| THE HANDSTAND | NOVEMBER-JANUARY2010 |
Pierre
Péan and Prince Antoine Nyetera, Authors of "Noires
fureurs, blanc menteurs" - Highlight ADAD Conference
Two of the highlights of this weekend's
Conference of ICTR Defense attorneys in The Hague were
the French investigative writer, Pierre Péan, author of
the magnificent history of the Rwandan counter-revolution
(1990-1994), "Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs," and
the Tutsi Prince, Antoine Nyetera, the source of Péan's
controversial four-page aria on the Rwandan (Tutsi)
culture of the lie (known in Kinyarwanda as 'ubwenge') at
the very beginning (pp 41-44) of his 500+page tome.
One or the other or both of them smartly pointed
out that the 'culture of the lie' is characteristic to
all irrational, anti-democratic, neofeudal, monarchic,
minoritarian--in a word, Fascist--political cultures.
The ruling minority, in constant fear of being
turned out by the masses they exploit for their
privileges, always play it fast and loose with the Truth,
with History, with Reality. And if you have a
problem with that fact, then you're probably a neofeudal
nostalgic, a cringing anti-democrat, a wincing Czarist, a
putrid piece of Nazi scum.
Péan's book came out in 2005 at about the same time that
journalist Stephen Smith leaked in Le Monde the report of
French anti-terrorist judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière's
investigation into the 6 April 1994 missile strike
against the Rwandan presidential jet that cost the lives
of two democratically elected African heads of state,
Presidents Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien
Ntaryamira of Burundi, their entourages, the Chief of
Staff of the Rwandan Army, Déogratias Nsabimana,
and the three-man French flight crew, Jacky Heraud (pilot), Jean-Pierre
Minaberry (co-pilot), and Jean-Marc Perrine (flt
engineer), the three French nationals whose families
instigated the Bruguière investigation.
Bruguière not only found Paul Kagame and his RPF,
currently the governing power in Rwanda and the darlings
of American clerico-fascism, to be responsible for the 6
April terrorist attack on the Presidents' plane--a
terrorist attack and not simply an act of war, as Paul
Kagame would like to have it, because it took place while
the Arusha Peace Accords of 3 August 1993, to which both
the Habyarimana government and Kagame's RPF were
signatory, were in place--but his investigation also
traced the RPF's involvement in the liquefactionist
destruction of the Rwandan revolution back to its 1
October 1990 invasion from Uganda, under the banner,
using the arms, personnel and materiel of the Ugandan
National Resistance Army (NRA), through a four-year reign
of terror, the double presidential assassination and the
subsequent bloody nationwide military offensive it
triggered, unto the 1996-1998 invasions of Eastern Congo
with their loss of innocent non-combattant lives now in
the multi-millions and climbing everyday.
In the time-tested tradition of The Holocaust Industry,
where with each military onslaught comes a parallel
propaganda blitz keyed to the issue of the minority Tutsi
genocide: from the Rwandan Social Revolution of 1959,
where the Hutu majority overthrew colonially-supported,
neofeudal Tutsi minority, to the ravaging of the Hutu
refugee camps in Congo, the rationale has always been
couched in a Human Rights defense of the Tutsis against
genocide or against 'the ideology of genocide.' So
when Judge Bruguière's report came out charging the
Tutsi 'rebels' of the RPF with doing the bulk of the
killing in Central Africa, and the Hutu majority making
up the majority of the victims, Rwandan President Paul
Kagame's reflex was to break off diplomatic relations
with France, claiming the judge's report was politically
motivated and an attempt to hide France's key role in
planning and preparing the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and
moderate Hutus in the one-hundred days between 6 April
and 16 July 1994.
