Friday 3 August 2018

Will Congo Go to the Polls—Or Go to War?

Will Congo Go to the Polls—Or Go to War?

03/08/2018

The government claims the country is having an election. Fighters in the East are preparing for battle.


A soldier from the Democratic Republic of Congo's Army
 at a hilltop outpost in Chanzu in the eastern North Kivu 
region, November 5, 2013.

MASISI, Democratic Republic of the Congo—It’s been four months since Gicha Victoir, a high-ranking officer in a local armed group, was told by Congolese government soldiers to prepare for war. Seated in a small wooden hut in a nondescript village on the outskirts of Masisi, a town in Congo’s North Kivu province near the Rwandan border, he recounted his clandestine meeting with the army.

“They asked us to collaborate with them because they said elections weren’t going to happen and that war was coming,” said Victoir, who belongs to the Nyatura FDDH (Forces for the Defense of Human Rights), a militia comprised of ethnic Hutus, including some from the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda)—the Hutu force formed in 2000 by genocidaires who fled Rwanda after losing the civil war in 1994. The purpose of creating the current armed group was to protect the Hutu community against others taking their land and against other armed groups.

In March, two generals from Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, traveled to Masisi to tell Victoir and his fellow fighters that the country’s upcoming elections wouldn’t take place and that they should prepare to fight.

In March, two generals from Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, traveled to Masisi to tell Victoir and his fellow fighters that the country’s upcoming elections wouldn’t take place and that they should prepare to fight.

For the past two years, the estimated 83 million citizens of this conflict-ravaged and mineral-rich country have been anxiously waiting for President Joseph Kabila to step down from office, after repeatedly delaying elections when his mandate ended in late 2016. Although it appears that Congo’s government, which is normally known for dragging its feet, has been relatively quick to adhere to the electoral calendar—elections are scheduled for Dec. 23 and Kabila is constitutionally barred from running—officials in Kinshasa seems to be doing one thing while saying another.

Masisi’s lush mountainous backdrop masks a region riddled by decades of war. The provinces of North and South Kivu shelter approximately 140 armed groups, which regularly clash over land, authority, and the expulsion of people considered foreigners. In the past six months, however, the situation has deteriorated, with increased violence erupting throughout the region. Locals claim that the government is purposely instigating attacks in an effort to sow the seeds of insecurity in order to avoid holding elections.

For many in the international community, the meeting in March, which has never been made public, was the first confirmation of deliberate government meddling. “It is certainly true that across the country … government forces have been involved in provoking violence either through disproportionate repression or by actually collaborating with armed groups,” said Jason Stearns, director of the Congo Research Group, an independent, non-profit research project focused on understanding violence in the DRC. “Until now we haven’t been able to prove any intent to use that violence to delay elections or to obtain another mandate for Joseph Kabila,” he added.

One local human rights activist, who was present at Victoir’s meeting with the generals, saw the arrival of members of the top brass from Kinshasa as significant. “The government doesn’t want elections to take place and is using its men to control armed groups around the country. In case people want Kabila to leave power he has control of the forces and he can use them to protect him,” said the activist, who didn’t want to be named for fear of retaliation.

Officials from Masisi’s local government couldn’t say whether the specific meeting in March occurred, but confirmed that an “unofficial, confidential collaboration” between the government and armed actors exists. “How do you think the groups get their weapons?” said Kangakolo Nikae Cosmas, minister of the interior for Masisi Territory.

Meanwhile, the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo denies having any relationship with rebel groups, saying that the army’s only goal is to “beat them all,” said Maj. Guillaume Ndjike Kaiko, the Congolese Army spokesman in North Kivu. The only form of collaboration comes from defectors who join the military and share information, he said.

Foreign Policy’s repeated attempts to speak with the two generals who attended the meeting in March, as well as the government spokesperson in Kinshasa, went unanswered. On a trip to Masisi in June, FP spoke with dozens of people, including several fighters from various armed factions—all of whom said that, since January, collaboration between government forces and armed groups had increased.

Isaac Mubuya, who used to fight for the Congo Defense Front, has been sharing intelligence with the Congolese army since February, helping them navigate complicated terrain and hard-to-reach areas. Since working with the government, the number of attacks on villages has grown, however, he said. In exchange for working together, he and his men have been promised positions in the Congolese Armed Forces once their collaboration ends, Mubuya explained. It’s not the first time this offer has been on the table. In 2010, the government asked for their help, offering the same deal, but then never delivered on its side of the bargain.

