Dear Ugandans,
I have been tuned in with bemusement, to the debate on Kyandondo North, and which faction (or is it ‘party’) stabbed the other(s) in the back during the petty struggle to position one of their own for sharing the spoils.. The acronyms that keep coming up include the following: UPC, DP, PPP, NRMO, CP, JEEMA, FDC, JF, UGP, NDF (plus Vicks Kingo!) and on and on…probably heading for the 623 of the evening of Mobutu’s Zaire , when that country was the most vibrant multiparty democracy in the world.
But the question is, where does factionalism end and where does pluralism begin? When one looks at the random harvest of Uganda’s political elite, all one sees are individuals that are exactly the same, but struggling to be different. They struggle to differ because of the narrowness of the ‘panya’ that leads to the coveted throne where some ruling clique of the day dishes out patronage, lubricated mostly unearned income that is tossed at us in form of aid.
Let us take a closer look at Uganda ’s demographics. We are just over 30 million. Of that, about 27 million, i.e., 90% are peasants. Let us take another country like France in the past. In 1789 on the eve of that country’s revolution, the French were 25 million and of that, 23 million i.e., 90% were peasants. Yes, one could argue that, that was France , and the year was 1789.. In other words: different locales, different epochs. But in socio-historical terms, Uganda 2008 = France 1789: 90% peasants and that tells a huge story about our capabilities across the board.
But of course you know that when France had the same proportion of peasants like we do now, they did not have political parties. Is it because the French were blind to the virtues of pluralism, and we, Uganda are cleverer? Is it a historical accident that when the earlier modernisers had similar demographics like Uganda ’s now they were ruled by monarchs (Mono: single person; archs: rulers)? And I am not a monarchist please….but, with our 90% peasants, the rest being – let us be honest – a lumpen bourgeoisie, a functional liberal democracy seems to be a negative dream in Uganda, as the purposeless jostling between and within our factions clearly demonstrates.
Attempting to cheat social development will not take us anywhere, because the gravity of our social reality seems to always push us towards our historical station: mediaevalism: 20, 30, 40 yrs in power like the Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Shoguns and Tudors did in their days!
Historically, political parties have always emerged as structures for forming and conveying group interests in VERTICALLY DIFFERENTIATED SOCIETIES whose structure is the outcome of the transformation engendered by the industrial and agricultural revolutions. In societies where political parties emerge, wage labourers at the base, bureaucratic elites in the middle and merchants, owners of capital, financiers, industrialists and land at the top (I am reminded here that, 70% of the land in Britain is owned by 0.7% of the population). In that kind of set up, a labourer in a factory will not give a damn about the ethnicity of a factory manager. What the wage labourer wants is a decent minimum wage, low income tax and acceptable working conditions. The head of his trade union can be any religion or lineage, as long as he is vocal enough to squeeze maximum benefits from the factory owner.
In those societies, political parties are nothing but the committees that manage the interests of those classes.. For example in Britain which colonised us, the interests of the top third are taken care of by the Conservatives, those of the middle third by the Liberal Democrats (the fence sitters) and those of the bottom third are managed by the Labour Party. Tell us: whose class interests do UPC or DP or PPP or NRM or CP or JEEMA or FDC or JF or UGP or NDF etc manage? Whose interests does Nzaana, Semuwemba, Ochieno, Wambuga, Nsubuga part I, Nsubuga Part II, Nsubuga, Adhola and…..er, L/Cpl Otto represent? Do we speak for wage labourers, landlords, financiers or what? Which class do we speak for?
Uganda now is a society that is HORIZONTALLY DIFFERENTIATED. The only groups known to the predominant ‘class’ (the 90% peasants) in Uganda are ethnicities, clans, sub clans, lineages, families, castes etc. The consciousness of the 10% (or even less) pseudo elite (one of whom you and I are) is false consciousness arising from what we see across the fence in the global north.
Now; people, when you impose the structures of interest aggregation and articulation of vertically differentiated polities onto horizontally differentiated countries like Uganda, IT IS AS IF YOU ARE FORCING A PAWPAW TREE TO GROW LIKE A PUMPKIN. That tree will either die off outright, or become a disastrous weed as it struggles to conform to alien territory: the undulating contours of that horizontal plane of pre-industrialism. The fact is that, political parties are not merely creatures of, but are an upshot of industrialism. We are not there. What political dispensation propelled the industrial, vertically differentiated polities to liberalism? It was not multipartyism!
