{"id":380012,"date":"2021-11-09T00:13:39","date_gmt":"2021-11-09T00:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=122330"},"modified":"2021-11-09T00:13:39","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T00:13:39","slug":"the-cult-of-the-toothpick-king-central-africa-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/11\/09\/the-cult-of-the-toothpick-king-central-africa-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cult of the Toothpick King: Central Africa Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review of British journalist Michela Wrong\u2019s remarkable new book Do Not Disturb:The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em> replete with a survey of some of the more notable reviews and the notorious1<\/a><\/sup> reviewers who reviewed it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Do Not Disturb<\/em> is a book out some six months now that has catapulted author Michela Wrong to a new low of infamy in the eyes of Paul Kagame, the President-for-Life in Rwanda, and those who applaud him.<\/p>\n

Those who applaud Paul Kagame are generally of the cult-worshipping variety and have no real grasp on the historiography of Rwanda, its current events, or the politics of genocide and human rights there, or\u2014more often\u2014they are willing agents in the disinformation and fake news wars where, sadly, they have so disfigured the truth that they actually believe the stories that they tell.<\/p>\n

The title Do Not Disturb<\/em> refers to the sign found dangling from the gilded latch to Room 905 of the Michelangelo Towers Hotel, Johannesburg, where it worked its magic to shroud the crime inside. The dead man on the bed was Rwanda\u2019s exiled Col. Patrick Karegeya, the ex-spy chief who once ran Rwandan President Paul Kagame\u2019s tenebrous External Security Organization and who also, some say, played a role in Kagame\u2019s foreign assassinations program. A smooth operator, Karegeya was for years tasked with handling<\/em> outsiders, everyone from foreign ambassadors, defense attach\u00e9s and intelligence operatives, to journalists and celebrities and academics.<\/p>\n

Patrick Karegeya\u2019s role as a \u2018handler\u2019 of outsiders was not unusual: anyone who visits Rwanda will be watched, their contacts vetted, their relationships \u2018handled\u2019 by agents of the criminal Rwandan regime. Anyone, and everyone. Most visitors are unaware of the nature and scope of surveillance practiced by Rwanda\u2019s state security apparatus. (Further, they are directed to select genocide survivors\u2014including Tutsis who were not even in Rwanda at the time\u2014and they are shown a pile of skulls and skeletons and, well, their minds are lost forever.) Patrick Karegeya was tasked with handling the high profile visitors and those deemed potentially problematic\u2014like journalists and fellow spies.<\/p>\n

Patrick Karegeya was also the jester darling of donor-nation\u2019s purse-string pullers: the cool Patrick Karegeya did his part to keep the money from foreign countries coming in. And it did. No matter the crimes committed by the shadow gang operating behind the faux<\/em> front government in Rwanda, \u201cno major donor moved to sever aid or impose sanctions, or considered exposing Kigali\u2019s plots to public view.\u201d <\/a>2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It is no small feat to kill a\u00a0spook<\/em>\u00a0with the kind of friends found in Colonel Karegeya\u2019s cell-phone contacts.\u00a0A seasoned apostle in the Cult of Intelligence\u2014no doubt cozy with MOSSAD, CIA, BOSS, MI-6, Canadian operatives\u2014his friends in high places also included prominent foreign correspondents and diplomats.<\/p>\n

Do Not Disturb<\/em> is an apt title for another reason: There are a lot of people whose careers and reputations rest on the falsification of consciousness constructed like a sarcophagus to entomb the dirty secrets and ugly truths that the piles of skeletons at Rwanda\u2019s and Uganda\u2019s genocide memorials can\u2019t point to and the skulls can\u2019t speak to. It\u2019s easy to pile up bleached bones and put a sign on them, declare them victims of the desired demographics, and that\u2019s what Yoweri Museveni (Uganda) and Paul Kagame (Rwanda) did. They did it first in the Luwero Triangle of Uganda, later in Kigali and Ruhengeri and Gisenyi in Rwanda; in Congo they dumped the bones in mass graves \u2014 and in the Congo river and its massive tributaries \u2014 but they went back later and disappeared even these.3<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 In Rwanda the RPA also had their crematoriums, churning thousands of bodies to ash and smoke, disappearing all trace of their victims.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\u201cUnless you\u2019re a pathologist, a corpse cannot tell its story.\u201d \u00a0Author Michela Wrong reminds us that dead men tell no tales.\u00a0 \u201cBy the mere dint of dying, it seems, [the victims] picked a side.\u201d\u00a0 Another page, she writes: \u201cPatrick [Karegeya] certainly knew where all the skeletons were buried.\u201d\u00a05<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n

Offering us a unique and deeply penetrating look at the internal workings of the “Grinding Machine” —6<\/a><\/sup> that\u2019s what Hotel Rwanda<\/em> hero Paul Rusesabagina called the Rwandan government of Paul Kagame — that has churned innocent men, women and children to dust on the hills of Rwanda and the steamy equatorial forests of Congo, a disturbingly unique dictatorship that also eats its own.\u00a0 Michela Wrong simultaneously offers us an incisive and comprehensive peek into a mind that is arguably the world\u2019s most disturbed, the King behind the Cult of Personality, Kagame, and with that she exposes the mystery that lies at the heart of human evil. Hers is not a historical revisioning. It is a masterful storytelling of a story whose time to be heard has perhaps finally come.<\/p>\n

Michela Wrong is a seasoned former foreign correspondent for Reuters<\/em>, the BBC<\/em> and Financial Times<\/em>. If Do Not Disturb<\/em> really is The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em> it is much more than that. It is also the herstory of a middle class British lady who slogged the doldrums of beat reportage\u2014\u201dcovering boxing matches, cycling races, gas explosions and rewriting stringer copy\u201d for years\u00a07<\/a><\/sup> \u2014all the way to Paris and to Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and to Kinshasa, from where she booked her story of the downfall of a dictator and the deluge that followed,8<\/a><\/sup> <\/a> and who would, one day, far into the unseen future, gain the confidence of a handful of media savvy guerrillas from whom she quickly bought their faux<\/em> Marxist liberation story and sold it to the world on a currency of moral righteousness of the Good Guys v. Bad Guys Hotel Rwanda<\/em> kind, only to find that she\u2019d been hoodwinked and the glue didn\u2019t stick and the victorious Tutsi left to tell the story, ever whining about their victimhood, weren\u2019t quite the saintly Disciplined-Tutsi-Rebels-Who-Stopped-the-Genocide-and-Won-the-War-and-Rebuilt-Rwanda-in-His-Utopian-and-Egalitarian-Image saviors that their manipulative propaganda\u2014bludgeoned into peoples\u2019 heads through bullying and fear and constant repetition and guilt, especially the guilt<\/em>\u2014made them out to be, and who, even in the dawning awareness of their treachery and deceit and the creeping cognizance that she too was walking-the-thin-bloody-line between filing Dispatches and being Dispatched\u2014off with her head!<\/em>\u2014kept on poking holes in the officially authorized but ever unfolding Untold Story <\/em>9<\/a><\/sup> with a persistent dedication to telling<\/em> it.<\/p>\n

Paul Kagame has ruled Rwanda more like a ruthless Tutsi King from the pre-colonial era than like your typical 20th century democra-despot<\/em>. I mean, the world has seen some choice head-choppers \u2014 Augusto Pinochet (Chile), Henry VIII (England), Paul Biya (Cameroon), Suharto (Indonesia), General Gnassingbe Eyadema (Togo), Charlemagne (France), but the dictate Off with their heads!<\/em> takes on a special new meaning for all those Rwandan masses living in fear amidst the secrets and subterfuge of the thousand hills of Rwanda\u2019s rebirth and the man who dreamed It.10<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

<\/a>Some reviewers of Do Not Disturb<\/em> produced simplistic reviews emulating the essentialized fiction of the Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda<\/em>: to them Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Army11<\/a><\/sup> are saintly. Some reviewers mount veiled attacks against the author and the camp they presume her to belong to; other critics engage in mental masturbation. Many of them regurgitate abandoned theories that always strained credulity. Reviews are launched like volleys across some epistemological battlefield, clear testimonials to the reviewer jockeying for ascendance in the ever shape-shifting Intellectual and Propaganda War being waged between privileged whites12<\/a><\/sup>, <\/a> (and a few people of color from the comprador<\/em> class) to be heard about all things Heart of Darkness<\/em> and the shadowy kingdoms<\/em> and fiefdoms<\/em> orbiting its periphery.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the Cult of Elitist Camps of High-Minded-Moral-Judgers-in-Chief of Events and History in Central Afrika (sic).13<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Not even a machete will help readers cut through the fictions to expose the facts given the competing narratives and personalities and hubris and vitriol surrounding the politics of genocide in Central Afrika.\u00a0The New York Times Magazine\u2019s<\/em> fictional hit-piece on Paul Rusesabagina by Joshua Hammer last March (2021) is a stellar example: \u201cHe Was the Hero of \u2018Hotel Rwanda\u2019: Now He\u2019s Accused of Terrorism.\u201d\u00a014<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

A Pop Survey of\u00a0 Reviews<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even the most hostile of the Western book reviews that populate our most prestigious journals and papers-of-record can\u2019t rival those cranked out by the Keepers of the Royal Word in Kigali. Hence, at one extreme, we have Rwanda\u2019s abacurabwenge<\/em>\u2014the specialists at King Kagame\u2019s court. Just like in olden times, these are subjects of Kagame\u2019s Kingdom authorized to defend the latest Toothpick King at all costs, and they do so by any means necessary: lies, distortions, slanders, ad hominem<\/em> attacks. People like Tom Ndahiro, one of King Kagame\u2019s perpetual propaganda peddlers who pops up in academia and the press and wherever the need arises to murder some everyday truth to enshrine some establishment lie.15<\/a><\/sup>,\u00a016<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n

By the way: the \u2018toothpick\u2019 descriptor is herein used as an adjective, not a noun, to describe the tall skinny aristocratic Tutsi Kings and, Rwanda\u2019s President\u2014he is no king, no more than he is a freely elected<\/em> President\u2014Paul Kagame, at 6 foot 2 inches, is the stuff of which Tutsi Kings were made. The former Tutsi monarchs were all tall and very skinny: King Mutara III Rudahagwa was 6 foot 8 inches and his successor King Kigeli V was 7 foot 2 inches. \u201cThere\u2019s a disconcertingly otherworldly appearance to these etiolated, Giacometti-slim monarchs,\u201d writes Michela Wrong, \u201cwith their high foreheads, protruding teeth, and endless legs\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The great \u201cwhite fathers\u201d of the Belgian catholic church surround the late King Mutara III Rudahigwa, who died under unusual or suspicious circumstances in Bujumbura, Burundi, in 1959.<\/em><\/p>\n

And it seems that the toothpick phenotype is not all King Kagame has inherited: there is also the pre-colonial legacy of violence\u2014the Royal ruthlessness, suspicion, spying, subterfuge, abuse, intrigue, cunning of the King\u2019s Court\u2014where, Michela Wrong reminds us, \u201c[t]he palace compound was a vipers\u2019 nest of scheming gossip, two-faced informers, incestuous couplings, and deadly familial plots.\u201d\u00a017<\/a><\/sup> <\/a><\/p>\n

King Kagame adapted his precursor\u2019s templates of violence to his contemporary panopticon. Battalions of the toothpick King Rwabugiri had a propensity to wiping out every man, woman and child at the King\u2019s whim. King Kagame has carried the aristocratic Tutsi ruthlessness and supremacy of his forbears\u2014attitudes, prejudices and behaviors premised in absolute superiority, including the license to extort, enslave, mutilate and murder\u2014into a present where total control begins with the control of people\u2019s thoughts, and this is done by manipulating the mass media, spinning the narrative, wagging the dog.<\/p>\n

