Quantcast
Channel: Bill Clinton – San Francisco Bay View
Viewing all 54 articles
Browse latest View live

Bill Clinton’s favorite African, Paul Kagame, wins re-election by 99 percent, arrests opponent

0
0

by Ann Garrison

How much longer can Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Benjamin Netanyahu, AIPAC and associated Zionist organizations cover for Rwandan President Paul Kagame? How much longer can they claim that he was Rwanda’s savior, that he stopped a genocide recalling the Holocaust, then helped Rwanda rise from the ashes?

The two women brave enough to mount election challenges to Paul Kagame, Victoire Ingabire in 2010 and now Diane Rwigara, were both arrested after the elections, which Kagame claims to have won by landslides of 93 percent in 2010 and 99 percent in 2017.

This week another woman who dared to challenge him for the presidency says he has taken vengeance on her and her family. In 2010, Kagame imprisoned Victoire Ingabire, who is now serving the seventh of a 15-year prison sentence, and now he has arrested Diane Rwigara, who attempted to stand against him this year.

Like Ingabire in 2010, Rwigara was told that her name could not appear on the ballot because her nomination papers were insufficient. Kagame’s election bureaucracy is a Kafkaesque maze for anyone who might pose a real threat to his reign of terror.

Rwandan police arrested Ingabire, then put her under house arrest, shortly after her return to Rwanda in January 2010. They imprisoned her shortly after Kagame claimed re-election with an implausible 93 percent of the vote in August that year. They arrested Rwigara shortly after Kagame claimed an even more implausible 99 percent on Aug. 4.

As of Sept. 5, there were many conflicting reports but no definitive account of the timeline of events before, during and after Rwigara’s arrest. Aljazeera was reporting that she had been arrested, then returned to her home. Rwigara’s assistant said that she had taken over her Twitter feed, and that she is now under house arrest though not yet formally.

Earlier this year, Rwigara had told the BBC that she was expecting reprisal: “Taking a stand or criticizing the Rwandan government is not an easy task. They do all in their power to try to discourage you and silence you.

“Our family businesses have been closed down. Our bank accounts have been seized. There is still a very high price for me to pay, and trust me, they have said that, after the elections, anybody who has spoken out, including my supporters, that: ‘We’ll deal with them.’”

Earlier this year, Rwigara had told the BBC that she was expecting reprisal: “Taking a stand or criticizing the Rwandan government is not an easy task. They do all in their power to try to discourage you and silence you.”

In a press conference earlier this year, Rwigara described Rwanda much as Ingabire did, as a nation of extreme poverty and fear hidden behind its modern capital city, Kigali, with its hotels, its convention center and its tourist industry, which not only makes a lot of money but also propagandizes visitors about Rwanda’s miraculous recovery from genocide. The ruling party, she said, is more eager to impress white people than its own citizens:

“While all these problems are going on, mainly high unemployment and poverty, our government is spending money building luxury hotels. The convention center cost over $300 million – the most expensive building in Africa.

“Why are we spending the most when we are among the poorest? Most Rwandans do not have the basic necessities like water and electricity, so our taxes should be invested in the people first.

“Rwanda has given priority to impressing white people instead of impressing our own people. Our country’s image, though important, should not take precedence over the well-being of Rwandans.”

Rwigara is a Rwandan Tutsi whose wealthy father supported the 1990 invasion of Rwanda from Uganda that ended in the 1994 massacres and Gen. Paul Kagame’s seizure of power. She became an outspoken critic of the government after her father died in an automobile accident that she and her family blame on Rwandan authorities. She did not, like Victoire Ingabire, challenge the received history of the genocide, and she even went so far as to say that free speech should not be a cover for revising its history:

“The freedom of expression I’m talking about is not the freedom that denies or revises the genocide, the 1994 genocide. People should not hide under the umbrella of free speech for divisive statements. The freedom of expression I’m talking about is being able to have the debates without fear of reprisals. Almost all topics in Rwanda are taboo.”

Rwigara has not spoken out against Rwanda’s catastrophic aggression in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as Ingabire did, either. Kagame was nevertheless unwilling to tolerate her criticism of Rwanda as it is now. Rwandan police arrested her and members of her family for, they say, tax evasion and forging signatures on her nomination papers.

Kagame did not empower women or stop a genocide

Nearly 60 percent of Rwanda’s Members of Parliament are women, and Kagame is commonly praised for empowering women, but that’s no more plausible than his 99 percent electoral victory or his claim to have stopped a genocide. He persecuted and silenced the only two women who dared stand up to him, and he didn’t stop a genocide; he started one.

He murdered the Rwandan and Burundian presidents, massacred his way to power in Rwanda, then invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees, and chased hundreds of thousands more through the jungle from Congo’s east to west. With his partner in crime Yoweri Museveni, he invaded, occupied and plundered the resource wealth of the Congo, leaving millions of Congolese dead and displaced.

Nearly 60 percent of Rwanda’s Members of Parliament are women, and Kagame is commonly praised for empowering women, but that’s no more plausible than his 99 percent electoral victory or his claim to have stopped a genocide.

Congolese officials and military officers, who are in fact Rwandan, continue a stealth occupation today. Even the infamous warlord Bosco Ntaganda, who is now on trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC), is a Rwandan pretending to be Congolese. The ICC, a tool of Western imperialism, agrees to this pretense because their brief is to prosecute Ntaganda for crimes committed within the borders of Congo, not for Rwanda’s crime against peace, the first and gravest international crime established by the Nuremberg Principles:

(a) Crimes against peace:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (I).

The U.S. and U.K. covertly supported Rwanda’s invasions of Congo, then helped Kagame justify decades of ongoing aggression in the name of hunting Hutu perpetrators of genocide. The ICC helps them create illusions of international justice for Congolese without acknowledging the Rwandan war of aggression that they supported.

What will happen to Diane Rwigara and Victoire Ingabire?

It seems likely that Diane Rwigara will be tried in a kangaroo court on trumped up charges and sent to prison, once again like Ingabire. If so, and if she appeals to the Supreme Court, she will lose, as Ingabire did. Some things in Rwanda are as predictable as presidential elections.

There is one glimmer of hope: Victoire Ingabire’s appeal of her conviction in Rwanda to the African Court of Human and People’s Rights in Arusha, Tanzania. Rwanda attempted to withdraw from the court’s jurisdiction after it agreed to hear her appeal, but the rules of the court and international law do not allow a member nation to withdraw after it has been named as party to a case that the court has agreed to hear.

It seems likely that Diane Rwigara will be tried in a kangaroo court on trumped up charges and sent to prison, once again like Ingabire.

Rwanda refused to appear at the March 2017 hearing, alleging bias, but the court proceeded to weigh the evidence and it could rule this month. Ingabire’s conviction is such a blatant case of political persecution that it will test the African court’s independence.

No matter how the court decides, however, it has no enforcement apparatus. If it overturns Ingabire’s conviction, she will win no more than a moral victory because the rule of international law is an unrealized ideal.

Paul Kagame and Bill Clinton are friends. Clinton has visited Kagame many times. Here they are together at Kagame’s farm in Muhazi, Rwanda, in 2010. – Photo: Charles Onyango-Obbo

Only international pressure to accept the court’s judgment could lead to her release, and no matter how bad Kagame’s press gets, he is always shielded from consequence by his powerful Western friends – Clinton, Blair, Netanyahu, AIPAC etc. Kagame’s state press advocated for Hillary Clinton’s election and made it clear that he was deeply disappointed by her defeat. The Clintons, and Bill Clinton’s weepy lies about having failed to stop the genocide, have served him for two decades.

Rwanda depends on foreign aid for 40 percent of its budget. The U.S. is its top bilateral donor, the U.K. its second, but the flailing Trump administration hasn’t turned any attention to Rwanda. It hasn’t even managed to hire a new assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

In the U.K., the Tories have supported Kagame, as Tony Blair and his government did, despite all the evidence of Kagame’s crimes. After Rwanda’s M23 militia ravaged the Kivu Provinces in 2012-13, Britain sharply increased its aid to Rwanda from £59 million in 2012-13, to £84 million in 2013-14. In 2014-15, British aid to Rwanda was £70 million and, a year later, £66 million.

Britain was the only major country to congratulate Kagame on his ridiculous 99 percent win in the August presidential elections. If, however, Jeremy Corbyn becomes the U.K.’s next prime minister, it could be a new dawn for the U.K.’s relations with Rwanda and its totalitarian ruler. Corbyn is an opponent of unilateral military intervention of any sort and a staunch advocate of international law.

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.


Ingabire Day: We are all Victoire and Victoire is all of us

0
0

by Ann Garrison

Order Victoire Ingabire’s book, “Between 4 Walls of the 1930 Prison,” by emailing Sales@FriendsOfVictoire.org.

Oct. 14 marked the seventh anniversary of Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire’s arrest shortly after she attempted to run for president against Rwanda’s military dictator, President Paul Kagame. I still remember my last conversation with her for the KPFA Evening News on Oct. 10.

The “UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993-2003” had been officially released on Oct. 1, and she said that the mandate of the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) should be expanded to include Rwandan crimes in Congo. That most certainly has not happened, and Victoire’s been in prison for seven years instead. Kagame’s powerful friend Bill Clinton defends him by saying that his crimes in Congo “haven’t been adjudicated.”

In that last radio news report including Victoire’s voice, ICTR defense attorney Peter Erlinder said: “If the United States wants something to happen, in terms of punishing these criminals, there’s a way to do it. If the U.S. doesn’t want it to happen, it won’t happen, tribunals or no.

“Because the United States controls the ICTR, because the United States controls the ICC, because the United States controls the Security Council. So extending the mandate of the ICTR has no effect unless the policy of the United States changes to allow the prosecution of the RPF and Kagame for the crimes that are already known that they’ve committed, and those crimes have been known for 15 years.”

Victoire’s commitment to peace, justice and the rule of law enabled her to at least imagine recreating the ICTR as a just court.

The Brussels-based International Women’s Network for Democracy and Peace commemorates Oct. 14 as Ingabire Day, a day of solidarity with Victoire Ingabire and all political prisoners. In a video produced for this year’s Ingabire Day, her supporters around the world repeat, “We are Victoire and Victoire is all of us.” They also say that she was arrested for making the following statement upon her return from the Netherlands to Rwanda in January 2010:

“It is essential that all Rwandans, regardless of their ethnic group, understand that it is time to unite to share mutual compassion in order for us to build a sustainable peace in our country. That is the reason why I am back in Rwanda. It is in order that we should all walk together on the path of unity and reconciliation so that we can work together to find the solution to ensure that injustice never prevails again, and finally all Rwandans can live freely in our country.”

The Brussels-based International Women’s Network for Democracy and Peace commemorates Oct. 14 as Ingabire Day, a day of solidarity with Victoire Ingabire and all political prisoners.

I asked Claude Gatebuke, Rwandan genocide survivor and founder of the African Great Lakes Action Network, to explain Victoire Ingabire’s message.

Claude Gatebuke: Her message was “Let’s tell the truth about what happened. Let’s tell the truth about the massacres and atrocities committed against the Tutsis. Let’s tell the truth about the massacres and atrocities committed against the Hutus.” And that implicated the government of Rwanda led by Paul Kagame, especially his ruling party and military, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), because they committed massacres and atrocities against Hutus, and Tutsis actually, but mostly against Hutus.

Ann Garrison: President Paul Kagame, his party and his international supporters, including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Rev. Rick Warren, claim that ethnic conflict has been overcome in Rwanda, that Hutu and Tutsi have reconciled. So why did Victoire call for reconciliation?

CG: That reconciliation story is simply not true. Because of the RPF’s ethnic cleansing against the Hutus, and the extremist Hutus’ ethnic cleansing against the Tutsis, there are people who are still hurt, who have not seen justice, who are still harboring trauma and fear. It’s a hurtful lie to state that it’s over and that the ethnic conflict has ended. That is why Victoire called for true reconciliation and healing.

Everyone needs to know the truth and have some closure about what happened to their families. Everyone needs to be able to mourn their dead, and Hutus cannot mourn so long as it’s illegal and dangerous to say that Hutus were also victims, as Victoire did.

AG: And isn’t there still an issue of Hutu people having equality in Rwanda?

CG: Yes, there is a big issue with that. One especially harsh policy that Hutu people are subjected to is Ndi Umunyarwanda, which basically requires every Hutu to apologize to the Tutsis for the 1994 genocide. This includes Hutu children who had not been born at the time the genocide took place. It also includes Hutu children who were way too young to have been involved, children who were 10 years old or even younger. They have to apologize for crimes committed by extremist Hutus in 1994, as if the crime is universal to the Hutu ethnic group.

AG: Isn’t wealth and power also concentrated in the hands of a Tutsi elite, with token exceptions?

CG: Yes, there is a small group of Tutsis, mostly military men who came from Uganda, the country that the RPF invaded from in 1990, who basically run the country. Wealth and power is concentrated in that group.

AG: In 2010, Bernard Ntaganda also tried to run for president and went to prison instead. Before his arrest, he told me that Rwanda’s greatest problem is that a small group of people control all the wealth and all the power, and the rest of Rwandans are very poor.

CG: That is still true.

AG: I should add that Bernard Ntaganda was released after four years, but as a former convict, he is no longer eligible to run for president.

CG: Yes, that’s the law. It applies to Bernard Ntaganda, and it will apply to Victoire Ingabire when she is released. It will also apply to Diane Rwigara, a woman who tried to run for president against Kagame this year, if she is convicted of the charges she’s now facing, as she no doubt will be.

AG: Several years ago, you told me that “Victoire Ingabire doesn’t believe in invading the neighbors.” Could you explain that again?

CG: Kagame and Uganda’s military dictator Yoweri Museveni invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1996 and then again in 1998. Despite a 2003 peace agreement, much of Congo is still under de facto Rwandan occupation and wracked by violent struggles over Congolese resource wealth.

Kagame’s excuse for invading DRC has always been hunting down “Hutu genocidaires” who had fled into Congo as his army advanced. Most of those who fled were simply refugees, not genocidaires, and his army massacred 200,000 of them, as was documented in the “UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993-2003.”

The invasions and resource plunder have also cost millions of Congolese lives. Many died violently but even more died of hardship while fleeing the violence or in refugee camps that lacked food, water and basic medicines. Many of those were children.

Victoire wants the surviving Hutu refugees to be able to return home safely to join a real reconciliation process in Rwanda instead of serving as Kagame’s excuse for his crimes in Congo. She doesn’t want Rwandan militias occupying Congo and plundering its resources.

There is also evidence that Kagame’s party has been harboring and arming Burundians who want to overthrow the Burundian government of President Pierre Nkurunziza and that they have even attempted to conscript Burundian refugees into a rebel army. Victoire Ingabire doesn’t believe in invading Burundi or any of Rwanda’s other neighbors. She wants to build sustainable peace and democracy.

AG: I remember, in 2010, watching a Dutch television journalist ask Victoire’s little boy Riszt Shimwa why his mother was returning to Rwanda. He said, “So there won’t be any more wars.”

CG: That’s true, and Riszt has had to grow up without her because of her courage.

AG: Victoire’s husband, Lin Muyizere, has also been without her for seven years, but he said that she is not just their Victoire anymore, that she now belongs to all of us.

CG: Yes, her family has been totally supportive of her and very generous in sharing her with us.

AG: And what did Rwandans and their friends do on Ingabire Day?

CG: It was a big day for people who believe in freedom all around the world. Even here in the United States there were gatherings to celebrate her courage. There were gatherings in Brussels, Belgium, Zambia, South Africa, Australia, Canada, France and other nations.

There was a book launch in London, where the book she wrote in captivity, “Between Four Walls of the 1930 Prison,” has been translated into English and made available on the Friends of Victoire website and amazon.com. If you’d rather support Friends of Victoire than Jeff Bezos, order it from them. It’s actually 2 euros less – translated into dollars – from Friends of Victoire.

