Six Decades of Terror: NATO is [STILL] al Qaeda

Meulan, 2010

Six Decades of Terror:

NATO is al QAEDA-pt1

—by Mick Collins

{In honor of the Pre-trial Defense Brief that got the Mladic case put on hold because of the Prosecution's complete inability to set forth specific perps and the crimes they committed in the DEFENSE of YUGOSLAVIA against NATO and NATO-proxie forces; in honor of the materialization of a long-awaited push-back in Chicago and elsewhere against the Fascist forces that terrorize the whole world under the banner of North Atlantic anti-Communism; and in honor of the return of a warm sun to brighten our days as we enter another political cotillion season to choose the Lords and Ladies of Wastedom, our very own executioners; and in hopes of shedding even more light on the stanky dankness that is home to the sentimental swine and greed-head droolers of the Human Rights and Stop the Fucking Genocide hustles, while they play on ignorant guilt and general false-consciousness to cushion their useless tenures: here is a post from the gayer Paris-days about who is really terrorizing whom.  


Have a beautiful day.  Take a Fascist to lunch.  Then poison him.  mc}


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[This is the first installment of our series commemorating the last 15 years of the six decades of US-backed global anti-majoritarian (i.e., anti-Communist or Fascist) terrorism. Brief recap:

11 March 2006 is the date of President Slobodan Milosevic's death at the hands of the NATO Tribunal in The Hague (mistakenly and illegally credited to the UNSC);

23 March 1999 marks the beginning of NATO's terror-bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo;

6 April 1994 is the date of the double presidential assassination that is said to have triggered a paroxysm of mass killing in Rwanda, come to be known as the 'Genocide of 100 Days,' in a parallel campaign of NATO terror in Central Africa;

and 23 April 1999 is the date independent journalism began its slow dance of death in the world media with the bombing of Belgrade's Radio/Television Serbia (RTS), which killed 16 journalists and station staff, and, as with the other cited atrocities (or 911), has gone without an investigation worthy of the name—and its real perps have gone unapprehended—but the victims of all these NATO crimes will continue to pay for them in perpetuity.

We are just back from an all-too-short stay in Belgrade (we being my son Max and I), where a truncated version of this text was presented at an anti-NATO/EU/Fascist rally in Republic Square on Tuesday night the 24th.

The initial intention of this writing was to convey in English the essence of a statement made for the Commemoration Conference at the Sava Center, by French General Pierre-Marie Gallois, one of Serbia's oldest and best friends in France, and the man who accepted the unconditioned release of two French NATO pilots downed over Bosnia in December 1995, from his Yugoslav Army homologue, General Radko Mladic. Both these men are venerated by their peoples as great war heros, though Mladic has been turned by NATO expedience and cowardice into a most-wanted war crimes suspect unto genocidaire.

But Max's presence at my side in Belgrade changed a lot. Just as this visit to Serbia, to Slobodan Milosevic's grave in Pozarevac, and to the prison where Dragoljub Milanović, the chief of RTS, is currently stepping off a dime bid—a 'reckless endangerment' beef so humbug it'd bend Lady Justice double and choke her with her own vomit—this whole trip has racked focus on the Western wars for commercial and financial domination against small independence-minded nations, revealing them for the hideous campaigns of global terror and victim-blaming they really are.

So, NATO is al QAEDA, nobullshit!—but will Obama be Osama? Stay tuned for Part 2. –mc]

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Six Decades of Terror:

NATO is al QAEDA—pt 1.

—Belgrade, 23 March 2009

Ten years ago, while NATO was ‘terror-bombing’ Yugoslavia over Kosovo (Newsweek’s pre-911 terminology), I had already been working on the Balkan Dossier for about four years. In 1995, during my first summer in Paris, I wrote a play about the Bosnian war, Black Samba, which was done in New York City at Soho Rep in 1998. By then the nation of Yugoslavia was just a memory in America, or a trivia question, like “Automobiles for $50: In what Southeastern European country is the Yugo manufactured?”. I couldn’t figure out why or how everyone fell into the easy, uncritical use of names like the ex-, or former-, or rump-Yugoslavia. I didn’t know what had become of the Yugoslavs, where their Yugoslavia had gone, but I had a hunch I knew the guys who’d gotten rid of it pretty well.

During the 1999 NATO bombing, the young woman with whom I was working to produce the Paris revival of my first Los Angeles play, WinoTime,—and who would later get me my greatest reproduction, my son Max—t ook me to a little restaurant, just outside Paris in Montreuil, called Le Café Yougoslavie. We would watch the gruesome news reports from Belgrade's RTS on a wall-sized projection TV. What we saw was people just like us—not little Southeast Asians or black Africans or swarthy Middle Easterners—, living in houses like ours—not in thatched huts or broken down refugee camps—, with cars like ours, and little families with beautiful kids—like everywhere in the world: we saw all this being destroyed, being blown to pieces, live and in color, and it was all being sponsored by those good people in the Human Rights business. It really made no sense—or, at least, what sense I did make of it was almost too cynical and too sinister to be anything else but inHuman Wrongs.

From the very beginning of the discussion, the conflict in the Balkans was seen to be an internecine battle among the once-Federated Republics, which had almost magically been declared independent sovereign nations by, first Germany, then the fledgling EEC-EU, and finally, once the US had weighed in, the entire ‘International Community’—less Russia and China, of course. It was instantly identified, even by the best historians, as a ‘civil war,’ just like the one that went down there during WWII: a war over territory, waged by the various Yugoslav ‘national minorities’, Croats, Bosnians and Serbs, with their goal of becoming a ‘national minority’ but within their own nations.

The disappearance of the United Nations-founding member-state of Yugoslavia, the nation of the Southern Slavs, into the historico-toxic fog of a disinformation-driven civil war, allowed the original aggression against the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia by US and EU financial and commercial interests, backed by endless waves of private-military terrorists, just like those being deployed in the Middle East and Central Africa at the same time, to be occulted within, even effaced from, the Historical Record, and eventually retro-blamed on the very Slav victims of the aggression, itself. Western financial speculators from Enron, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse/First Boston supported the extra-legal secessions from Yugoslavia, especially by Croatia and Bosnia, and seized the recently deregulated markets, then used their formidable Private Military Contractors, like DynCorp and MPRI, to dissolve all public sector protection from the now emaciated Yugoslav State by going after the Yugoslav People’s Army, the JNA. As long as Yugoslavia could be seen to be acting out age-old religious, ethnic and national animosities; as long as the Slavs, in defending themselves, could be seen to be trying to kill each other off: it was stupidly simple to convince the world that all the killing had its origins not in response to any foreign aggression, but in the restlessness of the hateful native tribes, and that the best way to put a stop to it was, first, to choke them hard with embargoes and other economic sanctions, then to interpose the world’s most powerful military force, but call it a ‘Humanitarian Intervention,’ and, finally, just bomb the shit outta all these petty ‘nationalists’ until they’re begging for peace—then bomb them some more. However costly in human lives this joint criminal enterprise might be, the Chicago School policy adopted by the Western Business interests involved dictated that it should be paid. Of course this war—like all wars—was great for Business, but those who actually paid the real costs were no longer of much economic good for anything else.

