Opinion / Columnist
Paul Kagame: Cruel Betrayal of Matebeleland
30 Oct 2022 at 04:56hrs | Views
In the first week of September 2022, Emmerson Munangagwa visited the Rwanda Genocide Memorial while he was attending a continental African Green Revolution Forum Conference in that country. Many people who know and care about what he himself did in Matebeleland were shocked by this outrageous act of double standards. The visit is a brazen desecration of the Rwanda Genocide Memorial consistent with Zpf's disrespect for life and an indictment on Africa.
The visit to that Memorial was obviously organized in liaison with the Rwandan government of Paul Kagame. It raises serious questions on which side of the divide on African Human Rights Paul Kagame stands. The latest revelations of very close collaboration between Kagame and Munangagwa are extremely disturbing.
One cannot wonder too far about what went on in his mind when he saw the arsenal of weapons (machetes, spears, pick handles. iron bars and other home made dangerous weapons, etc) on display at the Genocide Memorial. Yet these are only a tiny fraction of the weapons used to commit one of the worst atrocities in Africa. Pictures of dead bodies strewn all over Rwandan streets, schools , churches, villages, etc hanging on the Memorial's walls depict the cruel manner in which the victims had died, how helpless women and children were mercilessly hacked to death by the Hutu Intarahamwe simply because they were Tutsi. The lonely mass graves of unidentified victims scattered all over Rwanda evoke sad memories in the minds of normal people. Not possible with Emmerson Munangagwa. He does not tolerate memorials erected back home in Matebeleland by simple human rights activists who will not harm a fly. He destroys them under the cover of darkness and feigns innocence by the day in mind boggling 21st century chameleonic fashion.
The human mind can be so disrespectful and full of mischief. What we say or do is a mere selection from a huge plethora of options the mind generates. It gets even more bizarrely mischievous when one is asleep when it has a chance to defy what it cannot fathom in its wake state. When humans are asleep their mind defies science, disrespects culture, trashes social values and bends principles that make collective/shared life a controlled theater of human interaction.
I am convinced the images of Gukurahundi victims came to his mind as he stood/walked around the Rwandan Genocide Memorial with his entourage of outwardly benign former Gukurahundi operatives. He would not fail to see the sameness between the Matebeleland (1980 to 1987) and Rwandan (1994) Genocides. In place of Cockroaches , the word Dizidenti silently rang in his mind.
Images of Matebeleland unborn babies ripped from thief mothers' wombs, infants being pounded in mortars, homes razed to the ground, steel reinforcement bars used to break the bones of victims, canvass mail bags Gukurahundi used to drown just the heads and faces of victims hanging upside down from tree branches, building trusses, football goal posts, trucks etc, flogging victims with logs, victims forced to walk on gang nails, shooting victims crammed in mass graves who had just been forced to dig their own graves, firing squad style execution of helpless victims, gang raping women in front of their husbands, forcing couples/selected pairs to have sex in public view and so forth. I believe his mind couldn't stop the gory images flashing through it. The blood chilling broadcasts of Radio Rwanda played for visitors, fanning more killings as if they had been trained by Zimbabwe Broadcasting Cooperation on how to falsely accuse ethnic cleansing victims in order to justify the murders. We are then told he stood there with scuff hanging from his neck, feeling sorry for the victims. Nothing can be further from the truth.
Paul Kagame drove the sword I through the backs of activists demanding justice over Gukurahundi by letting Mungangwa visit the Genocide Memorial. Many who were justifiably riled by this cruel act unreservedly expressed anger at his mindless act of associating himself with a known perpetrator of a Genocidist.
Kagame continues to 'hunt' those who carried out the Rwandan Genocide widely condemned the world over. One of those who massacred Tutsi people in Rwanda (Potrais Mpiranya alias Sambao) found sanctuary in Zimbabwe from both gvts of Robert Mugabe and Emmerson Munangagwa, who ordered the ruthless massacres of more than one hundred thousand innocent and unarmed civilians in Matebeleland. This figure cannot be disputed by anyone within their normal senses given the rates of daily kill and the ferociousness of the barbaric operation. Suppressed figures of dead victims, numbers of displaced persons, those disabled through physical attacks can only trivialize the Zpf crime in Matebeleland. Victims were accused of being of foreign origin but were being unthankful for being allowed to stay in Zimbabwe after independence. They were blamed for all the failures of government. To this day, 42 years on, Zpf has not accounted for the crime they committed in Matebeleland.
While we were trying to come to terms with the harrowing feeling of betrayal by an African leader we thought was one of the most reasonable in the continent, there comes another senseless sledge hammer blow. Paul Kagame is visiting Zimbabwe during a Zanupf Congress. He will launch a rural electrification project we hear he had a central role in sourcing the funds from unknown monied people. The only people with money are east and west white oligarchs and a handful of blacks who rule Africa and ruling it badly. In this world one is either black or white.
