. There must be an independent and impartial International Commission, made up of real experts, capable of contacting without prejudice those people likely to have credible information and not just those whose knowledge is dubious, who have been rehearsed and trained to give the testimony they give or be forced into the kind of situation where there is no freedom of expression, but only fear for one’s life.


Focus on Extracts from the Mutsinzi Report

The Arusha Accords

“The Arusha Accords were supposed to go into effect at the end of 1993. But under pressure from extremist Hutus in his inner circle, President Habyarimana postponed the due-date several times.”

This is a lie and a piece of brazen disinformation.

In fact, the signing of the Arusha Peace Accords took place on 4 August 1993, and the Accords were supposed to go into effect 34 or 37 days later, either on 7 or 10 September 1993, after the swearing in of the members of the Broad Based Transitional Government (to include the RPF). The Accords distributed the government ministries among the various political parties and the RPF, and gave a number of phantom seats in the Transitional Parliament to each party. It is the political parties and the RPF who were supposed to designate their representatives in the Transitional Institutions and give their lists to the Prime Minister and to President Habyarimana to organize the swearing in ceremonies. President Habyarimana’s party was ready by the due-date. But the other political parties and the RPF had not yet finished designating their representatives.

In November or early December 1993, the UNAMIR organized a meeting between the governing party and the RPF in Mulindi, at the headquarters of the RPF, to discuss this delay. The governing party was represented by Minister Félicien Gatabazi, chief of the delegation, Minister Frédéric Nzamurambaho, the Chief of Staff of the National Gendarmarie, the then Colonel BEM Augustin Ndindiliyimana, a high official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Amri Sued, and others. Paul Kagame led the RPF delegation, which included, most notably, the RPF’s Presidential Counselor for political affairs, and others. The meeting decided that the delay was not due to the ill will of any of the parties involved, and acknowledged that two of the parties experienced real internal difficulties in sticking to the schedule. The RPF was ready on 28 December 1993, and it sent its representatives to Kigali. With the swearing in of President Habyarimana to open the ceremony, the inauguration of the other Transistional Institutions was to take place on 5 January 1994. The other Institutions could not take the oath because of conflicts resulting from the implosion of certain political parties, the polarization of their fringe elements, and the impossibility of agreement on the lists of names to be submitted. The RPF blended in and demanded that those fringe elements that were allies of theirs be sworn in, opposed the participation of the CDR in the Transitional Institutions because it did not have the right, and boycotted the swearing in ceremony for the members of Parliament. The status quo persisted until the Habyarimana assassination. Here is an extract from his last speech, broadcast on the radio 15 January 1994.

“I would like you to remember, once again, that the Arusha Peace Accords allot extensive power in the political parties before they participate in the Transitional Institution. This agreement makes them, in fact, responsible for naming their representatives to the Transitional National Assembly. It determines the number of ministerial portfolios each party will hold, as well as the number of members each will send to the Transitional National Assembly. From there, no one, no institution, can strip these parties and political groupings of the rights conveyed to them by the Arusha Peace Accords.

So, we have to respect the proposals of the Peace Accords and avoid interfering in the internal affairs of the parties. We have to let the political party officials make their decisions independently, in accordance with the by-laws of their parties.

In this way we will respect the laws and rules that we all chose when we put our names to the Peace Accords.

Consequently, we have to insist that the political forces who have not yet achieved it among their own memberships, come to a consensus on the lists of their representatives to the Transitional National Assembly and the Broad-Based Transitional Government, so that every effort can be made to remove all obstructions to helping our country get beyond this impasse and permit us to set up those institutions laid out by the Arusha Peace Accords.” [. . .]

“For this reason, on learning of the negotiations impasse in which the parties found themselves, I became of the opinion that we must impose the course to be followed and the timetable that will bring us by next week to a point where we can set up the two remaining Transitional Institutions, the Transitional National Assembly and the Broad-Based Transitional Government.

1. We cannot, in any event, by-pass either the Arusha Peace Accords or the law on Political Parties or the by-laws governing each party. To do so would not solve anything because it would go dangerously against our resolution to base our conduct on the principles of a State of laws. This is why we must at all costs take into consideration only those lists furnished by the legal Representatives of the Political Parties.

2. Everyone who would question these lists furnished by the legal Representatives of the Political Parties must do so in a court of law, as set forth in Article 28 of the Law on Political Parties. One could also be referred to a particular court with authority over that party, in accordance with the law, so that justice is done.

3. I hope all this is wrapped up no later than Thursday, 20 January 1994. Thus, we will be able quickly to set up these Transitional Institutions, while respecting the law and the statutes of the parties. This would not keep anyone who felt wronged from continuing to seek redress in the courts, but would also promote the reconciliation of the opposing tendencies within the Political Parties.”


