Congo: Do We Trace Genocide to Human Hatred or Corporate Profit?

by J.B. Gerald / February 10th, 2025

Rwanda has broken international law with the visible presence of Rwandan troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo alongside Rwanda’s covert M-23 militia. M-23 is reported to have captured Goma (again) and the civilians are in a state of emergency. This is familiar because M-23 previously took over the city in 2012 but had to withdraw because it wasn’t equipped to administer the city of two million. As the M-23 rebels and their allies increase their takeover of the East Congo with reported vows of advancing to the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo in a “liberation” of the country, it becomes clear Rwanda has invaded Congo again, possibly for keeps this time to maintain its hold on the East’s gold, copper, and coltan mines.The Congo’s government has requested international sanctions against Rwanda. But the international community has allowed an ongoing genocide of the Congolese people for thirty years. The people of the Congo live under a genocide warning.

Paul Kagame began invading the Eastern Congo after he took over Rwanda in 1994. Subsequently Uganda which sponsored Kagame’s invasion of Rwanda with U.S. funding. and Rwanda have maintained militias in the area. While genocide was brought under control in Rwanda, an insistence on mass killing was carried into the Congo by Kagame’s Rwandan troops in pursuit of Hutu refugees who fled there. This also allowed Rwandan forces to protect Tutsi groups settled in the Congo, and access and control a portion of the mining resources.

But the resources belong to the people. As they do in the Sudan and South Sudan. As they do in Gaza and Palestine. All three areas are currently threatened by genocide against the people who have lived there.

The U.S. Government’s official site for the National Library of Medicine, notes “5.4 million people have died in Democratic Republic of Congo since 1998 because of conflict, report says” (Peter Moszynski, Jan. 31, 2008, BMJ). Since the “First Congo War” in 1996 to the present, the white press underestimates the death toll at six million, civilians.

From the perspective of preventing genocide the source of the problem rests, in both the five lakes region of Africa and the Middle East, with corporate interests using national leaders to effect policy. This facile academic statement of the obvious covers the fact that millions on millions of individual innocent civilian lives are currently being sacrificed, for corporate growth and profit. This is against any sense of ethics, knowledge of right and wrong, law, religious commitments to honour life, or the people’s informed consent.

In the DRC the genocide continues because it is meant to. It works. The mines are working, The resources are taken. The peoples’ deaths are not a corporate concern. The elites are not about to stop it. They are the reason Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961 and the UN’s Dag Hammarskjöld killed. And the Simba rebellion crushed. And the Eastern Congo thrown into the chaos of warring militias.

The Rwandan sudden genocide among tribes living in peace brought in an Anglo-American-backed Paul Kagame. One could say Rwanda is responsible for the genocide of Congolese except that the benefits have devolved to International corporations, stock markets, manufacturers, economies.

This is so familiar because European and American policies have used Independent Congo (Zaire, DRC) since its colonial bondage as a people enslaved to the uses of Western capital. Now the Chinese have bought-in with the purchase of many previously American owned mines. The means of effecting colonialism has shifted but the people-as-prey remains the same. The genocide continues. With respect for conscience a portion of UN peacekeepers are in place to lessen the civilian body count. But the guilty parties here are the same who engineered the “Rwanda” genocide, which the UN did not stop, and which served a policy of Western corporate expansion.

There is little hope of any justice for the Democratic Republic of Congo’s people until the ownership and control of the mineral resources in the East are in the hands of a just regulator that assures the people safety and payment for their resources. It may have to be UN administered to include Russian and China. It is an alternative to an ongoing genocide. Until then all profits from the genocide should be tracked as evidence for eventual prosecution.

Background: The continuing genocide of civilians in the Congo is noted in Nightslantern’s genocide warnings for the Congo since 2004. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Recommended: Keith Harmon Snow’s “Merchants of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa” (2008); my 2006 essay, “Tactical Use of Genocide in Sudan and the Five Lakes Region,” (2006).

Image: “What it’s like to watch a genocide happening,” by Julie Maas
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John Bart Gerald is a poet/journalist living in Montreal. He writes the website nightslantern.ca concerned with the prevention of genocide. Read other articles by J. B..

 

Dallaire Continues to Justify Kagame’s Crimes

by Yves Engler / February 13th, 2025

Romeo Dallaire has greatly enabled the “Butcher of Africa’s Great Lakes” region. The Canadian general’s fairy tale has repeatedly justified Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame who has once again unleashed horrible violence in Congo.

Two months ago a man in front of me at Salon du livre de Montréal asked Dallaire if his “opinion of Rwanda has changed since the M23 movement emerged in the Congo?” The retired general’s response to this question about a Kigali spurred force, which has recently killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands in capturing the Congolese city of Goma, was extreme Kagame propaganda. He said: “No because the M23 is but one group who are trying to save the lives of Tutsis, who are Congolese Tutsis, while the Kinshasa government has a dozen or so rebel forces and so on who are slaughtering them. So the M23 are defending. And then the philosophy of Kagame has always been one to be on the offensive so he’s not going to [be] waiting to cross the border into his country to fight; he’s going to sort them out on the other side. So he’s simply continuing to get rid of the threat of extremists on the Congolese side and the Rwandan extremists who are there in the Congo still seeking the elimination of the Tutsis.”

Twenty-nine years after Rwanda first invaded Congo purportedly to target genocidaires, Dallaire is promoting Kigali’s apologia for mass slaughter. The Globe and Mail, New York Times, and Financial Times no longer even promote this framing of Rwandan aggression.

