Rwanda in Six Scenes - by Stephen W. Smith

Rwanda in Six Scenes -- by Stephen W. Smith from the London Review of Books

[Stephen Smith is the journalist who broke the Bruguière report in the French paper Le Monde. He now teaches in the US. His piece below is valuable because it exposes and seems to repent for Smith's initial bias for the RPF--as light-weight a bent as it might have been. But his personal experiences and interviews with the principals of the Rwandan drama are strictly first cabin all the way. --mc]

Rwanda in Six Scenes

by Stephen W. Smith

(published in the London Review of Books, Vol. 33, No. 6, of 17 March 2011; pages 3-8 | 5765 words)

A number of memories connected with Rwanda play in my mind like scenes from a movie, although I don’t pretend they add up to a film. In 1994 a genocide was committed against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda. All else about this small East African country, ‘the land of a thousand hills’, is open to question and, indeed, bears re-examination. ‘Freedom of opinion is a farce,’ Hannah Arendt wrote in 1966 in ‘Truth and Politics’, ‘unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.’ The problem with Rwanda is not only that opinions and facts have parted company but that opinion takes precedence.

The first scene: I’m walking beside Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda and then a rebel leader, past low picket fences and small prefabricated houses in a residential suburb of Brussels. It’s cold and our breath mingles in the air as we speak. Kagame is swaddled in a thick coat. Even so, he remains a spindly figure with a birdlike face. I can’t warm to him, but I know him well enough by now to hazard the question that has been preying on my mind for a while: ‘Why is it always you, the vice-president, whom I meet when I have dealings with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and not Alexis Kanyarengwe?’ Kanyarengwe was the movement’s president. ‘Don’t worry,’ he chuckles. ‘You’re seeing the boss. Kanyarengwe is only our front man. You’d be wasting your time.’

This was in 1992. The RPF had been set up in 1987 in Uganda by Tutsi exiles. Kagame’s parents had fled with him to Uganda when he was four. At the time of our meeting in Brussels, Kagame was avoiding the French. A few months earlier, in 1991, he’d just returned to his hotel near the Eiffel Tower from a meeting with officials at the Elysée when the French police called him in for interrogation. They were inquiring into a murky incident that was never entirely elucidated. Police sources claimed that members of Kagame’s delegation were ‘roaming around town with bags full of cash to buy weapons’; Kagame claimed the police were trying to discredit him. Tensions were running high between the rebel movement and France. The French were providing military support – 150 soldiers, later increased to 300, plus significant arms shipments – to the Hutu-dominated Habyarimana regime in Kigali, which the RPF was fighting to overthrow. Rwanda was a former Belgian colony, with eight million subsistence farmers jostling for a livelihood in a territory smaller than Haiti, and with little in the way of mineral wealth. It was a place where France felt obliged to assert itself as a tutelary power in Africa, if only to maintain its credibility as a guarantor of its local ‘friends’ and protégés and to defend ‘la Francophonie’ in Rwanda against the RPF, which operated from English-speaking Uganda. As for Kanyarengwe, the RPF figurehead, events would soon show that Kagame was telling the truth: he, Kagame, was the main man of the insurgency. Kanyarengwe, the nominal leader, was a Hutu defector: as head of the Rwandan secret services, he had helped Habyarimana to power in a coup d’état in 1973, but they later fell out and in 1980 he fled Rwanda. Ten years later – and two months after the RPF’s military campaign was launched from Uganda – Kagame offered Kanyarengwe the helm of the rebel movement to deflect the charge that the RPF was a Tutsi organisation. Kanyarengwe accepted in order to spite Habyarimana.

In the 1990s I was the Africa editor of the French daily newspaper Libération. The combination of the paper’s independence from the notorious Franco-African networks and my US passport represented Kagame’s best chance of an unbiased hearing in France, where government officials routinely referred to his rebel forces as the ‘Khmers noirs’. At the time, French public opinion made short shrift of small-scale military interventions in Africa. In June 1992 I alerted readers to what the Libération headline called ‘The Elysée’s Secret War’ in Rwanda – a deployment which had not been debated in parliament and had received almost no attention. In May 1993, 11 months before the extermination of the Tutsis began, I warned that ‘genocide’ was looming. But I also fell victim to the RPF’s manipulation of the press: I wrote about the supposed activities of the so-called Zero Network – presidential death squads – as well as the akazu, literally the ‘small house’, said to be the command structure responsible for pre-genocidal killings of Tutsis. Habyarimana’s in-laws were said to run the akazu and while I didn’t accuse President Habyarimana himself, I did point an incriminating finger at his wife, Agathe, and her brothers, accusing them of organising massacres of the ‘Tutsis of the interior’, as the oppressed minority inside the country was known. It was their way of retaliating against the Tutsis of the diaspora who had invaded the country from Uganda.


There were indeed massacres of Tutsis before the genocide – but they were organised by other people and at different levels of the state apparatus. Today, with hindsight, I know that the Zero Network didn’t exist and I’ve come to refer to the akazu, which continues to be used as a default category in journalistic and academic writing, as au cas où – French for ‘in case’ – as in ‘in case we find no master plan for the genocide in Rwanda’. I can’t say whether there was or wasn’t a master plan for the extermination of the Tutsis, some Rwandan equivalent of the Wannsee Conference. Historians must lay that question to rest’; the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the special UN court based in Arusha and charged with trying genocidal planners and killers, has found no one guilty of ‘conspiracy to commit genocide’ since it started its proceedings 16 years ago.

The Zero Network was first mentioned in an open letter published in 1992 by another defector from the Habyarimana regime, Christophe Mfizi, who had been the head of the government’s propaganda office in Kigali. As he later explained, he was anxious to avoid a libel suit. So he used ‘Zero’ as a way of fingering Agathe Habyarimana’s brother, Protais Zigiranyirazo, the prefect of Ruhengeri, the presidential family’s home province. Without giving his full name, Mfizi accused ‘Mister Z’ of running a network of hit squads, a charge a Rwandan journalist called Janvier Afrika wrote up in elaborate detail the following year.

Afrika has since recanted his testimony, explaining in similarly abundant detail how it was suggested to him by the RPF. Whether or not this is true, it’s perhaps significant that he recanted only after the RPF had taken power in Kigali, in November 1994, by which time he had fallen foul of the new regime. He fled to Cameroon, where I lost his trail in 1998. The ICTR has never summoned him as a witness. For his part, Mfizi obtained political asylum in France in September 1996, having resigned as the RPF’s first ambassador to Paris. Ten years later he submitted an exhaustive report on the Zero Network – nearly 50,000 words – at the request of the ICTR’s Office of the Prosecution. He repudiated the term akazu, which, he wrote, could not take the measure of ‘the political reality, and even less so the criminal reality … of the period between 1980 and 1994’. However, he reiterated his accusations against Zigiranyirazo, whom he now named, although his evidence did not bring a conviction: in November 2009, ‘Mister Z’ was acquitted on appeal by the ICTR.