The Assertion of Continental Magazine:

“A number of witnesses testified that at the beginning of 1994, the plan to assassinate President Habyarimana was an open secret among the elite units at Camp Kanombe. The threat became so direct at this point that various officers even announced, in a premonitory fashion, that President Habyarimana would be killed in an attack on his plane.”

However, if this information was circulating in a premonitory fashion within these units at Kanombe, the Camp Commandant and the units based at Kanombe would have informed the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army in an Occasional Security Report [OSR]. But no one indicated such a situation existed. On the contrary, the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army received a good deal of information from other sources, which gradually increased in intensity after 21 November 1993, all of it suggesting a plot was being cooked up by the RPF, but never of one coming from inside the FAR. Some examples:

--Information from 21 November 1993 indicated that there was a squad of RPF that had infiltrated the Capital, Kigali, to kidnap and assassinate the President.

--Information from 5 January 1994 indicated that the RPF battalion encamped on the CND was in possession of SAM 7 missiles. The day the RPF arrived in Kigali, 28 December 1993, the infiltrators who were by then spread throughout the city of Kigali, according to the report of the Commandant of the MP battalion mentioned above, were certainly not all secretly briefed and told that the RPF had brought in unchecked and unauthorized arms. The population understood and spoke, and the information got to the military intelligence services of the Rwandan Army.

--The intelligence report of 12 January 1994 showed that the RPF was trying to kill President Habyarimana on all his road trips, but that since it failed because of the security measures taken by the Presidential Guard, President Habyarimana would be killed aboard his plane and that it would go unnoticed.

--In January 1994, a letter addressed to Kagame and intercepted in Muhura-Byumba, from a certain Zubere of Nyamirambo in the city of Kigali, stated that it would not be easy to assassinate President Habyarimana without at least 100 men in civilian cloths. The courier had avoided the main route between Kigali and Mulindi and was using side roads to get this report to Kagame.

--On 14 Februaruy 1994 a soldier of the UNAMIR indicated with certainty that the RPF had SAM missiles on the CND.

--The last information dated 2 April 1994 reported on the assortment of assassinations of civilian and military authorities and leaders of the political parties close to the MRND and proposals to eliminate the President and the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army, while simultaneously launching a general offensive and invading Kigali. These attacks were expected between 3 and 9 April 1994. This information from a European source suggested that President Habyarimana should not make the trip of 6 April to Dar es Salaam.

It is certain that this information came from soldiers who were misinformed or who were deliberately tricking it out and turning it against the troops of the Rwandan Army to create confusion, if it was really getting around Camp Kanombe. Finally, if during the reception at the Hotel Meridian on 4 April 1994, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora ‘declared that he was opposed to the Rwandan president’s taking the trip to Tanzania and that the plane in which he was traveling would be shot down,’ it certainly followed from the information of 3 April 1994. His declaration shows that Colonel Bagosora was concerned for the safety of President Habyarimana rather than planning his assassination. To interpret this declaration as if Bagosora said he was going to order the assassination of President Habyarimana is to pervert his thinking. If he had planned to shoot down President Habyarimana’s plane, and this trip would have been the perfect opportunity to do so, Bagosora would not have opposed it and would never have stated as much. It is antithetic to attribute the attack to him.


Ordering, shipping, stocking and handling of the SAM missiles.

The former Rwandan military authorities do not deny the different orders that were made. The need to acquire anti-aircraft weapons certainly existed and is only normal. However, there were no such deliveries.

The Mutsinzi Commission seems to have misrepresented the letter from the Russian Embassy. ‘“On 13 July 1992, the Russian Ambassador to Rwanda sent a positive note verbale to the Rwandan Minister of Foreign Affairs” bearing notably on the furnishing of anti-aircraft weapons including SAM-16 missiles.’ The second part of this extract, which speaks of furnishing arms, seems to be an add-on by the Commission, as it is not contained within the quotes. In any case, the diplomatic note conveying the agreement to furnish arms is different from the note or memorandum of delivery from the manufacturing plant, the warehouses of another army or another contracted supplier, with the list of materials and their serial numbers. Does this note verbale from the Russian Embassy contain this list?

They should have looked for the former chief of administrative services and supplies for the Ministry of Defense and asked him if there had been any deliveries of the SAM missiles ordered and from which suppliers. They should have looked for and heard the claims of the former Commandant of the Rwandan Army base who administered the armaments to know if he had received the SAM missiles, from where, if he had stocked them in his depots and to which unit they were delivered.