The time, of course, was very right. The Soviet Union was broken up, and the European Union was about to put ink to its Maastricht Treaty. Globalization was on a roll, freeing capital to go wherever it wanted, to do whatever it wanted and without answering to anyone but its self-valorizing self. One by one, the countries that had depended on the Soviet Union for support to maintain their subsidized housing and domestic food-farming sectors, their universal free health care systems, their universal free education and their guaranteed full-employment; these former spudniks were freed from their orbits of privileged trade with Russia (especially in the realm of energy resources) and allowed, with full liberty and the wily ministrations of Western investment banks and brokers, to develop into morbidly exploitive and criminally anarchic market economies—all now the crushing bondage of NATO membership. Today, too late, they wish things had gone another way.

Yet the European moral vacuum necessary for this kind of Orwellian anti-rationality to be passed off as progress (e.g., wage slavery as an improvement on a socially guaranteed, healthy working life; victimization by profit-driven medical/pharmaceutical complexes that guarantee death by debt as preferable to socially supported protection against catastrophic illness; forced labor in the service of militarism and the wastage of never-ending war as preferable to living a peaceful, reflective and [pro]creative life) was sucked out in France by the elevation and celebration of nouveaux collabos-intellos, like Bernard Kouchner and Bernard Henri-Levy; and in the US by the achievement of state power by class collaborationists, and just common greed-heads, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and even the porcine Richard Holbrooke.

Only such lunatic sociopaths could accept rewards, however grand the money amounts or haughty the positions, for foisting onto their fellows a false consciousness, a culture of murderous lies and manipulations—the very sort of atmosphere that has allowed the tyranny of NATO to continue well beyond its real anti-Soviet relevancy. And even though by now they all, BK & BH-L & Holbrooke, have admitted in their various writings that the rationale of a ‘Serbian fascist aggression’ against, and the ethnic cleansing of, all non-Serbs (non-Slavs?) from the other innocently self-determining former-Yugoslav Republics, as well as its own southern province of Kosovo; that the tabloid stories of death and rape camps, even unto ‘a genocide of non-Serbs’ (non-Christians?), were the pure creations of Western marketing—principal among the tub-thumpers being Ruder-Finn International ‘s director James Harff, whose motto, ‘The client comes first, second and third. The Truth? We’ll get back to you on that after lunch,’ became the overly long mantra of everyone in the War Biz.

‘The French Doctor' Kouchner, in a scene from his autobiography, A Warrior for Peace, describes a dying Bosnian president Izetbegovic telling him that it was at the instigation of his Western minders—like Ambassador Warren Zimmermann, who talked him into pulling his signature off the 1992 Lisbon Accords, and on the word of President Clinton, himself, (who also ordered up the Srebrenica phantasmagoria)—that the Serbian death camp lie was cooked up:

INT: A SARAJEVO HOSPITAL ROOM--Day

An obviously dying old man lies in bed with all the necessary tubes and monitors in place and beeping:

Dr. K

                  You remember President Mitterand’s visit?

President Izedbegovic

(Through a death rattle)

                  I remember.

Dr. K

                  In the course of conversation, you mentioned that there were

                  {makes the quotes with his fingers} “EXTERMINATION CAMPS”

                  in Bosnia. You repeated that to journalists. That provoked a lot

                  of strong feelings in the world. . . . (beats) François {referring

                  to French President François Mitterand} sent me to Omarska. . .

                  and . . . we opened some other prisons. (several beats) They

                  were pretty horrible places, ok? . . . But the people there were

                  not systematically exterminated. . . {LONG PAUSE} You know

                  that, right?

President Izedbegovic

(Reluctantly)

                  Yeah. (beats) I thought my revelations would put a rush on the 

                  [NATO] bombing. . . . I saw how the French and others reacted. 

                  . . .  I was wrong.

Richard Holbrooke

                  You saw that at Helsinki President Bush didn’t react.

President Izedbegovic

(Resignedly)

                  Yes . . . I tried. But it was a bad call. . . . (beats) There were no

                  Death Camps, however shitty those places were.

Bernard Henri-Levy wrote in his book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, about the ‘open secret’ among the supporters of the Bosnian Muslims concerning the lies and manipulations that the Serb atrocity stories were, including the so-called Siege of Sarajevo, the bombing of bakeries and market places and, especially, the rape and death camps. But this secret truth never mitigated BH-L's support for the ferocious bombing of Serbian/Yugoslav positions in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, and then, again, over Kosovo in 1999. Throughout, BH-L kept clutching Bosnian Muslims to his blue-blazer-clad bosom.

And just to show that the Kosovo terror bombing was not some isolated aberration of US foreign policy in the Balkans: Scott O’Grady, a USAF pilot who took part in the 1992-1995 NATO bombing of Serb positions in Bosnia, and the subject of John Glenn’s film, Behind Enemy Lines [included in the CM/P seminar, Movies and the UnMaking-Of History], confessed in his book, Return With Honor, that he was briefed before his fateful mission that the massacres of civilians in Sarajevo had been authorized by the Izetbegovic government, itself, and not carried out by the Serbs. Despite O’Grady’s disclosures of the real balance of forces on the ground in Bosnia, the Hollywood-led demonization of the Bosnian Serbs in films like Welcome to Sarajevo and The Fourth Angel, made NATO’s terrorizing of Yugoslavia in 1999 both understandable and forgivable.

Women, too, showed themselves capable of abandoning moral dignity and shunning human decency for the sake of power and position. Who could forget Madeleine Albright, in a grotesque impersonation of a human being, claiming to CBS’s Leslie Stahl that the price of half a million Iraqi children’s lives was worth paying to stop Saddam Hussien. The same sort of ghoulish accounting was employed by Bernard Koucher’s wife, Christine Ockrent (a leading French radio and TV journalist), when she suggested that all the hundreds of thousands of refugees being created by the 1999 NATO terror in Serbia’s southern province, were preferable to allowing Milosevic and his ‘Serb thugs’ to kill as many or more Kosovo Albanians by doing nothing. This is not just human discernment degraded by ignorance; this is Human Reason and Decency mortgaged to geopolitical expediency. And it is also proof that women are no more likely to get it right than men.

