Anthony Blinken is uncomfortable at the podium as he delivers a lengthy speech at NATO while the Ukraine war continues and the West’s response continues to not only confuse the Ukrainian leader but also most people who are struggling to understand how the war has got to where it is today, with the latest massacres shocking the world.

What Blinken didn’t make a mention of was what happened on the same day in 1994, which was the start of the Rwandan genocide – a colossal failure of both the UN and NATO. Blinken spoke about the UN’s decision to suspend Russia from the U.S. Human Rights Council.

The Rwandan Genocide is important to remember as the similarities of the West’s activities in Ukraine today can be compared, in that giants in the UN and NATO like the U.S. remain as pusillanimous as ever towards actually fighting a real war for the rights and principles that they supposedly stand for.

In Rwanda, the CIA-backed English-speaking Tutsis entered the north of the country with a disinformation campaign which installed terror in the hearts of peasant Hutus who took to slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Tutsis with a common farmyard tool. There really isn’t an example of how information or disinformation can play such a decisive role in a war going one way or the other than Rwanda, which the West is entirely responsible for.

When the real killing started in great numbers, the Americans were nowhere to be seen. Clinton, after the PR disaster of Somalia just a few months earlier, pulled back from getting involved in Rwanda and the UN and NATO followed. The UN did have troops in Rwanda but the role of their soldiers is both polemic and ineffective.

On the evening of 6 April 1994, the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, was shot down with surface-to-air missiles as their plane prepared to land in Kigali, Rwanda – sparking the Rwandan genocide.

The parallel with Ukraine is chilling. It’s often forgotten how Malaysian Airlines MH17 was shot down in 2014, which in many ways was a similar catalyst to the fighting in Ukraine reaching a point, where Russia decided to enter the country and take control on February 24^th of this year.

The West blames Russia for the attack on the civilian airliner although the evidence is not entirely conclusive. The Rwandans themselves (the Tutsi-led government) concluded in 2010 that the missile which shot down the Rwandan president’s plane was almost certainly from the hardcore element of the Hutu army which believed the President had sold them out and brokered a peace, allowing Tutsis to return to Rwanda and make claims on land.

But on the 7^th of April 2022, Anthony Blinken made no historical references as he announced even more sanctions against Russia in a war which America hopes will be dragged out for months, in the belief that this will have an impact on Putin, impacting his ability to remain firm when the negotiations start. It wasn’t only the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide which Blinken decide not to mention (probably not wanting to remind the press pack gathered there of both Bill Clinton’s huge erroneous foreign policy play which led to 800,000 dead), but he also chose not to mention Europe’s failure to stop buying Russian oil and gas, which in many ways means that these countries are actually funding Putin’s operation in Ukraine.

If EU countries can’t actually stop buying Russian oil, then the farce of this war will continue for month and perhaps even years to come. Equally, if America’s role is to continue funding Ukrainian soldiers without genuinely wanting to negotiate peace (as the truth is that Blinken and his colleagues believe that a long war is a winning strategy for them), then all talks of peace and negotiating for it are folly. America got the war that it wanted in Ukraine, which is bite-sized and doesn’t involve the threat to American lives which they have been preparing for since 2014 when their own guy overthrew Russia’s chosen leader. We really shouldn’t be surprised by anything other than Blinken’s ability, rather than Biden’s to “fuck things up”.

When I initially read “The Politics of Genocide” [2010] by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson I was easily able to assimilate their critique of the brazen misapplication of the term “genocide” to events in Bosnia (Srebrenica) and Kosovo, since I was familiar with those issues and had worked at the Hague Tribunal, the place where the propaganda was ultimately reformatted to resemble authoritative, quasi-judicial court verdicts. But like most members of the general public, I thought that those authors’ deconstruction of the Rwandan conflict was exaggerated and tendentious because I knew practically nothing about it, aside from the steady stream of horror stories that were fed to news consumers in the 1990s (the authors fittingly called it “enduring lies” in a related volume). To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, Rwanda was literally a “quarrel in a far-away country, between people of whom we know nothing,” and that made it quite easy to fool all of us. In retrospect, the Rwandan pattern should have raised red flags for adhering too closely to the Bosnian script. But viewed in a factual vacuum and without any particular local expertise, the torrent of Rwandan genocidal allegations appeared largely credible and indisputable. Exactly as the “Srebrenica genocide” narrative must appear to most superficially informed members of the public.

It is only with the publication of Herman and Peterson’s meticulously researched and persuasively argued book that critical questions about Rwanda began to arise. The authors argued that the label “genocide,” far from being merely descriptive or following the legal criteria set by the UN convention, was in fact highly politicised and generally used by governments, journalists, and academics to brand as evil those nations and political movements that in one way or another interfered with the imperial designs of the global West. Two sets of rules govern the application of the term “genocide.” It is seldom used when the perpetrators are U.S. allies (or even the United States itself), while it is applied almost indiscriminately when murders are committed or are alleged to have been committed by enemies of the global West and its business or political interests. After removing media blinkers to study more closely the factual background of the Rwandan affair and applying Herman and Peterson’s analytical framework, events there came into focus and the received narrative about Rwanda was no longer making sense.

A recent reminiscence by Phil Taylor and John Philpot on Global Research about the judicial lynching of Rwandan Colonel Théoneste Bagasora, who recently passed away in prison after enduring many years of incarceration for his alleged role in genocidal killings, recalled not just the sordid impact of propaganda in misshaping public perceptions of important contemporary political issues. More importantly, it highlighted the squalid part played by “gekaufte Justiz,” as Udo Ulfkotte would undoubtedly have called it if he were alive to write a book on this subject today, in seemingly confirming and reinforcing propaganda’s toxic lies.

Taylor and Philpot demonstrate that Bagasora was railroaded by the ICTR, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which sits in Arusha, Tanzania, where he and scores of other Rwandan officials were tried. ICTR is the somewhat lesser-known but equally pernicious mirror image of the more infamous ICTY, or the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Attorney Christopher Black, with hands-on experience in both the Hague and Arusha, is unequivocal: “Bagasora was framed up. Not guilty of anything, but this is true of every one of the accused at the Rwanda Tribunal. They were all framed up.”

Black describes the technology of judicial lynching: “The prosecution targeted selected people to try to paint a picture of a government, so a few officers, politicians, party people, administrators, any Hutu intellectuals, etc. were indicted. They concocted stories and charges, all in the name of propaganda to justify the war the West conducted against Rwanda to overthrow its government.

“In 2007 thirty-seven of the [Rwanda] accused sent a letter to the UN declaring that they were political prisoners of the UN. Just think of that, the UN holding political prisoners. And it is a fact that they were.”

Black continues: “At the time I tried to get some of the accused at the ICTY [the Hague Tribunal] to join this action, but received no replies from anyone. The lawyers at the ICTY were sweetheart lawyers for the most part, except in the case of Milosevic.”

Referring to the structure of the pseudo-judicial twins, ICTR and ICTY, Black says that they are “identical in the way they chose people to target, the way they concocted evidence and arranged witnesses, in the way they tried to ensure that only weak lawyers were allowed to defend the accused (a constant battle at the ICTR), and in their control by NATO personnel at every level and in every department. They had the same prosecutor in charge of both [Carla Del Ponte], judges that went back and forth between the two, the same appeal chamber, etc. etc. Hans Köchler’s book about the two tribunals, “Global Justice or Global Revenge”, describes it best. He showed how the judges were all finally approved by the U.S.” Hence, one supposes, the indicative note in the blurb to Köchler’s book, that “the author’s main intention is to reflect upon the legal and philosophical foundations of international criminal law in the context of politics.”

“The two ad hoc tribunals were (and still are in the “Mechanism”) entirely show tribunals created to run show trials to frame up scapegoats for the crimes of the NATO countries involved,” Black concludes with understandable bitterness in his private communication with this author.

Going back to the Herman and Peterson analysis, both “tribunals” have been essential tools in perpetuating crude propaganda fabrications, that otherwise would probably have remained ephemeral, about the Bosnia and Rwanda conflicts by repackaging them in deceptive judicial wrapping. These sorry excuses for “international courts” are not merely a disservice to jurisprudence, to which they have inflicted incalculable damage, whose full scope will become apparent only with the passage of time. Inexcusably, they are guilty also of an appalling distortion of the historical record, arguably an even more grievous offence that may take much longer to rectify.

Gallup (an employee-owned company) normally sells the findings to wealthy investors throughout the world. In 2015, Gallup headlined, “75% in U.S. See Widespread Government Corruption”, and ranked only the 37 countries that the U.S. regime approves of, which the U.S. regime’s ‘Freedom House’ had ranked as having a ‘free press’ (meaning a press whose major ‘news’-media adhere sufficiently to the U.S. CIA’s advices). In rank order, the least corrupt of those 37 countries were: Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, and Germany — all of them ranging from only 14% corrupt, to 40% corrupt. The most corrupt, in rank order starting with the most corrupt, were: Lithuania, Portugal, Ghana, Spain, Czech Republic, and Slovenia — all of them at least 80% corrupt, which were actually ranked from 82% corrupt to 90% corrupt. 75% of Americans told Gallup they thought “corruption widespread throughout the government.” (We thus will call America “75% corrupt.”) Latvia was in the middle of the 37, at 63% corrupt. So: amongst ‘free press’ countries (governments that the U.S. regime isn’t aiming to regime-change), this percentage (63%) was the average rate of corruption (that is, of the population’s alleging corruption to be “widespread throughout the government”).

When Gallup published their complete poll-report, on 18 October 2013, which was headlined “Government Corruption Viewed as Pervasive Worldwide”, it included 129 countries. Shown here in rank order will be the 11 least-corrupt nations as indicated in that October 2013 Gallup news-report; and, for each nation, also — by way of comparison — the Transparency International (TI) corruption-rankings, in 2012, will be shown, because that was the year when Gallup’s data were being collected. (Click onto the link just above, if you want to see the complete 2013 Gallup article, with the scores shown for all 129, but Gallup provided there only the nation-by-nation scores, no rankings, and presented the 129 nations only in alphabetical order, instead of in rank order, perhaps so as not to give offence which might drive away potential clients that are in disappointingly low-scoring countries, such as America.) What is to be be shown here — for the first time anywhere — are the ranks that are based upon those Gallup-published scores.

