Does anybody wonder why the Dhaka International War Crimes Tribunal is progressing in such dithering manner with no definite sign of any indictment of known war criminals is in sight? Well, Stephen Rapp has paid three visits to Dhaka with specific aim of picking apart the 'rules of procedure' of the Tribunal set up. The memory of USA funded arms and ammo in the hands of Pak military and their Bengali collaborators is probably fading in our minds, but the Office of Global Criminal Justice at the United States Department of State is obviously keeping tab on US culpability in the genocide of 1971 in Bangladesh.
Read more on the US Ambassador at-Large Stephen Rapp and his role in his previous position as the chief prosecutor of the Rwandan genocide at the UN Security Council Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2001.
Farida Majid
---------------------------------------------
The United States' Global war crimes investigator Ambassador Stephen Rapp, head of the State Department's Office of Global Criminal Justice, will be in Sri Lanka this week to engage in high level talks with the government on the determinations of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission, applicability of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) to the 2009 final battle with Tamil Tigers, and accountability of GSL military forces in the final months of the battle.
Ambassador Rapp's visit comes ahead of the UN Human Rights Council Session due to commence end of this month in which the US, Britain and some EU nations want Sri Lanka to agree to substantive talks of the LLRC findings and recommendations.
Sri Lanka has vehemently opposed to this.
Mr. Rapp used ambiguous and conflicting information and data to accuse Sri Lanka of violating International Humanitarian Laws (IHL) in a report released to the US Congress in October 2009 about the military battle between the government forces and the Tamil Tiger fighting cadre during final - January to May 2009 - stages of the Eelam War 4.
Ambassador Stephen Rapp commences his official tour in Sri Lanka in search of answers to what happened during those five months and the government's accountability and reconciliation process with a very heavy baggage;his own culpability of covering-up Rwanda's 1994 genocide as an attempt to white-wash the United States involvement in that episode as the Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations-appointed International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (ICIn October 1990, the Ugandan army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army TR).
(RPF) led by Major General Paul Kagame (who is now the president of Rwanda) invaded Rwanda. The guerrillas who violated international laws and committed massive war crimes were backed by Britain, Belgium, the United States and Israel, according to many investigators and researchers. By July 1994, the RPF completed its coup d'etat and consolidated its power in Rwanda.
On April 6, 1994, the governments of Rwanda and Burundi were decapitated when the plane carrying the two presidents and top military staff was shot down over Kigali, Rwanda's capital. The well-planned assassinations of Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira sparked a massive escalation of warfare that is falsely portrayed as the result of meaningless tribal savagery. These assassinations were major war crimes, and the RPF was largely responsible, but almost every attempt to honestly investigate the double presidential assassinations has been blocked by the U.S. and its allies.
Professor Peter Erlinder, of the William Mitchell College of Law in Pennsylvania who was very much involved in defending some at the ICTR which was functioning in Arusha in Tanzania has come out with an array of evidence and interpretations of the direct culpability of the current Rwandan president Paul Kagame in the Rwandan genocide, how he and his colleagues were given military training in the U.S., how Kagame as the head of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a proxy force of the Pentagon according to Erlinder, invaded Rwanda to unleash a genocide with tacit approval of the United States, and in the following years how the United States took covert and overt steps to cover up its involvement in the Rwandan mass massacre.
It is here that Ambassador-at Large Stephen Rapp's name emerge. Mr. Rapp who is traveling to Sri Lanka as the head of the State Department's Office of Global Criminal Justice (until late last year was known as Office of War Crimes Issues) in his previous position as the chief prosecutor of the Rwandan genocide, according to Peter Elinder, and many other investigators, was one of the main person who was involved in the cover up of US involvement in the Rwandan Genocide.
Prof. Elinder outlined the United States endeavor in the cover up of its own culpability in the Rwandan genocide, and the role played by Stephen Rapp as the Chief Rwanda Prosecutor of the United Nations.