Just like a pawpaw tree cannot grow like a pumpkin, or kalitusi can not grow like lumonde, liberal democracy cannot thrive in our mediaeval-like conditions. We may need to go back to the drawing board!…..Look at what other preindustrial countries had to do to create the infrastructure for liberal democracy.
Comments
The Hearts Of Darkness Decodes Western Media’s Racism
By Anthony Rwaga
June 29th, 2009
Shedding light on historical media demonization of Africa and it’s contemporary manifestations
It is common knowledge that the Western media, particularly the American media, have generally not had a close and respectable rapport with Africa since her historical interface with the West.
Both the print and electronic media have been the notable culprits in this regard―this is actually the case, for instance, if one considers the fact that the West had fed and continues to feed her largely gullible masses with unequal dichotomous reportage on events unfolding in a putatively incorrigible Africa on the one hand and a virginal West on the other.
Therefore, it is not surprising when these uncritically imbibed misrepresentations are encapsulated, and, consequently held up by unabashed proponents of racial purity as immutable cultural paragon against which to evaluate the collective personality of Africa as well as the cognitive competence of her children.
What is the solution? Several. Per adventure the sweat and blood spurting from the singular orifice of a conscientious journalist’s mighty pen can help asphyxiate the extreme emotionalism associated with racist drivel to its ultimate demise.
In this essay, I review Milton Allimadi’s The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa, a book many readers are already familiar with.
First, let me recall two troubling conversations I had with a white American, a master’s degree holder from Yale University, in 1997. The other was with a Philippine-American, also a graduate student majoring in mathematics at New York University, in 1999. Let’s call the former Mr. Clinton and the latter Mr. Martinez.
Both dialogues transpired while I was working as a security guard at a Nursing Home in Carpenter Avenue in the Bronx, New York:
Mr. Clinton: “What is your name, gentleman?”
Francis: “I’m Francis.”
Mr. Clinton: “But why would you be named ‘Francis’? Don’t you have an African name, sir?”
Francis: “Oh, yes, I do. It’s Yaw. In the Akan culture of West Africa a male born on Thursday is called as such. In fact, Thursday is Yawada in my language Asante-twi or Fante-twi. I believe the name ‘Yaw’ arose from a pulverization of ‘Yawada.’ My surname is also Kwarteng, anyway.”
Mr. Clinton: “Wow. This is quite interesting. Anyway, aren’t you happy the president of your country is finally released from prison, Mr. Francis?”
Francis: “How so, Mr. Clinton? Sir, may I ask who this person is, and which country you’re referring to?”
Mr. Clinton: “Oh, it’s Africa, and the president is Mr. Nelson Mandela, the erstwhile communist and terrorist.”
Francis: “Africa, a country? And the honorable Mr. Nelson Mandela, the president of this so-called country, a communist and a terrorist?”
Hell broke loose as I fixated my attention on him, making him appear suddenly jaded, blanched, and slightly jumpy. Just then, he started to take leave of me, but not before indicting the American media for his helpless stupidity:
Mr. Clinton: “It’s not me, Mr. Francis, it’s the America media.”
This is how the second conversation, with Mr. Martinez, went:
Mr. Martinez: “Good morning, sir. How’re doing this morning, and where do you come from?”
Francis: “I’m great. I’m from Ghana, West Africa. How do you feel this morning too?
Mr. Martinez: “I’m fine. Oh, so you’re from Africa? Do you know I always wanted to go to Africa?”
Francis: “Happy to hear that, and do you also know that I‘ve never been a successful clairvoyant, Mr. Martinez? Why would you want to go to Africa, Mr. Martinez, if I should ask?”
Mr. Martinez: “Well, I wanted to go there and find out if I could also play with the lions and tigers and elephants like the way native Africans do when we watch them on American TV. In any case, how long does it take to get to New York from your country?
Francis: “10 to 11 hours, direct flight, from Accra, the capital city.”
Mr. Martinez: “Wow. Isn’t this strange, Mr. Francis, 10 to 11 hours, direct flight? How far removed Africa and your country must be from America!”
Francis: “Mr. Martinez, how long does it to get to New York from the Philippines, from Manila?”
