Exposing U.S. Agents of Low Intensity Warfare in Africa

Bread for the World director and former senator Bob Dole (R-KA) worked for years to advance the interests of mid-western U.S. grain corporations, esp. Archers Daniels Midland.  U.S. lobbyists for big agribusinessseeking vast landholdings in Sudan worked out of Dole’s office and frequently traveled to Sudan.  Dole also used and manipulated the World Food Program as an imperial tool to both leverage foreign markets and protect domestic ones.Famines, starvation, internally displaced people and refugees flows are these organizations’ stock in trade, and the war in south Sudan simultaneously took land out of agricultural production and created a market for U.S. corporations to dump surplus and sub-standard grains for a profit.  Many of these organizations are today connected to Yoweri Museveni–former co-chair of the euphemistically named Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa (PCHPA)–and they operate in tandem with USAID, which is really just a Christian-based “soft policy” wing of the Pentagon that uses food as a weapon under the disguise of charity.  Many of USAID’s programs are highly invisible.Donald Payne and Roger Winter were decorated by Rwandan president Paul Kagame at the July 4, 2012 celebration of the 16th Anniversary of the RPF’s victory in Rwanda.  Donald Payne, then 76, received only the UMURINZI “Campaign Against Genocide Medal for being “among ‘very few’ people in the world who recognized the Tutsi Genocide as the governments, media and individuals continued to debate.”  Roger Winter, then 67, received both Rwanda’s URUTI Liberation Medal and UMURINZI medal.”Roger Winter is one of Kagame’s most ardent supporters, and one of the most biased, and least credible,” says Rene Lemarchand, long-time Central Africa expert and former USAID consultant (1992-1998).  “It is not for nothing that Winter has been decorated by [Paul] Kagame for his past services as a praise-singer (griot) on behalf of his patron.  He played a key role in 1992 in putting Kagame in touch with high-ranking bureaucrats in the U.S. State Department, and he kept in close touch with the RPF in subsequent years.  I would trust him about as far as I can throw a piano.  I believe you’re right in saying that Winter worked as a U.S. intelligence operative. That’s my gut feeling but I cannot prove it.” ((Personal communication, Rene Lemarchand, August 2, 2012. René Lemarchand is a French political scientist who is known for his research on ethnic conflict and genocide in Rwanda, Burundi and Darfur. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, and has worked as a USAID consultant in Côte d’Ivoire (1992-1996) and Ghana (1997-1998).?))

“The silence is fathomless and overwhelming and eventually there will be no more sounds from this region,” wrote Roger Rosenblatt in a July 1993 Vanity Fair feature article (later published as a book) that sold the U.S. policy line on Sudan in 1993. ((Roger Rosenblatt & Sebastio Salgado’s story, “The Last Place on Earth,” Vanity Fair, July 1993, was turned into a coffee table picture book published in December 1994.?)) The article is a sales pitch, a provocative pornography of misery and violence meant to tug on western heart strings and open purses for western charity NGOs.  Whether by accident or intention, depopulation of indigenous lands is one of the objectives of Empire, enabling foreign interests to more easily steal and occupy the land.

“No side has a claim on morality in these wars.”  Rosenblatt prepares the argument for our SPLA support, taking the side sanctioned by the popular insanity, and in sync with the National Security apparatus.  This is, after all, a war for public opinion at home, as much as for Empire in Sudan.

“When [Government of Sudan] military convoys lose vehicles to rebel mines, they usually burn the closest village and murder its inhabitants.”  Rosenblatt is unwilling to expose the SPLM tactics in low-intensity warfare, where the people are used as human shields.  “Soldiers routinely rape women displaced from their homes by the fighting; the SPLA has also been accused of rape and kidnapping.”  The GoS soldiers are guilty of rape, while SPLA soldiers are only accused.  “Both the government and the SPLA have menaced relief operations and blown up trucks carrying food and medicine.”  So there are, in fact, two warring factions in this war!  “The government has amputated the limbs of prisoners of war; so has the SPLA.” ((Roger Rosenblatt & Sebastio Salgado’s story, “The Last Place on Earth,” Vanity Fair, July 1993, was turned into a coffee table picture book published in December 1994.?))

“Yet nearly everyone [sic] agrees that the Bashir government has been the main persecutor in the wars.”  Roger Rosenblatt’s script is still in use today!  “Muslim fundamentalists armed and inspired by Iran, they are the theocratic cleansers of their country–a twist on the ethnic cleansers in Bosnia.  They seek to “Islamize” the Sudan–as indeed Iran may seek to Islamize the entire Horn of Africa–by converting or killing off all the Christians and animists in the South.  Their weapons are famine, political repression, the torture of dissidents, and outright slaughter.” ((Roger Rosenblatt & Sebastio Salgado’s story, “The Last Place on Earth,” Vanity Fair, July 1993, was turned into a coffee table picture book published in December 1994.?))

Yet nearly everyone does not agree.

To conclude the upside-down and backwards charade, Rosenblatt proffered the thesis that “the U.S. government provided only intermittent humanitarian aid to the Sudan, either because it is loath to interfere with a sovereign government (this is how the political situation in Sudan differs from Somalia) or because there is no obvious geopolitical advantage in doing so in the post-Cold War environment.” ((Roger Rosenblatt & Sebastio Salgado’s story, “The Last Place on Earth,” Vanity Fair, July 1993, was turned into a coffee table picture book published in December 1994.?))

No obvious geopolitical advantage!  No geopolitical interests!  No strategic interests!  “The silence is fathomless and overwhelming,” indeed, and if “eventually there will be no more sounds from this region,” it will be due to the massive corporate depopulation land-grab [Lebensraum] by Wall Street bankers, industrial philanthropists and other white collar predators.

The example of Jarch Capital comes quickly to mind.  Wall Street banker Philippe Heilberg’s Jarch Capital, an investment firm, acquired 400,000 hectares in South Sudan in the last few years.  These landholdings the size of Vermont were acquired in a deal with SPLM warlord Gabriel Matip.  Jarch Capital came under some mild scrutiny when it was learned that Jarch executives include a former Clinton era Pentagon agent named Gwenyth Todd, and Joseph Wilson.  In 1997, just before Clinton destroyed Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory with cruise missiles, Joseph Wilson ran the National Security Council’s East Africa Desk.  Working under him was none other than National Security Council agent John Prendergast, America’s humanitarian poster boy for Sudan and George Clooney’s sidekick. ((See, e.g., Ann Garrison, “South Sudan Independence? Really?” July 10, 2010; and Profile: Joseph C. Wilson, Africa Confidential, accessed December 11, 2010.?))

“Whatever the causes of the war, it is southern civilians who have paid most dearly for it, and continue to pay,” wrote Human Rights Watch in a November 1994 report.  “In this second civil [sic] war, even the adults are hard pressed to survive where displacement, asset destruction, famine and disease are constantly recurring.  Children, always the most disadvantaged in any war, have been additionally punished in Sudan by being separated from their families, where they might find a modicum of adult protection, supervision and concern.  They remain at greater risk than adults.” ((Prendergast et al., Sudan: The Lost Boys: Child Soldiers and Unaccompanied Boys in Southern Sudan, Human Rights Watch, Vol. 6, No. 10, November 1994.?))

John Prendergast was one of several key researchers for the HRW report, based on research at refugee camps in Kenya, Sudan and Uganda from January to June 1993, and interviews in conducted in London, Cairo, Nairobi and Washington DC.  The report concluded that “the SPLA has engaged in recruitment of boy soldiers and in the separation of children from their families… Since 1987 the SPLA has maintained large camps of boys separate from their relatives and tribes in refugee camps in Ethiopia and in southern Sudan.  From these camps the SPLA has drawn fresh recruits as needed, regardless of the age of the boys.”Not only were the SPLA “lost Boys” camps used for military recruitment: they were also places of death.  Conditions were abhorrent.  While the Operation Lifeline Sudan was paying huge salaries to western ex-patriots, and while Christian NGOs were shipping bibles to remote locations suffering famine, boys were living in absolute misery in these camps.  Scores of thousands of children have died due to the indirect causes of the U.S. covert war.  Roger Winter and the low-intensity SPLM war created the so-called “Lost Boys of Sudan”–not the Khartoum government, as we are always led to believe.

The Council of Wonks are all well aware of the atrocities committed by the SPLM.  Like Human Rights Watch, and sometimes working for them, sometimes not, John Prendergast wrote about the SPLM campaigns of terror in south Sudan.  In his book, Frontline Diplomacy: Humanitarian Aid and Conflict in Africa, for example, Prendergast explores how the SPLM uses food as a weapon, how they shuttle refugees around for their strategic and tactical advantage, using people as human shields, attacking relief organizations and enforcing starvation to leverage foreign intervention.  Over the years however, Prendergast went silent on SPLM abuses.

The government think tank U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP) funded Prendergast’s Frontline Diplomacy project, just as they funded Philip Gourevitch to travel back and forth to see his friend Paul Kagame and produce the ‘non-fiction’ propaganda book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (Verso, 1999).

