Nefarious Genocides
1 . THE DARFUR WARS AND
KILLINGS
Samantha Power once marveled about how the government
in Khartoum “could hardly have predicted that an obscure, inaccessible Muslim
region like Darfur would become a cause célèbre in America.” (63) Power is
naive, ignoring the obvious facts that have made Darfur a predictably
well-qualified candidate for a focus on villainy: That its government is
dominated by Muslim Arabs; that the Sudan possesses oil, but that it is China
rather than the United States or the West which has developed a strong
relationship with Khartoum; and that the United States and Israel need
distractions from their own human rights atrocities and those of their allies
plundering the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.
Thus we read in Table 1 that “genocide” was used to
describe Khartoum’s conduct in Darfur (i.e., inside the Sudan) ninety times as
frequently as it was used to describe U.S. conduct in Iraq, a foreign country
seized via a war of aggression and where more than three-times as many people
died during the same years (2003–2009).
In fact, this far lower death-toll in Darfur had
already begun to receive full “genocide” billing within twelve months of the
Sudan Liberation Movement/Army’s first armed attacks on Sudanese military posts
and its accompanying political declaration in February and March 2003. (64) By
March 2004, perhaps ten thousand people had died in Darfur and upwards of one
million had fled their homes. Lobbying for foreign intervention, Mukesh Kapila,
the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sudan, called this the “world’s
greatest humanitarian and human rights catastrophe” and “possibly the world’s
hottest war.” The only question in Kapila’s mind was whether the events should
be designated “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide.” (65)
Rhetoric such as this is crafted to elicit action: In
the face of mass-atrocity crimes, we must do something—and even doing nothing
is a form of doing something, as one of the tenets of “humanitarian” and
R2P-type interventionism would have us believe. Calling Darfur an “Unnoticed
Genocide,” the American Eric Reeves wrote in the Washington Post: “[P]eople are
being destroyed because of who they are, racially and ethnically—‘as such,’ to
cite the key phrase from the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide.” (66) Unveiling
his Action Plan to Prevent Genocide, Secretary-General Kofi Annan singled out
Darfur of all the world’s conflicts “with a deep sense of foreboding,” likening
it to the situation in Rwanda ten years earlier and adding that “Whatever terms
it uses to describe the situation, the international community cannot stand
idle.” (67)
As Mahmood Mamdani puts it, such rhetoric is also a
“reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a
world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can
always and easily be told apart.” In this “simple moral world,” where “evil
confronts good” and “atrocities mount geometrically,” a group of “perpetrators
clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as
‘Africans’”—and the “victim [is] untainted and the perpetrator [is] simply
evil.” (68) Typical of this comic-book genre is the work of New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof, who “from the outset,” Mamdani adds, por-trayed
Darfur as a “contest between ‘Sudan’s Arab rulers’ and ‘black African
Sudanese’.” “The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese
government, partly through the Janjaweed militia, made up of Arab raiders armed
by the government,” Kristof wrote in March 2004, emphasizing the almost
other-worldliness of the Arab government in Khartoum. “The victims are
non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massaliet and Fur tribes. ‘The Arabs want to
get rid of anyone with black skin’, Youssef Yakob Abdullah said. In the area of
Darfur that he fled, ‘there are no blacks left’.” (69)
But the distinction made by Kristof, Power, Reeves,
and their many allies in the Save Darfur campaign between Sudan’s Arab rulers
and their black African victims falsely racializes the conflict. As the 2005
Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur concluded, any
rendering of the conflicts in the western Sudan as “African” versus “Arab”
mistakes political identities, which are the consequences of these conflicts,
as their causes. “The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and
killings (chiefly the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes) do not appear to make up
ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic group to which persons or militias that
attack them belong,” the Commission stated. “They speak the same language
(Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Islam).” (70) Contrary to Kristof et
al., the government in Khartoum is comprised of black Africans no different
than the black Africans in the western Sudan that oppose it. The relevant
distinction in the Western Sudan is thus a political one that turns on
supporting the government (“Arab”) versus opposing it (“African”). The alleged
“Arab-African divide” is one that has been “fanned by the growing insistence on
such a divide in some circles and in the media” (in particular the white
European and U.S. media); it is a process that has “contributed to the
consolidation of the contrast and gradually created a marked polarisation in
the perception and self-perception of the groups concerned.” (71) The “Crisis
in Darfur” is thus a kind of blank slate upon which Western moralists have
projected foreign categories that betray the nature of the interest they take
in the conflict, but do not reflect the realities or genuine needs of the
people involved.
Additionally, the UN Environment Program argued in an
extensive 2007 survey that the “underlying causes” of the conflicts in Darfur
were to be found in factors such as regional climate instability, drought,
desertification, population growth, food insecurity, and over-exploitation of
scarce resources; it concluded that “Darfur is degraded to the extent that it
cannot sustainably support its rural population.” Referring to this report,
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that “Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur
in a convenient military and political shorthand—an ethnic conflict pitting
Arab militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though, and
you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid the diverse social and political causes,
the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part
from climate change.... It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted
during the drought.” Another report issued in 2007 by a “blue-ribbon panel of
retired admirals and generals” for the CNA Corporation noted similarly that
“Struggles that appear to be tribal, sectarian, or nationalist in nature are
often triggered by reduced water supplies or reductions in agricultural
productivity.” This report added that the “situation in Darfur ... had land
resources at its root.... Probably more than any other recent conflict, Darfur
provides a case study of how existing marginal situations can be exacerbated
beyond the tipping point by climaterelated factors.” (72)
Still, the publicity generated over the course of
2004 by the framing of Darfur as the “unnoticed genocide” without doubt ranks
as the most successful propaganda campaign of its kind this decade. Always
alleged to be spiraling out of control, despite the fact that, through the end
of 2008, Darfur benefited from the “largest humanitarian aid operation in the
world, with more than 80 organizations and 15,000 aid workers,” and had
received this kind of high-priority response for five consecutive years; (73) and
yet always labeled “forgotten” or “ignored,” despite the fact that even when it
was alleged to be at its most ignored, Darfur already had become the most
heavily publicized crisis in the world. (74)
“It is time to move against the regime officials who
are responsible for the killing,” the International Crisis Group’s John
Prendergast urged in July 2004. “The sands of the Sahara should not be allowed
to swallow the evidence of what will probably go down as one of the greatest
crimes in our lifetimes.” (75) A PIPAKnowledge Networks poll that same month
found that 56 percent of Americans already had been convinced that “genocide”
was occurring in Darfur; 69 percent also believed that, “If the UN were to
determine that genocide is occurring in Darfur, then the UN, including the
U.S., should decide to act to stop the genocide even if it requires military
force.” (76)
As the signature Nefarious bloodbath of the early
twenty-first century, Darfur has been so successfully framed as “genocide” that
in its December 2008 report, the Genocide Prevention Task Force singled out the
“striking level of public engagement in the Darfur crisis” as a model for how
to “build a permanent constituency for the prevention of genocide and mass
atrocities” (77)— a statement we take to mean that the U.S. establishment’s
handling of the western Sudan (ca. 2003-2010) should serve as a model for how
best to propagandize a conflict as “genocide,” and thus to mobilize elite and
public opinion for action against its alleged perpetrator.
