The African Great Lakes: The forgotten genocide

 Flors, Manolo, Luis

On January 20, 1997 every front page in Spain carried, almost exclusively, the same tragic news of the assassination in Rwanda of three members of Doctors of the World-Spain: Flors, Manolo y Luis. This day was for me, together with other companions at our foundation, the seventh day of a fast to denounce and apply pressure in front of the doors of the building housing the Council of Ministers of the European Union in Brussels. Here in Madrid, fellow protestors were doing the same in front of the United States Embassy. There were also demonstrations every day in front of the EU consulate in Barcelona, with various NGO’s taking turns, in particular the members of Inshuti (Friends of Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). A few of the members of the NGO Manresa were friends of Flors Sirera, the paramedic who had just been assassinated. Demonstrations were also held in front of the U.S Consulate in Palma de Mallorca by other groups, including Humans Rights of Mallorca.

It had already been three months since the armies of Uganda, Burundi and, above all, Rwanda, with the excuse of securing their borders, systematically massacred hundreds of thousands of defenseless Hutu refugees in the east of Zaire and advanced towards the conquest of the rich mining areas in the interior of this enormous country. That day Commissioner Emma Bonino, before entering the Council of Ministers, approached us, as she always did, to give us information and to encourage us. That day the pain of the family members of the three victims, of their colleagues in Doctors of the World and of all of Spain was our own pain. That day we also tried to give encouragement to the Commissioner, telling her that there were already fifteen Nobel laureates who supported our demands. In the following weeks this number would climb to nineteen. We also received the support of practically the entire European Parliament and of its president, Jose Maria Gil Robles, with the help of deputies such as Francisca Bennassar and Carlos Carners, who spent many days working for our cause.

This day was marked not only by pain but also by astonishment. Even today the levity (in both senses of the word, speed and frivolity) with which the heads of the international news media blamed this triple crime on Hutu extremists, the so called Interahamwes, without conducting even the most minimal investigation or verification, surprises us. Also, even today, it doesn’t cease to surprise us that, on the contrary, those who have always disagreed with this single, official, omnipresent version of reality (and I am not referring simply or principally to this triple crime, but to the whole terrible tragedy which has existed since 1990 in the Great Lakes region of Africa) have been considered, during all these years, as extremists and that they have required from us the material proofs and evidence that underlie our unorthodox view of the situation, material proof and evidence which it is almost impossible to provide when even the UN has systematically been hindered in carrying out any sort of independent investigation into any of the many crimes of the FPR.

However, in these last months, an important change in the understanding of this conflict has begun, which I am going to try to demonstrate during this speech. As far as the truth of the assassination of our countrymen is concerned, first there was the UN investigation and also that of the Spanish police which questioned the arbitrary condemnation of the Hutus. Following that came the revelations of Colonel Christophe Hakizabera, among others, and the Hourigan report, which gave us the name of the Network Commando, the commando group which ended the lives of Flors, Manolo and Luis. This is the same group that brought down the presidential Mystere-Falcon in Kigali on that fateful April 6, 1994.

The passage of time is qualifying, at the very least, the irresponsibility of the way that so many in the news media and so many so-called experts, who without the least critical sense, were the vehicles for such serious and dubious (or directly false) assumptions. Forced to be frivolous, we have been so even with language. Surely all of us, including myself, have gone along with the idea that the "Interahamwes" are "those who kill together" when in reality the term only refers to those who do something together. In addition, far too often it has been insinuated, sometimes subtly and at other times openly, that the noun "Hutu" is synonymous with "extremist" and therefore with genocide. As the saying goes, the first victim of every war is the truth. And it is with language itself that the war begins to be won.

