by Charlie Hinton

When Bill and Hillary Clinton married in 1975, a friend gave them a trip to Haiti for their honeymoon. The Washington Post reported: “Since that honeymoon vacation, the Caribbean island nation has held a life-long allure for the couple, a place they found at once desperate and enchanting, pulling at their emotions throughout his presidency and in her maiden year as secretary of state.” Haiti’s president at the time was Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, and Hillary and Bill fell in love with a country living under a dictator and his tonton macoute death squad.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is joined by her husband, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and Sen. Pat Leahy at a new power plant during their visit to Caracol, Haiti, in 2012. This photo illustrates a Wall Street Journal article headlined: “How the Clintons Worked the Angles in Haiti: Bill handled earthquake aid while Hillary was secretary of state; the nation deserved better.” – Photo: Larry Downing, AFP

Bill Clinton helped found the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985, formed as a conservative counter to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition campaign of 1984, which more pro-business Democrats saw as a threat. Running as a “New Democrat,” Clinton became president in 1992 after 12 years of “Reaganomics,” philosophically part of the global economic movement called “neo-liberalism,” a policy of privatization and free trade that was transforming the global economy.

Instead of trying to brake or reverse Reaganomics, Clinton vigorously pursued Reagan-Bush policies, aligning with Republicans to push U.S. participation in both NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO) through a resistant Democrat-controlled Congress. He also signed the Republican-sponsored bill to overturn the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated commercial banking from investment banking. The destruction of that firewall fueled the Wall Street gambling-created economic bubble that burst in the housing mortgage crisis of 2008-2009.

Clinton finally had to confront some of the consequences of his actions. “We made a devil’s bargain,” Clinton apologized at a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2010. He apologized for forcing Haiti to drop tariffs on imported U.S. rice, subsidized by our government, during his time in office. Neo-liberal policy prevented Haiti’s government from subsidizing its own rice farmers, and they could not compete, wiping out Haitian rice farming and seriously damaging Haiti’s ability to be self-sufficient.

Clinton testified: “Since 1981, the United States has followed a policy, until the last year or so when we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food, so, thank goodness, they can leap directly into the industrial era.

“It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake … I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else.”

What he did not explain is that after Haitians stop producing rice to feed themselves, under neo-liberal gospel, they’re supposed to instead produce mangos and other tropical foods to export to Northern countries. Thus they become dependent on cutthroat global markets to earn the hard currency foreign exchange necessary to buy imported food, which can now be sold at monopoly prices because there is no domestic competition.

By the time Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned to office in 1994 after the first coup against him in 1990, “Miami rice” had already flooded Haiti’s markets. However, the Aristide government resisted enormous pressure to privatize other Haitian government-owned businesses, and Clinton made sure Aristide would not serve the full five-year term to which he was elected, despite demands from the majority of Haitians who wanted Aristide to complete five full years in office, making up for the almost four years spent in exile after the coup.

As a result of the destruction of the rice crop, Haitian farmers and their families who could no longer afford to farm flooded into Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, to look for work. Many of them were among the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured in the catastrophic earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010.

Eight days after the quake, Bill Clinton told the Washington Post, “This is a personal thing for us.” Hillary and I have “always felt a special responsibility” for Haiti and its 9 million people. “She has the same memories I do. She has the same concerns I do. We love the place.” The earthquake destruction “personally emotionally affected” him. His wife, he said, became “physically sick.”

The global community responded with incredible generosity after the quake, donating or pledging almost $10 billion. The Red Cross raised $488 million, World Vision $265.3 million (by 2015), Catholic Relief $159 million, Partners in Health more than $81 million, the Clinton Bush fund $52.6 million, the Clinton Foundation $36 million, and on and on. One hundred eighty charities raised money in the name of Haiti earthquake relief, yet Haiti remains as poor as ever, with the poverty rate in 2012 at 58.5 percent and in rural areas at 74.9 percent.

As a result of the destruction of the rice crop, Haitian farmers and their families who could no longer afford to farm flooded into Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, to look for work. Many of them were among the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured in the catastrophic earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010.

In “Haiti: Seven places where the earthquake money did and did not go,” Bill Quigley and Amber Ramanauskas note: “The largest single recipient of U.S. earthquake money was the U.S. government. The same holds true for donations by other countries.

“Right after the earthquake, the U.S. allocated $379 million in aid and sent in 5,000 troops. The Associated Press discovered that of the $379 million in initial U.S. money promised for Haiti, most was not really money going directly, or in some cases even indirectly, to Haiti. They documented in January 2010 that 33 cents of each of these U.S. dollars for Haiti was actually given directly back to the U.S. to reimburse ourselves for sending in our military. Forty-two cents of each dollar went to private and public non-governmental organizations like Save the Children, the U.N. World Food Program and the Pan American Health Organization. Hardly any went directly to Haitians or their government.

“The overall $1.6 billion allocated for relief by the U.S. was spent much the same way, according to an August 2010 report by the U.S. Congressional Research Office” – reimbursed to the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, to USAID disaster assistance, to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Homeland Security and so on.

International assistance followed the same pattern. After the earthquake, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti wrote an email saying, “The gold rush is on,” and indeed it was. For everyone but Haitians.

Instead of building infrastructure and providing aid to those most in need, Haiti’s international rulers continue their same old neo-liberal formula of promoting tourism, sweatshops, natural resource extraction, and cash crop exports. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton promoted this very policy, demonstrated particularly in the imposition of Michel Martelly as president.

In January, 2011, at the height of the Egyptian Arab Spring revolution, Clinton flew to Port-au-Prince to demand that Martelly be named one of the two runoff candidates, although he was not announced originally by the Electoral Council as one of the two top vote getters.

After the earthquake, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti wrote an email saying, “The gold rush is on,” and indeed it was. For everyone but Haitians.

Despite a voter boycott, with fewer than 20 percent of the electorate voting, Martelly was announced the winner of the “runoff,” and the results were accepted by the international community. The results have been catastrophic for the Haitian majority, as Martelly appointed Duvalierists throughout his administration and has sanctioned privatization, repression, death squads, corruption, illegally appointed judges and illegal changes to the Constitution, while bringing a particularly greedy and arrogant entourage into his government.

His administration has granted mineral concessions with no accountability and cut down the only forest on the island of Ile a Vache, displacing hundreds of peasant families, to build a tourist resort.

“At least seven hotels are under construction or are in the planning stage in Port-au-Prince and its surrounding areas, raising hopes that thousands of investors will soon fill their air-conditioned rooms looking to build factories and tourist infrastructure that will help Haiti bounce back from a 2010 earthquake,” according to USA Today. The Clinton Bush fund invested $2 million of earthquake money in the new luxury Royal Oasis Hotel.

The Clinton Foundation invested earthquake money in the Caracol Northern Industrial Park, with Korean apparel manufacturer Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd., known for its sweatshops, as the anchor tenant. Sae-A makes clothes for Walmart, Gap and other retailers.

“The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 Haitians. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six,” reports ProPublica, and this house in Port-au-Prince was actually constructed by the Spanish Red Cross. – Photo: Marie Arago, special to ProPublica

The earthquake did not touch this part of Haiti. Projected to provide 65,000 jobs, as of September 2014, only 4,156 people worked there. At the opening ceremony, Secretary of State Clinton said, “I want to begin by thanking President Martelly for his leadership and his vision and his passion about the people of his country and for your administration’s commitment to show the world Haiti is open for business.”

In June, 2015 Pro Publica and NPR published an analysis of the Red Cross called “How the Red Cross raised half a billion dollars for Haiti and built 6 homes.” “The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six. …

“After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to ‘develop brand-new communities.’ None has ever been built.” The donations, however, “helped the group erase its more than $100 million deficit.”

NGOs

Haitians call neo-liberalism Plan Lanmó, the “Death Plan,” because of the social and economic devastation caused by neo-liberal policies – the forced opening of markets to U.S. goods, sweatshop wages, the plundering of natural resources, austerity budget programs and the privatization of state owned enterprises.

This pattern is not new so much as a continuation of the same policies used to rule over Haiti since the people’s successful 1804 revolution to overthrow slavery and drive out the French. The former slave owning countries, in particular France and the United States, have operated ever since to prevent any true democratic form of government that would benefit the majority of Haitians and limit in any way U.S. and French business interests.

The most recent development is rule through non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. In “Is Haiti Doomed to Be the Republic of NGOs?” Vijaya Ramachandran writes, “One study found that even before the January 2010 earthquake, NGOs provided 70 percent of health care, and private schools (mostly NGO-run) accounted for 85 percent of national education.”

“Humanitarian agencies, NGOs, private contractors and other non-state service providers have received 99 percent of [earthquake] relief aid – less than 1 percent of aid in the immediate aftermath of the quake went to public institutions or to the government,” the article reports, with emphasis.

Haitians call neo-liberalism Plan Lanmó, the “Death Plan,” because of the social and economic devastation caused by neo-liberal policies – the forced opening of markets to U.S. goods, sweatshop wages, the plundering of natural resources, austerity budget programs and the privatization of state owned enterprises.

NGOs first entered Haiti shortly after World War II but became a flood in the 1980s, propelled by global neo-liberal economic ideology, changes in tax laws that allowed the mushrooming of foundations as tax dodge havens, and the desire to avert aid money away from the famously kleptocratic regime of Baby Doc Duvalier.

One goal of neo-liberalism is to starve governments of the money necessary to provide social services, so those services, like education, healthcare, water and even prisons, become privatized. Public assets, theoretically available to all who need them, get sold to corporations, and then only those with money get served. Once governments can no longer fund services, NGOs leap in to try to do the job, but with a hitch.

A democratically elected government will work to serve the needs of the people that elected it, whereas NGOs fulfill the agendas of those who fund them and are not necessarily accountable to the people they serve. While NGOs may seem benign, they actually help to destabilize social services, undermine governments and ultimately increase poverty.

One goal of neo-liberalism is to starve governments of the money necessary to provide social services, so those services, like education, healthcare, water and even prisons, become privatized.

Since foundations and governments in the Global North are primary funders of the NGOs that operate in the Global South, the goals of NGOs may not be the same as the goals of governments – particularly in Haiti, where 67 percent of Haitian voters elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president in 1990 with a mandate to develop institutions to support the majority of Haitians, instead of international investors.

Big NGOs operate as big businesses, with the same goals, methods and views, but their “profits” come from the “alleviation” of people’s suffering. In other words, NGOs exist as a result of suffering and they need that suffering to thrive and persist.

Each NGO has its own staff, its own office, own agenda, and own Haitian “partners.” They raise money in the name of Haiti, but they control that money, and they decide how to spend it, not Haitians. After the earthquake, not only did little money go to the Haitian government or institutions, many meetings about aid distribution excluded Haitians or were conducted in languages other than Haitian kreyol.

According to an internal Red Cross budgeting document for a housing project, “the project manager – a position reserved for an expatriate – was entitled to allowances for housing, food and other expenses, home leave trips, R&R four times a year, and relocation expenses. In all, it added up to $140,000. Compensation for a senior Haitian engineer — the top local position — was less than one-third of that, $42,000 a year.”

Plan Lanmó and cholera

The cholera epidemic provides possibly the most explicit example of how Plan Lanmó is the “death plan.” Cholera was introduced into Haiti by the waste dumped into the Artibonite River by Nepalese soldiers serving in the U.N. MINUSTAH army, which has occupied Haiti since the U.S., Canada, and French-sponsored coup against democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Feb. 29, 2004.

People suffering cholera symptoms are treated in a sports center converted into a cholera treatment center in Cap Haitien, Haiti, in 2010. – Photo: Emilio Morenatti, AP

Conservative estimates show that as of Aug. 30, 2014, 8,592 people had died from the disease and 706,089, 6 percent of the population, had been made sick because of water contaminated by sewage. At first the U.N. denied its role in introducing cholera; then, when a French scientist proved it, the U.N. refused to spend the necessary money to create or coordinate the creation of a sanitation system that would eliminate it.

The Pro Publica report says, “When a cholera epidemic raged through Haiti nine months after the quake, the biggest part of the Red Cross’ response — a plan to distribute soap and oral rehydration salts — was crippled by “internal issues that go unaddressed,” wrote the director of the Haiti program in her May 2011 memorandum.

“Throughout that year, cholera was a steady killer. By September 2011, when the death toll had surpassed 6,000, the project was still listed as ‘very behind schedule’ according to another internal document.”

The Guardian reported on a 10-year plan to eradicate cholera, “According to Nigel Fisher, head of the U.N. mission in Haiti, funding is tight – the U.N. has committed only $23.5 million on top of money it has already spent on cholera. This compares with the $650 million the U.N. spends annually on the troops that brought the epidemic to Haiti.”

It took four years after the introduction of cholera for the international community to hold a donor conference to raise funds for the cholera response. Of the $2.2 billion needed for an eradication program, only $50 million has been pledged.

So there you have it. When Haiti needs coordinated planning to create a massive infrastructure project, there is no entity capable of leading it. A competent government is the most obvious answer, but the Haitian government has been so neo-liberalized, privatized, defunded, imposed and corrupted that it has neither the will nor the capacity to carry out such a task.

The U.N. occupation army created the catastrophe, but a U.S. judge has ruled that the U.N. has legal immunity from any lawsuits by Haitians. There’s been no hearing of the case in Haitian courts.

The Red Cross distributes soap. Many governments, NGOs and church organizations initiate programs, most well intentioned and staffed by well-intentioned people, but their efforts are not coordinated, and none of them yet get to the root need – a modern sanitation system.

Almost all aid decisions are made – and the aid administered – by non-Haitians. When Haitians twice elected a government that actually worked to benefit the majority of its people, the U.S. government and Haitian elites twice orchestrated coups to overthrow it, and the U.S. is the primary funder of a U.N. occupation army which suppresses those calling for its restoration.

This system of outside control of Haiti – replacing government with foreign aid, NGOs and consultants – has totally failed most Haitians. Finally, Martelly and the Electoral Council called a parliamentary election for Aug. 9 and a presidential election for Oct. 25.

Former President Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas, will be running candidates for the first time since 2000. Repression and exclusion chicanery by forces allied with Martelly have already begun.

The Aug. 9 parliamentary elections have been widely denounced. Election day was marred by acts of voter suppression by Martelly’s PHTK party and two others affiliated with the Martelly-Paul government. Live radio interviews from many areas of Haiti reported violent acts by heavily armed individuals identified with PHTK against poll watchers and voters. These included the takeover and closure of polling stations, ballot stuffing and destruction of ballots already cast.

There were widespread reports of authorized poll watchers and voters denied access to polling stations while poll watchers from PHTK and allied parties were given free access. These are but the most recent of the repressive actions of the continuing 2004 coup d’état and occupation.

It’s time for Haitians to be able to choose their own government and for the international community to respect and support their choice.

Charlie Hinton is a member of the Haiti Action Committee, www.haitisolidarity.net. He may be reached at lifewish@lmi.net.

by Ann Garrison

KPFA Weekend News broadcast Dec. 5, 2015

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power calls on Rwanda’s President Kagame to step down at the end of his term in 2017.

Transcript

On August 4, 2014, Samantha Power posted this picture of herself with President Kagame to her Twitter account, with a note that said they were discussing regional security and Rwanda’s contributions to U.N. peacekeeping forces. This week she called on him to step down at the end of his current term.

KPFA/Weekend News Anchor Sharon Sobotta: Both Rwandan and Congolese Americans and other members of the Rwandan and Congolese diaspora have for years asked the United States to stop supporting the military dictatorship of Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Kagame’s rule in Rwanda is famously ironfisted and his invasion, massacres and plunder in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been well documented in more than 20 years of U.N. investigations.

Earlier this week U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power called on Kagame to step down at the end of his term in 2017. KPFA’s Ann Garrison has more.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: In a U.N. press conference, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power called upon Rwandan President Paul Kagame to step down at the end of his term in 2017.

Samantha Power: We expect President Kagame to step down at the end of his term in 2017. President Kagame has an opportunity to set an example for a region in which leaders seem too tempted, again, to view themselves as indispensable to their own country’s trajectories.

KPFA: In June, the U.S. State Department told KPFA that it would not support another term for President Kagame. Ambassador Power’s statement seemed even more significant because she is a longstanding supporter of Kagame.

Power built her career on “Bystanders to Genocide,” an article she wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in September 2001, in which she decried U.S. failure to intervene to stop the massacres in Rwanda in 1994. She expanded on that article in her Pulitzer Prize winning book, “A Problem from Hell; America in the Age of Genocide,” in which she asked the question, “Why do American leaders who vow ‘never again’ repeatedly fail to stop genocide?”

As a member of the National Security Council, she is credited with convincing President Obama that the U.S. was morally obliged to join the NATO war on Libya to “stop the next Rwanda.”

Rwanda’s President Kagame has long been shielded by his powerful friends, including Samantha Power and Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Howard Buffett and Rev. Rick Warren, but Power’s statement suggests that Kagame’s attempt to cling to power beyond 2017 exceeds the limits of support he can demand from the West. The European Union also objected to Kagame’s attempt to cling to power by revising the Rwandan constitution.

In Berkeley, for Pacifica, KPFA and AfrobeatRadio, I’m Ann Garrison.

Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report, Black Star News, Counterpunch and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News, KPFA Flashpoints and for her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at anniegarrison@gmail.com. In March 2014 she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace in the Great Lakes Region of Africa through her reporting.

by Ann Garrison

This is the transcript of an interview broadcast on the Pacifica Radio Network’s Project Censored Show on KPFA Jan. 1, 2016, and on other Pacifica stations during the following week, with guest host Ann Garrison:

Project Censored/Ann Garrison: Happy New Year, and welcome to the Project Censored show. Thanks to Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff for inviting me, Ann Garrison, to guest host.

Today we’re going to talk about regime change engineered by the U.S. government and its allies in East and Central Africa. We’re going to talk about Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1990s and Burundi today, where we’re still hoping for a better outcome.

Aerial bombing campaigns make U.S. wars for regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria highly visible and absolutely undeniable, but the corporate and state press don’t describe U.S. sponsored wars in Africa as such if they talk about them at all. Millions of African people have nevertheless lost their lives or seen their lives destroyed in U.S. sponsored wars for regime change and natural resources in Africa.

For more than a year now, Western policymakers and press have warned of a genocide in Burundi like that in Rwanda in 1994, and called for a so-called humanitarian intervention to override Burundi’s national sovereignty and replace President Pierre Nkurunziza with a president more to their liking. They tell us that they’re campaigning to stop genocide and mass atrocities, or often, for short, “to stop the next Rwanda,” which is what they told us when they took us to war in Libya and Syria.

One of the founding documents of humanitarian interventionist ideology is our U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power’s “Bystanders to Genocide,” an essay decrying America’s failure to stop the Rwandan Genocide, which she expanded into her book, “The Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide.”

Here with me to talk about this is University of Pennsylvania Emeritus Professor of Finance Edward S. Herman, co-author, with Noam Chomsky, of the classic “Manufacturing Consent.” Herman is also the co-author of “The Politics of Genocide” and “Enduring Lies: Rwanda in the Propaganda System 20 Years Later,” with researcher and writer David Peterson.

We’re going to talk about the enduring lies about Rwanda, which “humanitarian” interventionists now repeat as they pursue regime change in Burundi.

Welcome, Professor Ed Herman.

Ed Herman: I’m happy to be with you.

AG: Professor Herman, could you start by telling us why you and David Peterson describe the enduring lies about what really happened in Rwanda as the greatest success of the propaganda system in the past two decades?

EH: In this book, Ann, we describe the fact that Paul Kagame, the leader of Rwanda, has killed more than five times as many people as Idi Amin. He invaded Rwanda in 1990 and carried out a war of conquest there that ended sometime in 1994. He invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1996 and went in and out of that country for years, killing what the U.N. itself admitted was probably more than 4 million people.

Paul Kagame, the leader of Rwanda, has killed more than five times as many people as Idi Amin. He invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1996 and went in and out of that country for years, killing what the U.N. itself admitted was probably more than 4 million people.

He runs a dictatorship in Rwanda, where he gets 93 percent of the vote in a country where 90 percent of the people are Hutu who consider him to be a conqueror, a terrorist leader. And yet he’s considered, in the West, to be a hero, a savior.

In The New Yorker, he was described as the Abraham Lincoln of Africa. For a man who has outdone Idi Amin, I think this is miraculous.

The only way we can explain it is that he serves the ends of the United States, but it’s still a miracle that a man with that record can, in the free press of the United States, be considered a noble spirit.

In the capital city Kigali, a Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) soldier walks by the site of the April 6, 1994, plane crash that killed Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamirain in this May 23, 1994, photo. – Photo: Jean Marc Boujou, AP

AG: In other words, everything we’ve been told is wrong. And I can add that the enduring lies are so successful that that includes much of what’s been broadcast here on Pacifica Radio and published in any number of left liberal outlets. Any attempt to edit the Wikipedia entry on the Rwandan Genocide triggers so many edit alerts that it starts a Wiki editing war until the Wikipedia authorities declare a ceasefire with no changes made. That Wikipedia entry is all but written in stone.

Now, can we just go through the chapter headings in your book, each of which addresses one of the enduring lies?

EH: Yes, let’s do that.

AG: Since you’ve already given us some background and context, let’s start with Chapter Two: “The RPF invasion and low-level aggressive war that never was a ‘civil war.” People who know the story of the Rwandan Genocide only through the movie “Hotel Rwanda” are likely to think that it was an explosion of tribal bloodletting that began and ended in 100 days’ time in 1994.

Those who know that it was actually the final 100 days of a four-year war are likely to believe that it was the end of the Rwandan Civil War. There is an entry in the Wikipedia on the Rwandan Civil War. Why is this an enduring lie?

EH: Well, there was no major ethnic conflict in Rwanda back in late 1990. What happened in October 1990 was an invasion of armed forces from Uganda. This was a group of Tutsi, several thousand Tutsi soldiers, who were part of the Ugandan army.

They entered, they pushed several hundred thousand Hutu farmers out of their homes in northern Rwanda, and they were pushed back, but they kept coming. And the United States and its allies gave them assistance.

They pressed the Rwandan government to sign an Arusha agreement in 1993, which gave Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and its army a lot of power in Rwanda. But it also provided for an election to be held about 22 months after the agreement was signed, and the RPF could not have won that election. So they made sure they didn’t have to win that election, Instead, they resumed the war on April 6, 1994, and by July 1994, they had conquered Rwanda.

A 1993 Arusha agreement provided for an election to be held about 22 months after the agreement was signed, and the RPF could not have won that election. So they made sure they didn’t have to win that election. Instead, they resumed the war on April 6, 1994, and by July 1994, they had conquered Rwanda.

So the whole period from October 1990 to, say, July 1994 was a period in which the RPF was engaged in subversion and readying itself for a final war of conquest. So it was a war. I would say this was a war.

AG: OK, now let’s consider Chapter Three: “‘Hutu Power extremists’ did not shoot down Habyarimana’s Falcon 50 jet.” Juvenal Habyarimana was the president of Rwanda from 1973 until he was assassinated in 1994, a little more than a year before these elections were supposed to happen.

He was a Hutu, a member of Rwanda’s Hutu majority who had overcome centuries of Tutsi subjugation with independence in 1960. He died while returning home, along with Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, also a Hutu, when his plane was shot out of the sky above Rwanda’s capital Kigali.

After four years of war and massacres, which had driven a million Rwandans to the outskirts of Kigali, where they were camped as internal refugees, this convinced the Hutu population that the Tutsi army was coming to kill or subjugate them all again, and some Hutu began to kill Tutsi. Now, the Rwandan government narrative is that Hutu extremists assassinated Habyarimana because he might have blocked their genocidal plans. What’s the truth?

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania

EH: There’s no evidence of these genocidal plans, and the Hutu would have won the upcoming election.  The election was foreclosed by the assassination and conquest by Kagame.

But we don’t have to speculate about this. The Rwanda tribunal actually carried out an investigation of who shot the plane down back in 1996 and 1997.  They appointed a 20-man group to carry out this study. These investigators hired by the tribunal  came up with a report in 1996, based on what they thought to be credible witness testimony by members of the RPF, that Kagame had planned the assassinwhen the tribunal found that theation and carried it out.

When this report was presented to the prosecutor of the tribunal, she consulted the United States and then canceled the investigation. And, from 1996 to the present, although the shoot-down of this plane is widely thought to be the event that triggered the genocide, the tribunal hasn’t looked into it and the U.N. hasn’t looked into it beyond that.

These investigators hired by the Rwanda tribunal produced a report, in 1996, based on what they thought was credible witness testimony by members of the RPF, that Kagame had planned the assassination and carried it out. When this report was presented to the prosecutor of the tribunal, she consulted the United States and then canceled the investigation.

There’s lots of other evidence that the shoot down was carried out by Kagame, and it was logical too because he couldn’t win an election. So, to attain power by conquest, he shot the plane down.

And another point that shows that he was the villain in the case is that when the plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, his forces were ready and were in action within two hours of the shoot down, whereas the alleged plotters were completely bamboozled and confused and put up almost no resistance. So anyway, the evidence is compelling that the shoot-down was carried out by Kagame, and it’s logical. But most critically, it’s a proven fact.

AG: And even, whether you believe the evidence or not, Paul Kagame and his forces were the only ones who stood to gain by Habyarimana’s assassination and what happened afterwards, right? Otherwise they would have lost to Habyarimana and his party in the next year’s election.

EH: Yes, he’s the only gainer from it.

AG: OK, let’s move on to Chapter Four: “Rwandan genocide by the numbers.” When Professor Allan Stam wrote to a U.N. official to ask how he estimated that the dead in Rwanda were 500,000, the U.N. official responded that he couldn’t quite remember, but they knew they needed a really big number.

The numbers that eventually came to be most widely accepted were that 800,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi and a few Hutu moderates who tried to protect them died at the hands of Hutu extremists. Why is this impossible?

When Kagame arrived to speak at Oklahoma Christian University on April 30, 2010, he was met by protesters, including Rwandan American Claude Gatebuke. – Photo: Kendall Brown

EH: It’s impossible because the number of Tutsi in Rwanda, back in 1994, was way under 800,000. In fact, the best figure one could come up with in those early years was based on the census, the Rwandan census of 1991, which gave the Tutsi numbers at about 590,000.

So if all of them were wiped out, it wouldn’t come anywhere near 800,000. But all of them weren’t wiped out. After the war, the best estimate, which was by a Tutsi survivors’ group, was that there were 400,000 Tutsi still there.

