From 1994 (never mind the media propaganda from 1990 to 1994 covering up RPF/A war crimes and UPDF war crimes) to 1997 I also believed exactly what the media told us: The RPF and TUTSIS were the victims, and the Hutus were the killers. I wrote stpries about this, from this perspective. But then the truth began to unfold as soon as I looked deeper. Please take the opportunity to do so. Be careful in Rwanda. I’m very serious.

blessings
keith

Its a fair question for anyone : What takes you to Africa. The suggestion that it is some assumed right that I am violating by asking the question is itself emblamatic of the response based in a sense of entitlement. Read Paulette Goudge THE WHITENESS OF POWER on motivations and interests.

Read RACE AND EPISTEMOLOGIES OF IGNORANCE (Sullivan and Tuana) on white supremacy and obliviousness.

What took me to Rwanda? In 1990 it was gorillas. In 2000 it was investigations of RPF/RPA massacres in Rwanda and Congo.

All due respect, the list of authors you suggest is very problematic, to varying degrees, to say the least.

Philip Gourevitch, for example: Very close to Kagame (who set him up with Nubianm prostitutes, as well as all kinds of state liars.) But more critically, Gourevitch got his inside propaganda line(s) from James Rubin — Madeliene Albrights undersecretary, and I think he is also connected to Elizabeth Rubin, who has produced a lot fo nonsense on Africa (LRA for just one example)/ WE WISH TO INFORM YOU blach blach blah is total fiction billed as nonfiction. Gourevitch prodyuced the “GENOCIDE FAX” fiction — a psychological operation — in the New Yorker, a venue he alone is privileged to write about Rwanda in. He is defnately an agent for the US, no matter how you look at it.

But you don’t know anything about these issues, and in your sense of “outrage” at having your interests and motivations questioned you instead decied that my perspective is “strange”.

Do your homework.

There’s nothing strange about my views — merely because you dont know anything about the subject. If you did you would know about Gourevitch.

Read the Spanish indictments. It’s not my fault that you don’t know much about what you are talking about, and have a certain mindset, it seems, due to the institutionalized propaganda. Thats why you don’t see any problems with the writings of Destexhe , or Gourevitch, or Melvern.

Alain Destexhe (Spelling?) was one of the first to come out with a book that completely falsified the reality in Rwnada, whether by intention, design, obliviousness or accident. Maybe, like the rest of us, he was fooled. But he has NEVER to my knowledge corrected the record (his record). And theres pleanty of evidence.

If you have Hutu friends and can get away with asking them some questions, good for you. Watch out. Its just a matter of time.

Now, please don’t throw nonsense back at me, because you are feeling your privileges challenged. Please take the time to explore these deeper issues. See for example these pages:

http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php
http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=14
http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=47

Please.

keith harmon snow

Anyone can freely travel in Rwanda just so long as they are not [1] already wanted [2] speaking out about the regime [3] asking any of the “wrong” questions.

Just try it.

Just go to Rwanda, and start asking questions about the RPF / RPA massacres. You will IMMEDIATELY meet with trouble, and teh scale of your sudden troubles will be in direct proportion to teh depth of your questions and extent of your knowledge. Do it! And then record your experience on this blog.

Patrick’s point — like all his points — are tainted with self interests. Why focus on Kagame? Because he was and is backed by white folks from the power systems of those countries (US, CAnada, Belgium, Israel) that are indeed harboring the world’s worst war criminals. So the question PAtrick asks is disingenuous, becuase I suspect he knows perfectly well that teh Pentagon backed Kagame’s mass murder. Why do you suppose Clinton just cgave Kagame a special “humanitarian” (was it) award??

Read Wayne MAdsen’s GENOCIDE AND COVERT OPERATIONS IN AFRICA 1993-1999 and see how deep teh rabbit hole goes.

Like so many westerners who travel to Rwanda and visit the “genocide memorials” and then come away with exactly the perspective you describe above, this is a form of obliviousness grounded in whiteness.

Like I asked Patrick, who obviously wont answer what must be an incriminating question, what are YOUR interests in Rwanda? And your friends” Why did you and he travel to Rwanda?

These are pertinent questions, but without an answer (as in Patrick’s cas) I have no further reason to pursue the deeper issues. Like, for example, what we know about Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund or the Jane Goodall Institute,,,, or the oil sector … or Starbucks (genocide) “free-trade” coffeee.

Kagame is indeed the great entrepreneurial president, but the cost in human life of Kaame’s “making” the Rwnada of today is unprecedented. All those raw materials ripped out of Congo — all those hundreds of thousands of poeple (mostly but not only Hutus) murdered in Rwanda before, during and after 1994, and all the millions forced off the land and into refugee camps or into exile.

Wake up folks. The truth is there if you want it. There’s a whole barrage of articles on my web site which get into the details of Kagames regime of terror. Then you will see why things look like Alice’s WONDERLAND.. but are not.