Meanwhile, the violence is getting worse. In April, Kisuba Mirimo watched her grandmother get shot and killed when armed men stormed her town. The 40-year-old mother of eight said she can’t count how many times she’s been displaced in the last three years. “I feel such sorrow. It’s hard to eat and find food; it’s terrible always moving,” said Mirimo. She said the violence this year has been worse than previous ones with a proliferation of armed groups and a greater frequency of attacks.

Gisselle Bahati, the vice president of the Territory of Coordination, an advocacy group based in Masisi, blames the increased civilian deaths, sexual violence, looting, and displacement of people in Masisi on government cooperation with local militias. “The collaboration doesn’t support the security and protection of the civilians,” she says.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced since December, according to the Commission on Population Movements, a coordination body led by the The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, bringing the number of internally displaced people in North Kivu to approximately 1.5 million, the highest in the country. An official from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office in the provincial capital, Goma, said recently that North Kivu has been taking a step in the “wrong direction.”

Many Congolese citizens doubt whether President Kabila will go through with the election, but the Independent National Electoral Commission, the body charged with running it, is confident the vote will go ahead as planned. According to commission officials, the country has been following the electoral calendar and hasn’t missed “a single step.”

“The population should not be distracted by all that is evolving around political public declarations and maneuvering,” said Corneille Nangaa Yobeluo, chairman of Congo’s electoral commission.

Residents in Masisi, however, remain skeptical with many fearing an eruption of chaos if, come December, they aren’t able to vote. “People need elections because they want change,” said Pascal Kita, a local journalist. “If elections don’t happen, there will be war.”

BY SAM MEDNICK
Foreign Policy

Thursday 7 June 2018

Congo’s Looting and Killing Machine Moves Into High Gear

Congo’s Looting and Killing Machine Moves Into High Gear


07/06/2018


Millions of people already are displaced by violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now President Kabila is using the slaughter to keep himself in power.



KYANGWALI REFUGEE CAMP, Uganda—“What I left behind is so precious, so much more important than what I am left with here,” said the 37-year-old Congolese refugee we’ll call Edward. “When I arrived in the refugee camp, I fell to the ground in grief, traumatized by all that I had lost.”
Edward was a businessman who sold clothing before large-scale violence returned to the Ituri Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Over the last several months, well over 400,000 people from Ituri have been driven from their homes, the bulk of them ending up in refugee camps in neighboring Uganda, bereft of everything but the clothes on their backs. They join the 4.8 million people already displaced by Congo’s waves of violence, the second highest total in the world after Syria.

The militias would come and seal off a village, then go house to house with machetes.

“A year ago we heard rumors that [Congolese President Joseph] Kabila wanted to create violence to delay elections,” Edward told me. “The day before Christmas of this past year, two of my relatives were murdered. Then the killings accelerated. The militias would come and seal off a village, then go house to house with machetes. Very few people escaped. Eventually they would burn the village. At one point, there were so many bodies you could hardly walk.”
Edward said that Congolese soldiers who tried to intervene to protect villagers were themselves “chopped up” by the militias. Edward said he witnessed a woman in a nearby village being pursued by a militia. She ran and physically clung to a nearby policeman, but the militia “pulled her away and chopped her up.” When Edward was told by a Congolese soldier that he and his fellow soldiers were given instructions not to intervene, “My first thought was that Kabila had sold us out. I felt we had to run for our lives. We were so traumatized, we could not fight back. What we have known most of our lives is war.”
So Edward and 20 of his neighbors put their money together to hire a boat to escape. The price of a ride across Lake Albert to Uganda had doubled due to the heavy demand of those wanting to flee, which meant that many spent all the money they had just to get away. “I witnessed one boat with seven people which capsized. They all drowned.”
Kabila Bets on Chaos
Nearly every refugee we have met in Uganda laid the responsibility for the violence at the feet of President Kabila and his strategy of chaos which could provide the pretext for an indefinite delay in elections that were originally scheduled for 2016 but have been postponed repeatedly. Constitutionally, Kabila is mandated to hand over power to his elected successor.

