Rwanda: The Pentagon's African Holocaust
Spanish High Court investigates genocide committed by US-backed dictatorship
By Gearóid Ó Colmáin
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28198
Global Research, December 13, 2011
On November 29th investigative journalist and genocide expert Keith Harmon Snow testified before Spain's Highest Court (Audencia Nacional) to support the indictments against 40 Rwandan officials for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity during the western-backed invasions of Rwanda and Congo/Zaire by Rwandan president Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni's Ugandan People's Defense Forces (UPDF).
In 2005, the relatives of 9 Spanish nationals killed in Rwanda and the Congo in 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2000, filed a lawsuit against the government of Rwanda resulting in the issuing of Interpol international arrest warrants for 40 Rwandan officials of Kagame’s régime.
On 6 February 2008, the Spanish Investigative Judge Andreu Merelles issued an indictment charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials with serious crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism, perpetrated over a period of 12 years, from 1990 to 2002, against the civilian population, and primarily against members of the Hutu ethnic group.
While the investigations were initially based on complaints from families of nine Spaniards who were killed, harmed or disappeared during the period at issue, the indictment was subsequently expanded to include crimes committed against Rwandan and Congolese victims, based on the universal jurisdiction doctrine. The indictment rules out the prosecution of Paul Kagame, arguing that he may not be prosecuted as long as he holds the position of President of Rwanda.
According to Spanish lawyer Jordi Palou Loverdos:
“Spain’s Audencia Nacional was only met by silence when it duly and formally asked the U.N. to hand over the evidence of these crimes perpetrated against people in 1996 and 1997 or the evidence of the pillaging of valuable mineral resources conducted in these same years or earlier. The international media which had access to the UN report have made public the fact that the UN High Commissioner responsible for the report keeps- separately from the latter- a confidential data bank containing evidence that implicates individual Rwandan and Ugandan military officials.”[1]
In spite of threats and intimidation from agents linked to Western governments and from the United Nations, the Spanish High Court authorities are continuing to hear evidence against the Ugandan and Rwandan proxy forces of the United States in Africa.
Keith Harmon Snow has been researching the real facts of the tragedy known to the world as the "Rwandan genocide" (put in quotes?) since 1994, and has, along with many other experts, evidence to prove that the United States, Britain and Israel were responsible for the training, financing and covert military and logistic support of Kagame and Museveni's forces.
On 6 April 1994, the UPDF/RPA proxy forces assassinated the Rwandan and Burundian presidents (Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira), their military chiefs of staff, and the French pilots of the plane they were flying on, thus provoking and participating in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hutus and Tutsis in one of the most violent civil wars in modern history.
Snow also presented detailed evidence of the war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity committed by Kagame and Museveni's proxy forces, after they invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996, again backed by the Pentagon, Israel and NATO allies. The Congo/Zaire invasion was commanded by generals Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe, and they involved an officer attached to Kabarebe named Hyppolite Kanambe -- alias Joseph Kabila, the strongman in Congo today.
The ongoing Rwandan occupation and plunder of eastern Congo has resulted in the deaths of some ten million people, making this the worst war since the Second World War. The Central African holocaust has been largely ignored by the global mass media corporations who are calling for “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, much as they did to justify invading Libya, by the same countries responsible for supporting mass carnage in Africa.
In spite of orders from Laurent Désire Kabila (Congo's interim president of 1998-2001), to disengage from the Congo, the RPA and UPDF re-invaded the Congo in 1998, resulting in the Second Congolese War. Although the war is said to have ended in 2001, mass killing of the populations in the mineral rich Kivu provinces of Eastern Congo under the leadership of these US-backed dictators has continued to this day.
Contrary to its stated "peacekeeping" mission, the United Nations Observers Mission for the Congo (MONUC) and its follow on dependent, Monusco, has been deployed in the Congo since 2000 and has been involved in sexual violence and contraband activities. MONUC has provided cover for the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundi forces, USAID, the Pentagon's new Africa Command (AFRICOM), and scores of Western mining corporations who are plundering the Eastern Congo.
Snow gave detailed testimony to the Audencia Nacional of the American, British, Belgian, German, Israeli and Australian mining corporations who have profited from the Pentagon’s holocaust in the Congo. Many of these companies such as Banro Corporation, Barrick Gold and companies run by the Blattner dynasty.
Snow alleges that these corporations have direct links to the criminal networks run by Paul Kagame, who are plundering the Kivu provinces of the Eastern Congo and massacring the Hutu Rwandan refugees there.