But beyond the perverted use of language, what is really serious is that, without doubt, they intended to criminalize an entire people, a people which in reality has much more in common with the victim than the executioner. It is not surprising, for all of this, that our friends from the Belgian NGO, SOS Rwanda-Burundi produced a document which became public on October 23 1998 with the following title, which however long, hits the bull’s eye: "Don’t Accuse an Entire People of Genocide Without Having Had the Courage to Go the Whole Distance in Search of the Truth." Within the plan of the FPR to gain power at any price, the assassination of President Habyarimana was the "checkmate" for the military campaign. However it was also indispensable as a kind of check on the "queen" of the media campaign. It was necessary to label an entire people as perpetrators of genocide in order to take from them the right to decide their destiny democratically and to justify a ferocious dictatorship which planned to continue in absolute power.

It is irresponsible rashness on the part of so many of the media and of so many respected experts in respect to everything concerning the three Spanish co-workers: 1. It is not an isolated event. 2. Neither is it, according to our point of view, an accidental event, the product of random fate. 3. Nor is it a chance event in which there was no bias. It is not an event that could have harmed some just as well as others, as would happen when one played with dice that were not loaded.

If we observe carefully, we may possibly become aware that: 1. Situations very similar to this are frequent since 1990. 2: These anomalous situations have some of the same causes and origins. They are the result of a similar chain of events. Behind the frivolity of so much of the media and so many experts whom we could call "locals", there are always the dispatches from the large news agencies and the so-called "solid core of international experts," an expression which appears frequently in the latest document of SOS Rwanda-Burundi which has for its title: "Is It Possible to Build Peace in The Great Lakes Region of Africa on the Basis on Partial Truths and Manipulation?" The second tier media and experts have habitually done nothing more than reproduce in their own areas the information that they have received from the others. 3. These situations are always slanted towards the same side, they always run in favor of the regional victors (the Himas-Tutsi dictatorships of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi) and in favor of their powerful international god-fathers, (the United States, Belgium, Great Britain, etc.)

We could cite dozens of examples of this observable partiality to which I have just referred, and we could ask ourselves dozens of questions which, in addition to the answer that they would give, are already eloquent in themselves:

1. In October of 1990, starting from the border of Uganda, the FPR, with a lot of support from this country as well as the United States and Great Britain, began a large scale attack against Rwanda, which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and a million refugees. Unlike those that followed in April-June of 1994, these grave events were not broadcast widely. However organizations as trustworthy as OXFAM denounced them nonetheless. Moreover, this attack would mark the beginning of the huge and tragic destabilization that the Great Lakes Region of Africa has suffered since then.

The great magnitude of these events is in no way comparable with the attacks on Rwanda by the ex-FAR, from the border of Zaire, during the months after the assumption of power by the FPR in 1994. Nevertheless, in the first case, many among the media and the experts justified this invasion on the part of the "liberators" of the FPR. In the second, on the contrary, they decided that it was necessary to put an end to the "genocidal Hutu guerillas." In the same way they justified the international embargo on all arms sales to the government of Habyarimana while the FPR received massive amounts.

In the first case, that is to say the attack of the FPR on Rwanda in 1990, the principal justification was that the regime of Habyarimana did not permit the return of the Tutsi refugees. Nevertheless the majority of the economic operators in Rwanda were in fact Tutsis who had returned to the country during the regime of Habyarimana. It is not possible, therefore, to say that he closed all doors to the refugees. The 1990 Amnesty International report shows the satisfaction of this organization with respect to human rights in Rwanda. And the World bank, in its 1989 report, mentions that this country had succeeded in increasing production without at the same time provoking the injustices that frequently accompany development in other countries.

In the second case, that of the attacks of the ex-FAR from Zaire, we all already know the results: the attack with heavy weapons in October 1996 on the refugee camps in which millions of defenseless civilians were surviving under the flag of the United Nations. And, in the following months, the systematic persecution and elimination of hundreds of thousands of them - a massive genocide committed against the Hutu refugees, with the excuse of preventing a new, hypothetical, genocide which the Tutsis might suffer in Rwanda. Commissioner Emma Bonino called this a "huge international farce."

2. The question of the so-called "plan of genocide" is one of the preferred themes of

the FPR propaganda in order to solidly base the issue of the planning of the genocide, this idea of one sole planned genocide, which is the key to this propaganda project. I myself, starting in 1994, moved by the terrible massacres that we were shown by the major communications media, began to work for a just peace in this region, and listened from time to time and condemned in my heart the nefarious role of Radio Mil Colinas, with which the Hutu extremists stirred up ethnic hatred.

