Ordinarily, we don't write introductions to articles or essays published in The Black Star News but the following column by Keith Harmon Snow warrants it. Snow has been at the forefront, as has this newspaper, in exposing Western duplicity in Africa and how U.S. and U.K. corporate and government interests have caused the deaths of millions of Africans; all for the love of money.In the end, the African actors, the bit players really, are the ones who are blamed; wars of blood money and profits are referred to euphemistically by major newspapers, including The New York Times as "tribal wars," so that Americans can nod their heads and continue on with their lives without bothering to ask any further questions.After all, "tribal wars" are endemic to Africa; they always happen. Africans just wake up one day, grab machetes and start chopping off their neighbors' heads to satisfy "blood lust;" a term actually once used by Time magazine to explain what the magazine contended was the reason for the Rwanda massacres of 1994.Meanwhile, no one writes about the Western companies that somehow just always happen to be around digging the gold and the diamonds and ferrying off the timber and the young Congolese girls, even as the chopping off of heads and limbs occur.But Keith Harmon Snow, whose long report follows, is not with the program. He is the anti-New York Times kind of reporter; and the anti-New Yorker magazine; and, anti-BBC and anti-Washington Post kind of journalist.In fact, he is beyond being a mere journalist. He is the type of forthright individual that corporate media would refer to as "radical," in order to impugn his reputation, without having to challenge him on a single fact. He salvages a little respectability for the profession of journalism, which has been corrupted by corporate media.He is a crusader with a mission; his goal is to expose United States' and Britain's roles in the genocide in Uganda and in the Congo; with characters like Rwanda's president Paul Kagame and Uganda's Yoweri K. Museveni and Sudan's Omar Hassan al-Bashir all playing the bit roles.Snow writes long; he cannot help it because he feels the pain of the Congolese and the Ugandans and he wants someone somewhere here in the United States and Britain– to pay a price. He might be accused of being overly passionate; one has to be, when one feels the kind of indignation that Snow feels. When it is a matter of genocide no article can be too long. Readers that bear with Snow and read all his words will learn information not found in the corporate media.Corporate media are often accomplices to crimes against humanity. Sometimes in a most perverted manner. Take The New York Times' resident Sudanese genocide expert, Nicholas Kristoff. If Kristoff really cares about the suffering of Africans, and not just about winning a Pulitzer Prize as he did for his Sudanese crusade, don't you think he would lend his big pen to expose with equal passion the suffering of Congolese and Ugandan civilians; or might that lead to the indictment of Kagame and Museveni, "friends" of United States interests?Why would a humanitarian be selective in fighting against genocide unless there was a hidden agenda?Thank the creator for the Internet. In the past, the world was held hostage to the tyranny of selective coverage and cover-ups by newspapers such as The New York Times and writers like Kristoff. He is a hero to Africans in his own mind. The Internet era has broken the monopoly of disinformation and misinformation once enjoyed by elite media.Many years ago, George Orwell had warned against the dangers of propaganda, or what he called "New Speak." We hear New Speak every day; where everything is turned upside down, killers are praised, while innocents are marched off to shallow graves in the forests. New Speak celebrates murderers as heroes and denounces victims.Although successive generations have always declared "never again;" and "not on our watch," as surely as the sun rises, humanity never fails and genocide always occurs. New Speak always exonerates the killers. New Speak is public relations disinformation; black becomes white; red is yellow; and bad is good.As one of the characters in Orwell's 1984 puts it: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."Ah, yes; New Speak has helped send millions of Africans six feet under or to the crocodiles in the Kagera river, the Nile, and Lake Victoria.
