According to many of your request, here is the English translation of the Tigringa/Amharic version interview of Fitawrari Gezai Reda, a resident of Tigray region, northern Ethiopia.
Let me start my view by quoting from an article I read a few years back from Ethiopian Register magazine, under the topic: “Understanding the Machine of {www:Woyanne} Politics and How It Works.” In that commentary, the writer tried to show how the Ethiopian people were trying to identify the regime of Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF) [or commonly known as Woyanne] and the nature of it.
The writer says, “As critics and opponents of Meles Zenawi’s regime, we often look like those fabled individuals who try to identify a large animal blindfolded. One character touches the animal’s head, another its back, still another its legs, each one giving an account of the whole beast by the part of the beast it has felt.”
Similarly, opposition parties and groups describe the Woyanne political creature in various limited ways. Some say TPLF rules are similar to an Apartheid-like ethnic tyranny. Others draw parallels with a Marxist-Leninist clique. Still others equate TPLF with a shifta (banditry), two-faced par communist, par capitalist, political entity. We also mark the regime as a worari (occupying) force, clever at operating behind tribal lines, reminiscent of colonialism, yet quick to resort to frontal assault on dissidents, citizens, and communities to bolster its monopoly of power.”
Each of these outlines of TPLF rules is right, but only partially. Each depiction highlights a particular feature or element of the Meles dictatorship in Ethiopia.
Indeed, as the writer above tried to show the different features of TPLF, each one of these taken separately, or as a mere sum, the depictions do not, however, yield an adequate picture of the gangsters of Woyane Tigray. Even as mercenary as it is, stating Meles and his groups as group of “Banda”, still we can’t describe the nature of the political beast! The nature of the gangs should be interpreted in ways worse than what has been said for years. Can I simply say, “These are beasts dispatched from hell?
Many of us may not have the detail understanding and information how Tigrian farmers and citizens were the subject of these beasts for solid seventeen years. Because of our frustration, many of us blame the Tigrians for harboring the beasts for seventeen years, but in reality the Tigrian farmers and people have suffered more than all of us can imagine.
Leaving the weakness and the failure of the flamboyant members and sympathizers of the beasts, and leaving aside for a moment, the ugly record of the Tigrian intellectuals and all walks of Tigrians who defended and supported the cruel nature of TPLF leaders and their Bado Shidushte (06) (the notorious security apparatus of TPLF) for many years, without any doubt, the majority of the Tigrian people, particularly “farmers,” were the direct victims of TPLF savagery more than any society in Ethiopia.
In this report you will read a very shocking history from an elderly man from Tigray. Ato Gezai Reda was tortured and released after paying Birr 15,000 ($7,500.00), after he was captured by TPLF guerrilla fighters in 1969 EC (about 1976/1978), and recently exposed the cruelty and injustice done to the Tigrian farmers and citizens by the so called leaders of Woyane Tigray in his interview with Dejen radio, produced by my friend, Hailemariam Abebe. I am working on the full translation of the interview in Amharic, to be published in one of the national papers. Till then, take the idea home, weigh the gruesome and utterly despicable nature of TPLF, the mass murders and tortures it inflicted on thousands of Tigrians. As usual, please bear with me when it comes to my “proficiency” of the English language.
Here is the short summary of the interview:
Ato Gezai Reda is originally from Enderta (around {www:Mekelle}), but worked and spent most of his life in Shire Awraja (Enda-Selassie). He was an employee of the Ministry of Interior before his ordeal. Ato Gezai expresses his thanks to Dejen radio for having him as a guest, and for getting the opportunity to expose the crimes of TPLF to the Ethiopian people, after keeping them with him for many years for lack of a free forum.
Ato Gezai Reda, after briefly explaining about his life history, directly goes to his narration. In the mid-’70s, he was a member of “Teranafit” (a group established in shire district before it merged with Prince Mengesha Seyoum’s armed rebel group – the Ethiopian Democratic Union – EDU). He said TERANAFIT at first had no intention of fighting against TPLF. Teranafit was established to fight against then military Junta in power – the “Derg.” But TPLF accused members of Teranafit of being “rivals” in recruiting the Tigrian youth. Because of this, he said he and other Teranafit members came under the focus of TPLF hostility.
Ato Gezai Reda was captured in March 1969 (1977/78) when he and others were traveling by bus to Axum to celebrate the religious holiday of Hidar Tsion. TPLF fighters threw hand grenades and ambushed the bus in the vicinity of “Af Gah-gah”. Held at gunpoint, the rebels ordered three passengers to get down, and those were: Ato Gezai, Ato Feseha, and Ato GebreTsadik Woldu.
The three “captives” were taken to a locality called Mai Demas, where they were thrown into a closure, and spent a bitter cold night along with livestock.
The next day, says Ato Gezai, “we were taken to Badme. Along the way, every village we passed by, there were many young farmers and elders who were being rounded up by TPLF as Teranafit accomplices.”
Ato Gezai and other 50 prisoners were taken to a place called Ginbot (near Badme). Ginbot was lush green, and had several springs that watered the site. “Upon our arrival,” says Ato Gezai, “all of us were ordered to roll over a field covered with ash which was so thick and over a feet or two high. We did as ordered, but fell to severe coughing, sneezing, itching. Once our introductory lesson was over, we were thrown into a tiny cell, joining other prisoners who had lost their hairs due to inhuman conditions. Those who were imprisoned before us were seriously emaciated, like they have been starving for a long time. Parts of their bodies were burned with fire, and their skins had turned yellow. With their sunken eyes, they looked like skeletons. Their legs were swollen, and their voices coarse.”
Some of the young men whom Ato Gezai saw in that prison cell were students from Adi-Awala, Adi Dairo in Shirre. The other victims included individuals who suffered from “manic depression,” and had already lost their minds, understandably from the complication of constant exposure to cruel torture and loss of hope in life.
The next morning Ato Gezai was interrogated as an accomplice of the Teranafit rebel group which TPLF saw as a sworn enemy. On the second day, they woke Ato Gezai up, took him out, and tied his hands behind his back against a tree, and set a pile of firewood between his legs. He was fixed to a tree trunk as the TPLF guys used tight ropes and wires to wrap him by.
They started the fire between his legs, and Gezai Reda’s long journey into the world of hell controlled by TPLF starts in earnest. As a thick smoke chokes Ato Gezai, the fire has already created blisters all over his body. Out of desperation, he shouted “Kidus Michael! Kidus Michael…” His torturers heard what he said, and started to make fun of him. The torturers picked up two small rocks and rubbed the stones against each other and, mockingly, asked their victim: “Can you see your St. Michael in these stones?”
(At this moment on the Radio, Ato Gezai is overwhelmed with emotions of grief, and slips into silence)
He comes back on air, and continues his narration. “The fire was too much painful,” and I cried out: “The fire Is Hell!”, and said, “My brothers and sisters! I can’t move left or right. I am being eaten up by the fire. You bet Hell is better than enduring this cruelty!”
My hands were tied behind me to a tree; there is no way one can escape from the chocking smoke and the flames of the burning wood. My body started to swell like a balloon. My body was covered with blisters, containing water under the swollen skin. And at one time, my skin burst and gushed out water from my entire body. Then my torturers ordered a break, using the military code “erefti!” (Recess/ break!).
After this unbelievable torture of burning and roasting my body with fire, they took me away from the fire, and untied my hands. I was lying on the ground, from where I slipped into unconsciousness. I can’t remember how long I was in a state of shock. I only knew when they woke me up again, and ordered me to stand, walk, and sit back to the burning fire. I couldn’t move my body! I was burned, numb, and roasted; my throat and lungs were coarse like burned; I couldn’t talk either. Practically, my body was turned into the size of a monster; my eyes were hanging out of their sockets. My tormentors also knew I that I couldn’t move. They looked for other means. They burned a bunch of figs, and threw the fire onto my body.
After a few days, I woke up, and tried to make sense of where I was (mind you I was still in severe pain and mentally devastated). But once more, they took me out in that bad shape, when I was looking just like an invalid. I was asked if I’d learned anything from my being tortured. The interrogator asked me if there was something I could make as a confession. I said: “Other than being a member of Teranafit, I have nothing to confess; I did nothing wrong that harmed TPLF; if there is anything, please show me any evidence of wrongdoing than torturing me for a crime I know nothing about.” I begged them to tell me if I’d done anything wrong to them.
Ato Gezai went on to say, “The interrogator didn’t whet his thirst of cruelty, and told me, ‘You still didn’t learn a lesson after all that?!” He then ordered the torturers to take me back to the torture chamber, where I was hung upside down, and the interrogators started to beat my bare feet with a rubber stick. My body started to burn like I caught fire: I shivered, vomited, moaned with unbearable pain. By the way, I still have difficulty walking, and I often feel pain in my feet.”
“Those are not Tigrians, those are not Ethiopians; those are some evil creatures from hell! They have no respect for even the old. They were educated by us, by the Tigrian parents; they were schooled by the farmers’ and tax-payers’ money, they were armed by Tigrians but turned their back on us, and humiliated us in a way difficult to express in words.”
Dejen radio – Other victims?
Ato Gezai – There were many of them. At least eight people were being executed every day. Every morning, many young ones from among the prisoners would be called out by their names. The prisoners knew they were being taken to be murdered. The young ones would cry, scream, saying, “tell my parents and families that I am executed…goodbye Tigray! Good bye folks!”
Mass murder was routine. I can tell you a few more agonizing stories as to what extent TPLF’s cruelty stretches. The crimes of TPLF that I saw with my own eyes are chilling.”
