The Witches of Democratic Foreign Policy

[Now that Mme Clinton has returned the neocolonial war wing of the Democratic Party to unambiguous command and control, it might be a good time to look at how these sorcieres were never really off-stage--under any administrsation.--mc]

Hecate and Her Weird Sisters

My damn President?

Mad Albright

Hillary

Rice, Susan

Unca Sam

["Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and caldron bubble."

Since Reagan/Bush—and then Clinton, and then Bush, again—emancipated Private Capital from all effective State controls and any and all Social responsibilities, and all the duties formerly belonging to the Crown were contracted out in a ‘Free Market’ where nothing has intrinsic value but all is valorized only in its exchange, where alleviating Human want ceased to be the impetus for economic reproduction and Need, itself—expressed as debt, disease and misery—was commodified and mass-produced, perpetuated and traded on into futures that would test Azimov's imagination: now the essential outcome of human activity seems to have become the ever-greater re-production of Waste. 

Post-Capitalist Imperialism, without ever overcoming its malignant instinct for self-preservation and self-valorization, has introduced an even more lethal strain of colonialism than that propagated by Lord Kitchener and King Leopold:  the unregenerate extraction of the colonies' resources exchanges the native wealth for a sere hellscape over which the deeply mutilated victims of this spoilage are encouraged to wage Malthusian war.

And it is this plague-version of colonialism, this left-anti-imperialist-resistant genre of Imperialism—and if Dinesh  d'Souza is right in his Fuckumentary "2016", this is a geostrategy that Barack Obama's very DNA should oppose—that is being spread throughout Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North and Central Africa by the same agencies that pretend to be defending Human Rights and promoting Democracy.  Outfits like USAID, NED, Save the Children, Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, any of the Soros-backed Open Society groups like the IWPR, ICG, CANVAS, OTPOR, or francophonia's Survie & Ibuka—right, Western Military Intelligence in dirty dreads and a Sears poncho—are the vanguard.

So—and not merely to kill someone's psycho-historical glue-buzz over the Big Black Bare-Chested Villain Theory of Foreign Evil—on this the 20th anniversary of what continues—even as forests of evidence and legions of witnesses testify against its ever happening like that in Kigali--to be described as "The Rwandan Genocide:  In Which 800,000 Tutsis and Moderate Hutus Were Exterminated in 100 Days by Extremist Hutu Under the Direction of the Habyarimana/MRND Government After First Assassinating their Leader, etc., etc.":  It seems way past high-time that certain names were named and certain games were shamed.  

The Clintons and their neo-liberal, evangelical storm troopers for Humanity can no longer be allowed to front that they knew nothing about the horrors that were taking place at their behest in Central Africa after, say, 1 October 1990, the date of the Ugandan invasion of Rwanda; or after 6 April 1994 when a double presidential assassination brought less international attention than the JFK, Jr., assassination. 

That the four women pictured above are all deeply involved in bringing about the Wasting of decent societies in the Balkans of Central Europe and Les Milles Collines d'Afrique centrale—that they are WOMEN is nothing more than coincidence.  There is no implication of any sort of 'feminist conspiracy' here, beyond the usual geostrategic joint criminal enterprise that is claiming Rape as a war crime.  But that these four—and their neo-colonialist coven within the Democratic Party—continue to wield influence in the formation of Defense and State Dept. policy—and, in so doing, continue to neutralize and even corrupt the progressive tendencies that President Obama has demonstrated, especially domestically, throughout his presidency—is or should be the source of grave concern.

My friend Charles Onana, whose French works make up the definitive history of Central and North Africa, gave this interview to the weekly Marianne as a signal that his latest book on Rwanda will drop soon.  His writing seems to be purposefully withheld from Anglo-Saxon readers.  I've tried in little ways (like translating this interview) to fill this important lacuna.  But, as the interview will make obvious, the resistance in the US to knowing the real History of Africa is much stronger than this old man can break.—mc]

Marianne

Saturday 29 March 2014

http://www.marianne.net/Quelle-verite-pour-le-Rwanda_a237699.html

Interview with Charles Onana on Rwanda 20 yrs After

Marianne:  Is it still your view that France never stopped seeking a peaceful, political solution to the conflict between the RPF and the Habyarimana regime, while the US was constantly playing both sides off against each other?

