Gen. Paul Kagame — even corporate media are now re-evaluating the narrative placing him as “savior”
[The Rwanda Calamity In Perspective]
April 6 marks exactly 20 years since the cataclysmic massacres that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Rwanda.
Rwandan Refugees in other East African countries and Diaspora who had enrolled into Uganda President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA), now the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF) invaded Rwanda on October 1, 1990.
At the time of the invasion Paul Kagame, who is now President of Rwanda, was the chief of Military Intelligence in Uganda and had been sent by Museveni for U.S. training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The invasion sparked a destructive chain, including the recurrent invasions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), that all told may have cost the lives of six million or more Rwandans and Congolese.
To contextualize the calamity, this writer caught up with Peter Erlinder, a law professor at William Mitchell Law College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Erlinder has a new book “The Accidental Genocide,” that covers the period before and after the massacres that started on April 7, 1994 after the plane carrying the president of Rwanda Juvenal Habyarimana, and Burundi’s Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down with a missile. Prof. Erlinder’s book relies on U.S. documents and documents from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) where he was a lead defense counsel for the Hutu defendants tried after the war. FULL STORY