As was noted at the outset here, Rwanda ranked there as #1 (it had the lowest percentage — it was the least viewed as corrupt) that year. Only 5% of Gallup’s Rwandan respondents answered “Yes” to “Is corruption widespread throughout the government in Rwanda or not?” For purposes of simplicity and brevity, we may call that a finding of “only 5% corrupt.”

Here, then, to start with, are listed the corruption-percentages, and ranks, of the 11 least-corrupt nations, out of the Gallup-surveyed 129 nations:

1=Rwanda (ranked in 2012 TI as #50 out of 176 [but they say ‘198’] countries) 5%

2=Sweden (in 2012 TI #4 of 176) 14%

3&4=Singapore (in 2012 TI #5) & Denmark (in 2012 TI tied as #s1-3, one through three) 15%

5=Switzerland (in 2012 TI #6) 23%

6=NZ (in 2012 TI tied as #s1-3) 24%

7&8=Georgia (in 2012 TI #51) & Norway (in 2012 TI #7) 25%

9=Luxembourg (in 2012 TI #12) 26%

10&11=HongKong (in 2012 TI #14) & Finland (in 2012 TI tied as #s1-3) 30%

Near the middle of that Gallup 2013 ranking was:

63&64&65&66=U.S., tied with Guatemala, Nepal, Philippines, & Taiwan

At the very bottom were:

129=Tanzania 95% (ranked #102 out of ‘198’ — actually 176 — by TI)

(At the bottom of the TI rankings were 3 tied: Afghanistan, N. Korea, & Somalia.)

128=Kenya 93%

125&126&127=Greece, Nigeria, & Chad 92%

124=Uganda 91%

123=Lithuania 90%

120&121&122=Ghana, Cameroon, & Bosnia 89%

118&119=Portugal & Indonesia 88%

116&117=South Africa & Thailand 87%

U.S. ranked in the 2012 TI as being #19 out of 176 (‘198’), which, of course, is considerably worse than being #64 out of 129 (in the much more reliable Gallup survey), because TI itself is corrupt: it’s a U.S.-regime front.

Transparency International was founded in 1993 by former top officials of the World Bank. The World Bank had been initiated at the three-week, 1-22 July 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, in New Hampshire, and this was being done by appointees of the anti-imperialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and of the imperialist (or “pro-imperialist”) Winston Churchill, and so it wasn’t clear whether or not it would support imperialism. In fact, Wikipedia’s article on the “Bretton Woods Conference” states that:

In his closing remarks at the conference, its president, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, stated that the establishment of the IMF and the IBRD marked the end of economic nationalism. This meant countries would maintain their national interest, but trade blocs and economic spheres of influence would no longer be their means. The second idea behind the Bretton Woods Conference was joint management of the Western political-economic order, meaning that the foremost industrial democratic nations must lower barriers to trade and the movement of capital, in addition to their responsibility to govern the system.

This was before FDR died and Truman and the Cold War fundamentally changed things; and that Wikipedia article (being part of U.S. propaganda) falsely says that the attendees were representing “the foremost industrial democratic nations”, though many of those nations were actually dictatorships, such as Brazil, Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, Egypt, China, and the Soviet Union.

Democracy had nothing to do with it. Imperialism did — and, after FDR’s death, nothing could stop the Bretton Woods system from being imperialistic at its very start. The exhaustively documented study by Eric Toussaint, The World Bank — A Critical Primer, opens its Introduction by noting that, “The list of governments resulting from military coups that were supported by the World Bank is impressive,” and these have all been U.S.-supported (and mostly were U.S.-perpetrated) coups. He also noted that, “the U.S. government has indeed enforced its views in those areas [of the World Bank’s operations] in which it is directly concerned.” Furthermore, and more generally: “The hidden agenda of the Washington Consensus aims … at maintaining the US global leadership. … For instance, the World Bank will only grant a loan on condition that a country’s water and sanitation services are privatized.” Billionaires — mostly American ones — end up receiving the profits from what would otherwise have been public works in foreign countries. Those “works” consequently ignore the poor. This is why the interests of the local poor are ignored, while the interests of global billionaires (and especially of U.S.-based billionaires) are advanced. On page 134, Toussaint refers to “the total cynicism inherent in the system, which results in artificially increased debt loads [in poor countries] that in no way correspond to the money injected into the economies of these countries.” The existing World Bank’s system is exactly what FDR had condemned and said absolutely must be replaced (and explained why it needed to be replaced). The book’s Chapter “24: An Indictment of the World Bank” is a scathing summary of this international gangland operation. (FDR had similarly described imperialism.) As one review of Toussaint’s book summed up the work: “The strategy, in a nutshell, is that providing infrastructure should fall on the state sector, and anything that might prove profitable should be given to the private sector (preferably favouring multinational corporations), i.e. privatisation of profits combined with the socialisation of the cost of anything not profitable.” John Perkins’s classic Confessions of an Economic Hit Man details the operations that Perkins had done for the World Bank and the benefits he had been providing to billionaires, and the destruction he had been perpetrating upon the residents in those vassal-nations. This wealth-transfer, from the masses to the classes — further impoverishment of the poor — is similarly the agenda of Transparency International, not just the World Bank’s agenda. TI assists it by producing their faked rankings. In a sense, boosted rankings are being bought and paid for.

So, actually, the World Bank’s history is also TI’s history — its pre-history, which shaped it. That goes back to the Bretton Woods Conference, on 1-22 July 1944.

Wikipedia’s article on the “Bretton Woods Conference” says that, “The institutions [World Bank and IMF] were formally organized at an inaugural meeting in Savannah, Georgia, on March 8–18, 1946.[13] Notably absent from Savannah was the USSR, which had signed the Bretton Woods Final Act but had then decided not to ratify it. The USSR never joined the IMF and IBRD.” However, actually, the Soviet Union did not sign the “Bretton Woods Agreements”. The U.S.S.R. was the only Bretton Woods attendee which did not. Signing was done actually at a ceremony in Washington, DC, on 27 December 1945. In the U.N.’s online pdf of that final document, at page 120, where it says, “Pour l’Union des” (Républiques socialistes soviétiques), there is a blank, no one listed even as attending, and it’s the only blank. Every other Bretton Woods attendee sent a representative, who signed. As early as 26 July 1945, Truman had personally expressed his hostility to Stalin; and, clearly, from that moment on, Stalin knew that the death of FDR on 12 April 1945 had changed everything. (Which it did.)

The reason why TI was created by the World Bank in 1993 is that, at that time, the World Bank’s Chief Economist was the extremely pro-imperialist and highly political American, Larry Summers; and the World Bank’s President was J.P. Morgan’s former long-serving CEO, Lewis Preston, who became appointed by U.S. President G.H.W. Bush as the World Bank’s President in 1991. On 24 February 1990, just before the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact equivalent to America’s NATO military alliance all ended in 1991, G.H.W. Bush secretly started instructing America’s allies that though the Cold War was ending on the Soviet side, the Cold War was secretly to continue on the U.S.-and-allied side. Consequently, a new excuse for it — no longer ‘capitalism versus communism’ — was needed; and anti-corruption would be that excuse. That’s why TI was created. I previously explained in detail how “TI was instituted by the U.S.-created World Bank, in order to handle the ‘corruption’-propaganda portfolio for the U.S. empire.” TI is specifically a U.S. imperialist operation. It’s an intrinsic part of the U.S. regime’s operation for achieving all-encompassing U.S. empire. It is not an objective credible rating-system, for anything.

Whereas Gallup is honest, Transparency International (TI) is corrupt. Instead of being owned by its employees, TI is funded by the U.S. and its European allies (in other words, it’s a U.S. Cold War, CIA-affiliated, operation), a U.S.-regime PR gimmick, in order for them to use those ‘corruption’-rankings against governments (ones that consequently get scored lower) which the U.S. aristocracy — its billionaires — want to regime-change — overthrow, control, take over, conquer. Almost all on the list of TI’s donors are controlled by U.S. billionaires. America’s TI ranking, as of 9 July 2019, of 23 out of 180 (and that’s a real “180”: TI didn’t fake that count, in that year), is said there to be from “Corruption Perceptions Index 2018”, but if one clicks through to the complete list (it’s in .xlxs, but also here for anyone to see), then the U.S. actually ranks there tied as #23-#24, below (starting from #1):

1-2=Denmark&NZ,

3=Finland,

4-6=Singapore&Sweden&Switzerland,

7=Norway,

8=Netherlands,

9-10=Germany&Luxembourg, 11=Iceland,

12-15=Australia&Austria&Canada&UK,

16=HongKong,

17=Belgium,

18&19=Estonia&Ireland,

20=Japan,

21=UAE&Uruguay,

23-24France&U.S.

All of those governments — both directly and indirectly — fund TI.

TI’s methodology is based on officials’ opinions, not on data. Their published “Methodology” is a scandal, filled with opacities, easy to manipulate in the dark, such as: “Transparency International reaches out to each one of the institutions providing data in order to verify the methodology used to generate their scores. Since some of the sources are not publicly available, Transparency International also requests permission to publish the rescaled scores from each source alongside the composite CPI score. Transparency International is, however, not permitted to share the original scores given by private sources with the general public.” (Elsewhere, I have further discussed TI’s methodology.) Their rankings are PR tools, not trustworthy information-sources. Anyone who cites TI’s ‘findings’ (except critically) is not to be trusted, because even if they are honest, they are trusting a hoax. Gallup is vastly more trustworthy than TI.

