And he’ll never spend a day in the Hague Prison due to the fact that his vast war crimes have been so successfully and breathtakingly  white-washed over the past two decades.

It may be that you’d rather not read this as it’s longish and immensely depressing; I’d have preferred not to need to do the research, paste it together, waken over several nights seeing his nasty, smug face…and the images of those he’d killed so ruthlessly.  But in the end it seemed important to me that the least we can do is to bear witness to the grievous deeds of the Faces of Evil Our Rulers befriend.  Kagame is one of them.

In fact, the white-washing has been so effective, if you Bingle for the term ‘génocidaires’, the definition at Wikipedia says “are those guilty of the mass killings of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, in which close to a million Rwandans, primarily Tutsis, were murdered by their Hutu neighbors.”

‘Paul Kagame: America’s Genocidaire in Central Africa’, Glen Ford, BAR, Aug. 2010 (opening paragraphs):

“One of the United States’ main allies in Black Africa recently declared himself the winner of a farcical presidential election with 93 percent of the vote. But there will be no outcry from Hillary Clinton’s State Department or Barack Obama’s White House, or even much of a fuss from the New York Times, because President Paul Kagame, of Rwanda, serves U.S. interests. You will never hear western governments and media call Kagame by his true name: a dictator and warlord from the minority Tutsi tribe that holds sway over the majority Hutu population through a reign of terror. Instead, western capitalists shower his regime with money and high praise as an example of how Africa should be governed.”

‘PAUL KAGAME, ONE OF THE MAJOR GENOCIDAIRES OF OUR ERA’, france-rawanda.info, May 31, 2010  (it’s longish, but one paragraph at the end):

“Paul Kagame has used the excuse of pursuing “genocidaires” to justify his regular invasions of the Congo. The casualties in these operations, coordinated with fellow dictator Yoweri Museveni, have run into the millions. We believe that Kagame has far outstripped Idi Amin as a mass killer (Amin’s killings are estimated at 100,000-300,000, whereas Kagame’s surely run well over a million civilians). But Kagame is servicing establishment U.S. and Western interests, and for the past 20 years has therefore received a free pass to rob and kill.”

I’d first read of the cover-ups by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 2013, including this long, long, III-part exposé at wrongkindofgreen. org: ‘Flashback: The True Story Behind the Rwandan and Congolese Genocides’, Jan. 13, 2011, Christopher Black and Anthony Black

[Note: Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada where he defended accused in a wide variety of criminal offences, including acting as counsel in several murder trials. He has been involved in high-profile cases involving human rights and war crimes and has defended those accused of these crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and is on the list of counsel at the International Criminal Court, from his Wiki page.]  He also writes poetry; his poetry and essays can be found at his website here.]

““Propaganda”. What does the word invariably suggest, but that we are above it. Certainly we could never fall for the Big Lie and certainly not one of the largest lies to be perpetrated in modern history. A lie whose grim shadow covers the restive ghosts of some three to six millions souls awaiting the truth.

For the truth is that Paul Kagame, his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and their allies are responsible for the Rwandan “genocide” of 1994 and the multiple follow-up genocides in what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) from 1996 to the present. Kagame and the RPF, the very actors who claimed to be the victims and saviours, share this responsibility with those who allegedly came to their “aid”: i.e. the leading political figures in the United States, Britain, Canada, Belgium, Uganda, and Tanzania. The United Nations was also complicit, as were numerous Western NGOs, prominent American journalists and virtually the entirety of the Western corporate press.

Below is a story of outrage and woe. A story that would not have been told if not for the efforts of a small group of brave and dogged investigators, writers, lawyers, priests, former soldiers, and others -many of whom have risked, and not a few of whom have lost, their lives in the telling. It is a story that reminds us all that however far “above it” we may feel, we are not.”

He chronicles a long list of suppressed reports with exculpatory evidence for his client and others’, buried 2011 oral report from Robert Gersony, part of which transcription read:

“…he found he found that the RPF had been committing systematic massacres of the Hutu population in Rwanda starting in April 1994 through the date of his presentation. On page four of the UN record of Gersony’s oral presentation, we read:

“Significant areas….have been the scene of systematic and sustained killing and persecution of the civilian Hutu populations by the [Rwandan Patriotic Front]. These activities are reported to have begun, depending on location, between April and July 1994, immediately following the expulsion from each area of former Government military, militia and surrogate forces. These [RPF] actions were consistently reported to be conducted in areas where opposition forces of any kind – armed or unarmed, or resistance of any kind other than attempts by the victims of these actions to escape – were absent. Large scale indiscriminate killings of men, women and children, including the sick and elderly, were consistently reported.”

In her Oct. 24 ‘Intel Report on Assassins: “Rwandans are cold ass mofos” ‘, Ann Garrison, BAR contributor writes:

“Memos from an intel-for-hire outfit reveal that Washington’s top ally in Africa, Rwanda dictator Paul Kagame, runs one of the world’s most prolific assassination squads.

‘Rwandan dissidents in exile were assassinated in Brussels, Yaounde, and Nairobi, and there have been more since in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and other African cities.’

[from the Wikileaks published Stratfor Global Intelligence Files]

She then cites a lot of the content of the emails, but ends:

“We should also care because Rwandan President Paul Kagame is now the President of the African Union as well. Last week his foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo left her post to become head of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, the French equivalent of the Commonwealth, with the overwhelming support of its members, including France, Canada, and Belgium. Back in September 2009, just over a year before Parsley wrote this email, former President Bill Clinton presented a Global Citizen Award to Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the Clinton Global Initiative, his annual poverty pimping extravaganza in New York City. All those promoting Kagame to such high honors have agendas that make it convenient to ignore his global assassins’ far-reaching exploits and other international crimes. They are no less “cold ass mofos” than he.’