The Scribes of the Kagame Court, you see, must take care not to disappoint the regime\u2014which is really about pleasing the President King\u2014else they might uncertainly suffer the fate of the not-so-few-fallen-out-of-favor who were routinely abused, slapped, slandered, kicked, raped, killed or silently disappeared on the King\u2019s orders. Of course, for the lucky<\/em> survivors, the abuse has not stopped. Kagame\u2014the toothpick King\u2014routinely abuses his subjects. Do Not Disturb<\/em> shares shocking tales told by repentant RPA rogues now out of favor with the King.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey learned the importance of punctuality.\u201d Michela Wrong is here speaking of civilians<\/em> who suffered the President King\u2019s petulance. \u201cWhen a cabinet meeting was called, Kagame would often wait behind the door, and anyone who dared arrive late would receive a kick to the buttocks sending them sprawling.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s comical to imagine. This is one of the world\u2019s most decorated<\/em> leaders. In Do Not Disturb<\/em>, King Kagame\u2019s former comrades paint a portrait that evokes images of an animated toothpick cartoon character obsessed with springing out of the shadows to waylay his workers. Comical, but sanguinary, pathetic, disturbed. How many prestigious colleges and universities have honored Kagame as a speaker or conferred Honorary degrees on him?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>King Yuhi V Musinga (1883-1844):\u00a0 Reign:\u00a0<\/span>December 1896 \u2013 12 November 1931<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Mass murder is a messy business, and it hasn\u2019t always gone the King\u2019s way. Look at Kibeho: thousands of Hutu refugees systematically mowed down on the orders of King Kagame<\/em>. What a pickle! You\u2019d think. Right? In the north, in the south, in the middle of Rwanda, in the Congo, the atrocity business is a big job. Massacres were mismanaged. Villagers escaped, arms dangling, brains spilling out. Reports were filed, then unfiled, then buried, then denied. Shit happens. \u201cLike the cyborg running down its assigned victim, this vengeful Terminator never stops,\u201d Michela Wrong reminds us, \u201ceven when the pursuit comes across as bizarrely self-defeating.\u201d\u00a018<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The King, it seems, is perpetually disturbed. His punishment for soldiers was worse. Another day and his hoe-happy killers have slipped up. Made a mess of things. Let those phantasmagorical Hutu holdouts from Congo hop over the frontier, infiltrate northwestern Rwanda. His Hateful Highness ordered some 1500 of his Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) soldiers and gendarmes to assemble at barracks. The defense minister arrived followed by a Tata lorry under escort of his military police\u2014his homegrown manifestation of the East German Stasi.<\/em> \u201cIt was loaded with whips. As the troops watched in stunned silence, Kagame systematically whipped his senior commanders, while his military police meted out the same punishment to his junior officers.\u201d\u00a017<\/a><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Reminiscent of the utter brutality of King Kigeli V Rwabugiri (1840-1895), the bloodiest of the feudal Tutsi Mwamis<\/em> that preceded Kagame by a hundred years\u2014and one that Kagame claims his lineage to\u2014some fifty to sixty commanders were whipped. It took\u2014Michela Wrong reports\u2014the entire afternoon.\u00a017<\/a><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 And generals?<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 And generals.\u00a019<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Even General James Kabarebe\u2014the legendary RPA kingpin who so loyally served Kagame and comrades during their genocidal adventures in the \u2018rebellions\u2019 and coups d\u2019etat<\/em> and ongoing interventions20<\/a><\/sup> waged from Uganda to Rwanda to Congo and back\u2014has frequently suffered outrageous humiliations born of the sick soul soup of temper tantrum and paranoia and narcissism that make Paul Kagame the unique and bona fide<\/em> psychopath that he is.<\/p>\n

Do Not Disturb<\/em> chronicles such phenomena seen from the eyes of the secretive clique of those closest to King Kagame, and Michela Wrong gets it right enough. For that the Royal Scribes declared her a Genocide Denier, and one who set out a priori<\/em> to smear the government<\/em> (sic) of Rwanda.<\/p>\n

Oh, please. Nothing could be further from the truth.<\/p>\n

We can imagine King Kagame\u2019s reception of the book. Delivered by some functionary, the King makes the messenger wait: she stands before him, head bowed, wringing her hands. Heir Hitler, sitting on his throne, quietly inspects the book. He turns it in his hands, reads the Jacket Blurbs praising the book and its author. \u201cRefreshingly free of jargon\u201d says Rene Lemarchand. \u201cProfoundly criminal regime\u201d says Filip Reyntjens. \u201cRuthless dictator,\u201d says Adam Hocshchild\u00a021<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Insults to the King, all of them. The toothpick King tightens. He flips open the jacket cover. More insults. The King snorts. Murmurs to himself. Turns pages. Suddenly (by page 9) he snaps. Throws the book down. Bolts out of his plush leather chair (studded with Congo\u2019s diamonds?). Stomps feet, bangs fists on desk, shakes with rage. Screams and yells, in Kinyarwanda. Foams at the mouth, searches for scapegoats (having already shot the messenger).<\/p>\n

If you think any of the above is overstatement you are wrong, and none of this is past tense (excepting the lives already lost). And unless you count yourself as an acolyte of the Cult of <\/em>High-Minded Moral Judgers & etc.<\/em> shouting to drown out all competing camps\u2014which is pretty much the scene out there in the nebulous stratospherean Public Realm<\/em>\u2014you probably don\u2019t understand exactly what makes James Kabarebe so legendary, but I do, and I\u2019m doing my best to elaborate such details in a spirit of tolerance and expansionist understanding that \u201ccombines rigor and humility, i.e. passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others,\u201d i.e. a Democratic Spirit<\/em>.\u00a022<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The actual wars and war crimes on the ground in the Great Lakes of Afrika can\u2019t hold a spear to the brutal Propaganda Wars waged with Sycophantic Acclaim and Ruthless Derision between the academics and the journalists and the human rights advocates and the editors and all the others in the Cult of High-Minded-you-know-whats.<\/p>\n

At the heart of this tale is the rise and demise of Colonel Patrick Karegeya, a man whose charm mesmerized many a journalist and bureaucrat and ambassador\u2014 all of whom helped whitewash the blood from his hands. \u201cTo pick up a foreign magazine or newspaper and know he\u2019d helped bring about the glowing portrayal of Rwanda\u2019s new administration printed therein gave him a thrill of quiet satisfaction. He was helping to coax a story of heroic resurrection into being, a saga so poignant and uplifting it would entrance the world.\u201d\u00a017<\/a><\/sup> <\/a><\/p>\n

And the world remains entranced.<\/p>\n

The Elephant in the Room\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exemplifying one of the better<\/em> reviews on the scale of lousy to lousier, consider \u201cThe Dark Underside of Rwanda\u2019s Model Public Image,\u201d penned for the New York Times<\/em> by their erstwhile former East Afrika Bureau Chief and Central Afrika expert Howard W. French.\u00a023<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 A reasonable, though abbreviated and essentialized overview of some of the relevant history mixed up with a disparate grouping of facts, the review is more about the reviewer\u2019s experience in the blood-drenched forests of Equatoria<\/em> than it is about the book.24<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a taut, cinematic quality to Wrong\u2019s account of Karegeya\u2019s killing, and a mournful, hurt tone as well.\u201d Howard W. French nonetheless shares a poignant insight. \u201c[M]ournful because Karegeya, a skilled, seductive handler of Western reporters, had been a key source for [Michela] Wrong while he was in government. The hurt that infuses her story is more subtle, but ultimately more important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ah, the subtleties of the \u2018Rwanda Story.\u2019 Oh, oh, oh<\/em> so much intrigue, disinformation, outright lies, ethnocentrism, sordid rogues, conspiracy theories, and bona fide<\/em> conspiracies\u2014a thousand hills of opinion teetering on the edge of a great rift; so many people blinded by the propaganda groping in the darkness and clinging to the disjointed parts of the elephant in the room\u2014obtusely pretending to misunderstand the nature of the beast.<\/p>\n

What is the elephant in the room? It is the involvement of the Western interests behind and beside the Rwandan Patriotic Army\/Front that so many \u2018experts\u2019 expertly ignore or, worse, deny. The military intelligence apparatus, the multinational corporations, the Western diplomats, the shady covert operators, the foreign mining magnates\u2014where are they? Oh, right, this is Africa<\/em> (sic).<\/p>\n

The elephantine question here<\/em> is why Mr. French perpetually propagates the \u2018mystery\u2019 myth of the double presidential assassinations of 6 April 1994? The \u201cmysterious 1994 downing of an aircraft carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi\u2014 both Hutu,\u201d he wrote. And again: \u201cThe plane, shot down by unidentified attackers as it approached Kigali\u2026\u201d Mr. French, no doubt, is unwilling to stick his neck out. (Off with his head!<\/em>)<\/p>\n

On several key controversial issues, Michela Wrong weighs the igneous evidence and slippery theories and the dumb deliberations about, e.g., Hutu hardliners and their diabolical conspiracies. There are plenty of these and Michela Wrong disembowels some of them. Ridiculous unfounded claims, e.g., that Agathe Habyarimana, Juvenal Habyarimana\u2019s wife, was in cahoots with the \u2018Hutu hardliners\u2019 and that is who and how her husband came to be killed. Do Not Disturb<\/em> pretty much resolves Mr. French\u2019s \u2018mystery\u2019 about who shot down the plane. Of course, his review doesn\u2019t discuss any of that (which makes you wonder if he read her book or just skimmed it or merely gleaned a few facts to fabricate a convincing review). At the heart of Michela Wrong\u2019s plane-crash-by-missiles treatment, of course, is the tidy denouement <\/em>delivered by the indefatigable Filip25<\/a><\/sup> \u2014 \u201cThe RPF did it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Howard W. French reviews his-story as much as her-story, and his imperfect review is more honest than most. Still, one wonders why a Columbia School of Journalism prof who has walked in the footsteps of Mr. Kurtz and criticized the follies of the King in Kigali keeps slipping on the same banana peel and falling flat? It\u2019s a mystery, indeed. I mean, Mr. French speaks six languages, has authored a slew of books, and he mildly protested the slaughter of a few hundred thousand Hutu refugees in Congo, a criticism which was heresy<\/em> at the time and practically still is, and both his observations and his criticisms (sic) are now forever booked in A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope for Africa\u2014<\/em>replete with clear unequivocal evidence of the perverse and hostile prejudices that he harbored against the Hutu refugees and which absolutely contributed to their extermination.26<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Mr. French is very accomplished, and he\u2019s very smart, and he really gets around. So what\u2019s all this mystery<\/em> nonsense about?27<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Another problem with Mr. French\u2019s framing is his regurgitation of the Cattle-Herding-Tutsis-as-Victims-of-Hoe-Happy-Hutu-Killers narrative, a cud-chewing exercise that so many arm-chair Central Afrika sailors have salivated over, and the very same narrative that Kagame et al<\/em> defend by Royal Fiat of the Genocide-Ideology-and-Denialism-Hunt-Them-Down-and-Silence-Them-Forever kind.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs Hutu swept to power in Rwanda\u2019s 1961 elections, scattered Hutu pogroms against the Tutsi broke out.\u201d\u00a0 The \u2018Hutu swept to power,\u2019 he writes, and Belgium had their backs, and the Tutsi\u2014ever threatened and marginalized and persecuted\u2014poured out of Rwanda. That is standard establishment fare. With a couple half-truth<\/em> sentences like the one above (turning the facts on their heads) Mr. French obliterates a decade of the elite Tutsi aristocracy\u2019s temper-tantrum terrorism. He is not alone in that. And then, next para, he skips to 1972 where he (properly) situates the Hutu genocide in Burundi as a portent of the bloodshed to befall Rwanda (1994). \u201cLittle heed was paid to it at the time,\u201d he understates, \u201cand Wrong mentions it only in passing\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Huh? Mr. French never parses the \u2018Tutsi\u2019 demographic into the coexistent but counter-veiling factions of (1) the petulant Tutsi patricians who ran the show and (2) the \u2018petit\u2019 Tutsi paupers who suffered for it. This is important: for centuries the latter peasants had their backs broke toiling soil and toppling trees for the former, the toothpick Tutsi nobility who treated them like Hutu squat<\/em>.\u00a028<\/a><\/sup> \u00a0 To ignore the distinction is like dismissing Devlinism\u00a029<\/a><\/sup> in any reasonable discussion about Joseph Desire Mobutu which, of course, is exactly what you get if you read Howard W. French\u2019s book A Continent for the Taking<\/em>\u00a029<\/a><\/sup> which pretty much eschews any real hard truths in favor of a vague His-torical expeditionary memoir of the Howard W. French in Africa (spelled with a \u2018c\u2019) variety. For Mr. French to name drop Michela for such a peripheral offense is, well, just wrong.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the coup in Burundi turned into one of the worst ethnic killing sprees of the 20th century,\u201d Mr. French concludes. \u201cHundreds of thousands of Hutu were slaughtered by a Tutsi army, and thousands of others streamed into Rwanda, where tales of their persecution further radicalized the Hutu majority.\u201d \u00a030<\/a><\/sup> <\/a><\/p>\n

