Kagame personality in the commission of genocides in the Great Lakes region inspires artists.
The UN Mapping Report published on October 1st, 2010 hints on genocides committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo by the AFDL (Laurent Desire Kabila), UPDF (Joweri Museveni), APR (Paul Kagame) and FAB (Pierre Buyoya) during the period running from 1993 to 2003. Other reports have covered crimes of the remaining period until most recently.
If nothing seems to move towards any public acknowledgement of these atrocities, it is because there are many vested interested which do not want that our [people of the Great Lakes] dead be recognized as such because of the varied responsibilities in what happened.
It has always been the prerogative of governments to define the concept of genocide. People’s views appear not to matter in qualifying what happen to them. Sometime what is important? Is it really how atrocities are called or seeing justice being done for the victims?
Today, and for almost more than 2 decades, people of the sub-region of the Great Lakes, are subject to an ongoing genocide unfortunately not recognized by the international community. They are victims of torture, rape, kidnapping, massacres and forced displacement, crimes committed further to the senseless pursuit of minerals.
Sustainable peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the sub-region of the Great Lakes will never be achieved as long as that genocide and other internationally reprehensible crimes committed in the DRC remain unpunished.
We know that it took almost a century for the genocide against Armenians to be acknowledged though even today the Turkish government is still reluctant to consider it that way.
On the other hand it only took a few weeks for the 1994 genocide against Tutsi to be considered as one. The reason was that Tutsi had been campaigning for that since the social revolution of 1959, and more so since 1982 according to investigative writers Pierre Pean and Patrick Mbeko.
The region has suffered the loss of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994. It has also experienced the death of over 300,000 Hutu refugees in DRC according to some reports, as well as the murder of more than 6 million Congolese, and the systematic rape of women, children and men since 1996. Several UN reports document these crimes and name the perpetrators responsible of these atrocities.
In the 80s and 90s, there have been more than almost 1 million of Acholi people and between 300,000 and 500,000 of Baganda that Joweri Museveni’s wars and policies have caused death.
Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo could leave power today, whatever the way, but the wrong their regimes did to the people of the Great Lakes region will not be somehow vindicated if their victims are not at least acknowledged as such.
People have incommensurable power in themselves that they unfortunately ignore. Changes in many places around the world have been brought about by ordinary individuals like you and me.
For the victims of the criminal leaders of the Great Lakes, we primarily people of that region, Africans on the entire continent and in the Diaspora, and other nationalities across the world who care for the humanity of others, let’s all together, JUST BY ONE CLICK on www.dontbeblindthistime.org make that difference. SIGN NOW