“There was this elder who was highly respected in Shirre Endaselassie. His name was Gebrelibanos Mezgebo. He was a chief accountant employee of the Ministry of Internal revenue. He and a few other respected individuals like him were selected by the people of Shire and surroundings to go to TPLF bases, and meet with TPLF officials over how to peacefully resolve the war with the Derg. The idea was proposed by the Derg officials. The Derg explained to the elders of Shirre that war was killing the nation, and such peaceful plan was also being executed in Eritrea. Eritrean elders were also elected by residents to go to the mountains to meet the rebels over a possible dialogue with the Derg. The Derg proposed they can solve their differences with EPLF-ELF for the sake of peace to the war-torn country. Likewise, the elders from around Shirre went to TPLF-held areas so as to meet and discuss the issue with them.
“Mind you!” says Ato Gezai Reda “…these are respected elders, who know nothing about politics, or who have never been members of any political group. But since the Derg officials ordered them to do something to resolve the conflict, they went out as peace envoys, shouldering responsibilities both by the people and the Derg. The residents also gladly agreed to try the strategy if that would work out for the sake of peace. The elders met TPLF leaders, but they were unlucky: they were thrown into prison immediately.”
Dejen radio – And then?
Ato Gebrelibanos and the other elders were murdered.
Dejen radio : How come?
Ato Gezai – Well, it is a very sad and shocking scene to witness such tragedy taking place in ones presence. One night EDU rebels came to the vicinity with their full military might. Subsequently, TPLF “firing squads” rushed to where we were being held. And we heard the interrogators saying loudly, “Let us Kill them! Let us finish them!” Immediately, they opened the door and ordered us to line up. They wanted to carry out the execution there and then but they changed their mind, and rushed us to a gorge covered with thick forest. However, they delayed the execution for reasons we did not know.
“Let me take you back for a second, to the question of what happened to Ato Gebrelibnos Mezgebos. As I said earlier, we were told EDU rebels were encircling the area. At that moment they tried to kill all prisoners. But later on, they decided to rush us somewhere else. However, Ato Gebrelibanos was badly burned and tortured like myself. He was a sad sight to the eye. He had open wounds on his back and his legs. He was almost crippled from torture. The TPLF decided he should be put to death. THEY FIRED THREE SHOTS INTO HIS BODY AND MURDERED HIM where he was lying!”
“With him, there was also a very handsome young man who was their member, a “guerilla fighter,” who fell sick with severe malaria. He was shivering with high fever, was unable to walk. He was lying under a shade from the outside of the prison cell that housed us. He was there just to rest and get some medication. He too was shot to death by the firing squad in his sleep. They executed him on the spot because he was unable to walk with the rest of us. This young fighter was from a village called Enticho (Adwa). They pumped three shots into each of the two victims in a cold-blooded murder.
Dejen radio – Why did they do that?
Ato Gezai – They didn’t want to carry them.
Dejen radio – They shot and killed their own fighter too?
Ato Gezai – Yes, they were cold-blooded murderers who had no value for human life. I have no idea how such youngsters came out from the womb of Tigrians and turned into some despicable monsters!
Dejen radio – And then?
Ato Gezai – We left the two murdered gentlemen behind us as we were rushed to a place called Maay Lam (Mereb). It was very hot, humid, and sand. Many of the prisoners had a difficult time dragging themselves along a very hostile terrain. Many of us never had any exercise, let alone overcome long journeys atop our tortured bodies. We had no power at all. Many of us had headaches, dizziness, and were thirsty and exhausted. Those who were limping and had fallen behind, the rebels pulled them like they were animal carcasses to be disposed of. Rebel harassments were rampant against those who staggered on the way. Among the weak prisoners, I remember there was a respected elder, Balambaras Tilahun. He was from Deki Awuaala. They wanted to riddle his body with bullets. Fortunately, when they were ready to do just that, some higher official of the organization came to the scene, and the firing squad asked the official if they could kill the man whom they saw as a burden. The official asked them if his interrogation was finalized. They said “no.” He told them to first get over the investigation. The old man was spared, and was suggested they somewhat carry him. However, they tied him tight to a single long stick (It was supposed to be a stretcher). They went away rocking the old man left and right his body tied/hooked with that single stick. Finally we reached a place called “La’e-Lai Barka (may be close to Eritrea border), and it was time to spend the night there. On the same night, they told us there would be assignments, and they split us in two: Group A and Group B (the reason was one of the groups would go to the Red Cross for check-ups, while the other would take other assignments. That was what they said). We formed long columns, but we were worn out. Immediately everyone was asleep. But again in the same night, they woke us up, and called the names of 25 individuals. They took them to a nearby ravine, and in an outburst of gunfire, the 25 were murdered en masse. That day was Ethiopian Easter holiday.
The way how the gentlemen were killed was really frightening to human mind. They told the victims to line up like soldiers but they machine-gunned them down all at once. The killers didn’t even bother to bury the victims. Their bodies were later found by Eritrean cattle herders. When the cattle came closer to the sight, they began to retreat as if they had seen predators. This alerted the herders who became curious why their cattle were frightened, and suddenly saw the bodies of 25 Ethiopians murdered at one go. “It is really heart-wrenching to recall such tragedies despite the passage of a long time,” says Ato Gezai.
He mentioned some of the executed individuals by name. Among them:
Ato Tewolde Gebresilassie (a town council official from Endaselassie – Shire)
Ato Abebe Gebre-Mariam (an old man from Adi Beiray, Deki-Awala)
Wodi Goshim, a 16-year-old from Endaselassie.
Mohammed, a 12-year-old boy from Adua who came to the Selekleka to visit his aunt. In prison, the boy always cried, saying he wanted to go to his mother and his Aunt and would often ask them “what am I doing here? I want to go to mom”. Altogether with the kid, 25 people were slaughtered.
By the way, after the herders discovered the mass murder, they immediately notified ELF fighters. The ELF men were shocked, and held an official meeting, and expressed their disappointments by the gruesome murders TPLF committed. ELF told TPLF to move out of their territory. TPLF fighters who were guarding us shared the secret with us. Some of the fighters were very close to us and sympathized with our condition. It was their closeness and sympathy that helped us to get the information that TPLF had differences with ELF with that incident. Unfortunately, many of the prisoners were murdered, (even after the ELF ordered TPLF, move out itself and its prisoners from their area). Those murdered, were murdered in the same fashion: “summary execution!”
After they relocated us, there were killings as well. There were prisoners like Haleka Tilahun (Adi Hagerai?) , Yigzaw Hailu (I think if I am not mistaken he was the son of Kegnazmach or Dejach Hailu Aduwa). Yigzaw was unique than the rest. He was a strong man. He killed one of the executioners, and stabbed another with the executioner’s own knife, and fled on foot. They pursued him with a barrage of machinegun fire. They shot him, but could not find him, dead or alive. After a week, however, his death was confirmed when vultures were spotted, and they were scavenging on the corpse.
Dejen radio – What happened to you finally?
Ato Gezai – I was told I could bail myself out by paying them Birr 15,000 (then the equivalent of $7,500 U.S. dollars). They ordered me to write a letter to my wife to make the payment. I pleaded for lesser settlement. They told me “TPLF is not a market place for bargaining.” Finally, I wrote a letter to my wife and they took the letter to her, and she sold our hotel (the only source of income we had to support my children and my wife at that time while I was under TPLF custody). My wife had no other choice, and she sold our property, met one of the agents, and paid him 15,000 Birr. I was released but there was a string to it: If I talked about TPLF brutality, I would be hunted down. No mercy. And they had these so-called fedayeen, (disguised TPLF snipers who infiltrate towns either to kidnap victims, or else, murder them.)
Dejen radio – We have heard many people lost their finger-nails, and fingers and limps were being pulled off the bodies of victims during torture. And we heard TPLF was forcing its victims to dig their own graves before they were shot dead. It that true?
Ato Gezai – Many despicable things have befallen too many innocent people. One day, they decided to kill me. My hands were tied, and I was watching when they were digging my grave. They dug it themselves because I was too weak to do anything. I was tied very tight, and asked them: “My hands are tied and it is hurting me badly. Can you please loosen the rope?” One of my guards got upset and said: “This is your grave; in our law, you were supposed to dig your own grave. But because you have no muscle to do that, we are doing you a favor. Therefore, you better shut up and get ready to enter your warm grave!”
I was put down in the grave. Then, the firing squad gathered and started to lower down their heads to the ground with their formal whispers (prayers par communist zealots), called “zikri sema’atat” (in memory of our martyrs). When they prayed their version, I was also praying loudly: “ABUNE ZEBESEMAYAT… (Oh, our Heavenly Father…) at that moment, one of them by the name “Mesele” asked me, “what are you chanting for?”
When he was asking me this very question, another messenger called Alemseged came running and screaming so loud towards us. They said, “who is that guy?” He screamed so loud from a distance, and told them, “wait, wait! Don’t do anything! Don’t kill him!” Alemseged told them higher officials were saying that the prisoner had more interrogations and should be spared of the execution. The amazing thing was a member of the firing squad was my neighbor’s son by the name “Nuguse Lilai”. This young man was a promising soccer player in Shire Enda-Selassie, back in the good old days. At that time, I used to encourage him and his friends to pursue their sports. Occasionally, I used to support them financially. I also used to take their pictures, extending some form of fatherly help. He was the first one who jumped into the grave, and pulled me out, by cutting the rope that had tied my hands. I saw him and his friends beaming with joy in the presence of the executioners who were suddenly ordered to delay my death.
However, I felt like they were playing with me like a toy. I begged them to finish me off. I asked them why they were playing with my soul, and asked them to fire a single shot, and get over with me, instead of taking me back and forth to the same hellish life. They replied, “We have orders that you have more interrogations.” So to answer your question, “Yes, they used to make us dig our graves before they killed us. Indeed, they were evil, anti-Tigray, anti humanity, anti their own family, anti Ethiopia, generally they were demons from devil knows where.”