Though the majority of victims have been from the populations of Rwandan Hutus, Rwandan Tutsis and Twa have also been targeted, both in Congo and Rwanda, and many Congolese ethnic groups have been targeted in the Congo. The Kagame regime is determined to eliminate all possible opposition to its rule and to occupy and annex eastern Congo to create a "Republic of the Volcanoes" controlled by Rwanda and populated with sattelite US military bases.
Snow told the Spanish court that details collected by the UN Panel of Experts report of 2001 to 2010, detailing the illegal occupation, plunder and war crimes in the Congo, have been watered down by special interest groups linked to Western governments, thus shielding Western corporations and governments from scrutiny by the International Criminal Court and the Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.
Trained in the notorious Fort Levenworth, Kansas (USA) and advised by former British prime minister Tony Blair, Paul Kagame is without question one of the most evil dictators in modern history. The scale and intensity of his atrocities dwarf those of Pinochet, Suharto and Somoza combined.
Rwanda and the Congo belong to the ninth circle of global capitalism’s Dantesque inferno . It is the circle of betrayal; betrayal of the high ideals of the United Nations to uphold the rule of law and work towards the goal of international peace and stability; betrayal of the trust that ordinary citizens of the world have in media corporations to tell them what is really happening in the world, so that leaders and potentates can be held to account.
In spite of expertise gained on the ground throughout Central Africa spanning 20 years, expert testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2001, extensive work as genocide consultant to the United Nations and numerous meticulously documented reports, Keith Harmon Snow’s work continues to be ignored by the corporate media and many outlets who claim to be ‘progressive’ and ‘independent’ .
According to Snow,
"U.S.-based groups fronted by the intelligence and defense establishment and pretending to be 'grass roots non-government organizations' -- such as the ENOUGH project, Raise Hope for Congo, Resolve, STAND and Save Darfur -- have co-opted the grass roots movement and are whitewashing the issues and controlling the media, academic and public spaces to prevent the true grass roots voices for Central Africa from being heard and to prevent the deeper issues from being understood." [2]
In preparation for a documentary film to be released next year on the African holocaust, Keith Harmon Snow has just completed a series of interviews with distinguished scholars, investigative journalists and lawyers from France, Spain, Germany, Camaroun and Rwanda. The film, as yet untitled, is expected to be aired in film festivals throughout the world and will also be available online for mass viewing.
Rwanda and the Congo belong to the ninth circle of global capitalism’s Dantesque inferno . It is the circle of betrayal; betrayal of the high ideals of the United Nations to uphold the rule of law and work towards the goal of international peace and stability; betrayal of the trust ordinary citizens of the world have in media corporations to tell them what is really happening in the world, so that leaders and potentates can be held to account.
Uncovering the truth about the role of Western imperialism in the violence that has beset Central Africa since the fall of the USSR to the present day, is of vital importance, as the obscene and racist myth of an African genocide America “failed to prevent” constitutes the mendacious and insane basis for the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine.
Western governments and their pro-Kagame lobbies in the mainstream media are prompt to smear as ‘genocide deniers’ those who challenge the lies and distortions of the official genocide narrative of the current Rwandan régime by exposing the inconvenient and politically incorrect facts. In the case of Rwanda and the Congo, it should now be abundantly clear who those genocide-deniers are.
Genocide(s) in Rwanda and Congo – Spain and its Courts – the UN, the USA and Great Britain
by Jordi Palou Loverdos, Lawyer & Mediator.
Published in Spanish in El Plural, September 14th 2010
See pdf here
The analysis
Genocide(s) in Rwanda and Congo – Spain and its Courts – the ICC, the UN, the USA and Great Britain
Is all of this interrelated? More than it’d seem at first sight. And - why should
this matter concern us at all? It concerns us much more than we think. A few
days ago, the international press reported extensively on the leak of a report
by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) about ten years of
sustained violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (1993-2003). When
the report, almost 600 pages long, is released, ostensibly in the next few days,
we will see the actual wording of the text after the international flurry that has
arisen and the big threats – veiled and explicit – that are being made in all
directions by many of the key international players involved, including
governments.
