Blaming African Leaders

A wave of revisionist history ranging from that old warhorse for British Imperialism the BBC all the way to the alternative media has taken to blaming African leaders for some of the worst crimes in modern history.

It is infered that all of these massacres were black on black violence, you know Africans slaughtering Africans, and god forbid, don't blame the Europeans and Americans for any of this.

Case in point, what is known as the Rwandan Genocide committed in 1994. At the time I had been teaching a graduate level course in African history and when the massacres started the network of well informed activists that I was a part of immediately suspected the involvement of the French in the bloodshed.

The French, along with Belgium, had a long, bloody history of instigating and directing ethnic based massacres in both Rwanda and Burundi going back to “independence” in the early 1960’s. We are talking about upwards of 200,000 Africans massacred in a series of ethnic bloodlettings that resulted in hundreds of thousands of mainly

Tutsi's fleeing for their lives. So it was highly likely that this was another repeat of such atrocities.

Quickly evidence began to emerge that supported this view including the fact that several thousand French soldiers were stationed in Rwanda and despite desperate pleas by community leaders, both Tutsi and Hutu, the French army refused to intervene to put a halt to the massacres.

Then film footage emerged of French foreign ministry agents driving up to the roadblocks manned by the Hutu death squads and turning over computerized lists of those who needed to be “eliminated”, both Tutsi

and Hutu. This footage was later confirmed by first hand participants in these death squads. This footage has been repeatedly broadcast on African television programs and I have seen it several times here on

Eritrean television.

The evidence of French involvement was so great that the French Parliament was forced to hold a predictably white wash “investigation” into their role in this barbaric crime.

To mark the 10th Anniversary of the genocide in 2004 human rights activists convened the Peoples Tribunal on the Rwandan Genocide in France. The Peoples Tribunal produced reams of documentation and first hand testimony of the primary role played by the French Foreign Ministry in instigating and directing this major crime against humanity.

The reason the French were so desperate as to instigate and direct mass murder on such a scale was that a Ugandan based army of Tutsi refugees had launched an invasion of Rwanda in an attempt to overthrow the French backed Hutu dominated government.

The exiles, lead by one Paul Kagame, former head of Ugandan Military Intelligence and a member of a Tutsi family that had been driven into exile by a previous French instigated massacre, were anti-French and had publicly announced they were determined to rid Rwanda once and for all of any vestige of French domination.

Today all of this well documented history has been swept under the rug and the revisionists now charge Paul Kagame, along with his mentor President Musuveni of Uganda of instigating the massacre.

Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, instigated a massacre of mainly Tutsi’s, his own people and power base?

Today’s President Kagame of Rwanda has been committing major crimes in the Congo (see “Carnage in the Congo”) and certainly should face justice for this but is just doesn't pass the smell test to say he massacred his own power base in Rwanda, the Tutsi ethnic group.

For more on the French crimes in Africa you should see “French African Connection” on Al Jazeera.

Blaming Africans is what its all about. The latest attempt is in South Sudan, which is portrayed as tribal violence, you know, Hutus...I mean Nuer vs Dinka, mindless slaughter of innocents by blood thirst black

men, isn't that how the story goes?

Reik Machar, the leader of the “rebellion” in South Sudan who caused the war to break out at the beginning of 2014 when he attempted a coup against President Salva Kiirs government, planned way back in 2006 on

assassinating Mr. Kiir and declaring himself President. (this bit of gold we know thanks to Wikileaks).

The question still unasked by everyone from the BBC to the alternative media is where does Reik Machar get his funding, the money needed to pay salaries and all that waging warfare requires for tens of thousands of rebel soldiers, over $100,000,000 and counting. Taking into account the USA’s national interests requiring depriving China of Africa’s energy resources, as in Sudanese oil, the most likely suspect is the CIA, notorious for funding secret wars, especially in Africa.

What is no secret is that the USA wants regime change in South Sudan, as in getting rid of Pres. Salva Kiir who keeps riling Pax Americana by his refusal to shut down the Chinese oil fields in his country. So the USA green lights Reik Machar’s coup attempt, war breaks out, the oil fields are attacked and China is almost back to square one in their only majority owned energy project in Africa. The only winner in the war in South Sudan, the only one, is the USA.

Blaming Africans is what its all about, whether in revising the history of the Rwandan genocide and absolving French crimes against humanity to the ongoing conflict in South Sudan, to further its national interests the USA or the French will provoke murder and mayhem, tribal violence in all its horrifying stereotypes. The west

blaming Africans for western crimes is in vogue once again.

Thomas C. Mountain is an independent journalist living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He can be reached via twitter @thomascmountain, on Facebook at thomascmountain or at thomascmountain at g mail dot com