Mr. Martinez: “Oh, not that long, Mr. Francis, maybe 18 to 24 hours, direct flight. Why?”
Francis: “Not that long, you said, eh? Didn’t you just tell me a couple of minutes ago that you were a graduate student majoring in mathematics at NYU?”
Mr. Martinez: “Yes, I did, but why?”
Francis: “What is the numerical divergence of your 18 or 24 hours from my 10 or 11 hours, Mr. Martinez? Which is farther from New York, Ghana or the Philippines? You tell me. ”
The last question to him somehow catapulted him to full consciousness from his otherwise psychic somnolence. Surprisingly, he too would stare at me blandly. Then he quickly rushed to offer me the following platitudinous indictment of the American media before hastily departing:
Mr. Martinez: “Please Mr. Francis, it’s not me. It’s the American media. I plead ignorance.”
It is therefore no wonder, given the nature of these two reenacted conversations, that constantly hearing highly educated people parrot stereotypical mischaracterizations of Africa and her people make me angry and nauseous, even.
How could two brilliant elite university graduate students fall for shoddy journalism by shenanigans calling themselves journalists? Don’t such students take any course on African history in college at all?
Even if they do, don’t they possess the necessary psychological and emotional temerity needed for the independent investigation of the verity, or otherwise, of news coverage on Africa? I don’t think so. In any case, wanting to understand why so many people uncritically accept the infallibility of The New York Times and Time magazine, at least on matters relating to Africa, I ventured out on my own to trace the racist ideological lineage connecting the major American news media with political events in Africa.
The trajectory of my investigative odyssey would ultimately bring me into contact with Allimadi’s polemic The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa.
In this small volume Allimadi performs a superb sleuthing task of dredging up some of the racist reportage on Africa spanning the ’40s via the ’90s meticulously archived by the publisher of The New York Times. This is a fascinating work in that it agglutinates a broad spectrum of seemingly disparate topics into a comprehensive synthesis, with an expertise reminiscent of an authority on African historiography, race relations, and global history.
The broad sweep of Allimadi’s politico-historical analysis includes the racist language used by The New York Times’ reporters, for instance, Homer Bigart, who covered the inaugural birth of my country Ghana, with Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah as the first president; a fresh literary critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; a timely revisionist critique of Keith Richburg’s intellectually stunted and ideologically warped book Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa; the duplicity of Alex Shoumatoff and his sympathetic relationship with the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF); the tribalization of conflicts in Africa; a nonromantic revisit to some of the high points in Africa’s historical past; the evil of apartheid in South Africa; the disgraceful defeat of Mussolini‘s “formidable “ army in Ethiopia; the Mahdi’s militaristic thrashing of the British in the Sudan; a jocular and intellectual refutation of African anthropophagy; as well as the pathologizing of inferiority complexes associated with some Africans via Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask, are just a few of the effervescent mélange of items Allimadi so handsomely and so foolhardily catalogues in his book.
Allimadi also provides us with oodles of outstanding evidence for his modest claims. In fine, most of the book focuses on how news on Africa should have been reported―with The New York Times particularly in mind―during the period when the paper should have played a more positive role in Africa’s liberation struggles, rather than in her denigration, from the inseverably clenched teeth of colonialism.
Allimadi should be highly commended for a job well executed.
On a final note, I have to say that Allimadi also possesses a fabulous mastery of English, even as he subtly moves away from a geocentric focus on academic grandiloquence, as often seen in academic summae on Africa, toward prosaic simplicity.
Additionally, the complete lack of analytic denseness renders the book highly readable. It is therefore my recommendation that this well-written monograph on journalism, The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa, should be required reading in every enclave of intellectual inquiry―in which the decrepit paradigm of looking askance at Africa becomes a thing of the past and a refashioned African personality is placed in its stead.
Against this background, the cogency of Anthony’s manifold arguments and his stiff intellectualism in defense of Africa places his book on the same steric plane as Noam Chomsky’s Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies; Neil Henry’s American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media; Bernal Martin’s triumvirate volumes of Black Athena; Edward Said’s Orientalism; and Cheikh Anta Diop’s African Origin of Civilization.
But Anthony, when are you taking on the electronic media?