The question we have for Paul Kagame is: is it out of ignorance of the Matebeleland massacre led by Emmerson Munangagwa that Paul is now supping with a known arrogant genocidist or it is a case newly found political expediency for an agenda that is obviously anti African. Can the idiom 'hunting with the hounds and running with the hares ' be more appropriate than the banal politics being displayed here. Besides the Genocide, Rwanda has lately been hogging the limelight for the wrong reasons. Recently Kagame allowed that controversial maverick former UK Premier Boris Johnson to literally dump unwanted immigrants in the UK on Rwandan soil. Boris has a political career so clumsily checkered with mind boggling scandals and a weird obsession for colonialism. A few months ago Boris said 'Colonialism should never have ended'. That statement alone reflects how lowly Boris thinks of the black race, a race savaged and ravaged by colonialism and slavery with no reparations except to selected individual leaders who in turn hoard the money in Western banks. We wonder, by association, whether Kagame has consciously chosen to join the club of our former masters as a golf club bag career, soiling African dignity with the most pungent human waste. Whose money has he laid his hands on to borrow/give to a despicably corrupt regime without a shred of moral consciousness, to buy votes. Or is it from the much spoken about plundering of DR Congo mineral resources and the sponsoring of the M23 insurgents in fact true and is actually the source of the money being generously extended to Zanupf who were the first blood sucking vampires to drain the wealth of Congo during an unsanctioned military operation in the nineties that did not benefit the Zimbabwean fiscus but ballooned the pockets of many in the ruling elite while delivering loaded body bags to anguished families of ZNA soldiers. Does that explain his blue eyed boy status the West has so conferred on him to the point that they spare him criticism over his life presidency. It is also clear that Emmerson Munangagwa sees himself as life president of Zimbabwe. No election will stop his dream. The emerging alliance between Munangagwa and Kagame is certainly a pointer to words tragedies to befall Africa. Kagame's narrative of Africa's woes is based on an artificial and exaggerated self introspection that is supposed to question the moral compass of African leaders. Many people have been eating from his hand on this one. Even those who attended the recent Mo Ibrahim talk show on leadership have been eating from his hand judging by the body language, than criticizing the West for interfering with Africa's post colonial life when they kill leaders they don't like. Munangagwa's narrative on the other hand on the perennially limping Zimbabwe dual economy is based on fictitious sanctions imposed by the West on Zimbabwe. There is no battle of narratives here. It is just strange that both find confluence. African puppets get allowed a certain measure of stepping on the toes of the former slave masters yet they are the debilitating scourge of the African continent, the world oligarchs are using to pull the continent down. In the West financial oligarchs rule through proxies while in Africa the black oligarchs are mostly state rulers.
Moses Mzila Ndlovu
The visit to that Memorial was obviously organized in liaison with the Rwandan government of Paul Kagame. It raises serious questions on which side of the divide on African Human Rights Paul Kagame stands. The latest revelations of very close collaboration between Kagame and Munangagwa are extremely disturbing.
One cannot wonder too far about what went on in his mind when he saw the arsenal of weapons (machetes, spears, pick handles. iron bars and other home made dangerous weapons, etc) on display at the Genocide Memorial. Yet these are only a tiny fraction of the weapons used to commit one of the worst atrocities in Africa. Pictures of dead bodies strewn all over Rwandan streets, schools , churches, villages, etc hanging on the Memorial's walls depict the cruel manner in which the victims had died, how helpless women and children were mercilessly hacked to death by the Hutu Intarahamwe simply because they were Tutsi. The lonely mass graves of unidentified victims scattered all over Rwanda evoke sad memories in the minds of normal people. Not possible with Emmerson Munangagwa. He does not tolerate memorials erected back home in Matebeleland by simple human rights activists who will not harm a fly. He destroys them under the cover of darkness and feigns innocence by the day in mind boggling 21st century chameleonic fashion.
The human mind can be so disrespectful and full of mischief. What we say or do is a mere selection from a huge plethora of options the mind generates. It gets even more bizarrely mischievous when one is asleep when it has a chance to defy what it cannot fathom in its wake state. When humans are asleep their mind defies science, disrespects culture, trashes social values and bends principles that make collective/shared life a controlled theater of human interaction.
I am convinced the images of Gukurahundi victims came to his mind as he stood/walked around the Rwandan Genocide Memorial with his entourage of outwardly benign former Gukurahundi operatives. He would not fail to see the sameness between the Matebeleland (1980 to 1987) and Rwandan (1994) Genocides. In place of Cockroaches , the word Dizidenti silently rang in his mind.
