Rwanda's 2010 presidential election? What election?

by Ann Garrison

Joseph Ntawangundi, an assistant to Rwanda's FDU-Inkingi presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, was  arrested, imprisoned, and charged with the crime of genocide, on February 6th, three days after a mob in civilian clothes assaulted him, and Ingabiré, as the two of them waited for papers to register their party, and her candidacy, at a government office in Rwanda's capital city, Kigali.   Ingabiré was uninjured in the assault, but assailants stole her passport and national identification papers.  She will have to replace them before she can register for Rwanda's 2010 presidential election, though it now seems unlikely that she or any other candidate with any chance of winning will be allowed to run against the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front Party's President Paul Kagame.

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

The Democratic Green Party of Rwanda has tried five times to convene, beginning in August 2009, only to be met with bureaucratic roadblocks and, on October 30th, violence and arrests, followed by more harrassment, threats and arrests. On February 5th, Interim Rwandan Green Party President Frank Habineza issued a press release stating that he had been accosted, threatened, and warned that he is being watched all the time.   On 02.06.2009, Senegalese Green Party President Papa Meissa Dieng called on Global Greens and the American and European Greens Federations to act while there's still time by creating a mediation group to travel to Rwanda.   Habineza also urged the Global Greens to act now.

The Parti Social-Imberakuri managed to register and nominate Mr. Bernard Ntaganda, but they've since been threatened with exclusion, and accused, like Mrs. Ingabiré, of promoting "genocide ideology."

The statute criminalizing "genocide ideology' was passed to suppress the disputed history of the 1994 genocide, which hangs heavy over Rwanda and this election. Mrs. Ingabiré has put herself at great risk simply by stating that not only Tutsi, but also Hutu people died in the genocidal massacres of 1994, but some American journalists, academics, have gone much farther in challenging the received history.

Rwanda has revoked University of Michigan Professor Allan Stam's VISA because of his collaborations with other academics, investigators, lawyers, and statisticians, and his conclusions that:

- a million people died, 

- the vast majority of those who died were not Tutsi, but Hutu, 

- American, French, and Belgian leaders, including Bill Clinton and the CIA knew what was happening every day as the massacres continued, and 

- current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a U.S. ally trained at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, is guilty of war crimes of an extraordinary scale. 

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

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

The U.S. and its close ally, Rwanda

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at the 2009 AGOA Conference in Kenya, called Rwanda the beacon of hope for Africa, and, in November 2009, President Bill Clinton presented Rwandan President Paul Kagame with a Global Citizenship Award. However, the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Democracy and Labor's May 2009 report tells a very different story:

"Rwanda is a constitutional republic dominated by a strong presidency. President Paul Kagame was elected to a seven-year term in 2003; the next presidential election is scheduled for 2010. Chamber of Deputies elections that took place in September 2008 were peaceful and orderly, despite irregularities. Significant human rights abuses occurred, although there were improvements in some areas. Citizens' right to change their government was restricted, and extrajudicial killings by security forces occurred. There were significantly fewer reports of torture and abuse of suspects than in previous years. Prison and detention center conditions remained harsh. Security forces arbitrarily arrested and detained persons. Prolonged pretrial detention was a problem, and government officials attempted to influence judicial outcomes, mostly regarding the community-based justice system known as gacaca. There continued to be limits on the freedoms of religion, speech, and association. Restrictions on the press increased. Official corruption was a problem. Restrictions on civil society, recruitment of child soldiers by a Democratic Republic of Congo-based armed group, and trafficking in persons, also occurred."

Whose news, whose issues, and whose culture, produced by whom, and to what end?

Those were the main issues on my mind on February 3, 2010, as I headed toward 522 Valencia @ 16th Street, in San Francisco, for a public conversation about the future of KPFA Radio, with Steve Zeltzer, Riva Enteen, Jack Heyman, and Associate Bay View Editor J.R. Valrey.

I certainly didn't have all the answers but I had a few points:

1) The station needs a Program Council, which is essential to the community radio model. Since the Program Council was undermined years ago, and still hasn't been revived, I suggest that any individual or collective who wants to do a show take their proposal and/or demo tape to the public comment period of a Local Station Board (LSB) meeting and say they're bringing it to the LSB because there's no place else to take them, even though a Program Council is essential to the community radio model.

I honestly believe that if enough of the great proposals that I think this community is capable of come in, they're going to have to respond.