How do I end this review? Let me finish it off with another equally tantalizing story: Once upon a time, God was luxuriating in his bedroom after six hectic days of creation, when the clank of metals in his “creation laboratory” abutting his bedroom window unexpectedly punctured his cogitative bubble, derailing his articulated train of thought on whether he had left anything out of creation. He quickly sped past his library and entered the lab, only to find hirsute Satan on his hind legs in profuse perspiration. The following conversation ensued:
God: “What’re doing here alone by yourself, Lucifer, at this hour?”
Satan: “You…you left a whole set of race of people out of creation…and I’m here to create this miscellaneous race of human beings…I would then have to graft my evil personality on theirs since you imbued white folks’ essence with cherubic vitality…I would also make them cannibals, savages, tribesmen and tribeswomen, warmongers, intellectually inferior to whites, nymphomaniacs…make then evolve from monkeys if possible…make them kleptomaniacs, stateless, indolent, and so on.”
God: “What race of people do you have in mind then?”
Satan: “Black people…Black Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-Brazilians…Sub-Saharan Africans…Negroes…Niggers…I mean Black people, your honor?”
God: “I should have seen this event coming…Oh, yes, I read this prediction somewhere…I wish I could remember exactly where and stopped you before advancing to this stage.”
Satan: “But you’re God…aren’t you? And omniscient? And you can’t even recall where you got this information?”
God: “Oh, yes, I remember now…it’s the American media!”
Satan: “Are you surprised by this? If you don’t care to know the American media’s support of my ambition to create this degenerate race have been unwavering…lest I forget to also tell you this…I picked up this very idea from them in the first place.”
God: “The American media?”
Satan: “Oh, yes, the American media…ha…ha…ha…ha…you did just tell me this, didn’t you, Almighty God, that you got this info from the American media?”
God: “To tell you the truth, Mr. Lucifer, the chapter on such racist nonsense will surely come to pass with the publication of Allimadi’s The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa that should usher in a new era of journalistic fairness and intellectual positivism, especially where Africa is concerned.”
The Hidden Story Behind Rwanda’s Tragedy
By Anthony Rwaga
July 5th, 2009
Former President Clinton–the Rwanda calamity occured under his watch and former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Ghali said the U.S. was “one hundred” percent responsible
[ Africa Mass Killings]
Rwanda before 1990 was considered the Switzerland of Africa, a model of social development.
The result of the 1959 social revolution that deposed the Tutsi monarchy and aristocracy and freed the majority Hutu population from serfdom and a lifetime of humiliation was the establishment of a collective society in which both Hutus, and Tutsis as well as Twas lived together in relative harmony.
Tutsis were members of the government, its administration, present in large numbers in the education system, the judiciary and controlled most of the large private commercial companies in Rwanda.
The Rwandan army was a multiethnic army composed of both Hutus and Tutsis and it stayed a multiethnic force even when the Rwandan Army was forced by the invaders from Uganda to retreat into the Congo forest in July 1994 because it ran out of ammunition due to the Western embargo on arms and supplies.
Rwanda descended into chaos in 1990 when the self-described Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) forces launched a surprise attack on October 1, 1990 from Uganda. In fact, every one of the men and officers of that invasion force were members of the Ugandan national Army.
It was an invasion by Uganda disguised as an independent force of “liberation”. Liberation from what, has never been stated.
Initially the justification put out by the RPF was that of attaining the return of Tutsi “refugees” from Uganda to Rwanda. However, that problem had been resolved by an agreement between the RPF, Uganda, Rwanda, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the OAU a few weeks earlier. The Rwandan government had agreed to the return of all those Tutsis in Uganda who wanted to return to Rwanda.
That accord required that Tutsi representatives of the refugees travel to Kigali for a meeting to determine the mechanics of that population movement, and how to accommodate all those people in a small country. They were expected at the end of September 1990. They never arrived.
Instead of civilians returning in peace, Rwanda was viciously attacked on October 1, 1990 by a force that unleashed unbridled savagery. During that invasion the RPF forces of the Ugandan Army slaughtered everyone in their path, Hutu or Tutsi. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the majority Hutu, were butchered. These crimes have never been accounted for.
The RPF’s favorite method was the bayonet or knife with which they disembowelled men and women or to tied their hands behind their backs and smashed their skulls with hoes, the farm tool iconic of the Hutu peasantry.