The UN says that Rwanda could be to blame for the genocide in the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
Based on the analysis of thousands of documents and more than a thousand
testimonies gathered by experts, the leaked UN report forcefully exposes the
gruesome and systematic nature of the slaughter carried out against the Hutu
population, both Rwandan refugees and Congolese civilians. These killings
took place primarily during the two wars, from September 1996 to July 1998,
and from August 1998 onwards, respectively. According to the report, the
massacres were deliberate, claiming the lives of elderly people, children and
women in particular, and making no distinction between Rwandan and
Congolese Hutu. Besides, none of these deaths could be considered to have
been accidental or as collateral damage of war. The evidence gathered
shows that the above-mentioned massacres were “well planned and highly
organized”, pointing to more than 600 systematic criminal acts that resulted in
hundreds of thousands of victims. Just like the resolutions of the Spanish courts,
the UN now reveals that, further to being caused by light or heavy weapons,
the deaths were the outcome of other forms of committing genocide: the
population (Hutu refugees and the Congolese civilian population, whose
victims were also mostly Hutu) was deprived of food and victim of forced
displacements, sexual abuse, subject to starvation and disease all of which
caused their death. Yet if we only take a minute to look beyond the figures
(millions, indeed, far surpassing the 800,000 victims which is the official count
of the Rwandan genocide) and try to imagine the suffering – at the private,
family and collective levels – of each individual victim, we may be able to
come closer to the full scale of the horror. Even though that report does not
single out the responsibility of individual parties in the pillaging, it does hold
the Rwandan army – and its local allies – primarily responsible for it. The report
further details the crimes that could have allegedly occurred during the
decade covered in the investigation. The facts known about those crimes
can constitute crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes which could
even be considered genocide. Interestingly, what has caused a stir in the
Genocide(s) in Rwanda and Congo – Spain and its Courts – the UN, the USA and Great Britain
Article by Jordi Palou Loverdos, Lawyer & Mediator. Published in Spanish in El Plural, September 14th 2010
Rwandan government is the mention of genocide, and not the former two
crimes which Rwanda hasn’t brought up and which are in and of themselves
extremely serious international crimes. This is no happenstance: while not
omitting to remind of the huge tragedy caused by the Rwandan genocide of
1994, where victims were mostly Tutsi, the international press has made sure to
raise again and strongly question the role played by Paul Kagame and his
followers in this genocide. It has strongly questioned the version Kagame, and
his circle of top associates, give of their role, which claims it was he who
stopped the above-mentioned genocide. This account of the facts now
comes tumbling down like a house of cards and the UN report is just speeding
that collapse. Many people now state the need to look again into what really
happened during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in order to hold the
perpetrators of international crimes accountable to justice, irrespective of
their ethnic group or political affiliation, as the Statute of the International
Criminal Court for Rwanda requires. (This closer scrutiny includes taking a
closer look at the classified 1994 report compiled by Robert Gersony, then
American envoy of the UNHCR in Rwanda, and which was suppressed by the
U.N. itself. Former Rwandan Minister of Defense, among others, mentioned this
report in his testimony given during the investigation held by Spanish courts.
The report documented some 30,000 murders in a period of merely three
months after Kagame seized power by force after the four years of war that
followed his invasion of Rwanda from Uganda, and after he “officially
stopped the genocide.”) Let us point out that two U.N. reports from 2001 and
2002 (www.veritasrwandaforum.org/informes.htm) already revealed the
detailed planning and the high level of organization with which the Rwandan
army carried out its crimes, in this case the systematic pillaging of natural
resources such as gold, diamonds, coltan, tin and cassiterite, among other
precious metals (used to produce mobile phones, computers, consoles as
well as intelligent strategic weaponry), carried out together with North
American, European, African and Asian multinational companies.
Which court has the jurisdiction to investigate the international crimes
committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo?