And, though I know this is problematic, with regard to the by-laws, I think the elected LSB should be the Program Council. I think the by-laws should be amended to make it the Program Council, because when people vote for LSB members, they do so, most of all, in hopes of effecting programming. This is what democracy looks like, imperfect though it may be, and it could hardly be less perfect than the top down management the station has now.

2) If the Program Council could be revived, I'd like to see collectives arise to produce weekly or monthly shows on issues like mass transit, higher education, energy, land use/urban planning/"Redevelopment," and, war'n peace.

We need a new show just to keep track of all the wars the U.S. is involved in at this point, including all the covert U.S. wars in Africa, managed by AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command, and those becoming less covert, as in Somalia and Yemen. Democracy Now is the War'n Peace report, but I think we need a weekly show devoted just to what the U.S. military, the Pentagon, the recruiters, and the defense contractors are up to this week, and, what anybody's doing to resist, with local emphasis.

Allowing communities and coalitions organized around issues like these a chance to pitch and produce a show could widen the station's base of support by widening the number of people who feel they have a stake in the station and thus have a reason to volunteer and contribute.

3) The station should make more creative use of volunteers. Of course someone has to answer the phone during pledge, but that shouldn't be the only thing volunteers are invited to do. Station support communities, or communities who want to support a particular show, could do a lot to get KPFA broadcasts, segments, and the KPFA logo, out into the world via the Web, just by forming groups that make a point of getting them posted to the social networks like Facebook, the Youtube, DIGG, StumbleUpon, Newswvine, and Reddit. Volunteers could also admin Web pages for communities concerned with particular issues and/or shows on the station's website.

This would also make more people, and communities feel they have a stake in the station and a reason to support it.

4) KPFA's going to become an anachronism, soon, if it doesn't get a better grasp of the Web, browsers, and social networks.

The "KPFA community," and the wider Pacifica community, could become its own social network on the Web, or possibly a network within a larger coalition of some sort.

5) The station is spending way too many human and material resources on ephemeral broadcasts because its Web presence is so negligible. Each news and public affairs need to be posted to the station's podcasting channel, with tags and its own URL, sent to the Internet Archive, and indexed in Google News. Other media makers, advocates, list managers, organizers, and social networkers need to be able to find and repost KPFA segments they remember hearing much more readily without knowing how to download and edit them in an audio editor, tag them, and give them a URL, meaning finding an appropriate place to upload them to the Web.

As it is now, the best anyone can do if they want to post a segment of a two hour Morning Show broadcast, or an hour long Flashpoints broadcast, to the Web, is to post a link to the whole audio archive with a note saying, e.g., "The interview with J.R. Valrey about the Oscar Grant case, and his own, is 1 hour and 22 minutes in"---unless they have the time, skill, and patience to download, edit and post the audio.

Here are just a few examples of my own efforts to give life after broadcast to the KPFA News and Flashpoints broadcasts that I've been on myself:

San Francisco recruits; Blue Angels over the Bay

Greens fight for rights in Kagame's Rwanda

Here's a longer segment, close to half an hour, from the KPFA Morning Show, about the privatization of Candlestick Point State Park, in Bay View Hunters Point. I edited this out after downloading the whole two hours, because I thought it was so important, and because resident Nyese Joshua did such a kick ass job as a guest representing the Bay View community.

But, once I'd done the download and edited out the segment, as I really think KPFA staff should, I didn't have time to make a little movie to go with it, so I just slapped the KPFA logo on for posting to the Web.

(Note: To post pieces lengthier than those commonly on the Youtube, one has to put up with a brief advertisement at the outset, as here, on the Internet station, Current TV. The same is true of Vimeo, but KPFA could, I'm sure, obtain Directors' status, so as to post longer pieces on the Youtube and escape the ads. Just hold on about a minute, and, keep in mind that the fight to stop the privatization of Candlestick Point State Park ain't over yet.)

Whose park, for what purpose? Bayview, the Lennar Corporation, and Candlestick Point

Disputed histories of the Rwanda Genocide

Skulls of victims of one of the massacres during the 1994 Rwandan genocide displayed at the Genocide Memorial Site church of Ntarama in Nyamata, Rwanda.

I was surprised and alarmed on, 02.02.2010, to read Amil Omara-Otunnu's one-sided history of the Rwanda Genocide, "Rwanda Genocide: Lessons for Human Rights Advocacy," in the Black Star News, a publication I rely on for investigative reporting and commentary about Africa.  This is especially disturbing now, as tension around disputed Rwanda Genocide history increases amidst political repression leading up to Rwanda's August 2010 national elections.  