Indeed. Got that right.<\/p>\n

The Nail that Sticks out Gets Hammered Down<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the latest victims to be ensnared in King Kagame\u2019s lurid lair is Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the Hollywood film\u00a0Hotel Rwanda,<\/em>\u00a0abducted from Dubai.\u00a0The details of his kidnapping and capture have been revealed, but the truth about Paul R. has been clouded and distorted and\u2014like the man\u2014tortured.\u00a0Held hostage since August 2020, Paul R. was then tried for terrorism by the courts of King Kagame.<\/p>\n

Over the years since Paul Rusesabagina himself went into exile there were also attempts on his life. The story of one Paul\u2019s heroism, his rise to fame, his abduction, his trial, and so many sordid or unsorted details would make a great read. Michela Wrong managed to squeeze in several paragraphs pointing to Paul R.\u2019s plight, and the greater story she tells provides an appropriate context to view and understand Paul R.s\u2019 kidnapping and his captors. Now Paul R. is in prison, the trial concluded. As the trial of Paul R. proceeded, the behavior of the court\u2019s courtiers and clerks and counsels became curiouser and curiouser. Here is an ordinary man, an extraordinary story,31<\/a><\/sup> but they sentenced the wrong<\/em> Paul.<\/p>\n

Weighing in on King Kagame\u2019s side we have the NYT Magazine<\/em> hit-piece of March 2021. Joshua Hammer assaults the truth in his 7000-worder hammered together with all the duplicitous doublespeak that King Kagame\u2019s Royal Scribes have ever edicted<\/em>. You know, all the usual stuff the King burps up about Tutsi-hating Hutu hold-outs hunkered in hapless Congo prepped to rain apocalypse down on poor little Rwanda at the first sign of some splinter in the indurate fortress of Kagame\u2019s toothpick Kingdom.<\/p>\n

Joshua Hammer is one of those worldly journos who reported from the \u2018safe zone\u2019 in 1994, the Sleeping-with-the-RPA kind described by Michela Wrong in Do Not Disturb<\/em>. He traveled around the killing fields in a sporty Isuzu Trooper with an RPA escort and an AK-47-clutching [RPA] bodyguard and, obviously, routinely rubbed the blood off his boots with the lies of the RPA High Command, then pimped his fiction to Newsweek<\/em>, which is ever ready to regurgitate the party line.\u00a032<\/a><\/sup> In 1994, in the arms of the RPA, he toured \u201cthe half of Rwanda overrun by Tutsi rebels since the slaughter began\u201d and this is the genesis of his long litany of lies. Joshua Hammer never disclosed his cozy RPA relationship to the readers of the NYT Magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Joshua Hammer\u2019s post-publication pride in his cunningly-crafted-and-oh-so-deceptively-savvy character assassination of Paul Rusesabagina and his systematic dismantling of the standard interpretation<\/em> of Paul R.\u2019s plight is hammered sharp as nails in one obscure post-publication Facebook<\/em> comment in response to a starry-eyed follower: \u201cI\u2019m hoping that my views, such as they are, come across in the piece. That Rusesabagina\u2019s downfall is far more complex than the standard interpretation: that he is a human rights hero who was \u2018kidnapped\u2019 by a ruthless dictator determined to silence all criticism<\/em> (emphasis added).\u00a033<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 At some point [Paul Rusesabagina] did seem to go over to the dark side, swept away by naivet\u00e9, ambition, and who-knows-what-else.\u201d\u00a033<\/a><\/sup> <\/a><\/p>\n

Joshua Hammer\u2019s biases don\u2019t stop with his dismissal of the crime of an international abduction. He also nurtures delusions of a shared trajectory of victimization between \u2018his tribe\u2019 and the \u2018Tutsi tribe\u2019\u2014the old Jews of Africa<\/em> theme that was annealed to the Rwanda genocide narrative with the golden goose of Gourevitchism.34<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The opening spread of Joshua Hammer\u2019s March 2021 New York Times Magazine feature article hit-piece on Paul Rusesabagina.<\/em><\/p>\n

Dr. Brian Endless is professor of Political Science and Director of African Studies at Loyola University Chicago, and he\u2019s spent years working with Paul R. and his Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation.\u00a0 When the fact checkers of the NYT Mag<\/em> unloaded the quotes that Joshua Hammer had attributed to him<\/em>, they didn\u2019t check. Asking around, Dr. Endless learned that his were not the only mis-quotes chambered for publication, so he emailed the editors seeking to retool the Hammer story.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have never even considered going over a reporter\u2019s head to talk to their editor,\u201d Dr. Endless wrote.\u00a0 \u201cTime after time those of us who spoke with Josh [Hammer] presented him with facts and he is not looking at them\u2026 He should not be allowed to write this story and a more objective journalist should be substituted.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSadly but as expected, the final article by Joshua Hammer is a stereotypical example of \u2018hack journalism\u2019 at its worst.\u201d Brian Endless again emailed the editors<\/a> after the story ran. \u201cI do not use \u2018hack journalism\u2019 here lightly, but I believe the dictionary definition applies.35<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Joshua interviewed me and many other people affiliated with Paul Rusesabagina, plus a number of journalists and academic experts. He clearly ignored all of our input, and instead told the story that has been put out since shortly after the terrible 1994 genocide by the propaganda machine of Rwandan President Paul Kagame.\u201d\u00a036<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is, most of Hammer\u2019s pro-Kagame\/anti-Rusesabagina sources are close to Kagame\u2019s regime.\u201d Canadian journalist Judi Rever pokes at Joshua Hammer\u2019s inflated ego. \u201cHammer does interview several individuals who are critical of Kagame or close to Rusesabagina, but their comments are stripped of their context, and come off jarring and misleading.\u201d\u00a037<\/a><\/sup> <\/a><\/p>\n

Joshua Hammer never informs his readers that King Kagame\u2019s British propagandist Andrew Mitchell is a British MP and former UK Development Minister who earns US$ 55,802 annually\u2014paid by Rwanda.37<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 The US Ambassador for War Crimes in 2003, Pierre Prosper \u201cnegotiated a deal in which the UN\u2019s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda handed over jurisdiction for prosecuting RPF crimes to Kagame\u2019s own government\u2014allowing the criminals to investigate themselves, and granting Kagame de-facto immunity for war crimes. Pierre Prosper also happens to be Kagame\u2019s personal lawyer. Why didn\u2019t Hammer mention this?\u201d35<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

My attention to Joshua Hammer\u2019s hit-piece against Paul Rusesabagina is no diversion from the book under review. It rather hits the nail on its head.<\/p>\n

The operation to kidnap Paul R. \u201csucceeded in one key regard,\u201d wrote Michela Wrong in Do Not Disturb<\/em>: \u201c[i]t sent a cold chill down the back of every government critic based abroad, hammering home the \u201cYou can run but you can\u2019t hide\u201d message Kagame voiced at [a] prayer breakfast after Patrick\u2019s [Karegeya\u2019s] murder.\u201d38<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Joshua Hammer continues to peddle the perfidious proofs and twisted truths produced by the Kagame killing machine. Unlike Howard French, Joshua Hammer has never equivocated over the double presidential assassinations of 6 April 1994. \u201cThe assassination\u2014blamed by Hutu hardliners on the Tutsi rebels\u2014set the plot to exterminate the Tutsi minority in motion.\u201d In a GQ<\/em> article packed with Hutu hate and all the racist distortions born of his early Rwanda sojourns in RPA la-la land, Joshua Hammer peddles the elite Tutsi lie that Hutu extremists killed their own. \u201c(A U.S. State Department intelligence report would blame Hutu extremists\u2014members of Habyarimana\u2019s elite presidential guard\u2014for shooting down the jet.)\u201d\u00a039<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n

And, Voila! The pesky problem of who killed the two dead presidents is duly dispatched.<\/p>\n

In September 2021 Joshua Hammer appeared on an AfricaNews.com<\/em> blog legitimizing King Kagame\u2019s kangaroo courts and the pre-ordained verdict against Paul Rusesabagina. AfricaNews.com<\/em> is an elite pro-business venue, affiliated with the establishment press and partnered with EuroNews <\/em>(which earned $138 million from the European Commission 2014-2018), that whitewashes the plunder of Africa and its plunderers under the slogan \u201cmade by Africans for a growing Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joshua Hammer obviously dismissed Michela Wrong\u2019s book. He didn\u2019t read Judi Rever\u2019s important book In Praise of Blood<\/em> \u00a040<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 <\/a> and he didn\u2019t read your humble correspondent\u2019s latest garrison<\/em><\/strong> series on Rwanda41<\/a><\/sup> and he knew about all of these because he contacted all of us and we all responded, sincerely, politely, honestly, in good faith. When Judi Rever told him how the RPF mobile killing squads operated to routinely hunt, murder, incinerate and disappear thousands of Hutu people, Mr. Hammer would have none of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese brazen, or gullible, revisions of history found an eager audience amongst groups of Hutu extremists in exile who were looking for ways to damage Kagame\u2019s credibility,\u201d he wrote, in his attack on Paul Rusesabagina, \u201cto minimize Hutu culpability and, for some, to justify attempts to retake Rwanda by force.\u201d<\/p>\n

Look out ! Here come those Tutsi-hating Hutu hold-outs hunkered in hapless Congo again!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The nasty graphic that accompanied Joshua Hammer\u2019s hit-piece against Rwandan Hutu businessman Felicien Kabuga: “The Epic Hunt for One of the World\u2019s Most Wanted Men<\/a>\u00a0 GQ, January 19, 2021.<\/em><\/p>\n

Alas, Joshua Hammer wrote what he wanted, and the NYT<\/em> fact-checkers who called us (his sources) didn\u2019t care that they (we) disputed the quotes attributed to us, or the context, or both. We were the chosen ones<\/em>, the contrarian \u2018sources\u2019 selected to create the illusion of balance, and Joshua fit the battle of propaganda to malign us as conspiracy theorists: his goal from the get-go.<\/p>\n

He calls us the Big Lie Propagators<\/em>.41<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a kind of outcry and a claim that there was a miscarriage of justice,\u201d Joshua Hammer chirped, \u201cthat this was a foregone conclusion, that the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, was determined to silence one of his main political enemies. While there may be some validity to that, the larger truth is that all the evidence shows that Rusesabagina is guilty.\u201d42<\/a><\/sup> <\/a><\/p>\n

Fact is, Joshua Hammer slept with the RPA at ground zero and has pimped for them ever since.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the larger truth is that all the evidence shows that Joshua Hammer is an unabashed apologist for mass murder, he has actively promulgated anti-Hutu sentiment and anti-Hutu disinformation in support of the genocide against Hutu people, and that he appears to be an operative for the CIA or MOSSAD (or both).<\/p>\n