Not only do Rwandans know that their country is relatively outstanding against corruption, but even the countries that fund TI begrudgingly acknowledge it. On 22 July 2010, the BBC headlined “Rwanda has negligible corruption – Transparency” and reported that, “Incidents of bribery in Rwanda are negligible, anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International says.” But TI’s rating of Rwanda was systematically an under-rating of that country’s outstanding performance, because the industrialized nations donate to TI, and they don’t want to be outshone by a third-world nation. “He that pays the piper calls the tune.” Rwanda has not been paying the piper. However, even the CIA-edited (and even written) Wikipedia acknowledges that Rwanda’s leader, Paul Kagame, “is popular in Rwanda,” and that “Rwanda’s economy has grown rapidly under Kagame’s presidency, with per-capita gross domestic product (purchasing power parity) estimated at $1,592 in 2013,[212] compared with $567 in 2000.[213] Annual growth between 2004 and 2010 averaged 8% per year.[214]” Unfortunately, this situation could rapidly change. For example: starting, in 2013, Rwanda’s debt/GDP ratio soared, from a long stable 20%, up to around 40% in 2017, and, during the three years of 2019 through 2021, Rwanda’s monthly debt-service payments due, mainly to the World Bank, will have soared from $2.688 billion to 23.341 billion. Will Rwanda still be enforcing its anti-corruption laws in 2022? Or will foreign billionaires instead be effectively in control over that country? Who knows? However, even on public debt, Rwanda isn’t yet anywhere near the worst countries. As of 2018, these were the 12 countries (out of 186) where public debt/GDP was actually over 100%: Barbados 123%; Cabo Verde 130%; Congo Republic 101%; Cyprus 112%; Greece 188%; Italy 130%; Japan 238% (but almost all domestic-owned); Lebanon 150%; Portugal 121%; Sudan 168%; U.S. 106%; Venezuela 159%. So, even on that, Rwanda outperforms U.S.

China’s Xinhua News Agency headlined on 10 December 2019, “What makes Rwanda one of least corrupted countries in Africa?” and opened with some of the explanation for Rwanda’s recent outstanding performance:

Rwanda, which ranks as one of the least corrupted countries in Africa, has made holistic efforts to fight corruption, officials and scholars told Xinhua on Monday, the date of this year’s International Anti-Corruption Day. The central African country ranked 48th among 180 countries across the world in the Corruption Perceptions Index 2018 published by Transparency International, making it the least corrupted country in East and Central Africa and the fourth least corrupted in the entire African continent.

Rwanda’s achievements in its fight against corruption can be attributed to several factors, including political will, awareness campaigns, and enforcement of laws, said Clement Musangabatware, Rwanda’s deputy ombudsman in charge of preventing and fighting corruption. … The unity of the Rwandan people in the fight against corruption has also contributed to eliminating vice, according to Rwandan Senator Juvenal Nkusi.

The government of Rwanda has effectively combated corruption by creating a culture of transparency and accountability while making the cost of getting involved in corruption high, said Nkusi, noting that Rwandan officials are aware of the dire consequences of corruption.

The nation’s zero-tolerance policy, which is maintained by top leaders, is an “apparent consensus” among the political community regardless of party affiliation, said Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, an independent researcher on politics and public affairs.

On 4 August 2020, Kenya’s The East African headlined “KAGAME: We’re putting maximum pressure on the corrupt” and opened, “Rwandan public officials convicted of corruption risk facing hefty fines and auctioning of their property if convicted as the country steps up the fight against the vice in the face of dwindling domestic revenues which have come under enormous pressure during the coronavirus pandemic.” Another reason for this intensified enforcement might be to police the increased investment into the country by foreigners.

Furthermore, there are also other indicators of the rankings of various countries as regards corruption. On 15 April 2013, I headlined “How the U.S. Performs in Recent International Rankings” and reported that:

A much broader ranking-system, from the World Economic Forum, is “The Global Competitiveness Report 2012-2013,” which ranks 144 countries, on a wide range of factors related to global economic competitiveness. … Corruption seems to be a rather pervasive problem in the U.S. On “Diversion of Public Funds [due to corruption],” the U.S. ranks #34. On “Irregular Payments and Bribes” (which is perhaps an even better measure of lack of corruption) we are #42. On “Public Trust in Politicians,” we are #54. On “Judicial Independence,” we are #38. On “Favoritism in Decisions of Government Officials” (otherwise known as governmental “cronyism”), we are #59. On “Organized Crime,” we are #87. On “Ethical Behavior of Firms,” we are #29. On “Strength of Auditing and Reporting Standards,” we are #37. On “Reliability of Police Services,” we are #30. On “Transparency of Governmental Policymaking,” we are #56. On “Efficiency of Legal Framework in Challenging Regulations,” we are #37. On “Efficiency of Legal Framework in Settling Disputes,” we are #35. On “Burden of Government Regulation,” we are #76. On “Wastefulness of Government Spending,” we are also #76. On “Property Rights” protection (the basic law-and-order measure), we are #42.

The U.S.’s overall “global competitiveness” ranking was #7. All of the “corruption” factors were listed under the heading of “Institutions,” and the United States’ overall “Institutions” ranking was #41. (Singapore had the #1 “Institutions” ranking. NZ was #2 on “Institutions.” All nations’ “Institutions” rankings were shown on pages 16-17. However, some of the “Institutions” factors, on the basis of which those ranks are generated, do not concern corruption. Furthermore, most of the information that was inputted to calculate these rankings came from the World Bank. Only the Gallup surveys are based upon perceptions by the public within each of the ranked nations.)

The summary for Rwanda said: “Rwanda moves up by seven places this year to 63rd position, continuing to place third in the sub Saharan African region. As do the other comparatively successful African countries, Rwanda benefits from strong and relatively well-functioning institutions, with very low levels of corruption (an outcome that is certainly related to the government’s non-tolerance policy), and a good security environment. Its labor markets are efficient, its financial markets are relatively well developed, and Rwanda is characterized by a capacity for innovation that is quite good for a country at its stage of development. The greatest challenges facing Rwanda in improving its competitiveness are the state of the country’s infrastructure, its low secondary and university enrollment rates, and the poor health of its workforce.”

Here were a few of Rwanda’s corruption (“Institutions”) ranks (shown in the report’s page 307): On “Diversion of Public Funds,” Rwanda was #37. On “Irregular Payments and Bribes,” it was #21. On “Public Trust in Politicians,” it was #6. On “Strength of Auditing and Reporting Standards,” it was #69 (and that was Rwanda’s worst “Institutions” rank). Rwanda’s overall “Institutions” ranking was #20. (However, page 77 of the report indicated that Rwnda was being rated on the basis of 2011 data, not 2012.)

So: for “Institutions,” U.S. was #41, and Rwanda was #20, whereas the 2012 TI “corruption” rankings were U.S. #19 and Rwanda #50. That contrast in rankings might be a fair indicator of how corrupt (bought and paid for) TI is. (Of course, if Gallup’s findings were the best measure of a country’s “corruption,” then that contrast against TI’s U.S. #19 and Rwanda #50 would instead be U.S #65 versus Rwanda #1.) Anyway, Rwanda was vastly less corrupt than the U.S. is. Whether Rwanda might have been #1 out of 129, or #20 out of 144, can be reasonably debated, but that it would have been #50 out of 176 (which TI claimed was instead out of 198) can be simply ignored — it is outside the bounds of reasonable credibility.

Associated with lack of corruption is honest police forces. On 28 June 2018, Rwanda’s leading daily newspaper, The New Times, headlined “Gallup report: Rwanda is second safest place in Africa”, and reported that 83% “of Rwandan residents have confidence in the local police force and … feel safe walking alone at night.” The safest countries were: Singapore 97%, and — in second through fourth place — “Norway, Iceland and Finland who tied at 93 per cent respectively. Rwanda came at 40 globally.” U.S. ranked at #35 out of 142 countries in this survey.

By contrast, as compared to the case of Rwanda — a country that is trying hard not to be corrupt — the U.S. Supreme Court has (see “Federal Public Corruption Prosecution After ‘Bridgegate’”) unanimously ruled, on 7 May 2020 (in Kelly v. U.S.), that unless direct bribery can be proven against a public official, any other type of abuse of public office (than direct bribery) is entirely legal, and not subject to penalty, under any U.S. criminal laws, regardless of any suffering that might have been perpetrated upon the general public, or upon any individual, by that official’s action, or decision. This landmark ruling concerned two subordinates, not the elected official himself; and, so, of course, elected officials themselves are now, essentially, totally immune in the U.S. Even their subordinates are safe, and therefore won’t have incentive to give plea-bargained testimony against their boss in complex corruption-cases. They’re already “home free.” A month later, on June 15th, this same U.S. Supreme Court, in yet another landmark decision, ruled by 8 to 1 that even low officials, such as police, are beyond the reach of the law if they even murder totally innocent persons, if it’s being done while they are on the job. The badge is their protection. (Of course, both of those rulings are likely to cause corruption in the U.S. to grow yet higher.)

As Nicole M. Argentieri, one of America’s top experts on corporate crime, commented about the Kelly v. U.S ruling, one result of the ruling is that “even conduct that the court unanimously characterized as an ‘abuse of power’ can escape prosecution.” The 9 ‘Justices’ didn’t consider the prevention of abuse of power by public officials to be a sufficiently high priority for it to be prosecuted, or even to be at all illegal. Of course, America’s courts aren’t supposed to be writing the laws, but prior rulings, from prior U.S. Supreme Courts, had interpreted America’s laws regarding corruption very differently. As Argentieri observed, “Between the 1940s and the 1980s, it was common for federal prosecutors to use federal fraud laws to prosecute public officials for ‘schemes to defraud citizens of their intangible rights to honest and impartial government’.” Corruption was prosecuted, but now it virtually cannot be. U.S. Supreme Court rulings such as these have made public corruption increasingly legal, and this year’s two rulings make it henceforth entirely legal. And, regardless of whether America’s now allowing public corruption should be attributed primarily to the legislative or to the judicial branch, it’s the current situation. And, yet, TI’s latest, 2019, ranking for the U.S. is #23 out of 198 countries (actually out of 176 countries); and their ranking for Rwanda is #51 (out of ‘198’), which pretends that Rwanda is quite a bit more corrupt than is the United States. TI’s rankings are thus worthless. They are pure propaganda, no news-value except for their own scandalousness and TI’s corruptness. And, as far as TI’s own ‘transparency’ is concerned, it’s yet another fraud. Itself is both opaque, and corrupt. Rwanda has tried hard to be neither.

TI’s ‘corruption’ scores affect how high an interest-rate the nation will pay on its sovereign debt. The IMF’s Public Financial Management Blog headlined on 15 September 2016 “The (Fiscal) Benefits of Transparency”, and reported: “A series of studies (Ciocchini et al 2003; Depken et al 2007; Remolona et al 2008) show that as scores on Transparency International’s (TI’s) Corruptions Perception Index (CPI) decrease, borrowing costs increase. These studies all show direct causality between corruption risk and borrowing costs, controlling for other influences.” Investors trust the fraud and therefore pay lots more for debt from ‘Transparent’ regimes than from low-scored ones. The IMF (the U.S. regime) can only be happy that the TI fraud works. However: taxpayers in any non-U.S.-allied country can only be sad that it does, because it raises their nation’s debt even further. The entire existing World Bank, IMF, and IBRD (‘International Bank for Reconstruction and Development’) system is set up so as to steal from taxpayers in low-income countries — such as Rwanda — in order to increase the wealth of foreign investors who invest in low-scored countries (which America’s billionaires want to conquer — which, if that happens, would increase their own wealth even more).