But Holbrooke, Albright, Kouchner and their ilk seem so co-opted by the political powers that they are not able to be in the same room with Truth and Justice, even with the fierce gravity of the ever-burgeoning mass of legally determined evidence. Judicial calls like the ICTY’s acquittal of Serbian President Milan Miltunovic on all charges of crimes against humanity in Kosovo; the ICTR's verdict in the Military I case, where the so-called Extremist Hutu ‘masterminds’ of the Rwandan Genocide were acquitted on all charges of ‘planning or conspiring to commit genocide’; the February 2007 ICJ ruling absolving Serbia of any active responsibility for genocide in Bosnia: these judgments indicate that the expedient application of the charge of Genocide, so essential to sustaining the global spread of neocolonial domination, is historically unfounded, judicially unprovable, and can only be stipulated to or otherwise ordered by a court ‘to take judicial notice of’—as was done by the Appeals Chamber at the ICTR on 16 June 2006.

So, now years after the discovery of the decomposing body of lies on which these congenital, carrion-slarving cowards have nourished their public careers, Holbrooke and Kouchner have once again been rewarded with promotions—Holbrooke with Obama’s appointment to be the US's man in Afghanistan and Pakistan (officially charged with supervising the bombing of wedding parties and mosques), and Kouchner with the French Foreign Minister’s gig from the sweaty, ever-more demented and Nixon-like Nicolas Sarkozy—and all without ever having to acknowledge their complicity in one of the great war crimes and national betrayals of the late 20th Century: NATO’s 78-day and 79-night terror bombing of Yugoslavia/Serbia-Montenegro.

So why can’t all this evidence of who were the real aggressors and who were the real aggressed be applied to correcting the Historical Record, rehabilitating the policies of those governments that sinned, and repairing and restoring the lives of those who were wrongfully damaged in this geopolitical crime spree known as globalization? An important reason—though far from the only reason—is a want of solidarity among the targeted countries with the establishment of ruling compradors. In the past ten years, we have all lost the sense of our shared history to an atomizing multifarious terror, and our struggles for Independence and Justice are only effective when they are joined. Divided we fail.

Like that young woman who got me my son: ten years ago, as we sat together in the Café Yougoslavie—now called ‘Il y a une fois un Yougoslavie’ (Once upon a time there was a country called Yugoslavia)—and as we watched the suffering of the Serbian people, our Slavic kith and kin, she vowed to come with me to Belgrade, and she assured me that everything would be all right. That hooked me back then.

However, now she’s at home in Paris, and I’m not sure just how far things are from ever being all right—at home or anywhere else—because I still have a feeling that most things are gone terribly wrong. But because Max is with me here in Belgrade, I do have hope—real live hope. And by giving him this opportunity to come to Belgrade and meet some truly heroic people, I feel like these paternal strivings of mine, to get things right in the world, will not end with me, and, maybe, ten years from now, when we come back to Serbia, Max will have made far more things far better than I ever could.

That’s my audacity of hope. Because today is a new day. There’s a new administration in Washington (though it is redolent of the corruption of the previous Democratic government that destroyed Yugoslavia and Rwanda), and for the first time in my life I can support a US president because he seems truly to want to promote majoritarian interests.

So far, my President Obama has shown his intelligence and decency by listening, deeply and intently, to everyone who speaks to him, and fully considering everything before he speaks—and some of his statements are so politic, like his position on the expansion of NATO (‘All countries that want to join, should be allowed to join!”), as to be almost comical.

If we can all get together to write the true history of the real crimes against humanity committed against Yugoslavia, against Serbia and all the Slavic people, and present this story to President Obama; if we can show him the horrific misdeeds of his Democratic predecessors, the Clintons, the Holbrookes, the Bidens and Wes Clark’s NATO, in perpetuating a moribund socio-economic system, a system of production that only destroys life through terror, war and waste; if he can be shown the unprovoked violence, the unnecessary death and destruction, the wanton murder of brave patriots protecting their homes and families, the criminalization of national self-defense, the flagrant theft of territory and resources and the indeterminate indenture of ordinary people with extraordinary courage: perhaps—and just perhaps—we can begin to make tomorrow a better day for Max and his generation and all the generations to come.

Mick Collins

CirqueMinime/Paris

The International {In}Justice of the ad hocs: The Ndindiliyimana Trial

Col. Luc Marchal

[In the foreword to his book, Rwanda: Le Paradis perdu, Protais Mpiranya[1], the former-commander of martyred Rwandan Chief-of-State Juvénal Habyarimana’s Presidential Guard, describes what he hopes his writing will help bring about:

"This document I made up my mind to write after nine years[2] in which I experienced anguish, nightmare, and humiliation, is not meant to be a historical record nor a work of literature.  It is quite simply a testament to what I lived through, saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, and personally read.  It is finally what I did and thought to do in my soul and my conscience, and all that results is my own responsibility. This testimony is meant to allow the reader, military or civilian, Tutsi, Hutu or Twa, religious or commercial, farmer or civil servant, Rwandan or foreigner from any of the far corners of the earth, who has heard commentaries of every stripe on the attack against the President’s plane and its consequences, to be able to make a judgment that is founded only on the reality, on the real truth.

"So this testimony is eventually meant for the International Community, which, with its ultra-sophisticated means and its highly-qualified personnel, organized, ordered, coordinated and took part in bringing about all that the Rwandan people went through and continue to endure.  In hopes that the leaders of these Great Powers and all the players in the theatre of International Humanitarian Law will be awakened to an understanding that the blood of every human being is the same color.  That these Powers will not promote only destruction, discord and disunity.  That this International Community will do everything it can, that it will give everything possible besides weapons, to bring about a rapid return to peace in Rwanda and in the region of the African Great Lakes.  That the great decision-makers of this world will cease to impose a Victors’ Justice on the Vanquished, and that some among them will stop shedding crocodile tears so as to absolve themselves of responsibility in the Rwandan drama.  And that this International Community will commit itself to establishing a system of equal justice for all Rwandans."

(pp 18-19)

Considering that International Justice, as extra-statuatorily interpretted by the U.N Security Council in its unauthorized formations of the ad hoc Tribunals for Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone (among others), has been much more an experiment in the Theatre of Irony (which is the West’s replacement term for ‘Cynicism’), Cruelty and Absurdity, than anything like a forum treating in independent, fair and balanced precedential law; the reflections of Colonel Luc Marchal, the Belgian batallion commander of the UN Peacekeeping Forces in Kigali in 1994, on the outcome of the trial at the ICTR (Military II) of our General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, Chief of Staff of the Rwandan National Gendarmerie at the time of the troubles, are most appropriate and timely.

