Rwanda Stories Stink

They are singled out, literally and figuratively.

"Genocide trial of ex-Rwandan intelligence chief opens; France conducts first prosecution in mass killings" by Maïa de la Baume |  New York Times, February 05, 2014

PARIS — In an unprecedented step, a French court opened a genocide trial Tuesday against a former Rwandan intelligence chief in the first of what could be several prosecutions of former officials and others who fled Rwanda after the 1994 slaughter there.

Many here consider the trial of the former intelligence official, Pascal Simbikangwa, 54, an important effort by France to end its long-standing protection of Rwandan fugitives accused of participating in the ethnic genocide that killed 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, in just 100 days.

On Tuesday, Simbikangwa, who had been sought under an international arrest warrant since 2008, appeared before a panel of judges in Paris to face accusations of “complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity” for acts perpetrated in Rwanda from April to July 1994. If convicted, Simbikangwa could face a life sentence. He was arrested in 2009 on the island of Mayotte, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, where he had been hiding for several years.

In his initial indictment, Judge Olivier Leurent quoted neighbors of Simbikangwa who said they had seen him storing weapons at his home in 1994, and others who had heard him lashing out at members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group. Simbikangwa is a Hutu, the ethnic majority that dominated the government.

Leurent quoted a witness as saying that Simbikangwa had been “the strongman of the neighborhood and had a real authority on the Interahamwe militia.” The Interahamwe was the Hutu militia that carried out the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis.

I'm not doubting it; he was commander-in-chief.

Everything about the trial is exceptional: its length, the circumstances under which it is being held and the number of scheduled witnesses. It is expected to last seven weeks, and judges are scheduled to hear from 53 witnesses, including the defendant’s former neighbors in Kigali, the Rwandan capital.

I'll keep an eye out (bad pun) in my Glob.

French historians and former Rwandan officials are also expected to testify. The trial is scheduled to conclude with testimony from Tharcisse Renzaho, a former politician and prefect, a government position, who was sentenced to life in prison by the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Renzaho is a Hutu.

France, which has long been accused of providing military training to the Hutus, has never before tried anyone accused of complicity in the Rwandan genocide.

Did they ever charge any of themselves? 

That would be something coming from western hypocrites, I mean, governments.

After restoring diplomatic relations with Rwanda in 2009, Paris appointed five judges to investigate the matter of the Rwandan fugitives and opened a police section specializing in crimes of genocide.

Got a few million dead in Iraq and Afghanistan if you are interested. Pakistan certainly in the thousands, and I know I'm forgetting a few other places off the top of my head (Palestine, Syria, Vietnam, sorry to those left out at the moment).

In addition, there are five human rights organizations that have filed a civil case against Simbikangwa.

On Tuesday, the civil plaintiffs included the Collective of Civil Plaintiffs for Rwanda, the group that first found Simbikangwa in Mayotte and filed a complaint against him.

“I am especially dedicating this trial to the anonymous victims of Pascal Simbikangwa, those without a name, a grave. This is for them today,” said Dafroza Gauthier, who founded the collective with her husband, Alain, in 2001.

On Tuesday, Simbikangwa, who was paralyzed after a car accident in 1986 and appeared in court in a wheelchair, listened carefully to the judge’s indictment but showed no emotion. He has steadfastly denied any involvement in the genocide and his lawyers said that he would plead not guilty.

In Europe, several countries — including Belgium, a former colonial overseer of Rwanda, and Norway — have already brought Rwandans to justice.

Not to beat a dead horse, but when they going to apply it to their own? 

And that Belgium experience was one of the worst butcheries in human history, btw.

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Related: France's Gypsy Genocide Complete 

Not a very good record seeing as the helped the Germans.

France's Mass-Murdering Holocaust Deniers

Which makes one wonder....

"Rwandan spy chief’s death stirs suspicion" by Michelle Faul and Ray Faure |  Associated Press, January 03, 2014

JOHANNESBURG — The suspicious death of Rwanda’s former spy chief in a plush Johannesburg hotel is resurrecting allegations that President Paul Kagame is orchestrating a campaign to kill opponents at home and abroad.

The fact that my propaganda pre$$ is immediately pointing the finger at him makes me think he's being framed. 