Dejen radio – Ato Gezai, you have seen and witnessed all these nightmares, and the unbelievable evilness of TPLF. I think to my understanding hearing this shocking story, do you think you considered them as Tigrians? This is barbaric. Their action is even worse than Fascist Mussolini’s atrocities. How were you judging them at that time?
Ato Gezai — Oh! We took them as the disciples of Satan. Given their lack of humanity, I could only say I was saved by the power of God! They were cruel. They fed us very salty food so that we would feel thirsty, and they would punish us by denying us water. They added gasoline to the injera and soup so that we would suffer with hunger. It is hard to explain their cruelty. They kept prisoners in dungeons; there were dungeons in Kalema (Jihanem) near Gondar, another one in one of the Tekeze River hills, and another in Tembien. Those underground prisons were dug beneath the hills. I heard it was very hard for strangers to tell if there were underground prison chambers or not.
Dejen radio – Have you had children at the time? Did they ever know where you were?
Ato Gezai – I had young children, all of them under seven. They didn’t know where I was till my release.
Dejen radio – After your wife sold the hotel and paid TPLF the money they had asked, how did you end up going back to EDU? What forced you to leave town?
Ato Gezai – Let me tell you, whether I like it or not, they could have taken the money anyway.
Dejen radio – How is that?
Ato Gezai – What they did to many innocent families, they could have done to my wife too. There are more and more sad stories. For instance, they execute their victim. By the way, they cover the heads of their victims with some sort of garment. Then they execute them. After that, the TPLF prepares a letter as if it were written and signed by the victim. TPLF would write as though the victim was alive, and was a dedicated fighter. In the letter, they would write as if their victim would tell his family that he would never abandon TPLF, and for his cause, he was dedicating the family property to his organization – TPLF. So when the family gets the letter, given the reign of TPLF terror in the area, would be forced to hand over the property. Don’t forget TPLF has already killed the individual. Many families were robbed of their children and property by such sordid TPLF crimes. They never cared that their victimized family had kids, and would perish to hunger.
Let me tell you about the fate of one promising businessman in Adi Hagerai, Adiabo. His name was GebreTsadik Tsige, the son of Haneta Tsige. They were of Eritrean origin that lived as good Ethiopians. The young businessman had heavy-duty trucks and over a thousand heads of cattle. They killed him. On top of that, they ordered his wife to pay Birr 12,000. She said she had 6,000 Birr to pay right away, and not the entire sum of money. She asked them to give her more time. They demanded she had better paid the full amount right away. When she could not find the money, they took the trucks, 500 heads of cattle from the family ranch.
Now, let me go back to your question and answer what happened to me after I was released. I gave my hand to Colonel Kale-Kristos Abai, then regional governor of Tigrai province.
I visited the colonel’s office, where I was interviewed by the governor himself and other attending senior officials. Upon hearing my harrowing stories of tortures and mass killings, they were heart-broken, shocked and truly disoriented. On my part, I begged them to keep the stories to themselves. “If the stories leaked and reached TPLF,” I told them, “they will kill me. No doubt about that.” But the officials were overwhelmed with the gruesome murders TPLF was carrying out against innocent people. They immediately called for public meeting with the residents of the town. They began to tell the people the crimes being committed by TPLF. At that moment, they wanted an eye-witness, and called my name to testify. I heard them calling my name, but I kept quiet. I did not want to risk my life for I knew TPLF would murder me. In the first place, I didn’t want to disclose TPLF crimes to the Derg. But the Derg was also another problem, and I had no choice but to tell them what I went through. Immediately on the third day, TPLF sent me a “death warrant.” They sent one old man relative of my family. The letter told me to get prepared for my death any time. I prepared myself in a few days, kissed my kids and my wife good-bye, and after a long trek through the jungle, I joined EDU combatants.
Dejen radio – Dear Ato Gezai: You have seen TPLF in detail. TPLF is anti Tigray, anti Ethiopian culture. They changed everything, even the names of villages and hamlets. They devalued the honor of our mothers, they chopped away our territories, and ports preserved by our forefathers. Would you share your views with us on these points?
“TPLF is insane; they are evil, anti Christian, anti religion and anti our culture. They went against Tigrian culture. They desecrated churches. They smoked cigarettes inside churches. They turned churches into dancing halls. They tore down holy church garments and used them as sacks for stolen goodies. They used Medhani-Alem churches in Sheraro as their dancing floor for their “artistic troupe.” They forced elderly priests to lead their dances. They forced priests to throw their crosses, and made them carry guns and forced them to shoot. This was the most disturbing time in the history of our country. After having been an EDU combatant, I was forced into the world of exile, and I will never be able to visit my country until I make sure TPLF is removed and gone forever.”
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
Who is Ato Gebrelibanos Mezgebo? I am his son in law. Ato Gebrelibnos Mezgebo is from Yeha, near Adwa. His wife, Woizero Yeshi, is from Adwa, Yeha. Woizero Yeshi, an elderly mother is still alive with her 7 children and many grand children. Justice will reveal, murderers who killed elders and young children as old as 12 years would one day face the wrath of justice.
The cold-blooded murderers can fool the fools pretending like they are peaceful individuals and peaceful leaders. Regardless of their camouflage, their blood-soaked life would one day end up in front of the court of justice. I thank Ato Gezai Reda from my heart, and Dejen radio in behalf of the family. The family may not question TPLF currently for fear of persecution. We the family are many and we are everywhere to challenge the thugs and murderers. Justice will prevail! There will no more be a mystery. The curtain that had covered the criminal and murderous nature of TPLF is uncovered for all to see, and for all to add their voices they had up to day kept for themselves for fear of being added to the long list of the thousands of men and women TPLF firing squads murdered in the quiet fields of northern Ethiopia. In Recent interview, Fitawrari Gezaie Reda exposed his torturers and prison chiefs who sent many young kids and elders to their death chamber as Abebe Teklehaymanot (filed name Usman) he was the ETPLF/EPRDF Air force chief. Awalom Weldu (real name Tiku Weldu- the brother of Abay Weldu currently Abay Weldu is TPLF’s CC) – he was the first TPLF/EPRDF Ethiopian Ambassador to Eritrea. (Currently, Ass/chair and CC of Gebru Asrat’s “Arena” party). Mesele was also the x-Derg Lieutenant Officer, who later fled to TPLF and became one of the executioners. The story will be published in book version for history to document it. Any one who is interested or have any question to contact Fitawrary or about our family already executed in the field by TPLF while in his asleep (or about other TPLF victims),- contact me on the following address.
By Getachew Reda
BSN Editor’s Introduction: Ordinarily, we don’t write introductions to articles or essays published in The Black Star News but the following column by Keith Harmon Snow warrants it.
Snow has been at the forefront, as has this newspaper, in exposing Western duplicity in Africa and how U.S. and U.K. corporate and government interests have caused the deaths of millions of Africans; all for the love of money.
In the end, the African actors, the bit players really, are the ones who are blamed; wars of blood money and profits are referred to euphemistically by major newspapers, including The New York Times as “tribal wars,” so that Americans can nod their heads and continue on with their lives without bothering to ask any further questions.
After all, “tribal wars” are endemic to Africa; they always happen. Africans just wake up one day, grab machetes and start chopping off their neighbors’ heads to satisfy “blood lust;” a term actually once used by Time magazine to explain what the magazine contended was the reason for the Rwanda massacres of 1994.
Meanwhile, no one writes about the Western companies that somehow just always happen to be around digging the gold and the diamonds and ferrying off the timber and the young Congolese girls, even as the chopping off of heads and limbs occur.
But Keith Harmon Snow, whose long report follows, is not with the program. He is the anti-New York Times kind of reporter; and the anti-New Yorker magazine; and, anti-BBC and anti-Washington Post kind of journalist.
In fact, he is beyond being a mere journalist. He is the type of forthright individual that corporate media would refer to as “radical,” in order to impugn his reputation, without having to challenge him on a single fact. He salvages a little respectability for the profession of journalism, which has been corrupted by corporate media.
He is a crusader with a mission; his goal is to expose United States’ and Britain’s roles in the genocide in Uganda and in the Congo; with characters like Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame and Uganda’s Yoweri K. Museveni and Sudan’s Omar Hassan al-Bashir all playing the bit roles.
Snow writes long; he cannot help it because he feels the pain of the Congolese and the Ugandans and he wants someone somewhere –here in the United States and Britain– to pay a price. He might be accused of being overly passionate; one has to be, when one feels the kind of indignation that Snow feels. When it is a matter of genocide no article can be too long. Readers that bear with Snow and read all his words will learn information not found in the corporate media.
Corporate media are often accomplices to crimes against humanity. Sometimes in a most perverted manner. Take The New York Times’ resident Sudanese genocide expert, Nicholas Kristoff. If Kristoff really cares about the suffering of Africans, and not just about winning a Pulitzer Prize as he did for his Sudanese crusade, don’t you think he would lend his big pen to expose with equal passion the suffering of Congolese and Ugandan civilians; or might that lead to the indictment of Kagame and Museveni, “friends” of United States interests? Why would a humanitarian be selective in fighting against genocide unless there was a hidden agenda?
Thank the creator for the Internet. In the past, the world was held hostage to the tyranny of selective coverage and cover-ups by newspapers such as The New York Times and writers like Kristoff. He is a hero to Africans in his own mind. The Internet era has broken the monopoly of disinformation and misinformation once enjoyed by elite media.
Many years ago, George Orwell had warned against the dangers of propaganda, or what he called “New Speak.” We hear New Speak every day; where everything is turned upside down, killers are praised, while innocents are marched off to shallow graves in the forests. New Speak celebrates murderers as heroes and denounces victims.
