OKLAHOMA CITY — A federal judge in Oklahoma has dismissed a lawsuit against Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
U.S. District Judge Lee R. West ruled last week that as a foreign head of state, Kagame is immune to the lawsuit, which accuses him of ordering a plane that was carrying the presidents of two African nations to be shot down in 1994 in Rwanda.
[2008] The Great Rwanda “Genocide Coverup” by Prof. Peter Erlinder recently issued French and Spanish international “war-crimes” warrants and new evidence at the UN Rwanda Tribunal have exposed Kagame as the war-criminal who actually touched-off the 1994 “Rwanda Genocide” by assassinating the previous President and who is benefiting from a decades-long U.S.-sponsored “cover-up” of Pentagon complicity in massacres committed by Kagame’s regime, which even Britain’s Economist has called “the most repressive in Africa.”QuotesIn fact, it is known that Museveni’s half-brother, Salim Saleh, was at the final RPF meeting in Mulindi where the date for the shoot-down was set. The attack on the plane killed the Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, the Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, a Hutu, the Rwandan Army chief of staff, Deogratias Nsabimana, a Hutu, and everyone else on-board.
It was the first massacre of 1994, and it was a massacre of Hutus by the RPF. The RPF then immediately launched attacks across Kigali and throughout the north of the country. In the sector of Kigali known as Remera, they killed everyone living there on the night of the 6th/7th, wiped out the Gendarme camp there, wiped out the military police camp at Kami, and launched a major attack against Camp Kanombe, Camp Kigali and the main Gendarme camp at Kacyiru. They slaughtered everyone in their path. [2010] THE TRUTH ABOUT RWANDA by Christopher BlackAs we have already suggested, the established perpetrator-victim line requires suppression of the crucial fact that the April 6 shooting-down of the government jet returning Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprian Ntaryamira to Kigali, that killed everyone onboard, was carried out by RPF commandos (as discussed below), and had been regarded by RPF planners as an essential first strike in its final assault on the government. Although the mass killings followed this assassination, with the RPF rapidly defeating any military resistance by the successor to Habyarimana’s coalition government and establishing its rule in Rwanda, these primegénocidaires were, and still are today, portrayed as heroic defenders of Rwanda’s national unity against Hutu “extremists” and the Interahamwe militia, who were the RPF’s actual victims. more
The widows of former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira filed the suit in Oklahoma last year while Kagame was in town for a keynote address at a university there.
Kagame has denied any involvement in the 1994 Rwanda crash. One of his attorneys, Pierre-Richard Prosper, said he’s pleased with the judge’s decision.
|
Around 8 PM local time on the evening of April 6th, 1994 the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi was shot down over Kigali, Rwanda as the presidents returned from a summit of regional leaders in Tanzania. Both men died, as did their senior aides and the French aircrew. Within hours, the Presidential Guard was out on the streets setting up roadblocks in Kigali and going house-to-house to find and attack prominent Rwandan opposition leaders and Tutsi civilians.As Lt. Gen. Dallaire, the UN commander in Rwanda, recalls “In just a few hours, the Presidential Guard had conducted an obviously well-organized and well-executed plan-by noon on April 7 the moderate political leadership of Rwanda was dead or in hiding, the potential for a future moderate government utterly lost.” (Note 1)The genocide in Rwanda had begun.
The judge also ruled that the widows’ attorneys never properly served notice to Kagame when he was in town for the commencement speech at Oklahoma Christian University.
Attorneys for the widows who filed suit planned to appeal the judge’s decision.
Peter Erlinder, the director of the International Humanitarian Law Institute at William Mitchell College of Law who has been working on the case, contends Kagame was a rebel Army leader at the time of the killings and has no claim to immunity.
“We think it’s just completely wrong that he could have any immunity at all, because these killings took place before he was president of Rwanda and before he was in any government at all,” Erlinder said. “And the Supreme Court has already explained that in that sort of situation, you can’t have immunity.”more
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2010
Bill Clinton's Rwanda Guilt
While the Rwandan president is celebrated for rebuilding his country after its horrific genocide, over the past year he has brutally suppressed his political opposition, arresting presidential rivals and censoring journalists. This month, a leaked U.N. report accused Kagame’s militias of murdering and raping thousands of members of the Hutu ethnic group who fled over the border to Congo in the late 1990s.Yet here at the Clinton Global Initiative, Kagame has one very powerful defender: Bill Clinton himself. At last year’s CGI conference, Clinton presented Kagame with a Global Citizen Award. At this year's event, he is promoting Rwanda's success in expanding rural health care and aid to family farmers.
Paul Kagame & Bill Clinton (AP Photo 2) Kagame has denied the accusations against him. When I asked Clinton Monday evening whether the world community should hold Kagame accountable for the violence and political suppression, he equivocated.
“The U.N. said what it did about what happened after the [Rwandan] genocide, in Congo. … Kagame strongly disputes it,” Clinton said. “Right now I’m not going to pre-judge him because there’s this huge debate about what happened in the Congo and why, and I don’t know.”
No comments:
Post a Comment