Congolese march shines light on genocide

Some 30 former citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo now living in Illinois cities walked quietly through downtown Springfield on Friday, Sept. 17, to call attention to the genocide and mass rape happening in their former country.

“Our country is known today as the World Capital of Rape,” Pappy Bakungola of Springfield said. Tens of thousands have been killed in refugee camps and villages, much of the violence instigated by the President Paul Kagame of neighboring Rwanda, according to individuals demonstrating last week. Former Congolese living in Champaign, Bloomington, Beardstown, Chicago and Springfield participated.
Soldiers from the Rwandan Patriotic Front sent by President Kagame into Congo since 1994 have been charged with atrocities in a United Nations report that has been circulating recently. Rwandan forces and Congolese militias targeted Hutu refugees and native Congolese Hutus.
The U.N. report, “Democratic Republic of Congo, 1993-2003,” will be officially released on Oct. 1. It was leaked to the French newspaper Le Monde in August. Most believe that it was leaked so that the word “genocide” was made public, in case the report was later watered down in the final version.
Kagame has called the report “outrageous” and is reportedly pressuring the U.N. to remove the word “genocide” from the report. He is also threatening to withdraw peacekeeping forces from the Sudan as the United Nations begins its fall session.
The Congolese group walked to the office of U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin to encourage him to continue his support for the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo and to speak out on how the situation is handled at the United Nations this fall.
Durbin was a cosponsor to Senate Bill 109-456, the “Democratic Republic of Congo Relief, Security and Democracy Promotion Act,” which was introduced by then-Senator Barack Obama, and signed into law in 2006 by President George W. Bush.
The group also met with representatives from Sen. Roland Burris’s office in Springfield.

“This report is a very, very powerful tool which will bring the truth to the public,” Bakangola said. “It gives specific information of crimes in specific villages. For the first time the international community is bringing to light what we’ve been saying all along.”
The report documents 600 events of murder, torture, and rape in DRC between 1993 and 2003. It was compiled from some 1,000 documents and 1,000 eyewitness accounts. Most of the victims were children, women and elderly and sick people.
“More people have been killed in Congo than in Darfur,” Bakangola said. “We had to stand up and let our voices be heard. We are average people — students and people working in restaurants. The rapes and killings continue today, and people committing these crimes go free.”

No bail for men accused of killing Rwandan general

Published in: Legalbrief Today


Date: Thu 23 September 2010

Category: In Court

Issue No: 2652

Pascal Kanyandekwe, fingered as the brains behind the assassination attempt against a former Rwandan general living in SA, has been denied bail by the Johannesburg Magistrate's Court.
A report in The Star says Kanyandekwe and his co-accused face charges of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder for the June shooting of Lieutenant-General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa. The report says in a case that has already seen SA recall its ambassador to Rwanda, evidence placed before the court seems to indicate the men were acting on the instructions of the Rwandan Government. But Kanyandekwe also faces a further charge of conspiracy for allegedly plotting to kill Nyamwasa while he was recovering in hospital. It was for this charge that he and two co-accused were denied bail. After the first failed assassination attempt, Kanyandekwe is alleged to have regrouped with a new set of conspirators. Their supposed plan was to pose as hospital visitors. Once in Nyamwasa's room, they were to strangle him before ditching their suits and escaping in casual wear. But the men were arrested on the way to the hospital after a police tip-off. Magistrate Lukas van der Schyff also denied bail to co-accused Shafiri Bakari and Ahmed Ali. The report notes two other alleged conspirators - Juma Husein and George Francis - abandoned their bail applications earlier in the trial.

Spain asks SAfrica to extradite ex-Rwanda general

(AP) – 1 hour ago

JOHANNESBURG — A justice department spokesman says South Africa has received an extradition request from Spain for a Rwandan general already at the center of tensions between the two African countries.

Spokesman Tlali Tlali said Wednesday that he would not comment on how the South African government would respond to the request or when it was received by the government.
Spain's cabinet on Friday said it was asking South Africa to extradite former army Gen. Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa so that he can be tried for genocide and killing Spanish aid workers, charges Rwandan authorities have denied.
Spanish legal doctrine allows Spanish courts to prosecute egregious human rights crimes even if they are alleged to have occurred in other countries, so long as there is a clear link to Spain.