So let’s say there were 600,000 beforehand and afterwards there were 400,000, that means 200,000 dead Tutsi. If there were 800,000 killed and 200,000 of them were Tutsi, 600,000 of them must have been Hutu.

If it was a million, 800,000 of them must have been Hutu. And it’s completely logical that the Hutu were the greatest victims by number, because this was an invasion by a Tutsi army.

If a million Rwandans were killed in 1994, 800,000 of them must have been Hutu. And it’s completely logical that the Hutu were the greatest victims by number, because this was an invasion by a Tutsi army.

I conclude, as do Christian Davenport and Allan Stam, who did a very careful study of the killings in 1994, that many more Hutu were killed than Tutsi. And my estimate would be that it was between a 2 to 1 and 5 to 1 ratio, probably more like 4 to 1. That’s my best point estimate.

AG: OK, and because this is a very sensitive subject, I want to add that this was a tragedy for everyone in Rwanda. Hutus and Tutsis died.

Now let’s move on to Chapter Five, “The West’s alleged ‘failure to intervene.’” The story of the West’s failure to intervene to stop the Rwandan genocide has become the starting point of all the campaigns to go to war to “stop the next Rwanda.” What’s wrong with this story?

EH: What’s wrong with it is that the West was intervening from the very beginning. The West supported Kagame’s invasion in 1990. He was trained at Fort Leavenworth. And the United States and Britain pressed the Rwandan government to allow the RPF to penetrate and bring armed forces into Rwanda.

Just before the shoot down of the plane on April 6, 1994, the United States caused the U.N. to withdraw some of its troops. That was an intervention.

After the shoot down and the mass killings really started, the government of Rwanda called repeatedly for a ceasefire repeatedly, but Kagame did not want it because he knew he could win. And therefore the United States did not support any ceasefire and it recognized Kagame’s government after three more months of war.

It’s absolutely untrue that the West failed to intervene. They did intervene, but they intervened to support the man who was engaging in this war of conquest in Rwanda.

It’s absolutely untrue that the West failed to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. They did intervene, but they intervened to support the man who was engaging in this war of conquest in Rwanda.

AG: I think that really needs emphasis. People have been led to believe that the massacres began and Paul Kagame and his army moved to stop them. What actually happened was that the massacres began and Paul Kagame resumed the war to win, at all costs.

EH: Yes, that’s true. In fact one could say that all the dead people were collateral damage. The aim of the United States was to support Kagame’s takeover, and if vast numbers of people were killed, it was a cost that we were prepared to accept.

But it doesn’t look good, so we have to say that we failed to intervene; we failed to stop it. Well, in fact, we not only failed to stop it, we actually supported the mass killing.

One could say that all the dead people were collateral damage. The aim of the United States was to support Kagame’s takeover, and if vast numbers of people were killed, it was a cost that we were prepared to accept. We not only failed to stop it, we actually supported the mass killing.

AG: Yes, Professor Allan Stam has reported that the Pentagon estimated collateral damage of 250,000 people, a quarter of a million. It turned out to be closer to a million.

EH: I can believe it.

AG: Those are some pretty grim numbers. The Pentagon, according to Professor Allan Stam, estimated that the collateral damage for putting our guy Kagame in power in Rwanda would be 250,000 Rwandan lives and it turned out to be closer to a million. Let’s take a breath and a musical break and we’ll be back shortly.

Musical interlude: Rwandan gospel music

Rwandan gospel singer Kizito Mihigo is now serving a 10-year prison sentence in Rwanda.

AG: And that was Rwandan gospel singer Kizito Muhigo, a Rwandan Tutsi who is now serving 10 years in a Rwandan prison for singing those lyrics for both Hutu and Tutsi who died in the Rwandan massacres. The lyrics are:

Even though genocide orphaned me

Let it not make me lose empathy for others

Their lives too were brutally taken

But not qualified as genocide

Those brothers and sisters

They too are humans, I pray for them

They too are humans, I comfort them

They too are humans, I remember them

AG: Now we return to our conversation with Professor Ed Herman, co-author, with David Peterson, of “Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System 20 Years Later.” Chapter Six: “The ICTR delivers victor’s justice.” The International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda is hailed as a great triumph of international justice, mostly in the corporate and state press. What was it in fact?

Rwandan refugee children plead for permission to cross the bridge to Congo, then Zaire, during the 1994 Rwandan massacres. – Photo: AP

EH: It did deliver victor’s justice. The first part of that statement is therefore correct. That it was a great triumph of international justice is a complete fallacy because victor’s justice is not international justice. Victor’s justice is a kind of revenge and, in fact, the ICTR served as a virtual arm of Kagame and the Rwandan state.

It went after only Hutu, although, as I pointed out a while ago, the majority of killings were killings of Hutu in Rwanda. But of course the RPF could not be brought to trial.

And of course the shoot-down of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane. When the tribunal found that Kagame’s forces were the ones who had shot down Habyarimana’s plane, it canceled any further investigation. That’s victor’s justice and a triumph of international injustice.

AG: They actually fired the prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, who had said that she was going to indict President Kagame for assassinating President Habyarimana.

EH: The prosecutor who dropped the case was Louise Arbour, but Carla Del Ponte actually did try, as you say, to go after some RPF people. She was not allowed to do it. She was fired shortly thereafter. Again, this is true victor’s justice.

AG: OK, Chapter Seven: “The alleged Hutu conspiracy to commit genocide that never was.” The idea that Rwanda’s majority Hutu conspired to wipe out the Tutsi minority is central to the Rwandan government’s official narrative. What’s the truth?

EH: Actually, the belief that there was a conspiracy to commit genocide is swallowed by the ICTR, by Human Rights Watch and many, many commentators. But the tribunal itself, when it had to come to grips with this, couldn’t find any such conspiracy.

They did believe that there was a genocide, and certainly there was mass killing, but a conspiracy to commit genocide would have had to take place before the shoot-down of the plane on April 6, 1994.

And so when high level people in the Hutu government were brought to trial and there was an attempt to find that they actually had a plan, the tribunal couldn’t find it. In this book, we studied 15 top trials where the prosecution attempted to prove a conspiracy to commit genocide, and in all 15 the tribunal found that there was no evidence for a conspiracy.

A Rwandan refugee father and his baby barely cling to life in Kibumba refugee camp, Goma, Zaire, in July 1994. – Photo: Debbie Morello, USN&R

There was killing, which they called genocide, but they could not find any pre-April 6, 1994, plan to commit genocide. So they rejected this argument, but the defenders and apologists for Kagame continue to talk about this conspiracy to commit genocide.

AG: Yes, I have noticed this, that the press doesn’t hesitate to repeat this, that there was a conspiracy before April 6, even though no court at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda convicted anyone of that crime.

EH: Yes, it’s a remarkable fact that wipes out many of the claims about what happened in Rwanda.

AG: OK, let’s move on to Chapter Eight, “Did Paul Kagame’s RPF really ‘stop the genocide’?” This is the story that’s made him a celebrity in Western capitals. What’s the truth?

EH: Well, as I’ve been saying, Kagame actually started the genocide. He carried out the war. He refused to accept any ceasefires during the killing period. And I have made the case that more people were killed by Kagame’s RPF than were killed by any Hutus.

Kagame actually started the genocide. He carried out the war. He refused to accept any ceasefires during the killing period. And I have made the case that more people were killed by Kagame’s RPF than were killed by any Hutus.

I think this idea that he stopped the genocide is the inverse of the truth. He started the genocide and in fact it never ended, because after he conquered the country, he didn’t stop killing Hutu. And within a short time, he went in to start killing Hutu and do other things in the Congo, where vast numbers of Hutu were killed.

I would argue that, insofar as there was a genocide in Rwanda in 1994, it can be credited to Paul Kagame. And there was a second, bigger genocide in the Congo that was also Paul Kagame’s doing.

So he’s a double genocidist, and one could argue too that Bill Clinton was a partner in this. Bill Clinton is arguably a genocidist.

AG: Yes, and one would hope that people might consider that in this upcoming election year. I know that people from this part of the world are very concerned about the likelihood of Hillary Clinton’s election.

Paul Kagame is a double genocidist, and one could argue too that Bill Clinton was a partner in this. Bill Clinton is arguably a genocidist.

Bill Clinton and his daughter Chelsea are led by Paul Kagame on a tour of Rwanda health clinics in July 2012. – Photo: Cyril Ndegeya, AP

Now, Chapter Nine: “Africa’s World War: Kagame’s alleged pursuit of ‘genocidaires’ in Zaire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the death of millions.” What’s wrong with Kagame’s claim that his troops and proxy militias were in DR Congo for nearly 20 years to hunt down the Hutu genocidaires guilty of killing Rwanda’s Tutsi in 1994?

EH: Well, one problem is there were no “genocidaires.” There were members of the Rwandan army that had been beaten and dispersed, but they were not genocidaires. That’s baloney.

And he knows who did the killing, that he himself with his forces did most of the killing. But also, the army that was in the Congo, the old Hutu army, was no longer a real force. It had been defeated and these people had been dispersed in the Congo. They did not constitute a real threat to Rwanda.

So this claim was really, essentially, a big lie that Kagame was using with the support of the United States to continue attacking in the Congo. I mean you couldn’t say, “I’m going into the Congo to exploit their rich resources.”

No, you had to have a better excuse, and so the excuse was that there were these people who had committed planned genocide in Rwanda out there in the Congo and he was going in after them.  For 20 years. This is baloney but it’s been very effective.

Kagame couldn’t say, “I’m going into the Congo to exploit their rich resources.” No, he had to have a better excuse, and so the excuse was that there were these people who committed planned genocide in Rwanda in the Congo and he was going in after them.  For 20 years. This is baloney but it’s been very effective.

It’s one reason why the ICTR, the tribunal, and the continuous prosecution of Hutu in Rwanda played into Kagame’s hands. He could argue, look, these people are being tried and convicted.

These are people who’ve committed genocide and there are some of them out there in the Congo, so I must hunt down these evil criminals. It’s a wonderful propaganda gambit. And it was swallowed in the West and he was not stopped.

So we’re dealing here with really mass killing. And yet there’s no tribunal that’s ever been established to try anybody for these crimes that tower over even what happened in Rwanda. Why is that? It’s because he’s a U.S. client and he’s serving U.S. and British interests in this resource rich Democratic Republic of the Congo.

AG: OK, now finally Chapter 12: “The role of the U.N., human rights groups, media, and intellectuals in promulgating the standard model, otherwise known as the official narrative of the Rwandan Genocide.”

Click to enlarge

EH: Well, the United States has been the superpower that has dominated what has happened in this area in the Congo and in Rwanda. The American people know almost nothing about the area, and since the United States has had a strong position of support for Kagame and for the invasion of the Congo, that dominated all the institutions that were associated with it.

The U.N. – most of its reports – were really supportive of the invasion. They swallowed the conspiracy to commit genocide line. They provided the tribunal.

It’s true that they did have some reports, like these reports I mentioned, that talked about mass killing in the Congo, but they couldn’t avoid that because this was such an enormous volume of killing, and there were millions of refugees. So the U.N. had to confront it, and they had to speak a certain amount of truth.

But essentially, the U.N. supported the U.S. position. And even during the Rwanda crisis in 1994, the U.N. did nothing when Kagame put a lot of military people right in Kigali. They let him get away with it.

The human rights groups also did poorly. Human Rights Watch was an outrage from the beginning, following the standard line.

And the media, moving forward to April 2014, and the 20th anniversary of the 1994 massacres, have supported the Western propaganda line.  When that anniversary made headlines, the bias of the mainstream media was dramatic. Thus 20 advocates for the standard model were given ten times as many bylined articles ad distinguished dissenters from that model; most of the dissenting experts couldn’t get into the mainstream media at all. And particularly terrible were the U.S. and British media.

Of the 20 dissenters from the standard model, there were a grand total of 17 articles, and most of them were in France. And most of these experts that were dissenters could never get into the mainstream media at all. And particularly terrible were the U.S. and British media.

The photo of this distraught child has become emblematic of the 1994 Rwandan massacres.

AG: OK, now that we’ve gone through most of the enduring lies, what similarities do you see between Rwanda 1990 to 1994 and what’s happening in Burundi now?

EH: Well, one very important similarity is that the United States and its allies are trying for regime change in Burundi, just as they did in Rwanda. They wanted to get rid of the Habyarimana government, a social democratic government in Rwanda. They don’t like the social democratic government in Burundi and they’re trying to get rid of it.

Another thing is that they’re talking of intervention here based on the fact that the head of state of Burundi has taken a third term, which is contested on a constitutional basis. And it’s ridiculous that the great powers should be upset about a third term, when they’re supporting Kagame, who is a dictator and who has his chief contestant, Victoire Ingabire, in jail and claims to get 93 percent of the vote.

It’s ridiculous that the great powers should be upset about a third term for Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza, when they’re supporting Kagame, who is a dictator and who has his chief contestant, Victoire Ingabire, in jail and claims to get 93 percent of the vote.

They swallow that and don’t bother him at all, but here they’re going after the Burundian state, which is by comparison with Rwanda a wonderful democracy, and it is a social democracy.

AG: They have objected to Kagame’s plan to run for another term, but that’s their only objection.

EH: Yes, after all these years of atrocities.

And there’s also intervention more directly in Burundi now. There’s strong evidence that the Kagame government has been intervening in Burundi and that it’s trying to stir up agitation and killings that will cause more tension and upheaval in Burundi. This is all in preparation for further intervention to “save the people from genocide.” It has a familiar ring to it.

AG: Yes, it does. On page 20 in your book, you write, “At the time, meaning in the 1990s, and in contrast to the crises in Syria, Ukraine and Iraq today, Boris Yeltsin’s Russia was a non-factor in the U.N. Security Council and a rubber stamp for the United States.” Since you wrote that, Russia and China have used their veto power to keep the Security Council’s Western powers from passing resolutions to censure Burundi’s President Nkurunziza for seeking a third term in office or to approve humanitarian intervention “to stop genocide.”

Nothing has yet come to a formal vote and veto, but the U.S. and E.U. keep failing to get the language they want into resolutions that are passed. Most recently, they asked the Security Council to approve an intervention by 5,000 African Union troops. It responded instead that it welcomed contingency planning in case an intervention was needed, but without giving its approval. How do you think this might play out?

EH: That’s a tough one. I’m just hoping that the Russians and the Chinese will stand firm and that the situation in Burundi will not deteriorate. If it does, if the destabilization efforts of Kagame and probably the United States are successful and it becomes increasingly violent, then it’s going to be tougher to stop the approval of that intervention from the African Union troops.

I just hope that doesn’t happen, but it’s very hard to predict. It’s an ominous situation.

AG: Is there anything else you’d like to say in closing?

EH: Well, what I’d like to say is that this issue on Rwanda and the struggles there and the work of the ICTR, it’s a very complicated issue, so I would urge people to get this book that we put out, which has a lot of detail.

But there are also some other really excellent books on the work of the ICTR and other international courts. There’s a very good book called “Justice Belied: The Unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice,” and it’s an anthology edited by Sébastien Chartrand and John Philpot. “Justice Belied” – it’s a critical work on the workings of the international justice system.

And many of the writers are very familiar with Rwanda and the issues in Africa and it’s even argued by some of the writers that the international justice system, as it’s now working, is really an arm of U.S. foreign policy.

It’s even argued by some of the writers that the international justice system, as it’s now working, is really an arm of U.S. foreign policy.

AG: And here I think we have to mention Robin Philpot’s book as well, “Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa, from Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction,” and the CIUT-Toronto Taylor Report, which has kept the truth about this story alive for nearly two decades. The Taylor Report airs at 5 pm Eastern time every Monday on CIUT-89.5fm-Toronto.

Professor Ed Herman, thank you for speaking to the Project Censored show.

EH: It was a pleasure, Ann.

Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report, Black Star News, Counterpunch and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News, KPFA Flashpoints and for her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at anniegarrison@gmail.com. In March 2014 she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace in the Great Lakes Region of Africa through her reporting.

by Diane Bukowski

Detroit – The deliberate lead poisoning of the people of Flint, especially its children, babies and those still in their mothers’ wombs, likely ranks among the greatest genocidal crimes in the U.S. in the 21st century, an act of domestic terrorism comparable only to the thousands of murders of unarmed Blacks, Latinos and poor people by law enforcement since 2000.

Flint’s dirty water gushes from a fire hydrant.

No matter what promises Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder made in his Jan. 19 State of the State address, no matter how many planeloads and truckloads of bottled water are brought into the city now, no matter how much is spent to restructure water systems, no matter how many speeches are given, rallies held and class action lawsuits filed, the damage done is “irreversible,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

“Lead has … serious consequences for the health of children,” WHO says. “At high levels of exposure, lead attacks the brain and central nervous system to cause coma, convulsions and even death. Children who survive severe lead poisoning may be left with mental retardation and behavioral disruption. …

“In particular lead affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioral changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are believed to be irreversible.” Adults are affected as well.

Every child and adult in Flint who drank Flint’s water since April 2014 has been exposed to lead, according to studies done so far. That includes 8,657 children under the age of 6, who are most severely affected. Ten adults have died so far from Legionnaire’s Disease, also a result of the lead contamination.

EPA guidelines for lead contamination of water indicate that action needs to be taken at 5-15 parts per billion (ppb) of lead, but that NO level is “safe.”

But in Virginia Tech’s study of 257 Flint households, according to the Washington Post, “The lowest reading they obtained was around 200 ppb, already ridiculously high. But more than half of the readings came in at more than 1,000 ppb. Some came in above 5,000 — the level at which EPA considers the water to be ‘toxic waste.’ The highest reading registered at an astounding 13,000 ppb.”

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the director of pediatric residency at Hurley Children’s Hospital who first exposed the severity of the crisis, told the AP, “It has such damning, lifelong and generational consequences.”

What punishment is sufficient for those who are responsible? What must be done to forever change the nature of the system that preordained this would happen?

“I know apologies won’t make up for mistakes that were made,” Snyder said at his State of the State address yesterday. “I take full responsibility to fix the problem so it will never happen again. We will be doing whatever we must until the crisis is resolved.”

He even hypocritically had Dr. Hanna-Attisha stand for a round of applause, mispronouncing her last name and saying he calls her “Dr. Mona.”

While admitting some responsibility, Snyder laid most of the blame on officials from the Michigan Departments of Environmental Quality and Health and Human Services, whose leaders answered directly to him. He announced he had fired several top MDEQ executives.

Flint’s Department of Public Works Director Howard Croft exposed Snyder.

He repeated the lie that the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) terminated its service to Flint. He also blamed the mayor and City Council of Flint, who voted in 2013 to connect with the private Karegnondi Pipeline, although they did not vote to disconnect from DWSD immediately or use Flint River water.

The Karegnondi Pipeline itself represents more dangers. The mainstream media has held it up as the ultimate answer to Flint’s problems, providing “clean” water from Lake Huron. However, they fail to mention that is ALL Karegnondi will do. The individual communities serviced by it must build their OWN treatment facilities.

An initial assessment from the U.S. Environmental Task Force’s newly created Flint Drinking Water Task Force warns: “There are many other communities scheduled to transition from their current water sources to the KWA pipeline. Although the source water will be the same for the City of Flint and all communities transitioning to the KWA pipeline source, the intended treatment planned for these communities may differ and the studies undertaken for the City of Flint may or may not be suitable for use by the other communities.”

Snyder also blamed the EPA. The EPA said in a statement, “Our first priority is to make sure the water in Flint is safe, but we also must look at what the agency could have done differently,” with a spokeswoman confirming the agency did not act fast enough to address the problem

In Montgomery, Alabama, Blacks carpooled and walked to work and school for over a year, refusing to financially support a racist system, thus forcing it to meet their demands.

The EPA statement also said that “while EPA worked within the framework of the law to repeatedly and urgently communicate the steps the state needed to take to properly treat its water, those necessary (EPA) actions were not taken as quickly as they should have been.”

It cited “failures and resistance at the state and local levels to work with us in a forthright, transparent and proactive manner.”

But it was Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder who directly ordered Flint’s then-Emergency Manager Darnell Earley to disconnect Flint’s water system from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department and use the Flint River water and city facilities, with no lead protections in place, in April 2014. That set the poisoning of Flint in motion, according to an article published by Curt Guyette in the Michigan Democracy Watch Blog.

In a recent interview with the ACLU of Michigan, Flint Public Works Director Howard Croft … pointed the finger of blame at the state, saying the decision to switch came from the governor’s office,” Guyette wrote.

Earley, at Snyder’s behest, is now wreaking havoc in the Detroit Public Schools. As of today, 88 Detroit schools have been ordered shut down due to walkouts by teachers over conditions in the schools and Snyder’s role in dismantling DPS.

U.S. Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton took cynical advantage of the situation during the presidential debates, opining that the lead poisoning would not have happened in affluent white cities. However, she did not say that if elected, she would have the U.S. Department of Justice criminally indict Snyder or any other operatives in the disaster.

Detroit children wait for free coats given away by the Moorish Science Temple of America

Clinton likewise neglected to address the millions of deaths and destruction of world-class water system and other infrastructures resulting from the genocidal global wars she and President Obama continue to conduct against Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and throughout Africa and Latin America.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson of Rainbow PUSH spoke last week in Flint about the lead crisis and then stuck around for celebrations of the national Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. birthday holiday Jan. 18. He was also present outside the governor’s address.

“We should have … tape around the city because Flint is a crime scene.” he said. “The people of Flint have been betrayed.”

But only two days after the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, Jackson did not propose using the strategy that resulted in one of Dr. King’s major successes – the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which brought the city to its knees economically and led eventually to passage of national civil rights legislation.

We, the Voice of Detroit, propose once again a national boycott of Michigan’s major businesses!

Kevin Matthews

Why? As Dr. King proved, the only way to affect the slaughter of poor and working people by corporate interests is to hit the banksters in the pocket.

During a Michigan Welfare Rights march against the cut-offs of 12,600 Michigan families from public benefits on Sept. 29, 2011, VOD asked Jackson and U.S Rep. John Conyers if they would call for a boycott of Michigan businesses in response to what the protesters said amounted to “murder.”

Both Jackson and Conyers reacted with a horrified, resounding “No.” They said an “economic recovery” was underway in Michigan, despite evidence to the contrary all around them in the neighborhoods of Detroit.

Jackson went on to attend Rainbow PUSH’s Global Automotive and Energy Summit at MGM Grand Casino the following week, hobnobbing with corporate executives who sit on Rainbow PUSH’s board.

In fact, it was Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill Clinton who signed the legislation which permanently cut off federal benefits to the poor after four years, if each state opted in. Just before she left office, Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm gave state approval, although she had vowed not to do so, leaving it to Snyder to drop the ax.

Today, Michigan’s majority-Black cities are suffering far worse than even in 2011.

In Detroit, with at least an 83 percent Black population, 59 percent of the city’s children live in poverty, with rates of unemployment, home mortgage and tax foreclosures and evictions, and public school shutdowns skyrocketing.

Under the Bankruptcy Confirmation Plan of 2014, Detroit has effectively lost the revenue of all its major assets, including the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, Belle Isle and the Detroit Institute of Arts, where billions of dollars worth of art owned by the city was lost to a “trust.” The Flint debacle results directly from the state-sponsored dismantling of the country’s third largest public water and sewerage facility.

Congressman John Conyers – Photo: AP

VOD recently reported that there are hardly any workers left at the city’s Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP), the largest in the U.S. and the third largest in the world. As raw sewage flows into the Detroit River and downriver to southeast Michigan and Toledo, Ohio, due to increasing dysfunction there, countless more Flints can be expected.

Like the WWTP workers, City of Detroit workers everywhere have faced massive layoffs and privatization. Retirees are rapidly sinking below the poverty level, having lost huge chunks of their pensions, annuity savings and medical benefits.

Some, such as Belinda Myers-Florence, officer of the Detroit Active and Retired Employees Association (DAREA), which has now appealed the bankruptcy plan to the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, have lost their lives due to the stress of this vicious attack.

Rev. Edward Pinkney, a fearless protest and boycott leader

Highland Park’s population of 10,000 is 93.5 percent Black, and 51 percent of its people live below the poverty level. Pontiac, 52 percent Black, has a 36.6 percent poverty rate. Flint, 56.6 percent Black, has a 41 percent poverty level.

Benton Harbor, nearly 90 percent Black, had 42.6 percent of its people living below the poverty level in 2013.

General Motors first abandoned and impoverished Flint, Pontiac and Detroit, shutting down most of its auto plants in those cities.

Ford Motor Co., whose pro-fascist founder Henry Ford created the white city of Dearborn, has done nothing to stop the ongoing racist murders of Blacks who venture into that city, including the execution-style slaying of Kevin Matthews by a white Dearborn cop Dec. 23, 2015.

Chrysler abandoned Highland Park to its fate, leaving its public school system, libraries and housing stock in shambles.

Among other Michigan-based companies, Whirlpool abandoned the nearly all-Black city of Benton Harbor, pulling its plants out, taking over public land and sanctioning racist police murders there as well. With Whirlpool’s support, the activist Rev. Edward Pinkney is now languishing in a Michigan prison, falsely charged with changing dates on an election recall petition aimed at Whirlpool-endorsed Mayor James Hightower.

What is the common denominator for these cities and many more like them, including even working-class majority white cities in Michigan? After all, over the last 10 years, the state has cut $7.2 billion in revenue-sharing to its cities.

It was the coup d’état pulled off by Snyder and his legislative and corporate allies, in the secrecy of night in December 2012. They created the second Emergency Manager Act, P.A. 436, after the residents of 84 out of 86 counties had voted down its virtually identical predecessor, P.A. 4, in a referendum vote.

Despite pleas by Michigan’s Black population, 51 percent of which was disenfranchised under the emergency manager acts, the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and his Black attorney general, Eric Holder, refused to open a Voting Rights Act investigation of the legislation, requested by U.S. Congressman John Conyers, D-Detroit.

Boycott major Michigan corporations

Hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. fought in the streets, in the fields, in the cities of the South and North – and many lost their lives – to establish the Voting Rights Act. The failure of a Democratic Black administration to fight the attack on it in Michigan was a historic betrayal that can never be forgiven or forgotten.

Like the youth of Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago and elsewhere who have spent the last two years fighting in the streets for their very lives against police assassinations, the people of Flint and of Michigan must not be hoodwinked by the election hi-jinks being played out now.