Nevertheless, a few years later I discovered, thanks to organizations like Cercle Rwandais de Réflexion du Québec or the Association Américaine de Juristes with headquarters in Montreal or the RDR, that it was the FPR which was the first, starting in 1990, to found a series of media infrastructures such as Radio Muhabura, whose broadcasts did nothing but raise, stir up and poison the ethnic tensions in Rwanda. And that the RTLM (Radio Mil Colinas) was created only three years later in response to Radio Muhabura. In addition, the broadcasts of the latter had been taken up again since 1990 by the newspapers that answered to the FPR, such as Rwanda Rushya, Inpuruza, Le Tribun du Peuple, Kanguka etc., and also by Radio Uganda.

The Canadian Dominican missionary Yvon Pomerleau, who had worked in Rwanda since the 1960’s, confirmed in the magazine IDEE (June 1994, vol. 5, N.2): "In April 1993 a new radio station was founded (Radio Mil Colinas) as a counterweight to the FPR station (Radio Muhabura). Another missionary stated in the Belgian newspaper De Standaar on 6/5/94: "This radio station Muhabura is just as provocative as the RTLM …(…)…One never hears one word of reconciliation."

More serious still is the suspicion (which for the experts is more like a certainty) that supposed Hutu extremists such as Ngeze Hassan, founder of the newspaper Kangura, or Robert Kajuga, the person responsible on a national level for Interahamwe, were nothing more than members of the FPR who had infiltrated the MRND government.

3. In 1994 all the TV cameras of the world filmed thousands of cadavers in Rwanda, supposedly almost all of them recently massacred Tutsis. But it is worthwhile asking oneself why such people as the Belgian Marcel Gerin and his wife or the Spanish missionary Santos Ganuza, whose own experience in the region in those months doesn’t exactly coincide with the version that had succeeded in imposing itself, had so much difficulty in making themselves heard in the media. They confirm that in their region the large massacres were committed by people of the FPR, sometimes openly, other times disguised with uniforms of the FAR. It is worthwhile asking oneself why there was such a big difference in the treatment of these massacres in 1994 and those which the Hutu majority had been suffering since at least 1972 (350,000 victims in Burundi) and which continue until today. It is worthwhile asking oneself why, after the attacks on the Hutu refugee camps in the east of Zaire, access was systematically denied for any independent reporter to witness this human hunt of hundreds of thousands of these refugees.
4. In the last days of 1996 and the first days of 1997, again the major news media and the great experts convinced the rest of humanity that the humanitarian operation to save these refugees didn’t make sense given that they had already voluntarily returned to Rwanda. Those were the days when the sophisticated and powerful satellites of the United States were not able to see a human sea of hundreds of thousands of human beings. Those were the days in which Commissioner Emma Bonino received us calmly in her office in Paris, together with Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate of 1980, and Pere Sampol, vice-president of the Consell Insular do Mallorca, and shared with us their intention to go meet these refugees who didn’t exist accompanied by all the TV cameras that they could gather together. Days afterwards, in spite of having encountered 300,000 of them in Tingi-Tingi alone, they returned to Brussels announcing: "I have returned from Hell."

 