*

The second scene etched on my memory is set in a sombre living-room with a low ceiling 40 kilometres south of Paris. It is 1998; I’m sitting on a couch opposite Agathe Habyarimana, now the widow of the former Rwandan president, whose plane was shot down on 6 April 1994, triggering the genocide. Photographs of the slain general cover the walls. Next to Mrs Habyarimana, now in her mid-fifties, sit four of her eight children: Jeanne and Marie-Merci; Léon and Bernard. I’ve been seeing Bernard for some time and he has persuaded his mother to meet me on her return to France after two years in Gabon. There are many grandchildren underfoot; eventually they’re banished from the room.

What do you ask ‘the Lady Macbeth of the Rwandan genocide’, as Philip Gourevitch called her? How do you approach a conversation with someone who’s been portrayed as the latter-day incarnation of a legendary sorceress in Rwandan dynastic history? Or as the ultimate ‘Hutu power’ extremist, who some believed was behind the assassination of her own husband for accepting a power-sharing agreement – the Arusha Peace Agreement signed in August 1993 – with the Tutsi rebel movement? What can you say to someone who’s generally presented by journalists, human rights activists and academics as the engineer of the 1994 extermination campaign? I ask myself a simpler question: would her grown-up children huddle around her if there were grounds for suspicion that she conspired to murder their father?

Agathe Habyarimana recounts what she saw in Rwanda during the genocide, from the moment she and her family heard the explosion of the presidential jet, which was hit by a missile right above their heads at 8.25 p.m., with debris raining into their garden, until her evacuation by the French army three days later. ‘We collected the body parts and gathered them on plastic sheeting or carpets. We were able to identify my husband, Elie’ – she’s referring to one of her half-brothers – ‘and several other members of the delegation. But our efforts were hampered as we were under constant gunfire. I didn’t speak to any civilian or military authority, still less issue orders.’ In addition to her only brother, ‘Mister Z’, Agathe Habyarimana had two half-brothers. Elie Sagatwa was one of them; he was also her husband’s private secretary. If the akazu really was the nerve centre of the genocidal project kick-started by the president’s assassination, would Sagatwa and his sister have hatched a plot that involved Sagatwa’s own death, in order to kill a man they were both intimate with, and could easily have eliminated in some other, simpler way?


A few months and several meetings later, I published an interview with Agathe Habyarimana in Libération. The interview was a scoop, but the prospect of providing a platform for a notorious génocidaire had prompted a ruckus in the newsroom. One of my colleagues had described my piece as ‘revisionism’. I told the editor-in-chief that I was always eager to revise what I or others had got wrong and suggested my colleague should write a profile of Agathe Habyarimana containing all the incriminating facts he could muster, which could be printed alongside my interview. After ten days, the face-off ended with a bad compromise. There wouldn’t be a profile but my interview had to be kept short. So in fewer than a hundred words, headlined ‘I’m not afraid of the truth,’ Mrs Habyarimana said that she was ready to appear before the ICTR at any time, that the akazu was a portmanteau word, a term of convenience, and that her son Jean-Pierre had never been a ‘pal’ of Mitterrand’s son, Jean-Christophe, who was his father’s Africa hand at the Elysée in the 1980s and early 1990s. ‘So much has been invented without ever giving me a fair chance to reply.’ That was the only sentence I felt uncomfortable about publishing.

In the same year, 1998, the French judiciary opened an investigation into the downing of Habyarimana’s plane at the request of relatives of the French crew members who had died in the crash. This marked the beginning of a long legal tug-of-war between Paris and Kagame’s RPF regime in Kigali. Relations between the two reached their nadir in November 2006, when a French judge issued international arrest warrants for nine key members of Kagame’s entourage. Rwanda severed diplomatic ties with France. Much was written about the self-aggrandising investigative magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, and about France’s hostility to the RPF regime. The Spanish judiciary, widening an investigation into the murder of some Spanish missionaries, reached even more grievous conclusions. In 2008, a judge in Madrid, Fernando Andreu Merelles, issued international arrest warrants for 40 RPF leaders on counts of ‘acts of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and acts of terrorism’. The Rwandan leaders, first among them Paul Kagame, were held responsible for ‘the attack on the life of President Juvénal Habyarimana … with a view to preparing the final offensive to seize power and to create a situation of civil war’.

The Kagame regime fought back. In August 2008 it accused France of having played an active role in the ‘preparation and execution of the 1994 genocide’, and threatened to issue 33 arrest warrants targeting French politicians, including three former prime ministers – Balladur, Juppé and Villepin – and the army top brass. Since then relations have improved; France and Rwanda restored diplomatic ties towards the end of 2009. In February 2010, President Sarkozy spent four hours in the Rwandan capital to seal the reconciliation. He admitted to France’s ‘errors’ and, more specifically, ‘a form of blindness when we failed to discern the genocidal dimension’ of the Habyarimana regime. Speaking about the génocidaires still at large on French soil, he mentioned the government’s decision to refuse asylum to ‘one of the persons concerned’ – a transparent reference to Agathe Habyarimana, whose request had been definitively rejected by the Conseil d’Etat four months earlier. Only days after Sarkozy’s return to Paris in March, she was briefly taken into custody as a result of an international arrest warrant issued against her by Kagame’s government in October 2009. It was an event staged for the media. She was released the same day on condition that she report regularly to the police. Nine months later, in December 2010, a formal request for extradition had still not been submitted by the Rwandan judiciary.

The rejection of Agathe Habyarimana’s asylum request in France was largely based on akazu-linked charges brought against her brother before the ICTR. The ruling was made a month before the ICTR acquitted Protais Zigiranyirazo. As for Mrs Habyarimana’s surviving half-brother, Séraphin Rwabukumba, both the UN tribunal and the courts in Belgium, where he lives, have abandoned proceedings against him. It’s just possible that the akazu was a women-only conspiracy, or that Agathe Habyarimana acted on her own. But if so, why hasn’t the ICTR indicted her? And why did the RPF regime wait 15 years before issuing an international arrest warrant in 2009? It could be that there are simply no legal grounds for prosecution, or that Rwanda’s tardy arrest warrant was just a way of intensifying the pressure on France. It could also be that no one – least of all the RPF leadership in Kigali – is interested in a trial in which the downing of Habyarimana’s jet in 1994 would inevitably come under scrutiny.

*

A third scene, May 1994: I reach Butare, the biggest town in southern Rwanda, by car from neighbouring Burundi. On the way, I’m stopped at numerous Hutu roadblocks. The barriers are manned mostly by young people with clubs, hammers or machetes. At one, a small boy is holding a nail-studded cudgel with tufts of bloody hair. The smell of putrefying bodies by the roadside is sickening. The starter of my dilapidated car is defective and the militiamen lay down their weapons to give me a push. Being French – or French enough – I’m regarded as a friend. ‘Vive la France!’ They wave their hands, which I’d just shook, as I make for the next roadblock.


In Butare, the Catholic bishopric is a safe haven. The priests allow me in and provide me with a room for the night. From my window, I can see the imposing red brick cathedral built by the Belgians just across the street. I walk over there, knock at the presbytery door, stay for a while and then return to my room. The last surviving Tutsis in Butare hiding out in these two buildings, the cathedral and the bishopric. Whichever of the two they’re in, they believe the one across the street is ‘safer’. A young woman in tears begs me to hide her in the boot of my car and drive her out of the country. ‘I really can’t. We wouldn’t even reach the edge of town.’ ‘You want me to die.’ Throughout the night, I hear noises in the streets – drunken militiamen – and also above my head, when from time to time the Tutsis hiding in the double ceiling drag their numb bodies across the floor in an attempt to stretch or get a breath of fresh air. Twice in the night, furious fists batter at the wooden entrance door and coarse voices vow to return in search of ‘cockroaches’. When they finally go away, the ceiling weeps.