As to the stocking and handling of the SAMs, they should have looked for and questioned the former Commandant of Camp Kanombe, Colonel Mayuya, and the Commander of the Operational Sector of the City of Kigali, the Commander of the Artillery Company and the former officers of the Anti-Aircraft Battalion. They should, especially, have asked if this specialized unit, which had to have had the anti-aircraft missiles if the FAR was actually in possession of them, had even one soldier who knew of these anti-aircraft missiles, had seen and worked with them, had received any training on them and where he had received it.

They should also have sought out the former officers of the Presidential Guard who were outside the country and asked them if someone in their unit had received any training in these anti-aircraft missiles, if this unit was equipped with such weapons, since when and from where they had come. But the Mutsinzi Commission also seems not to have questioned Colonel Evariste Murenzi, a former officer with the Presidential Guard who distinguished himself by being deleted from the Mucyo Commission report against France. Anyway, he had the courage to say that the Presidential Guard never had the SAM missiles and his testimony was just simply not included.

They should have sought out the former G1 (chief of personnel) of the Rwandan Army and the former chief of services in the Department of Military Cooperation of the Ministry of Defense and asked them if there were any ex-FAR soldiers who received training in anti-aircraft missiles. They might just have questioned the last chief of personnel of the Ministry of Defense and asked him if there was even one soldier in the FAR who had received such training.


The Document: Rwanda’s Downward Spiral

“From 8 April 1994, the US State Dept. received information from the High Command of the Rwandan Army according to which a missile fired by extremist Hutus from the Presidential Guard shot down the plane carrying the Presidents . . . in accordance with the Embassy in Kigali and the DAO (Defense Attaché Officer) in Yaoundé. It is significant that no one within the Rwandan military Command accuses the RPF of being the source of the attack,” the document specifies.

This report seems to be disinformation meant to direct the decisions of the American authorities. It is important to know just when the US Embassy in Kigali and the DAO in Yaoundé received this information and from whom. One must know if this information was directly delivered to the US Ambassador, himself, or if he was informed by one of his agents, and if this information was sent on to Washington by his own agency! Did the DAO Yaoundé receive the information directly from the same source (person) at the “High Command of the Rwandan Army”? If so, how did this foreign-based service directly receive this information from the “High Command of the Rwandan Army”? If not, was he informed by the US Embassy in Kigali?

What is meant by “High Command of the Rwandan Army,” since this terminology was never used by the Rwandan Army? If it refers to the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army, this supposes that the information was delivered to the US Embassy by an appropriate authority for it to be accepted. If the information came from the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army and that it is dated 7 or 8 April, for this to be remotely probable, it must have come from Colonel Joseph Murasampongo, who replaced the Chief of Staff at that time. Colonel BEM Marcel Gatsinzi, who was designated as Interim Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army, did not arrive in Kigali until 8 April around 17.00 hours and took up his duties that night.

If, instead, “High Command of the Rwandan Army” refers to the Command of the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), a term used to designate the Command of the Rwandan Army and the National Gendarmerie unified within the Ministry of Defense, the information must have been delivered by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, Cabinet Director of the MINADEF, 7 April 1994, before noon, to have been accepted as coming from the FAR, because he was the appropriate authority to speak for the FAR (see, especially, all the communiqués sent out that were signed by Bagosora). If the information was dated from the afternoon of 7 April, it must have been delivered by the president of the Crisis Committee created at a meeting of the High Command of the FAR held at the ESM (the Military Academy) on 7 April 1994 at 10 am, that being Major General Augustin Ndindiliyimana (Chief of Staff of the National Gendarmerie). Was this information conveyed to the Embassy physically by an appropriately identified Rwandan military authority who went to the Embassy, or to the Ambassador’s envoy who then went to see the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army. Was it transmitted by telephone by an authorized representative of the Rwandan Army’s Chief of Staff, which regularly telephones the Embassy and whose voice would be recognized to verify the just who was on the phone? But if the information came from someone else, it could only have been a diversionary tactic initiated and carried out by elements of the RPF presenting themselves as being from the High Command of the Rwandan Army or by an element of a fifth column. No soldier, regardless of rank or duty, would be able to take it upon himself to communicate with the Embassies. This observation applies as well to the theory suggested by the French Ambassador to Rwanda in his note to Paris from 25 April 1994. From whom had he received this information according to which “the shots came from Kanombe where the Presidential Guard has a camp.” There was no camp of the Presidential Guard at Kanombe. There was only one detachment committed to the defense of the grounds of the presidential residence, deployed to the perimeter there.

The Command of the FAR suspected the RPF as soon as the attack was announced because of the intelligence discussed above, which indicated there was a plot afoot by the RPF to hit the president. This was the view of those in attendance at the emergency meeting of the superior officers of the FAR held by, and at the site of, the Command of the FAR by the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army on the night of 6 and 7 April 1994, thus before the information was communicated to the US Embassy in Kigali. So it is wrong to report that “no one within the High Command of the Rwandan Army accused the RPF of being behind the attack.” It was also quite surprising to hear General Roméo Dallaire push his version of the events as an accident when the plane was brought down by a surface-to-air missile strike.