Although successive generations have always declared “never again;” and “not on our watch,” as surely as the sun rises, humanity never fails and genocide always occurs. New Speak always exonerates the killers. New Speak is public relations disinformation; black becomes white; red is yellow; and bad is good.
As one of the characters in Orwell’s 1984 puts it: “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
Ah, yes; New Speak has helped send millions of Africans six feet under or to the crocodiles in the Kagera river, the Nile, and Lake Victoria.
Take Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni as an example; he is a master New Speaker. He has single-handedly, with the assistance of U.K. and U.S. financing and military hardware, caused the deaths of more than eight million Africans –half a million or more in Uganda; one million in Rwanda; seven million in Congo. Please see http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/116/10455.pdf
Yet, at least up until the time President George W. Bush left office, he was treated like some respected elder statesman of politics in the West.
He is such a smooth New Speaker that he attends the funerals of people whom he has reportedly eliminated in Uganda. He is such a smooth operator that he even secured an audience with President Bush in the White House in 2007 even though The Wall Street Journal had already reported on June 8, 2006, that he is being investigated by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes committed by his troops and militia in Congo between 1998-2003 and conceivably, like Liberia’s former president Charles Taylor, and like Sudan’s president al-Bashir, he too may be indicted by the ICC.
While President Bush could ignore the inconvenient truth and entertain Museveni in the White House, praising him for fighting HIV/Aids, even as he used his other hand to eliminate millions of Africans, it is difficult to imagine how President Barack Obama, a constitutional law professor, could ignore the smell of blood emanating from the Ugandan. Then again, on this earth, anything is possible.
Rwanda’s Kagame is another master New Speaker.
Earlier this week, he presided over memorial ceremonies for the victims of the 1994 massacres. Kagame indulges in this macabre exercise each year even though he was instrumental in the very genocide which he now “mourns”: he commanded the invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990 and a French court has concluded that he ordered the missile downing of the presidential plane carrying Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntayamira of Burundi, sparking the 100 days of mass murders.
Western media had also prepared the global community for the eventual demonization and criminalization of all Hutus –even the ones who never participated in the mass murders of 1994– with a racist campaign against them in major magazines such as The New York Times magazine and The New Yorker, both with circulation in the millions. One of the first media volleys against the Hutus was an article by Alex Shoumatoff, published on June 20, 1992 in The New Yorker, where he described people he had observed while travelling in Burundi, which has the same ethnic combustibility between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis; at that time Burundi’s army and government were controlled by the Tutsi minority.
“There were three obvious Tutsis,” Shoumatoff wrote, of the people he saw in a taxi cab, “Tall, slender with high foreheads, prominent cheekbones, and narrow features.” He added: “They were a different physical type from the five passengers who were short and stocky and had the flat noses and thick lips typical of Hutus.”
Almost three months later, an even more insidious article by Shoumatoff, “Rwanda’s Aristocratic Guerrillas,” was published on December 13, 1992, in The New York Times magazine. By this time, the invasion of Rwanda was in its second year and the RPF had already committed numerous massacres against Hutu civilians, as a lexis-nexus search of news reports will reveal. These crimes were glossed over or ignored in Shoumatoff’s article and all contemporary and subsequent accounts in major newspapers such as the Times.
Moreover, Shoumatoff was married to a Tutsi woman who was the first cousin of the RPF’s spokesperson and he was met at Entebbe airport in Uganda by RPF officials who guided him to the zones they controlled. So, The New York Times knowingly participated in the demonization campaign against the Hutus, who make up 85% of the population in both Rwanda and Burundi.
“In the late 19th Century,” Shoumatoff, acting as an unofficial propagandist for the invading army wrote in The New York Times magazine, describing Tutsis, “early ethnologists were fascinated by these ‘languidly haughty’ pastoral aristocrats whose high foreheads, aquiline noses and thin lips seemed more Caucasian than Negroid, and they classified them as ‘false negroes.’ In a popular theory of the day, the Tutsis were thought to be highly civilized people, the race of fallen Europeans, whose existence in Central Africa had been rumored for centuries.”
Shoumatoff added, of the Tutsis: “They are not a race or a tribe, as often described, but a population, a stratum, a mystical, warrior-priest elite, like the Druids in Celtic society.” As for the Hutus, they were far from resembling warrior priests: as Shoumatoff revealed, they were “short, stocky local Bantu agriculturalists.” [To read more critique of Western media demonization of Africans, please see “The Hearts Of Darkness, How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa,” (Black Star Books, 2005)]
Yes, henious crimes against humanity and war crimes occurred in Rwanda, not only in 1994, but right from the time of the Uganda-sponsored invasion in 1990. Yet, the account here shows, many people would rather pretend that the atrocities started in 1994.
Some of the people who participated in the crimes have been caught and tried; many who have been tried and convicted did not even participate; those prosecuted so far have been only Hutus.
The story can never be complete when others involved in the same crime are exonerated through New Speak–some are outside Rwanda, including Museveni, for sponsoring the invasion and reportedly for supplying the missile used to down Habyarimana’s jet; others, indicted and unindicted criminals now govern Rwanda.
But ours is a mere introduction. Let Keith Harmon Snow tell the sordid story. — Milton Allimadi, BlackStar News
False Narrative: Whitewashing Rwanda Genocide
By Keith Harmon Snow
On 12 February 2009, Alison Des Forges, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch (HRW) for more than 20 years, was killed when Continental Airlines Flight 3407 crashed on route to Buffalo, New York. Des Forges was widely cited as a staunch critic of the Rwandan military government controlled by Paul Kagame and the victors of the war in Rwanda, 1990-1994.
In the ongoing life-and-death struggle to reveal the truth about war crimes and genocide in Central Africa, competing factions on all sides have posthumously embraced Alison Des Forges as an activist challenging power and a purveyor of truth and justice against all odds. Meanwhile, in March, 2009, based on false accusations of genocide issued by the Kagame regime—and given the close relations between Rwanda and the Barack Obama Administration’s former Clintonite officials—the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began the process of revisiting all immigration cases of Rwandan asylum seekers and criminalizing innocent refugees.
“In May of 1994, a few weeks into the killings of Tutsis in Rwanda,” reported Amy Goodman, posthumously, on Democracy Now, Alison Des Forges “was among the first voices calling for the killings to be declared a genocide.” Added Goodman: “She later became very critical of the Tutsi-led Rwandan government headed by Paul Kagame and its role in the mass killings in both Rwanda and neighboring Congo after 1994. Last year, she was barred from entering Rwanda.”
To say that Des Forges was “amongst the first voices calling for the killings to be declared genocide” in 1994 is an Orwellian ruse. The genocide label applied by Alison Des Forges and certain human rights bodies in May of 1994 was misdirected, used to accuse and criminalize only the majority Hutu people and the remnants of the decapitated Habyarimana government; much as the genocide and war crimes accusations have been selectively applied against President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan.
The Clinton Administration refused to apply the genocide label: to do so might have compromised an ongoing U.S.-backed covert operation: the invasion of Rwanda by the Pentagon’s proxy force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A).
According to U.S. intelligence insider Wayne Madsen, Des Forges’ criticisms of the U.S.-brokered pact between Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s President Joseph Kabila in December 2008 “earned her some powerful enemies ranging from the murderous Kagame, who will not think twice about sending his agents to silence critics abroad, and international interests who want nothing to prevent them from looting the DRC’s vast mineral and energy resources.”
“With U.S. military forces of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) now backing a joint Ugandan-DRC offensive in the northeastern DRC to wipe out the Lord’s Resistance Army,” wrote Madsen on 16 February 2009, “with hundreds of civilian casualties in the DRC and Uganda, and a secret pact worked out between Kabila and Kagame to permit Rwandan troops to occupy the eastern DRC, the target of both operations is securing the vast territory that is rich in commodities that the United States, Britain and Israel—all allies of Uganda and Rwanda—want badly.
Those commodities are gold, diamonds, columbium-tantalite (coltan), platinum and natural gas.” Massive oil reserves are also at stake, with major concessions bifurcated by the international border. Ongoing petroleum sector investment (exploration and exploitation) in the region involves numerous western extraction companies—many being so-called petroleum “minors” likely fronting for larger corporations—including Hardman Resources, Heritage Oil and Gas, H Oil & Minerals, PetroSA, Tullow Oil, Vangold Resources, ContourGlobal Group, Tower Resources, Reservoir Capital Group, and Nexant (a Bechtel Corporation subsidiary).
Billed as a “tireless champion” and “leading light in African human rights,” there is much more to this story than the western propaganda system has revealed: Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch (HRW) provided intelligence to the U.S. government at the time of the 1994 crises, and they have continued in this role to the present. Des Forges also supported the show trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), institutionalizing victor’s justice and shielding the Kagame regime.
Alison Des Forges came across to many people as a wonderful human being with great compassion and impeccable integrity. Indeed, this was my impression upon meeting her as well. She is said to have helped people who were being persecuted—no matter that they were Hutus or Tutsis—by the Rwandan regime that has for more than 19 years operated with impunity behind the misplaced and misappropriated moral currency of victimhood. In the recent past, Alison Des Forges spoke—to some limited degree—against the war crimes of the Kagame regime.
In life she did not speak about the deeper realities of “genocide in Rwanda”, and she had plenty of chances. In fact, she is the primary purveyor of the inversion of truth that covered up the deeper U.S. role in the Rwanda “genocide”, and she spent the past 10 years of her life explaining away the inconsistencies, covering up the facts, revising her own story when necessary, and manipulating public opinion about war crimes in the Great Lakes of Africa—in service to the U.S. government and powerful corporations involved in the plunder and depopulation of the region.