So: when the U.S. empire, starting in 1991, took anti-corruption as its new excuse for being imperialistic, replacing its old anti-communist excuse, what actually emerged in the U.S. itself has been a country in which around three-quarters of its own residents believe “corruption widespread throughout the government.” That’s tied with Guatemala, Nepal, Philippines, & Taiwan. According to any measure (except the fraudulent TI), Rwanda is far less corrupt than that. Whether it will remain so is another matter.

From the materialist standpoint of Victorian England or 1950’s Atomic America it was probably very reasonable to consider Africa “poor”. Even as recently as 2000 the Economist called Africa “The Hopeless Continent”, implying that even with the help of the almighty West it is doomed to an eternity of geopolitical irrelevance and struggle for survival. This however at the start of the third decade of the new centuries is becoming an obsolete opinion.

Shockingly CNN’s series “Marketplace Africa” presents a version of the Heartland of the Global South in a light similar to what you hear from people who were actually born there, i.e. things are actually changing and developing. Obviously there is a very good chance that the motivation to do such a project by CNN is probably a form of White Man’s Guilt, cherry picking stories to make the region look nice. But since there is now plenty of real economic news to take from Africa no overinflating stories is necessary. Africa now is a real “marketplace” that has growing value and here are some reasons why.

Photo: Taking a virtual tour of Africa via Google Maps shows areas that are far from dirt poor like downtown Kigali, Rwanda.

Winning the Numbers Game

The United Nations projects that Global Population growth is beginning to slow down except for Sub-Saharan Africa which may further explode 20th century style.

Stereotypically we associate China and India with being the largest humanity producers on Earth with their billion+ populations, but this is simply no longer true as many regions of these two major civilizations have European birth rates. India and China are levelling off with even a real possibility of a gentle decline.

Numbers create markets, it is that simple. China is so big and so wealthy that Hollywood is now very concerned with not offending it. Fragmented post-Soviet Russia simply does not have the numbers to shape global media and thus envy Chinese sway. Africa however, although very diverse between languages and borders, as a whole may, start to be treated like China – too big to be ignored or offended.

Why is Africa growing? Well, if there is one thing that modern Liberalism is good at doing it is killing off the ability for people to have children and Africa remains very untouched from it. Pioneers leave with arrows in their backs and the Europeans who dabbled in Individualism and Free Markets first may be swept away from relevance by those who will do so last. Old school attitudes produce children, and despite the occasional Youtube video about crazy African pastors the continent has the right attitude towards human production.

The 20th and 21st century are showing that economics is a numbers game and Africa’s numbers will be the last to grow explosively. Numbers create big markets and big markets create wealth opportunities.

China will make Africa Great Again

The Chinese have been moving into Africa and rather than just taking the resources by hook or economic crook (like the Europeans of old) they have been leaving infrastructure as payment. Forbes is very paranoid about this asking “What China Is Really Up To In Africa” in one of their headlines. What they are really up to is fairly obvious. One solution to Africa’s corruption problem is being paid in buildings and roads, which are harder to make vanish into government servants’ pockets. The Chinese need African resources which they can pay for with cheap but decent infrastructure.

Every culture has its own nuances, and furthermore Africa is not mentally monolithic but for many places below the Sahara it is becoming understood that resources for cash results in nothing, but resources for infrastructure builds a future.

Russians often ask themselves why Silicon Valley didn’t happen in Moscow. Russian sources show that the Soviets were very capable of making revolutionary technology, the problem was getting it to the masses under a sluggish system. On a grander scale the question is, why didn’t Silicon Valley happen in Iceland, Caracas, Manila or anywhere else?

Because the human and physical infrastructure that was needed to make it happen was lacking. Silicon Valley came about due to like minded individuals moving to or being born in California with the excess resources of their WWII generation parents at their disposal to use on projects in garages. Shipping and tech in general were simply way better in the U.S. at the time and all these factors created the lightning in a jar that is the reason today Mac products say “Designed in California” on them.

So in that spirit it seems sad on the surface that only four in ten Africans have access the internet, but then again if the population of the continent rises to a billion (as projected) that means they will have an internet using market of 400 million people, spread over many major cities, which means Africa will have the critical mass needed to become a serious economic force.

Furthermore, it is hard to imagine that this 40% internet access will stay frozen in the upcoming decades as China’s massive 10,000 Villages program is spreading digital cable TV across many nations and will probably lay the groundwork for better internet penetration. If Africa gets to seven or eight internet users out of ten then it will be very much thanks to Chinese Communism and will put amazing economic opportunity on the table.

Photo: Although governments can hide their secrets Kigali, Rwanda looks like any major city from up high.

An AU to compete with the EU

More often than not Africa is written about by the same people who write about every region of the world never making contact with anyone from any of them. But if you ever get the chance to speak with people from Rwanda you’d be surprised how happy they are with the growth of their country and their hope that it may become the epicenter of regional integration (or atleast a not poor country).

Photo: At least for now Rwandan President Paul Kagame is transforming the genocidal nightmare zone of the 1990’s into the envy of many African nations.

Besides going from genocidal madhouse to attempting to become “Africa’s Singapore” the country has also created a regional block called the East African Community that is going to attempt to play the regional integration game in a similar way that the EU and the Eurasian Union are doing. Visa free travel, (i.e. open borders for members who share similar cultural and linguistic tendencies) is a key feature and has really created opportunities for tiny Rwanda to work with its neighbors.

With the floundering EU losing its first member, and Russia’s attempts at integration being ultimately stale (or purely economic) we shouldn’t be over optimistic that a giant East African Empire will form around Kigali… but it could. The six nations currently in the Community are vastly more valuable and influential as a whole than as tiny parts and would demand much more respect and attention. At least Kigali gets an A for effort in countries that stereotypically are not known for putting much effort into anything.

African needs reconsideration

Obviously we can still hear crazy stories of poverty coming from Africa, like how away from the big successes of urban Nigeria, gasoline generators are still being used to charge cell phones as big business in villages or how new employees in Uganda simply vanish after a few months because they made enough money “to get by for a while”, and how the nightmarish levels of racism and violence in Zimbabwe and South Africa have destroyed these countries’ futures. This is all terrible and real, but there is major change going on. That is why it is time to “rethink” Africa because perhaps it may be different, then again the more things change the more they stay the same.

Schultz and those like him who have or are harboring political ambitions want governments to serve the neo-mercantilist elites, not the common folk. The historical precedent for this behavior is the British East India Company, also known as the “Honorable East India Company.” This London-based company controlled a vast monopoly on trade, extending from India and Southeast Asia, China, and Japan to the wharves of Boston in the British colony of Massachusetts Bay in North America.

The famous “Boston Tea Party” of 1773 was a rebellion by American colonial merchants over the imposition of the Stamp Tax on tea and other goods imported to North America from India by the British East India Company. However, the rebels of Boston were more interested in their bottom line than in political fervor to break from the British Crown. In fact, the thirteen red and white stripes on the flag of the British East India Company, with the British Union Jack in the canton, became the basis for the design of the American flag, with a field of white stars replacing the Union Jack. When Americans fight over respect for “the flag,” few realize that what they are being forced to respect is a modified form of the standard for one of the largest mercantilist contrivances in history. In effect, the British East India Company, which had its own army and navy, ruled over India and British colonies in Malaya, China, Burma, Mauritius, and Reunion.

The same mercantilist notions of trade expansion and control of commodities exists today with companies like Starbuck’s. The coffee chain distinguishes itself from its competitors by offering coffee choices with exotic-sounding names like “Sulawesi Dark Roast,” “Rwanda Blue Bourbon,” “Sumatra Dark Roast,” and “Guatemala Antigua,” and menus featuring choices written in a bastardized version of Esperanto. Schultz prides himself on being an enlightened entrepreneur, however, a close look at the Brooklyn-born mega-merchant of Seattle, yields the company he formed far from advocating any notions of progressive capitalism. As with other “new age” global corporations, including Apple, Amazon, Ikea, Microsoft, Starbuck’s has ridden the wave of corporations becoming more powerful than many countries, just as was the case with the old British East India Company and British South Africa Company, the latter founded by uber-capitalist and colonialist Cecil Rhodes.

When it came to buying coffee from some of the world's worst human rights violators and child labor practitioners, Schultz led the pack.

Starbucks enjoyed a very cozy relationship with the Indonesian military-backed coffee-growing colonists who ran East Timor's large plantations, during the Indonesian occupation of the former Portuguese colony. In 1999, protestors highlighted Starbucks' practices in East Timor and other countries during the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Starbuck's headquarters. Starbuck’s, a company that prided itself as being progressive, turned out to be no different from than Shell, British Petroleum, Nike, Chiquita Brands, and other companies that exploit workers in poor developing nations.

In 1994, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) officially took control of East Timorese coffee plantations from the Indonesian armed forces. One of the Indonesian military bigwigs in on the deal was former Indonesian armed force commander General Benni Murdani, a favorite of the Central Intelligence Agency. Although Murdani was forced to resign as commander in 1993, his influence over East Timor's coffee production remained significant. Operating through a local super-cooperative called the Timor Coffee Project, which acted like a modern-day British East India Company, USAID and the US National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA) administered the coffee plantations and arranged for most of the organically-grown reddish-hued Arabica bean crop to be sold to none other than Starbuck's.

In East Timor, many of the local officials of the coffee cooperative were not even native Timorese, but migrants from Java and Bali who wanted to turn a quick profit on the backs of underpaid East Timorese farm workers.

Rather than be caught selling East Timorese coffee at its stores, Starbuck's cleverly re-named the coffee as being from Sulawesi or Sumatra.

To deal with the public relations debacle caused by its exposure in East Timor, Starbuck’s agreed to place "Fair Trade" labels on its products as proof that it was paying coffee farmers a fair price for their coffee. The Fair Trade labels were the brainchild of Trans Fair USA, the American branch of a self-regulatory international industry watchdog group that guarantees coffee, tea, chocolate, and banana growers receive a fair price without the markup of middlemen, and that farm laborers work under safe conditions.

