DRC-Rwanda crisis

 This is taken from The Conversation.

‘In the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC),South African, Burundian and Tanzanian troops are fighting against the Rwandan army, which has deployed in support of the rebellion by the March 23 Movement, or M23.

Soldiers from South Africa and Burundi, as well as from the United Nations peacekeeping mission, have recently suffered casualties. In the crossfire, civilians have fled: seven million Congolese are now displaced due to this and multiple other crises in the DRC.

Diplomats are concerned: the conflict in the eastern DRC was the subject of a special meeting at the United Nations Security Council on 20 February 2024 and a mini-summiton the sidelines of the African Union annual meeting of heads of state on 16 February.

Rwanda, which has denied backing M23,says the Rwandan rebel group – Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) – which includes combatants who participated in the 1994 genocide, has been fully integrated into the Congolese army. It also claims that the Congolese government is engaged in “massive combat operations” aimed at expelling Congolese Tutsi civilians.

The Congolese government has mounted a campaign against Rwanda. In December, while he campaigned for re-election, President Félix Tshisekedi compared his Rwandan counterpart to Adolf Hitler and accused him of expansionist aims.

In January, the Burundian president Évariste Ndayishimiye closed his border with Rwanda and accused the country of backing rebels against him. He stopped just short of calling for Kagame’s ouster.

We have been working on the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for around 20 years. This wave of violence resembles previous ones, but is also different. At the root of the M23 conflict are countries such as Rwanda and Uganda, intent on projecting power and influence into the eastern DRC, while the Congolese government seems incapable and often unwilling to stabilise its own territory. Donors and United Nations peacekeepers provide humanitarian aid, but do little to transform these dynamics.

Resolving this crisis will require less hypocrisy from foreign donors, the end of Rwandan aggression, and a more accountable Congolese government. But the hopes of a grand bargain are far off, for now. The current peace processes – a ‘Nairobi process’ for domestic negotiations and a ‘Luanda process’ for regional talks – are dead or on life support.

The upcoming elections in Rwanda (July 2024) and the US (November 2024) will likely not help cool heads or focus minds. But it is clear that ending the violence will require a new approach, one that places the lives of innocent Congolese civilians at its centre.

During the early days of his presidency, Tshisekedi’s army collaborated intensely with the Rwandan army, allowing troops to conduct operations against the FDLR on Congolese territory in 2019 and 2020. In late 2019, his government even recommended dropping charges against the M23 commanders, then in exile.

Less than three years after winning power, however, Tshisekedi changed his approach, breaking his coalition with his predecessor, Joseph Kabila, and moving to cement his position in power. He declared a state of siege in two eastern provinces, shuffled generals around in the army, and sidelined key securocrats. He also shifted gears in his regional relations.

By mid-2021, Tshisekedi had begun to privilege relations with Uganda, then a bitter rival of Rwanda. Notably, Tshisekedi gave permission to the Ugandan army to deploy somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 troops to hunt down Allied Democratic Forces rebels, an Islamist Ugandan rebellion based in the eastern DRC. Shortly after that, he did the same for the Burundian army, which had its sights on RED-Tabara, rebels based in the DRC seeking to overthrow the government of Ndayishimiye.

Rwanda suddenly felt isolated, even vulnerable, surrounded by hostile neighbours. According to United Nations investigators, it probably resumed throwing its weight behind the M23 in November 2021. It is above all these regional tensions, coupled with its goal of maintaining influence in the Congo, that pushed it to move.

Since then, the regional fault lines have shifted. Rwanda has patched up relations with Uganda, and the East African Community intervention force – Kenyan, South Sudanese, Burundian and Ugandan troops – that deployed in 2022 to help quell the violence was asked to leave just a year later. This is because their hosts saw them as dragging their feet, if not complicit with the M23. Tshisekedi, who came into office seeing east African countries as allies, has now turned southwards.

Military changes in eastern DRC

Beginning in late 2023, a new force from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) began deploying troops from South Africa, Tanzania and Malawi to take the fight to the M23, alongside the Burundian army.

Already, these forces have begun to take casualties. Two South African soldiers were killed on 14 February by a mortar strike; two others were injured when their helicopter took fire. Some sources indicate that Burundian soldiers have taken heavy losses.

The rising degree of military sophistication also raises eyebrows. The US government has accused Rwanda of deploying surface-to-air missiles, UN officials have reported armed drones striking their bases, while Tanzania has sent Soviet-era BM-21 Grad rocket launchers. The DRC has bought nine Chinese CH-4 combat drones (three of which have reportedly been shot down already).

Meanwhile, the Congolese army has partnered with private security contractors as well as with an array of local militia, collectively dubbed Wazalendo (patriots), who are poorly trained and disciplined. There are credible reports from late 2023 that, as in the previous year, they are also partnering with the Rwandan FDLR rebels.

And yet, the Congolese government has been unable to make much headway. In early February, M23 forces surrounded the lakeside town of Sake, just 30km west of the provincial capital Goma. This most recent push has displaced another 135,000 people toward Goma; there are around half a  million displaced people around the town now.

Unlike the previous M23 crisis, influential foreign actors have sent mixed signals. At the UN Security Council on 20 February, the US and France called on Rwanda to withdraw their troops from the DRC. The US has gone the furthest of all of Rwanda’s donors, sanctioning a Rwandan general, suspending all military aid, and attempting to broker a ceasefire in December 2023.

And yet, the US remains, by far, the largest donor to Rwanda, which receives the equivalent of around a third of its budget in aid. Other countries have pushed much less or not at all. While the M23 rebellion was going on, the 

British Commonwealth held its big biannual meeting in Kigali in 2022 and the UK struck a controversial asylum deal with Rwanda.

The EU gave US$22 million to support the deployment of the Rwanda Defence Force in Mozambique. On 19 February, the EU announced a deal to boost mineral exports from Rwanda.

This last piece of news caused an uproar in the DRC, touching on the popular belief that minerals are the root of the crisis. While the causes of the violence are far more complex than that, they have a point: the largest export tfrom Uganda (56% in 2021), Rwanda (23%), and Burundi (29%) in recent years has been gold, almost all of which is smuggled to their countries from the DRC.

In the long term, the DRC government will need to undertake a host of reforms to quell these cycles of conflict. They include reforming the Congolese army, a new demobilisation programme for armed groups, an economic development programme that would allow Congolese to benefit from their resources, a plan for communal reconciliation, and an end to discrimination against Kinyarwanda speakers. But none of that can happen as long as Congo’s neighbours continue to destabilise it.’

https://theconversation.com/drc-rwanda-crisis-whats-needed-to-prevent-a-regional-war-224345

Promoted by The Socialist party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN

Rwanda's shameful arms trade

Between 800,000 and 1 million people were killed over the course of 100 days in Rwanda in 1994 during the civil war.

Documents detailing Israel’s defence exports to Rwanda during the country’s civil war and genocide in the 1990s are to remain sealed, the country’s Supreme Court has ruled. Two years ago Professor Yair Auron and attorney Eitay Mack submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Israel’s defence ministry to discover the nature of any arms exports made to Rwanda between 1990 and 1995. The request was denied by the Ministry of Defence and later by the Tel Aviv District Court, upholding the argument that the release of information would undermine state security and international relations.

Mr Mack responded to the decision by calling it “mistaken and immoral,” but said that “at no point during the proceedings was there a denial that there were defence exports during the genocide,” and vowed to “continue to fight to expose the truth”.