AG: OK, to close for now, let’s add that Victoire Ingabire’s appeal of her conviction and 15-year sentence is before the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights, which could rule any day. And that the U.S. is the largest bilateral donor to Rwanda, and Rwanda is a longstanding U.S. military partner and proxy on the African continent.

CG: All true.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@kpfa.org. Claude Gatebuke is a Rwandan Genocide survivor and the founder of the African Great Lakes Action Network. He can be reached at claude@aglan.org.

The crime that turned Central Africa into a vast killing ground

0
0

by Ann Garrison

April 6 was the 24th anniversary of the day that Gen. Paul Kagame shattered a ceasefire agreement and resumed the 1990-1994 war in Rwanda by assassinating Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira. His troops, acting on his orders, fired a rocket at Habyarimana’s plane when it appeared overhead in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, returning from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) soldiers, then in rebellion against the elected government of President Habyarimana, inspect the wreckage of his plane on May 26, 1994, which had been shot down on Gen. Kagame’s orders April 6, 1994. – Photo: Corinne Dufka, Reuters

The plane crashed into the presidential palace and the BBC reported heavy fighting at the crash site as the news spread. No one has ever been brought to trial for the crime, even though Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo became vast killing grounds in its aftermath.

The 90 days of chaos, war and massacres that followed the assassinations came to be known simply as the Rwandan Genocide, even though its overarching context was Kagame’s final push to seize power in the war that began on Oct. 1, 1990, when he and his army invaded Rwanda from Uganda.

Both assassinated presidents were of the Hutu ethnicity, and the Hutu population panicked, imagining their own doom; some began to slaughter their Tutsi neighbors in what turned into a bloodbath broadcast by global news networks. Much of the coverage depicted Hutu people as inherently bloodthirsty, subhuman, demonic killers – a cruel, racist stereotype that survives to this day.

At the same time, Gen. Paul Kagame and his army launched a carefully planned military offensive – not to save Tutsis, but to seize power. In a 2011 interview, Col. Luc Marchal, commander of the Belgian peacekeeping troops in UNAMIR, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Rwanda, told Jambo News: “On the military side, it is impossible to take advantage of an opportunity like the attack [on the presidents’ plane] to launch an offensive on three strategic axes. It takes months of preparation from a logistical point of view.”

Kagame and his so-called Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) claimed that his troops had not fired the rocket that took down the plane. They instead blamed it on Hutu hardliners and accused them of firing it so as to create an excuse for unleashing their genocidal madness on Tutsis – no matter how catastrophic it would be to themselves.

Gen. Paul Kagame and his army launched a carefully planned military offensive – not to save Tutsis, but to seize power.

No members of the Hutu government or the Hutu population had anything to gain by assassinating the two presidents or otherwise disrupting the ceasefire, and they had everything to lose. All they needed to do was wait for elections scheduled in the Arusha Accords that had established the ceasefire; they would no doubt have won both the presidency and the majority in parliament.

Kagame and the RPF, however, had everything to gain. They could hope to seize power only by force, so they had to either resume the war or accept minority parliamentary status. When Col. Marchal appeared as a defense witness at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, he told the court: “From my experience, my conclusion is that the RPF had one goal – seizing power by force and keeping it to themselves.”

This is an exchange between BBC HardTalk Host Stephen Sackur and President Paul Kagame in a 2006 interview:

Stephen Sackur: France’s leading antiterrorism judge wants you and some of your key aides to face trial – trial on the accusation that you ordered the shooting down of the plane which was being used by the serving Rwandan president on the 6th of April 1994. Are you ready to let justice take its course?

President Paul Kagame: I think there can’t be justice in that particular case for various reasons: First of all, there is no basis whatsoever on which the people in Rwanda, leaders of Rwanda, people who fought to stop genocide, people who fought against the genocidal government and the forces to be tried – and moreover be tried by anybody from France – when France is seriously implicated in the genocide of Rwanda. And we are very sure that this judge is not acting in any way within a sound legal basis. This judge is more political than anything else.

Stephen Sackur: I suspected you would counter with charges against France … we will talk about those. I just want to remind you of something you said in a BBC interview in February 2004 when you said, “Anybody who wants to investigate me or try me, I have no problem with that.” So what’s changed?

President Paul Kagame: Yes, if anybody acting on a legal sound basis. That’s what I was talking about. You don’t just have anybody coming up with wild allegations and accusing me and accusing … I am the president of Rwanda. I am a Rwandese. I had a right. I had the basis for getting involved in the armed struggle to liberate my country from Habyarimana, from the government he was leading. I had been a refugee in … outside Rwanda for 30 years.

Stephen Sackur: But you didn’t have a right to shoot down his plane and to assassinate him.

President Paul Kagame: Well I had the right to fight for my rights!

Stephen Sackur: But do you believe you had a right to assassinate him?

President Paul Kagame: No [LAUGHING], but of course Habyarimana, having been on the other side that I was fighting, it was possible that he could easily die. Imagine if I had died myself in the same process. Would the same judge be asking about my death or who killed me? …

I am saying [that] this was a situation where there was a war which was being fought. But this has nothing to do now with who actually killed Habyarimana yet. I am not even coming to that. I am only saying that it is even surprising that somebody involved in a war can die. Does that also mean that you simply bring up wild allegations against me without…

Stephen Sackur: Sorry to interrupt you … But you were involved in a peace negotiation with him at the time! The RPF was talking to him.

President Paul Kagame: Yes, and the genocide happened a while after that as well. We had a genocide …

Stephen Sackur: You call them wild allegations, but of course you know they are not wild allegations. You know that Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière has been working on that case for many, many years. You also know that he is one of the most respected judges in all France.

He has a track record of tracking down terrorists, bringing them to justice. He has been working on your case and he has, and I have it here, about 70 pages of documentary evidence pointing to your …

President Paul Kagame: No, no, no! It is 70 pages of trash, of nothing and I will show that. Look at the people he is talking about, that he talked to, that he got his testimonies from.

Almost all of them are people who are indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. People who are in fact wanted by the tribunal but they can’t have access to them. They can’t get hold of them. Yet, the judge has access to them, because they enjoy protection in France. …

Stephen Sackur: Judge Bruguière comes up with this conclusion that “the final order to attack the presidential plane was given by Paul Kagame himself during a meeting held in Mulindi on March the 31st, 1994.”

President Paul Kagame: That represents absolutely nothing. First of all, the judge wants to … bring out this incident as having been responsible for the genocide. But the judge, the French, people of the U.N., everybody they know, there were months of preparations for the genocide; they bought arms, they trained people, they got arms from France, money paid by the French government to the government of Habyarimana to prepare for a genocide.

This has nothing to do with the aircraft. Even if we are talking about the assassination of Habyarimana or bringing down the aircraft, it has nothing to do with that. It is absolutely nonsense, nonsense …

Stephen Sackur: Why not, why not bow to the wish of Judge Bruguière … and have your case tested at the International Tribunal on Rwanda?

President Paul Kagame: I can’t bow to the wishes of Judge Bruguière, with the French acting politically, with France having had a genocide in Rwanda, never! Just because he is coming from France.

Bill Clinton honors Paul Kagame with the 2009 Clinton Global Citizen Award on Sept. 24, 2009.

“Acting politically” is Kagame’s term for differing with him. The general who became Rwanda’s president thrives on his self-righteous pronouncements about genocide, “the crime of crimes,” on the world stage. He is, according to his own absolute truth, Rwanda’s savior.

Anyone who dares to challenge his authority or his narrative within Rwanda gets killed, goes to prison, or goes into exile. Some are even killed in exile and others face extradition after anonymous witnesses accuse them of 1994 genocide crime many years later. Kagame’s abundantly evident sociopathology makes Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s determination to heroize him all the more sinister.

Kagame says that no one should be surprised that Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was assassinated, because there was a war going on – not only a war but a genocide. For the past 24 years, he and his propagandists, including Clinton and Blair, have managed to erase the ceasefire and the Arusha Accords from the story repeated by the corporate press, the U.N., the Wikipedia and the Samantha Power mob, which is forever eager to start another war “to stop the next Rwanda.”

“Acting politically” is Kagame’s term for differing with him. Anyone who dares to challenge his authority or his narrative within Rwanda gets killed, goes to prison, or goes into exile.  

Kagame seized power in Rwanda’s capital in July 1994 without, as he claims, “stopping genocide.” He in fact triggered the massacres and has ever since blackmailed the rest of the world over its failure to stop them – even though he himself threatened to fire on U.N. troops if they intervened.

He changed Rwanda’s language of international business from French to English and became a key U.S. and U.K. ally in the region. He and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni then invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo, toppled one Congolese president and assassinated another, plundered Congolese resources, and left millions dead, mostly of hunger and disease, often in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs).

Bill Clinton presented Kagame with a 2009 Global Citizen Award at the Clinton Global Initiative, his annual poverty pimping extravaganza in New York City, and the U.S. is now donor #1 to Rwanda, the U.K. donor #2.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@kpfa.org.

Et tu, RT? Amplifying Western disinformation on Rwanda

0
0

Between 1 and 2 million Rwandan refugees fled into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then called Zaire) in 1994 for fear of the conquering army led by Gen. Paul Kagame.

by Ann Garrison

During a recent campaign event, Florida Sen. Bill Nelson said: “That story of Rwanda is very instructive to us because when a place gets so tribal that the two tribes won’t have anything to do with each other, and that jealousy turns into hate – we saw what happened to the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, it turned into a genocide. A million people hacked to death within a few months. And we have got to watch what’s happening here.”

That got a lot of headlines even though U.S. ethnicity is binary only if seen as white vs. everybody else. Whatever Sen. Nelson meant, those who do see it that way have certainly gained prominence since Trump took the White House.

However, that is a newly minted reference to the Rwandan Genocide in U.S. discourse. It’s most often remembered in urgent calls for “humanitarian intervention,” aka war, to stop another genocide. We’re told that the U.S. failed to stop Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, so we’re now obliged to “intervene” anytime and anywhere another genocide is underway.

That’s why, we’re told, the U.S. and its NATO allies had to bomb Libya into ongoing chaos in 2011. That’s why Lockheed Martin had to step up production of cruise missiles to drop on Syria. That’s why Sens. Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, both 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, became initial co-sponsors of an Orwellian bill to “enhance” our government’s ability to “prevent genocide and mass atrocities” with military force: Senate Bill 1158, the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018.

That is a newly minted reference to the Rwandan Genocide in U.S. discourse. It’s most often remembered in urgent calls for “humanitarian intervention,” aka war, to stop another genocide.

More soberly, given the lies we’ve all been told in order to start wars, doesn’t it seem likely that this story – that the U.S. failed to stop the Rwandan Genocide – is one more? Not that the genocide didn’t happen and not that it wasn’t a terrible tragedy, but that the story we were all told and Bill Clinton’s crocodile tears about his “worst mistake” are a lie.

In fact, the U.S. and U.K. backed Gen. Paul Kagame’s invasion of Rwanda from Uganda on Oct. 1, 1990, and prevented a U.N. intervention until he and his army had massacred their way to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, to seize power on July 4, 1994. Just over three weeks later, on July 28, the New York Times reported that the “U.S. Is Considering a Base in Rwanda for Relief Teams,” and Kagame has been a key U.S. ally and “military partner” ever since. He not only collaborated with the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) but also invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo, left millions dead, and thus created new opportunities for U.S. mining corporations.

Professor Edward S. Herman and researcher-author David Peterson deconstructed the propaganda about Rwanda in “The Politics of Genocide” and “Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide 20 Years On.” In “Enduring Lies,” they wrote that “The institutionalization of the ‘Rwandan genocide’ has been the remarkable achievement of a propaganda system sustained by both public and private power, with the crucial assistance of a related cadre of intellectual enforcers. The favorite weapons of these enforcers are reciting the institutionalized untruths as gospel while portraying critics of the standard model as ‘genocide deniers,’ dark figures who lurk at the same moral level as child molesters, to be condemned and even outlawed.”

More soberly, given the lies we’ve all been told in order to start wars, doesn’t it seem likely that this story – that the U.S. failed to stop the Rwandan Genocide – is one more?

Ed Herman and I had many conversations about this before his death in November 2017, including one on KPFA Radio’s Project Censored Show on New Year’s Day, 2016. The transcript was published by the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report and Global Research.

More recently, former Agence France Presse and Radio France International journalist Judi Rever broke down the simple story of Tutsi victims, Hutu perpetrators in her book “In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.” Here’s some of what she told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. after the book’s publication:

“Judi Rever: He [Kagame] did not stop the genocide because at the same time that ethnic Tutsis were being killed in Hutu controlled zones, his Tutsi troops were killing with equal zeal and organization. And in every zone that the Rwandan Patriotic Front and its army entered, they killed massively and in an organized way.

“CBC: Killed Hutus?

“Judi Rever: Killed Hutus. They also fueled the genocide against the Tutsis. They infiltrated the Hutu militias very successfully, and they baited the violence. They egged on the violence, but they also – some of their commandos – participated in the slaughter of Tutsis at roadblocks.”

Kagame knowingly ordered and encouraged Tutsi massacres to build a storyline that would justify his Tutsi minority dictatorship after he’d seized power and control of the country’s electoral apparatus. Had he proceeded to real elections, as mandated by the Arusha Accords signed to end the war, the Hutu majority would have elected a Hutu president.

Former Rwandan Foreign Minister Jean-Marie Ndagijimana tells the same story from a different standpoint in “How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsi.” Most of these victims were poor Tutsis who had been left behind when the wealthy and aristocratic Tutsis fled to Uganda during the Hutu Peasant Revolution of 1959-1961.

Rever’s conclusions are based on years of research and interviews, many of them with RPF troops who were tormented by memories of what they had done and felt compelled to confess. Her book also includes accounts of how she, her husband and even her children were threatened while she was researching it, and how Belgian security operatives accompanied her everywhere during a research trip to Brussels to interview political exiles and refugees.

Kagame knowingly ordered and encouraged Tutsi massacres to build a storyline that would justify his Tutsi minority dictatorship after he’d seized power and control of the country’s electoral apparatus.

In an email released by Wikileaks, a Stratfor intelligence analyst said that “Rwandans are cold ass mofos” and detailed Rwandan operatives’ transnational assassinations and assassination attempts. Their targets are almost always high-profile figures who, like Rever, challenge the story of Tutsi victims, Hutu perpetrators that is so essential to Kagame’s survival and international stature.

I myself haven’t feared for my life at the hands of Rwandan operatives, but I did file an assault complaint after a dustup with Kagame’s contingent at Sacramento State University’s 2011 Third International Genocide Conference.

Et tu, RT?

Despite all this, the propaganda has been so effective that the standard story of Tutsi victims, Hutu perpetrators, and Bill Clinton’s failure remains all but unassailable in mainstream media. It’s in the Wikipedia, where a host of “edit alerts” assure that any attempt to change it starts a tireless “editing war” that Wikipedia moderators will finally shut down with no changes made.

It’s at the heart of former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power’s interventionist bible, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” It’s in Obama’s 2011 “Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities” and “Mass Atrocities Response Operations: A Military Handbook,” which was produced by the Pentagon and Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights with help from Pierre Omidyar’s Humanity United Foundation. And it’s in the template of every Reuters and AP newswire that ever touches on the subject.

Despite all this, the propaganda has been so effective that the standard story of Tutsi victims, Hutu perpetrators, and Bill Clinton’s failure remains all but unassailable in mainstream media.

Et tu, RT?

I was nevertheless surprised when RT repeated the standard propaganda as well. Mightn’t one expect RT to dig a little deeper into a narrative used to justify the U.S. war in Syria among others? I don’t know why, but they hadn’t done so before asking me to comment on a news story about the recent appeal of a French court’s ruling that French soldiers were not criminally complicit for failing to protect Tutsis massacred at Bisesero, Rwanda, in 1994.

I agreed, so they called me on Skype, but the host and I proceeded to frustrate one another, and most of what I said was left on the cutting room floor. CIUT 89.5fm-Toronto host and former ICTR investigator Phil Taylor sent me a consolation note saying, “I felt for you, Ann. I saw the item in real time and slapped my forehead. The cutting was done with shears.”

