Tag: Rwandan President Paul Kagame

Friends of the Congo’s Executive Director Maurice Carney told KPFA that the U.N. Combat Intervention Brigade is really just the U.S., U.K., and other Western powers’ excuse for continuing to support African dictators – Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Congo’s Joseph Kabila. All three, he says, collaborate with foreign interests to drain Congo of its vast resource wealth.

The European Parliament adopted a resolution this week calling for a fair trial for Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire, whose case is now being heard by the Rwandan Supreme Court. Ingabire has been behind bars in Rwanda’s capital Kigali since 2010, the year she attempted to run for the presidency against Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

On Thursday this week, in a performance that raised eyebrows and caused teeth gnashing among Congolese peace and justice activists, movie actress Angelina Jolie thanked the G8 summit of the world's eight wealthiest nations for their effort to end sexual violence in war. KPFA’s Ann Garrison has the story.

On Monday, March 18, major news outlets all over the world reported East African warlord Gen. Bosco Ntaganda had crossed the border from DR Congo into Rwanda and “surrendered” at the U.S. Embassy in Kigali. Rwandan American law professor Charles Kambanda spoke to KPFA about Ntaganda and why the story of his surrender is thoroughly implausible.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame will speak at the University of Hartford, Connecticut’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies to mark the launch of its “Genocide and Holocaust Education Initiative,” despite scholars, journalists and protestors all over the world, and nearly 20 years of U.N. reports accusing Kagame himself of genocide and mass atrocities in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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.

The Obama administration was on the defensive about the U.S. relationship with Rwanda and its U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice at the Dec. 11, 2012, U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Two days after the hearing, Rice withdrew her name from consideration to become secretary of state. In President Obama’s statement on Susan Rice, issued the same day, he praised her work but did not mention Rwanda, Uganda or Congo.

The International Development Committee of the British Parliament’s House of Commons has announced that it will examine the controversial decision to disburse budget support to the government of Rwanda after first withholding it in response to U.N. investigators’ reports that Rwanda is behind the M23 militia fighting and seizing territory in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Imprisoned Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire and her supporters await a Kigali court’s verdict in her case this coming Friday, Sept. 7. Ingabire has been in prison for nearly two years, charged with giving financial support to a terrorist group, planning to cause state insecurity, and divisionism, a violation of Rwanda’s “genocide ideology” statute.

On Aug. 17, Rwandans, Congolese and international criminal attorney Christopher Black delivered a complaint and documentary evidence to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, calling for Rwandan President Paul Kagame to be investigated for war crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Cholera has broken out in the internally displaced persons camps growing again in eastern Congo, as Congolese people flee the war which, with backing from the Kagame regime in Kigali, Rwanda, resumed in April. The cholera outbreak has sparked fears of an epidemic. Now drenching rain is adding to the refugees’ misery. U.S. Special Forces are in the region, but not to hunt for Joseph Kony. It’s a military operation to secure oil and other African resources and limit Chinese access.

In July 2010, Victoire Ingabire told Womens’ International News Gathering Service that the warring that followed refugees from Rwanda into eastern Congo must be brought to an end with dialogue, not invasion: “The stumbling block is the refugees issue,” she says.

On May 12, Sonoma State University awarded honorary doctorates in humane letters to former Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill and his wife Joan, paid for with a $12 million “donation.” On the same day, William Penn University awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters to Rwandan President Paul Kagame, despite his army’s atrocities in Rwanda and Congo.

Many journalists have been convicted of the same speech crimes that presidential contender Victoire Ingabire is accused of: disagreeing with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his regime, also known as “divisionism,” and disagreeing with the constitutionally codified history of the Rwanda Genocide, known as “genocide ideology.”

Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire is spending her second Christmas in Rwanda’s maximum security prison. Her ongoing trial, on charges of terrorism and genocide ideology, has implications not only for Rwanda, but also for the entire Great Lakes Region of Africa – most of all, for the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Victoire Ingabire left Rwanda almost two years ago in January 2010 to return to her native Rwanda in hopes of challenging Rwandan President Paul Kagame in the country’s 2010 presidential election. Her party was not allowed to register, she was not allowed to run, and she has spent the last year not as the president of Rwanda, but as a prisoner in Kigali’s 1930 maximum security prison.

We believe it is fundamentally inadvisable to collaborate with the current Rwandan government, given its grave human rights violations record and overt curtailment of political freedoms in Rwanda. If you move forward, we request that CMU promote democratic space and respect for human rights in the region.

The Kagame regime knows about these minerals that have been entering Rwanda illegally for all these years. We’re happy they gave a little back, but they never should have invaded and occupied the eastern Congo in the first place, so there should be no points given for having emptied the cookie jar and then giving back one of the cookies.

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.