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| Keith Harmon Snow is a war correspondent and former UN genocide investigator, who was one of the voices in this 02/12/2014 KPFK report. Someone offered to trade him this surface-to-air missile launcher for his camera in DR Congo. He tried shouldering it for this picture but then declined. |
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| The 18-year war and conflict in the Democratic Republic of theCongo is the most lethal since World War II, costing more millions of lives than anyone can at this point know. The only scientific estimate was 5.4 million during 10 of those eighteen years. It began when US allies Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundiinvaded DR Congo in 1996, overthrew Mobutu SeseSeko and thus established U.S. military dominance in that resource rich country. The Rwandan Genocide and the story of the brutally autocratic, U.S. allied Rwandan regime that ensued are an essential part of this story. |
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| Soldiers in DR Congo, 2009, the year that a bizarre"peace agreement" was signed, on March 23. The agreement was a de facto concession of Congolese territory to Rwanda and Uganda's CNDP militia. Three years later it gave rise to the Rwandan and Ugandan CNDP's return as the March 23, or M23 movement. |
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| Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire was convicted of the speech crime of disagreeing with the official, legally enforced history of the Rwanadan Genocide. In 2010, the year she was arrested and imprisoned, she attempted to run for president against General Paul Kagame. General Kagame has used his false, legally enforced history of the Rwandan Genocide as an excuse for war and resource plunder the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996. Every time his soldiers cross the the Rwanda/Congo border, or his faux Congolese militia start another war in DR Congo, he says they're hunting down the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide, even though he himself is the greatest individual perpetrator of all. He has used this excuse with the blessing of the U.S. and the "international community," since 1996. Whether that blessing ended with the defeat of M23 in 2013 remains to be seen.
Professor Ed Herman, co-author of Manufacturing Consent and The Politics of Genocide, calls the misinformation about the Rwandan Genocide and Congo Wars the greatest triumph of the propaganda system in recent decades. For more, see Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa, from Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction, by Baraka Books Publisher Robin Philpot, and/or Accidental Genocide by International Criminal Defense Lawyer and Law Professor Peter Erlinder. For briefer information (LOL), see San Francisco Bay View, 03.24.2014, Rwanda's Ambassador to bring legally enforced history to Sonoma State University.
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