<html> <head> <style> P { margin:0px; padding:0px } body { FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY:Tahoma } </style> </head> <body> Keith Harmon Snow ( http://www.allthingspass.com/ ) will be speaking: [1] At the Project Censored Media Accountability Conference, I will be on a panel on Saturday November 4, at Sonoma State University: http://www.projectcensored.org/conference.htm [2] At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, on Tuesday November 7, a multimedia presentation: Adventuring the African Apocalypse http://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/ (short description) http://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/details.php?ID=344 (further info & description) http://www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/2005/2803.html Rwanda's Secret War U.S-Backed Destabilization of Central Africa Special Report from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by Keith Harmon Snow, www.allthingspass.com March 28, 2005 Central Africa's Ongoing Genocide Paul Kagame's Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, launching a four-year campaign of guerrilla warfare. Open support for Rwanda's then-Hutu-led government from French paratroopers failed to prevent the RPA victory of August 1994, following the coordinated genocide of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis by hard-line Hutus, Force Armee Rwandaise (FAR) and affiliated Interahamwe (Hutu) militias from April to July. Critics such as Wayne Madsen, author of Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999, assert that Kagame and the RPA orchestrated the April 6, 1994 assassination of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi – shooting down their plane on approach to Kigali airport with SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles taken from Iraq by France in 1991, then delivered by the US military to Uganda, the base for RPA guerrilla operations against Rwanda prior to 1994. Evidence was provided at a special hearing held by then Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney at DC's Rayburn House Office Building on April 6, 2001, the seventh anniversary of the assassinations. Journalist Charles Onana of Cameroon, author of The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide, also aired claims of RPA involvement in the incident, and was sued for defamation by Paul Kagame. A Paris court found in favor of Onana. Defense attorneys working at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) maintain that the standard figure of 800,000 Tutsis killed in the 1994 genocide is grossly inflated. At least three major films continue to circulate in the US, all furthering the pro-RPA and pro-Tutsi perspective of the Hutu genocide. Paul Kagame, who was trained by the US military at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has been a regular visitor at Harvard University, at the James Baker III Institute in Houston Texas, at the White House and the Pentagon. US, European and South African military interests have continued to support various factions in Central Africa, arming militias and rebel groups through proxy armies from Uganda (UPDF), Rwanda (RPA), Burundi and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in south Sudan. France's presence in Central Africa is based out of Gabon, the major point of French military penetration on the continent. Terror continued in Rwanda under the new RPA government of Paul Kagame, with Amnesty International documenting a pattern of assassinations, arbitrary imprisonment and "disappearances." Nearly all political opponents—Tutsi or Hutu—have been labeled "genocidiares", and Amnesty has protested that some trials and executions of accused genocidiare collaborators have been tainted and politically motivated. The first Rwandan invasion of its huge neighbor to the west occurred in 1996. According to the influential Africa Confidential newsletter, Major Gen. Paul Kagame visited the Pentagon in August of 1996, conferring with Washington prior to launching a grand plan to unseat Mobutu Sese Seko. While the US public was consumed with the 1996 presidential elections, Rwanda was preparing its war against Zaire—and it began with the shelling of Hutu refugee camps in eastern Congo with Katusha missiles, killing non-combatant men, women and children. RPA joined with Ugandan People's Defense Forces (UPDF) and the guerrilla army of Laurent Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL) in the "War of Liberation" that subsequently ended the decades long reign of President Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo (Zaire). Sources in DRC quickly add that American military personnel were seen on the ground advising the joint UPDF/RPA invasion which swiftly moved across the vast forested territory of Zaire. Mobutu's generals were reportedly contacted in advance by high-level US officials in the region; most of those who agreed to support the US invasion when it came remain in high posts in DRC today; other of Mobutu's highest military were sacrificed one way or another. Wayne Madsen reported that the US established major communications and listening stations in Uganda's Ruwenzori Mountains. Witnesses interviewed in Kampala, Uganda's capital, support this claim. Communications equipment was also seen on Idjwe Island in Lake Kivu, on the DRC-Rwanda frontier. Recent interviews with survivors across the country document crimes against humanity and acts of genocide committed against Congolese civilians by all sides in the ensuing war. </body> </html>