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| Africa: Subsaharan |
| De Villepin (who is a man) and his role in the Rwanda genocide |
| 2005-09-29 |
| This is the translation of the last article (of 18) by Serge Farnel, for the Metula News Agency/Ména Press, http://www.menapress.com/, a french israeli news agency. Theses articles covers in great damning details the direct and criminal implication of the french establisment in the Rwanda genocide, as well as the general cover-up (notably by "Le Monde" and "Marianne", which are also the pillars of anti-americanism and antizionism... probably a coincidence...) and they are a must-read (in french unfortunately). IMHO, the real power of theses articles, as well as the other cheval de bataille of the Mena, which is the infamous Mohamed Al Dura blood-libel enbabled by the french MSM, is to clearly illustrate a system where the elites can go unchecked and act in the name of "the interest of the State" whenever it suits their own interests, may they be ideological or private. This corrupt and nepotic system is at work in the arab policy of France (up to the Eurabia process, but maybe I'm being paranoid), in the EU, in the immigrationnist and multiculturalist deathspiral of France and Europe,... The "elites" are left free to act because there are no counterpowers (media, big business, unions, they're all complicit in the system which profits them greatly) and they can both plunder Africa along with "rois nÚgres" and order the french army (which I do not blame for doing its work) to shoot black unarmed demonstrators in Ivory Coast in the name of national interests, and to sue satiric websites about islam in the name of diversity. De Villepin: up to the ears, before, during and now Par Serge Farnel © Metula News Agency Others have understood "that he would not allow his people to live and that he still refuses them the burial rights" Translation from French by Sanda Kaufman Post-colonialism, networks, exploitation and contempt On June 29, 1994, while the operation Turquoise (French military operation in Rwanda presented to the public as a humanitarian operation) was sneaking out the authors of the genocide, and while the massacre of the Tutsis continued, the chief of staff of the French Army forces, Admiral Lanxade, talking on the Radio Monte-Carlo, insisted that he could not "be reproached for having armed those who kill". In support of his remarks he made an argument directly borrowed from the strategy used to dissimulate Franceâs responsibility in the Tutsi genocide behind the smoke screen of a tribal fight: "Besides", he continued, "the massacres were perpetrated with sticks, machetes, bayonets !" He probably imagined managing to bleach the French Army in the ears of listeners, inviting them to hold responsible only the immediate perpetrators for the massacre of Tutsis. As far as the French citizens are concerned, it is even simpler: in light of testimonies such that of Lanxade, they are content to pretend that they have been manipulated in 1994, and since then. Does this argument exonerate the French civil society, and particularly its political class, from its incapacity to put a term to the underground, mafia-style management of the Franco-African relations that persisted for four decades? Nothing is less sure. Isn't it, in fact, our neglect and our inaction that made possible the institutionalization of a system of which the Tutsi genocide â a million assassinations â in Rwanda is but one manifestation? It seems almost a slip, following the permanent hijacking of the African natural resources by France, which requires the denial of democracy for the Africans. In the 1960s, walking in the step with the world anti-colonial movement, France officially broke up with the majority of its colonies. It is only time for the Africans to realize that they were misled -- that a French neocolonialism was born, at the very moment when colonialism was dying out; that it did not cease weaving its net from the Elysee, under the watch of a Jacques Foccart, who was soon going to trap the African continent and to maintain it in an inextricable dependence. Foccart, who deceased 8 years ago, was the former right arm of the former French president General de Gaulle. He co-founded of the Civic Action Service (SAC) of sad memory, gathering delinquents in the service of the De Gaulle regime. It is he also, the former "Mr. Africa", who was at the origin of this cobweb, more known under the name of Foccart network, that organized many coups d'etat in Africa in the years 1960. At the base of this Machiavellian strategy, the newly independent nations never tasted in practice one ounce of this sovereignty promised by their new statute. After having made this observation, it remained necessary to understand the mechanism by which this underhanded system could be maintained to our days, while no tenant of the Elysee considered putting an end to it, and even less denouncing his predecessors. It seems as if all outgoing presidents were giving their successors the keys to FranceAfrica, just as they transferred to them