In the morning, over breakfast, I talk to the priests. They’re prepared to die with their ‘guests’ at the hands of the militia; they describe the militia as ‘God’s children who’ve lost their way’. I don’t like to leave without a modest offer of hope. ‘The RPF is advancing rapidly. Soon they’ll reach Butare, and it’ll all be over. Just hold out for a few more days!’ I stare into bitter smiles. ‘That’s no solution,’ someone says. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because they’ll kill us.’ ‘But why on earth would they want to kill you? You’ve stuck together, Hutus and Tutsis!’ ‘Precisely for that reason.’ I drive away dispirited and bewildered. It’ll take me a long time to grasp that, for many of the exiled Tutsis who are now returning, especially the generation raised or born abroad, the genocide is not only what happened over the hundred days between April and July 1994, but an entire history of violence, discrimination and hardship that began with the so-called Social Revolution of the Hutus in 1959. In their eyes, Hutus and Tutsis can’t live together on equal terms because, unless the minority keeps the majority in check, Tutsis will always be humiliated or killed. To pretend otherwise, as the ‘Tutsis of the interior’ did when they stayed in the country after 1959, is to betray the dead among your kith and kin.

*

A change of location: Nairobi, February 1996, two years into the new RPF dispensation in Rwanda. As I speak to Seth Sendashonga, his vivid eyes are glazed with sadness. I have just spent several weeks in Rwanda, and have returned bearing notepads full of crimes. It isn’t as if he doesn’t know what happened: on the contrary, I’d leaned heavily on Sendashonga’s contacts in Rwanda. In 1991, when he joined the RPF, Sendashonga was the only eminent Hutu-turned-rebel who was not a defector from the Habyarimana regime. He undertook to rewrite the rebels’ political platform, to explain to the children of exile what the land of their fathers was like and, more important, to build bridges with opposition parties in Rwanda. ‘Our agenda is not revenge but true democracy,’ he assured them. Under the new regime, Sendashonga became Kagame’s minister of the interior. But he could not accept the RPF’s reprisals for the genocide, including planned massacres and systematic killings. Kagame failed to respond to any of the 700 letters documenting abuses which Sendashonga sent him. Eventually, Sendashonga had to face the fact that he was only another front man. Six months before we met in Nairobi, he resigned and went into exile.

Poring over a table strewn with papers, Sendashonga and I compare two independent lists of people killed in Gitarama province, central Rwanda, during the first 11 months after the RPF took power. We move forward line by line, name by name, address by address, cross-checking dates. One list has been compiled by parish priests throughout the prefecture; the other established at neighbourhood level for 11 of the 17 communes in Gitarama. The two lists largely tally. The first comprises about 25,000 dead, the second 17,000. Assuming RPF reprisals were equally severe everywhere in Rwanda this leads to an extrapolated figure of 150,000 people killed between July 1994 and April 1995 in the entire country. Based on research completed in August 1994 in 41 of the 145 Rwandan communes, Robert Gersony, a UNHCR consultant, estimated that ‘between 25,000 and 40,000 persons’ were killed during the first 100 days of RPF rule. The Gersony report – in fact just briefing notes – was leaked to the press. Under intense pressure from Kigali and its allies, the UNHCR went on the record denying its existence. No Gersony report, no dead.

In February 1996, Libération published my investigation into the killings allegedly committed by the post-genocide regime. I estimated that ‘more than 100,000’ Hutus had been murdered during the RPF’s first year in power. Libération also published an interview with Gérard Prunier, a specialist on the Great Lakes region, and the eyewitness account of a Rwandan nurse who had described to me two sites where he claimed he had been forced to work: one near Kigali where, he said, prisoners were put to death (their skulls were crushed), and another in a game reserve, the Akagera National Park, where scores of Hutus were cremated. There wasn’t much of a reaction to the dossier, though the Rwandan embassy in Paris issued a strongly worded denial. The wire services picked up the story but it disappeared very quickly. It was just a sour note in a concert.


Seven months later, in October 1996, the Rwandan army dispersed the Hutu camps in eastern Zaire, today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo. More than a million Hutus streamed back into Rwanda, while 300,000 fled deeper into Zaire. Of that 300,000 nearly two-thirds died over the next six months, according to a field study by Médecins sans frontières. They were killed or died of disease, exhaustion and hunger as they made their way across the African interior. The UNHCR spoke of ‘crimes against humanity’, but, again, there was hardly any response. Twelve years later, in August 2010, a fresh investigation by the UN put the number killed at ‘probably in the several tens of thousands’:

The extensive use of edged weapons (primarily hammers) and the apparently systematic nature of the massacres of survivors after the camps had been taken suggests that the numerous deaths cannot be attributed to the hazards of war or seen as equating to collateral damage. The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick … the apparent systematic and widespread attacks described in this report reveal a number of inculpatory elements that, if proven before a competent court, could be characterised as crimes of genocide.

The new regime in Kigali went after Sendashonga in exile. In 1996, the day before Libération published the dossier on the RPF killings, he was ambushed and sustained two bullet wounds. He identified one of the two attackers as his former ministry bodyguard in Kigali. The other was Francis Mgabo, an official from the Rwandan embassy in Nairobi, who attempted to dispose of his firearm in the toilet of a nearby petrol station. The Kenyan authorities asked Rwanda to lift Mgabo’s diplomatic immunity, so that he could go on trial, but Kigali refused and for a time the two countries broke off diplomatic relations. On 16 May 1998 in Nairobi, during the evening rush hour, gunmen armed with AK-47 assault rifles opened fire on Sendashonga’s car, killing him and his driver. As his wife later revealed, he had been scheduled to testify before the ICTR. He had also set up an armed opposition group (Forces de résistance pour la démocratie), which attracted both Hutus and Tutsis. His wife claimed that the acting Rwandan ambassador in Kenya at the time, Alphonse Mbayire, had organised Sendashonga’s assassination. Mbayire was recalled by his government, only to be shot dead by unidentified gunmen in a bar in Kigali a month later.

*

The fifth scene: Kigali, January 2002. For six years, I’ve been persona non grata in Rwanda. Finally, I managed to persuade the foreign ministers of France and Britain, Hubert Védrine and Jack Straw, to take me on their plane as they make a joint tour of four African countries – the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda – and to drop me off in Kigali. Though it means they have to give up a seat for a reporter covering their entente cordiale, they agree. For the Rwandan authorities, it is tricky to deny me a visa as part of a Franco-British delegation. Védrine is the first French minister to visit Kigali after the genocide. The UK accounts for half of Rwanda’s foreign aid. So here I am, an unwelcome visitor, on sufferance and under surveillance after the ministers’ departure. To meet ordinary people means putting them at risk while RPF officials, many of whom I knew when they were still rebels, won’t return my calls. Finally, Charles Murigande, who is in charge of foreign affairs, comes to my hotel. I launch into a lengthy profession of good faith. He replies with a Rwandan proverb: ‘There’s no use drinking milk on a stomach full of hatred. It’ll throw up blood.’ With this, he draws his chair back and leaves.

