[This article is part of a series by P.D. Lawton, a South African based writer, on Rwanda and U.S.-UK imperialism in Central Africa—Editors]
“On the Anglo-Saxon side, and particularly for the US, the solution seemed straight forward: their champion Laurent-Desire Kabila, supported by both Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, respectively presidents of Rwanda and Uganda, would overthrow the marshal [Mobutu], seize power, and never mind if Kivu, the whole east of the country up to the regional capital of Kisangani, and all the mineral treasures had to be abandoned to the rapacity of neighbouring countries and their allies. The opportunity was too good to marry false public morality with economic efficiency.”
—Charles Million, former French Minister of Defense
[Page 11 ‘Holocaust in Congo: the International Community`s Omerta’]
Charles Onana`s most recent book Holocaust in Congo: the International Community`s Omerta (2019) has caused a stir. What his book entails is well defined in the word ‘omerta’ which means: “A rule or code that prohibits speaking or divulging information about certain activities, especially the activities of a criminal organization.”
The inferred criminal organization is the ‘international mineral mafia,’ as referenced in the Foreword by Charles Million, former French Minister of Defense under Jacques Chirac (1995-1997).
The court case against Cameroonian investigative journalist and author, Charles Onana and his publisher Damien Serieyx, is currently underway in Paris. He is on trial charged under France’s genocide laws.
The French Republic, founded after the revolution against imperial rule, through its actions against the accused, is proving that it is itself a colony of the Western corporate empire, as much in need of liberation as is Rwanda.
Charles Onana is on trial not for writing about a European genocide but a genocide that took place in the African country that was once a Belgian colony, Rwanda, and one would assume logically not to be under French legal jurisdiction.
Advocate Rety Hamuli, attending the trial of Onana, says that the International Community silences any voices that speak about the crimes committed by Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
From the information available it would appear that this trial is along the lines of numerous International Criminal Court (ICC) kangaroo mockups of justice that have convicted anyone whose story runs counter to the official narrative. It would appear from the information available that Onana is being targeted under Hate Speech laws.
For the last two and a half decades, Onana has denounced Paul Kagame and his regime for the crimes and atrocities both in Rwanda and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But he is not a genocide denier by any account. Asked about being an anti-Tutsi genocide negationist/denialist, Onana explained that there are many Rwandans who are Tutsi and in prison in Rwanda for questioning the events of 1994.
An example is Onana’s friend Déo Mushayidi and co-author of the book he wrote in 2002, Les Secrets du génocide Rwandais: Enquête sur les mystères d’un president. Mushayidi has been incarcerated in Rwanda since its publication.
Rwandan artist, Kizito Mihigo was tortured to death in 2020 after writing a song criticizing the Kagame regime. Kizito Mihigo’s murder is emblematic of the utter sheer horror of life in Rwanda.
Onana and Congolese author, Patrick Mbeko, courageously continue to shed light on the crimes of the RPF and President Kagame. Mbeko’s latest book Rwanda: Malheur aux Vaincus 1994-2024, Woe to the Vanquished is an examination of how the false official narrative of the events of Rwanda in 1994 were constructed and by which institutions.
By coincidence or not, the trial of Onana is coming at an historic moment for the entire world. The BRICS Kazan Summit in late October has opened the door to a multipolar world that will replace the self-cannibalizing Anglo-American empire that has overtly as well as clandestinely occupied so many African governments.
It goes without saying that this new world will not support psychopathic protégés of the Anglo-Americans like Paul Kagame whose 30 years in office, protected by the U.S. and Britain, has overseen the murder of well in excess of 10 million Congolese and Rwandan citizens.
On behalf of its Western masters, Kagame’s Rwanda has dutifully fulfilled its role as the conduit for illicitly traded Congolese resources while maintaining the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo in a state of destabilization with utopian-level deregulation for the corporate supply chain of critical minerals.