the keys to the nuclear weapon. In the 1970s, it was the French politician Charles Pasqua who introduced the current president of the republic to the gangster system of FranceAfrica. Pasqua asserted himself with his elbows, like a post-De Gaulle version of Foccart, and did not hesitate to benefit the former French socialist president Mitterrand father and son with the advantages of his own network. In 1986, the current president of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, has also recovered the Foccart network. From now on, borrowing from De Gaulle his very dainty formula "when I fart, Foccart stinks !" one no longer knows in which direction to sniff in order to locate the sources of flatulence of Chiraquia (France, n.t.). Darn, they are far too many ! But, slowly though unrelentingly, the black pawns on the chess-board of FranceAfrica, will be swallowed by authentic African leaders equal to Mandela, Nyobé or Sankara. They are far from the caricatural leaders such as Eyadema and other Nguesso, simian figurines of post-colonialism, but also, natural corollaries of the view of the African to which the French leaders had been accustomed. This view amounted to an African man indefinitely unsuited to democracy whom one could easily subject to exploitation for some handouts of CFA francs. This caricature, oh how arrogant and racist Senegalese president and poet Léopold Sédar Senghor would have cut it up into confetti with his own hands: "But I will tear the banania laughter off all the walls of France" (Liminary poem to L.-G. Damas, drawn from the collection Black Hosts). The citizenâs vote weapon The Rwandans are now endeavoring to democratically revive their country. Meanwhile, beyond challenging the impunity of the French strategists and collaborators to the Tutsi genocide, which conditions the political profile of future French generations, there is another means a democracy offers its people so that it can make itself heard - a citizenâs weapon citizen that does not evoke our national anthem, which is called the vote. In 2007, the French will have to choose their new president and civil society would do well to wonder, starting now, about the opportunity of placing on the agenda of prospective candidates the issue of eradicating Franco-African underground practices. To avoid being reproached for sinning by naivety, we must ask ourselves if it is even possible to drag the esoteric practices of FranceAfrica under the light of political debate and if it is economically reasonable to hope to put an end to it. The problem is that this Franco-African Mafia has overtaken political circles as well as the media and that it knew how to distribute its rewards among those whom it needed. Besides France Télévisions acting as the Elyseeâs media trust, and for whom this is obviously not an issue, it would be necessary to be ingenuous indeed to imagine that its private competitor, TF1, would grab and run with such a topic. Our colleague François-Xavier Verschave reveals to us in this connection another confusing aspect of the relations prevailing between Tele-Bouygues (Bouygues owns TF1) and FranceAfrica. Reading his work âDespising the peoplesâ (âAu mépris des peuplesâ, François-Xavier Verschave, Philippe Hauser, the Factory editions, March 2004), we learn that in fact "the GLNF (Grand National French Loge) holds a key place in the French media, specifically by being part of all the leadership of TF1, [as well as] a goodly share of the national and regional press." Masonry, although traditionally humanistic, and having amply contributed to building the Western democracies, is thus not safe from the instrumentalisation of the secrecy of its initiation. If we were to believe the former president of the Survival Association, this Masonic loge, the old Grand Loge of France and of the Colonies, "collected the worst dictators of FranceAfrica", making membership a prerequisite for any hope of exercising power in any of the African countries in the French zone of influence. It required the obedience not to feel too embarrassed about what others would say, when, still according to Verschave, on November 12, 1983, it carried out the wholesale initiation of the 200 most influential personalities of Gabon, and when the African dictators mutually sponsored each other, following the example of the Congolese war criminal Denis Sassous Nâguesso and his Chadian godson Idriss Déby. De Villepin: a subscription for the hundred days Among the candidates to the Elysee (French presidency n.t.), the actual French Prime minister Dominique de Villepin made his "poetical" debut with the publication of his work âIn praise of the fire robbersâ (âEloge des voleurs de feuâ, Gallimard, May 2003; â¬26,50). An "uninterrupted cataclysm of words" on 800 pages, according to the very expression of the autohor ! A minister believing himself a poet, convinced of his ability to aim at Lautréamont (page 159) without realizing that at that moment he is describing the verbal lapidation he himself is inflicting to his reader. An avalanche, fortunately punctuated by a few verses by famous