Not one person ascribed the atrocities in the gold- and oil-rich Ituri Province to inter-ethnic or “inter-tribal” violence, the reason cited in most international media and diplomatic accounts. Similar spasms of violence—with alleged state government complicity—have occurred in other regions of Congo over the last year, including in the Kasai region in the center of the country and North and South Kivu in the east. As another refugee said, “I did not flee the Hema-Lendu conflict,” referring to the two main ethnic groups in Ituri where the refugees come from. “I fled the conflict caused by the government.”
The use of extreme violence by the leaders of successive Congolese regimes (and Belgian King Leopold II before them) has been a central part of a strategy to maintain power by any means necessary.
The state has been repurposed to privatize Congo’s extraordinary wealth in the hands of the head of state.”

The current governmental institutions have been captured by President Kabila, some of his close family members, senior political and military officials, and their foreign commercial collaborators in order to loot the vast natural resources of the country.
Instead of providing security, delivering services, and dispensing justice, the state has been repurposed to privatize Congo’s extraordinary wealth in the hands of the head of state and his small network of beneficiaries. To solidify this arrangement, Congo’s military and police foment violence and repress independent voices in a classic divide and conquer political strategy.
In order to secure that wealth and immunity from prosecution, President Kabila seeks to extend his presidency as long as he is able to, preferably for life, just as some of his savvier Central African neighbors have done before him.
As the rule of law is subverted and those with the biggest guns grab the loot, there are winners and losers.
The losers are the vast majority of the Congolese people, 77 percent of whom live below the poverty line, according to the United Nations, and with more and more ending up in the displaced and refugee camps like the one I am visiting.
The winners are most conspicuously President Kabila and his commercial, political, military, and paramilitary co-conspirators. But the real money from this looting and killing machine is being made outside the country, by Congo’s neighbors and international corporate collaborators.
Blood Money and Band-Aids

Regionally, commercial actors and/or officials in Rwanda and Uganda continue to benefit tremendously from smuggled minerals, particularly gold, as they compete over the illicit spoils of Congo’s vast natural resource wealth. These two neighbors have a sordid history over the past two and a half decades of intervening militarily or through proxy militias in Congo’s mineral-rich east. Zimbabwe, Burundi, and Angola, among others, have also taken advantage of Congo’s compromised sovereignty during the past two decades.
Internationally, a host of parasitic financiers, mining companies, banks, and mineral smugglers have earned spectacular profits on the back of Congo’s misery. As if to punctuate this, while I had lunch on a veranda overlooking Lake Victoria before journeying to the refugee camp, I overheard a group of foreign businessmen from a few different countries devising a plan for circumventing regulatory controls in their mineral sector investments.
In response to the death, displacement, and destruction in Congo, which has few post-World War II parallels globally, the international community has spent billions of dollars to provide emergency aid and deploy the largest and most expensive United Nations peacekeeping operation in the world. These are humanitarian band-aids attempting to cover gaping human rights and governance wounds. Instead of just treating symptoms, we need to begin to attack the root causes of this spiraling crisis.
A Vote That Counts
After many delays, the elections scheduled for December represent Congo’s veritable fork in the road. If they are stolen or Kabila remains in power beyond December, violence and regional instability will escalate, and the kleptocracy will be reinforced. The warning signs are apparent now: billboards and videos campaigning for Kabila are going up in Congo, and the government is preventing parties and protestors from holding rallies. On the other hand, if a credible election and transition are held, a major first step will be taken on Congo’s long and difficult road to an accountable and transparent government, the critical prerequisite for peace and human rights.
There may be no greater challenge on the African continent today than supporting such a system change, a far different goal than the regime change that the Kabila government regularly accuses its adversaries of fomenting. There are internal and external elements to a strategy that could successfully see the dismantling of the violent kleptocratic system in Congo today.
Inside the country, civil society, media, legal, and parliamentary efforts at reform are critical. Exposing human rights abuses, combating corrosive corruption by pressing for mining deals and companies to be fully transparent, advocating for prosecuting those responsible for atrocities, demanding opportunities for women and youth, pushing for the delivery of social services and reform of the military, mediating disputes before they explode into violence, and other such efforts are all building blocks for meaningful system change.
Outside the country, governments around the world should ramp up pressure on President Kabila’s kleptocratic network, which will do all it can to avoid serious reform or change. The international community should focus on using its tools of financial pressure now, ahead of a critical period: June 23 to August 8, when candidates must register.
If Kabila unconstitutionally puts himself on the ballot then, it will spell disaster and will be much harder for the international community to positively influence the situation and for a credible democratic transition of power to occur in Congo.
Governments around the world should ramp up pressure on President Kabila’s kleptocratic network.”