Yet, for twice as many years as Darfur, the
Democratic Republic of Congo has suffered nearly twenty-times as many deaths,
leading researchers to call it the “world’s deadliest crisis since World War
II,” with an estimated 5.4 million deaths from August 1998 through April 2007.
(78) But Kinshasa is not Islamic, and its foreign exploiters are the United
States, Britain, France, and other African states allied with the West—most
notably Rwanda and Uganda. Hence, it is the Congo’s vastly greater death toll
over ten years that has been truly ignored, while to its north, it was Darfur
that became a “cause célèbre in America,” with more NGO, celebrity, student,
and Internet-based activism and emotional tourism devoted to Darfur than to any
other crisis in the contemporary period. The U.S. authors Steven Fake and Kevin
Funk write that unlike “[e]fforts to halt Western-backed humanitarian
catastrophes, such as the bloodbath in Iraq, or the Israeli Occupation, [which]
fail to attract corporate funding or sympathetic pledges from the Oval Office,”
Darfur activism thrives because it is “largely rooted in establishment-friendly
ideals such as a Western ‘purity of arms’, disregarding prospects for a
negotiated settlement in favor of the language of force, and the use of force
in this case by self-designated benevolent Westerners to save dark-skinned
victims from their Arab and Muslim tormentors.” (79) Given these variables, the
campaign to stop the monumental bloodletting in the Congo can wait, and blood
can keep flowing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Palestine with fewer
interruptions.
“As of today, I would not say there is a war going on
in Darfur,” the Nigerian General Martin Agwai, retiring as military commander
of the joint UN–African Union Mission in Darfur, told reporters in late August
2009. “Militarily there is not much. What you have is security issues more now.
Banditry ... people trying to resolve issues over water and land at a local
level. But real war as such, I think we are over that.” (80) The New York
Times’s coverage of Agwai’s remarks reported that he had said the “war in
Darfur was essentially over.” (81) “Agwai became the latest senior figure ...
to play down the level of violence in Darfur,” Reuters added, “where the
conflict has mobilised activists who accuse Khartoum of genocide.”
As news of Agwai’s remarks circulated, the Save
Darfur coalition immediately rejected them, as did others. Agwai “undermines
international urgency in resolving these problems if people are led to believe
that the war in Darfur is over,” former International Crisis Group member and
veteran Darfur-”genocide” activist John Prendergast said, and thus “takes the
wind out of the sails of international action.” (82) Prendergast’s Enough
Project (co-founded by Prendergast in 2007 “to build a permanent constituency
to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity” (83)) was just then launching
a new advocacy campaign around Darfur called Keep the Promise: Sudan Now; the
new campaign involved like-minded organizations such as Stop Genocide Now, the
Genocide Intervention Network, and Investors Against Genocide. (84) Citing
Prendergast’s reaction, Alex de Waal, among the most highly respected Sudan
experts in the world, was outraged. “[Prendergast’s] campaign is not about
domestic solutions but international (read: U.S.) action,” de Waal wrote on his
Making Sense of Darfur blog. “A campaign focused on a genocide that isn’t
happening, for the U.S. to step up its pressure to stop killing that has
already ended, is just making Save Darfur look poorly-informed, and America
look silly.... ” ‘Save Darfur’ isn’t about Sudan, or indeed Darfur, at all—it’s
about an imagined empathy and generating a domestic American political agenda.
Shame on you, Prendergast and your fellow ‘activists,’ shame, shame, shame.” (85)
But Western officials, Kofi Annan’s United Nations,
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), “human rights” celebrities, and the news
media long ago succeeded in framing the crisis in Darfur as “genocide,” pitting
Muslim Arab perpetrators against black victims—and making it the Nefarious
genocide-of-choice. This channeling of interests and emotions toward Darfur is
also a wonderful diversion from the more directly Western-controlled violence
in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and elsewhere. As we show throughout this
book, this is the standard operating procedure for all atrocities-management
campaigns.
2 . BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
During the civil wars that accompanied the
dismantling of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the United
States, Germany, NATO, and the European Union (EU) all sided with the national
groups seeking to break away from the unified federal state, and opposed the
national group that held out for the longest time to preserve it, the Serbs;
this placed the Western bloc solidly behind the Croats and Slovenes, then the
Bosnian Muslims, and finally the Kosovo Albanians. (86)
The wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995) and
Kosovo (1998–1999) received enormous attention in the United States and in the
West generally, helped along by the creation of the ICTY and its determined
service on behalf of NATO and its Yugoslavian clients (the Bosnian Muslims,
Croatians, and Kosovo Albanians) and in opposition to the demonized Serbs.