“Alison des Forges is a liar,” Cameroonian journalist Charles Onana told me, in Paris, France, several years ago. Onana is the author of numerous exposés on war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in Central Africa, and he is the author of the book “The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide, Investigations on the Mysteries of a President,” published in French in 2001.
Kagame, Rwanda’s one-party president “elected” through rigged elections, sued Charles Onana for defamation in a French court in 2002; Kagame lost the original trial and the appeal. Kagame was the commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) and a leading agent—with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and their U.S., U.K., Belgian and Israeli backers—behind the massive bloodshed and ongoing terrorism in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan and Somalia.
In his book, Onana accused Kagame of being the principle instigator of the missile attack of April 6, 1994 that brought down the plane carrying Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi’s Cyprien Ntaryamira. Unlike the U.N.’s ongoing high-profile investigation of the murder of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafik Hariri, no major power has pushed for a similar probe into the murder of the two African presidents.
Des Forges own death in a plane crash garnered major coverage.
“Leading light in African Human Rights killed in Buffalo Crash,” reported the Pentagon’s mouthpiece, CNN. “Human Rights Watch, which is based in New York, said she was ‘best known for her award-winning account of the genocide, Leave None to Tell the Story.’ She was truly wonderful, the epitome of the human rights activist—principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and to using that truth to protect ordinary people.”
Alison Des Forges first worked as a HRW agent in Rwanda in 1992; in 1993 she helped produce a major international document highly biased against the Rwandan Government and protective of the RPF/A invaders: “Report of the International Commission of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda since October 1, 1990.”
In late 1992, the International Federation of Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, the Inter-African Union for Human Rights and the Rights of Peoples, and the International Center for the Rights of the Individual and the Development of Democracy created the International Commission of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda since October 1, 1990. With 10 members from eight countries, the commission reported its findings in March 1993: Des Forges was co chairperson, one of the three principal writers, and translator of the French to English version.
The report noted that “hundreds of thousands” of Rwandans were made homeless and forced to flee, prior to January 1993, but these casualties of the RPF/A invasion were not attributed to international crimes of peace against a sovereign government committed by an invading army—the RPF/A guerrillas covertly backed by the U.S., Britain, Belgium and Israel—but instead merely to “war”.
In other words, the initial act of aggression, the RPA/F invasion, was institutionally protected and the war crimes that set the stage for the conflagrations in Rwanda and Congo went unpunished.
Later in 1993, Rwandans Ferdinan d Nanimana and Joseph Mushyandi, representing four Rwandan organizations under the Rwanda Associations for the Defense of Human Rights, challenged the DesForges commission in their 26-page document, “A Commentary on the Report of the International Commission’s Inquiry on the Violation of Human Rights in Rwanda since October 1990.”
“How can an international commission be taken seriously when its members spent only two weeks extracting verbal and written evidence on human rights violations for a period of two years?” the authors wrote. They also pointed out that the commission spent less than two hours in areas controlled by the RPF/A rebels and that they could not visit all the 11 prefectures in the country because of demonstrations that blocked the roads. “Can there be any objective and credible conclusions in their report?”
Ferdinand Nanimana was later sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide. Many members of the Rwandan human rights organizations he worked with prior to April 1994 were subsequently killed. The rights and due process of Rwandan Hutus are systematically violated due to victor’s justice secured by the U.S., Europe, Israel and the proxy states Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. Bernard Ntuyahaga, a Major of the former Rwandan army (ex-FAR) accused of killing 10 Belgian soldiers and Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, surrendered to the ICTR to avoid extradition to Rwanda; he was tried in Belgium and sentenced to 20 years in prison on July 4, 2007.
Like other researchers who have endlessly perpetuated the disinformation, Des Forges made no attempts to correct the record. In 1992, human rights researchers Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal established the London-based NGO African Rights. In August 1995, African Rights published Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, another pivotal “human rights” report that manufactured the “genocide” fabrications, set the stage for victor’s justice at the ICTR, and began the process of dehumanizing millions of Hutu people and protecting the true terrorists. In 1995, Omaar and de Waal recycled the disinformation in the left-leaning Covert Action Quarterly under the title “U.S. Complicity by Silence: Genocide in Rwanda.”
Since 2003, Alex de Waal has been one of the primary disinformation conduits on Darfur, Sudan. “An intensive back and forth activity between this so-called British human rights organization, African Rights, and the intelligence services of the [Kagame] President’s office and the Rwandan military, has been observed,” wrote Paul Rusesabagina, whose heroics was immortalized in the film Hotel Rwanda. “Her investigators are very close to the [RPF/A] military intelligence apparatus, and the modus operandi of both appears to be similar.”
Alison Des Forges years-long “investigations” into the bloodshed of 1994 resulted in the fat treatise on genocide in Rwanda, “Leave None to Tell the Story,” a book co-researched and co-written by Timothy Longman, now Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Vassar College. Longman and Des Forges produced numerous documents—based on field investigations in Congo (then Zaire), Rwanda and Burundi, from 1995 to 2008—touted as independent and unbiased human rights documents, all skewed by hidden interests.
According to a recent PBS Frontline eulogy, less than two weeks into the killing in April 1994 Des Forges met with officials in the U.S. State Department and National Security Council (NSC) and lobbied for their help. “We were not asking for U.S. troops,” Frontline quotes her saying, “it was clear to us that there was no way that the U.S. was going to commit troops to Rwanda.”
But the U.S. military was heavily backing the RPF/A tactically and strategically already. Key to the operation were “former” Special Operations Forces (Ronco Company) providing military equipment and ferrying RPA troops from Uganda to Rwanda; the Pentagon’s logistical and communications support; Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA operatives. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), was also collaborating with the RPF/A, serving the Pentagon interest.
Genocide in Rwanda became a massive psychological operation directed against media consumers using ghastly images—produced by RPA-embedded photographers like James Nachtwey and Gilles Peres—to infer that all cadavers were Tutsi victims of an orchestrated Hutu genocide; meanwhile the text was racist disinformation produced by Joshua Hammer. Newsweek, June 20, 1994.
ICTR defense attorney Christopher Black reports that reliable sources confirm that US Special forces were with the RPF all the way through the war. “My client testified in June that U.S. Hercules [C-130 military aircraft] were seen dropping troops in support of the RPF…”
Further, on 9 April 1994, three days after the so-called “mysterious plane crash” where Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira and President Habyarimana were assassinated, some 330 U.S. marines landed at Bujumbura’s airport in Burundi, ostensibly to “rescue Americans” in Rwanda.
More centrally however, Uganda—with U.S. trained forces and U.S. supplied weaponry—launched its war against Rwanda as a proxy force for the United States of America on October 1, 1990.
The result was a coup d’état: we won. The 2003 Frontline interview with Alison Des Forges exemplifies her continuing role in whitewashing U.S. involvement in war crimes and genocide in Central Africa. “Kagame received his military education under the Pentagon’s Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) at the Command and General Staff College of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, beginning in 1990,” wrote John E. Peck of the Association of African Scholars (2002). “His sidekick, Lt. Col.
Frank Rusagara, got his JCET schooling at the U.S. Naval Academy in Monterey, California. Both were dispatched to Rwanda in time to oversee the RPF’s takeover in 1994. Far from being an innocent bystander, the Washington Post revealed on July 12, 1998 that the United States not only gave Kagame $75 million in military assistance, but also sent Green Berets to train Kagame’s forces (as well as their Ugandan rebel allies) in low intensity conflict (LIC) tactics. Pentagon subcontractor Ronco, masquerading as a de-mining company, also smuggled more weapons to RPF fighters in flagrant violation of UN sanctions. All of this U.S. largesse was put to lethal effect in the ethnic bloodbath that is still going on.”
“This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power,” Des Forges wrote, blaming “Hutu Power”. However, her assertions about a “planned” Hutu genocide—”They seized control of the state and used its machinery and its authority to carry out the slaughter”—collapse under scrutiny.
From 1990 to 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), comprised most heavily of Ugandan soldiers led by Ugandan citizens like Paul Kagame, committed atrocity after atrocity as they forced their way to power in Kigali, always falsely accusing their enemies—the power-sharing government of then President Juvenal Habyarimana—of genocide.
“Kagame assigned some people to work with Alison Des Forges,” says Ugandan Human Rights activist Remigius Kintu, “and also to assist her in fabricating and distorting stories to suit Tutsi propaganda plans.”
According to the International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, whose discoveries resulted in the high courts of Spain issuing international indictments against 40 top RPF/A officials: “Between 1990 and 1994, the RPA waged a systematic, pre-planned, secretive but highly organized terrorist war aimed at eliminating the largest number of Rwandan people possible—bodies were hacked to pieces and incinerated en masse.
From 1994, once the RPA violently seized power, a terror regime was created, and developed, and a criminal structure parallel to the state was set up to pursue pre-determined kidnappings; torturing and raping of women and young girls; terrorist attacks (both directly and by simulating that the same had been perpetrated by the enemy); illegal detention of thousands of civilians; selective murdering; systematic elimination of corpses either by mass incineration or by throwing them into lakes and rivers; indiscriminate attacks against civilians based on pre-determined ethnic categories for the elimination of the predominant ethnic group; and also to carry out acts of war in Rwanda and Congo.”
Before former President Habyarimana’s assassination on 6 April 1994, Des Forges, and the organizations she worked with, blamed the whole war crimes show on President Habyarimana and his government, they dismissed the illegal invasion and atrocities of the RPF/A, and they began calling it genocide against the Tutsis as early as 1992.
“In the Military II case Alison Des Forges admitted that she was funded by USAID when she was part of that so-called International Commission condemning the Rwandan Government [under Habyarimana] for human rights violations,” reports Canadian Chris Black, a defense attorney at the ICTR, “and she admitted that she just took the word of the RPF and pro-RPF groups and that she did not deal with RPF atrocities, as she did not have the time.”