Professor Omara-Otunnu's elegant English, rationality, and partial rightness put this essay leagues above the vicious propaganda currently being published in the Rwanda New Times or the confusion in the Rwanda News Agency, both of which are promptly reproduced on allAfrica.com, seemingly without editorial review or discretion, but his account of the Rwanda Genocide and its aftermath is wholly biased towards Rwandan President Paul Kagame, his ruling RPF Party, and the suffering of Rwandans identified as Tutsi.  It disregards all the evidence that Kagame and the RPF are themselves guilty of major human rights violations, including compromised courts and elections, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal violence against Rwandan Hutus, and, of ruthless invasion and resource theft in Eastern Congo.  

Omara-Otunnu makes no mention of the tension and repression of opposition political parties in Rwanda now, as the nation's 2010 national elections approach.

And he makes no mention of the Human Rights Watch release pointing to the failure of the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) to indict the ruling RPF, which makes the ICTR's legacy an example of one-sided justice rather than a historic example for human rights investigations and courts to emulate.  

Nor does he mention Rwanda's prisons, which house the third highest per capita prison population in the world, including many political prisoners.

Though he decries the international community's "inaction," in accordance with the received Rwanda genocide narrative, he says nothing about evidence of foreign powers covert involvement, including that of the U.S. and its allies, and France, and/or of their ongoing involvement in Rwanda and the wider region now.

This essay is elegantly written, but the writer's disregard for disputed narratives of the Rwanda Genocide, including those of Victoire Ingabiré Umuhoza, FDU/UDF-Inkingi's 2010 presidential candidate, and the need to reconcile disputed narratives is dangerous and irresponsible.

I should add, however, that Professor Amara-Otunnu's has been outspoken in his opposition to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's state terror and genocidal violence against the Acholi people of Northern Uganda. 

See: 

"Rwanda's 1994 genocide and the 2010 elections" 

"ICTR's legacy threatened by failure to charge Rwandan Patriotic Front," 

All Things Pass, Writings of Keith Harmon Snow  

David Barouski's Z-Space Page

Rwanda Documents Project, created by Dr. Peter Erlinger, Lead Defense Counsel for the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda

Dr. Peter Erlinder and "The Rwanda Genocide Cover-up"

Skulls of victims of one of the massacres during the 1994 Rwandan genocide are displayed at the Genocide Memorial Site church of Ntarama in Nyamata, Rwanda, in 2004.

On 01.20.2010, I published "Rwanda's 1994 genocide and 2010 elections" in the Digital Journal.

This morning I received the response,below, from Peter Erlinder, the Lead Defense Council at the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (ICTR).   Neither Dr. Erlinder, nor I, nor any of the journalists, Rwandan dissidents, exiles, or opposition Rwandan political parties deny that genocidal mass murder occurred in Rwanda. We disagree only with the onesided history, in which the former Hutu government and military are said to have conspired to commit genocide against Tutsis, and in which only Tutsis, not Hutus, were mass murdered.

The victorious, now ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front party has made this history not only sacrosanct, but also a legal requirement, by passing laws against "genocide ideology"---meaning history that disagrees with their own.

Members of the RPF are now calling for the prosecution and incarceration of FDU-Inkingi leader Victoire Ingabiré Umuhoza for daring to say that Hutus were also targets of genocidal mass murder, upon her return from exile.

"Ms. Garrison,

Thanks for the article. As Lead Defense Council at the ICTR I have had a chance to closely examine a the violence associated with the RPF takeover of Rwanda, and have concluded that the "victors" have told the story of the 4-year war, and its aftermath.

During the past 7 years the Prosecutor at the ICTR, with the help of the Kagame government, US and UK have been unable to marshall evidence that the former military or government planned or conspired to kill civilians, much less Tutsi civilians.

In Feb 2009, the Judgement in the Military I (Bagosora) case found that NONE of the top four officers (including Bagosora) were guilty to conspiracy before or after the assassination of Habyarimana.

In Feb 2009, the former ICTR Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte admitted in her memoirs that she had been ordered to bury evidence of RPF crimes, including Kagame's assassination of Habyarimana which had been known to her office in 1997...by the U.S. State Dept.
 

'The Great Rwanda Genocide-Coverup' is beginning to unravel....but US, as you note, is deeply invested in maintaining a Prussian-style military presence in Central Africa. I have posted several articles and the - Rwanda Documents Project - has many of the contemporaneous confirming documents.  -Peter Erlinder"

Digital Journal: Rwanda's 1994 genocide and 2010 elections

Skulls of victims of one of the massacres during the 1994 Rwandan genocide are displayed at the Genocide Memorial Site church of Ntarama in Nyamata, Rwanda, in 2004.