Starbucks, as the first company to adopt the Fair Trade labeling scheme for coffee, offered its "fair trade" coffee free to passers-by during the World Bank protests in Washington, DC in 2000. Although Starbucks wanted to get ahead in the public relations contest, fair trade labels were not found on most of the company's products. Also, there has never been a real way for determining how much of Starbucks' business is really conducted through "fair trade" entities, or if only a small percentage of its wholesale coffee purchases are "greenwashed" for public relations reasons. Many have argued that such “mercantile activism” is nothing more than a corporate smokescreen designed to hide more unsavory business practices.

As East Timor slowly drifted toward independence from Indonesia, Washington, DC lobbyists, some employed by Starbuck’s, went to work. Following East Timor's overwhelming vote for independence in a 1999 referendum, every statement issued by the US State Department concerning the Indonesian genocide against the people of East Timor was tainted by assertions that any United Nations relief operation would have to be worked out with the authorities in Jakarta. Oddly, no such preconditions concerning Belgrade's acquiescence were ever attached to NATO's invasion of Kosovo taking place at the same time. Starbucks’ lobbyists were clearly trying to buy time for the status quo in East Timor.

One place where Starbuck’s phoniness on fair trade coffee was exposed was in the rebellious Mexican state of Chiapas. There, a Starbuck’s "greenwashing" effort was in full operation. In an attempt to drive independent squatters off of the sensitive rain forest land in Montes Azules, where farmers slash and burn for agricultural land, groups such as Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), as well as the always suspect USAID, began a campaign to protect the land for 66 surviving Lacandon Mayan families. However, it was discovered that the non-governmental organizations and their USAID partners had other motives, which included gaining access to the Montes Azules rainforest for the exploitation of coffee, fruit, oil, and pharmaceutical precursors. Leading the parade of the firms wanting to exploit Montes Azules was Starbuck’s, with ExxonMobil, Chiquita Brands, and Coca Cola in tow. The Zapatista National Liberation Front, which is active in Chipas, said it would fight any attempt to remove any villagers from Montes Azules, once again pitting Starbuck’s and its agents of influence against the poorest of the poor.

Starbucks' support for unsavory regimes did not end with the Indonesian military occupiers of East Timor. After Rwandan President Paul Kagame transformed his country into a virtual one-party state, Starbuck’s announced it was interested in buying Rwandan coffee. In April 2004, Kagame made a pilgrimage to Seattle, the home of Starbucks, with his trade and agriculture ministers in tow. Rwanda's coffee industry received financial support from the Bush administration, anxious to bolster its client in Kigali. The “Assistance a la Dynamisation de l'Agribusiness au Rwanda” (ADAR), a Rwandan enterprise designed to spur entrepreneurship in the coffee industry, received US government funding.

In an appearance in Seattle to promote his movie, "Hotel Rwanda," director Terry George, used the occasion to promote Rwandan coffee: "If Starbuck's would carry Rwandan coffee—which is extremely good, by the way—that alone could save the country from economic disaster."

Under Brazil's new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, the nation's child labor laws are being rolled back, with companies like Starbuck's at the ready to take advantage of the situation to purchase cheaper coffee beans.

Howard Schultz, like other mercantilists of today and yesteryear, made his billions on the backs of others, including, in some cases, children as young as five-years old. It does not help Schultz’s political case to have signed on to his nascent exploratory campaign staff, Steve Schmidt, the former Republican Party strategist who convinced 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, to select Alaska’s Governor, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. The United States has already experienced the ravages brought about by a self-seeking billionaire currently occupying the Oval Office and it can ill-afford to replace him with another.

Image: FARDC troops from the 1st integrated brigade on operations in South Kivu. 
Photo c. keith harmon snow 2006.

In the twilight hours of 2 June 2015 residents of the city of Goma, in Congo’s eastern province of North Kivu, were awoken after midnight by gunshots, mortars and heavy artillery fire, and battle tanks.  The fighting lasted several hours.  At daybreak most government offices, schools and businesses remained closed.  The fighting resumed around 11:00 AM, and receded to the Rwanda border as Congolese tanks pressed the attackers back to Rwanda.

We are in great stress since last night.”  An official in Goma who asked not to be named reports that this is the work of the regimes in Rwanda and Uganda. From about 1:00 to 3:00 in the morning there was a lot of firing inside the town of Goma and on the border with Rwanda: Simple and heavy guns and even war tanks.  Officially, we have no precision, but it’s known that Kagame’s forces entered Congo this night.  Eight Congolese soldiers were killed; I saw one of them with my own eyes in the Virunga quarter of Goma.   The Governor and Congolese military officers are keeping quiet. [1]

Gunmen attacked the airport in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s largest city, Goma, in an overnight raid in which four government soldiers and three suspected assailants were killed, a local official and a witness said on Tuesday.”  The Reutersnews syndicate produced the only report that appeared in western media venues on 2 June 2015.  Reuters reported that North Kivu governor Julien Paluku referred to the attackers only as ‘bandits’. “A Congolese security official involved in the clashes and a Goma-based diplomat said the assailants were Mai-Mai fighters, members of one of the dozens of armed militias that control large parts of Congo’s mineral-rich eastern borderlands. [2]

Later in the day on 2 June 2015, Agence France Presse attributed the attack to a criminal gang and called the war-torn North Kivu a ‘restless province’, suggesting that the province itself is inherently prone to permanent unrest of the African variety.  ”At least one soldier and a gunman were killed overnight when a gang raided the Goma airport in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo during an apparent robbery, officials said Tuesday.  ’Bandits got inside the airport area to try to steal from depots (storing goods) waiting to be loaded on to cargo planes,’ the governor of the restless North Kivu province, Julien Paluku, toldAFP.” [3]

By 3 June 2015 the supposed culprits had been captured, and the western news syndicates were regurgitating claims by Congolese officials that the ‘bandit’ leader of the ‘gang’ was ‘a criminal from the distant city of Butembo’ who had recruited other criminals and organized an attack on Goma airport.  The reportage is confused: the attack is blamed on both ‘criminals’ and ‘ethnic Mai Mai militia’ and the Reuters correspondent ignores the contradictions.

Soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo have captured the man suspected of being behind a deadly attack this week on the largest airport in the east of the country, the government’s spokesperson said on Wednesday,” Reuters continued.  ”At least four soldiers and three suspected assailants were killed in the gun attack at Goma airport on Tuesday that military and diplomatic sources said was the work of ethnic Mai-Mai fighters. [4]

“The region has seen years of conflict involving dozens of armed militia such as the Mai-Mai that control large parts of the mineral-rich eastern borderlands, but attacks of this kind are rare.

Reuters falsely spins this as an uncharacteristic attack atypical of war-torn eastern Congo, where Ugandan and Rwandan militias under the command of presidents Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame have perpetrated war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide since at least 1994.

Similarly, there is also no mention by Reuters of the vast tracts of mineral-rich land that have been acquired and cleared of Congolese people by western mining companies like Banro Gold Corporation [5], Metallurg [6], Casa Minerals [7], or Alphamin [8], the western mining firm that has captured massive concessions in North Kivu (see Map).

Government spokesperson Lambert Mende described the man captured as a ‘criminal’ from the town of Butembo, some 270 km north of Goma. [9]

This is bullshit!”  The (unnamed) Goma official is adamant.  ”How can a group of Mai Mai leave Butembo 290 km from Goma and come to attack the airport!  And for which purpose?  Everyone knows there is no food or weapons at the Goma airport.  The [DRC] government does not want to accuse Rwanda, but Congolese people are not stupid.[10]

The 3 June 2015 Reuters article also attributes the capture of the ‘criminals’ and ‘bandits’ to the friendly cooperative assistance of neighboring Rwanda.  ”The man was arrested in Goma thanks to information provided by three captured assailants and intelligence help from neighboring Rwanda, whose phone networks the attackers used, [DRC spokesman Lambert] Mende later told Reuters.” [11]

The assailants came from Rwanda and went back to Rwanda.” The unnamed DRC official in Goma is certain that the attack is part of the new Rwandan-Ugandan military thrust — the newly and euphemistically named Christian Movement for the Reconstruction of the Congo (MCRC) — in eastern Congo.  ”There were almost 20 Mai Mai being held [in advance] just to be accused in case the attack failed.  Congolese tanks fired in the direction of Rwanda and the retreating assailants.  These were Tutsi soldiers and they came from Rwanda.  We are afraid as we know the government is hiding the truth: people saw Rwanda troops coming into Congo.[12]

The Reuters story is further confused by the inclusion of a Associated Press photograph captioned: “Congolese soldiers visit territory retaken last week from M23 rebels near the Rwandan border Joseph Kay AP.”  The Rwandan/Ugandan backed M23 insurgency was named in recognition of the 23 March 2009 peace treaty that integrated the former Rwandan/Ugandan army, theNational Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), into the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo(FARDC).  M23 soldiers claimed that the Congolese government failed to honor the terms of the agreement, and so they launched another war.  The recycled AP photograph by Joseph Kay originated in an AP story of 6 September 2013, but has been used over and over for various and diverse disinformation.[13a]

Image: United Nations (MONUC) helicopter departing an eastern Congo airport. Photo c. 2007 keith harmon snow.

The real story is that Congo appears to be on the cusp of a new insurrection.  Like the RCD, CNDP and M23 occupations, this is yet another military thrust by Rwanda and Uganda to destabilize eastern Congo and seize absolute control.  The first objective: take control of Goma.

On 6 June 2015 the Rwandan ‘news’ venue Imirasire, one of the main propaganda/disinformation venues of the regime of Paul Kagame, run by the Directorate of Military Intelligence, published a very short clip claiming that the attack on Goma airport was perpetrated by “a new rebel group headed by a former politician.”  While naming the problem more accurately than Reuters or the Congolese government were willing to do, the Imirasire report is laughable in its pretensions about violence and minerals theft. [13b]

Some Mai Mai from the Cheka [armed] group infiltrated Goma from the bush,” says the unnamed official in Goma, “and soldiers came from Rwanda and both attacked in the night under heavy rain with hope to take the airport, but they failed because the FARDC they found there were Republican Guards, trained by the USA and Israel, the best soldiers we have in Congo.  The last noise from the fighting was in the area of ‘La grande barriere’ on the Rwanda border.  Workers at the Congolese border office and Republican Guards confirmed.  After they had failed, MCRC withdrew back to Rwanda.  Local authorities forbade TV stations to show the bodies of ‘bandits’ that were killed.[14]

THE WARLORD’S WARLORDS

For the past six years Rwandan General Laurent Nkunda has been hiding in Rwanda and Uganda, shielded from arrest or prosecution by Rwandan president Paul Kagame and Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and their western backers.