Basic journalistic ethics and not wanting to be misrepresented compelled me to write about why this interview turned into such a hot mess after beginning with the usual false recitation:

“The genocide in Rwanda lasted just over three months and left nearly a million people dead.

“…

“The genocide was committed mainly by the Hutu government and its backers against the ethnic minority Tutsi tribe. Allegations of the French government’s support for the Hutus, who carried out most of the slaughter in the genocide, have been rough on the French government’s relations with the Rwandan government for years. But the French, although they admit that they’ve made mistakes, they say they have no complicity in the genocide that took place there.”

I told RT that the context of the 1994 Bisesero massacre was a four-year war that began on Oct. 1, 1990, when a detachment of the Ugandan Army led by then General, now President, Paul Kagame invaded Rwanda from Uganda. I said that those Ugandan troops were Rwandan Tutsis or the children of Rwandan Tutsis who had fled to Uganda between 1959 and 1961, when the Hutu majority finally liberated themselves from centuries long domination by the Tutsi minority.

I said that focusing on this single tragic incident, the Tutsi massacres at Bisesero, imposed the propaganda narrative about the Rwandan Genocide on their story.

I said that France’s Operation Turquoise had created a humanitarian corridor for civilians fleeing to Congo in terror of Kagame’s advancing army, so it was a distortion to discredit the French troops over this one incident in which they were accused of failing to act even though it wasn’t clear they had a mandate.

I considered quoting Ed Herman, David Peterson and Judi Rever, but ran out of time. That was more complexity than RT wanted to add to their news story. They had already built it on the widely received account of what happened in Rwanda before calling me.

Having produced some radio news myself, I know that the show must go on at the scheduled hour even if it could be better. Had they nevertheless considered that there might be something wrong with their premises? I don’t know, but I’m going to send this to the producer and hope they understand that I’m just encouraging them to review this Western narrative as they do so many others. Stay tuned.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@kpfa.org.

After Dems’ crime bill, they now need super predators’ votes to survive

0
0

by Charlie Peach

Bill Clinton, at Stone Mountain Correctional Facility, Georgia, pushes his “Tough on Crime” bill in 1992. Stone Mountain is known as the home of the KKK, the mecca of white supremacy.

The Democrats are complete trash to me, after destroying Black communities and disenfranchising generations of Black men, women and youth; they now need their votes to survive.

However, these same people have done nothing to stop the recidivism that feeds the private prison machine that they all profit from. They also have not worked to make the many Black communities whole again after they were destroyed via mass incarceration and the so-called war on drugs.

The only growth we see in any of these communities has been mass gentrification by white liberals and the complete erasure of the Black faces who once fought to survive there.

So after decades of using Black communities to fill private prisons and slave labor, they now need these same people to save their party. Sadly, John Lewis was one of the five Democrats who voted against the First Step Act Bill on Prison Reform … because Lewis is a hack who does what he is told by his liberal and corporate owners, and supporting any issues that would somehow make Trump look good to Black people is an absolute no no, no matter how impactful it could be to Black people.

So after decades of using Black communities to fill private prisons and slave labor, they now need these same people to save their party.

Democrats wasted no time to register former felons in Alabama to vote for Doug Jones, yet poor Blacks in Alabama have been found to suffer from hookworm disease, a rare disease normally only found in Third World countries. All of this while people lauded and applauded when Congresswoman Terri Sewell was elected as the first Black woman to Congress from Alabama.

Sewell is an Ivy League Princeton grad who can afford to wear $5K Saint John suits to work, yet poor people living in Alabama are pushed to register to vote to keep people like her, the Democrat Party establishment and Doug Jones in power – as they suffer unimaginable diseases and poverty. All of this while Democrats give millions for sanctuary cities, illegal immigration and other forms of welfare to support the undocumented, but they are not fighting for the millions of America’s poor (especially DOS) who were actually born here.

“Our billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates fund water treatment around the world, but they don’t fund it here in the U.S. because no one acknowledges that this level of poverty exists in the richest nation in the world,” says Catherine Flowers in  The Guardian.

Democrats give millions for sanctuary cities, illegal immigration and other forms of welfare to support the undocumented, but they are not fighting for the millions of America’s poor (especially DOS) who were actually born here.

Democrats are good at using Black people as firewalls, mules and props to further their white supremacy – and a certain class of Black people are all too willing to oblige, as long as they get their piece of the pie for doing so – while never giving anything to those communities in return.

Lastly, I am beyond sick of Democrats using Black people as excuses for them to stack the voting ballots with undocumented immigrants … every Black person in America has an ID, it’s insulting to keep using that lie (as though Black people are too poor and ignorant to have an ID) in order for them to slip in people who should not be voting. You can’t get any form of government assistance, housing or healthcare without an ID, and Democrats are complete frauds to continue pedaling this worn out lie.

Democrats are good at using Black people as firewalls, mules and props to further their white supremacy.

P.S. Anyone (sans murder) who has paid their dues to society should always have their voting rights restored, once completed. However, that’s not why Democrats are pushing for this now.

From Russia with love,

Charlie Peach

Charlie Peach describes herself this way: “World traveler, unbossed & unbought: independent & critical thinker, informer NOT conformer! No Democrat/ No GOP – #DemExit – Unapologetically BLACK!” This story first appeared on Medium. Contact her on Twitter: @CharliePeach

John Kerry helped George Bush steal the 2004 election, not the Russians, the Greens or Wikileaks

0
0
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., shakes hands with President Bush after the third and final presidential debate in Tempe, Ariz., Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2004. – Photo: Kevork Djansezian, AP

by Ann Garrison

The Democratic National Committee’s scapegoating began early in 2016, months before pussy grabbing, wall building, climate change denying, health care abolishing, tax dodging, shit spewing demagogue Donald Trump surprised everyone including himself by taking the White House. First Wikileaks elected Trump by releasing 19,252 DNC emails plus attachments on the eve of the Democratic Party Convention. Then Russia did it. Russia helped Wikileaks do it. Then Jill Stein and the Green Party did it. They all did it together.

Of course, the Green Party does it every presidential election year, but in 2016, we doubled down to elect the most fearsome Republican Godzilla yet. (Because he shares our core values: ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy and nonviolence.) Jill Stein even had her picture taken during her citizen diplomacy trip to Russia, just as Vlad the Impaler had stopped by her banquet table.

And now, according to Hillary Clinton, the Green Party is scheming to do it again by grooming Hawaii’s Democratic House Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, author of the stillborn Stop Arming Terrorists Act, to accept the Green Party presidential nomination – but only if Jill Stein, our dastardly 2012 and 2016 candidate, stands down. We did it, Russia did it, Wikileaks did it, and we’re all going to do it again. Wikileaks is still afloat on the Internet even as its founder Julian Assange is tortured in Belmarsh Prison, according to UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melsner.

One thing the DNC lynch mob and its corporate media would like us to forget is that one of their own, John Kerry, did it in 2004. Kerry knew that George Bush and the Republican Party stole the 2004 election from him in Ohio after his voters reported that their votes appeared as Bush votes even though they pulled the lever for Kerry, and after people in majority Democratic districts stood in long lines in thunderstorms and torrential rain waiting to vote (or went home) while majority district Republicans voted easily. Kerry’s patrician memoir “Every Day Is Extra” includes this comic description of another concern:

“Some on the team were bothered by the fact that many voting machines came from a private company, Diebold, owned by two Nebraska brothers who were the chairs of the Bush campaign for president.

“I wonder how many countries have elections in which the machines are privately owned and controlled, where the coding for the tallying cannot be inspected or verified because it is ‘proprietary information.’”

Kerry also wrote that he anticipated fraud but hoped for such a clear outcome that he wouldn’t need to contest. When that bubble burst, he chose not to expose the rot at the core of our so-called democracy, although, of course, he didn’t put it that way.

As soon as he and his team realized Bush had stolen it again, he wrote, they went into deep deliberations about what to do. His vice presidential candidate, John Edwards, thought they should contest, but both knew that they might win their way past several appeals courts only to lose in the Supreme Court, as Al Gore had.

Ohio voters waited outdoors in the rain for hours to vote for president in 2004.

Why not tell Americans, and the rest of the world, the truth?

Because, Kerry wrote, he was “deeply concerned about a nation at war, with the world looking at us, coming out of a second consecutive election, where we would be sitting in limbo, wondering for the next six weeks or more who the president would be.”

But why should anyone have been surprised by that? In 2003, John Kerry had voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and during his campaign, he stood by his vote. Discussing national security, he said:

“(W)e must launch and lead a new era of alliances for the post-9/11 world. America must always be the world’s paramount military power. But we can magnify our power through alliances.”

Nevertheless, people were surprised and aghast. Kerry wasn’t as crude as Bush. He wasn’t so obviously sadistic and sociopathic, so many had somehow imagined that his election would end the horrors we were inflicting on the Iraqi people and the soldiers coming home in coffins or physically and psychically mangled for life.

On election eve, Nov. 2, I had gone to see some political theater where everyone was eager to learn that the nightmare was over. Then we exited the theater space to a reception area with televisions mounted on the walls and learned that it wasn’t.

The next morning George Bush told a press conference that he had earned a lot of political capital, and he was going to use it. Five days later, on Nov. 7, the Second Siege of Fallujah began.

I stayed up much of the night listening to the BBC’s on-the-ground reporters. One described women and children trudging out of Fallujah before the battle began until some of the women turned around and ran back to shoulder surface-to-air missiles alongside their men. Then the bombs came thundering down and innocent Iraqis were blown to bits. I wondered how many bodies would even be identifiable.

Everyone of good conscience was horrified by the Iraq War, but why did anyone think John Kerry might end it? Bill Clinton took office in 1993, two years after the Soviet Union collapsed, when some of us still hoped for a peace dividend that would turn swords into ploughshares, but he never delivered. During his eight years in the White House, he:

  • constantly bombed a “no-fly zone” over Iraq;
  • caused hundreds of thousands of deaths by imposing brutal sanctions on Iraq;
  • bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan;
  • bombed Iraq to distract from his impeachment for sordid sexual behavior with an 18-year-old White House intern;
  • destroyed Yugoslavia with a merciless bombing campaign;
  • and oversaw covert operations that left millions dead in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as mining moguls from Hope, Arkansas, and beyond moved in.

(Then and now, most Americans understand Congo’s ongoing agony as “ethnic conflict,” if they give it any thought at all.)

Some may have also remembered John Kerry as the young veteran who campaigned passionately against the Vietnam War and even testified to Congress about its ills. But those days were long gone, and his memoir suggests that he used widespread opposition to the war as a springboard for his political career.

John Kerry wouldn’t have stopped the war, and in the end, he decided not even to let Americans know that the presidency had been stolen again, and not by the Greens. We hadn’t even campaigned in the swing state of Ohio.

There were no safe scapegoats in sight and, in John Kerry’s mind, the United States’ national prestige in the world was at stake. How could he justify his claim that “America must always be the world’s paramount military power” if we couldn’t even hold an honest presidential election? In his memoir he wrote:

“The decision was mine. I didn’t want to put the country through that again. It would be selfish and irresponsible. I knew some would be angry. People had a right to know that their votes were counted properly. They were correct to be incensed. But I decided I would continue that fight in a way that didn’t put our nation into banana republic status.”

It was already a bit late for that, but no one as richly rewarded by the status quo as John Kerry would want to risk rocking the boat till it ran aground or tipped over.

(Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that the Green Party ran a safe-states campaign in 2004.)

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. Please support her work on Patreon. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com.

The post John Kerry helped George Bush steal the 2004 election, not the Russians, the Greens or Wikileaks appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

The shocking death of Rwandan gospel singer and dissident Kizito Mihigo

0
0

by Ann Garrison

Rwandan gospel singer, organist and composer Kizito Mihigo has died in police custody. On Feb. 17, the Rwandan National Police reported that he had committed suicide in an isolation cell. He was 38 years old. A Tutsi genocide survivor, he grew from age 8 to 12 during the four years of the Rwandan war and massacres, which ended in 1994, when Gen. Paul Kagame seized power in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s newspaper, The New Times of Rwanda, reported, “Singer Kizito Mihigo commits suicide in police detention centre.” Other headlines, including those in The Guardian and the BBC, were far less conclusive. Most said that he died in a prison cell and noted that Rwandans are likely to be skeptical of the official story.

Skeptical indeed. I know quite a few Rwandans, Hutu and Tutsi, but I don’t know any who will believe that Kizito Mihigo committed suicide in a cell. I don’t believe it either, but there will be no trial or evidence of what really happened because the totalitarian Rwandan government has spoken. They say Mihigo took his own life, and as is the case in all the many deaths of Rwandan dissidents, there will be no credible investigation, evidence or trial.

This will give longtime Kagame ally Bill Clinton another chance to say, “It hasn’t been adjudicated,” which is what he says when questioned about Kagame’s crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the UN report, “DRC: Mapping human rights violations 1993-2003,” investigators said that Kagame’s army massacred hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees in DRC, and that he could be rightly charged with genocide if ever brought to a court of law. Since Kagame first invaded and occupied DRC in 1996, millions of Congolese have died violently, or died of hardship while fleeing or sheltering in refugee camps.

Joseph Bukeye, a Rwandan economics professor living and teaching in exile in Brussels, wrote to say:

“Kizito Mihigo had been persecuted for advocating compassion for all the victims of the genocide, Hutu, Tutsi and Twa. He refused to abandon that commitment and collude in Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s policy of demonizing and blaming all Hutu people for the Rwandan Genocide. Kagame has become fiercely vengeful with dissident Tutsis because they are breaking up his constituency.

“Kizito would not have committed suicide because he had many musical and reconciliation projects underway.

“Upon his re-arrest, on Rwanda’s southern border, he was accused of attempting to join alleged rebel militias threatening Rwanda from Burundi. His death is a warning to any Rwandan contesting the RPF’s official narratives:

1) that the 1994 Rwandan Genocide was committed solely by Hutus killing Tutsis;

2) that the government cares especially for all Tutsi genocide survivors; and

3) that it has worked to reconcile Hutus and Tutsis since the 1994 genocide.”

Rwandans are skeptical of the authorities’ claim that beloved musician Kizito Mihigo was arrested and committed suicide in a solitary prison cell. – Photo: Stephanie Aglietti, AFP

Charles Kambanda, a Rwandan lawyer living in exile in New York City, addressed President Kagame on his Facebook wall:

“Kagame, you will be prosecuted for executing this young man. It’s my hope and prayer that when, not if, Rwandans bring down your bloody junta, they will institute a special tribunal to prosecute those most responsible for these crimes against Rwandans.”

A Rwandan who preferred to remain anonymous sent me this message:

“I am a policeman. I was posted at Remera police station until last November. There is no wire rack on the prison windows where an inmate can tie the sheets to hang himself! This is a total lie. I have asked a colleague who is there now and he told me that they brought the body to the police station very early in the morning. Please don’t reveal my name.”

Another wrote:

“The truth is that any police cell in Rwanda is always occupied by several inmates and another thing that people must know is that those cells have no beds, no sheets and no blankets. Inmates sleep on bare floors. This is a fact, unless they start putting those things in from now on so they can claim that he hanged himself by a sheet tied to the window.

“If he was held alone, then he was not at the police station jail because there are always 20 or more inmates there and they are always together because there are no individual cells. Instead, the police brought his body to the police station early in the morning from Kibagabaga. I hope you don’t buy this story from the Rwandan National Police that he killed himself. They murdered him.”

Legacy

Kizito Mihigo will be remembered for his music, his immense love for all his Rwandan people, and his commitment to true reconciliation among all Rwandan Genocide survivors. He was still unmarried at the time of his death, but he had said that he would marry a Hutu for the sake of reconciliation.

As a popular Tutsi gospel singer, he was favored by Kagame and his government until, in 2014, he recorded “Igisobanuro Cy’urupfu” (“The Meaning of Death”), which was shared with English subtitles on the YouTube. (Watch above.) The song included these lyrics (translated from Kinyarwanda):

“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

Those brothers and sisters

They too are humans, I comfort them

Those brothers and sisters,

They too are humans, I remember them.”