In a town you know, there’s sure to be someone who wants to see you. Not that Pasteur Bizimungu and I are especially close, but the former head of state badly needs a friend. Before joining the RPF in 1990, he was the director of Electrogaz, a coveted post in Habyarimana’s dispensation. He gave up the position to become the rebels’ spokesman and then a member of their negotiation team in Arusha. Finally, the RPF picked him as the Hutu figurehead for the post-genocide government of national unity. He became president while Kagame effectively ran the country. The pretence came to an end in 2000, when Kagame took the top job for himself. Bizimungu created his own political party, Ubuyanja (‘Renewal’). It was a more ambitious idea than the RPF could allow: he was accused of rekindling ethnic hatred and placed under house arrest. So I am sure to find him at home.

The soldiers at the gate are taken by surprise: a white man, tailed by security agents in a car – probably from the Directorate of Military Intelligence – nervously fingering their cell phones. ‘M. Bizimungu doesn’t want to see anybody!’ But I’d already rung the bell. Pasteur Bizimungu shoots out and welcomes me. ‘Yes, I want to see him, absolutely!’ he tells the soldiers and whisks me inside. He locks the door and leans against it, breathing heavily. A volley of accusations about Kagame follow; I remember the expression ‘the dark side of power’. When it is clear that no one will order me out, Bizimungu leads me into his library. We talk until we are both exhausted. ‘You know, they were right,’ he says finally. ‘The explorers, the missionaries, the colonisers, about the Tutsis being liars. They are liars.’ I am thrown clean off balance. Bizimungu climbs a stepladder to reach down a book from a high shelf. In no time, he finds the passage he’s looking for, about the ‘Tutsi culture of duplicity’, which he reads out, stressing key words. I make my excuses and leave. Bizimungu has been driven mad.

After my visit, he was entirely cut off from the outside world. Two years of solitary confinement at home preceded his sentence, in 2004, to 15 years in jail. In 2007, the former president was pardoned by Kagame, who had by then won his first election with 95 per cent of the vote. No one could have mistaken the poll in 2003 for an exercise in democracy. After the legislative elections of 2008 even the RPF found the machine score – 98.39 per cent – embarrassing and lowered it to 78.76 per cent. The EU electoral observers duly documented this self-restraint, but the head of their mission, Michael Cashman, agreed with the EU delegate in Kigali, David MacRae, not to go public about it – it might have raised uncomfortable questions. For his re-election in August 2010, Kagame approved a slight erosion of his Soviet-style popularity, allowing his vote to drop to 93 per cent. Rwanda’s burgeoning Democratic Green Party had lobbied against the country’s admission to the Commonwealth, citing the regime’s gross human rights violations. Its vice-president was found decapitated but that didn’t stop Rwanda joining the postcolonial club, the 18th African Commonwealth state and – after Mozambique – only the second member that is not a former British possession. In 2008 Kigali had made English – instead of French – the official teaching language at all levels of the Rwandan educational system.

Rwanda, as a recent document has it, is a one-party authoritarian state, controlled by President Kagame through a small clique of Tutsi military officers and civilian cadres of the RPF from behind the scenes. The majority Hutu community remains excluded from a meaningful share of political power. State institutions are as effective as they are repressive. The government relies on severe repression to maintain its hold on power … Rwanda is less free today than it was prior to the genocide. There is less room for political participation than there was in 1994. Civil society is less free and effective. The media is less free. The Rwanda government is more repressive than the one that it overthrew.

This is not the preamble to a new Hutu manifesto but an excerpt from the ‘Rwanda Briefing’ published last year by four senior figures in the Kagame regime who’ve now fled abroad: the former secretary general of the RPF Theogene Rudasingwa; his brother Gerald Gahima, one-time prosecutor general and vice-president of the Rwandan Supreme Court; the erstwhile chief of external security services Colonel Patrick Karegeya; and General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, the ex-chief of staff of the Rwandan army. Nyamwasa survived an attempt on his life last June, when a commando opened fire on him in Johannesburg, where he now lives in exile. The South African authorities laid the blame with the government in Kigali.

The authors of the ‘Rwanda Briefing’ may not be trustworthy advocates of freedom and democracy, or paragons of ethnic inclusiveness, but they describe a system they’re familiar with and a leader they know well. To his many Western admirers they have this to say: ‘President Kagame is a very polarising figure. His policies continue to divide Rwandan society along the lines of ethnicity and to fuel conflict. The likelihood of a recurrence of violent conflict, including even the possibility of genocide, is very high.’

*

A final scene: on 21 September 2006, President Kagame lectures on ‘Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development in Africa: The Rwandan Experience’ at Princeton. The country he describes – ‘different from the old system which plunged Rwanda into mayhem’, with ‘checks and balances’ in place after a ‘decisive break with exclusivist practices’ – is not one I recognise. Even in a packed auditorium, I have the same unsettled feeling in Kagame’s presence as I’ve had in the past. He seems unchanged: taking questions from the audience, he refers to ‘the genocide in the 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s’, as if ‘the one in 1994’ were merely one in a series – a hair-raising denial of the singularity of events between April and July 1994. But Goethe was right: ‘Everyone hears only what he understands.’ The students ask questions about gender equality in Rwandan politics, the fight against corruption and atrocity – a genocide? – in Darfur. How many of them have been moved by Hotel Rwanda, and how many know that Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero played in the film by Don Cheadle, is now a thorn in Kagame’s side? Rusesabagina continues to speak out for the ideals that led him to save more than 1200 lives during the genocide in Kigali. For Kagame, however, he is a ‘fabricated hero’ and a collaborator of the die-hard Hutu génocidaires exiled in Congo.

I am not arguing that we should all know everything there is to know about Rwanda. My point is that we don’t seem to want to know what happened in 1994, or what’s happening now. We’ve learned the wrong lesson from the organised massacre of 800,000 people, which we failed to prevent. Eager to pay off our moral debt, we’re blinded by guilt. The near total lack of media coverage of the ICTR trials and findings suggests that we’re happy to waive our best chance of grasping the inner workings of the genocide. We clamour for international justice but the detailed proceedings of the tribunal don’t interest us. At the same time, the denial of freedom and rights under the previous regime in Rwanda impels us to shower Kagame with leadership awards and aid money even as he denies them again. We are hypnotised by the 1994 genocide, and oblivious to the atrocities of a regime we regard as exemplary. Aid, we say, must be conditional on good governance – but post-genocide government is an exception. La Francophonie is at best ridiculous and at worst a vector of France’s influence, but the Commonwealth is honourable as it embraces a dictator who favours English over French. Democracy is a precondition of peace – but not in a post-genocidal state. Justice, truth and reconciliation heal – but not the wounds of exterminatory hatred. The invasion and plunder of eastern Congo are criminal – but not when they’re carried out by genocide survivors. Hutu power is bad, but Tutsi chauvinism is acceptable. We hold these opinions not because they’re right but because they put us on the right side. This makes Rwanda a more tragic place than it needs to be.