Pictures of People protesting Kagame in Newyork.

The truth about Rwanda conflict

Rwanda Hutu rebels warn UN over Kigali's 'tactics'

By AFP


Posted Tuesday, September 14 2010 at 17:17
NAIROBI, Tuesday

Rwandan Hutu rebels urged the United Nations Tuesday not to succumb to Kigali's threat to withdraw troops from Sudan if the world body publishes a report accusing the country's troops of crimes.

The Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) rebels, based in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, called on the UN to purge its peacekeeping missions of forces it claimed were soiling its image.
The group asked the UN "not to surrender to the manoeuvres, tactics of intimidation and other forms of blackmail that Kigali began to practice... by threatening to withdraw its troops from the UN peacekeeping missions.
"Rather, it's now or never for the UN to get rid of soldiers that, with hands stained with innocent blood, bring disgrace upon an institution whose mission is to maintain peace in the world," the FDLR said in a statement.
A draft version of a UN human rights report on the DR Congo accused Rwandan troops of genocide-style massacres in the country in 1996-97.
Infuriated Kigali threatened to pull out its 3,500 troops serving in a UN peacekeeping mission in the Sudan, prompting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to travel to Kigali last week for talks with President Paul Kagame.
"The FDLR urge the international community and particularly the UN... to ensure that no one, without exception, of those who have participated in the genocide of Rwandan and Congolese Hutu escape justice," added the text.
Some FLDR elements have themselves been accused by Kigali of participating in Rwanda's 1994 genocide by Hutu extremists in which some 800,000 people, mainly Tutsis, were killed

New allegations against Rwanda president

MBANDAKA, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sept 10 GNE - Mbandaka is a town on the southern bank of the Congo River. Inaccessible, hidden, lost deep inside the Democratic Republic of Congo, it is far from its neighbour Rwanda.
Yet according to a draft United Nations report, seen by the GlobalPost news service, it was there, almost 2000 kilometres from their home, that Rwandan soldiers and their allies killed hundreds of refugees on May 13, 1997.
According to the leaked report compiled by a team of researchers from the United Nations' Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rwandan troops "opened fire on refugees at the port for five to 10 minutes, killing an unknown number".
"The commanding officer then ordered the soldiers to stop firing and told the refugees to leave their hideouts," the report continues.

"Some jumped into the Zaire (now Congo) River, hoping to escape. The soldiers then took up position along the river and opened fire. Around two o'clock in the afternoon, the soldiers began to sort the refugees, then clubbed them to death."
Accusations of atrocities have been levelled before at Rwandan rebel-turned-president Paul Kagame's forces, but never in such detail and never by an organisation carrying the authority of the UN.
The researchers spent seven months examining a decade of violence between 1993 and 2003 across the entire country.
To conduct the "mapping exercise", they consulted more than 1500 documents and interviewed more than 1280 witnesses insisting on double sourcing of all allegations.
Of the 617 incidents included in the 500-page draft, 104 are attributed to Kagame's troops and their allies.
Kagame's forces invaded Congo in 1996 to hunt down the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide two years earlier in which about 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered by Hutu extremists.
The invasion triggered a violent years-long maelstrom that drew in six more countries and led to the deaths of millions, mostly because of resulting sickness and disease.
Observers have dubbed the conflict "Africa's World War".
While every side involved in the fighting is accused of killing civilians, it is the Rwandans who come off worst.
The UN report says Rwanda and its allies made "no effort" to distinguish between civilians and combatants, between innocent and guilty, in the "relentless" pursuit of Hutus across Congo's vast territory.
"Probably several tens of thousands" were killed, the report says.
In numerous examples, Hutus were rounded up under some pretext or another - perhaps to be registered for a return to Rwanda, or to be given food - only to be shot, hacked or clubbed to death and flung into mass graves, hundreds at a time.
"The numerous deaths cannot be attributed to the hazards of war or seen as equating to collateral damage," the report says.
"The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who were often undernourished and posed no threat to the attacking forces."
Most controversially, the report states that if proven in a court of law some of the incidents "could be classified as crimes of genocide".
The Rwandan government is outraged over the report, especially because Kagame's moral authority rests on his reputation as the man who stopped the Rwandan genocide.
The report is "immoral and unacceptable", according to Kagame's spokesman, Ben Rutsinga.
In a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon written before the leak, Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo threatened to withdraw its peacekeeping soldiers from the joint UN and African Union mission in Darfur if the report was published in its current form.
"It is patently absurd for the UN, which deliberately turned its back on the Rwandan people during the 1994 genocide, to accuse the army that stopped the genocide of committing atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo," Ms Mushikiwabo wrote in the letter obtained by GlobalPost.
Following Rwanda's outcry, publication of the report had been delayed until next month.
"We have decided to give concerned states a further month to comment on the draft and I have offered to publish any such comments alongside the report itself on 1 October," said Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, based in Geneva.
Sources say the "genocide" allegations are expected to remain in the final report, and although the Rwandan government will have its right to reply the damage might already have been done.
Recent presidential elections in Rwanda were widely criticised for the stifling of dissent, banning of newspapers and political parties, and mysterious murders that preceded the polls.
Kagame went on to win a landslide victory but his reputation took a knock. The leaked UN report is a still deeper scratch in Kagame's carefully burnished image.
© 2010 AAP

