Charles Onana trial and Kagame’s 1990-94 US, UK and Ugandan-backed regime change
Updated: Dec 8, 2024
Let us now turn to other sentences of the 16 which six NGOs, acting as plaintiffs, have chosen in Paris to attack Charles Onana and his editor Damien Serieyx as genocide deniers.
The other trial articles of this series can be found here
"Paul Kagame and his men never saved the Tutsis from a "genocide", they did not envisage this." (page 456)
"To continue to spout a hypothetical Hutu "pre-planning of the genocide" or a RPF pseudo-operation to rescue the Tutsis is a scam, an imposture and a falsification of history." (page 460)
"The relentless media offensive launched by Paul Kagame’s regime against Operation Turquoise aimed simply at preventing people from looking closer at the massacres committed by both parties and, above all, aimed to conceal the RPF obsession of taking power through armed force and violence." (page 461)
These three sentences are all taken from a sub-chapter whose topic focuses on the military and humanitarian consequences of the 1 October 1990 Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) aggression. Onana in this chapter cites sources ranging from former RPF soldiers, former Rwandan government officials as well as UN personnel on the ground at the time, who all underscore that the RPF had a precise plan: regime change. This was corroborated at trial by many of Onana’s witnesses, amongst which Rwandan human rights activists Joseph Matata, former United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) Colonel Luc Marchal and former Belgian ambassador in Rwanda Johan Swinnen.
Perhaps the most astonishing fact we heard at trial was Luc Marchal's recalling how many Tutsis living in Rwanda told him at the time that they were afraid of the RPF.
It is surprising that the plaintiff chose these sentences to accuse Charles Onana and his editor Damien Serieyx of genocide denial, as a similar statement was made by one of the plaintiffs in this trial, the French-based International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) in an April 1999 report co-written with Human Rights Watch, No witnesses must survive. The genocide in Rwanda. Twenty-five years ago they wrote: “The genocide took place in the context of a war that the RPF was keen to win, rather than just save Tutsis.” They underscore: “the RPF strategy, admired by other military experts, may have offered the best chance of winning a military victory, but it did not represent the best strategy for saving Tutsis.” [i]
Former RPF soldier Abdul Ruzibiza in his 2005 book Rwanda, l’Histoire secrète (Rwanda, a secret history) gives details on how the aim of saving Tutsis was not at the forefront of the RPF’s strategy: “all the localities and towns (Bugesera, Kibuye, Butare, Rwamagana and others) with a high density of Tutsis were perfectly known to the high command of the APR, but the latter chose not to do anything to save this population despite the insistence of the troops and junior officers.”[ii]
Often the RPF’s army was just a few kilometers from Tutsis in danger and yet they did not come to their rescue. Abdul Ruzibia recalls that many RPF soldiers committed suicide as they could not bear not coming to the rescue of people killed under their eyes. Former RPF army wing members Abdul Ruzibiza, colonel Christophe Hakizabera and James Munyandinda also evoke a macabre modus operandi on the part of the RPF, where Interahamwe militias were infiltrated and massacres committed. Congolese geopolitical analyst Patrick Mbeko in his harrowing account of a three-decades long world-wide judicial persecution of Hutus, Rwanda, Malheur aux vaincus, (Rwanda, Woe to the vanquished) cites the case of Bisesero which journalist and author Judie Rever uncovered in 2019.[iii]
Even Belgian journalist and pro-Kagame apologist Colette Braeckman wrote in 2005:“Kagame and his men, who are military tacticians above all, are not among those who hesitate to sacrifice civilians, including Tutsis, if that must be the price to pay to achieve their ends.”[iv]
Lawyer, human rights activist and former Rwandan ambassador in Paris Jean-Marie Ndagijimana, who was supposed to testify in favor of Onana at this trial, but could not do so due to a bureaucratic glitch, wrote an entire book in 2009 on the topic: How Paul Kagame deliberately sacrificed the Tutsi, namely the Tutsis of the interior, those living in Rwanda. He also underscores that Kagame never intended to protect the Tutsi families inside Rwanda, but only to use them in his drive to seize power by force of arms: “The RPF and the American government did everything they could to make sure our parents would not be saved from these massacres,” Ndagijimana writes. “They stacked ‘one obstacle on another’ to keep the UN from sending international troops to stop the genocide, their sole purpose was to allow Kagame to ‘ascend to power.’”[v]
Onana relentlessly underlines in his writings the crucial distinction one needs to keep in mind, when analyzing Rwandan history, between the Tutsi population and the Tutsi-led RPF.