5. Even today they continue to investigate over and over again the huge massacres in Rwanda after April 7, 1994, the only ones which they call genocide. Other investigations, including one by the UN itself, in which it is the Hutu tribe which appears to be the victim of genocide, were either aborted or suppressed. This is the case of the Gersony report and the report by Garreton. In March of 1999, Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of the Leagues of Human Rights published an 800 page report on the genocide in Rwanda called: "Leave None to Tell the Story." It is incredible to confirm what a small amount of information there is on the FPR. The same authors recognize that the killings committed by the FPR against the civilian population were investigated very little (p. 692) and add: "Although this report centers its attention on the genocide, the gathering of facts on the crimes committed by the FPR is limited." In the end, they are affirming, as did the 1994 UN report in respect to the killings committed against the Tutsis, that the FPR only committed isolated acts of vengeance, but that they did not assassinate in a "concerted, planned, systematic and methodical" way. It is incredible also that at this distance, with everything that is known already about the attacks against Presidents Habyarimana and Ntaryamira, and the close relationship between this event during the night of April 6, 1994 and the huge massacres that began the following day being so clear, it is impossible to get anyone to start an international investigation into this double assassination. In the meantime the International Tribunal of Arusha is nothing other than a trial by the victors in which all of the accused are Hutus.
6. The five or six crimes by settlers in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in the past months have rated entire pages in the mainstream media. On the other hand we don’t find anything in this same media on the tens of thousands of victims every month from the invasion of the Republic of the Congo. Nor of the death, after seven months of imprisonment, of the great leader Monseigneur Kataliko, Monseigneur Munzihirwa’s successor in Bukavu, assassinated by the FPR. Nor of the caravan more than thirty kilometers long of Congolese who, in spite of the prohibition by the authorities of the Rwandese invasion, went to pay their last respects to Monseigneur Kataliko. "By chance," those responsible for these enormous, silent crimes are the armies invading the Republic of the Congo, that of Rwanda, that of Uganda and that of Burundi. "By chance" Mugabe, with his thousands of soldiers in the Congo, is on the other hand, together with the already eliminated Kabila, the principal obstacle to these three invading armies. It is surprising to see how, after only a few months, when the UN itself had already approved Resolution 1.304, in which what is happening in this huge African country was called an invasion, a supposed great Spanish expert on these questions wrote in El Pais, that the troubles of a number of countries, among them The Republic of the Congo, can be looked for in the internal corruption of their governments. Not even one reference of the ferocious invasion which is producing hundreds of thousands of victims and plundering this rich country.

With respect to the international news agencies, it is interesting to read what the ethnologist Pierre Erny of the University of Strasbourg has written:

In effect, the FPR has always considered, as is actually the fact, that the war is being played out on the level of the media, at the same time as on the battlefield, since it is in the North that they make the alliances that determine the victory on the ground. Access to the combat zones or to any other sensitive zone is strictly controlled. The media need images, and it is difficult and dangerous to obtain them under certain conditions. On the other hand, the presence of journalists puts the witnesses to these situations in danger. If we ask anything in public, some person will take the responsibility of watching over the replies: people know this and don’t speak. As a consequence it is difficult for journalists to obtain important information from the people.

The major part of the founders of the FPR are veterans of guerilla warfare in Uganda who were brought to power by Museveni. They are aware of the repercussions that reports and hints of the crimes have on international public opinion. Thus the burning of victims, secrecy, transportation of bodies from the scene of the crime to some hidden place, communication by way of code, and doubletalk have made it difficult to obtain facts about their activities.

When the media see that it is impossible for their correspondents to reach the zones where the crimes are taking place, (it is not enough just to sit in the capitals of these countries), this is when they resort to the dispatches from the major media. The capacity of these to "create" reality is enormous. From this point of view, the dangerous process of globalization, including monopolization, of information is the biggest challenge of the future. The fact that 96% of the international news is generated by 5 large news agencies is alarming. For the majority of the media it is very difficult to get out from under the "official" version of these large agencies.

For a small group of people who are truly informed about the conflict it is almost impossible to obtain adequate media coverage. Only a few are able to carry out what we could consider true investigative journalism. And, nevertheless, their information doesn’t get the exposure that it merits. This is the case, for example, of Steven Edwards, who several months ago revealed, in the Canadian newspaper The National Post, the existence of a UN report produced by the Australian Michael Hourigan and "embargoed" like all the others which accuse the FPR of genocide. In it three Tutsi soldiers of the FPR admit to having been part of a commando group which, on the orders of the Rwandan President Paul Kagame, brought down the presidential airplane and which also assassinated the three Spanish co-workers in February of 1997

