Oh come on Leo, your post is just a smoke-screen.
You argued that my viewpoint, that the RPF was backed by the US was beyond the pale and that it was restricted to a lunatic fringe.
I showed you that far from that being the case, it was well supported, by amongst others the Washington Post and the radical journal Covert Action Quarterly.
Then you seek to rubbish the credentials of Covert Action Quarterly (why not the Washington Post?). Apparently CAQ carries articles by Michel Chossudovsky. Outrageous! I think many people on this list, even those that disagreed with his assessment of the Yugoslav conflict would agree that Chossudovsky was a creditable addition to any publication. But in any event, was it the case that Chossudovsky wrote the article in question. No. So what is your point, exactly? None, but a smear, resting on an assumption that few share. Does any of this call into question the veracity of the article in CAQ? No. Does any of this call into question the view of the Washington Post journalist that the US was heavily involved in the RPF regime. No.
Leo sought to suggest that this was a viewpoint beyond the pale. It was no such thing. Like Yoweri Museveni's government in Uganda, Paul Kagame's is considered one of the US's most loyal allies in Africa, and amongst the 'new generation' of political leaders there. Kagame was trained by the US military, as Leo accepts, but hopes that this will not add up to the fact that the US was involved in the invasion. Well, I'm happy to bandy sources on this one.
As part of the smokescreen Leo raises the question of the Ogoni in Nigeria. Why? What has that got to do with Rwanda? It is a smokescreen, like the association of the - allegedly - anti-Muslim Michel Chossudovsky.
Leo thinks it inconceivable that the US would ditch its one-time ally in the region Mobutu. Presumably it is equally inconceivable that the US would have ditched its former allies Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Marcos, etc etc.
Leo only recognises atrocities committed by Hutus against Tutsis. The slaughter of Hutu refugees in the Camps in Zaire, or of Hutus by RPF forces in Northern Rwanda, or of Hutus by Tutsis in Burundi are all excised from history, just as they are ignored under the terms of the tribunal.
Leo insists that the government in Rwanda is mixed, in ignorance of the fact that the resignation of the last of the Hutu ministers was the event that forced Kagame to take control rather than ruling through figure heads.
And what about democracy? Does Leo agree that Rwandans ought to elect their government? Or does he support the continuation of the military dictatorship?
Leo says that all major investigations concluded that Hutus killed the president. But he declines to comment on the UN investigation that implicated Kagame, as reported in the New York Times. Is he saying that this is wrong?
In message <4b.1a31f78.270cae7b at aol.com>, LeoCasey at aol.com writes
>Jim Heartfield's comments on this topic (reproduced below) dismiss the very
>reality of the Rwandan genocide, "evenhandedly" condemning both its
>perpetrators and its victims, one million of which are dead. In this, as in
>their attacks on Ken Siro-Wiwa and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni
>People in their struggle with Shell and the Nigerian military regime, at the
>very time that there was an unsuccessful international struggle to save
>Siro-Wiwa from execution, Jim and his fellow _Living Marxism_ adherents
>pursue a bizarre political logic which puts them unequivocally on the wrong
>side of central issues in African politics time and time again. To this end,
>arguments are marshaled which are nothing more than the conspiracy theorist's
>mishmash of isolated facts taken out of context, distortions of facts, red
>herrings, conclusions of most dubious 'authorities' without any supporting
>argument and fantastic speculation, ungrounded by any credible evidence.
>
>Let us start with the easiest issue: Jim seizes upon my recommendation of
>Philip Gourevitch's magnificent book, _We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We
>Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda_, to suggest that this
>was the source of all my information on the subject, and that the weight of
>available evidence suggests a different conclusion. I hold to my original
>proposition, that if one is to read one book on the subject, Gourevitch's
>text is surely the best. But unfortunately for Jim, in the age of the
>Internet all manner of information is readily available for anyone who wished
>to seek it out, and even a most cursory search engine inquiry will rapidly
>show that virtually every credible body which has investigated the Rwandan
>genocide has come to the conclusions I originally put forward here: that it
>was a genocide, organized and pursued by a state and party of extremist
>racist Hutus, and conducted against Tutsis and non-racist Hutus, and that the
>major world powers either did nothing to stop it (the US) or even intervened
>to protect its perpetrators (France).