Is General Laurent Nkunda now moving freely between Rwanda and Uganda, organizing a new insurrection in eastern Congo’s Kivu provinces, directing a new guerilla movement that has already perpetrated human rights atrocities and destabilized the eastern Congo?

Other known Rwandan war criminals with deep historical ties to General Laurent Nkunda are on the move.  One of these is Rwandan Major General Vincent Gatama, one of Nkunda’s former comrades, now in charge of Rwanda’s military operations in Congo.  On the night of 17 November 2012 then Colonel Vincent Gatama led a Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) special forces unit in the 2012 attack on Goma.[15]  Soon after the Goma attack, Paul Kagame promoted Gatama from Colonel to Major General in support of war operations to infiltrate and occupy eastern Congo.

Another of these Nkunda-allied warlords is General Bwambale Kakolele, a former leader of one of the original Rwanda- and Uganda-backed ‘rebel’ armies from the 1998-2002 war, the Congolese Rally for Democracy, and later one of General Nkunda’s top commanders in the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) insurrection.

Born in the Congo to the Nande tribe of Orientale Province, Bwambale Kakolele is a former Forces Armee Zairois (FAZ) soldier under the Mobutu regime who originally joined the Rwandan-Ugandan war of 1996-1997 to help oust long-time CIA-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.  By late 2001 he was leading the RCD’s Movement for Liberation (RDC-ML) faction, and he was named by the United Nations for trafficking arms in violation of the wartime arms embargo.  After this Kakolele was part of theCongolese Revolutionary Movement (MRC), one of the scores of militias involved in the bloody Ituri conflicts of 2003-2008. General Nkunda and the CNDP joined forces with the MRC in 2006, and the MRC agreed to disarm in August 2007.

General Kakolele left the CNDP in 2008, and in 2011 was participating in DRC government activities that facilitated his being dispatched to north Kivu province.  The DRC government allegedly arrested him in 2013 in Beni, North Kivu, for blocking the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) process. [16], [17]

Like his military allies, General Kakolele is an opportunist who has pursued any profitable enterprise in war-torn Congo, no matter how ruthless and lawless, including diamonds, and he allegedly has deep long-standing ties to the Ugandan ‘rebel’ Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).  Like the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda, the ADF is on the U.S. government list of terrorist organizations.  Kakolele gains protection through his ties to various guerrilla armies backed by Rwanda and Uganda.

Image: RwandAir air waybill proving Rwandan government mineral shipments out of Bukuvu, DRC on RwandAir, a company tightly linked to the regime through Kagame business kingpin John Mirenge; the transport chain involves DHL International, SGS Laboratories, SwissAir and other international corporations. 

Third on the list of Nkunda allied over-achievers in Congo bloodletting is Ugandan Colonel Sultani Makenga, another warlord who was also involved in the 2012 invasion of Goma, and one of president Yoweri Museveni and his half-brother General Salim Saleh’s protégés in the region.  Makenga is said to be very sick with HIV, but, allegedly, he participated in May meetings in Uganda where the new insurrection was born.

Finally, there is the rogue warlord Mai Mai leader Ntabo Ntaberi, alias ‘Cheka’, who has been plundering and killing in the Walikale and Lubero districts of North Kivu.  In 2010 soldiers under Cheka’s command raped some 300 women in Walikale region.  In 2013, after the defeat of the Rwandan M23 army, the regime in Rwanda provided troop reinforcements and arms to Cheka.

Throughout 2013, 2014 and early 2015 the forces under Cheka have perpetrated massive human rights atrocities and crimes against humanity in a wide swath of North Kivu between Lubero and Walikale.  Cheka has been hunting civilians in their villages and fields, accusing them of being collaborators of FDLR and Congolese Mai Mai, and killing them.  Crimes include summary executions, rape, mass abductions, forced marches and other forced labor, and shooting of children.  Commander Cheka is one of the most ruthless and dangerous military commanders on Congolese soil and he runs his own militia namedNduma Defense of the Congo.[18]

Cheka rose out of the forests of North Kivu on a self-declared mission to gain justice for the Congolese people, and was originally allied with the FDLR rebels in Kivu.  Corrupted by power and private profit — plundering resources and waging brutal campaigns of forced taxation — Cheka has served Paul Kagame’s interests by hunting down and assassinating FDLR leaders in Congo.  In March 2015 Cheka’s forces attacked villages where the FDLR reside in the Lubero territory of North Kivu.[19]

“Kagame gave Cheka equipment and men,” says the official in Goma.  ”Cheka replaced Laurent Nkunda and Bosco Ntaganda of CNDP, and Makenga of M23.  Cheka operates in Walikale and Lubero, 200 to 300 kilometers from Goma.”

Even Human Rights Watch has called for the arrest of Ntabo Ntaberi Cheka.[20]  The HRW report of January 2015 documents the most brutal atrocities committed by Cheka and his troops, and their backing by Rwanda.

Former NDC fighters also told Human Rights Watch that Cheka received financial and other military support from Rwanda. They said that Cheka’s ethnic Tutsi wife travels regularly to Rwanda and acts as a liaison with Cheka’s contacts in the country. One former fighter said that ammunition was often sent into Congo from Rwanda via Goma and was delivered to Cheka on motorcycles in bags of beans.[21]

Image: Alphamin Resources maintains a clean, organized, shiny, operations base, accessed by helicopter
– a parallel economy to that of Congolese people who suffer extreme depredations.
Photo: Alphamin Bisie NI 43-101 Report.

There are allegations that Mai Mai Cheka has colluded with Alphamin Resources Corporation to displace artisanal Congolese miners.[22]  Meanwhile, several of the concessions stolen from Congolese people by Alphamin remain under ‘Force Majeure’ — a formal declaration, agreed to by the Congolese government in Kinshasa, establishing that the mining operations cannot proceed due to unforeseen circumstances.

Alphamin Resources Corporation is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and staffed with all white directors from North America, Europe and South Africa.  Alphamin controls vast tracts of North Kivu, mining concessions rich with tin, gold, coltan and copper, the largest of which is the Bisie Mine.[23]  The foreign control would not be possible without first neutralizing and/or eliminating the Congolese landowners.  Western mining companies achieve pacification and land control by any means necessary.

According to their own web site: “Alphamin, through its wholly owned subsidiary, Mining and Processing Congo Sprl (MPC), has full legal title (100 % ownership) over five exploration permits (No’s: PR 5270; PR 10346; PR 5266; PR 5267; and PR 4246) and an exploitation permit (PE 13155) in total covering 1,270 square kilometers in the North Kivu province. ” The Bisie Project falls on PE 13155.  Due to the current volatile security situation, three licenses (PR 5270, PR 5267 and PR 4246) are still under Force Majeure.

The Force Majeure was lifted at the Bisie Project in February 2012, and Alphamin Resources established a camp on the Bisie ridge and commenced exploration drilling in July 2012.

Image: Concesions “100% owned by Alphamin” in North Kivu.

Thousands of Congolese artisanal miners have suffered loss of livelihood or life due to the occupation of large mining concessions by Alphamin, and the concomitant pacification of the communities through direct violence.  Artisanal miners have attacked Alphamin mining operations, and Cheka forces have attacked artisanal mining camps, and artisanal miners have attacked Alphamin operations after being themselves attacked by Cheka forces (that they believe to be aligned with Alphamin).[24]

Of course, many local miners have to leave their communities since those big companies come with papers and authorizations from Kinshasa.”  The unnamed Congolese official has visited many Kivu mining areas over the past 20 years.  ”In North Kivu it is Mining Processing of Congo, and just like with Banro Gold in Twangiza in South Kivu: they claim the right to receive ‘security’ assured by FARDC.[25]

Like their commanders-in-chief, Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, these Ugandan/Rwandan commanders have directed assassinations of political and military targets.

WAR CRIMES, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY AND GENOCIDE

In September 2005 the Congolese General Military Prosecutor issued international arrest warrants against General Nkunda and Rwandan Colonel Jules Mutebesi charging them with the creation of an insurrectional movement, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.  Even Human Rights Watch, the selective U.S.-based human rights organization that has been notoriously slanted in favor of team-U.S. interests in the Great Lakes region, in 2006 briefly outlined the history of Nkunda’s crimes, including “numerous war crimes and other serious human rights abuses during the past three years… summary executions, torture, and rape committed by soldiers under Nkunda’s command, in Bukavu in 2004 and in Kisangani in 2002.” [26]

Over the years Laurent Nkunda and his allied commanders have committed the most egregious war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, dictating the life and death of millions of people. Their crimes rival those of Paul Kagame, Yoweri Museveni, General James Kabarebe, General James Kazini, General Salim Saleh, and other high-level Tutsi-Hima commanders from Rwanda, Uganda and Congo.  They have established formal networks of organized crime premised on direct violence: criminal racketeering, looting, taxation, gunrunning and minerals plunder.  Their troops have committed massacres, mass rapes and extrajudicial executions of the most inhuman kinds.

This time they are calling their terrorist enterprise the Christian Movement for the Reconstruction of Congo (Mouvement Chretien pour la Reconstruction du Congo).

Their histories of atrocities are ugly, brutish and anything but short.

They have organized and run insurgency and counter-insurgency ‘programs’ to neutralize any ‘infrastructure’ and all opposition (and potential opposition) to their elite Tutsi-Hima agenda.  The word ‘infrastructure’ here refers to Congolese chiefs (mwamis), legitimate rulers, politicians, diplomats, soldiers, human rights defenders, civil society members, and ordinary people.  The euphemism ‘neutralize’ means to drive off, exile, make to defect to their (own) cause, capture, torture, maim, sexually mutilate, kill, disappear people.  Beheadings, amputations and butchering of corpses are common.  They have incinerated bodies, dead and alive.  There is no language that can make clear the extremes of their pathological behaviors.