In September of 1999, Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General of the United States, made this statement to us in his office in the heart of Manhattan and authorized us to make it public: "The government of my country has succeeded in infiltrating and in great measure controlling the United Nations, many of the major media and now also many of the major NGO’s." This amounted to a confirmation of our former, and ever more deeply held, suspicions. Already in February 1999, several members at the Montreal headquarters of the Association of American Lawyers had made similar remarks to us concerning the deep complicity and responsibility of some of the experts and NGO’s dedicated to human rights and also on the use of great principles (human rights, democracy, prevention of genocide, etc.) as an excuse for carrying out unspeakable projects. At the time these affirmations seemed to us to be extremely difficult to accept. Now we are beginning to be conscious of the heavy propagandistic, diplomatic and military machinations which have been set in motion in order to arrive at controlling the Great Lakes region of Africa.

Time and again, at the exact moment and in the most strategic place, the "expert" appears. The expert who, from the position and the attitude of "he who knows best" puts voluminous reports on the table, reports such as that of Alison Des Forges, financed by the large American NGO Human Rights Watch. Reports which are always slanted because, on the one hand, these genocidal dictatorships, which we have endeavored for years to denounce, never have permitted and never will permit, with the diplomatic cover of the United States on the international stage, any type of independent investigation in the territories which they control. And on the other hand, these experts also do not seem to have any interest in investigating the crimes of the Himas-Tutsi armies of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. Alison Des Forges, on page 692 of her report (English version) admits to not having information on the crimes committed by the FPR against the civilian population. She takes for granted, as do many other experts, the official thesis of one sole genocide with only a few who were responsible for it. And she concludes that the crimes of the FPR, since they do not constitute genocide, will not be the object of her investigation.

Thus the vicious circle, according to which the assassination of more than 2,500,000 Hutus doesn’t constitute genocide and that, on the contrary, the killing of a third or a quarter as many Tutsis is, closes. All those who dare to question this are a priori "extremists, "revisionists" and "denialists." Just like the neo-Nazis who try to question the reality of the tremendous genocide which the Jewish people suffered. Everything is anticipated, everything is manipulated. Perpetrators of genocide who have publicly professed Nazi beliefs, such as Museveni, the president of Uganda, have thus succeeded in using the huge tragedy of the Jewish people for their own benefit. But the manipulation of the reports of certain of these experts is not limited only to what they don’t say. The above mentioned report of Alison Des Forges is being criticized by various people whose testimony is collected in it, as, for example, that of General Ndindiliyimana. This Rwandan general accuses her of manipulating his own declaration for the purpose of reinforcing the pre-established thesis of one sole planned genocide.

In effect, as SOS Rwanda-Burundi confirms, "there exists a solid core of expert witnesses who have taken on themselves the mission of giving credence to the thesis of one planned genocide against the Tutsi, conceived and prepared over a long period of time by the Hutu elite and the Rwandan state (otherwise known as Hutu)". One of the principal presumptions of this thesis, as was formerly confirmed by the French Minister of Information Gerard Prunier, one of these expert witnesses, is that it was the Hutu extremists who assassinated President Habyarimana, and that this attack was fundamental to the unleashing of the genocide. Colette Braeckman, in her book, Rwanda, the History of a Genocide, explains how she was the first to popularize the thesis of the responsibility of the Hutu extremists for this attack, which was meant to provoke a genocide which had been planned for a long time. Jean-Pierre Chretien’s book, Rwanda, the Means of Genocide, which constitutes the Bible of this core of experts, amply illustrates this postulate.

We can enumerate other presuppositions of this thesis: 1. That the Tutsis constitute an endangered minority. But this hides the fact that it deals with a dominant minority which during four centuries has monopolized power and an important fraction of which has never accepted the referendum organized by the UN in 1961. 2. That an identity card existed that marked Tutsis, like the star of David did the Jews But they are silent on the fact that this card was instituted by Belgium in 1936 at the request of the Tutsi Minority in order to perpetuate their privileges from father to son. 3. That the civil war initiated by the FPR in 1990 played no role in the following events. But this completely loses touch with reality, because this contention is simply untrue. 4. That the ethnic groups of Rwanda are an invention of the colonizers. But this tries to hide the fact that they didn’t do anything other than legalize something that had already existed for centuries.