Israel was not the only country to have supplied arms into this conflict. Egypt supplied $6million of weapons.  It included 60-mm and 82-mm mortars, 16,000 mortar shells, 122-mm D-30 howitzers, 3,000 artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades, plastic explosives, anti-personnel land-mines, and more than three million rounds of small arms ammunition. South Africa supplied automatic rifles, machine guns, mortars, grenade launchers and ammunition. In May 1993, a French arms dealer agreed to sell $12 million worth of weapons to Rwanda. On Jan. 21, 1994, in violation of the terms of the recent peace accords, a French DC-8 cargo plane landed covertly in Kigali loaded with weapons, including 90 boxes of 60mm mortars.

Africa's Non Green Revolution

One of the major strategies to reduce poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is through policies to increase and modernise agricultural production. Up to 90 per cent of people in some African countries are smallholder farmers reliant on agriculture, for whom agricultural innovation, such as using new seed varieties and cultivation techniques, holds potential benefit but also great risk.

Agricultural policies aimed at alleviating poverty in Africa could be making things worse, according to research by the University of EastAnglia (UEA). The study finds that so-called 'green revolution' policies in Rwanda - claimed by the government, international donors and organisations such as the International Monetary Fund to be successful for the economy and in alleviating poverty - may be having very negative impacts on the poorest.

In the 1960s and 70s policies supporting new seeds for marketable crops, sold at guaranteed prices, helped many farmers and transformed economies in Asian countries. These became known as "green revolutions". The new wave of green revolution policies in sub-Saharan Africa is supported by multinational companies and western donors, and is impacting the lives of tens, even hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers, according to the study's lead author Dr Neil Dawson.

The study reveals that only a relatively wealthy minority have been able to keep to enforced modernisation because the poorest farmers cannot afford the risk of taking out credit for the approved inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers. Their fears of harvesting nothing from new crops and the potential for the government to seize and reallocate their land means many choose to sell up instead.

The findings tie in with recent debates about strategies to feed the world in the face of growing populations, for example the influence of wealthy donors such as the Gates Foundation, initiative's such as the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, and multinational companies such as Monsanto in pushing agricultural modernisation in Africa. There have also been debates about small versus large farms being best to combat hunger in Africa, while struggles to maintain local control over land and food production, for example among the Oromo people in Ethiopia, have been highlighted.

Dr Dawson, a senior research associate in UEA's School of International Development, said: "Similar results are emerging from other experiments in Africa. Agricultural development certainly has the potential to help these people, but instead these policies appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural inhabitants. Many of these policies have been hailed as transformative development successes, yet that success is often claimed on the basis of weak evidence through inadequate impact assessments. And conditions facing African countries today are very different from those past successes in Asia some 40 years ago. Such policies may increase aggregate production of exportable crops, yet for many of the poorest smallholders they strip them of their main productive resource, land. This study details how these imposed changes disrupt subsistence practices, exacerbate poverty, impair local systems of trade and knowledge, and threaten land ownership. It is startling that the impacts of policies with such far-reaching impacts for such poor people are, in general, so inadequately assessed."

The research looked in-depth at Rwanda's agricultural policies and the changes impacting the wellbeing of rural inhabitants in eight villages in the country's mountainous west. Here chronic poverty is common and people depend on the food they are able to grow on their small plots. Farmers traditionally cultivated up to 60 different types of crops, planting and harvesting in overlapping cycles to prevent shortages and hunger. However, due to high population density in Rwanda's hills, agricultural policies have been imposed which force farmers to modernise with new seed varieties and chemical fertilisers, to specialise in single crops and part with "archaic" agricultural practices.

Dr Dawson and his UEA co-authors Dr Adrian Martin and Prof Thomas Sikor recommend that not only should green revolution policies be subject to much broader and more rigorous impact assessments, but that mitigation for poverty-exacerbating impacts should be specifically incorporated into such policies. In Rwanda, that means encouraging land access for the poorest and supporting traditional practices during a gradual and voluntary modernisation.

Building Homes or Selling Property?

Known as Vision City and financed by the Rwanda Social Security Board, or RSSB, the country’s pension body, the project will begin with an initial phase of 504 units, due to be completed next year. It will eventually scale up to 4,500 homes. In line with Kigali’s ambitious master plan, which seeks to transform the city of 1.3 million into a “center of urban excellence,” the site’s developers promise a community “tempered with a tinge of elegance and subtle nobility” that will be a “reference point for contemporary Rwandan living.” In addition to the houses, there will be restaurants, hotels, offices, schools, a sports complex and a Wi-Fi-connected town center. It’s all part of a citywide mixed-use strategy meant to decentralize key business and recreational activities and minimize road congestion.

There’s just one nagging detail. According to RSSB, the most affordable Phase 1 Vision City units, two-bedroom apartments, will cost 124 million Rwandan francs ($172,000), more than 100 times the city’s median annual household income. The most expensive — five-bedroom luxury villas with exteriors of marble and granite — will run close to 320 million francs.

Vision City is only one of several forthcoming Kigali housing developments, some of which, officials say, will deliver more affordable units. But the project is emblematic of a conundrum facing cities across sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s most rapidly urbanizing region. Buoyed by a decade-and-a-half of robust economic growth, Africa’s cities are home today to unprecedented concentrations of wealth. They’re also seeing endless streams of impoverished rural migrants, typically young people in search of jobs who see no viable future in the small-scale farming of their parents’ generation. These dual phenomena have led to striking degrees of inequality. According to the United Nations Human Settlements Program, U.N. Habitat, Africa’s urban areas are now collectively the most unequal in the world, having surpassed the cities of Latin America sometime in the century’s first decade.

Nowhere is this widening gap more visible than in Africa’s radically divergent standards of housing. While upscale developments, which are more attractive to investors, have sprouted on all corners of the continent, governments across the region have largely failed to spur development of modern formal housing that’s accessible to ordinary urban residents. Today, according to U.N. figures, 62 percent of Africa’s urban population lives in slums. These are typically tightly packed, haphazardly planned settlements that do not adhere to basic building standards nor allow for proper sanitation. Cities with a high prevalence of informal, single-story houses generally face extensive public-health challenges and lack the population density needed to become cost-effective hubs of manufacturing, therefore hindering job creation.

Kigali, which only became Rwanda’s capital during the country’s 1962 independence, is at an earlier stage of development than many African cities. It’s also largely free of the extreme degrees of squalor present in many of the continent’s urban areas. An estimated 80 percent of Kigali’s population lives in informal settlements, most of which were erected as the city swelled in size in the years following the 1994 genocide. But Kigali’s slums tend to be far less densely populated, and better equipped with amenities, than those of Nairobi, Kenya; Kampala, Uganda; or other major cities in the region. Kigali’s formal built environment has also blossomed. Today, modern office buildings sprout from the hilltop city center, highlighted by the 20-story blue-glass-paneled Kigali City Tower. In quiet suburbs, connected to town by roads so impeccably manicured they feel sterile, local elites and expatriates dine on Neapolitan-style pizza, sushi or steak au poivre and conduct business over cappuccinos at one of some two dozen upmarket coffee shops. Save the occasional waft of unpleasant odors — a reminder that Kigali still lacks a central sewage system — much of city would be barely recognizable to someone who left in the midst of the 1994 carnage.