Because the wars were supported and even carried out by the NATO powers, and
there was significant ethnic cleansing and ethnic killings, it goes almost
without saying that not only “ethnic cleansing” but also the words “massacre”
and “genocide” were quickly applied to Serb operations. The remarkable inflation
of claims of Serb evil and violence (and playing down of NATO clients’
violence), with fabricated “concentration camps,” “rape camps,” and similar
Nazi-and Auschwitz-like analogies, caused the onetime head of the U.S.
intelligence section in Sarajevo, Lieutenant Colonel John Sray, to go public
even before the end of the wars in Bosnia with his claim that “America has not
been so pathetically deceived since Robert McNamara helped to micromanage and
escalate the Vietnam War.... Popular perceptions pertaining to the Bosnian
Muslim government ... have been forged by a prolific propaganda machine. A
strange combination of three major spin doctors, including public relations
(PR) firms in the employ of the Bosniacs, media pundits, and sympathetic
elements of the US State Department, have managed to manipulate illusions to
further Muslim goals.” (87)
The Bosnian Muslim leadership had started touting
claims of 200,000 deaths by early 1993, (88) only some nine months after the
start of these civil wars, and figures such as this and 250,000 (and sometimes
higher) quickly became institutionalized in the establishment media, helping to
push the “genocide” claim and to justify calls for foreign intervention to
protect the Bosnian Muslims. But this claim came to grief in 2005–2007, when
two different studies, the first sponsored by the ICTY itself and the other by
the Norwegian government, concluded that the Bosnian conflicts had resulted in
combined deaths on the order of one hundred thousand for all sides, including
both civilians and military victims. (89) Given their sources, these findings
could not easily be ridiculed as “holocaust denial” or “revisionism,” but they
were treated in very low-key in the Western media, only slowly displacing the
much higher 200,000–250,000 figures— and with no analyses and explanations of
the earlier gullible acceptance of the implausible and unverified Bosnian
Muslim propaganda claims.
Of course, the “Srebrenica massacre” of July 1995 has
been cited heavily and repeated endlessly, and with the greatest indignation,
to demonstrate that “genocide” actually had taken place in Bosnia. This was
helped along by the fact that both the ICTY Trial Judgment and decision on
Appeal in the case of the Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic argued that genocide
could occur in one “small geographical area” (the town of Srebrenica), even one
where the villainous party had taken the trouble to bus all the women,
children, and the elderly men to safety—that is, incontestably had not killed
any but “Bosnian Muslim men of military age.” (90) As Michael Mandel observes,
“Genocide was transformed in this judgment, not into mere ethnic cleansing but
into the killing of potential fighters during a war for military advantage....
In the Krstic case, the concept of genocide, except as pure propaganda, lost
all contact with the Holocaust—a program for the extermination of a whole people.”
(91) The case for eight thousand “men and boys” being executed at Srebrenica is
extremely thin, resting in good part on the difficulty in separating executions
from battle killings (of which there were many in the July 1995 Srebrenica
actions), partly on highly contestable witness evidence (much under coercive
plea bargaining (92)), and an interest and passionate will-to-believe the worst
of the thoroughly demonized Serbs. A videotape of Bosnian Serbs killing six
Bosnian Muslim men, far from Srebrenica and of dubious provenance, was read
even by respectable Western analysts as serious evidence that eight thousand
had been executed at Srebrenica. (93)
But even if an event such as the Srebrenica massacre
occurred exactly as accepted by the Western establishment, we are still faced
with the anomaly that the total number of deaths in Bosnia (one hundred
thousand on all sides), and even more so the number of Bosnian Muslim civilian
deaths during the four years of “genocide” (some thirty-three thousand in all),
pales into relative insignificance when compared to the deaths suffered by
Iraqi civilians during the thirteen-year-long “sanctions of mass destruction”
and the now seven-year-long U.S. invasion and occupation. Given the 800,000 and
one million death estimates for the two Iraqi cases, deaths there exceeded the
Bosnian Muslim civilian death toll by 24-to-1 and 30-to-1, respectively.
However, as Table 1 shows, the use of the word “genocide” was greater for
Bosnia by six times for the sanction-deaths and thirty-seven times for deaths
during the invasion-occupation. The anomaly of disparate word usage (and
differential attention and indignation) can only be explained by the adaptation
of the media and intellectuals to the propaganda and public relations needs of
the Western political establishment. They are very attentive to and passionate
about Nefarious, hence “genocidal,” bloodbaths; but they are exceedingly quiet
over those that are Constructive and display “complexities.”
3 . KOSOVO
In the Kosovo case as well, Western plans for
attacking and dismantling Yugoslavia called for the prior demonization of the
Serbs, inflating their killings of worthy victims, and preparing— ex ante and
ex post justification—for the NATO bombing war, occupation, and neocolonial
control of Kosovo. The ICTY played a key role in this process, having been
organized from the beginning as a faux-judicial instrument of NATO’s policy,
which required war for its consummation, along with the indictment and
prosecution of NATO’s primary targets. This was the true “joint criminal
enterprise” in the Balkan wars, blamed in Orwellian fashion on an alleged
Serb-based “joint criminal enterprise.” (94)
Just as the word “genocide” was used lavishly for the
Bosnian Serbs’ conduct during the wars in Bosnia, so it was applied often to
the Serbs’ conduct in Kosovo (i.e., inside the Republic of Serbia), both before
the NATO bombing war of March 24–June 10, 1999 and during and after that war.
In the year before the bombing war, as NATO prepared for the attack, the ICTY
also turned its focus on Serb maltreatment of the Kosovo Albanians, (95) and
Western officials, the ICTY, and Western media built up a steady volume of accusations
and publicity about Serb wrongdoing. There is solid evidence that in this
period the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was being supplied and trained for
military action by U.S. forces and was made extremely aware that provocations
of the Serbs would pay off with a long prepared U.S. and NATO attack. (96)
Amusingly, British Defense Secretary George Robertson acknowledged to his
Parliament on the very day that NATO launched its war that, through January
1999, more people had been killed in Kosovo by the KLA than by the Serbs; (97)
the total estimated killings in Kosovo since the start of 1998 were two
thousand, with perhaps five hundred attributable to the Serb military. (98)
The bombing war led to some furious military action
by the Serb army and the KLA in Kosovo, with many killings and a massive flight
of the province’s residents, Serb and Roma as well as Kosovo Albanians. (99)
There were indignant official claims in the United States, Germany, and Britain
of massive Serb killings and an ongoing genocide. Within days of the start of
NATO’s war, German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping claimed “Genocide is
starting here,” and NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea that “we are now on the brink
of a major humanitarian disaster ... the likes of which we have not seen in
Europe since the closing days of World War II.” (100) Hysterical NATO and KLA
estimates of the missing and presumably slaughtered Kosovo Albanians at times
ran upwards of one hundred thousand, reaching 500,000 in one State Department
press release. (101) German officials leaked “intelligence” about an alleged
Serb plan called Operation Horseshoe to depopulate the province of it ethnic
Albanians, and to resettle it with Serbs, which turned out to be an
intelligence fabrication. KLA commander Hashim Thaci warned a German television
channel that the Serbs had rounded up one hundred thousand ethnic Albanians in
a soccer stadium in Pristina, their fate unknown but likely sealed. Again a
piece of disinformation, but reported as probable fact. U.S. Defense Secretary
William Cohen told CBS TV’s Face The Nation program that Milosevic “put about a
million and a half people out of their homes, and we’re now seeing about
100,000 military-age men missing.” (102)
Wartime propaganda was sustained for the first few
months after the war, as forensic experts and media representatives descended
on Kosovo like hungry locusts, looking for bodies and stories of massacres. (103)
The search for stories ran aground on a sea of unprovable allegations and
provable lies. But the coup de grace for the Kosovo “genocide” was the absence
of bodies. In the end, only some four thousand bodies were found, including
Serbs and military personnel; and by the middle of 2007, only 2,047 were still
listed as missing. (104) Looking at Table 1, we can see that news-papers used
the word “genocide” to apply to Serb actions in Kosovo 323 times, versus eighty
for Iraq’s “sanctions of mass destruction” and thirteen for the Iraq
invasion-occupation, whereas the death-tolls in the last two cases exceeded that
in Kosovo by 200 and 250 times. Bias could hardly be more spectacular. But you
may be sure that officials, the media, and the humanitarian intellectuals have
never apologized for their lies and bodycount inflations or explained how all
of this happened.
