Posted on 01/04/2007 11:09:39 PM PST by neverdem
The hastily arranged car boot sale outside the French Embassy in downtown Kigali last Monday did good business. On offer were laptop computers, televisions, three-piece suites and, well, even the cars themselves. Given the decision taken by the Rwandan Government ten days ago to expel the French Ambassador, his staff and to close all official French buildings in the tiny Central African country, there was clearly little expectation of a return.
Behind these scenes of gloomy embassy employees packing and selling their diplomatic and domestic baggage is a recent history between France and Rwanda steeped in a mire of blood and guilt. Indeed it is the second time in 12 years that the French have found the need for a sudden retreat from Rwanda.
In April 1994 the French Embassy became the setting for the formation of the extremist Hutu Government that was to organise and carry out the meticulously planned genocide of the Tutsis. Witnesses spoke of these ministers, many now facing life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, sitting in plush embassy chairs comparing notes on where the killing was going best. Their host, the French Ambassador, later helped to evacuate those extremists to Paris, away from the apocalypse they had created. The ambassador then made a bonfire of two rooms piled high with documents linking his Government with that of the Hutu dictatorship of Juvénal Habyarimana.
Rwanda is made up mainly of two ethnic groups, the vast majority being Hutu, who, under Habyarimana’s “apartheid” State, took total control of the army, bureaucracy and government. The Tutsi, 15 per cent of the population, were banished from public life.
When François Mitterrand, then the French President, decided in 1990 to send in crack paratroopers to protect Habyarimana, his French-speaking friend and ally, it looked like just another attempt by Paris to keep a client leader in power. The danger came from across the border in Uganda. Anglophone Paul Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front, made up mostly of Tutsis previously driven from their homeland by a series of earlier massacres, had invaded.
During the next three years Mitterrand had no compunction in sending in troops to save a brutal and corrupt regime. The Hutu army received millions of dollars of French weaponry; and the French elite training corps trained its Rwandan allies in how to dismember bodies, fire its new heavy artillery and use attack Gazelle helicopters.
Habyarimana was assassinated on April 6, 1994, when unknown assailants shot down his Falcon 50 jet, another present from the French taxpayer. The event ushered in possibly the hundred bloodiest days in history. Up to one million Tutsis were slaughtered.
As the body count grew, France welcomed ministers of the genocidal Government to an official reception in Paris. Meanwhile, its military continued to send arms to bolster its Hutu allies in power, regardless of the genocide they were perpetrating.
Since 1994 France has been adept at trying to hide this stain on la gloire. Its ministers, including the current Prime Minister, constantly repeat the “double genocide” myth, which alleged that while Hutu killed Tutsi, the Tutsi also killed Hutu. It is akin to claiming that Holocaust victims were also mass murderers.
So the latest French government attempt to cover its Rwandan shame is no surprise to observers of La Françafrique. The timing behind the sudden release of Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière’s report, which blames Kagame for Habyarimana’s death, is no coincidence. Four senior French military and political figures will shortly give testimony before the international war crimes tribunal in Arusha. They have been called by the defence team of Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who faces charges of being the mastermind behind the genocide.
It is deeply embarrassing, like being called to defend Nazis at Nuremberg. Shortly, too, Kagame’s government of reconciliation, which drove the genocidaire out in 1994, will announce the findings of its own inquiry into the French involvement in the genocide. It promises to uncover even more explicit details of Mitterrand’s crime.
President Kagame arrived in London on Sunday for a five-day visit to the UK. His 12-year-old Government has revived a country torn apart by genocide, corruption and poverty. He has emphasised there is no “Hutu” or “Tutsi” in his country now, only Rwandans. But while he has created a stable economy and new sense of pride, it is vital that the world, which looked the other way in 1994, now demands answers from France about its direct complicity in the genocide.
There seems to be an unwritten rule among Western leaders not to question each other’s foreign policies too closely. But genocide cannot be allowed to be so cynically forgotten. Tony Blair has a duty to ask some deeply troubling questions about how and why the Élysée supported a genocidal government before, during and after one of the most appalling episodes of killing the world has ever seen. He may put at risk having some of his own skeletons unearthed. But the dead and the traumatised survivors in Rwanda deserve such belated recognition — and respect.
next thing you know Tomahawk will go Knock, Knock...........
and that is the punch line!!
Its called selfish diplomacy, and they are willing to ignore crimes against humanity to avoid breaking the status quo various French citizens and corporations have within its client nations. In short, the French COULD have prevented the brutal machete murders of thousands of Tutsis, with just a few plane loads of soldiers, but , Mon Dieu, who would pay?