The leaked UN report ends by asking which court can take over the
investigation and prosecution of these crimes. This is a key question that
needs to be answered in order to stop the impunity, which has been
surrounding these crimes for years, from continuing to feed on the violent
conflict as it has been doing to date. However, the idea of conducting an
investigation into these crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo is not
new: UN experts started working on this in July 2008, a few months after the
Spanish courts issued a Resolution on February 8, 2008 issuing international
arrest warrants against 40 top political and military officials of the Rwandan
government. The Order charged them of crimes of genocide, crimes against
humanity and war crimes, among others, which had allegedly taken place in
Rwanda and in the former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo,
approximately between 1990 and 2002. The Order
(www.veritasrwandaforum.org/dosier/resol_auto_esp_06022008.pdf)
summarized the findings of a three-year investigation spurred by the lawsuit
filed in 2005 by the relatives of 9 Spanish nationals assassinated in both
countries in 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2000. Plaintiffs in this lawsuit were also
Rwandan and Congolese survivors; Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez
Esquivel; former US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney; the Spanish City
Councils of Sevilla, Manresa, Figueres, Navata and Tremp, as well as Spanish
and international NGOs grouped under the International Forum mentioned
below. Numerous people who survived such massacres in the Democratic
Republic of Congo - people who fled almost two thousand kilometers by foot
– as well as visual documents obtained on site, such as those by Hubert
Sauper, have described the account the UN now discloses in public:
systematic attacks on refugee camps; bombings with heavy weaponry;
systematic persecutions on roads and in jungles, villages and towns – on
many occasions in Kisangani, in particular – and even UNHCR’s forced
repatriations of refugees who would subsequently be killed or imprisoned, as
the Spanish judicial Resolution itself had shown. With the recent leak of the UN
report, Paul Kagame and the government of Rwanda have now made the
same threat that they made back in 2008, when they were faced with the
judicial investigation and the fact that the international arrest warrant (which
the town councils themselves, as civil parties, had requested to the UN
Secretary-General) could be put into effect: if, despite the Spanish
international arrest warrant, Rwandan general Karake Karenzi, one of the 40
officials sought by justice, was not confirmed in the post of second
commander of the hybrid UN peacekeeping force in Sudan, Rwanda would
withdraw all its peacekeeping forces from this country. After the U.S.
Department of State gave US$20 million to Karake Karenzi and the Rwandan
Defense Forces on September 3, 2008, Karenzi was confirmed by the U.N. in
the post. A few days ago Rwanda made its threat again: if the army led by
Paul Kagame is accused of genocide, Rwanda will withdraw its troops from
peacekeeping operations.
Regarding the question as to which court can be in charge, there are people
interested in making things appear more complicated than they really are so
that, ultimately, nothing gets done. For crimes perpetrated between 1993 and
2003 there are two international courts that have already opened
investigations and legal proceedings. The only court worldwide already
conducting an investigation into the crimes perpetrated between 1993 and
July 1, 2002, is the Spanish court, in accordance with the principle of universal
jurisdiction (to cite only one example: one of the 40 international arrest
warrants issued by the Spanish court has already resulted in a request for
extradition for crimes committed in Rwanda and in the Democratic Republic
of Congo during the same period covered by the UN report. The request
seeks the extradition of General Kayumba Nyamwasa, Paul Kagame’s former
right-hand man, who has currently fled to South Africa). Concerning the
crimes perpetrated from July 1, 2002 until 2003, the International Criminal
Court already has two ongoing legal proceedings. Both courts have
jurisdiction over these cases despite having extremely few resources to pursue
their task. Spain’s Audiencia Nacional [National Court] has only been met by
silence when it duly and formally asked the U.N. to hand over the evidence of
these crimes perpetrated against people in 1996 and 1997 or the evidence of
the pillaging of valuable mineral resources conducted in these same years or
earlier. The international media which had access to the UN report have
made public the fact that the UN High Commissioner responsible for the
report keeps – separately from the latter - a confidential data bank
containing evidence that implicates individual Rwandan and Ugandan
military officials in the crimes stated above. The High Commissioner, Ms
Navanethem Pillay - coincidentally a South African national - and herself a
former judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and at
the International Criminal Court (ICC), knows very well the consequences at
stake and the scale of the tragedy in Central Africa. She should thus make
available to the ICC and the Audiencia Nacional the evidence which
implicates specific individuals in those international crimes, in compliance with
international law.
