Marianne2 Article on Libé's Fake Scoop--Another Media War Crime

[At this moment when France's new Socialist-led government seems unable to feel any kinship with the Ba'athist Socialist-led government of Syria, and, in fact, is offering to throw in once more with Western Waste Capital's criminal elite in raining fiery death on yet another innocent people in the name of Democracy and Human Rights, and, in so doing, is blacking out its recent history of craven collaborationism with global Fascism:  It seems the perfect moment for this debunking of one more Rwandan Genocide hustle:  How the Rwandan's were never invaded, occupied and terrorized, but committed all that horrible, cold-blooded murder on themselves and for no good reason.  

In the pungent tradition of Dallaire's false genocide fax and the laughable reports Mutzinsi and Mucyo, the teabag hack'n'flack, Linda Melvern, has fished another unsanitary napkin from the cesspool of the UN files (read: the CIA/MI6/Mossad mimeograph room), and is trying to pass more stale shit off as new money.  

So the UN, the same pack of wet-brained carney shills who fronted for the Bosnian jihadists, the KLA terrorists in Kosovo, and those inglorious Western proxies the RPF; the International Community's stand-in who apologized for Srebrenica, Raçak, the 6 April 1994 double presidential assassination, without ever deigning to investigate any of these atrocities unto even losing/hiding/fabricating evidence so as not to have to bring cases against the real guilty parties; this same benighted army that has policed genocides from Korea to Indochina to Iraq, Afghanistan, Central Africa and Congo, Libya and soon enough Syria:  this fascist militia continues to have the full confidence of the World Public.  

And that is why, even with the strong investigative journalism someone like our dear friend Péan has practiced so well for so long, or with the table-turning work of someone like Charles Onana on Sudan, Côte d'Ivoire and soon Congo, the force of the false consciousness that the Genocide Lobby continues to feed, financially and amorally, will not soon be burned away by the bright light of revealed Truth. --mc]

Several Experts Deny Libération’s Scoop on [FAR] Missiles

by Pierre Péan

Pierre Péan, author of “Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs” [Black Fury, White Liars—still not in English!] and “Carnages” [see our translations of two chapters (6 & 16) of this very important work], demonstrates how the scoop in Libération about the alleged presence of French-made missiles in the stocks of the Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) prior to the attack that cost the life of Juvénal Habyarimana.  In reality, this information, which is not new, was set aside as irrelevant by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

Sarkozy stealing Kagame's watch.

Mediatically, the scoop in the 1 June edition of Libération claiming there were 15 Mistral missiles in the arsenal of the FAR during the Habyarimana regime, was a big success, a coup picked up by most of the French media.  One small problem:  this scoop was no scoop.

The list of these French-made surface-to-air missiles—discovered by a British journalist [Linda Melvern, a paid RPF flack and genocide hustler from day one] in the records of the UN—was submitted Thursday to [anti-terrorist, investigative] Judges Marc Trévidic and Nathalie Poux by two Defense lawyers.  This information was also transmitted to Libération, which then put it on the front page of the next day’s edition.  This “scoop” was supposed to weaken the current thinking that holds Paul Kagame responsible for ordering the attack that cost the life of President Juvénal Habyarimana.  This attack is thought to have set off the genocide.

You don’t have to be an expert to understand the effect produced by the introduction of such a document into the minds of Libération readers or the consumers of the other media that carried the story:  If the FAR possessed these Mistral, they would have been able to use them to shoot down their president's Falcon 50.  This stock of weapons indicates the responsibility of the Hutus and the involvement of France in the attack that set off the genocide. . . 

This fake scoop, penned by the journalist Maria Malagardis, is really just the umpteenth psy-op by Kigali.  The alleged repository of 15 Mistral held by the FAR was brought up in October 1994 by Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch, and she, at that time, based her claim on a list presented by Sean Moorhouse, a British officer of the UNAMIR2, to whom it had come second hand.

Contacted by several interests, Moorhouse today denies having written that the FAR had 15 Mistral.  In an exchange of emails with Belgian Professor Filip Reyntjens, Moorhouse last year wrote, apropos of this list revived by HWR: “I did not make up the list of weapons suspected to be in the hands of the FAR.  I inherited it.”  


Moorhouse adds that he did not place a great deal of stock in the reliability of this list, which was part of a flood of rumors at that time.  He even suggested that the Mistral were added later.  Filip Reyntjens did not hesitate to comment on the “scoop” in Libération:  “So all of this is not really serious, and all that Maria Malagardis “revealed” was her own lightweight approach to a case that deserves a lot more rigor.”

“Phony scoop . . . Ridiculous . . . A dud . . .”, is how it was described to me by Col. Luc Marchal, deputy commander to General Dallaire with the UNAMIR in 1994.  This Belgian officer was the charged with knowing where to find weapons held by both parties (FAR and RPF) and with confiscating all but personal arms.  Very hard on the Libération article, he acknowledged that this document had been around for a long time and that it had been discussed in Arusha at the ICTR, before being set aside as irrelevant.  “If the FAR had some Mistral, I would have known about it, that was my job.  The possession of such missiles would have required a technical infrastructure they didn’t have. . . . And, if the FAR actually had such a system, they would have set it up to protect their airspace and we would have been able to track it.”

Libération published this fake scoop at the precise moment when the lawyers for the plaintiffs were presenting their concluding arguments on the expert ballistics evidence in the case of the 6 April 1994 missile-strike.  This evidence, without being categorical, pointed the investigation toward the missiles' being fired from Camp Kanombe, held at that time by the FAR, rather than from the farm at Masaka.  Without ever indicating the possible authors of this attack.  Libération has drawn totally distorted conclusions, blacking-out the huge "Irrefutable" from its 11 January 2012 front-page headline.  So the daily, without a second though, has taken up the theme played by Kigali, thus leading its readers to believe that the investigation has come to a close, that the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, was innocent and that Extremist Hutus were the perpetrators of the attack, with a headline that makes the report say something that it had never even suggested:  “Rwanda: the evidence of a planned genocide”. . .

This “Page One” and this article have caused a number of indignant reactions, like those of Rony Brauman, Claudine Vidal and Jean-Hervé Bradol, who published an op-ed in Marianne entitled: “Kagame’s useful idiots.”  So these “useful idiots” put the covers back on at the precise moment when the judges were presenting documents showing that this report was not, as the media had been hammering on, irrefutable, but in need of some counter-expertise.

So the fake scoop in Libération came as another smokescreen arriving just when many of Paul Kagame's closest collaborators have decided to confide in the French judges.  They have given new information that tends to cast suspicion on Paul Kagame and indicates that he is the one who ordered this attack.

The game in Kigali is easily explained:  the Rwandan regime acted to put pressure on the judges at a time when it has been weakened by the departure of Nicolas Sarkozy, who wanted to abandon the judicial investigation into the attack.  As far as this judicial decision on his guilt goes toward affecting his survival, it totally calls Paul Kagame’s legitimacy into question.

Once again, Libération seems to have been transformed into a Kigali version of Pravda.  The theme of the article seems to have mistaken one of the arguments of the Defense made by Maitres Lev Forster and Bernard Maingain, lawyers for the nine Rwandans from Paul Kagame’s inner circle, still under suspicion, despite the extreme pressure put on the French judges for the past six years.  The Rwandan tragedy gave birth to a new kind of journalist.  Those who know the truth a priori and who then investigate just to prove they are right.  A sort of hemiplegic investigation on which, alas, Libération  holds no monopoly.