After several weeks of intense fighting, the RPF forces were destroyed by the small Rwandan Army and the remnants fled, on US instructions, back into Uganda to regroup and reorganize.
The RPF still never justified this aggression and the needless slaughter of civilians in a peaceful country. Individual Tutsis had always been allowed to return to Rwanda from the early 1960s and several times the Rwandan government invited them all to return. However the Tutsi aristocracy, jealous of its lost power and which viewed the Hutus as nothing but subhuman, refused to return unless their absolute power was restored. This the people of Rwanda, even the Tutsis who remained in the country, refused.
In the 1960s and early 1970s various Tutsi groups in Uganda and elsewhere had organized terrorist raids into Rwanda in which they murdered without pity anyone they caught. These raids were repelled by Rwanda’s tiny armed forces. The years that followed were a period of development and peace for Rwandans. Even though one of the smallest and poorest countries in the world it had the best road system, healthcare, and education systems in Africa. Until the late 1980s it prospered and received help from both the socialist countries of the USSR, North Korea and China and West Germany, France and Israel and others.
Some Tutsis in Uganda became involved in the civil wars there between the socialist Milton Obote and the US- and UK puppet Yoweri K. Museveni who was supported by the West to get rid of socialism in Uganda. By 1990 Tutsis composed a large section of the Ugandan Army and all the senior officers of the RPF were high officers in the Ugandan Army, the National Resistance Army. Paul Kagame himself was one of the highest-ranking officers in the intelligence services of the Ugandan army and was notorious for enjoying torturing prisoners.
Rwanda until 1990 was a one party socialist state. The ruling party the National Movement For revolutionary Development (MRND) was not considered a party as such but rather a social movement in which everyone in society took part through local elections and the mechanism of consensus much like the system in Cuba.
The fall of the Soviet Union led to pressure from the West, notably the United States and France to dismantle the one party state system and permit multiparty democracy.
The President, Juvenal Habyarimana, instead of resisting, agreed to a change in the constitution and in 1991 Rwanda became a multiparty democracy. The fact the Rwandan government did this in the middle of a war is more than remarkable. It was also an offer of peace. The RPF, since its abject failure in 1990, had changed its strategy from a frontal assault to the tactics of terrorism.
The RPF likes to refer to this phase as the guerrilla. However, it was not the guerrilla of a liberation struggle like the FLMN in Vietnam or the FARC in Colombia. It was instead a mirror image of the Contras campaign of terrorism conducted against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Its purpose was not to make revolution. Its purpose was to overthrow the 1959 revolution. And, like the contras, the RPF was supported by the United States.
This was clear from the beginning of the war.
When the RPF launched their attack, President Juvenal Habyarimana was in Washington, lured out of the way, by the State Department. The evidence that the US was aware of and supported the October surprise attack was the US Administration’s offer to Habyarimana of asylum in the United States if he surrendered power to the RPF.
Habyarimana refused and immediately flew back home. There was no condemnation of the Ugandan-RPF aggression by the United States, a matter which France raised at the United Nations, or any of its allies despite the big noise they made at the same time about the advance of Iraqi forces into Kuwait. Further, the Rwanda ambassador to the UN, then on the Security Council, filed a protest in the Security Council but the US had it taken off the agenda.
In fact the US and its allies supported the aggression against Rwanda from the beginning and US Special Forces operated with the RPF from the beginning. Recently, while former president Bill Clinton was in Toronto, he denied any involvement in Rwanda–this is one of the big lies of the century. Clinton and George W. Bush are up to their necks in the blood of the Rwandan and Congolese people.
With the arrival of multiparty democracy in 1991, the RPF took full advantage and created several front parties to take away support from the popular MRND. These parties though claiming to represent different political views in fact were, in the main front parties for the RPF.
The press was expanded and many of the new papers were financed by and acted as mouthpieces for the RPF. At the same time as these parties sprang up, criticizing the government, the RPF continued its terror campaign: planting mines on roads that killed Hutu and Tutsi alike; assassinating politicians and officials; and, blaming it, with the help of various NGOs funded by western intelligence agencies, on the government.
