Rwanda’s 2010 presidential election? What election?

07-02-2010
by Ann Garrison

Joseph Ntawangundi, an assistant to Rwanda’s

“Rwanda is a constitutional republic dominated by a strong presidency. President Paul Kagame was elected to a seven-year term in 2003; the next presidential election is scheduled for 2010. Chamber of Deputies elections that took place in September 2008 were peaceful and orderly, despite irregularities. Significant human rights abuses occurred, although there were improvements in some areas.


Leaders of the ruling RPF Party have been calling for Mrs. Ingabire’s arrest for the crime of promoting “genocide ideology” ever since her return to Rwanda, from exile, on January 17th.

The statute criminalizing “genocide ideology’ was passed to suppress the disputed history of the 1994 genocide, which hangs heavy over Rwanda and this election. Mrs. Ingabiré has put herself at great risk simply by stating that not only Tutsi, but also Hutu people died in the genocidal massacres of 1994, but some American journalists, academics, have gone much farther in challenging the received history.
Rwanda has revoked University of Michigan Professor Allan Stam’s VISA because of his collaborations with other academics, investigators, lawyers, and statisticians, and his conclusions that:

• a million people died,
• the vast majority of those who died were not Tutsi, but Hutu,
• American, French, and Belgian leaders, including Bill Clinton and the CIA knew what was happening every day as the massacres continued, and
• current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a U.S. ally trained at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, is guilty of war crimes of an extraordinary scale.

Professor Stam also concludes that there are “no good guys in this story,” no simple right and wrong.

Mrs. Ingabiré, the FDU-Inkngi Party’s candidate, has called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, like South Africa’s after apartheid.

The U.S. and its close ally, Rwanda


Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at the 2009 AGOA Conference in Kenya, called Rwanda the beacon of hope for Africa, and, in November 2009, President Bill Clinton presented Rwandan President Paul Kagame with a Global Citizenship Award. However, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy and Labor’s May 2009 report tells a very different story:
Citizens’ right to change their government was restricted, and extrajudicial killings by security forces occurred. There were significantly fewer reports of torture and abuse of suspects than in previous years. Prison and detention center conditions remained harsh. Security forces arbitrarily arrested and detained persons. Prolonged pretrial detention was a problem, and government officials attempted to influence judicial outcomes, mostly regarding the community-based justice system known as gacaca.
 
There continued to be limits on the freedoms of religion, speech, and association. Restrictions on the press increased. Official corruption was a problem. Restrictions on civil society, recruitment of child soldiers by a Democratic Republic of Congo-based armed group, and trafficking in persons, also occurred.”
Since 1994, the world witnesses the horrifying Tutsi minority (14%) ethnic domination, the Tutsi minority ethnic rule, tyrany and corruption in Rwanda. The current government has been characterized by the total impunity of RPF criminals, the Tutsi economic monopoly, the Tutsi militaristic domination, and the brutal suppression of the rights of the majority of the Rwandan people (85% are Hutus), by the RPF criminal organization.

© olored Opinions
 
The Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and Nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a “time”, yet It cannot be destroyed. ==> Wolverine