Geography Archives: Rwanda

Rever: We should not be engaging with, or buttressing a nation that has inflicted so much harm on innocent people.

The European Union has sanctioned five members of different armed groups operating in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), including the spokesman for the M23 militia. It did not, however, sanction Rwanda, Uganda or the Rwandan and Ugandan presidents, despite decades of UN Group of Experts reports that the militias operating in the eastern DRC are largely Rwandan and Ugandan, though they typically claim to be Congolese.

Genocost asks that nations formally recognize August 2nd as Congo Genocide Commemoration Day.

In their recent article on “How Britain and the US Decided to Abandon Srebrenica to Its Fate” (Observer, July 5, 20151), Ed Vulliamy, a veteran reporter for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and Florence Hartmann, a reporter and former spokesperson for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia […]

On October 1, 2014, a remarkable event occurred in Britain.  The British Broadcasting Corporation’s BBC 2’s This World telecast Rwanda’s Untold Story, a documentary produced by Jane Corbin and John Conroy that offered a critical view of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and of his and the British and U.S. roles in the 1994 mass killings […]

Twenty years later, full light has not been thrown on the shooting down of the plane of the then president of Rwanda, Habyarimana.  The event was immediately followed by the genocide of the Tutsis by Hutu militias.  Two hypotheses remain to this day equally possible: 1) the plane was shot down by Hutu extremists, making […]

On Tuesday, June 14, the Guardian of London published “Left and Libertarian Right Cohabit in the Weird World of the Genocide Belittlers.”1  In this nearly 1,100-word commentary, the British writer George Monbiot attacked the two of us (among others) as “genocide deniers” and “revisionists” for our writings on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  Monbiot also […]

  We are 47 people from 22 organizations in 18 countries (Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, South Africa, Central African Republic, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Portugal, USA, France, and Germany).  We are farmers and staff representing member organizations of La Via Campesina, along with allies from other farmer […]

Gilbert Achcar defends the recently “UN-authorized” imperialist intervention in Libya on the ground that general principles may require exceptions in concrete cases.  “Every general rule admits of exceptions.  This includes the general rule that UN-authorized military interventions by imperialist powers are purely reactionary ones, and can never achieve a humanitarian or positive purpose.”1  This kind […]

With respect to international law, in what ways does this intervention in Libya differ from those carried out in Afghanistan and Iraq? The intervention in Afghanistan, despite protestations to the contrary, was not authorized by the Security Council, whose relevant resolutions did not even mention Afghanistan, let alone authorize “all necessary means.”  That was because […]

  Report of the Mapping Exercise documenting the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed within the territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003 Excerpt (Footnotes Omitted): Several incidents listed in this report, if investigated and judicially proven, point to circumstances and facts from […]

Jean Bricmont is professor of theoretical physics at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and is a member of the Brussels Tribunal.  He is the author of Humanitarian Imperialism and co-author, with Alan Sokal, of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.  He has written critically about ‘humanitarian interventionism’ since the Kosovo war in 1999.  In […]

  On August 26, the French newspaper Le Monde revealed the existence of a draft UN report on the most serious violations of human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo over an eleven-year period (1993-2003).1  The massive draft report states that after the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s takeover of Rwanda in 1994, it proceeded to […]

Like Gerald Caplan’s hostile “review” of our book, The Politics of Genocide, Adam Jones’s aggressive attack on our response to Caplan can be explained in significant part by Jones’s deep commitment to an establishment narrative on the Rwandan genocide that we believe to be false — one that misallocates the main responsibility for that still […]

It has become an annual ritual each July to commemorate the “Srebrenica massacre,” which dates back to July 11-16, 1995.  The now institutionalized characterization is that “8,000 [Bosnian Muslim] men and boys” were executed by the Serbs at that time, in “the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War.”  This memorial is […]

In his June 17 “review” of our book The Politics of Genocide, for Pambazuka News,1 Gerald Caplan, a Canadian writer who Kigali’s New Times described as a “leading authority on Genocide and its prevention,”2 focuses almost exclusively on the section we devote to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.3  Caplan says virtually nothing about […]

  Peter Erlinder received “unconditional medical release” from the Rwandan court. Thursday, June 17, 2010 (Washington, DC) — Peter Erlinder, Professor of Law at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, MN and Lead Defense Counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was arrested in Kigali, Rwanda on May 28, 2010.  On […]

  The May 28 arrest of U.S. attorney and Chicago native Peter Erlinder by the Paul Kagame dictatorship in Rwanda reveals much about this regime that is routinely sanitized in establishment U.S. and Western media coverage and intellectual life.  But if we use Erlinder’s arrest to call attention to some less-well-known facts, a much grimmer […]

Professor Peter Erlinder, noted criminal defense lawyer and past president of the National Lawyers Guild, was arrested Friday morning in Rwanda for “genocide ideology.”  Erlinder’s representation of high-profile defendants before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has incurred the wrath of government officials, who have charged him with “negation of the Tutsi genocide” for […]

  New York — The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) demands the immediate release of its former president, Professor Peter Erlinder, whom Rwandan Police arrested early today on charges of “genocide ideology.”  He had traveled to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, on May 23, to join the defense team of Rwandan presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza.  Erlinder is […]