Baroness Chalker's Minions Are
Plunging East Africa Into War
Executive Intelligence Review, September 8, 1995, p.
46-47
By Linda de Hoyos
Ugandan
President Yoweri Museveni, under the auspices of the British Ministry for
Overseas Development, is on the march. All parties in the Eastern Great Lakes
region of Africa--Sudan, Kenya, Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda--are bracing
for a multi-theater regionwide war. Although most of the world's media will
attempt to paint the coming eruptions as yet another sad tale of ``ethnic
conflict,'' the conditions for such a conflict, as an {EIR} investigation has
documented, have been created primarily by British intelligence, represented on
the scene by Minister of Overseas Development Baroness Lynda Chalker.
At the end of July, Chalker arrived in Kampala, Uganda, to meet with Museveni, who, according to her own statements, is one of her best friends on the continent. Chalker had ``no harsh words'' for Museveni, reported the London {Independent} on July 30, even though Museveni declared in May that political parties would continue to be banned in Uganda and elections would be postponed past 1996. Her visit to Uganda coincided with the news that Uganda's donors would be handing over an additional $80 million in funds to Museveni. Chalker's doting on the Ugandan dictator contrasts sharply with her behavior during her first stop in Kenya, where she imperiously upbraided the elected President of the country, Daniel arap Moi, and announced a cut-off of all bilateral aid, in protest to the ``rudeness'' of Kenyan internal politics.
Within the week of Chalker's visit to the area, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), now ruling the country from Kigali, amassed 50,000 troops on the border with Zaire, according to the {New York Times,} citing U.N. reports.
On Aug. 14, Zaire warned that it faced attacks on Hutu refugees inside its country from both the Rwandan and Burundi militaries. The military of Burundi is 99% composed of Tutsis, and is closely integrated with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, itself a spin-off of Museveni's National Resistance Army. ``From corroborated sources,'' the statement from Kinshasa said, ``it emerges that Rwanda and Burundi have mobilized a force of 2,000 men to attack the [refugee] camps with multi-barrel rocket launchers and armored cars.''
On Aug. 15, Museveni paid a three-day State visit to Kigali, during which Rwanda was consolidated as a satellite state of Uganda. Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu declared that Rwanda can learn a great deal from Uganda, ``which has rebuilt the economy and social fabric to a level acclaimed internationally.'' He further testified in his official report on the visit, that Rwanda and Uganda will cooperate closely in the areas of agriculture and animal husbandry, commerce and industry, transport and communications, energy, finance, especially in the fields of {privatization and tax collection, defense and internal security,} justice and education'' (emphasis added). Bizimungu further hailed the Ugandan dictator for his ``contribution to regional cooperation''--although he declined to say that this cooperation is mostly in the military realm. Bizimungu reported that it was agreed that the ``free movement of goods and people between Rwanda and Uganda is the best way of nurturing health and larger economies.''
While Museveni was in Kigali, on Aug. 16, the United Nations Security Council approved a one-year suspension of the arms embargo that had been placed on Rwanda in May 1994, after an escalating campaign by the Rwandan government. The lifting was carried through by the United States, Germany, and the non-aligned countries, with Britain staying in the background.
On Aug. 19, Zaire began to expel Rwandan refugees from the camps, a measure that all political factions had agreed upon in Kinshasa. The expulsion was primarily a protest against the lifting of the arms embargo against Rwanda, but also was designed to call the bluff of Kigali, which has claimed that Zaire and the Hutu militias are restraining refugees from going back home. In the course of the next five days, fewer than 12,000 refugees--out of more than 1 million in Zaire--were sent back, and upwards of 180,000 fled into the hills, to escape a forced repatriation.
On Aug. 24, Zaire halted the expulsions.
Reflecting the buildup for war in the region, the same day, Museveni announced in Kampala that Uganda would ``soon be equipped adequately to fight mobile and modern warfare and therefore the people should not worry about recent incursions by rebels,'' as reported by Kampala Radio.
The war that all parties in the region expect to break out will be a multi-theater engulfment. In the west, the war will pit Zaire against the Ugandan-Rwandan-Burundi militaries. There is already fighting taking place in northwest Burundi, between the Rwandan-Burundi militaries and various armed Hutu groups. It is not known whether Tanzania, home to 750,000 Hutu refugees, will remain out of a war; Tanzania was forced to warn in July that it would take all measures against the Burundi military to defend Tanzanian sovereignty, after the Burundi military was regularly carrying out raids against the camps along the border.