Although Mihigo did not identify “those brothers and sisters” as Hutus, that is clearly what he meant. Despite preposterous charges that he was plotting to kill President Kagame, that was clearly the reason that Kagame put him in prison in February 2015. He was released in September 2018, along with opposition leader Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza and several thousand other prisoners, but he and Victoire were both forbidden to leave Rwanda without official permission.

The final message on the music video uploaded to the YouTube in April 2014 said, “Tell #Kagame to #FreeKizito.” He was already in custody, though not yet sentenced, at that time.

Now it’s time to mourn Kizito. His courage was enormous and he paid for it with his life. He may well become larger in death, as do many martyrs, like Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, and the American abolitionist John Brown. I would like to say that President Kagame has finally gone too far, that the powerful industrial nations will finally stop running cover for his crimes, but that would greatly surprise me.

They not only run cover for his crimes but also reward him with more “investment” than Rwanda can conceivably absorb. They do so in exchange for access to Congo’s unparalleled resource wealth, including minerals high on the “strategic” and “critical” list. (In the US, “strategic” minerals are those that the government must stockpile in sufficient quantity to keep manufacturing weapons long enough to win any conceivable war. “Critical” minerals are those stockpiled to sustain the US economy despite supply chain collapse.)

The list of Kagame’s war crimes is already mind-numbing and it’s impossible to predict when the powerful nations will stop feeding their industrial hungers on the blood and minerals of Rwandans and Congolese.

R.I.P. Kizito Mihigo, July 1981 to February 2020.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. Please support her work on Patreon. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com.

Kizito drew enormous crowds, posing a political threat to Kagame.

The post The shocking death of Rwandan gospel singer and dissident Kizito Mihigo appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

John Lewis’ militant speech at the March on Washington

0
0
John Lewis speaks at the March on Washington.

John Lewis, then the 23-year-old leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, better known as SNCC, delivered a speech at the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington that at the time drew almost as much attention as Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream.” 

At Lewis’ funeral, Bill Clinton arrogantly exalted Lewis over his successor at SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, saying: “There were two or three years there where the movement went a little bit too far towards Stokely. But in the end, John Lewis prevailed.” 

Today, as Black activists and allies try to clear the wreckage of the Clintons’ neo-liberalism that appears to love Black culture but hate Black people, here is the speech John Lewis delivered that day. 

Instead of taking Bill Clinton’s word for who John Lewis was, listen to Lewis’ own words at the March on Washington. In summary, he said: “I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until a revolution is complete.” 

Rep. John Lewis Speech at The March on Washington (AUGUST 28, 1963)

“They’re talking about slow down and stop. We will not stop. The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South; through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham. But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today." — Rep. John LewisThank you for everything. Rest In Power.

Posted by All On The Line on Friday, July 17, 2020
John Lewis, 23-year-old head of SNCC, delivers his speech at the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. He and two SNCC comrades sat on boxes with a portable typewriter behind the Lincoln Memorial to “tone it down” until the literal last minute before Lewis’ turn at the mic. Still, it was universally recognized as the most militant speech of the day.

His appeal is just as timely in Black August of 2020 as it was when he made it 57 years ago. – Introduction by Mary Ratcliff

This is Danny Glover reading the original text of the SNCC speech that John Lewis planned to give at the March on Washington, recorded, with an introduction by Howard Zinn, at Voices of a People’s History of the United States on Oct. 5, 2005, in Los Angeles.

The speech John Lewis delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Aug. 28, 1963

“We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here, for they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all. While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than three dollars per day, 12 hours a day. While we stand here, there are students in jail on trumped-up charges. Our brother James Farmer, along with many others, is also in jail.

“We come here today with a great sense of misgiving. It is true that we support the administration’s Civil Rights Bill. We support it with great reservation, however. Unless Title III is put in this bill, there’s nothing to protect the young children and old women who must face police dogs and fire hoses in the South while they engage in peaceful demonstration.

“In its present form, this bill will not protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear of a police state. It will not protect the hundreds and thousands of people that have been arrested on trumped up charges. What about the three young men, SNCC field secretaries in Americus, Georgia, who face the death penalty for engaging in peaceful protest?

“As it stands now, the voting section of this bill will not help the thousands of people who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama and Georgia who are unqualified to vote for lack of a sixth grade education. ‘One man, one vote’ is the African cry. It is ours too. It must be ours.

“We must have legislation that will protect the Mississippi sharecroppers, who have been forced to leave their homes because they dared to exercise their right to register to vote. We need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation. We need a bill that will ensure the equality of a maid who earns five dollars a week in the home of a family whose total income is $100,000 a year. We must have a good FEPC [Fair Employment Practices Commission] bill.

“My friends, let us not forget that we are involved in a serious social revolution. By and large, politicians who build their career on immoral compromise and allow themselves an open forum of political, economic and social exploitation dominate American politics.

“There are exceptions, of course. We salute those. But what political leader can stand up and say, ‘My party is a party of principles’? For the party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. 

“Where is our party? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march in the streets of Birmingham? Where is the political party that will protect the citizens of Albany, Georgia?

“Do you know that in Albany, Georgia, nine of our leaders have been indicted, not by the Dixiecrats but by the federal government for peaceful protest? But what did the federal government do when Albany deputy sheriff beat attorney C.B. King and left him half dead? What did the federal government do when local police officials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King and she lost her baby?

“We want our freedom and we want it now.”

“To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we must say that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now.

“We are tired. We are tired of being beat by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again, and then you holler, ‘Be patient.’ How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now.

“We do not want to go to jail, but we will go to jail if this is the price we must pay for love, brotherhood and true peace. I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until a revolution is complete. 

“We must get in this revolution and complete the revolution. In the Delta of Mississippi, in Southwest Georgia, in the Black Belt of Alabama, in Harlem, in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and all over this nation the Black masses are on a march for jobs and freedom.

“They’re talking about slow down and stop. We will not stop. All of the forces of Eastland, Barnett, Wallace, and Thurmond will not stop this revolution. If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our march into Washington. 

“We will march through the South, through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham. But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.

“By the forces of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall send a desegregated South into a thousand pieces, put them together in the image of God and Democracy. We must say, ‘Wake up, America, wake up!’ For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.”

Bay View editor Mary Ratcliff can be reached at editor@sfbayview.com or 415-671-0789.

The post John Lewis’ militant speech at the March on Washington appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.


2020 hindsight brings corrupted radiation testing into focus at the EPA – Part 2

0
0
A 1986 Akron Beacon Journal story depicts a worker in a hazmat suit at the Industrial Excess Landfill.

What happened at the Industrial Excess Landfill (IEL) in Ohio wasn’t unique. The handling of the controversial Superfund site in the ‘90s became a turning point in the EPA’s de-evolution from theoretical environmental protector to enabler of polluters, aka “regulatory capture.” Fatally flawed cleanups due to shoddy field work and substandard testing became cover-ups that could happen all over the country – such as at Hunters Point in San Francisco – while citizens were left to live with the toxic consequences. 

by Greg M. Schwartz

Citizens living near Superfund sites in the early 1990s found themselves forced to become frontline activists, as they increasingly witnessed the EPA seemingly acting as more of a defender of polluters than as a protector of environmental health. 

Activists like Chris Borello from Concerned Citizens of Lake Township (CCLT) near Canton found allies in the two US senators from Ohio. These were former astronaut John Glenn, a Democrat first elected in 1974, and Howard Metzenbaum, a pro-labor Democrat elected in 1976. Metzenbaum toured the IEL site and then pushed for evacuation of the site’s border residents, as well as helping to ensure that they received a fair market price for their properties. He also used his political power to urge the EPA to do more comprehensive testing at the site.

Glenn chaired the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs from 1987 to 1995, a position from which he led investigations into problems at facilities where nuclear weapons were produced. This included a 1992 hearing on “Radiological Contamination in the United States.” 

Glenn’s ongoing efforts featured investigations of four facilities that generated large quantities of nuclear waste. These were RMI Co.’s uranium extrusion plant in Ashtabula; the Mound National Laboratory in Miamisburg that developed radioactive isotopes for weapons and nuclear power; the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center adjacent to the Great Miami River aquifer near Cincinnati; and the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant managed by Goodyear Atomic that enriched uranium for the Department of Energy near Piketon. 

Glenn’s office questioned the EPA on why it wouldn’t order core samples of soils at IEL to be tested for radioactivity, since the agency had already agreed to have PRC/Tetra Tech drill exploratory boreholes into the landfill in 1991 to further investigate locations that had demonstrated “high soil gas VOC (volatile organic compounds) concentrations”

Yet while the senator and the public were told core samples could not feasibly be taken to examine for specific radiation, the work plan revealed that PRC/Tetra Tech did in fact collect soils from the boreholes for further characterization of the site. “Soil samples from on- and off-site exploratory boreholes will be collected at 5-foot intervals and classified in the field by a geologist,” PRC/Tetra Tech wrote in their work plan.

In response to the questioning from Glenn’s office on the EPA’s refusal to do core sampling, the EPA’s Region 5 administrator Valdas Adamkus argued that soil core sampling would be too expensive and impractical. He cited an EPA-commissioned study titled “Probability computations for soil sampling at the IEL site in Uniontown, OH,” which had calculated that “the probability of locating the radioactive waste for the first time with 50,000 boreholes is only 22%.” 

How the technical report put together by UNLV/ERC in Las Vegas came up with this number was nebulous – the EPA’s own scientific advisory board would later call out Adamkus’ logic: 

“The technical assumptions of this calculation are wholly inappropriate for a real core sampling program, and the estimate is thus flawed.” 

Adamkus utilized the technical report from UNLV/ERC as well as a second technical report authored by PRC/Tetra Tech that he sent to Glenn three months later to argue that “the risk to on-site health and safety from intrusive drilling, the associated schedule delays, and the cost of this enormous sampling and analysis effort are significant barriers to comprehensive waste characterization.” He instead asserted that “the likelihood of detecting radioactive compounds, if present, was much greater through analysis of groundwater, where these compounds would have dispersed.” 

Here Adamkus cited the study by PRC/Tetra Tech titled “Final Report on the Probability of Detection of Hypothetical Radiochemical Contamination of Groundwater at the Industrial Excess Landfill, Uniontown, Ohio.” The study included more than 70 pages of complex data, maps and analysis to allege that testing the groundwater would be more likely to detect hypothetical sources of “low-level” isotopes of radioactive cesium, tritium and uranium than would soil-core sampling. 

Independent scientists retained by CCLT were dismayed by the PRC/Tetra Tech report’s failure to note that groundwater testing might detect a radioactive isotope like tritium, which is soluble in water, but not necessarily an isotope like plutonium, which can migrate in groundwater under certain conditions. Both of these technical reports that Adamkus used to dismiss concerns from Glenn, Metzenbaum and other elected officials would later have their validity called into question by the EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Board in 1994 (as detailed below).

EPA had PRC/Tetra Tech collect two rounds of groundwater samples in August and December of 1990. The August round was sent to a commercial lab in Florida. A team from D.C., Chicago (Region 5’s headquarters), and the EPA’s National Radiation Lab (NAREL) at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama then descended on Uniontown to explain why the testing had been declared invalid. 

Several hundred residents gathered to hear the EPA admit that the Florida lab had reported eight radioactive isotopes in excess of “background” levels. But the EPA threw out the results, citing various errors and omissions, including that PRC/Tetra Tech had used plastic jars instead of glass to gather water for analysis. This went against NAREL protocols because isotopes such as tritium might cling to the plastic and not appear in the water, therefore compromising the results. 

CCLT’s scientific advisers later pointed out the irony that this would mean potentially even more radiation in the water than the Florida lab found, not less. 

Yet instead of firing PRC/Tetra Tech for this mistake, the EPA discredited the Florida lab and sent the second round of samples to a different lab in New Mexico with PRC/Tetra Tech still collecting the samples in the field. Then the public learned in August 1991 that tritium in samples collected from off-site private wells during the second round exceeded federal drinking water limits.

The EPA accused the New Mexico lab of improprieties but this time the lab pushed back, arguing that the EPA had ordered a non-standard testing procedure (known as the alcohol ignition method) that caused the suspended solids in the IEL samples to “spew” in the lab (which can bias the results for plutonium bound to those particles). CCLT understood from EPA that this non-standard method had been derived from PRC/Tetra Tech’s specifications, since they had authored the Quality Assurance Project Plan.

“We were right and they were wrong,” the president of the New Mexico lab insisted. “They [EPA and Tetra Tech] gave us the methods they wanted us to use, and we didn’t agree, but did it anyway. They weren’t approved EPA methods … and so we put a disclaimer on it, and then got blamed when they said the results weren’t right, because we found positive test results [of both tritium and plutonium].”

At the mercy of the EPA and getting nowhere with its Region 5 managers, a Stark County coalition composed of citizens, elected officials and technical experts appealed to EPA Administrator William Reilly in 1991. Troubled by what he heard, Reilly appointed independent investigator Thomas Grumbly, who was president of Clean Sites Inc., an organization that specialized in removal of hazardous waste from abandoned dump sites.

At Grumbly’s recommendation, EPA’s Region 5 put together a Science Advisory Board (SAB) panel to look into the radiation questions at the IEL. The controversy forced Reilly to assign Grumbly to look into the two rounds of botched tests conducted by PRC/Tetra Tech. When the EPA released data from the second round per Grumbly’s recommendation, the public learned of the man-made plutonium isotopes that had been detected in addition to the high levels of tritium reported the year before. 

. . . these tritium levels were akin to “citizens drinking wastewater from a power plant.”

Ohio EPA then decided to test a few offsite wells that US EPA and Tetra Tech had ignored. A sample collected in March 1991 from a shallow drinking-water well southwest of the IEL showed 280 pico-curies per liter (pCi/L) of total Beta radiation – high-speed electrons generated by an isotope. A sample drawn in June 1991 from a different shallow drinking-water well southeast of the site showed over a million pCi/L of tritium – about 50 times higher than federal limits. 

Borello says one of the Ohio EPA officials working on the case told her that these tritium levels were akin to “citizens drinking wastewater from a power plant.” That sample was collected from a sod farm during a dry period, but the high levels did not re-appear in the same well during record breaking rainfall in 1992. 

“Was this an example of the EPA using dilution as the solution to the pollution?” Borello asked at one of the town meetings, citing longtime Cleveland TV weatherman Dick Goddard’s reporting that had characterized the rainfall as one of the wettest months in Ohio history.

However, even discounting that outlier, the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry reported that mean levels of tritium in ensuing samples from the monitoring wells were approximately 2,000 pCi/L – way above “background.” But instead of resampling the private wells, the EPA delayed groundwater sampling and sent PRC/Tetra Tech to drill the “exploratory boreholes” for gases at the IEL in the fall of 1991. 

Then someone anonymously sent aerial photos to the Ohio EPA of a suspected disposal area in the landfill’s northeast corner. Ohio EPA sent a letter to Region 5 in October of 1991 requesting an expanded investigation of the northeast corner of the site:

“To reiterate, OEPA feels strongly that the aerial photograph given to NEDO [Northeast District Office] on May 25, 1991, indicates the potential for buried drums and/or liquid disposal in the northeast corner of IEL.”

Ohio EPA further reiterated that it was ready to use its own contractor to pursue such an investigation “in the event USEPA was unwilling or unable to undertake these investigatory activities,” with site coordinator Bob Princic requesting a formal response. Princic would be re-assigned in midstream to another site in Cleveland in 1992, after collecting unfiltered groundwater samples at the IEL that revealed high levels of gross alpha and beta radiation. 

Under pressure from the Ohio EPA, the US EPA directed PRC/Tetra Tech to drill an additional borehole down to bedrock in the northeast corner in January 1992 along with the ones drilled in fall of 1991. Sure enough, data from these boreholes suggested the presence of both Pu 238 and Pu 239, two of the most dangerous and long-lasting plutonium isotopes. 

