Tag: KPFA Evening News Anchor Anthony Fest

Rwandan exiles in Canada and their Canadian allies, all of whom are well-known critics of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, held a press conference earlier this week in Montreal to call on Canadian authorities to protect them from attacks by Rwandan government agents. The dissidents said they’d been warned by allies within the Rwandan government that so-called diplomats assigned to Rwanda’s embassy in Canada were actually there to intimidate or assassinate dissidents.

Potentially catastrophic military operations, authorized by the U.N. Security Council, may lie ahead soon for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The U.N. Security Council has urged the Congolese army to join U.N. combat troops from South Africa, Tanzania and Malawi in hunting down the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, a Rwandan refugee militia commonly known as the FDLR.

This weekend was the conference on Dirty Energy and Clean Solutions. ​Ironically, the conference in San Francisco came at the same time that San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee proposed to cut the entire $19 million dollar budget that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors had set aside to create a renewable power option for city residents looking for an alternative to PG&E power.

Twenty-four years after the Ugandan invasion of Rwanda in October 1990, both the history of the four-year war that followed and realities of life on the ground in Rwanda today are fiercely disputed. Claude Gatebuke survived the violence and founded the African Great Lakes Action Network (AGLAN) to promote truth and reconciliation in Rwanda and the rest of the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

This week’s mining and business headlines reported that Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler turned a nearly 30,000 percent profit by buying the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s oil rights in waters off its Atlantic Coast in 2006, then selling the same rights back to them six years later. KPFA’s Ann Garrison spoke to anti-corruption and resource theft watchdog Global Witness and filed this report.

The South Sudan Human Rights Society for Advocacy is based in both Juba and Kampala, the capitals of South Sudan and Uganda. In a statement published in the New York City-based Black Star News, they called South Sudan’s President Kiir and Uganda’s President Museveni an unholy alliance and called on the international community not to let Museveni destroy South Sudan.

Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, spoke yesterday in Bangui, the capital of the war torn Central African Republic, on the border of the northern Democratic Republic of the Congo this week. Power announced that the U.S. will spend $100 million to support the French military intervention now underway in the Central African Republic, where 1,000 people were killed on one day, Dec. 6, in the country’s capital city.

At the end of November, headlines around the world announced the Congolese Army’s defeat of the M23 militia, with the help of U.N. intervention forces. Since that time, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been under pressure from Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and his so-called mediators, and from US Envoy Russ Feingold and U.N. Envoy Mary Robinson, to sign an agreement with M23.

The Congolese army, with the help of the UN Force Intervention Brigade, decisively defeated the M23 militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s eastern Kivu Provinces this week, but many Congolese, Rwandans, and Ugandans, are asking why the Democratic Republic of the Congo is now engaged in peace talks with the M23, and not with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

Grahamstown Unemployed People’s Union spokesperson Ayanda Kota had much more to say about this tragedy and its post-apartheid South African context than we were able to report on the KPFA Evening News on Sunday, March 3, 2013. He said that the Black Consciousness Movement founded by Steve Biko, with his call for the restoration of humanity shattered by apartheid, offers the best hope of healing.

South African President Jacob Zuma, in his State of the Nation address, promised to speed the pace of land redistribution and housing construction to replace the country’s urban shantytowns, but nearly 20 years after the end of apartheid, the number of people living in shantytowns has doubled and the state violence to evict the residents has increased.

The United States says it’s ready to send surveillance drones to the Democratic Republic of Congo to help the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the African state despite the government of Rwanda’s objections from its new rotating seat on the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. also supports the plan to use drones to increase surveillance capacity in other African countries.

Ingabire returned to her native Rwanda from the Netherlands in January 2010 to stand for the presidency against incumbent President Paul Kagame, but she was not allowed to run and was imprisoned on charges of terrorism and genocide ideology. A court sentenced her to eight years, and her lawyers have filed an appeal with the Rwandan Supreme Court.