He said: "The July 9, 2009 New York Times reported that the Obama administration had selected Stephen Rapp to replace the Bush administration Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, Pierre Prosper. Rapp began his international career at the UN Security Council Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2001, while Carla Del Ponte was Chief Rwanda Prosecutor. Rapp's nomination just a few months after Del Ponte's of her memoir of her years as Chief UN Prosecutor, Madam Prosecutor:
Confronting Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity was published in English.
"Del Ponte's book describes in detail the systematic U.S.-initiated cover-up of crimes by the current Rwandan government, a U.S. ally, committed during the Rwanda Genocide, and how she was removed from her ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) position in 2003 by U.S. Ambassador Prosper, himself, when she refused to cooperate with the U.S.-initiated "cover-up."
According to Del Ponte, her ICTR Office had the evidence to prosecute Kagame for "touching-off" the Rwanda Genocide by ordering the assassination of Rwanda's former President Juvenal, Habyarimana, long before 2003. She also details the dozens of massacre sites, involving thousands of victims, for which the current Rwandan President, Paul Kagame and his military, should be prosecuted. The well-publicized canard, that "the identity of the assassins of Habyarimana is unknown" is a bald-faced lie, well -known by ICTR Prosecutors, according to Ms. Del Ponte, writes Prof. Elinder in a popular/well read web site Global Research.
Two years after Del Ponte was removed from office, Stephen Rapp became "Chief" of ICTR Prosecutions with access to all of the evidence known to Ms. Del Ponte, and more that has been made public in the past few years. During his four years at the ICTR, Ambassador Rapp like Del Ponte, also was in a position to prosecute Kagame and members of the current government of Rwanda but, not One member of Kagame's military has been prosecuted at the ICTR, to date…and the "cover-up" revealed by Del Ponte, continues today. And, unlike, Ms. Del Ponte, who was fired by the U.S., Mr. Rapp was first rewarded with an appointment as Chief Prosecutor at the U.S.-funded Sierra Leone Tribunal and now, a coveted ambassadorship by the Obama administration as the chief of the Office of Global Criminal Justice at the United States Department of State.
In February 2009, the ICTR issued its Judgment the Military-1 case, that main case at the ICTR, in which Mr. Rapp personally appeared for the Prosecution. Although massive violence did occur in Rwanda, the court certainly recognized that blaming only one side WAS a falsehood, when it acquitted all of the "architects of the killing machine" (as Mr. Rapp called the defendants in court) of conspiracy or planning to kill civilians. The highest ranking military-officer was acquitted of all charges.
And, although it is now clear from Ms. Del Ponte's memoirs that Mr. Rapp had the evidence to clear the ICTR defendants of the assassination charges and only the losing side has been blamed for all crimes committed in Rwanda in 1994. Simply put, Mr. Rapp and other ICTR prosecutors have withheld evidence that would be beneficial to the defense, contrary to Tribunal Rules; have prosecuted defendants for crimes they knew were committed by Kagame's forces; and, have created a system of "judicial impunity" that has permitted Kagame to kill millions in the eastern Congo.
It is in this context that Prof. Peter Elinder writing to Global Security questioned President Obama's wisdom in appointing Stephen Rapp as the head of the Office of War Crimes Issue (as was known before) at the State Department in this manner: ?"This "inconvenient-African-truth," raises an uncomfortable question regarding President Obama's nomination of Mr. Rapp, in the first place: Are Obama and his advisors ignorant of the public record regarding Rapp's complicity in the ICTR Cover-up….or do they just not give a damn"
Ambassador Stephen Rapp was also privy to the following information when he was the Chief Prosecutor of the ICTR:
The US Ambassador to Rwanda, and declassified US documents from 1994, establish that:
(a) the assassination of the President of Burundi in October 1993 triggered a "genocide of 150,000 Burundian Hutus;"
(b) hundreds of thousands of Burundian Hutu refugees then poured into Rwanda;
(c) Rwandan Patriotic Front military aggression displaced 1.5 million Rwandans in early 1993; and
(d) the Rwandan Patriotic Front assassinated the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in April 1994.