There must be meaningful consequences for the regional and international commercial enablers who profit from the exploitation of natural resources while sustaining those directly responsible for this horrific violence, and preventive sanctions to send a clear message to Kabila that his candidacy is unacceptable and stop him before he makes a disastrous electoral decision.
In order to disincentivize financial motivations for perpetuating these atrocities and promote a credible democratic transition, the international community should aggressively escalate the use of financial tools of leverage such as targeted network sanctions focused not just on those carrying the guns and machetes but also the checkbooks and briefcases of cash for Kabila and his cronies. Earlier sanctions helped get the government and opposition to sign a key deal in December 2016, but more pressure is needed now for the larger goal, a democratic transition.
‘As It Stands Now, War Crimes Pay’
A major building block for an escalation strategy was the U.S. sanctioning Israeli mining and oil tycoon Dan Gertler, a major facilitator of and profiteer from Kabila’s kleptocracy, along with 19 of his companies and one of his business associates.
While targeting Gertler was an important first step, more sanctions against other commercial enablers are urgently needed now in order to prevent Kabila from running in the elections and to enable a credible democratic transition.
In addition, strict anti-money-laundering standards should be applied by financial institutions conducting business in the region or who process transactions on behalf of other banks that do. Until we cut off the ability of the kleptocratic elites to enjoy the spoils of the misery that they sow in Congo, the innocent will continue to suffer.
As it stands now, war crimes pay. Dictatorship and conflict facilitate the looting. Unless we target that equation, the mass suffering will continue.
As one refugee told me simply, “My hope is to leave this camp and go home in peace.” In order for peace to have any chance, those benefiting from human misery inside and outside Congo need to pay a price, whether financial, legal, or political, and the kleptocratic system that favors violence and repression needs to be steadily and systematically dismantled.
 By JOHN PRENDERGAST
       Daily Beast

Wednesday 23 May 2018

POURQUOI LA FRANCE SOUTIENT LA CANDIDATURE DU RWANDA ANGLOPHONE A LA TETE DE L’ORGANISATION INTERNATIONALE DE LA FRANCOPHONIE (OIF) ?


POURQUOI LA FRANCE SOUTIENT LA CANDIDATURE DU RWANDA ANGLOPHONE A LA TETE DE L’ORGANISATION INTERNATIONALE DE LA FRANCOPHONIE (OIF) ?


23/05/2018

LE CADEAU DE MULTINATIONALES FRANCAISES A L’ANGLOPHONE RWANDAIS, PAUL KAGAME 


Louise Mushikiwabo, Ministre Rwandaise des Affaires 
étrangères, est confirmée par le Rwanda comme
 candidate au Secrétariat de la Francophonie.

Depuis l'échec de l'opération française dite « Turquoise » au Rwanda en 1994, l'Hexagone a toujours été mise hors-circuit dans les affaires par Paul Kagame, le plus grand président receleur des minerais de la RD Congo.

En effet, le Président à vie du Rwanda, Paul Kagame, n'a jamais pardonné Ã  la France de son soutien tous azimut aux ex-Forces Armée Rwandaises (FAR) et aux milices Interahamwe pendant la guerre civile rwandaise de 1990-1994. Pour punir la France, "complice des génocidaires", Kagame se tourna rapidement vers le Commonwealth (anglophone) en adoptant le modèle économique singapourien "plus aisé, pratique et plus flexible".

Depuis vingt-quatre ans, les multinationales françaises ont payé un lourd tribut dû aux "erreurs du Rwandagate" et n'ont donc pas pu profiter des opportunités d'affaires offertes par le pays des mille collines, le paradis fiscal pour les “revendeurs illégaux” de minerais du sang venant de la RD Congo.

Cela a fait croitre les inquiétudes des milieux d'affaires français sur l’avenir des relations franco-rwandaises d'autant plus qu'il est plus facile de créer une entreprise au Rwanda qu'en France selon la Banque mondiale. Ne pas s’entendre avec le gouvernement rwandais de Paul Kagame fait du tort à la France.


LE MACRONISME ET LE RÔLE DE SARKOZY DANS LE RAPPROCHEMENT FRANCO-RWANDAIS

L'ancien président français Nicholas Sarkozy rencontre 
Kagame du Rwanda avec un groupe d'investisseurs
 français qui explorent les opportunités 
d'investissement dans le pays.

L'avènement du macronisme, mouvement social libéral largement financé par les entreprises numériques et les sociétés de capital-investissement, va briser la "raison d'Etat" traditionnelle dans la question rwandaise depuis 1994 prônée par la gauche socialiste et la droite républicaine.