The number of witnesses (557)

It is not the number of witnesses that counts, it is the quality of the real information they hold and not the information that has been suggested to them. Some of their testimony needs commentary.

According to Jean Marie Vianney Gasana, “The Extremists in the military resented Habyarimana for being too friendly with the Tutsis.” When a witness uses the term ‘Extremist,’ it shows that his or her testimony was ordered, or suggested to the witness, by the RPF.

According to Lt. Makuza, “Certain among us knew that there was something going to happen on 6 April—without knowing exactly what.” By specifying the date as 6 April, this witness shows that his testimony was forced to give it credibility.


The plot hatched by the FAR

The insinuation of a plot hatched by members of the FAR and especially Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and the commanders of the Presidential Guard, the Para-Commando battalion and the Reconnaissance battalion, seems unfounded, since no information relevant to such a plot was ever brought to the attention of the Command of the Rwandan Army, either officially or unofficially. In fact, if it was being spoken of in all the units at Camp Kanombe, as the witnesses before the Mutsinzi Commission have alleged, military intelligence would certainly have known about it. But there was not a word of it there!

To allege that every Battalion Commander at Camp Kanombe was a member of the AMASASU (Alliance des Militaires Agacés par les Séculaires Actes Sournois des UNARistes [Alliance of Soldiers Annoyed by the Underhanded Secular Acts of the UNARists {those behind Arusha and in favor of uniting the Hutu and Tutsi forces}]) organization is an aberration. There were only three Battalion Commanders at Camp Kanombe: the Para-Commando Battalion, the Anti-Aircraft Battalion and the Artillery Battery of that Company assimilated into a battalion. The other units were Companies. How could a witness who was not even aware of this organization give credible testimony? If the members of this AMASASU organization were known to be at Camp Kanombe, the Camp Commander would have reported it to the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army. But no information on this organization ever came out. Except for two leaflets that this organization issued at the beginning of 1993, AMASASU did not demonstrate its existence. This is what made it difficult to identify its members, if there were any and if it was not just one guy calling himself an organization! The AMASASU base at Camp Kanombe was not in the hypotheses of the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army.


The spot from which the missiles were fired

The precision with which a half dozen ex-FAR “declared that the missiles were fired from inside the enclosed grounds of the president’s residence or very nearby” indicates that these witnesses were in the place where the missiles were fired. Does this mean they were part of the detachment of Presidential Guards deployed to defend the perimeter of the residence?

Other witnesses have said that the shots came from inside the camp or from the area very close to the camp without indicating which side. This sort of testimony is vague, which shows that it is faked. None of this testimony specifies the direction of the missiles. But the plane could not have fallen like a stone into the garden of the presidential residence if it had been shot down by missiles fired on it at that altitude from the enclosure of the residence. The same applies if the plane was hit after it had passed over the Nyarugunga Valley, as Silas Siborurema testified. As the crow flies, this would be 200 or 300 meters from the presidential residence. When a plane is hit by a missile, it does not fall straight down from the point of impact, or even just a few hundred meters from it. It will fall further along its course from the point of impact depending on its altitude, its air speed, its flight path and its weight. Consequently, if the plane was struck by the missile while it was approaching the places cited, it would have crashed either between the presidential residence and the military hospital at Camp Kanombe, or at the top of the Camp on its northern side, or in the middle of the Camp in the section of the Military Buildings Company and the Quarter Master or of the Transport Company, or else on the very eastern end of the runway or on the runway itself. In any case, this testimony gathered 15 years after the attack from witnesses who are in the claws of the RPF cannot replace that which was taken first hand from the people of Masaka, Rusororo and Ndera, who were freely deposed the day after the attack.


Access and egress by the RPF Commando Unit to Masaka

It is good to remember that traffic was moving freely. There was no curfew, no FAR units deployed in the zone, no checkpoints or roadblocks on the route joining Kigali-Musha-Rwamagana. The RPF moved around freely throughout the zone under the control of the UNAMIR. Masaka was in this zone. RPF elements in civilian cloths would not have been recognized because the usual checking of IDs by the Gendarmerie had been stopped by Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. After the missile strike, the commando unit buried the missile launchers in the bush where they were discovered on 25 April 1994 by displaced persons from the East who were building shelters. The commando unit could have gotten back to Kigali in a civilian vehicle; it could have headed toward Rwamagana and disappeared into the countryside; it could have blended in with acquaintances in Masaka, Rusororo, Kabuga, Musha, etc. . . . and rejoined the RPF in its march on Kigali.


