The Rwandan Patriotic Front’s bloody record and the history of U.N. cover-ups (tags)
On Aug. 26, the French newspaper Le Monde revealed the existence of a draft U.N. report on the most serious violations of human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo over an 11-year period, 1993-2003.1 The massive draft report states that after the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s takeover of Rwanda in 1994, it proceeded to carry out “systematic and widespread attacks” against Hutu refugees who had fled Rwanda to neighboring Zaire (now the DRC) as well as against the Hutu civilian population of the DRC in general. Crucially, it concludes that the pattern of these attacks “reveal[s] a number of damning elements that, if they were proven before a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide.”
Rwanda's Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza speaks to Womens International News Gathering Service (tags)
Rwanda’s FDU-Inkingi Party leader, peace and social justice activist Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, spoke to Ann Garrison for Womens’ International News Gathering Service (WINGS) in July 2010, near the close of Rwanda’s 2010 presidential election year, which was really an election stage play complete with election observers from the U.S. and the U.K. Incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame was “re-elected” on Aug. 9, receiving 93 percent of the vote, an implausible victory in any pluralist democracy, though 3 percent less than the 96 percent he received in Rwanda’s 2003 presidential election.
Africa advocates to Obama; don't recognize Kagame election (tags)
President Obama said, in his 2009 speech in Accra, Ghana, that America should support strong institutions and not strong men. However, in the case of Rwanda, this has been no more than rhetoric. Rwandans, like most Africans, cheered Obama’s election, hoping that it might signal a new, more peaceful and cooperative relationship between the U.S. and Africa, but Obama has expanded AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command, and now he remains silent as Rwanda’s strongman, President Paul Kagame, prepares a sham presidential election to retain his brutal grip on power.
Why Rwanda's sham elections must be stopped (tags)
After 16 years in exile, I came back peacefully to my motherland. Peace will be my guiding light in my political activities and the activities of my political organization, FDU INKINGI, in our endeavor to end injustice and remove all barriers to the people’s full enjoyment of their inalienable political and civil rights. The Rwandan people are now living in anxiety and fear and are longing and yearning for a genuine policy of national unity and reconciliation.
Erlinder released as Kagame cracks down on his own (tags)
As U.S. Law Professor Peter Erlinder was released, after three weeks incarceration in Rwanda, Kagame cracked down hard on his own. Rwandan Umuvugizi journalist Jean Leonard Rugambage was assassinated in Kigali Rwanda on June 24, 2010, after publishing a report that Rwandan President Paul Kagame had ordered the attempted assassination of General Kayumba Nyamwasa in South Africa.
Bishop Christopher on gay suicide, gay genocide, and Article 13 (tags)
On Monday, May 26, Ugandan Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, fondly known as Bishop Christopher, spoke to a circle gathered round him at San Francisco’s African American Art and Culture Complex. He explained his counseling work with LGBT youth, his advocacy for LGBT rights and his opposition to Uganda’s infamous proposed Anti Homosexuality Act, a.k.a., “Hang-the-Gays” bill, which has caused alarm at the Western Christian Right’s globalization of the culture wars. And, he explained Article 13, the one section of the act still likely to be written into law, which would make way for wholesale human rights abuse.
Privatizing California: S.B. 792 (tags)
If the state privatizes our Candlestick Point Park, then, as budget crises worsen at every level, what’s next? What’s to stop the privatization of every park in California? The federal government has, since the Reagan era, championed the privatization of everything from prisons to HUD foreclosure counseling, so, if California joins the rush to privatize, how long will it be before we’re told we have to put up with a coal-fired power plant generating electricity for a uranium mining operation in Death Valley National Monument, just like those in Saharan Niger, because, otherwise, we just can’t afford the park anymore?