>
>This is the conclusion of two reports of the United Nations, one commissioned
>by UN Secretary General Annan and the other authored by the Canadian social
>democrat Steven Lewis, and of the report of the Organization of African
>Unity; it has been supported by a report of an International Panel of Eminent
>Personalities [former Presidents of African states and leaders of UN bodies],
>and the results of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. It is the
>findings of reports by Amnesty International, by the Human Rights Watch [the
>encyclopedic _Leave None To Tell The Story_], and by the London based African
>Rights. It is the message of the American Physicians for Human Rights and of
>the French Medecins San Fontiers; it has been substantiated by the reports of
>the International Steering Committee of the Joint Evaluation of Emergency
>Assistance to Rwanda and the US Committee for Refugees. It is found in
>scholarly studies such as Gerard Prunier's _The Rwandan Crisis: History of a
>Genocide_ and Christopher Taylor's _Sacrifice As Terror_, as well as
>journalistic book-length accounts such as Fergal Keane's _Season of Blood._
>
>Against this, Jim proposes... an article from the _Covert Action Quarterly_,
>in its current incarnation as a publisher of the likes of Michel
>Chossudovsky, the author of many an anti-Moslem racist diatribe in defense of
>the Milosevic regime and its 'ethnic cleansing' in the former Yugoslavia. He
>doesn't point out that before the current group forced out the prior editors,
>_CAQ_ published articles on the Rwandan situation which put forward an
>analysis entirely in line with the analysis universally accepted among
>legitimate human rights organizations and credible students of Rwanda. [The
>interesting irony here is that having accused me of having only one source
>for my analysis on Rwanda, all of the points Jim makes are derivative of the
>one Ellen Ray article in _CAQ_.]
>
>To the particular claims:
> No one, least of all Kagame himself, has ever suggested anything but that
>he was a colonel in the Ugandan armed forces, and as such, undergoing
>military training in the US when the original leader of the RPF was killed in
>battle. It was then that Kagame resigned from the Ugandan military and left
>the US to assume battlefield command of the Rwandan forces. Only in the
>overactive imagination of conspiracy theorists does this rather thin reed
>translate into a case for American sponsorship of the RPF.
> We are supposed to believe, on the basis of an unnamed Zimbabwean friend
>[Of Jim? Of the author of the _CAQ_ article?] that American troops intervened
>in the fighting in the Congo to rescue Rwandan military forces. This little
>tidbit of news managed to miss every mass media outlet in North America,
>Europe and Africa, as well as the attention of Republican politicians in
>Washington DC which would have loved such an opportunity to attack Clinton
>and Gore on the issue (Remember the streets of Somalia!), but according to
>Jim, it took place. I won't even go into the fictional account of how the
>Kabila forces were conducting a successful military campaign against the
>combined forces of the Rwandans, the Ugandans and various ethnic groups,
>including Congo Tutsi, from the eastern Congo: this is sheer fantasy.
> BTW, if there ever was a "puppet" of US imperialism in Central Africa,
>surely is was Mobutu of the Congo/Zaire, going back to the days of the
>overthrow and assassination of Lumumba. Isn't it interesting how this account
>manages to completely evade the question of why "American imperialism" would
>direct its one "puppet" [the Rwandan RPF] to remove its greatest regional
>asset, Mobutu?
> The Rwandan genocide was conducted against Tutsis and against Hutus who
>would not be a party to the genocide. The current Rwandan government includes
>both Tutsis and the non-racist Hutus. These are basic facts, easily checked.
>Without suggesting that the current Rwandan government is incapable of error
>-- after all, it faces a most daunting set of circumstances in the wake of
>the genocide and the continued threat of militias connected to it, Jim's
>account of it is very misleading, part of his "even-handed" approach which
>directs its fire at those who ended and survived the genocide.
> Every one of the accounts noted above look at the question of the
>shooting down of the plane carrying Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda,
>a Hutu, and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, a Tutsi. They all note that
>Habyrimana and Ntaryamira had reached a tentative accord with the RPF that
>would have ended the fighting in Rwanda, and that the extreme racist Hutus
>were opposed to it. They also note that the Hutu forces which conducted the
>genocide were organized and on the go shortly after the shooting down of the
>plane. The universal verdict: circumstantial evidence points heavily toward
>the Hutu forces which conducted the genocide.
>
>Sadly, it must be concluded that the position Jim takes here is one of rank
>historical revisionism. And it has the incredible effect of excusing the
>American and French governments, as well as other world powers, of a moral
>failing up there with the failure to take practical steps to end the
>Holocaust. African lives, it appears, are still cheap fodder for
>conspiratorial ideology.