Take Uganda's Yoweri Museveni as an example; he is a master New Speaker. He has single-handedly, with the assistance of U.K. and U.S. financing and military hardware, caused the deaths of more than eight million Africans –half a million or more in Uganda; one million in Rwanda; seven million in Congo. Please see http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/116/10455.pdfYet, at least up until the time President George W. Bush left office, he was treated like some respected elder statesman of politics in the West.He is such a smooth New Speaker that he attends the funerals of people whom he has reportedly eliminated in Uganda. He is such a smooth operator that he even secured an audience with President Bush in the White House in 2007 even though The Wall Street Journal had already reported on June 8, 2006, that he is being investigated by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes committed by his troops and militia in Congo between 1998-2003 and conceivably, like Liberia's former president Charles Taylor, and like Sudan's president al-Bashir, he too may be indicted by the ICC.While President Bush could ignore the inconvenient truth and entertain Museveni in the White House, praising him for fighting HIV/Aids, even as he used his other hand to eliminate millions of Africans, it is difficult to imagine how President Barack Obama, a constitutional law professor, could ignore the smell of blood emanating from the Ugandan. Then again, on this earth, anything is possible.Rwanda's Kagame is another master New Speaker.Earlier this week, he presided over memorial ceremonies for the victims of the 1994 massacres. Kagame indulges in this macabre exercise each year even though he was instrumental in the very genocide which he now "mourns": he commanded the invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990 and a French court has concluded that he ordered the missile downing of the presidential plane carrying Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntayamira of Burundi, sparking the 100 days of mass murders.Western media had also prepared the global community for the eventual demonization and criminalization of all Hutus –even the ones who never participated in the mass murders of 1994– with a racist campaign against them in major magazines such as The New York Times magazine and The New Yorker, both with circulation in the millions.One of the first media volleys against the Hutus was an article by Alex Shoumatoff, published on June 20, 1992 in The New Yorker, where he described people he had observed while travelling in Burundi, which has the same ethnic combustibility between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis; at that time Burundi’s army and government were controlled by the Tutsi minority."There were three obvious Tutsis," Shoumatoff wrote, of the people he saw in a taxi cab, "Tall, slender with high foreheads, prominent cheekbones, and narrow features." He added: "They were a different physical type from the five passengers who were short and stocky and had the flat noses and thick lips typical of Hutus."Almost three months later, an even more insidious article by Shoumatoff, "Rwanda's Aristocratic Guerrillas," was published on December 13, 1992, in The New York Times magazine. By this time, the invasion of Rwanda was in its second year and the RPF had already committed numerous massacres against Hutu civilians, as a lexis-nexus search of news reports will reveal. These crimes were glossed over or ignored in Shoumatoff's article and all contemporary and subsequent accounts in major newspapers such as the Times.Moreover, Shoumatoff was married to a Tutsi woman who was the first cousin of the RPF's spokesperson and he was met at Entebbe airport in Uganda by RPF officials who guided him to the zones they controlled. So, The New York Times knowingly participated in the demonization campaign against the Hutus, who make up 85% of the population in both Rwanda and Burundi."In the late 19th Century," Shoumatoff, acting as an unofficial propagandist for the invading army wrote in The New York Times magazine, describing Tutsis, "early ethnologists were fascinated by these 'languidly haughty' pastoral aristocrats whose high foreheads, aquiline noses and thin lips seemed more Caucasian than Negroid, and they classified them as 'false negroes.' In a popular theory of the day, the Tutsis were thought to be highly civilized people, the race of fallen Europeans, whose existence in Central Africa had been rumored for centuries."Shoumatoff added, of the Tutsis: "They are not a race or a tribe, as often described, but a population, a stratum, a mystical, warrior-priest elite, like the Druids in Celtic society." As for the Hutus, they were far from resembling warrior priests: as Shoumatoff revealed, they were "short, stocky local Bantu agriculturalists." [To read more critique of Western media demonization of Africans, please see "The Hearts Of Darkness, How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa," (Black Star Books, 2005)]Yes, henious crimes against humanity and war crimes occurred in Rwanda, not only in 1994, but right from the time of the Uganda-sponsored invasion in 1990. Yet, the account here shows, many people would rather pretend that the atrocities started in 1994.Some of the people who participated in the crimes have been caught and tried; many who have been tried and convicted did not even participate; those prosecuted so far have been only Hutus.The story can never be complete when others involved in the same crime are exonerated through New Speak–some are outside Rwanda, including Museveni, for sponsoring the invasion and reportedly for supplying the missile used to down Habyarimana's jet; others, indicted and unindicted criminals now govern Rwanda.
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