Direct action by the people, including boycotts, uprisings, strikes like the current mass walkouts by Detroit Public School teachers and other militant responses can be the only appropriate response to the horrendous crime which has been committed against the people of Flint.

Detroit-based journalist Diane Bukowski, an investigative reporter who wrote for the Michigan Citizen for many years and has been an activist in union and people’s struggles for 40 years, is publisher of The Voice of Detroit, “the city’s independent newspaper, unbossed and unbought,” where this story first appeared. She can be reached at diane_bukowski@hotmail.com.

Related stories:

http://voiceofdetroit.net/2015/10/16/flint-water-and-the-no-blame-game-true-files-fed-complaint-re-disparate-impact/

http://voiceofdetroit.net/2015/10/13/will-regional-takeover-of-detroit-water-make-residents-of-6-counties-drink-flint-water/

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by The People’s Minister of Information JR

2015 was a historic political year for the African continent because one of the continent’s most radical anti-imperialist leaders chaired the African Union, and I am talking about President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Although Western sanctions have been leveled against Zimbabwe for the last decade and a half because of its land reclamation program, which stripped the descendants of European colonial farmers of the lands their predecessors stole from the indigenous population, returning the land to 350,000 of the rightful caretakers, Mugabe and Zimbabwe have continued to blaze a revolutionary path, looking East instead of West to sustain their sovereignty.

Inside of the U.S., there is an overwhelming amount of propaganda aimed at creating a wave of public opinion that goes against the interests of African people worldwide, and we have dedicated our lives and platforms to changing that narrative.

I talked with Obi Egbuna, the U.S. correspondent for the Zimbabwean national newspaper, The Herald, about what President Mugabe accomplished leading Zimbabwe and the African Union in 2015. Here is what he had to say.

Evans Gororo is a farmer near Chinamora, Zimbabwe, whose “corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,” as the song says. Blacks are proving to be even more productive farmers than the whites who stole the land from them. – Photo: AFP

M.O.I. JR: Can you tell the people a little bit about why the U.S. and the Western powers were threatened by Zimbabwe’s land reclamation policy to the extent where they would put sanctions on Zimbabwe?

Obi Egbuna: My brother, the annals of history show all who are interested in learning the truth that separation anxiety is a central part of the colonialists’ and imperialists’ makeup. It is extremely difficult for them to accept defeat of any kind.

In the case of Zimbabwe, they have been defeated militarily and diplomatically. The foundation for Zimbabwe’s land reclamation program is the historical background which gave President Mugabe and ZANU-PF a significant advantage on the world stage and in the court of public opinion which, for a people who endured colonialism and slavery, matters the most.

The U.S.-E.U. alliance invested much time and energy in making Madiba Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress the face of anti-colonial resistance in the Southern region of Africa, the last geographical area on our beloved Mother continent to liberate itself from settler colonial rule. What this did is put the strengths and weaknesses of The Madiba and the ANC front and center, which reveals to those amongst us who don’t know and those who appear to have forgotten that since its inception ANC never raised or prioritized the issue of land and self-determination.

This is why the iconic Pan African warrior Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe and the militant comrades in the ANC youth wing decided to break away and start the Pan African Congress of Azania whose slogan is Izwe Lethu I Afrika which means the land is ours. While South Africa begins its 22^nd year as a sovereign nation, 83 percent of its land is still in the hands of the former apartheid ruler.

What this means is, on the other side of the Limpopo River (the boundary between Zimbabwe and South Africa), you have President Mugabe and ZANU-PF who initiate a land reclamation program that was created from the bottom up. This aspect of the story has an extremely special twist: The land reclamation program was spearheaded by the War Veterans Association, who were the comrades that bravely led ZANU-PF to victory during the Second Chimurenga.

When the Land Reclamation program was launched, President Mugabe was in Cuba for the G-77 summit. After learning that the War Veterans had put their plan into motion, he returned to Zimbabwe and gave their courageous and visionary effort the ultimate blessing.

Those of us who strive to be true daughters and sons of Africa know this is the 40th anniversary of the overthrow of Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah that took place on Feb. 24, 1966, the same day Dr. King had dinner with the most Honorable Elijah Muhammad at his private residence in Chicago. The connection is that Osagyefo was on the way to Vietnam to present a proposal to end the war on Vietnam which cost Dr. King his life.

What we witnessed was the evolution of African anti-imperialist resistance. In the 1960s, Nkrumah leaves Ghana, and President Lyndon Johnson and the CIA put the wheels into motion to carry out the coup to bring about regime change in Ghana. In 2000, President Mugabe is on revolutionary soil in Cuba and his comrades begin the process which reclaimed land for 350,000 families in a country where the average indigenous family consists of six people.

The foundation for Zimbabwe’s land reclamation program is the historical background which gave President Mugabe and ZANU-PF a significant advantage on the world stage and in the court of public opinion which, for a people who endured colonialism and slavery, matters the most.

The land reclamation program in Zimbabwe comes on the heels of Operation Sovereign Legitimacy, when the military and defense forces representing Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola fought off a plan spearheaded by U.S. imperialism to re-invade the Democratic Republic of the Congo and reestablish the colonies of the war criminal and neo-colonialist stooge Mobutu Sese Seko. This was the coming out party of President Obama’s current National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who at the time was the assistant secretary for African affairs, serving under Madeline Albright when she was secretary of state during the second term of the Clinton administration.

At the time, it was Zimbabwe’s turn to chair the SADC defense forces, which meant all the militaries of each and every country in the Southern Region of Africa. This put President Mugabe and Madiba Mandela on a collision course, because they had a difference of opinion. The Madiba was not in agreement that SADC should send a defense force to fight off this invasion effort.

The advantage that President Mugabe had was historical. Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and Mozambique, when they were known as the frontline states, all fought protracted armed struggles for their independence, where South Africa’s independence was a result of long drawn out negotiations between Madiba Mandela and Frederick DeKlerk. This means the Madiba had to defer not only to President Mugabe but President Nujoma of Namibia and President Dos Santos of Angola because ZANU-PF, SWAPO and MPLA were no strangers to not only waging armed struggles but emerging victorious when the smoke clears.

The land reclamation program of Zimbabwe puts the racism and deceit of U.S. and British imperialism front and center. Forget the Bill Clinton wannabe Tony Blair, who decided not to honor the Lancaster House agreement from 1979, where the Carter and Thatcher administrations agreed to finance the transition of Rhodesian settlers from 70 percent of the country’s most resourceful land that they illegally occupied.

In the case of U.S. imperialism, Reagan decided to ignore the agreement, which means that President Mugabe and ZANU-PF must have reminded him of the Black Panther Party. The arrogant manner the Bush administration behaved concerning the U.S. conference on racism, xenophobia and other related intolerances put Zimbabwe front and center because of the decision by President Bush to boycott the conference if slavery, Palestine and reparations were discussion items on the agenda.

We, as Africans, cannot discuss slavery, Palestine and reparations without the land reclamation program in Zimbabwe, for those who decide to do so lack both vision and integrity. The irony is the conference took place in 2001, which ironically was the same year that the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act was introduced by President Bush and pushed through Congress by the late Donald Payne and Christopher Smith of New Jersey and the Senate by Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

A happy farmer, Tracy Mutinhiri stands outside her tobacco farm near Harare, Zimbabwe. – Photo: Kevin Sieff, Washington Post

The sanctions were a vindictive and cowardly response that is true to the tradition of rape, racism, plundering and white supremacy. Those who are in favor of the sanctions are the enemies of Africa and our struggle for liberation, even if they are of African ancestry.

M.O.I. JR: What do Congresswomen Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters of the Congressional Black Caucus have to say about the sanctions?

Obi Egbuna: Our sisters’ vote on the sanctions represents something we said as children – monkey see monkey do – something that’s said when we feel our peers blindly following behind something or someone without understanding where they are headed. For the record, the entire Congressional Black Caucus came five votes short of voting unanimously in favor of U.S.-E.U. sanctions on Zimbabwe.

Those who abstained were Corrine Brown of Florida, the late Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio, Carolyn Kilpatrick the mother of the former mayor of Detroit Kwame Kilpatrick, the former Black Panther Bobby Rush of Illinois and our sister Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. This means not one single member of the CBC voted against the sanctions.

If this sounds outrageous, be reminded it is consistent. Not one CBC member felt historically obligated to pound the halls of Congress and demand that the Lancaster House Agreement, negotiated by their beloved white liberal ex-President Carter, be honored or they would raise hell on behalf of the Zimbabwean people.

Let us not forget the Land Reclamation program spearheaded by President Mugabe and ZANU-PF was 21 years after the Lancaster House negotiations, which means all those CBC members along with their comrades in arms in the numerous organizations who made getting arrested in front of the South African Embassy politically en vogue.

Where it gets sensitive for the CBC is, when it comes to African issues, the group as a whole always treated Congressman Donald Payne like a pearl of wisdom. When it came to the Zimbabwe question, Congressman Payne had a serious conflict of interest that isn’t public knowledge.

Congressman Payne for nine years served on the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, which was created after President Reagan spoke before the British Parliament and talked about the need for the U.S. and E.U. to develop a think tank to ensure a victory for the imperialists in the Cold War. Like his colleagues in the CBC, Congressman Payne wore many hats; he also was on TransAfrica Forum’s board of directors.

Few amongst us who have done an in depth study of the anti-apartheid movement. As a result, so many of our people function from the understanding that Randall Robinson started the anti-apartheid movement in the U.S., which means he had no regard for the Council on African Affairs led by Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois which raised the issue.

The legendary actor Canada Lee was dragged off the stage at the NAACP convention in the ‘50s for raising the apartheid question, SNCC members were arrested in front of the South African consulates in D.C. and New York in the ‘60s and protested in front of Chase Manhattan Bank. This all occurred before the creation of TransAfrica Forum in 1977, which means Mr. Robinson either has problem using calendars or chose to dismiss the contributions of those who came before TransAfrica.

Not one CBC member felt historically obligated to pound the halls of Congress and demand that the Lancaster House Agreement, negotiated by their beloved white liberal ex-President Carter, be honored or they would raise hell on behalf of the Zimbabwean people.

The role of TransAfrica Forum Africa Action and the Priority for Africa Network in attempting to bring about regime change in Zimbabwe is connected to Congresswoman Lee, who serves on Africa Action’s board of directors. These three organizations, under the guise and auspices of a cover called the Zimbabwe Solidarity Fund, were funneling National Endowment for Democracy money to 14 civil society groups in Zimbabwe.

Congresswoman Lee also received the Addie Wyatt Award from the Congress of Black Trade Unionists which is aligned to the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unionists, who, when the U.S. and British governments created the Westminister Foundation for Democracy, put up the money to start the Movement for Democratic Change led by the former prime minister of Zimbabwe and main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who was the secretary general for ZCTU and resigned to lead MDC.

The money to start MDC was funneled through ZCTU, and the gentleman considered the dean of trade unionists in the so-called African American Trade Unionists, William Lucy, who is also on the NAACP’s board of directors, was instrumental in persuading the NAACP to accept the request of the U.S. State Department not to publish their report on the 2002 presidential elections in Zimbabwe, which was extremely favorable. The NAACP went in place of the CBC, who President Mugabe invited even though none of them voted against U.S.-E.U. sanctions on Zimbabwe. When has the CBC ever turned down a travel opportunity or a photo-op?

Congresswoman Lee also has ties to the Communist Party USA through their U.S. Peace Council, who, during the Second Chimurenga, had an analysis of Zimbabwe that saw it as an extension of the Soviet Union. That supported Joshua Nkomo and ZAPU and not President Mugabe and ZANU, who have the distinction of being the only Chinese supported liberation movement in Southern Africa to come to power.

Congresswoman Lee also has ties to the Black Aids Institute, whose leader, Phil Wilson, actively attempted to dissuade Dr. Dorothy Height from signing a resolution that went to the U.N. and World Health Organization in 2007 that exposed how the U.S. and Britain, through former U.S. Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson and his British counterpart, Richard Feacham, who were the chair and executive director of Global Fund, blocked Zimbabwe’s applications for the second, third, fourth and sixth rounds this millennium respectively.

A couple of years ago, President Mugabe, while addressing the U.N. General Assembly, used three words to describe the meddling of the U.S. government in Zimbabwe’s 2013 presidential election – shame, shame, shame – which led to Congresswoman Lee walking out, which, with all due respect, was rude and immature, but honest. Congresswoman Lee had the temerity to show her true feelings, while Congressman Gregory Meeks of New York, who replaced Congressman Payne on the board of NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, Congressman Melvin Watt of North Carolina and Congressman Danny Davis of Illinois lied to President Mugabe’s face, telling him they would return to the states and spearhead a campaign to lift the sanctions.

Edwin Masimba Moyo grows snow peas near Marondera, Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s government launched land reforms 15 years ago. – Photo: Newsday

Both Congresswomen Lee and Waters gained national and global recognition for condemning the war on Iraq and helped portray President Bush as the reincarnation of Satan himself. However, on the question of Zimbabwe the CBC were Satan’s little helpers. The issue of a pro imperialist regime change in Zimbabwe has made the likes of President Obama, Gen. Colin Powell and the CBC comrades in arms.

It is not thrilling to know in order to fight to lift U.S.-E.U. sanctions on Zimbabwe, we have to go to war with the Congresswomen Lee and Waters and the rest of the CBC and President Obama. What will determine the outcome is what is stronger – their loyalty to the Democratic Party and U.S. imperialist interests or our sacred land, the start of all civilization.

M.O.I. JR: Can you tell us about Mugabe’s address to the U.N. in 2015. What was significant about his speech?

Obi Egbuna: Let’s begin with the grandstanding of presidential hopeful, the former U.S. secretary of state, U.S. senator and former first lady, Hillary Clinton, using platforms afforded to her to accuse President Mugabe of bashing the LGBT community. The statement Mrs. Clinton took out of context is: “We equally reject attempts to prescribe ‘new rights’ that are contrary to our values, norms, traditions and beliefs,” which ended with President Mugabe saying, “We’re not gays.”

Why does the Obama administration continue to impose their viewpoint on Africa, which gives the impression that tolerance and advocacy are one in the same? The homosexual question is equivalent to the Zionist question 25 years ago, from the vantage point that the mere mention of Zionism resulted in one who dared to condemn Zionist aggression being bombarded by all apologists and supporters of Israel.

If President Obama has the audacity to go before the African Union and tell all of Africa they must accept the Western narrative and paradigm of homosexuality to be at the front of the line for humanitarian aid and preferential diplomatic treatment, what needs to be addressed is how many homosexuals in civil rights organizations, churches, the U.S. Congress and Senate are working for regime change in Zimbabwe because President Mugabe and ZANU-PF refuse to join the chorus aimed at increasing their presence in Africa.

The next question: Are homosexuals in MDC, ZCTU and the 400 civil society groups being financed by the NED, National Democratic Institute and Open Society for Southern Africa, which is funded by none other than George Soros, the political version of the Annie character Daddy Warbucks, working for regime change because they feel that ousting President Mugabe and ZANU-PF from power will result in a homosexual renaissance that will take priority over the land reclamation program, indigenization bill and Look East Policy?

In the final analysis, it’s not about homosexuality but consolidating the national gains of the First, Second and Third Chimurenga. The main focus of President Mugabe’s speech was how Zimbabwe was faring in meeting their millennium development goals despite the challenges that U.S.-E.U. sanctions present.

The president also lent his voice to the struggle of the Palestinian people. I had the honor of interviewing the Palestinian ambassador to Zimbabwe, H.E. Hashem Dajani, after the SADC summit in Zimbabwe in August of 2014, and he talked about how President Mugabe is respected and appreciated in Palestine and the ties between the Zimbabweans and Palestinians. This was rather compelling because, as we speak, there are key forces in our community who are “johnny come latelys” to Palestinian solidarity work, who prior to 2001 had no track record of doing any work defending the Palestinian struggle and cause.

What is necessary for Africans at home and abroad to understand is that Palestinian solidarity is only the first step to having an anti-zionist position, because the Zionists are direct enemies of Africans. The Zionist state of Israel supported apartheid in South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe and refused to recognize Algeria and Tunisia as sovereign nations.

Why does the Obama administration continue to impose their viewpoint on Africa, which gives the impression that tolerance and advocacy are one in the same?

The President also discussed Agenda 2063 of the A.U. and how it recognizes the intrinsic and inextricable linkages between peace, security, development and the full realization of human rights. He also discussed how peace and security is one of the six pillars of the Common African Position.

Whenever President Mugabe addresses the U.N., it confirms how U.S.-E.U. imperialism fears an African head of state they don’t control, who has a command of the English language. Each and every time President Mugabe takes that podium, we think of the appeal of the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey to the League of Nations in the ‘20s and the appeal of W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson that dealt with genocide.

This also invokes the memory of Malcolm, who was assassinated by the FBI-CIA and NYPD before he could go before the U.N. with the fighting spirit of DuBois, Robeson and Garvey before him.

M.O.I. JR: How do you see China’s role on the African continent?

Obi Egbuna: I just finished an article in the Herald entitled “Understanding Zimbabwe’s Look East Policy.” Some of the highlights were as follows: According to the newsletter SADC Today, China has built approximately 20 agricultural training centers throughout Africa for the purpose of farming mechanization. The one in Zimbabwe is called the Gwebi Agricultural Center, which was built by the Chinese in 2009 and which was turned over and is under Zimbabwean control since 2015.

Without the wealth of white farmers, Zimbabwean farmers like this one in Masvingo Province succeed using traditional farming methods.

Out of the 20 centers, seven are in Southern Africa where, according to SADC Today, 62 percent of families depend on agriculture for their livelihood. This explains why all of Southern Africa is enamored with Zimbabwe’s land reclamation program and has continued to vehemently oppose the U.S.-E.U. sanctions on Zimbabwe – all with the exception of Botswana, whose head of state, the current chair of SADC, President Karma, said Botswana’s airspace could be used by the West if they were ready to invade Zimbabwe.

The irony is President Karma was educated in Zimbabwe – but excuse the momentary digression; we are well aware that some of our comrades’ lack of insight and exposure have gone as far as to call China, Africa’s next colonizer. This means they do no respect and appreciate the basic and fundamental premise of revolutionary solidarity, which teaches us that no people on earth have an identical history, but ties are established based on obvious and irrefutable similarities.

When China under Mao Tse Tung and India led by Gandhi and Nehru defeated British colonialism and imperialism, this paved the way for Osagyefo Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party’s defeat of the British colonial empire in Ghana once and for all. When the Vietnamese immortal fighter Ho Chi Minh and the fearless Gen. Giap defeated the French on the battlefield, this made DeGaulle and his soldiers vulnerable in Algeria, where after eight years Ahmed Ben Bella and the FLN emerged victorious.

And lastly, in Guinea, the only other man Commandante Fidel Castro – besides Jose Marti – referred to as a revolutionary apostle, Ahmed Seku Ture and the Democratic Party of Guinea, who the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan calls his political father, refused France’s overture to accept a referendum that was neo-colonialist to the core.

When you desperately want your independence, you appreciate momentum you gain from the defeat of your enemies. At the root of solidarity is gratitude, which the Tanzanians showed when China built their railroads after independence. I can tell you, 12 years ago, when President Mugabe and ZANU-PF announced Zimbabwe’s Look East Policy, the U.S. State Department had an emergency meeting because they know that Africa-Asian relations is going to lead to the monstrous grip that Western imperialism has on the world economy being broken once and for all.

The Africa summit that the Obama administration had in Washington during the summer of 2014,which excluded Zimbabwe, Eritrea and Sudan, in the final analysis was a feeble attempt to woo African nations to move away from China and reconsider President Clinton’s Africa’s Growth and Opportunity Act, which points us in the direction of the Corporate Council on Africa and the United States Agency for International Development, which oversees the U.S.-Africa Business Exchange, the mechanism that screens the African businesses that still want to jump in bed with U.S. imperialism.

The Corporate Council on Africa had a seminar on Zimbabwe six years ago when it was announced that General Electric had developed a working group on Zimbabwe. The seminar began with the former U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe, Mr. Charles Ray, announcing Zimbabwe was open for business. This reminded us of when Sen. Jesse Helms hosted the counter-revolutionary Zimbabwean Bishop Abel Muzorewa and introduced him to the chairmen of RJ Reynolds and the Phillip Morris tobacco companies for the purpose of the bishop agreeing to let these tobacco conglomerates rape and plunder Zimbabwe in the tradition of Cecil John Rhodes.

I can tell you, 12 years ago, when President Mugabe and ZANU-PF announced Zimbabwe’s Look East Policy, the U.S. State Department had an emergency meeting because they know that Africa-Asian relations is going to lead to the monstrous grip that Western imperialism has on the world economy being broken once and for all.

What President Mugabe has said is Africa should readopt the Bandung agenda, which so-called African Americans remember Brother Malcolm discussing in his legendary “Message to the Grass Roots” speech. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell went in his capacity as the publisher of his newspaper, the People’s Voice, which coincidentally is the name of ZANU-PF’s paper.

What the Obama administration will have to get used to when it comes to Africa is the role of a window shopper, meaning they are on the outside looking in. You even have their favorite African heads of state like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, who is the biggest advocate of AFRICOM and who attacked Zimbabwe opportunistically, establishing a One China Policy. We saw China veto an attempt by U.S.-E.U. imperialism to convince the U.N. Security Council to impose an additional measure of sanctions on Zimbabwe. Those amongst us attacking African-Asian relations should be presented with a library card or pointed in a direction of the African bookstores we have left.

M.O.I. JR: Describe how President Mugabe chaired the African Union this year? What kind of initiatives did he push?

Obi Egbuna: The main story in my humble opinion is based on the predictions of experts on Africa, U.S.-E.U. diplomats and politicians. President Mugabe was not supposed to make it to become the chair of the A.U. or the chair of SADC, which he chaired from August of 2014 to August 2015.

What must be understood is how Southern Africa as a region defended the sovereignty during an extremely difficult period back in 2006. President Mutharika of Malawi was threatened by the E.U.; if he named one of the main roads in Malawi in honor of President Mugabe, they would discontinue a project to refurbish the roads, which were some of the worst in all of Africa.

President Mutharika also was told by the E.U. to cancel a ceremony in President Mugabe’s honor. His response was it was un-African to disinvite a guest you have invited; the only exception was to disinvite one who invited himself.

The next step was the late Zambian President Mwanasasa and the former president of Botswana, Festus Mogae, while in attendance at Zimbabwe’s annual Harare AgriShow, letting the audience know that the rumor that the SADC heads of state had asked President Mugabe to step down was not true, and they were in support of the Land Reclamation Program and opposed to the sanctions.

A young tobacco farmer tends his crop near Shamva, Zimbabwe. – Photo: Aaron Ufumeli, Mail & Guardian

The next crucial move was all the SADC leaders threatening to boycott the U.S.-E.U. summit in Portugal in 2007 if President Mugabe failed to attend. This was in response to the former prime minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, saying he would boycott if President Mugabe attended.

You then saw Namibia come to Washington to lobby Congress and the Senate to lift the sanctions because it compromised the region. This occurred when Namibia chaired SADC.

When Tanzania’s President Kikwete and President Mutharika of Malawi chaired the A.U., they called for the lifting of the sanctions. The support of your neighbors is vital when it comes to politics in Africa. If our fallen brother Muammar Qaddafi had had this, perhaps he would still be here.

The president is pleased with the A.U. flagship programs: the Continental Free Trade Area, the African Center for Disease Control, a Pan African University for Science and Technology to develop skills for the value addition and benefication of the continent’s vast mineral resources, a single aviation market, a high speed train and a Pan African e-network.

What the African world will see is how Zimbabwe has carried Africa on its shoulders. The land reclamation program resulted in the A.U. establishing a mandate that 10 percent of all countries’ budgets go towards agricultural development. We see who got the Confucius Peace Prize from the Chinese and it wasn’t President Obama.

What the African world will see is how Zimbabwe has carried Africa on its shoulders.

One of the most important lessons of the African revolution is the boldest and most visionary amongst us aren’t appreciated till long after they’re gone. I’m sure President Mugabe won’t mind if he joins this illustrious list. He will be in the company he deserves.

Obi Egbuna Jr. is the U.S. correspondent to the Herald and the external relations officer to ZICUFA (Zimbabwe-Cuba Friendship Association). His email is obiegbuna15@gmail.com.

From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted – and Hillary Clinton supported – decimated Black America.

by Michelle Alexander

Hillary Clinton loves Black people. And Black people love Hillary – or so it seems. Black politicians have lined up in droves to endorse her, eager to prove their loyalty to the Clintons in the hopes that their faithfulness will be remembered and rewarded.

Hillary and Bill Clinton in 1992 – Photo: Reuters

Black pastors are opening their church doors, and the Clintons are making themselves comfortably at home once again, engaging effortlessly in all the usual rituals associated with “courting the Black vote,” a pursuit that typically begins and ends with Democratic politicians making Black people feel liked and taken seriously. Doing something concrete to improve the conditions under which most Black people live is generally not required.

Hillary is looking to gain momentum on the campaign trail as the primaries move out of Iowa and New Hampshire and into states like South Carolina, where large pockets of Black voters can be found. According to some polls, she leads Bernie Sanders by as much as 60 percent among African Americans. It seems that we – Black people – are her winning card, one that Hillary is eager to play.

And it seems we’re eager to get played. Again.

The love affair between Black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that.

At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a Black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first Black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.

Hillary Clinton loves Black people. And Black people love Hillary – or so it seems.

Black voters have been remarkably loyal to the Clintons for more than 25 years. It’s true that we eventually lined up behind Barack Obama in 2008, but it’s a measure of the Clinton allure that Hillary led Obama among Black voters until he started winning caucuses and primaries.

Now Hillary is running again. This time she’s facing a democratic socialist who promises a political revolution that will bring universal healthcare, a living wage, an end to rampant Wall Street greed and the dismantling of the vast prison state – many of the same goals that Martin Luther King Jr. championed at the end of his life. Even so, Black folks are sticking with the Clinton brand.

What have the Clintons done to earn such devotion? Did they take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they courageously stand up to right-wing demagoguery about Black communities? Did they help usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization and the disappearance of work?

No. Quite the opposite.

* * *

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, urban Black communities across America were suffering from economic collapse. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs had vanished as factories moved overseas in search of cheaper labor, a new plantation. Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard.