As smart as he is, Joshua Hammer didn\u2019t think for himself\u2014off with his head!<\/em>\u2014he merely reconstituted the RPA\u2019s tired warped enduring brilliant narrative, with no lie left disinterred by his ego, his self-interest, his prejudices or his wrong historiography\u2014a DO NOT DISTURB<\/em> sign dangling from the doors of his imperception. Here was another machete-job where the author\u2019s projections and his interests and his pandering for popularity disfigured the subject being writ\u2014and his editors put the New York Times <\/em>brand on it.<\/p>\n

Not so with Michela Wrong: no branding here. No matter the faults of the book, its author launches into the fray with a humble and painful public <\/em>admission. \u201cAs examples of the RPF human rights abuses and unaccountability accumulated, I was not the only previously supportive journalist who winced, frowned, and was quietly grateful to be writing about other things. My career had taken me elsewhere, Rwanda was no longer my beat. Still, it was painful to accept that I might have unwittingly misled my readers.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the hurt<\/em> flagged by Howard French (in his review).\u00a0 It is also \u201ca little silvery salamander of shame that flips over inside me\u201d now and again, she wrote.43<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 \u201cSo, how do<\/em> you write Rwanda\u2019s contemporary history,\u201d she asks, \u201cwhen so many key sources now readily admit they lied at the time?\u201d\u00a044<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

A: Read the book.<\/p>\n

The Roots of Rwanda\u2019s Genocide<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the most accurate and yet si<\/strong>multaneously scathing<\/em> reviews appeared in the New York Review of Books<\/em>. In \u201cThe Roots of Rwanda\u2019s Genocide\u201d,45<\/a><\/sup> the reviewers criticized Michela Wrong for, they said, glossing over atrocities committed against Hutu people in northern Rwanda by RPA soldiers, pre-1994, under the command of Paul Kagame, and for glossing over the Rwandan (RPA) and Ugandan (UPDF) slaughter of Hutu refugees\u2014mostly unarmed, non-combatant men, women and children\u2014in the Congo (Zaire) 1996-1997. The reviewers had other complaints too.<\/p>\n

\u201cWrong\u2019s decision not to go into these details gives\u00a0Do Not Disturb<\/em>\u00a0a move-along-nothing-to-see-here flavor that deflects scrutiny of [Patrick] Karegeya and [General Kayumba] Nyamwasa, with whom she clearly sympathizes,\u201d wrote Helen Epstein and Claude Gatebuke.<\/p>\n

The reviewers complain about what is in the book and what isn\u2019t, and they accuse the author of disrespecting the Hutu people\u2014all because, they say, she was too close and too sympathetic to her sources. \u201cWrong is hardly the only Africanist who continues to downplay the\u00a0RPF\u2019s pre-genocide crimes,\u201d they conclude.<\/p>\n

Yours truly has a shopping list of criticisms of Do Not Disturb<\/em>, some very fair, others prolly less so, some might even be downright snotty.\u00a046<\/a><\/sup> . (Please revisit fn. 12, above), <\/em>but I liked the NYRB review The Roots of Rwanda\u2019s Genocide\u00a0<\/em><\/em>and I liked it a lot, and I told Michela Wrong that. I liked it because\u00a0it is unprecedented in the annals of the New York Times<\/em> or mainstream press to see such truths written about Kagame, the RPF, and Rwanda.\u00a0I also immediately saw the truth in the reviewers\u2019 criticisms.\u00a0Helen Epstein et al<\/em> also hen pick a few of Michela Wrong\u2019s comments, flagging her as a closet racist, at best, but these criticisms tend to wrongly exaggerate, in light of the whole.<\/p>\n

\u201cShould I have allotted more attention to the RPF atrocities committed specifically between 1990-1994?\u201d\u00a0 Michela Wrong expresses her frustration. \u201cProbably a few more paragraphs, yes. But there was, as you know, A LOT OF GROUND TO COVER with this story, and my focus was the inner workings of the RPF, the relations between a former band of brothers-turned-enemies\u201d and \u201c[they] accuse me of ignoring context and historical buildup to the genocide, [but] that\u2019s there in my pages\u2014I could quote the page numbers.\u201d\u00a047<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

And it is there. And there was<\/em> a lot of ground to cover. And she does<\/em> cover a lot of ground. And it is not, per se<\/em>, a story about bloody atrocities. While there is some truth to the above reviewers\u2019 claims, their review more poignantly pins their place in the Genocide and Propaganda wars.<\/p>\n

Their own review has one glaring problem, and that is the author\u2019s statement that \u201cRPF atrocities committed against the mostly Hutu population of northern Rwanda that have barely been recognized by historians, journalists, and even human rights investigators\u201d \u2026 \u201cwere methodical but they weren\u2019t genocide.\u201d48<\/a><\/sup>;\u00a049<\/a><\/sup> \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, they were. Hutus were enslaved, tortured, raped and killed, en masse<\/em>, precisely because they were Hutus. It was cold. It was calculated. It was genocide by any reasonable definition of the concept.<\/p>\n

\u201cRPF abuses during this period [1990-1994] were largely concealed both by Habyarimana\u2019s totalitarian repression and by the RPF\u2019s nimble propaganda.\u201d Epstein and Gatebuke go on. \u201cWrong barely mentions them\u2014they merit a single phrase on page 419 of her 488-page book. But they, and the international community\u2019s near-total disregard of them, are what set Rwanda on the path to genocide.\u201d\u00a049<\/a><\/sup> <\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One of the establishment press articles of 1994-1998 that supported the RPA\/UPDF genocide against the Rwandan Hutu people by universally demonizing them as genocidaires.\u00a0 Hundreds of thousands of innocent, non-combattant men, women and children were hunted down and slaughtered by the RPA\/UPDF forces under the command of Major General Paul Kagame.<\/em><\/p>\n

Reviewers attacked Michela Wrong on the most spurious grounds. Indeed, the reviewer for Foreign Affairs<\/em> was so preoccupied with Michela Wrong\u2019s disclosures about Karegeya\u2019s lurid sexual behavior \u00a0<\/strong>that it taints his brief review.50<\/a><\/sup> British academic Phil Clark distorts the book\u2019s message and its conclusion in a sophisticated masturbatory review where he apparently does not even see the circulatory undermining of his own duplicitous arguments. \u00a051<\/a><\/sup> He also resorts to character assassination by sexual innuendo (like Joshua Hammer, he doesn\u2019t grasp the relationship between his own disturbed psyche and what he has written). Male readers will miss it, females less likely to. Phil Clark\u2019s fixation on certain facets of Michela Wrong\u2019s dance with Patrick Karegeya, coupled with his selective tweets of these particular paragraphs, confirm his preoccupation with the notion that Michela Wrong had an affair with Patrick Karegeya. Isn\u2019t that how weak men typically deal with powerful women?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Typical sexualized caricature of white female journalists of the kind routinely published to harass and intimidate Jennifer Fierberg or Ann Garrison. This one appeared in the Rwanda regime\u2019s propaganda venue \u2018The Exposer\u2019 run by Tom Ndahiro.<\/em><\/p>\n

Phil Clark is an academic-in-high-demand paid to testify at U.S. Department of Homeland Security (ICE) removal hearings of Rwandan asylum seekers being hunted by Kagame and his external neutralization and assassinations program.\u00a0 As Kagame\u2019s most ardent \u2018expert\u2019 witness, he collects his fees from Kigali for reports that distort the facts and defame the victims being hunted by the regime.<\/p>\n

Phil Clark further stretches credibility when he categorizes Michela Wrong as racist by saying that she \u201cextends an unfortunate Orientalist52<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 strand that runs through the book.\u201d\u00a0 Phil Clark\u2019s fervent worship and exotic admiration of King Kagame, coupled with his disingenuous defense of the RPA juggernaut suggest that he might want to look in the lavatory mirror on one of his regular airplane flights in and out of Kigali: a survey of his work reveals that one could hardly be more Orientalist<\/em> and, anyways, he was long ago criticized by academic peers for his complicity with the regime.53<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not everyone who can come and go so freely from Rwanda: one has to be truly $pecial<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Phil Clark is cozy with King Kagame and remains at liberty to roam the Royal Realm far and wide, and he capitalizes on his collusion with little fear and a lot of favor. Ditto Joshua Hammer, Philip Gourevitch, Howard Buffet, Andrew Young, Ben Affleck<\/a>, Paul Farmer, Rick Warren, and many others whose spit-and-polish perpetuate the King\u2019s grip on the commons.<\/p>\n

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em> is a remarkable work by a main stream foreign correspondent with a pedigree<\/em> d\u2019emploi<\/em> that deflects the usual accusations meant to discredit and dismiss. Not only that, but Michela Wrong\u2019s sources are often those you wouldn\u2019t expect to see divulging the kinds of secrets they are. That is the book’s greatest currency.<\/p>\n

This book is also an archeology of the discourse on Central Afrika, and it challenges the various ideological camps to expand their conceptions of what happened, who done it, where, when and what for. Given Michela Wrong\u2019s stark details and reasonable treatment of material, and her honest admissions of uncertainty, only the most doctrinaire ideologue or bloodthirsty liar or cult-fanatic (e.g. Tom Ndahiro, Phil Clark, Joshua Hammer) will continue to sling around the usual disinformation and conspiracy theories of, for example, the mysterious-plane-crash<\/em> for the double presidential assassinations or the Tutsis-are-the-Jews of Africa<\/em> kind. Michela Wrong coolly dispatches some of the usual shibboleths of the standard pro-RPA narrative with little fanfare.<\/p>\n

For those who haven\u2019t read it or those sensitive gun-shy souls wary of skeletons jumping out of the pages, Michela Wrong\u2019s Do Not Disturb<\/em> could rightly be mistaken for an excavation of some really dark material. I mean, really <\/em>dark, sanguinary heart-of-darkness horror. However, this is not a book to be confused with Judi Rever\u2019s In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front<\/em> (2018) which digs deep into the massacre of truth to disinter the stark, ugly, Machiavellian machinations of the Grinding Machine<\/em> in Rwanda (and the ugly, brutish and short half-life of any public criticisms of it).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The skeletal remains of innocent villagers massacred by Ugandan- and Rwandan-backed militias in the Bogoro massacre in the north of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo c. keith harmon snow 2006<\/em><\/p>\n

Do Not Disturb<\/em> is non-fiction, it is compelling, it is accessible and, demonstrating the author\u2019s vivacious literary flair and superb storytelling, it might entertain you whether or not you are a snoot\u00a0<\/em>((Refer to the term Snoot<\/em> as the very same one self-abashedly and self-effacingly and proudly adopted by David Foster Wallace as \u2018syntax nudnik of our time\u2019.\u00a0 See, e.g., Harper\u2019s<\/em>, April 2001.)) <\/a> who spends their life pouring over the literature and dissecting reports and confronting facts re: all things Central Afrika. Indeed, whether you are coryphaeus or pupil of the Cult of Elitist Camps of High-Minded Moral Judgers-in-Chief of Events\u00a0and History in Central Afrika<\/em>, or a lay Gourevitchist of the New Yorker<\/em>-over-breakfast kind of infotainment, Do Not Disturb<\/em> might either shock your sensibilities awake or yawningly confirm your already petrified prejudices, no matter in which muddy camp you stake your genocide flag.<\/p>\n

The beauty of it is that you might not need to read any preparatory material to navigate this book or the author\u2019s lines of enquiry\u2014as long as you remember that Michela Wrong isn\u2019t right about everything. She lays some nice groundwork, though, enough to gain a fair, reasonable, accurate portrait of the nastiness and horror of the regime we<\/em> (sic) keep in power.<\/p>\n

The ugly of it is that you probably watched Hotel Rwanda<\/em> and thought it was true, or you read We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With our Families<\/em> and thought that<\/em> was true, and you probably have not read The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness<\/em> or even heard of its author Dr. Amos Wilson,54<\/a><\/sup> which all in all translates to: you have a serious Problem (capital \u2018P\u2019).<\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n