poets, cited in support of his remarks, shedding light, by a crude reflection, on the verbosity of the diplomat we know. In 2001, Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin had already made himself guilty of a lyric fresco recalling the last days of Napoleon, The Hundred Days or The Spirit of Sacrifice (ED Perrin). Villepin proclaims himself part of the caste of those for whom the right word is a permanent Grail. The emperor Napoleon called the cross of honor a rattle of vanity, but contrary to Galouzeau, he was the one who awarded it to others. Enough ! As long as current the Prime Minister is unable don the Elysee laurels, it is still possible in our country as well as at the bottom of Africa, to hear the muffled beat of the tom-tom drums of hope. The Hundred Days or The Spirit of Sacrifice ! We might think that de Villepin took out a subscription for the hundred days: a hundred days to restore confidence in the country. But especially, a hundred days to support actively, from his post of director of the cabinet of Foreign Affairs, the extermination of a million Tutsi men, women and children, in an ethnocide that the State civil servant, transgressing all conventions of the gentlemen, would try to dilute with the lowly thesis of the "double genocide". This is an impossible stance, between the auto-attributed values of Praise for the fire robbers and the terrible remarks Villepin made on September 1, 2003 on the RFI waves, when had the audacity to speak about the "terrible genocides which struck Rwanda". By using the genocide term in the plural, he joined François Mitterrand, who inaugurated the expression at the time of the Franco-African summit of Biarritz in November 1994, triggering at once a polemic paralleling the ignominy of the "double-genocide" thesis. And now Villepin, hardly two years ago, put it in his head to take an active part in the revision campaign of the hundred days of the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda ! But he will no longer be able to claim to have found his words without risking discrediting himself in the world of the fire robbers ! However, the words exist neither to lie, nor to serve the deadly propaganda On April 27, 1994, in his quality of director of the cabinet of Foreign Affairs, the current candidate to the supreme function gave up the mantle of innocence by receiving the persons in charge of a criminal junta, whose account included 100,000 dead in three weeks, threatening Hitlerâs genocidal effectiveness at the time of Shoah. Ever since this repugnant occurrence, the poetic posture of innocence in the face of his readers and his voters, which makes him deplore that "the verb remains impotent to tell the skinned flesh, and the heart that bleeds, the quartered arms, the burned skin, the asphyxiated lungs" (page 422 of Praise of the fire robbers), no longer belongs to him. We will prefer Léopold Sédar Senghorâs premonitory verse of: "The gratuitous bloodshed along the streets, mixed with the blood of butcheries" (In memoriam â excerpted from the Songs in the Shadow collection) if we should need a poetic representation of the massacre, among the causes of which no poet would ever be counted ! All this does not even speak to the order to abandon the personnel of the French embassy in Kigali to the genocidal killers, which is likely to have emanated from the one of the persons in charge of the Quai dâOrsay (French Ministry of Foreign Affairs). And if this is not the case, then it came undoubtedly from the governing Cabinet to which our "national poet" belonged, and which, together with him, managed for France the Rwandan double-genocide... Isn't it risky, for the image of France in the world, to elect to the presidency a man likely to be called in front of the courts for complicity in a genocide and to be condemned by them, given that there is not diplomatic immunity in this field? The question deserves to be asked. At the time of the first live transmission of the French very popular tv show Everyone is talking about it, which, according to its animator Thierry Ardissonâs recent announcement, will happen probably in the presence of the current Prime Minister, it is not impossible to imagine that they will manage to make him share the limelight with some others, something he has understandably refused to date. Not much to see in this avoidance, however, considering the definition that the aspirant to the Elysee throne gives of the poet, who "plunges in the depths of the mirrors to drink the naked reality" (page 395). Is the poet no longer thirsty? Referring to the genocide of Tutsis in a forum of Liberation (French newspaper, n.t.) of March 25, 2004, Villepin deplored that "the international community did not manage to get together to implement effective preventive diplomacy". He carefully omits, however, to describe for his readers the mechanism by which France had taken an active part in the U.N. torpedoing of this gathering that he recommends a posteriori. He fails to mention that France proposed, in a highly unusual procedure, to relieve Roméo Dallaire of his functions as