African Great Lakes Observer

by Edward S. Herman "The plane was shot down by Paul Kagame and his Tutsi associates, [15] with active or tacit help from the Belgians, UN representative Romeo Dallaire, [16] and possibly the CIA. This act was part of the Kagame-Tutsi final assault to seize power after a four-year war, with the assistance of the U.S.-sponsored Ugandan military. When the chief investigator for the Rwanda Tribunal, Australian Michael Hourigan, reported solid evidence on this locus of responsibility for the April 6th assassination to Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour in 1997, she immediately closed down the investigation and ordered him to destroy his files. This finding, which does not comport with the idea of a pre-planned Hutu murder program, has been suppressed in the Free Press. [17]" We have all heard about “genocide denial” and “holocaust denial” as very bad happenings that have focused attention, indignation, and concern to the point of laws passed to criminalize such behavior in Austria, B...

This shiny surface, however, hides a gloomy reality, with Kagame accused of war crimes committed before and during the 1994 genocide, denying political and press freedom in Rwanda subtly recomposing the old power-structure in favor of the Tutsi ethnic group. One of the most notorious accusations against Kagame has come from French judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, who investigated the 6 April 1994 plane crash that killed then-Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, then Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira and three French nationals. Bruguiere’s investigation concluded that the aircraft was shot down on orders from Kagame himself. Not only has Kagame denied all accusations but has even argued that France directly participated in the genocide that followed the assassinations. Since then, diplomatic relations between the two counties have been frozen. There after a spain juge delivered 40 international warrants against RPF's soldiers responsible for war crimes,internationa l human rights...