The initial 2008 civil suit brought by SOS-Racisme
against Péan, one of the organization's founders and a
long-time patron, and his editor, Claude Durand, seems
part of this Holocaust Industry-like subterfuge for
attempting damage control. Last November the Paris
court acquitted Péan and Durand. But immediately
the plaintiffs filed what is, here in France, called 'an
appeal,' but what seems to someone who's only played a
couple of lawyers on TV like double jeopardy.
So here is
the AP story on Péan's recent re-acquittal that we
translated from the French:
Pierre Péan acquitted a second time on
charges of provoking racial discrimination
AP | 18.11.2009 | 16:16
The writer Pierre Péan was acquitted for a
second time Wednesday (18/11/09), on charges of provoking
racial discrimination in his book on the Rwandan genocide,
"Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs" ["Black
Fury, White Liars"--though no English version yet
exists--nb], published in 2005. "It is a
victory for freedom of expression," said his lawyer
Florence Bourg. His editor, Claude Durand, was also
acquitted.
"I'm very pleased with this decision, which
is in keeping with the spirit of the law. There was no
criminal intention on Pierre Péan's part, and he did not
incite racial hatred," Maitre Bourg said. "Noires
fureurs, blancs menteurs is, above all, a political
analysis."
For the court, there was no defamation or
incitement to racial hatred on the part of the writer.
The Court of Appeals in Paris decided, as did the
court in the first trial last year, that Pierre Péan and
his editor did not promote racist thought. The
complaint had called for them to be condemned for racial
hatred.
SOS-Racisme had filed its complaint in October
2006, charging Péan with having written that the Tutsis
resorted to lies and dissimulation or were masters of
manipulation, the writer sometimes citing other authors
in the pages in question
In the first trial, Pierre Péan was acquitted
of the two most important charges, "complicity in
racial defamation" and "complicity in the
provocation of racial discrimination."
The lawyer for SOS-Racisme, Lef Forster, said
that the plaintiffs are going to file yet another appeal
with the French Supreme Court.
As with the first trial, the court dismissed the
countersuit by Péan and his editor against SOS-Racisme
for "abusive persecution." AP
But this time out the Human Rights and Holocaust
Industrialists brought some stronger shit into the game.
Elie Wiesel, the renowned survivor of the Nazi
concentration camps, who fled Auschwitz only to follow
his Fascist tormentors back into Germany and await
Western allied liberation at an abandoned Buchenwald,
rather than be sprung in Poland by the Red Army, weighed
in against Péan--in a case he seemed painfully
unfamiliar with--by charging the writer with failing to 'privilege
the victims' truth' in his recounting of the mass
killings in Rwanda, which The Wiesel would liken to The
Shoah.--in what the French would call an 'amalgame.' So
it turns out that the HI's stronger shit is really pretty
weak.
Péan's response to The Wiesel's intimations of
revisionism or negationism is worth taking a good look at:
The Péan Trial/RWANDA
Rwanda: Pierre Péan answers Elie Wiesel
His actions called into question by the Nobel
[Peace] laureate in the midst of the civil trial over his
book dedicated to the Rwandan genocide, Pierre Péan sent
us the following letter:
“What an honor for a writer to arouse a
response from a Nobel Peace Prize winner!
Did he write his article a few hours before the
beginning of my trial so as to influence French Justice?
Such would not be worthy of him. In fact, I’d
like to believe that, despite what he wrote, he has not
really read my book, “Noire fureurs, blancs menteurs,”
and that that is why he caricatured it as “Morally
deplorable and historically regrettable.”
For those readers who would not know my book
except for Elie Wiesel’s critique, I will straight
away point out that I was acquitted by the court of these
same charges of racial defamation and incitement to
racial hatred, brought by SOS-Racisme, after the first
trial. The action was brought because of a few
sentences, found on pages 41 to 44 of my 500-page book,
which were part of a quick political history of Rwanda
since the beginning of the 20th century: I wrote these
pages with Antoine Nyetera, a Tutsi descendant of the
royal family.