Unemployment rates among young Black men had quadrupled as the rate of industrial employment plummeted. Crime rates spiked in inner-city communities that had been dependent on factory jobs, while hopelessness, despair and crack addiction swept neighborhoods that had once been solidly working-class. Millions of Black folks – many of whom had fled Jim Crow segregation in the South with the hope of obtaining decent work in Northern factories – were suddenly trapped in racially segregated, jobless ghettos.

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, urban Black communities across America were suffering from economic collapse.

On the campaign trail, Bill Clinton made the economy his top priority and argued persuasively that conservatives were using race to divide the nation and divert attention from the failed economy. In practice, however, he capitulated entirely to the right-wing backlash against the Civil Rights Movement and embraced former president Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare and taxes – ultimately doing more harm to Black communities than Reagan ever did.

We should have seen it coming. Back then, Clinton was the standard-bearer for the New Democrats, a group that firmly believed the only way to win back the millions of white voters in the South who had defected to the Republican Party was to adopt the right-wing narrative that Black communities ought to be disciplined with harsh punishment rather than coddled with welfare.

Reagan had won the presidency by dog-whistling to poor and working-class whites with coded racial appeals: railing against “welfare queens” and criminal “predators” and condemning “big government.” Clinton aimed to win them back, vowing that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime than he.

In practice, however, he capitulated entirely to the right-wing backlash against the Civil Rights Movement and embraced former president Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare and taxes – ultimately doing more harm to Black communities than Reagan ever did.

Just weeks before the critical New Hampshire primary, Clinton proved his toughness by flying back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired Black man who had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him for later. After the execution, Clinton remarked, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.”

Clinton mastered the art of sending mixed cultural messages, appealing to African Americans by belting out “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in Black churches, while at the same time signaling to poor and working-class whites that he was willing to be tougher on Black communities than Republicans had been.

Clinton was praised for his no-nonsense, pragmatic approach to racial politics. He won the election and appointed a racially diverse cabinet that “looked like America.” He won re-election four years later, and the American economy rebounded. Democrats cheered. The Democratic Party had been saved. The Clintons won. Guess who lost?

* * *

Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. Clinton did not declare the War on Crime or the War on Drugs – those wars were declared before Reagan was elected and long before crack hit the streets – but he escalated it beyond what many conservatives had imagined possible. He supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing and boosted funding for drug law enforcement.

Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.

Clinton championed the idea of a federal “three strikes” law in his 1994 State of the Union address and, months later, signed a $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces. The legislation was hailed by mainstream-media outlets as a victory for the Democrats, who “were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.”

When Clinton left office in 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Human Rights Watch reported that in seven states, African Americans constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison, even though they were no more likely than whites to use or sell illegal drugs.

Prison admissions for drug offenses reached a level in 2000 for African Americans more than 26 times the level in 1983. All of the presidents since 1980 have contributed to mass incarceration, but as Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson recently observed, “President Clinton’s tenure was the worst.”

When Clinton left office in 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

Some might argue that it’s unfair to judge Hillary Clinton for the policies her husband championed years ago. But Hillary wasn’t picking out china while she was first lady. She bravely broke the mold and redefined that job in ways no woman ever had before.

She not only campaigned for Bill; she also wielded power and significant influence once he was elected, lobbying for legislation and other measures. That record, and her statements from that era, should be scrutinized.

In her support for the 1994 crime bill, for example, she used racially coded rhetoric to cast Black children as animals. “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

Both Clintons now express regret over the crime bill, and Hillary says she supports criminal justice reforms to undo some of the damage that was done by her husband’s administration. But on the campaign trail, she continues to invoke the economy and country that Bill Clinton left behind as a legacy she would continue.

So what exactly did the Clinton economy look like for Black Americans? Taking a hard look at this recent past is about more than just a choice between two candidates. It’s about whether the Democratic Party can finally reckon with what its policies have done to African-American communities, and whether it can redeem itself and rightly earn the loyalty of Black voters.

* * *

An oft-repeated myth about the Clinton administration is that although it was overly tough on crime back in the 1990s, at least its policies were good for the economy and for Black unemployment rates. The truth is more troubling.

As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels for white Americans in the 1990s, the jobless rate among Black men in their 20s who didn’t have a college degree rose to its highest level ever. This increase in joblessness was propelled by the skyrocketing incarceration rate.

Why is this not common knowledge? Because government statistics like poverty and unemployment rates do not include incarcerated people. As Harvard sociologist Bruce Western explains: “Much of the optimism about declines in racial inequality and the power of the U.S. model of economic growth is misplaced once we account for the invisible poor, behind the walls of America’s prisons and jails.”

An oft-repeated myth about the Clinton administration is that although it was overly tough on crime back in the 1990s, at least its policies were good for the economy and for Black unemployment rates. The truth is more troubling.

When Clinton left office in 2001, the true jobless rate for young, non-college-educated Black men – including those behind bars – was 42 percent. This figure was never reported.

Instead, the media claimed that unemployment rates for African Americans had fallen to record lows, neglecting to mention that this miracle was possible only because incarceration rates were now at record highs. Young Black men weren’t looking for work at high rates during the Clinton era because they were now behind bars – out of sight, out of mind, and no longer counted in poverty and unemployment statistics.

When Clinton left office in 2001, the true jobless rate for young, non-college-educated Black men – including those behind bars – was 42 percent. This figure was never reported.

To make matters worse, the federal safety net for poor families was torn to shreds by the Clinton administration in its effort to “end welfare as we know it.” In his 1996 State of the Union address, given during his re-election campaign, Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over” and immediately sought to prove it by dismantling the federal welfare system known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC).

The welfare reform legislation that he signed – which Hillary Clinton ardently supported then and characterized as a success as recently as 2008 – replaced the federal safety net with a block grant to the states, imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, added work requirements, barred undocumented immigrants from licensed professions and slashed overall public welfare funding by $54 billion – some was later restored.

To make matters worse, the federal safety net for poor families was torn to shreds by the Clinton administration in its effort to “end welfare as we know it.”

Experts and pundits disagree about the true impact of welfare reform, but one thing seems clear: Extreme poverty doubled to 1.5 million in the decade and a half after the law was passed. What is extreme poverty? U.S. households are considered to be in extreme poverty if they are surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person per day in any given month.

We tend to think of extreme poverty existing in Third World countries, but here in the United States, shocking numbers of people are struggling to survive on less money per month than many families spend in one evening dining out. Currently, the United States, the richest nation on the planet, has one of the highest child poverty rates in the developed world.

Despite claims that radical changes in crime and welfare policy were driven by a desire to end big government and save taxpayer dollars, the reality is that the Clinton administration didn’t reduce the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor; it changed what the funds would be used for. Billions of dollars were slashed from public housing and child welfare budgets and transferred to the mass-incarceration machine.

By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps. During Clinton’s tenure, funding for public housing was slashed by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent), while funding for corrections was boosted by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), according to sociologist Loïc Wacquant, “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.”

Billions of dollars were slashed from public housing and child welfare budgets and transferred to the mass-incarceration machine.

Bill Clinton championed discriminatory laws against formerly incarcerated people that have kept millions of Americans locked in a cycle of poverty and desperation. The Clinton administration eliminated Pell grants for prisoners seeking higher education to prepare for their release, supported laws denying federal financial aid to students with drug convictions, and signed legislation imposing a lifetime ban on welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense – an exceptionally harsh provision given the racially biased drug war that was raging in inner cities.

Perhaps most alarming, Clinton also made it easier for public housing agencies to deny shelter to anyone with any sort of criminal history – even an arrest without conviction – and championed the “one strike and you’re out” initiative, which meant that families could be evicted from public housing because one member – or a guest – had committed even a minor offense.

Bill Clinton championed discriminatory laws against formerly incarcerated people that have kept millions of Americans locked in a cycle of poverty and desperation.

People released from prison with no money, no job and nowhere to go could no longer return home to their loved ones living in federally assisted housing without placing the entire family at risk of eviction. Purging “the criminal element” from public housing played well on the evening news, but no provisions were made for people and families as they were forced out on the street.

By the end of Clinton’s presidency, more than half of working-age African-American men in many large urban areas were saddled with criminal records and subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and basic public benefits – relegated to a permanent second-class status eerily reminiscent of Jim Crow.

It is difficult to overstate the damage that’s been done. Generations have been lost to the prison system; countless families have been torn apart or rendered homeless; and a school-to-prison pipeline has been born that shuttles young people from their decrepit, underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons.

* * *

It didn’t have to be like this. As a nation, we had a choice. Rather than spending billions of dollars constructing a vast new penal system, those billions could have been spent putting young people to work in inner-city communities and investing in their schools so they might have some hope of making the transition from an industrial to a service-based economy.

Constructive interventions would have been good not only for African Americans trapped in ghettos, but for blue-collar workers of all colors. At the very least, Democrats could have fought to prevent the further destruction of Black communities rather than ratcheting up the wars declared on them.

It didn’t have to be like this. As a nation, we had a choice.

Of course, it can be said that it’s unfair to criticize the Clintons for punishing Black people so harshly, given that many Black people were on board with the “get tough” movement too. It is absolutely true that Black communities back then were in a state of crisis, and that many Black activists and politicians were desperate to get violent offenders off the streets.

What is often missed, however, is that most of those Black activists and politicians weren’t asking only for toughness. They were also demanding investment in their schools, better housing, jobs programs for young people, economic-stimulus packages, drug treatment on demand and better access to healthcare. In the end, they wound up with police and prisons. To say that this was what Black people wanted is misleading at best.

To be fair, the Clintons now feel bad about how their politics and policies have worked out for Black people. Bill says that he “overshot the mark” with his crime policies; and Hillary has put forth a plan to ban racial profiling, eliminate the sentencing disparities between crack and cocaine and abolish private prisons, among other measures.

But what about a larger agenda that would not just reverse some of the policies adopted during the Clinton era but would rebuild the communities decimated by them? If you listen closely here, you’ll notice that Hillary Clinton is still singing the same old tune in a slightly different key.

She is arguing that we ought not be seduced by Bernie’s rhetoric because we must be “pragmatic,” “face political realities,” and not get tempted to believe that we can fight for economic justice and win. When politicians start telling you that it is “unrealistic” to support candidates who want to build a movement for greater equality, fair wages, universal healthcare and an end to corporate control of our political system, it’s probably best to leave the room.

But what about a larger agenda that would not just reverse some of the policies adopted during the Clinton era but would rebuild the communities decimated by them? If you listen closely here, you’ll notice that Hillary Clinton is still singing the same old tune in a slightly different key.

This is not an endorsement for Bernie Sanders, who after all voted for the 1994 crime bill. I also tend to agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that the way the Sanders campaign handled the question of reparations is one of many signs that Bernie doesn’t quite get what’s at stake in serious dialogues about racial justice. He was wrong to dismiss reparations as “divisive,” as though centuries of slavery, segregation, discrimination, ghettoization and stigmatization aren’t worthy of any specific acknowledgement or remedy.

But recognizing that Bernie, like Hillary, has blurred vision when it comes to race is not the same thing as saying their views are equally problematic. Sanders opposed the 1996 welfare reform law. He also opposed bank deregulation and the Iraq War, both of which Hillary supported and both of which have proved disastrous. In short, there is such a thing as a lesser evil, and Hillary is not it.

The biggest problem with Bernie, in the end, is that he’s running as a Democrat – as a member of a political party that not only capitulated to right-wing demagoguery but is now owned and controlled by a relatively small number of millionaires and billionaires. Yes, Sanders has raised millions from small donors, but should he become president, he would also become part of what he has otherwise derided as “the establishment.”

Recognizing that Bernie, like Hillary, has blurred vision when it comes to race is not the same thing as saying their views are equally problematic.

Even if Bernie’s racial-justice views evolve, I hold little hope that a political revolution will occur within the Democratic Party without a sustained outside movement forcing truly transformational change. I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself.

Of course, the idea of building a new political party terrifies most progressives, who understandably fear that it would open the door for a right-wing extremist to get elected. So we play the game of lesser evils. This game has gone on for decades.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the eminent scholar and co-founder of the NAACP, shocked many when he refused to play along with this game in the 1956 election, defending his refusal to vote on the grounds that “there is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I do or say.”

The idea of building a new political party terrifies most progressives, who understandably fear that it would open the door for a right-wing extremist to get elected. So we play the game of lesser evils. This game has gone on for decades.

While the true losers and winners of this game are highly predictable, the game of lesser evils makes for great entertainment and can now be viewed 24 hours a day on cable news networks. Hillary believes that she can win this game in 2016 because this time she’s got us, the Black vote, in her back pocket – her lucky card.

She may be surprised to discover that the younger generation no longer wants to play her game. Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll all continue to play along and pretend that we don’t know how it will turn out in the end.

Hopefully, one day, we’ll muster the courage to join together in a revolutionary movement with people of all colors who believe that basic human rights and economic, racial and gender justice are not unreasonable, pie-in-the-sky goals. After decades of getting played, the sleeping giant just might wake up, stretch its limbs and tell both parties: Game over. Move aside. It’s time to reshuffle this deck.

Michelle Alexander is a legal scholar, human rights advocate and author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” (The New Press). She can be reached on Facebook. This story originally appeared in The Nation and is republished with permission.

Freedom and medical care for Leonard Peltier!

by Mumia Abu-Jamal

For 40 years, former American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier has been in the clutches of the U.S. prison system –The Iron House of the whites, as indigenous people call them – on trumped up murder charges. Now, as he suffers poor health and an abdominal aortic aneurism, time is no longer on his side.

The aneurism, diagnosed just weeks ago, threatens his very life, so supporters of Leonard are demanding his freedom, so he doesn’t perish in the Iron House.

Comanches, Apaches, Pueblo, Dine (Navajo) and members of many more Native nations marched on Oct. 12, 2015, Albuquerque’s first official Indigenous People’s Day, formerly Columbus Day, to free Leonard Peltier and right all the wrongs done to Native people. – Photo: Steve Ranieri

Decades ago, when Bill Clinton was president, he visited Pine Ridge, South Dakota – once Peltier’s home – and told people there, “Tell Leonard I won’t forget about him.”

A promise from Clinton proved as empty as any politician’s promise: gas, air, wind. (He musta forgot, huh?)

So Peltier languished in the Iron House as decades passed. He wrote. He painted – and he awaited white justice.

He’s still waiting.

His supporters want people to write to the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), demanding his health care and release. The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee needs you to write and call on Leonard’s behalf. Contact www.bop.gov/inmates/concerns.jsp.

Refer to Leonard Peltier, 89637-132, and his home jail, USP Coleman I.

And while you’re at it, contact the White House and demand Leonard’s executive clemency.

Leonard Peltier needs freedom now; and Native Peoples need him to return home.

© Copyright 2016 Mumia Abu-Jamal. Keep updated at www.freemumia.com. His new book is “Writing on the Wall,” edited by Joanna Hernandez. For Mumia’s commentaries, visit www.prisonradio.org. Encourage the media to publish and broadcast Mumia’s commentaries and interviews. Send our brotha some love and light: Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM 8335, SCI-Mahanoy, 301 Morea Road, Frackville, PA 17932.

40th anniversary statement of Leonard Peltier

Greetings friends, supporters and all Native Peoples.

Baba Jahahara took Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier to Super Bowl 50 at Levi Stadium on Feb. 7, 2016.

What can I say that I have not said before? I guess I can start by saying see you later to all of those who have passed in the last year. We Natives don’t like to mention their names. We believe that if we speak their names it disrupts their journey. They may lose their way and their spirits wander forever. If too many call out to them, they will try to come back. But their spirits know we are thinking about them, so all I will say is safe journey and I hope to see you soon.

On Feb. 6, I have been imprisoned for 40 years! I’m 71 years old and still in a maximum security penitentiary. At my age, I’m not sure I have much time left.

I have earned about four to five years good time that no one seems to want to recognize. It doesn’t count, I guess? And when I was indicted, the average time served on a life sentence before being given parole was seven years. So that means I’ve served nearly six life sentences and I should have been released on parole a very long time ago.

Then there’s mandatory release after serving 30 years. I’m 10 years past that. The government isn’t supposed to change the laws to keep you in prison – EXCEPT if you’re Leonard Peltier, it seems.

John Lennon of the Beatles makes his demand. That’s how long people have been pushing for Leonard’s release.

Now, I’m told I’ll be kept at USP Coleman I until 2017, when they’ll decide if I can go to a medium security facility – or NOT. But, check this out: I have been classified as a medium security prisoner now for at least 15 years, and BOP regulations say elders shall be kept in a less dangerous facility and environment. But NOT if you’re Leonard Peltier, I guess.

As you’ll remember, the history of my bid for clemency is long. My first app was with Jimmy Carter. He denied it. Ronald Reagan promised President Mikhail Gorbachev that he would release me if the Soviet Union released a prisoner, but Reagan reneged. George H.W. Bush did nothing.

The next app was with Bill Clinton. He left office without taking action even though the pardon attorney did an 11-month investigation – it usually takes nine months – and we were told she had recommended clemency. George W. Bush denied that petition in 2009. And in all of the applications for clemency, the FBI has interfered with an executive order. That’s illegal as hell!

Today, I’m facing another dilemma – an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). It’s the size of an AAA battery. The doctor told me if it bursts, I can bleed to death. It’s also close to my spine and I could end up paralyzed. The good news is that it’s treatable and the operation has a 96-98 percent success rate. BUT I’m in a max security prison. We don’t get sent for treatment until it is terminal.

As President Obama completes the final year of his term, I hope that he will continue to fight to fulfill his promises, and further the progress his administration has made towards working in partnership with First Peoples. It gives me hope that this president has worked hard to affirm the trust relationship with the Tribal Nations. With YOUR encouragement, I believe Obama will have the courage and conviction to commute my sentence and send me home to my family.

Looking back on the 40 years of efforts on my behalf, I am overwhelmed and humbled. I would like to say thank you to all the supporters who have believed in me over the years. Some of you have been supporters since the beginning. You made sure I had books to read and commissary funds to buy what I may need to be as comfortable as one can be in this place. You made donations to the defense committee so we could continue fighting for my freedom, too.

To the sounds of prayers, drumbeats and gunfire, hundreds of Native Americans marched Feb. 27, 2014, AIM Liberation Day, to pay homage to the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee and demand freedom for Leonard Peltier.

You all worked hard – are still working hard – to spread the word about what is now being called the most outrageous conviction in U.S. history. There are good-hearted people in this world, and you’re among them. I’m sorry I cannot keep up with answering all of your letters. But thanks for the love you have shown me. Without it, I could never have made it this long. I’m sure of it.

I believe that my incarceration, the constitutional violations in my case, and the government misconduct in prosecuting my case are issues far more important than just my life or freedom. I feel that each of you who have fought for my freedom has been a part of the greater struggle of Native Peoples – for treaty rights, sovereignty and our very survival. If I should be called home, please don’t give up on our struggle.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse …

Doksha,

Leonard Peltier

Send our brother some love and light: Leonard Peltier, 89637-132, USP Coleman I, P.O. Box 1033, Coleman FL 33521.

After 40 years, it’s long past time to free Leonard Peltier

by Leah Todd

Leonard Peltier in 1992 – Photo: ©Jeffry Scott

This Saturday will mark 40 years since political prisoner Leonard Peltier was arrested and charged with the deaths of two federal agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. Since that time, new information has come to light about improprieties in the government’s handling of the case, and the movement for Native American rights has made great gains in fighting discrimination and building recognition of the long U.S. history of colonial violence. Yet Leonard Peltier remains in jail, now 71 years old and experiencing multiple serious health issues, most recently an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

Eight years before Peltier’s arrest, activists formed the American Indian Movement (AIM) to promote Native American treaty rights and sovereignty and oppose discrimination, racism and government violence. The government’s response to AIM was brutal.

Agents ended the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation by AIM and other Native American activists in 1973 with a full-on military assault, killing two people. While the U.S. government never accounted for its actions that day, CCR defended AIM activists Dennis Banks and Russell Means against charges of conspiracy and assault arising from the incident, successfully winning a dismissal. The case was marked by prosecutorial misconduct – the judge remarked that “the waters of justice have been polluted” – which would prove to be a recurring trend in government cases against AIM political activists.

AIM’s activities occurred amidst the height of the FBI’s since-discredited COINTELPRO program targeting political activists from a wide array of civil rights and leftist groups. They also took place in the context of large-scale militarization, and harassment and intimidation of Native American activists by the FBI and government-supported paramilitaries who called themselves the “GOON squad.”

This resulted in the deaths of dozens of activists in the three years following the occupation of Wounded Knee, known as the “Reign of Terror.” For decades, these deaths, including one that occurred at the same time as the shooting of the agents at Pine Ridge, remained unresolved.

A San Francisco rally on AIM Liberation Day, Feb. 27, 2014, called for a Department of Justice investigation into the 1973-1976 “Reign of Terror” on the Pine Ridge reservation and for freedom for Leonard Peltier.

On June 26, 1975, two FBI agents in unmarked vehicles traveled onto Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Both were killed in a shoot-out involving a group of people on the reservation. No one suspected of participation in the shoot-out was apprehended that day, but the FBI began a resource-intensive, invasive and heavily-critiqued investigation to achieve a resolution of the case.

At their trial in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, CCR co-founder William Kunstler defended Darrell Butler and Robert Robideau, who were accused of the shooting alongside Peltier. They were acquitted due to the government’s failure to prove they had fired the fatal shots.

It was also determined that, in the context of the Reign of Terror on Pine Ridge, the exchange of gunfire with the agents constituted an act of self-defense. After Peltier was extradited from Canada, his case on the same charges was moved to Fargo, North Dakota, under a conservative judge who prevented him from introducing some of the same evidence of the climate on Pine Ridge that had freed Butler and Robideau.

Peltier’s 1977 conviction was fraught with misconduct, including suppression of potentially exculpatory evidence, recantation of witness affidavits, improper tactics in achieving his extradition and the use of undercover informants who had infiltrated AIM. The practices engaged in during the investigation have been broadly recognized as illegitimate: Several appeals court judges chastised the prosecution during argument or in written opinions for the FBI’s “improper conduct” and “clear abuse of the investigative process.”

Kunstler joined other attorneys in defending Peltier in his 1978-1993 criminal appeals, decrying the evidence suppression, coerced and false affidavits, witness intimidation and generally bungled FBI investigation that had led to Peltier’s arrest. Over the course of the appeals process, the prosecutor shifted from asserting that Peltier killed the agents single-handedly to admitting in court, “but we can’t prove who shot those agents.”

Still, Peltier’s appeals and new trials were unsuccessful in overturning his conviction. Because Peltier has always maintained that he did not kill the agents, he continues to be denied parole.

CCR sent a letter to President Obama on Feb. 2, 2016, arguing that he should consider principles of compassionate release and international human rights norms around “conditional release” (parole) in deciding on Peltier’s petition for executive clemency. The letter reminds President Obama of the commitments he has made to Native Americans; as a presidential candidate in 2008, he gave a speech at the Crow Indian Reservation and was adopted into the Crow Nation, and he later made his first visit to a reservation as president in 2014 at the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation, where he affirmed many of his promises to improve relations with Native Americans.

As Native Americans continue to experience staggering rates of police brutality, health issues, poverty and sexual and intimate partner violence; disproportionate discipline in schools; poisoning of land and natural resources with toxic materials; frequent failures of the government to prosecute crimes committed against them by non-Natives; and continuing trauma from the effects of cultural genocide through initiatives like boarding schools, a simple gesture Obama could make to promote healing and justice would be to release Leonard Peltier.

As numerous human rights defenders, Nobel laureates, members of Congress, international authorities, and even a judge who oversaw Peltier’s criminal appeals agree: It’s time to free Leonard Peltier.

If you would like to contact President Obama to encourage him to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier, see the guidelines available on his support site and sign the public petition.

Read the Center for Constitutional Rights’ letter to President Obama requesting executive clemency for Leonard Peltier HERE.

As a legal worker and legal program associate at the Center for Constitutional Rights, Leah Todd supports CCR’s legal and advocacy work and manages CCR’s term-time internship and volunteer programs. She and CCR can be reached at https://ccrjustice.org/home/who-we-are/contacting-center-constitutional-rights. This story first appeared at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

An interview with Phil Taylor by Ann Garrison

Why did the NBA All Star Game Weekend celebrate Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, who is known to have launched invasions that cost millions of African lives, and to brutally repress his own people?

Rwandan President Paul Kagame is fourth from left in this lineup of NBA players, managers and officials during the NBA All Star Weekend.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame spoke at the screening of “Giants of Africa,” a film about basketball camps in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Rwanda, which are the project of Toronto Raptors Nigerian-born General Manager Masai Ujiri, meant to promote the sport and create opportunity in Africa. His appearance inspired indignation and headlines in the Toronto press. A Globe and Mail headline read, “Rwandan president Paul Kagame feted in Toronto despite controversy,” and a Toronto Star headline read, “NBA courts controversy with Rwandan president all-star appearance.”

I called CIUT-Toronto Taylor Report host Phil Taylor to ask what he thought of this and how it happened. Taylor frequently hosts the fiercest critics of Kagame’s iron-fisted rule and the false genocide narrative that he uses to stay in power.

Ann Garrison: Phil Taylor, you’ve kept the truth about Rwanda alive on the Taylor Report for nearly two decades. What do you think of the NBA hosting and celebrating Rwandan President Paul Kagame in your hometown during this week’s NBA All Star Weekend? The Toronto Star says that he’s been at a number of events attended by the city’s sporting and business elite and met more than 80 members of the Young Presidents’ Organization business group at a breakfast alongside retired Gen. Roméo Dallaire.

Phil Taylor: It seems like a bad joke on all of us. I really don’t comprehend how this happened. I think it’s terrible, and a very cynical exercise.

The NBA is very interested in developing relations with Africa to develop the sport. And my understanding is they deal with Ghana, which has an elected president and a democracy. They deal with Kenya, which has a democracy, and Nigeria, which has a democracy.

Victoire Ingabire has been in prison for nearly six years for attempting to run for president against Paul Kagame.

But Paul Kagame does not. There’s a woman named Victoire Ingabire; she’s been in prison for nearly six years now because she wanted to run for president against Paul Kagame.

I can’t believe that anybody associated with the NBA, particularly African American players, would want to do this. Some very powerful people pulled off, to my mind, a public relations stunt to bring him in. It’s embarrassing to the NBA, or it ought to be.

AG: David Himbara, Kagame’s former economic advisor, who now lives in exile there in Toronto, said that the Raptors and the NBA should apologize for this. Do you agree?