<\/a>A:\u00a0 See Ellul.55<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Do Not Disturb<\/em> is also brimming with intrigue and shocking revelations that might provoke a shiver of shame<\/em> from those who for years have seen only fashion in the foibles of Kigali\u2019s naked King and polished the image of the King\u2019s Court in exchange for, well, diamonds and gold and columbium-tantalite, and access to presidents and Swiss bank accounts, or merely for a pinprick of power, or for a sprawling villa on Rwanda\u2019s more remote volcano lakes, or for nubile pubescent virgin females. You know, for some or all of the perks that people sell their souls for.<\/p>\n

Given the Pandoran<\/em>-scale plunder of the Great Lakes of Afrika, where all the usual metals comprising whole rows and columns of the Periodic Table\u00a056<\/a><\/sup> <\/a> are extracted, where Cobalt and Nickel and Uranium oxides (and their actinide \u00a057<\/a><\/sup> <\/a> derivatives) are distilled out of Congo for an arsenal of western Fat Men<\/em> and Little Boys <\/em>((The uranium-oxide ore (pitchblende) used to build the first atomic bombs (under the top secret Manhattan Project<\/em>) was mined at the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in what was then known as the Belgian Congo. In 1940, 1,200 tons of ore were shipped to the US by Edgar Sengier\u2019s African Metals Corp., a commercial arm of Belgium\u2019s Union Miniere de Haut Katanga<\/em>.\u00a0The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan) were named Fat Man<\/em> and Little Boy<\/em>, respectively, because they were of the two distinct<\/em> atomic weapon designs developed under those names.))<\/a>, as are heaps of odd elements for applications that yours truly and most of the hoi polloi<\/em> have never even heard of,58<\/a><\/sup> any expectation of sudden moral clarity is dubious at best, the flashy crocodile-tear promotionalizing of Elon Musk59<\/a><\/sup> and his crystal adventures60<\/a><\/sup> in Congo notwithstanding.<\/p>\n

Now, let\u2019s consider for a moment that Paul Kagame, Rwanda\u2019s stick-figure leader supreme should perhaps have been recruited by some pro-basketball team, where the Cs and Ds on his General Ed Certificate and his oft-chronicled habit of spying on and Ratting Out<\/em> fellow students and comrades-in-arms \u00a061<\/a><\/sup> were overlooked. Instead we have this tall lanky (a.k.a. toothpicky<\/em>) guy who ended up in press-ganged new camo fatigues and cold blue metal Ak-47 dribbling blood on the front lines of several coups d\u2019etat<\/em> and who deftly out-maneuvered both the Court of Public Opinion and the International Court of Justice that indicted 40 of his subordinate officers (including \u2018the General\u2019 Nyamwasa of Michela\u2019s Wrong\u2019s chronicle).\u00a062<\/a><\/sup> Heads of state and Toothpick Kings, it seems, automatically get a pass for such trifling misdemeanors as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, but when the top-tier credentialed journalists and human rights defenders are camped out safely behind your lines, you can definitively count on their fealty. That, at least, is what King Kagame did.<\/p>\n

This was another coup d\u2019etat<\/em> for the Toothpick King. We can hold up Joshua Hammer as a shining<\/em> example (in the Nicholsonian <\/em>sense of shining<\/em>).63<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\u201cWestern reporters fresh to Kigali wrote admiring articles so similar they could almost have been photocopied.\u201d64<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Michela Wrong frequently assaults her own naivete and the lackluster due diligence of her particular species\u2014the many foreign correspondents who serve the propaganda establishment. But, I already said this. But, it\u2019s worth hammering home because her revelations are sincere and refreshing. She recounts testimonies declaring \u201c\u2018[a]pproved\u2019 journalists were taken to the massacre sites like tourists and helped to file their stories. The [Rwandan Patriotic Front] were smarter and better resourced than the journalists they were dealing with. They gave us transport, food, and protection, they told us a story, and we relayed it. In a way, we were public relations officers, not journalists.\u201d65<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/a>“The General” Kayumba Nyamwasa of the Rwandan Patriotic Army<\/p>\n

British journo Michela Wrong was on the ground in Afrique Centrale around the same time as the NYT\u2019s<\/em> Howard French and Newsweek\u2019s<\/em> Josh Hammer, and they all put out their own unique portraits of the horror, the horror, manufactured by Kagame and Museveni (and their backers). Now, 27 years later, at 488 pages, Michela Wrong\u2019s is one of few accountings that genuinely exalts the nakedness of the King and what she has created is a masterpiece of organization, with plenty of intrigue and a lot of style<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Michela Wrong never bludgeons you, reader, with a barrage of bodies or skeletons like someone of the human-rights-crusader kind where, as she told me, \u201c[r]eading feels like an ordeal, a form of mental torture, about as much fun as a dose of food poisoning\u2026 where violence described is so extreme and unrelenting, so apparently gratuitous, that the temptation is simply to close the book and stop reading.\u201d\u00a066<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Alas, in your foreign correspondent\u2019s humble opinion, her book has its faults. Her descriptions and assessment of Ugandan president Milton Obote is lousy, far off the mark, and her treatment of Yoweri Museveni is not much better, but this is due to her overreliance on the Tutsis who animate her story: The former is always the devil and the latter indecisively divine.<\/p>\n

While footnoting Milton Obote\u2019s Notes on the Concealment of Genocide<\/em>, for example, her treatment of the atrocities in Uganda\u2019s Luwero Triangle during Museveni\u2019s \u2018Bush war\u2019 is decidedly coated with RPF drool. Appreciating the potential for Obote\u2019s own biases to overwhelm the truth, we can nonetheless find in Notes<\/em> an accounting of the atrocities committed by Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army, a guerrilla insurgency with its vengeful Tutsi vanguard\u2014the same Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe and \u2018the General\u2019 Kayumba Nyamwasa whose long march to infamy terminated uncountable lives\u2014and the tactics they used then as now.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere has not been a more progressive and least bigoted Administration in Uganda\u2019s history than the first Obote administration.\u201d Professor Amii Amara-Otunnu, a Ugandan, confers. \u201cCongolese, Rwandese and Sudanese were all welcome to Uganda and most of them were afforded citizenship. Of course, we now know that Museveni dictatorship is the worst and most diabolical Administration in Uganda\u2019s history.”67<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The whole problematic narrative of the \u2018liberation\u2019 of Uganda by Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Army (NRA),68<\/a><\/sup> with the Banyarwanda69<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Tutsis\u2014Paul Kagame and Fred Rwigyema and Patrick Karegeya and Kayumba Nyamwasa\u2014by his side, sets the stage for the whole twisted problematic narrative of the \u2018liberation\u2019 of Rwanda by the RPA\/F. We hear these guys Karegeya and \u2018The General\u2019 espousing their versions of history and the Tutsis are always the victims and its rather insufferable, and the author let them go on.<\/p>\n

These elite Tutsis love their vicarious victims\u2019 tales.<\/p>\n

No matter. \u00a0Every now and again they bubble up something truly revealing.<\/p>\n

Michela Wrong makes it clear up front that her sources are inveterate liars and blood-thirsty killers. Here again she connects the pre-colonial past of the Tutsi Toothpick Kings and their culture of lying (Ubwenge<\/em>) to the post-colonial, post-Habyarimana present and King Kagame\u2019s lies of the times.<\/p>\n

Reader beware.<\/p>\n

The Winter of Africa\u2019s Discontent<\/strong><\/p>\n

The book has one major ideological flaw,<\/strong> and although it is not fatal, this flaw must be appreciated, no matter that is it peripheral to the overall achievement, and that is the author\u2019s contribution to the perpetuation of the Tutsi supremacy ideology and the mythology that so many scholars and journalists and human rights activists and other Rwanda \u2018experts\u2019 mistakenly, foolishly, callously, ignorantly or blindly adhere to. The ideological roots of this Tutsi supremacy underpin and inform most all scholarship that relies\/d on the fabricated and falsified historiography to enable and facilitate the deep-seated RPA\/F narrative and, consequently, all their actions. As I previously mentioned, Michela Wrong\u2019s treatment of the historiography of the Banyarwanda (Tutsis, Hutus, refugees, settlers) in Uganda is skewed by her reading, and adoption, of establishment prejudices and mythologies that pervade the literature and distort the entire gestalt<\/em> re: all things Rwanda.<\/p>\n

Through the vehicle of Do Not Disturb<\/em>, what we see in Michela Wrong is an example of the self-reflective, self-directed process of the decolonization of the mind (hers). She admits to her having been duped by the RPA\/F and its Rwandan and Ugandan agents. Slow in the uptake,70<\/a><\/sup> it took some 20 years for the fa\u00e7ade to crack and fully expose the nakedness of the Emperor.\u00a0 She described herself as one who \u201chad seen the RPF as implacable, certainly, but a disciplined, highly effective movement with a farsighted leadership and a progressive agenda, felt our certainties begin to tremble. I didn\u2019t want to confront the truth of just how thoroughly I might have got it wrong.\u201d71<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Having \u2018got it wrong\u2019, and no matter her humility and sincerity in admitting the error, on some details Michela Wrong continues to get it wrong, only a skip and a jump off the mainstream establishment path. On page 119, for example, she cites \u201cBritish journalist Cathy Watson, who wrote one of the best reports on the topic\u201d of the Banyarwanda in Uganda. \u00a0Who is this Cathy Watson and what is this report and why does it matter?<\/p>\n

Published February 1991, only months after the RPA\u2019s invasion of Rwanda from Uganda, Exile from Rwanda: Background to an Invasion<\/em> is a 20-page \u2018Issue Paper\u2019 published under the trademark of the euphemistically named \u2018U.S. Committee for Refugees\u2019\u2014a highly specious front organization serving overt and covert U.S. interests\u2014that funded and disseminated Watson\u2019s \u2018research\u2019. The paper is copyrighted, however, by the equally nebulous, secretive, nationalist American Council for Nationalities Service.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Roger Winter, the head of the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR), was the kingpin behind Washington-backed guerrilla insurgencies in Congo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. In 1988, Roger Winter organized a conference for Tutsis in the diaspora, held in the U.S. and funded by the USCR, where RPA cadres openly declared their intentions to resume the armed struggle to \u2018liberate\u2019 Rwanda (read: to recover the power lost in 1959 and reinstate the Tutsi-supremacist aristocracy and do so by any means necessary).72<\/a><\/sup> Roger Winter was in the field behind RPA lines during the civil war in Rwanda 1990-1994, and this is the reason he was pinned with several medals<\/a> by King Kagame.<\/p>\n

Roger Winter\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9s included U.S. National Security operatives Susan Rice, Gayle Smith, Jendayi Frazer, John Prendergast and Ted Gagne, and Roger Winter and USCR constantly trotted out RPA propagandists, including Alison Des Forges\u00a073<\/a><\/sup> and Catherine Watson, and disseminated their work, serving a very partisan and specious interventionist<\/em> agenda. Another agent in the RPA arsenal was Monique Mujawamariwa, seconded to Roger Winter by RPF high command. She was launched on speaking tours by Roger Winter which culminated into an audience in the White House on April 22, 1994 with Mr. Anthony Lake, National Security Advisor to President William Jefferson Clinton.74<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Michela Wrong never mentions Roger Winter, or the USCR. In a short discussion of the smooth-talking, self-laudatory comments by Theogene Rudasingwa, another former RPF operative now in exile, she does introduce several of Roger Winter\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9s through the mouthpiece of another RPF defector. Theogene Rudasingwa brags \u201cwith a rueful laugh\u201d\u2014Michela Wrong wrote\u2014about deceiving foreign officials, journalists, intelligence agents and press, and he even claims ownership of the mythology that the RPF had heroically intervened to stop a genocide started by Hutu extremists who had killed their own president. \u201cI was a very effective salesman of that [RPA] narrative. I charmed them all.\u201d75<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the time came to justify breaking up the [mostly Hutu] refugee camps in Zaire, while adamantly denying Rwandan involvement, [Rudasingwa] did that, too, although there was always a nudge-nudge wink-wink quality to those conversations.\u201d Quoting Rudasingwa again: \u201cThere was a kind of unspoken understanding among the people I dealt with, like Susan Rice, Gayle Smith, John Prendergast, Ted Dagne, that we all knew what the truth was.\u201d\u00a075<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