In the case of these ad hocs, the overriding tension that deforms any, even the most jaded and expedient, sense of Justice, is between two sorry facts:  The Tribunals have found it impossible to prove on the evidence that any or the plotting or planning requisite to a ‘Genocide’ actually took place and has had to acquit all the major defendants of those most important charges; and the Tribunals have no contingency for defendants who are acquitted.  Those who just cannot be convicted, as a way to avoid an acquittal that would call the very raison d’être of the ad hocs into question, are merely ‘put down’ by their jailers.  Like the writer of ‘Paradise Lost’ or George Rutaganda or Slobodan Milosevic, some are often said to have succumbed to ‘natural causes’. 

But death at the hands of Injustice is never Natural.  It is quite monstrous.  –mc]

Where is the Justice in International Justice?

The Trial of Augustin NDINDILIYIMANA

Drawing lessons from the past

It is certainly too soon to write the history of the ICTR[3], even if presently the days of this court are numbered.  Nevertheless, and even if we do not have the necessary remove, it is useful to conduct a mid-term reflection on this already rich judicial experiment, which has been going on for more than a decade now.  Because it is a queer road that runs between the parody of judicial procedure that convicted Jean Kambanda[4] and sentenced him to life in prison, and the acquittal at trial, for the principal charge of intending to commit genocide, of the person universally taken to be the brains of the 1994 genocide, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora.  The question is not do we applaud the judges when they acquit or boo them when they convict.  No, not at all.  The fundamental question, what must come out at the end of any trial, is whether we can firmly believe that “Truth and Justice” were the sole driving forces of the legal arguments.

Someone said that those who do not learn from History are condemned to repeat it.  So it is with the ICC[5], if it does not take into account some of the errors of the ad hoc[6] tribunals.  In this context, the case of Augustin Ndindiliyimana, former Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Gendarmerie, seems to me to demand a particular interest.  It concerns someone with whom I have had occasion to work very closely during a particularly difficult period in his country’s history.  And his tribulations before International Justice are worth spending some time on in the hope that they will inspire a necessary reflection by those whose heavy responsibility it is to render justice for the whole world.

A short stay in Belgium

It was with the approval of the Foreign Minister at the time[7] that Augustin Ndindiliyimana came to Belgium early in July 1994.  In May 1998, he obtained political refugee status after a conflictual administrative procedure.  In January 2000, following the visit of ICTR Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte to Belgium, he was arrested on the basis of an all-purpose indictment, of a most general character, in which certain parties, without legal grounds, were simply tarred with the same brush.  Directly afterward, this document was twice amended.  This was evidence, if any is needed, that his arrest was not the result of a judicial investigation, but rather of a way of working that paid little or no attention to the most basic rights of the accused.  Just arrest them and we’ll see what happens!

What was the real reason for his arrest?  Had he really been arrested for something he did?  And, if so, shouldn’t the indictment have reflected this fact.  But, it did nothing of the kind.  Still, had he been arrested because, among other reasons, he was of interest to the Prosecutor in her overall indictment strategy?  Bear in mind, it had already been four years (2000) that the prosecution had been trying to demonstrate that a genocide was, in fact, being planned by Hutu leaders.  For four years, not even the tiniest sprouts of evidence were being brought forth by prosecutors.  And did Carla del Ponte figure that by arresting Augustin Ndindiliyimana she had picked up someone who was likely to testify for her against the “big fish” from the former government and bring out the elements necessary to establish her thesis about the planning of the genocide?  The tawdry negotiations that took place over several years in Arusha,  in the vain hope of gaining his “collaboration”, testify to just how obviously his arrest was an essential part of the overall prosecutorial strategy.  This legalistic machinery runs strictly in one direction, because no RPF leader has ever been charged by the ICTR, nor will one ever be.

But what, really, are the rules of the game proposed by the Prosecutor?  It’s not some dark secret, because the negotiations take place in an official manner and in the presence of defense lawyers.  In fact, this was the deal:  should Ndindiliyimana choose to cooperate (read: if he agreed to testify for the prosecution), he would catch a reduced sentence of 20 years [though, according to The General's lead defense counsel, Chris Black, this 20 yrs deal was an initial offer and was changed in 2003 to a total dismissal of all charges in exchange for his cooperation--cm/p], and should he refuse to cooperate, his sentence would be no less than the maximum, i.e., full-life without parole.  So where does one find Truth and Justice in this rotten deal?  One might believe that all the world’s just a marketplace where everything, all ideas and values, can be bought and sold.  But Belgium considers the Arusha Tribunal an extension of its own national justice system.  And in view of such metaphysical merchandizing, it is not seemly to be greatly enthusiastic about this kind of development.

Remember that during this same period of time, General Léonidas Rusatira[8] was also the object of an arrest warrant issued by Carla del Ponte.  He was arrested by Belgian authorities in May 2002.  Fortunately for him, he was able to take advantage of the unhappy experience of Augustin Ndindiliyimana.  Because of a Belgian solidarity movement on Rusatira’s behalf, the ICTR Prosecutor was led to acknowledge that the charges against him were unfounded.  So del Ponte abandoned his case.  Thanks to that, he regained his freedom after three months in prison.  One can only recoil in disgust at these methods that harken back to medieval practices.  You throw a man in jail as if he is some worthless object.  Here again, the Belgian authorities did not distinguish themselves with their concern for those things in between the determination exerted against an opponent of the current Rwandan regime (and on who, moreover, held refugee status) and the good-grounding of the charges made against him. 

An Abbreviated Trial

The official opening of the “Military II” trial took place on 20 September 2004.  The procedure in effect at the ICTR saw the Prosecutor present all his witnesses first, and then each Defense team, one after the other, presented their witnesses.  So it was that Augustin Ndindiliyimana, second in the line of defendants, began the actual presentation of his defense in January 2008.  Thoughout the course of his trial, two incidents, among many others, stayed with me because they seemed indicative of the sort of errors that any credible system of International Justice must do everything to avoid.

First, on 22 September 2008, after several months of judicial guerilla warfare, the judges in “Military II” rendered a judgment critical, to put it kindly, of the current ICTR Prosecutor, Hassan Bubacar Jallow.  Using unequivocal terms like “a level of integrity” and “a failure of diligence”, they reminded the Prosecutor that his duty was to assist the court in discovering the truth concerning the allegations contained in the indictment, and to render justice in the name of the International Community, for the victims as well as for the accused.  What could have caused the judges to take such a virulent position?  The rules of the ICTR impose on the Prosecutor the obligation to communicate to the lawyers for the accused all the elements that could be useful in their defense.  But, in this trial, it came out that for several years, testimony that favored the accused was not conveyed by the Prosecutor’s office to the Defense.  Let’s not beat around the bush.  It was not only a question of negligence or a lack of promptness in the transmission of this evidence, but rather a willful and deliberate avoidance thereof, no more and no less.  After this purposeful damage, Augustin Ndindiliyimana’s defense was allowed to present new witnesses as well as to recall certain prosecution witnesses for re-cross-examination.  However, the 18 new witnesses requested and the 6 prosecution witnesses to be recalled were reduced to 5 and 4 subsequent to an order by the judges.