PT: Yes, I think we’re all owed some kind of explanation because Kagame’s record is well known, so whoever brought him here really had no respect for the population of Toronto or Canada, and certainly for those who are victims of Paul Kagame. I would not expect there’ll be an apology, but I’ll bet there are a lot of questions going around about how this happened.

AG: In this article in the Tor Star, the Toronto Star, it sounds like the NBA is a bit embarrassed. It says their spokesman “declined to comment” on whether or not President Kagame would be in the bleachers at the game.

PT: I watched to see if the camera found him anywhere, but, so far as I could tell, it did not, so we’ll probably never know whether he was there or not after the bad press he caused the NBA. But we always want to remember that Kagame is the MVP of America in Africa.

Obama and previous presidents, particularly Bill Clinton, have embraced him. And while they are sometimes critical, the money keeps flowing in, and Mr. Himbara, who also lives in this city of course, is the one who has pointed out that Rwanda is totally dependent on money from the U.S. and its Western allies.

AG: I’m not clear that the movement slogan “Black Lives Matter” has meaning outside the context of police brutality in the U.S., but if it did have meaning in Africa, the movement would seem to have a major issue with the NBA about this.

PT: Oh, absolutely. You know, the word genocide comes up so often in connection with Kagame, in a way that makes him out to be a hero, but he is an invader of countries. He invaded Rwanda in 1990, he invaded Congo, the DRC, in 1996 and now he talks about invading Burundi, another of Rwanda’s neighbors.

And in the case of Congo, lives were lost in the millions. So, it doesn’t compute that he receives any respect here in Toronto, or from the NBA.

Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report, Black Star News, Counterpunch and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News, KPFA Flashpoints and for her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at anniegarrison@gmail.com. In March 2014 she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace in the Great Lakes Region of Africa through her reporting.

Paul Kagame

by Freddy Usabuwera

In his 22 years as the powerful man in Rwanda and 16 years as the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame has proved to be not a tyrant and dictator responsible for large scale human rights abuse with an extreme and effective way of crushing dissidents and political opponents.  Hd has nevertheless been able to garner many powerful friends.

For the last 20 years, Paul Kagame has been credited with stopping the Rwanda genocide when he was the commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), a rebel force that took power in Rwanda in 1994. This made him a global celebrity praised by some leaders of the free world like Bill Clinton, who called him “one of the greatest leaders of our time,” and Tony Blair, who called him “a visionary.” Bill Gates and Pastor Rick Warren are also among the people who work closely with Kagame.

Under Kagame’s leadership, the Rwandan economy has been praised as a miracle. More than once, Kagame has been invited to high end and prestigious international forums to speak about the economy, leadership and environmental issues in the world. He has several times spoken at universities in the USA, including the Harvard University School of Business, where he is invited again as a speaker this coming weekend.

Before heading to Harvard, Kagame will be speaking on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016, at the IHS CERAWeek 2016 being held in Houston. The conference, whose theme is “Energy Transition: Strategies for a New World,” covers many topics including global markets, technology, competitive strategies, industry structure, regulatory policy and geopolitics. Participants are essentially leaders and executives in oil, natural gas, power, coal, nuclear and renewable energy industries.

One can ask oneself why Kagame has been invited as a speaker at this event while he has nothing to offer in regards to energy, as he has no achievement in this regard.

Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, 2010 presidential candidate, is in jail for 15 years on fabricated charges.

Looking at the recent history of Rwanda and the reality of what’s happening in real life on the ground inside Rwanda and the neighboring countries, the picture that is revealed there is the opposite of what Kagame has been praised for. Many have started to question the rhetoric about the economic growth in Rwanda, as many reports are showing an increase in poverty in the country, an increase in corruption and also a lack of basic infrastructure for a real growing economy, such as energy, manufacturing plants and also a qualified labor force.

In 2006, in his article titled “Rwanda, ten years on: From genocide to dictatorship,” Professor Filip Reyntjens stated: “Ten years after the 1994 genocide, Rwanda is experiencing not democracy and reconciliation but dictatorship and exclusion. … [The Rwandan Patriotic Front, President Kagame’s ruling party has] concentrated power and wealth in the hands of a very small minority, practiced ethnic discrimination, eliminated every form of dissent, destroyed civil society, conducted a fundamentally flawed ‘democratization’ process, and massively violated human rights at home and abroad.”

In 2010, the United Nations published what they called “The U.N. Mapping Report,” documenting serious crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In this report, the Rwandan army under the leadership of President Kagame is accused of “widespread and systematic violations: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide.”

The report meticulously documents 617 violent incidents, each pointing to the commission of gross human rights violations or international crimes. Most of these individual incidents, the report states, targeted several unarmed civilians, often women and children. The 550-page report detailing killings, rapes, destruction and other violent attacks is alarming, not least because similar crimes continue to be committed in the DRC, where impunity still reigns large.

In its 2014 report, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor of the U.S. Department of State documented the human rights problems in Rwanda. This bureau mentioned, among other abuses committed by President Kagame and his regime, “disappearances, government harassment, arrest, and abuse of political opponents, human rights advocates, and individuals perceived to pose a threat to government control and social order; disregard for the rule of law among security forces and the judiciary; and restrictions on civil liberties.”

In 2014, the BBC produced an unprecedented documentary in which the rhetoric and the official narrative on the 1994 Rwandan genocide is revisited. In this documentary, “Rwanda’s Untold Story,” we learn that the official story we have been told over and over again about what happened in Rwanda in 1994 might not be the truth.

In his own words, Professor Allan Stam of the University of Michigan, based on his research and investigation on the ground in Rwanda, says: “What the world believes and what actually happened in Rwanda during the genocide are quite different. In this documentary, Paul Kagame is accused by his then comrades in the army, Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa and Maj. Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa of being responsible for the shooting down of the plane of then President of Rwanda Juvenal Habyarimana, an act of terrorism viewed as triggering the genocide.

Gen. Kayumba was the chief intelligence officer of the RPF and military chief of staff of the Rwandan Defense Forces. Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa was chief of staff to President Kagame, general secretary of the Rwandan ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and former ambassador to the United States from 1996 to 1999.

The documentary also accuses the RPF of widespread and systematic killings of the Hutu population during and after the genocide. Paul Kagame is also accused of using the genocide as an export currency to gain more attention for the international community.

All these accusations and facts are just a small part of all other abuses committed by President Kagame and his regime. For the last 10 years, Kagame has been crushing his dissidents and political opponents by killing them inside the country or abroad and also silencing them by putting them in jail. To name a few, those include political party leaders like André Kagwa Rwisereka, leader of the Green Party in Rwanda, who was found dead and decapitated just days before the 2010 presidential elections.

Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, leader of the FDU Inkingi, an opposition political party, is in jail since 2010 on fabricated charges and sentenced to 15 years behind bars. Dr. Theoneste Niyitegeka is still languishing in jail as we write simply because he dared to run for president in 2003.

Musician Kizito Mihigo, a genocide survivor, is in jail for 10 years on fabricated charges.

Deo Mushayidi, former president of PDP Imanzi, an opposition party, is also in jail just because he ventured to practice politics in opposition to President Kagame. The famous musician Kizito Mihigo, a genocide survivor, is serving 10 years of jail time just because of the truthful and uniting messages found in his gospel songs.

The list of those who were silenced by the Kagame regime can go on and on, but we cannot help but mention the current military kangaroo court hearings in Rwanda on Gen. Frank Rusagara and Col. Tom Byabagamba.

How about Col. Patrick Karegeya, former Rwandan chief of external intelligence, who had fallen out with Kagame and was a member of the RNC (Rwanda National Congress), another opposition political party, was found strangled to death on 2015 New Years’ Eve in a hotel in South Africa? Kagame’s former personal physician, Dr. Emmanuel Gasakure, was shot dead while he was in police custody for no reason.

The business tycoon Assinapole Rwigara, journalists, human rights activists and scholars are also on the list of those who were killed by President Kagame and his regime. These evil tactics by President Kagame and his regime were also revealed by his former economic advisor and personal secretary, Dr. David Himbara and Maj. Robert Higiro during their recent appearance at the congressional hearing on May 20, 2015.

In his recent book “Bad News: Last Journalist in a Dictatorship,” award winning journalist and author Anjan Sundaram exposes Kagame’s network of fear. At a time when he was living in Rwanda and teaching journalism, Anjan describes in details how the people in Rwanda, especially journalists, live a life of terror and fear.

More recently, President Kagame has been accused of meddling in the domestic affairs of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi by arming groups that have been causing chaos and insecurity in those countries. The U.N. has just released a report accusing the Rwandan army of recruiting and arming Burundian refugees in Rwanda in order to attack their own country.

Against the above background, therefore, one wonders how all those who are inviting President Kagame to make speeches do not realize that he has nothing to offer. He is a serial killer who is just trying to buy time and cover up his wrongdoings and crimes. The Harvard University School of Business community should pause before giving him the podium.

Writer Freddy Usabuwera can be reached via Twitter at @usabfreddy.

by Sundiata Acoli and Earl Edelin

Most parties now agree that mass incarceration is NOT the solution to crime in America. The reason being is that its prison population size is NOT determined by the number of CRIMES committed.

For at least five straight years, both violent and nonviolent crime rates have been declining and serious crime rates were as low in 2011 as they were in 1964, yet the nation’s prison population remained functionally the same size and the U.S. continued its shameful position as the country with the most prisoners in the world.

So if the crime rate is not the dominant factor, what is? A look at the U.S. prison population shows that poor people make up its largest economic group and Blacks are its largest racial group, followed closely by Latino(a)s and other people of color. Whites are a racial minority in the prisons.

These proportions in prison are a shocking contrast to their percentages in outside society, where workers are the largest class and Whites are the largest racial group, followed by Latino(a)s, then Blacks and other racial and ethnic groups of color. It strongly suggests – as any quick review of racial and class relations between the government and people of color and the poor will show – that UNJUST racial and class policies are the dominant driving forces behind mass incarceration in the U.S. today.

The financial cost of mass incarceration has put critical strains on federal, state and city budgets nationwide, plus the moral crisis brought on by continued unjust racial and class policies toward people of color and the poor has created a social crisis in America. This has forced the federal government to initiate projects that address mass incarceration in federal prisons. Similar processes are being put in place to free state prisoners.

Since Blacks in particular and other people of color and the poor in general suffer disproportionate harm from encounters with the American justice system, many look upon these initiatives as President Obama’s attempt to “finally do something for the Black masses”: the average Black person in the street, the ones who have borne and are bearing still the brunt of the harm from the American justice system.

Sundiata Acoli 2013

Civil rights lawyer Alex Karakatsanis said in an Aug. 18, 2015, New York Times op-ed: “There are many people … in America’s federal prisons … whose sentences are now obviously illegal … (but) the Justice Department said that it did not want a rule that allowed other prisoners … to retroactively challenge their now illegal sentences. If the ‘floodgates’ were opened, too many others – mostly poor, mostly Black – would have to be released. The Obama administration’s fear of the political ramifications of thousands of poor minority prisoners being released at once around the country, what Justice William J. Brennan Jr. once called ‘a fear of too much justice,’ is the real justification.”

The sun is setting on the Obama administration, which seemingly has patterned its legacy on the Lincoln presidency that “freed the slaves.” And we believe the long arc of history will ultimately judge Obama, not by Bin Laden, GLBT, women, immigrants, business bailouts nor healthcare, but by whether he “freed the captives” or not.

There is more than ample justification for Obama, the first Black president, to do so, despite Bill Clinton’s claim to that title. Ironically this is the same Bill Clinton who, admittedly, during his tenure put more Black men in prison and kicked more Black women off welfare than any other president in U.S. history.

The projects provided to date are far from adequate for a timely resolution of the mass incarceration problem unless they are altered to take in and favorably process many more prisoners than their present capacity. And to make matters worse, the federal pardon attorney, Deborah Leff, recently sent her letter of resignation, effective Jan. 31, 2016, to the president.

She was unable to do her job due to lack of resources and blockage by the deputy attorney general who has authority to review the pardon attorney’s clemency recommendations, and federal prosecutors generally have little interest in revisiting or undoing their department’s criminal convictions.

Meanwhile, as Ms. Leff leaves office, more than 10,000 pardon petitions await review.

Obama has announced new standards and encouraged tens of thousands of federal prisoners to request reductions of their inordinately long drug sentences. He can end the blockage by running the pardons office out of the White House or by appointing an independent commission, as several states have done to improve or streamline the clemency process.

Right now, the most significant criminal justice reform package, which would, among other changes, reduce unjustly long drug sentences, is teetering on the edge of collapse in Congress. Whether it will survive or not is anybody’s guess.

But there is no question that President Obama has the power to revitalize clemency and deliver more justice to more people, if only he would do it. (See “Mr. Obama’s Pardon Problem,” an op-ed in the Jan. 27, 2016, New York Times.)

Earl Edelin counsels teenagers at the Stanton Dwellings housing complex in Southeast Washington. – Photo: Juana Arias, The Washington Post

Earl Edelin taught at the Roots Academy in Northwest Washington. – Photo: Dudley M. Brooks, The Washington Post

So this is mostly to urge federal prisoners to file for relief under the programs offered and to mobilize y(our) families, friends, supporters and others who believe in freedom and justice to write, wire, call or email President Obama and urge him to run the pardon office directly out of the White House or by an independent commission.

The various decarceration projects, programs and filing procedures are:

1. CLEMENCY – Clemency is an executive act generally made by state governors or the president of the United States. In 2010, President Obama signed legislation that reduced harsher sentences for possession of crack cocaine, compared to equivalent amounts of the powder form of the drug. The administration announced in 2014 new rules to ensure that people who commit relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses would no longer be charged with federal crimes carrying strict mandatory drug offense sentences.

The best way to begin this process in the Bureau of Prisons is to ask your prison case manager for one or more Clemency and Commutation forms. You can also request these forms from the United States Pardon Attorney, 1425 New York Ave. NW, Washington DC 20530. I should add that when you apply for a pardon, you are required to have been incarcerated for five years.

2. SENTENCE REDUCTION – Most requests for sentence reductions come with time limitations; generally you must make such a request within a year. A few things you should think about when asking for a sentence reduction are:

• Why I deserve a sentence reduction;
• What I have done while in prison;
• What employment skills I have;
• Where I will live and how I will take care of myself – this also includes your health care plans.

President Obama has created an Affordable Health Care Program that provides free health care for people being released from prison. There is a limit as to how long you can receive this health care.

There are several retroactive amendments that reduce your sentence for drug offenses: One is a Motion to Modify the Terms of Imprisonment. You file this motion pursuant to 18 U.S.C. Sec. 3582(c)(2). However, I suggest before you file anything, you simply write a letter to the Clerk of the Court of your area and also send a letter to the lawyer who handled your case. In the letter to the court, start by saying: “If I may, please let this letter serve as my motion to determine if I qualify for a modification under the 782 Amendment – or 750 Amendment – or any other relief that may be available to me. I also request that the court appoint me counsel, as I am indigent and want to avoid the risk of constitutional error.” In your letter to your lawyer, just ask him if he can get appointed to file a Sec. 3582(c)(2) motion for you. They will respond – good or bad.

3. THE SENTENCING REFORM AND CORRECTIONS ACT OF 2015 – This bill, S. 2123, was approved by a bipartisan vote of 15 to 5 in October 2015. All we are waiting for now is for the House of Representatives to vote it into law, which will be real soon. Specifically, the bill includes provisions to

• Reduce the mandatory life without parole sentence for a third drug or violent offense to a mandatory minimum term of 25 years in prison (retroactive);
• Reduce the mandatory minimum 20-year sentence for a second drug or violent offense to a mandatory minimum term of 15 years in prison (retroactive);
• Narrowly define which prior offenses can trigger longer mandatory minimum drug sentences;
• Make the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA) of 2010 retroactive, allowing approximately 6,500 drug offenders sentenced before Aug. 3, 2010, to seek sentences in line with that law’s reform to the 100-to-one disparity between crack and powder cocaine mandatory minimum sentences. The FSA will reduce your offense level by four levels;
• Expand the drug “safety valve” exception so that nonviolent drug offenders with non-serious criminal histories can receive sentences below the mandatory minimum term (not retroactive);
• Reduce the 15-year mandatory minimum sentence for certain gun possession offenses by people with criminal records to a mandatory minimum term of 10 years (retroactive);
• Reduce the 25-year mandatory minimum sentence for those who commit multiple offenses of possessing guns in the course of drug trafficking offenses to a mandatory minimum term of 15 years (retroactive) and apply that penalty to people with prior violent state convictions; and
• Allow some categories of federal prisoners to earn time credits for completing rehabilitative programs and “cash in” those time credits at the end of their sentence for a transfer to a different type of supervision, such as a halfway house;
• Allow almost all federal prisoners (except for murder, sex or terrorism offenders) to earn up to one third off their sentences for completing rehabilitative programs (retroactive);
• Fix the “stacking” of multiple 18 USC Sec. 924(c) sentences for multiple charges brought in one indictment (retroactive).

For your information – The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group Inc. make billions and billions of dollars operating prisons. They have given over $25 million to lobbyists to lobby against prison reform and against any program designed to release prisoners from prison.

These groups have donated over $10 million to some of the presidential candidates to reject prison reform programs. The bottom line is, the only way they stay in business is to keep us prisoners locked up.

HOPE IS THE NECESSITY OF MANKIND – This sentencing reform bill gives us and our families HOPE that we are released from prison … HOPE that we are able to live out the remainder of our lives with our loved ones. Keep this HOPE alive! Do something every day towards getting out of prison.

Earl Edelin is an accomplished jailhouse lawyer. Send our brothers some love and light: Earl Edelin, 01207-748, FCI Cumberland, Cumberland MD 21501-1000, and Sundiata Acoli (C. Squire), 39794-066, FCI Cumberland, Cumberland MD 21501-1000.

Editor’s note: CourthouseNews.com reported some bad news on Tuesday, Feb. 23: “Sundiata Acoli was denied parole Tuesday by the New Jersey Supreme Court, which found that he never went before the full parole board as required by law.

“The state high court’s decision reversed a previous ruling by the New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Division, which had granted parole to Acoli, and urged ‘patience, exercising judicial restraint, and allowing the administrative process to reach its conclusion.’

“Acoli was convicted in 1974.”

by Richard W. Behan

For 24 years Bill and Hillary Clinton have courted Wall Street money with notable success. During that time, the New York banks contributed:

• $11.17 million to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992
• $28.37 million for his re-election in 1996
• $2.13 million to Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign in 2002
• $6.02 million for her re-election in 2006
• $14.61 million to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008
• $21.42 million to her 2016 campaign

“Hillary Clinton deleted 30,000 personal emails after presenting her official correspondence to the State Department” is the original caption for this photo. – Photo: AP

The total here is $83.72 million for the six campaigns,^{i, ii} disbursed from 11 congenial banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, UBS, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, Barclay’s, JP Morgan Chase, CIBC, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley.^{iii, iv}

Then there were the speeches. Sixteen days after leaving the White House in 2001, Mr. Clinton delivered a speech to Morgan Stanley, for which he was paid $125,000. That was the first of many speeches to the New York banks. Over the next 14 years, Mr. Clinton’s Wall Street speaking engagements earned him a total of $5,910,000:^v

• $1,550,000 from Goldman Sachs
• $1,690,000 from UBS
• $1,075,000 from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch
• $770,000 from Deutsche Bank
• $700,000 from Citigroup

After she resigned as secretary of state in 2012 Hillary Clinton took to the lecture circuit as well. Some of her income has come to light during the current presidential campaign – the infamous $675,000 she was paid for three speeches to Goldman Sachs.

That disclosure, however, belittles her financial achievement and the scope of her audiences. She also addressed the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Ameriprise, Apollo Management Holdings, CIBC, Fidelity Investments and Golden Tree Asset Management. In doing so, she earned another $2,265,000.^vi

No other political couple in modern history has enjoyed so much money flowing to them from Wall Street for such a long time – $92.57 million over a quarter century.

During a CNN forum on Feb. 3, Anderson Cooper wondered if Goldman Sachs’ $675,000 might impact her prospective presidential decisions. Defending her integrity with undisguised indignation, she described her independence from the banks:

“Anybody who knows me, who thinks that they can influence me, name anything they’ve influenced me on. Just name one thing. I’m out here every day saying I’m going to shut them down, I’m going after them. I’m going to jail them if they should be jailed. I’m going to break them up.”^vii

No other political couple in modern history has enjoyed so much money flowing to them from Wall Street for such a long time – $92.57 million over a quarter century.

Her campaign website confirms her fierce determination to oversee the banks and hold them strictly to account. “Wall Street must work for Main Street,” the website claims, outlining her program for “Wall Street Reform”:

• Veto Republican efforts to repeal or weaken Dodd-Frank.
• Tackle dangerous risks in the big banks and elsewhere in the financial system.
• Hold both individuals and corporations accountable when they break the law.^viii

Goldman Sachs’ $675,000 might be insufficient to elicit Ms. Clinton’s sympathetic ear, but a quarter century of accepting tens of millions of dollars is not so easily dismissed. It would likely have some impact on the Clintons’ sense of gratitude and certainly on their social, cultural and political environments.

Over that period of time, while one of them or the other held public office almost continuously, the couple accumulated a net worth of $125 million.^{ix, x} Measured by family wealth, this inserted the couple into the top 1 percent of American families by a factor of 16 ($7.88 million is the threshold).

Bill and Hillary Clinton leave a Wall Street event. – Photo: A. Katz, Shutterstock

Breaking up banks, jailing the lawless executives, forcing Wall Street to work for Main Street: Hillary Clinton’s stern proclamations of impartial law enforcement and strict regulation are difficult to take seriously.

Wall Street doesn’t. One bank executive assured his clients, “We continue to believe Clinton would be one of the better candidates for financial firms.” He was quoted in a CNN Money article, “Wall Street Isn’t Worried about Hillary Clinton’s Plan,” which stated:

“Hillary Clinton unveiled her big plan to curb the worst of Wall Street’s excesses … The reaction from the banking community was a shrug, if not relief.”^xi

There is good reason for the banks’ sanguine view. Over the 24 years of the romance, the Clintons first reoriented their political party, gave it a new name, the New Democratic Party, and put it at Wall Street’s service.

Then they engineered financial opportunities for the New York banks of immense value – running into the hundreds of billions. And through the years as president, senator and secretary of state, the Clintons supported Wall Street’s interests at every necessary turn and without fail.

Breaking up banks, jailing the lawless executives, forcing Wall Street to work for Main Street: Hillary Clinton’s stern proclamations of impartial law enforcement and strict regulation are difficult to take seriously.

In the early 1990s, chairing the Democratic Leadership Council, Bill Clinton ushered in the centrist, triangulating New Democratic Party, explicitly to be more business-friendly – and to attract the financial support of corporate America. Wall Street supported his 1992 campaign handsomely, and Bill Clinton became the first president under the new banner. Hillary Clinton was at his side, a de facto minister-without-portfolio.

When he appointed Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs as secretary of the Treasury Department, Clinton established a precedent. For the next 24 years, every administration would find Wall Street executives to serve in the position. The New York banks became the primal clients of the New Democratic Party.

In the early 1990s, chairing the Democratic Leadership Council, Bill Clinton ushered in the centrist, triangulating New Democratic Party, explicitly to be more business-friendly – and to attract the financial support of corporate America.

But the working families of America and the African-American and Hispanic communities – the party’s historic constituencies – were betrayed and abandoned, deprived of effective representation in Washington. The Clintons’ political campaigns over the next decades became monumental hypocrisies, Bill donning sunglasses to play his saxophone for Arsenio Hall, Hillary visiting Black churches to hug the parishioners. They speak warmly to the traditional constituencies with carefully scripted political rhetoric, currying their favor, depending on them for electoral victory, but effectively obscuring the truth of their betrayal.

But the working families of America and the African-American and Hispanic communities – the party’s historic constituencies – were betrayed and abandoned, deprived of effective representation in Washington.

The traditional constituencies were not only betrayed, but targeted. On taking office, Mr. Clinton announced, “The era of big government is over.” On that cue he co-opted two issues long used by Republicans to mask their party’s racism: “welfare” and “crime.” To address the issues, two laws were passed in Clinton’s first term that savaged the betrayed constituencies.

The first was The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It fulfilled Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it,” and the punishing effects it set in motion have yet to abate.

Since the end of the Clinton administration, poverty in the U.S. has nearly doubled: “(T)he number of Americans living in high-poverty areas rose to 13.8 million in 2013 from 7.2 million in 2000, with African-Americans and Latinos driving most of the gains.”^xii

Mr. Clinton co-opted two issues long used by Republicans to mask their party’s racism: “welfare” and “crime.”

To show how tough on crime he could be, Clinton next guided The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 through Congress. A flurry of prison construction quickly followed, an industry of private for-profit prisons took hold and flourished, and a skyrocketing population mostly of young Black males soon filled them, most frequently charged with drug offenses, non-violent and victim-free.

Sixteen years later the effects of the law were described in a searing book: “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” The author of the book is a distinguished legal scholar and human rights activist, Michelle Alexander.

Ms. Alexander well understands how the Clintons and their creation, the New Democratic Party, left working families and communities of color without a political voice. And no one addresses the tragedy more forcefully.

Her latest work is an article, “Black Lives Shattered,” in the Feb. 29, 2016, issue of The Nation. She details how the two Clinton laws have devastated African-American families and sent millions – particularly those young Black males – to prison. In the article’s caption, she asks, “The Clintons’ legacy has been the impoverishment of Black America – so why are we still voting for them?

The online version of her article carries a different title, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.” Her compelling case is abbreviated in the subtitle: “From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted – and Hillary Clinton supported – decimated Black America.”

The two Clinton laws have devastated African-American families and sent millions – particularly those young Black males – to prison.

When pressed, and with limited enthusiasm, Hillary Clinton now apologizes for the laws, suggesting they are no longer quite so appropriate.

But she has not, cannot and unquestionably will not mention two other laws passed at the bidding of President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. These laws enriched the Wall Street banks by hundreds of billions of dollars, but they too devastated working families, African-Americans and Latinos.

The first was The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, repealing the Glass-Steagall legislation of 1933. Now it was legal once more for financial institutions to mix commercial and investment banking. Goldman Sachs et al. could now use depositor’s funds, insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., to buy up “subprime” mortgages, the high-interest debt obligations of typically low-income, Black and Latino families.