These are the foreign operatives euphemistically described as \u2018policy wonks\u2019 in a mainstream establishment whitewash lauding their interventionist adventurism in Sudan.76<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 Michela Wrong\u2019s excavation of the admissions above are really an indictment of Roger Winter and his prot\u00e9g\u00e9s, their complicity with terrorists, and the entire corrupt enterprise. Her presentation is subtle, indirect, but unmistakably incriminating.<\/p>\n

Ugandan expert Remingius Kintu is adamant. \u201cThe U.S. Committee for Refugees Inc. (sic),\u201d run by Roger Winter, \u201cbecame a virtual command post for RPF external operations: logistical management, disinformation propaganda, psychological operations and other political intelligence activities for RPF with almost unlimited funds from dubious sources in the USA.\u201d\u00a077<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

There\u2019s so much more. Catherine Watson was married to Yoweri Museveni\u2019s chief hired gun, William Pike, the \u2018journalist\u2019 turned editor of the New Vision<\/em> newspaper, Museveni\u2019s state mouthpiece. Pike\u2019s Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda <\/em>((William Pike, Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda<\/em>, self-published, 2019.)) is a propaganda whitewash of the National Resistance Army (NRA) and, later, of RPA crimes. William Pike burst onto the international media scene through big British media with the first boots-on-the-ground accounts \u2018from the bush\u2019 portraying Museveni and the NRA as Marxist liberation heroes in a biblical contest with the evil Obote regime. Combatants<\/em> is really a rather shocking but vacuous self-delusional disinformation memoir, packed with bias(es) and unsubstantiated claims echoing the supremacist Tutsi line, that falsifies and subverts the entire historiography of the NRA insurgency 1980-1985, and of the state-sponsored terrorism in the years that followed, 1986-1995.78<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>President Paul Kagame pins a medal on the chest of U.S. covert operative Roger Winter at a special celebration in Rwanda July 2010. Winter was honored with Rwanda\u2019s URUTI National Liberation Medal and UMURINZI Campaign Against Genocide Medal.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWorking with the National Resistance Movement as a journalist,\u201d wrote William Pike, \u201cgave me a real sense\u2014which I never had in the [British] Labour Party\u2014that I was an active participant in a historic movement that was changing the world for the better.\u201d\u00a079<\/a><\/sup> William Pike was embedded with the NRA and he idolized Yoweri Museveni.<\/p>\n

Catherine Watson\u2019s report mirrors the slant and framing of her husband\u2019s Combatant<\/em>s, only she focuses exclusively on the Tutsi \u2018refugees\u2019 proclaiming them a \u201cstateless and spiritually homeless\u201d people. It is an essentialized, manipulative, biased account, replete with half-truths and bald-faced lies, that ignores the extremist supremacy of the Tutsi aristocrats-in-exile (an \u2018exile\u2019 which many themselves chose, by the way), the extremist Tutsi ideology and the terrorism committed in its name, and the hysterically vengeful<\/em> intent of Tutsi supremacists to revenge and commit genocide against Hutus and punish the Tutsis who chose to remain in Rwanda after the first years of the independence struggle. It also completely erases NRA responsibility for atrocities in Uganda. As apologists who whitewashed NRA and RPA terrorism\u2014including war crimes and crimes against humanity\u2014Catherine Watson and William Pike (like so many others) helped set the stage for genocide.80<\/a><\/sup>;\u00a081<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Exile from Rwanda<\/em> is a racist, anti-Hutu, anti-Obote, pro-RPA propaganda tract, and it is consistent with much pro-Tutsi supremacist scholarship that both preceded and followed it. It gained a lot of currency because, at the time, it was the only publication of its kind, and it still is. Backing the RPA guerrillas, factions of the U.S. and U.K. power elite ate it up and regurgitated it, favorably. Catherine Watson\u2019s association with William Pike, and their mutual insider status with Museveni, the NRA, the RPA and all the Ugandan Tutsi leaders were not disclosed.80<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

You [Roger Winter] also generously provided facilities for members of the RPF
\nin the United States to meet and disseminate much needed information.
\n(From: Citations to 2010 Medal Recipients<\/a>, Rwanda New Times<\/em>, July 05, 2010)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Michela Wrong\u2019s historiography of the pre-colonial era and references to the Royal vocabulary are mildly problematic, but peripheral to the focus of her book. The rise and shine of the inglorious Intore<\/em> are appropriately flagged but she renews the frenzy over the Inyenzi<\/em>. These Kinyarwanda<\/em> terms bespeak the institutions of hegemony and hegemonic relations that obtained between Tutsi elites, their Twa shock troops, and the Hutu masses. The Toothpick King and his Cockroach<\/em> Court have restored the Intore<\/em> for their own nefarious glory, as Michela Wrong aptly notes, but the scampering scurrilous cockroach epithet\u2014the whole nasty Inyenzi<\/em> thing\u2014has yet to be dragged into the light and unceremoniously squashed.\u00a082<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The extremist Tutsi guerrillas of the 1960s called themselves Inyenzi<\/em> and there is a deep historiography of elite Tutsi terrorism behind the term Inyenzi<\/em> that was NOT coined by the Hutu intelligencia<\/em> or the Habyarimana propaganda system or by \u2018Hutu Power\u2019 (another racially distorted terminology used in the arsenal of slanders to dehumanize<\/em> Hutu leaders and, by default, all Hutu people) as universally and disingenuously claimed by so much of the pro-RPA propaganda and adherents like Joshua Hammer and Phil Clark.41<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 \u2018Cockroach\u2019 was not the sole Kinyarwanda derivation of Inyenzi<\/em> that led to its adoption by Tutsi guerillas.<\/p>\n

Oh, oh, oh!<\/em> \u00a0How the hydra of Tutsi supremacy rears its ugly head again and again! Michela Wrong utilizes sources like the French\u00a0 journalist Gerard Prunier, a close RPA confidant whose first book The Rwanda Crises: History of a Genocide<\/em> (Columbia, 1995) is a distortion of history and apologia of RPA crimes, even if his position changed somewhat, out of favor with King Kagame, later. There are ideas and whole sections in Do Not Disturb<\/em> that mirror so many erroneous accounts\u2014like Prunier\u2019s and William Pike\u2019s79<\/a><\/sup> and, even the most erudite, like Mahmood Mamdani\u2019s\u00a083<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 that downplay or entirely mischaracterize the violent Tutsi guerrilla terrorism waged against countrymen emerging from colonialism and hundreds of years of aristocratic Tutsi oppression and brutality. William Pike and Mahmood Mamdani were the peels protecting the NRA and RPA bananas; each nurtured the propaganda campaigns and psychological operations that whitewashed the NRM and RPA insurgencies and protected leaders like Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, Fred Rwigyema, Patrick Karegeya, Kayumba Nyamwasa and all the rest. Meanwhile, against the NRM and RPA enemies, these propaganda agents advanced unsupported fabrications, perpetuated claims about false flag operations, and regurgitated other unfounded accusations.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

John Garang (L) shakes hands with Roger Winter, now an honorary adviser to the South Sudan government and one of the Council’s original members, in this undated image taken in Sudan and provided to Reuters by Roger Winter. Nationhood has many midwives. South Sudan is primarily the creation of its own people. It was southern Sudanese leaders who fought for autonomy, and more than two million southern Sudanese who paid for that freedom with their lives. U.S. President George W. Bush, who set out to end Africa’s Longest-running civil war, also played a big role, as did modern-day abolitionists, religious groups, human rights organizations and members of the U.S. Congress. But the most persistent outside force in the creation of the world’s newest state was the Council, a tightly knit group never numbering more than seven people, which in the era before email, began gathering regularly at Otello, a restaurant near Washington’s DuPont Circle. REUTERS\/Handout<\/p><\/div>\n

Is Michela Wrong sympathetic to the King\u2019s henchmen? To the generals and spy chiefs? To the body-burners and trigger-pullers and hoe-swingers? The propagandists and whisperers of life-ending rumors?\u00a0 The Colonel Karegeyas and General Nyamwasas and repentant Rudasingwas\u00a084<\/a><\/sup> that made King Kagame what he is and then ran for their lives like every dog who was ever undeservingly kicked by his mean-spirited master?<\/p>\n

\u201cTo these men who no doubt ended up doing dreadful things? I sure was.\u201d Michela Wrong stakes her flag in the moral high ground of reality. \u201cI\u2019m a firm believer in the notion that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The challenge was to get the reader interested in these characters in the first place, then nuance and qualify that assessment as the story goes on and we learn more about their personal itineraries. No one reads a book in which every single character is a psychotic bastard, from the get-go through to the end, because that\u2019s not the world we know or live in. We live in a world where impish charmers do dreadful things and murderers love their children.\u201d85<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

There are other problems with the book: absurd tributes to fallen RPA \u2018heroes\u2019, some slippery analyses here and there, a few sycophantic accolades to real bastards, some genuinely wrong<\/em> stuff, and some \u2018expert\u2019 from the Cult of Elitist Camps of All Things Central Afrika will likely sort these out. And maybe no one ever will.<\/p>\n

Take page 302, for example. Here we meet Rick Orth, \u201cwho as U.S. defense attach\u00e9 in Kigali witnessed the General [Kayumba] in action at close hand.\u201d I bet he did. And that\u2019s just it: Michela Wrong offers a few insights into Orth\u2019s deep relationship to the RPA Grinding Machine. Orth\u2019s comment\u2019s are self-incriminating. He was no ordinary bystander to genocide. It will be decades before the classified papers are released, if ever.<\/p>\n

Do Not Disturb<\/em> is not much of a cover-up, though perhaps a little self-censoring whitewash\u2014everyone does that, your humble correspondent included\u2014and maybe even more than a little. Only Michela Wrong can answer to that. What we don\u2019t yet know, on the other hand, we don\u2019t yet know. It\u2019s hard to know what someone knows, and what they don\u2019t, or why they make the choices they make. Assumptions and arrogance go hand in hand. It disappoints me that she repeats so much of the nonsense put out by key \u2018sources\u2019 for so many years, ad nauseum<\/em>, and that she obviously believes what she wrote.86<\/a><\/sup> There are a few names dropped throughout the text, and even some quotes from some really sly dogs, who are never challenged, but who instead sing out as voices of authority. And that leads to my biggest criticism: where are all the white war collar criminals behind the black Afrikan warlords? What about the nefarious Soldiers of mis-Fortune? The gun-runners and profiteers? The Diamond kingpins? Tony Buckingham and Tim Spicer and all these other Gucci mercenaries?<\/p>\n

When it comes to writing about Central Afrika, that is some of the difference between Michela Wrong and Helen Epstein.87<\/a><\/sup> We know, for example, that Rowland \u2018Tiny\u2019 Rowland backed Yoweri Museveni\u2019s war machine in Uganda (even if it\u2019s not clear to everyone when this began): that\u2019s the kind of thing Helen Epstein might tell us (and she does). What about British American Tobacco? Unilever? And where are the oil companies in these accounts?\u00a088<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n

As any real journalist knows, the \u2018protection\u2019 of sources is both blessing and curse. Quoting an unnamed South African security expert about the execution of Patrick Karegeya, she does reveal that \u201cthe formative influence on Rwandan intelligence is Mossad and this was standard Israeli MO.\u201d89<\/a><\/sup> Now, that\u2019s something. Of course, for journalists, there is always this question of access<\/em>. Who are all these people attached to some 73 citations credited to: \u201cAuthor\u2019s interview, anonymity requested\u201d?<\/p>\n