The renewed outcry forced the US EPA to finally begin groundwater sampling for radiation with PRC/Tetra Tech conducting quarterly rounds between May 1992 and March 1993. But technical experts hired by CCLT said that PRC/Tetra Tech had improperly “field-filtered” the water before testing, a process that could grossly underestimate the actual levels of plutonium by removing contaminated particles in the field before samples were sent to the lab for analysis. 

Citing the “elevated radiation levels found in 21 wells around the landfill” and expressing “grave concerns … that man-made Plutonium 241 may be present,” Sen. Glenn urged EPA Administrator Reilly “to direct EPA to provide an alternate water supply to residents who request it.” 

But the EPA repeated a familiar rationale – the suspect sample “appeared to be from natural sources and not related to any potential waste material present at the IEL site.” While 20 of the 21 wells sampled by PRC/Tetra Tech “had radioactivity far below the current drinking water standard … no radiation levels of concern have ever been detected in any drinking water wells in Uniontown. In addition, the landfill monitoring wells have not been found to contain radiation in concentrations which require corrective action. Therefore, EPA has no scientific basis or authority under Superfund to provide alternate water to citizens simply because they request it.”

Glenn deemed the EPA’s denial to be “inadequate, especially in light of recent renewed allegations of the presence of radioactive materials in the landfill, possibly dumped there illegally from the Mound facility in southern Ohio.” 

This was the first official acknowledgement in the public record that the IEL may have received waste materials from part of the nuclear weapons complex regulated by the Department of Energy (DOE). 

The Clinton-Gore era: high hopes, little change

The EPA’s stubborn refusal to overrule its contractor – PRC/Tetra Tech – and order a comprehensive testing program continued to baffle the citizens and their representatives in Congress. But Reilly was soon out of the picture and the IEL’s fate would fall to a new Democratic administration’s EPA.

When Bill Clinton and Al Gore took office in the White House in January 1993, local activists and environmentalists across the nation took new hope for an end to the era of corporate cronyism at the EPA. But there was little in the way of genuine change. 

By the time new US EPA chief Carol Browner took over the agency, the regional fiefdoms set up by Reagan, George H.W. Bush and their corporate allies were firmly established in the bureaucracy. In some cases, the regional headquarters reportedly had more power than the D.C.-based headquarters and would act independently. 

The EPA’s scientific staff was still hamstrung by the prior political appointees. Browner replaced all of the regional bosses save for one – Region 5’s Valdas Adamkus, who therefore continued to oversee the IEL. 

A critical chapter in the landfill’s controversial saga occurred in 1993-94 when the EPA’s own “blue ribbon” SAB panel review included a condemnation of the PRC/Tetra Tech study – along with the related UNLV/ERC study – that had been the primary basis for Adamkus’ dubious refusal to order core sampling: 

“Both of these reports include technical flaws and provide no clear evidence that groundwater monitoring is more sensitive in detecting the presence of radioactive material in the landfill than would be a soil-core sampling program.”

The SAB challenged Adamkus and PRC/Tetra Tech’s claims that “the extensive groundwater and soil-gas testing that is planned at IEL will identify any contamination that may exist at levels of concern.”

“The studies show no such thing … It certainly does not follow that the network of wells would detect the radiation with high probability if enough waste had been dumped to cause a threat to human health.”

“The reports themselves have serious problems,” the SAB continued, noting multiple errors:

“(B)oth of these reports are based on a large number of assumptions that have not been validated for the IEL site … In summary, the studies EPA carried out to support groundwater monitoring rather than coring are poorly done and should not be used as models for future studies.”

A close reading of that SAB report additionally reveals another significant problem. The report expressed serious concern regarding the two lone background monitoring wells labeled MW12 and MW20, noting that they weren’t adequate to reliably characterize the background conditions for comparison with wells that did have contaminants.

“Even if the groundwater flow patterns at the landfill were simple and predominantly from east to west, these two wells, alone, would not be adequate to characterize the mean and variability of background radionuclide concentrations for estimating the ‘no-landfill’ condition … Given the complex, partly radial nature of groundwater flow at the IEL site as described in the recent USGS report … the two wells are clearly inadequate for characterizing background. Data from MW20 are particularly suspect, given the site flow patterns and immediate proximity of the well to the site.”

Monitoring Well 20 had curiously been drilled close to the stream called “Metzger’s Ditch” that bordered the entire eastern side of the landfill. This stream or ditch was downgradient from the large unlined chemical lagoons that had been utilized to receive huge amounts of discharged liquid contaminants from polluters’ tankers. 

An aerial photo of the Industrial Excess Landfill taken June 8, 1972, with interpretive code

CCLT and their scientific advisors had long pointed to this issue of bogus “background” wells – questioned by the SAB itself – as an inherent part of the cover-up. Borello notes that the EPA had suspiciously claimed that these so-called background wells had not been impacted by contamination from the site, which could result in “fatally flawed” decisions regarding the cleanup.

“In our case, we believe these crooked comparisons of data directly aided EPA in doing away with the entire cleanup,” Borello says of the data from these alleged background wells. “When you’ve got levels that are erroneously being dismissed as naturally occurring from local geology, it can taint the decisions made on other contaminant results.”

The D.C.-based watchdog group called the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) would later issue an extensive report on the IEL which noted numerous problems, including how the EPA didn’t even follow its own experts’ recommendations:

“These recommendations included increasing the number of background wells and testing for radiation at least once a quarter until successive quarterly samples produce a constant level of gross alpha and beta radiation that is close to background. The EPA followed none of SAB’s recommendations … yet the EPA continues to claim that the SAB supports its groundwater program.”

The EPA cherry-picked the SAB report to publicize the parts that re-enforced their flawed procedures, while largely ignoring the panel’s criticisms.

“On the one hand, the SAB threw us some crumbs that were conveniently never acted upon. However, the SAB blew it entirely when it came to their main task of whether the radiation test methods used at IEL were appropriate for IEL as well as other Superfund sites,” Borello says of the SAB’s critiques. “The SAB pandered to the agency by rubber-stamping the continued usage of the Finished Drinking Water Methods 900 Series that the US EPA R&D staffers said was never meant for screening raw, untreated toxic wastewater at Superfund sites.”

“The SAB not only threw Uniontown and other sites under the bus by way of condoning the EPA 900 Methods, they also contrived to cover their collective rear-ends with other recommendations for improving testing for the presence of radiation in future review of other sites while failing to apply those same suggestions for the case directly in front of them at IEL,” Borello adds.

A case in point is seen in the report where the SAB panel cited a significant flaw in the sampling field work conducted by PRC/Tetra Tech: “The failure to record the volume of water passed through the filter and the dry weight of collected solids at the IEL site was such that a full accounting of the dissolved and particulate concentrations of radioactive constituents could not be made. This should be corrected in the future.”

Did the lack of scientific accountability regarding the EPA’s endorsement of PRC/Tetra Tech’s flawed field work at the IEL ultimately enable the fraud that Tetra Tech was implicated in years later at Hunters Point in San Francisco?

Next, Part 3: Questionable science enables the EPA and their contractors to avoid seeing levels of radioactivity that they don’t want to find at the IEL.

Investigative reporter Greg M. Schwartz has covered public affairs for outlets including the KPFA Evening News, Cleveland Free Times, San Antonio Current, Austin Bulldog and Ecowatch.com. His 2009 “Crime Scene Cleanup” story on San Antonio’s “toxic triangle” area won a Lone Star Award for investigative reporting from the Houston Press Club. He can be reached at greg.m.schwartz@gmail.com or Twitter.com/gms111. 

The post 2020 hindsight brings corrupted radiation testing into focus at the EPA – Part 2 appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

Ruchell Cinque Magee speaks

0
0
Ruchell Cinque is the longest unjustly held political prisoner in the US, under lockdown for nearly six decades. Cinque was a key figure in the 1970 Marin County Civic Center shootout but was acquitted of murder along with Angela Davis. We must demand his immediate release now!

by Ruchell Cinque Magee, transcribed and introduced by Baba Jahahara Amen-RA Alkebulan-Ma’at

This year, unlike most for the past few decades, there were no in-person Black August mass commemorations here in the sacred Indigenous Ohlone lands aka the California Bay Area. However, some of us did gather at San Quentin State Prison before and after to demand the release of those unjustly held during this deadly pandemic that has claimed so many lives. 

In the spirit of Black August and as we celebrate the release in October of political prisoner and Jericho Amnesty Movement co-founder Baba Jalil Muntaqim after 50 years of torture, I want to share a recent message from Elder Ruchell Cinque Magee. 

Ruchell is now our longest unjustly held political prisoner in the US – and possibly our world – under lockdown for nearly six decades. Many are aware of the shoot-out at the Marin County Civic Center in 1970. Ruchell Cinque was a key figure in that situation but was acquitted of murder, along with our beloved and wise Elder Angela Davis. He should have been set free decades ago, and we must demand his immediate release now. Here we share his insightful words. Asé. 

Sept. 2, 2020

Greetings, Jahahara,

Ruchell Cinque here, confined in California Medical Facility-Vacaville. Allow me to bring to your attention a live judicial proceeding challenging a kangaroo court’s slave operation showing by the pending writ of habeas corpus litigation entitled Ruchell Magee, Case No. S263467, before the California Supreme Court at 350 McAllister St., San Francisco, CA 94102.

According to many who fear to face the truth of the slave operation and what we – the people oppressed – are dealing with, the evidence brought out in court legal documents is not important for learning.

There are many instances I have read about where legal proceedings in the courts and Congress resulted in reparations for the Japanese people in America, as well as judicial action that reversed Chief Justice Taney’s slave law decision in Dred Scott and judicial action in the Amistad case releasing Joseph aka Cinque and others who had been kidnapped from Africa to be made slaves.

This means evidence exposing illegal slavery and how it has been carried out matters because it must be exposed and corrected to make sure that what happened to me and my family doesn’t happen to anyone else.

It has taken me more that 35 years in prison trying to determine the behavior patterns shared between the racists and the psychopaths with law badges. Both inflict excessive emotion and stress on others, often causing wrongful deaths. 

The jury foreman filed a federal lawsuit in January 2001 along with a criminal complaint with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and US Department of Justice asking that corrupted judges and lawyers be stopped from assaulting the jury system and myself.

I have served 57 years in California state prisons for allegedly “Kidnapping to Commit Robbery.” Evidence has proven this never occurred prior to my arrest on March 23, 1963.

On false charges in a kangaroo court, I was put in shackles and muzzled in the presence of the mock jurors, while criminals with badges – the judge, lawyers and police – put on a show speaking of my life and using their own false guilty and insanity pleas as evidence. I had no counsel for defense against the prosecution’s false evidence and suppression of proof of my innocence.

I have been filing legal documents in state and federal courts for over five decades: However, I’ve never been allowed the opportunity to be heard on the prima facie issues that mandate reversal of my illegal conviction. New evidence proving my constitutional rights claims now showing in the court are irrefutable. 

Being Black makes me appear deserving of being put through white supremacy’s death trap hell played up as “law and order” out of public sight. As I’ve been basically isolated for decades without press coverage, in the eyes of the badged psychopaths, my constitutional rights claims are frivolous or are disregarded before being heard.

Regarding the Aug. 7, 1970, Slave Rebellion

After seven years in prison and petitioning the courts, I found myself in an oppressive circle of negative, psychopathic, racist judges who limited their review to doctored transcripts and piecemeal arguments by the state’s attorney general, who suppressed the most important portions of the trial court records.

Aug. 7, 1970, I joined the slave rebellion with other Black prisoners in Marin County, Calif., where I was taken from a San Quentin dungeon cell to the Marin County Courthouse as witness for James McClain. Shooting ensued, and four people were killed by San Quentin guards and one person killed the superior court judge. I was charged with murder, kidnap and conspiracy along with Professor Angela Davis – charges of which we both were acquitted.

I can think of no special circumstances that would justify use of a constitutional privilege to discredit or convict a person who asserts it.

The jurors in San Francisco County who found me not guilty of kidnap studied evidence of the 1960s hate crime frame-up now included in the habeas corpus. The jury went to the press after trial, publicizing that the acquittal was concealed by the judge, thus subjecting my person to double jeopardy prosecution in Santa Clara County. Now: the cat again threatens to get out of the bag.

The jury foreman, Mr. Bernard J. Suares, filed a federal lawsuit in January 2001 along with a criminal complaint with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and US Department of Justice asking that corrupted judges and lawyers be stopped from assaulting the jury system and myself. The jury got the old racist runaround.

The acquittal and double jeopardy issues are being challenged by separate litigation in the US Supreme Court. If either case is allowed to be heard, this will open others’ records for investigation into the legislative corruption, which will educate hundreds of millions of peoples of all races. The acquittal and constitutional law prove much bigger than racist and psychopathic elements.

I can think of no special circumstances that would justify use of a constitutional privilege to discredit or convict a person who asserts it. My view of psychopathic and racist behavior is influenced by the criminal and sick action I’ve witnessed and suffered for decades. 

Many racists with a law badge seem to have accepted the idea that their Jim Crow tool, referred to as the Anti-Terrorist Act and put into law by Bill Clinton, eliminated our rights under the Constitution. Otherwise, they apply it in deceptive ways to ensure that no racist practicing slavery under color of law can be proven wrong in court. 

Therefore, no Black person under attack can be protected against the psychopathic attacks. Out in the open, where people of normal intelligence ask relevant questions court, the real criminals run back into their “good guy” game playing.

As it stands, from an order to show cause on merit, the California attorney general will agree that I am a victim of the kangaroo court frame-up – one of the worst ever recorded over the past century!

Thank you for reading this missive. I remain, Ruchell Cinque.

Activists, attorneys and justice-loving individuals and organizations, please reach out to support Baba Ruchell Cinque Magee, A92051, CMF T-115, P.O. Box 2000, Vacaville, CA 95696.

The post Ruchell Cinque Magee speaks appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

Rwanda and Zaire (DRC) 1990 to 1997, where the US blocked real humanitarian intervention

0
0
“Rwandan refugee children plead with Zairean soldiers to allow them across a bridge separating Rwanda and Zaire where their mothers had crossed moments earlier before the soldiers closed the border, in Zaire, now known as Congo, Aug. 20, 1994,” according to ABC News, where this photo appears. – Photo: Jean-marc Bouju, AP

by Ann Garrison

The cases of Bosnia and Rwanda are the most often cited in arguments for humanitarian war, Bosnia as a case in which the US and NATO intervened, Rwanda as a case in which they did not, but the truth of both histories is disputed. I spoke with Judi Rever, author of “In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front,” a book that upended the received history of the Rwandan war and genocide of 1990 to1994.

Ann Garrison: Judi, the story that most people know, the one that’s in the Wikipedia and more or less told in the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” is that, in April 1994, Rwandan Hutus were suddenly consumed by mass psychosis and ethnic bloodlust and killed half a million to a million Rwandan Tutsis. And that they were egged on by La Radio des Milles Collines in Kigali. Then they were saved by Gen. Paul Kagame, who appeared – in the movie – out of nowhere.

And before going on, I think I should say that our friend Paul Rusesabagina, the real life hero of Hotel Rwanda, is now in prison in Rwanda because, for one, he has a much more complex view of what actually happened than that portrayed in the movie.

So tell us what really happened.

Judi Rever: Well, that story that you described more or less was forged in a climate of terror, violence and propaganda. It was put together fairly quickly as the dust was settling in July 1994. And in the months and years after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) led by Gen. Paul Kagame seized power in Rwanda.

My book tells the story of what began in 1990, when the RPF invaded from their base in Uganda, then waged a three and a half year scorched earth campaign against northern rural Rwanda, uprooting about a million Hutus in the north and sending them into displacement camps in terrible conditions and killing many, many Hutus in the north. And that set the stage for the conflict to come.

And so my book is really a reexamination of the genocide. And by that, by the genocide, most people mean the Tutsi genocide, but I also document Hutu genocide. There are various estimates as to how many ethnic Tutsis were killed in Hutu controlled zones in Rwanda, from April to July. And some of those estimates range from 400,000 to a million people. And the West, when it’s being generous, adds that there were something called “moderate Hutus,” Hutus who supposedly resisted the violence that other Hutus waged or who were opponents of the predominantly Hutu government led by President Juvenal Habyarimana.