Rwandan journalist, Tom Ndahiro, with his career lubricated by Kagame`s Ministry of Truth, writes in furious defence of the crumbling official narrative of the events of 1994 in a recent article “Denial of Genocide: from PARMEHUTU to Charles Onana” that:
“Genocide is not a natural human act. The moral and psychological hurdles to taking a human life, especially in mass numbers, are immense. Perpetrators must first desensitize themselves, stripping their victims of their humanity to the point where ethical considerations no longer apply.”
How do the gatekeepers of the ‘Great Lakes Lie’ respond when the shoe is on the other foot?
The Kibeho Massacre
On the 22nd of April 1995 more than 8,000 Rwandans were massacred and thousands more injured in Kibeho, an Internally Displaced people’s (IDP) camp as the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) troops unleashed heavy fire on the camps.
On that day, a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) team witnessed the Rwandan army’s deliberate massacre of over 8,000 displaced people in the Kibeho camp in southwest Rwanda. MSF spoke out publicly to denounce the killing and produced a report based on the eyewitness accounts of its volunteers.
“In Kibeho camp more than 100,000 IDP’s were living. The military chased the displaced out of their shelters while pulling down the plastic sheeting.
In the initial panic and chaos, ten people (nine children and one woman) died of trampling and suffocation, and more than 100 people got wounded.
The displaced were forcibly regrouped on the hill in the centre of the camp, around the UNAMIR compounds. Here they have been standing squeezed together from the morning of Tuesday 18th till Saturday afternoon. They stood in the open air, with hardly any access to water and food. Most of them had had no time to take their belongings during the nightly expulsion from their huts…”
The UN peacekeeping soldiers were left to watch helplessly from the sidelines as men, women and children were cut to pieces by machetes or gunned down in cold blood. They had dictated that their rules of engagement were to defend UN soldiers only.
“At 15:45 hours, shooting started again…This time there was permanent machine-gun fire, combined with heavier weapons. The permanent machine-gun firing was right outside the second UNAMIR compound where we found ourselves. One of the UNAMIR soldiers coming back into the compound commented: ‘They are spraying them.’ The soldiers were shooting directly into the crowd who fled in panic, inevitably trampling everybody who fell down…”
July 1994 Gitarama Roadblocks
“Towards the end of the war of 1994, [2nd week of July 1994] the 59th battalion of Paul Kagame’s RPA had established its headquarters in Gitarama, close to UNAMIR positions and opposite the French operation Zone Turquoise. The battalion set up barriers by which the population returning from the Turquoise Zone had to pass through. This population was screened at the barriers. The majority was killed only because they were Hutu. The soldiers in charge of this task were divided into six groups of eight men chosen exclusively from the Tutsi ethnic group of the RPA. They killed their victims with agafuni.
The slowest teams killed between 20 and 30 persons per night, but the specialists of agafuni could kill 100 per night. Towards the end, the victims were to dig their grave before being killed. This work lasted four to five weeks, day and night. Other people, Hutu intellectuals and ex-FAR (soldiers with the Rwandan Armed Forces from the former Hutu regime of Habyarimana) preferred not to cross the RPA barrier and established a camp near UNAMIR position. With the refusal of UNAMIR to dismantle the camp, the [RPA’s] 59th battalion attacked this refugee camp. The RPA soldiers shot at the occupants without any distinction. The number of victims of this carnage was evaluated at between 2,000 and 3,000 according to the witness who used to be an RPA soldier and who participated in the attack” by International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) investigators in their Top Secret Summary Report.[1]
Tom Ndahiro’s career, as with all the Rwandan (almost singularly Tutsi) gatekeepers of the ‘Great Lakes Lie’ will have been sponsored by many of the very institutions or their affiliates that have bought the charges against Charles Onana. That entity is the human rights machine, human rights as the soft power tool for regime change across the globe, human rights according to the ‘nice guys’ of the liberal Rules Based Order.
The Association Survie, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Rwandan Community of France (CRF) and the Human Rights League (LDH) are responsible for bringing the case to court. The French non-governmental organization, Survie, are suing Onana and his publisher.
