Sudan's War Criminal Bashir to attend African Union Summit in Rwanda

President Omer al-Bashir will travel to Rwanda on Saturday to attend the African Union summit in Kigali, Sudan Tribune learnt. The 27th African Union Summit will take place in the Rwandan capital Kigali from the 10th to the 18th of July 2016.

Al-Bashir attended the African Union summit in South Africa in June 2015 although South Africa is a member to the International Criminal Court (ICC). A local court ordered to prevent him form leaving the country, but Johannesburg government facilitated his return to Sudan.

In May of this year al-Bashir visited Uganda and Djibouti, which are ICC state members of Rome Statute.

As a host-country of the African summit, the Rwandan President Paul Kagame has announced that his country will not arrest President al-Bashir during his coming visit to participate in the African Union summit.

“President al-Bashir is welcomed in Kigali at any time. He will be free in his second home country. We will not respond to the ICC calls to arrest him. We will not take any action of such type against him”, Kagame said.

Rwanda is not a state party to the tribunal of war crimes but has the obligation as a member of the United Nations to cooperate with the court. However like many other African capitals, Kigali is critical to ICC and to its focus on Africa.

In April 2007, the judges at the Hague-based tribunal issued an arrest warrant for President al-Bashir, and for the governor of North Kordofan state Ahmed Haroun, who at the time served as state minister interior.

DJIBOUTI & UGANDA: On a related development, the ICC said Tuesday it had referred Djibouti and Uganda to the United Nation Security Council for failing to arrest al-Bashir while he was on their territory.

As ICC members, the two countries are obliged to arrest the Sudanese president. However, the African governments refuse to arrest him saying they are committed to an African Union decision calling to not cooperate with the Hague based court .

"On 11 July 2016, Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court (ICC) decided that the Republics of Uganda and Djibouti had failed to comply with the request for arrest and surrender of Omar Al Bashir to the ICC and referred the matter to the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute and the United Nations Security Council,". said a statement released on Tuesday.

"It is now up to them to take the measures they deem necessary regarding this matter," the ICC further said.

Al Bashir is facing two ICC arrest warrants for five counts of crimes against humanity, two counts of war crimes and three counts of genocide. (ST)

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But Kigali is the safest city in Africa! Why all the security?

Roads closed, security tight as Netanyahu lands in Rwanda

Major roads linking Rwanda's capital Kigali to the 10km main road from the airport have been blocked off as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in the country for a one day visit.

The Israeli Premier is in Rwanda for few hours during which he has visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre at Gisozi and is expected to hold talks with President Paul Kagame at Village Urugwiro.

Upon arrival, he was welcomed by Mr Kagame at the airport where he inspected a Guard of Honour before proceeding to the memorial centre where he was taken around the museum which contains records of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

President Paul Kagame (left) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu inspecting a guard of honour shortly after he arrived in Rwanda on July 6, 2016. PHOTO | URUGWIRO VILLAGE

The two leaders will address the press before concluding the visit.

The road from Kigali International Airport (KIA) to Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre remained sealed off as motorists and pedestrians were asked to use alternative routes.

Adjoining roads to the main road which link to the main administrative and commercial parts of the city were closed off as stranded motorists parked in wait.

“We don’t know when we will be released to go. We are just waiting. It is a huge inconvenience,” a motorist who spoke to The EastAfrican said.
Rwanda National Police Traffic Department spokesperson, Jean Marie Vianney Ndushabandi, however said only one road was closed off to allow safe passage for the visiting leader.

“The other roads are open. There are alternative roads people can use,” he said briefly on phone. However, motorists and pedestrians said that alternative roads were not communicated.

The two countries share a similar history with regard to the Tutsi Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust.

Ties between the two countries have been strengthened in recent years, with Rwanda opening a diplomatic mission in Tel Aviv in March 2015.
They also have in place trade and investment partnership agreements with the Israel pledging to support Rwanda in sectors such as ICT, agriculture and defence among others.

Last year, Rwanda appointed Col Joseph Rutabana as the country’s Ambassador to Israel.
However, some of Rwanda’s dealings with Israel are not without controversy.

Last year, it emerged that Rwanda had signed a pact with Israel to take some unwanted immigrants from different African countries in return for favourable deals. Uganda is also involved in the deal and has come under scrutiny.
The agreement, which has come under scrutiny by human rights organisations, allows Israel to deport hundreds of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers to both Rwanda and Uganda in return for favourable deals that include millions of dollars in grants.
Addressing a press conference in Kigali last year, President Kagame acknowledged that discussions between Rwanda and Israel were ongoing.

“On Rwanda and Israel, yes, I know there has been this discussion and it has been a debate in Israel about these Africans who have migrated to Israel as they do to other European countries. Some of them are either there illegally or with different status,” President Kagame said at the time.