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Rwanda needs deeper reforms

In a signed paper emailed to Sunday Monitor, co-authors Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa, Col. Patrick Karegeya, Dr Theogene Rudasingwa and Gerald Gahima say progress in Rwanda needs to be buttressed by deeper democratic reforms. Excerpts.

In 1994, Rwanda suffered a tragedy that left over one million of its citizens dead as a result of war and genocide. The war and genocide resulted in immense suffering to millions more. The war and genocide have had far-reaching repercussions for both Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa as a whole.



Rwanda’s recovery from the ravages of war and genocide is generally regarded as a rare success story in post-conflict reconstruction. Visitors to the country are impressed by its economic growth, security situation and cleanliness, as well as the orderliness of its people and the efficiency with which its institutions conduct business. To its passionate friends, Rwanda is a shining example of democratisation, reformation, and an effective and efficient government.

Supporters of the Rwandan government largely attribute Rwanda’s success in post-war reconstruction to President Paul Kagame. The rebel general-turned-civilian politician cultivates a cult-image as the sole hero of the country’s achievements. President Kagame is perceived by most outsiders as both invincible and indispensable to national and regional stability.




RPF achievements

The Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) has registered many achievements since 1994. Its army is generally credited with having stopped the genocide, although there are genocide survivors who do not share this view. Its government re-established law and order, restored essential social services, repatriated and resettled millions of refugees and internally displaced persons, and established effective state institutions, that have rescued Rwanda from the brink of becoming a failed state.



The government has, with the often grudgingly acknowledged assistance of the international community, helped to spur economic recovery. President Kagame rightly deserves his share of credit for Rwanda’s progress in reconstruction after the war and genocide.



There is, however, more to Rwanda and Kagame than new buildings, clean streets, and efficient. Rwanda is essentially a hard-line, one-party, secretive police state with a façade of democracy. The ruling RPF has closed space for political participation. The RPF does not tolerate political opposition or open competition for power.
The government ensures its monopoly of power by means of draconian restrictions on the exercise of the fundamental human rights of citizens. The press, civil society and opposition parties are deprived of freedom to operate freely. President Kagame and the ruling party that he leads depend on repression to stay in power.




Rwanda has failed to transition to good governance and democracy. The RPF manipulated the transition process to entrench its monopoly of political and economic power. Rwanda is a one-party authoritarian state, controlled by President Kagame through a small clique of Tutsi military officers and civilian cadres of the RPF from behind the scenes.



Hutus excluded

The majority Hutu community remains excluded from a meaningful share of political power. State institutions are as effective as they are repressive. The government relies on severe repression to maintain its hold on power.



The situation that prevails raises serious questions about the country’s future. Are the country’s development achievements sustainable? Can Rwanda continue to be peaceful while the government continues to be repressive and many people consider the government illegitimate? How do we balance individual freedoms and the requirement for a stable community? How should citizens respond when rulers mistake the state to be their personal estate and deprive their subjects of their inalienable rights?