Kigali’s rapid development, however, has also ushered in a host of challenges. Chief among them is the shortage of adequate housing. With a population of just over 200,000 in 1990, the city has grown sixfold in the 25 years since. That rate is expected to slow only slightly in the coming years. Kigali’s master plan, prepared in 2013 by the Singapore-based firm Surbana, projects the city will be home to 4 million people by 2040, at which point Kigali’s planners intend it to be transformed into a regional hub of finance, education, logistics and other value-added services. The housing scale-up required to support this growth is difficult to overstate. According to a 2012 City of Kigali study, the projected population increase and inadequacy of much of the city’s current housing stock mean Kigali will require 344,000 new housing units by 2022. That’s an enormous number given that the supply of new houses in the formal market has historically been fewer than 1,000 units per year. Moreover, the majority of these new houses, like those soon to be on sale at Vision City, have catered to the city’s elites. Yet as outlined in the city’s study, two-thirds of all new housing demand will come from families earning less than 200,000 francs per month.

As in many African cities, Kigali land prices are highly inflated, the result of speculation by elites who lack the range of vehicles for investment that savers have in more advanced economies. An underdeveloped financial sector also means that mortgage rates are high, typically 17 or 18 percent, putting home ownership out of reach for many otherwise well-off families. Rwanda’s limited industrial capacity and location 1,000 miles from the coast also make the cost of construction, despite an abundance of low-wage labor, abnormally high. According to Wang, the Vision City site manager, his company is forced to import 70 percent of the materials used in the project’s construction. That includes cement sourced from Uganda and Tanzania and finishing products from Turkey, Dubai and China. “If we buy materials from China, the transport to Kigali from the port will be twice the cost of transport in the sea,” he says. “Materials are the No. 1 expense.”

Kigali officials say the city’s first affordable formal housing units are currently in the pipeline. According to Fidele Ndayisaba, Kigali’s mayor, construction on several new mass housing developments is due to begin in the next few years. Unlike high-end projects such as Vision City, which typically generate adequate returns without the need for state support, these developments will benefit from government subsidies for roads, water, electricity, sanitation and other basic infrastructure. The idea, Ndayisaba explained, is that this will attract reluctant investors. The first of these projects, a 600-unit “low-cost” development known as Batsinda Estate, to be financed by RSSB and built by the military-affiliated contractor Horizon, will soon be under construction on Kigali’s northern outskirts. According to Daniel Ufitikirezi, the pension body’s director general, Batsinda will be an “experimental project” meant to prove the viability of the concept and help lure private-sector interest in similar state-supported projects in the future. Units, most of them three-bedroom apartments, will cost approximately 20 million to 25 million francs. RSSB, Ufitikirezi said, will help connect buyers to sources of finance, which, in theory, will offer more-favorable lending terms than are currently available on the market. “We wanted something that would be affordable to the majority of our own employees,” he said.

Even if Batsinda proves to be a viable model, however, such prices are still far beyond the means of most Kigali residents. Despite economic growth that’s averaged 8 percent per year over the last decade, only a minority of Rwandans have income beyond what’s required for day-to-day survival. Today, in many informal settlements, rental units are available for as little as 15,000 francs per month — a segment of the market that is only expected to grow with continued migration from the countryside. One explicit goal of the master plan, however, is to move toward a slum-free city, eradicating these settlements over time though a mix of demolition, upgrading and the unfurling of the planned mass-housing strategy. To many critics, including Tomà Berlanda, director of the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town and co-founder of the Kigali-based studio Active Social Architecture, these realities simply do not match up. Although slum life may be far from ideal, he argues, authorities’ insistence on a top-down push toward formal housing risks causing unnecessary hardship for the city’s-lower income residents while increasingly excluding them from much of the urban fabric. “My sense is that there is a kind of naïve optimism that what is affordable is actually way too expensive for the average population,” Berlanda said. “Kigali is still richer than other parts of the country, but by and large it’s poor. And that message is difficult to discuss with government, because it’s not something that Rwanda wants to portray.”

Past slum eradication efforts, including the razing of hundreds of homes near the city center to make room for yet-unrealized commercial development, have only made life more difficult for the majority of affected residents. According to a 2014 study by Vincent Manirakiza, a Rwandan researcher at Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain, families removed from the city’s informal settlements have typically had “little chance to reclaim their former standards of living.” That’s mainly because compensation, which is guaranteed under Rwandan law, is “often too low, not fairly calculated, and only paid after lengthy delays,” he writes in the study. Manirakiza’s research, based on interviews with members of 360 Kigali households, found that only 20 percent of relocated families had managed to build “improved homesteads.” Sixty-five percent, meanwhile, had purchased houses in other informal settlements. Others were pushed to peripheral areas, in many cases far from employment opportunities. Residents seeking to construct new informal houses, his paper notes, also face daunting bureaucratic challenges due to strict regulations intended to limit informal development. Often, residents are compelled to undertake “illicit” building strategies. These include the construction of small rooms at night or during the weekend, when inspectors are absent, or the building of new homes based on permits for renovations. Such structures are often discovered — and demolished. “So many houses built like this are destroyed,” Manirakiza said. “It’s very risky.”

From here 

The Israeli Cash-for-Africans Deal

Israel and Rwanda confirmed reports that the African country was working to finalize a multimillion dollar deal with Jerusalem to take on some of Israel's African immigrants and asylum seekers. Rwanda's President Paul Kagame said a deal was in the works and Israel's Interior Minister Gilad Erdan confirmed the report. Both however failed to disclose exact details but the agreement between Israel and Rwanda will see Israel deport hundreds of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers to both Rwanda and Uganda. In return, Rwanda will receive millions of dollars in grants and sales from Israel.

Israel's Interior Minister Gilad Erdan explained that the individual asylum seekers will be given a flight and $3,500 “ no small sum in these countries.” He added.  “They will be given visas and will be allowed to work," he said. Rwanda is a poor rural country with about 90% of the population engaged in (mainly subsistence) agriculture with 45% of the population under the poverty line. The unemployment rate in Rwanda was 28.6% female and 14% males in 2012.

Israel’s Interior Ministry promises that:

“When you arrive at the third country, people will receive you at the airport and give you information about life in the country and other important information. The Sudanese and Eritreans who left with the help of the Israeli government to the third country said they are living a good life, studying English and have a good work. According to them, some have opened businesses and are living well,” the Authority’s notice to the African asylum seekers continued, adding that the asylum seekers would stay in a hotel for their first night in their new unnamed country and will each be given a visa there.”

However, the truth is that the reception in their new country was nothing like what Israel promised it would be and asylum seekers felt abandoned and were now alone in yet another strange country with no one to help them. 

As Israel celebrates the Passover, the treatment of political asylums seekers is passing-the-buck.

Rwanda -the Social Inequality Persists

Whilst the Economist in 2011 ranked Rwanda 10th on the world’s fastest growing economies list in the world, the African Development Bank (AfDB) ranked Rwanda 3rd smallest middle class economy among 44 African countries surveyed.

The AfDB reported that only 2.6% of the Rwandan population is categorised as stable middle class with the capacity to spend between US$4 – US$20 per day. Considering its high record of economic growth over the last two decades, one would have expected that Rwanda has developed a burgeoning middle class. This has not been the case. Indeed only 82% of the country’s population continues to live on less than US$ 2 per day. Moreover, the seemingly poverty reduction achieved in Rwanda is based on the country’s poverty line not on the international poverty threshold of US$1.25 per day. Had the former been used to measure poverty level in Rwanda, 63% of the country’s population would still be counted as living well below the poverty line in contrast to the official and widely reported figure of poverty level of 44.9%.

Not only is the average household income very low, but it is also unequally distributed in Rwanda. A recent joint report by The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and African Union (AU), revealed that inequality undermines effort to reduce poverty in Africa. The poorest 20% of the population often accounts for less than 10% of total income while the richest 10% controls from quarter to half of it or more in Africa.