SOS Rwanda-Burundi concludes: "These experts have testified assiduously in all areas, indirectly by their writings or directly as witnesses for the prosecution. Today, when the lies that they have facilitated already have been uncovered, there remains in evidence how these illustrious experts allowed themselves to become entangled in the whitewash of an historical lie, like common drug dealers."

From time to time we ask ourselves the following question, which has converted itself into a kind of unbreachable wall: If a perverse project exists for the control of the Great Lakes region of Africa, how it is that none of the large NGO’s have denounced it loud and strong independently of the issue of human rights? If it is true that in this decade 2.500,000 Rwandan Hutus have been assassinated, how is it that they have not protested energetically? Surely not even the ones who, with the best of intentions, ask these questions are aware to what degree they are judging exclusively the power of the "independence" of the large NGO’s (almost all of which are anglophone). And to which point they distrust the small ones, those of the Africans or the small missionary congregations, solely because they are small, African or religious. Out of humility we need to remember that in Nazi Germany not even the Red Cross was capable of discovering through its investigations what was happening in the extermination camps. The ability of these powerful dictatorships to manipulate any investigator whatsoever is enormous.

The passage of time has confirmed, each time with greater evidence, that during the past years international public opinion has been deluded, as the Bishop of Bukavu, Monseigneur Munzihirwa, declared already in 1996, a few days before being assassinated.

The majority of the evidence comes from the same events. Radically pro-Tutsi "experts", who in these last years have caused so much confusion and so much damage to truth and justice, as in the case of Colette Braekman, are already beginning to recognize that these Himas-Tutsi leaders are nothing more than war lords, invaders and violators of borders, cynical exploiters who have lost all credibility before the international community. They are beginning to recognize that talking about negotiations or dialog between the Congolese is nothing more than a big farce. Actions such as the merciless genocide of 500,000 Hutu refugees in Zaire, actions like the shameless second invasion carried out by the armies of Museveni, Kagame and Buyoya into the deepest territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in which the most important mineral deposits of this enormous country are to be found, an invasion which already is responsible for the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Congolese, events such as the confrontations between Ugandans and Rwandans, provoked by their excessive greed, which have produced thousands of innocent Congolese victims, such events are definitive evidence that the "noble" causes invoked for invading and assassinating have been nothing more than enormous lies:

• The return of Tutsi refugees and of democracy in 1990;
• The security of Rwanda in the face of the genocidal Interahamwes, who, hidden among the refugees in Eastern Zaire, were able to provoke a new genocide;
• The violated rights of the Tutsis, Bayamulengues, etc.

These have been no more than alibis in order to obtain absolute control in Rwanda through violence in the first place, to annihilate the democratic process already begun by the weakened government of Habyarimana and, afterwards to plunder the extraordinary mineral reserves of the Kivu in Zaire. And, later, those of all of Zaire, when the invaders and their great protectors were assured of the passivity of the international community in the face of such shameful events.

By the same token there is more and more evidence of:

• The ultimate responsibility of important multi-national mining companies in the fomentation and development of this conflict;
• The great logistical, diplomatic military and economic support for these extremist Himas-Tutsi lobbies by certain western powers, lead by the United States;
• The all important manipulation of international organizations (such as the UN), of international news, of the NGO’s and of the great principles relative to human rights, on the part of these great powers and multi-nationals.

During this year there have been numerous publications and valuable documents aligned with this same analysis of the events. The letter that the Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney sent to President Clinton on 8/31/99 is especially significant because of who it came from, because it sums up the position of an ever greater number of observers, and because it points out the responsibility of the United States in this conflict. Also concerning the great responsibility of important sectors of the north American administration one can find ample information in the section entitled "The implication of the United States" in the book, The War of the Great Lakes, which Filip Reyntjens published in 1999. This investigative work complements those already done by other specialists such as Remigus Kintu or Londende Lokenge, (a pseudonym for security reasons.) On the mining interests which are at the origin of all the suffering, death and destruction provoked here throughout this entire shocking decade, one can refer to the investigative work, "The Geopolitical Objective of the International Mining Societies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire)" also published in the last few months, by the mining civil engineer Pierre Baracyetse.

