The Free

Coverup: Damning US/UK Role in 1994 Rwandan Genocide

from thefreeonline on April 17, 2024 by Ann Garrison at StuartBramhall.

“The genocide in Rwanda was 100% the responsibility of the Americans!” – UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali,

The U.S. kept the U.N. Security Council from sending in troops to stop the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

The most widespread and pernicious myth about the Rwandan Genocide may be that the US stood by and let it happen, but nothing could be further from the truth. The US in fact intervened aggressively—to make sure there would be no UN intervention—as Robin Philpot explains in Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa: From Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction . This book is a classic history, as important this year, the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, as it was upon its English publication in 2013.

At its opening, and in Chapter 7, “How is the Empire?,” Philpot quotes former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who said, “The genocide in Rwanda was one hundred percent the responsibility of the Americans!”

Well over a million refugees fled from Rwanda into Uganda, Tanzania, and Zaire at the end of the Rwandan Genocide.

He quotes Boutros-Ghali’s 1999 book Unvanquished: A US-UN Saga in which the former Secretary-General writes, “The US effort to prevent the effective deployment of a UN force for Rwanda succeeded with the strong support of Britain.”

The 1994 genocide took place three years after the Soviet Union collapsed and broke up into 15 independent states. The Cold War was over and the US reigned supreme economically and militarily, with veto power on the UN Security Council.

President Bill Clinton thus sent his UN Ambassador, Madeleine Albright, to systematically block any kind of UN military intervention to stop the bloodshed in Rwanda.

No intervention would be tolerated, even if the US did not participate.

Why not? Because the US wanted to see its imperial proxy, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) led by General Paul Kagame, seize power in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. It wanted to displace France and the French language and establish itself as the dominant power in East and Central Africa. It wanted ready access to the immense mineral wealth of Rwanda’s neighbor, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which Rwanda and Uganda would invade two years later. It wanted to destroy the strong state established by the Rwandan social revolution of 1962, which overthrew the feudal Tutsi monarchy. The RPF, who carried US interests and the English language into Kigali, were largely Tutsi aristocrats who had taken refuge in Uganda after that revolution.

One hundred days that ended a four-year war

The popular understanding of the genocide is that it was 100 days of bloodletting in which the country’s Hutu majority executed a plan to exterminate the country’s Tutsi minority.

No birdsong, no water in the creek, no beating wings: how a haven for nature fell silent

thefreeonline updated July 2024 from Stigmatis … by Phoebe Weston (NEW-on Telegram – t.me/thefreeonline)

As the soundscape of the natural world began to disappear over 30 years, one man was listening and recording it all The tale starts 30 years ago, when Bernie Krause made his first audio clip in Sugarloaf Ridge state park, 20 minutes’ drive from his house near San Francisco.

He chose a spot near an old bigleaf maple. Many people loved this place: there was a creek and a scattering of picnic benches nearby.

As a soundscape recordist, Krause had travelled around the world listening to the planet. But in 1993 he turned his attention to what was happening on his doorstep. In his first recording, a stream of chortles, peeps and squeaks erupt from the animals that lived in the rich, scrubby habitat. His sensitive microphones captured the sounds of the creek, creatures rustling through undergrowth, and the songs of the spotted towhee, orange-crowned warbler, house wren and mourning dove.

Back then, Krause never thought of this as a form of data-gathering. He began recording ecosystem sounds simply because he found them beautiful and relaxing. Krause has ADHD and found no medication would work: “The only thing that relieved the anxiety was being out there and just listening to the soundscapes,” he says.

Bernie Krause ‘out there and listening to the soundscapes’ in Sugarloaf Ridge state park. Photograph: Cayce Clifford/The Guardian

Inadvertently, he had begun to gather a rich trove of data. Over the next three decades he would return each April to the spot at the bigleaf maple, set his recorder down and wait to hear what it would reveal.

But in April last year, Krause played back his recording and was greeted with something he had not heard before: total silence. The recorder had run for its usual hour, but picked up no birdsong, no rush of water over stones, no beating wings. “I’ve got an hour of material with nothing, at the high point of spring,” says Krause. “What’s happening here is just a small indication of what’s happening almost everywhere on an even larger scale.”

A rich weave of sound fades

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00:52How Sugarloaf Park fell silent 2000 – 2023. Credit: Bernie Krause at Wild Sanctuary 2024

Animals produce a vast array of sounds: to find mates, protect territories, identify offspring or simply by moving about. But traditionally, ecologists have measured environmental health by looking at habitats rather than listening to them.

Desirae Harp, an educator at the park and member of the local Mishewal Wappo tribe.

Krause developed the idea that the sound of healthy ecosystems contained not only the calls of individual animals, but a dense, structured weave of sounds that he called the “biophony”……..

….Life swept away by fire…..A silent message to the world…..Comparison of 2003 and 2023:…..