Museveni, who apparently has been promised a major upgrading of his military equipment and arsenal, has also poised his troops along the Kenyan border, where he can be expected to join in any civil fracas Chalker is able to instigate inside Kenya.
It is possible that warfare will also escalate against Sudan, the primary target of London in the region. Uganda has been a steady supporter of the British-created Sudanese People's Liberation Army of John Garang, and Ugandan troops have reportedly been forwarded into the SPLA. However, in mid-August, Garang suffered a major defeat with the taking by Khartoum of a key town on the SPLA supply route. The SPLA is charging that the Sudan government offensive was carried out under cover of a Zairean artillery barrage. It can be expected that Uganda will step in to bolster Garang.
But Museveni also has some problems at home: He is facing up to 16 guerrilla operations in the country, including in the state of Buganda. Chunks of northwestern Uganda are out of Museveni's control altogether.
As the Belgians did during their colonial reign over Rwanda, the British have latched on to the Tutsi caste in Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda, as their vehicle of control over the region. They have inculcated among their chosen Tutsi leaders, such as Paul Kagame, current defense minister of Rwanda and leader of the RPF, the ideology of superiority to fuel an ``ethnic cleansing'' of Burundi and Rwanda--ethnic cleansing that produces the result the British desire: depopulation.
On Aug. 31, the RPF regime in Kigali removed the last vestiges of any Hutu representation in the government, announcing that the Hutu Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu, and four other ministers, three of them Hutus, had been sacked. According to sources, even before this, no Hutu government official has been permitted to wield any power associated with his nominal post. It is likely that the undiplomatic shift is designed to consolidate a trusted war cabinet in Kigali.
There are also multiple reports, including from aid officials, that within Rwanda, the RPF--representing Tutsis who left Rwanda in the wake of the Hutu revolution that overthrew the Tutsi colonial caste in 1959--is not only seizing the property of dispersed Hutus, but are also turning out those Tutsis who had remained in Rwanda and survived the summer 1994 bloodletting.
Otherwise, the so-called tribunals to bring to justice those who were involved in the mass murders of 1994, are a travesty. Individuals have been arrested on the testimony of only one person; few trials for the more than 100,000 prisoners in the country have taken place. However, there is a growing list of ``disappeareds''--especially of those Hutus who are educated or who had a role in the previous governments. It is believed that up to 1,000 people die each day in the Rwandan prisons of disease, and in some documented cases, of suffocation.
n neighboring Burundi, the ``ethnic cleansing'' now being carried out by the Tutsi military is more fully documented, because of the uneasy condition of power-sharing that still exists in the country. The ruling party is the majority Frodebu party, composed of Hutus and those Tutsis who have repudiated the caste system. But th judiciary and the military remain in the hands of the Tutsis. Since independence, this Tutsi military ran Burundi under a dictatorship, until elections forced by the United States brought about the first elected President, a Hutu Melchior Ndayaye. Since an attempted coup and successful assassination of Ndayaye in October 1993, the Tutsi military has worked steadily to force the Frodebu to hand over more and more power. The military has also carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the capital city of Bujumbura and other cities.
In Bujumbura, out of nine districts in the capital city, only two have any Hutu residents left. One district is Kamenge, from which most Hutus fled after intense fighting in July, which left 75% of the district's houses destroyed, according to Burundi Communications Minister Germain Nkeshimana. He also related that Bujumbura University, the premier university in the country, has been completely ``cleansed'' of any Hutu students, after a terror campaign waged by terror squads armed by former Tutsi Prime Minister Jean Baptiste Bagaza. Bagaza returned to Burundi in late 1993, after six years of exile in Libya. Hutu professors were also murdered. Hutus are now fleeing from other campuses. According to Tanzania radio, the Burundi military ``has embarked on a campaign of destroying Hutu primary schools in villages along the border.''
The Belgian {De Standaard} further reported on Aug. 23 that the Tutsi militias--the Sans Echecs--are ``in the process of systematically taking out Hutu intellectuals. This is shown by a whole series of corresponding testimonies. The most recent striking attack took place on Aug. 21 against priest Michel Sinankaw,'' a close assistant the Hutu bishop of Bujumbura. ``Young Tutsis also carried out direct attacks on the College of the Holy Spirit, led by a Hutu Jesuit, and there were roundups on the university campus.''
It is this willingness to destroy intellectuals and destroy educational opportunities for black Africans that is the obvious appeal of the Tutsi caste for such upper-crust Britons as Baroness Lynda Chalker.