Cyrille Bolloré de la multinationale française Bolloré Transports & Logistics, a entamé des négociations avec le gouvernement rwandais pour le "grand retour de la France au Rwanda". Selon lui, dans la crise politique franco-rwandaise, c’est la France qui est perdante au profit des entreprises anglo-saxonnes. Il a donc engagé l'ancien président français Nicolas Sarkozy, à la tête d'un groupe d'investisseurs français pour entamer des négociations d’affaires avec le patron du Rwanda.

Notons que Nicolas Sarkozy est connu pour sa sympathie à la cause rwandaise. L'ancien président français est l'auteur de la doctrine du « partage des terres et des richesses entre le RD Congo et le Rwanda » et a donc été avancé par le gouvernement Macron et les milieux d'affaires proches d'AREVA auprès du gouvernement rwandais pour préparer le retour du Rwanda dans la zone d'influence française.


LE RETOUR DE L'ENFANT PRODIGUE

Le vendredi 11 mai 2018, le personnel de Bolloré 
Transport & Logistics Rwanda Ltd rend hommage 
aux victimes du génocide de 1994 contre
 les « Tutsis »

La percée stratégique du groupe industriel français TOTAL en Afrique de l'Est (Ouganda et RD Congo) face aux multinationales anglo-saxonnes Tullow Oil et Heritage Oil a fait sonner le glas de la fin du monopole anglo-saxon de l'exploitation énergétique en Afrique de l'Est. Cela a conduit le président rwandais à reconsidérer sa stratégie d'autant qui consistait à mettre les entreprises françaises hors d'activité au profit des Anglo-Saxons. Kagame veut adopter une position équilibrée et multilatérale entre le monde anglophone et le monde francophone.

Ce Mercredi 23/05/218, le président Paul Kagame a confirmé que la ministre rwandaise des Affaires étrangères, Louise Mushikiwabo, est en concurrence sur le poste de secrétaire général de l'organisation "Francophonie". Une candidature de la réconciliation, ouvertement endossée par l'Elysée, qui arrange les milieux d'affaires et industriels français mis hors-jeu dans les Grands Lacs depuis 24 ans. “ le cadeau entretienne l’amitié “ dit-on.

Les deux grands géants de l'énergie française (AREVA et Total) soutiennent le grand retour de l’enfant prodigue dans la zone d'influence française qui ne sera que bénéfique aux intérêts français qu'avec de multiples contrats d'exploitation du gaz et du pétrole au Kivu.

Notons aussi que les appétits de Total et d'Areva pour le contrôle de l'énergie dans le Grand Rift Valley Africain continuent de croître. Dans cette conquête géostratégique du Grand Rift Valley Africain, la réconciliation du Rwanda avec le grand frère français est donc nécessaire et fortement encouragée. 

Le Rwanda « dynamique » est essentiel aux intérêts français dans la région vue que les minerais de la RD Congo sont transférés au Rwanda pour pouvoir atteindre facilement les ports de l’océan indien. Ceci représente une offrande pour le groupe Bolloré Africa Logistics, expert en activités logistiques incluant les ports et le transport routier, afin de contrôler le commerce des minerais et de les évacuer.

Par Serge Egola Angbakodolo
et Ishiaba Kasonga 










Tuesday 10 April 2018

Why we must listen to those who have fled Kagame’s Rwanda

Why we must listen to those who have fled Kagame’s Rwanda


10/04/2018

In a new book, Canada journalist Judi Rever details the brutal actions of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and the RPF. In this essay for OpenCanada, she explains the need to uncover the story and asks: why has the world stayed so silent on the issue?


Rwandan refugees carry their belongings on their way 
to Ruhengeri refugee camp August 1, 1994, shortly 
after returning back to the country which they fled 
because of the war between government troops
 and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