The USIP funded other Sudan and Rwanda propaganda, conferences and policy papers.  Speaking at a USIP conference titled “Religion, Nationalism and Peace in Sudan” on September 16-17,1997, Roger Winter reportedly demanded full-scale backing from the U.S. government for a war “to bring down the Khartoum government” in Sudan, adding, “even though I know it will bring about a humanitarian catastrophe.”  John Prendergast and Ted Dagne were on the same panel as Winter, and Council of Wonks member Francis Deng spoke on another panel.

Over the past few decades, the human rights agencies became and more and more muted about crimes committed by the U.S., the U.K. or Israel–if mentioned at all–with resources and public relations increasingly concentrated on documenting the crimes of ‘enemies’ that are in the way of Empire.  “The grand narrative of human rights contains a subtext which depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on the other,” writes Professor Makau Mutua. ((Makau Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.?))

SPLM war crimes and crimes against humanity are documented in stark detail in the March 1990 Human Rights Watch/Africa Watch report “Denying ‘The Honor of Living’: Sudan, a Human Rights Disaster”. Between 1984 and 1989, the SPLM attacked southern Garrison towns, disappeared and tortured, and shot civilian airliners out of the sky.  In 1986, the SPLM attacked Ugandan (mostly Acholi) refugees in southern Sudan–forced out of Uganda by Museveni’s NRM low-intensity war there–killing refugees and forcing at least 35,000 refugees back to insecurity in Uganda.  In 1989 the SPLM attacked Ethiopian refugee camps on the Ethiopian border.  Both instances were violations of international humanitarian law.

As Operation Lifeline Sudan grew in scope, so too did the scale and magnitude of the crimes committed by the SPLM–and the sophistication of the western intelligence apparatus at hiding them.  The Council of Wonks and the ‘human rights’ establishment and the misery industry increasingly closed their eyes to SPLM atrocities, funded by western taxpayers, and increasingly honed and
tuned the propaganda corps to demonize the Government of Sudan in keeping with the savior versus savage narrative at work behind the new humanitarian fascism.

Did the SPLM reform itself in the mid-1990s and post-2000 era?  Starting in 1999, from his offices at Smith College, policy wonk Eric Reeves screamed louder and louder–ever more hysterical by the day–about the Government of Sudan’s bombing campaigns, the climbing death tolls, the genocide, and about our moral imperative to facilitate “regime change” in Khartoum by any means necessary.  Meanwhile, John Prendergast became increasingly silent about SPLM terrorism in Sudan in direct proportion to his proximity to the U.S. government.  The closer Prendergast got to the National Security apparatus–and the perks of power and private profit–the quieter he became.

Ditto with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and the western human rights corpus.  The massive tome Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (1999), researched and written by Human Rights Watch agent Alison Des Forges, offers a scant 43 pages (out of 793 pages) on crimes committed by the “highly disciplined” RPF, and these crimes are often downgraded to allegations or unverified reports.  Roger Winter is not once mentioned in the book.  Alison Des Forges also worked as a consultant to USAID.

Similarly, the 343-page Human Rights Watch book Behind the Red Line: Political Repression in Sudan (1996) offers a mere 20 pages (out of 343 pages) attending to SPLM crimes, and these 20 pages also include further “Crimes by All Parties to the Conflict.”

As human rights and so-called humanitarian NGOs have evolved, they have become ever more focused on presenting western civilization as saviorsand our proxy forces as victims, in a contest with savages. In the case of the governments (and people) we wish to overthrow, the ‘savages’ are the Arab Government of Sudan, the Hutu government of Rwanda, and so on, and so forth.  It is all too easy for affluent westerners to adhere to this narrative.

It is “a project for the redemption of the redeemers,” writes Makau Mutua, “in which whites who are privileged globally as a people–who have historically visited untold suffering and savage atrocities against nonwhites–redeem themselves by ‘defending’ and ‘civilizing’ ‘lower,’ ‘unfortunate,’ and ‘inferior’ peoples.” ((Makau Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.?))

Hamilton reports that Smith College professor Eric Reeves began working with the policy wonks–and the implication is he began working on Sudan–in 2001 after Roger Winter spoke at Smith College.  In fact, it was the other way around: Eric Reeves began screaming about “genocide in Sudan” in 1999.  If his Sudan crusade was inspired by Roger Winter, he has changed his story.

“When the former executive director of the U.S. branch of Doctors Without Borders, Joelle Tanguy, told Reeves she thought Sudan needed a champion, she probably didn’t expect it to be an English prof from Northampton, Massachusetts.”  John Prendergast wrote this while eulogizing Eric Reeves in his book Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond. ((John Prendergast, Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, Hyperion, 2007: p. 142-143.)) “Fighting cancer and frequently working from his hospital bed, he has waged an often lonely but always Herculean struggle to ensure that the American public is aware of what is happening to the people of Sudan…”

Reeves has stated he met Joelle Tanguy and adopted the Sudan cause “early in 1999”.  On April 1, 1999, Smith College hosted a lecture by Roger Winter organized by Eric Reeves.  “Winter ‘is a really distinguished presence in the world of humanitarian agencies,’ says Smith English professor Eric Reeve, an organizer of the event…” ((Director of U.S. Committee for Refugees to Present Lecture, Press Release, Smith College, March, 1999.?))

On October 30, 2000, Smith College hosted a special ceremony where Roger Winter and the U.S. Committee for Refugees honored Reeves with an award recognizing Reeves “for his widely published work calling attention to Sudan’s vast and ongoing humanitarian crisis.” ((Prior to Public Talk, Smith Professor to be Honored for Sudan Advocacy, Press Release, Smith College, October 16, 2000.?))

In Eric Reeves’ hysterical perspective, virtually all violence in Sudan is attributed to the “genocidal counterinsurgency by the [Khartoum] Government of Sudan.”  Reeves’ disinformation–especially his inflation and fluctuation of mortality estimates in Darfur (2003-2010)–has been roundly debunked. ((While warning the reader that Mahmood Mamdani’s scholarship as regards Sudan and the Great Lakes of Africa is compromised by his formerly close relationship to Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame and the NRM during the bush war (1980-1986) and years after (1986-1996), the reader can find an excellent accounting of Dr. Eric Reeves’ disinformation and manipulation of mortality statistics in: Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics & the War on Terror, Pantheon, 2009.)) The charge of genocide in Darfur was equally specious–meaningless in the context used by Eric Reeves and Nicholas Kristof.

In 2006, the U.S. Government Accountability Office in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences convened twelve experts to review six sources of data on mortality in Darfur. The GAO study, reported to the U.S. Congress in November 2006, questioned the validity of three of the six ‘expert’ international sources providing estimates of mortality on Darfur, offering a “devastating critique of assumptions, source data and extrapolations behind the findings of the two most prolific high-end researchers associated with Save Darfur…” ((While warning the reader that Mahmood Mamdani’s scholarship as regards Sudan and the Great Lakes of Africa is compromised by his formerly close relationship to Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame and the NRM during the bush war (1980-1986) and years after (1986-1996), the reader can find an excellent accounting of Dr. Eric Reeves’ disinformation and manipulation of mortality statistics in: Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics & the War on Terror, Pantheon, 2009.))

One of these high-enders was professor John Hagan, who authored the highly politicized “Atrocities Documentation Report” produced by an NGO called the Coalition for International Justice.  The second high-end researcher was Dr. Eric Reeves.  “Nine of the experts found Hagan’s source data ‘generally’ or ‘definitely’ unsound, while ten experts said the same of Reeves’ source data.  Ten said Hagan’s assumptions were ‘somewhat’ or ‘very unreasonable,’ and eleven said so with regard to Reeves.  Eleven said Hagan’s extrapolations were ‘somewhat’ or ‘very inappropriate,’ and all twelve said so in reference to Reeves.” ((While warning the reader that Mahmood Mamdani’s scholarship as regards Sudan and the Great Lakes of Africa is compromised by his formerly close relationship to Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame and the NRM during the bush war (1980-1986) and years after (1986-1996), the reader can find an excellent accounting of Dr. Eric Reeves’ disinformation and manipulation of mortality statistics in: Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics & the War on Terror, Pantheon, 2009.))

Worse still, the escalation of Save Darfur hysteria occurred in 2006, even as the violence in Darfur had greatly receded.  Reeves’ mortality estimates went up and down and up again, and he paid no attention to the GAO critique, but continued to scream about between 400,000 to 500,000 dead due to the “genocidal counterinsurgency” by the Government of Sudan.  Given the cloudy assessments of the actual mortality–somewhere between the Government of Sudan’s estimate of 10,000 and other reasonable estimates of around 200,000–the hysterical behavior of Dr. Eric Reeves is shocking.

Of course, behind Reeves was the Council of Wonks.  To his credit, Dr. Eric Reeves specifically acted as Minister of Disinformation for the Council’s anti-Sudan campaign: he had nothing to do with the low-intensity wars in Uganda, Rwanda or Congo.  Or did he?

While the (extremely conservative) International Rescue Committee estimates of death tolls in the neighboring Congo were coming in at 3.9 million dead by 2004 and 5.4 million dead by 2007–some 45,000 Congolese dying every month–Reeves was inflating mortality statis on Darfur, monopolizing attention, getting shriller and shriller by the day, focusing the global consciousness on Darfur. Like Mahmood Mamdani–whose analyses of Reeve’s manipulation of Darfur mortality stats was utilized above–Dr. Eric Reeves has protected Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame from scrutiny; the former by defecting attention from the SPLM’s covert supply chain in Uganda, the latter by whitewashing the Rwandan Defenses Forces’ (formerly known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front) combat operations under the African Union flag in Darfur.  By falsifying consciousness on Sudan, Dr. Eric Reeves was also falsifying consciousness about the Great Lakes.

