6B - The Ridgway Record – The Daily Press, – The Kane Republican, Friday, July 24, 2015 Guest Commentary The Official Rwanda Story Unravels


For two decades, West- ern elites have spun a tale of how Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame heroically ended the 1994 genocide in that country. That narra- tive has persisted despite the fact that a great deal of evidence shows that Kagame’s Rwandan Patri- otic Front (RPF) did much of the killing and has committed extraordinary levels of violence in neigh- boring Congo since invad- ing that country not long after seizing power. The recent BBC telecast of “Rwanda: The Untold Story” indicates that the truth about Kagame may finally be penetrating the mainstream. “Rwanda: The Untold Story” pres- ents much information that contradicts the official narrative, specifically that the dramatic escalation in violence began not in April 1994 but in October 1990 when the RPF in- vaded from its outposts in Uganda; that RPF forces killed tens of thousands of people in the 42-month period from the invasion to April 1994; and that the RPF is responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand more Rwandans during the three month pe- riod of bloodshed in 1994. In contrast, the spinners of the “Kagame the Hero” tale have put the entire responsibility on the Hutu- controlled government and armed Hutu mobs. The RPF’s 1990 invasion, meanwhile, has been completely written out of history in the official nar- rative, as has RPF respon- sibility for the shooting down of a plane carry- ing Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana. It was immediately after the murder of Habyarimana that what has been known since as the Rwandan Genocide began. Another part of the official narrative that was exposed long ago by Edward Herman, Robin Philpot, and others is that


the U.S. didn’t do enough to stop the killing. In fact, Kagame was an imperial operative as early as the 1980s who trained at Fort Leavenworth and the U.S. was closely allied with the RPF even before the 1990 invasion. Throughout the spring of 1994, the Clin- ton administration was proactive in blocking the UN from taking measures that might have pre- vented much of the killing. Former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, for one, has put the entire blame for what happened in Rwanda in the 1990s on the United States.


In addition, while the Rwandan government and France, its primary ally, supported international action to stop the killing, Kagame was so deter- mined to take complete control of the country that he eschewed a ceasefire and negotiations. The inescapable conclusion is that the mounting deaths on both sides were ac- ceptable to Kagame and, by extension, the U.S., so long as the end result was complete victory and the ascension of the RPF to power.


From the outset, both Hutu and Tutsi survivors, U.N. officials, and numer- ous investigators have presented an entirely different version of events. Those stories, which have been fortified by popula- tion studies and other means, reveal that both sides are each responsible for hundreds of thousands of killings. These dissident voices have been ignored and, in the case of several studies by human rights groups and the U.N., sup- pressed – at least until the airing of “Rwanda: The Untold Story.”


Perpetrators and sup- porters of empire, who have never seen a U.S. war crime they didn’t like, have attacked critics of the of- ficial narrative and obfus-


cated who really benefits from the ongoing warfare. It’s a neat trick practiced regularly: falsely accuse dissidents of denying atrocities and deny impe- rial atrocities, all the while obscuring the billions in U.S. business profits made possible by Kagame’s inva- sions of the Congo. Western plunder of the region dates to the mur- derous rule of Belgian King Leopold II. No sooner did the Congolese indepen- dence movement succeed in 1960 than Congolese reactionaries and their Belgian and CIA helpers overthrew and eventu- ally murdered Patrice Lumumba, the nation’s first elected prime minis- ter. Eventually installed in Lumumba’s place was U.S. puppet Mobutu Sese Seko, who for 30 years served U.S. business interests as zealously as Kagame has. A succession of U.S. ad- ministrations have hailed Mobutu as a great man. The Clintons, Madeline Albright, George W. Bush, Samantha Power and Su- san Rice all hail Kagame as "the man who ended the Rwandan Genocide." Never mind the millions of Congolese who have been killed or died from starva- tion, disease and other causes traced directly to Kagame’s invasions. The unraveling of the official Rwanda story has global implications, as the U.S. has invoked “prevent- ing another Rwanda” to justify invasions of the for- mer Yugoslavia, Libya and large swaths of the Middle East. With a population increasingly alarmed by endless wars of aggression, the fact that the founda- tion for those acts is one big lie brings us closer to the day when we can end forever imperial ambitions and war.


– Andy Piascik is an


award-winning author and is syndicated by PeaceV- oice.


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