The next law was The Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Now Goldman Sachs et al. could transform packages of those “subprime” mortgages into complicated derivatives called “mortgage-backed obligations,” have them fraudulently rated as AAA investments, and sell them around the world, without limit, without restriction, without regulation, at immense profit.

These laws enriched the Wall Street banks by hundreds of billions of dollars, but they too devastated working families, African-Americans and Latinos.

For eight years the bubble inflated, and then it collapsed in the last year of George Bush’s administration. Real estate values plummeted.

The stock market was hammered. So was the U.S. economy. And so tragically were many low-income, African-American and Latino families. $13 trillion in household wealth vaporized. Nine million workers lost their jobs. Five million families were evicted from their homes.^xiii

This is what the Clinton administration, and the New Democratic Party, had wrought.

The banks were caught with hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed derivatives still in the pipeline, the market values of which were dropping like stones. Wall Street’s prospective losses were horrific; bankruptcies loomed.

But George Bush’s treasury secretary was the obligatory Wall Streeter: Mr. Hank Paulson, recently CEO of Goldman Sachs. In a heartbeat, Mr. Paulson rammed through Congress The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It was known as the “Troubled Asset Relief Program,” and it handed Mr. Paulson $700 billion of taxpayers’ money to buy the near-worthless securities from the banks.

Hillary Clinton, now the U.S. senator from New York, voted for the bill, telling a New York radio station the next day, “I think the banks of New York are probably the biggest winners in this.”^xiv

Eagerly, Mr. Paulson started buying, typically paying the banks half again the market value of the “troubled assets.”^xv But a presidential campaign was underway, and soon he would have to stop.

Barack Obama, overcoming Hillary Clinton in the primaries, was elected as the second president from the New Democratic Party. Mr. Obama’s campaign contributions from Wall Street:

• Goldman Sachs: $1,034,615
• JP Morgan Chase: $847,855
• Citigroup: $755,057
• Morgan Stanley: $528,182

The total here is $3.7 million.^xvi (Hillary Clinton’s campaign, apparently thought more likely to succeed, was supported with $14.6 million from the banks.^xvii)

President Obama’s choice of Wall Street bankers to head his Treasury Department was Mr. Timothy Geithner, lately the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Mr. Geithner wasted no time in resuming the “troubled asset” purchases, and his execution of the program was no less profitable for the banks than Mr. Paulson’s.^xviii

Wall Street’s grip on the New Democratic Party, however, and its influence in the Obama administration appeared in the Department of Justice as well. Mr. Eric Holder joined the administration from the law firm of Covington Burling, which represents in Washington most of the Wall Street banks.

Charged with prosecuting their criminal behavior, Mr. Holder found the banks “too big to fail.” Instead of criminal indictments and lawsuits, then, Mr. Holder negotiated with each of the banks a financial penalty to be paid from corporate funds.

No corporate executives were jailed, no personal fines levied, no records of criminal conduct filed, no salaries reduced, no bonuses denied.

Today the Wall Street banks are larger and more powerful than ever, and Mr. Holder has returned to Covington Burling. President Obama, however – of the New Democratic Party – has provided no similar relief to the brutalized working families and communities of color.

Their struggles continue, the crime and welfare laws have not been repealed, and the title of a recent study tells the tragic truth: “During Obama’s Presidency Wealth Inequality has Increased and Poverty Levels are Higher.”^xix

Because of the Clintons’ romance with Wall Street and their corrupt New Democratic Party, the New York bankers and the Clintons are richer today. Others – betrayed, abandoned, savaged – are not.

Notes

i: “Two Clintons. 41 years. $3 Billion,” Washington Post, Nov. 19, 2015

ii: “Occupy Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Speeches,” Huffpost Politics, Feb. 28, 2016

iii: “Hillary Clinton. Top 20 Contributors, 1999-2002,” Open Secrets

iv: “Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush Still Favorites of Wall Street Banks,” Huffpost Politics, Oct. 22, 2015

v: “$153 Million in Bill and Hillary Speaking Fees, Documented,” Robert Yoon, CNN, updated Feb. 6, 2016

vi: “Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks That Most of Us Earn in a Lifetime,” The Intercept, Jan. 8, 2016

vii: “Clinton Defends Wall Street Speeches at CNN Town Hall,” Time, Feb. 4, 2016

viii: From Hillary Clinton’s campaign website, under “Wall Street Reform,” http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street

ix: “Hillary Clinton Net Worth: $45 Million,” Celebrity Net Worth

x: “Bill Clinton Net Worth: $80 Million,” Celebrity Net Worth

xi: “Wall Street Isn’t Worried about Hillary Clinton’s Plan,” CNN Money, Oct. 8, 2015

xii: “Poverty Has Nearly Doubled Since 2000 in America,” International Business Times, Aug. 9, 2015

xiii: “Wall Street Reform: Wall Street must work for Main Street,” HillaryClinton.com

xiv: “Hillary Clinton’s Fake Tough Talk on Wall Street,” The Daily Beast, Nov. 13, 2015

xv: “Troubled Asset Relief Program,” Wikipedia

xvi: “Barack Obama. Top Contributors, 2008 Cycle,” Open Secrets

xvii: “Two Clintons. 41 years. $3 Billion,” Washington Post, Nov. 19, 2015

xviii: “Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street,” by Neil Barofsky

xix: “During Obama’s Presidency, Wealth Inequality Has Increased and Poverty Levels Are Higher,” Counterpunch, Feb. 26, 2016

Richard W. Behan, a frequent commentator on economics and politics and author of “Plundered Promise,” lives in Corvallis, Oregon. He can be reached at rwbehan@comcast.net. This story first appeared on Counterpunch.

by Liz Fields

Bill Clinton has a history of sometimes suffering from severe foot-in-mouth disease and veering dangerously off message while on the campaign trail for his wife, Hillary. On Thursday, a short video clip of the former president sparring with Black Lives Matter protesters from the stump in Philadelphia once again raised the question of whether Bill is actually helping or hurting Hillary’s campaign.

The heated exchange began after the demonstrators interrupted Clinton several times while he was on stage, lambasting his administration’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The legislation has been blamed for ushering in an era of mass incarceration that disproportionately affects Blacks and Latinos, raising the U.S. prison population by more than a million.

But the part of the exchange that has been shared most widely on social media probably came when one of the protesters suggested Clinton should be charged with “crimes against humanity.”

“I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children,” Clinton said, pointing his finger at the crowd. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens.”

“You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter!” he went on. “Tell the truth. You are defending the people who caused young people to go out and take guns.”

Clinton also defended the crime legislation, saying it helped bring about record lows in crime and murder rates.

“Because of that bill, we had a 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate – and listen to this – because of that and the background check law, a 46-year low in the deaths of people of gun violence,” he said. “How do you think those lives were, that mattered? Whose lives were saved, that mattered?”

Bill Clinton lectures Black Lives Matter protesters at a rally for his wife Hillary in Philadelphia on April 7. – Photo: Dennis Van Tine, Star Max-AP

The Clinton campaign declined to comment Thursday, while the Sanders campaign did not immediately respond to an inquiry from VICE News.

Hillary Clinton and Sanders have openly attacked each other in recent days ahead of a crucial New York primary on April 19. Both candidates have also held rallies and town balls in largely Black and Latino areas of New York this week, campaigning on a raft of issues including criminal justice reform and police brutality.

Clinton’s campaign, which has eagerly and successfully courted minority voters, has done so with the support from prominent Black politicians, leaders and relatives of Black people who were killed by police.

The former secretary of state held an event in Brooklyn on Wednesday with a panel of prominent Black women, including Chirlane McCray, the wife of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Nicole Bell, the fiancée of Sean Bell, who was infamously shot by police 50 times on the night of their wedding in 2006.

“Nine years ago, I lost my fiancé, Sean Bell, in a police-involved shooting, and unfortunately, there are too many families with stories like mine,” Bell said in a statement to the New York Times on Sunday. “[Hillary Clinton] understands that we need reforms that can be felt on our streets and in our communities,” she added, declaring that she “will stand up to the gun lobby, work to end racial profiling, and make key investments to ensure that law enforcement officials have adequate training.”

After several early episodes in which Hillary Clinton was heckled by Black Lives Matter protesters, she met with several activists from the movement and has since campaigned heavily on issues of criminal justice and ending excessive use of force by law enforcement. The Black Lives Matter movement, a nonpartisan coalition of groups and individual activists, has stated it will not endorse any one candidate in 2016.

After several early episodes in which Hillary Clinton was heckled by Black Lives Matter protesters, she met with several activists from the movement and has since campaigned heavily on issues of criminal justice and ending excessive use of force by law enforcement.

Sanders has also sought to increase his support among Black voters and remedy early criticisms that his campaign focused solely on economic insecurity, to the exclusion of race and other issues. Sanders had also experienced early run-ins with Black Lives Matter protesters at several campaign events.

At one conference, demonstrators demanded that the senator recognize the names of Black people who have died in police custody, including Sandra Bland, who was found hanging in her Texas jail cell last July. Sanders received criticism for declining to “say her name” at the time, but later issued statements firmly stating that “Black lives matter.”

He has since also campaigned heavily on the issue, often repeating the line, “When a police officer breaks the law, that officer must be held accountable,” at rallies and events.

The Black Lives Matter movement, a nonpartisan coalition of groups and individual activists, has stated it will not endorse any one candidate in 2016.

In February, Sanders received an endorsement from Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, who died in an illegal police chokehold in July 2014. On Wednesday, the senator elicited loud cheers at an event in Philadelphia when he said he would formally apologize for slavery if elected president.

Liz Fields, New York-based reporter and associate editor for Vice and reporter for ViceNews covering foreign policy, ethnic conflict, culture, humanitarian and international affairs, and the 2016 election, can be reached at @lianzifields.

Bill Clinton ‘almost’ apologizes for lecturing Black Lives Matter protesters

by Nick Wing

Former President Bill Clinton offered a more even-tempered analysis of his criminal justice legacy on Friday in an apparent effort to smooth over the controversy surrounding his contentious exchange with protesters the day before.

“So I did something yesterday in Philadelphia. I almost want to apologize for it, but I want to use it as an example of the danger threatening our country,” Clinton told attendees at a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The former president then dove back into disagreements about the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Prevention Act, a controversial piece of legislation that has become a point of criticism for both Hillary Clinton, who supported it as first lady, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, who voted for it as a congressman. During a campaign appearance in Philadelphia on Thursday, a pair of Black Lives Matter activists criticized the former president for passing the law, while calling his wife a “murderer” who was guilty of “crimes against humanity.”

“It is true [the bill] had longer sentence provisions,” Clinton said Friday. “It is true that they led to some people going to jail for too long in ways that cannot be justified. And I went to the NAACP convention last year and said that and said it was way past time to change.”

Clinton went on to say that in his attempt to “vigorously defend” his wife on Thursday, both he and the protester ended up “talking past” one another.

“We’ve gotta stop that in this country,” said Clinton. “We’ve gotta listen to each other.”

While Clinton has admitted in the past that the 1994 crime bill contributed to an era of mass incarceration – “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” he said last year – his defense on Thursday lacked that air of self-reflection.

Clinton explained the harsh sentencing measures of the legislation as necessary to ensure its passage, and pointed to the fact that the bill had many African-American supporters at the time. He also seemed to suggest that despite its catastrophic side effects, the new laws had played a part in lowering rates of gun violence and crime, a conclusion that hasn’t been borne out by empirical evidence.

While Clinton has admitted in the past that the 1994 crime bill contributed to an era of mass incarceration – “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” he said last year – his defense on Thursday lacked that air of self-reflection.

In one particularly heated section of the back and forth, the former president appeared to respond to criticism of Hillary Clinton’s decades-old comments regarding child “super-predators,” a now-debunked myth about kids with “no conscience, no empathy” who were committing crimes in the ‘90s.

“I don’t know how you would describe the gang leaders who got 13-year-olds hopped up on crack and sent them out in the streets to murder other African-American children,” he said, appearing to suggest that the “predators” were not the children themselves. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens, [Hillary] didn’t. …You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter.”

The former president’s remarks drew immediate backlash, as people accused him of revisiting the very sort of racially tinged rhetoric that had been used to push through the 1994 crime bill in the first place. To make matters more complicated, Hillary Clinton has already apologized for her comments on “super-predators.”

But despite his changed tone on Friday, Clinton once again pointed out that the political climate was different in the early 1990s, as the nation sought to deal with a crime wave that had many cities in a chokehold.

“You’re living in a country where young African-Americans think their number one threat now is from police officers,” he said. “When I signed that crime bill, they knew what their number one threat was. It was from gangs, making money out of cocaine, taking teenage kids, hopping them up, giving them guns and telling them to go kill other teenagers to prove their bones. It’s different.”

Nick Wing, senior viral editor for The Huffington Post, can be reached at Twitter.com/nickpwing.

by Musa al-Gharbi

As an African American, I have struggled to understand why so many of my Black brothers and sisters seem to prefer Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.

While Hillary Clinton tries to recast herself as a champion of Black empowerment, even a child can sense the hypocrisy behind the smile.

Some have argued that Black people are terrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency, and so they rally around Clinton under the belief that she is more electable in the November general contest. However, looking at the election results so far, it seems clear that Bernie Sanders actually stands the best chance of prevailing over Trump, while Hillary would likely lose.

Then there’s the notion that Hillary Clinton is somehow preserving Barack Obama’s legacy: Just a few short months ago she was going out of her way to distance herself from the Obama administration because she believed it was politically expedient to do so. Now, under threat from Sanders’ insurgency, she is cynically trying to sell herself as Obama’s right hand. But of course, the moment she locks down the nomination, she’ll go back to drawing contrasts – the Clintons have always been leaders at “vote capturing.”

But perhaps the most disturbing of all is the insinuation that Hillary Clinton has some kind of proud and storied legacy in the service of Black empowerment. She doesn’t. Consider the comparative records of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders:

The Chicago years

While attending the University of Chicago, Sanders served as a chapter chairman for the Congress for Racial Equality. In this capacity, he worked to end segregation in schools and housing – activities for which he was arrested.

What was Hillary Clinton doing while Sanders was organizing sit-ins and demonstrations? Well, she was also living in Chicago at the time, but she was working for the other team: In 1963-4, Clinton was a volunteer and supporter for the campaign of Barry Goldwater.

For those who don’t know, Goldwater’s claim to fame is that he was the first Republican to win the Deep South since Reconstruction. He achieved this feat by vowing to undermine enforcement of the Civil Rights Act and to prevent further erosion of white privilege.

In 1963, Bernie Sanders took part in the historic March on Washington with Dr. King. In 1964, Hillary Clinton supported Barry Goldwater, a Republican right-winger almost as infamous as Trump, for president.

His campaign was so disgusting that many Republican leaders, such as George Romney and John Rockefeller, refused to endorse his candidacy even after he won his party’s nomination. A good deal of the Republican electorate, who had traditionally championed civil rights and civil liberties, also refused to support him.

As a result, those aforementioned Deep South states were literally the only contests he won other than his home state of Arizona in one of the most dramatic landslide losses in U.S. presidential history. Yet, this is the man who inspired Hillary Clinton to get into politics. And she was campaigning for him while Bernie was campaigning for desegregation.

The trend continues: In 1984 and ‘88, Bernie Sanders endorsed and supported Jesse Jackson’s bids for the White House, which would have made him America’s first African-American president. Rather than endorsing this movement, Bill Clinton infamously sought to elevate himself among white Southern and Rust-Belt voters at the expense of Mr. Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition.

Of course, it’d be easy to write this off – after all, it was a long time ago. However, the Clintons’ tenure in the White House doesn’t look so great in hindsight either:

The Clinton administration(s)

Bill Clinton’s deregulation of banks and Wall Street helped bring about the 2008 financial collapse that profoundly and disproportionately obliterated Black wealth. In the wake of this disaster, and despite the banks’ long and sordid history of discrimination and predatory practices against people of color, Hillary Clinton continues to defend the institutions responsible – and is richly rewarded for doing so.

Bill Clinton’s welfare reform further contributed to extreme poverty – particularly for African Americans and other communities of color. While Bernie strongly resisted these measures, Hillary staunchly advocated for them – referring to people on welfare as “deadbeats” who were largely responsible for their own continued poverty.

And then, of course, there are the Clinton-era “tough on crime” measures, which Hillary Clinton actively lobbied for. While Sanders ultimately voted for the bill for the sake of its assault rifle ban and domestic violence protections, he first took to the Senate floor to passionately denounce the draconian sentencing provisions contained therein, which he aptly predicted would be exercised primarily against America’s poor, largely people of color. In contrast, Hillary Clinton referred to the criminalized as animals, describing them as “super-predators” who have to be “brought to heel.”

More Americans were incarcerated under Bill Clinton than any previous president – almost all of them poor people, overwhelmingly Black and Brown. Yet as late as 2008, despite the by-then obvious effects of these policies on communities of color, Clinton stood by this record proudly and actually mocked Barack Obama’s opposition to mandatory minimum sentences.

Later in that same cycle, it would be Clinton supporters who first began circulating rumors that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and might be a secret Muslim – launching the “birther” movement. Not only did Clinton fail to denounce these claims from her supporters – then later hypocritically bash Donald Trump for doing the same – her campaign actively attempted to capitalize on this paranoia, dog-whistling that Hillary was “born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century” and bragging about the edge she held over Obama among non-college attending white Americans.

Little has changed

Then again, 2008 was eight years ago, right? What about today?

Consider that one of the people currently attempting to slime Bernie Sanders on Clinton’s behalf is her long-time friend and ally, David Brock, who infamously led the hatchet job against law professor Anita Hill when she accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. For Hillary Clinton to sell herself as a champion of women and African Americans while closely associating herself with someone like Brock is deeply unsettling … much like Clinton taking foreign policy and national security guidance from the same consulting firm that formulates strategy for Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

In a recent debate, Clinton reiterated confederate narratives about the origins of America’s racial dynamics. In the aftermath of Dylann Roof’s massacre at Emannuel AME in Charleston, she went to a predominantly Black church in Ferguson, Missouri – the site of the first Black Lives Matter uprisings following the death of Michael Brown – and went out of her way to emphasize that “All Lives Matter.”

One could go on and on. These are not instances of occasional misspeaking or malformed policies – instead, a consistent pattern of words and actions persisting over decades. This is not to suggest Hillary Clinton is racist, at least not any more than most white people, but the idea that she is or ever has been a stalwart advocate for Black empowerment is absolutely ludicrous.

A generational divide?

Although Black people do vote with more cohesiveness than most other groups, we are not a monolith. And the narrative that people of color unanimously back Clinton over Sanders is misleading at best:

While much of the “old guard” of African American politicians has rallied around Hillary Clinton, newer leaders – like Rep. Keith Ellison and contemporary Black revolutionaries like Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates – have aligned themselves with Bernie Sanders in the conviction that his policies and his approach stand the best chance of meaningfully redressing social inequality. Still others, such as Black Lives Matter Chicago co-founder Aislinn Pulley, are demanding substantive action over platitudes or token reforms and are increasingly refusing to be part of the DNC farce at all.

This bodes ill for Clinton: The longer this race goes on, and the more Black voters examine the comparative records, platforms and prospects of Clinton v. Sanders, the more likely it is that the former’s cynical identity politics campaign will once again implode, as it did in 2008.

Hillary’s record on civil rights is indeed extensive, albeit inconsistent and often ignoble. By contrast, Bernie has a long, proud, consistent record on fighting inequality – often far ahead of the Democratic Party in this regard – and always far, far ahead of Hillary Clinton.

Musa al-Gharbi is a political philosopher affiliated with the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflict (SISMEC). Readers can connect to his work and social media via his website, www.fiatsophia.org, where this story first appeared. It was republished by Salon.

by Mutope Duguma

It’s personal because your actions against the oppressed were calculating, premeditated and strategically targeting New Afrikans and other oppressed, poor citizens of this nation. Not only did you wickedly abuse the trust of the people who believed in you, but you demonstrated what hatred looks like in policy.

Graphic: Nsiala Kongo

Yes! Your charisma, accompanied with your oiled up tongue, allowed you to work your charms on the people while all the time preying on them like a wild, mad predator. Yes! You were able to carry out some of the most horrific policies in modern day times, in order to set in motion what we see today right before our very eyes.

I personally have always seen you exactly as you are, cunning, conniving and narcissistic. Not for one second did I think you genuinely cared about the poor people of this nation or the world, or for anyone other than yourself.

But your charisma was able to mask your true intent, which was to “kill” unremorsefully – with racial pride. Well, I happen to be an outcast in this world of ours, one who’s part of a caste system – oppressed marginalized people of the world – sanctioned by your bosses, the 1 percenters. Due to my race and class status, my words carry no weight with the people of middle and upper class status of the world.

Not only did you wickedly abuse the trust of the people who believed in you, but you demonstrated what hatred looks like in policy.

Therefore, we’ll allow your policies and actions or lack thereof to represent who and what you are: born to William and Virginia Cassidy Blythe on Aug. 19, 1946, who named you William Jefferson Blythe IV. Your father died before you were born, your mother remarried Roger Clinton and you took on his last name, Clinton.

You earned your undergraduate degree from Georgetown University in 1968 and attended Oxford University for two years as a Rhodes Scholar. You ducked the draft in order to avoid the Vietnam War.

You earned a law degree from Yale in 1973. You taught at the Law School of Arkansas for three years, 1973-1976. You were then elected state attorney general in Arkansas in 1978.

You married Hillary Rodham, your law school classmate. And you went on to be governor of Arkansas.

It’s important to understand that “we the people” know that you are an accomplished person who’s very intelligent; you’re not stupid, naïve nor ignorant by a long shot. Everything you’ve done thus far in your life has been deliberate, shrewd and calculating.

In 1992, you would oversee the modern day lynching of a mentally impaired New Afrikan man named Ricky Ray Rector. You even had a few choice words after the execution: “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.”

Aren’t you the same Bill Clinton who dodged the draft? You’re too smart to put yourself in a position to be nicked!

Under any other circumstances, could you carry out such a murder, especially with a gun in your hand? But it’s real easy for you to do when you carry it out under state sanctioned murder, which you sponsored as the governor of Arkansas.

It’s important to understand that “we the people” know that you are an accomplished person who’s very intelligent; you’re not stupid, naïve nor ignorant by a long shot. Everything you’ve done thus far in your life has been deliberate, shrewd and calculating.

You would get elected president of the United States after demonstrating that you had no problem killing niggers. And, you would demonstrate just that in your policies.

You came into office endorsing the idea of a federal three strikes law, meaning that you wanted to bury as many people in federal prisons as possible. You then signed off on a $30 billion crime bill, and the result of that bill was a new federal capital crime, mandatory life sentences for three time offenders, and more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of state and local police forces.

So why would you institute policies that would build hundreds of prisons that would be used to massively incarcerate human beings? especially thousands of New Afrikans, citizens of this nation? Your actions moved this whole country toward a police state.

Then you set your sights on the single, poor women of this nation, especially New Afrikan women, who were already part of the oppressed class. Knowing what your intent was, did you really have to take so many photo-ops with these women? their children? as if you were coming into office to serve their interests? Did you have to be so cruel? while smiling that cunning smile?

Why would you institute policies that would build hundreds of prisons that would be used to massively incarcerate human beings? especially thousands of New Afrikans, citizens of this nation?

Then you signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, PRWORA, which was a very sadistic way to tell these poor oppressed women on welfare, “You’re on your own,” when their very lives were dependent on government assistance. You knew, Bill, that these women were uneducated, with no profession and no clue on how to enter a work force.

You couldn’t even be straight out about it. You would double talk them by introducing Aid to Families with Dependent Children – AFDC – while all the time using a back door block grant to renegotiate AFDC and call it Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

“TANF imposed a five year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, as well as a permanent lifetime ban on eligibility for welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense, including simple possession of marijuana,” explains Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow.”

Is this why you upped the ante on the War on Drugs that disproportionately targeted New Afrikans, increasing imprisonment of New Afrikan women in particular, which rendered them unable to receive any government assistance? Why would you target the most vulnerable human beings in our society? destroying what was left of the oppressed New Afrikan family structure in Amerikkka?

You did all this relatively quickly, between 1993 and 1996. Damn, Bubba, you was seriously “kill crazed” on the New Afrikan people and their communities.

Yet, you were not done! You continued to find ways to economically deprive the oppressed communities of this nation by rerouting the money that was going into these communities, money that you would put into repressive, punitive polices, which was all the money you took out of the AFDC, food stamp program and public housing – money you redirected to build prisons all over this country.

Why would you target the most vulnerable human beings in our society? destroying what was left of the oppressed New Afrikan family structure in Amerikkka?

I must admit, it was a clever way to re-enslave the people into the prison industrial slave complex, PISC, while raising homelessness to an all-time high. When you took $17 billion out of public housing, it was probably the most inhumane thing you could do to a human being, to not provide them with affordable housing.

But you were introducing the new HUD program, the PISC, the new government housing, which supported your modern day slave plantation idea! Is this why you boosted correctional spending by $19 billion? You and the Democratic Party single handedly decimated the lives of New Afrikan and oppressed citizens of this nation.

Does your hatred for New Afrikans (Blacks) stem from your Arkansas upbringing, or did you learn these ways at Oxford? I ask because your racial hatred can be seen in your policies.

Was it really necessary to exclude anyone with a criminal history from receiving federal housing assistance under your “one strike and you’re out” initiative? Again, you come with that double talk, because “criminal history” would mean that there already exists a criminal record, right? But your “one strike and you’re out” initiative, requiring only an accusation of criminal activity, was able to illegally evict New Afrikan women all over Amerika, leaving many of them homeless.

You started two of the worst federal drug programs in the history of this country, Community Oriented Policing Services, COPS, and the Byrne Grant Program, which was how you was able to militarize the local and state police, who we see today terrorizing and killing New Afrikans in particular and other poor citizens of this nation.

Does your hatred for New Afrikans (Blacks) stem from your Arkansas upbringing, or did you learn these ways at Oxford? I ask because your racial hatred can be seen in your policies.

You also signed off on the Anti-terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act, AEDPA, that literally put time limits on people filing their criminal conviction appeals in court. The prisoners had one year to get their appeal in the court on their own, or forfeit their appeal, sealing the fate of life prisoners all over this country.

You are a lawyer; you know that it takes years to learn law. Yet you impose a policy that allows the most uneducated people in this nation to learn in only one year how to challenge their prison conviction in the courts.