Roger Winter and Ted Dagne and the other Council of Wonks members were Reeves’ primary sources of information, and Reeves accepted their data and perspective all too happily.  His reports, appearing anywhere and everywhere in the U.S. media, reeked of hysteria and outright lies.  Reeve’s understanding of a greater geopolitical context, such as the political fault lines of front line states (Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda) involved in Sudan’s war (or the international geopolitical importance of countries like Libya) was unnecessary for the mission of propagandizing the western public and providing cover for the covert low-intensity war prosecuted by the SPLA and backed by Washington.

“To this day [Reeves] carries his draft card from the Vietnam war in his wallet,” wrote Rebecca Hamilton in Fighting for Darfur, “its status is marked ‘1-0’–conscientious objector.” ((Rebecca Hamilton, Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011: p. 139)) The irony is thick as the blood in South Sudan.  While the media always underscores Reeves’ supposed morality–was it a commitment to non-violence or a refusal to support an imperialist war?– Reeves openly advocated more conventional U.S. military war against Sudan.  His draft card in his wallet offers proof of his saintliness.  Dr. Reeve’s struggle with leukemia is also invoked as irrefutable evidence of his saintliness.

Reeves’ statements before the U.S. Congress sound like pro-SPLM military briefings.  “The SPLA has not, so far, successfully attacked in a major way the oil infrastructure.”  Reeves is responding to U.S. Congressman Ed Royce, Chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Africa Subcommittee in March 2001.  “There have been attacks on the oil pipeline as it approaches Eritrea.  There have been attacks and seizures of individual wells, but the security is very, very extensive.  The scorched earth warfare that the government of Sudan has conducted has created a cordon sanitaire that has made it virtually impossible for the SPLA to deploy resources that would allow for major military attack on the infrastructure in the Unity and Heglig fields.” ((America’s Sudan Policy: A New Direction? Joint hearing before the subcommittee on Africa and subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, 107th Congress, First Session, March 28, 2001, Serial No. 107-8.))

There is no rest for the wicked, and so the Council of Wonks will not stop their war until the National Islamic Front Government of Sudan is gone.  It doesn’t matter how messy it gets.

“Security cooperation between Khartoum and Washington [Central Intelligence Agency] and London [Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)] has increased sharply in volume over the past two years, for instance in the number of documents handed over and the numbers of joint liaison meetings,” reported Africa Confidential.  The article stated obvious facts that the policy wonks have hidden. “Some Western strategists regard the longer term plan to engage the NIF regime on security, and also more widely in peace negotiations with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, as regime change by stealth.”  The same AC article reported: “Western intelligence sources briefed journalists that some teams of U.S. Special Forces units were operating in northern Sudan in pursuit of terror cells and Al Qaida units.” (( “Sudan/Britain: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” Africa Confidential, January 2005.?))

In a speech before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights on June 16, 2011, Roger
Winter, described as “the former U.S. special envoy to Sudan,” called for immediate military action against Khartoum in order to strengthen the South Sudan army and, ostensibly, to halt attacks on civilians.

“Take a military action against a Khartoum military target now,” Winter said, adding that the goal would be “to strengthen the SPLA in meaningful ways as a deterrent against Khartoum aggression, provocation and attacks against civilians.” (( “Former U.S. Envoy Calls for Military Action Against Sudan,” Sudan Tribune, June 16, 2011.))

Like Reeves and the other members of the Council of Wonks, Winter blames all the violence on Khartoum and he inflates mortality estimates out of thin air. “Winter said that any commitments made by the Khartoum government are unreliable and that the government’s actions had led to the death of three million people.” [35]

No matter their hysteria, their warmongering, or their lack of credibility, these guys continue to be widely celebrated and published.  Evidence suggests that the system appreciates them precisely because they obfuscate reality and inculcate necessary illusions.  “We are, once again, on the verge of genocidal counterinsurgency in Sudan,” screamed the mad doctor and indefatigable dink at Smith College, in his June 13, 2011 Washington Post Op/Ed titled “In Sudan, Genocide Anew?”  “History must not be allowed to repeat itself.”

Irish Catholic gun-runner Daniel Eiffe is another shady intelligence operator who is never mentioned by Dr. Eric Reeves, and certainly a friend of Roger Winter and the Council of Wonks.

“This year, the Republic of South Sudan officially became a state,” reported Eoin Butler, in the Irish Times, “thanks in no small part to a diminutive former priest from County Meath [Ireland], who also has gunrunning, renegade militancy and newspaper publishing on his CV.” ((Eoin Butler, “Our Man in South Sudan,” The Irish Times, Saturday December 17, 2011. ))

“How did a diminutive priest [Daniel Eiffe] go from providing humanitarian aid for the victims of civil war, to taking up arms in support of one side?” Butler asks.  Eiffe is the publisher of the Sudan Mirror, a pro-SPLA and pro-Christian South Sudan newspaper published with the support of Trociare and other international AID agencies.

In the early 1990’s, Eiffe was employed by Norweigan People’s Aid, a gun-running NGO that uses humanitarian relief as its cover. Eiffe organized weapons and logistics for the SPLA through Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni in Kampala, Uganda. ((Eoin Butler, “Our Man in South Sudan,” The Irish Times, Saturday December 17, 2011. )) USAID has funded Norwegian People’s Aid for years; USAID support in 2010, for example, was $8.5 million (while other U.S. government agencies gave NPA $6.9 million in 2010).

The rebel priest ‘commander’ Dan Eiffe’s Sudan Mirror is also funded by USAID, ensuring that the people of the new South Sudan are properly educated about the wonders of their new found freedom and democracy.  The Office of Transitional Initiatives (OTI), a subsidiary of USAID, in conjunction with the Sudan Development Trust (run by Eiffe) set up the Sudan Mirror and the Sudan Radio Service. USAID’s OTI also works with PACT, another U.S. government NGO ‘charity’ front staffed by former U.S. government officials, intelligence and financial planners, including a close relative of the Bush family.

Eighteen months after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement [sic] that ended Sudan’s two-decade civil war had been signed, few Sudanese knew its details.  This was precisely because the power brokers involved–including USAID and Roger Winter, U.S. government officials, and the leadership of the SPLA–do not represent the people or their best interests.

“That began to change in April and May 2006, when USAID launched an initiative to help more than 150,000 people in five Southern Sudanese states access details of the agreement and participate more fully in implementing the peace.  Documents in Arabic and English were distributed to all government officials in the south, and an official summary was developed and published in English and Arabic. The Sudan Radio Service created audio versions of the summary in seven languages–Moro, Arabic, simple Arabic, Toposa, Shilluk, Dinka, and Nuer–and the Sudan Mirror published 22,000 summaries to be included as supplements in its Easter edition.” ((See: USAID Photo gallery, “Sudan: Disseminating the Peace,” USAID web site, 2006.))

The Sudan Mirror has also been supported by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, a British government-backed organization, akin to the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI), all involved in “promoting democracy and human rights” through subversive and clandestine programs aligned with NATO intelligence and defense operations. (( “Sudan Mirror Sheds Light.”))

Daniel Eiffe’s ties to Roger Winter and USAID are outlined in a 1998 expose by the right-wing Lyndon LaRouche publication Executive Intelligence Reveiw. “Eiffe himself operates out of Wilson Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, and has a forward base at Lokichoggio, Kenya, along the border with Sudan.  Even in July, after the scandals around the NPA had exploded in Norway, Winter’s U.S. Committee for Refugees brought Eiffe to Washington to lobby for money, a stance that was endorsed in July 29 [1998] hearings by the Africa Subcommittee of the House of Representatives, in which Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice called for funding non-governmental organizations operating outside of the United Nations’ Operation Lifeline [Sudan]–a clear reference to the NPA.”

In a 2009 radio interview, Daniel Eiffe stated that in June [sic] 1998 he stood in the U.S. Congress and said to the congressmen and women: “Southern Sudan is apartheid at its worst.  Apartheid is a tea party in comparison to what happens in Southern Sudan.”  Eiffe confirmed that he was in Washington “meeting with Congressman Donald Payne, the head of the [Congressional] Black Caucus, he’s very close to Clinton, he’s a good friend of mine.” ((2009 interview with Dan Eiffe, publisher of Sudan Mirror, part 1; part 2; and part 3.))

Donald Payne was one of the Council of Wonks closest collaborators.

A few key details about the Council of Wonks’ Francis Deng are also in order.  Sudanese diplomat Francis Deng is on the board of the ‘charity’ International Alert–which is also funded by the Westminister Foundation for Democracy.  Other International Alert funders are USAID, Bread for the World, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

In formulating the U.S. position on Sudan, Francis Deng worked closely with the prominent U.S. government official Elliot Abrams.  “For example, on Sudan, we helped elevate the issue of religious persecution in southern Sudan,” said Abrahms, then chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “and for that matter in northern Sudan, to get it more attention from the president and the National Security Council and the secretary of state and make it a larger item in U.S. foreign policy.” ((Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson, “Interview with Elliott Abrams: ‘Religious Freedom is More Important Today’,” ?Middle East Quarterly?, Winter 2001.))

Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, and retired U.S. Marine Corps officer Oliver North were pivotal players in the Iran-Contra affair–all were serving under the administration of then U.S. president Ronald Reagan.

In Francis Deng we find another choice topic for a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Deng has the perfect cover: he has for many years been the United Nation’s Special Adviser to the Secretary General on Displaced Persons and, since 2007, the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Deng began his long and distinguished career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: common sense suggests he is a Central Intelligence Agency spook.

If Francis Deng is merely an honorable diplomat, then Americans are equally foolish in their acceptance of the drug-dealer-turned-Christian-savior cover story provided for Sam Childers–the infamous ‘machine gun preacher’ of south Sudan.

A mercenary who could not possibly operate in south Sudan without the sanction of the U.S. and commanders Roger Winter and Dan Eiffe, Sam Childers has been backed by the Museveni regime and the SPLM–who put a unit of SPLA soldiers under Childers’ personal command.  Childers exemplifies the countless fronts in which militarized Christianity operates in South Sudan with both open and clandestine U.S. support. Of course, machine-gun preacher makes a great ‘documentary’ film for oblivious propaganda consumers and arm-chair human rights patrons.  “God protects me in Africa,” Sam Childers always says.

Remember the trial of Henry Kissinger? Can a case be made that Roger Winter should be indicted and charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide? ((Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Verso, 2001.?))

Where was Roger Winter in the 1970’s? His public dossier suggests that he started with the U.S. Committee for Refugees in 1981, at the age of 38; he was director of USCR by the middle of the 1980’s and transitioned to USAID working in Sudan from 2001 to 2006. Then he became some kind of Special Adviser in south Sudan, and they even created a special office for him in Washington.

Back in the 1980’s, Roger Winter also worked with USCR in Indochina at a time when U.S. intelligence and defense operations were assisting ‘refugees’ fleeing the Pol Pot regime after decades of U.S. state-sponsored terrorism there; these ‘refugees’ would have included a phalanx of political and military operatives who supported U.S. covert operations like ‘Phoenix‘.

Winter’s ties to guerrillas in Central Africa pre-date the SPLM war in Sudan.  In the early 1980’s Winter backed the National Resistance Movement (NRM) guerrilla war–led by Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame and other Hema-Tutsi elites–against the Milton Obote (2nd term) government in Uganda. Winter regularly visited Museveni’s NRM guerrilla’s in the bush. Winter is alleged to be one of the architects behind the false accusations blaming the Obote government for genocide in the Lowero Triangle. (The same tactic was used in Rwanda in 1992 to blame the Juvenal Habyariman government with genocide.)  Most likely, Winter also advised the NRM in some of the nasty tactics in low-intensity warfare, including Psy-Ops and ‘pseudo-operations’–where NRM guerrillas disguised as government forces committed atrocities–terrorizing the population. (( “Pseudo-operations” were developed, defined and practiced during the so-called ‘Mau Mau insurgency” by British military commander Frank Kitson, and their efficacy did not escape notice of the Pentagon. See, for example: Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs, London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960; Frank Kitson, Low-Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency & Peacekeeping, Faber & Faber, 1971; and Kline, Pseudo-Operations and Counter-Insurgency: Lessons from Other Countries, U.S. Army War College External Research Associates Program, June 2005.?)) The terror tactics seen in Uganda appeared later in Rwanda (1990-1994) and again and again in the bloody Congo wars (1995-present).  The signature of Museveni and Kagame’s guerrillas is all over the Congo, where pseudo-operations and Psy-Ops have been used to blame RPF atrocities on someone else (FARDC, Mai Mai, FDLR, LRA, Interahamwe).

For the duration of the 1980’s Winter advanced the militant plans of the Banyarwanda–Rwandan Tutsi elites who had ruled over the Hutu masses but fled Rwanda in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Roger Winter and the USCR even funded their propaganda tracts advocating guerrilla war.  Working with the Tutsi diaspora, Roger Winter and the Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora USA organized the International Conference on the Status of Banyarwanda [Tutsi] Refugees in Washington, DC in 1988, and this is where a military solution to the Tutsi problem was decided. The U.S. Committee for Refugees reportedly provided accommodation and transportation for the event.

“Roger Winter is an intelligence operative,” says Dr. Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, a former Rwandan government official who fled Rwanda under threat of death in April 1994.  “Winter organized the meeting of the Rwandan [Tutsi] diaspora in Washington, D.C in 1988.  The USCR was one of the contributors to the RPF journal Impuruza.”

The best known of the RPF-Banyarwanda publications was Impuruza, created by Dr. Alexandre Kimenyi, a Rwandan Tutsi in the U.S., where it was published from 1982 to 1994.  Like most RPF publications Impuruza circulated clandestinely in Rwanda amongst Hutu and Tutsi elite.  This publication began the process of dehumanizing the Hutu people and set the stage for the ongoing genocide against them–a genocide facilitated by Roger Winter, funded by western tax-payers who have been betrayed by the military-industrial-media complex.

“Winter followed the activities of the RPF in Uganda, including visiting the battlefield,” says Dr. Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro. “He visited RPF forces in Rwanda before April 6, 1994.  I met him first in Washington in 1988.  The second time I met him was in Chicago in 1995 at a conference on Rwanda organized by a Rwandan Tutsi at the University of Illinois.  Alison Des Forges was there too. ((See: Keith Harmon Snow, “The Rwanda Genocide Fabrications: Human Rights Watch, Alison Des Forges and Disinformation on Central Africa,” Dissident Voice, April 13, 2009.)) Roger Winter tried to stop the conference from happening.  Winter handed out pro-RPF literature prepared by the U.S. Committee for Refugees.  Then he was in Congo [Zaire] after the RPF and AFDL launched their military offensive to topple Mobutu regime.  After the overthrow of Mobutu his target became Sudan where he sought the overthrow of the central government, but then settled with the independence of South Sudan.  In South Sudan he serves under the cover of an adviser to the government of South Sudan.  So, what is next?  He has accumulated success after success.”

Acting as a spokesman for the RPF and their allies during the earlier stages of the RPF guerrilla war, Roger Winter appeared as a guest on major U.S. television networks such as PBS and CNN at times when the RPF was committing atrocities (e.g. in northern Rwanda 1990-1993). Winter and Rwanda ‘genocide’ propagandist Philip Gourevitch also made contacts on behalf of the RPF with American media, particularly the Washington Post, New York Times and Time magazine.  U.S. Rep. Donald Payne worked closely with them to support the RPF’s low-intensity wars in Africa and the necessary propaganda in the U.S., Canada and Europe.  Later, when the war in south Sudan shifted to Darfur, Donald Payne sponsored the hegemonic Darfur Genocide Accountability Act.

Roger Winter and Jeff Drumtra, another USCR agent, released numerous pro-RPF policy statements and alerts during the RPF assault of 1994.  Winter and Drumtra were amongst the first U.S. officials to advocate that the civil war in Rwanda in 1994 be declared a genocide against Tutsi civilians.  After April 6, 1994, they also worked to delegitimize Rwandan interim government.

“Effective policy requires a proper understanding of the root causes of the violence in Rwanda,” Winter and Drumtra wrote in a USCR alert.  “The U.S. media have generally mischaracterized Rwanda’s massacres as amorphous, uncontrollable ‘tribal violence’ that Westerners cannot possibly understand or affect.  Other reports mistakenly imply that the huge numbers of deaths are due to crossfire in the civil war between the government army and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).”

Winter and Drumtra helped shift the simplistic media accounts from their focus on tribal warfare to a new focus on coordinated and planned campaign of genocide being committed by the Hutu power structure.  The International Tribunal on Rwanda has never proved that the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda was planned by the “Hutu power structure” or “extremist Hutus” as has always been claimed. Roger Winter is one of the first to spread these ideas, which rely on simplistic reductionist arguments and distortions of the facts.  On the other hand, Kagame’s role in facilitating the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis is now becoming more clear.  In taking the pro-RPF position he took, and Winter facilitated the dehumanization of millions of Hutus and set the stage for the invasion of Congo-Zaire two years later.  The parallels with south Sudan are striking.

“USCR urges the U.S. and U.N. to declare formally that the massacres in Rwanda constitute genocide as defined in international law,” Winter wrote.  “This declaration is an important step necessary for establishing the moral, legal, and political contact for forceful action by the international community: the international Genocide Convention of 1951 legally requires the international community to take action ‘appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide’.” ((See, e.g., Roger Winter, “Power, not tribalism, stokes Rwanda’s slaughter,” Globe and Mail, April 14,1994 (reprinted by the US Comrnittee for Refugees, Washington, D.C.).))

Of course, there was no international action taken to stop the slaughter in Rwanda. Contrary to the disinformation campaign suggesting the United States knew what was happening and failed to act is the hard truth that the United States RPF proxy was prosecuting a terrorist war.  The United States had no intention of stopping it, because we started it.  It is the same story, slightly different, with the SPLM in Sudan.