Congresswoman McKinney, a member of the International Relations Committee and the National Security Committee concluded her letter to President Clinton thus:

In addition to all these events, a series of important revelations are appearing that confirm that, contrary to what had, to a massive extent, become public opinion, it was the FPR who committed, with the help of a western power, probably Belgium or the United States, the attack on the Presidential airplane. Internal divisions in the FPR, revelations of some relevant members of this organization, and the conclusions of the UN investigator Michael Hourigan are conclusive. The antiterrorist judge Jean-Paul Bruguiere already seems to have proof that the attack was executed by a Tutsi commando group in the orders of the present president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, and very probably with North American support, according to information from Wayne Madsen, an investigator from the United States who specializes in publications on the National Security Agency of his country. One hopes that Bruguiere will sign the order for the search and capture of those most responsible in this affair. The case was initiated in a petition by the widow of one of the three French soldiers who were also killed in the attack.

In his investigatory work, made public in July 1999, "Memorandum on the Assassination of President Habyarimana," Felicien Kanyamibwa provided a lot of information on the subject. One month later, in August, the exceptional testimony of Christophe Hakizabera, one of the first members of the FPR and the only survivor of the original members who abandoned the organization, appeared. Hakizabera testified: "The FPR elaborated a macabre plan to lead the country into chaos: The death of President Habyarimana. He was considered the major obstacle to taking power by force . . ( . . ) .

Relevantly, it is known that the decision to assassinate President Habyarimana was taken in Bobo-Dioulasso, in Bourkina Fasso, in March 1994 and that commander Paul Kagame, leader of the FPR, participated in this meeting."

Later, on March 1, 2000, the Canadian newspaper The National Post published the UN report, written by the Australian Michael Hourigan, that I referred to formerly. And last, for now, the testimony of the other important member of the FPR, Jean-Pierre Mugabe, has confirmed many facts pertinent to this attack and to other crimes by the most important leaders of the FPR.

The testimony of Hakizabera, together with others too numerous to cite in this shortened document, also makes it clear that the FPR did everything possible, with the diplomatic support of the United States, in order to obstruct the intervention of the UN, which could have stopped the huge slaughter of Tutsis in the interior starting on April 6, 1994. It sought in this way not only the objective of avoiding obstacles to its military advance into the interior of Kigali, capital of Rwanda, but also at the same time to convert the Tutsi tribe, to which they belonged, into the great victims of the one sole genocide. They succeeded by means of the sacrifice of many Tutsis in the interior, whom they had considered traitors since the time when they had decided to stay, beginning in the sixties, in a Rwanda governed by the Hutu majority. All of this testimony illustrates further many other methods with which the FPR reached absolute power, no matter what the price.

It was surprising to confirm, in January 1997, with what rapidity they laid the blame on Hutu guerillas, one more time, for a new triple crime. But still one can see even today the power of the inertia caused by so much propagandistic manipulation. Still today after so much elapsed time and such important information having been made public, still now when analysts such as that same Colette Braekman (the great expert of Le Soir and Le Monde Diplomatique) have made a 180 degree turn, it is almost impossible to get the major media sources to dedicate the space it deserves and the professionalism it deserves to this historic and bloody neo-colonization of the Great Lakes region of Africa.

When one controls the major TV networks and the major news agencies, with what ease can one manipulate international opinion, and with so little, a few little half truths and a few campaigns of distraction! How difficult it is, on the contrary, to succeed in bringing this international opinion truthful information on a conflict in which one of the parties is the major protégé of the most powerful lobbies and governments in our globalized world and the other party is of no interest to anybody and, in fact has been abandoned by everyone! How difficult it is to go against the current of this official version which the great powers succeed in imposing, even when there is much and important evidence that the reality is otherwise. How difficult it is to liberate oneself from the enormous pressure of this omnipresent official thinking, even on the part of those who honestly try to work for the people.