Earlier this year, it emerged that Israel had sold arms to Rwanda during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, but the Israeli government said it would keep the details of the arms deal confidential.
From Rwanda, Netanyahu will head to Ethiopia as he concludes an eastern Africa tour which also covered Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda.

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War Criminal Paul Kagame of Rwanda

When Rwandan-backed rebels recently took Goma, the biggest city in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Paul Kagame had every reason to think the world would give him a pass. That, after all, has been the pattern for years.

Frequently lauded by people such as Bono, Tony Blair, and Pastor Rick, the Rwandan president enjoys some extraordinary backing in the West—support that is particularly remarkable given his alleged hand in ongoing regional conflicts believed to have killed more than 5 million people since the mid-’90s.

War criminal Paul Kagame of Rwanda

On the aid and awards circuit, Kagame is known as the man who led Rwanda from the ashes of the 1994 genocide—one of the late 20th century’s greatest atrocities—to hope and prosperity: a land of fast growth and rare good economic governance with enviable advances in health care, education, and women’s rights. Bestowing his foundation’s Global Citizen Award on Kagame three years ago, Bill Clinton said: “From crisis, President Kagame has forged a strong, unified, and growing nation with the potential to become a model for the rest of Africa and the world.”
But that model narrative seems to be shifting in the aftermath of the Goma takeover. After a United Nations report found that Rwanda created and commands the rebel group known as M23, important European friends such as Britain and Belgium partially suspended aid donations to Rwanda, and President Obama called Kagame to warn him against any continued military adventurism.
Leading observers say the reevaluation of Kagame and his legacy is long overdue. Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian scholar whom many consider the world’s foremost expert on Rwanda, describes Kagame as “probably the worst war criminal in office today.” In an interview, Reyntjens told me that Kagame’s crimes rank with those perpetrated by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein or Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Washington and London have long supported Kagame as a bulwark of stability in a volatile region. But a recent U.N. report accused his government of instigating trouble across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Meanwhile, specialists in African affairs say a regime like Kagame’s, an ethnic dictatorship built along unusually narrow lines, represents a political dead end. And international human-rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, have raised serious questions about violence committed against journalists and opposition figures. Kagame has generally been dismissive of such accusations of abuse.

Tall, gaunt, and almost professorial in manner, Kagame cuts an unusual figure for a former African guerrilla leader. His rise to power began in 1990, when as head of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, an exiled movement made up primarily of Tutsis, he launched a war to take over his native country from bases in neighboring Uganda.

Four years later, the course of history took a dramatic turn: on April 6, 1994, an airplane carrying Rwanda’s president, Juvénal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu, was mysteriously shot down on its approach to the capital, Kigali, unleashing the murder spree that became known as the Rwandan genocide. In the space of 100 days, about 800,000 people—most of them members of the Tutsi minority—were killed at the instigation of Hutu extremists. As Kagame and his army gained control of the country, ending the genocide, the Hutu extremists, along with hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, fled to neighboring states, in particular Zaire, as it was then known.

Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu, was named president in what seemed an effort at providing representation for the roughly 84 percent Hutu majority in Rwanda’s new national unity government. However, Kagame, a Tutsi and the nominal vice president, kept control of the Rwandan Army, becoming the country’s de facto leader. And by 2000, after numerous cases of forced exiles, disappearances, and assassinations of politicians, Bizimungu resigned the presidency, bringing a definitive end to the illusion of ethnic balance in high office. (The government now prohibits the use of ethnic labels.)

Since then, former Rwandan officials say, almost every position of meaningful power in the country has been held by a Tutsi. In 2001, when Bizimungu began organizing a political party in order to run for president, it was outlawed on charges of being a radical Hutu organization. The following year, Bizimungu was arrested on charges of endangering the state, and later he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

(Bizimungu, whom Amnesty International called a prisoner of conscience, was pardoned by Kagame in 2007, but the methods used to sideline him have been applied broadly ever since, with critics of the regime of all stripes being prosecuted for promoting “genocide ideology,” which has become an all-purpose charge.)

Troubled Neighborhood: For years Rwandan government forces and their proxies have operated in Congo, setting off conflicts that have killed millions.

Theogene Rudasingwa, a Tutsi who was appointed Rwanda’s ambassador to Washington after serving as an officer in Kagame’s army, puts it bluntly: “If you differ strongly with Kagame and make your views known from the inside, you will be made to pay the price, and very often that price is your life.”

Rudasingwa, who now lives in exile in the United States, describes Kagame as an extreme control freak who has concentrated power in the hands of a select group of Tutsis who, like Kagame himself, returned to Rwanda from years of exile in Uganda after the genocide.

