Recently in Rwanda Category

When the former Hutu-led government of Rwanda was busy organizing the butchery of some 800,000 ethnic Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu, the Security Council looked the other way.

The man who encouraged them to do so was Jean Damascène Bizimana, a 36-year old Rwandan Ambassador, who by chance was presiding over U.N. Security Council deliberations while the slaughter was taking place.

The election is only a few months away and bombs, both real and political, are going off all over the place. Rwanda's hard knuckle government has made the extraordinary claim that democracy leads directly to genocide.

So writes veteran foreign correspondent Geoffrey York (left) of Canada's Globe and Mail  in his latest  Africa Diary . There he discusses some recent grenade attacks in central Kigali, and disturbing evidence pointing to the connivance the state's omnpresent security services. York interviews the embattled independent journalist Didas Gasana (below) of the weekly Umuseso. They also discuss the outlandish claim about genocide and democracy by a  senior advisor in the office of Rwandan President Paul Kagame.  More after the jump

The New Yorker's Philip Gourevitch has obtained, and published, the first English-language copy of a thumping new report by a Rwandan investigative commission into the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana, the country's long-time dictator, whose plane was shot down by a pair of surface-to-air missiles and crashed in the backyard of his own palace on the night of April 6, 1994.

This was the trigger for the genocide and as he reported in his 1995 New Yorker article "After the Genocide" and in my bestselling book "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda," Hutu Power extremists used Habyarimana's assassination as the pretext for going ahead with their plans for a genocide of the Tutsi minority--a program of massacres in which close to a million Tutsis were murdered in the next hundred days.