Chris Black notes that Des Forges presented reports to the ICTR in certain legal cases that were decidedly doctored from the original reports presented in previous cases against other accused Hutu genocidaires, and that it was necessary to cross-examine Des Forges “very forcefully” to get her to agree that changes had been made to the reports presented as evidence in the case being tried.
“In her expert report in the 2006 Military II trial against General Ndindiliyimana,” Chris Black adds, “she removed all the positive things she had said about him in her book and in her previous expert report in the [Colonel Théoneste] Bagasora case. When asked by me why she deleted the positive view of him at his own trial, and why she tried to hide the fact that he saved a lot of Tutsis, among other things, she had no explanation. It was a cheap, low thing to do and I can tell you even the judges here at the ICTR were not too happy about it.”
On December 18, 2008, after the protracted ‘Military I’ trial, the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda ruled that there was no conspiracy to commit genocide by former Rwandan military leaders affiliated with the former Habyarimana government. It was war, and the actions—far from a calculated genocide—were found by ICTR judges to be “war-time conditions”.
“The media reports of the December 18 judgment [Military I] at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda focused primarily on the convictions of three of four former top military leaders, who were the supposed ‘masterminds’ of the Rwandan genocide,” wrote ICTR defense lawyer Peter Erlinder. “But, as those who have followed the ICTR closely know, convictions of members of the former Rwandan government and military are scarcely newsworthy.”
Since the inception of the ICTR its decisions have been decisively biased—victor’s justice—in favor of protecting the Kagame regime and its backers. Thus it is no surprise that the former top military leaders of the Habyarimana government—Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and Major Aloys Ntabakuze—were sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“The real news was that all of the top Rwandan military officers, including the supposedly infamous Colonel Bagosora, were found not guilty of conspiracy or planning to commit genocide,” writes Erlinder. “And General Gratien Kabiligi, a senior member of the general staff, was acquitted of all charges! The others were found guilty of specific acts committed by subordinates, in specific places, at specific times—not an overall conspiracy to kill civilians, much less Tutsi civilians.”
Now, after more than 15 years of massive western propaganda proclaiming an organized, systematic elimination of the Tutsi people by the Hutu leaders of the former Rwandan government, the official Rwanda genocide story has finally collapsed.
In contradistinction to the establishment narrative accusing the “Hutu leadership” of an “organized” and “planned” genocide were the countless acts of genocide committed through a spontaneous uprising of the Hutu masses—people who had been brutalized, disenfranchised, uprooted and forced from homes; people who had witnessed massacres and rapes of family members; people who were themselves the victims of brutal atrocities.
These were more than a million internally displaced Rwandan Hutus, people who had been terrorized by the Rwandan Patriotic Army from October 1990 to April 1994, as it butchered its way into Rwanda; and possibly a million Burundian refugees, Hutus who suffered massive reprisals in Burundi after the first civilian President, Melchior Ndadaye, a democratically elected Hutu, was assassinated by the Tutsi military in October 1993.
There is evidence that the RPA/F pursued “pseudo-operations”—death squads committing atrocities disguised as government soldiers—and evidence that at least some of the infamous Interahamwe militias pursued their campaigns of terror in the pay of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army.
“She concealed the fact that from 1990 the war caused an unprecedented economic poverty and that the one million internally displaced people tore the social fabric apart!” wrote Dr. Helmut Strizek, a former German official who had called for Des Forges’ resignation from HRW.
“And these people knew that Tutsi rebels caused their misery. They did not wait for ‘instructions’ in order to revenge, once no one was able to maintain public order after the April 6 assassination and resumption of hostilities by the RPF.”
“Alison Des Forges is no longer,” writes Charles Onana. “Peace be with her soul! She nonetheless leaves behind her many victims of injustice, who she painstakingly accused, using false testimony, before the International Criminal Tribunal Court for Rwanda (ICTR).” Alison Des Forges provided expert testimony in 11 genocide trials before the ICTR, including the ‘Military I’ trials that condemned Col. Theoneste Bagosora and two others on December 18. Des Forges also testified in genocide trials in Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada.
Charles Onana continues: “Among her victims there is Jean-Paul Akayesu, the first to be condemned to life imprisonment for genocide. This man, who Alison Des Forges had accused without any proof against him, was even defended by a Tutsi from the Patriotic Rwandan Army [RPA] who had been party to the fabrication of the ‘incriminating’ evidence against him in Rwanda. The Tribunal never listened to this witness, but they did listen to Alison Des Forges.”
“I have also discovered during the course of my investigations into the ICTR that, at the start of the trial in 1997, she introduced a forged fax that was purported to be written by General Dallaire in 1994. This fax, maintained Des Forges, concerned the ‘planning of genocide’.”
New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch spread the mythology of “The Genocide Fax” far and wide. Gourevitch’s first pro-RPF/A disinformation piece appeared in the New Yorker in December 1995; in May 1998 the New Yorker published Gourevitch’s “The Genocide Fax,” a charade fed to him by Madeleine Albright’s undersecretary of state James Rubin.
Gourevitch’s fictional book “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families” was funded by the euphemistically named U.S. Institute for Peace and written in league with the Kagame regime.
It is certainly possible that Alison Des Forges was unaware of the original fabrication, but she and Human Rights Watch never changed their tune, and they never denounced the fabrication.
Charles Onana continues: “It was on the basis of this false document that she called for the condemnation of Jean-Paul Akaseyu. To lend credibility to this first trial process, the ICTR, with astonishing lightness and irresponsibility, condemned this man to life. The Tribunal had no proof. The judicial dossier is slapdash and skimpy, but that has no importance. This was Alison Des Forges first great victory.”
“She then decided to pursue a Rwandan refugee living in Canada: an ideal target,” Onana adds, referring to Leon Mugesera. “He had the misfortune to be Hutu. For her, this man was a ‘planner of genocide’. But where is the proof? Alison Des Forges has none, but she wants to see this man in prison. Having deciphered or seen through Alison Des Forge’s arguments, the Judge of the Canadian Federal Tribunal concluded witheringly and without pity: ‘I note above all the relentlessness with which Mme Des Forges launched her diatribe against M. [Leon]Mugesera, and am astonished by the lack of care she has demonstrated in drawing up the report for the International Commission of Enquiry and in her Expert Assessment.’”
“The Canadian judge did not hesitate to qualify Mme. Des Forges as partisan, demonstrating ‘a prejudice or preconceived position against Léon Mugesera’. He concluded that she could not be considered an objective witness, adding that no correctly informed tribunal could take her allegations seriously. Nevertheless it was on the basis of the same arguments, and of the same fantasy report published in 1999, that she accused numerous Rwandans, all Hutu.”
“CONTINENTAL SHIFT,” one of Philip Gourevitch’s pivotal disinformation essays that appeared in the New Yorker, outlined the “new brand of African leader” exemplified by Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame: it is a whitewash of U.S.-backed terrorism. “It was thus that she devoted the penultimate day of her examination, during the process against the military, to presenting Colonel Bagosora, Hutu, as the king pin in the genocide.
The Tribunal in the long-running ‘Military I’ trial did not accept the ‘planning of genocide’ that Alison Des Forges never ceased to hammer on about by means of her pseudo-fax of 11 January 1994. She lied, lied and lied again. She tried a come-back or to recover her credibility by criticizing her ‘hero’ Paul Kagame, the organizer of the 6 April 1994 assassination of two presidents.”
“Alison Des Forges finally dared to speak of the crimes committed by the Tutsi rebels of the RPF/A: the great taboo. It was a bit late but it assuaged her conscience. For those who were condemned by the ICTR, deliberately and unjustly recorded by her, there will be no justice for them. Can Alison Des Forges still hear their suffering and their pain? She who has done them so much harm—along with their families? She who claimed to defend the Rights of Man has without doubt violated the rights of many Rwandans, who will undoubtedly never forget her. Their homage to Mme. Des Forges would have been different, very different, to what her many friends in the media have to say.”
Timothy Longman and Des Forges, the co-authors of the HRW treatise, “Leave None To Tell The Story,” both worked with USAID, the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. Des Forges was a member of the HRW board from 1988 and was “principal researcher” on Rwanda and Burundi, 1991-1994.
In this period Des Forges also consulted for USAID, and collaborated with the State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council. Simultaneously, Des Forges worked with, informed and influenced U.S. Congress-people, Permanent Representatives at the United Nations, the U.N. Under-Secretary General, and U.N. Special Rapporteur for Rwanda and Special Rapporteur for Summary and Arbitrary Executions. Des Forges also pumped the disinformation into the academic world through her high-level ties to human rights committees, African and Africana Studies departments and the elite African Studies Association.
In the same period, Des Forges constantly influenced the U.S. media through special briefings to the editorial boards and reporters of the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and Associated Press, and she was frequently presented as an “expert” on genocide in Rwanda for CNN, 60 Minutes, Nightline, All Things Considered, BBC, Radio France Internationale, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
Such relations explain the mass media’s consistency in producing the monolithic disinformation about Rwanda that shielded the illegal U.S.-backed and covert RPF/A- Ugandan guerrilla insurgency. The blanket media coverage falsely situated the “Rwanda genocide” as it is now widely misunderstood: 100 days of genocide, 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed with machetes; the “highly disciplined” RPF/A stopping the genocide.
Such is the disinformation that indoctrinated the English-speaking media consumers and created a mass psychological hysteria about Rwanda that persists to this day. Timothy Longman worked with Des Forges in Rwanda in 1994 and has worked regularly with both USAID and HRW on contracts in Congo, Burundi and Rwanda, throughout the late 1990’s and into the present; Longman worked in Rwanda on one USAID contract for Management Systems Incorporated, a firm whose clients include the Pentagon. Longman also worked as a consultant for HRW in the spring of 2000 conducting field research in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and producing “a detailed report on human rights conditions in rebel-controlled areas.”