4 . RWANDA AND THE
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
Elsewhere we have written that the breakup of
Yugoslavia “may have been the most misrepresented series of major events over
the past twenty years.” (105) But the far bloodier and destructive invasions,
insurgencies, and civil wars that have ravaged several countries in the Great
Lakes region of Central Africa over the same years may have been subjected to
even greater misrepresentation.
To a remarkable degree, all major sectors of the
Western establishment swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned
perpetrator and victim upside-down. In the much-cited 1999 study of “Genocide
in Rwanda” on behalf of Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of
Human Rights in Paris, Alison Des Forges writes that “By late March 1994, Hutu
Power leaders were determined to slaughter massive numbers of Tutsi and Hutu
opposed to [Hutu President Juvénal] Habyarimana,” and that on April 6, 1994,
with the assassination of Habyarimana, “A small group of his close associates
... decided to execute the planned extermination.” Although “responsibility for
killing Habyarimana is a serious issue,” it pales in comparison to
“responsibility for the genocide. We know little about who assassinated
Habyarimana”—a false statement, as shown below—but “We know more about who used
the assassination as the pretext to begin a slaughter that had been planned for
months”—true enough, but in exactly the opposite sense reported by Des Forges.
(106)
During testimony at a major trial of four Hutu former
military officers before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR),
Des Forges acknowledged that by April 1992 (i.e., a full twenty-four months
before “the genocide” is alleged to have been implemented), the “government in
charge of Rwanda [had become] a multiparty government, including Tutsi
representatives, and it is for that reason alone that it is impossible to
conclude that there was planning of a genocide by that government.” (107)
Although Des Forges tried to salvage the Hutu conspiracy model, alleging plans
by individual Hutu members of the coalition government to use their “official
powers” to carry-out a pre-planned genocide, this model disintegrated on
cross-examination. (108) Des Forges could not explain how Hutu “individuals”
used these “powers” without the knowledge of their Tutsi and Rwandan Patriotic
Front (RPF) associates. Furthermore, she was forced to admit that pro-RPF
ministers were in cahoots with the RPF and its plans for war (which we describe
below) and that after the Habyarimana assassination, the RPF did not simply
respond in self-defense to a Hutu-organized killing spree, but initiated its
own killing spree. In other words, while the Hutu members of Rwanda’s
power-sharing government couldn’t possibly have planned a genocide against the
Tutsi, the Tutsi-led RPF was well-positioned to paralyze any government
response to plans it had developed—and that were implemented—to avoid the
threat of a free election the RPF was destined to lose, to assassinate the Hutu
president, and to take over the country by military force. Yet, Des Forges’
dramatic concessions before the ICTR never turned-up in the Western media, and
in her public statements thereafter she continued to repeat the official
propaganda line about a Hutu conspiracy to commit genocide right up to the very
end. (109)
To accept the standard model of “The Genocide,” one
must ignore the large-scale killing and ethnic cleansing of Hutus by the RPF
long before the April-July 1994 period, which began when Ugandan forces invaded
Rwanda under President (and dictator) Yoweri Museveni on October 1, 1990. At
its inception, the RPF was a wing of the Ugandan army, with the RPF’s leader,
Paul Kagame, having served as director of Ugandan military intelligence in the
1980s. The Ugandan invasion and resultant combat were not a “civil war,” but
rather a clear case of aggression. Yet this led to no reprimand or cessation of
support by the United States or Britain—and in contrast to Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait just two months before, which was countered in the Security Council by
the same-day demand that Iraq withdraw its forces immediately, the Council took
no action on the Ugandan invasion of Rwanda until March 1993 and did not even
authorize an observer mission (UNOMUR) until late June 1993; the RPF by then
occupied much of northern Rwanda and had driven out several hundred thousand
Hutu farmers. (110)
It is clear that Museveni and the RPF were perceived
as serving U.S. interests and that the government of President Habyarimana was
targeted for ouster. (111) UN Security Council inaction flowed from this
political bias. In his assessment of the years he spent representing U.S.
interests in Africa, former Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen raised
the question of why, as of October 1, 1990, the “first day of the crisis,” as
he calls it, “did [the United States] automatically exclude the policy option
of informing Ugandan President Museveni that the invasion of Rwanda by uniformed
members of the Ugandan army was totally unacceptable, and that the continuation
of good relations between the United States and Uganda would depend on his
getting the RPF back across the border?” (112) This is naive but revealing— the
answer, like that to the question of why the United States lobbied for the
withdrawal of UN forces from Rwanda as the “genocide” was getting underway in
April 1994, is that the Ugandan army and RPF were doing what the United States
wanted done in Rwanda.
The United States and its allies worked hard in the
early 1990s to weaken the Rwandan government, forcing the abandonment of many
of the economic and social gains from the social revolution of 1959, and
thereby making the Habyarimana government less popular and helping to reinforce
the Tutsi minority’s economic power. (113) Eventually, the RPF was able to
achieve a legal military presence inside Rwanda thanks to a series of
ceasefires and other agreements that led to the Arusha Peace Accords of August
1993. Pressed upon the Rwandan government by the United States and its allies,
they called for the “integration” of the armed forces of Rwanda and the RPF and
for a “transitional,” power-sharing government until national elections could
be held in 1995. (114) These accords positioned the RPF for its bloody
overthrow of a relatively democratic coalition government and the takeover of
the Rwandan state by a minority dictatorship.