“When you look at the structure of key parts of government, leadership is occupied almost entirely by Tutsis from the outside, and this is especially true in the military,” Rudasingwa says. “As for the Hutus, they are completely marginalized, and things [for them] have never been as bad as they are today. Almost the entire Hutu elite that was built up since 1959 is either outside the country or dead. They are marginalized and banished, forced into exile when they haven’t simply been killed.”

Kagame tightly controls the country and its citizens through the Tutsi-
dominated Army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the country’s dominant political party. Throughout Rwanda—in every town and tiny village—the RPF is present, not unlike the Stasi in East Germany during the Cold War. While a town may have a Hutu mayor, under Kagame’s system government officeholders have little authority compared with the RPF representatives who work in parallel to them and often pull rank.

RPF regulations—enforced by local commissars with vigor and steep fines—govern almost every aspect of daily life. There are laws requiring peasants to wear shoes and good clothes when not working their fields and prohibition of drinking banana wine from shared straws—a traditional gesture of reconciliation—and myriad other rules, generally resented as gratuitous and insulting.

“The RPF saturates every aspect of life in Rwanda,” said Susan Thomson, a longtime Rwanda expert at Colgate University. “They know everything: if you’ve been drinking, if you’ve had an affair, if you’ve paid your taxes.” Everything is reported on, Thomson says, and there is no appeal.

From the beginning, Kagame’s legitimacy was founded on his image as the man who had halted the genocide committed by the Hutu-led government and extremist militias. While the vast majority of the 800,000 people killed in the frenzy were Tutsis and moderate Hutus, there are profound flaws in what is usually a rather simplistic telling of the country’s history.

Pointing to the origins of the war and its bloody aftermath, Scott Straus, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, said: “An honest analysis ... would show that the reasons for what happened were much more complicated than the idea that the Hutus hate the Tutsis and want to wipe them out.”

For one thing, there is abundant evidence that Kagame’s forces in the early days carried out targeted executions of the Hutu elite, followed later by much larger extermination campaigns that killed tens of thousands of people.

A year after the genocide had ended, blood was still being spilled, recalls Timothy Longman, then the country director for Human Rights Watch. “People would take me around and say, ‘There’s mass grave right over here,’ and you would ask, ‘From when?’ And they would say, ‘Just from a few weeks ago—not from the genocide,’” says Longman, who now directs the African Studies Center at Boston University.

One of the earliest investigations was undertaken by a U.N. team led by the American Robert Gersony in the fall of 1994. The team conducted research by interviewing people in refugee camps and the countryside. In a report later suppressed by the U.N., partly as a result of American political pressure aimed at supporting the new RPF government, Gersony’s team concluded that four provinces had seen “systematic and sustained killing and persecution of their civilian Hutu populations by the RPA,” the armed wing of the RPF.

Furthermore, the report estimated that the RPA killed between 15,000 and 30,000 people in just four of its survey areas in the summer of 1994. Years later a key member of Gersony’s team told me that the real number of Hutus killed during this period was likely much higher, but that a low estimate had been published because of fears of a political backlash within the U.N. so soon after its failure to stop the larger-scale killing of Tutsis. “What we found was a well-organized military-style operation, with military command and control, and these were military-campaign-style mass murders,” the team member told me.

(In one notorious incident in April 1995, the RPA attacked an internally displaced people’s camp in Kibeho using automatic weapons, grenades, and mortars. A team of Australian medics listed more than 4,000 dead when the RPA forced them to stop counting. France’s leading researcher on the region, Gérard Prunier, estimates that at least 20,000 more people from the camp “disappeared” after the massacre.)

Many people inside the country know this history well but have been prevented from talking about it as the political space has narrowed.
In the run-up to the 2010 election in which Kagame was declared the winner, there was widespread violence, with several journalists and figures from the opposition attacked or killed, including a politician who was beheaded. Amnesty International condemned the violence and the “killings, arrests, and the closure of newspapers and broadcasters [which] reinforced a climate of fear.”

The case of Victoire Ingabire, a politician from the opposition, was instructive. When she returned to Rwanda that year, having lived 16 years in exile, to prepare a run for president, her first stop was at the official genocide memorial. “We are here honoring at this memorial the Tutsi victims of the genocide. There are also Hutu who were victims of crimes against humanity and war crimes, not remembered or honored here,” she said in a prepared statement. “Hutu are also suffering. They are wondering when their time will come to remember their people. In order for us to get to that desirable reconciliation, we must be fair and compassionate towards every Rwandan’s suffering.”

Ingabire was promptly arrested and accused of “genocide ideology.” During her trial, President Kagame publicly declared that she was guilty.

Tiny Rwanda is called the land of a thousand hills because of its verdant, rolling countryside of strikingly fertile farmland. It is a land of beauty and unrelenting order. But unlike its much larger neighbor Congo, it is not endowed with any mineral wealth to speak of. Yet Rwanda’s economy depends on the exploitation of Congolese resources.