The Des Forges and Longman position vis-à-vis their whitewashing of the Tutsi-led RPF/A organized genocide in Rwanda certainly explains the sanitation of HRW reports, and it raises questions, for example, about how Human Rights Watch “researchers” navigate their “work” in rebel (read: Rwandan and Ugandan) controlled areas in DRC.
It also raises questions about how, why and when HRW does or doesn’t expose the western operatives, non-government organizations and multinational corporations: a singular example is the Human Rights Watch report that mildly exposes the criminal operations of Anglo-Gold Ashanti—a company partnered with the George H.W. Bush connected Barrick Gold Corporation—in eastern DRC.
HRW says nothing about Moto Gold, Mwana Africa, Banro Resources, Hardmann Oil, Tullow Oil, De Beers, H Oil & Minerals, OM Group, Metalurg, Kotecha, International Rescue Committee—and the many proxy armies, militias, gun-runners and other organized white collar war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Congo.
The role of HRW as an intelligence conduit to the U.S. Government is incidentally confirmed by Samantha Power in her book “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide”—a whitewash of U.S. and allied war crimes for which she was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize.
While Power’s “bystanders to genocide” thesis about Rwanda is a total inversion of the facts, she notes in passing that “Human Rights Watch supplied exemplary intelligence to the U.S. Government and lobbied in one-on-one meetings” in April and May 1994, and that Alison Des Forges and other HRW staff visited the White House on April 21, 1994. Samantha Power is currently a member of the National Security Council in the Obama Administration.
The mass media was flooded with “Rwanda genocide” disinformation between April and July of 1994, and advertising that served up subliminal seduction and white supremacy often surrounded these “news” clips.
Alison Des Forges continued to remain silent about Western corporate and military interests in the Great Lakes region to her death. A perfect example of this silence is the very unrevealing March 2008 interview by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum titled “Alison Des Forges: The Impact of Rwandan Genocide in Congo.”
Timothy Longman also produces significant pro-US propaganda about Sudan. Thus it is important to note that amongst the key USAID conduits for disinformation and covert operations in Sudan today is Roger Winter, one of the primary architects of the RPF/A guerrilla war, organized from Washington in 1989, that led to the loss of millions of lives in the Great Lakes of Africa since October 1990.
Alison Des Forges, of course, never mentioned Roger Winter or his colleague in covert operations, Susan Rice, the Obama Administration’s Ambassador to the U.N. Of Roger Winter, Remigius Kintu, the Ugandan Human Rights activist says “he was the chief logistics boss for the RPF until their victory in 1994….”
“Roger Winter was with the RPA on the front lines in Rwanda and he regularly briefed the Clinton Administration of the RPA’s military achievements,” says Jean Marie Vianney Higiro, former Rwandan official. “Alison Des Forges contributed to the RPF/A takeover of Rwanda. I have no doubt about that… I met her three times, first in 1995, and in 2004 she encouraged me to testify at the ICTR. I said ‘no way: I will only testify if RPF officials are arrested.’ She insisted I should testify, she was confident that the RPF were going to be arrested. I think she did not realize that the U.S. government would never accept that. She was something of an opportunist.”
The zeal displayed by Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch in the pursuit of justice and human rights appears in sharp contradistinction to their absence of zeal in pursuing the architects of the criminal invasion of Rwanda on October 1, 1990, by Uganda, the double presidential assassinations of April 6, 1994, and all kinds of other murderous corporate conspiracies in Central Africa where foreign-financed wars are used as cover for illegal extraction of resources, particularly in the Congo.
Ironically, as the world this week commemorated the 15th Anniversary of the terrible mass murders that followed the assassination of the presidents, Rwandan asylum seekers that are critics of the Kagame regime live under perpetual fear of being hunted down, branded as genocide perpetrators, ostracized, and persecuted by an illegitimate dictatorship. Forty of the regime’s military officials have been indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by two international courts.
Kagame’s ruthless Directorate of Military Intelligence has dispatched agents to Europe to eliminate RPF opponents; some of these agents are operating under cover as bogus asylum-seekers in Europe and North America.
As of January 20, 2009 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began reopening all cases of Rwandan asylum seekers, and is criminalizing and threatening to deport legitimate refugees to Rwanda, actions that violate the 1951 United Nations High Commission for Refugees Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.
(Keith Harmon Snow is the 2009 Regent’s Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work, outside of academia, contesting official narratives on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide while also working as a genocide investigator for the United Nations and other bodies.)
By Yao Graham | The Ghanaian Journal
Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and Ghana’s founder and first President Kwame Nkrumah during the formation of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa. [Getty Images]
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While many African leaders have aspired to inherit Nkrumah’s mantle as the visionary and driver of Pan-Africanism and continental unity, writes Yao Graham, a gaping political leadership vacuum remains at the heart of the continent’s collective expression. From an age when there were a number of outstanding African leaders, among whom Nkrumah was preeminent, Graham argues that the African Union’s election of Gaddafi as its leader is a statement of a collective failure of leadership and underlines the crisis in which the Pan-African project is currently mired at the inter-state level. Where, asks Graham, are the African leaders who see opportunities for change in the current crisis, and who are ‘ready to dare and look beyond guaranteeing the sanctity of aid flows?’
In February Ghana’s new President John Atta-Mills announced that Nkrumah’s birthday in September will be observed as Founder’s Day and a national holiday. The long and tortuous national rehabilitation of the man who led the country to independence and remains an inspiration to Africans all over the world had taken yet another important step in the centenary year of his birth.
In the years after Ghana gained independence, Nkrumah’s life and work was dominated by two primary concerns, one international, the other domestic. Internationally Pan-Africanism as a project of political and economic freedom, unity and structural transformation linked to the issue of Africa’s place and voice on the world stage was dominant. Inside Ghana the main issue was the structural transformation of the mono-crop dependent colonial economy bequeathed by the British into a balanced and internally linked one that offered improved and secure livelihoods to Ghanaians. The domestic and international concerns were of course closely linked in Nkrumah’s pronouncements and practice. He hoped that any achievements in Ghana would serve as a model as well as a unit in the economy of a united Africa. Nkrumah was ready to incur the wrath of the major imperialist powers of the day in pursuit of what he believed was in the interest of the African people.
David Rooney concluded his critical biography of Nkrumah with the acknowledgement that ‘His hopes were encapsulated in his ultimate goal of a United Africa in which its rich natural resources would be used for the benefit of all its people and would not be filched from them by foreign financiers and other exploiters. It may take centuries for Nkrumah’s goal to be achieved, but when it is, he will be revered as the leader with the dynamism and intelligent imagination to take the first brave steps’.
From an age when there were a number of outstanding African leaders, among whom Nkrumah was preeminent, the continent currently confronts the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and a host of other challenges such as the situation in and international political play around Darfur without a rallying figure.
Nkrumah’s leadership and rallying role in African affairs went well beyond his vision and theorising. Importantly it included support for national liberation movements. This support embodied a unity of his Pan-Africanism and commitment to anti-colonial independence as a necessary precondition for the continent’s unity and progress. The activities of the Bureau of African Affairs which oversaw support for national liberation movements and the training of their cadre in Ghana with support from the Soviet bloc and China led to Cold War accusation that Ghana was a base for communist subversion in Africa. Two events however stand out in Nkrumah’s readiness to support the national liberation struggle as well as defend its unity with the Pan-African cause, even when face to face with much more powerful countries. These are the financial aid Ghana gave to newly independent Guinea in 1958 and Ghana’s stance and action in support of Patrice Lumumba’s government during the Congo (DRC) crisis of the early sixties. Developments in the two countries soon after independence offer credence to Cabral’s argument that ’so long as imperialism is in existence an independent African state must be a liberation movement in power, or it will not be independent’.
As France stared defeat in the face in Algeria at the hands of the National Liberation Front (FLN) – a prospect made all the more difficult to countenance because of the humiliation inflicted by the Vietnamese in 1954 – it sought to re-package its colonial control by offering its African colonies membership of a French community. All French African colonies, except Guinea under Sekou Toure, agreed to the new colonial package. In an unforgettable act of vindictiveness, the departing French stripped Guinea of anything they could carry, leaving the country on the brink of collapse. Nkrumah stepped in with a £10m loan to help the newly independent country avoid collapse. This was a considerable sum in those days and big sacrifice by a small country like Ghana.
Nkrumah’s brave and sustained but ultimately doomed support for Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the unity of Congo and his faith in the UN in the face Western plotting and intrigue marked a high point of his willingness to assume international leadership on African causes. The outcome was also a stark statement of what could not be achieved without a concerted African engagement in the face of powerful external forces. Nkrumah maintained a consistent line during the Congo crisis. He insisted that the country should solve its problems with the support of other African countries within the framework of the UN without the meddling of global powers, especially the NATO bloc. He assumed that the UN framework would give international legitimacy to the African led process. Nkrumah sent troops to support Lumumba using Soviet planes much to the anger of the USA. On 23 September 1960 Nkrumah used the platform of the UN General Assembly to make the case for Congo’s unity, Lumumba’s leadership and for an African solution under UN auspices to the crisis in the Congo. The appeal failed to gain traction, mainly because the UN auspices also provided perfect cover for the US and its NATO allies to carry out their plans in the Congo.
It is now a public fact that even before Congo’s independence on 1 July 1960, the American CIA was getting ready to put its puppets in power. President Dwight Eisenhower issued a national security order for the killing of Prime Minister Lumumba within six weeks of Congo becoming independent. Congo’s fate as a Western plaything in the Cold War was sealed and its long and tragic descent into what it has become today had begun. The gulf between Nkrumah’s intentions and his weakness in the situation was tragically highlighted by how Ghana’s contingent in the UN military force became detached from Nkrumah’s political objectives and acted as accessories to actions against Lumumba.