On 01.17.2010, I posted a short report the Netherlands-based blog Colored Opinions, on Victoire Ingabiré's return to Rwanda from a 16-year exile and arrival at the Kigali, Rwanda airport. The slew of articles attacking Ingabiré in the Rwandan press, within one day of her return, and the tension I then sensed, even over the phone to Rwanda, caused me some concern about publishing beyond Colored Opinions and this blog, but the worst things happen when the world is paying no attention.  So, on 01.20.2010, I published this more detailed version of that story, with pictures sent from Rwanda, to the Canadian Digital Journal:

Rwanda's 1994 genocide and 2010 elections

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/286067 

Contemporary colloquial use of the word "fuck"

 

San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly promised to say "Fuck!" in every Board of Supervisors' meeting until he terms out in 2010. 

My hometown San Francisco's bad boy politician Supervisor Chris Daly, local champion of tenants' rights and other peoples' politics, recently got into a scrap with Supervisor David Chiu, President of the City and County Board of Supervisors, over the use of the word "fuck" in the Board of Supervisors Chambers.  Afterwards Chiu reportedly dropped a bar of soap off at Daly's office, suggesting he wash his mouth.  Chiu reportedly has a foot long rod up his ass.

Supervisor Daly responded, in his Facebook status, by swearing to say "Fuck!" in every Supervisors' meeting till he terms out of office this year, which won him a lot of press, and a deluge of wildly enthusiastic Facebook friend requests.

He responded to critics, including San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, in "Profanity vs. the Truly Profane," in San Francisco's Fog City Journal.  Local politico Marc Salomon, who ran against Daly two terms ago, posted this video to Daly's Facebook page, as an example we might all aspire to, further demonstrating that the sexual definition of "fuck," especially in the expression "Fuck!" is now secondary to the word's primary colloquial meaning as an expression of outrage, disgust, and sociopolitical, cultural, environmental, and/or gender opposition:

Et tu, San Francisco, and California?

Budget strapped San Francisco, and California, bail out Lennar, an ailing subprime lender

At the close of 2008, and throughout 2009, we watched the federal government reward the reckless multinational financial sector with trillions of dollars for causing the worst hardship since the Great Depression.

San Franciscans and Californians joined in the agony but few understood that both San Francisco and California have come up with their own bailout for one of the major players in the meltdown, the South Florida based Lennar Corporation, thanks to Proposition G, followed by State Senator Mark Leno's Senate Bill 792, which legalizes the transfer of 23 acres of pristine waterfront parkland to Lennar.

Lennar is not just a big industrial homebuilder; Lennar is also a big mortgage lender.  Like D.R. Horton, Pulte, and all the rest of the big builders, Lennar has its own mortgage lending subsidiary, Universal American Mortgage Company (UAMC), which makes loans to sell its own properties.

UAMC's top competitors, according to Hoover's, are Bank of America, D.R. Horton's DHI Mortgage, and Pulte Homes' Pulte Mortgage.

During the years leading up to the subprime loan meltdown, home builder mortgage operations plied customers with incentives far beyond the common 1% for one month teaser rate.   On 10.13.06, Marketwatch reported, in "Home builders up ante to lure buyers," that:

"The NAHB found 55% of companies were offering home-option items such as granite countertops and landscaping at no charge, up from 37% the prior year. About 43% were offering to pay the closing costs on the buyer's previous home. . . "

Forty-four percent of builders were reducing home prices, 4% were including a new car with the home, and 5% were offering a free holiday trip."
 
Marketwatch also quoted Lennar CEO Stuart Miller on the increasing use of incentives and price cuts, and Lennar's need to keep cash flowing, at whatever cost, even in October 2006.
Why?  Because Lennar had overbuilt, way beyond new housing demand, and had to keep overlending to keep moving it.

Less than a year later, in "House of Cards," published in Builder Online, 08.07, John Caulfield described the pressure Lennar had put not only on borrowers, but also on UAMC managers:

Another source, who worked 2 ½ years as a manager for one of Lennar's UAMC offices in Nevada before she was laid off in October 2006, says the pressure to approve buyers for loans was “overwhelming.”  That pressure came directly from Lennar's divisional president, "who told us the relationship between the builder and the mortgage company was ‘master and slave.'”   When this source says she got tougher about qualifying buyers, Lennar removed several communities from her loan office's territory. When asked why Lennar would sanction its mortgage subsidiary to approve loans for buyers it knew would not be able to pay them, this source replies, “Lennar wasn't thinking long term; it's a publicly traded company that's judged on how many homes it closes.”

Never mind how many UAMC mortgages were bound to go bad.

Never mind that the prices of Lennar properties, even after deep discounts, were artifically inflated by UAMC's approval of buyers for more than they'd be able to pay.

Never mind that financially unsophisticated borrowers would eventually drain any and all resources that they and their families could earn or liquidate to keep up with negative amortization payments, adjustable rates, and/or balloon payments.

Never mind that these borrowers would be left trying to talk to distant "loan servicing" bureaucrats, who would have no memory or concern for the borrowers, or the negotiations that had led to the loans.

Never mind that the loan servicers would demand payment and/or threaten foreclosure, but refuse to reveal the names of the new "lenders," those who had bought their mortgages from UAMC on the secondary mortgage market, even though they, the new lenders, were the only ones who could have agreed to renegotiate loans.




Investment banks, the master subprime puppeteers

Much has been written and said about the Machiavellian machinations of investment banks like Deutschebank, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs, who bought megamillion dollar bundles of loans from Lennar's UAMC and all the other reckless builders and mortgage lenders, then turned them into securities that could be bought and sold speculatively, insured themselves against losses they well knew were coming, and sold "pass through certificates," a.k.a., income strips, on securities that they themselves were selling short.

Pension funds and municipalities that bought income strips no longer producing income are still scrambling.

The results:

-a staggering upward transfer and concentration of wealth, long before the bailouts,

-global recession far worse than capitalism's usual boom and bust cycles,

-hardship, and despair from Australia, where mortgage and credit card debt now exceeds even that of Americans, to D.R. Congo, where the crtiical mining contract review was finally abandoned under World Bank, IMF, and recession pressures, and,

-ongoing waves of foreclosures and layoffs, and new tent cities,

-falling home values, property and income tax revenues.

Reagan redux

Throughout 2009, city, county, and state legislatures, battled over what to cut next, health, schools, arts, or public transportation, as federal trillions flowed into financial industry coffers, all in the name of Reaganite trickle down economics.

And nobody knows where it went, only that that it hasn't trickled down.

Lennar and the other overbuilders and lenders stepped up for another $33 billion handout in the Worker, Homeownership and Business Assistance Act of 2009, which became law on 11.06.2009, prompting NY TImes financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson to ask "would it be so terrible if some builders that lost their heads during the housing mania ceased to exist?"

Lennar, the most aggressive overbuilder/lender, spent $240,000 lobbying for its share,
spent $240,000 lobbying for its $250,000,000 share, proving yet again that politicians offer an astounding return on investment----a 1,041.66% return for Lennar on this one.

Et tu, San Francisco?   Et tu, California?  

At the San Francisco City and County Board of Supervisors, in the San Francisco Bay View, National Black Newspaper, and on the phone to Mark Leno and other Sacramento legislators, I keep asking why cash strapped San Francisco and California are rewarding Lennar/UAMC for all this, and, urging them on, with more "public private partnerships," and "title transfers," a.k.a. land grabs, including 23 acres of pristine waterfront parkland at Candlestick Point? 

This corporation has not changed its ways.

When foreclosed properties flooded the market, competing with its new properties, it launched an ongoing ad blitz to buy new, asking, "Why take the risk and buy a used foreclosed home or a short sale when you can afford a brand new one?"

Indeed.  Especially if it's a foreclosed Lennar Home, quite likely built with toxic Chinese dry wall, or, on top of a bomb test range with live ordinance still underground, or any number of the other toxic dumpsites Lennar specializes in building on, like San Francisco's Hunters' Point Naval Shipyard, the hugely contaminated home of the now shuttered Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory.

Lennar's marketing team even produced a newly aggressive video argument for exhausting the planet's resources, "Why buy new?"

Last spring Lennar's Southeast Florida division announced a weekend sale, "THIS BAILOUT'S FOR YOU":

PR Log (Press Release) – Apr 14, 2009 – LENNAR CELEBRATES ‘THIS BAILOUT’S FOR YOU’ SALES EVENT THIS WEEKEND IN SOUTH FLORIDA   MIAMI, Fla. - Corporations should not be the only ones benefiting from bailouts. This weekend April 18 and 19, the Southeast Florida division of Lennar, one of the nation’s leading homebuilders, is bailing prospective homebuyers out with incredible prices, incentives and interest rates that make it simple to buy a new home in today’s current real estate market.

As with the war, if we can't stop it locally, I don't know where we can.