The second incident has to do with the use, conscious or unconscious, of false witnesses by the prosecution.  For years this issue has been systematically entered into evidence.  In the present case there can be no doubt about it.  Not only was there a document written by one of the prosecution witnesses admitting that he was forced, under pressure from the Rwandan authorities, to make false accusations against Augustin Ndindiliyimana, but, moreover, a parallel investigation carried out by the Clerk of the Court established that the document composed by this repentant witness was, in fact, written in his own handwriting, and that it was in no way an attempt to mislead the court.

So here is how it stood in 2010.  Unlike the situation that followed the court’s judgment in 2008, there was no question of reopening the arguments.  Because, with the end of the Defense case in June 2009, the debate between prosecution and defense was concluded.  We had to wait for the judgment of the court, which came down on 17 May 2011 (i.e., nearly two years after the final arguments!!!!), in order to be able to appreciate just how the judges had adapted their understanding of the case to include the various tricks pulled by the Prosecutor.  Whatever that might be, this accumulations low blows were in no way in keeping with the honest and calm arguments we have a right to expect.  Today we know that Augustin Ndindiliyimana was sentenced to time served (i.e., his sentence was the eleven years he had already spend in detention awaiting this judgment.).  We can only wonder at the penalty inflicted on him, which seems to be intended more to avoid problems on an administrative level[9] or to escape the anger of the Kigali regime, than to punish any real crime that has been committed.  An appeal has been filed against this judgment by General Ndindiliyimana’s Defense.

Final Considerations

The trial of Augustin Ndindiliyimana is unfortunately not the only one where the means used tended to trample all over any real search for the truth.  Obviously, there was an unjustifiable confusion between the means and the ends.  After that, one could in good faith ask the question: How many people in the past have been convicted under similar circumstances?   This possibility must absolutely be taken into consideration by the ICC in the formation of the rules that will govern its functioning.  But, for the time being, it seems unthinkable that the ICTR would wind up its work without first focusing on a specific process for reviewing certain trials in which the basic rights of some defendants might have been violated.

If it is normal for the International Community to take it upon itself to prosecute crimes that are imprescriptible by national jurisdictions, it is also evident that International Justice must be vigilant, in a most meticulous fashion, to the quality of justice that is rendered in the courts over which it holds authority.  As for the ICTR, it seems that the International Community, considering its shock in the face of its own responsibility in the 1994 genocide, has decided to delegate the management of the results of its cowardice by forgetting that every delegation implies de facto indispensible control.  I am thinking here, especially, of the obstacles to the pursuit of  justice presented by the regular use of false witnesses.

During the time that the ICTR has been at work, how many witnesses have been called upon to give false testimony in order to justify its existence?  There certainly have been some, but their number is insignificant in the scope of the whole experience.   Note should be taken here of the signal case of Abdul Joshua Ruzibiza[10] who came to Arusha to testify in March 2006 in the “Military I” trial.  At this time, he made grave accusations against, among others, the current Chief-of-State of Rwanda.  In November 2008, he quite casually retracted his testimony, claiming that it had all been a pure fabrication on his part.  How can such a flip-flop be allowed without demanding a minimal explanation to the parties involved?  Considering the range of his revelations and the consequences of his retraction, should the International Community, in the absence of any reaction from the ICTR, itself, not have to intervene to shed all possible light on just what led this witness to perjure himself?  Or, if no accounting is demanded of him, could it be because someone wishes to avoid the real motives for his change of heart being made public knowledge[11]?

Still in the context of false witnesses, should we not insist that the Prosecutor have a more critical attitude toward the witnesses selected for him from Rwanda?  We know that nearly all of them are serving long prison sentences.  This alone should move the Prosecutor’s satisfaction with his office’s being used as a mere mail drop for receiving witnesses chosen by the Rwandan authorities, and encourage him to take on the full critical duties of his role in the organization of the ICTR.  Here again, we can only wonder at the International Community’s flagrant resignation as it stands by and watches this parody of justice.  Something that can only exacerbate the tensions still existing within Rwandan society.

If International Justice wants respect, it is essential that it do everything it can to be respectable.  How can this institution hope to reach this goal while it remains enslaved to other purposes than the search for justice?  The unwholesome strategies used for several years now by the current Prosecutor at the ICTR, in hopes of not having to go after those important figures in the RPF and the RPA[12] who have already been charged with war crimes and crimes against Humanity in other national jurisdictions, have certainly not contributed to gaining the court this all-important respectability.  Is it not ironic to have to note that, in the entire history of the ICTR, the only prosecutor to have been sanctioned was the one[13] who, after multitudinous prevarications to be sure, finally expressed an intention to pursue the crimes of the RPF, in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 955?  What a sorry state of affairs.

Let’s hope that the ICC will go to school on all the accumulated fouls committed over the years by the ICTR.  That all actions taken by the court will be guided by the sole concern of rendering justice in the name of the International Community, justice for the victims and for the accused, as the judges in the “Military II” case so rightfully pointed out.  Before reaching this objective, International Justice must break away from the tutelage it is currently held in by certain States[14].  Only total independence will permit the court to meet its huge global responsibility.  We will, doubtlessly, soon have a more precise understanding of this question due to what could be the outcome of the report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, officially published on 1 October 2010?  We know that this report deals with grave violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law between March 1993 and June 2003 on the territory of the Democratic Republic of Congo.  These grave violations are on the order of war crimes and crimes against Humanity whose motives might place them in the category of genocidal acts, in as far as this qualification can be established by a tribunal.  The crimes in question were for the most part committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army, whose unchallenged leader is the current president of Rwanda.  This time things are clear:  either this report receives a thorough judiciary follow-up as was suggested by the report’s South African coordinator Navanethem Pillay[15], or the whole issue, like so many others, gets flushed down the memory hole.  If this second alternative prevails, the credibility of the UN Secretary General, of the Security Council and, as a result, of  International Justice will, purely and simply, go up in smoke.  We are at the end of the first quarter of 2012, and, as yet, there has been nothing like a judiciary follow-up to this devastating report that concerns the deaths of several million human beings . . .

Luc Marchal

[translated from the French by CM/P]

---

[1] My dear friend Faustin Ntilikina (author of “The Taking of Kigali and the Hunt for Refugees by the Army of Paul Kagame”—our wishful translation of the book’s title, as it still exists only in French—ed.), who wrote the Preface, gave me this book on our first meeting in Paris in 2010.  Mpiryana’s “Rwanda:  A Paradise Lost” was published posthumously (the writer died in exile in 2006) by Éditions Sources du Nil and, as yet, has not been translated into English from the original French.  But it is high on CM/P’s list of ‘must translate’s.