So what did this guy know about French involvement, 'eh?

South African police opened an investigation after former colonel Patrick Karegeya’s body was discovered New Year’s Day.

‘‘He was found in the hotel room dead on the bed,” said Lieutenant Colonel Katlego Mogale. ‘‘A towel with blood and a rope were found in the hotel room safe. There is a possibility that he might have been strangled.”

They kill him, and then lock the incriminating evidence in the hotel room safe? WTF?

Rwandan opposition leader Theogene Rudasingwa identified the hotel as the Michelangelo Towers and called the death an assassination that fit a pattern of attacks against prominent opponents of Kagame.

Almost as if it's a.... gasp.... conspiracy.

‘‘By killing its opponents, the criminal regime in Kigali [Rwanda’s capital] seeks to intimidate and silence the Rwandan people into submission,” he said in a statement. ‘‘The regime is hugely mistaken. Such criminal activities make Rwandan people more emboldened to struggle to remove the dictatorship.”

True anywhere.

Karegeya, 53, was a wartime ally from Kagame’s days as a rebel leader but parted ways with the Rwandan president and reportedly fled to South Africa in 2007. Karegeya told an AP journalist a month ago that his work organizing the opposition to Kagame was risky and could cost him his life.

Rwanda’s government vehemently denies targeting dissidents.

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Globe wasn't too suspicious because that was a one-day wonder, same as the article above it.

You know jwho can fix Rwanda?

"Anne Heyman, 52; lawyer sheltered Rwandan orphans" by Douglas Martin |  New York Times,  February 09, 2014

NEW YORK — When Anne Heyman learned in 2005 that the genocide in Rwanda had orphaned 1.2 million children, she saw a glimpse of salvation for the country in the experience of Israel.

“It popped out of my head: They should build youth villages,” she told The New York Times last year.

Ms. Heyman, a wealthy, South African-born lawyer who had given up her legal career in New York to devote herself to philanthropy, was thinking of how Israel, as a new nation state in the late 1940s, had welcomed and cared for tens of thousands of children who had been orphaned by the Holocaust.

How times have changed.

The Israelis set up residential communities called youth villages to nurture them.

“Israel had a solution to the orphan problem,” Ms. Heyman, a supporter of Jewish causes, told The Jerusalem Post last year. “Without a systemic solution, this is a problem that won’t solve itself.”

See: Self-Centered Jewspaper 

Just want you to know what you are reading.

Ms. Heyman knew no one in Rwanda and little about the country, but she plowed ahead, raising more than $12 million; recruiting expert help from Rwanda, Israel and the United States; winning the support of the Rwandan government; and acquiring 144 acres in a setting of lakes and hills in eastern Rwanda.

She then built a village of 32 houses for orphaned teenagers, setting it high on a hill, she said, “because children need to see far to go far.”

She died Jan. 31 at a hospital in Delray Beach, Fla., after falling from a horse while competing in a masters jumper competition at the Palm Beach International Equestrian Center in Wellington, Fla. She was 52.

That is tragic.

The cause was cardiac arrest brought on by a head injury, said Marisha Mistry, a spokeswoman for Liquidnet, an Internet stock-trading company founded by Ms. Heyman’s husband, Seth Merrin. Ms. Heyman had homes in Florida, Manhattan, Westchester County, N.Y., and Israel.

Nice to know some people have many homes while so many others have none.

When the village for orphans opened in 2008, a long line of teenagers, alone and shattered, stood in the blazing sun holding small brown paper bags containing all their possessions. Entire families of some had been wiped out, and they had no photographs. Some did not know their birthdays, or even what their real names were.

At first, almost all who came had been orphaned by the genocide committed in 1994 by ethnic Hutus against the minority Tutsis and the Tutsis’ moderate Hutu supporters. Later, more and more children of parents who had died of AIDS began arriving. Other vulnerable children were also taken in.

When does the village for Palestinians open?

Ethiopian Jews who had grown up at a youth camp in Israel were the first counselors.

Now Israel is deporting them.

Housemothers were hired locally to make the houses into homes, often the first the youths had known. Many of the women had lost their husbands and children to genocide; some had machete scars.