PEOPLE — HUTU PEOPLE EVERYWHERE ARE TERRIFIED THAT THEY WILL BE THE NEXT TARGET OF TEH UNJUST INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM WHICH HAS PAINTED THE VICTIMS (Hutus) AS KILLERS AND THE KILLERS (Kagame’s RPF/A) AS VICTIMS.

By the way, you can also travel freely in Gabon, Niger or Kenya, or Uganda — another perfect example of a terror regime — but if you step out of line in the least little way you will find out what simmers beneath the surface and keeps the people from their freedom: terror.

SO. I Say again, you just go to Rwanda and start asking questions.

>>>>Feel free to invite me to any of your genocide deniers conferences if you really want to know me.<<<

I have never been to one. But I'm sure you would do quite well there.

keith

I asked who this Patrick is because I have a suspicion I know, and I asked what he did in Rwanda because many of today’s “genocide survivors” in Rwanda have benefited massively from the depopulation that occurred under Paul Kagame and the RPF killing machine. Many are suddenly landholders or businessman who benefited at other people’s expense and so their interests blind or corrupt them. Many are silenced by fear of being hunted by Kagame and/or assassinated just as so many other Ttsis were under Kagame after they somehow crosses the Kagame regime.

Kagame’s counter claims that the French are responsible for genocide, and his production of a report to establish that, are dubious at best. The subject of France’s involvement is always thrown up to distract atention from the much greater threats and evil — the RPF / UPDF / Pentagon killing machine — and its much greater responsibility for genocide (of Hutu people in Rwanda and Congo, and murder of many Tutsis in Rwanda), and facilitation of acts of genocide (committed under conditions of civil war) against the Tutsis in Rwanda as a backlash or reprisal killings against the RPF massacres and terrorism.

what was your full name?

And what did you say you were doing in Rwanda?

You will notice tat I have not in any way suggested that Tutsi people did not die in Rwanda (or Banyamulenge) in Congo. But your simpla analysis is in complete alignment with the propaganda produced to cover up Kagame and the RPFs war crimes. These are well documented. Just becuase you saw people killed and may they happened to be your family, or not, does not negate the realities of what Kagame and the RPF have done, and it does not negate the investigations of the French or, especially, the Spanish court, and it does not negate the investigations of the professors Davenport and Stam and it does not negate the work of Wayne Madsen.

Perhaps you could open your mind to the possibility that both realities exist: you lost family members and saw people killed, and the RPF machinery was primarily responsible.

Read the Spanish indictments. These rely on witnesses including former RPF top officials who., just like you, say they were there .

blessings
keith

Please, go to hell as soon as possible.

We, The People, have the right to have such perceptions and another example is Bill Clinton, Although around two decades elapsed inbetween, his serious war criminality, gangster character and actions, as U.S. President don’t leave it credible that he fled to England to protest against the Vietnam War for honourable reasons. We have the right to definitely believe that he fled to England to protest because he was too coward to stand next to fellow U.S. citizens protesting in the USA, and maybe also to make it easier to escape the draft. It minimally was a cowardly flight. Given that we can know without doubt that he was an extreme liar as U.S. President, we can justly assume that this definitely was nothing new in his character. Etc.

Imo, General Dallaire likely never was a soldier of honourable character. Those who are are people who are [intelligent], in the good ways of being intelligent, and such people don’t go around switching to being evil unless it’s because they’ve become insane and don’t know what they’re doing. This surely hasn’t happened to General Dallaire, who was probably insane well before 1994.

It’s part of the reason why I emphasised that he left no links to any of the work he claimed to have performed and we can’t start wasting time looking for articles by some comment user employing the comment board username of Patrick, or any other, to see if we might possibly find some of the person’s work; it could take a lifetime and the result could still be NIL. People who have solid claims to make were either direct eyewitnesses, with proof that they were, or they have at least links that these people purport prove their claims. Patrick provided nothing to support his claims.

The other part of that overall reason was to simply state what my perception of his last post is.

Anyway, I appreciate your response for the sake of readers I will likely recommend this copy of your article to.

I offered important developments — like the Davenport and Stam story.

General Romeo Dallaire completely supported the RPF invasion — shipping RPF troops into the capital. France’s role was far , far less significant in RWanda than the US / RPF role.

Who committed genocide in RWanad? The RPF. The panish indictments are stunning. Even I was shocked at the level to which we have been indoctrinated and decived by the propaganda about Hutus killing tutsis. Patrick is not interested in truth and I am not interested in respoding to post of propganda by government (UK) propagandists like Linda Melvern.

Well, that work should be supported with links so that readers can learn more from this work. After all, Patrick is not a name for doing Web searches; there are far too many people with this first name, even some women having it. No full name and no work titles, and no links? How are people supposed to know what the work consists of?

