photos of peace rally sydney, page-46

N,

Come, Come where was Belgium France and Germany. After all it was Germany's colonial patch. This was a monumental UN failure. The US was never a colonial power in Africa.

Here is an account from RWANDA: ETNIC TRAP by Benjamin Sehene a native of Rwanda who fled into exile to Paris in 1964.

"Everything that was being said and written about the war and massacres in Rwanda, was being done by western journalists, western ethnologists, foreign humanitarian organisations whose knowledge and understanding of the conflict was only superficial at best given the European erronous interpretations of Rwandese society ever since the begining of colonisation.

Europe was discovering Rwanda, exactly one hundred years after the first European, Count von Götzen set foot in the country. Friends for whom I had once pointed out Rwanda on the map(with difficulty) , now came asking me whether I was Tutsi or Hutu. And every day they sent me newspaper clippings of the latest horrors. For the European boudoir political pundits, Rwanda replaced the former Yugoslavia, as a synonym for the horror of ethnic strife that lay in store for the post-Cold War world: the "new world order" described as the "ideological hang-over" by French writer Rony Brauman. They did not or prefered not to see a genocide carried out by an army and militias armed and trained by France.

The rwandese was the first televised genocide: the murderers gave prime time interviews with impunity, and carried out their grisly pursuit before helpless western journalists and aid workers. Colonel Theonest Bagosora head of the Hutu militias gave interviews on French television.

In his book Civil War, the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes: "If these [television] images of terror don't make terrorists out of us, they turn us at least into voyeurs, and subject each one of us to an enduring moral blackmail. Once we have become eyewitnesses, we are open to accusations: now that we know the situation, what are we going to do about it? Television the most corrupt of all media, is transformed into a paragon of morality."

The "new World Order" in Africa was chaos, the death of the state. There were civil wars in Somalia, in Liberia, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Algeria, or in a latent state of civil war as in Egypt, Burundi, Mozambique, Niger, Zaire, Congo, Nigeria. The sheer number of conflicts made any kind of intervention impossible, with astronomical political costs. The United Nations peace mission in Rwanda, the U.N. Military intervention in Rwanda (UNAMIR) constrained by a contradictory United Nations mandate, looked on helplessly as Hutu militias and Rwanda government (FAR) soldiers killed unarmed Tutsi civilians. Then on the 7th of April ten soldiers, from the Belgian contingent in UNAMIR, guarding the Prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana were disarmed tortured and assassinated by soldiers of the Presidential guard. The Belgian government, horrified by the torture and killings of their soldiers decide to withdraw the rest of their soldiers from UNAMIR. On the 9th of April, Belgium and France sent troops to evacuate theirs and other western nationals.

Stunned by this sudden withdrawal other nations followed suit because they believed , Belgium the former colonial power, knew the region best. And on the 27th of April the U.N. security council in New York, still haunted by the peacekeeping fiasco in Somalia, instead of voting to increase its peacekeeping contingent in Rwanda, voted to reduce it from 2,700 to 450 men, in the midst of the massacres. The protracted civil war in Bosnia and the peacekeeping fiasco in Somalia had buried any notions that peace and stability can be imposed from outside by major powers in the post-Cold War world order. So for several weeks the world stood back, and shamelessly looked on as unarmed civilians, women and children were cut into pieces by machette. As the death toll continued to rise the international community was still undecided whether to define what was happening in Rwanda as genocide. And finally when the UN Security Council decided to do something, it refused to qualify the massacres as genocide as this would have obliged them to intervene under international law. However, there was no doubt about it that the mass killings in Rwanda were genocide. For two or three year, persitent rumours of omnius preparations, a death list of prominant Tutsis and nocturnal training camps kept reaching even the Tutsi diaspora.

In june 1994 the French press, in a deliberate excercise of disinformation, described the tragic events in Rwanda as "tribal strife", "inter-ethnic war", giving the impression that machete wielding Hutu and Tutsi were hacking each other to pieces in a national gladiatorial match, with western journalists keeping the score. I felt helpless and useless knowing the truth, that innocent people, women and children and the old, the relatives I had never met, were being hacked to death for no other reason than that of being Tutsi, for their height, the shape of their nose. Finally I decided to go to Rwanda because I had to see for myself, to witness the tragedy of my people in the hope that this time around the massacres would not pass in impunity as they had done in 1959-63, 1973, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993.

This was in June 1994, two months after president Habyarimana's plane was shot down, already an estimated half a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were believed to have been massacred, and everyday brought news of more massacres. Hundreds of bloated dead bodies floated down the Nyabarongo and Akagera river towards Lake Victoria, at the rate of two dead bodies per minute, along what Hutu propaganda called "the shortest way back to Ethiopia". The third genocide of this century was almost accomplished; soldiers of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) were holding Kigali under siege and the United Nations security council had voted the redeployment of peace keeping troops, far too late for hundreds and thousands of Tutsi.

On the 16th of June as the then French foreign affairs minister Alain Juppe announced the imminence of a French military intervention in Rwanda in order to rescue their Hutu allies........"

This gives the lie to the half truth information you posted. This I repeat was a monumental failure of the UN and particularly of those in the UN who are so active in maintaining the murderous regime in Iraq.viz Belgium and France and Germany.lrj