The basis of a reconciliation and an authentic and stable peace in this region cannot be anything other than that of truth and justice. But "how can we dare to speak of reconciliation between Hutus and Tutsis when the ones are demonized and the others sanctified? Can there be understanding between angels and devils? And how can one think to establish an international court for the Hutus who were victimized and accused of having set up a civil defense and not for the Tutsis who attacked?" These obvious questions, which do not hypocritically hide the powerful ethnic component (tied to the control of power) of this conflict, do not come from a racist Interahamwe. They were spoken before the European Parliament on 11/27/98 by Antoine-Th. Nyetera, a Tutsi from the royal family who lived in Rwanda during all those regimes which followed each other across this century: the monarchy, Kayibanda, and Habyarimana. He fled the FPR and lives in Belgium.

And Mr. Nyetera continues: "All the university graduates are here in Europe, others are dead. How can one even think about economic and scientific development in Africa when the brains to achieve it either have been cut off or reduced to inactivity? And these refugees are here receiving welfare, just so that they don’t die of hunger and just so they don’t have to live from begging." More recently ex-President Mandela was the one who, on taking up the negotiations in Burundi again said: "As long as a minority of 15% can continue monopolizing the political, economic and military power, one can achieve neither peace nor stability".

The immediate future does not seem very hopeful, but one can and must continue building the basis for a future which at a more distant time will undoubtedly be better. In principle this needs to be rebuilt by the peoples of this region themselves, even though it be done by the foreign Diaspora. But these are precisely the greatest victims of this conflict and still do not possess sufficient means of expression or political power.

The great institutions such as the UN, "domesticated" and controlled, fundamentally by the United States, have blocked humanitarian interventions and resolutions which, during these last years, could have saved the lives of millions of human beings in this African region. It was the Spanish ambassador to the UN himself, the by no means suspect Inocencio Arias, who told us a while ago that nothing moves in this organization without the consent of the United States.

The societies of the developed countries are lulled to sleep by a few notable campaigns of distraction and by powerful and intoxicating propaganda. The collective of the NGO’s, who should be the conscience of these societies are confused and divided for the same reason.

Many of the large NGO’s dedicated to human rights probably have also been manipulated or even have been infiltrated by or been created specifically as instruments in the service of other interests different from those of human rights. Some of them such as African Rights, African Watch and the United States Committee for Refugees present, for example, the war of the FPR as a war of liberation, and, as a consequence, legitimate. Roger Winter, President of the US Committee for Refugees, and the vice-president of Interaction, a large federation of NGO’s in the United States, played a very important role in the politics of the government in the Great Lakes region of Africa.

The world of human rights will hold a growing strategic importance in the future, in the first place because the large NGO’s created to defend them have been converted into the main sources of public opinion. In the second place, it is precisely in the name of these rights (those of a minority that is supposedly oppressed and always in danger of genocide, those of a return to a democracy which afterwards never comes, those of security for their own borders while they systematically violate those of others, etc.) that they are carrying out invasions, genocides and coups d’etat which formerly in Latin America were performed in the name of "Christian western civilization."

Because of all this it is probably from the arena of justice that hope in the middle of this desolate panorama can be reborn. Justice doesn’t need a large collective consensus, which in this moment is very difficult in the other areas which we have just enumerated. In principle all that is needed is sufficient determination and tenacity on the part of a few judges, as has been highlighted by the cases against the Latin American dictatorships. The progress of the lawsuit instituted by Judge Bruguiere seems to indicate this.

The energetic dedication of a small collective in the arena of justice would be capable of changing international opinion about the truth of these events of the recent past. Legal action could provide the evidence of the genocidal nature of the dictators who, for years, protected by some of the great powers and important multi-national lobbies, devastated the Great Lakes region of Africa. The powerful propaganda machinery, whose strings are pulled in the highest domes of power in our globalized world and who have presented these criminals to the world as "the new emerging African leaders" and even as "the new liberators," could thus be neutralized.