Those are lacking pieces of information and when making vague references like “My own work has shown”, we should always provide links to this work or good samples of it.

This is not to say that France wasn’t involved as Patrick says, but this part of the story, if it is true, doesn’t mean that the Anglo imperialists weren’t involved. Both may have been. Both often are. Anglo imperialists of the U.S. can also let imperialists of some European countries carry out a lot of dirty work to clear the way for the Anglo U.S. to then move in and take over. From what I’ve gathered, the imperialists, corporatists, … of the U.S. do work with counterparts of Europe, but they often do not fully “see eye to eye”, they have tensions between themselves, feud, struggle for power against one another. They’re not a perfectly united group.

The act-of-war coup d’etat against Haiti on Feb. 29, 2004, was conducted by the U.S., Canada and France, and all three want their shares of the “pie”, but the U.S. is the dominant “player” in this “game” and team, and they brutally employed UN “peacekeepers” from Brazil; very brutal, criminal, murderous, imperialist foot soldiers, …., whose commander was rather very hostile towards the UNHRC representative of head who was demanding that corrections be made in the situation in Haiti, for Haitians.

UN “peacekeepers”? They evidently are hardly ever good, honourable, legal, moral, …. This applies in Haiti, Lebanon, Kosovo, and surely in African countries, as well as other places. They don’t represent [democracy]. The UNSC does not represent democracy. The UNSC represents an oligarchy, a loose one, I guess, but still a sort of oligarchy, and one dominated by the world’s superpower, the governent of the USA, which does not serve the will of the population of the USA, for it serves the imperialists, corporatists, … of the U.S. This reality of the UNSC isn’t conspiracy theory; it’s obvious. If the UNSC was truly respectful of democracy, then the UNGA would have its votes well respected, but its votes are regularly overruled by the then tyrannical UNSC. If the UNSC was truly respectful of its Charter, then it would give great respect to calls from UNHRC heads, like the two who resigned out of frustration caused by rejections of the UNSC when they called for corrections to be made to stop the [genocide] of Iraqis during 1991-2003, f.e.

I wouldn’t try to whitewash the Anglo west with respect to what happened in Rwanda in 1994. These imperialists were most likely involved and it would’ve been very secret; or the dark aspects of their involvement would’ve been secret, anyway. The U.S. always works to try to keep its dark works or works of darkness secret, including when its presence is otherwise known. Terrorism, assassinations of heads of states, wars of aggression, criminally protecting Israel and U.S. corporations, there’s nothing new or even recent in this for the U.S.

If the U.S. was darkly involved in what happened in Rwanda in 1994, then General Dallaire might have known about this and, for one reason or another, chose to stay silent about it. It could be to share in the profit, or to protect his own life from being assassinated through a mysterious accident, as enough assassinations seem to be or are conducted. He could have been bought off, or threatened.

Who knows such details, except for the people who’d have been on the inside?

France is not innocent in African history, and the same applies with other European countries, in addition to England or Britain. But the U.S. also isn’t innocent there, or … hardly anyplace on Earth. It’s guilty in the USA, continental and not, Mexico and much of the rest, if not all of the rest, of Latin America, other South American countries, Europe, Africa, and Asia; East to West, North to South, all hemispheres, many countries. And the number of them has only continued to rise.

Henry Kissinger evidently was literally quoted saying that he, which I extend to ilk, wants mass human death; wants, and, according to him, we need mass death of millions of people. Why? Natural resources and profit? Less resistance to hegemony? Greater and broader domination, globally? Surely.

He was also quoted saying that soldiers are just “dumb animals” useful for serving the interests of the elites, the “masters”. Generals are soldiers, only of high rank. A General like Dallaire would’ve been as replaceable, expendable for them as necessary, if he’d had gotten in the way. They assassinate state leaders! They overthrow good or reasonably good governments.

Soldiers of Canada and Belgium assassinated former Congolese MP Patrice Lumumba, according to a book published this spring, “The Black Book of (or on?) Canadian Foreign Policy”, by Yves Engler. It was already know that soldiers of Belgium had done this, but it seems to be new information when it comes to Canada’s direct involvement. Why? What did Canada, or either, have to gain? Mining or mineral resources? Surely, but I don’t know that this was the sole reason.

President Bill Clinton pretended, for public apparence, to be good vis-a-vis Haiti, but he evidently was far from good; having been extremely rotten, criminal.

The Cold War against the former USSR, Gore Vidal says that when he questioned President John F. Kennedy about this bogus war, President JFK replied that it was is only for “apparences”. Iow, he told Gore Vidal that the Cold War was bogus in terms of the public statements issued by the government of the USA.

I would not believe that the U.S. had a clean slate in terms of what happened in Rwanda in 1994. And the CIA would probably have been able to know what France was doing. If the CIA knew, then the White House most surely also knew.