That’s the official story, but my book tells a different story. And what my book actually says is that Kagame’s RPF unleashed the genocide by creating conditions of violence before April 6, 1994, then shooting down the plane that carried Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, and the assassination of those two presidents unleashed a wave of ethnic massacres. So the RPF is responsible for the terrible massacres that ensued as soon as the plane was shot down.

And then the RPF, according to the research I’ve done for many, many years, started to kill, in a systematic, organized way, Hutus from the north down to the east of the country in every zone that its troops seized. Kagame’s RPF therefore committed its own genocide against Hutus all the while that Tutsis were being targeted for mass extermination in Hutu controlled zones.

Kagame’s RPF committed its own genocide against Hutus all the while that Tutsis were being targeted for mass extermination in Hutu controlled zones.

The other thing I say in my book, and this is backed up by very sound evidence, some of which came from International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) confidential documents, is that Tutsi commandos, or rather RPF commandos, infiltrated Hutu militia, and themselves killed Tutsi civilians during the genocide. So the RPF fueled the genocide against Tutsis to justify seizing power. That’s basically a summary of what my research reveals.

AG: That story is told in “How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsis“ by former Rwandan diplomat Jean-Marie Ndagijimana.

JR: Yes, that book is an important contribution to understanding what really happened.

AG: Could you tell us about the two UN interventions, which would have been legal, according to international law, but were blocked by the US?

“Tens of thousands of Rwandan refugees who were forced by the Tanzanian authorities to return to their country despite fears they will be killed upon their return stream back towards the Rwandan border on a road in Tanzania, Dec. 19, 1996,” according to ABC News, where this photo appears. The Rwandans had fled to Tanzania in 1994. – Photo: Jean-marc Bouju, AP

JR: There were two very important international operations or endeavors that were either underway or were proposed. One that was already on the ground was a UN peacekeeping operation in Rwanda, before the plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents was shot down, and that peacekeeping operation, which was estimated to be about 5,000 UN peacekeepers, could have actually stepped into gear and saved a lot of Rwandans and actually created zones of security for Rwandans once the massacres were unleashed.

But the United States did its best to dismantle that UN peacekeeping mission and persuaded the UN to vote to bring those peacekeepers home while that violence was raging. So, in other words, there was ample opportunity to stop the killings, but the US used its influence and pressured the UN to let Kagame’s military campaign proceed. Madeline Albright was at the time Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations.

She would not recognize that the killings were intensive and ethnically charged, nor would her colleagues, nor would Bill Clinton at the time. And there was no possibility whatsoever that the US would send its troops in. What was really appalling was that most of the troops who were there already were actually pulled out. So that was one of the first major UN operations that the US had extraordinary influence over and stopped. And their insistence on inaction destroyed many lives.

What was really appalling was that most of the troops who were there already were actually pulled out. So that was one of the first major UN operations that the US had extraordinary influence over and stopped. And their insistence on inaction destroyed many lives.

At the same time, and this is a subtext, another side of what was going on, the US had access to satellite technology. So Bill Clinton and his advisors absolutely knew what was happening on the ground. They knew that the massacres were going on.

I’ve argued in my book that the RPF was loading thousands of Hutus in waves onto trucks and bringing them to Akagera Park, a big park in the east of the country, then killing them there and burning their bodies. And all of these massacres, whether they were Tutsis or Hutus massacred, could be documented in real time by an extensive network of satellites, which pick up fires and which are so sophisticated that they can pick up the slaughter of civilians.

The US has used satellite images at the ICTY, which was set up to prosecute crimes in the Balkans, when it wanted to nail, for example, Ratko Mladic. [“The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a United Nations court of law that dealt with war crimes that took place during the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s,” according to its website.]

But of course the US is not going to provide evidence that would implicate one of its allies, in this case Paul Kagame. The US knew what was happening on the ground at the time in 1994 and succeeded in having the UN Peacekeepers pulled out.

You mentioned the radio at the beginning of this interview. The US also had the power to jam those radio broadcasts, but it did not.

So clearly, what the US wanted, according to what the evidence shows much later, was for Kagame to seize power. It wanted to let his military campaign proceed and it wanted Tutsi genocide to serve as justification for that regime change. But Hutus were prosecuted for what was deemed hate speech over the radio.

As Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations in 1994, Madeline Albright persuaded the UN to vote to bring its peacekeepers home while the violence was raging in Rwanda. The US had ample opportunity to stop the killings, but instead pressured the UN to let Kagame’s military campaign proceed.

The second possible UN led military intervention that was discussed was two years later when Canada rather naively decided that it would lead a multinational force to protect Rwandan Hutu refugees in what was then Zaire. And that was really an attempt to provide a humanitarian corridor inside Zaire, where Hutus had fled after the genocide.

More than a million Hutus had lived inside Zaire’s border in a number of camps for two years by that time. Kagame then decided to attack and bust up those camps and force those Hutus home so they could not attack Rwanda from Zaire.

That was the cover story, but, in fact, what actually happened on the ground was that the RPF started attacking those camps and killing a lot of Hutu refugees in October 1996. The multinational force that Canada had proposed never got off the ground.

AG: Why not?

JR: Because the United Nations political insiders, the big wigs, and Washington in particular, ixnayed the whole idea. They dismantled that force before it even got underway. The US did not want a UN led force to protect Hutu refugees because it was seen as a possible impediment to Kagame’s military sweep across the Congo.

So anything, for example, that would have documented what Kagame’s forces had done immediately after they invaded and what they did then from the Kivus across the entire country, anything that might have stopped Kagame’s military campaign, was seen as a very bad idea for Washington. So a lot of politicking and diplomatic work went into canceling that multinational force that Canadians had proposed.

What the US wanted, according to what the evidence shows much later, was for Kagame to seize power. It wanted to let his military campaign proceed and it wanted Tutsi genocide to serve as justification for that regime change.

And what happened after that is history, of course. Kagame’s forces pushed more than half of those Hutu refugees further into Zaire. They hunted the refugees down, like prey, probably killing several hundred thousand of them, and many more died of exhaustion or hardship in the Zairean jungle.

Kagame’s military campaign went all the way to Kinshasa and toppled Mobutu Sese Sekou by May 1997. And so there was a restructuring of Central Africa, and that war that began in 1996 has decimated the Congo ever since. Millions of people have died, some directly from violence and others from war related diseases. Zaire became the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and that war rages off and on today, mostly in its eastern provinces bordering Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi.

And the reason I’m insisting on this is because I still hear and read the same propaganda about that period of the counterinsurgency from 1995 to 1998, and I’ve researched three or four major operations during that time where the RPF staged these major attacks that killed villages. Two major operations were cited in ICTR UN confidential documents.

This is extraordinary material, which should interest journalists and academics who are trying to understand the complex dynamics of the genocide and the violence that then flowed into Congo. I just wish that people would look at this more closely.

AG: OK. Now to summarize the intervention history, there was a real UN peacekeeping force in 1994, while the genocide was going on, and the US intervened at the UN Security Council to have it pulled out. And then there was another real humanitarian intervention proposed at the UN that didn’t get very far at all to protect the Hutu refugees who had fled from Kagame’s Tutsi army into Zaire. The US prevented that as well.

And the one thing I might add is that at that point, Russia and China were not feeling powerful or confident enough on the UN Security Council to oppose the US, and that’s changed. They’ve stood up to the US on Syria, Burundi and most recently Ethiopia.

JR: That’s a summary. I think you can also say that the US gave Kagame’s troops the green light to invade Zaire and topple Mobutu. There’s no question that they were given the green light and that the US actually worked with Kagame to invade Zaire and overthrow Mobutu. In my book, I discussed a number of ways in which the US helped Kagame topple Mobutu.

AG: I read a really good book “Dying to Live: A Rwandan Family’s Five-Year Flight Across the Congo” by Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga.” He says that, at first, when the refugees saw planes overhead, they thought they were going to protect them, but soon realized that they were instead protecting Kagame’s army.

JR: I met Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga in Montreal many years ago. It’s a tremendous book. I’m glad you brought it up. He mentioned in that book the RPF attack on a Hutu refugee camp, Birava Camp, where he and his family were sheltering in 1995. The RPF attacked that camp, killed many people and injured even more.

That’s an important example that never gets reported in the Western media of the RPF attacking camps in eastern Zaire even before they launched an all out invasion to overthrow Mobutu and seize power in 1996. And one extraordinary thing that must be mentioned is that NGOs, human rights organizations and certainly Western governments seemed to fall into this sort of consensus that the military invasion of Zaire was justified because Hutu insurgents had been attacking Western Rwanda and threatening to bring genocide back to Rwanda by 1996.

NGOs, human rights organizations and certainly Western governments seemed to fall into this sort of consensus that the military invasion of Zaire was justified because Hutu insurgents had been attacking Western Rwanda and threatening to bring genocide back to Rwanda by 1996.

But the RPF had already attacked a refugee camp, the one I just mentioned, and that is chronicled in the book before they invaded. And the RPF commandos had actually staged a number of false flag attacks on Rwanda from Zaire.

They crossed over the border into Zaire, then staged attacks on Western Rwanda and blamed it on the refugees. I’m not suggesting that there were no Hutu insurgencies from Zaire against Rwanda, but there were also false flag attacks to justify Rwanda’s invasion of Zaire. I think much more honest, rigorous and independent research needs to be done on that.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. Please support her work on Patreon. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com.

The post Rwanda and Zaire (DRC) 1990 to 1997, where the US blocked real humanitarian intervention appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

Wanda’s Picks: June 2021

0
0
This Juneteenth, sculptor Dana King, pictured here with her African Ancestors, is installing 350 Ancestor sculptures in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in an installation called “Monumental Reckoning,” representing enslaved Africans stolen from their homes into chattel slavery in 1619. The space the Ancestors will hold is on the site that previously featured a statue of slaveholder Frances Scott Key, brought down by protesters last Juneteenth. The installation’s unveiling will take place Friday, June 18, 5 p.m., https://www.monumentalreckoning.org/. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

Congrats to all the graduates! Happy Birthday to the Geminis and Cancers! 

by Wanda Sabir, Arts and Culture Editor

Congrats to all the graduates! Happy Birthday to the Geminis and Cancers! Don’t miss the Virtual Global Libations and Prayers for African Ancestors of the Middle Passage on Saturday, June 12, 8:30-11:30 AM PT. Visit FB@remembertheancestors and FB@maafabayarea and YouTube@ADASI.

CAPTION: Join us for the Annual Virtual Global Maafa Celebration Saturday, June 12, from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m., featuring music, artists, dancers, poets, activism and presentations on our political prisoners. Visit Facebook.com/Maafabayarea for more information.

Gosh, it is getting more difficult to keep up. I know a lot more than makes it to the page. We are “opening up,” yet the consequences of this opening are untested. Keep on your masks, folks. and keep at a safe – 6 feet – distance. 

I am still Zooming a lot and have no desire to sit in a closed space with strangers, or people I know either. I find myself breaking out in hives when people hug me once I leave my office or workspace. 

I am hella anxious. Nothing personal; do not touch. 

Dana King, the ancestor woman

I had a great conversation with Dana King, artist, whom I call the ancestor woman. She just channels the energy so well into bronze, stone, iron, steel, vinyl tubing. We spoke on Wanda’s Picks Radio Show on Malcolm X’s birthday, May 19. I was gushing, so I hope the recording makes sense. 

Invited to visit her studio in the Fruitvale, I said yes, and was wowed by the fortress space that looks inconspicuous from the busy street corner. It is better to not draw unnecessary attention to one’s work nowadays when so many are suffering. 

Inside, women artists assembled ancestor bodies while others assembled the heads. We walked around the corner where a friend with a studio offered to host the ancestors until Golden Gate Park staff picked up the first 100 or so completed works. 

Dana is a slender woman who is moved by spirit. It is good she can channel her fire into steel. The former award-winning journalist is passionate about African people and our history. These African ancestors are her gift to a collective soul we embody yet can no longer name. 

In King’s bronze memorials, energy is transferred and transformed. “African Ancestral spirit lives” is all one can say who has been in the presence of a King tribute – whether this or her first commission, “A Man for the People,” Berkeley, Calif., 2016, which honors the Honorable William Byron Rumford, the first African American elected to the California State Legislature from Northern California in 1948. 

He wrote the Fair Housing Act, which was rolled into the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Imagine that: The Civil Rights Act which changed everything for everyone except Black people – well, we benefitted a little – was a piece of important legislation written here. 

When the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery in 2018, there on the grounds of the lynching memorial in bronze were three generations of Black women, an elder and a pregnant woman walking during the Montgomery Bus Boycott – Dana King’s commemorative work, “Guided by Justice.” 

We often speak of the ancestors as if they are an imagined presence rather than a real energy we can tap into at will. I have been practicing this with spirit guidance shared at Acorn Center for Restoration and Freedom in Atlanta and Afrikan Healing and Wisdom at InsightLA, both virtual Black spaces. 

Dana King’s African Ancestors sculptures will number 350 in Golden Gate Park beginning in June. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

Gina Breedlove’s sound medicine is the tool used to traverse various chakra, and InsightLA’s African wom(b)en-centered healing centers various practices: mindfulness and Ifa. And of course, we continue to meet bi-monthly as Black Wom(b)en at the Wombfulness Gatherings – Facebook @wombfulness. We had a great session May 22. The next gathering is July 17, 10 a.m. -12 p.m.

I was speaking to a person who shared with me insight gained through Isabel Wilkerson’s book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent.” He hadn’t known America’s treatment of its African or Black residents modeled for Zionists in Germany, Israel and the Apartheid regime in occupied Azania or South Africa. 

I told him he had no need to know, as he benefited from systemic racism. It is this ignorance of the cyclical nature of history under Eurocentric rule that calls for what Dana King names a “Monumental Reckoning.” 

Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent” is the story of the people she describes in “The Warmth of Other Suns.” Caste or legislated exclusion is the continuation of the saga once these people, Black people – denied every right or privilege except the right to die for this nation – move away from the South in the largest mass exodus in US history. 

Some Black folks left in the ‘40s to work in the war industry, others left in the early ‘60s, just before Dr. King and El Hajj Malik were killed. Now people are returning to the homeland to try it again. Up-South was good for a time, but home is home – ya know? Land and trees and the ancestors. 

America is the prototype for Zionism or white privilege worldwide, whether this is Israel’s establishment in 1948 or as a model government for repressive regimes throughout the Western world from Germany under Adolf Hitler in 1933-41 to Hendrik Verwoerd, architect of Apartheid, 1958-66.

It’s great what’s happening in Namibia. German soldiers killing of the Herero and the Nama because they resisted the theft of their land 1904-08 was Germany’s “practice” Holocaust, yet the 10,000 Africans were not remembered, even though this genocide was not a secret. If this story interests you, read John Edgar Wideman’s “The Cattle Killing.” 

Oh, another book I just read, which is a fascinating story about ancestral memories, is “Makeda,” by Randall Robinson.

Misdemeanor citations are law enforcement’s excuse to harass vulnerable people.

Enslavement of African people was a model experiment. The parlay of the industry into other forms of legal captivity captivated other leaders worldwide – still does. George Wallace, Bull Connor, Bill Clinton and others up to the recent President Trump modeled policies that sanction murder by the state with no consequences. 

People want to hold hands and act like the problem affects everyone … Yes, there are hate crimes against other people too. However, the true victims remain African American.

Everyone except us benefits from civil liberties or laws that make certain behaviors illegal. For my people, even with legislation, we do not benefit consistently. If laws are not enforced, they are useless. El Hajj Malik El Shabazz speaks to this in an interview at UC Berkeley, Oct. 11, 1963. He says America pretends Black people are citizens when, if we were, there would be no need for civil rights. The laws that already exist would apply to us. 

There was no reason for George Floyd’s death. There are laws that protect citizens from such abuse from law enforcement. At most, what Floyd was guilty of was a misdemeanor. 