Very important elements!

a) The fake black box.

Did the Mutsinzi Commission investigate the origins of the fake black box that was attributed to the presidential Falcon jet and was hidden in the offices of the United Nations in New York until its discovery by judge Jean-Louis Bruguière? According to the article by Partrick de Saint-Exupery in Le Monde of 8 April 2009, this black box came from an Air France Concorde 209, marked F-BVFC. It was found by the UN (i.e., the UNAMIR) on 27 May 1994, abandoned near the crash site. So it was 7 weeks after the attack that the UNAMIR found the fake black box. The plane came down in the garden of the presidential residence, not in the bush, the forest, the swamp or in a lake. All the visible debris from the wreckage was in the garden. Nothing could have been hidden. No piece the size of a matchbox or even smaller could have gone unnoticed. The FAR held the site until 20 May 1994 and was moved out during the night of 20-21 May 1994. The RPF took over this position in the early morning of 21 May 1994, and the UNAMIR was on the site the same day, according to Patrick de Saint-Exupery. The fake black box was found on this location one week after it was occupied by the RPF, who surely must know how it got there!

b) The missile launchers

Did the Mutsinzi Commission try to recover the two missile-launchers found on 25 April by the people living in the bush of the Masaka Valley? They were turned over to President Mobutu, then in charge of their security if needed for an investigation. When Laurent Désiré Kabila took power in Kinshasa on 15 May 1997, they were in the warehouses of the military camp at Kokolo. The commandant of Camp Kokolo was Commander John Numbi, the current Inspector General of the Congolese Police. General James Kabarebe, currently the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Defense Forces was the Chief of Staff and a Major General of the Congolese Armed Forces. The two missile-launchers disappeared from these warehouses at Camp Kokolo during their commands. John Numbi refused to testify on this subject. These two men are responsible for the disappearance of the missile-launchers!

Any investigation into the attack against President Habyarimana that does not deal with the fake black box (its origins, how it got onto the crash site and its use to record the flight data of the Falcon 50 on 6 April 1994), the disassembly and disappearance of the real black box, and the missile-launchers, can only be biased.

Victory to the Truth, and down with lies, manipulations and disinformation!
27 December 2009
Kanyarwanda Veritas

THE TRUTH ABOUT RWANDA - by Christopher Black

Bill'nKiller

THE TRUTH ABOUT RWANDA - by Christopher Black

[Here's an antidote to some of the toxic bilge coming out of Anglo-Saxony these days on the subject of Rwanda. Even quisling frogs like Gérard Prunier (whose perfect English is perfectly maddening) have joined with their trans-chunnel and trans-Atlantic kith, like Linda Melvern and Wm Schabas, in pissing in the information pool, which has so recently been refilled with hard evidence against their mythic genocide of '800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus carried out in 100 days by Extremist Hutus in pastel periwigs and weilding Red Chinese machetes', just so as not to let go of the historical lie that has for so long been their meal ticket.

Thus, from dankest Canadia, comes our strong comrade, Me Chris Black, with yet further proof that, no matter what the military humanists bleat, ça ne s'est pas passé comme ça en Rwanda.

So here, read this--then try and cop a hook at D'Arusha à Arusha, a new French doc by Chris Gargot--and start demanding that your favorite English-language, leftish press (I'm thinking Verso, Soft Skull, MR and Pluto, here) start printing translations of important French works on this history--like those of Pierre Péan, Ambassador JMV Ndagijimana, Col Jacques Hogard, Faustin Ntilikina, Charles Onana--and that's just the few that lurch forth in my incipient senility.

But this history is key to understanding the thorough privatization of the world and all dominant state functions--esp the military--from which U.S. President Obama is (impossibly) charged with saving us. Putin did it for Russia--but Russia had 70 years of socialism in its history. That vague part of the socialist history that survived the bloody purges of the late 19th and 20th Centuries by the Pinkertons and the FBI, has been driven deep into the denial reflex of the collective sub-conscious of a nation terrorized into willful ignorance unto terminal amnesia.

This one's for all those who continue to fight for truth, justice and peace, against the craven forces of terrorized idiocy--and it's for Obama, too. --mc]

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Christopher Black: The Truth About Rwanda (29.12.09)
(Reposted from SaveRwanda, with editions by cm/p)


The reaction of some readers to the publication of the open letter to Paul Kagame

(http://cirqueminime.blogcollective.com/blog/_archives/2009/5/27/4202188.html)

by the Hutu political prisoners held by the US-controlled Rwanda Tribunal is a tragic manifestation of the deliberate disinformation fed to the world’s public, especially the English-language public, since Kagame and his gangsters destroyed democracy in Rwanda and annihilated millions of people, both Hutu and Tutsi, in his four-year campaign of terror to install a fascist Tutsi minority junta in the country.