President Slobodan Milosevic Flipped the Tables on NATO--an Interview with Cathrin Schutz from Junge Welt (trans from the German by John Catalinotto)

President Slobodan Milosevic, taken 6 March 2006--Long Live a Free Slobo!!

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Milosevic Put His Accusers on Trial--Interview with Cathrin Schütz--Published in Junge Welt, March 11, 2011. Translated from the German by John Catalinotto.

[We were supposed to be in Vienna this weekend, Max and I. But, you know, force majeur, disruptions in the Domestic Tranquility, and all that.


So this post is to let the comrades know that we will always be with them in Revolutionary Spirit. And we want to thank them all for keeping the political and moral lessons we all learned from the trials of Slobodan Milosevic, way back when, alive and fresh for Max's and Seina's, for Beckett's and Francis' and Zoé's, and all subsequent generations to grown on.


Long live the legacy of President Slobodan Milosevic! Long Live a Free and Sovereign Serbia and a heroic Yugoslavia!


(And especial thanks to The Cat Man and the IAC for this translation from the German.)--mc]

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‘Milosevic put his accusers on trial’

Five years ago Yugoslavia's president died in The Hague. The UN ad hoc tribunal there denied him adequate medical treatment. A conversation with Catherine Schütz:

By Rüdiger Göbel, Junge Welt www.jungewelt.de

Cathrin Schütz, who holds a degree in Political Science and is a writer/analyst for Junge Welt, was a member of the defense team for Slobodan Milosevic before the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) from 2002 on. Among her contributions was "The destruction of Yugoslavia - Slobodan Milosevic replies to his accusers," published by the Zambon-Verlag

RG: On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the death of Slobodan Milosevic you will be protesting this Friday (March 11, 2011) at the Offices of the United Nations in Vienna. Why not in The Hague where the former Yugoslav and Serbian president died in his Scheveningen prison cell during his trial before the Yugoslavia Tribunal (ICTY)?

CS: The UN has created a monster with the ICTY, and we’re demanding the final removal of this monster from the world. The governments of the United States and Germany set up the ICTY in 1993 as the first ad hoc tribunal through a resolution of the UN Security Council, although the SC has no legal authority to take such a step. A UN body, which judges citizens of member states, is in fundamental contradiction to the UN Charter. At this illegal establishment in The Hague there is no one with whom to discuss this.

RG: What interests were the U.S. and Germany pursuing with the establishment of the ICTY?

CS: Because Yugoslavia stood in the way of their drive to expand into Eastern Europe, they instigated its destruction; both states share responsibility for the outbreak and escalation of secessionist civil wars. With full awareness of the results of their plans, they had already, in 1993, by diplomatic and covert operations, covered their hands with Balkan blood, and then invented a "court" that could be used as a weapon to pressure the warring parties. And it was supposed to judge the crimes committed in former Yugoslavia - in true NATO-style: bring the recalcitrant Serbs to their knees and acquit the NATO countries of their responsibility. With this in mind, protected by the ICTY, NATO conducted an aggressive war against Yugoslavia in 1999 without a UN mandate. Because of its financial resources and political connections, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea described the Atlantic alliance as a "friend of the ICTY" and thus proactively explained why there would be no charges brought against NATO for its war crimes -- crimes that have been certified by Amnesty International (among others).

RG: But there do exist international standards for fair trials.

CS: In order to carry out the political mission, the ICTY had to disregard the standards that normally apply. The Serbian opposition leader Vojislav Seselj has been held in custody for eight years. This is a clear breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. Under the rule of law, a defendant has the right to know of what he is accused. The ICTY has made basic changes in the details of the indictments several times, even after the trials had begun. It changed its own rules umpteen times and constantly violated them. Milosevic was refused his guaranteed right to defend himself. Radovan Karadzic is threatened with the same. The principle of giving equal treatment to prosecution and defense was violated every day. The prosecutor held weekly press conferences in the ICTY, and Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch, a renowned producer of anti-Serb propaganda, rushed regularly to the foyer to attack Milosevic to the media. Meanwhile our colleague was ejected from the building when he distributed a handout to a journalist. The huge budget of the ICTY stood behind the accusers. The Milosevic-defense had to rely on donations alone. When the German government criminalized the fundraising campaign, froze our funds and also blocked my account, the ICTY refused us any support. This greatly limited our work.

RG: You describe the ICTY as anti-Serb. But there were also Croats and Bosnian Muslims convicted...

CS: Although this was a three-sided civil war, about 80 percent of all defendants have been Serbs, including many top politicians and senior military. Not so with the Croats and Bosnian Muslims. The Croatian General Ante Gotovina was indeed found responsible for notorious "ethnic cleansing of Krajina," which displaced hundreds of thousands of Serbs, but none of his superior officers was. The same applies to the Bosnian Muslim Naser Oric. Although he boasted during the war to the Western press with the severed heads of Serbs as trophies, the ICTY says that no one can prove he is responsible for attacks by his soldiers on the Serbs around Srebrenica. The U.S. journalists, who were the first to see his human war trophies, were never called to testify by the ICTY. The pseudo trials against non-Serbs are meant to demonstrate to the outside world the impartiality of the ICTY.

RG: Former ICTY chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte will now render a judgment in the case of organ trafficking by the Albanian Kosovar mafia. Serbs from Kosovo were deported to Albania and were systematically eviscerated.

CS: Del Ponte demonstrated in her autobiography the information needed to expose the organ trade, which led to the investigation and the report of the Special Rapporteur of the Council of Europe, Dick Marty. But I wonder if she in her current involvement wants to cover up a bigger scandal. Marty has notably discovered that under Del Ponte, in 2003, the ICTY destroyed evidence of organ harvesting by the criminal gangs in Kosovo!

RG: The majority of the local media [in Berlin] then described Slobodan Milosevic as they describe Muammar al Gadhafi today. Take your pick: Either he was a megalomaniac, evil, genocidal, yes, even a new Hitler. You were part of his defense team. What was he like?

CS: Lord David Owen, former EU Special Envoy for the Balkans, described Milosevic as a "Yugoslav” who was anything but an ideologue for a Greater Serbia or promoter of "ethnic cleansing." I agree with Owen. Milosevic often took Croats and Bosnian Muslims under his protection, and he stressed how they were used by the West and misled. He also mentioned in his defense the support of the Bosnian Muslim forces by foreign mujahideen. However, he was opposed to any overestimation of the "Islamic terror." He stressed instead that the U.S. was responsible for the importation of Islamic fighters. It was no coincidence that the non-Serbs facing charges also respected him.

I was impressed by the reports of the defense witnesses, with whom I had close contact. They were Western politicians, diplomats, military officers, journalists who, in one way or another, witnessed the war. And all of their statements they confirmed that the allegations against Milosevic were as false as everything else that has been reported about Yugoslavia.

RG: How did Milosevic experience his imprisonment and trial?

CS: He probably never believed that the presumption of innocence would apply to him or that he would experience a legitimate trial. But he held his head high and put his accusers on trial. He made no compromises, no deals that would bring him privileges. He was free inside, as he himself observed. He could not help but see the ICTY as a repressive political instrument that was used to punish political leaders like himself who refused to surrender unconditionally to Imperialism. More and more harassment was used in order to weaken his defense. Finally the Tribunal in early 2006 refused to allow him treatment at a heart clinic in Moscow, which assured that he would not survive the Tribunal without it.