Today the village houses about 500 youths, who go to high school, work on a farm, learn trades, record gospel music and, most of all, feel a sense of belonging.

The camp was named Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village. “Agahozo” is a Kinyarwanda word meaning “a place where tears are dried.” Shalom is Hebrew for peace. Reflecting this thought, residents do not identify themselves along tribal lines as Hutu or Tutsi.

Diversity is for everyone but the Jewish state -- who are the ones who came up with the divisive idea in the first place!

Ms. Heyman, who made Hebrew the first language of her own children in New York, saw Agahozo-Shalom as an expression of her Zionist ideals.

Woah, the Z-word makes an appearance in my Zionist-controlled War Daily.

“It is a way for us to share those values with the non-Jewish world,” she told The Jerusalem Report in 2007.

Emmanuel Nkundunkundiye, 21, a recent graduate of the village school, told the Jewish American newspaper The Forward, “The Holocaust is the same history that we face, the same tragedy.”

Anne Elaine Heyman was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 16, 1961, the second of four children, and was raised in Cape Town. She moved with her family to Boston at 15 and became active in Young Judea, a Zionist youth movement. She spent a year of high school in Israel in a Young Judea program and met her future husband there.

It's a Zionist love story!

She leaver her husband; their sons Jason and Jonathan; their daughter, Jenna; and her parents, Sydney and Hermia Heyman.

Well, that sucks. Parents should never bury children.

Anne Heyman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, then spent another year in Israel before going to George Washington University Law School, where she was an editor of the law review.

In 1984, she transferred to Columbia Law School and graduated the next year.

After two years of private practice, she became an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, prosecuting white-collar crime. She resigned to devote herself to her family after her son Jonathan was born in 1994.

When was that ever prosecuted? They cut deals and give 'em chump change fines.

Ms. Heyman began her career as an activist and philanthropist while at home with her children. She volunteered for Dorot, a Manhattan-based organization that serves the elderly, and became its chairwoman.

One of her first steps in her Rwandan mission was linking up with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which had set up youth villages in the Americas, Europe and Africa. Her principal model was the village of Yemin Orde in western Galilee, one of 50 youth villages in Israel.

What would we all do without the benevolent Jew looking out for us all, huh? Imagine what a shit hole the world would be without 'em.

It has taken in orphans and other needy children from around the world. She had Agahozo-Shalom’s foreign staff members quickly replaced by Rwandans.

Palestinians?

She also built one of the largest solar energy plants in sub-Saharan Africa; it contributes power to the rest of Rwanda as well.

It's all agenda, all the time, everywhere in my paper. The most innocuous articles contain it.

She had plans to make the village self-sustaining, so that major western donors would not always be needed.

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And no disrespect intended to the dead, but....

"Robert Raiche, 85; gave teens from war-torn areas hope" by Kathleen McKenna |  Globe Correspondent, February 09, 2014

Mr. Raiche raised funds from private donors and arranged for the boys to visit the United States, socialize, and have fun in a place safe from war and conflict.

From that first trip in 1986 grew Friends Forever, an international organization that now brings teenagers from Ireland, Israel, and Uganda to the United States, most often to the North Shore, with the goal of building friendships and understanding among youths from opposite sides of conflicts....

Then why is Israel deporting Africans and dumping them there?

Youths on Friends Forever trips to New England typically spend two weeks canoeing and mountain climbing; visiting mosques, synagogues, and churches; and performing community service. They usually stay in a donated space, cooking for themselves....

Martineau described a recent trip when visiting Israeli teens stayed at a facility for elders on the North Shore. “You walked in the door of the place and there were all these Jewish and Arab kids playing piano with a bunch of Alzheimer’s patients,” he said.

Mr. Raiche’s plan, Martineau said, was to get youths out of their element so “they see that even though they’re Arabs and Israelis, over here, they’re the ones who are alike.”

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Robert W. Raiche was born in Springfield and graduated from Springfield College with a bachelor’s degree in recreation and youth leadership.

While he was directing a YMCA in Springfield, he accepted an offer to transfer to Hilo, Hawaii....

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He was a “stubborn optimist with a childlike wonder” -- which is what I used to be when I purchased and looked forward to reading my morning jew$paper.

Never again.