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.

Instead of civilians returning in peace, Rwandan was viciously attacked on October 1, 1990, by a force that unleashed murderous savagery. During that invasion, the RPF forces of the Ugandan Army slaughtered everyone in their path, Hutu or Tutsi. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the majority Hutu, were butchered. The RPF’s favorite methods were the bayonet or knife, with which they disemboweled men and women, or to tie their hands behind their backs and smashed their skulls with a hoe, the farm tool iconic of the Hutu peasantry. After several weeks of intense fighting, the RPF forces were destroyed by the small Rwandan Army, assisted by forces from France and Zaire, and the remnants fled, on US instructions, back into Uganda to regroup and reorganize.

The RPF still has not justified this aggression and the needless slaughter of innocent civilians in a peaceful country it brought about. From the early 1960s, individual Tutsis had been freely allowed to return to Rwanda, and several times the Rwandan government invited them all to return. However the Tutsi aristocracy, jealous of its lost power and considering the Hutu as subhuman, refused to return unless their absolute power was restored. This the people of Rwanda, even those Tutsis who remained in the country, refused.

In the 1960s and early 1970s various Tutsi groups in Uganda and elsewhere had organized terrorist raids into Rwanda during which they pitilessly murdered anyone they caught. These raids were repelled by Rwanda’s tiny armed forces. The years that followed were a period of development and peace for Rwandans. Even though one of the smallest and poorest countries in the world, it had the best road system, healthcare, and education system in Africa. Until the late 1980’s it prospered and received help from both the socialist countries of the USSR, North Korea and China, and West Germany, France and Israel, among others.

The Tutsis in Uganda became involved in the civil wars between the socialist Milton Obote and US-UK puppets like Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni, who were supported by the West to get rid of socialism in Uganda. By 1990 the Tutsis composed a large section of the Ugandan Army, and all the senior officers of the RPF were high-ranking officers in the Ugandan Army, the NRA. Kagame, himself, was one of the highest-ranking officers in the intelligence services and was notorious for enjoying the torture of prisoners.

Rwanda until 1990 was a one-party socialist state. The ruling party, the MRND (roughly, the National Movement For Revolutionary Development), was not considered a political party as such, but rather a social movement in which everyone in the society took part through local elections and the mechanisms of consensus, much like the system in Cuba. The fall of the Soviet Union led to pressure from the West, notably the United States and France, to dismantle the one-party state system and permit multi-party democracy. The President, Juvénal Habyarimana, instead of resisting, agreed to a change in the constitution, and, in 1991, Rwanda became a multi-party democracy.

The fact the Rwandan government did this in the middle of a war is more than just remarkable. It was also an offer of peace. The RPF, since its abject failure in 1990, had changed its strategy from a frontal assault to the tactics of terrorism. The RPF likes to refer to this phase as ‘the guerrilla.’ However, it was not the guerrilla of a liberation struggle like the FLN in Vietnam or the FARC in Colombia. It was instead a mirror image of the Contras’ campaign of terrorism conducted against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Its purpose was not to make revolution. Its purpose was to overthrow the revolution. And, like the Contras, the RPF was supported by the United States.

This was clear from the beginning of the war. When the RPF launched their attack, President Habyarimana was in Washington, lured out of the way, by the U.S. State Department. The evidence that the U.S. was aware of and supported the October surprise attack was the U.S. administration’s offer to Habyarimana of asylum in the U.S. if he surrendered power to the RPF. Habyarimana refused and immediately flew home. There was no condemnation of the Ugandan-RPF aggression by the U.S. or any of its allies, despite the big noise they made at the same time over the advance of Iraqi forces into Kuwait. Further, the Rwandan ambassador to the UN, then seated on the Security Council, filed a protest in the UNSC, but the U.S. had it taken off the agenda.

In fact, the U.S. and its allies supported the aggression against Rwanda from the beginning, and U.S. Special Forces operated with the RPF from the beginning. Recently in Toronto, Bill Clinton denied any involvement in Rwanda, but this is one of the Big Lies of the Century. He and Bush are up to their necks in the blood of the Rwandan and Congolese people.

The RPF took full advantage of the arrival of multi-party democracy to Rwanda in 1991 and created several front parties to take away support from the popular MRND. These parties, though claiming to represent different political views, in fact, were mainly front parties for the RPF. The press was expanded and many of the new papers were financed by and acted as mouthpieces for the RPF. While these newly formed political parties were criticizing the Habyarimana government, the RPF was continuing its terror campaign, planting mines that killed Hutu and Tutsi alike, assassinating politicians and officials, and, with the help of various NGOs funded by western intelligence agencies, blaming it all on the Rwandan government.