“No independent observers have accused the RPF rebels or ethnic Tutsis of involvement in shooting down the plane of President Habyarirnana on April 6,” Winter and Drumtra wrote, producing some of the earliest disinformation befogging the double presidential assassination of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira. Roger Winter steered attention away from the RPF (who were all Ugandans) and their western defense and intelligence backers. ((Roger Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Responding to the Rwanda Crises: Declare Genocide and Other Policy Steps,” News from the U.S. Committee for Refugees, May 3, 1994–a six page USCR document “unclassified released in full” by the U.S. State Department on 8 June 2004.))

“No neutral international observers have accused the RPF of participating in massacres during the past month,” Winter and Drumtra continued.  The disinformation that the RPF was a disciplined army was spread far and wide through the western media, always repeated by western journalists who helped cover up the egregious atrocities of the RPF.  “The RPF, which currently controls at least half of Rwanda, should be encouraged to maintain the discipline of its troops,” they wrote, “abide by internationally recognized rules of human rights and honor its pledge to cooperate fully with human rights investigators of the U.N. and other agencies.” ((Roger Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Responding to the Rwanda Crises: Declare Genocide and Other Policy Steps,” News from the U.S. Committee for Refugees, May 3, 1994–a six page USCR document “unclassified released in full” by the U.S. State Department on 8 June 2004.))

Winter further called for the Pentagon to jam the radio broadcasts of the “extremist Hutu” radio station.  He also referenced his ties to the Pentagon directly.  “USCR urges the U.S. to use immediately its technical capability to ‘jam’ the radio broadcasts of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), which Rwandan extremists have used to disseminate their racist, hate-filled violence.  In recent days this radio station has broadcast messages to the militias and to the public exhorting them to accelerate the slaughter.  U.S. military personnel have told USCR that the U.S. military has the ability to jam these broadcasts almost immediately.” ((Roger Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Responding to the Rwanda Crises: Declare Genocide and Other Policy Steps,” News from the U.S. Committee for Refugees, May 3, 1994–a six page USCR document “unclassified released in full” by the U.S. State Department on 8 June 2004.))

The May 3, 1994 communiqué makes it clear that Winter had easy access to Kagame and other RPF commanders or officials, including RPF cadres in the United States–relations that began long before May 1994.  Winter called for immediate protection for Rwandan’s currently in the United States, a critical step to provide domestic U.S. protection for Tutsis in the diaspora whom Winter was working with. ((Roger Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Responding to the Rwanda Crises: Declare Genocide and Other Policy Steps,” News from the U.S. Committee for Refugees, May 3, 1994–a six page USCR document “unclassified released in full” by the U.S. State Department on 8 June 2004.))

The USCR disinformation insinuated that there was some distinct and distant separation between Roger Winter and the RPF and between Roger Winter and the U.S. military in Rwanda.  In fact, as a covert operator, Winter moved in and out of western-backed guerrilla campaigns in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and Sudan, always supporting the U.S./U.K./Israeli factions.  Roger Winter’s propaganda, routinely and unquestioningly published by such mainstay U.S. institutions as the Washington Post, included pro-RPF and pro-SPLM pieces that furthered the psychological operations generated by the Pentagon and its RPF and SPLM proxy forces in the region.

At the height of RPF terror operations inside Rwanda (1994-1995) and Congo-Zaire (1995-1998), where millions of Rwandan Hutus and hundreds of thousands of civilian French-speaking Tutsis and millions of Congolese civilians were subject to the most egregious atrocities, Winter was whitewashing the RPF (UPDF) crimes and blaming the victims.

“Take the case of the 120,000 suspected perpetrators of genocide now in Rwanda’s jails,” Winter wrote in February 1998.  “Many have never been formally charged, a fact that most of my colleagues view as an egregious abuse of human rights and proof that Rwanda’s leaders lack commitment to basic rules of justice.  I see it differently.  I regard their jailing as a human rights victory.  Most of the country’s judges, attorneys and investigators were killed during the genocide or fled the country, leaving no means of trying these 120,000 prisoners.  But they are still alive and awaiting trial.  They have not been gunned down or chopped apart in a frenzy of revenge for the genocide many of them committed.  Instead, they have remained in
jail while the Rwandan government tries to rebuild its judicial system.  The detention of suspects for trial indicates a willingness to abide by fundamental human rights principles under difficult circumstances.” ((Roger P. Winter, “How Human Rights Groups Miss the Opportunity to do Good,” Washington Post, February 22, 1998, p. C02.))

In fact, the RPF did chop up Hutu and French-speaking Tutsi people in the coldest of cold blood, both out of sight of the world community in Rwanda from 1990 to 1994 and, as with the massacre of over 10,000 civilians at Kibeho and other refugee camps inside Rwanda in 1995-in plain sight of the entire world.  Kibeho was so cold-blooded that the trenches that would become mass graves were dug days in advance of the RPF attack.

Roger Winter routinely lied, distorted the facts, and produced disinformation to cover up the RPF atrocities–including the genocide against at least 300,000 Hutu civilians in Eastern Congo from 1995 to 1998.

“After the [1994]genocide, we failed to push hard enough to expel genocidal killers from refugee camps,” Winter wrote, in 1998, exercising the standard good-versus-evil, savages-versus-saviors dichotomy that has been used to wholly dehumanize both the former Habyarimana government leaders and the Hutu people more generally, and to facilitate the genocide against them, “and we shrank from the truth that it was worth risking bloodshed to force a separation between killers and legitimate refugees.” ((Roger P. Winter, “How Human Rights Groups Miss the Opportunity to do Good,” Washington Post, February 22, 1998, p. C02.))

The truth that we shrink from is that the former Habyarimana government leaders were under attack, and they had a right to defend their country and their families.

Winter was meeting with the ‘ADFL rebel leaders’ in eastern Congo and defending them in the Washington Post even as the rebels were slaughtering Hutu people and Congolese civilians in the most ruthless campaign of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in recent contemporary history, and one that–some 14 years after the atrocities occurred–was finally, though tepidly, referenced as ‘genocidal’ in a 2010 United Nations “Mapping Report” for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. ((Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993-2003: Report of the Mapping Exercise documenting the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed within the territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003, August 2010.?))

“Some leaders despise their own citizens,” Winter opined, in 1998, defending the guerrilla-democrats that Madeleine Albright and Philip Gourevitch and the New Yorker magazine lauded as ‘a new breed of African leader’. ((Philip Gourevitch, “Letter from the Congo: Continental Shift,” New Yorker, August 4, 1997.?)) “But sometimes governments are more inexperienced than evil.”

The so-called ‘inexperienced’ leaders that Winter was defending were Rwanda’s Kagame and Uganda’s Museveni (Ethiopia’s dictator Meles Zenawi was typically included in this group) and the reference extended to SPLA guerrilla commander John Garang and ADFL puppet ‘commander’ Laurent Kabila.

Paul Kagame’s operational military tactics and methods of information control were far from anything we might define as ‘inexperienced’. Kagame’s doctrine of ensuring information shutdown was central to his strategy in the invasions of Rwanda and Congo-Zaire.

“We used communication and information warfare better than anyone,” Paul Kagame told Nik Gowing in an interview on 8 April 1998. “We have found a new way of doing things.”

“Many believe that this highly effective strategy of information control and access shut down was the result of Kagame refining the knowledge of information warfare he acquired during a U.S. Command and Staff course in 1990,” wrote Nik Gowing, in a 1997-1998 study funded by the European Union. ((Nik Gowing, ‘Dispatches from Disaster Zones’: The reporting of Humanitarian Emergencies, Conference Paper, London, 27 and 28 May 1998.?))

“Rwandan officials laugh off these suggestions.  They say Kagame only spent three months out of a planned twelve months as a Ugandan officer on a training course at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.  He cut short his studies to return to lead and plan the RPF advance into northern Rwanda after the commander, Fred Rwigena, was killed in action.  However Kagame himself acknowledges the importance of the Fort Leavenworth contribution to his thinking, especially in information warfare and communications.  Kagame confirmed that “central to my studies in Leavenworth” were “organisation, tactics, strategy, building human resources, Psy-Ops [psychological operations], information, psychology and communications among the troops.” ((Nik Gowing, ‘Dispatches from Disaster Zones’: The reporting of Humanitarian Emergencies, Conference Paper, London, 27 and 28 May 1998.?))

Nik Gowing’s credentials are very interesting.  From 1989-1998, Gowing worked variously as an international consultant, BBC World news anchor and diplomatic editor for Britain’s Channel Four News.  His reports were aired frequently by the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, NBC’s SuperChannel and CNN International.  These are the same institutions that covered up Kagame’s low-intensity guerrilla operations and subsequent crimes.  In 1994, Gowing was a resident fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. ((Nik Gowing, ‘Dispatches from Disaster Zones’: The reporting of Humanitarian Emergencies, Conference Paper, London, 27 and 28 May 1998.?))

Nik Gowing was also a Visiting Fellow in International Relations at Keele University, a board member for the British Association for Central and Eastern Europe, a member of the Director’s Strategy Group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, and a governor of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy–the British think tank that is funding pro-SPLM propaganda in alliance with USAID and Irish gunrunner Daniel Eiffe.

Nik Gowing’s potentially volatile 1998 conference paper did nothing to hold anyone account for recent past abuses or to forestall the terrorism that the ‘new breed of African leaders’ would soon unleash on Central Africa.

