Genocide In Africa: Exposing Ban Ki-Moon’s And Ocampo’s Coverups

Now, finally, comes the official United Nations report. Will justice prevail? Will the UN call for a Special Tribunal to try the perpetrators of the war crimes? Will Uganda’s role in launching the 1990 invasion also be examined? And what about the U.S. role during the Clinton Administration?

[Publisher’s Commentary]

If any two individuals deserve indictments in connection with war crimes, then they are Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General and Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Others on the list –and if the current trend continues they may get their just dues– include Uganda’s Gen. Yoweri K. Museveni and Rwanda’s General Paul Kagame. Former President Bill Clinton is also a stellar candidate.

Secretary Ban and the ICC’s Ocampo are both guilty of an appalling miscarriage and obstruction of justice for their role in tampering with evidence and potentially blocking the criminal prosecution of two architects of genocide in Central Africa, Gen. Museveni and Gen. Kagame.

Ban Ki-moon recently traveled to Rwanda and met with Kagame, who had just conducted sham elections and had been proclaimed president for a fresh 7-year term to appeal that Kagame rescind his threat to withdraw Rwandan troops from a peacekeeping mission in Sudan’s Darfur region in retaliation for the impending damning UN report showing his troops’ role in genocide.

It is believed that in return the Secretary General promised to shelve the UN report, subsequently published Oct. 1, by not referring it for judicial action. The report confirmed what many people have known for years– that the Kagame-led Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) committed genocide against Hutus who had fled to what was then Zaire, after Kagame seized power in Rwanda in 1994.

Secretary Ban was following the lead of chief ICC prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo, an accused rapist, who should not even be holding that office and has engaged in coverups benefitting Gen. Museveni.

In 2005, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ruled that Uganda’s army and its allied militias had committed what amounted to war crimes in the Congo, including massacres, mass rapes, razing of homes and theft of natural resources. The ICJ awarded $10 billion in compensation to the Congo for Uganda’s war crimes. Thereafter, Congo’s President Joseph Kabila referred the case to the ICC, which, had it acted on the same evidence as the ICJ, would have prosecuted several of Uganda’s military commanders, including Gen. Museveni.

Ocampo has been sitting on the action for years. Certainly Gen. Museveni knew it was a serious matter and The Wall Street Journal reported on June 8, 2006 that he had begged then Secretary General Kofi Annan to block an ICC investigation.

Apparently, Museveni’s plea fell on Ocampo’s sympathetic ears. That a man who first made his name as a hero prosecuting and successfully convicting genocidal war criminals in Argentina should now cover-up for a war criminal of the same ilk in Africa is mind-boggling.

Now Secretary Ban is playing the same role for Rwanda, presumably with the support of the United States. The UN report implicating Kagame’s troops was officially published last Friday. For weeks there had been speculation that the UN might delete any references to “genocide” and succumb to Kagame’s blackmail that he would pull troops from Darfur.

Not surprisingly, Uganda through its foreign affairs minister Sam Kutesa had also announced that it would consider pulling troops from Somalia if the UN released the report, which, not surprisingly in light of the ICJ finding, also implicates Ugandan troops in Congo crimes.

Why would the United Nations and the United States consider covering up crimes of genocide, even if the victims were Africans, a people whose lives are not regarded as valid currency in many quarters?

Is it really only about protecting Kagame and Museveni, both responsible for the deaths of millions of Africans? Or is it more about shielding the role of the United States in the Central African genocide?

Indeed, this is the angle that has yet to be adequately explored. We have dealt with it in previous commentary and there are other media sources that have touched upon it.

Rwanda erupted in mass and uncontrollable blood letting on April 6, 1994, after its president Juvenal Habyarimana was assassinated. His plane, with its French crew, was shot down by missiles, which The New York Times has reported was linked to a shipment sent to Uganda; it’s believed Uganda supplied them to Kagame’s RPF.

Cyprien Ntaryamira, Burundi’s Hutu president who was accompanying Habayarimana, also died in the crash.

Yet, the path towards the 1994 massacres was paved on October 1, 1990, when Uganda launched a war of aggression against Rwanda and occupied its territory. Units of the Ugandan army carried out the invasion; after seizing territory in Rwanda, these units, farcically, became the “Rwanda Patriotic Front.” In fact, these units were comprised mostly of soldiers of Rwandan and ethnic Tutsi origin who had taken up residence in Uganda.

A senior Ugandan military officer of Rwandan origin, Gen. Fred Rwigyema, led the 1990 invasion. When he was killed early in the invasion, Museveni summoned Kagame, then chief of Uganda’s Military intelligence, to take command.

Kagame at the time was being trained at the United States military academy at the U.S. Army Command and Staff College (CGSC) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He abandoned the training, returned to Uganda and took charge of the war of aggression.

When the French government tried to bring the matter up for discussion at the UN Security Council, it was blocked by the United States. This was clear evidence that the United States wanted the war to proceed; Museveni had convinced Bill Clinton that if French influence could be displaced from the region, the mineral wealth in neighboring Congo, a country then comatose under Mobutu, would become available to U.S. interests.

Clearly, Uganda was guilty of launching a war of aggression, and contributed directly to all the attendant calamities and suffering that befell Rwanda and its citizens; further still, the United States also shares culpability.