They use networks of paid informers to spy and inform on anyone and everyone.  They infiltrate agents into social networks, political structures, government agencies, and military organizations.  They sow fear, mistrust, divisiveness and terror through psychological operations and propaganda.  Some of them have been trained, advised, schooled and indoctrinated by the leading institutions of terror in the west, and — through the regimes inn Rwanda and Uganda — they have relationships to AFRICOM, the Pentagon’s Africa Command.

None of this is much reported in the mass media and if reported at all the atrocities and crimes are blamed on the victims, some of which include armed resistance forces with legitimate rights, legitimate grievances and very real claims.

The agenda of the Kagame-Museveni axis is to depopulate the homes, villages and territories of the eastern Congo (as they did in Uganda 1980-1986 and Rwanda 1990-1995) of their rightful owners and repopulate them with outsiders; to create large, destitute, traumatized populations of refugees on the run for their lives or herded into death camps; to control the extractive (minerals, timber, agricultural commodities, petroleum, natural gas) industries; to control taxation at regional, national and international borders; to fill their pockets and bank accounts with cash; to militarize their private kingdoms; to terrorize and destabilize and manufacture perpetual war.  The documentation of these crimes is plentiful and irrefutable.

The commanders of the new MCRC guerrilla insurgency have done the ‘dirty work’ for Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame since the very beginning.  And, like their patron-dictators, no matter the documentation, no matter the evidence, no matter the eyewitnesses and proof of their crimes, most of them remain terrorists at large.  Under the secret programs of these Rwandan and Ugandan agents due process has been nonexistent, impunity the rule.  Millions and millions of lives have been destroyed, and it is happening again now.

They have been protected and/or supported by the U.S. administrations of William Jefferson Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barrack Obama.  AFRICOM supports Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni directly, and has military bases in Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.

Image: General Laurent Nkunda in his ‘saviors’ costume for this AP photo c. Jerome Delay 2008.

And why is the MCRC’s first objective to take Goma?  The control of Goma would be used as leverage to manipulate the international community to recognize and accept the demands of the MCRC, and these are the objectives of the Kagame and Museveni regimes: to occupy, control and annex eastern Congo.  In this effort the Tutsi-controlled regime of alias Joseph Kabila in Kinshasa is complicit.  By controlling Goma, the former Rwandan and Ugandan ‘rebel’ soldiers that were integrated into the FARDC but remain loyal to Rwanda and Uganda would join the MCRC insurrection.  By controlling Goma, Kagame can openly (more openly than in recent years) send Rwandan Defense Forces into Congo without international intervention.

UGLY, BRUTISH AND NOT SHORT

First there was Museveni’s war in Uganda, 1980-1986, with Paul Kagame fighting for the National Resistance Army and Yoweri Museveni.  They committed massive war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, often blamed on the losers.  Then they invaded Rwanda, in 1990, and for the next four years they did the same thing, only more finely tuned, more sophisticated, and arguably much more brutal.[27]

The violence wreaked on Congo-Zaire by Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame was exported by perpetrators who first waged genocidal campaigns and coups-d’état that violated the most fundamental international covenants on state sovereignty first in Uganda, then Rwanda, then Zaire (Congo).  On 6 April 1994, they assassinated heads of state from Rwanda and Burundi, again the most fundamental and egregious violations of international law.  The U.S., U.K., Canada and Israel could not have been happier.

These first campaigns of Tutsi-Hima guerrilla warfare set the stage for unprecedented violence as the terror regimes of Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame tortured, slaughtered, raped, disappeared, assassinated, and terrorized millions of innocent non-combatant civilians from Uganda to Rwanda to Burundi to Congo (and in South Sudan). They had the backing of western intelligence and covert operations at the start. [28a]

Next came the covert operations in Zaire (Congo) by the special forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) from 1994 to 1996.  RPA hit squads were dispatched to the Kivu provinces in Zaire well in advance of the U.S.-backed invasion that formally arrived in September 1996.  From July 1994 to August 1996 RPA Special Forces employing hit-and-run terror tactics crossed the Zaire border to commit targeted acts of terrorism, including sabotage, bombings, psychological warfare, assassinations, massacres, disappearing.

One of their primary strategies has always been the sowing of terror through pseudo-operations: disguised as some ‘enemy’ faction (whether such faction has ever been involved in violence or not) the RPA (and UPDF) commit atrocities, generally under cover of night, which are then blamed on the enemy faction, and provide justification for RPA assaults, retaliation, and occupations. [28b]  Under this rubric, the victims are portrayed as the killers, and the killers are portrayed as the victims.

Then in August of 1996 came the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) invasion of Zaire.  The establishment narrative portrays the 1996 invasion of Zaire as a purely Congolese affair led by Laurent Desire Kabila and the Alliance for the Democratic Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL-CZ).  Similarly, the ‘rebellions’ — bloody illegal guerrilla warfare insurgencies — in eastern Congo are typically portrayed as purely Congolese affairs, at least until the truth can no longer be denied, and then they become the subjects of propaganda campaigns that are duplicitous and expedient: damage control.

The United States military, intelligence apparatus, and diplomatic sector were 100% involved in the invasion of Zaire-Congo 1996-1998, providing logistics, weapons, aircraft, intelligence, satellite communications, and Special Operations Forces (U.S. Special Operations Command: SOCOM).  These were heavily armed and outfitted black- and brown-skinned U.S. troops, fluent in regional languages, on the ground in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Congo. [29]

Not only did the invading forces ruthlessly hunt and terminate every Rwandan Hutu man, women and child they could find, they also slaughtered tens or scores or hundreds of thousands of innocent Congolese Bantu people.   They used bulldozers and logging equipment to disappear the bodies. They dumped corpses into the vast Congo River and its vast tributaries.  They went back months later to the Congo forests and swamps to scavenge every skeleton they could find and disappear these once and for all. There are plenty of eyewitnesses who survived. [30], [31]

Their campaigns of rape set the stage for the unprecedented sexual violence yet to come: sexual violence perpetrated by Rwandans and Ugandans but blamed on the Congolese.

Unable to control their proxy Laurent Desire Kabila, whom they chose to lead the Alliance for the Democratic Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL-CZ), and who then became president of the Congo (until his assassination in 2001), Rwanda and Uganda next used the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) and Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) to aggress the Congo in the manufactured ‘Congolese rebellion’ from 1998 to 2003.

After signing some peace treaties in 2003, Rwanda and Uganda next aggressed the Congo through an alphabet soup of warring guerrilla militias: RCD, RCD-Goma, RCD-K, RCD-ML, PFJC, MRC, FNI, FRPI…and many more.  From 2003 to 2006 some 26 militias operated in the Ituri sector of Orientale Province alone: Ituri became the bloodiest place on earth at that time.  Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian militias rampaged in the provinces of Orientale, North and South Kivu, and Maniema, ripping apart the last vestiges of social fabric, ripping out the timber and the minerals, littering fields with skeletons and skulls, and mass graves everywhere.

Image: Skulls & skeletons in Bogoro, Orientale Province, DRC. Photo: c. keith harmon snow 2007.

In 2006, Rwanda and Uganda took their aggression against Congo to new levels through General Laurent Nkunda’s new Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) insurgency.

An arrest warrant was issued against Nkunda for war crimes, crimes against humanity and insurrection months ago but the police and army have done nothing about arresting him,” reported Alison Des Forges, senior advisor to the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, in 2006.  ”So long as Nkunda is at large, the civilian population remains at grave risk.[32]

Similarly, from 2006 onward, Rwandan General Bosco Ntaganda was wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in northeastern Congo in 2002 and 2003, including recruiting and using child soldiers, murder, rape and sexual slavery.  Ntaganda is also a former leader of the Rwanda-backed CNDP, and Ntaganda and his fighters were integrated into FARDC after the peace agreement of 23 March 2009.

The M23 guerrilla insurgency was more aggression by Rwanda and Uganda against Congo that began in March 2012 based on a FARDC mutiny led by Bosco Ntaganda and Sultani Makenga.  The rebellion took the name ‘M23′ in recognition of the 23 March 2009 neutralization of the Rwandan CNDP.

Rwandan M23 troops occupied Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu, on 20 November 2012, and the FARDC and MONUSCO did nothing to stop them. General Vincent Gatama commanded RDF Special Forces allied with M23 and both armies were involved in massive atrocities.

In March 2013, after the Ntaganda and Mukenga factions of M23 came to blows, Ntaganda surrendered to the U.S. embassy in Rwanda and was flown to The Hague to be tried by the International Criminal Court.

The defeat of the M23 by November 2013 came as a victory for the 18-month military campaign against them by the FARDC the MONUSCO Force Intervention Brigade, and supported by Congolese civil society and activists. The 3096 SADC Force Intervention Brigade forces (attached to MONUSCO) from Malawi, South Africa, and Tanzania quickly routed the Rwandan M23 troops. [33]

Rwandan commanders Paul Kagame, James Kabarebe, Laurent Nkunda, Bosco Ntaganda, Sultani Makenga, Vincent Gatama, Kakolele Bwambale and Hippolyte Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila) all hold titles to this long sordid pedigree of armed warfare sponsored, spawned, supported, spread and prosecuted by Rwanda, Uganda and their western backers.

Here is another way that Rwanda and Uganda and their western backers have advanced the elite Tutsi-Hima agenda to pacify, occupy and balkanize the eastern Congo, and create a Rwandan-controlled Republic of the Volcanoes: Demobilization, Disarmament, and Reintegration.  Since the first DDR programs begun around 2003, thousands of Rwandan and Ugandan Tutsi soldiers have been integrated (sic) into the Armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC): it is meaningless to say that Rwandan Tutsi soldier can be re-integrated into a Congolese army.

Through the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs funded by the World Bank and western donors, these hostile foreign soldiers have been infiltrated into the FARDC, creating a national army compromised by having thousands of enemy (Rwandaphone) soldiers within its ranks.  The DDR section of MONUSCO supports the Government of the DRC, which retains the primary responsibility for defining the DDR policies.