Nkrumah’s lonely and heroic but ultimately futile stance on the Congo crisis contrasts sharply with the flabby collective African approach on Somalia and Darfur. The former process has lurched from crisis to crisis with ever diminishing credibility and capacity of the transitional government. The situation was further compounded by the readiness of Ethiopia, the host country of the African Union, to act in concert with the Bush administration in pursuit of their particular national interests that converged in Somalia. Old Ethiopian imperial pretensions meshed with Bush’s war on terror. All these fuelled the discrediting, resistance to and delegitimation of the AU’s role in that country.
The Darfur crisis and its escalation around the indictment of Sudan’s President Bashir by the International Criminal Court has provided a grave test for Africa’s collective ability to deal with African issues which are heavily intermeshed with international dimensions and interests. The UN/AU hybrid peacekeeping operation in Darfur (UNAMID) continues to face various difficulties. Joint UN-AU as well as Arab League mediation and peace initiatives do not appear to be making much progress. The indictment of Bashir and the issuing of a warrant for his arrest has further complicated the situation. Having failed to exert a decisive influence on the course of events in Darfur, including on the behaviour of the Sudanese government and the evolution of the ICC’s pursuit of Bashir, the African Union has taken a critical stance towards the implementation of the arrest warrant. As the internationalisation of the Darfur conflict widens, the purchase of the African Union on how it is likely to be resolved shrinks.
In recent years Pan-African structures, institutions and processes have proliferated. The mechanisms of the AU have been undergoing refinement since it took over from the OAU as the premier continental institution. Alongside these phenomena, many African leaders have aspired to inherit Nkrumah’s mantle as the visionary and driver of Pan-Africanism and continental unity. A gaping political leadership vacuum however remains at the heart of the continent’s collective expression.
Earlier this year the AU elected Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as chair of the Union. In recent years, he has emerged as the most forthright spokesman for the urgency of creating a United States of Africa. How best and how quickly to move forward to a union of African states was the main item on the agenda of the 2007 AU summit, fittingly held in Accra during Ghana’s 50th year of independence. The debate was inconclusive but the exercise underlined Gaddafi’s stature as a leader of the Unity Now! camp.
The African Union’s election of the unpredictable Gaddafi at this grave moment in history is more a negative than a positive. It is a statement of a collective failure of leadership and underlines the crisis in which the Pan-African project is mired at the inter-state level. His seemingly radical stance on African Unity notwithstanding, the sad truth is that Gaddafi is not the successor to Nkrumah that the continent currently and urgently needs. He does not offer a coherent vision or leadership practice of pan-Africanism in keeping with the needs of the age. These shortcomings are compounded by his unpredictability and histrionics. Some of his views and pronouncements show him up as a man deeply marked by his years as an authoritarian leader. Among his many bizarre acts is his current self-designation as king of Africa’s kings, a reactionary assertion out of tune with the democratic logic on the continent’s national liberation struggles.
The African people want democracy not monarchs. If there is one element of Africa’s post-colonial history that the masses want behind them it is the years of despotism. In Black Star, his deeply sympathetic study of Nkrumah’s life and times, Basil Davidson, who devoted his life to supporting Africa’s national liberation struggles, pointed to the decay of internal party democracy and the gradual ascent of authoritarian use of power in Nkrumah’s Ghana as a key contributor to the erosion of mass support for Nkrumah’s efforts to transform the economy for the benefit of ordinary people. ‘The view for tomorrow is that Nkrumah’s aims were the right ones and their realisation will become increasingly possible as conditions ripen and as other strategists take up further struggles for liberation. These strategists will succeed… in the measure that they undertake and carry through the work of building democratic organisations which become the vehicles of mass participation as well as mass support: movements in which the mass of ordinary people really make, enshrine and uphold the fundamental law of the land’.
The African delegation to the London G20 summit was led not by Gaddafi the chair of the AU but by Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi, who is chair of NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) and a good friend of the West. NEPAD is at best a substructure of the AU and Zenawi’s presence is illustrative of the ease with which many outside Africa are able to pick and choose how to deal with the continent. During the Beijing China Africa Forum the Chinese were able to deal with African countries as individuals while the AU was treated as observer.
Processes of restructuring of global leadership are underway in the international level responses to the unfolding economic crisis. One strand of these is the emergence of the G20 as a key site of global economic leadership, the effective downgrading of the G8. This process mirrors the way in which the old wholly Western quartet of leading powers in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been replaced by a new quad of the US, EU, Brazil and India. The seating around the G20 table reflects the power of individual Asian and Latin American economies with South Africa the only African country there as an individual member country. Realistically the most effective way African countries could have optimised their voice would have been through effective prior preparation and definition of positions and South-South diplomacy ahead of the meeting, as well as having a collective representative of their own choosing.
The continent’s response to the global crisis has so far lacked urgency and the sense that this is an opportunity to make a break with some of the discredited policies which have failed to deliver transformative growth over the past couple of decades. The main line in the global fora has been to plead for Africa to be remembered and for the security of aid budgets. As African leaders traipse around international fora, the glaring absence of leaders who see opportunities for change in the current crisis stands in sharp relief.
The current global crisis has validated what critics of neoliberalism have been saying for years. In the last few years the annual Economic Report on Africa (ERA) published by the UN Economic Commission for Africa has been gently putting out its critique of the experience of the neoliberal agenda in Africa. Years of growth had failed to effect either transformation or the much touted poverty reduction. The current crisis had again brought to the fore the fundamental structural problems of Africa’s economies which the recent years of growth had masked, especially in countries exporting oil or benefiting from the commodities boom.
Nkrumah reportedly broke down in tears when confronted with the news that the collapse of cocoa prices had cut the ground from under his plans for the economic transformation of Ghana. In the years since Nkrumah’s overthrow, the cyclical movement of cocoa and gold prices have been the determinant factors in the health of the Ghanaian economy, tempered in recent years by the substantial aid that the country receives. For some years now Ghana has been a model of the type of economy and economic policy that has been proclaimed as the way forward for Africa but which has failed to deliver over a generation and has been exposed as bankrupt by the global crisis.
During the last six or so years of his rule Nkrumah attempted to transform the colonial economy he inherited. Many leaders of his generation – Nyerere in Tanzania, Kaunda in Zambia, and many others – recognised this to be a primary task of post-colonial economic policy. Despite the claims that Nkrumah’s difficulties were because of his socialist policies, the truth is that for a long time he was a good pupil of the dominant economic theories and ideas of his day as purveyed by leading thinkers in the West. His later attempt to learn from the development strategies of the Soviet Union as well as China and Yugoslavia showed a readiness to take risks and try uncharted paths. In retrospect it clear that many mistakes were made and offer rich lessons for today, but he dared.
In the 15 years Nkrumah was in power a leading role for the state in the economy was the norm in both communist countries and the West where Keynesian economics prevailed. The experience of the Soviet Union offered lessons in rapid industrialisation, which India had started learning before Ghana came along. The relative success of import substituting industrialisation in Latin America had made that strategy a respectable one by the time of Ghana’s independence. The Labour party was undertaking extensive nationalisations in Britain when Nkrumah first came to power. Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism was powered by a grander vision and ambition than the modest European Coal and Steel community, which has flowered into the European Union, but they were united by a recognition of the benefits of regional integration.
Using existing resources, Nkrumah rapidly expanded education, health and infrastructure and aided other newly independent countries such as Guinea. With additional borrowing, industrial and agricultural investments were made. Many of the agro-industrial projects, not all well conceived, were in their infancy when he was overthrown. He inaugurated the Akosombo hydroelectricity dam, the centre piece of the Volta River project, which he saw as powering Ghana’s industrialisation a month before his overthrow. The creation of a local raw material base was not properly scheduled with the new factories that were built in the period before the 1966 coup. By that time the crisis in the international price of cocoa had wrought considerable damage to revenue and growth projections, putting pressure on imports and consumption.
The turn towards the Soviet Union and China was an economic as well as political act. Nkrumah’s anti-imperialism meant that he did not believe he could rely on the West for full support for his transformational project especially given the centrality of African unity with its implication for existing colonial spheres of influence as well as US intrusions into the continent.
One of the key lessons from Ghana’s development experience under Nkrumah is linked directly to his commitment to a pan-African solution to the challenges of under development. Nkrumah’s works are replete with warnings about the limits of what small ‘balkanised’ African countries can do on their own. Faced with the absence of a larger political economic unit he sought to transform the small economy and market of Ghana into an industrialised economy at a fast pace. The post-Cold War global economic framework has made the regional and continental even more key in any serious African project of economic transformation.
Sadly even in the face of the global crisis many African governments are looking only outwards towards their ‘development partners’ rather than exploring the opportunities for deepening regional and continental cooperation and integration. The IMF is offering its pernicious advice that not much needs to change and there seem to be many in African leadership ready to listen. Meantime in the global North, pages are being torn from the rulebooks by which African economies have been run from Washington. The norms which have driven the negotiating positions of the West in fora such as the WTO have been called into question by domestic policies in those countries.
All these offer important opportunities for a new agenda for economic transformation in Africa. Where are the African leaders ready to dare and look beyond guaranteeing the sanctity of aid flows? Wanted: an African ‘leader with the dynamism and intelligent imagination to take the first brave steps’.
(Yao Graham, an activist and writer, is the head of Third World Network Africa, a pan-African research and advocacy organization based in Accra, Ghana.)
One of the best kept secrets in the international media these days is the link between the USA, Ethiopia and the Somali pirates. First, a little reliable background from someone on the ground in the Horn of Africa.