
The issue at stake is not only one of increased food insecurity, but an attack on food sovereignty or peoples’ right to produce their own food. Land grab is a violent act to take away peoples’ right to food, access to their ancestral land, their social and historical ties, and their overall right for human dignity.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is in political crisis. The Independent National Electoral Commission announced that incumbent President Joseph Kabila is the winner, with 49 percent of the vote. But his leading challenger, Étienne Tshisekedi, rejected the results and declared that he now considers himself the nation’s president.

They had machetes and guns and all kinds of weapons and they ordered us to dig our own graves. Two young men came and negotiated for us; they wouldn’t give up until the militia just got tired of negotiating and left us alone and let us go. I was 14. I felt like I was going to get chopped up into pieces. I felt like I was going to be one of those people screaming for help with no hope of getting help. But good people came to our rescue. The truth will be turned on its head by having Paul Kagame, a genocide perpetrator, speak about genocide denial and genocide prevention.

Dodd-Frank and its proponents penalize the people of eastern Congo but do little to curtail the militias and their backers. Congress should confront the real causes of the conflict, which are failed leadership and corruption in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, and predatory policies of Rwanda and Uganda, which destabilize eastern Congo while benefiting from the mineral trade.

Mathaba has learned that the African Union is intending to pull out of the United Nations Organization unless NATO stops bombing fellow AU member, Libya.

“A new report claims farmers in Africa are being driven off their lands to make way for vast new industrial farming projects backed by hedge funds seeking profits and foreign countries looking for cheap food. “

“Had the RPF not been made militarily dominant by outside support and the two presidents not been assassinated in the RPF assault for power, the ICTR evidence suggests that the Rwandan genocide would never have occurred,” concludes Professor Erlinder.

On Feb. 23, I attended a San Francisco Police Commission hearing to oppose arming the San Francisco Police with tasers as well as handguns and said, “I’m here … because the culture that we impose on other parts of the world is something we create right here.”

On Dec. 15, a French judge filed preliminary charges against six people close to Rwandan President Paul Kagame for the 1994 assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents that triggered the Rwanda Genocide. When will Obama take heed of these new French charges? How much longer will the U.S. back the regime sued on two continents and in three countries?

The health of the incarcerated chair of FDU-Inkingi, Ms. Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, is causing real fears after leaks from police sources confirmed that the opposition leader is ailing with unknown conditions due to ill treatment.

With respect to the United Nations Report officially released Oct. 1, regarding genocide against Hutus in the Congo, I think that the language used is much less important than the killing of 6 million or more and the illegal extraction of resources from the eastern Congo.

The official Oct. 1 release of the U.N. report documenting the Rwandan and Ugandan armies’ massacres of Hutus in the Congo, should be a defining moment for President Barack Obama. The Congo bill he authored as a senator, passed in 2006, forecast much of the explosive information in the report.

A long-standing code of silence inside the U.N. is coming to an end regarding what is probably the largest genocide ever since the U.N. founding: the genocide committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front since 1990 End impunity in Rwanda, a discussion with distinguished human rights champions Peter Erlinder, Juan Carrero Sarlegui and Spanish Sen. Pere [...]

The leaked U.N. report to be officially released Oct. 1 is not the first such report to have been drafted by the U.N. – nor is it the first one to be covered up. On Oct. 11, 1994, Robert Gersony of USAID reported that Kagame’s RPF army had been committing systematic massacres of the Hutu population in Rwanda starting in April 1994.

Presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire reported that her party’s treasurer, Alice Muhirwa, mother of two, fainted in a Rwandan courtroom due to untreated torture wounds inflicted by the Rwandan police. The FDU reported that Rwandan police refused to take Ms. Muhirwa to a hospital to be treated for bleeding caused by boot kicks to the stomach.

“Peter Erlinder is in need of all assistance the international organization for human rights lawyers can muster. He is in the hands of a murderous, brutal regime,” declares six-term Congress member and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney. Professor Erlinder was jailed after traveling to Rwanda to defend Victoire Ingabire, leading candidate challenging incumbent President Paul Kagame.

Violence, repression and human rights abuse continues to increase as 2010 elections approach in the East African neighbor nations of Rwanda and Burundi, whose ethnicity, politics and conflicts are closely intertwined. This week Burundi ordered Human Rights Watch’s researcher out of the country by June 5, after she published her report on political violence, “We’ll Tie You Up and Shoot You.”

When opportunity presented itself in the form of widespread warfare in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwean military leaders were quick to provide troops in exchange for permission to establish Zimbabwean corporations to exploit Congolese raw materials.

The December 2008 United Nations report is the latest in a series of U.N. reports dating from 2001 that clearly documents the systematic looting and appropriation of Congolese resources by Rwanda and Uganda, two of Washington and London’s staunchest allies in Africa.

Blacked out by a media smokescreen are the corporate executives, government officials and expatriate personnel of Western enterprises whose success amidst chaos implicates them in the deracination and death of millions of Black people.