Japan didn’t attack the U.S. on Pearl Harbor day. Japan retaliated for the USA’s act of war against Japan, when the U.S. imposed criminal sanctions preventing or prohibiting oil imports to Japan. It’s not what is taught in schools in the West though.

I don’t think any of these imperialist, colonialist, corporatist, … governments can be trusted. The trust that we can perhaps safely place in them is microscopic.

All of the above, except for the opening paragraphs specifically referring to Patrick’s post, and the very last paragraph, above, is information gathered from online, from reliable, respectable sources. Since it’s not my work, but only readings, I won’t bother providing the supporting links. However, when we refer to our work, as Patrick did, then we should always provide links for further or continued reading. Maybe Patrick has that work written down, but not online anywhere and not in any published books; but this could also be made clear to readers.

With that said, what Patrick says regarding France’s secret involvement seems credible. Whether it’s true or fully true, or not, I’m not qualified to say. France is an imperialist, colonialist, corporatist, … country, too. Many western countries or governments are.

It would’ve been good to have a follow-up response from Keith Harmon Snow on Patrick’s last post, and while he can be contacted through his website, it’s much too late now to bother. The article by Keith Snow was of Jan. 23, 2009, and we’re now ten months later.

People who claim he was innocent and honest in 1994 Rwanda might be getting only one part of the story about him in that context. While he might’ve been against what France was doing, if it indeed did as Patrick wrote, this doesn’t mean that he wasn’t simultaneously backing Anglo western power elites, imperialism, etcetera. He might not have been doing the latter when being against France’s secret actions, but he might have been.

Most Rwandans surely did not have [full] knowledge of what was then going on and most probably still don’t have full knowledge. None likely would, unless they were on the “inside” or flies on walls on the “inside”.

France and genocide: the murky truth
By Linda Melvern
The Times, August 8 2008

What happened in Rwanda in 1994 is a milestone event; in a few terrible months, up to one million people were killed in organised massacres, planned in advance by the Hutu regime. Its aim was to create a “pure Hutu state” by eliminating the minority Tutsi and all opponents of its extremist Hutu Power ideology. This was done by mobilising the country’s unemployed youth into a militia called the Interahamwe; 30,000 young men were recruited and trained to kill with agricultural tools. They were indoctrinated with a racist anti-Tutsi ideology. There were no secret death camps. The killing was in broad daylight.

The French had favoured the Hutu cause since the 1960s. The rule by the majority Hutu in this one-party state was considered democratic. The overt discrimination against the minority Tutsi and the human rights abuses against them were largely ignored. By 1990 some one million Rwandans were living as refugees in neighbouring states, Tutsi who had fled during murderous anti-Tutsi campaigns. In October 1990, the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded from neighbouring Uganda to force a return home for them. The French immediately sent elite troops to defend the regime in Kigali and in the three years of civil war that followed the French military and French-supplied weaponry ensured its survival.

These French forces stayed for three years, until late 1993 when UN peacekeepers were sent to monitor an internationally brokered peace agreement providing for the return of the refugees and a transition from a Hutu dictatorship to a power-sharing democracy that would include the Tutsi minority.

Drawing on documents recently released from the Paris archive of Mitterrand, the commission clearly describes the motive for French policy in Rwanda. These documents show how the RPF invasion was considered as clear aggression by an Anglophone neighbour on a Francophone country. The RPF was a part of an “Anglophone plot”, involving the President of Uganda, to create an English-speaking “Tutsi-land”. Once Rwanda was “lost” to Anglophone influence, French credibility in Africa would never recover. The policy was to avoid a military victory by the RPF.

The French journalist Patrick de Saint Exupéry alleges that the French created a secret command of the Rwandan Army through what he called a “légion présidentielle”. This was a group of elite operatives that was answerable only to Mitterrand and which drew up battle plans and military strategy, and built a psychological warfare capability with operatives trained in the manipulation of public opinion.

My own work has shown that not all French military operatives left Rwanda when the UN peacekeepers arrived in 1993. When the genocide began six months later there were senior French officers attached to key units in the Rwandan Army – the para-commando and reconnaissance battalions, and the Presidential Guard. It was French-trained soldiers from these units who, early in the morning of April 7, had orders to eliminate members of Rwanda’s political opposition – and to kill anyone with a Tutsi identity card. Without a full accounting from these French officers the story of the crucial early hours of genocide will never be complete. To date only three French officers have testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda – and only then in defence of Rwandan military officers on genocide charges.

The French Senate discovered how policy towards Rwanda had been made by a secretive network of military officers, politicians, diplomats, businessmen, and senior intelligence operatives. At its centre was Mitterrand. French policy had been unaccountable to either parliament or the press. This has made the discovery of the truth about France’s role in the genocide difficult. It may be that a true reckoning of France’s responsibility will never be possible.