From 1990 to 1994, with the acquiescence of the United States, Gen. Museveni continued to arm, advise and finance the RPF, which had offices based in Uganda as well as in the territory it had seized inside Rwanda; it was actually a case of Uganda supplying its regular army on loan to Kagame.

The swift downfall of Rwanda’s President Habyarimana was only delayed when French and Congolese forces bolstered his army during the initial stages of the war. Later, many Western newspapers started referring to a “civil war” when it was in fact a war of aggression from a neighboring country backed by a superpower, the United States.

Thereafter, a war of attrition ensued for years. During this period Kagame recruited and built up his army. News clips document the atrocities Kagame’s RPF committed during that period; and even more violent retributions against ethnic Tutsis by Habyarimana’s regime followed.

At the same time, the International community half-heartedly sponsored peace talks. A power sharing arrangement was concluded, with a call for elections.

Meanwhile, the RPF and its Ugandan sponsor, Gen. Museveni, realized that elections would negate the fruits that had been attained through warfare, terror, and destruction. Hutus comprised almost 90% of the population in Rwanda and any candidate on the Kagame and Museveni-sponsored ticket would be defeated. The aggressors would be exposed.

Kagame and Museveni had to explore a game-changing option.

So on April 6, 1994, the presidential plane carrying Habyarimana was shot from the sky as it prepared to land in Kigali. According to a New York Times article, parts of the missiles found later matched the series that had been provided to Uganda, who then supplied them to the RPF. Indeed, years later, in 2006 a highly respected French prosecutor Jean-Louis Bruguière indicted Kagame in connection with the assassination of Habyarimana.

The recent UN report –despite attempts at a cover-up by Secretary Ban– merely tightens the noose around Gen. Kagame, and by extension, Gen. Museveni. The American players have yet to be clearly identified, but certainly any fair review should look at the roles of then President Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

What resulted from the murder of Habyarimana is well documented. The images of the victims of the mass killings –many chopped to pieces with machetes– were beamed throughout the world. Human beings everywhere wanted someone to halt the abominable bloodletting.

The killings continued as the Museveni-backed RPF, under Kagame, routed the demoralized and discredited Rwandan army, which was in utter disarray after the murder of its commander in chief Habyarimana. After the RPF seized power, Kagame was hailed as a hero. Machiavelli himself would have nodded approvingly; the engineers of the war of aggression against Rwanda and the architects of genocide through the assassination of Habyarimana had prevailed.

Subsequently, the looming elections, which had already been agreed on –and which would have exposed and nullified the RPF– were suddenly of no importance.

Rwanda has never had a democratic election since the RPF seized power, and in the decades before the RPF victory there were also no democratic elections, except at independence.

After Habyarimana was assassinated, a sea of humanity, comprising millions of Hutu civilians, fled towards and then into Congo, following the routed Habyarimana army.

Eventually, Kagame’s RPF entered Congo in hot pursuit. The RPF continued the atrocities that it had committed during the four-year period prior to when it seized power in 1994. The United Nations documented the massacres. The United States, under Clinton –whom some people believe deserves to be hauled away as an accessory to the war crimes in Rwanda– blocked the release of the 1994 report, which forms the basis of the report issued last week.

After all, how would it look if it was revealed that the U.S. had trained Kagame; and that the U.S. had blocked France’s attempts to have the Security Council debate Uganda’s war of aggression in the early 1990s; and, that the U.S. had continued to equip Uganda’s army and train more Ugandan officers when one of the trainees commanded an invasion against a neighboring country?

Consequently, the fiction that Kagame and the RPF had “rescued” Rwanda and “ended the genocide” began to be disseminated all over the world by U.S. officials and by pliant –or even co-opted media– including the BBC, The New York Times, and The New Yorker magazine. Reporters such as the Times’ Donatella Lorch and the New Yorker’s Phillip Gourevitch were principle mouthpieces of this fairy tale about an angelic and heroic Kagame and the RPF.

Silence followed. Hutu opposition was muted; even moderate Tutsis were sidelined. What was the use of shouting out when Kagame had the backing of the world’s single remaining superpower?

Years later, Clinton was able to travel to Rwanda and shed crocodile tears. In fact, he must have known, or should have known, that Uganda’s war of aggression against ethnically volatile Rwanda might spark the kind of mass murders the world witnessed in 1994.

Kagame ruled with an iron fist. Whenever he was questioned, his retort was: Where was the rest of the world when we suffered genocide? He used the genocide card conveniently. It was quite a perverted strategy, considering that he and Museveni were the prime architects.

Kagame’s most recent sham elections were in August. He “won” by 93%. Leading up to the election, a prominent opposition figure was beheaded, and a major candidate, whom many believe would have won, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, was placed under house arrest –under “genocide denial” charges, and prevented from registering and campaigning; several other opposition parties were also disqualified and blocked from participating in the elections.

Now, finally, comes the official United Nations report. Will justice prevail? Will the UN call for a Special Tribunal to try the perpetrators of the war crimes? Will Uganda’s role in launching the 1990 invasion also be examined? And what about the U.S. role during the Clinton Administration?

The court of international public opinion must be heard demanding for justice and accountability, so that charlatans like Ocampo and Secretary General Ban can be prevented from committing a travesty.

Read the full report here.

[Full URL: http://www.scribd.com/doc/38542370/Drc-Mapping-Report-Eng-10-08-26-Final-a4#about]

“Speaking Truth To Empower.”

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