More questions

Should they resist peacefully or take up arms? If armed conflict is ill-advised, given its potential to cause human suffering, how else then can citizens reclaim their rights to hold the government accountable?

What strategies would help Rwanda avoid violent conflict that appears inevitable and to set it on the path towards peaceful resolution of the problems that drive conflict in Rwandan society?
The state of governance in Rwanda cannot be discussed in isolation from the character of the RPF and the quality of its leadership because of the very dominant role that the RPF in general and President Kagame have played in the politics of post-genocide Rwanda. The RPF assumed control of government at the end of the genocide and civil war because it was the only opposition group with the military capacity to take on the organisers and perpetuators of the genocide.




At the end of the genocide, the RPF briefly cohabited in a coalition government with other organisations that had opposed the Habyarimana dictatorship. Since late 1995, the RPF has progressively assumed exclusive control of the state.



The RPF was originally established as a people’s movement whose goal was to bring together under one umbrella, individuals and groups of different political backgrounds and ideological beliefs that shared a minimum political platform to promote democracy in Rwanda. From its founding in 1979 as the Rwandese Alliance for National Union (RANU) to its capture of state power in 1994, the RPF professed a commitment to the vision of a free, democratic order under an accountable government.



The RPF is no longer the democratic, inclusive and principled organisation that its founders and early leaders and members intended it to be. The organisation has now become a caricature of its former self.

The party, like the rest of the country, is engulfed by fear, held hostage to President Kagame’s arbitrary and repressive rule.



The prime objective of the struggle of the RPF, as well other groups that rose up during the late 1980s and early 1990s to take on the challenge of opposing the Habyarimana dictatorship, was to establish democracy in Rwanda. The RPF’s management of the affairs of Rwanda since the genocide and civil war has led to reversing, rather than consolidating, the gains that the struggle for democracy had achieved prior to the genocide.

In practice, the RPF has progressively reduced the space for other political forces to operate in the country. The 1995 ousting of Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu and other critical ministers started a trend towards progressive consolidation of the RPF’s monopolistic control of the machinery of the state. The RPF has, since then, striven for unrivalled political supremacy in Rwanda.
It has achieved this political supremacy not through an open and free process of competition with other political forces, but through repressive laws, administrative practices and the use of the security services to frustrate the exercise of the civil and political rights of opponents. Not only is the opposition excluded from participating in government; it is effectively barred from undertaking any activities inside the country at all. The RPF enjoys unchallenged power in Rwanda. Rwanda is far less free now than it was prior to the genocide. The political system of the Rwandan state lacks mechanisms of checks and balances that are essential for good governance and genuine democracy. The President has absolute control over the executive branch of government. The Executive, in turn, completely dominates other organs of government.




Re-defining sectarianism

The government passed legislation to punish sectarianism and discrimination. The government has, since 2003, used accusations of “sectarianism,” “divisionism,” and “spreading of genocide ideology” to curtail political opposition and civil society work, most specifically human rights work. These crimes are not properly defined in the relevant legislation.



The politics of ethnicity remain intractable in Rwanda. The majority of the Hutu middle-class that was ousted from power in 1994 remains in exile, un-reconciled to the new political order, biding time and hoping for a regime change. Some armed insurgents continue to wage war against the Rwandan state from their sanctuaries in the Democratic Republic of Congo, sixteen years after the genocide.

The externally-based unarmed opposition calls for dialogue on how to resolve the country’s continuing crisis, but the government says that the conflict has been resolved and there is no need for negotiation of a settlement.




Reconciliation wanting

There cannot be genuine reconciliation in Rwanda until the grievances of the Hutu community over the issues of political participation, as well as the guarantees for the minorities, equal citizenship before the law, access to resources and accountability for human rights abuses are addressed.



The hopes for a democratic, peaceful and stable Rwanda that the overthrow of the rump government that carried out the genocide once inspired have dissipated. The issues that have previously driven conflict in Rwanda remain unresolved. Rwanda is, by many accounts, again in grave risk of very violent conflict.



Such conflict is not inevitable, but neither is it easily avoidable. Whether Rwanda will again have to endure atrocious conflict or find a way to overcome the forces responsible for intractable conflict and transition to a peaceful, stable democracy will depend on the policies and actions of many players, including President Kagame himself, Rwandan society at large and, indeed, the international community.