And, that these were the actual causes of the Rwanda Genocide.
The U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda personally warned Kagame in November 1993 that, if he resumed the war, he would be responsible for mass violence in Rwanda in 1994, like that in Burundi in 1993. This was confirmed by cables from the State Dept on April 7, 1994;
UN documents show that the RPF was militarily dominant as of February 1993 and, according to UN Gen. Dallaire's cables to the UN in April-June 1994, Kagame refused to stop the violence because he was winning;
Former ICTR Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte's 2009 memoirs document then–Gen. Kagame's culpability for the assassination of the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi of April 6, 1994 that began the Rwandan Genocide, as does the 2008 indictment issued by Spanish Judge Fernando Abreu Merelles and the 2006 indictment of French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière;
The Spanish indictment also describes, prefecture-by-prefecture, 325,000 murders of Hutus and Tutsis for which Kagame and the RPF are responsible, not including the massive killing after 1994, in both Rwanda and neighboring Congo;
In 2009 published Edward S. Herman and David Peterson's investigative/research book The Politics of Genocide said: "The United States and its allies worked hard in the early 1990s to weaken the Rwandan government, forcing the abandonment of many of the economic and social gains from the social revolution of 1959, thereby making the Habyarimana government less popular, and helping to reinforce the Tutsi minority's economic power. Eventually, the RPF was able to achieve a legal military presence inside Rwanda, thanks to a series of ceasefires and other agreements. These agreements led to the Arusha Peace Accords of August 1993, pressed upon the Rwandan government by the United States and its allies, called for the "integration" of the armed forces of Rwanda and (Kagame's) RPF, and for a "transitional," power-sharing government until national elections could be held in 1995. These Peace Accords positioned the RPF for its bloody overthrow of a relatively democratic coalition government, and the takeover of the Rwandan state by a minority dictatorship."
The U.S. State Department's Office of War Crimes Issues - now known as Office of Global Criminal Justice - chief Stephen Rapp knew this entire Rwandan episode, the U.S. interests in Paul Kagame, the UN concealment of the 1994 report at the behest of the Clinton administration, the U.S. military assistance to Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front and the entire exercise of the 'Rwandan cover up' to conceal the U.S. culpability in the Rwandan genocide when he focused his attention elsewhere; Sri Lanka.
- Asian Tribune –
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Read more on the US Ambassador at-Large Stephen Rapp and his role in his previous position as the chief prosecutor of the Rwandan genocide at the UN Security Council Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2001.
Farida Majid
---------------------------------------------
US War Crimes chief Stephen Rapp in Colombo: Covered-up Rwanda genocide to absolve US culpability
By Daya Gamage - Asian Tribune Analysis
Washington, DC. 06 February (Asiantribune.com):
Ambassador Stephen Rapp
Ambassador Rapp's visit comes ahead of the UN Human Rights Council Session due to commence end of this month in which the US, Britain and some EU nations want Sri Lanka to agree to substantive talks of the LLRC findings and recommendations.
Sri Lanka has vehemently opposed to this.
Mr. Rapp used ambiguous and conflicting information and data to accuse Sri Lanka of violating International Humanitarian Laws (IHL) in a report released to the US Congress in October 2009 about the military battle between the government forces and the Tamil Tiger fighting cadre during final - January to May 2009 - stages of the Eelam War 4.
Ambassador Stephen Rapp commences his official tour in Sri Lanka in search of answers to what happened during those five months and the government's accountability and reconciliation process with a very heavy baggage;his own culpability of covering-up Rwanda's 1994 genocide as an attempt to white-wash the United States involvement in that episode as the Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations-appointed International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (ICIn October 1990, the Ugandan army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army TR).
(RPF) led by Major General Paul Kagame (who is now the president of Rwanda) invaded Rwanda. The guerrillas who violated international laws and committed massive war crimes were backed by Britain, Belgium, the United States and Israel, according to many investigators and researchers. By July 1994, the RPF completed its coup d'etat and consolidated its power in Rwanda.