The report mentions Rwanda among the few African countries where the richest 10% earn more than 40% of total income and the poorest 10% earn between 3 and 5%.

Rwanda’s Gini index1 level is 0.49 and remains the highest among the East African Community2 (EAC) member states.

The Human Development level of Rwanda is affected by low and unequal distributed income household in the country. This is because the level of household income determines the living standard of that household. A 2014 UNDP report shows that although Rwanda’s overall human development index (HDI) is increasing, the country loses 33.2% of its HDI due to inequality in life expectancy, education and income.

Unequal distribution of land among households across the country is a significant cause of the low and unequal average household income in Rwanda. The majority of Rwandans who live in rural areas earn their income through selling their harvest from their cultivated land or through working as labourers on the land. However, there is an increasing inequality in land distribution in Rwanda according to a study in 2011 which found that more than a quarter of agricultural households cultivated less than 0.2 hectare in 2006. This happened despite the existence of land holdings of hundreds or even thousands of hectares in Rwanda. Interestingly, most of these lands are held by government and military representatives, other members of the urban elite and foreign investors. Land is increasingly becoming a precious asset in Rwanda. Persistent scarcity and unequal distribution of land make it a contentious asset in the country.

The increasing inequality of land distribution is intertwined with land rights inequality among households across the country. A study of land rights inequalities in Rwanda of 2011 revealed that households headed by women (35 % of all households in Rwanda are headed by women) or young persons, households who have been displaced due to conflict or people who resettled in village settlements referred to as “imidugudu” have weaker land rights. Therefore, it is not surprising that stakeholders with more influence and resources exploit inequalities in land rights and acquire lands from the vulnerable and the poor. Such land transfers from the majority that are vulnerable and poor towards the few that are rich works to the detriment of Rwanda’s economic and human development. This is so because it expands income inequalities within the country.

Young people who have not access to quality education and gained relevant qualifications will be left behind and they are the majority. With noted low and unequal household income, only few can afford private schooling in Rwanda or abroad which offer better quality education than the public schools available in the country. A global report by UNESCO published in 2012 reads in reference to Rwanda that “ it is not clear that ICT and other services, which tend not to create as many jobs as other types of industry, can help children of poor parents escape from poverty…”

http://www.jambonews.net/en/news/20150223-rwanda-looking-beyond-the-economic-growth-numbers-part-one/

The MisLeaders of Africa

Until last year, Rwanda’s GDP averaged 8 per cent, and GDP per capita, when adjusted for purchasing power, grew from $575 in 1995 to $1,170 in 2012. The statistics have been so impressive that many in the West have called upon other African leaders to emulate President Paul Kagame’s and Rwanda’s approach. Kagame is loved and admired at home. His direct style of leadership has won him accolades, and he has got Rwanda out of the abyss.

But there is another side to this story. Under Kagame, Rwanda has become one of the most tightly controlled societies in Africa, where human rights and freedom of speech are severely curtailed. In 2010, when Kagame won 93 per cent of the vote, the main opposition parties were excluded from the ballot. Dissent from journalists, political opponents or even his own lieutenants has been fiercely dealt with. Former comrades who fell out with him have been assassinated, most recently Patrick Karegeya, a former intelligence chief, who was killed in January. Rwanda’s human rights record is so bad that it ranks alongside that of Syria and Eritrea. Yet this is a country that continues to be held up as a prime example of how donor support can work, and Kagame is hailed as a visionary.

President Kagame’s argument has always been that he saved Rwanda from oblivion when everyone else, including the international community, was hopelessly looking on. Granted, the genocide stopped after the RPF’s military victory, but the real question is whether putting an end to genocide was the RPF’s main objective. The memoirs of General Roméo Antonius Dallaire, the man in charge of the UN forces in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, for example, suggest that this was never the case. The Gersony Report detailed findings by experts contracted by the UN, who identified a pattern of massacres by the RPF during and after their military victory. The British and the Americans were instrumental in preventing the Gersony Report from being published, over fears its findings might rock the boat of a fragile new government.

From here

Chinese Construction Tenders Beat The Local Rwandans'

Chinese investment in Africa has increased at an unprecedented level during the past two decades. Known as the ‘weapon of mass construction’, China’s footprint in Rwanda is no exception. Still recovering from the devastating 1994 genocide, the country urgently requires infrastructural investment to rebuild what was destroyed, and develop the future. The myth, however, looms larger than the reality Vivian Kayitesi, the head of investment promotion at Rwanda Development Board (RDB) noted: ‘The major area of Chinese investment in Rwanda are in construction and real estate, hotels and ICT’. She went on to say that since 1994 China’s investments stand at almost $200 millions out of more than $5 billion, which is less that 4% of total investments. Projects included the construction of high profile ‘landmarks’ such as the Marriot Hotel at $60 million (2010) through joint ventures, as well as Chinese-owned initiatives such as BCEG ($10m, 2009).

But not all construction is good construction.

During the past year, nightclubs and cafes were developed using allegedly sub-standards materials. In 2012, Rwandan authorities claimed that 84 hazardous cases were recorded; and 120 cases in 2013. According to statistics from the Rwanda National Police Fire and Rescue Unit, 33 cases were very ‘serious’, largely occurring in Kigali, due to short-circuiting. ‘Investigations indicate that electricity installations in these affected facilities were either sub-standard, outdated or were badly installed.’


Local construction companies, we learned, feel they cannot compete. ‘Most of big building and roads construction projects are being executed by Chinese contractors,’ said a local engineer who requested anonymity. He explained that Chinese companies win big tenders due to a combination of low cost of construction backed by vast technical and financial capacities. ‘They offer low prices because they import most materials and equipment from China from partners who supply them with materials at cheap prices,’ claimed the engineer.

In a government tender to construct a hangar at Kigali International airport, China Star won the tender, bidding $1,2m. Two other local companies, Real Constructors Ltd and Horizon Construction ,a subsidiary of Horizon Group, had respectively bid $1.8 m and $3m.

Yet, Chinese construction companies have also been accused of malpractice in tender processes. A supervisory engineer, working at Real Constructors Ltd in Kigali said that cheapened project value was due to cost-cutting measures that impacted the integrity and quality of projects.

 In the middle of Kigali, Chinese labour is busy at work, building shopping malls and hotels. Kigali Marriot Hotel is one of the projects awarded to a Chinese company. The US-based hotel chain announced in March 2011 a partnership it entered with the government of Rwanda and New Century Development Limited from China — currently constructing the hotel at former Jali Club in Kigali — to manage the over $60m facility to open in December 2014.

An accountant at the site who requested anonymity said that the bulk of labour and materials used were imported from China, except for cement sourced from Uganda and a few local materials such as wood and bricks. It is a must to source the latter locally because of they are cheap at 10 RWF a brick and it would be expensive to transport them in case they could be sourced from China.

A local engineer, Kazungu Fabrice, with more than 20 years of experience, said that even though they are touring the site he is not confident that his company will win that tender.

It is difficult to compete with Chinese companies accessing low cost capital. The origin of their financial capacities is their home banks which provide them with loans at a very low rate of interest. Wei Heng, the operations manager at China star construction Co. Ltd, said that his company access loan to Chinese banks at 8%. Local companies struggle to get loans and once they get them, high rates of interest that stands between 17 to 18% in Rwanda become a stumbling block.

 As another local engineer informed us, the problem with Chinese companies is that they use all means possible to win tenders, even bribery. ‘During execution, they can bribe a supervisor to use cheap sub-standard materials or equipment. He said that it is hard to supervise Chinese companies to comply with the terms of tenders because they want to use sub-standards materials that were not prescribed in the terms of tenders they won in order to maximize profits.’