[2] Mpiryana probably wrote this in 2003, nine years after the tragic events of 1994 that cast Rwanda into a madness of mourning and confusion. (ed.)

[3] The Internation Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda located in Arusha, Tanzania.

[4] Prime Minister of the Interim Government at the time of the genocide in 1994.

[5] The International Criminal Court. The first permanent international criminal court, it was created in July 1998 by the Treaty of Rome and achieved full legal status in July 2002.  It is located in The Hague, The Netherlands.

[6] These are international courts created specifically for certain jurisdictions:  e.g., Rwanda, ex-Yugoslavia, Cambodia, etc., . . .

[7] Willy Claes.

[8] The commandant at the École Supérieure Militaire (The Rwandan National Military Academy) in April 1994. He tried to serve with the Rwandan Patriotic Army, but his experiences made him choose to go into Belgian exile instead.

[9] The acquittal of General Gratien Kabiligi in 2009, after ten years imprisonment, posed a real administrative problem for the court because the rules of the ICTR had never taken into account the issue of compensation due after an unjustified detention.  This problem has yet to be resolved in 2011.

[10] A former-member of the Rwandan Patriotic Army.  Early in the 2000s he went into exile in Europe.  He is the author of the book Rwanda l'histoire secrète, which was published by Éditions Panama in 2005.

[11] It’s now too late, since the witness in question died in September 2010.  He did, however, go back on  his retractions before his death.

[12] Rwandan Patriotic Army.

[13] Carla del Ponte.

[14] See on this subject the testimony of Carla del Ponte in her book, Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity, (Jan 20, 2009).

[15] She was the president of the “Truth and Justice Commission” that tried to reconcile the conflicts that remained in post-Apartheid South Africa. She was also President of the ICTR from 1995 to 2002.  

Brecht Forum Presentation: Rwanda/Libya: Same Counter-Revolution, Different Day.

The video of this presentation can be found here:

http://politube.org/show/3416

Rwanda/Libya:

Same Counter-Revolution, Different Day

With the current intensification of the campaign for regime change in Syria (and finally a division of the

UNSC along WWII lines with China and Russia trying to dust off their old anti-fascist creds to stop the

anti-Palestinian madness), the repetition/compulsion syndrome driving this paramilitary activity that

passes for geopolitics may have, once again, disappeared into the fuzzy uniqueness of this, yet another

coup d’état against a popular government led by a mass party, Assad’s Syrian Ba’athist Socialists.

Rwanda’s regime change began more than 20 years ago now–right on the heels of the busting and

privatization of the Soviet Union. Then, similarly, came Yugoslavia’s violent buy-out. And most recently

Libya’s Jamalahiya was overturned and its leader murdered most gruesomely. All the while, there have

been parallel fascist acquisitions using this model for geopolitical privatization at work in Iraq,

Afghanistan and, with much less success though just as much violence, in Iran–actually, throughout

North/Central Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, East/Central Europe–really, the military campaign behind

the venture capitalist wastage of the planet and everything on it has for some time now reached fully

global proportions.

I hope that by going over some of the techniques used to get us to accept just one more violent national

buy-out in the name of Human Rights and civilian security–the linguistics of it, the media lies and

manipulations in the use of terms like ‘genocide’, ‘rape as a weapon of war’, and duly elected leaders as

‘dictators or Stalinist strongmen’, the evisceration of the international Justice system (such as it is or ever

has been), and the flipping of international institutions for Peace into global militias for the IFI

(International Financial Institutions) to enforce their criminal contracts–I hope we can get a feeling for

how this latest crime against Humanity is neither unique nor singly correct, and that the subsumption of

use-value by exchange value, on a purely human and geopolitical level, has led to the uncontrolled and

uncontrollable destruction–for no good purpose and to no one's real gain: just wasting for waste’s sake–of

our entire material–and philosophical–ecosystem.

We are living through an inversion of reason and a perversion of decent human sociability that make

Orwell’s vision seem like Rogers and Hammerstein’s.

-Mick Collins

MICK COLLINS

Wednesday, March 7, 7:30 PM

451 West Street, New York, NY 10014

(212) 242-4201

www.brechtforum.org

The Brecht Forum

Collins is either a washed up stage and screen actor/writer/director moonlighting as a geopolitical historian/agitator/propagandist, or vice versa.

Saving Genocide from Historical Truth: The Media Will Say ANYTHING!!

[Yesterday I received an email from friends in Germany pulling my coat to the release of the latest report on the Habyarimana/Ntaryamira assassinations that took place over Kigali, the Rwandan capital, on the evening of 6 April 1994. This report was the work of a French investigative magistrate, Marc Trévidic, who caught this case when the original anti-terrorist judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, retired.

Bruguière had become a sort of hero to some of us chumps in the Rwandan Truth movement. His report was solid gold, and it was hard to figure how some comrades, like, say, Thierry Meyssan, the first 911 whistleblower, could dump all over this investigation as being bogus and purely in service of French imperialist interests in Central Africa. Well, turns out, in geopolitics as in everything else, a hero ain’t nothing but a sandwich—and our need for them, heroes, the human kind, is one of the principal weaknesses exploited by our masters to keep us from any understanding of our geopolitical reality.

“Bush invaded Iraq based on bogus intelligence.” “Obama ordered the indefinite detention of US citizens.” “Putin chooses his own successor.” “Saddam, Khadaffy, Assad, Bashir, Milosevic, Kim Jung Il, slaughter their own people.” The geopolitical is personal. Nothing to do with mass parties, popular democracy. Nothing to do with systemic or institutional malignancy. And the personal analyses of political leaders, the pseudo-psychological evaluations of their personalities (Khadaffy is a madman, Obama a charlatan, Putin is Peter the Great, Milosevic and his wife both have bad haircuts), prejudging their intentions, their intelligence or insanity, their style, is as close as we in the West are allowed to get to real political critique.

So when Bruguière found Kagame and his cohort responsible for the murders of presidents Habyarimana and Ntaryamira, and the millions of African souls lost in the wake of this terrorist act, there was nothing heroic about it—the evidence was simply so overwhelming that even a blind squirrel could have gathered these nuts. But in 1989, when a French airliner, UTA flight 772, was blown up over the Ténéré desert, and Judge Bruguière’s investigation covered up all French and Israeli involvement in this terrorist act by laying full blame, as was done with Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, on Moammar Khdaffy’s Libya, he earned the righteous ire of all good anti-imperialists, and especially those who, like Meyssan and his Voltaire network, received a goodly part of their sustenance from Libya’s petroleum-based largesse.

So much for geopolitical villains and heroes. And no one really believed the gifts of papa Jean-Louis would be passed on to his Marc.