In 1992, a coalition government was formed, with the RPF or its front parties seizing control of key Ministries and appointing the Prime Minister. Through these agents they also controlled the civilian intelligence services that they then began to dismantle. The RPF engaged in a ‘talk-and-fight’ strategy. Always agreeing to a ceasefire while pressing for more power, then launching new attacks on civilians. The most egregious of these crimes against peace was their breaking of the ceasefire and their major offensive in February 1993, during which they seized the major town of Ruhengeri and murdered 40,000 civilians, most of them Hutu. The Rwandan Army, even though hamstrung by the civilian ministries that were controlled by the RPF, managed to drive the enemy back. Finally in August 1993, under pressure from the U.S. and its allies, the Arusha Accords were signed giving the RPF major concessions in return for the formation of a broad-based transition government to be followed by general elections.

However, the RPF knew they could not win such elections as they were not only unpopular with the majority Hutu population, but they did not even enjoy the support of many Tutsis inside Rwanda whose lives and businesses had been destroyed by a war they had never seen the need for.

Instead of preparing for elections, the RPF prepared a final offensive. As far back as December 1993, UN reports document the massive build-up of men and weapons coming into Rwanda from Uganda. The UN force that was deployed supposedly to ensure a peaceful transition, in fact, was a cover for the U.S. and its allies to assist in this build-up. General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the UN force, hid this build-up from the Rwandan army and the President. The build-up was accompanied by death threats against President Habyarimana. In October 1993, according to an account of Habyarimana’s last conversation with Zairian president Mobutu just two days before the Rwandan president was murdered, U.S. State Dept. representative Herman Cohen told President Habyarimana that unless he ceded all power to the RPF, they would kill him and drag his body through the streets. He received the same threat from the Belgians and the Canadians through General Dallaire. These threats were punctuated by the murder of the Hutu president of Burundi by Tutsi officers in October 1993, another assassination in which Kagame and the RPF had a hand. In the aftermath of that murder, 250,000 Hutus were massacred by the Tutsi army of Burundi, and hundreds of thousands of Hutus fled to Rwanda.

The result of the February 1993 offensive was that one million Hutus fled the RPF’s terror in northern Rwanda towards the Rwandan capital. So, by April 1994, over a million refugees were encamped in or around Kigali, and hundreds thousands more were in camps in the south, all fleeing RPF terror.

The RPF did all it could in 1994 to paralyze government functions, to exacerbate racial tensions, and prepare for war. Then, on April 6, 1994, they launched their final surprise attack by shooting down the presidential plane returning from a meeting that Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni had arranged in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.

In fact, it is known that Museveni’s half-brother, Salim Saleh, was at the final RPF meeting in Mulindi where the date for the shoot-down was set. The attack on the plane killed the Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, the Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, a Hutu, the Rwandan Army chief of staff, Deogratias Nsabimana, a Hutu, and everyone else on-board.

It was the first massacre of 1994, and it was a massacre of Hutus by the RPF. The RPF then immediately launched attacks across Kigali and throughout the north of the country. In the sector of Kigali known as Remera, they killed everyone living there on the night of the 6th/7th, wiped out the Gendarme camp there, wiped out the military police camp at Kami, and launched a major attack against Camp Kanombe, Camp Kigali and the main Gendarme camp at Kacyiru. They slaughtered everyone in their path.

The Rwandan government and army called for a ceasefire the same night, and again the next day. The RPF refused. The Rwandan government asked for more UN help to control the situation. The U.S. arranged, instead, that the main UN force be pulled out, while they continued to supply the RPF with men and supplies flown in by C130 Hercules. The Rwandan Army, short of ammunition and unable to contain the RPF advances, even offered an unconditional surrender on the 12th of April. Incredibly, the RPF refused it. Instead, they shelled the Nyacyonga refugee camp where a large part of the one million Hutu refugees were located, provoking their flight into the capital, Kigali. The effect of one million people flooding into a small city that itself was under bombardment cannot be described. The RPF used this flood of people to infiltrate its men behind army lines. This created panic among the Hutu population, who began killing anyone they did not recognize, fearing that everyone was an RPF soldier out to cut their throats. It was clear that the RPF was not interested in saving lives, even Tutsi lives, but only in seizing total power, and they did not want to negotiate at all.

Dr. Alison Des Forges, in her testimony in the Military II trial at the ICTR in 2006, stated that the RPF’s claim that they attacked to stop a “genocide” was a myth, mere propaganda to justify their attempt to seize power by force of arms. She also testified that the Rwandan government did not plan and execute a genocide. This accords with the testimony of General Dallaire, who also confirmed that there was no planned genocide by the government. And the deputy head of Belgian Army Intelligence, Colonel André Vincent, also testified at the ICTR that the idea of a genocide was a fantasy.