military chief of the United Nations Mission of Assistance to Rwanda, after having diagnosed that Dallaire, animated by a compulsive obsession to alert the international community of the imminence of the genocide of Tutsis, had mentioned in one of his reports the presence of French soldiers inside the presidential guard close to the Interahamwe militiamen who will perpetrate the massacres. So when Villepin writes that "the international community only became aware too late of the gravity of the facts", it seems useful to remind him that it is not the international community which, more than one half million dead after the beginning of the massacre, continued to deliver weapons to the authors of the genocide, but France alone, with the permission of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose cabinet he fully directed then. Weapons delivery ! It is just about the only shared trait we manage to distinguish between Dominique Marie François René and the one who invented the expression fire robber, and who ended his life while engaged in arms traffic: the famous French poet Arthur Rimbaud. As for the "gravity of the facts", the current the Prime Minister knew it sufficiently to alert in time the international community; and this well before events of â94, since between 1992 and 1993, in his capacity as deputy manager of the Quai dâOrsay to the African and Malgasi businesses, alongside Paul Dijoud, he had been able to follow very closely the irreversible rise of tropical Nazism in Rwanda. At that time, they already spoke of sending the Tutsis down the river to a place which they had arbitrarily decreed to be their origin. And not by boat, Mr. minister. During the genocide, numerous corpses of Tutsis would indeed be thrown in the Nyabarongo River for this purpose. De Villepin also tries to legitimate the Turquoise operation by a "will of France to face the acceleration of the events on the ground". We agree. Except that it was in no case an issue of a humanitarian operation, as the government announced, but an attempt aiming to slow down the progression of the army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, whom it was necessary to prevent from taking Kigali in order to prevent Rwanda from leaving the French zone of influence. The attempt of the Prime Minister to claim that at the time of this operation "France made the choice of the humanitarian intervention" is in the domain of the laughable. To rest a claim on the alibi of some hundred hospital beds conveyed by Turquoise to Rwanda, when we know the extent of the disaster unfolding there, would not hold water in front of the jury in court. The jurors would quickly understand that to put an end to the organized massacre of Tutsis was far from being de Villepinâs preoccupation or that of his friends, whose concern was rather to block from advancing the only force that planned to make it stop. As for asserting, as Chirac's minister does, that this operation made it possible "to save thousands of human lives", Villepin, obviously forgetting the Tutsis survivors flushed out by the French soldiers and delivered by them to the killers of the Interahamwe militia, refers to the few thousands of Tutsis who were able only by chance to escape from their programmed death. This after colonel Rosier, who commanded the Special Opérations Commandment (COS) in Rwanda, was unable to prevent indefinitely some of his soldiers from going to the site in order to put an end to the massacre. Villepin also declares that "France endeavored to shed light on the events", relying for evidence on "the exemplarity" of "the parliamentary mission of information chaired by Mr. QuilÚs (former French ministry of defense)". This is to ignore the many incidents that marked this investigation. Such is the absence of the testimony of the former chief of the French National Gendarmes Intervention Group (GIGN), Paul Barril, about whom Paul QuilÚs was happy to pretend that the undesirable witness was "unfortunately" at this time "in on assignment in the US". Mr. de Villepin, contrary to your declaration, France made all the effort to remove from the curiosity of its own representatives the man employed as link between the Rwandan genocidal government and the Elysee. He was the one who kept François Mitterrand informed every morning, when he read his reports submitted to him, with the croissants,by the godfather of his daughter, François de Grossouvre. When Villepin chooses to enumerate some of the " tragic precedents" which "remind him that, in the face of serious violations of humans right (...), it is necessary to intervene without delay", he relies on the "Rwanda, Bosnia or Kosovo" examples. But why doesnât he rely on the "tragic precedent" for France of the electoral failure of the petro-dictator Denis Sassous Guesso? This was a popular disavowal, constituting a grave violation of the "rights of the FrancAfrican Mafia" ! This electoral failure led France at once, if we are to believe French inquiry magistrates who obtained the proof during a search at the French oil company Elf, to organize a putsch with the