But still, the news from the BBC and Libé, from Le Monde and VOA, was like battery acid on my corneas. It was shameless stuff, like "Kagame Exonerated", "Extremist Hutu Assassinate Their Own President", "All In The Family"—just some deeply repugnant shit.

I didn't know what to do—what to say, to write. In a Mexican joint on Bellevue in upper Montclair I called my friend Charles Onana at 1 am in Brussels, and he just said, "C'est scandaleux." Couldn’t raise Chris Black, but I know he’d be feeling it a lot more deeply than I.

I felt pressed, repressed and depressed. A nasty feeling of déjà vu was turning my stomach—or it might’ve been that New Jersey Mexican food. I looked back at the BBC articles and could only think of all the terrorist cover-ups before and since 6 April 1994—this pre-911 911.

I remembered the year or so I spent translating the Bruguière Report, that real watershed in the Rwandan Genocide Truther movement. That broken key on the tripe-writer of frantic Golden Ass-saving investigative commissions: from the Warren Commission Report to the 911 Commission Report to the Mucyo Commission Report and the Mutsinzi Report.

But all of this was so much last season’s line. All these Commission Reports had already received multiple debunkings—more than one of them right here:

http://cirqueminimeparis.blogspot.com/2010/01/rebuttal-of-mutsinzi-commission-report.html

and here:

http://cirqueminimeparis.blogspot.com/2010/02/analysis-of-mutsinzi-report-by-luc.html

and here:

http://cirqueminimeparis.blogspot.com/2010/01/habyarimana-family-rejects-mutsinzi.html

and here:

http://cirqueminimeparis.blogspot.com/2010/02/un-political-prisoners-in-arusha.html

Well, you get it.

Turns out Judge Trévidic's report hasn’t even completely entered the public’s digestive tract. I mean, I think Gourevitch must still be trying to Babelfish it.

And the media are only doing what they always do: jumping to expedient and totally unfounded conclusions. Ex: Last year's Norwegian bombing and mass shooting at an island youth camp was the work of Islamic extremists, right?; popular governments in Libya and Syria are killing thousands of their own people for no good reason; the polls had barely opened when Western organizations supporting non-violent regime change (like the NYTs) discovered that . . . the Russian Duma elections—the Iranian presidential elections—the Zimbabwean national elections—the voting in Côte d'Ivoire . . . were all rigged, and the opposition candidates were declared (by extra-national agencies like the UN) to be the winners.

So, to keep from duplicating a lot of old work, we've translated this article by Hervé Cheuzeville from Brother Musabyimana's great "Site de documentation et d'informations socio-politiques sur Rwanda" of today (11/1/2012).

I hope you will find this information about the media's hysteria in trying to save its cash cow, Genocide, from even the most flaccid attempts at discovery (read 'Holocaust denial", "negationism", “anti-Semitic revisionism”) every bit as soothing as I did—which, to be honest, was not at all.

As my XXXLent comrade, the engaged and enraged Serb philosopher and artist, Duci Simonovic, whose best work is coming out right now—as Simonovic would tell the media: Yebega! Yebega! Yebeta!! (Something about fucking somebody’s mother on one side or the other of the Serb/Montenegrin border—trans)

I've always believed in Lenny Bruce: “The Truth is what is.” But in times like ours, with so much of our collective imagination spent on occulting rather than enlightening, you really have to give a second nod to one of Lenny's main dippsychos, and the founder of The Realist, Paul Krassner: “The Truth WILL make you Silly Putty.”

At least if you try to find it in the NYTs, Le Monde or on the BBC, it will.

--mc]

ite de documentation et d'informations

socio-politiques sur le RwandaSite de documentation et d'infosocio-politiques sur le Rwanda

Judge Trévidic’s Huge Burden of Responsibility

Hervé Cheuzeville

(11 January 2012)

[translated/adapted from the French by CM/P]

This morning I experienced feelings of indignation, of fear and revulsion. It seemed to me that all my efforts over several years, mine and those of others often more qualified than I, made with the intent of setting off the truth, had been wiped out by a few news flashes from last night of the highly spun results of a flaccid investigation.

As I would come to understand, it was mere publicity for the conclusions of “experts” designated by French Judge Marc Trévidic that had so crushed my buzz. Because, if I were to believe what was being so effusively disseminated by the French media, the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, their respective entourages and the French flight crew, on the fateful night of 6 April 1994, this Falcon 50 had been brought down by some “Extremist Hutu” (to recycle a piece of the now-threadbare media jargon of that day). It could not have then been shot down by agents of Paul Kagame, the strongman who came to power in the months following this event that triggered the horrific mass killings and the resumption of war in Rwanda.

These same big media along with their traditional propaganda hacks in France and Belgium “reminded” us that these conclusions contradicted a narrative considered official since 1994, that being that it was Paul Kagame’s RPF that had been behind the missile strikes on the presidents’ plane. Nothing could be further from the truth!

These conclusions actually honor the official narrative that has guided the debate over the Rwandan genocide for years. Fact is, throughout the late 90s and into the 2000s, it was this idea of an action taken by “Extremist Hutu” that was considered most credible and was repeated in the big International media. But little by little the over-sedation brought on by years of accumulated lies began to wear off. Very slowly, another possibility started to appear: that the shoot down had been pulled off by the RPF, on direct orders from Paul Kagame. True, this latter version started coming out after the work of Judge Trévidic’s predecessor, Jean-Louis Bruguière, became known. Judge Bruguière did not hesitate to issue international arrest warrants for several close associates of Paul Kagame’s, but because of the executive privilege of a sitting head-of-State, he was unable to tag Kagame, himself. The investigation initiated by Judge Bruguière caused the half-mad dictator to become totally nuts and break-off diplomatic relations with France on 24 November 2006.

The storyline in which Paul Kagame gives the order to shoot down President Habyarimana’s plane did not just come out of the Bruguière judgment. Numerous Rwandan witnesses, including those from the ranks of the RPF, have also supported it. The most recent to do so was Dr. Théogène Rudasingwa, the former Secretary General of the RPF and a Major in Kagame’s army at the time of the events. Dr. Rudasingwa fled to the U.S. and from there issued a shocking confession in October 2011. In this statement, he reveals that Kagame, himself, told him he had given the order to shoot down the plane. In a communiqué published yesterday, Dr. Rudasingwa expressed surprise that he was not contacted by Judge Trévidic, despite his full and complete availability to testify.

In order to try to see all this more clearly, it is good to go back over a number of important elements of this story.