RG: During the wars in the former Yugoslavia, most of the media were uncritically anti-Serb. How did you find the journalists at the trial?

CS: The press was never interested in the content of the trial. When it became clear that the prosecutors couldn’t prove their allegations, and, on the other hand, Milosevic could expose the arming of the Croatian and the Bosnian Muslim sides, and later the Kosovo-Albanian side, by Germany and the United States, the trial was hushed up. They did not allow the image of Serbia as the aggressor to falter. The German media did not even report it when a German witness was clearly shaken at the Kosovo portion of the trial. Ex-army officer Dietmar Hartwig was head of European observers in Kosovo and on the spot until the beginning of the NATO bombing. He experienced terror, not from Serbs, but from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). And Bo Adam of the Berliner Zeitung newspaper was told by local Albanians, that the "innocent Kosovars" at Racak* were really combat deaths.

Usually no journalists were there, with the exception of Germinal Civikov, whose reports provide valuable evidence.

*In January 1999, casualties from a battle between KLA commandos and Serb police and army in Racak, Kosovo, were disguised as civilians, and Western politicians and media used the incident to promote anti-Serb propaganda leading to the war.--Translator

Published in Junge Welt, March 11, 2011. Translated from the German by John Catalinotto.

Rise Up, Worker! by Ljubodrag 'Duci' Simonovic

Ljubodrag Duci Simonović

„RISE UP, WORKER! – SAVE THE PLANET!“

[This is the latest from our dear comrade Duci Simonovic. And it's a welcome adjustment to the fluffy "Oh, glory, Springtime for Democracy comes early this year" delusions being propagated by all sides in the West over the willful destabilization of neocolonial states throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.

Demostrations calling for a change in government in Imperialist client states, are like volleyball practice being called on A deck after you've hit the iceberg.

Our only hope is to reorganize the systems of reproduction and circulation unto redefining value, or we'll all (those of us sadly still left) be sharing our last meal of smoked sand with our very thin offspring somewhere down McCarthy's Road.

Listen to Simonovic. This book is just a fiver (5 euros) and, believe me, it's more nourishing than 5 euros worth of any food--even that Bio shit--that you'll find anywhere out there.

To order a copy, send Simonovic an email (comrade@sezampro.rs), or see his web site on the left column of our Blogcollective site. --mc]

INTRODUCTION

A worker is not “the work force”.

A worker is a man.

Man is a life-creating, historic, libertarian, universal creative and social being.

The nature of the contemporary workers’ class struggle is conditioned by the nature of contemporary capitalism.

Capitalism is based on ecocidal terrorism.

The annihilation of nature as a life-creating whole is at the same time the annihilation of men as natural and human beings.

Instead of Marx’s notion of “alienation” (Entfremdung), the key notion in the critique of capitalism should be destruction.

Marx's revolutionary humanism opposes capitalism as a system of non-freedom, injustice, and non-reason, and advocates freedom, social justice, and a reasonable world, which means that it appears in the essential sphere.

Existential humanism emerges in relation to capitalism as a destructive order that annihilates nature and man as a biological and human being – and places the struggle for the survival of the living world in the foreground, which means that it appears in the existential sphere.

The anticipation of the future, as a concrete anticipation of a concrete future, must anticipate the development of capitalism, that is, the consequences generated by capitalism as a destructive order that inevitably condition man’s freedom and, along with it, the possibility of a future and its concrete nature.

Capitalist development of productive forces does not enhance the certainty of human survival, as Marx argues, but questions it more and more dramatically.

Instead of fighting to increase their consumer-standards, the workers should be fighting to increase their living standards.

The emancipated ecological consciousness became a necessary condition for the creation of the contemporary revolutionary consciousness.

Capitalism transformed the historical being of the working class and created conditions such that its main historical task is not only to abolish class society and liberate humankind from oppression, as it is with Marx, but to prevent the annihilation of humankind.

The conforming behaviour of workers is, in fact, the consequence of the class domination by the bourgeoisie, and not a process that proceeds by itself, with a fatalistic character.

The capitalist propaganda machinery strives to hide the most important thing: capitalists' fear of workers as a potentially revolutionary agent was, and still is, the most important feature of capitalist political practice.

“Democracy” is a political form of the domination of capital over people.

Capitalist “democracy” is not based on human and civil rights, but on the absolutized principle of profit, which in turn is based on the absolutized principle of private property.

When private property is the absolute principle, then the worst crimes are legal and legitimate if they serve to prevent the disintegration of the ruling order.

Man's right to freedom and life is subordinated to the right of capitalism to survival.

It becomes more and more obvious that capitalism creates an increasingly deep social and ecological crisis that it cannot control.

The transition of capitalism is going on, from the stage of “controlled” to the stage of uncontrolled chaos.

A specificity of capitalism is that, in contrast to “classical” barbarism (which is of destructive, murderous and plundering nature) it annihilates life by creating a “new world” – a “technical civilization” and an adequate, dehumanized and denaturalized man.

“Humanization of life” is being limited to the creation of micro-climatic conditions, of special capitalistic incubators – completely commercialized artificial living conditions to which degenerated people are appropriate.

Capitalism destroys man as a social being.

Loneliness is spreading like the plague.

Capitalism turns man from a social being into a consumer being, and society from a community of emancipated people into a consumer crowd.

The creation in man of fear of others is one of the most horrible crimes committed by capitalism against humankind.

As far as the Internet is concerned, the increasing possibilities of technical “communication” are becoming a substitute for the decreasing possibilities of authentic human communication.

The computer screen does not show the true picture of a man, but his mask.

The Internet does not serve to establish interpersonal contacts, but technical relations where people are “freed” from the sensual, erotic, emotional, and ultimately from social existence and social mediation.

One becomes “free” from the world where man cannot realize his humanity as he is reduced to a technically disguised apparition.

To accept the virtual world means, in fact, to accept the existing world where there is no place for youth, love, future...

To destroy man as a social being by means of technology and the “consumer” way of life is the most efficient way toward his depolitization.

Capitalism has established a universal exploitation of women.

Women is reduced to a housewife and prostitute, a working force and consumer, mother and advertising doll, policewoman and soldier, capitalist and politician...

Literally every part of the woman's body, from nails to womb, has become the means for the creation of profit.

The woman is an anthropological manifestation of the life-creating power of the living world and thus is a symbolical being.

The capitalist form of “woman's emancipation” turned into destruction of the woman as a generative being, and thus the destruction of society's reproductive ability.

The sterilization of the life-creating power (fecundity) of living creatures has become a universal principle of capitalist development.

The subordination of all life to the growing velocity of capital reproduction is one of the key causes of the dramatic reduction in the birth rate in developed capitalist countries.

The recuperation of man’s life-creating ability as a fecund (life-creating) being represents one of the most important challenges that capitalism poses for man.

Terrorism is a capitalistically degenerated form of the fight against capitalism – destructive violence that uses capitalist means and methods – and only contributes to the intensification of the process of destruction.

It does not long for creation of the new world, but for annihilation of the existing world: this is the essential difference between revolutionary struggle and terrorist actions.