As we have already suggested, the established
perpetrator-victim line requires suppression of the crucial fact that the
shootingdown of the government jet returning Rwandan President Juvénal
Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira to Kigali on April 6,
killing everyone onboard, was carried out by RPF commandos and had been
regarded by RPF planners as an essential first strike in its final assault on
the government. Although the mass killings followed this assassination, with
the RPF rapidly defeating any military resistance by the successor to
Habyarimana’s coalition government and establishing its rule in Rwanda, these
prime génocidaires were and still are today portrayed as heroic defenders of
Rwanda’s national unity against Hutu “extremists” and the Interahamwe militia,
the RPF’s actual victims.
Acceptance of this line also requires the suppression
of a key verdict in a December 2008 Judgment by the ICTR. (115) This
seven-and-a-half year trial of four former high-ranking Hutu members of the
Rwanda military produced an acquittal of all four defendants on the Tribunal’s
most serious charge: That they participated in an alleged conspiracy to commit
genocide against the country’s Tutsi minority. To the contrary, the court ruled
unanimously that the evidence is “consistent with preparations for a political
or military power struggle and measures adopted in the context of an on-going
war with the RPF that were used for other purposes from 6 April 1994.” (116) Of
course, it was the RPF that had been organized to carry out a “military power
struggle” against Rwanda’s Hutu majority for several years prior to April 1994;
and with its Tutsi base a numerical minority in the country (at most 15 percent
overall), the RPF recognized that they would suffer an almost certain defeat in
the free elections called for by the Arusha Accords. But that it was the RPF, itself,
that conspired to assassinate Habyarimana and to carry out subsequent mass
killings in its aftermath remains entirely beyond the grasp of the ICTR.
Although it has failed to convict a single Hutu of the conspiracy to commit
genocide charge, the ICTR has never once entertained the question of an RPF
conspiracy— despite the RPF’s rapid overthrow of the Hutu government and
capture of the Rwandan state. This, we believe, flows from U.S. and allied
support of the RPF, reflected in media coverage, humanitarian intellectuals’
and NGO activism, as well as the ICTR’s jurisprudence.
Paul Kagame and the RPF were creatures of U.S. power
from their origins in Uganda in the 1980s. Allan Stam, a Rwanda scholar who
once served with the U.S. Army Special Forces, notes that Kagame “had spent
some time at Fort Leavenworth, ... not too far before the 1994 genocide.” Fort
Leavenworth is the U.S. Army’s “commander general staff college, ... where
rising stars of the U.S. military and other places go to get training as they are
on track to become generals. The training that they get there is on planning
large-scale operations. It’s not planning small-scale logistic things. It’s not
tactics. It’s about how do you plan an inva-sion. And apparently [Kagame] did
very well.” By 1994, Kagame’s RPF possessed a sophisticated plan for seizing
power in Rwanda that, in its final execution, Stam says, “looks staggeringly
like the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 1991,” as well as the manpower and
the materiel necessary to carry it out. Stam adds that the RPF launched its
final assault on the Rwandan government almost immediately after the
assassination of Habyarimana, within 60 to 120 minutes of the shooting-down of
his jet, with “50,000 [RPF] soldiers mov[ing] into action on two fronts, in a
coordinated fashion”—clearly “a plan that was not worked out on the back of an
envelope.” (117)
So the Hutu conspiracy model, still at the center of
establishment belief even if implicitly rejected by the ICTR, suffers from the
RPF-Kagame locus of responsibility for the triggering event (the shootdown of
Habyarimana’s jet during its approach to Kigali airport) and the incredible
speed and coordinated nature of the RPF’s military response, which again
suggest detailed planning, and a different set of conspirators.
But there is also the fact that the alleged Hutu
perpetrators of “The Genocide” were the ones driven from power, with several
million Hutus sent fleeing from Rwanda by July 4, the date by which the RPF had
taken Kigali. We also see that before the end of July, Washington withdrew
diplomatic recognition from the ousted government and awarded it to the RPF—the
“entity that exercises effective control in Rwanda,” a State Department
spokesman explained. And we see that at the same time, Washington began
dispatching U.S. troops and large-scale aid to Kigali, (118) after having
lobbied and voted at the Security Council on April 21 for a withdrawal of
virtually all UN troops, over the objections of Rwanda’s ambassador, (119)
positively facilitating both the slaughters and the RPF’s conquest of power. If
the established narrative about “who used the assassination as a pretext” were
true, then Rwanda would be the first case in history in which a minority
population, suffering destruction at the hands of its tor-mentors, drove its
tormentors from power and assumed control of a country, all in the span of less
than one hundred days. We find this incredible in the extreme.
So does a whole body of important but suppressed
research. An investigation in July and August 1994, sponsored by the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to document Hutu massacres of Tutsis, found
instead massacres of Hutu civilians in RPF-controlled areas of Rwanda on the
order of twenty-five to forty-five thousand, leading the UNHCR to take the
extraordinary step of blocking Hutu refugees from returning to Rwanda in order
to protect them. Prepared by Robert Gersony, the report “concluded that there
was ‘an unmistakable pattern of killings and persecutions’ by soldiers of the
[RPF] ... ‘aimed at Hutu populations,’” the New York Times reported. But the
Gersony report “set off a bitter dispute within the world organization and led
the Secretary General to demand that the United Nations officials refrain from
discussing it,” in an effort to placate the RPF and, more importantly, its
Western sponsors. (120) Officially, the report “does not exist” at the United
Nations, (121) and Gersony was instructed never to discuss his findings (a ban
he has largely respected (122)).
A memorandum drafted in September 1994 for the eyes
of Secretary of State Warren Christopher reported that the UNHCR team
“concluded that a pattern of killing had emerged” in Rwanda, the “[RPF] and
Tutsi civilian surrogates [killing] 10,000 or more Hutu civilians per month, with
the [RPF] accounting for 95% of the killing.” This memorandum added that “the
UNHR team speculated that the purpose of the killing was a campaign of ethnic
cleansing intended to clear certain areas in the south of Rwanda for Tutsi
habitation. The killings also served to reduce the population of Hutu males and
discourages refugees from returning to claim their lands.” (123) The added
significance of this campaign was that the south of Rwanda shares border with
northern Burundi, where a majority Tutsi population long has dwelled.