According to one of his sponsors, Tom Ndahiro’s journalistic career started:
“After the genocide of 1994, Ndahiro joined the Rwanda Information Authority (ORINFOR), a national organization, which owns and runs the national radio, television and print media. With ORINFOR, Ndahiro held various positions, including External Relations Officer and Head of the Department of Rural Communication. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the Kinyarwanda weekly, IMVAHO NSHYA, before being elected to the HRC.”
Ndahiro’s recollections of those times differ dramatically from those of a contemporary, Dr Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, whose first-hand accounts can be read here.
Ndahiro writes that the Tutsi of Rwanda have always been the subject of vilification. It is rather like the rabid attacks on those denounced as climate deniers in that their argument only has a basis if there is a collective memory hole in the theory, that being the omission of the Medieval warm period where temperatures in the northern hemisphere were warmer than they are currently.
The Rwandan Tutsi version of history has memory holed the barbarity of the Tutsi monarchy that continues to butcher its path through history under the present line of uncrowned royalty, Paul Kagame.
The gatekeepers like Ndahiro blame the Catholic bishop Father Andre Perraudin for the genocide of 1994. The basis of their reasoning is that Perraudin sided with the Hutus. Yes, as any clergyman upholding Christian values should, Perraudin was applauded by the bestial conditions under which all Hutu and many Tutsi were kept as serfs of the Tutsi monarchy.
The Tutsi aristocracy fled Rwanda after the 1959 Social Revolution and the first president of the Rwandan republic, Grégoire Kayibanda. The Tutsi aristocracy later returned to Rwanda in the form of the RPF, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. They returned with the aid of some very powerful British and American friends.
Ndahiro writes about the ‘dehumanization’ of the Tutsi under the first two governments of the Rwandan Republic, Grégoire Kayibanda, and Juvenal Habyarimana.
Ndahiro does not write about the current terrorist tactics used by the militant faction of the Banyamulenge who are the Rwandan presence in DRC. He does not write about rape techniques applied by March 23 Movement (M23) on men, women and children and he does not write about mass executions of civilians with their arms tied behind their backs with wire as occurs regularly, the latest being in North Kivu in June this year, the slow holocaust of Congolese villagers on land coveted by the international mineral mafia while the gatekeepers sanitize M23.
According to Ndahiro:
“When a group of people are dehumanized, their life ceases to be of value. As the victims are no longer viewed as human beings, the social and moral obligations that normally govern behaviour towards fellow humans no longer apply.”
What Ndahiro is doing as a journalist gatekeeper, as it is called in psychology, is projection: when a liar falsely accuses someone of doing what they themselves are doing.
Do Rwandan adherents to the lies of their history do so because they are afraid their reality will disintegrate? As in the words of Etienne de la Boetie: Discours de la Servitude (1548):
“There are people who bind themselves together because should they refuse to serve their tyrant, they would break their chains.”
Paul Kagame is a Tutsi supremacist and has a virulent hatred of Hutus. The Tutsi supremacists that surround him are not dissimilar in ideology to the current Israeli government that is committing genocide against Arabs who live on land the Israelis covet.
French Revelations
In 2006, under the Presidency of Jacques Chirac, a French court investigating the plane crash that precipitated the genocide in which the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were assassinated along with three French flight crew, called for Kagame to stand trial for murder.
The political spin-doctors turned the judgement against France and accused the French of trying to cover-up their role in the genocide under Opération Turquoise. That political game is still being played. This court case will reveal to what extent the ancien French military will be heard this time around. That France should break its chains to the oligarchy is unlikely at present.
Recently French President Emmanuel Macron asked for Rwandan forgiveness for its role in the genocide.
Macron asks for all to be forgotten when an official investigation should be reopened in light of this case, Charles Onana`s book and the testimony of key French military personnel.
Operation Turquoise was deliberately obstructed according to high-ranking French military officers stationed in Rwanda at the time. Those testimonials should be fully investigated such as the testimony of General Didier Tauzin who has testified at Onana`s trial, in itself an extremely explosive testimony.