“The full picture of Rwandan, Ugandan and–arguably–non-regional involvement has yet to be uncovered,” Gowing wrote.  Like Samantha Power in her September 2001 Atlantic Monthly disinformation feature “Bystanders to Genocide,” Gowing suggests that the many high-level sources he interviewed are honest and their statements can be taken at face value.  “Extensive high-level interviewing for this study has provided evidence of limited political, logistical and advisory support by both regional and nonregional powers.  Hearsay and circumstantial evidence is reported.  However, despite widespread concerns at the time of writing there is scant documentary proof or evidence of either direct backing or complicity.  Rwandan officials from Vice President Paul Kagame downwards deny emphatically any such relationship.” ((Nik Gowing, ‘Dispatches from Disaster Zones’: The reporting of Humanitarian Emergencies, Conference Paper, London, 27 and 28 May 1998.?))

>Really?  It seems that the evidence of foreign backing for the RPF/UPDF invasion was readily available.  Notably, though Gowing interviewed and quoted many ‘humanitarian aid’ professionals on the ground in Central Africa, most are not named, and he never mentions Roger Winter.  “There remain many ‘whisky talk’ suspicions about outside, non-regional involvement,” he concluded. ((Nik Gowing, ‘Dispatches from Disaster Zones’: The reporting of Humanitarian Emergencies, Conference Paper, London, 27 and 28 May 1998.?))

Both the U.S. and France deployed large teams of special operations forces in Central Africa.  In Goma, at this time, a western war correspondent photographed U.S. Special Forces machine-gunning unarmed refugee men, women and children in what he described as “one of the most horrible examples of mass atrocities I have ever seen.”  He was later threatened into silence by U.S. officials.  The U.S. military was all over Bujumbura, Kigali and Entebbe. ((See: Keith Harmon Snow, “Pentagon Produces Satellite Photos of 1994 Rwanda Genocide,” ConsciousBeingAlliance.com, April 6, 1994.?))

“U.S. agents were seen with rebels in Zaire,” reported the Boston Globe on October 8, 1997.  “Active participation is alleged in military overthrow of Mobutu.” ((Colum Lynch, “U.S. agents were seen with rebels in Zaire: Active participation is alleged in military overthrow of Mobutu,” Boston Globe, 8 October 1997, A2.)) Was this Roger Winter?

To funnel selected intelligence to United Nations headquarters’ Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), the U.N. had created a special multinational intelligence Situation Center (SitCen) in New York.  The SitCen’s new Information and Research (I&R) Unit existed from 1993 to 1999, providing “significant and useful intelligence about arms shipments, belligerent activities,” noted Canadian military expert A. Walter Dorn, “and the status of refugees and [making] several prescient predictions and warnings.” ((See: A. Walter Dorn, “Intelligence at UN Headquarters? The Information and Research Unit and the Intervention in Eastern Zaire 1996,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2005, p.440-465.))

The SitCen was staffed and informed by Russian, French, British, and U.S. defense and intelligence officials seconded to the operation.  “These individuals maintained substantial links to the intelligence services of their home countries, most having come from these agencies. They were ‘the interface’ with these intelligence services. In return for the loan of these officers and the information they provided, the nations sought the U.N.’s coded cables (situation reports) from the field, some of which may have made their way back to national capitals, a prospect that displeased some U.N. Secretariat officials.” ((See: A. Walter Dorn, “Intelligence at UN Headquarters? The Information and Research Unit and the Intervention in Eastern Zaire 1996,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2005, p.440-465.))

The U.N.s DPKO received credible intelligence documenting that Kagame’s RPF forces were engaged in ‘pseudo-operations’ that are the signature of Kagame’s and Museveni’s guerrilla terrorism in the entire region: disguising themselves and their atrocities as the work of the ‘enemy’–the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Mai Mai, the FDLR, the Interahamwe, government forces of Milton Obote in Uganda or Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda–pick your bogeymen.

“The I&R Unit reports describe night raids by the Zairian rebel [ADFL] forces…. In an act of deception, the government of Rwanda stationed its forces ‘under the disguise of Banyamulenge’ in Zaire to protect hydroelectric plants that provide power to both Rwanda and Burundi (19 December 1996).” ((See: A. Walter Dorn, “Intelligence at UN Headquarters? The Information and Research Unit and the Intervention in Eastern Zaire 1996,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2005, p.440-465.))

“The I&R Unit boldly asserted that the Tutsi rebellion was backed by ‘American teams’ (6 February 1997).  Despite official U.S. support for the Canadian-led humanitarian mission in November-December 1996, the Unit alleges that the U.S. sought to undermine the operation: ‘On the American request to deter the deployment of a U.N.-authorized Multi-National Force led by a Canadian General, the RPF [Rwandan army] along with ADFL [rebel group] elements lured the ex-FAR and Interahamwe in a combat operation north of the Muganga camp (Zaire).” ((See: A. Walter Dorn, “Intelligence at UN Headquarters? The Information and Research Unit and the Intervention in Eastern Zaire 1996,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2005, p.440-465.))

“If these allegations were true,” Dorn wrote, “it has a striking parallel with duplicity in the Congo mission in the 1960s.  While U.N. forces were protecting the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba as part of a U.N. operation explicitly backed (and partly paid for) by the U.S., CIA operatives in the Congo were trying to assassinate him and later backed the Army Chief Joseph Mobutu as he seized the Presidency.” ((See: A. Walter Dorn, “Intelligence at UN Headquarters? The Information and Research Unit and the Intervention in Eastern Zaire 1996,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2005, p.440-465.))

“The U.S. position after the attack was clear: it wanted the mission aborted,” wrote Dorn.  “The U.S. estimate of the number of remaining refugees was almost 400,000 less than the consensus figures used by the humanitarian community.  Lieutenant General Maurice Baril, the Multinational Force Commander, was suspicious of U.S. reports of numbers, which were too rapidly sliding downwards.  Members of the I&R Unit had briefed him on what they believed was [U.S.] disinformation.  Both the French and British officers in the Unit were tracking the numbers. France was providing figures from overflights with Mirage jets.  The British officer was gaining information from U.N. agencies on the ground (e.g., UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, etc.). They both concluded that the U.S. numbers were far too low.” ((See: A. Walter Dorn, “Intelligence at UN Headquarters? The Information and Research Unit and the Intervention in Eastern Zaire 1996,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2005, p.440-465.))

“One is left to wonder if a strong early U.N. intervention could have saved the Congo from the subsequent chaos and loss of over three million lives,” Dorn concluded, “or at least have mitigated the human tragedy.” ((See: A. Walter Dorn, “Intelligence at UN Headquarters? The Information and Research Unit and the Intervention in Eastern Zaire 1996,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2005, p.440-465.))

Had Kagame been stopped cold in 1998, millions upon millions of Congolese people, and uncountable Rwandan people, would likely not have been raped, mutilated or killed–and the Congo would be a very different place than it is today.

Gowing’s report reads like an after-the-fact apology of why and how journalists and ‘humanitarian’ NGO’s couldn’t report the truth about the mass slaughter of Congolese IDPs and Rwandan refugees.  “I had no doubt it was genocide,” he quotes one unnamed NGO insider to say.  “We still had no doubt, but should we say it was genocide? No.” ((See: A. Walter Dorn, “Intelligence at UN Headquarters? The Information and Research Unit and the Intervention in Eastern Zaire 1996,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2005, p.440-465.))

According to the glowing Western propaganda, the new breed of African leader was supposedly determined to steer Africa in a new direction, and it would behoove the world to allow them some latitude in their excesses.  “Central Africa’s new leaders have the enormous task of reassembling nations that are among the poorest on earth, ethnically divided,” wrote Roger Winter, “riven with corruption and saturated with arms and shadowy groups willing to use those arms to gain power.” ((Roger P. Winter, “How Human Rights Groups Miss the Opportunity to do Good,” Washington Post, February 22, 1998, p. C02.))

Roger Winter never failed to remind the good and caring media consumers of the West about the shadowy forces of evil who are ‘saturated with arms’ and–unlike the guerrilla forces of the SPLM or the NRM or the RPF (or Roger Winter himself)–willing to use these arms to destroy all the good that had been ostensibly achieved through Roger Winter’s selfless dedication to human rights and statecraft.

“The military in Rwanda is more willing to listen to criticism if we acknowledge the difficulties they face in waging counterinsurgency wars,” Winter added, again casting the criminal aggressors as the aggrieved victims.  Looking back at Winter’s statements made at the time these crimes were fresh (1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, etc.), we see in his unabashed defense of the murderous ADFL guerrillas, themselves comprised mostly of the RPF and UPDF and some smaller numbers of Eritrean, Ethiopian and SPLM regulars, a conscious admission that massive atrocities had been and were still being committed.  Yet Winter apologizes away all responsibility. ((Roger P. Winter, “How Human Rights Groups Miss the Opportunity to do Good,” Washington Post, February 22, 1998, p. C02.))

Does Roger Winter ever suggest that the United States or Israel should acknowledge the difficulties that the Government of Sudan faces in waging its “genocidal counterinsurgency war” against the SPLM?

“It seems certain that thousands of Rwandan refugees and genocidaires (those who commit genocide) were killed last year [1997] during the civil war [sic] that brought Congo’s new leaders to power,” Winter wrote.  “Less certain is whether [Laurent] Kabila and his colleagues [Kagame, Museveni] actively sought to kill refugees–or whether the deaths resulted from poor military tactics, lack of troop discipline or the actions of foreign soldiers. A U.N. human rights investigation is examining those questions.”