Separately, U.S. academics Christian Davenport and
Allan Stam estimated that more than one million deaths occurred in Rwanda from
April through July 1994. (124) They concluded that the “majority of victims
were likely Hutu and not Tutsi.” Initially sponsored by the ICTR, but later
dropped by it, Davenport and Stam’s work shows convincingly that the theaters
where the killing was greatest correlated with spikes in RPF activity (i.e.,
with RFP “surges,” in their terminology), as a series of RPF advances,
particularly in the month of April 1994, created roving patterns of killing. In
fact, they describe at least seven distinct “surges” by the RFP (e.g., “they
surged forward from the North downward into the Northwest and middle-eastern part
of the country”), and every time, an RPF “surge” was accompanied by serious
local bloodbaths. (125) Then in late 2009, Davenport and Stam reported what
they called the “most shocking result” of their research-to-date: “The killings
in the zone controlled by the FAR [i.e., the Hutu-controlled Armed Forces of
Rwanda] seemed to escalate as the RPF moved into the country and acquired more
territory. When the RPF advanced, large-scale killings escalated. When the RPF
stopped, large-scale killings largely decreased.” (126)
With these facts, Davenport and Stam appear to link
the mass killings of 1994 to RPF actions; this work also suggests that the mass
killings were not directed against the Tutsi population. Moreover, a number of
observers as well as participants in the events of 1994 claim that the great
majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million. (127)
Yet, Davenport and Stam shy away from asserting the
most important lesson of their work—not only that the majority of killings took
place in those theaters where the RPF “surged,” but also that the RPF was the
only well-organized killing force within Rwanda in 1994, and the only one that
planned a major military offensive. (128) Clearly, the chief responsibility for
Rwandan political violence belonged to the RPF, and not to the ousted coalition
government, the FAR, or any Hutu-related group. But Davenport and Stam are
inconsistent on the question of likely perpetrators, with their evidence of
likely RPF responsibility contradicted by assertions of primary responsibility
on the part of the FAR. (129) In short, their work does not break away from the
mainstream camp overall. However, they do acknowledge that forms of political
violence took place other than a straightforward Hutu “genocide” against the
minority Tutsi—in itself, a rarity in Western circles. As with the suppressed
Gersony report, Davenport and Stam’s findings caused great dismay at the United
Nations, not to mention in Washington and Kigali. They have been under attack and
in retreat since they were expelled from Rwanda in November 2003, when they
first reported that the “majority of the victims of 1994 were of the same
ethnicity as the government in power,” and have been barred from entering the
country ever since. (130) The established narrative’s 800,000 or more largely
Tutsi deaths resulting from a “preprogrammed genocide” committed by “Hutu
Power” appears to have no basis in any facts beyond the early claims by
Kagame’s RPF and its politically motivated Western sponsors and propagandists.
We also know a lot more about “who assassinated
Habyarimana.” In one of the most important, and also suppressed, stories about
“The Genocide,” former ICTR investigator Michael Hourigan developed evidence as
far back as 1996–1997, based on the testimony of three RPF informants who
claimed “direct involvement in the 1994 fatal rocket attack upon the
President’s aircraft” and “specifically implicated the direct involvement of
[Kagame]” and other members of the RPF. But in early 1997, when Hourigan
hand-delivered his evidence to the ICTR’s chief prosecutor Louise Arbour, the
latter was “aggressive” and “hostile,” Hourigan recounts in a 2006 affidavit, (131)
and advised him that the “investigation was at an end because in her view it
was not in [the ICTR’s] mandate”—a decision that “astounded” Hourigan. It is
one that former ICTR chief prosecutor Richard Goldstone also rejected, telling
a Danish newspaper that the assassination is “clearly related to the genocide,”
as it was the “trigger that started the genocide....” (132) Suppressing
evidence of the assassination’s perpetrator has been crucial in the West, as it
seems awkward that the “trigger” for “The Genocide” was ultimately pulled, not
by the officially-designated Hutu villains, but by the Tutsi victors in this
conflict, the RPF, long-supported by the United States and by its close allies
(who very possibly aided the assassins in the shoot-down (133)). It has also
been important to suppress the fact that the first Hutu president of Burundi,
Melchior Ndadaye, had been assassinated by Tutsi officers of his army in
October 1993, an action celebrated by the RPF and stirring fears among Rwanda’s
Hutus.
A far more comprehensive eight-year investigation by
the French magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, who had been asked to rule on the
deaths of the three French nationals operating the government jet that was shot
down in April 1994, concluded that the assassination followed from Kagame’s
rejection of the Arusha power-sharing accords of August 1993, and that for
Kagame the “physical elimination” of Habyarimana was therefore essential to
achieving the goal of an RPF-takeover in Rwanda. (134) Bruguière issued nine
arrest warrants for high-ranking RPF members close to Kagame and requested that
the ICTR, itself, take up Kagame’s prosecution, as under French law, Bruguiere
could not issue an arrest warrant for a head of state. (135)
As best we can tell, the existence of Hourigan’s
evidence has been reported only once in two different U.S. newspapers (the Los Angeles
Times and Seattle Times), and never in the New York Times, Washington Post, or
Wall Street Journal; Bruguière’s findings were mentioned in several U.S.
newspapers (sixteen that we have found), including three short items in the
Washington Post, a major report in the Los Angeles Times (reprinted in the
Seattle Times), and one blurb apiece in the New York Times and Wall Street
Journal totaling ninety-four words. (136) Amusingly, the U.S. media have
reported fairly often on Bruguière’s work as a “counterterrorism” specialist in
France, including several dozen items in the New York Times, Washington Post,
and Wall Street Journal. But when we check the U.S. media for Bruguière’s
eight-year inquiry into mass killing in Rwanda, a case where his focus was on a
U.S. client-agent as the primary villain, their interest declines close to
zero. (137) The propaganda system works.
The invasions, assassinations, and mass slaughters by
which the RPF shot its way to power in Kigali advanced many objectives, and
their support by the “enlightened” states is regarded by many of the defense
teams that practice before the ICTR as reflecting a quid pro quo between
Washington and the RPF: Washington gains a strong military presence in Central
Africa, a diminution of its European rivals’ influence, proxy armies to serve
its interests, and access to the raw material-rich Democratic Republic of
Congo; the RPF renews Tutsi-minority control of Rwanda and gains a free hand to
kill any perceived internal rivals, along with a client state’s usual
immunities, money, weapons, foreign investment, and a great deal of
international prestige.
