Rwanda isn't part of our War on Terror briefings today [Iraq | The Wider War], but it's worth your attention for other reasons. How could Andrew Apostolu possibly find this Guardian article 'uninteresting'? Good grief, it's just choc-a-bloc with interesting stuff. Things like:
* U.N. ICTR Criminal Prosecutions for 1990s Rwandan genocides: 12 cases.
* Illiterate African villagers using traditional Gacaca process: thousands of cases, in a process even The Guardian seems to approve of.
I, too, would trust a gathering of illiterate African villagers over anything the U.N. might attempt. Nor is this the only good news out of Rwanda:
bq. "Gacaca is the centrepiece of a set of reforms which has already seen the writing of a new constitution, passed by a referendum in May, and presidential and parliamentary elections (the latter are being held later this month). With gacaca, the government has calculated that enough guilty people "will want a second chance to live a decent life," as the president put it, and therefore confess. With the elections, they calculated - correctly, as the presidential poll showed - that the Rwandese would buck the trend of ethnic voting in Africa, and instead vote for a party (the Rwandese Patriotic Front) and a president who have proved they can bring stability, offer reintegration to old enemies, and begin to revive a rock-bottom economy."
That last bit about non-ethnic voting is incredibly important, because it's such a huge departure for Africa. Of course, "caring" international NGOs are upset over the Gacaca process, and over the executions of 20 perpetrators of genocide. Which bring us to the 2 most telling paragraphs in the whole piece, as the NGO set and the French get theirs in quick succession:
"With a few exceptions, the donor community in Kigali and western NGOs criticise the government in notably similar terms... Kagame is cool about the criticisms: "It is because we want to do things our own way - they want to give lessons ... We just have to go on with our own business of changing lives here." The most notable of the enemies are the French, who have never forgiven Kagame for winning the war against the French-backed regime responsible for the genocide, and for thwarting the French military Operation Turquoise which occupied a swathe of western Rwanda trying to preserve its clients. Then in 1996 the Rwandese military attacked the refugee camps in eastern Zaire which were controlled by the genocidaires of 1994, where active military training for another genocide carried on under the noses of international organisations. More than a million peasants walked home and were resettled in an extraordinary feat of organisation for any country, never mind one so very poor."Well. Doesn't that just sum up the 'Toyota Taliban' NGOs and the French in 2 neat paragraphs?
Fascinating. Thank you for linking to this.
It would be nice to get another view—not just because the article appeared in the Guardian, but also because the article’s longer version is in The Nation. I do hope that the news from Rwanda is in fact good.
And the role of France! It would be interesting to see a compilation of criticisms of France from across the political spectrum. Or a compilation of URLs leading to such.
"It would be interesting to see a compilation of criticisms of France from across the political spectrum."
I was just thinking the same thing, especially when reading stuff like this and various blog comments praising France for standing up to the Colonialist Imperialist American Hegemon ™.
Winds of Change:
September 22, 2003
Re: From Rwanda, Truth Joe Katzman September 22, 2003
Thanks for pointing us to the Guardian article. And we liked your readers' suggestion that "It would be interesting to see a compilation of criticisms of France from across the political spectrum."
Here's our contribution:
Rwanda, France and NGO's:
Trócaire: A Chronicle of a Pious Fraud
www.blog-irish.com/pious.htm
(Discusses an Irish Catholic "charity"'s counter-factual exploitation of the Rwanda myth (among other things) to con citizens and the Government out of millions.)
France:
The Irresponsible, Badly Brought Up, Infantile Dutch
www.blog-irish.com/dutch.htm
(The Dutch demand that the French follow the rules.)
The French Leave Us At A Loss for Words
www.blog-irish.com/higgins.htm
(The French demand that we all pretend that international politics is a series of tableaux vivantes.)
False Comfort
www.blog-irish.com/tighttic.htm
(The monetary conservaism of Jean-Claude Trichet, candidate for president of the European Central Bank, and his independence from M Chirac will not help the Irish ecomomy.)
More on Ireland's Favourite NGO:
Fischler: NGO's Responsible for Cancun Failure
www.blog-irish.com/ngocancun.htm
Earth to Trócaire
www.blog-irish.com/earth.htm
Eric Hobsbawm and Trócaire
www.blog-irish.com/hobsbawm.htm
Justin Kilcullen (Trocaire)
www.blog-irish.com/kilkullen.htm
Trócaire Continues its Cognative Dissonance
www.blog-irish.com/mirobund.htm
Cancún: What Went Wrong?
www.blog-irish.com/cancun.htm
Trócaire at Cancún
www.blog-irish.com/flash.htm
Bran at Blog-Irish.com
How could we have fogotten our first "French" piece, "Lara Marlowe: Fine Wine and Fine Distinctions" www.blog-irish.com/marlowe2.htm in which we pointed out that the world wide wine glut, not Francophobia, was hurting French wine sales, and concluded
"Shrill screams of European victimhood in the face of the market facts, laughable media misrepresentation of significant trans-Atlantic issues such as claiming that "making France suffer" is "official US Government policy", and gross, xenophobic, poor sportsmanship at international matches are not what we need now.
"The Americans might come back to the UN if we stop screaming untruths at them.
BRAN (Posted on June 26, 2003)"
For the straight dope on what happened in Rwanda, get the book "The Rwanda Crisis" by Gerard Prunier. He is French, and has lots of information about what the French did -- up to, and including, training the militias which later committed the genocide.
