Tag: Rwanda

Last week, Bernard Ntaganda was sentenced  to four years imprisonment for “endangering state security” and “harboring ethnic divisionism.”  The former charge is all too familiar to human rights activists and is little different from similar politically-motivated prosecutions across the globe.  The crime of “divisionism,” however, codified as “sectarianism” under Rwandese law, is relatively unique.  The closest parallels to these laws are probably most familiar to Americans as “hate speech” laws common to Europe, but prohibited by the First Amendment in the United States.  

   International human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have concluded that Mr. Ntaganda was almost certainly targeted for his opposition to the regime of President Paul Kagame.  President Kagame is not well known in the United States, but he owes his prominence to the role he played in ending the 1994 Rwandan genocide as leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF.  The sanitized version of this story was distributed to American audiences briefly in the award winning film Hotel Rwanda.  Unfortunately, the politcally correct version omits several important facts, omissions that help explain the current political climate in Rwanda and the slide toward authoritarianism on the part of Kagame and the rest of the political leadership.

Population 1960-2008

I’ve been watching the great HBO series Six Feet Under on DVD for about a week, and yesterday I saw the episode which ends with Ruth Fisher singing along with a tape of Joni Mitchell. I didn’t even recognize the song, but a google search for the lyrics revealed it was Woodstock.

Then last night I had a dream about walking up a long hill with the same song playing in my head, but when I came to the crest and looked down, instead of mobs at a concert I saw a flood like an ocean, and millions of people washed away in it.

“And maybe it’s the time of year

or maybe it’s the time of man

and I don’t know who I am

but you know life is for learning.”

“We are stardust,

billion year-old carbon,

we are golden,

caught in the devil’s bargain

and we got to get ourselves

back to the garden.”

George W. Bush has a clear conscience. Clear as a vacuum. Clear as in there’s nothing there. Last week, Dan Froomkin had this interesting tidbit:

President Bush doesn’t have second thoughts. It’s just not his style.

Though at times he’s been forced to admit problems during his presidency, he never suggests that he should have taken a different approach.

And so he remains largely at peace with himself — even in the face of a genocide that continues years after he called it by that name.

It might fairly be said that Bush doesn’t have many first thoughts, but it’s comforting to know that not having done anything to stop a little genocide doesn’t bother him. Then again, we know that Bush converses directly with God, so he obviously believes he has cover. You may recall Bush’s 2004 answer, when asked if he sought his father’s advice, before invading Iraq:

“You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to,” Bush said.

And there was the report in the Independent about a Bush interview with the BBC:

In the programme Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, which starts on Monday, the former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath says Mr Bush told him and Mahmoud Abbas, former prime minister and now Palestinian President: “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,’ and I did.”

And “now again”, Mr Bush is quoted as telling the two, “I feel God’s words coming to me: ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.’ And by God, I’m gonna do it.”

Mr Abbas remembers how the US President told him he had a “moral and religious obligation” to act. The White House has refused to comment on what it terms a private conversation. But the BBC account is anything but implausible, given how throughout his presidency Mr Bush, a born-again Christian, has never hidden the importance of his faith.

Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people talking to what they perceive to be God. But there is a problem when they act on what they believe to be God’s direct word. There’s a word for people who think they hear voices. There’s a diagnosis. And when they’re in the position of being able to start wars, there is literally nothing more dangerous.