Serious international involvement in the crimes perpetrated in Africa
This whole thing isn’t just a matter between Rwandan and Congolese Hutu
and Tutsi, nor does it only pertain to Central Africa: it is the violent conflict
which has claimed more lives since the Second World War, according to ICC
prosecutor Moreno Ocampo. What emerges is a story of violence, war and
neo-slavery during the pursuit of geo-economic, geopolitical and
geostrategic control of Central Africa after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a story
whose installments keep coming to light little by little. In former times
Europeans and North Americans used for their own ends an African minority
for the latter to exploit and take advantage of its own kin. The patterns of
exploitation and slavery used in the 15th to 19th century (by the world powers
at the time such as Spain, France, Portugal, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland,
and later the United States) were repeated at the end of 20th century and
now at the beginning of the 21st, albeit with new methods. The only
difference is that now – without having to displace slaves from the territory -
governments, multinational corporations and power groups are the parties
which exploit and manipulate those African ‘elites’ into massacring their
African brothers in exchange for a small piece of power and a small cut of
the revenue from the systematic war pillaging. The money that stays back in
Africa is a trifle compared to the huge profits that are siphoned off to North
America, Europe and their allies under the guise of complex business deals, as
the U.N. itself points out in its reports from 2001 and 2002. Instead of bringing
hope and support to people of different races worldwide, and to humanity in
general, the U.N. has, rather, become a puppet in the hands of governments,
multinational corporations and big powers pursuing their own agendas. In this
respect, the hidden chapters being unveiled by independent and tenacious
investigators now allow us to learn how North American, Canadian and British
governmental agencies, together with Big Business, join forces in order to seize
control of specific territories, their wealth of natural resources as well as of the
local governments. To cite just an example: former U.S. congresswoman
McKinney – herself descended from slaves, like the current U.S. First Lady, and
President Clinton’s Special Envoy to Central Africa in 1996 – later declared
that she found out that the plane which took her to Africa – chartered by
senior managers of the multinational company American Mineral Fields – was
also boarded by arms dealers. In addition, she had found out that a plan was
in place to finance the war intended to remove [President] Mobutu from
office in the then Zaire and gain control of the country’s mining areas in order
to, first, pillage and then exploit the mines. These facts were later confirmed in
the U.N. reports from 2001 and 2002. Another fact, also corroborated: while
receiving military training in the U.S. in October 1990 (at the U.S. Army
Command – linked to the infamous School of the Americas – in the Fort
Leavenworth base in Kansas), Paul Kagame was summoned to Uganda to
head the revolt aimed at removing the then Rwandan president
Habyarimana from office.
The U.N., Kagame, Rodríguez Zapatero and international politics
The UN report, which minces no words with Rwanda, has been leaked with
diplomatic finesse, coincidentally three weeks after – not before – the
presidential elections that took place in Rwanda. In these elections Paul
Kagame (accused by the Spanish courts of committing international crimes
related to those perpetrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, on
the other hand, someone who has at his disposal free consulting services from
former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, among others) was re-elected
president, obtaining some 93% of the votes. Yet these elections, in which
opposition candidates have been either put into prison or murdered, have
been validated despite strong international reservation expressed by
diplomatic circles and international NGOs. The U.N. Secretary-General must
no doubt have known of the contents of that report when he went to Madrid
in July to attend the U.N. summit he himself had called. The summit, intended
as preparatory meeting for the Millenium Goals, was to feature the
attendance of the two co-chairmen he himself had –allegedly – chosen:
Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, head of the country
whose courts are investigating precisely those very crimes; and Paul Kagame,
the president under investigation and accused by a Spanish court of being
the main person responsible for those crimes, including the assassination of 9
Spanish nationals in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Fortunately, Prime Minister Rodríguez Zapatero, paying heed to the request
made to him by the nine families of the Spanish victims and a platform of
Spanish and international NGOs (www.bastayadeimpunidadenruanda.org)
as well as to requests coming from embassies from all over the world and the
explicit request from senators and seven political groups from Congress (with
the exception of the PSOE and the PP), decided last minute not to meet with
Kagame. He also changed the location of the meeting to a private hotel.
Nevertheless, unless there are last minute changes, co-chairmen Zapatero
and Kagame will be present at the official meeting to be held at the U.N.
headquarters in New York on September 20, as will U.N. Secretary-General -
who is about to release the devastating report. Accomplishing the millennium
goals of eradicating hunger and disease worldwide, among other essential
and praiseworthy objectives, would rather require implementing measures
which are more effective than a meeting such as this, a shameless and
unworthy meeting behind-the-scenes. As Carlos Castresana, prosecutor for
causes of universal justice in Argentina and Chile, has pointed out, it may
ultimately be necessary to draft a big agreement for Africa along the lines of
the ‘Marshall Plan’. The U.S., China, Great Britain, France, Germany, India,
Canada and Brazil as well other countries, would play a key role in this plan
aimed at opening new markets and finding new consumers for these hungry
powers and their multinational corporations, while simultaneously benefiting
African countries – and us all in the process – in a decisive and lasting way, as
well as at least seven generations to come. Yes indeed, the law of the
boomerang is unrelenting, and all of this concerns us much more than we are
able to imagine.
Jordi Palou-Loverdos
He is an attorney accredited at the International Criminal Court and mediator
in international conflicts. He is also legal counsel at the Spanish courts for the
Spanish, Rwandan and Congolese victims and of the International Forum for
Truth and Justice in the African Great Lakes Region
www.veritasrwandaforum.org
Published in Spanish in El Plural, September 14th 2010:
