Keith Harmon Snow on Obama's Invasion of Congo on his Inauguration Day

Photo -- "Keith Harmon Snow asked to swap camera for RPG Rocket Launcher" -- FARDC Operation "Iron Fist" (spin-off), remote hills in or near Kahuzi Beiga National Park, South Kivu (province), DRC. Circa June 2006.

On Sunday, 01.23.2011, I called veteran Africa investigator Keith Harmon Snow for KPFA Weekend News regarding the second anniversary of the outset of the catastrophic 2009 Eastern Congo Offensive. As is always the case with “sound bite news,” I couldn’t include most of our conversation, but Keith was kind enough to write out his answers to the questions I’d sent for AfrobeatRadio.net. We at AfrobeatRadio consider Keith’s website, Conscious Being Alliance and the various audio recordings of his presentations, including, recently, his Lecture on Profiteering from Genocide in Central Africa, at the Brecht Forum in New York City, to be some of the best investigative reporting and analysis of African issues available.  -Ann Garrison

KPFA/Ann Garrison: Most Americans, including those who campaigned hardest for Obama, would have a near impossible time making sense of this. Few would recognize the acronyms of the Rwandan Defense Force (RDF), the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), or the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).

Keith Harmon Snow: There has been a US backed campaign to destabilize, depopulate, and colonize eastern Congo/Zaire since the first US-supported invasion of 1996, which occurred under William Jefferson Clinton, and which followed the US destabilization and coup d’etat in Rwanda. The US and its allies are deploying their proxy army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) — renamed the Rwandan Defense Forces or RDF about 10 years ago – in our secret campaign to balkanize Congo and create a Republic of the Volcanoes in this region. This would be an expansion of Rwanda achieved through the annexation of the Kivu provinces of Congo, possibly along with Maniema Province. Uganda for its part, with US support, would like to annex the Ituri province. These campaigns are backed by multinational corporations, and the goals are political, military and, mostly, economic.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: So, what sense does it make, to say that Barack Obama invaded Congo, the heart of Africa, on his Inauguration Day?

Keith Harmon Snow: The US backed military invasion of 20 January 2009 included US military commanders, special forces, military advisers, technicians and other US military personnel, and it involved weaponry supplied by the US and Britain.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: Can you explain the CNDP militia and the significance of its integration into the Congolese army, the FARDC, on January 20, 2009?

Keith Harmon Snow: First, the name CNDP – Congress for the Defense of the People – couldn’t be further from the truth. The CNDP was a Rwandan Tutsi based militia that was created by Rwandan war criminals that had infiltrated Eastern Congo, infiltrated troops into eastern Congo, and that mobilized, armed and economically empowered Rwandan Tutsi civilians that had infiltrated eastern Congo in recent years and in recent decades. There was a tripartite agreement between Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame, Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni, and the president of Congo – another Rwandan – Joseph Kabila – which worked behind the massive propaganda of “peace talks” to advance the military campaign to infiltrate and control eastern Congo. By quote “integrating” these Rwandan militia elements into the Congolese National Army the Rwandan program was advanced through a kind of Trojan horse operation.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: Can you explain the arrest of Laurent Nkunda and Bosco Ntaganda’s assumption of CNDP leadership in his place?

Keith Harmon Snow: This was a cosmetic move with no real importance, meant only to pacify certain international calls to arrest and remove the self-proclaimed General Laurent Nkundabatware. Both Nkunda and Bosco Ntaganda were documented war criminals. Nkunda of course knows too much, he is too much of a liability to Kagame, and so he is living a very good life at present in Rwanda.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: And, what about the UN Mapping Report leaked on August 26th, then finally released on October 1st?

Keith Harmon Snow: Well, that report, while revealing and progressive, in the sense of holding certain armies and individuals accountable for war crimes, was also a whitewash of the real situation. On one hand it introduced, for the first time, some credible evidence, produced by international bodies and the United Nations, that the Rwandan and Ugandan militaries committed genocide against unarmed Hutu people – mostly women and children – in Congo from circa 1995 to 1999. At the same time the evidence and facts are distorted and downplayed, and the criminality of Rwanda and Uganda are downplayed and even questioned, and the numbers of dead and kinds of atrocities are downplayed or distorted, and there is absolutely no mention of western agents or militaries or corporations involved in the killing. For example, we know the names of US diplomats, USAID officials, and military commanders involved in hunting down and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutus, mostly women and children.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: What do you think this operation, the 2009 Eastern Congo Offensive, which began on Obama’s Inauguration Day, says about the racial justice that many hoped the election of Barack Obama would represent?

Keith Harmon Snow: The operation called “Umoja Wetu” resulted in massive war crimes, and Barack Obama is no symbol or agent of racial equality, but just another US official involved in persecuting people of color everywhere, and through all sorts of horrible deprivations and war crimes.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: And what about the racism inherent in this mission to “hunt down Hutu militias”?

Keith Harmon Snow: Well, this is more nonsense—the whole “hunt for Hutu genocidaires was a key element of the psychological operation against the western English-speaking world to cover up for western imperialism and the commission of massive war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide—and plunder of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of minerals, timber, and lives. Under this psychological operation—using such propaganda films as Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April and Shake Hands With The Devil and Beyond the Gates—the English-speaking world suffers a collective mental illness about what really happened in Rwanda. Instead of the racist story about Hutus killing Tusis with machetes in 100 days of genocide, the truth is that the US, British and Israeli military and their Ugandan and Rwandan proxy forces are responsible for genocide against both Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, Congo and Burundi. Who are the victims? The innocent civilians in Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and Congo and they are still suffering massively under US overt and covert operations in the Great Lakes region.

Many thanks to Ann Garrison, David Landau & Anthony Fest, and the KPFA Weekend News.  -Keith Harmon Snow

KPFA News: Rwandan Police in Haiti, 03.15.2010

KPFA News segment re Rwandan troops in Haiti, 03.15.2010:

Click image or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtkvraLh7Lk to play.

KPFA Radio News: Keith Harmon Snow on Rwandan Police in Haiti

Keith Harmon Snow, independent journalist and human rights investigator, photographed here in D.R. Congo.

On 03.13.2010, I reported for KPFA Radio about Rwandan police undertaking special training to serve as "peacekeepers" in Haiti, which I had reported on Colored Opinions and the San Francisco Bay View, National Black Newspaper, in "Just what Haiti doesn't need: Rwandan police," http://bit.ly/9kJjp7   For KPFA, I recorded Keith Harmon Snow's response:

KPFA Radio News, 03.13.2010: 
Rwandan Police in Haiti, http://bit.ly/a4pYqa


This seems to have struck a nerve, making Rwandan reality more real to people in this hemisphere, even way out here on the Pacific Coast.  Progressives are very conscious of Haiti in the San Francisco Bay Area, and of Palestine, largely because these are the two hot spots that the popular KPFA Flashpoints Investigative Radio show focuses on most faithfully.

Consciously or not, we consume the resources of the Great Lakes region every day, including Starbuck's coffee and tea from Rwanda, and coltan and cassiterite from eastern Congo, smuggled across the border for export from Rwanda, for all the electronic gadgetry designed and manufactured in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Apple Computer, Hewlett Packard, and Google headquarters are all roughly an hour away from the City of San Francisco, in Silicon Valley, as are many military industrial contractors, who rely on cobalt ore mined in the Katanga Copper Belt running through southeastern D.R. Congo into Zambia.



 

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

BELGIAN PARATROOPERS TO CRUSH RISING CONGO REBELLION?

Independent investigative journalist and human rights investigator Keith Harmon Snow has made repeated trips to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other parts of Africa.

I spent most of Sunday, 12.06.2009, studying this report by Africa and human rights investigator/reporter Keith Harmon Snow---so as to suggest edits that might make it more comprehensible to Americans unfamiliar with this part of the world, which is most Americans.  I suggested, first of all, maps identifying D.R. Congo, a.k.a., Congo-Kinshasa, in Africa, D.R. Congo's Equateur and Kivu Provinces, the nine nations bordering D.R. Congo, and the Obangui and Congo Rivers so important to this story.

The international corporate press is blocking this story out, or, as ever, publishing vague racist reports of African tribal savagery.  Keith Snow, writing in conscious being, describes instead a serious Congolese rebellion against elites controlling Congo's resources in the interest of foreign powers, and details:  

1) Mai Mai militia from South Kivu Province, on Congo's Eastern border with Rwanda, collaborating with rebels based in the city of Dongo, in Equateur Province, on Congo's border with the Republic of Congo, a.k.a., Congo-Brazzavile; 
2) Rwandan President Paul Kagame's Rwandan Democratic Front (RDF) forces flown across the country, from the East, to Equateur, 
3) Rwandans who went into exile after the Kagame/RPF takeover of 1994 crossing the border from Congo-Brazzaville into Congo-Kinshasa's Equateur Provice to join the Dongo rebellion; and, 
4)  Many Congolese, including defectors from the Congolese Army (FARDC) joining the Dongo and Mai Mai rebels, and,
5) MONUC (UN "Peacekeepers"), AFRICOM (the U.S. Africa Command), forces from the neighboring Central African Republic, and Belgian and/or Belgian trained paratroopers moving into Equateur to put down the rebellion.


 

BELGIAN PARATROOPERS TO CRUSH RISING CONGO REBELLION?

Rwandan Defense Forces Flown into Western Congo Defeated; Kabila Regime Under Siege on Multiple Fronts

With the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) engulfed in bloodshed and terrorism due to the secretive occupation and expansion by the Rwandan regime of Paul Kagame, Congo's President Joseph Kabila has reportedly requested an immediate emergency military intervention from Belgium to crush a growing rebellion sparked by resistance forces in the far western Congo.

Full text at conscious being, http://www.consciousbeingalliance.com/2009/12/belgian-paratroopers-to-crush-rising-congo-rebellion/.