One year after ICTY and ICTR chief prosecutor Carla
Del Ponte (successor to Louise Arbour) opened what she called the “Special
Investigation” of the RPF in 2002, she was terminated as chief prosecutor at
the ICTR, despite taking her plea directly to Secretary-General Kofi Annan,
whom Del Ponte called inflexible on the question. In her memoirs, Del Ponte
recounts a June 2002 meeting with Kagame at his presidential abode in Kigali.
Kagame, “fuming,” told her: “If you investigate [the RPF], people will believe
there were two genocides.... All we did was liberate Rwanda.” This was followed
by a May 2003 meeting with Pierre Prosper, the Bush administration’s ambassador-at-large
for war crimes, who, in Del Ponte’s words, “backed the Rwandans” and “suggested
that [she] surrender responsibility for investigating and prosecuting the
alleged crimes of the RPF.” By the time Del Ponte was able to meet with Annan
in New York in late July 2003, she told Annan: “This will be the end of the
Special Investigation,” and to which Annan replied: “Yes. I know.” (138)
Del Ponte told an interviewer after her position with
the ICTR ended: “It is clear that it all started when we embarked on these
Special Investigations” and “pressure from Rwanda contributed to the
non-renewal of my mandate.” (139) Doubtless, pressure from other sources with a
lot more clout on the Security Council played an even greater role. Former ICTR
(and ICTY) spokesperson Florence Hartmann also recounts extensive interference
by the United States, Britain, and Kagame’s RPF in every effort by the Office
of the Prosecutor to investigate RPF crimes. (140) Hassan Jallow, Del Ponte’s
successor at the ICTR, has stated on the record that he does not believe the
assassination of Habyarimana belongs within the ICTR’s mandate, and under his
charge (September 2003 on) the Office of the Prosecutor systematically dragged
its feet when it came to the crimes of the RPF, always pleading a need to carry
out “additional inquiries” without ever bringing a single indictment. (141)
Through the end of 2008, 100 percent of the ICTR’s indictments for “serious
violations of international humanitarian law” committed during 1994 have been brought
against Hutu members of the former government and ethnic Hutus more generally,
and none against members of the RPF, despite the ICTR’s Statute making no
distinctions on the basis of ethnicity or political allegiance. (142) Neither
the RPF’s violent takeover of Rwanda, its massacre of “10,000 or more Hutu
civilians” per month in 1994, nor any of its other numerous postwar slaughters,
have ever once been disturbed by criminal charges at the ICTR.
Very big lies about Rwanda are now institutionalized
and are part of the common (mis)understanding in the West. In reality, Rwanda’s
Paul Kagame is one of the great mass murderers of our time. Yet, thanks to the
remarkable myth structure that surrounds him, he enjoys immense popularity with
his chief patron in Washington, the image of this big-time killer transmuted
into that of an honored savior deserving strong Western support. Philip
Gourevitch, one of Kagame’s prime apologists for many years, portrays him as an
emancipator, a “man of action with an acute human and political intelligence”
who “made things happen;” he also compares Kagame to “another famously tall and
skinny civil warrior, Abraham Lincoln.” (143) A more recent hagiography by
Stephen Kinzer portrays Kagame as the founding father of a New Africa. It is
“one of the most amazing untold stories of the modern history of revolution,”
as Kinzer explains it, because Kagame overthrew a dictatorship, stopped a
genocide, and turned Rwanda into “one of the great stars” of the continent,
with Western investment and favorable PR flowing. (144) In fact, what Kagame
overthrew was a multiethnic, power-sharing, coalition government; what Kagame
imposed was a Tutsi-dominated dictatorship; and what Kagame turned Rwanda and
the whole of Central Africa into was a rolling genocide that is still ongoing—
but it is true that he is a shining “star” in the Western firmament and its
propaganda system.
In Samantha Power’s view, and in accord with this
same myth structure, “The United States did almost nothing to try to stop [the
Hutu genocide],” but instead “stood on the sidelines”— ”bystanders to
genocide.” (145) But this is doubly false. What the United States and its
Western allies (Britain, Canada, and Belgium) really did was sponsor the
U.S.-trained Kagame, support his invasion of Rwanda from Uganda and the massive
ethnic cleansing prior to April 1994, weaken the Rwandan state by forcing an
economic recession and the RPF’s penetration of the government and throughout
the country, and then press for the complete removal of UN troops because they
didn’t want UN troops to stand in the way of Kagame’s conquest of the country,
even though Rwanda’s Hutu authorities were urging the dispatch of more UN
troops. (146) Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali also wanted to
increase UN troop strength, (147) and complained bitterly in his memoirs about
the “obstruction” caused by the Clinton administration: “The U.S. effort to
prevent the effective deployment of a UN force for Rwanda succeeded, with the
strong support of Britain,” he wrote; the Security Council “meekly followed the
United States’ lead....” (148) (We may recall that Samantha Power also claimed
that the United States “looked away” when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975,
when in fact the U.S. gave Indonesia the go-ahead, the arms to carry out the
invasion, and diplomatic protection in the United Nations. For Power, whenever
the United States colludes in a genocidal process, she pretends that U.S. guilt
is at worst that of remaining a mere “bystander,” but never that of an
accomplice, let alone a perpetrator.)
In the Rwanda “genocide” case, the “human rights”
community played an unusually active role in supporting the real aggressors and
killers, in close parallel with their own governments’ perspectives and policies.
As in the case of the Western aggressions against Yugoslavia (1999) and Iraq
(2003), Human Rights Watch and other nongovernmental organizations simply
ignored the “supreme international crime” (or “act of aggression by Uganda,” in
Herman Cohen’s phrase) while conveniently, and in hugely biased fashion,
featuring lesser human rights violations. (149) They downplayed or ignored
entirely the refugee crisis created by the Ugandan-RPF invasion and occupation
of northern Rwanda and the armed penetration and de facto subversion of the
rest of the country by the RPF. Every response to these by the Habyarimana
government from October 1990 onward was scrutinized for “human rights”
violations and framed as evidence of unlawful state repression. They systematically
evaded the massive evidence of RPF responsibility for the April 6, 1994
shoot-down surely because the finding conflicts with their deep commitment to
the model of a pre-planned Hutu genocide and the RPF’s self-defensive rescue of
Rwanda, the twin components of the established perpetrator-victim line. We
believe that their biases played an important role in supporting the RPF’s
aggression, its penetration of the country, and the execution of its final
assault on power. Above all, we believe that their biases and propaganda
service con-tributed substantially to the mass killings that followed—all in
accord with the needs of actual U.S. policy.