Charles Onana:  From the time the RPF attacked Rwanda from its guerilla bases in Uganda, in 1990, President Mitterrand believed that, whatever the cost, it was necessary to stop the destabilization of Rwanda and, more broadly, that of the entire Great Lakes region.  In a direct continuation of policies created by his predecessor Valery Giscard d’Estaing, he (Mitterrand) decided to support Habyarimana and to adopt the military cooperation agreements that bound the two countries.  The Americans followed a completely separate logic.  Habyarimana was allied with Mobutu, the president of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC]), a privileged partner with the US for thirty years because he was considered an effective bulwark against communism, but had become less useful, and even a burden, in their eyes.  In 1990, the Americans feigned surprise at the RPF offensive that resulted in thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of displaced persons.  But in reality, they knew all about it. 

And for good reason:  Kagame had been trained at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, just like many other RPF officers.  The Pentagon and the CIA knew perfectly well that he would take the route of insurgency, knew all about and, in fact, supported his project to topple Habyarimana by force of arms and invade eastern Congo/Zaire.  At the time of the RPF attack, Habyarimana was in the US, where officials had offered him asylum, intending, certainly, to leave an open field for the RPF.  He refused this offer. . . .  When he got back to Kigali, Mitterrand pressured him constantly to negotiate with the RPF, demanded he democratize the country and put in place a government open to the unarmed opposition.  Habyarimana accepted without batting an eye because of his need for French aid.

From 1990 to 1993, François Mitterrand, despite his great efforts, was unable to bring about an agreement between the two parties.  On several occasions he rushed emissaries to urge Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni to put pressure in this direction on Kagame and his RPF, who were, purely and simply, active members of his military and government services.  Bruno Delaye, a Mitterrand advisor at the Élysée, and the Minister of Cooperation Marcel Debarge made the trip to Kampala.  Officially, the US and Great Britain supported these efforts, but, on the down low, they had been supporting the insurgents since 1988.

Marianne:  Does this include militarily?

CO:  Actually, Washington’s solid support of the Tutsi rebellion was worked out in the second half of the George H.W. Bush (Poppy) administration.  In 1992, in Orlando, Florida, investigators from the US Customs Service uncovered significant arms trafficking, including missiles and helicopters, destined for Uganda and whose kingpin was none other than the Director of Yoweri Museveni’s Cabinet.  But at this time Uganda was not at war, and the president had eliminated all opposition from inside his country.  Some of these arms must have been meant for the South Sudanese rebels of John Garang, at war against the Khartoum government of General Omar al-Bashir whom the Americans wanted to get rid of, and the rest . . . for Kagame’s RPF.

Marianne:  Did they make it to their destination?

CO:  When the US Justice Dept. found out that this arms business was old and that Museveni was behind it, the CIA and the Pentagon did all they could to cover it up.  And they must have, to a certain extent, succeeded because the Bush administration wound up releasing, very officially, a specific aid budget for Uganda, meaning, in reality, for the Tutsi rebellion.  Later, at the time of the signing of the Arusha Peace Agreement, UN observers would find large quantities of weapons from “Ugandan stocks” in the hands of the RPF.

Marianne:  You write that, for the Americans, Habyarimana’s chief fault was his close relationship with Mobutu.

CO:  The two men were really very close, but, I repeat, the US wanted to be rid of Mobutu.  The Rwandan ambassador to Washington told me how, at that time, Herman Cohen, US Under-Secretary of State for African Affairs, had revealed the destabilization plan they intended to carry out.  For that they needed Habyarimana to grant them passage through Rwandan territory.  He never accepted this nor ever really understood that the offensive against the French “Pré-Carré” or French-speaking Africa was written into American policy and had already been to a large extent implemented.