Brave New Films’ “Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem“ shows how misdemeanor citations are law enforcement’s excuse to harass vulnerable people. Using a counterfeit bill, which is what Floyd was accused of, is not a felony charge and the city could have given him a ticket. Other recent stops that resulted in death or maiming, like a broken taillight, is not an offense that involves arrest either: The city could just mail the owner a fix-it ticket. 

Carrots and copper

With more years behind me than in front of me, I am taking time to reflect on what is past that continues to serve my good and what needs to go. I am reminded as June rolls onto the horizon of a unique sorority I am privileged to belong to. 

One of five Gemini sisters, I am the last one left. Sister Nida (June 1), Sister Laiqa Louise (June 14), Sister Dorothy Ummus Salaama and Sister Sadaqa are ancestors now. I remember going to Sojourner Truth Manor, where Sister Sadaqa would cook a duck for our shared birthday meal.

Sojourner Truth is on Martin Luther King Jr. Way – old Grove Street. It’s across the BART tracks from old Merritt College, now Children’s Hospital Annex.

We’d shop for the bird at Housewives Market. Later, I met Arnold White, the artist, there with my daughters. I remember my excitement when Housewives was going to be the site of a shared community co-operative living space and then membership priced out all the people in West Oakland at that time. 

Community development was not the goal; gentrification was – our presence swept away. I missed the writing on the walls. I guess I wasn’t tall enough to scale them.

We sat around talking as the duck did its thing in the oven. Smelling delicious. When the duck was ready, I’d take a polite slice once it had cooled. I brought vegetables and bread, others brought desert and beverages. 

I don’t remember the details of their lives. I was just encouraged. In the midst of the lives we were swimming … these women did not drown. In fact, they put on bathing suits and carved out time to lie on the beach and relax. Four generations of beauty queens. 

Sister Nida rode camels in Egypt and took vacations in Hawaii; she knew how to have fun. She did not allow worry to clutter her life. An entrepreneur – her shop, Marrakesh, an oasis in Berkeley for the weary – we would sit in her swivel chair and big mirror and imagine ourselves as we could be, and she would make it happen. 

Photo albums fell over themselves for attention – her travels documented in these picture books she would tell us stories about. A film buff, we’d also travel cinematically via popular and classical Black cinema. 

Housewives was going to be the site of a shared community co-operative living space and then membership priced out all the people in West Oakland at that time. 

I might enter with questions; however, I always left feeling unquestionably more beautiful than when I entered. Black women need spaces like Marrakesh and tour guides like Sister Nida Ali.

She helped where she could and allowed the adults in her life to live with the consequences of their choices. She did not micromanage anyone else’s life. 

Sister Nida Ali is my angel, watching out for me. When I called her before she died, she told me: “Call me whenever you like, Wanda.” It was the company, this grown Black woman, Black Muslim women company, that I treasured. That I miss.

I was the youngest in the party at Sister Sadaqa’s. I didn’t have children and then I did. I didn’t have a husband. And then I did. Sister Laiqa Louise, school secretary at Muhammad University when I attended, could hear then and later she couldn’t. Sister Sadaqa could still dance. 

Bay View Editor Nube Brown says: “Welcome planet-side, little one!” Join us in welcoming Wanda Sabir’s grandson, here at three days old. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

Old didn’t have a number; it was just grace and a knowing. Was she 70 or 80? Who knows. Sister Nida and Sister Ummus Salaama were probably in their 50s and Sister Laiqa in her 60s, while Sister Sadaqa was ageless. No one knew her age and I don’t think she was telling. 

Sister Sadaqa was independent and lived in what we thought a supportive facility until she no longer could take care of herself. She fell and was moved to a convalescent home. She hated it. I had another child and could not support Sister Sadaqa as she deserved though I advocated for her wishes. 

She got pneumonia at the place on Fairmount Street near Kaiser and died. Before she passed, she gave me a copper bracelet and told me to wear copper and drink carrot juice.

I didn’t know Osun then; I do now. Sister Sadaqa gave me her Champion juicer too. I kept it for its name even when I stopped juicing. 

I am eating carrots again. The juicer was green like algae, kelp … green like the tops of trees in the forest when the sun washes them with her kisses. I loaned the juicer to a friend when she was pregnant. I hope it has nourished other homes where souls sit and meditate on grace and wholeness and infinite connections. Happy Birthday, Geminis.

‘Monumental Reckoning’ 402 year later

On the first-year anniversary of the toppling of the Francis Scott Key monument in Golden Gate Park, 350 Ancestors are preparing to shake things up in a town known for earthquakes. 

Artist Dana King, a woman who channels African ancestor energy into bronze, has re-peopled the 350 ancestors stolen from home in the spring of 1619 on the San Juan Bautista, a Spanish slave ship, which left Luanda, Angola, with 350 kidnapped Africans set for the new world. 

Along the journey to the Gulf of Mexico, two English ships, the Treasurer and the White Lion, captured some of the African cargo, later trading the 20 or so Africans for a meal and other provisions at Old Point Comfort in what is now Hampton, Va., thus beginning the slave trade, https://historicjamestowne.org/history/the-first-africans/

“350 is close to the number of years Africans were enslaved here, too, since 1535 when Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés first colonized Baja California, utilizing 300 enslaved Pan Africans.” – MAAFA 2019 Proclamation. 

Why is this nation still singing a song that promotes violence – gun violence, at that? Francis Scott Key, like so many other dead white male criminals, took up public space. These monuments represent what this nation honors – bloodshed. Dead white men are coming down all across America, and the San Francisco Commission on Historic Buildings has to address this changing landscape. 

Why not take down all the public art that does violence to the psyches of citizenry, whether that is on a plinth in Golden Gate Park, a mountainside, even on currency – “from sea to shining sea”? 

The “Monumental Reckoning” interrupts. These ancestors are a visceral wrecking ball intended to break up, smash, disrupt notions that do not belong in a free society. With the legislation on the books to eliminate slavery from California’s Constitution and a bill to pay reparations to enslaved or imprisoned women forcibly sterilized, what “Monumental Reckoning” does is challenge us to imagine what it means to live as a truly free people. 

At 4:30 a.m. on May 26, Bay View Arts and Culture Editor Wanda Sabir took a photo of the Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse as it rose at Crown Memorial State Beach in Alameda, Calif. – Photo: Wanda Sabir

BLM is slogan. The “Monumental Reckoning” demands change in how we run the city, county and nation. 

These Black-on-Black figurative statues’ oval faces are attached to bodies made from coiled tubing wrapped around an iron core. Their hair swings in plaits, a bit playful – seeped in wonder at the gathering of so many sisters after such a long time apart. 

Instead of distinct heritage symbols, Dana King allows each patron an opportunity to project our lineage forward as these ancestors embrace us as well – they are the family we have been missing. The 350 can carry us home literally as the moonlight catches a likeness in oval worlds. 

The ancestors can help us remember a place where we had language and land and family. The 350 are the chain that remains unbroken, even if it often feels that way. The brokenness is what binds us to one another, Bryan Stevenson says. So true. What is broken mends stronger. 

However, there is a problem – the ancestors are ready to go.

This Juneteenth in Golden Gate Park, Dana King says: “We will honor the enduring spirit of these 350 ancestors.” It is even more fitting that it is the place where slave owner and racist government official Key was ensconced that the Hon. James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” lights a literal consciousness. 

However, there is a problem – the ancestors are ready to go. In fact, more than 100 4-5-foot-tall Black female ancestors are already on site in the Green Room. However, the SF Historic Preservation Commission has taken the item off the Wednesday, June 2, agenda to vote whether or not to approve the installation of the words. 

What is there to think about? On the sesquicentennial of James Weldon Johnson’s birth June 17, 1871, the song he composed, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” which is proposed as a national hymn by Rep. James Clyburn, would “bring this country together.” 

A nation which almost buckled under a pandemic and a coup – not to mention multiple state sanctioned acts of violence towards Black citizens, which has municipalities across the country looking at dismantling the police –needs a rallying cry. A call for San Francisco to “lift” its voice in peace and justice, harmony and liberty would mend a riff that is growing wider and wider. What did James Baldwin say about the “fire next time”? 

The words will be displayed across the Temple of Music in the Golden Gate Park Music Concourse for June 18, 2021-June 20, 2023. Send a letter to the Commission: https://www.monumentalreckoning.org/letter-to-hpc

Dana King is looking for 350 Black women in white with their families for the inaugural event. If you’d like to be a part of the growing constellation, show up June 18, 5 p.m. Sign up in advance so we can be in touch. MAAFA SF Bay Area is proud to be a supporter and participant in “Monumental Reckoning”: https://www.monumentalreckoning.org/constellation

Virtual Global Libations and Prayers for African Ancestors of the Middle Passsage

Don’t miss the Virtual Global Libations and Prayers for African Ancestors of the Middle Passage, 8:30-11:30 a.m. PT. Visit Facebook @remembertheancestors and Facebook @maafabayarea and YouTube @ADASI.

Performing Diaspora at CounterPulse

Performing Diaspora 2021: pateldanceworks and Byb Chanel Bibene/Kiandanda Dance Theater is on Thursday and Friday, June 3-4 and 10-11, 8 p.m. PDT at CounterPulse gallery, 80 Turk St. in San Francisco; Saturday matinees on June 5 and 12, 2 p.m. PDT. On Saturday, June 12, 2 p.m. PDT, there will be a livestream and artist Q&A. Find tickets: https://counterpulse.org/event/performingdiaspora2021/.

Kheven LaGrone’s ‘Pillow Talk’

Kheven LaGrone’s “Pillow Talk” is a virtual play directed by Tanika Baptiste at Theatre Rhinoceros. In 1990s Oakland, Baby Boy regularly waits for an older man, Chuck, to drive up. Baby Boy climbs into the car and gives Chuck what he needs. But can Chuck give Baby Boy what he needs? And will Baby Boy accept it? Find out in this exciting African American queer play by local playwright Kheven LaGrone of The Rhino’s 2017 hit “The Legend of Pink.”

The play runs June 11-20, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday matinee June 20 at 3 p.m.; Sunday, June 20, 5 p.m.-12 a.m. Streaming on demand is available too. Listen to an interview with the playwright and director on Wanda’s Picks Radio Show, May 28.

Oakland Theatre Project’s world premiere of ‘Begin the Beguine: A Quartet of One Acts’

“Begin the Beguine: A Quartet of One Acts” is co-directed by Kathleen Collins, Dawn L. Troupe and Michael Socrates Moran. Tickets: https://oaklandtheaterproject.org/begin.

Oakland Theatre Project presents the world premiere of African American pioneering filmmaker and playwright Kathleen Collins’ “Begin the Beguine: A Quartet of One Acts,” which is co-directed by Kathleen Collins, Dawn L. Troupe and Michael Socrates Moran. This OTP is in collaboration with BAMPFA, where patrons can watch Collins’ film as well as participate in a virtual panel discussion. Listen to an interview with Ms. Troupe on Wanda’s Picks Radio Show, May 28.Visit https://www.blogtalkradio.com/wandas-picks/2021/05/28/wandas-picks-radio-show.

AfroSolo Arts Festival

AfroSolo Arts Festival presents its 26th annual season of “Black Voices: Our Stories, Our Lives” during Juneteenth celebrations in a two-program format. Program One is June 9-13; Program Two is June 17-20. Created and produced by Thomas Robert Simpson, the festival’s mission is to nurture, promote and present facets of the African American experience through solo performances and the visual arts.

Program One features the journeys of four formerly incarcerated Black men on their road to recovery and their return to society. Program two features AfroSolo’s founder, Thomas Robert Simpson, as he recounts how his father overcame many struggles as a Black man raising a family in the Jim Crow South.

This year’s festival takes place on-demand via AfroSolo’s YouTube Channel – programs to be posted in June. To make the performances available to a wide audience, the online event is free of charge. No RSVPs are required. Listen to an interview with Thomas Simpson and the cast for week one on Wanda’s Picks Radio Show, May 26

SFIndie’s DocFest, June 3-20, kicks off with a wonderful in-person film and party

The DocFest’s opening night party “Summer of Soul Roller Disco” features the film “Summer of Soul,” directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary – part music film, part historical record – created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture and fashion. 

Over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1969, just 100 miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Marcus Garvey Park. The footage was never seen and largely forgotten – until now. “Summer of Soul” shines a light on the importance of history to our spiritual well-being and stands as a testament to the healing power of music during times of unrest, both past and present. 

The feature includes never-before-seen concert performances by B.B. King, Nina Simone, Sly & the Family Stone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Stevie Wonder and more.

The Roller Skate party is at Church of 8 Wheels, 554 Fillmore St. at Fell, Thursday, June 3, 8-10 p.m. Signal the reopening of the city and the return of live events by strapping on some skates. Jam to “Summer of Soul” tunes at the roller disco with other film festival goers and documentary fans after watching the award-winning opening night film. This event is open to the public.

Film and party tickets are $30 and available at sfindie.com. Party Only tickets are $15 and may be purchased at the venue until sold out. Skates will also be available for rent for $5 a pair. I haven’t been to a DocFest roller skate party in too many years! 

SF DocFest will screen 40 features and 38 shorts across six different short programs. All films will be available to view on demand anytime during the festival and 36 of the films will also be shown at the Roxie Theater.

Oaktown Jazz Workshop

Oakland Jazz Workshop is streaming a fundraiser on Saturday, June 12, 9:00 p.m. PDT, featugint Richard Howell & Sudden Changes and a special set of original music by MeloDious. It’s a free event, donations appreciated.

Bay View Arts and Culture Editor Wanda Sabir can be reached at wanda@wandaspicks.com. Visit her website at www.wandaspicks.com throughout the month for updates to Wanda’s Picks, her blog, photos and Wanda’s Picks Radio. Her shows are streamed live Wednesdays and Fridays at 8 a.m., can be heard by phone at 347-237-4610 and are archived at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/wandas-picks.

The post Wanda’s Picks: June 2021 appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

A light at the end of the tunnel for Kevin Cooper

0
0
“Free Kevin Cooper” – Art: Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, 264847, Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, P.O. Box 500, Carlisle IN 47838

Kevin’s June letter to comrades and loved ones

Dear Comrades in Struggle,

This is Kevin Cooper writing these few things to you. It’s been a while since I last sent out a missive letting you know how I am, so I have decided to do so now.

I am COVID-19 free and have had two Moderna vaccination shots, and I am negative for that horrible virus. I truly hope that the same can be said by all of you (smile).

It’s my understanding that all of you now know that Gov. Newsom did grant me the innocence investigation that we have been asking him for. We asked Gov. Jerry Brown for it too, but that coward wouldn’t do it.

Just so you know, this is the first time in the history of the death penalty in California that a death row inmate has been granted an innocence investigation. There are a lot of firsts in this case, starting with the fact that I was the first death row inmate to walk inside that death chamber waiting room in 2004 and actually walk out of it hours later. 

Every other person, man or woman was carried out in a body bag after they were murdered by this state and prison.

In May, an innocence investigation was ordered for Kevin Cooper by Gov. Newsom due to the growing call for re-evaluation of his case, citing contaminated DNA samples, false testimonies and inconclusive evidence. Here, Kevin is pictured in 1985 as a San Diego judge imposes the death penalty on him. To this day, Kevin maintains his innocence, which will be proven as the investigation gets underway – a result which could potentially eliminate the death penalty in California altogether. – Photo: Associated Press

This was the first case from death row that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took, had a hearing about and ruled on, saying that my constitutional and human rights were violated by this state.

The first case in which 13 justices on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dissented in, and the 13th, while concurring and upholding the conviction, wrote an opinion which agreed with everything that we stated but couldn’t grant me relief because of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act signed into law by Bill Clinton.

The first death penalty case in which the president of the American Bar Association wrote a letter in support of a death row inmate – me. The first to have two different governors order DNA testing. 

And, hopefully in the not too distant future, the first death row inmate to walk off of death row from a pardon issued by the governor.

This is the first time in the history of the death penalty in California that a death row inmate has been granted an innocence investigation.