In 1992 a coalition government was formed with the RPF or its front parties seizing control of key ministries and appointing the prime minister. Through these agents they also controlled the civilian intelligence services that they then began to dismantle. The RPF engaged in a “talk and fight” strategy. Always agreeing to a ceasefire, pressing for more power, then launching new attacks on civilians. The most egregious was their breaking of the ceasefire and their major offensive in February 1993 in which they seized the major town of Ruhengeri in the process murdering 40,000 civilians most of them Hutu.
The Rwandan Army, even though hamstrung by the civilian ministries that were controlled by the RPF, managed to drive the RPF back. Finally in August 1993 the Arusha Accords were signed under pressure from the United States and its allies in which the RPF obtained major concessions in return to the formation of a broad-based transition government to be followed by general elections.
However, they knew they could not win such elections as the RPF was not only unpopular with the majority Hutu population it did not even enjoy the support of many internal Tutsis whose lives and businesses had been destroyed by the war they did not see a need for.
Instead of preparing for elections the RPF prepared for their final offensive. As far back as December 1993, UN reports document the massive build-up of men and weapons coming in from Uganda. The UN force that was deployed supposedly to ensure a peaceful transition; in fact, it was a cover for the US and its allies to assist in this build up.
General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the UN force hid this build up from the Rwandan army and the President. The build-up was accompanied by death threats against the president.
According to an account of Habyarimana’s last conversation with president Mobutu Sese Seko of what was then Zaire, just two days before he was murdered, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman Cohen had, in October 1993, told Habyarimana, that unless he ceded all power to the RPF they were going to kill him and drag his body through the streets.
These threats were punctuated by the murder of the first Hutu president of neighboring Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, by Tutsi officers in October 1993 in which Kagame and the RPF also had a hand; the officers who committed the murder, including Lieutenant Paul Kamana, later fled to Uganda. Ndadaye was in office a mere four months, having won the country’s first free elections. In the aftermath of that murder 250,000 Hutus were massacred by the Tutsi army of Burundi and hundreds of thousands of Hutus fled to Rwanda.
The result of the 1993 offensive was that one million Hutus fled the terror of the RPF in northern Rwanda towards the capital, Kigali, so that by April 1994 over a million refugees were encamped close to the capital and hundreds thousands more in camps in the south all fleeing RPF terror.
The RPF did all it could in 1994 to paralyse the functioning of the government, to exacerbate racial tensions, and prepare for war.
Then on April 6, 1994 they launched their final surprise attack by shooting down the presidential plane returning from a meeting in Tanzania that Uganda’s Museveni had arranged. In fact it is known that Museveni’s half-brother general Salim Saleh was at the final meeting at which the date for the shoot down was agreed.
The missile attack killed Habyarimana, as well as Burundi’s new Hutu president Cyprien Ntayamire, and Rwanda’s military chief of staff, and others on board. This was the first massacre of 1994 and it was a massacre of Hutus by the RPF.
The RPF then immediately launched attacks across Kigali and the north of the country. In the sector of Kigali known as Remera they killed everyone on the night of the 6th and the 7th, wiped out the Gendarme camp there, wiped out the military police camp at Kami and launched a major attack against Camp Kanombe, Camp Kigali and the main gendarme camp at Kacyriu.
The Rwandan government and army called for a ceasefire the same night and next day. The RPF rejected the call. The Rwandan government asked for more UN help to control the situation. Instead, the US arranged that the main UN force be pulled out while flying in men and supplies to the RPF using C130 Hercules aircraft.
The Rwandan Army, short of ammunition and unable to contain the RPF advances even offered an unconditional surrender on April 12th. The RPF rejected even this offer and instead shelled the Nyacyonga refugee camp where the one million Hutu refugees were located provoking their flight into the capital.
The effect of one million people flooding into a small city that itself was under bombardment cannot be described. The RPF used this flood of people to infiltrate its men behind army lines. This created panic among the Hutu population that began killing anyone they did not recognize. It was clear that the RPF was not interested in saving lives, even Tutsis, but in seizing total power and did not want to negotiate at all.
The late Dr. Alison Des Forges, the American who was considered a noted scholar on Rwanda, in her testimony in the Military II trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 2006 testified that the RPF claim that they attacked to stop a “genocide” was a myth; just propaganda to justify their attempt to seize power by force of arms.