Rwanda Bureau of Standards, RBS, the government institution charged with developing standards and enforcement, claimed that the majority of low standards products originate from China. Philip Nzayire, head of quality assurance at RBS, said recent inspections of construction materials entering Rwanda included low-standards electrical installation cables, roofing sheets and other goods. RBS successfully sought to re-export the goods back to their country of origin.

What happens when low quality materials are not identified in time? Well, they find their way into public buildings such as nightclubs and restaurants that have caught fire. Literally.


Taken from here

Re-Writing History in Rwanda

In Rwanda, Hutu nationalists had come to power in the “Hutu rebellion” of 1959–1962, during the last years of Belgian colonial rule. They overthrew the traditional Tutsi kingdom and its ruling class, resulting in the death of around 20,000 Tutsi and the exile of another 200,000 to neighboring countries. Independence from Belgium in 1962 marked the establishment of a Hutu-led Rwandan government. The RPF was formed in 1985 by Tutsi nationalist exiles who demanded the right to return to their homeland. They attacked Rwanda from neighboring Uganda in 1990; though the invasion failed, Hutu fear of losing power paved the way for mass murder four years later. Pro-genocide propaganda ran in newspapers, dominated public gatherings, and was broadcast across the country.  On Aug. 3, 1993, when President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda signed the Arusha Accords, which would have weakened the Hutu hold on Rwanda. Eight months later he was dead. On April 6, 1994  Habyarimana  was returning from a summit in Tanzania when a surface-to-air missile shot his plane out of the sky over Rwanda's capital city of Kigali. Hutu extremists in the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development blamed the Tutsis for the assassination. From April to July of 1994, upwards of perhaps one million Tutsi were massacred by Hutu-led gangs and the country’s army. It ended when Tutsi exiles in Uganda, organized in the RPF, invaded the country, marched into the capital of Kigali, and defeated the perpetrators of the genocide. Some two million of the genocidaires, known as the Interahamwe, fled into the vast rain forests of the eastern Congo, from where they have periodically launched attacks into Rwanda. Since 1994, the RPF-led government has been dominated by a small clique of anglophone Tutsi who had been in exile in Uganda, and who blamed Belgium and France for having supported Hutu rule.

In 2010 Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda since 2000 and candidate of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), won a second term with 93 per cent of the vote, in an election marred by repression, murder, and lack of credible competition. Some potential opponents were disqualified or failed to enter the race, because they would have been charged with “divisionism.” References to “Hutu” and Tutsi” in public discourse is a crime, as part of  “unification” policies designed to create a national identity. Offenders can be prosecuted, newspapers shut down, and political parties banned. The government insists that all of the country’s citizens are simply “Rwandans.”

The history books have been rewritten to stress the “harmony” of its pre-colonial past. This form of what the sociologist Stanley Cohen, in his book “States of Denial,” refers to as “social amnesia,” is an attempt to allow the country to separate itself from its horrific past. According to the new historical discourse, prior to the arrival of, first the German, then Belgian, colonialists, the labels “Hutu” and “Tutsi” referred to wealth and social status, not “essentialist” ethnic groups, and hence they were fluid. Insofar as there was inequality between the royal court and ordinary Rwandans, both Hutu and Tutsi were equally victims of subjugation.  It is now claimed that it was the Europeans who introduced the “Hamitic hypothesis” — the idea that the Tutsi were actually immigrants to Rwanda from Ethiopia, whereas the “Bantu” Hutu were indigenous to the region. The Europeans thus elevated the Tutsi as the supposedly “superior race,” breeding resentment among the Hutu. They were the creators of ethnic dissension.

After 1934, the Belgian government introduced an identity card system, which identified each person as either a Hutu, Tutsi or Twa (a very minor ethnic group). And by having defined the Tutsi as more recent arrivals, the colonialists also allowed Hutu nationalists to argue that the country should be restored to its “original” owners. With independence, Tutsi could thus be portrayed as a foreign minority who were enemies of the country.

Hence it’s necessary to eliminate the colonial discourse about ethnic identity — which, by happy coincidence, also obscures the predominance of the minority Tutsi, now some 15 per cent of Rwanda’s 12 million people, and allows them to run the state without official reference to that fact, even though everyone knows it!

From here 

No Choice

In Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya the opposition had either been totally smashed or is rotting in jail. Alternatively, it has ceased to exist. Elections are fights between corrupt politician A and corrupt politician B, both campaigning along ethnic lines and on behalf of their vested mercantile interests who ‘compete’ over who will be the one to get his snout into the trough at the end of the ‘democratic electoral process’. Politicians do not use the rhetoric ‘Socialism or death!’ (whatever they take to mean socialism to be.) Nor do they campaign on the promise of ‘Let’s liberate our people from misery!’ The accepted political agenda is the more modest: ‘It’s our time to eat!’


In the recent Kenyan elections, not one single Presidential candidate dared to raise the essential issues exposing the neo-colonialism of the muli-nationals. Nor did any candidate protest being a military proxy for other powers.
In Rwanda, where the regime is co-responsible for the loss of millions of human lives in DR Congo, there is, at least, no charade about democracy. It is courted by ‘world leaders’ like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. The most prominent opposition leader in Rwanda, Ms. Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, is in prison. Her name much lesser known than Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi when she was in detention. Ingabire considers herself relatively lucky because many other Rwandan opposition figures have already been murdered.
Museveni, the President of Uganda, has held the reigns of power since 1986. He wears a cowboy hat which is indicative of his personality - a cowboy. Brutal civil war is raging in the north of Uganda. There, according to countless reports, the military are ordered, periodically, to rape but that is not preventing the West using Ugandan troops as ‘peacekeepers’ all over Africa, particularly where their interests lie. He is another loyal mercenary of the West in the region, Uganda is deeply involved in Somalia, Sudan and above all, in DR Congo. For the West, Museveni has been a very effective ‘buffer’ against Sudan. He is, of course, very useful for US interests in DR Congo. US gives Uganda money and they give them the bodies that they want removed.
Museveni hates gays, and he occasionally threatens them with capital punishment. To give the credit where it is due, there actually is, at least, some opposition in Uganda. Its members periodically protest; they write books and articles, arrange demonstrations, and even end up in prisons. But they too are also very careful not to alienate the West.

In these African countries, as elsewhere, there is very little talk about alternative political and economic systems.

Traditional is not always the best

Malnutrition remains a key cause of numerous diseases that have led to death of children under the age of five in Rwanda and herbalists have been blamed for this. Most rural residents in Eastern Province, particularly in Kirehe and Ngoma districts, prefer herbs from traditional healers to drugs prescribed at health centres.

Alice Muhongerwa, the provincial coordinator National Women Council (CNF), the persistence of malnutrition in the area was mainly due to traditional healers. "In Kirehe, it is a sad reality...malnutrition has prevailed because of herbalists. Parents keep on feeding their children on herbs instead of recommended foods like beans and milk, which they do not lack by the way. A typical example is that of Gahara Sector which is the richest in food production and has the highest cases of malnutrition. Ignorance is still a problem,"

Source

Congo's pain

What is happening in eastern DR Congo is not a civil war, but continuation of a 16-year aggression by the country’s two neighbours. 