One of the footnotes (to a passage describing the French mentality) reads "The author of this book, being French, is also obviously a traitor because he writes in English. He was told so in no uncertain terms by an interestingly wide cross-section of academics, army officers, and politicians. Only journalists seemed immune, probably because they had fallen under the spell of the modern world-wide Anglo-Saxon culture."
Prunier was brought in (as an outside specialist) to be involved in the planning of Operation Turquoise -- which he would not have joined if it had really been an operation to protect France's old clients even after they had committed genocide. (But he wasn't sure that wasn't the aim until he posed a change of plans to them -- to send the French troops to an area where they could do more good -- which was accepted.)
I'm sorry to have to disagree with Norman Yarvin, but Prunier's account of the benign role of the French army in Operation Turquoise is a whitewash.
I lived in France all through the 90's, when the French press was a lot more free and diverse than it seems to be today. Mags such as Le Point & L'Express had real journalists on the scene who reported the action of the French army, which supported the Interahamwe, the machete-wielding militia created by the late President Juvenal Habyarimana. After he was assassinated by the political opposition, his widow's newspaper and radio station whipped the militia into a berserker frenzy. She and her close associates instigated and prolonged the massacre.
Most of the masses of refugees who seemed to be fleeing the Rwandan Patriotic Front were simply hostages, permitted to live by the Interahamwe thugs who drove them into exile in Zaire, where the French set up internment camps near Bukavu with the complicity of Mobutu.
Operation Turquoise created a huge salient in southwestern Rwanda, where Mme. President's radio station continued to broadcast under the French aegis. The radio spread panic among the people, urging them to flee, and continued to whip up the killing frenzy of the Interahamwe. When Kigali fell the thugs and their leaders, Mme. Habyarimana included, sought refuge in the French army salient. The army exfiltrated them into Zaire, rearmed the thugs and put them in charge of the internment camps, then flew the VIPs to France. Mme. H and her coterie of war criminals remained as guests of France, housed in luxury in the flossy 16th Arrondissement of Paris until their presence scandalized even the French. Ultimately, they were scattered widely throughout France's former colonies in West Africa.
The moral of this dreary tale is blindingly obvious. At all costs, do not accept French assistance in Iraq.
Hmm, perhaps I worded that a bit wrong. What Prunier was worried about, with Operation Turquoise, was whether it was intended as an operation to defeat the Rwandan Patriotic Front -- which would inevitably have served to prop up France's genocidal former-allies. This is a much worse possibility than anything that happened. Yet Prunier had good reasons to consider that possibility; he writes, for instance, that "After talking with General Mercier who was in charge of the overall planning for the operation [Turquoise], I felt that he, at least, had no hidden agenda. But I could not be sure about some other officers who were grumbling in the aisles about 'breaking the back of the RPF'."
In any case, the official position was that this was a purely humanitarian operation -- they wouldn't fight unless attacked (and they didn't, though Prunier had to do a lot of talking merely to get them to have any communications with the RPF), and they wouldn't get involved in politics (which explains ignoring the radio station). Just go in, rescue some of the few surviving Tutsi (the genocide had been going on for two months already, and was basically over) to look good for the TV cameras, and leave. Even saving the lives of mass murderers fits in fine to this humanitarianism-uber-alles attitude. Arming genocidal thugs doesn't fit (it would have to be done on the sly); but giving genocidal thugs control of food, which they then sell for arms, does fit. As for leaving the thugs in charge of the camps, those thugs had been the government; it was natural to leave them in charge. The bulk of the people were so enervated by decades of totalitarian government that they were mentally unfit to take charge. (This is not an excuse for the French; they had been the chief foreign supporter of that totalitarian government.)
What I just called the humanitarianism-uber-alles attitude -- the mindset that tries to fix effects of evil deeds without going after the evildoers -- is a mindset that deserves strong condemnation, but a mindset that is much larger than France. It wasn't just the French who shipped food to the genocidal Rwandan exiles in Zaire -- food some of which was sold to buy weapons. And it wasn't just in the Rwanda episode that "humanitarian" food aid was sold to buy weapons; the same thing happened for many years in Somalia, and something very similar happened in Iraq with the "food for oil" program. When it was the contras in Nicaragua who were being shipped "humanitarian aid", the media saw through the pretense instantly; but in other cases their vision has not been nearly so penetrating.
wanted the French army kicking FPR ass and sending it back to Uganda. Apparently the
extermination of a bunch of niggers (sorry
about the word) was less important than the
defence of francophony and of France's
interest in Rwanda. Balladur, the right wing
prime minister, and thus in control of the
money, opposed to Mitterand's plans. I don't
know if it was for moral reasons (he is a
devout Catholic) or for financial/political
reasons (elections were scheduled for following
year)
The compromise was Operation Turquoise.
Pretexting the need to protect surviving
Tutsis the French Army was deployed in
regions where none was left but who de facto
hindered FPR's advance and prevented the
encirclement of the genociders. "Radio
Mille-Collines" kept calling for murder and
specifically for the murder of childen without
the French Army (who had units at ten miles of
it) lifting a finger to close it.
I am still prone to fits of rage when I remember
that day where I found "Place de la Bastille"
full with 200,000 or 300,000 persons who came to
mourn the death of Mitterrand, the death of a
genocider.
France is the friend of evil, tyranny and genocide everywhere.
Never forget it.