She also testified that the Rwandan government did not plan and execute genocide. This accords with the testimony of General Dallaire who also confirmed an earlier statement that there was no planned genocide by the government as did the deputy head of Belgian Army intelligence, Col. Vincent, who also testified at the ICTR that the idea of a genocide was a fantasy.
The fighting in Kigali was intense. UN officers –confirming what has been said by Rwandan and RPF officers who have testified— state that the RPF was launching hundreds of Katyusha rockets every hour round the clock while the Rwandan Army ran out of hand grenades in the first few days and was reduced to fighting the RPF with hand made explosives.
The vaunted RPF could not take Kigali. The siege of Kigali lasted three months and only ended when the Rwandan Army literally ran out of ammunition and ordered a general retreat into the Congo forest.
RPF officers have stated that the RPF killed up to two million Hutus in those 12 weeks in a deliberate campaign to eliminate the Hutu population. The Akagera River, the length of which was under RPF control throughout, ran red with the blood of the Hutus massacred on its banks.
The RPF claimed these were Tutsis but there were no Tutsis in that area and only the RPF had access to that area. Robert Gersony, of USAID in a report to the UNHCR in October 1994, filed as an exhibit at the ICTR, stated that the RFP carried out a systematic and planned massacre of the Hutu population. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gersony
As the Rwandan Army, including Tutsi officers within that army and men retreated into the Congo forest, the Hutu population, in fear for their lives fled with them in their millions. In local villages, Hutu neighbours attacked Tutsis in revenge for the murder of Hutus or fearing death at their hands. Tutsis also attacked Hutus. It was total war just as the RPF wished. The RPF later pursued the Hutus through the Congo forest between 1996 to 1998 and killed hundreds of thousands and possibly millions. They were shelled, machine gunned, raped, cut to pieces with knives. Accounts of that trek are difficult to bear.
The RPF was assisted in its offensive by the United States. The UN Rwanda Emergency office in Nairobi was in fact manned by US Army officers and acted as the operational headquarters of the RPF and gave them intelligence on Rwandan Army movements and actions and directions.
Prudence Bushnell the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs telephoned the Rwandan Army chief of staff in May 1994 and told him that unless he surrendered he must know that he was fighting the United States of America and would be defeated. US Special Forces fought with the RPF. There is also evidence that Belgian forces of the UN were involved as an intercepted radio message from Kagame to his forces in the field refers to the help they had received from the Belgians.
There is also evidence that Canadian forces were also involved and Atoine Nyetera a Tutsi prince, who was in Kigali in that period testified for the defense in the Military II trial and stated that not only were there no massacres committed against Tutsis by the Rwandan Army but that it was the RPF that began the massacres after they took Kigali and began killing Hutus.
Nyetera testified that despite the claim by the RPF of being a Tutsi liberation group, when he saw their long columns enter the capital he saw that most of them were Sudanese, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Tanzanians and others speaking Swahili or Sudanese languages, in other words, mercenaries.
Several RPF officers have testified at the ICTR and stated that they fled the Kagame regime as they had been promised that they fought for liberation of the Tutsis. However, when they wanted to take over the streets of Kigali to stop reprisals against Tutsis by Hutu civilians the junior officers were forbidden to do so, putting the lie to Kagame’s claim that he attacked to save Tutsis.
These officers testified that Kagame wanted deaths to justify his war. The RPF could have controlled large parts of Kigali as they had at least 15,000 men in or near the capital opposed to 5,000 Rwandan Army forces. Instead Kagame used his men to ethnically cleanse the rest of the country of the Hutu population.
The Rwanda War was a total war. All means were used to destroy that country and the Hutu people. The ultimate objective, the resources of the Congo. The US agreed to support the RPF in return for the RPF acting as a US proxy force to invade the Congo and seize its resources.
The US now has several military bases in Rwanda and the country is nothing more than a US and UK colony run by thugs who keep control of the majority of the people by intimidation, murder and disinformation.
None of this could have happened if those in the UN such as Kofi Anan, then in charge of the Department of peacekeeping operations, had done his job. None of this could have happened without the connivance of the NATO
countries and Uganda, from where the invasion was launched.
Ultimately, the prime responsibility rests with the United States of America and in particular the regimes of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and now President Barack Obama. As Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then UN Secretary General, stated to Canadian historian Robin Philpot in 2004: “The United States is one hundred percent responsible for what happened in Rwanda.”