Roger Winter had it both ways.  He regularly described Kagame and the RPF as highly disciplined and responsible, good-intentioned and cooperative, open to human rights monitoring.  Here he is dismissing the brutal slaughter and the hunting down and killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent and unarmed Hutu civilians–mostly women and children–on the grounds that perhaps the ADFL [read: RPF] were suffering from “poor military tactics” or “lack of troop discipline.”  We should excuse the RPF, faced with “the difficulties of waging counterinsurgency war,” but when the Government of Sudan is faced with counterinsurgency war they are guilty of genocide. ((Roger P. Winter, “How Human Rights Groups Miss the Opportunity to do Good,” Washington Post, February 22, 1998, p. C02.))

While we observe these rationalizations of cold-blooded murder, remember that Roger Winter ostensibly worked as an advocate for refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), employed by an organization called the U.S. Committee for Refugees.  According to his supposed job description–ever touted by the western press and U.S. State Department–Winter was an advocate for vulnerable people caught up in the maelstrom of war.  However, he behaves instead like an apologist for murder who blames the victims and protects their killers.

“For more on this story we are joined by Roger Winter, the director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a private, non-profit organization advocating protection and assistance of displaced persons,” reported National Public Radio icon Charlyne Hunter-Gault on May 17, 1997.  “He spent almost two weeks with the leader of the rebel movement, Laurent Kabila, since the
conflict began more than four months ago.” ((Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “Zaire in Turmoil,” PBS Newshour, May 17, 1997.))

Charlayne Hunter-Gault advanced several lines of disinformation already put in motion by the U.S. State Department and its subservient western media organizations.  First was the idea Laurent Kabila was the ‘leader of the rebel movement,’ the ADFL.  This fiction was peddled with the utmost seriousness in the western press.  Combined with the Psy-Op that this was a ‘homegrown rebellion’ against President Mobutu, this served to render Kagame, Kabarebe, Museveni, Salim Saleh and the real ADFL leadership invisible.  Even more invisible, then, was the Pentagon’s involvement. ((Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “Zaire in Turmoil,” PBS Newshour, May 17, 1997.))

Second was the false theme that Roger Winter had only recently established communications with the ADFL ‘rebels’, and this around the time of the fall of the city of Kisangani–some eight months into the genocidal campaign against the Hutu refugees in Congo-Zaire’s forests.  In reality, Winter was in constant liaison with the U.S.-backed RPF rebels as they invaded Congo-Zaire from Rwanda. As previously noted, Winter’s comraderie with the RPF power structure was established as early as 1988 in Washington D.C., and he
was no stranger to RPF operations zones during the four year civil war (1990-1994) in Rwanda.

Deflecting the gaze of western media consumers from seeing the truth–that this is a western-backed invasion led by a western proxy army in contravention of international law–Charlayne Hunter-Gault asks the standard leading question about Tutsis being under attack, falsely framing the discussion of war and plunder in Congo-Zaire around the need to protect Tutsi people from genocide of the kind that (we were all told) spontaneously erupted in Rwanda. “Because this started,” Charlayne Hunter-Gault points out, “of course, when the Tutsis in the Eastern part of Zaire were threatened with expulsion by Mobutu, rose up in arms, and so [Kabila] joined that.” ((Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “Zaire in Turmoil,” PBS Newshour, May 17, 1997.))

“Exactly. What happened was, in my view, that what was triggered, the fuse was lit by this so-called planned expulsion of the Banyamulenge, this Tutsi population you’re talking about,” Roger Winter duplicitously explains.”But it’s rapidly evolved far beyond the Tutsi issue or Rwanda-related issue, as a lot of outsiders would seek to make it.  What it’s become is a struggle for a new Zaire.  That’s what’s unfolding right now. And it’s important to have that as the context, not some exterior outside forces.” ((Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “Zaire in Turmoil,” PBS Newshour, May 17, 1997.))

Roger Winter’s deceptions run deep.  To begin with, the whole notion of Banyamulenge rights in Congo-Zaire is highly contested.  Instead, the pro-Tutsi agenda uses the argument of an ever present threat of a Tutsi genocide in Congo-Zaire as carte-blanche justification for Kagame’s military operations in eastern Congo.  In the PBS Newshour interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Winter revealed that he had visited ‘rebel’ bases, plural, a remarkable impossibility for your average humanitarian aid worker, made possible in fact by Roger Winter’s close association with the rebels, the U.S. military and the intelligence establishment.  This is the profile of a covert operator, a cold warrior, an Iran-contra gunrunner type outfitting rebels and providing a liaison for logistics and communications in low-intensity wars. ((Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “Zaire in Turmoil,” PBS Newshour, May 17, 1997.))

Rwanda, Congo-Zaire, Sudan–Roger Winter ran a covert arms operation for the United States military, funding and supplying and advising guerrillas in low intensity warfare.

“Well, let me say when I was with [Kabila] the last week or so of January,” Winter said, “it was very clear to me that young [Congolese] men of all ethnic stripes from all over the country were rallying to that cause.  I went to some military training bases, and the young men who were training were not Tutsi.  They were from Chaba.  They were from all over the country, and exiles returning.  He was setting up a civil structure to govern, as it were, the areas that were under his control, and the great bulk of the people were not Banyamulenge.  They were from all over the country.” ((Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “Zaire in Turmoil,” PBS Newshour, May 17, 1997.))

In fact, the ‘rebels’ were most heavily drawn from the ranks of the RPF and UPDF, with assorted Ethiopian, Eritrean and SPLA regulars, and some Congolese Tutsis (Banyamulenge).  In fact, there were also plenty of Congolese boys–the ‘kidogo‘ child soldiers–and these were intentionally armed and sent to the frontlines where they were meant to draw enemy fire.  The kidogo–the Sons of Congo–were sacrificed, in cold blood.

Roger Winter was on the ground in eastern Congo during the RPF attacks on refugee camps, shuttling back and forth between the Kivu provinces and the U.S. embassy and RPF headquarters in Rwanda.

According to professor Filip Reyntjens, one of the foremost experts on Central African affairs: on 16 November 1996, “the day after the attack against Mugunga refugee camp, Roger Winter organised a meeting between Laurent Kabila, the ADFL figurehead, and U.S. special envoy Ambassador Richard Bogosian, Ambassador Robert Gribbin, and a U.S. military colonel reporting to U.S. General Edwin P. Smith military and U.S. diplomats.”  Dr. Reyntjens exposes the false statements made by Ambassador Gribbin and General Smith. Major Richard Orth, a long time agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was an ardent RPF collaborator, to the point of embarrassing the U.S. State Department. ((Filip Reyntjens, The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996-2006, Cambridge University Press, 2009.?))

U.S. Major-General Edward Smith stated categorically that aerial and satellite reconnaissance backed the US claim that almost all the refugees had returned to Rwanda.  The Pentagon and U.S. State Department’s recent production of satellite images for anti-Hutu asylum removals in the U.S. is striking evidence that the U.S. has superior intelligence about what was happening where and when. ((See: Keith Harmon Snow, “Pentagon Produces Satellite Photos of 1994 Rwanda Genocide,” ConsciousBeingAlliance.com, April 6, 1994.?))

Knowing perfectly well that U.S. covert forces and military advisers were on the ground in support of the RPF invasion, Winter produced disinformation to counter international efforts to provide a multinational peacekeeping force to intervene to protect some 1.2 million Hutu refugees in eastern Congo-Zaire.  In another USCR production co-signed by Jeff Drumtra Winter wrote: “We should only send troops to eastern Zaire if their purpose is to disarm Rwandan Hutu killers who participated in the 1994 genocide.” ((Roger P. Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Military Deployment in Eastern Zaire Would be Misguided,” USCR Press Release, 27 November 1996.))

Winter sold the same disingenuous line used in Rwanda in 1994: an international peacekeeping force would only strengthen the ‘Rwandan Hutu killers’.  “As long as the international force pledges not to confront the killers,” Winter wrote, November 21, 1996, clearly working on behalf of the RPF and not for the protection of vulnerable Rwandan and Congolese populations, “the force would not be useful and could be counterproductive.” ((Roger P. Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Military Deployment in Eastern Zaire Would be Misguided,” USCR Press Release, 27 November 1996.))

Winter was not the only one who lied.  U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson and Madeleine Albright did their share, lying through their teeth about the Pentagon’s holocaust in Zaire.

Winter then redoubled the lies, providing doublespeak about Pentagon forces being deployed to ostensibly protect Rwandan Hutu refugees that were forced back to Rwanda, and downplaying the numbers of returning Hutu refugees: “U.S. officials have indicated that a small American military contingent will help provide humanitarian assistance inside Rwanda to 600,000 former refugees who have returned home in the past week.” ((Roger P. Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Military Deployment in Eastern Zaire Would be Misguided,” USCR Press Release, 27 November 1996.))

Translated to tactical and strategic military language: The RPF wanted a clear path to dominate the enemy–eliminating as many Hutu people as possible–and achieve a decisive military victory.  Hutu refugees were not only slaughtered in Congo-Zaire, but also on return to Rwanda.