It’s not a one off. Dallaire has repeatedly called Kagame an “extraordinary man” and raved about his government. In April, Dallaire stated, “the past thirty years in Rwanda have stood as the most profound example of noble and brave peacemaking I have ever witnessed; perhaps that ever existed…. I join you in celebrating Rwanda and its people, who are leading all of Africa by the example of moral strength and commitment to harmony and prosperity.”

Dallaire made that statement two years into a new wave of Kigali/M23 instigated violence against its highly impoverished neighbour. Over the past three decades Rwanda’s repeated invasions have killed millions of Congolese.

Dallaire has assisted the US military college-trained Kagame since leading the military component of a UN mission designed to help end the conflict caused by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)/Uganda invasion of Rwanda. Between fall 1993 and July 1994, Dallaire is credibly accused of favouring the US-backed RPF in contravention of UN guidelines. In response to the Canadian general’s self-serving portrayal of his time in Rwanda, the overall head of the 1994 UN mission in Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, published Le Patron de Dallaire Parle (The Boss of Dallaire Speaks). Almost entirely ignored by the Canadian media, the 2005 book by the former Cameroon foreign minister claims the Canadian general backed the RPF and had little interest in their violence despite reports of summary executions in areas controlled by them.

Dallaire has propagated Kagali’s wildly simplistic account of the Rwandan Genocide. He has ignored the overwhelming evidence and logic that points to the RPF’s responsibility for blowing up the plane carrying the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi (and much of the Hutu-led Rwandan military command), which unleashed the mass genocidal killings in April 1994.

To align with Kagame’s claim of a “conspiracy to commit genocide,” Dallaire has changed his depiction of the Rwandan tragedy over the years. Just after leaving his post as UNAMIR force commander, Dallaire replied to a September 14, 1994 Radio Canada Le Point question by saying, “the plan was more political. The aim was to eliminate the coalition of moderates…. I think that the excesses that we saw were beyond people’s ability to plan and organize. There was a process to destroy the political elements in the moderate camp. There was a breakdown and hysteria absolutely…. But nobody could have foreseen or planned the magnitude of the destruction we saw.”

To a large extent the claim of a “conspiracy to commit genocide” rests on the much celebrated January 11, 1994, “genocide fax”. But, this fax Dallaire sent to the UN headquarters in New York is not titled, to quote International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda lawyer Christopher Black, “‘genocide’ or ‘killing’ but an innocuous ‘Request For Protection of Informant.’” The two-page “genocide fax”, as New Yorker reporter Philip Gourevitch dubbed it in 1998, was probably doctored a year after the mass killings in Rwanda ended. In a chapter devoted to the fax in Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Year Later, Edward Herman and David Peterson argue two paragraphs were added to a cable Dallaire sent to UN headquarters about a weapons cache and protecting an informant (Dallaire never personally met the informant). The two (probably) added paragraphs said the informant was asked to compile a list of Tutsi for possible extermination in Kigali and mentioned a plan to assassinate selected political leaders and Belgian peacekeepers.

Mission head Booh-Booh denies seeing this information and there’s no evidence Dallaire warned the Belgians of a plan to attack them, which later transpired. Finally, a response to the cable from UN headquarters the next day ignores the (probably added) paragraphs. Herman and Peterson make a compelling case that a doctored version of the initial cable was placed in the UN file on November 27, 1995, by British Colonel Richard M. Connaughton as part of a Kigali–London–Washington effort to prove a plan by the Hutu government to exterminate Tutsis.

Even if the final two paragraphs were in the original version, the credibility of the information would be suspect. Informant “Jean-Pierre” was not a high placed official in the defeated Hutu government, reports Robin Philpott in Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa: From Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction. Instead, “Jean-Pierre” was a driver for an opposition political party, MRND, who later died fighting with Kagame’s RPF.

Incredibly, the “genocide fax” is the primary source of documentary record demonstrating UN foreknowledge of a Hutu “conspiracy” to “exterminate” Tutsi, a charge even the victors justice at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) failed to convict anyone of. According to Herman and Peterson, “when finding all four defendants not guilty of the ‘conspiracy to commit genocide’ charge, the [ICTR] trial chamber also dismissed the evidence provided by ‘informant Jean-Pierre’ due to ‘lingering questions concerning [his] reliability.’”

At the end of their chapter tracing the history of the “genocide fax” Herman and Peterson write, “if all of this is true, we would suggest that Dallaire should be regarded as a war criminal for positively facilitating the actual mass killings of April-July, rather than taken as a hero for giving allegedly disregarded warnings that might have stopped them.”

Thirty-one years later Dallaire continues to cover for Kagame’s crimes, claiming Rwanda has the right to destabilize and kill millions in Congo.

He’s gone beyond words. As part of his support for the most bloodstained dictator on the continent, the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security established their headquarters in Kigali. It works closely with the Rwandan military. In August 2023, Dallaire met with Kagame and Rwandan Minister of Defence Juvenal Marizamunda. The Rwandan military’s website has multiple posts about working with Dallaire’s Institute. The institute trains Rwandan forces as part of the 2017 Vancouver Principles on Peacekeeping and the Prevention of the Recruitment and Use of Child Soldiers.

Global Affairs Canada has provided over $20 million to the Dallaire Institute. According to the Globe and Mail, a Global Affairs director wrote a memo raising concerns about funding the Dallaire Institute because it worked closely with a Rwandan military using child soldiers in Congo.

When the regime in Kigali finally falls, the history books will not look kindly on Romeo Dallaire. Rather than a humanitarian who worked to stop violence, he’ll be seen as someone who enabled mass killings in Africa’s great lakes region.FacebookTwitterEmail

Yves Engler is the author of 12 books. His latest book is Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People's History of the Canadian Military</em . Read other articles by Yves.

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