The African region which includes Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo has been in virtually a state of war since 1995; that is at war with each other. This has engaged the national armies, foreign armies, militias, ‘civil defence’ groups, looters, pillagers, child abductors and abusers, rapists, arsonists and murderers. One can add to this list of villains and plunderers the United Nations so-called Peacekeepers. 5 million Congolese have died. Many of these deaths were due to starvation or disease that resulted from the war, as well as from summary executions and capture by one or more of a group of irregular marauding bands. Millions more had become internally displaced or had sought asylum in neighbouring countries.These wars, centred mainly in eastern Congo (North and South Kivu and Maniema) have involved nine African nations and directly affected the lives of 50 million Congolese.

Initially these wars and the pillaging associated with them derived from the efforts to profit from the valuable mineral resources of the Eastern Congo, coltan and diamonds. Now the current targets of their looting – the oil and gas industries. In 2009 Heritage Oil discovered oil in Uganda. The oil and gas industries in East and Central Africa have been the world’s most important area of exploration in the last nine years. Africa is the main continent in the world with frequent and substantial new findings of oil and gas. A joint report by the African Development Bank, African Union and the African Development Fund observed that oil reserves in Africa grew by over 25 per cent, while gas has grown by over 100 per cent since the late 1980s. There have been major finds in Kenya and has become the latest African country to join the great African oil boom. In May 2012 Kenya announced its second profitable oil discovery in two months; and large oil deposit in the remote northern Turkana region.

Unfortunately the good fortune has only brought war and destruction in its wake. The Uganda finds in the Albert Graven were located in the seabed of Lake Albert. The border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (‘DRC’) runs down the middle of the lake. Uganda wants all the oil and has been funding the various insurgencies to control all the oil and gas of the lake. Perhaps the most contentious and conflicted result of the oil and gas finds in the region has been the Vanoil of Canada’s success in finding oil beneath Lake Kivu. Vanoil holds exclusive exploration rights to the 1,631 sq. km oil and gas concession in the north-western part of Rwanda better known as the East Kivu Graben. The Kivu Graben area is part of the great East African Rift System and is approximately 90 kilometres wide and 200 kilometres long. The Graben straddles both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is the Southern extension of the Albertine Graben in Uganda where major oil discoveries have been made by Tullow Oil and Heritage Oil.

In March 2007, when the governments of the DRC and Rwanda met with the assembled lake experts and developers at Gisenyi on the northern shore of Lake Kivu, an initiative commenced to define the rules and regulations of safe and environmentally sound exploitation of Lake Kivu's gas reserves. Rwanda seeks to alter this by taking control of the other side of the lake. It has recently taken over Goma through its M23 surrogates and plans to exploit the oil reserves with Vanoil and to seek a competent gas partner for the buried methane. The M23 rebels have announced that they were going to take over the entire DRC. The root of much of the difficulties lies with the fact that the current DRC President, Joseph Kabila is weak, vacillating and bereft of the support of a united nation. That weakness has alienated many in the national army. The countries which supported the DRC in its last war against the Ugandan and Rwandan invaders may well intervene again. The citizens of the DRC have suffered grievously. Their future looks no better.

From here

TOO POOR TO DIE

In Rwanda, where 60% of people live below the poverty line and land is scarce, burying the dead comes at too high a price. A new bill before Parliament would introduce cremation, a totally new custom in this country.

 The prices of tombs in Rwandan cemeteries are exorbitant for the poor seeking to bury their dead. “In Kigali and elsewhere, people sometimes have to abandon their dying family members out of fear that they won’t have enough to pay for the funeral,” says a villager. In Rusororo, a town 20 kilometers from Kigali, a funeral costs from $25 to $1,500 depending on the size of the grave and the materials used.

 Moreover, cemeteries take up space in arable lands that aren’t cultivated. Yet, the country has over 390 inhabitants per square kilometer -- over 800 in some areas -- and farms are getting smaller and smaller (an average 0.2 hectares in the more populous north of the country). But farmers have to wait at least 20 years to cultivate cemeteries once they have stopped being used. “Some families believe the land where their family members are buried is sacred, and prefer to keep it uncultivated,” explains an Eastern villager.

  “You can easily tell the rich from the poor in a cemetery,” says a Gasabo villager. The tombs of the rich are built durably, with tiled walls and written inscriptions for identification.

Tony Blair - the new Cecil Rhodes?

Tony Blair has defended his close personal and working relationship with one of Africa's most controversial leaders, Rwanda's Paul Kagame, even as foreign governments distance themselves over accusations of war crimes and the suppression of political opposition. A UN report that accused Kagame's forces of war crimes, including possibly genocide, in the east of Democratic Republic of Congo, and charges that the Rwandan government is increasingly authoritarian after the opposition was effectively barred from challenging Kagame in August's presidential election. The White House has criticised Kagame for the suppression of political activity and made clear that it does not regard Rwanda as democratic. The UN report in October accused Rwanda of war crimes in eastern Congo, including the wholesale massacres of Hutu civilians and the plunder of minerals which tarnished Kagame's image.
Kagame has denied the accusations but human rights groups have been documenting such crimes for years. His re-election in August was with 93% of the vote, after his main rivals were jailed and barred from running after being accused of stirring up ethnic hatred between Hutus and Tutsis after what Human Rights Watch called "persistent harassment and intimidation" of their parties by the government, and the curbing of criticism in the press including the banning of two newspapers. The deputy leader of a third opposition party was murdered in July.

Blair has described Rwanda's president as a "visionary leader" and a friend after making the central African country the focus of the work of his charity, the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI). The initiative includes placing officials hired by Blair in Rwanda's institutions such as the president's policy unit, the prime minister's office, the cabinet secretariat and the development board to assist with administration. Blair said allowances have to be made for the consequences of the 1994 genocide of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and suggested that Kagame's economic record outweighed other concerns. Blair told the Guardian: "I'm a believer in and a supporter of Paul Kagame. I don't ignore all those criticisms, having said that. But I do think you've got to recognise that Rwanda is an immensely special case because of the genocide. Secondly, you can't argue with the fact that Rwanda has gone on a remarkable path of development. Every time I visit Kigali and the surrounding areas you can just see the changes being made in the country."

AGI, a registered charity, launched its first project in Rwanda in 2008 and involves placing Blair's staff in high government offices, such as presidential policy units and cabinet secretariats, to build "effective governance" through "a combination of on-the-job coaching and support and formal and informal training".

"There is a clear sense by this generation of African leaders that the future of Africa is in their hands and they're not interested in a debate about the colonial past," he said. "They're very much eager to get their countries sorted out. They're perfectly willing to listen and learn from the outside. They're also keen on bringing in quality private sector investment and that is the way you build a country."

But the initiative is open to criticism for promoting a model that pressures African states to again surrender political and economic autonomy.

"You've got to make a judgment about this, and my judgment, rightly or wrongly, is that he [Kagame] is somebody who does want to do his best for his country, is doing his best for his country..." Blair stated.

Socialist Banner is fully aware of Blair's sense of good judgement and his avowed declarations of good intent - such as the invasion of Iraq !

French War Criminals

France played an active role in the 1994 Rwanda genocide, a report unveiled Tuesday by the Rwandan government said, naming French political and military officials it says should be prosecuted. The 500-page report alleged that France was aware of preparations for the genocide, contributed to planning the massacres and actively took part in the killing.

It named former French prime minister Edouard Balladur, former foreign minister Alain Juppe and then-president Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996, among 13 French politicians accused of playing a role in the massacres.Dominique de Villepin, who was then Juppe's top aide and later became prime minister, was also among those listed in the Rwandan report.The report names 20 military officials as being responsible.

"French forces directly assassinated Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis... French forces committed several rapes on Tutsi survivors," said a justice ministry statement

"The overwhelming nature of France's support to the Rwandan policy of massacres... shows the complicity of French political and military officials in the preparation and execution of the genocide," the statement said.