Through mafialike networks reportedly run by the Rwandan Army and the RPF, huge quantities of Congo’s minerals are siphoned out of the country, experts say.

As early as 2000, Rwanda was believed to be making $80 million to $100 million annually from Congolese coltan alone, roughly the equivalent of the entire defense budget, according to Reyntjens, the Belgian expert.

Pillaging the Congo obscures Rwanda’s giant military budget from foreign donors who provide as much as 50 percent of the country’s budget every year. It also provides a rich source of income to the urban elites, especially returnees from Uganda, who form the regime’s core.

“After the first Congo war, money began coming in through military channels and never entered the coffers of the Rwandan state,” says Rudasingwa, Kagame’s former lieutenant. “It is RPF money, and Kagame is the only one who knows how much money it is—or how it is spent. In meetings it was often said, ‘For Rwanda to be strong, Congo must be weak, and the Congolese must be divided.’”

Congo looms large in the story of Kagame in other ways as well. For years Rwandan government forces and their proxies have operated in Congo. Twice Rwanda has invaded the country outright, in September 1996, when with U.S. acquiescence it successfully waged war to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko, and again beginning in August 1998, when it mounted a repeat operation to depose Laurent-Désiré Kabila. This second operation, to replace the very man Kagame installed to replace Mobutu, ended in failure but established a pattern of intervention and meddling aimed at undermining its much larger neighbor. The ensuing war, involving several African nations, is believed to have cost the lives of 5 million people.

As early as 1997, the U.N. estimated that Rwandan forces had caused the deaths of 200,000 Hutus in Congo; Prunier, the French expert, has since estimated that the toll is closer to 300,000. According to the U.N. report, these deaths could not be attributed to the hazards of war or to collateral damage. “The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who were often undernourished and posed no threat to the attacking forces.” The report concluded that the systematic and widespread attacks, “if proven before a competent court, could be characterized as crimes of genocide.”

Two years ago, Kagame delivered a lecture in London on “The Challenges of Nation-Building in Africa: The Case of Rwanda.” When confronted with a U.N. report that was then making headlines with the suggestion that his forces had committed genocide in Congo, he dismissed such allegations as “baseless” and “absurd.” Clearly he was keener to talk about economic indicators and repeat the oft-told success story of his country.

But even that is a truth with modification. Social inequality in Rwanda is high and rising, experts say. Despite an average annual growth rate of about 5 percent since 2005, poverty is soaring in the countryside, where few Western journalists report without official escort.

“The rural sector has suffered enormous extraction under the post-genocide government, far more than what had happened before,” said one longtime researcher who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “There is a real increase in misery. When you speak of Rwanda as a volcano, that’s what’s involved.”

Will Rwanda explode again? The big, looming issue is whether Kagame will leave office in 2017, as the Constitution calls for. With so much to answer for, few expect a straightforward exit.

_____
HOWARD W. FRENCH 

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Watch Kagame say he Never Wanted to Remain President

Blair and Buffett Crown Kagame King of Rwanda

Watch Kagame say he never wanted to remain president, but was forced to stay in power. Watch also his consultants Blair and Buffett crown him King. Howard says he would not have invested in Rwanda if Kagame was not the ruler.

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Barack Obama's Top 10 Rules For Success

He's the 44th and current President of the United States, and the first African American to hold the office.

He's a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review.

He defeated Republican nominee John McCain in the general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.

He's Barack Obama and here are his Top 10 Rules for Success.


Sources:
https://youtu.be/L88H2HWEXrw
https://youtu.be/t6NS9unm-OQ
https://youtu.be/Qbel5MhtDq4
https://youtu.be/qMlLjFPCO4M
https://youtu.be/qVQKTPHBdVg
https://youtu.be/oRPbfrkfCdc
https://youtu.be/AjLLhWHH4Ww

1. Move the ball forward
He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree.

2. Have hope
He worked as a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law at University of Chicago Law School between 1992 and 2004.

3. Don't get complacent
He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

4. Stay Focused
He received national attention during his campaign to represent Illinois in the United States Senate with his victory in the March Democratic Party primary

5. You can't do it alone
After a close primary campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2008, he won sufficient delegates in the Democratic Party primaries to receive the presidential nomination.

6. Commit to something bigger
He then defeated Republican nominee John McCain in the general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.

7. Stop making excuses
Nine months after his inauguration, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

8. Don't take yourself too seriously
He was reelected president in November 2012, defeating Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

9. Stick to your plan
He normalized U.S. relations with Cuba.

10. Follow your passion
He spearheaded discussions that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement on global climate change

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EVAN
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