The "let them eat cake" attitude of Marie Antoinette is obviously still alive and well within the French Department of State.
That's a good way for Europeans to stay out of trouble with us: to point fingers at each other publicly. It's too bad that other western European countries don't publish enough in English to point fingers back and make it a worthwhile show.
Thanks for posting this article.
Glad to see you posted this.
I only saw this today at the Belmont Club. Then came here to see if it had been picked up. Good job.
Any idea why, with the early December dateline, it's only now making waves?
Unless you are an American Republican President. What a crock.
I hope Mitterand is toasting in Hell with Saddam.
Nonsense. They hate the United States because we cut into the criminal cash flow that supports their neo-colonial klepto-fascist fantasy, whether Oil for Food or an illicit supply line maintained by Elf Aquitaine.
Wow. Bumping.
Why is that article only now making the rounds?
Look. If you're like the majority of people I encounter, you figure there has to be some point at which population poses a threat to the planet. We're inundated with that sort of tinking. Especially those a generation or two younger than me. That's it's pessimistic in it's outlook for the future and for humanity is hardly a case against it. What is a case against it is the belief, fostered greatly by what I see as effetes, that humanity is too stupid to solve this real time. Like we are only consumers and not creators and problem solvers.
No. Only the super-smart who know they're smart because the tell each other so, are fit to manage populations. "If misleading large herds of people is easy, doesn't that alone prove they are merely herds anyway?"
Anyway, that's been my experience. Take it or leave it.
Now here's where FR has really been in the forefront of being good watcheful sheepdogs. It's the "solutions" that some are all too willing to engage in that -- also happen to give them wealth and power along the way -- with rationalizedly cleared consciences that I think those who still have retained their full conscience need to confront. You need to learn HOW to do address these monsters. And you need to know what they're up to in order to do that.
I've been attacked for publicizing this very ping list. Accused of paranoid imaginings and conspiracy theorizing and the usual rot. And so will you too. Can you handle it?
For one thing, forget conspiracy. It can't be a conspiracy when the operations are out in the open; when the majority of intellectually acceptable thought agrees that overpopulation is THE major survivability issue.
The only thing that is close to being clandestine is the various ways people are discouraged from reproducing; encouraged to activities ones wants even if it puts one's life (and some others "too stupid for their lives to be worth anything anyway") at risk; not educated in history and the dangers lurking from power-seeking people claiming to do "only good things"; the various ways division and hatefulness is anything but discouraged by rulers and would-be rulers (those who have the propaganda arms to sooth dissension but instead let those tools be used almost exclusively by dividers).
Let me end this relatively mild rant with a simple example of the one-sided use of propaganda. Abortion "rights" are fiercely promoted in all old media, but both alternatives to abortions and the various consequences to those who've had abortions are given little positive coverage.
Old media blocks almost all mention of alternatives, or belittles them when they do mention them. As to those who've regretted their partaking or involvement in the abortion movement, they are either blocked or blackened by old media.
Old media is establishment media. Without large sums of ad revenue their vast decline in viewership and readership would have put a nail through their "hearts" years ago. Ergo, our establishment is promoting abortions even as our population is in decline. WTF? Well, that is, in a nutshell, an undeniable source of old media's continued existence.
Hence why the term Establishment media is now more clear than ever before.
So why is Establishment media laboring so hard to convince us to kill ourselves off?
That's a damn good question to ask. I hope the members of this ping list continue to ask it.
Please let me know if you're tired of this stuff. I'll remove you from the list.
Thanks.
Av
Thanks for the ping. You make thought provoking points as usual. FWIW I don't think over population is in itself a problem much less a world-threatening problem. Intelligent use of resources is the problem and lack of education is the main root of that.
I've taken to calling them "the Democrat Media." After all, they are a totally protected arm of the Democrat Party, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free propaganda to them each and every election cycle.
You're right about France's motives. Cold cash. I think it would be accurate to say that it's a result of their socialist policies. They have bankrupted themselves through their entitlement programs (a natural result) and desperately need to find cash from outside the country. So desperate that the end justifies any means. All socialist/communist systems live by leeching off of the producers. France has nearly destroyed its native producers and is out-sourcing its blood sucking.
Apt, that.
Causing death is the sole power and purpose of the State.
Intelligent use of resources would make human populations thrive. Legitimate education would help both that and the ability to distinguish foe from friend.
There are a few like C_O who are better able to show how, at every opportunity to further about either or both, we find well-established obstacles.
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