One of the most vexing moral challenges for journalists who cover war is how to find meaning amid the trauma. Bearing witness to the suffering of others is daunting enough. But how we convey that suffering through the filter of our own privilege and bias can be even more problematic.
Two decades ago, when I was a young journalist, I went to Congo to cover an unimaginable humanitarian crisis. Rwanda’s army, backed by military allies from Uganda, had invaded the country and attacked UN refugee camps housing Rwandan refugees inside its eastern border. These forces eventually toppled president Mobutu Sese Seko. When I arrived in the region in May 1997, just days after the overthrow, nearly a half a million Congolese were internally displaced by the civil war, and another 200,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees who had lived in the camps had gone missing and were presumed dead. At the time, Rwandan troops were firmly entrenched in a country roughly the size of Western Europe.
The chatter among Western elites far removed from the carnage was initially euphoric; Mobutu’s 32-year reign had long been synonymous with decay and the West now expected nothing short of a renaissance in the heart of Africa. The man tapped to lead this dramatic transformation was Paul Kagame, now Rwanda’s long-time president,* whose Rwandan Tutsi soldiers had then been credited with stopping a genocide committed by Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda, where up to a million people had been killed, three years before.
I knew then that the talk of renaissance in central Africa was a lie, and I wasn’t alone in this assessment. Humanitarian workers and a cabal of journalists who had been in the forests of Congo had seen what Kagame’s troops had done, and what it presaged for the region’s future.
During search and rescue missions with aid workers south of Kisangani, in the Congolese jungle, I learned how Kagame’s soldiers had hunted hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees across a brutal terrain. I interviewed dozens of orphans ravaged by disease, their faces hollowed out with grief, fear and hunger. Countless men and women, their voices trembling, told me stories of how Tutsi troops machined gunned their camps and, in some instances, forced survivors at gunpoint to bury their loved ones. Some refugees showed me their bullet wounds; I could barely fathom how they had managed to live another day. Local aid workers told me soldiers brought in bundles of firewood and barrels of gasoline to burn corpses in late April and early May 1997, days before I’d arrived. The remains of victims initially buried were eventually dug up and brought to more remote areas.
My whole world view shattered when I realized how Canada had downplayed the crisis as it was happening, and eventually acquiesced to the position of the United States that Kagame’s forces should be allowed to proceed, whatever the human cost. And I have never quite recovered from the stupor of learning that multinationals, some of them Canadian, struck mining deals with the killers, in the very midst of the slaughter. For years I was frozen in horror at the cynicism and sheer inhumanity of it.  
"Despite UN findings, there has been no serious international attempt to try Kagame and his senior commanders for these atrocities."
International organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, Refugees International and the Montreal-based International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development wrote devastating reports detailing the crimes in Congo’s jungle. A United Nations special rapporteur spoke of genocidal acts, yet it took more than a decade for the United Nations to thoroughly investigate these incidents and declare that Kagame and his army had probably committed its own genocide against unarmed Hutu civilians in Congo.
Despite the UN findings, published in 2010, there has been no serious international attempt to try Kagame and his senior commanders for these atrocities. In fact, politically powerful insiders have worked to shield Kagame from prosecution at the International Criminal Court since 2002, despite compelling evidence that he has created and supported a succession of militia that have ripped Congo apart and feasted on its resources ever since. Several million Congolese have died from violence and war-related causes since he unleashed the war in 1996.
I will never forget the gaze and voices of victims in Congo and Rwanda. Nor will I forget the stories of why Rwandans fled their country in the first place, during and after the genocide of 1994. The stories I collected in Congo contained crucial clues about what the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) did years before. Hutus did not flee to surrounding countries — as the international media and Kagame’s government claimed — because armed Hutu elements were holding them hostage in the camps. They did not flee because they were all guilty of committing genocide of Tutsis and were afraid of going to jail if they returned. They told me they fled Rwanda because the RPF had killed their family members during the genocide, and they were afraid then of going back home to be finished off.
But the world did not listen to them then, or since. Even I had difficulty, at first, understanding what they told me. Why? Because I had absorbed the propaganda and been conditioned to believe that the RPF had stopped the genocide as soon as it routed Hutu soldiers and militia. It took me months after my trip to Congo and Rwanda in 1997, recalling these anecdotes and re-listening to interviews, to realize and finally accept that there were perpetrators and victims on both sides during the genocide in 1994. And it took me years of dogged reporting to finally uncover what the RPF had actually done, the depravity and organization of its crimes, before, during and after the genocide.
Along the way, Kagame’s operatives have tried to silence me. Strange men have attempted to lure me into dangerous situations; they’ve harassed, threatened and at times chased me in public places. My family has been targeted. Agents working for Rwandan embassies in Canada and Belgium reportedly laid traps for me. Belgian state security told me they had convincing intelligence the Rwandan embassy in Brussels posed a threat to my safety. The risk level was considered so severe that Belgium provided armed bodyguards and an armoured Mercedes for all my interviews in the country.
"For many years, Western governments and a vast majority of journalists, rights groups and academics refused to believe the people who fled."
If that sounds terrifying, it hardly equates to the decades’ long nightmare experienced by Rwandan journalists, activists, Hutu civilians and Tutsis who refused to endorse these crimes and managed to defect. For their honesty and courage they have been accordingly silenced, hunted down, jailed or killed since Kagame took power. For many years, Western governments and a vast majority of journalists, rights groups and academics refused to believe the people who fled. They believed the propaganda of the RPF, whose army won a savage war in which Tutsis and Hutus committed genocide against each other.