Elie Wiesel distorts my intentions by looking to
capture the whole book in a single sentence: “The
Tutsi chiefs were responsible for their own
catastrophic downfall, which they, then, called genocide.”
Why speak in the plural of ‘Tutsi chiefs,’
when it is a political organization, the RPF, equipped
with its own armed forces, that I am charging?
I acknowledge that Paul Kagame, at that time the
leader of the RPF, is responsible for the attack of 6
April 1994 against Juvénal Habyarimana, the legitimate
president of Rwanda. But, today, the whole world
knows that this act of war was what triggered the
genocide. Because of this, Kagame bears an
important part of the responsibility for the genocide of
the Rwandan Tutsis.
Since my book came out in 2005, [French anti-terrorist]
judge [Jean-Louis] Bruguière and Spanish judge [Fernando]
Andreu Merelles, have likewise determined that the
criminal responsibility for this terrorist act lies with
the current Rwandan dictator. The Spanish judge has
even issued 40 arrest warrants against Kagame’s
inner circle charging them with the crime of genocide.
Elie Wiesel speaks of his experiences in The
Shoah. But, these two historical calamities, the
WWII Jewish Holocaust and the genocide of the Tutsis,
have nothing to do with one another, and cannot be
compared. It is the RPF that, on 1 October 1990,
crossed into Rwanda from Uganda and, with 7,000 Tutsi
rebel troops, pushed to within a few miles of Kigali: War
was declared against the Habyarimana regime. After
four years of military hostilities, after the genocide of
the Tutsis and the mass slaughter of the Hutus, it is
Paul Kagame who took state power in Kigali.
“The victims’ truth deserves to be
privileged,” says Elie Wiesel. But Paul Kagame
is not a victim, and the ‘truth’ that he would
impose on the world is a grotesque affront to the memory
of the victims. I respect the comparison that Elie
Wiesel makes between these victims because it is grounded
in his memory of The Shoah, but this comparison is not
sufficient for seeking after and discerning the truth.
The story of the Rwandan tragedy has not yet
been written; I believe I have made a modest contribution,
especially by noting that the Tutsis were not the only
victims, that there were also hundreds of thousands of
Hutu victims.
All the victims deserve our respect and our
compassion. To cry only for the Tutsi victims is
“morally deplorable and historically regrettable.”
Pierre Péan
**************************
But the kicker in this whole story--and the
major clear moment at last weekend's Conference in The
Hague--was when Prince Antoine Nyetera testified that the
greatest act of racism in the entire Péan case was when
SOS-Racsime went after the European Jew, Péan, instead
of his source, the African Jewish nobleman, Nyetera. (My
amalgame, The Economist called the Tutsis the "Jews
of Africa.")
And though I am sure we have not heard the last of Kagame
and his HI/HR/Liberal/STFG minions--even with the recent
spate of reversals of RPF fortunes in ICTR cases, like
the acquittals on genocide charges of Fr. Hormisdas
Nsengimana; of Protais Zigiranyirazo, the
martyred President Habyarimana's brother-in-law whose
acquittal also exploded the whole Akazu (Little House)
myth of the late President's inner circle and family
plotting his assassination to trigger the genocide of the
Tutsis; while both these rulings followed on
the extraordinary Military I judgement of December 2008 (published
in February 2009) in which the 'brains of the genocide,'
Colonel Theoneste Bagosora and his three co-defendants
were found not guilty of any conspiracy or planning in
the Tutsi genocide of 1994: it is becoming more and more
apparent that the ICTR's continuing service as a mosquito
net protecting the expansionist military interests in
Africa of the US, the UK and Israel, is rapidly
being obviated by the intense shredding of the false
history and outright lies from which it was spun that is
currently being carried out by the courageous and
commited lawyers of ADAD and its support network--to
which we here at CM/P are proud to belong. --mc
Human rights concerns raised as Rwanda set to join Commonwealth
Kigali wants allowances made for how far it's come since the genocide
Monday, 23 November 2009 The Independent,UK
REUTERS
Rwanda is set to succeed in its bid to join the Commonwealth this week despite serious concerns over its human rights record, according to a senior source close to the negotiations.