"Fight against terrorism" becomes a pretext for introduction of global terror by the most powerful capitalist corporations.

Those who terrorize the world in the form of the "fight against terrorism" try to crush all those who threaten their efforts to transform the entire world into their own concentration camp.

The offered "protection" from terrorism is of a mafia nature: those who do not accept the iron embrace of the "global policeman" will be exposed to the worst American terror.

The main objective of the “fight against terrorism” is to create, through controlled media, an existential panic that will make citizens obediently accept such “protection from the terrorist threat” as provided by the ruling order, which involves depriving the citizens of their basic human and civil rights.

Tens of millions of cameras, implanted bugs and chips, similar to the chips implanted in dogs and cattle, entering flats, kidnapping, torture, “silent” liquidations, total control of the media, deployment of special military units in towns…

“The fight against terrorism” is, actually, a form of open dictatorship, by which capitalists declare war against their fellow citizens.

Fanatics of capitalism are the worst sort of terrorists: they are destroying life on Earth.

Capitalist totalitarianism is the most perilous form of totalitarianism ever created.

It is based upon the total commercialization of nature and of society.

Each part of the planet, each segment of social and individual life has become an integral part of the destructive capitalist growth mechanism.

Contemporary capitalist totalitarianism is based upon destructive nihilism: it annihilates both the idea of transcendence and the idea of a future (past) and thus it also annuls the very possibility of establishing a critical distance from the existing world.

Capitalism abolishes history, transforming historical time into mechanical occurrence, that is, into a positive nothingness.

The most perilous characteristic of capitalism is related to the fact that, from the results of life-destruction, it creates a source of profit and, thus, a basis for its own further development, where man's creative powers become a vehicle for the development of the destructive powers of capitalism and for acceleration of the destruction process.

Capitalism has become a self-reproducing mechanism of destruction, which, to the living world, represents what a malignant tumour represents to an organism: it extends its own lifetime by devouring all that provides humankind with a chance for survival.

The ecocidal capitalist fury has given rise to a genocidal doctrine and practice that “overcome” both Malthus’ theory and Nazi barbarism: destroying more and more people becomes the basic condition of the survival of fewer and fewer people.

In respect to the repeated “argument” that “overpopulation” is the main cause of the increasing shortages of drinking water, food and energy, it should be said that the Americans, Europeans and Japanese, whose populations total about one billion, use (destroy) the same amount of water, food and energy as 500 billion people would use at today’s rates of consumption in the underdeveloped countries.

Not a shortage of natural resources, but a shortage of humanity - which above all means domination by the inhuman and destructive capitalist order – is the main cause of the ever-deepening existential crisis.

Fascism is the clenched fist of capitalism in crisis.

The champions of contemporary fascism are not the groups of young people “adorned” with the Nazi symbols, but capitalist corporations that, generating the increasing existential and, therefore, overall social crisis, generate a fascist ideology.

The ruling principle of monopoly capitalism, “Destroy the competition!” is a generator of the contemporary fascist practice both in the economic and in the political spheres.

The contemporary situation in the USA and Europe suggests that German fascism was but one of the historical manifestations of fascism and that fascism is the enfant terrible of capitalism.

Capitalism deprives life of its human purpose and thus of the essential.

We are witnessing a capitalist levelling: everything is standardized, everything is on the consumer assembly-line turning faster and faster.

The promotional postcard of capitalism does not display an imagined man.

The “society of the spectacle” (Debord) is the manifestation of a world ruled by destructive nothingness.

Life itself has become a destruction of reason and the need for reason.

The terror of a positive life and a positive ratio has been established.

A great idea does exist, but its voice does not reach the people deafened by commercial ads.

A mountain looms out of the fog, but people are blinded by the spotlights of “consumer society” and are unable to see it.

The colours of life have waned under the dazzling lights of the “consumer society”.

The darkness of death is hidden under colourful propaganda messages.

In commercials, everybody is “happy”.

The tragic has drowned in “Coca Cola”.

Consumer-man has killed homo sapiens.

Capitalism generates the pathological man that accepts destruction as way of life.

The petit bourgeois is a man degenerated in a capitalist way.

The final process of the capitalist degeneration of man as a human and biological being is under way.

It is about the creation of a “mondialist man” suited to the nature of contemporary capitalism.

He is deprived of a libertarian and visionary consciousness, particularly of the responsibility for the destruction of the world.

What we have here is the “Titanic syndrome”: as the ship sinks – the music gets louder.

The basic task of the “mondialists” is to purify the world of its libertarian history and national cultures and turn it into a capitalist concentration camp.

The “European Union” is not a "democratic community of nations", but a form of integration of the European multinational corporations in their fight against the American corporations – which use the American state as a vehicle for the achievement of their interest at the global level.

The “European Union” is an anti-human and destructive order based upon the ruling principles of monopolist capitalism, "Big fish devours small fish!" and "Money does not stink!" .

The “European Union” is not based upon the emancipating traditions of European nations, but upon the imperialist traditions of European capitalism.

"European identity" cannot be built on formal principles (such as a constitution), but based on a libertarian tradition and on the cultural heritage of European nations.

Europeans must be judicious and resolute people who defy the processes of destruction of cultural heritage and of life in general; people who would, through political struggle, turn objectively accumulated potential for creation of a new world based on reason and freedom into the realistic potential for liberation.

Europe (world) should become a garden where flowers of all European cultures flourish together.

It is of no importance which flower is "bigger", but that each of them emanates its own scent.

It is about implementation of the leading ideas of the French Revolution, ideas that are not only humanistic, but have become basic existential principles.

Only based upon a struggle for the new world can the emancipating legacy of the European and other nations living in Europe be achieved.

Europe will overcome the growing social crisis by creating a new world – or it will collapse.

For the European nations, acceptance of the "American way of life" means suicide.

Concerning the strategy of survival of “small countries”, events in the world evermore dramatically indicate how fatal is the strategy of “defending the national interests” based on crawling before the mighty.

This strategy has turned out to be not only humiliating, but fatal for national survival.

Ideologues of capitalism create an illusion that the ruling relation to reality is based on a certain way of thinking, which means that it has a rational nature.

Philosophy has become a “rational” echo of destructive capitalist irrationality.

Humanity will again appreciate the importance of serious thinking when people return to the basic existential questions.

Capitalistically degenerated art mutilates the human with an “artistic” form, which acquires a spectacular dimension.

Capitalistically degenerated art has become a spectacular kitsch.

The “spectacle” does not only serve to deceive – it does not only prevent man from seeing the important, but kills in him his human being and thus the very possibility to see the important.

A blind man is not blind.

Blind is the man who cannot see humanity in the other.

A capitalistically degenerated technique deprived art of elitist exclusivity by depriving it of its humane essence.

The development of an “esthetical sense” is achieved by destroying the sense of the human.

It turns out that there is no use in making art a means for changing the world if it is not an integral part of a comprehensive political movement seeking to create a new world.

Thus a distinction should be made between a false (capitalistically degenerated) art and a libertarian and genuine art.

The role of a libertarian art is to unmask the true nature of capitalism; to create the vision of a new world; to indicate objective possibilities for the creation of a new world and, most importantly, to develop man's need for another man – as the basis of a genuine socialization without which no political movement can save the world from destruction.