Images of Matebeleland unborn babies ripped from thief mothers' wombs, infants being pounded in mortars, homes razed to the ground, steel reinforcement bars used to break the bones of victims, canvass mail bags Gukurahundi used to drown just the heads and faces of victims hanging upside down from tree branches, building trusses, football goal posts, trucks etc, flogging victims with logs, victims forced to walk on gang nails, shooting victims crammed in mass graves who had just been forced to dig their own graves, firing squad style execution of helpless victims, gang raping women in front of their husbands, forcing couples/selected pairs to have sex in public view and so forth. I believe his mind couldn't stop the gory images flashing through it. The blood chilling broadcasts of Radio Rwanda played for visitors, fanning more killings as if they had been trained by Zimbabwe Broadcasting Cooperation on how to falsely accuse ethnic cleansing victims in order to justify the murders. We are then told he stood there with scuff hanging from his neck, feeling sorry for the victims. Nothing can be further from the truth.
Kagame continues to 'hunt' those who carried out the Rwandan Genocide widely condemned the world over. One of those who massacred Tutsi people in Rwanda (Potrais Mpiranya alias Sambao) found sanctuary in Zimbabwe from both gvts of Robert Mugabe and Emmerson Munangagwa, who ordered the ruthless massacres of more than one hundred thousand innocent and unarmed civilians in Matebeleland. This figure cannot be disputed by anyone within their normal senses given the rates of daily kill and the ferociousness of the barbaric operation. Suppressed figures of dead victims, numbers of displaced persons, those disabled through physical attacks can only trivialize the Zpf crime in Matebeleland. Victims were accused of being of foreign origin but were being unthankful for being allowed to stay in Zimbabwe after independence. They were blamed for all the failures of government. To this day, 42 years on, Zpf has not accounted for the crime they committed in Matebeleland.
While we were trying to come to terms with the harrowing feeling of betrayal by an African leader we thought was one of the most reasonable in the continent, there comes another senseless sledge hammer blow. Paul Kagame is visiting Zimbabwe during a Zanupf Congress. He will launch a rural electrification project we hear he had a central role in sourcing the funds from unknown monied people. The only people with money are east and west white oligarchs and a handful of blacks who rule Africa and ruling it badly. In this world one is either black or white.
The question we have for Paul Kagame is: is it out of ignorance of the Matebeleland massacre led by Emmerson Munangagwa that Paul is now supping with a known arrogant genocidist or it is a case newly found political expediency for an agenda that is obviously anti African. Can the idiom 'hunting with the hounds and running with the hares ' be more appropriate than the banal politics being displayed here. Besides the Genocide, Rwanda has lately been hogging the limelight for the wrong reasons. Recently Kagame allowed that controversial maverick former UK Premier Boris Johnson to literally dump unwanted immigrants in the UK on Rwandan soil. Boris has a political career so clumsily checkered with mind boggling scandals and a weird obsession for colonialism. A few months ago Boris said 'Colonialism should never have ended'. That statement alone reflects how lowly Boris thinks of the black race, a race savaged and ravaged by colonialism and slavery with no reparations except to selected individual leaders who in turn hoard the money in Western banks. We wonder, by association, whether Kagame has consciously chosen to join the club of our former masters as a golf club bag career, soiling African dignity with the most pungent human waste. Whose money has he laid his hands on to borrow/give to a despicably corrupt regime without a shred of moral consciousness, to buy votes. Or is it from the much spoken about plundering of DR Congo mineral resources and the sponsoring of the M23 insurgents in fact true and is actually the source of the money being generously extended to Zanupf who were the first blood sucking vampires to drain the wealth of Congo during an unsanctioned military operation in the nineties that did not benefit the Zimbabwean fiscus but ballooned the pockets of many in the ruling elite while delivering loaded body bags to anguished families of ZNA soldiers. Does that explain his blue eyed boy status the West has so conferred on him to the point that they spare him criticism over his life presidency. It is also clear that Emmerson Munangagwa sees himself as life president of Zimbabwe. No election will stop his dream. The emerging alliance between Munangagwa and Kagame is certainly a pointer to words tragedies to befall Africa. Kagame's narrative of Africa's woes is based on an artificial and exaggerated self introspection that is supposed to question the moral compass of African leaders. Many people have been eating from his hand on this one. Even those who attended the recent Mo Ibrahim talk show on leadership have been eating from his hand judging by the body language, than criticizing the West for interfering with Africa's post colonial life when they kill leaders they don't like. Munangagwa's narrative on the other hand on the perennially limping Zimbabwe dual economy is based on fictitious sanctions imposed by the West on Zimbabwe. There is no battle of narratives here. It is just strange that both find confluence. African puppets get allowed a certain measure of stepping on the toes of the former slave masters yet they are the debilitating scourge of the African continent, the world oligarchs are using to pull the continent down. In the West financial oligarchs rule through proxies while in Africa the black oligarchs are mostly state rulers.
Moses Mzila Ndlovu
Source - Moses Mzila Ndlovu
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