For the eight years of your presidency you did everything to attack New Afrikans and the poor citizens of this nation – instituting policy after policy designed to kill many – and that’s exactly what your polices are doing today, killing New Afrikans and other citizens of this nation by the thousands if not millions. To see you still do photo ops with New Afrikans and Afrikans demonstrates to me that there is a serious communication problem between our people.

I want to ask you one last question: Why did you sit back as president of the U.S. and allow 1 million Rwandans to be massacred when you could easily have used your executive authority to end the massacre? I must admit that looking at your policies and imagining you watching 1 million Afrikans being slaughtered speaks to your deliberate desire to kill as many niggers as possible.

Bubba, it’s personal because you did it while smiling in our faces. Your cover is blown. So why would New Afrikans (Blacks) support Hillary Clinton? when her husband has murdered thousands of us during his presidency through his policies?

Why did you sit back as president of the U.S. and allow 1 million Rwandans to be massacred when you could easily have used your executive authority to end the massacre?

And someone needs to hurry up and give our Sister Beyonce a heads-up. She is blindly supporting Hillary Clinton simply because she’s a woman. Well, Sister, this support can end up with deadly consequences as demonstrated by her husband.

I want to thank our Sister Michelle Alexander for providing much needed information for and to the community in her book, “The New Jim Crow,” that further exposes the racial hatred being carried out in local, state and federal government policies.

One love, one struggle!

Mutope Duguma

Send our brother some love and light: Mutope Duguma, D-05996, Calipatria SP B5-C-246, P.O. Box 5005, Calipatria CA 92233.

BlockReportRadio.com interviews Claude Gatebuke of the African Great Lakes Action Network, about the 20th anniversary of the invasion of the Congo by Rwanda and Uganda on behalf of the western world. We talk about genocide, child soldiers, mass rapes, mineral extraction, slavery, and more.

We also talked about the role Hillary Clinton, Uganda Pres. Museveni, Rwandan Pres. Kagame, and the African Union have played in this conflict, which has killed more people than any other war except WWII.

Please tune in for more at BlockReportRadio.com.

by Ann Garrison

Rwanda Day-San Francisco was a bad day for identity politics. Rwandan President Paul Kagame stepped to the podium and said that he was happy to be in San Francisco because it’s so diverse, seeming not to understand that his guest speaker, Rev. Rick Warren, champion of the 2008 Prop 8 ballot measure banning same sex marriage, wouldn’t appeal to San Francisco’s diverse population. The city and surrounding Bay Area communities include the nation’s highest concentration of men and women who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

Journalist Ann Garrison registered and was initially allowed to attend Rwanda Day-San Francisco.

Then Rev. Rick Warren got up and told the audience that he might look like an American, but he’s really a Rwandan, and that he may have white skin, but he’s black on the inside.

Neither the Black president nor the black-on-the-inside reverend took note of how rapidly gentrification is disappearing San Francisco’s Black neighborhoods.

Though President Kagame forever plays the race card, claiming that his critics are racists who have contempt for Africans, his dependence on the political, diplomatic and military support of the U.S. and NATO make it arguable that he’s Black on the outside and white on the inside. His Rwanda Days in the West are unique; No other nation holds anything like these annual promotions rotating from one Western metropolis to another.

The first Rwanda Day was staged in Chicago in 2011, while Rwandans and Congolese protested outside. Other Rwanda Days – in Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Boston and Atlanta – inspired similar protests outside and/or along the president’s travel route. Hotel security at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis told me they’d prepared for a protest but none materialized.

Fellow journalist Jeremy Miller had also registered and been admitted – but only until someone either recognized Ann or spotted Jeremy’s Bay View t-shirt, the Bay View having carried Ann’s coverage of Rwanda for years to the Rwandan government’s chagrin.

Fellow San Francisco Bay View journalist Jeremy Miller and I registered to attend Rwanda Day, but we had to watch President Kagame and Rev. Warren’s remarks on video because we were both ejected, with the help of three San Francisco Police officers and the head of Marriott Marquis hotel security. No surprise there because I’ve been denounced in Rwandan newspapers a number of times. For example, “Look at who the Rwanda haters have recruited now” and “Genocide deniers on a rampage.”

A genocide denier is anyone who characterizes the Rwandan war and massacres of 1990 to 1994 in any way that varies from the Rwandan government’s constitutionally codified, legally enforced description – “genocide against the Tutsi.” I’ve done that and I’ve interviewed scholars and International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda defense attorneys who’ve done so as well.

Most of my essays and interviews have been published in the San Francisco Bay View, so someone on the president’s security team must have recognized me or the San Francisco Bay View logo on Jeremy’s t-shirt. I was a little surprised to see him waltz in wearing it, but he always walks tall.

Jeremy and I had taken some distance from one another while waiting in line, thinking that might make it more likely that one of us would get in if the other didn’t. We thought we were home free once we’d both made our way through the metal detectors, viewed the cultural exhibits, bought some Rwandan coffee and taken seats inside the Marriot Marquis Yerba Buena Ballroom.

However, just before the program was about to begin, a gentlemen came down the aisle and asked us to get up and follow him, so we did – out of the ballroom, back up the escalators and back through the metal detectors, at which point more Rwandan security demanded the badges we’d been given at entry. Seemed they wanted to make sure we didn’t sneak back in.

I didn’t protest because it was their private party in their rented ballroom, so they had every right to give us the boot, but another white woman who’d been sitting next to me was ejected with us, no doubt because security thought we were all together, and she started kicking up a fuss. She had registered! she insisted. They had no right to single her out from the rest of the audience! She wasn’t surrendering her badge or anything else!

Three SFPD officers were summoned to help eject Ann and Jeremy.

Jeremy demanded an explanation, then took out his mini-voice recorder and cell phone camera, at which point someone summoned three SFPD officers and the head of hotel security. They escorted Jeremy and me to the hotel lobby, after I tried to explain that the woman who’d been sitting next to me was an innocent, not one of us genocide deniers. We were gone before we could see if she got back in.

Why so much anxiety about our attendance?

My fractious relationship with the Rwandan government began in 2010, when Victoire Ingabire attempted to run for president against Paul Kagame, and I started calling her in Rwanda for Pacifica’s KPFA Weekend News, WBAI AfrobeatRadio, and Women’s International News Gathering Service. Victoire was never actually allowed to register her party and run for president, but she did talk to us, despite a gag order, and it became clear that she was mounting a challenge to the story we’ve all been told by the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” the Wikipedia, the mainstream media, the State Department, and Bill Clinton, who often says that failing to send in troops to save Rwandan Tutsis was the greatest mistake of his presidency.

Victoire said that there were extremists and victims on both sides of the Rwandan conflict, before during and after the genocide. She said that all the victims, Hutu and Tutsi, must be remembered for the Rwandans to heal and reconcile. Saying even that much is an imprisonable offense in Rwanda, and she’s now serving the sixth year of a 15-year sentence.

The Rwandan conflict of the 1990s was in fact Uganda’s invasion and four-year war in Rwanda backed by the U.S. and U.K. It ended in the assassination of two Hutu presidents and the overthrow of the Rwandan government after the final fratricidal bloodletting and breakdown of social order that came to be known as the Rwandan Genocide.

In Rwanda, you have to call it the “genocide against the Tutsi” and treat that description like a sacrament or you’re locked up and labeled a “genocide denier” or “genocide ideologist.”

Victoire Ingabire didn’t say all that in those words, but she went to prison for telling a more complex story and for allegedly conspiring with terrorists and encouraging the Rwandan people to rise up against the government.

It’s true that she attempted to give Rwandans a chance to elect her instead of Paul Kagame, but the terrorism charges were ludicrous; Victoire Ingabire is as opposed to violence as anyone I’ve ever known. She so firmly believes in dialogue, debate and democracy that talking to her was almost enough to renew my own faith in these tarnished ideals.

Having been ejected, Ann and Jeremy had to resort to a broadcast to watch the Rwanda Day speeches. This is Rwanda President Paul Kagame.

The last time we spoke was several days before her October 2010 arrest, and shortly after release of the UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC], which concluded that the Rwandan army’s massacres of Rwandan Hutu refugees in the DRC would likely be judged war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide if adjudicated in a court of law. Officials who could and should be charged with these crimes aren’t typically inclined to dialogue, debate or democracy.

Nor are the Western powers who support them. Bill Clinton, when questioned about his effusive praise of President Kagame, said that the crimes Kagame’s accused of “haven’t been adjudicated.” He and his top policy officials made sure of that when they stage-managed the victor’s court known as the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda.

I reported on Victoire’s ill-fated attempt to run for president and on the assassinations of President Kagame’s opponents inside Rwanda, in every nation bordering Rwanda, and even in South Africa throughout that 2010 so-called election year. None of the three viable candidates, Victoire Ingabire, Frank Habineza and Bernard Ntaganda, was allowed to register and run.

Roughly a year later, in 2011, after the “Third International Genocide Conference” at Sacramento State University, I filed an assault complaint against President Kagame’s contingent, who had surrounded me, shouting, and even laid hands on me before someone from the university said, “Hey, hey, hey, you can’t do that here.”

In 2012, I sent the assault complaint to the U.K. Parliament Development Committee, which published it and several other submissions after they decided to cut aid to Rwanda during the M23 militia’s scourge and atrocities in eastern Congo. The heroic 2012 U.N. Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) had written:

This is Rev. Rick Warren speaking at Rwanda Day.

“The government of Rwanda continues to violate the arms embargo [in DRC] by providing direct military support to the M23 rebels, facilitating recruitment, encouraging and facilitating desertions from the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and providing arms, ammunition, intelligence and political advice. The de facto chain of command of M23 includes Gen. Bosco Ntaganda and culminates with the Minister of Defense of Rwanda, Gen. James Kabarebe. Following the publication of the addendum to its interim report (S/2012/348/Add.1), the Group met the Government of Rwanda and took into consideration its written response. The Group has, however, found no substantive element of its previous findings that it wishes to alter.”

I didn’t attend Rwanda Day-San Francisco to protest, nor did I do so at Sacramento State University in 2011. There I simply sat and listened in an auditorium till the end of the day, when I finally asked, in a smaller, classroom-sized session, “What about the Gersony Report, the Garreton Report, the U.N. Group of Experts Reports on the Illegal Exploitation of Resources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo 2001, 2002, 2003, the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Final Report 2008, and the UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993 – 2003?” (Those were all the reports that U.N. investigators had published on Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1994 and 2011.)

President Kagame and his supporters don’t want to hear about these reports. Just naming them is enough to make them scream, shout and even assault a mild-mannered journalist like myself. U.S. presidents and their State Departments largely ignore the reports, although 2012’s was finally so damning that a show of chasing Rwanda out of DRC had to be staged.

No matter how high and horrific the atrocity count, Rwanda remains a key U.S. ally and military partner, as it has since Kagame seized power with U.S. blessing in 1994, the second year of Bill Clinton’s first term.

Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report, Black Star News, Counterpunch and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News, KPFA Flashpoints and for her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at anniegarrison@gmail.com. In March 2014 she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace in the Great Lakes Region of Africa through her reporting.

by Ann Garrison

Ann Garrison: Earlier this year, you told me that you differ with Noam Chomsky, your co-author of “Manufacturing Consent” and other books, in that you plan to vote for the Green Party’s presidential and vice presidential candidates Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Are you still planning to do so?

Edward S. Herman: Yes.

AG: Can you explain why?

ESH: Because the two duopoly candidates are dangerous to societal and international welfare and even survival. Hillary Clinton is a neo-liberal and pre-eminent war-monger. I think she is the most dangerous person living in the world today, given her highly likely election victory and her likely performance as president.

She represents the corporate elite and military-industrial complex more clearly than Trump and she is a follow-on to Bush and Obama. She will pursue similar policies except for her somewhat more aggressive bent.

Trump is a self-promoting windbag, racist and dangerous, unpredictable phony. We have a ghastly choice in these two.

Jill Stein offers a protest opportunity, more so than not voting. On the line that either voting for Stein or not voting would constitute a vote for Trump, one might argue that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war with Syria and Russia and a vote for Netanyahu (and hence for escalated violence in Palestine).

AG: Hillary Clinton and John Podesta’s email has revealed that Hillary Clinton is well aware that the Saudi and Qatari rulers – not rogue elements – fund ISIS, and the same Saudi and Qatari rulers fund the Clinton Foundation. Throughout the last George Bush’s presidency, there were innumerable headlines that “Saudi oil sheikhs met with George Bush on his Crawford, Texas, ranch.” What are your thoughts on that?

Hillary Clinton and John Podesta’s email has revealed that Hillary Clinton is well aware that the Saudi and Qatari rulers – not rogue elements – fund ISIS, and the same Saudi and Qatari rulers fund the Clinton Foundation

ESH: Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally and an instrument of the warfare state. Hillary Clinton has treated its leaders warmly and she will continue to do so as president.

The Clinton Foundation’s receipt of money from Saudi and Qatari leaders is a first class conflict of interest and outrage, but the media have focused on the many less important abuses of Trump, helping cover over the outrages of their preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton, and her husband, Bill Clinton.

AG: What do you think of Clinton’s statement that she would make removing Bashar Al-Assad her top priority? And Trump’s statement that he would not, because that would recklessly risk confrontation with Russia?

ESH: Hillary Clinton has essentially promised to escalate war in Syria and is therefore promising to go to war with Russia as well. Diana Johnstone has made the case that Hillary Clinton plans to try to bring about “regime change” in Russia.

Hillary Clinton has essentially promised to escalate war in Syria and is therefore promising to go to war with Russia as well.

This is of course incredibly dangerous and would have aroused a really democratic media, but the existing media are part of the war system; hence Hillary Clinton’s commitment to wars is essentially suppressed. Trump has made a number of statements along the lines of reducing U.S. interventions and commitments abroad and trying to deal with Russia in a less confrontational manner, but he has sometimes contradicted himself by urging expanded arms, use of nuclear weapons etc.

But Hillary Clinton has said nothing that would offset her war-mongering. This difference from Trump may help explain the intensity of media hostility to Trump.

AG: Jill Stein has said that “wars for oil are blowing back at us with a vengeance” and that she would cut the military budget by half, close most of the foreign bases, and redirect resources into a Green New Deal that would fully employ Americans building sustainable energy and agricultural infrastructure. I can’t imagine you disagree, but do you think it’s important for the Greens to articulate such a vision at the national and international level, instead of focusing solely on local races that they might win?

Jill Stein has said that “wars for oil are blowing back at us with a vengeance” and that she would cut the military budget by half, close most of the foreign bases, and redirect resources into a Green New Deal that would fully employ Americans building sustainable energy and agricultural infrastructure.

ESH: The Greens don’t have the resources to compete in many local elections. So she is wise to focus on the big national and international issues. Furthermore, the real gap in the political system is the lack of opposition to national neoliberal and militaristic policies.

It is said that she can’t make a bigger mark given the hegemony of the duopoly, but even Ralph Nader couldn’t get 5 percent of the vote. The system still works well – for the 1 percent.

AG: Michael Moore has made a movie called “Trumpland” and warned that Trump’s election would be the end of the United States, assuming that would be a bad thing. David Swanson, author of “War Is a Lie,” has imagined the same but argued, in “Secession, Trump, and the Avoidability of Civil War,” that the break-up of the United States is not the worst possibility on the horizon. Do you have any thoughts on this?

ESH: Michael Moore is completely oblivious to the fact that the enlarging war that is likely to follow Hillary Clinton’s election threatens not only a nuclear exchange, but also attacks on civil liberties and the march toward fascism. In its own way, the election of Hillary Clinton might threaten a democratic order as much as a Trump victory. The anti-Trump hysteria has tended to block out consideration of the Hillary Clinton menace.

The enlarging war that is likely to follow Hillary Clinton’s election threatens not only a nuclear exchange, but also attacks on civil liberties and the march toward fascism.

AG: Is there anything else you’d like to say about why you’re voting for Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka?

ESH: I’ve always believed in the moral rule laid down in the categorical imperative: “Do that which you would wish generalized.”

Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report, Black Star News, Counterpunch and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News, KPFA Flashpoints and for her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at anniegarrison@gmail.com. In March 2014 she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace in the Great Lakes Region of Africa through her reporting.

An interview with Friends of the Congo Executive Director Maurice Carney

by Ann Garrison

Ann Garrison: Maurice Carney, could you summarize what has happened in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the last two months, while most of our attention was fixed on Trump, Russia and Syria?

Maurice Carney: Certainly. On Dec. 19, President Joseph Kabila, according to Congo’s Constitution, was supposed to step down. Over the past several years, he had demonstrated that he was going to stay in power by any means necessary, including killing Congolese. In January 2015, about four dozen Congolese were killed by Kabila’s security forces as they protested his trying to put measures in place to stay in power beyond Dec. 19, 2016.

Patrice Lumumba – Photo: AP

On Sept. 19, 2016, when Congolese demonstrated in the streets, he killed over 50 of them with his security forces.

So, come Dec. 19, a big day when Congolese are supposed to be in the streets demonstrating, Joseph Kabila unleashed his security forces throughout the country. Tanks, police, military were in all parts of the capital city of Kinshasa and other major cities throughout the country.

So he basically had the country under occupation, and he remained in power beyond Dec. 19. People did come into the streets on Dec. 20 and his security forces killed about three dozen.

The Catholic Church, in the meantime, intervened in an effort to negotiate a settlement between Kabila and his coalition and opposition forces, and they were able to do so on Dec. 31. The main elements of the agreement were that Kabila would stay in power for another year until December 2017, when elections are supposed to be organized.

AG: Do you have any faith in this agreement?

MC: Very little. First of all, the agreement doesn’t really meet the aspirations of the Congolese people. The Congolese people wanted Kabila to abide by the Constitution and step down. Secondly, the agreement says that Kabila can stay in power until elections are organized.

However, if elections are not organized in December 2017, Kabila remains in power. So there’s still no great incentive for him to organize the elections or allow them to be organized.

AG: What would you like readers to understand about the role of the U.S. in this?

MC: Well, there’s a lot of discussion right now in the U.S. media about Russians intervening in the U.S. election. I’d like people to understand that the U.S. has a history of intervening in elections abroad. The Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S., since the 1940s, has intervened in some 81 elections overseas.

One of the most devastating U.S. interventions was the overthrow of the democratically elected leader of the Congo, Prime Minister Patrice Emery Lumumba, in 1960. That overthrow has been devastating for the Congolese people, because not only did the U.S. overthrow and assassinate the democratically elected leader, but they also imposed a dictatorship on the Congolese people for over three decades, and it has crushed and destroyed the country and the people.

AG: That dictator was Mobutu Sese Seko, but they got rid of him when he’d ceased to be useful, and then got rid of his first successor, didn’t they? Can you explain that series of events?

MC: When Mobutu became a liability rather than an asset, the U.S. sought to replace him – not through a democratic process by supporting the vibrant, nonviolent, pro-democracy movement but rather by backing an invasion of the then Zaire led by her neighbors, Rwanda and Uganda.

The two U.S. allies installed Laurent Desiré Kabila, who was subsequently assassinated and replaced by 29-year-old Joseph Kabila, who quickly secured the backing of the U.S. and maintained that support from 2001 to the present.

In the final analysis, U.S. support has been decisive in the Congo. Since the U.S.’ violent overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in 1960, no leader his risen to head of state without U.S. backing and there has not been a peaceful transfer of power.

U.S. support has been decisive in the Congo. Since the U.S.’ violent overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in 1960, no leader his risen to head of state without U.S. backing and there has not been a peaceful transfer of power.

AG: Many people from your part of the world or its neighbors, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi – and I’m not talking about the presidents; I’m talking about ordinary people – many of them expressed relief that Hillary Clinton was not elected, despite the fact that Donald Trump was. Could you explain that?

MC: Yes, I understand that because they see the Clintons – not just Hillary Clinton but her husband, Bill Clinton – as being in cahoots with the most sociopathic war criminals in the region over the past 20 years. They felt that if Hillary Clinton was to be elected as president of the United States, they would just continue to support President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

So there is some relief that Clinton did not get elected. Not that they were rooting for Trump, but they’ve experienced the Clintons and seen how devastating their support for strongmen in the African Great Lakes Region has been for the people there, especially the Congolese.

AG: Friends of the Congo is based in Washington, D.C. What do you have planned for Inauguration Day?

MC: Well, this week, on Jan. 17, we’ll be commemorating the assassination of Lumumba. Jan. 19 is another commemorative day for us, when the Telema youth were gunned down in the streets by President Kabila’s security forces in January 2015.

So we’ll be hosting commemorative events and, at the same time, we’ll also be attending other events here in the city, the Womens’ March, the Civil Rights March and forums, and we’ll be trying to bring the local and global together.

As we stand in solidarity with people here as they confront the incoming Trump administration, we’ll also be calling on them to stand with us as we fight imperialism, especially on the African continent.

As we stand in solidarity with people here as they confront the incoming Trump administration, we’ll also be calling on them to stand with us as we fight imperialism, especially on the African continent.

AG: Maurice, thanks for your time.

MC: You’re welcome.

Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report, Black Star News, Counterpunch and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News, KPFA Flashpoints and for her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at anniegarrison@gmail.com. In March 2014 she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace in the Great Lakes Region of Africa through her reporting.

Bay View turns 40!

Part 1

Editorial by Bay View publisher Dr. Willie Ratcliff

It’s 2016, 40 years since Muhammad al-Kareem founded the New Bayview, now renamed the San Francisco Bay View, in 1976. Inspired by Malcolm X, he wanted to bring a newspaper like Muhammad Speaks to Bayview Hunters Point. He’ll tell the story of those early years, and I’ll pick it up now at the point when my wife Mary and I took over in 1992.

The New Bayview was 15 years old when we took it on. This is our first paper. From that paper, dated Feb. 3, 1992, to now, January 2016, we’ve published 785 papers.

Watching our first paper roll through the huge two-story tall lumbering old press at Tom Berkley’s Post Newspaper Building on Feb. 3, 1992, was a feel-like-flying thrill we’ll never forget. Tom Berkley and Carlton Goodlett of the Sun Reporter are the giants of Bay Area Black newspaper publishing on whose shoulders I stand.

“The New Bayview newspaper, published since 1966 by Mr. Muhammad al-Kareem, has changed ownership,” announces a story in our first issue. “Mr. al-Kareem founded the New Bayview 15 years ago to serve ‘as a positive force in the struggle for freedom.’ … The New Bayview’s new owners, Willie and Mary Ratcliff, pledge to continue the tradition of courageous journalism.”

Courage was on the front page of that Feb. 3, 1992, paper. We’d called a meeting of volunteers to staff the paper, and two of them, well known tenant organizer Louise Vaughn and Hava Gurevich, a tiny young red-headed Russian photojournalist, had teamed up for a photo story on Geneva Towers. The twin 22-story towers, built as luxury housing for the 1 percent, were occupied by then by the 99 percent, their rent HUD subsidized.

Typical of low-income housing, the Towers were patrolled by a security crew mostly comprised of moonlighting cops – sleep deprived, mean and brutal. “I began to feel like in a prison camp,” Ms. Gurevich reported. “Who are they protecting? They tried to stop me every time I raised my camera.”

That was after Louise Vaughn had rescued her from a jail cell in the basement. She’d been jailed for bringing a camera to the Towers. “How long must we watch housing management capitalize off the poor?” asked Louise, referring, in the case of Geneva Towers, to the notorious John Stewart Co. A company grown fat over the decades, its founder once sidled up to Mary at a Geneva Towers meeting to brag, “I control 35,000 Black people in this city.”

“The New Bayview newspaper, published since 1966 by Mr. Muhammad al-Kareem, has changed ownership,” announces a story in our first issue.

Also in that first paper 24 years ago were stories on Rev. Jesse Jackson kicking off California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s re-election campaign, “Muni Metro on Track to Bayview,” the inauguration of San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan picketed by homeless artists, testimony of Kevin Williams to the U.S. Commission on Minority Business Development on white contractors’ refusal to observe and cities to enforce affirmative action in construction, David Alston’s entertainment column, reporting on Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte’s fundraiser to restore the Bayview Opera House, where Danny learned acting, “Sharing the Challenge: HIV and AIDS in Our Community” and an essay by a college student about losing her shame of living in public housing.

Printing that first paper was paid for by 30 ads for local businesses, nearly all of them Black, plus nine churches and one mosque. We’d jump for joy to have that kind of Black business support today. More Black businesses might have survived if they’d kept advertising.

“Over 13,000 New Voters Registered in Hunters Point, Vis Valley, OMI, Fillmore” to defeat Prop 165 to cut welfare 25 percent was the banner headline Oct. 2, 1992 – 450 of those new registrants housed at the San Francisco County Jail. We proudly endorsed Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai, one of the registration campaign leaders, who was running for College Board.

“Jobs, Not Jails” hollered the front page of the next issue, on Oct. 16, 1992 – we were publishing twice a month in those early years – over a story urging a No vote on a $158 million bond to build a new jail. “San Francisco Jail Blacks at Twice National Rate, Ten Times Rate in So. Africa” headlined another front page story reporting on a new study by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.

“Clinton Promises Jobs” reports presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s promises to “concentrate on economic growth – jobs, businesses and affordable housing – in the inner cities,” to create 100 community development banks and end redlining. Are the Clintons credible?

And notice the echo of those headlines today – a campaign for jobs not jails and a Clinton running for president counting on Black votes. The issues persist, but this year we soundly defeated a new San Francisco jail.

Another theme that still echoes was struck in that issue by Jacquie Taliaferro in “Film Festivals: Who’s Invited?” He introduced readers to FESPACO, the festival held in Burkino-Faso, and told how Spike Lee got his start. David Alston was promoting En Vogue and RBL Posse.

By July 2, 1993, Hunters Point legend Charlie Walker was writing a column on the back page called “Why Has Nothing Worked?” “There is but one way to come up from under the madness. We must own and operate the businesses in our community,” he preached.

Sam Jordan, “Mayor of Butchertown” and BVHP’s best known restaurateur, touted the economic potential of the ghetto. Though we were once forced to live here, “the ghetto has proven to be a plus for those of us who are strong. … Let’s work hard to turn our money over in our community at least 12 times. Wake up, giants!”

A front page editorial in that issue, “Ed Lee Calling Kevin Williams ‘Ignorant’ and ‘Sleazy’ Is OK, Human Rights Commission Rules,” slams Ed Lee, San Francisco’s current mayor, then director of the Human Rights Commission, who insulted the only HRC staffer who fought for the Black businesses the agency had been created to serve. Another front page headline that echoes today is “Jailing Blacks Puts California in Poorhouse.”