Tauzin’s testimony equally sheds light on the Western powers namely America and Britain that got Kagame into power.
He also revealed that there was an American military plane that arrived in Kigali shortly after the RPF had taken the city. General Tauzin`s book is titled: Rwanda: Je Demande La Justice Pour France et ses soldats`(2011).
Other firsthand testimony from high-ranking French officers includes that of Colonel Luc Marchal who Onana has quoted in his book.
Colonel Marchal has testified in a previous hearing that the RPF “attacked immediately after the presidential plane was shot down and this would prove that it had been ready for months. The first massacres were the hundreds killed on 7 April by the RPF, which targeted the Rwandan academics, professionals and civil servants. In early April, RPF reportedly refused any intervention by UN Peacekeepers and all requests for a ceasefire from the Rwandan army to put an end to the massacres. The RPF never had the objective of saving Tutsis.”
These are also the conclusions of British researcher, Barrie Collins in his book The Myth of the Akazu Genocide: Conspiracy and its Consequences.
General Jean Claude Lafourcade is another high-ranking French officer to testify at Onana’s trial. He has previously denounced President Macron‘s cover-up of the role played by France in 1994.
This is the second time that Onana has been taken to court. In 2002, Paul Kagame sued him for defamation for what he wrote in “Les Secrets Du Génocide Rwandais—Enquête Sur Les Mystères d’un Président.” (The Secrets of the Rwandan genocide—Investigations on the Mysteries of a President).
Onana made the case that:
“President Kagame should be judged by the UN Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, for what he describes as ‘Kagame’s incontestable responsibility’ in not only the shooting down of the Rwandan President’s plane that caused his death and that of his Burundian counterpart but also his responsibility in the Rwandan genocide.”
Hate Speech
Dr. Coulibaly, acting for the prosecution, is blaming voices like that of Onana on the increase in violence in the DRC. The absurdity of this thinking is truly Orwellian.
According to Survie, she related the following [auto translation from French]:
“She says that the problem is not so much the sources that Onana uses, but the way in which he claims to draw conclusions from it, truncating them. It ends with the Hamitic ideology—the anti-Titicide ideology that served as the basis for the genocide against the Tutsi, citing inequality of ethnic groups–and its current consequences in Congo. According to her, Onana takes up this idea of the Tutsi invading or foreign element and her writings, considered a reference today, are part of the proliferation of hate speech and acts of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congp (DRC) that she is studying.
Onana’s lawyer asks a question about her Bosnian origins and then asks whether it is possible to draw a parallel between the characterization of genocide used by Bosnia before official recognition in 1995 to call for the assistance of the international community, and the use of the word genocide by the RPF before it is recognized by the courts—so as to justify the use of the quotation marks by his client.”
Protesters are on Guard
Charles Onana was in Kinshasa twice this year to publicize his latest book. His first invitation was from Congo’s National TV station and his second invitation came from Kinshasa University. He was given a hero’s welcome.
The intention of his book is the examination of the root causes of war in eastern DRC, which have their origins in the events that took place in Rwanda 1994.
If this French court convicts Onana, it will be a shameful day for the French judicial system. If this French court convicts Onana it will be the death knell for France in the Great Lakes Region.
France`s relationship with West Africa is already finished, destroyed. If this French court convicts Onana, they will find 110 million Congolese protestors outside their court and not just the several hundred who are currently there.
The Congolese adore Onana for the extreme risk he is taking and the truth he is spreading in order to remove the lies Kagame and his regime have been spreading for decades.
See Judy Rever, In Praise of Blood, The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada, 2018). ↑
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About the Author
PD Lawton was born in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.
She is an independent writer, researcher and editor and founder of africanagenda.net.
Because of her belief in the need for the industrialization of all African economies, she writes about hard infrastructure such as the African Continental High Speed railway network and energy generation including nuclear, all needed to address Africa`s chronic energy deficit.
She has a degree from the University of Life and is the co-author of the recently published book `Fathers of Pan-Africanism`
Ms. Lawton can be reached at pdlawton0@gmail.com.