The military and humanitarian Operation Turquoise carried out by the French in Rwanda between June and August 1994 abetted the killings perpetrated by militia.

The 1994 genocide in the central African nation left around 800,000 people -- mainly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus -- dead, according to the United Nations.

Socialist Banner has previously reported on ther blood stained hands of Mitterand and more background to the actual events of the genocide here

The blood-stained hand of Mitterand

Documents in today's Le Monde for the first time confirms long-held suspicions against France's president François Mitterrand supported the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide despite clear warnings that mass killings of the Tutsi population were being orchestrated , according to The Independent .

Previously secret diplomatic telegrams and government memos also suggest the late French president was obsessed with the danger of "Anglo-Saxon" influence gripping Rwanda. In three months from April 1994, at least a million Rwandans - mainly Tutsis - were systematically slaughtered in killings engineered by the Hutu regime to exterminate its ethnic rivals and repel the Uganda-trained Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The documents, obtained by lawyers for six Tutsi survivors who are bringing a case against France for "complicity with genocide'' at the Paris Army Tribunal, suggest the late President Mitterrand's support for the Hutus was informed by an obsession with maintaining a French foothold in the region. One of the lawyers, Antoine Compte, said France was aware of the potential danger of its support for the pre-genocide Rwandan government.
"Massacres on an ethnic basis were going on and we have evidence that France knew this from at least January 1993. The French military executed the orders of French politicians. The motivation was an obsession with the idea of an Anglo-Saxon plot to oust France from the region."

Among the evidence to suggest France was informed of the mounting genocide is a diplomatic telegram from October 1990 in which the French defence attaché in the Rwandan capital Kigali alerts Paris of the "growing number of arbitrary arrests of Tutsis or people close to them". The cable adds: "It is to be feared that [it could] degenerate into an ethnic war.''

Another diplomatic memo, quotes a Rwandan informant as saying that thepresident of the country, Juvenal Habyarimana, had suggested "proceeding with a systematic genocide using, if necessary, the army''.

Even though Rwanda was Belgian for most of the colonial era, France took a strong interest in the country after independence, seeing it as a bulwark against the powerful influences of English-speaking Uganda and Kenya. In the 1980s, French involvement in Rwanda was limited to two dozen military advisers. But when the Uganda-based RPF began launching attacks against President Habyarimana's regime in 1990, France sent arms and troops. Critics claim French troops stood by and watched as Rwandan Hutu soldiers massacred Tutsi civilians.

See Rwanda Genocide and also La Francafrique

The Rwanda Genocide

The instability that has plagued the Great Lakes region has always been distorted by both the perpetrators of the crisis and ignorant political analysts. This article presents a socialist viewpoint of the problem .

As Rwandans prepare to mark a decade of the genocide that was imposed on them by a tiny section of the international community, the real perpetrators of the massacre are still making frantic efforts to conceal the truth. France is leading the crusade with the tacit backing of the other world powers through their ubiquitous media. The strategy, as is always the case, is to reduce the whole affair to insignificant issues. In this present attempt, they are doing all they can to demonise the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame as the sole cause of the genocide. He is said to have been the one who ordered the shooting down of the late President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane - an act that sparked off the killings. But what is never mentioned is that the massacre was so well organised that it could not have occurred just because someone shot down an aircraft or a president was murdered. The genocide was a premeditated, not a spontaneous, act and therefore its cause cannot be reduced to what the world is being told.
The real reason for the genocide cannot be properly understood until a broader perspective of the scenario is appraised. The killings that took place in Rwanda are only one aspect of a much wider design. It was only a link in a long chain of activities engulfing the whole of the Great Lakes region. Here is an area generously endowed with huge deposits of minerals and other natural resources. It is perhaps the richest area on the continent where one can boast of immense quantities of gold, diamond, coltan, copper, cobalt, zinc, oil, gas, and such forest resources as timber, coffee, etc.

To have easy and cheap access to these vital resources, the capitalist companies in Europe and America need not only to have puppet regimes in power but they also need to keep the region in perpetual turmoil and instability. This was the reason for Patrice Lumumba’s assassination way back in the sixties by Mobutu and that under the supervision of the western powers and their United Nations. It was also for the same reason that Yoweri Museveni was sponsored to wage the bush war, which culminated in the overthrow of Milton Obote in the eighties. The same goes for Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Army, whose war was bankrolled by American and European governments on behalf of big business interests. Museveni and Kagame were carefully hand picked, groomed and helped to ascend the throne and then thrown into D R Congo to do the dirty work of looting for the western companies. There is a staggering wealth of evidence to prove the active involvement of the UA, UK, France and Belgium and corporate business interests based and or owned by members of these countries. Uganda and Rwanda prop up (to this day) almost all the rebel groups in DR Congo from funds donated by their masters abroad.

THE UNITED NATIONS

It is important to understand the role of the UN in the Great Lakes region. But first of all it is worth noting that the UN is kept alive through the contributions of the Western capitalists through their governments. And since it is the one who pays the piper who calls the tune, it is not strange to realise that the UN is at the beck and call of the capitalists. A typical example is seen in the recent refusal by American capitalism to listen to the UN and to then go ahead and attack Iraq. Long before the massacre in Rwanda in 1994, the UN was fully aware of the intention and plans of the perpetrators of the genocide and refused to act. In fact it even deliberately smothered all information on the impending atrocity. Kofi Annan was then in charge of peace keeping operations at the UN. But as if that was not enough, the UN went ahead, against expert advice, to dissolve the small military mission in Rwanda (MINUAR) during the peak of the mayhem.

That the UN was merely obeying its master’s directives can be deduced from the actions and words of Kofi Annan (now the Sec. General) almost a decade after his criminal and inhuman action and inaction. In 2003, he removed Carla Del Ponte from her post as prosecutor at the Rwanda Genocide Court. The reason? She was treading on dangerous ground: she had decided not only to carry out her duty of prosecuting suspects but also to look into the part played by Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Army in the massacres. This would have exposed real forces behind the killings – the Western capitalists. Naturally, Annan was ordered to act swiftly. He quickly put the matter before the UN Security Council, which unanimously voted her out of Rwanda. Another proof of guilt is seen in his belated apology to the people of Rwanda on Monday 29th March 2004.

THE CAPITALIST MEDIA

The capitalist controlled media also played and continue to play its historically determined role in this sordid affair. Corporate journalists initially maintained an irreverent silence on the genocide, but when it was no longer possible for them to do so they were at their negative best on their reports on the mayhem. They completely reduced the obvious capitalist war to a trivial tribal conflict. Their masters dictated to them what to report in return for the cash. They refused to acknowledge the fact that what was happening in Rwanda was the killing of innocent, helpless and poor Tutsis and Hutus by a combined force of trained RPA militia and Rwandan government soldiers. These militia and soldiers were themselves forced to kill because they were fed deceit and false propaganda. They had absolutely nothing to gain from the killings. In fact those they were deceived to kill were actually their relatives, neighbours and friends with whom they previously lived together in peace and harmony. This fact was so palpably glaring that the media found it hard to neglect and so they had to couch it in such terms as "Hutus killing Tutsis and moderate Hutus". Moderate, of course, being a misnomer for those who had realised the hollowness in the reasons advanced for the internecine war and refused to take in it.