If we had only listened to all victims — and not just those inside Rwanda over which the RPF has exerted control — we could have lessened or possibly prevented the wave of bloodshed after July 1994, when Kagame seized power. But the world did not listen. His intelligence apparatus set about killing Hutu males, in particular Hutu  recruits or soldiers of the previous regime. These were acts of androcide.  Hundreds of thousands more Hutus were killed in the counterinsurgency and in the forests of Congo.

The following are just a few of the alarming reports the West chose to deliberately conceal:

  • At the height of the genocide, a UN cable revealed that Kagame’s forces were shooting, stabbing and burning refugees and dumping bodies of victims in the Kagera River. Others were hauled off in trucks, according to survivors fleeing to neighbouring Tanzania.
  • In 1994, an international consultant with extensive experience in African war zones named Robert Gersony concluded that 40,000 Hutu refugees were slaughtered in less than one third of the country’s communes he visited, and he believed the operations were systematic and amounted to genocide. The UN buried his report to protect Kagame’s regime. A whistleblower released it online in 2010.
  • Early evidence from RPF informants indicated that on April 6, 1994, Kagame’s commandos had shot down the plane carrying Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira. Their assassinations triggered the Rwandan genocide, which claimed the lives of several hundred thousand Tutsis. Louise Arbour, the Canadian prosecutor of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), shut down that probe in 1997. She argued that the tribunal did not have jurisdiction to investigate the plane attack. Yet Article 4 of the ICTR Statute specifically called for the body to investigate acts of terrorism.  
  • A political group comprised of Rwandan Hutu refugees conducted an incomplete investigation in camps in Zaire (which was renamed Congo) and Tanzania. That investigation listed the names of 20,000 victims, most from northern Rwanda, who had been killed in RPF zones by Kagame’s army. In many cases the names of witnesses to the killings were listed, and occasionally the names of the alleged killers, who were members of the RPF, were identified. The investigation, which I got access to, was submitted to the UN tribunal in 2000, but the court buried the findings.       
  • A Rwandan human rights activist and journalist named André Sibomana collected the names of 18,000 men, women and children who were slaughtered in the prefecture of Gitarama after the RPF seized the zone in June 1994. Rwanda’s former prime minister, Faustin Twagiramungu, and former interior minister, Seth Sendashonga, gave those names to the ICTR and to Belgium in 1996. No judicial action was taken. Sendashonga was gunned down in Nairobi by Kagame’s operatives. Sibomana, who devoted his life to the vulnerable and voiceless, died in 1998.
I consider it a privilege to be Canadian, because I have a reasonable assurance that our rights are respected. But that privilege doesn’t inure me to the suffering of others in far away places. And it doesn’t mean that I’m willing to stay silent as a group of violent criminals hijack international justice in the name of a doomed, geopolitical experiment. The silence has fuelled Kagame’s killing machine.
There is a shame in staying silent about history and our part in it. It’s a shame that’s insidious because it creates a false sense of powerlessness. Rwandans and Congolese are not powerless. Nor are Westerners who care about that part of the world. Victims long gone, and those still among us, matter. After all these years, let us listen to people who have fled Kagame’s Rwanda. They should be protected instead of betrayed.
*Paul Kagame became leader of the RPF’s military wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), in October 1990 after it invaded Rwanda from its base in Uganda. Kagame had grown up in Uganda and helped former rebel leader turned president, Yoweri Museveni, topple the regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, in 1979 and 1985. Kagame became President Museveni’s spy chief and was known for torturing enemies of the Ugandan state. Kagame became Rwanda’s de facto leader when his troops seized power in July 1994, and has received considerable international support to rebuild the country since the genocide. In 2000, he was declared president and has since won three presidential elections. Kagame and his ruling RPF have been accused of silencing and jailing critics, and assassinating opponents at home and abroad.
BY: JUDI REVER 