Throughout all of this, you, or many of you, have been with me and sending me your heartfelt thoughts, prayers, support and anything else that I may have needed. For that, I send you my gratitude and heartfelt thanks!

While we still have a way to go, we can see the light at the end of this very long and very dark tunnel that I am in. My entire legal team is confident that once this investigation is done they will get me out. In order for us to even get this investigation order, we had to prove our case, and we did!

It’s very important to me to communicate with you that we believe that if I do get a pardon – because we have not only proved that I am innocent, but that I was framed by those cops in San Bernardino County and the DA’s office – that my case can be the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty in this state. We will finally bring an end to it.

If I am to get off of this modern-day public plantation, I want for you to know that I am going to continue to fight for our human rights, which most definitely includes ending the death penalty, LWOP – which as you know is just another form of the death penalty – and every other crime against humanity that certain people and or institutions love to do to we oppressed people.

I will hopefully meet some of you in person, and I want to work with all of you, even if online, to continue to do my part in this historic fight for equality, freedom, justice and everything else that can and will give us all a better quality of life without oppression.

As a Black man in this world and country, as a man of culture and consciousness and conscience who is not only oppressed but also imprisoned and almost burned alive from the inside by those torturous lethal injection drugs in 2004, I know who my fight is with, and who it is not with.

My fight is against oppression and oppressors, that’s it, that’s all! With these few things said, I will end this for now, wishing all of you peace, good health and much happiness.

In struggle and solidarity,

Kevin Cooper

Send our brother some love and light: Kevin Cooper, C-65304, 4-EB-82, San Quentin State Prison, San Quentin CA 94974.

The post A light at the end of the tunnel for Kevin Cooper appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

Pattern of practice – brutality, schemes and crimes against humanity since 1619

0
0
A-Stranger-in-a-Land-that-Is-Not-Yours-1619-2019-meme-by-unknown-artist, Pattern of practice – brutality, schemes and crimes against humanity since 1619, Behind Enemy Lines

by Mutope Duguma

1619 began the forced exportation of Afrikans to what is now called the United States. Between 1619 and 1776, this severe form of chattel slavery flourished within the 13 British colonies: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

Simultaneously declaring independence from its mother country on July 4, 1776, the newly formed United States government took over this stolen land, including perpetuating the vicious system of chattel slavery. These enduring atrocities continued from 1776 to 1865.

Abraham Lincoln signed the so-called Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, which ended chattel slavery as we knew it. 

The Black Codes law, instituted by the Confederate states, lasted for 12 years – and I’m not talking about “12 Years a Slave” the movie. From 1865 to 1877, this newly created exclusion and exploitation system through segregation found the newly emancipated slaves continually denied fundamental human, civil and political rights. 

New Afrikans were kept in slavery by denying them a right to life. This includes the right to vote; right to employment; right to freely move about; right to own Land; right to education; right to decent housing; right to adequate food and clothing; right to a fair and just judicial system and much more.

After the U.S. government’s Black Code laws, radical republican state governments replaced the laws with newly introduced measures systematically embraced by this nation – enacted in the South from 1877 through the 1950s, which legalized racial segregation via Jim Crow laws for nearly 100 years.

Pattern of practice

Our Afrikan ancestors, continually forced to make their way, were repeatedly denied any rights and were frequently subjected to vicious racist attacks by local, state and federal government officials. They were using vagrancy laws to criminalize New Afrikans, making unemployment a violation of state and federal law while allowing the same system to shut them out of the job market.

Once convicted under the vagrancy laws, they would be off to prison, where slavery is codified as legal under the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Using judicial proceedings, thousands of New Afrikans were incarcerated under these vagrancy and Jim Crow laws, ensuring that they were locked into legal free slave labor, the government’s official objective.

Pattern of practice

As a domestic colonized nation (DCN) within the United States’ borders, the struggle for self-determination started for New Afrikans in this country in 1619. We have always resisted the brutal system of slavery and injustice forced on us by the local, state and federal governments. New Afrikans rebelled through civil disobedience, violent revolts on slave plantations and present-day uprisings in cities all over Amerika.

Pattern of practice

The struggle for civil rights in this country can easily define the pattern of practice. President Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 after Congress passed it. It was supposed to include New Afrikans in the citizenship and extensive civil rights for all persons born in the United States, except Native Americans. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1870 was a law passed to re-enact the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was considered questionable constitutionally. The 1870 law was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883. 

The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968 were testaments to the consistency of a resistance struggle for civil rights in this country by New Afrikans and the countless others.

Then the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a federal law, was passed to outlaw discrimination in public places because of race or previous servitude. Then again, the act was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of decisions 1883-1885, which stated that the 14th Amendment, the constitutional basis of the act, protected individual rights against infringement by the state, not by other individuals.

Pattern of practice

The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968 were testaments to the consistency of a resistance struggle for civil rights in this country by New Afrikans and the countless others who joined in this Civil and Human Rights Movement. 

Yet, the system would continue with the U.S. and state governments with judicial proceedings interfering every step of the way and obstructing the human and civil rights for New Afrikans for almost 103 years. And we are right back where we started, today, fighting for our human and civil rights.

Pattern of practice

Here is where the real injustices occur, the pattern of practice’s actual classist and racist application: As long as all government branches systemically deny the human and civil rights of New Afrikans, we will be fighting indefinitely. The government forces New Afrikans to address this issue every year.

NOTE: I have always been of the mindset that we validate a system that does not believe in the human and civil rights that we as a domestic, colonized nation have always desired. It is not surprising that we are not receiving the fundamental human and civil rights we seek. 

After four centuries of struggle, one would think it’s clear that we will not be afforded these rights. Yet, we continue, generation after generation, to appeal to our oppressors as if their heart has softened, while countless people continue to suffer.

We hold the power to grant human and civil rights – we the people, not the government! 

Brief historical perspective

In our struggle for independence, it is essential to highlight Denmark Vesey, famous for leading the 1822 slave revolt; Martin Delany, one of the first Black nationalists and a physician; and Marcus Garvey of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The UNIA nationalized us as a people and was a catalyst for many freedom movements to come.

These civil and human rights organizations were instrumental in laying the foundation for more progressive struggles to take center stage in our fight for liberation: The Nation of Islam (NOI), The Black Liberation Movement (BLM), which gave life to the Black Panther Party (BPP), Republic of New Afrika (RNA), Black Liberation Army (BLA) and countless other revolutionary formations that became the face for struggle for Black liberation and freedom in Amerika. 

Africans-to-New-Afrikans-art-by-unknown-artist, Pattern of practice – brutality, schemes and crimes against humanity since 1619, Behind Enemy Lines
These words by Mutope Duguma exemplify the sentiment, “a picture is worth a thousand words”: “We evolved into New Afrikans. No matter what our oppressors did to us, we would still be Afrikans. Everything we were and believed in was made anew – even our identity to some degree. So it’s part of our history that we identify with our Afrikan heritage and legacy, forever connecting us to the land and people from whom we all descend. We are New Afrikans.”

The New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) was established – and our struggle continues – for self-determination to govern ourselves as a New Afrikan independent nation within Amerika’s borders. In contrast, New Afrikans would attempt to mobilize our people around socio-cultural, political and economic principles that speak to our humanity as a people, bringing into focus an ideology that represents the core of our identity, lifestyle and beliefs, inclusive of all humanity. 

Throughout our struggle, the Civil Rights Movement was and is of astronomical value to our Resistance Movement. 

These movements would progress to the mid-1970s. Simultaneously, the state and federal governments waged a concerted, vicious campaign to stamp out all New Afrikan movements, whether peaceful or radical. The local, state and federal law enforcement agencies worked in conjunction to murder and incarcerate any New Afrikans fighting for basic humanity and the right to self-determination. 

Suppression programs waged against our people, such as COINTELPRO, instilled fear. 

These repressive attacks by the government jeopardized the political and ideological development of our people. The brutal suppression programs waged against our people, such as COINTELPRO, instilled fear, forcing the struggle for freedom and, to some extent, the fight of the people to take a back seat. 

Pattern of Practice – lost communities

The attacks imposed on our communities included the opening of the flood gates to street vices. They introduced and unleashed on New Afrikan communities, extreme poverty, drugs, alcohol, police, guns, etc., all weapons of mass destruction. 

At the same time, New Afrikans would move toward assimilation into Amerikan society’s fabric, especially the professional New Afrikans, who provide a service to exploit for Amerika’s corporate interests – not the best interest of the People, thus creating a situation where what little wealth and resources were within the communities was outsourced. 

The more economically deprived the New Afrikan community became, the more desperate it would become. It is here where all sense of society began to be lost – each individual trying to survive at the expense of everyone else, by any means necessary.

From 1975 to the present generation, has left New Afrikans to their own devices causing them to be compromised by the vices just spoken.

Pattern of practice – weapons of mass destruction

In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, with government support, PCP, pills and heroin were heavily pumped into our communities. The 1980s and 1990s saw PCP and crack cocaine devastate our neighborhoods. In the mid-1980s and 1990s, the government supported a high concentration of guns being pumped into our communities. 

Within our New Afrikan communities, there are drive-through, fast-food restaurants causing mass obesity. Liquor stores saturate the neighborhood, enabling easy access to alcohol. Toxic chemical plants became common around us, causing all kinds of ailments. 

Next came the occupation by the state militarized police departments, where police have saturated the community, murdering our children and people with impunity.

Pattern of practice – declaration of wars

The government implemented its declaration of wars against the New Afrikan communities:

War on the unemployed: Countless so-called “newly freed” slaves were incarcerated to enslave them under the U.S. Constitution, starting with convict leasing.

War on crime: This came in the 1970s-1980s; thousands of New Afrikans were criminalized under the war on crime. 

War on drugs: In the 1980s and 1990s, this was a tool to imprison New Afrikans at alarming rates – 50 percent of those incarcerated in the Prison Industrial Slave Complex (PISC) are New Afrikans.

The so-called “first Black” President, Bill Clinton, signed the 1994 Crime Bill – killing many New Afrikans and countless others by proxy.

War on gangs: In the mid-1980s, 1990s and 2000s, the war on gangs terrorized New Afrikan communities. This war saw the intense use of battering rams, SWAT teams, gang injunctions, police at schools, gentrification, illegal evictions, intense occupation – all carried out under the guise of a war on gangs.

War on domestic and global terrorism: In the mid-1990s, this war was declared and would be used to open up an aggressive form of fascism on the New Afrikan communities, placing our entire community under the fascist eye of “big brother” with government tracking devices and cameras strategically placed in our communities. 

The forces of fascism – corporate Amerikan government – hindered economic and political development under the 1996 Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). This subjected thousands of poor New Afrikans to civil death. Under this new draconian law, thousands of poor folks serving life sentences are told they have one year to file an appeal to the state court, on their post-conviction. 

We’re talking about people who can barely read and write. That would mean they come into prison, learn law within a years’ time and litigate their conviction within that year. If not, they will forfeit their appeal, sealing their fate in these prisons for the rest of their natural lives, where most will die. 

The so-called “first Black” President, Bill Clinton, signed this law – and is also the author of the 1994 Crime Bill – killing many New Afrikans and countless others by proxy. These declarations of war are all coded declarations toward declaring war on the New Afrikan People.

Pattern of practice – economic deprivation

The government and corporate Amerika have been active participants in ensuring that New Afrikans and their communities remain economically deprived by maintaining control of all the wealth inside these communities. They own 90 percent of the community’s commercial and state properties that they allow to be unkempt – schools, businesses, buildings, lots and empty fields. 

Those born and raised in these communities watch their property values drop due to the neighboring property’s desolate conditions. They are not permitted to maintain or utilize the land for the community’s interest. Only when an offer is made to purchase the desolate property are the true intentions of government and corporate actions exposed. 

Many New Afrikan Political Prisoners are being held for their political beliefs, the most educated of our people, kept in isolation for decades in state and federal prisons – torture chambers.

Owners attempt to hide behind state or federal policies that prevent the property from being sold or given to the people to improve on. The excuse is that the property is in a low-end area, riddled with crime. Or the corporate owners will attempt to place some huge, out-of-the-ordinary price on such desolate property. 

They have no use for it, other than using it as an instrument to devalue the already struggling, economically deprived communities. This scheme has been used for centuries to create poverty-stricken environments all over Amerika, especially in New Afrikan communities.

Pattern of practice – political prisoners

The U.S. government sanctioned the many New Afrikan Political Prisoners held worldwide in solitary confinement units, tortured by state and federal government workers for their political beliefs. We’re talking about the most educated of our people, kept in isolation for decades, with no end in sight for release from these state and federal prisons – torture chambers. 

Many have dedicated their lives to improving our living conditions and empowering the people so they can control the socio-cultural, political and economic systems that ultimately dictate how their lives will be. We must, as humans, reach back to these folks who have sacrificed so much. 

Pattern of practice – modern-day slave plantations

The government deliberately calculated building its PISC in strategic areas. They are providing a surplus of modern-day slaves – the new plantation system – to its many dilapidating, economically deprived white, rural communities creating jobs at the expense of other impoverished human beings.

This has been a very creative way of laundering taxpayers’ money back into white communities. We are talking trillions of dollars over time.

Pattern of practice – main culprits

Corporate Amerika works hand in hand with the United States government against the New Afrikan community. It is using its institutions to carry out race and class warfare. Mass media uses a psychological profile that glamorizes a subsidiary subculture. It is used to dehumanize, devalue, degrade and desensitize New Afrikans to the rest of the world and ourselves. 

No matter what our oppressors did to us, we would still be Afrikans.

This is an on-going marketing campaign toward our social, cultural, political and economic genocide. There has always been an indictment against New Afrikans by the government, implemented through policies and laws, tracked easily throughout our 400 years in this country.

Politicians who are the power brokers of this nation use the Black establishment, the Latino establishment, the Asian establishment, the Arab establishment and countless others as willing participants in carrying out institutionalized racism and race and class warfare. Inside policies, whether domestic or foreign, have been genocidal toward Black, Brown and poor human beings.

Pattern of practice – conclusion

There seems to be one thing that the Democrats, Republicans and Independent politicians can agree on unanimously: the declaration of wars – depriving human beings of basic necessities, such as adequate educational institutions, adequate jobs and proper housing, adequate food and sanitized water.

If we are truly about the social justice movement, the people must address corporate racism and institutionalized racism. It is the only way we can attempt to achieve something regarding ending the prevalent injustices that plague us as humans.

The term New Afrikan defines us as a people. We as descendants have evolved as a domestic-colonized nation inside Amerika. Negating the deliberate contradiction caused by our identity crisis and the many classifications often given to us by others – n-word, Negro, Colored, Black, Afro-Amerikan, Afrikan Amerikan and the many names we place on ourselves out of ignorance: mixed, multi-racial, colored, Creole, dark skin, light skin, half breed – we have to understand our historical contradiction because we evolved on slave plantations into a domestic, colonized nation. 

Our ancestors from many different countries all over the continent of Afrika were forced to coalesce. They didn’t speak the same language or share the same socio-cultural, political or ideological beliefs. Yet, they were all colonized under a system of oppression: slavery. 

It’s here where we evolved into New Afrikans. No matter what our oppressors did to us, we would still be Afrikans. Everything we were and believed in was made anew – even our identity to some degree. So it’s part of our history that we identify with our Afrikan heritage and legacy, forever connecting us to the land and people from whom we all descend. We are New Afrikans.

One Love, One Struggle, 

Mutope Duguma 

Send our brother some love and light: Mutope Duguma, D05996, LAC B5-141, P.O. Box 4490, Lancaster, CA 93539. Mutope was the “chronicler” of the 2011-2013 mass hunger strikes, the largest such strikes in history. He, with his cellmate Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, a “main rep” and the principle Black leader of the strikes, wrote a progress (sometimes regress) report for each issue of the Bay View newspaper. It was largely those reports that drew 30,000 prisoners to participate in the last, largest and longest strike, in 2013.

The post Pattern of practice – brutality, schemes and crimes against humanity since 1619 appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.

Viewing all 54 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images