Garrison’s oeuvre on Rwanda and Uganda at BAR is extensive.

Last, but certainly most important and revelatory although its length is daunting is ‘Top Secret: Rwanda War Crimes Cover-Up’, Christopher Black, journal-neo.org, Oct. 22, 2018

He writes that the US and it allies are masters at covering their war crimes and finding scapegoats to ‘take the blame’.  Masters as well at disinformation about Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria, including at the UN’s Yugoslavia tribunal (the ICTY) white-washing NATO’s role and blaming the Serbs’ resistance.

“And now a document has come to light, leaked from the UN’s Rwanda war crimes tribunal, the ICTR, that contains a report on the war crimes of the US supported Rwanda Patriotic Front that invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, conducted four years of terrorist operations against the Rwanda people and government, then in 1994 launched their final offensive and slaughtered their way to power. To discuss this document, marked “Top Secret” I have to burden the reader with a brief history of events from the evidence available in order to give it some context.”

“Paul Kagame, the leader of the RPF junta now in control of Rwanda, and who was seen with US Army soldiers at his headquarters two days before the event, gave the final order for the shoot down but he did so with the assistance or complicity of the governments of the United States of America, Britain, Belgium, Canada, and Uganda. It was the United States and its allies, hoping to gain total control of the resources of Central Africa through their proxies in the Tutsi RPF, that provided the military support for the RPF invasion of Rwanda from Uganda beginning in 1990, flowing that support through Uganda.

It is known that the missiles used to shoot down the aircraft came from stockpiles the Americans had seized in their first war against Iraq, passed to Uganda, and it was in a warehouse at Kigali airport, rented by a CIA Swiss front company, that the missiles were assembled. In fact, the French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, who spent several years investigating the shoot down on behalf of the families of the French flight-crew, told Boutros-Boutros Ghali, the Secretary-General of the UN in 1994, that the CIA was involved in the shoot down, adding strength to Boutros-Ghali’s statement to a Canadian journalist that the Americans are 100% responsible for what happened in Rwanda.” [large snip naming names, alliances, and evidence, including strong circumstantial evidence.]

“The report into the shoot down of the plane by the French investigative judge Jean-Louis Bruguière was leaked to the French newspaper Le Monde in 2004 and states that the RPF was responsible with the help of the CIA. But before the French judge began his investigation The Chief Prosecutor for the Rwanda tribunal, Canadian judge Louise Arbour, the same woman that framed up President Milosevic on behalf of the USA at the Yugoslav tribunal, was told in 1997 by her lead investigator, Australian lawyer Michael Hourigan, that it was the RPF commando group known as the “Network”, with the assistance of a foreign power, implicating the CIA, that was responsible for the shoot down.”

(Published on Sep 29, 2010)
“At that point Arbour, instead of prosecuting everyone involved, as she should have done, on American instruction, ordered the investigation closed and kept secret thereby making her an accessory to a war crime. The facts relating to Arbour’s action is detailed in Michael Hourigan’s affidavit, still available on the internet and his report to the Office of Internal Oversight of the UN.

Yet, little did we know as our trial proceeded that the prosecution had in their hands another document, an internal report dated October 1, 2003 in which their own investigators list and describe in 31 pages the crimes of the RPF forces they had investigated. This report, designated Top Secret, has recently been leaked and a copy was sent to me, among others, to examine and it is as damning of the RPF, and therefore their western allies, as the others.

The document, with the subject reference “General Report on the Special Investigations concerning the crimes committed by the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) during 1994’ was sent to the then Prosecutor Hassan Jallow by three members of the Prosecution Special Investigations Unit. It provides to the Prosecutor the evidence they had gathered that the RPA had committed massacres of thousands of Hutus in various places across Rwanda, for example, Byumba, Kabgayi, Rambara, Gitarama, and Butare, as well as the murder of three Catholic bishops and nine other priests at a church. The circumstances set out in the report confirm Gersony’s Report of similar massacres and also confirms witness testimony we heard during the trials that the RPA forces had infiltrated men into civilian barricades to kill people in order to pin the crimes on the Rwandan government forces and the youth group known as the interahamwe.

It is a very important and damning report. Kept secret. One wonders how many more secret reports they have.

There is not space here to detail the horrific crimes set out in the document, or to relate to you the evidence we heard at the trials-what one Hutu refugee, speaking of the hunting down of Hutu refugees in the Congo by the RPF forces, assisted by spotter planes with US Air Force markings, called the “genocide with no name,” so I provide just a few examples from this document to give readers the picture. On page 28, in reference to the capital city of Rwanda, Kigali, it states:

“Camp Kanombe (a government military base) at the end of May 1994. When the RPA captured Kanombe, approximately 1500 civilians had taken refuge in the camp. They were all massacred by the RPA.’

‘Kanombe Airport, at the end of May 1994, approximately 200 to 300 civilians of all ages were brought …and executed.”

“Masaka, Kanombe commune, end of July 1994, – in 5 days approximately 6,000 women children and men were executed with their arms tied behind their back at the elbow.

“Camp Kami, during the capture of the camp by the RPA thousands of civilians who had taken refuge there were executed”

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Christopher Black: Living Under Threat, Toronto Star, April 15, 2015

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)