From the beginning, we distributed the paper to the people we wanted most to read it and write it. From 1992 to 2008, we distributed the paper door to door throughout Bayview Hunters Point and several public housing developments nearby. A lively flock of children threw the paper for many years – young adults still greet us with “You gave me my first job!” and sometimes it’s the only job they ever had. When the shooting got too heavy, adults took over.

Then as now we also dropped the paper at literally hundreds of stores, churches, libraries, community centers – and at the San Francisco County Jail, where the paper was read and carried on into state prisons. By the Nov. 19, 1993, issue, several prisoners were among the writers. Rodney A. Wrice, aka Kango, wrote: “I have spent time in most Level 4 high security prisons – yes, even Pelican Bay, which is being charged with the very racism that we as Blacks or African Americans face each day …

“With blood in my eye, I now, once a street kid, speak consciously with the mind of a guerrilla. It is time that we as intelligent adults, gangsters, heroes and leaders give back to our youth their youth and teach them the identity of responsibility … that Black-on-Black violence breeds only Black hate from within.

“Society’s jails and prisons are full of Black inmates. Our streets are full of Black blood … We must teach liberating concepts.” The unruly younger prisoners that the Pelican Bay SHU veterans, now released to the mainline, are encountering come from that reality.

From the beginning, we distributed the paper to the people we wanted most to read it and write it.

Death row prisoner Steve Crittenden wrote the lead editorial, “Lift Every Voice: End the Death Penalty,” arguing, “We are the only free country which says that if a person is not the right color and has no money, the chances are that he will never encounter justice.” That Nov. 19, 1993, issue also has a series of “Personals” from prisoners like today’s “Pen Pals Wanted.”

“We Shall Not Be Moved” blasts the big banner headline on March 4, 1994, over a story by Louise Vaughn, “Agnos and Jordan conspire to drive Blacks out of Southeast San Francisco: Two bitter competitors come together to practice genocide on Blacks,” referring to then HUD Regional Director – and former mayor – Art Agnos and then current mayor, Frank Jordan. That issue and other Bay View papers are featured in an exhibit currently at the San Francisco Main Library called “I Am San Francisco” about the days when the city was home to 100,000 Black people, most of them gone now, unable to heed that banner headline.

On April 15, 1994, my front page editorial, “Stop! Before we Slide Back into Slavery,” read: “Voter registration workers, hurrying to register African American voters before the May 7 deadline, are meeting many who are simply afraid to register. They are afraid of being found, of being noticed, of speaking out – even by casting a secret ballot. Why?

“1) If they have a job, they’re afraid of losing it. San Francisco, lacking a Black business base, leaves Blacks little choice but to work for whites, who rarely tolerate outspoken ‘uppity’ Black folks.

“2) If they have a home, they’re afraid of losing it. In San Francisco, at least 70 percent of African Americans live in HUD-assisted public or low-income housing where speaking out gets you an eviction notice.

“3) If they have children they’re afraid of losing them. State officials say San Francisco’s DSS is the worst in the state for its habit of snatching Black babies away from their parents and placing them in distant white suburbs where many have died.

“4) If they are out of jail, they’re afraid of losing their freedom. San Francisco jails Black men at a rate 10 times higher than South Africa. This city, studies say, has the highest Black incarceration rate in California, which has the highest rate in the U.S., which has the highest rate in the ‘civilized’ world.

“So their fears are well founded. It’s hard to be Black in San Francisco.”

“1966 riot recalled” shouted a front page headline in the Sept. 16, 1994, issue. Bayview Hunters Point was deeply traumatized by what’s known as the ’66 Hunters Point Uprising, when, on Sept. 26, 1966, police shot Matthew “Peanuts” Johnson in the back, murdering him, and the community exploded.

Instead of setting fire to the Third Street corridor, where most businesses were still Black-owned, Hunters Point youth fought to drive out and keep police off their hill. The mayor’s response was terrifying.

“National Guard tanks were rolling down Third Street and police in full riot gear were lined up with rifles trained on the Opera House, which was loaded with young people and children. Many of our youth were wounded, though no one was killed,” was our summary of the story Harold Brooks told in a play at the Bayview Opera House that was shut down after one performance.

Harold, a beloved community organizer, had briefly broken the silence that had gripped the neighborhood ever since. Oldtimers are only now replacing shame with pride when they recall how, as teenagers, they scared the powers that be enough to put “Hunters Point Riot” in headlines around the world. Nineteen days later, on Oct. 15, 1966, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland. Panthers have Hunters Point in their DNA.

On Jan. 20, 1995, “300 Blacks form ring around City Hall” topped the front page describing Black construction contractors and workers protesting the Black share of only 3/10 of 1 percent of a contract to rehabilitate San Francisco City Hall. And my editorial on March 17, 1995, “Run Willie run,” was the first to urge Willie Brown to run for mayor.

Oldtimers are only now replacing shame with pride when they recall how, as teenagers, they scared the powers that be enough to put “Hunters Point Riot” in headlines around the world. Nineteen days later, on Oct. 15, 1966, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland. Panthers have Hunters Point in their DNA.

The photo I took of a sea of Black people at the Million Man March that graces the front page on Oct. 20, 1995, is the best picture of the march she’s ever seen, according to my wife. And inside that issue is a sports section captained by that legend of Black sports writers Huel Washington, who stayed with the Bay View for several years.

On Feb. 16, 1996, Huel penned “Community fed up with police brutality,” reporting newly appointed Black Police Chief Earl Sanders saying, “When I take off this uniform, I know I’m a candidate to be just another nigger beat up by the police.” On the same front page, Ross Mirkarimi penned “Black men jailed at eight times the rate of whites.”

Hard Bricks comic strip (later J-Cat and Bootzilla) was written and drawn by Ronnie Goodman, then a prisoner himself in San Quentin and now the most famous homeless artist in San Francisco, who’s been featured on the front page of the Chronicle and whose work is a popular feature of many exhibits. The Bay View is proud of all the people who’ve written or been written about in our paper over the years and have gone on to higher heights.

“Protesters condemn prison ‘slavery’” was the top headline on April 5, 1996, a story by legendary journalist Kevin Weston on a rally outside California Department of Corrections headquarters in Sacramento that was organized by Martin Reed of Hunters Point from inside San Quentin Prison and drew a crowd of 150 in the driving rain. By then, the New Bayview had been renamed San Francisco Bay View with a rising sun masthead designed by artist Keith Lewis.

With a new push by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency to take control of Bayview Hunters Point, Marie Harrison, by then a fixture on the back page, wrote on June 7, 1996, “Remember the Fillmore. Remember South Park. Bayview Hunters Point is our final frontier in San Francisco. Here is where we make our stand. So hold the line. Refuse to be removed, replaced and dealt a slow death. Say No to the power plant and Yes to toxic cleanup. Save yourself and your neighborhood.”

That week the Board of Supervisors unanimously defeated a proposal for a new power plant we’d fought for a year – the fight revealing that we in Bayview Hunters Point were drowning in toxic soup, some of the worst environmentally racist conditions in the country that we’ve been fighting ever since.

“Prison officials stage ‘gladiator fights,’” reported on the Nov. 1, 1996, front page, updated a story we broke that September and the Chronicle finally picked up on Oct. 28. Our reporter was prisoner and Black Panther veteran Warren Wells, who wrote: “When you hear about Black and Mexican prisoners fighting in here, know that it is the state playing games, pitting us against each other so they can ask the public for more funds to build more prisons.”

“S.F. Bay View named national ‘Black Newspaper of the Year’” blared the banner headline in the July 18, 1997, paper. The honor was presented to us by the National Black Chamber of Commerce at their 1997 convention in Denver. Among the Bay View’s many other awards are the Society of Professional Journalists’ Excellence in Journalism Award in 1996 and their Freedom of Information Award in 2004, and we were named Best of the Bay by the great Bay Guardian in 1997 and 2009.

The front page of that paper also reports on the start of the landmark Shumate v. Wilson trial filed by prison health care hero Charisse Shumate, alleging gross medical neglect and abuse, a constant Bay View theme for decades.

Inside that paper in the Culture Currents section is a review by Wanda Sabir, soon to become our arts editor and still the only journalist covering the incredibly vibrant Bay Area Black arts scene. Her column took the name Wanda’s Picks on July 14, 1999. She’s also a strong advocate for prisoners and a board member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.

The back page is graced with the J-Cat and Bootzilla comic strip that ran for years, artist Ronnie Goodman mailing a new strip from inside San Quentin twice a month.

Inside the July 18, 1997, Bay View, Ronnie Goodman had renamed his comic strip J-Cat and Bootzilla, a pair of prisoners on an island that looked a lot like Alcatraz who were incessantly trying to escape. Here, they’ve made it out for a while, but they’ll be back.

On Feb. 4, 1998, we took a deep breath and dared to begin publishing the Bay View every week instead of the twice a month schedule of our first six years. From the beginning, we’ve never had the funds to hire a real staff, though countless great writers have generously shared their work with our readers. Today, we’d love to resume printing the paper weekly, which we had to suspend in 2008, when we lost everything in a foreclosure.

But even more critical is to make plans for the Bay View to live on beyond Mary and me. I’m 83 and she’s 76, and the pace of publishing stories daily on our website and monthly in print is getting harder and harder to maintain. We’d love to hear from anyone with ideas for making the Bay View sustainable.

On Sept. 5, 1997, the Bay View graduated from a tabloid to a big broadsheet newspaper with the banner headline, “10,000 cross Golden Gate Bridge” to overturn anti-affirmative action Proposition 209. Black economic power was – and still is – under massive attack.

I’ve always preached that winning Black economic power is the solution to most of the other plagues on the Black community, and as a lifelong contractor, licensed since 1967, I’ve fought for Blacks – we who built this country – to perform a major share of pubic construction work. When provided by Black contractors, construction jobs give a better-than-living-wage income to our people regardless of their academic and criminal records.

“Hunters Point power plant will shut down” was the banner headline on July 15, 1998, over a story written by Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. announcing, “In recognition of the City’s commitment to the long-term revitalization of the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood, the City and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. have reached an unprecedented agreement whereby the 69-year-old Hunters Point will be permanently closed.”

Oh, how we had fought that nasty plant, the oldest in the state, which blanketed the north side of Hunters Point Hill with toxins that had children up all night with nosebleeds and rashes. My editorial that week was headlined “Confirmation of our power.”

But even more critical is to make plans for the Bay View to live on beyond Mary and me. I’m 83 and she’s 76, and the pace of publishing stories daily on our website and monthly in print is getting harder and harder to maintain. We’d love to hear from anyone with ideas for making the Bay View sustainable.

It was about this time that Kevin Weston, revolutionary journalist and pied piper to a generation of radical mediamakers, whose beautiful life was taken by leukemia last year, began filling one or two of the Bay View’s cultural pages each week with wild commentary, poems and graphics he called Anti-Verses. I’m proud of all the Bay View’s cultural coverage and promotion of brilliant Black talent and trends.

The banner headline “Terror at the Airport” on Sept. 2, 1998, topped a picture of the hangman’s noose found in the jobsite trailer of my company, Liberty Builders, that signaled the lockout of Blacks from construction in San Francisco – a lockout that continues to this day. As head of the African American Contractors of San Francisco, I’d worked with the Willie Brown administration to ensure the participation of Blacks and other contractors of color on the multi-billion dollar airport expansion, and most of our members had won multi-million-dollar contracts, the largest of their careers.

However, as they would arrive with their crews to begin work, they were greeted with death threats, leaving Liberty Builders the only Black contactor at SFO and the target of some of the craziest harassment I’d ever seen. But my all-Black crew braved personal life-threatening attacks and topped the five-story building off early, though work had been several months behind schedule when we started.

The noose was our reward, sparking a firestorm of Black protest, led by then San Francisco NAACP President Alex Pitcher, who had fought lynching as a young civil rights attorney in Louisiana. In succeeding weeks, ace reporter Lee Hubbard chronicled Pitcher’s success in persuading the FBI to investigate and the Board of Supervisors to hold hearings. “Discrimination is alive, kicking and doing well, even in the so-called City of St. Francis,” said then Supervisor Amos Brown, now head of the SF NAACP. Media Alliance gave us an award for the series.

“The noose and the newspaper,” my editorial on Oct. 14, 1998, began: “The tactics being used by the San Francisco International Airport, the Human Rights Commission and large general contractors – the good ol’ boys club – to keep the construction industry segregated are also threatening to put the San Francisco Bay View newspaper out of business. They see the Bay View’s role in informing, uniting and championing the rights of African Americans to public contracts and jobs as an attack on their supremacy, and they want the paper silenced.

“From the time we bought the paper in 1992 my construction company, Liberty Builders, substantially subsidized the Bay View because the paper didn’t make enough money from advertising to cover the costs of printing and distribution. But Hensel Phelps Construction Co., the folks who brought us the noose, put a stop to that. For the past 18 months that Liberty Builders worked as their concrete subcontractor at the airport, Hensel Phelps never paid us a single progress payment.”

But ultimately, as reported by Brother Jahahara on Nov. 25, 1998, the prime contractor, Hensel Phelps, which had hung the noose in Liberty Builders’ trailer, was cleared of discrimination charges by the city’s Human Rights Commission, and SFPD wouldn’t even call it a hate crime. Showing Blacks under attack on the justice front as well as the economic front, another front page headline that week read, “Protests increase as death warrant looms: ‘All out to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.’”

Happier news was in the March 3, 1999, banner headline: “Read your Bay View on the world wide web: www.sfbayview.com.” That website was created and the story written by our daughter, Kenya Ratcliff. The Bay View was one of the first newspapers on the internet. We were already there when Google came along, and when you search for a topic we’ve covered, you’ll often find the Bay View’s story ranked up there with stories from the New York Times and the Washington Post.

We were already there when Google came along, and when you search for a topic we’ve covered, you’ll often find the Bay View’s story ranked up there with stories from the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The March 10, 1999, front page asked “Who needs a Master?” decrying San Francisco’s decision to give the Hunters Point Shipyard, which had been undergoing toxic cleanup all that decade, to a “master developer.” Sure enough, Lennar, the “master” they chose, has been a curse on this community.

Another headline that week, “North Beach housing residents fight removal” was part of our constant coverage during that decade of public and subsidized housing residents’ struggle to keep – and to own – their own homes and community, while government at every level was moving to privatize and destroy them. A federal law allowing residents to organize, gradually take over management and eventually own their development as a co-op was carried further toward victory in San Francisco than in most other parts of the country, and the brutal way it was put down intensified the turf wars that have plagued the Black community ever since.

On March 17, 1999, the banner headline, “98% of City contracts go to out-of-town white male-owned firms,” condemned San Francisco’s economic racism that, along with police occupation and gentrification, has pushed the Black population down to near 3 percent today. “Communities hit by crack cocaine epidemic sue CIA” on the same March 17, 1999, front page was part of our coverage of the U.S. government’s campaign to rid itself of Black power.

Warren Wells, a leading member of the Black Panther Party who came from Hunters Point, was a political prisoner when he wrote many astute reports for the Bay View on the horrors of California prisons, including the Corcoran gladiator fights. From our first issue, we dropped papers for people locked up in San Francisco County Jail, and they introduced the paper to state prisons when they were convicted and sent there. It was courageous writers in California prisons who began to use the Bay View to reveal the terrible oppression. Today it remains the only paper in the country widely distributed both inside and outside prisons, facilitating dialog, planning and organizing nationwide to win real justice.

A photo of youths, fists raised, headlined “Up in arms over Mumia, Prop 21 and Amadou,” graced the March 1, 2000, front page – evidence of the rising power of young people, enraged at Prop 21 that enables California to condemn children to adult prisons. Bay View readers today know that many of those children were nurtured by older prisoners to become some of the keenest minds bent on abolishing prison in the long term and reforming it meanwhile.

“Toxic fire at HP Shipyard” bellowed the banner headline on Sept. 13, 2000. Federal law requires that the process of closing a military base, cleaning up the toxic mess left behind and developing the land must, first and foremost, benefit the people who live around the base. Since the people surrounding the Hunters Point Shipyard are poor and Black, the Navy and the City see the current residents not as beneficiaries but as obstacles to the upscale development they prefer.

So when multicolored flames and smoke billowed from the Shipyard’s largest landfill, one of the most toxic landfills in the U.S., full of radioactive and chemical toxins, the Navy and the City tried to hush the media, but the Bay View wouldn’t hush. When the fire flared again in July 2001, Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, M.D., who would soon be named the Bay View’s health and environmental science editor, had begun to shake up the political establishment with her rare combination of medical, scientific and journalistic skills infused with courage.

“20,000 gone: Stop the exodus” reports “Black population in SF drops 23% since 1990” on the April 11, 2001, front page. “Prop P becomes official City policy” headlines my editorial on Aug. 15, 2001, reporting that 87 percent of San Francisco voters supported prohibiting development of the Shipyard until it is thoroughly clean. Lennar’s current development is moving residents onto a Shipyard that is nowhere close to clean.

“Idriss Stelley supporters demand end to cover-up,” also on that front page, updates the story we broke on June 20, 2001, that set the Bay Area on course to be a major national innovator in response to police terror. From the moment her son and only child, Idriss Stelley, was executed by SFPD, Mesha Irizarry has fought relentlessly for justice for all the victims and their families.

“No police in our schools!” marks the first front page story by JR Valrey, now known as the people’s minister of information, in the June 27, 2001, Bay View. He quotes Askari X in “Ward of the State”: “The police ain’t nothing but another organized oppressive army occupying our community.”

On Oct. 17, 2001, is a theme initially struck on our very first front page nearly a decade earlier, “3^rd Street rail must be built for us by us.” Devastated by the mass murder of Black construction expertise during the SFO debacle in 1998, however, nearly all Black contractors were out of business, so Black workers were also locked out. While I had always seen the construction of Third Street light rail as an economic opportunity for Bayview Hunters Point – “Muni is our mitigation” headlined my editorial on Jan. 9, 2002 – City Hall used it as a means to speed BVHP’s gentrification.

The banner headline on Jan. 16,  2002, “Muni’s Third St. work privatized,” has a series of check marks next to “No resident hire, no affirmative action, no prevailing wage, no union, no competitive bidding, no community notification whatsoever – nothing but parking tickets, lost business, dust, noise – no jobs but flagging for a non-union contractor.”

Devastated by the mass murder of Black construction expertise during the SFO debacle in 1998, however, nearly all Black contractors were out of business, so Black workers were also locked out.

We later learned that Muni, San Francisco’s public transit system, had chosen not to do for Third Street’s then mostly Black businesses what it had done in every other commercial corridor torn up by major construction and apply for available federal funds to keep those businesses alive when few customers could reach them. That decision killed many Black businesses, the bedrock of Black economic power.

One of our all-time most powerful front pages came out on Feb. 6, 2002, with the banner headline, “Police to parents whose children they were beating: ‘As long as you people are here, we will act like this.’” I called my editorial “Gentrification by terror” when, on Martin Luther King Day up on Kiska Road families were relaxing after a community barbeque and police attacked 12-14-year-old children peacefully sitting in a car listening to music.

I wrote: “What I believe (the cop quoted in the headline) meant was, ‘We are carrying out orders to beat you and your children under color of law whenever we please. We are telling you, take a Section 8 certificate and get yourself and your family the hell out of here, because the big greedy developers want your space, your view, your land on the sunny side of San Francisco, to make money for themselves – and they don’t care about you.’”

That issue, marking my 10^th anniversary as publisher, featured the photos of 28 contributing writers, many still writing. I extend my deepest gratitude to all the writers who have blessed us with their work all these years. Another striking front page was our first in color, dated June 5, 2002. The featured story, about “Mrs. Sloan, who washed dishes for 30 years to buy four homes for her extended family, loses them to county conservator,” was written by Lisa Gray-Garcia, lovingly known as Tiny of the Poor News Network, a treasured companion in our efforts to liberate journalism.

On June 26, 2002, Terone Ward’s glorious new masthead made its debut – bright green and sun-splashed, the same one we still use. Terone’s arrival as webmaster and layout designer ushered in a new era that saw the Bay View increasingly written by and for our youth. Only 19 then, Terone was already the father of two adorable little boys, who often came to work with him.

JR, too, worked out of the Bay View “newsroom,” the living room of our little flat that was often crowded with young folks – among them Apollonia Jordan, only a teenager when she started writing and taking photos for the Bay View, who’s now back covering the SFPD execution of Mario Woods.

The Oct. 2, 2002, front page was topped with JR’s review of “Bay View Appreciation Night,” celebrating my 70^th birthday at D’wayne Wiggins’ Jahva House in Oakland with music by D’wayne and Askari X. At the bottom of the front page, JR and Terone collaborated on a colorful panel with a monthly theme, a tradition we continue today.

This history of the Bay View will also be continued. I hope you’ve enjoyed walking down memory lane with me and that you’ll be inspired to join me and the Bay View in seeking the justice and enlightenment to build a better world.

Bay View publisher Dr. Willie Ratcliff can be reached at publisher@sfbayview.com or 415-671-0789.

An interview with Rene Mugenzi

by Ann Garrison

When Kagame’s troops opened fire on people who tried to flee the Kibeho Camp for internal refugees in southern Rwanda on April 22, 1995, the rest rushed back inside. This is the photo that inspired Kanye West’s fashion show. – Photo: Paul Lowe

Twenty-two years ago, on April 22, 1995, Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) massacred between 4,000 and 8,000 Hutu men, women and children at the Kibeho Camp for internal refugees in southern Rwanda. U.N. human rights monitors, photojournalists and U.N. peacekeepers all witnessed the massacre, but neither Kagame nor any of his officers have ever been indicted for the crime in international courts.

In “Kibeho: A Story of Flesh and Blood,” an article published in Foreign Policy Journal, Canadian investigative journalist Judi Rever cites evidence that the Kibeho Massacre was only one instance of the systematic massacre of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutus after the RPA invaded Rwanda in 1990, before, during and after the massacres of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994.

Rever’s book “In Praise of Blood,” has been accepted for publication by Random House. It will document crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The title refers to Western leaders’ consistent praise for Kagame and his regime despite their record of massive crimes for more than two and a half decades.

I spoke to Rene Mugenzi, a Rwandan refugee, British citizen and human rights activist, who continues to seek acknowledgment and indictment for the crimes against humanity and, arguably, genocide committed at Kibeho in 1995.

Ann Garrison: Rene, you organized an event attended by Amnesty International and U.N. peacekeepers who witnessed the massacre, at which you showed photographs that had not been shown in public before. After that, the Metropolitan Police warned you that Kagame had sent assassins to kill you in London. You obviously survived, at least for now, but have you come any closer to seeing indictments or prosecutions for the Kibeho Massacre?

Kagame’s troops slaughtered 4,000-8,000 Hutus at Kibeho on April 22, 1995.

Rene Mugenzi: Unfortunately, no, but we have managed to raise awareness about the massacre with various international institutions and organizations as well as members of the U.N. Security Council (UNSC). We will continue our work until a decision to prosecute suspects is announced.

AG: The evidence could hardly be more persuasive. It includes the eyewitness testimony of U.N. human rights monitors, U.N. peacekeepers, and photojournalists and photo documentation. Why has the international legal system, including the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda and the International Criminal Court, still failed to prosecute Kagame and his officers?

RM: The U.N. and other international legal systems are suffering from extreme fatigue about Rwanda-related justice issues after spending billions of dollars on ICTR judgments and court proceedings for more than a decade and half. There is little interest in any legal cases related to what happened in Rwanda in the 1990s.

The Kagame regime and its powerful Western allies – including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Howard Buffett – have also been determined to prevent the revision of Rwanda’s official “genocide against the Tutsi” narrative or the prosecution of Rwandan officers, including Kagame himself.

AG: What happened at Kibeho undermines the ideology of “humanitarian intervention” based on the claim that the world failed to stop the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Could you talk about that?

RM: Indeed, the U.N. peacekeepers at Kibeho were ordered not to fire their weapons to defend the refugees. I’m sure that U.N. officials would rather not acknowledge that or identify the person or persons responsible for the order.

By refusing to send the case to the ICC for prosecution, the U.N. Security Council has shown that it is not really learning from its mistakes as is claimed by advocates of “humanitarian intervention” like Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire and former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. The UNSC should review their decision-making processes and make a real commitment to the preservation of human lives and freedoms.

These are a few of the models in Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 3 Kibeho Massacre-inspired “refugee” fashion show in February 2016. – Photo: Demetrios Kambouris

AG: In 2015, Kanye West modeled his Yeezy Season 3 fashion tableau on a photograph of the Kibeho camp, which looks like an inferno. The IDPs (internally displaced persons) had rushed back inside and refused to leave after Rwandan troops opened fire on their fellows on their way out.

Kanye told his models to “channel a Rwandan refugee camp” to promote his fashion line. Did this spread any awareness of what happened at Kibeho?

RM: That fashion show was an appalling commodification of the mass killing and suffering of Rwandan people.

AG: Was there ever any indication that Kanye West knew or cared about what really happened at Kibeho?

RM: No. If he had, he would have talked about it during his promotion event. It is inhumane to use a scene of suffering people for financial benefit and ignore the story of their suffering.

AG: Did he ever respond to your request for an apology?

RM: We wrote to him but never received a reply.

AG: After the fashion show, American scholar Laura Seay tweeted at Kanye West: “This is beyond tasteless. Kibeho is a massacre site, not a runway. A Kibeho-themed fashion show is as offensive as an Auschwitz-themed fashion show would be. Historical horrors must not be commodified.”

Others on Twitter called it “crass, inappropriate, offensive and unacceptable” and asked what Kanye West knows about Kibeho or Rwanda. Would you like to add to that?

RM: That was my feeling too. He could have learned and spread awareness about the Kibeho Massacre, but he didn’t know or care about the story behind the image. Neither did the fashion writers or anyone else in the fashion world.

Instead they turned it into something “cool.” Kanye West should apologize, learn the truth about Kibeho, and call on the international justice system to indict those responsible for genocide and crimes against humanity.

Rene Mugenzi is a Rwandan refugee, British citizen and human rights activist who lives in London. He can be reached at Info@rwandansrights.org.

Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report, Black Star News, Counterpunch and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News, KPFA Flashpoints and for her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at anniegarrison@gmail.com. In March 2014 she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace in the Great Lakes Region of Africa through her reporting.