Tag: Rwandan Patriotic Army

On Feb. 12, 2018, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported that there were 4.49 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 630,500 refugees in neighboring countries. The IDP population had nearly doubled in the previous year alone, mainly as a result of clashes and armed attacks. This week I spoke to Swiss Congolese historian and activist Bénédicte Kumbi Ndjoko about recent developments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Twenty-two years ago, on April 22, 1995, Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Army massacred between 4,000 and 8,000 Hutu men, women and children at the Kibeho Camp for internal refugees in southern Rwanda. I spoke to Rene Mugenzi, a Rwandan refugee, British citizen and human rights activist, who continues to seek acknowledgment and indictment for the crimes against humanity and, arguably, genocide committed at Kibeho in 1995.

This week marked the 20th anniversary of the 1995 Kibeho Massacre in Southwestern Rwanda, where an estimated 8,000 Rwandan Hutu people were killed by Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Army. The same number of people were killed in Bosnia, also in 1995. Professor Ed Herman explains the politics of genocide manifest in media coverage of the 1995 massacres in Kibeho and Srebrenica.

On April 22, 1995, 4,000 to 8,000 Rwandan Hutu people, maybe more, were massacred at the Kibeho Camp for Internally Displaced Persons in Southwestern Rwanda. The Kibeho massacre is one of many committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army in Rwanda and DR Congo, but it is one of the most shocking because it was witnessed by U.N. Peacekeepers and well documented by at least two photographers, but no one was ever prosecuted for the crime.

The U.K. Foreign Office called on the Rwandan government to lift the ban on its BBC broadcast in Rwandans' native language. The government banned the native language broadcast after the BBC broadcast “Rwanda’s Untold Story,” a documentary which upends conventional belief about the Rwandan massacres of 1994.

A Rwandan witness for a French court investigating the assassination of two African presidents, Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, in 1994 has gone missing and is reported to have been kidnapped in Nairobi, Kenya. The witness, Emile Gafirita, is a former bodyguard to Rwandan President Paul Kagame. KPFA’s Ann Garrison has the story.

Gen. Paul Kagame ordered the shooting down of the plane in which President Habyarimana and President Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, French citizens, and all others on board were killed on April 6, 1994. This assassination triggered the genocide. Since then President Kagame has imposed a reign of terror to keep himself and the ruling party in absolute power.

On Oct. 3, 2013, the U.S. State Department announced sanctions against Rwanda because of its support of the M23 militia that uses child soldiers in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Rwandan President Paul Kagame has used child soldiers known as Kadogo ever since he invaded Rwanda from Uganda with his refugee Rwandan Patriotic Army in 1990, beginning what came to be known as the Rwandan Civil War.

A U.N. report says that the USA’s conflict minerals legislation, Section 1502 of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, is increasing rather than decreasing criminality and conflict in the Congo and that Bosco Ntaganda is now in control of minerals smuggling from the Congo into Rwanda.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame will be traveling to Sacramento to give a keynote speech at a conference on genocide. Many leading scholars, human rights investigators, genocide survivors and now Kagame’s own former Chief of Staff Theogene Rudasingwa hold him most responsible for the Rwanda Genocide of the 1990s, for the ensuing Congo Wars and Congo conflict, and for the plunder of Eastern Congo’s vast natural resource wealth.Join the protest Thursday, Nov. 3, 9 a.m., outside the Redwood Room, Sacramento State University campus, 6000 J St., Sacramento.

On Aug. 29, Barack Obama’s State Department filed a request for immunity for Rwandan President Paul Kagame in the civil lawsuit Habyarimana vs. Kagame, which alleges Kagame’s guilt in the Rwanda Genocide and Congo wars and demands damages for the widows of assassinated Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira.

The 2010 U.N. Mapping Exercise Report, U.N. Prosecutor Del Ponte’s 2009 exposé of Rwandan Patriotic Front crimes, and the 2008 Spanish genocide indictment of President Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front tell the real story.

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.

The U.N. report on human rights abuse, including genocide, in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been explosive in the international community, but it simply confirms what has long been a “Pucinella” secret that many knew but pretended not to know. So many atrocities were committed that they could not be concealed forever.

Sen. Barbara Boxer co-sponsored the LRA Disarmament Act, even though it strengthens the hand of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, whose human rights record includes not only war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, but also the criminalization of homosexuality, with a penalty of 14 years to life.

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.

An explosive 545-page U.N. report leaked by the French newspaper Le Monde accuses the Rwandan Patriotic Army of Rwandan President and General Paul Kagame of the massacres of Rwandan Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutus in what some are already calling “the Congo Genocide.”

The recent UNHCR Gimme Shelter campaign uses the iconic Rolling Stones song and Hollywood star Ben Affleck's video of suffering in Congo as a propaganda tool to peddle the international catastrophe of Western aid, intervention, plunder and depopulation in Central Africa.