On April 6, 1994, the governments of Rwanda and Burundi were decapitated when the plane carrying the two presidents and top military staff was shot down over Kigali, Rwanda's capital. The well-planned assassinations of Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira sparked a massive escalation of warfare that is falsely portrayed as the result of meaningless tribal savagery. These assassinations were major war crimes, and the RPF was largely responsible, but almost every attempt to honestly investigate the double presidential assassinations has been blocked by the U.S. and its allies.
Professor Peter Erlinder, of the William Mitchell College of Law in Pennsylvania who was very much involved in defending some at the ICTR which was functioning in Arusha in Tanzania has come out with an array of evidence and interpretations of the direct culpability of the current Rwandan president Paul Kagame in the Rwandan genocide, how he and his colleagues were given military training in the U.S., how Kagame as the head of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a proxy force of the Pentagon according to Erlinder, invaded Rwanda to unleash a genocide with tacit approval of the United States, and in the following years how the United States took covert and overt steps to cover up its involvement in the Rwandan mass massacre.
It is here that Ambassador-at Large Stephen Rapp's name emerge. Mr. Rapp who is traveling to Sri Lanka as the head of the State Department's Office of Global Criminal Justice (until late last year was known as Office of War Crimes Issues) in his previous position as the chief prosecutor of the Rwandan genocide, according to Peter Elinder, and many other investigators, was one of the main person who was involved in the cover up of US involvement in the Rwandan Genocide.
Prof. Elinder outlined the United States endeavor in the cover up of its own culpability in the Rwandan genocide, and the role played by Stephen Rapp as the Chief Rwanda Prosecutor of the United Nations.
He said: "The July 9, 2009 New York Times reported that the Obama administration had selected Stephen Rapp to replace the Bush administration Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, Pierre Prosper. Rapp began his international career at the UN Security Council Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2001, while Carla Del Ponte was Chief Rwanda Prosecutor. Rapp's nomination just a few months after Del Ponte's of her memoir of her years as Chief UN Prosecutor, Madam Prosecutor:
Confronting Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity was published in English.
"Del Ponte's book describes in detail the systematic U.S.-initiated cover-up of crimes by the current Rwandan government, a U.S. ally, committed during the Rwanda Genocide, and how she was removed from her ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) position in 2003 by U.S. Ambassador Prosper, himself, when she refused to cooperate with the U.S.-initiated "cover-up."
According to Del Ponte, her ICTR Office had the evidence to prosecute Kagame for "touching-off" the Rwanda Genocide by ordering the assassination of Rwanda's former President Juvenal, Habyarimana, long before 2003. She also details the dozens of massacre sites, involving thousands of victims, for which the current Rwandan President, Paul Kagame and his military, should be prosecuted. The well-publicized canard, that "the identity of the assassins of Habyarimana is unknown" is a bald-faced lie, well -known by ICTR Prosecutors, according to Ms. Del Ponte, writes Prof. Elinder in a popular/well read web site Global Research.
Two years after Del Ponte was removed from office, Stephen Rapp became "Chief" of ICTR Prosecutions with access to all of the evidence known to Ms. Del Ponte, and more that has been made public in the past few years. During his four years at the ICTR, Ambassador Rapp like Del Ponte, also was in a position to prosecute Kagame and members of the current government of Rwanda but, not One member of Kagame's military has been prosecuted at the ICTR, to date…and the "cover-up" revealed by Del Ponte, continues today. And, unlike, Ms. Del Ponte, who was fired by the U.S., Mr. Rapp was first rewarded with an appointment as Chief Prosecutor at the U.S.-funded Sierra Leone Tribunal and now, a coveted ambassadorship by the Obama administration as the chief of the Office of Global Criminal Justice at the United States Department of State.
In February 2009, the ICTR issued its Judgment the Military-1 case, that main case at the ICTR, in which Mr. Rapp personally appeared for the Prosecution. Although massive violence did occur in Rwanda, the court certainly recognized that blaming only one side WAS a falsehood, when it acquitted all of the "architects of the killing machine" (as Mr. Rapp called the defendants in court) of conspiracy or planning to kill civilians. The highest ranking military-officer was acquitted of all charges.