No matter. The book\u2019s meritorious contents outweigh its deleterious discontents. Sure you might wonder why a line of inquiry is suddenly killed dead, what deeper currents some innuendo<\/em> swirls, who pulls the strings of the obvious puppets. There\u2019s a lot that isn\u2019t in this book, and that\u2019s more than O.K., it was necessity<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Leave it. The author has done a superb job (my criticisms notwithstanding). She\u2019s been threatened, ridiculed, everything but hunted in the ways the Toothpick King hunts and silences people. I mean, at least they haven\u2019t pulled a Rusesabagina<\/em> on her\u2014drugged and abducted, hauled to Rwanda, tortured, tried as a terrorist in King Kagame\u2019s kangaroo courts, her kind character and professionalism pilloried by the weasely Joshua Hammer wielding the New York Times<\/em> brand over the court of public opinion. I suppose there\u2019s still time, but the damage is done. The book is out and it\u2019s perfect.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

They have already labeled Michela Wrong a genocide denier<\/em> and, dealing with King Kagame, this is a badge of achievement. Now she\u2019s the target of sexual taunting\u2014repeated tweets by Rwanda\u2019s Service of Subversion and Shame (pretending to be ordinary tweeters) echoing the claim she was Patrick Karegeya\u2019s lover, you know, five times a day, for months, again and again, and the recent twist, claiming that she is Yoweri Museveni\u2019s whore. We have seen the same lurid childish sexist treatment served on other female journalists who have had the audacity<\/em> to challenge the Rwanda story.90<\/a><\/sup> Isn\u2019t that what it always comes down to with intelligent, powerful women and especially for women who stand up to power?<\/p>\n

Nothing original about any of these guys. What is original is Michela Wrong\u2019s telling of the untold tale and her documentation of the casual admissions of dreadful deeds of RPA dissidents. Here is a woman who has shown real courage, and she\u2019s given the world a prize and Do Not Disturb<\/em> is far more deserving than most Pulitzer recipients.<\/p>\n

Rwanda is not defined by a geographical space; it is a state of mind.\u00a091<\/a><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

War is peace. Victims will be killers, and killers will be victims, but the lions have yet to tell the story of the hunt. <\/em>The RPA won the war. They were backed by the USA, UK, Canada, and Israel. The RPA narrative is the establishment narrative. Michela Wrong offers us the voices of some of the most notorious victors.<\/p>\n

Maybe you will suck at your teeth, clench your martini, tear a few pages in the anxiety of turning them, wake your lover out of a dead sleep in the excitement of some twisted or phantasmagorical revelation, and maybe that\u2019s not you, but the story will carry you through even the miscellaneous dulls on the wind of its authors\u2019 humility and derring-do. It\u2019s written fairly well. You will even find sentences that strike at the banal absurdity of it all, like the last one below.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring these sessions, Patrick [Karegeya] never exposed his hand, teasing his new acquaintances instead with what he could tell them but somehow never did. The chat was gossipy and inconsequential\u2014what was going on in the White House, Clinton\u2019s sexual misdemeanors\u2014seasoned with the kind of gynecological jokes that are a Ugandan specialty.\u201d\u00a092<\/a><\/sup>;85<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

And you might just laugh out loud.<\/p>\n

\u2022 First published at Keith Harmon Snow’s website<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