We offer the following reflections on some of the steps that may need to be taken to avert a new catastrophe and set Rwanda on a path towards security, peace, democracy, genuine reconciliation, national healing, and sustainable development.



Promoting freedom as the foundation on which to build peace and shared prosperity for all Rwandans; Undertaking a genuine, inclusive, unconditional and comprehensive National dialogue on the nature and causes of the country’s major problems, and on a compact on the future of the country; Establishing a New National Partnership Government to lead Rwanda through the transition to democracy; and Engaging the international community including, in particular, Rwanda’s neighbours, to support Rwanda’s reform agenda.

Looming crisis


The people of Rwanda, together with rest of the international community, have a moral duty to work to end this repressive system of government. Rwanda is literally again on the brink of an abyss.



The complicity of collusion and silence that contributed to making the 1994 genocide possible ought not to be repeated. The manner in which the international community has engaged the government of Rwanda to date clearly indicates that the lessons that ought to have been drawn from the 1994 genocide have not been learnt.



The next priority is to ensure that Rwanda changes its laws on political participation.

U.N. report on Congo genocide strengthened

A draft U.N. report accusing the Rwandan army of massacring Hutus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1990s is corroborated by findings of an international human rights group.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) postponed the release of the report on Thursday after leaked sections of the document prompted angry protests from Rwanda.

The draft report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, notes the "devastating consequences of the Rwandan genocide on the declining Zairian state" between March 1993 and June 1996. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was known as Zaire at the time.
It accuses Rwanda's Tutsi-led army of killing tens of thousands of Hutus, including women, children and the elderly.
The period July 1996 to July 1998 was marked by the "relentless pursuit and mass killing" of Hutu refugees by members of the former Armed Forces of Rwanda and affiliated militias, the draft report says.

The report covers a period from March of 1993 to June of 2003.
"The period covered by this report is probably one of the most tragic chapters in the recent history of the DRC. Indeed, this decade was marked by a string of major political crises, wars and multiple ethnic and regional conflicts that brought about the deaths of thousands, if not millions, of people. Very few Congolese and foreign civilians living on the territory of the DRC managed to escape the violence, and were victims of murder, mutilation, rape, forced displacement, pillage, destruction of property or economic and social rights violations," the draft report says.
Rwandan officials say their troops entered the former Zaire in pursuit of Hutu militias responsible for the massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

The international watchdog Human Rights Watch extensively documented abuses that took place in former Zaire in the late 1990s.
The group's researchers are familiar with most of the incidents document in the draft report, said Rona Peligal, acting director of the Africa division at Human Rights Watch. "But even they are still shocked and horrified by the extent of the abuses perpetrated against the Congolese people, particularly by the Rwandan army and its Congolese allies," she added.
"This is a very uncomfortable issue for the Rwandans because the report is quite a damning investigation of abuses committed in part by Rwandans and their Congolese allies," Ms. Peligal said in a phone interview on Friday.




Rwanda has threatened to pull its troops out of U.N. peacekeeping missions in protest.



U.N. High Commissioner for Human RightsNavi Pillay said on Thursday that she had postponed publication of the report to Oct. 1.



"Following requests, we have decided to give concerned states a further month to comment on the draft and I have offered to publish any comments alongside the report itself on 1 October, if they so wish," Ms. Pillay said in a statement.



The U.N. has been under political pressure not to undertake this report.



"We had heard that the Rwandans were very much trying to dilute the report and prevent its publication and the fact that it has taken this long to publish is a testament to that," Ms. Peligal said.



She said she initially had concerns that the report would be watered down, but added, "we believe that the delay will make possible the full publication of the report with Rwanda's comments."

Ms. Peligal said she was somewhat disappointed by the delay.

"But we also look forward to the report being published in full. That is the most important thing. And that proper action is taken on the report's recommendation," she added.

The report results from interviews and meetings with several hundred Congolese men and women.

"[N]o report could adequately describe the horrors experienced by civilian populations in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo," Ms. Pillay says in an introduction to the draft report. "Every individual has at least one story to tell of suffering and loss."

Rwandan hutus refeeges killed in congo.