Since Clinton’s arrival in the White House, this policy had intensified, especially under the influence of then-US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright and Susan Rice, then on the staff of the National Security Council (later, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and now US National Security Advisor—cm/p)

Marianne:  But didn’t the US support the Arusha Peace Accords between the RPF and the Habyarimana regime?

CO:  Absolutely.  But in a very twisted kind of way.  I found a document from the State Dept. addressed to Herman Cohen explicitly describing the pressures he was supposed to put on Habyarimana, by France’s Paul Dijoud (director of African Affairs for the Foreign Ministry in 1992) and Belgium’s Willy Claes (then Foreign Affairs Minister for that country), to accept the entirety of the Arusha Accords.  Knowing full well that the terms were unacceptable to the Hutus.

Marianne:  What was the attitude of the US after the 6^th of April 1994?

CO:  For the three months the killings lasted, the Americans didn’t once make a move toward creating any real peacekeeping operation that might have put an end to them.  They had to make sure the French didn’t introduce a military force into Kigali because the RPF had demanded they get out of Rwanda. . . .  As long as the French troops remained in Kigali, the RPF would not be able to take power.  In June, when the UN asked France to put together what would become Operation Turquoise, the Americans supported them formally but not logistically, even though they had promised to furnish them with air support.  Then they put together their own humanitarian operation, Support Hope, out of Kampala (the Ugandan capital—ndlr), but by then there was no one left to save in Rwanda. . . .

The British went right along with the US creating their own Operation Gabrielle.  In reality all these military officials, among whom were Israelis, took it upon themselves to train a new Rwandan Armed Forces that would be under the control of the RPF.

Even before the mass killings had stopped, the US State Dept. insisted that the new authorities be recognized.  And sometime later, French, which had been the official language of the Rwandan government from before colonial times was removed from administrative life. . . .

Marianne:  Was Mitterrand aware of the Anglo-Americans’ double-dealing?

CO:  Yes, especially because his Chief of Staff, General Christian Quesnot, perfectly understood the strategy of the RPF and its supporters in Washington and London.  But Mitterrand was already sick and, in the face of the violent anti-French campaign in the national media, he could not or did not know how to oppose it.

Marianne:  François Mitterrand, friend and accomplice of the génocidaires. . . . This charge appeared once again in a recent cartoon promoted by journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry.  What do you think of that?

CO:  It’s ridiculous!  On a personal, political, or media level, what interest could this man, whose great intelligence even his enemies acknowledge, have had in encouraging a genocide?  Among his detractors who compare the Rwandan genocide with The Holocaust—and that makes no sense on a historical level—some are merely evening scores with him.

Marianne:  But isn’t it a premeditated genocide all the same?

CO:  If this were the case, don’t you think the RPF, the international organizations, those countries present in one way or another in the region would have sounded the alarm well before the 6^th of April 1994?  But there isn’t any documented evidence of such a phenomenon.  And that is why the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has had such difficulty establishing it.

Marianne:  The only expert-report to date, that of judges Marc Trévidic and Nathalie Poux, assigns responsibility, without naming any of them, to Extremist Hutus for being the most likely perpetrators of the 6 April attack, coming out of Camp Kanombé under the control of the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), who were faithful to Habyarimana. . . .  

CO:  First, the investigation by these judges is far from being finished.  And, in my opinion, it still has numerous weaknesses.  How is it that, for example, the commander of Camp Kanombé has never given testimony?  He did, however, write to Judge Trévidic in this regard, just as a Captain in the FAR who had gathered a great deal of pertinent testimony from among the soldiers of the camp.  Likewise for the UN observers present on the scene or with General Roméo Dallaire, the Commander of the UNAMIR.  All of these people could have brought important information to enrich the investigation.

Marianne:  After four books and years of inquiry, what do you believe?

CO:  I remain persuaded that Kagame and his men are the ones who carried out the attack.  I have already written that, and he sued me in French court before later withdrawing his complaint.  Strange, huh?  The ICTR has done everything it could to exclude the attack from its investigations.  If they had documents and testimony supporting their conviction that the Hutus were responsible for the attack, don’t you think the Tribunal would have acted on them?

Interview by Alain Léauthier