A summit of Commonwealth heads of government in Trinidad and Tobago will add the central African nation to its 53 current members, despite its failure to meet entry requirements. "There is consensus on Rwanda" a senior African negotiator told The Independent.
The decision, expected before the week's end, has been greeted with dismay by NGOs, while the author of a major report on Rwanda's candidacy said it was clear evidence that the Commonwealth "could not care less about human rights".
Professor Yash Pal Ghai, a Kenyan-born expert in constitutional law and author of an independent report for the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) said: "From the very beginning, the governments of the Commonwealth had decided they wanted Rwanda in. The secretary general, Britain and Uganda have all been pushing for that outcome."
Supporters of the bid have argued that entry into the club would encourage Kigali to raise its standards, but critics counter that it will "lower the group's average" and make it harder to take actions against states – such as Fiji, currently suspended for refusing to call elections – that trangress in future. "The Commonwealth stands for very little if it doesn't stand for human rights and democracy," said Tom Porteous, head of Human Rights Watch in London. "Admitting Rwanda will make it harder for the Commonwealth to project itself as a credible promoter of these values."
Rwanda, a former German colony, which later came under a Belgian mandate from the League of Nations, applied in 2007 to join the voluntary association of mainly English-speaking former British colonies. That move followed the breakdown in relations between Kigali and France as both countries traded accusations over events in the build-up to the 1994 genocide.
Applicant countries are meant to have some historical or constitutional link with the Commonwealth, although the grouping made an exception for the former Portuguese colony Mozambique in 1995.
In its bid, which has been strongly backed by Britain, Australia and Uganda, Rwanda has argued that it should be judged on how far it has come since 1994 rather than against a global standard. "There is room to improve, but no country is 100 per cent perfect," Foreign Minister Rosemary Museminali said. "Rwanda should be looked at in the context of where it's come from."
President Paul Kagame, whose Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front took power in the country after routing the Hutu militias responsible for the massacres, has succeeded in modernising the country's image. The administration has a reputation for efficiency and has attracted strong international support including substantial foreign aid from the UK and US in particular.
However, the CHRI's report paints a portrait of a very different Rwanda. "The Rwandan government has excellent public-relations machinery. Its leaders are astute, and effectively play upon the conscience of the world," it states.
The report details a country in which democracy, freedom of speech, the press and human rights are undermined or violently abused, in which courts fail to meet international standards, and a country which has invaded its neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo, four times since 1994.
Professor Ghai draws attention to the laws against "genocide ideology", prohibiting the raising of doubts about the extent of the killing of Tutsis in 1994 or any discussion of retaliatory killings of Hutus. Censorship is prevalent, according to the report, and the government has a record of shutting down independent media and harassing journalists.
It concludes that Rwanda's constitution is used as a "façade" to hide "the repressive nature of the regime" and backs claims that Rwanda is essentially an "an army with a state". Kigali reacted furiously to the accusations, saying the claims had "absolutely no basis".
Rwanda has trumpeted its Commonwealth credentials with the switch from French to English instruction in schools last year, and won acclaim for low levels of corruption and high health and education spending. Rwanda's former ambassador to the UN, Gideon Kayinamura, has boasted that other countries could learn from its democracy "where as many as 56 per cent of its MPs are women". Its membership bid is strongly backed by Tony Blair who works as an unpaid advisor on governance.
Suspicions persist that, beyond talk of deepening trade and improving cultural ties, Commonwealth diplomats are tempted by the prospect of cementing such a public defection from the Francophone world. "This British-French rivalry is a batty reason," declared Professor Ghai, who said diplomats responded with "glee and pleasure" at the prospect of Rwandan membership which, they admit, would have no big impact on trade or relations."