support of the genocidal Hutus. This was a tragic precedent, financed by France, which resulted in the death of men by the thousands. Evoking the establishment of the International Penal Tribunal for Rwanda whose "refusal of impunity" de Villepin praises loudly and in writing, he does not have the discipline to resist adding that "it is truly the spirit in which France worked in favor of the International Penal Court". It is hypocrisy ! In truth, it is following a mobilization of the French civil society, led a few months before the convention of Rome by the socialist politician Elisabeth Guigou, that Jospin and Chirac were forced at the last minute to lend the official support of France to the International Penal Court. France obtained in exchange for its nationals a clause exonerating them for seven years from being pursued for war crimes. What is this fierce negotiation carried out for obtaining this indulgence, if it is not an incredible confession of culpability of our authorities ?! Galouzeau de Villepin also knows, when the opportunity arises, how to become professor of applied political science. In his forum on Liberation, he explained the way in which it is necessary to solve the internal political crises in Africa; noting that "from principles nourished by the experiment a method can emerge for dealing with the crises". He praises his own method, which consists of a "conciliation around a government of transition charged to preserve the national unity". It is either chutzpah, or lack of consciousness, but it is surely gigantic ! Several years earlier, when he was functioning as principal private secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, de Villepin had allowed shelter to be given within the French embassy in Kigali, to those who -- a few hours after having executed Agathe Uwilingiyimana, the Prime Minister of the true government of national unity, that had resulted from the negotiations of Arusha â were going to form, on French territory, the "government of transition" of which our presidential candidate is telling us. It was the the Rwandan Interim Government (GIR), more simply known under the name of genocidal government ! It is the story of an adventurous and recidivist character, which, atop an awkward harp, would like to melt among us like a cave cricket and even to be carried on the throne. A friend of the killers who pretends to hold as important "that no wall closes again as a tomb stone on frozen truths" (page 395 of Praise of the fire robbers). Others have understood "that he would not allow his people to live and that he still refuses them the burial rights" [1], by denying the reality of the genocide which Tutsis underwent, by denying the reality of the genocide that Villepin and its colleagues took part in inflicting on them ! Notes: [1] Paraphrase drawn from The injustice, in the collection Memorial from the Black Island by the chilian poet Pablo Neruda. |
| Posted by:anonymous5089 |
| #4 I have seen (part of) them |
| Posted by: JFM 2005-09-29 18:16 |
| #3 JFM, If you ever want it I got about 45 mins hi-res video of that Ivory Coast shooting. Sent out by their national radio station as raw footage on a bit-torrent right after it happened. Amnesty Int. refused to look at it. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2005-09-29 11:49 |
| #2 More context: the French President is the commander in chief so it is him not the first minister who can give orders to Army units. The FM can block military initiatives by not financing (that is how the operation for driving back the FPR was downgraded to pseudo-humanitarian Manta) but not initiating them. |
| Posted by: JFM 2005-09-29 11:42 |
| #1 To say the truth Villepin was acting on the orders of a right wing government who was trying to limit the involvement of France in the Rwandan conflict. had he had his way Francois Mitterand (socialist) would have had the French Army driving back the FPR (Tutsi) so genocide would have continued. Also the Rwandan president talls that he made a visit to Hubert Vedrine (I don't recall if he was Foreign Minister or his aide ie Villepin's predecessor) during the preceeding socilaist government and he was told "if you try to conquer Rwanda no Tutsi will be left alive". I hear the interview and the wording was (purposefully?) ambiguous: not clear if he was threatening or warning. Just to recall that the main responsabilities with the genocide had to be laid at the feet of the socialists and specially of Francois Mitterrand. Context: The right had been in power only for a year a the moment of the genocide (after 5 years of socialist government) and only for theree years in the thirteen preceeding years. In addition Foreign Policy has been traditionally the "reserved domain" of French Presidents since de Gaulle: ie it is the President not the First Minister or the Foreign Minister who determine France's Foreign policy. Even when the first minister (who has theorically the real power) in charge has been from an opposite party the President has ever been the real boss in Foreign matters. |
| Posted by: JFM 2005-09-29 11:35 |