And, although it is now clear from Ms. Del Ponte's memoirs that Mr. Rapp had the evidence to clear the ICTR defendants of the assassination charges and only the losing side has been blamed for all crimes committed in Rwanda in 1994. Simply put, Mr. Rapp and other ICTR prosecutors have withheld evidence that would be beneficial to the defense, contrary to Tribunal Rules; have prosecuted defendants for crimes they knew were committed by Kagame's forces; and, have created a system of "judicial impunity" that has permitted Kagame to kill millions in the eastern Congo.
It is in this context that Prof. Peter Elinder writing to Global Security questioned President Obama's wisdom in appointing Stephen Rapp as the head of the Office of War Crimes Issue (as was known before) at the State Department in this manner: ?"This "inconvenient-African-truth," raises an uncomfortable question regarding President Obama's nomination of Mr. Rapp, in the first place: Are Obama and his advisors ignorant of the public record regarding Rapp's complicity in the ICTR Cover-up….or do they just not give a damn"
Ambassador Stephen Rapp was also privy to the following information when he was the Chief Prosecutor of the ICTR:
The US Ambassador to Rwanda, and declassified US documents from 1994, establish that:
(a) the assassination of the President of Burundi in October 1993 triggered a "genocide of 150,000 Burundian Hutus;"
(b) hundreds of thousands of Burundian Hutu refugees then poured into Rwanda;
(c) Rwandan Patriotic Front military aggression displaced 1.5 million Rwandans in early 1993; and
(d) the Rwandan Patriotic Front assassinated the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in April 1994.
And, that these were the actual causes of the Rwanda Genocide.
The U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda personally warned Kagame in November 1993 that, if he resumed the war, he would be responsible for mass violence in Rwanda in 1994, like that in Burundi in 1993. This was confirmed by cables from the State Dept on April 7, 1994;
UN documents show that the RPF was militarily dominant as of February 1993 and, according to UN Gen. Dallaire's cables to the UN in April-June 1994, Kagame refused to stop the violence because he was winning;
Former ICTR Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte's 2009 memoirs document then–Gen. Kagame's culpability for the assassination of the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi of April 6, 1994 that began the Rwandan Genocide, as does the 2008 indictment issued by Spanish Judge Fernando Abreu Merelles and the 2006 indictment of French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière;
The Spanish indictment also describes, prefecture-by-prefecture, 325,000 murders of Hutus and Tutsis for which Kagame and the RPF are responsible, not including the massive killing after 1994, in both Rwanda and neighboring Congo;
In 2009 published Edward S. Herman and David Peterson's investigative/research book The Politics of Genocide said: "The United States and its allies worked hard in the early 1990s to weaken the Rwandan government, forcing the abandonment of many of the economic and social gains from the social revolution of 1959, thereby making the Habyarimana government less popular, and helping to reinforce the Tutsi minority's economic power. Eventually, the RPF was able to achieve a legal military presence inside Rwanda, thanks to a series of ceasefires and other agreements. These agreements led to the Arusha Peace Accords of August 1993, pressed upon the Rwandan government by the United States and its allies, called for the "integration" of the armed forces of Rwanda and (Kagame's) RPF, and for a "transitional," power-sharing government until national elections could be held in 1995. These Peace Accords positioned the RPF for its bloody overthrow of a relatively democratic coalition government, and the takeover of the Rwandan state by a minority dictatorship."
The U.S. State Department's Office of War Crimes Issues - now known as Office of Global Criminal Justice - chief Stephen Rapp knew this entire Rwandan episode, the U.S. interests in Paul Kagame, the UN concealment of the 1994 report at the behest of the Clinton administration, the U.S. military assistance to Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front and the entire exercise of the 'Rwandan cover up' to conceal the U.S. culpability in the Rwandan genocide when he focused his attention elsewhere; Sri Lanka.
- Asian Tribune –
Share32
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26.02.12
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