Manufacturing Rwanda:
Paul Kagame and the New York Times
Dateline: August 26, 2003:
Paul Kagame "Wins" Elections in Rwanda
Reporting that Paul Kagame "won" the presidential elections that concluded on August 25th in Rwanda, the New York Times has once again openly deceived its readership. With the story and photo appearing on page one of the Tuesday, August 26th edition, the New York Times has further institutionailzed the deceptions which they have presented to the American public for almost a decade.
It began with the April 6, 1994 invasion of Rwanda by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the RPF, led by Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame, who had been trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, under special US military programs.
Described then as now as Rwanda's saviors who "stopped the genocide of over 800,000 and perhaps a million Tutsis by the Hutu majority government at the time" the RPF seized power and began to systematically eliminate all opposition to their programs. Supported by US military funding, logistical and tactical military support and hardware, the RPF subsequently perpetrated a counter-genocide on what Central Africa experts believe to be over a million people, from combattants to hundreds of thousands of innocent and unarmed men, women and children.
Further, Kagame and Museveni, President for Life of Uganda, spearheaded the invasion of adjoining Zaire, and then the invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and have continued to perpetuate atrocities there, leading to the death of over 4 million people since 1998, and the despair and suffering of millions of Congolese people. Assasinations, massacres and rapes are commonplace. (See, for example, Human Rights Watch reporting on Eastern Congo.)
In Rwanda, and in nearby DRC, the Rwandan pograms have been almost completely ignored by the western media, corporations that work to further clandestine and open intelligence, military and corporate intersts from the United States, Europe and Australia. This story was voted one of the most censored stories by the US press for 2001-2002 by Project Censored.
Included amongst the interests that Kagame and his close allies (US, Uganda, U.K.) are defending are the gold and diamond mining inerests of the George Bush dynasty, and their Barrick Gold Corporation, that has operated in the central Africa region for years. Plundering DRC for diamonds are interests closely associated with Harvard University, and with the Clinton family, and the diamonds come to small town jewlers across the United States through Lazare diamonds and the companies of Maurice Templesman.
Further, US military bases were set up in the region in 1995 by Halliburton Corporation subsidiary Brown and Root, closely associated with US Secretary of State Dick Cheney.
Petroleum interests in the Lake Albert (Lake Mobutu) region -- straddling the border of Uganda and DRC -- are phenomenol, and the petroleum connection to war-as-cover for private profit remains completely unreported. Branch Energy is one of the major players, a shady intelligence outfit dealing in arms and private military contracts where superior force and firepower are used to secure corporate and private interests.
Unreported by the New York Times is that throughout Kagame's tenure, and in the run up to the 2003 presidential elections, the RPF government of Kagame has perpetuated assassinations, reprisal killings, tortures and massacres of political dissidents, both Hutu and Tutsi government officials, and thousands of innocent people.
The New York Times knows perfectly well what the situation is in Rwanda, but as with Mobutu in Zaire, or General Eyadema in Togo, dictatorship is the preferred mode of operation to secure the interests of the United States and the multinational corporations that operate over and above the US government.
Prior to the Presidential "elections" advertised on 8/26 by the New York Times, the Kagame/RPF government instilled terror in the general population, with assasinations and persecution and widespread political violence and intimidation against anyone seen to oppose, in any way, the main political party of the RPF. The New York Times
See also DRC: STOP THE SLAUGHTER NOW by Amnesty International.
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