Rwanda’s sole hero Paul Kagame “won” the 4 August election by 99%. Emboldened by his Western benefactors and cheerleaders, Kagame rules with reckless intransigence and impunity. He has conveniently forgotten that the civil wars of 1959 and 1990s were about the exclusion of whole ethnic groups from state power. The dream of freedom and peace remains distant for Rwandans.
Despite Kagame’s totalitarian regime being infamous for horrendous human rights abuses inside the country and in DR Congo, Rwanda is now a member of the UN Human Rights Council. Rwanda has signaled that it will use its seat to defend its friend, the colonial state of Israel.
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. UN human rights monitors, photojournalists, and UN peacekeepers all witnessed the massacre but neither Kagame nor any of his officers have ever been indicted for the crime in international courts.
Unity in Rwanda is part of a rehearsed consensus. The government has established a monopoly over the country’s history, to the extent that alternative histories cannot be articulated. Debate about the past is actively policed. The regime’s authoritarian approach has prevented the emergence of potentially more complex identities from below that could form the basis for more inclusive forms of citizenship.
Tagged under Governance RWanda Patriotic Front, Rwanda Genocide, Rwanda divisionism, Paul Kagame
Dr. Munyakazi is dangerous to Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who justifies his ruthless totalitarian regime by claiming to be the savior who stopped a genocide. He is also dangerous to the Holocaust and genocide industries, whose false equation of the Holocaust and the Rwandan massacres is at the ideological foundation of “humanitarian” war ideology.
Tagged under Violence & Peace Rwanda Rwanda Genocide, Paul Kagame, Bill Clinton
The shameless hypocrisy of former U.S. President Clinton will not change the historical record about his administration’s cold indifference to the Rwandan genocide. Clinton pushed for the drastic reduction of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, leaving the field open for the horrific murders.
Tagged under Violence & Peace Bill Clinton, Rwanda Genocide