The FARDC has seen more than 29 top-level commanders drawn from the Rwandan / Ugandan forces in its command structure. Additionally, there are some 300 more or less Rwandan Tutsi Captains in the regular FARDC ranks.[34]

Under the leadership of President Hippolyte Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila) every peace treaty and joint DRC government / U.N. demobilization effort since 2003 has involved infiltration of hostile Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers into the Congolese military, national police, security services, parliament, government, governors offices, and more

This process of co-opting the Congo at the deepest levels began in 2003, when the decision was made to integrate some of the top war criminals into the Congolese power structure as Vice-Presidents of the transitional government; these included AzariasRuberwa (RCD); Arthur Z’ahidi Ngoma (RCD); and Jean-Pierre Bemba (MLC).  The Sun City ‘peace’ agreements declared amnesty to RCD combatants.

The Congo’s national army, FARDC, cannot conduct responsible military operations that serve the interests of the Congolese people.  The command structure is full of Rwandans and Ugandans aligned with Museveni and Kagame, with thousands of Tutsi soldiers in the ranks.  The command structure is disorganized, and this is due to the conflicting agendas, and the subterfuge of the Rwanda/Ugandan agents within.  There are parallel command structures dictated by military commander’s involvement in the illegal mining and taxation.  Many FARDC commanders, whether of Congolese or Rwandan origin, only seek to enrich themselves.  Embezzlement, racketeering, conscription of labor, combined with the routine entropy of a poorly paid and poorly managed national army, have created a culture of deception, manipulation and personal profit.  Finally, there may be as many as 14,000 Rwandans in the FARDC; soldiers of Rwandan and Ugandan origin that have been infiltrated into the FARDC desert at will, taking their weapons with them and turning them against the Congo.

Image: Troops of the first ‘integrated’ FARDC brigade in a training exercise led by the United Nations (MONUC)
in Bukavu, South Kivu, 2006. Photo: c. keith harmon snow 2006.

The government of Congo is also highly compromised by having many Tutsi politicians in in civilian ranks, not least of which is the president of the country.  President Hippolyte Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila) is a Rwandan Tutsi who marched across Congo-Zaire under the guidance of his uncle, RPA general James Kabarebe, one of the top 40 RPA soldiers indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in 2009 by the International Court of Justice, Audiencia Nacionale, in Spain. Kanambe surreptitiously serves the interests of Rwanda and Uganda, and the United States, Canada, the U.K., Belgium and Israel.  Alias Joseph Kabila is not the son of Laurent Desire Kabila, and he never was.[35]

IMPUNITY FOR RWANDAN AND UGANDAN WARLORDS

One of Laurent Nkunda’s primary tasks with the AFDL-CZ was to ensure the assassination of the Hutu and Bantu customary chiefs in the collectives on the Congo-Rwanda border so that Rwandaphone agents could replace them.[36]

Nkunda was a senior officer in the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy-Goma (RCD-Goma).  In 2004 he was named general in a new national Congolese army created from troops of the dissident forces at the end (sic) of the war.   He refused the post and withdrew with hundreds of his troops to the forests of Masisi in North Kivu.  In August 2005, Nkunda announced a new ‘rebellion’: the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP).

Rwanda’s Majar General Gatama worked with Nkunda during the aggression of the Rwandan rebel CNDP.  Gatama later worked with Rwandan warlords General Bosco Ntaganda and Colonel Sultani Makenga during the guerilla M23 Movement.  Gatama was on the front lines in Congo when M23 was defeated by the joint military operations of the Congolese army (FARDC) and the MONUSCO Force Intervention Brigade (FIB), sent by the South African Development Community (SADC).

Colonel Sultani Makenga is another Kagame henchman who was born in South Kivu (DRC) but joined the RPA invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990.  Later sent back to Congo for the various rebel insurgencies manufactured by Kagame and Museveni, Makenga was always a very close collaborator with Laurent Nkunda.  When Nkunda was ‘arrested’ in Rwanda by Kagame, Colonel Makenga and General Bosco Ntaganda continued Rwanda’s dirty work in the M23 insurgency.

After Makenga and Ntaganda had a falling out in 2013, with Ntaganda evicted, Colonel Makenga became the de facto sole military leader of the victorious faction of M23.  After the Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) defeated M23, Makenga left his command headquarters at Bunagana, which was also Laurent Nkunda’s base, and fled North Kivu to Uganda.

Although he has no ICC arrest warrant hanging over his head,” reported the BBC in November 2013, “the UN Security Council imposed a travel ban and asset freeze on him last year, accusing him of being responsible for the ‘killing and maiming, sexual violence, abduction, and forced displacement’ — a reference to the fact that some 800,000 people fled their homes during the 19-month [M23] rebellion. [37]

Reports say Colonel Makenga and about 1,700 fighters have been disarmed and are being held in a secret location,” reported the BBC on 7 November 2013.  ”The BBC‘s Catherine Byaruhanga in Kampala says Col Makenga poses a tough diplomatic challenge for Uganda… A Ugandan government spokesperson told the BBC a decision on whether to hand him over would have to wait until a peace deal is signed between DR Congo and the M23 rebels, which is expected this weekend. [38]

International press reports after September 2013 described how Col Sultani Mukenga ‘surrendered’ to the Ugandan government and his possible imminent extradition to Congo: it seems the regime in Kampala had no intentions, ever, of surrendering Mukenga to Congo.  The BBC does not perform a public service in advancing such propaganda.  Indeed, the press widely raised disingenuous questions about Makenga’s fate, and the ‘tough diplomatic challenge’ faced by the government of Uganda.

By November 2013 the western mass media was reporting that the M23 ‘rebels’ had ‘surrendered in Uganda’ or ‘turned themselves in’ in Rwanda.  This is a stale ruse, since one does not ‘turn themselves in’ or ‘surrender’ to the people that they work with and to whom they swear eternal blood allegiance.

The arrest of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s notorious rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda removes a major impediment to peace in one of the world’s most war-torn countries,” cheered TIME Magazine on 23 January 2009.  ”The fact that he was arrested in Rwanda also helps the government of President Paul Kagame restore a reputation severely tarnished last month, when the U.N. accused it of arming and supplying men to Nkunda and using him as a proxy inside Congo. [39]

TIME magazine has played a pivotal role whitewashing all western military and western corporate mining plunder in Congo, and it hammers the tired and false establishment narrative about genocide in Rwanda.  According to this narrative, which legitimizes the ongoing genocide against Rwandan Hutu people, Kagame invaded the Congo (Zaire) in 1996 purely “to stamp out the Hutugenocidaires sheltering in Congo.” [40]  The false narrative turns Hutu victims into killers, and the mass murder of innocent Hutu people into what is supposed to be a just and necessary punishment. [41]

Rwandan troops, RCD, M23, Ugandan army, CNDP, they all work together: these names like M23 and MCRC are meaningless.”  Jean Paul Romeo Rugero is a Rwandan born Hutu in exile.  In July 1994, at the age of 15, he fled Rwanda with his family and he survived the Rwandan Patriotic Army genocide against hundreds of thousands of innocent non-combatant Hutu men, women and children in Congo.  ”The soldiers in these ‘rebel’ armies know no borders.  They have been in all these armies: NRA, UPDF, RPA, RCD, CNDP, M23.  They don’t see any borders, they don’t see any countries; they just see one big Tutsi-Hima land and that is what they are fighting for.

THE FARCE OF HOUSE ARREST

In January 2009 the western press was blanketed with stories describing how General Laurent Nkunda had been arrested in Gisenyi, Rwanda, and was placed under house arrest by the government of Rwanda.  The prevailing wisdom said that Nkunda had become too much of a political liability to his boss, Paul Kagame, who was loosing funding from international donors that were worried about Nkunda’s impact on western mining operations in Congo.

With Nkunda’s arrest in 2009, one story after another provided Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni with the international fanfare they needed to distance their regimes from what was then the latest bloody insurgency in eastern Congo, led by Rwandan and Ugandan forces under the name of the ‘Congolese Revolutionary Army’, more popularly known as ‘M23′.

“The arrest of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s notorious rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda removes a major impediment to peace in one of the world’s most war-torn countries,” wrote TIME Magazine in January 2009.

 ”The fact that he was arrested in Rwanda also helps the government of President Paul Kagame restore a reputation severely tarnished last month, when the U.N. accused it of arming and supplying men to Nkunda and using him as a proxy inside Congo.”

Attempts by the government of Congo to extradite Nkunda to Congo for trial after his arrest in Gisenyi, Rwanda were blocked by Kigali, who claimed that Nkunda was being held under house arrest, the propaganda line widely parroted by the international media.

Rwandan dissidents claimed that Nkunda was living comfortably in Rwanda.

A year after his supposed arrest Nkunda’s defense attorney, Canadian barrister Stephane Bourgon began claiming that Nkunda’s rights were being violated.  Bourgon claimed that Rwanda was keeping Nkunda illegally in ‘no-man’s land’ without charge and that the Rwandan government was blocking access to his client. [42]

Stephane Bourgon is also a Royal Canadian Military College graduate who served in the Canadian Forces for more than 20 years as logistics officer and military legal advisor. [43]  (Canadian General Romeo Dallaire supported the Rwandan Patriotic Army invasion of Rwanda 1993-1994.)

“Former Congolese warlord Laurent Nkunda is ready to face trial for alleged war crimes or go into exile to end his detention without charge in Rwanda,” Bourgon reported in an interview with Reuters news service in 2010. [44]

In 2012, stories about Rwandan warlord Bosco Ntaganda — Nkunda’s rival and successor warlord running M23 — briefly captured the international spotlight, and most of these routinely mentioned that General Laurent Nkunda was being held under house arrest in Rwanda.

Image: Rwandan warlord Bosco Ntaganda with officers of CNDP/M23 in North Kivu. Photo: c. unknown.

In June 2012, Kagame responded to international criticism with threats to turn Nkunda loose on Congo.  Rwanda continued to refuse to hand Nkunda over to Congo to face charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and insurrection, with Kagame disingenuously claiming concerns that Nkunda would not get a fair trial and might simply be killed for his ethnicity.[45]

In July 2012, the US, Netherlands, Sweden and Germany withdrew or delayed disbursement of their budgetary support to Rwanda in protest of Rwanda’s alleged support for M23 Congolese rebels.

By late 2012 the subject of Laurent Nkunda has slipped off the international news scene.

ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Beginning in mid-April 2015, hundreds of Uganda and Rwandan soldiers began infiltrating eastern Congo, crossing the border through the Virunga National Park and northern Lake Kivu region, to join the ranks of the latest Rwandan/Ugandan guerrilla occupation of eastern Congo.