  1. The word \u2018notorious\u2019 is neutral, though its interpretation is usually colored by the presumption of a pejorative connotation<\/li>
  2. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 77.<\/li>
  3. When I worked in Kisangani (DRC) in 2004, I learned from an expat European how the RPA commandeered his big excavating and logging machines to disappear the bodies of thousands of innocent Hutu men, women and children slaughtered by the RPA and UPDF with cold, wicked, calculated, pathological cruelty. See, e.g.: Kisangani Diaries<\/em>, a short film by Hubert Sauper.<\/li>
  4. When British jurnalist Nik Jones reported the crematoriums, no one believed it: they still don\u2019t.<\/li>
  5. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 57.<\/li>
  6. In a 2007 interview conducted with your foreign correspondent, Paul Rusesabagina, the real life hero of the Hotel Rwanda story, described the regime of Paul Kagame as a “Grinding Machine”: \u201ca machine grinding human beings.\u201d<\/li>
  7. Private communication, October 2021.<\/li>
  8. Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu\u2019s Congo<\/em>, Harper Perennial, 2002.<\/li>
  9. This is a reference to the BBC<\/em> documentary \u201cRwanda\u2019s Untold Story,\u201d broadcast 1 October 2014, a documentary based on multiple individuals’ persistent reportage, including my own, contrarian to the falsification of consciousness inculcated through the mainstream establishment narrative.<\/li>
  10. Veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer authored the pathologically problematic hagiography of Paul Kagame titled:\u00a0A Thousand Hills: Rwanda\u2019s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It<\/em>.<\/li>
  11. The Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) is the armed wing of the Ugandan forces comprised mostly of Tutsis who invaded Rwanda in October 1990 and fought the civil war to seize power absolutely in July 1994.\u00a0 The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) is the name of the political wing of the RPA. The two names are often loosely interchanged with no loss of meaning or accuracy.<\/li>
  12. Your humble correspondent counts himself amongst them, though he also counts himself Survivor-in-Recovery of the Cult of Elitist Camps of High-Minded Moral Judgers-in-Chief of Events and History in Central Africa.<\/li>
  13. Afrika spelled with a \u2018K\u2019: According to the Afrikan-American poet and writer Haki Madhubuti in his From Plan to Planet<\/em> (1973), there are basically four reasons to spell Afrika with a \u2018K\u2019. Please see: Keith Harmon Snow, \u201cTutsi Hegemony: Genocide in Rwanda\u201d (part II), garrison<\/em>: The Journal of History and Deep Politics<\/em>, Issue 002, July\/August 2019: sidebar.<\/li>
  14. Joshua Hammer, \u201cHe Was the Hero of \u2018Hotel Rwanda.\u2019 Now He\u2019s Accused of Terrorism.\u201d\u00a0New York Times Magazine<\/em>, March 2, 2021.\u00a0 See, e.g., the letter from Professor Brian Endless<\/a>\u2014who was one of the many sources misquoted in the story\u2014to the editors of the\u00a0New York Times Magazine<\/em>.<\/li>
  15. For those who seek hard proof, it is easy to demonstrate the extreme bias of Tom Ndahiro, who cherry-picks his sources and facts, lacing his scholarship with demagoguery. See, for example, Ndahiro\u2019s selective and miscontextualized presentation of a letter written 25 January 1960 by Bishop Bigirumwami in Ndahiro\u2019s chapter contribution \u201cThe Church\u2019s Bling Eye to Genocide in Rwanda,\u201d in Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches?<\/em> (Rittner, Roth & Whitworth eds., Aegis Trust, 2004, p. 229). Ndahiro presents Bigirumwami as a voice of reason speaking out against hate, which is always attributed to Hutus. (Ndahiro\u2019s further attention to Bigirumwami is so distorted as to be too insufferable to unpack). The true ideological and political position of Bishop Bigirumwami, in its proper historical and political context, is properly situated and detailed in Ian Linden\u2019s important work Church and Revolution in Rwanda<\/em> which, of course, Ndahiro never mentions. Indeed, Bishop Aloys Bigirumwami, Linden informs, was born into the Gisaka royal lineage, and his name meant \u201c\u2018All things belong to the mwami\u2019 a prudent choice by the Gisaka Royal line.\u201d He was, in fact, an adherent of the aristocratic Tutsi supremacy. In the tumultuous period of Rwanda\u2019s independence struggle, Bishop Bigirumwami leaned into a conservative monarchist position, vacillating in his support of the Tutsi Union Nationale Rwandais<\/em> (UNAR) nationalists, the political backbone of the Tutsi aristocracy\u2019s guerrilla terrorist Inyenzi<\/em> insurgency, but eventually swung fully into the conservative Tutsi nationalist (UNAR) camp. Ian Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda<\/em>, Manchester University Press, 1977: pages 153, 244 n. 89, 269.<\/li>
  16. It\u2019s also easy to excavate Tom Ndahiro\u2019s vitriolic disingenuous name-calling ad hominem<\/em> attacks, on-line, published against the regime\u2019s perceived enemies, including your humble correspondent. See, e.g. Tom Ndahiro, \u201cKeith Harmon Snow, A Prototype Virulent Tutsi and Jews Hater who Inspired BBC\u2019s<\/em> Untold Story<\/a>,\u201d umuvugizi<\/em>, 24 October 2014.<\/li>
  17. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021.<\/li>
  18. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: 436.<\/li>
  19. If the reader is unfamiliar, this is a satire of the \u2018devastating phrase\u2019 Q. And babies? A. And babies’ that appeared 1970, printed in red over an original photograph of the 1968 Mai Lai massacre taken at the scene by army photographer Ron Haeberle. The phrase \u200bcame from a news interview with soldier Paul Meadlo, who had participated in the slaughter. Designed by artist-activists Irving Petlin, Jon Hendricks, and Frazer Dougherty, the offset lithograph poster is currently part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.<\/li>
  20. RPA General James Kabarebe is pivotal to the perpetual plunder, extortion, human trafficking, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in eastern Congo. At one point Kabarebe was one of the primary agents overseeing the RPA\u2019s infamous \u2018Congo Desk\u2019 and he was named in the United Nations\u2019 Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo<\/em>, S\/2001\/357, 12 April 2001.<\/li>
  21. Author of King Leopold\u2019s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa<\/em>, Houghton Mifflin, 1998.<\/li>
  22. This is the \u2018spirit\u2019 elucidated by David Foster Wallace in his \u201cTense Present,\u201d Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/em>, April 2001.<\/li>
  23. Howard W. French, \u201cThe Dark Underside of Rwanda\u2019s Model Public Image,\u201d\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, March 30, 2021.<\/li>
  24. Let it be known that your humble correspondent once many years ago interviewed Howard W. French and\u2014fair or unfair\u2014has been less than humble in his critiques of Mr. French\u2019s reportage.<\/li>
  25. ilip Reyntjens, The RPF did it. A fresh look at the 1994 plane attack that ignited genocide in Rwanda<\/em>, Working Paper, ISSN 2294-8643, May 2020.<\/li>
  26. See chapter seven, \u2018Where Peacocks Roam,\u2019 in Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa<\/em>, Vintage, 2005.<\/li>
  27. That is a rhetorical question that I could but won\u2019t be answering here.<\/li>
  28. The decolonization of the Western Mind is no trifle: off with our heads.<\/em><\/li>
  29. Lawrence \u2018Larry\u2019 Devlin definitively was<\/em> a spook. See, e.g., Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu\u2019s Congo,<\/em> Harper Perennial, 2002; Lawrence Devlin, Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2008; and, especially, David N. Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention<\/em>, University of Chicago Press, 1991.<\/li>
  30. Howard W. French, \u201cThe Dark Underside of Rwanda\u2019s Model Public Image,\u201d New York Times<\/em>, March 30, 2021.<\/li>
  31. Paul Rusesabagina & Tom Zoellner,\u00a0An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography<\/em>, Penguin, 2007.<\/li>
  32. Joshua Hammer, \u201cI\u2019ve Lost Nearly Everyone,\u201d Newsweek<\/em>, April 24, 1994; and: Joshua Hammer, \u201cThe Killing Fields,\u201d Newsweek<\/em>, 22 May 1994.<\/li>
  33. The italics were inserted by your humble correspondent. Please note that Joshua Hammer bracketed kidnapped<\/em> in quotes, which is by itself a red flag on Hammer\u2019s veracity: he diminished and dismissed the kidnapping, which has been justified by the principle mala captus bene detentus<\/em> (wrongfully caught, legally detained), but which brings into disrepute the administration of justice, encourages lawlessness, violates state sovereignty, disregards international human rights law, and undermines the international extradition network.<\/li>
  34. One of the most entrenched and cultist Camps in the Genocide wars has its genesis in the Rwanda reportage of Philip Gourevitch, a regular columnist for the New Yorker<\/em> magazine since 1995, and a close confidante of Paul Kagame who also had rather intriguing insider connections to the administration of William Jefferson Clinton and whose expositions on Rwanda\u2014the latest of which appeared 14 April 2014\u2014eventually came under rather sharp criticism even by some of the former adherents of Gourevitchism.<\/li>
  35. Brian Endless goes on: \u201cAccording to Quora and many other sources: the word \u2018hack\u2019 refers to someone who is disreputable, unreliable, or mediocre; it can also refer to a partisan who only cares about their group or their political party.\u201d<\/li>
  36. See: letter to the New York Times<\/em> from Brian Endless<\/a>, who is one of many sources quoted out of context in Hammer\u2019s article.<\/li>
  37. Judi Rever, \u201cAn intimate, one-sided view of Paul Kagame\u2019s Rwanda in a journal of record,\u201d Judi Rever website<\/em>, 10 March 2021.<\/li>
  38. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 437.<\/li>
  39. Joshua Hammer, \u201cThe Epic Hunt for One of the World\u2019s Most Wanted Men,\u201d GQ<\/em>, 19 January 2021.<\/li>
  40. Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front<\/em>, Random House Canada, 2018.<\/li>
  41. See: Keith Harmon Snow: \u201cGenocide in Rwanda\u201d (part I), garrison<\/em><\/strong>: The Journal of History and Deep Politics<\/em>, Issue 001, April\/May 2019; \u201cTutsi Hegemony: Genocide in Rwanda\u201d (part II), garrison<\/em><\/strong>: The Journal of History and Deep Politics<\/em>, Issue 002, July\/August 2019; and \u201cRwanda\u2019s Technicians of Death: Genocide in Rwanda\u201d (part III), garrison<\/em><\/strong>: The Journal of History and Deep Politics<\/em>, Issue 003, October\/November 2019.<\/li>
  42. \u201cRwanda\u2019s Rusesabagina is Guilty as Charged\u2014Analyst<\/a>,\u201d Africanews<\/em> with AFP<\/em>, September 2021:<\/li>
  43. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: 250.<\/li>
  44. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: 6-7.<\/li>
  45. Helen Epstein and Claude Gatebuke, \u201cThe Roots of Rwanda\u2019s Genocide,\u201d The New York Review of Books<\/em>, June 10, 2021.<\/li>
  46. Not to be confused with snooty<\/em> (see fn. 63 below.<\/li>
  47. Personal communication with the author, July 2021.<\/li>
  48. Phew! Barely escaped that one: I began writing about RPA atrocities against Hutus almost 20 years ago.<\/li>
  49. Helen Epstein and Claude Gatebuke, \u201cThe Roots of Rwanda\u2019s Genocide,\u201d New York Review of Books<\/em>, 10 June 2021: p. 37.<\/li>
  50. Phil Clark, \u201cThe Two Rwandas: Development and Dissent Under Kagame,\u201d Foreign Affairs<\/em>, May\/June 2021.<\/li>
  51. Your humble correspondent\u2019s prejudices due to his personal encounters with Phil Clark, in courts of law where we appeared as expert witnesses on opposing sides, over-ride all pretense of honoring the democratic premise elucidated above.<\/li>
  52. Edward W. Said, Orientalism<\/em>, Vintage, 1979.<\/li>
  53. See, e.g., the extensive back and forth between Phil Clark and Dr. Susan Thomson, here<\/a>.<\/li>
  54. Dr. Amos Wilson, The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness<\/em>, Afrikan World Infosystems, July 1993.<\/li>
  55. See: Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men\u2019s Attitudes<\/em>, 1963.<\/li>
  56. To wit: Row 2, Cols. Ia & IIa; Row 4; Row 5; excluding the Diatomic and Polyatomic non-metals, the Noble gases and most of the s-block elements.<\/li>
  57. The actinides comprise Row 6, Column IIIa of the Periodic Table; more precisely, Googled<\/em>: \u201cany of the series of fifteen metallic elements from actinium (atomic number 89) to lawrencium (atomic number 103) in the periodic table. They are all radioactive, the heavier members being extremely unstable and not of natural occurrence.\u201d<\/li>
  58. E.g.: Praseodymium and terbium and dysprosium and most all of the lantinoids<\/em> of Row 5, Column IIIa of the Periodic Table; more precisely, Wikipedia\u2019d<\/em>: The lanthanide or lanthanoid series of chemical elements comprises the 15 metallic chemical elements with atomic numbers 57\u201371, from lanthanum through lutetium. These elements, along with the chemically similar elements scandium and yttrium, are often collectively known as the rare-earth elements.<\/li>
  59. Elon Musk has had a lot to say about how the raw materials for his Tesla production lines\u2014extracted from Congo\u2014come from \u2018clean\u2019 and unbloodied and conflict-free sources. It\u2019s all rubbish.<\/li>
  60. Crystal Ventures is the current name of the Sogo Shosha-size <\/em>holding company set up and run by Patrick Karegeya, Paul Kagame, James Kabarebe, and other Rwandan Patriotic Army commanders who ran the shadow organization behind the public fa\u00e7ade of government in Rwanda and the legendary \u2018Congo Desk\u2019 in eastern Congo. The company was set up in 1995 under the name Tri-Star Investments, but was rebranded in 2009 after being named in connection with diverse crimes (e.g. racketeering, forced labor, extortion, abductions, & etc.) in the United Nations\u2019 Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo<\/em>, S\/2001\/357, 12 April 2001: paragraphs 82 & 86.<\/li>
  61. Kagame was most trusted of all by supreme commander Yoweri Museveni during the \u2018bush war\u2019 in Uganda precisely because of his perverse talents at spying and reporting on comrade soldiers of the National Resistance Army.<\/li>
  62. International Court of Justice, Audiencia Nacionale<\/em>, Madrid, Spain. On 6 February 2008, Andreu Merelles, Investigative Judge of the Spanish Audiencia Nacional, issued a 180-page indictment, charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials of the Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) and allied military groups with many crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism.<\/li>
  63. A.k.a., Jack Nicholson, the horror, the horror, in The Shining<\/em>.<\/li>
  64. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 389.<\/li>
  65. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 264.<\/li>
  66. Personal communication, 21 June 2021.<\/li>
  67. Private communicate, June 2021.<\/li>
  68. As with RPA and RPF, the terms \u2018National Resistance Army\u2019 (NRA) and \u2018National Resistance Movement\u2019 (NRM)\u2014the army\u2019s political wing\u2014are interchangeably used herein.<\/li>
  69. The term \u2018Banyarwanda\u2019 is itself a floating nebulous term depending on the area that is being written about or discussed (e.g. eastern Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania or Burundi) and the author or speaker\u2019s understanding or definition (and hence, usage) of the term. E.g. Banyarwanda in Uganda included former Rwandan\u2019s who identified as Hutu and those who identified as Tutsi.<\/li>
  70. The decolonization of the mind is not an easy process, but rather a slow, churning, disorienting process where two steps forward are followed by three steps backward; where some overall forward progression is only achieved by the lucky, persistent, self-critical ones who are devoted to truth; with a high rate of recidivism for all; and failure for the majority, leading these to a state of apathy, indifference, denial, and sometimes a violent and active resistance to the truth.<\/li>
  71. What a courageous public admission, and unprecedented in the annals of the mainstream media.<\/li>
  72. See: Keith Harmon Snow, \u201cSpecial Report: Exposing U.S. Agents of Low Intensity Warfare in Africa: The \u2018Policy Wonks\u2019 behind Covert Warfare and Humanitarian Fascism,\u201d Dissident Voice<\/em>, 9 September 2012.<\/li>
  73. A noted Rwanda expert, Alison Des Forges served as a USAID consultant and researcher for Human Rights Watch. While it is true that Des Forges eventually fell out of favor with the Kagame regime, this does not negate her earlier role as an RPA propagandist.<\/li>
  74. See: Keith Harmon Snow, \u201cSpecial Report: Exposing U.S. Agents of Low Intensity Warfare in Africa: The \u2018Policy Wonks\u2019 behind Covert Warfare and Humanitarian Fascism,\u201d Dissident Voice<\/em>, 9 September 2012; and Remingius Kintu, The Truth Behind the Rwanda Tragedy<\/em>, a paper presented as part of personal testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, Arusha, Tanzania, date unknown.<\/li>
  75. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 350.<\/li>
  76. Rebecca Washington, \u201cSpecial Report: The Wonks who Sold Washington on South Sudan,\u201d Reuters<\/em>, 11 July 2012.<\/li>
  77. See, e.g.: Remingius Kintu, The Truth Behind the Rwanda Tragedy<\/em>, a paper presented as part of personal testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, Arusha, Tanzania, date unknown.<\/li>
  78. Helen Epstein, who claims a friendship with William Pike, wrote a brief, ambivalent book review of Combatants<\/em>, wherein she challenges Pike\u2019s accounting of the war, his whitewashing of NRA crimes and blaming everything on Obote and others, providing an important though subdued critique. Helen Epstein, \u201cThe Elephant Culture\u201d, New York Review of Books<\/em>, June 2019.<\/li>
  79. William Pike, Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda<\/em>, self-published, 2019.<\/li>
  80. Catherine Watson, Exile from Rwanda: Background to an Invasion<\/em>, Issue Paper, U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1991.<\/li>
  81. On the NRA and RPA commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide: [1] the military tactics of the NRA qualify on at least the first two counts; [2] from November 1989 to June 1990, Major Paul Kagame was head of the NRA\u2019s Directorate of Military Intelligence; [3] the October 1990 invasion of Rwanda by Ugandan troops\u2014read: \u2018RPA rebels\u2019\u2014was a supreme violation of state sovereignty in contravention of international law; [4] the RPA invasion and occupation of northern Rwanda involved atrocities targeting the Hutu people precisely because they were Hutus<\/em>.<\/li>
  82. See the abbreviated discussion of Inyenzi<\/em>: Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 119.<\/li>
  83. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda<\/em>, Princeton University Press, 2001.<\/li>
  84. Michela Wrong recounts the transformation of the Rwandan Patriotic Front\u2019s intellectual insider Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa from soldier of misfortune to Born Again Christian.<\/li>
  85. Private communication with the author, 17 October 2021.<\/li>
  86. Even Rwanda and Burundi<\/em> (1972), the seminal work of Rene Lemarchand\u2014another of the world\u2019s premier Central Afrika experts\u2014suffers from of an overly distorted hyperinflated Tutsis-as-Victims bias.<\/li>
  87. See, e.g.: Helen C. Epstein, Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror<\/em>, Columbia Global Reports, 2017.<\/li>
  88. See, e.g.: Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Relations in Africa, 1993-1999<\/em>, Edwin Mellen Press, 1999, and the general Central Africa reportage by Keith Harmon Snow.<\/li>
  89. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 29.<\/li>
  90. E.g.: Canadian journalist Judi Rever, and U.S. journalists Ann Garrison and Jennifer Fierberg.<\/li>
  91. Brigadier General Frank Rusagara, Rwanda Defense Forces (formerly RPA), quoted in Major Robert Beeland Rehder Jr., From Guerrillas to Peacekeepers: the Evolution of the Rwanda Defense Forces, Master of Military Studies, United States Marine Corps, Command and Staff College, April 15, 2008.<\/li>
  92. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad<\/em>, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 290, para. 5.<\/li><\/ol>The post The Cult of the Toothpick King: Central Africa Revisited<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Review of British journalist Michela Wrong\u2019s remarkable new book Do Not Disturb:The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad replete with a survey of some of the more notable reviews and the notorious1 reviewers who reviewed it. Do Not Disturb is a book out some six months now that has catapulted [\u2026]<\/p>\n

    The post The Cult of the Toothpick King: Central Africa Revisited<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3826,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380012"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3826"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380012"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":380176,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380012\/revisions\/380176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}