1. According to the theory that blamed “Hutu Extremists,” President Habyarimana was assassinated because he had made too many important concessions to the Tutsi enemy in the Arusha negotiations. The Extremists, fearing the RPF would get into the transition government, decided to remove their President from power. To do that, they had to eliminate him corporeally. All the witnesses on the ground at the time acknowledge that panic and disorganization reigned over what remained of the Rwandan government in the hours immediately following Habyarimana’s death. Those who were forced to take control the next day had obviously been blindsided by the event. They were totally unprepared and without a clue what to do. Having experienced a certain number of military coups d’État, I know that such an operation cannot be improvised. It is always planned weeks or months in advance. The organizational plan for a new government has generally been prepared well before the coup actually goes down. This was not the case with Rwanda on 6 April 1994. The top of the government had been lopped off by a missile strike and the B-team found themselves out on the field without ever having prepared a playbook: a good example is Col. Théoneste Bagosora [aka “the brains of the genocide”—trans.] who was only the Cabinet Director for the Minister of Defense and not even in Kigali that day. On the other hand, the general military offensive launched by the RPF on the night of the attack was a long way from impromptu. Without having studied at any Military Academy, I know that a general offensive must be in preparation for months in advance. The logistics, especially, (fuel, munitions, means of transportation and communication) have to be in place. The coordination of different units, of different services, must be fine-tuned down to the smallest detail. And finally, the troops must be ready and must be assembled at preordained position for deployment when they are needed. The RPF’s general offensive could not have been ordered as a reaction to the death of President Habyarimana, but it certainly was prepped in expectation of his death.

2. Elements of the RPF had been in Kigali for months in compliance with the peace terms of the 4 August 1993 Arusha Accords. They were stationed at the CND, the Rwandan Parliament, and convoys escorted by UN forces allowed them to come and go between the territory they occupied in the North, around Mulindi, and the capital, Kigali. So it is not inconceivable that the RPF troops, probably dressed up in uniforms of the government FAR soldiers, had been able to get near enough to the airport to fire missiles on the plane as it was on its final approach to land.

3. The missiles: it has been established that these missiles were of Soviet issue. But, the Rwandan Army was not equipped with such weapons. However, interestingly enough, the Ugandan Army was. Remember that the RPF was an off-shoot of the NRA [the National Resistance Army] of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. It was a faction within this army, made up of soldiers and officers of Rwandan origins, wearing Ugandan uniforms, carrying Ugandan arms procured from Ugandan armories, which attacked Rwanda from Ugandan territory on 1 October 1990, igniting a war that would eventually bring the RPF to power. Throughout the entirety of this war, the RPF had access to bases in Uganda, it recruited in Uganda and it received its weapons, equipment and reinforcements from that country. So is it inconceivable that the surface-to-air missiles that brought down President Habyarimana’s plane had been furnished to the RPF by Uganda?

4. The conclusions drawn by Judge Trévidic’s experts point to the missiles having been fired from the military camp at Kanombe. It would be good here to explain a little about the topography around Kigali. This city has spread out progressively to cover different hills, which are becoming the different quarters of the Rwandan capital. Kanombe is not just a military camp. It is first a section of Kigali located on a hill called “Kanombe,” in close proximity to the airport. If it is difficult to accept that the RPF could have fired missiles from camp Kanombe, it is easy enough to imagine that they could have done the job from Kanombe hill. And that would not contradict any of the conclusions drawn in the experts’ report.

This being posited, it would be good also to recall in just what atmosphere the experts’ report was made public. Since the election of President Nicolas Sarkozy, French diplomacy, on the initiative of ex-Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, a good friend and propagandist to Paul Kagame, has tried to mend fences with Rwanda. Claude Guéant went to Kigali in 2009 to negotiate terms with Kagame for a French-Rwandan reconciliation. With the Kigali dictator more and more isolated, his Anglo-Saxon allies and his Scandinavian friends had begun to keep their distance from his regime. Kagame set a precondition for any rapprochement with Paris: a quashing of all litigious tension created by the Bruguière judgment. So everything was done in France to discredit the Judge’s work with the aim of rescinding his order to issue international arrest warrants for President/General Paul Kagame & Cie. It was agreed that Bruguière’s replacement would have the opportunity to conduct his investigation on the ground in Kigali. Until then, Kagame was still against any investigation into the death of his predecessor. There is no doubt that his agencies, experienced in the matter, carefully prepared the ground for Judge Trévidic’s experts, and that they furnished them with smartly concocted pieces of evidence.

The next step in the process would surely have to be the cancellation of the international arrest warrants ordered by Judge Bruguière.

Some French military personnel died on 6 April 1994: Jack Héraud, pilot of the Falcon 50; Jean-Pierre Minaberry, co-pilot; and Jean-Marc Perrine, flight engineer. [I believe this flight crew were civilians—cm/p] Other French nationals were mysteriously killed in their home on the following day: Lt.s Maier and Didot, as well as Didot’s wife, Gilda. It is very possible they knew too much about what had really happened in the capital [as they were in possession of elaborate radio equipment—cm/p]. For nearly 18 long years, the families of these French citizens have waited for the true circumstances of these deaths to see the light of day. Burundians have asked when light will be shed on the deaths of their President Cyprien Ntaryamira, of Bernard Ciza, the Burundian Minister of Planning, and of Cyriaque Simbizi, the Minister of Communications. Finally, the people of Rwanda, in their entirety as a nation, continue to hope that the truth will one day be brought out concerning the attack that cost the life of their President Juvénal Habyarimana, General Déogratias Nsabimana, the Rwandan Army Chief of Staff, Col. Elie Sagatwa, Military Cabinet Chief to the President, Juvénal Renzaho, the President’s advisor on foreign affairs, and Dr. Emmanuel Akingeneye, the Chief-of-State’s personal physician. Because beyond the deaths of all these people, it is important to understand just who gave the order to bring down the executive jet, who committed this crime and how. The answer to these questions will allow us also to know who bears the greatest responsibility for the widespread mass-killings that followed the attack. It is this attack, followed by the military mobilization that further violated the peace treaty, that brought together the conditions under which these massacres could take place.

So Judge Marc Trévidic bears a huge burden of responsibility. He must take the time to gather all the witnesses, including Dr. Rudasingwa who asks only that he be allowed to testify, and those other former RPF members who are still alive. He has to demonstrate his independence to resist the powerful political and diplomatic pressures. And above all, the big media must restrain themselves from jumping to conclusions and make better use of their critical faculties. The Rwandan tragedy surpasses many of great dramas of the 20^th century in its size, its magnitude and, especially, its horror. The victims, all the victims, must be afforded their right to know respect and the truth.

Hervé Cheuzeville, 11 January 2012

(Cheuzeville is the writer of three books: “Kadogo, Enfants dess guerres d’Afrique centrale”, l’Hartmattan, 2003; “Chroniques africaines de guerres et d’espérance”, Editions Persée, 2006; “Chroniques d’un ailleurs pas si lointain – Réflexions d’un humanitaire engagé”, Editions Persée, 2010)