The fact of the matter is that there has always been a class conflict in that society, just as in any other society. In Rwanda, it was reflected in the antagonistic relations between a minority of feudal lords, mostly Tutsi, and the commoners comprising both Tutsi and Hutu. These feudal lords lived off the toil of the mass of peasants. This generated, however latent, resentment for the ruling classes by the masses. And as is usually the case, the poor masses, in times of hardship, ignorantly vented their anger on their fellow sufferers instead of on the exploiting tribal rulers. In Rwanda this confused situation was further aggravate by the colonialists through their policy of divide and rule. A pernicious wedge was driven between the Tutsi, who were accorded a more privileged status, and the Hutu. Then, with the attainment of the so-called independence and the subsequent introduction of the World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies with its attendant biting effects, the animosity and mutual hatred heightened. Thus, the society became an ethnic time bomb ready to explode at the least prompting. And that was exactly the situation that the leadership of both groups exploited.

It follows from the above that at the heart of the Rwandan genocide and indeed the other massacres going on in the whole of the Great Lakes region is the quest for raw materials. It was the same search for raw materials that brought the Europeans to Africa and the resultant colonialism. These raw materials are not needed for their own sake; they are the means to super profits that constitute the ultimate aim of the capitalists. Thus, profit is the underlying cause of all our woes. The driving force of capitalism is profit and there is no way the world’s people can do away with killings, war, hunger, suffering, disease, etc until that profit system is done away with.

[Reference: New African, November & December 2003, Congo Panorama – A pamphlet of the Congo Solidarity Campaign.]

From African Socialist 7

La Francafrique

In previous blogs we have highlighted the roles of Chins and The united Staes in the politics and economics of Africa and in case we are criticised for not mentioning the other nations exploiting the continent , we have decided to highlight the French on this occasion

French businesses have longstanding operations in Africa. The continent accounts for 5 percent of France’s exports. Though France has diversified its sources of raw materials, Africa remains an important supplier of oil and metals. There are 240,000 French nationals living in Africa.

About 6000 French troops engaged in peacekeeping operations are deployed in Africa in both military and advisory capacities, according to the French Ministry of Defense. There are three main French bases in Africa. The largest is at Djibouti , with smaller forces at Dakar in Senegal and Libreville in Gabon. Their purpose is to promote regional security, though the base in Djibouti allows France to exercise a measure of military influence in the Middle East. (Also in Djibouti are about 1,500 American personnel stationed at the former French base Le Monier since 2003.)

Chad. France fields some 1,200 troops in Chad to protect French nationals, support the government of President Idriss Deby Itno, and provide logistical and intelligence support to Chadian forces. On a recent visit, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin promised France would “honor its agreements with a friendly and legitimate government.”

Central African Republic . France maintains some 300 troops in the CAR capital Bangui as part of Operation Boali, charged with restructuring the local armed forces and supporting FOMUC, an African force led by the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa, a regional body. François Grignon of the International Crisis Group say it’s likely “French special forces were engaged for limited but decisive operations.” The Economist reported that French fighters, attack helicopters, and special forces quashed a rebel advance on the capital Bangui in late 2006, allowing government forces to retake towns captured by rebels.

Ivory Coast. France deploys approximately 3,000 troops—under a UN mandate—to patrol the buffer zone between the rebel-controlled northern regions and the government-controlled south. Locals tend to view French troops as an occupation force; one French observer, as quoted in the Economist, calls Ivory Coast “France’s little Iraq.”
"First, we send soldiers to protect our nationals," declared diplomatic correspondent Christophe Ayad. "Then, we send more soldiers to protect the soldiers protecting our nationals. In the end, we send soldiers to decide a war."

Togo. French soldiers and transport aircraft are stationed in nearby Togo to support the operations in Ivory Coast.

France conducts joint maneuvers and peacekeeping training through the Reinforcement of African Peacekeeping Capacities (RECAMP) program and its Peacekeeping School (EMP) in Mali, which has trained over 800 African officers. These institutions intended to support the African Standing Force, a 20,000 strong rapid-response peacekeeping force projected to be ready by 2010.

France intervened militarily in Africa 19 times between 1962 and 1995. Most of the operations were ostensibly to protect French nationals or subdue uprisings against legitimate governments. Yet Professor Shaun Gregory of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in England points out that the standard for military support was contingent on an African leader’s willingness to support French interests.

French hands had blood on them during the Rwanda genocidal massacres . Despite having been a Belgian colony, by 1990 Rwanda was a fully-fledged member of "La Francafrique".
The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1990. The aim of this Tutsi dominated army was a return to their Rwandan homeland. The RPF were vilified by high-ranking French military figures as a "terrorist" bunch of foreigners from Uganda, and likened to the "Khmer noir".
Elite French paratroops were sent into Rwanda to keep the RPF at bay, in one of sixteen non-UN mandated military interventions by Paris in Africa between 1960 and 1994. Officially France sent more than $25 million worth of arms to Rwanda between 1990 and 1993, as well as providing army trainers to motivate and advise Habyarimana's army. Witnesses have recently testified that the French were also involved assisting with the newly formed youth militia, which were later to carry out the bulk of the genocide. In late June 1994 Mitterrand launched Operation Turquoise as a "humanitarian" intervention to protect Tutsis. While it undoubtedly saved around 10,000 lives, it also allowed fully armed genocidaire to escape over the border into Zaire, from where they were to relaunch attacks on the newly installed Kagame government. Such attacks, which independent NGO's said were partly financed and aided by French operatives .Mitterrand went further, to block desperately needed EU aid to the devastated country.

Rwanda's Green Gas

Came across this BBC article that explores the renewable energy possibilities that could be made available to the peoples of Africa if only....

The calm, blue waters of Lake Kivu in the west of Rwanda belie the energy powerhouse it stores deep underwater. Hundreds of metres down in the inky blackness, the lake is holding enough unexploited energy to meet Rwanda's needs for 200 years. Rotting vegetation which has been deposited for millions of years at the bottom of the lake is giving off a constant regenerating supply of methane gas. Methane is a combustible gas ideal for use in electricity generation and heating, it is the main component of "natural gas" fed to cookers all over the world.

Put in simple terms, all that is needed to release the dissolved gas is to bring water up from close to the bottom of Lake Kivu, to a depth of about 70 metres. Because of the huge pressure at a depth of several hundred metres, no pumping is required to get the water up. All that needs to be done is to "agitate" the water a bit and the pressure will force it up. At 70 metres the reduction of pressure will allow the dissolved methane to bubble out of the water. Other gases like carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide will remain dissolved in the water, which is then pumped back down to the depths again, leaving a chamber gradually filling up with methane. The gas can then be piped away for storage and use.
Cheap, accessible and plentiful .

There are billions of cubic metres of methane at the bottom of the lake and recent studies have shown that enough is regenerated every year to supply all of Rwanda's energy needs and can also be piped to the peoples of Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo .

It is also very prudent to begin using this trapped methane in Lake Kivu .

Geological evidence from around the lake shows that every 1,000 years or so there have been cataclysmic events which have wiped out all animal life in a huge radius surrounding the lake.
What happens is that gradually so much methane and carbon dioxide is dissolved in the water that it begins to acquire buoyancy. Instead of this being released gradually there is a sudden huge explosion, where the lake effectively turns over. The gas laden water from the bottom of the lake surges to the surface, releasing billions of cubic metres of gas; this settle like a huge toxic blanket over the surrounding area. It is heavier than air so all the oxygen is forced out and all life is suffocated. This is what happened at Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986, when 1,700 people were killed. Lake Kivu is hundreds of times bigger than Lake Nyos and it is estimated that more than two million people would die. Extracting methane from the lake will help to mitigate this cataclysmic eventuality.