On March 8, 1993, just days before the Security
Council took up the situation in Rwanda for the first time, a consortium of
four human rights organizations, led by Human Rights Watch and calling itself
the International Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Abuses in Rwanda,
issued its Report. (150) The commission concluded that, rather than Rwanda
having suffered an invasion by Uganda, from which the Habyarimana government
had yet to liberate its country, the Habyarimana government was instead guilty
of something very close to a genocidal rampage against the country’s Tutsi
minority, with two thousand dead since October 1990, “systematic killings,”
widespread rape, and a “climate of terror.” (151) Alison Des Forges, one of the
commission’s co-chairs, later commented that this report “put Rwandan human
rights abuses squarely before the international community” (152) — but it was
only the Habyarimana government’s alleged abuses that the commission focused
on.
The commission produced its report after its members
spent no more than two weeks on the ground in Rwanda in January of that year
and only two hours in territory controlled by the RPF. The commission itself
had close ties to the RPF, its sponsors “either directly funded by the RPF or
infiltrated by it,” Robin Philpot reports. (153) Prior to her work on this
commission, Des Forges had worked for the U.S. Department of State and National
Security Council. William Schabas, a Canadian member of the commission, issued
a press release at the time the full report was released that bore the title
“Genocide and war crimes in Rwanda.” (154) He thus drew attention to a category
of crime that not even the establishment narrative alleges was to begin for
another thirteen months. Stressing that in the work of the commission the “word
genocide has been mentioned on a number of occasions,” Daniel Jacoby, the
president of the International Federation of Human Rights League, stated that
the situation in Rwanda “is not simply an ethnic confrontation. It goes beyond
that. Responsibility for the killings can be placed extremely high.” (155)
Human Rights Watch’s annual World Report covering 1993 noted that when the RPF
launched its major offensive that year, “it justified the offensive in part by
the need to counter human rights abuses of the Rwanda government” such as those
put squarely before the world by the commission’s report. In short, with the
brunt of its findings coming down against the Habyarimana government, the
commission’s work served to delegitimize the government of Rwanda and enhance
the legitimacy of the armed forces of the RPF. As the RPF quickly used the
commission’s claims to justify a new killing spree, we believe the case can be
made that the overall impact of this report—and of the work of HRW and its
allies with respect to Rwanda over the past two decades—was to underwrite the
mass killings to follow, including the vast numbers in the Democratic Republic
of Congo, regularly explained as carried out by the benevolent RPF and Uganda
in search of Hutu “génocidaires.”
As we see on Table 1 (above), the 1994 mass killings
in Rwanda remain the sine qua non for “genocide” usage, generating more
attributions for this theater than for any other in our survey (3,199, nearly
triple the number for Darfur). This, we believe, follows from the successful
framing of the Hutus as the villains, executing a preplanned “genocide” against
the Tutsis—a Nefarious and Mythical bloodbath at one and the same time—and
Kagame’s RPF as the defender-savior of the Tutsis and of Rwanda and Central
Africa as a whole, with the RPF unexpectedly finding itself the new power in
the country one day. But it also cleared the ground for Kagame and Uganda’s
Yoweri Museveni—Kagame’s ally and the two staunchest U.S. clients in the
region—to periodically invade and occupy the DRC (named Zaire through 1997) and
beyond without opposition from the “international community.”
The Pentagon has very actively supported these
invasions of the DRC, even more heavily than it supported the RPF’s drive to
take Kigali. This led to the killing of many thousands of Hutu refugees in a
series of mass slaughters (ca. 1994–1997), and also provided cover for a
greater series of Kagame-Museveni assaults on the Congo that have destabilized
life in this large country of perhaps sixty million people, with literally
millions perishing in the process. (156) In his letter of resignation to Chief
Prosecutor Hassan Jallow, Filip Rentjens, a Dutch academic and one-time expert
witness before the ICTR, took issue with the “impunity” that protects the RPF
leadership from prosecution. “[RPF] crimes fall squarely within the mandate of
the ICTR,” he wrote, and “they are well documented, testimonial and material
proof is available, and the identity of the RPF suspects is known.... It is
precisely because the regime in Kigali has been given a sense of impunity that,
during the years following 1994, it has committed massive internationally
recognized crimes in both Rwanda and the DRC.” (157)
But this again has been compatible with Western
interests and policy, as it contributed to the replacement of Mobutu with the
more amenable Laurent Kabila (and later his son Joseph) and the opening up of
the Congo to a new surge of ruthless exploitation of precious gems, rare
industrial minerals, and timber by Western companies in a different kind of
“resource war”—a fine illustration of “shock therapy” with murderous human
consequences for the Congolese people, the equivalent of “one tsunami every six
months” for more than a decade, (158) but with large gains to a small business
and military elite. In a series of UN reports which coined the phrase “elite
networks” to denote the “politically and economically powerful groups involved
in the exploitation activities” that lie at the heart of the Congo genocide, we
read that “The war economy controlled by the three elite networks [i.e.,
Kinshasa, Rwanda, and Uganda] operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
dominates the economic activities of much of the Great Lakes region.... Years
of lawlessness and a Government incapable of protecting its citizens have
allowed the armed groups to loot and plunder the country’s resources with
impunity.... They have built up a self-financing war economy centered on
mineral exploitation”—and sales to the transnationals that manufacture the
personal computers and cell phones of our everyday lives. (159)
The U.S.-supported leaders Paul Kagame and Yoweri
Museveni undeniably have been key actors in the terrible bloodbaths of the
Congo. In consequence, these were Benign bloodbaths, in contrast with killings
in Darfur or Kosovo. Table 1 shows that in only seventeen items in our
newspaper universe were deaths in the Congo referred to as “genocide”—or one
“genocide” reference for every 317,647 deaths. When we contrast this with how
the same newspapers treated, say, the Nefarious bloodbath of the Kosovo
Albanians, where only twelve deaths were necessary to receive one “genocide”
reference, the basic outline of the politics of genocide could not be made more
stark or clear.
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