>
><< Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 08:34:10 +0100
> From: Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: Rwandan Genocide
>
>In message <3f.afd51fc.270a5686 at aol.com>, LeoCasey at aol.com writes
>that my aside on Rwanda is
>
>> one which has no currency whatsoever outside of the horizons of what
>> was _Living Marxism_ . The notion that
>> "American imperialists" gave even the slightest thought to what happened in
>> Rwanda, much less trained the RPF forces which finally put a stop to the
>> genocide, ventures into the realm of some pretty creative historical
>fiction.
>
>> One U.S. official interviewed by the Washington Post contended that "the
>United States is focusing disproportionate military assistance on Rwanda as
>part of the creation of a 'zone of influence' in East Africa...."
>"U.S. officials ... discussed options with Kagame, including air strikes to
>hit at extremist bases.... Information about the camps was exchanged...."
>(Lynne Duke, "U.S. Military Role in Rwanda Greater Than Disclosed,"
>Washington Post, Aug. 16, 1997.)
>
>Leo writes
>
>> I have made it a minor interest of mine to read up on the Rwandan situation,
>But his reading does not extend far beyond the popular account by
>journalist Philip Gourevitch. How about this, from Covert Action
>Quarterly?
>
>"the U.S. was deeply involved in both Uganda and Rwanda, and very close to
>Paul Kagame. In 1990, Kagame, a Rwandan exile serving as a colonel in the
>Ugandan army,10 was training at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff
>College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, when he dropped out of the program and
>rushed back to Uganda to take command of the rebel army that invaded Rwanda."
>(U.S. Military and Corporate Recolonization of the Congo by Ellen Ray)
>
>(A Zimbabwean friend tells me the following story of US involvement in the
>Rwandan-Congolese war. After Kabila's forces broke with their Rwandan
>backers, they turned on the overextended Rwandan army occupying the Congo,
>forcing them to retreat. The Congolese, with Zimbabwean backing had pinned
>down the Rwandans to a valley, where they expected to make short work of
>their foe. To their surprise, just as they closed in US military troop
>carriers turned up in force to evacuate the entire Rwandan force before they
>could attack.)
>
>Leo continues
>
>> the Rwandan genocide shows just how incredibly
>> irrational and even fantastical 'racial' categories can be.
>
>Yes, indeed. But ought one then ignore the fact that Paul Kagame's government
>is entirely drawn from one racial group, Tutsis, who make up a minority of
>the country (around 15 per cent), and its security forces are overwhelmingly
>Tutsi, whilst the vast majority of the disenfranchised population is Hutu.
>Furthermore, only Hutus are tried for ethnic killings, but the many massacres
>perpetrated by the RPF are not investigated or tried. It seems very
>convenient to develop a blindness over racial categories when the country has
>become an ethnic dictatorship.
>
>>And yes, it is one of the greatest failings of the Clinton presidency that
>the US did nothing in face of this genocide.
>
>But this is not so. Fort Leavenworth trained US agent Paul Kagame played a
>key role in the genocide:
>
>"when an airplane carrying Rwanda's Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was
>shot down, with all aboard, including President Cyprien Ntaryamira of
>Burundi, killed. A still secret 1997 U.N. investigation implicates Kagame in
>the assassinations." (U.S. Military and Corporate Recolonization of the Congo
>by Ellen Ray)
>
>The U.N. investigation revealed "that Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, had ordered the
>shooting down of the ... plane" Barbara Crossette, ("Rwanda: Kagame
>Implicated," New York Times, World Briefing, Mar. 24, 2000)
>
>Does Leo's extensive reading on the subject not include this vital fact?
>The assassination of Habyarimana was the event that triggered the slaughter
>in Rwanda, just as panic rose over the invasion by the RPF.
>
>- --
>James Heartfield >>
>
>Leo Casey
>United Federation of Teachers
>260 Park Avenue South
>New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
>
>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
>It never has, and it never will.
>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
>lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
>-- Frederick Douglass --
>
>
>
>
>
-- James Heartfield
Great Expectations: the creative industries in the New Economy is available from Design Agenda, 4.27 The Beaux Arts Building, 10-18 Manor Gardens, London, N7 6JT Price 7.50 GBP + 1GBP p&p