Scientists have become the capitalists paid murderers and the driving force in the destruction of the world.

A vast majority of scientists are engaged in the production of weapons of mass destruction, devices for mass control, the genetic distortion of man, the destruction of nature, the manipulation and idiotization of people...

Scientific knowledge has been deprived not only of its human purpose; it has acquired an anti-existential nature.

The “invasion of space” has made man face the immense universe in a way that reduces the earth to a tiny cosmic speck that can disappear at any moment.

Asteroids, comets, supernovas, black holes, anti-matter – all these phenomena become the projections of a fear of destruction created by capitalism as a destructive order.

Time and universe are relativized and thus the notion of the real time in which we live is lost.

To link humanity's near future to cosmic vastness is the fatal illusion created by the Hollywood film industry.

The earth becomes a springboard for “conquering the universe”, and celestial bodies are the raw material and, as such, are subject to exploitation.

The myth of the “omnipotence of science and technology” has become a means for the creation of a capitalistically degenerated religious consciousness and, in that context, the image of the future.

The vision of “paradise”, in which the “souls of the deceased are united in God”, is replaced by the vision of a “perfect technical world”.

Ultimately, the “invasion of space” does not improve the state of humanity and does not increase the possibility of human survival, but hinders the fight against capitalism and contributes to the development of new mechanisms of domination, manipulation and destruction.

Man’s unlimited creative powers are the “measure” of infinity: the enhancement of humanness represents widening of the boundaries of the new universe.

The essence of the physical universe is determinism; the essence of the human universe is freedom.

A thought, a song, a painting, an embrace – tell more about the essence of man as a specific cosmic being than do all the “space programs” combined.

The occurrence of man is the only truly cosmic occurrence; man’s becoming human is the only truly cosmic process.

Metaphysical mysticism and religious fanaticism are but another side of the “technical civilization”, which deprived life of meaning and turned man into the means for capital reproduction.

Religion is less and less a spiritual need, and more and more an escape from capitalist nothingness and the expression of a fear of disappearance.

In contemporary capitalism, to appeal to God is, actually, a way in which the petite bourgeoisie gets rid of its responsibility for destroying the world.

The leading religions are not only a means for doing away with the emancipatory legacy of civil society, but also with the faith that life on the earth can be preserved.

From a means for destroying man's libertarian dignity, religion turned into a tool for destroying the will to live.

Ultimately, people are not divided into atheists and theists, but into those who fight for capitalism and those who fight against capitalism – to preserve life on the planet and create a humane world.

The “crisis of the left“ as an organized political movement has resulted from the conflict between capitalism and the emancipating patrimony of civil society, in the course of which all those political movements and concepts that open a possibility for the creation of a new world are being degenerated and eliminated.

Capitalism has turned the political sphere into a political market where each party strives to optimally sell its own political program (political commodities) and to convert its social influence into cash, starting from the interest of bureaucratized and corrupt party oligarchies.

An immediate effect of the corruption of (nominally) “leftist” parties is the establishing of an increasingly large anti-capitalist movement that does not consent to a dominant role for parties belonging to the political establishment.

The original leftist thought, the one that insists on freedom and social justice, is mostly present among the most deprived working layers and the young – those who are vitally interested in the realization of the original leftist ideas.

In spite of the harsh anti-communist propaganda, where the ideal of communism is reduced to the practice of Stalinism and this to the “gulags”, communism appears as the only real alternative to capitalism and the only possible future of humanity – in both the essential and existential sense.

The general crisis of capitalism, which grew to dramatic proportions in the autumn of 2008, made Karl Marx the most widely read author in the West.

The victory of the left has become the necessary condition for the survival of humanity.

The war against capitalism can be won only from the experiences gained in the lost battles for a humane society.

The affirmation of man as a creative and libertarian being is a response to the world where man is alienated from himself as a creative and libertarian being.

The assertion that man is a life-creating being is a response to the world based upon the destruction of life.

The most important task for the humanist intelligentsia is to develop in contemporary man a self-consciousness that will provide humankind with the possibility to survive.

The humanist intelligentsia has to draw attention to the increasingly dramatic consequences of the development of capitalism as a destructive order and to the existing objective possibilities for the creation of a new world.

At the same time, it needs to develop a political strategy that will become the starting point for the creation of global forms of political struggle that would stop the destruction of life on the planet and create a new world.

We are not suggesting the development of a distinctive intellectual “elite” that would declare itself “the conscience” of humankind and thus become a group alienated from “ordinary” people, but a commitment by people conscious of the destructive nature of capitalism and willing to dedicate their lives to the struggle for the preservation of life and the freedom of humankind.

A genuine humanist intelligentsia needs to light the road to the future.

In the context of an increasingly dramatic existential crisis generated by capitalism, it needs to become a lighthouse that will shine with an expanding glow, as the darkness generated by capitalism grows thicker.

The Promethean principle has become a basic existential principle.

That is why it is of crucial importance not to make compromises and not to adjust to the current political situation.

A compromise results in the loss of the ability to create light – without which humankind will vanish into the darkness of destructive capitalist nothingness.

“Consumer society” represents the last offensive of capitalism and announces its complete and definitive disintegration.

The struggle for freedom becomes the struggle for survival.

In order to survive, man has no one to address for assistance but another man.

Sociability is an existential imperative.

The survival of each represents the basic condition for the survival of all.

Never in history has man confronted a task related to the preservation of life on the planet and to preventing the annihilation of humankind.

Capitalism generates a destructive man that becomes a vehicle for the development of capitalism, that is, for the destruction of life.

Concurrently, capitalism generates the increasingly militant anti-capitalist man who identifies the meaning of life in destroying capitalism and preserving life on Earth, through the creation of a new world.

An increasingly intensive destruction of life results in a more and more ruthless conflict between these two types of men, which actually represent the contemporary class division of the world: a class of destructive capitalist fanatics and a class of reasonable and uncompromising combatants for the survival of humankind.

In the struggle for the preservation of life and the creation of a new world, man will become a true man.

He is not a mythological man who will, like a present-day Phoenix, ascend from the ashes of capitalism, with his wings unharmed.

He is a concrete man who will experience the consequences of the destruction of nature with his entire being, for he represents its organic part.

This is what modern tragedy rests on: man experiences the world's annihilation as his own annihilation.

Man no longer needs science or philosophy to be able to understand that capitalism destroys life on the planet.

Essential relativism is replaced by existential obviousness.

The biological clock of humanity is ticking away.

Time began to run backwards – from the zero ecological milestone which, if overstepped, is humanity’s doom.

Man can only fight for survival.

Man cannot and must not be pessimistic.

He must not allow everyday life and the ruling propaganda machinery to bring him to such a psychical state that he gives up on everything and surrenders to nothingness – heading towards death.

Faith in the future has become not only the basic essential, but also the basic existential imperative.

Only a man who has not lost this basic human quality, his need for other human beings, can strive for a humane world.

When a man loses human warmth, he becomes a living dead.

The amount of evil inflicted on people by capitalism is outrageous...

The amount of humanity’s suffering is outrageous...

And a new, humane world is at hand.

All that is needed is to organize and fight.

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