Roger Winter was blatantly supporting the RPF military campaign, while disingenuously arguing that it best served the interests of millions of Rwandan survivors.  These were absolutely destitute human beings, ematiated, hopeless and sick after months of intentional starvation under an macabre UNHCR policy of intentional withholding of food in the camps in eastern Congo: the World Food Program rations were stored over the summer of 1996 and only disbursed to arriving RPF troops in September and October.  These were the survivors of the RPF bombing campaign against the refugee camps–survivors of some 6 years of persecution and terrorism against them that began with the RPF invasion of October 1990.

Kagame complained that an international force deployed to eastern Congo-Zaire might strengthen his adversaries and inhibit the RPF’s absolute victory.  These strategic objectives had previously been demonstrated to succeed: between April and July of 1994, Kagame threatened the international community promising that the RPF would attack U.N. troops if the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR II) was expanded and strengthened. Instead, UNAMIR was gutted.  As evidence of their belligerence, and their determination to annihilate the Rwandan masses, RPF troops engaged in combat with the French-led forces from the U.N.-authorized ‘Operation Turquoise’ dispatched on June 21, 1994 to create a safe zone’ in the southern prefectures of Rwanda.

Following suit in Congo-Zaire in 1996, Kagame’s RPF troops and Pentagon backers similarly lobbied to prevent international forces from being deployed to provide any humanitarian protection for the millions of refugees.  Roger Winter was their point man in Washington, their leading advocate in the propaganda diplomacy to win hearts and minds for the RPF plans, and he is culpable in the subsequent war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide that have occurred in the Great Lakes since, beginning with the first UPDF invasion of Rwanda of 1 October 1990 and up to the present day Rwandan occupation of eastern Congo.

While the Pentagon and U.S. State Department and the U.N. Security Council feigned concern for some 1.2 million Rwandan refugees in eastern Congo-Zaire in the fall of 1996, they had no real intention of doing anything but stalling, enabling the RPF to advance the invasion as the Pentagon proxy.  This involved U.S. covert forces, heavy weaponry provided by Washington, troop deployments supported by C-130 aircraft, and state-of-the-art Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) support, including massive satellite dishes installed on Idjwe Island in Lake Kivu and in the Ruwenzori Mountains on the Uganda border.

Roger Winter’s ploy for the RPF succeeded in forestalling a multinational intervention.  The western press seized on the idea that western policy-makers could do nothing but stall and argue about who would pay for ‘humanitarian’ troop deployments.

Winter and the USCR also engaged in the sinister campaign to convince the world that hundreds of thousands of refugees from Rwanda and Burundi–now mixed with hundreds of thousands of IDPs from Congo–were few in number, had all neatly crossed the border back to ‘safety’ in Rwanda and Burundi, or simply could not be found.  Again, nothing could have been further from the ugly truth. ((Roger P. Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Military Deployment in Eastern Zaire Would be Misguided,” USCR Press Release, 27 November 1996.))

“Uncertainty persists about the number, locations, and condition of Rwandan refugees in Zaire in the aftermath of violence in the past month.  Several hundred thousand Zairians have also been affected by the violence,” Roger Winter and Jeff Drumtra stated in the USCR report of November 21, 1996. ((Roger P. Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Military Deployment in Eastern Zaire Would be Misguided,” USCR Press Release, 27 November 1996.))

Winter’s USCR communiqué of November 26, 1996 responded directly to the international debate about the massive discrepancies in the estimates of the numbers of refugees (and IDPs) remaining in Congo-Zaire.  However, Roger Winter further advocated that the only reasonable and effective solution to aiding these refugees (and IDPs) was to negotiate with the ADFL rebels for “improved access by humanitarian workers into eastern Zaire using Rwanda as a staging base for humanitarian supplies.”  This advocacy relied on the oft-stated premise that the RPF military were the good guys, that they had “stopped the [Tutsi] genocide of 1994,” and it relied on the Psy-Op that the RPF was a disciplined, responsible and accountable fighting force that could be trusted to do the right thing according to international norms. ((Roger P. Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Military Deployment in Eastern Zaire Would be Misguided,” USCR Press Release, 27 November 1996.))

In this disinformation communiqué, Winter proposed that the numbers of uprooted Rwandan, Burundian and Zairean people remaining in eastern Zaire were between 510,000 and 950,000. He also reported that the USCR had conducted nine site visits to eastern Zaire and Rwanda since 1994–making it clear that Winter maintained a constant presence in the region.

While covering up the massive RPF atrocities and U.S. covert forces machine-gunning of Rwandan refugees and Congolese civilians from Bukavu to Kisangani and all the way across the vast Congo, the western propaganda system finally declared that the refugees had rescued themselves.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.

“Americans can be forgiven if they are frequently confused about foreign policy,” wrote the U.S. State Department media conduit Johanna McGreary, who uses journalism as her cover . “Like last week, when the pictures and the words looked remarkably out of synch to anyone trying to make sense of events in Africa. There was Bill Clinton announcing that the U.S. would participate ‘in principle’ in an international military force to rescue more than half a million sick and starving Rwandan refugees caught up in brutal tribal war. Even as he spoke, hundreds of thousands of them appeared on TV screens, marching safely out of Zaire back across the border to the homeland they had fled two years [earlier].” ((Johanna McGeary, “How should we help? Humanitarian missions can’t cure political conflicts,” Time magazine, November 25, 1996.))

Amongst the most egregious and offensive examples of the contempt, arrogance and white supremacy of the capitalist media system, this ‘news’ feature was published even as hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees–mostly women and children–were being hunted down and killed by the U.S. proxy forces directed by Roger Winter.

Over the next nine months, Hutu refugees who fled westward into Congo’s forests were hunted all across the vast Congo, into Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville.  With a bounty in U.S. dollars paid by UNHCR, they were even hunted in Gabon, Cameroon, Angola and Zambia.

“In northwest Rwanda, reports suggest that government troops have killed thousands of people during counterinsurgency operations,” Winter continued, not specifying the year(s) he is referring to, as he in turns performs mental gymnastics to shield the RPF and UPDF domestic terror operations inside Rwanda. ((Roger P. Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Military Deployment in Eastern Zaire Would be Misguided,” USCR Press Release, 27 November 1996.))

The Kagame/Museveni war machine massacred at least tens of thousands of Rwandans (mostly but not only Hutus) as it invaded northern Rwanda from Uganda, 1990-1994, and these were not “counterinsurgency operations”, but insurgency.  Declassified documents produced by relief organizations during the so-called ‘100 days of genocide’ in 1994 show that it was the RPF killing Hutus–and not genocidal Interahamwe or the Hutu Armed Forces of Rwanda (FAR) killing Tutsis–and dumping the bodies in the Kagera River of northwest Rwanda. ((See: Keith Harmon Snow, “Pentagon Produces Satellite Photos of 1994 Rwanda Genocide,” ConsciousBeingAlliance.com, April 6, 1994.?))

Throughout the late summer and fall of 1994 the RPF continued to commit massive atrocities against the population, documented in part by the infamous Robert Gersony, a highly respected consultant hired by UNHCR, whose then unwelcome report remains buried in the bowels of the United Nations.  The premeditated mass murders at Kibeho in 1995 followed.  In 1996 and 1997 scores of thousands, at the very least, of refugees returning from Congo-Zaire (the survivors of the coordinated RPF attacks against refugee camps in Zaire) were slaughtered in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. ((See: Keith Harmon Snow, “Pentagon Produces Satellite Photos of 1994 Rwanda Genocide,” ConsciousBeingAlliance.com, April 6, 1994.?))

In the end, Roger Winter sounds more like the Council of Wonk’s Goebbels-esque Minister of Propaganda, Dr. Eric Reeves.  “What is less clear is the extent to which the killings are intentional massacres, or whether genocidaire insurgents are again using civilian populations as human shields in combat zones.” ((Roger P. Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Military Deployment in Eastern Zaire Would be Misguided,” USCR Press Release, 27 November 1996.))

‘Genocidaires’ are Hutus by international consensus, and Hutus are genocidaires by international consensus, and genocidaire is the code word used to describe the local bogeyman ever out to destroy democracy in the Great Lakes theater.

Does anyone see the irony in Roger Winter’s suggestion that Rwandan genocidaire insurgents are “again using civilian populations as human shields in combat zones?”  Such is exactly the modus operandi of the SPLM.  Classic guerrilla warfare as practiced by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement has been premised on the SPLM’s ability to disappear into the vast landscape and become invisible amidst the civilian populations of South Sudan.

This is classic low-intensity warfare, and it is combined with modern propaganda, psychological operations, electioneering, and ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ promotion by means of the distribution of large sums of cash, the purchasing of local agents and the commodification of civil society through punishment and reward.

The recent “Arab Spring” uprisings in Khartoum signal further destabilization by the U.S. and its allies.  The SPLA have been armed and are being prepared to complete the mission of regime change in Sudan.  It happened the same, slightly differently, in Rwanda.

This is how the United States of America, Canada, Britain, our European allies, and Israel, have carved a ‘newly independent state’ out of the formerly autonomous sovereign nation of Sudan.  This is how the same western alliance used low-intensity warfare to bring disaster capitalism to first Uganda, then Rwanda, and then the Congo.  Wonkfare in America, warfare in Africa. It is time to issue indictments.