The fighting in Kigali was intense. UN officers, corroborating the testimony of Rwandan and RPF officers, state that the RPF was launching hundreds of Katyusha rockets every hour, around the clock, while the Rwandan Army ran out of hand grenades in the first few days and was reduced to fighting the RPF with artisanal explosives. Even so, the vaunted RPF could not take Kigali. The siege of Kigali lasted three months and only ended when the Rwandan Army literally ran out of ammunition and ordered a general retreat into the forests of Congo.

During that fighting, the RPF killed anyone in their path. RPF officers have stated that their troops killed up to 2 million Hutus during those 12 weeks in a deliberate campaign to eliminate the Hutu population. The Akagera River, the length of which was under RPF control throughout, ran red with the blood of the Hutus massacred on its banks. The RPF claimed these were Tutsis, but there were no Tutsis in that area, and only they had access to that area. Robert Gersony, of USAID, in a report to the UNHCR in October 1994, filed as an exhibit at the ICTR, stated that the RFP carried out a systematic and planned massacre of the Hutu population.

As the Rwandan Army, including its Tutsi officers and men, retreated into the Congo forest, the Hutu population in the millions, fearing for their lives, fled along with them. In local villages, Hutu neighbors attacked Tutsis in revenge for the murder of Hutus or fearing death at their hands. And Tutsis attacked Hutus. It was total war—just as the RPF had wished. Then, in 1996-1998, the RPF pursued the Hutus through the Congo forests and killed hundreds of thousands unto millions of unarmed refugees. They were shelled, machine gunned, raped, and cut to pieces with knives. Accounts of that trek are difficult to bear.

The RPF was directly assisted in this offensive by the U.S., which set up the UN Rwanda Emergency Office in Nairobi, manning it with U.S. Army officers and acting as the operational headquarters of the RPF to give them intelligence on Rwandan Army troop movements, actions and directions. Prudence Bushnell, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under Ambassador George Moose, telephoned the Rwandan Army chief of staff in May 1994 and told him that, unless he surrendered, he must know that he would be fighting the United States of America and would be defeated. U.S. Special Forces fought along side the RPF. There is also evidence of the Belgian UN forces involvement from an intercepted radio message sent by Kagame to his forces in the field and referring to the help the RPF had received from the Belgians.

There is also evidence that Canadian forces were involved, and Antoine Nyetera, a Tutsi prince, who was in Kigali during that period, testified for the defense in the Military II trial and stated that not only were there no massacres committed against Tutsis by the Rwandan Army, but that it was the RPF that began the massacres against Hutus after taking Kigali. He also testified that despite the claim by the RPF of being a Tutsi liberation group, when he saw their long columns enter the capital, he recognized that most of them were Sudanese, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Tanzanian, and that others were speaking Swahili or Sudanese languages: In other words, they were mercenaries.

Several RPF officers have testified at the ICTR and stated that they fled the Kagame regime because they had been promised that they were fighting for the liberation of the Tutsis. However, when they wanted to take to the streets of Kigali to stop reprisals against Tutsis by Hutu civilians, the junior officers were forbidden to do so, putting the lie to Kagame’s claim that he attacked to save Tutsis. These officers testified that Kagame wanted (Tutsi) deaths to justify his war. The RPF could have controlled large parts of Kigali as they had at least 15,000 men in or near the capital opposed to 5,000 Rwandan Army forces. Instead he used his men to ethnically cleanse the rest of the country of its majority Hutu population.

The Rwanda War was a total war. All means were used to destroy the country and the Hutu people. The ultimate objective was the resources of Congo—then Zaire. The U.S. agreed to support the RPF in return for the RPF acting as a U.S. proxy force to invade Congo and seize its resources. The U.S. now has several military bases in Rwanda, and Rwanda is now nothing more than a U.S.-UK colony run by thugs who control the majority of the people through intimidation, disinformation and murder. None of this could have happened if those in the UN, like Kofi Anan, then in charge of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, had done their jobs. None of this could have happened without the connivance of the NATO countries and Uganda. But the prime responsibility rests with the United States of America and, in particular, the regimes of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush--and now with Mr. Obama. As Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN Secretary General at the time, stated to Canadian historian Robin Philpot in 2004, “The United States is one hundred percent responsible for what happened in Rwanda.”

Christopher Black
Barrister, International Criminal Lawyer
Lead Counsel, General Augustin Ndindiliyimana
Chief of Staff, Rwandan Gendarmerie
International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda
Toronto, Canada