Friday 23 February 2018

APPLE FACES CHILD LABOR SCRUTINY AS IT LOOKS TO TAKE CHARGE OF COBALT MINES

APPLE FACES CHILD LABOR SCRUTINY AS IT LOOKS TO TAKE CHARGE OF COBALT MINES


23/02/2018



An impending global shortage of cobalt—an essential ingredient in everything from smartphones to electric cars—is prompting a scramble for the scarce mineral that is once again drawing attention to human rights abuses in the mining process.
In order to meet its own cobalt needs, Apple is reportedly planning to go straight to the source and secure it directly from the mines. The news follows investigations into cobalt mines in recent years that have repeatedly revealed incidents of child labor and hazardous working conditions.
According to Bloomberg, the world’s richest company has been in talks with mining companies for more than a year in order to guarantee a steady supply of the mineral over the next five years, which human rights campaigners tell Newsweek could present serious ethical challenges.
It is not clear which mines Apple is in talks with, though much of its current cobalt is sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 50 percent of the world’s cobalt supply originates. It is also where some of the most grievous human rights abuses have been reported.

FAIRPHONE
According to Amnesty International, children as young as seven were discovered working in cobalt mines in the DRC and in a 2016 report from the charitable organization, children working in mines recounted “being subjected to beatings and extortion by security guards and exploited by traders.”
As one of the biggest cobalt consumers—the mineral is used to produce the lithium-ion batteries found inside every iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and MacBook—any deal between Apple and the mines would protect the tech giant from choked supply chains but also open them up to closer scrutiny. Currently, as a “downstream company,” Apple is not directly responsible for the mines’ practices.
Apple declined to comment on whether it was in talks with mining companies but reiterated to Newsweek its efforts to prevent human rights abuses in its supply chains, including that of cobalt.


Amnesty’s latest report on cobalt supply chains, published in November last year, ranked Apple favourably against other tech firms, citing the company’s decision to publish the names of its cobalt suppliers. Amnesty said Apple was currently the “industry leader… but the bar is low,” adding that the company still fell short of taking all possible action to ensure responsible cobalt sourcing.
In a 2016 report, Apple revealed that 20 percent of its cobalt supply came “from sources that don’t currently have responsible sourcing programs in place to meet our rigorous requirements,” adding that it was not cutting ties with these mines because it wanted to effect change.
“We’ve consciously chosen to stay engaged with mines and smelters that are not yet meeting our high standards and will work with them to develop responsible practices,” the report stated.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
Apple also compared favourably to other leading tech companies in a study by Greenpeace last year that judged firms on their transparency, performance and advocacy efforts, though campaigners  warn that the Cupertino company will face a brand new type of challenge when dealing directly with mining companies.
Elizabeth Jardin, an IT campaigner at Greenpeace, told  Newsweek: “As companies move to ensure a steady supply of cobalt for their products, Apple and others must also take greater responsibility to ensure stronger standards to protect the health of the miners and the surrounding environment.”
The issue is one that has occupied Dutch smartphone maker Fairphone since 2013, when it began working with traceability initiatives in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The startup’s aim was to produce an ethically-minded device, though the complexity of supply chains mean it is still unable to boast of a truly fairtrade handset.
“Even Fairphone isn’t able to meet its own standards,” Tessa Wernink, co-founder of Fairphone, told Newsweek at the launch of the Fairphone 2 in 2016. “There’s around 30 minerals in the smartphone and so far we’ve only been able to trace two back to conflict-free mines.”
A spokesperson for the firm tells Newsweek that cobalt is a “focus mineral” for Fairphone and partnered with Hayou Cobalt last year to set up a traceable supply chain for the material.
“Even though cobalt is not classified as a ‘conflict mineral’, the mining conditions are often associated with severe human rights violations, including child labor,” Fairphone said in a November blogpost on its website that explored the issue of cobalt sourcing.

Fairphone describes the need to improve the cobalt mining sector as “urgent” and said it has invited other brands to join them in setting up a new supply chain, but has not revealed which.
In addition to the improvements required in Apple’s supply chain, the most irresponsible companies when it comes to cobalt sourcing, according to Amnesty, include Microsoft, Huawei and Lenovo. As demand for the finite resource continues to grow, Amnesty International has called for these companies to take more action.
“This is a crucial moment for change,” Seema Joshi, head of business and human rights at Amnesty International, when its latest report into child labor in cobalt mines was published.
“The energy solutions of the future must not be built on human rights abuses.”
BY ANTHONY CUTHBERTSON 
Newsweek US