Renown Rwanda expert Filip Reyntjens writes in a 2021 book Le Génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda (The Tutsi genocide in Rwanda) that there is no history written on the Rwandan 1990-94 war, as the focus of historical reconstruction has been exclusively on the genocide. This is misleading to say the least as Reyntjens simply ignores the numerous first-hand Rwandan written testimonies ; the daily military analysis of the war by professors Alan Stam and Christian Davenport; historians and geopolitical analysts Charles Onana, Patrick Mbeko, Robin Philpot, Justin Podur or Barrie Collins, to name just a few, who have all focused on the reconstruction of the war.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni stated at the time that the soldiers that had invaded Rwanda in October 1994 did so without his knowledge, as they defected from the national Ugandan army. After their first invasion the RPF was pushed back across the border into Uganda with the help of Zairian and French forces and a ceasefire was signed on 26 November 1990. Historian Barrie Collins in his excellent 2014 book Rwanda 1994: The Myth of the Akazu Genocide Conspiracy and its Consequences (Rethinking Political Violence) asks some crucial questions which have remained unanswered to this day: “ How was it that the defeated deserters could return to Uganda with impunity and regroup and rearm for renewed war against Uganda’s neighbor? How did Kagame and several other would-be RPF officials, receive military training in various locations in the US as Ugandan citizens, and then be allowed to return to Uganda and renew a war immediately upon the defeat of an invasion force of illegal ‘deserters?[vi]
Pro-Kagame propagandist at the time, Gerard Prunier, who is still considered a reference on the history of the Rwandan genocide, underlined in his The Rwanda crisis, history of a genocide that the interim government sworn in, after the decapitation of the Rwandan government on April 6 1994, did nothing to try and halt the massacres. Actually, the contrary is true: the interim government called for countless cease-fires so it could divert its military to protecting the population,which the RPF each time refused. Onana cites five examples of cease-fire calls on the part of the interim government just for the month of April 1994.[vii]
Historian Barrie Collins cites a former Ugandan Minister Peter Otai in the second Obote administration on the meticulous preparation of this war: funding for the war was released by the World Bank/International Monetary Fund structural adjustment program which required Uganda to also significantly reduce its army. Barrie Collins writes: “ While publicly ‘hounding them out’ of the NRA ( National Resistance Army, the Uganda’s national army), Museveni was discretely moving Rwandans out of the secret ‘army-within an-army’ into a separate reserve army. He also moved his younger brother Salim Saleh, out of the NRA to command this new army.“ Collins underlines how the refugee problem, as well as political liberalization, was progressing positively thus the RPF “had to take up arms against Kigali immediately or risk becoming rebels without a cause.” Collins asks: “ How could the armed wing of an organization representing the elite of a minority ethnic group hope to overthrow the Rwandan state and retain power ?”[viii] For Collins the answer is through foreign backing.
The US imperialist blueprint for regime change is repetitive: a head of state is demonized by relentless corporate media campaigns (there is always a personalization of the country targeted, in this case President Juvénal Habyarimana) and weakened by neoliberal financial institutions and bi-lateral sanctions, before an outright military action, via a proxy, is undertaken against the government targeted. The multidimensional US agression also makes use of psyops and propaganda in its hybrid war policy. Recent cases of US backed regime changes were attempted in Syria and Venezuela and carried through in Libya and Ivory Coast amongst others. Why should one suddenly think that this imperialist US policy was not also applied in Rwanda and subsequently Zaire, despite all the evidence we have today?
The USA and UK provided Museveni’s war with international diplomatic cover as Collins’ book demonstrates.
Even an extreme Kagame apologist such as Linda Melvern writes in a 2007 article The UK Government and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda that the history covering this tragedy has still not been fully written. One of the reasons she gives, that Onana quotes in Rwanda, The truth about Operation Turquoise[ix], is odd to say the least: “There are continuing attempts to obscure individual responsibility in the decision-making process. There is even a claim that, in the archives of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in Whitehall, the paper trail on Rwanda, 1990–1994, has been weeded. There is resistance to release any of the diplomatic cables that passed between the policy makers in London and Britain’s UN mission in New York.” (…) “ This story is massively incomplete, as the author is the first to admit. We should never forget the gaps”. One must however wonder today if these are just “gaps” or key facts that should be acknowledged to explain the country’s recent history.
Blaming the French military for being an accomplice to the genocide, when years of judicial proceeding in France against Operation Turquoise military personnel have led to a no case to answer, was a RPF psyops to deflect attention from other on- going military operations outside the UN mandated Operation Turquoise : the US Operation Support Hope, the UK Operation Gabriel and the Israeli Operation Interns for Hope. The fact that these operation are not known today reveal the strength of the US, UK and Rwandan propaganda and shows how little we know today about the Rwandan tragedy.
Notes:
[i] cit. in Patrick Mbeko, Rwanda, Malheur aux vaincus, éditions Duboiris, 2024
[v] Ann Garrison, How Paul Kagame deliberately sacrificed the Tutsis, Black Agenda Report, 20 March 2024.
[vi] Barrie Collins, Rwanda 1994: The Myth of the Akazu Genocide Conspiracy and its Consequences (Rethinking Political Violence), Palgrave Macmillan. p 58
[vii] Charles Onana, Rwanda, La vérité sur l’Operation Turquoise, l’Artilleur, 2019 p 457 footnote 2
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