NO African country has been known to arm itself during a conflict.
There is usually a supplier of weapons that are not produced locally but are used by Africans to kill countrymen and neighbours.
In Rwanda’s case, it was France which was the supplier, advisor and aid of the Hutu extremists who undertook the genocide of Tutsis.
During the war, the French, at times, would conduct the military raids on behalf of the Hutu militia. For example, the French paratroopers would begin air attacks in positions were the Tutsi rebel army was concentrated and let the Hutu ground militia finish them off.
This took place in Byumba in 1992 and the French killed many Tutsis with a new weapon called 105mm artillery battery.
When this mission by the Rwandan armed forces failed regardless of the heavy attack that the French had done on the Hutu army’s behalf, survivors remember an angry white man yelling in French over the radio.
He ridiculed the Rwandan forces for failing to secure victory when the French had invested so much in them. Moreover, from his tone he seemed more interested in defeating the Tutsis than the Hutu militants.
During the genocide, the French behaved no differently. Knowing what was about to take place, the French militia withdrew its presence from the region in late 1993 and the beginning of 1994. However, some of them remained and they participated in delivering Tutsis to Hutu militia, inciting people to flee their homes for neighboring countries and at times being involved in the murdering of Tutsi civilians.
France also defended the interim government at the UN Security Council and was responsible for downplaying the extent to which the massacres were taking place.
All through this period, the French continued supplying weapons to the Rwandan Government and maintained high level contact with the Hutu militants.
Even after the war and genocide, the French were still contributing to instability in and outside of Rwanda by way of funding and facilitating Interahamwe training in neighbouring Congo Brazzaville and the Central African Republic.
They also supported the training of Interahamwe in Zaire (DRC) and these events would lead to more warring years after the Rwandan genocide had ended.
The Interahamwe had been quashed as soon as the Rwanda Political Front or the Tutsi Rebel Army took over Kigali and ended the genocide in July 1994. It was in fact the French who contributed in restructuring, retraining and re-arming the Interahamwe in neighbouring lands.
The French also frustrated the investigations that were taking place after the genocide by not co-operating sufficiently and even protecting suspects who had a hand in the genocide. This, the French had started doing long before the genocide because they feared being exposed as instigators and trainers of violence.
In this last part of the series, we shall dwell on how this European misbehaviour is not limited to Rwanda, but all other African nations that seek intervention from the French and other European nations in their time of need.
Last week we focused on the sexual abuses committed by the French troops against Tutsi women, children and men. It is through envoys hosted by international organisations such as the UN that Europeans opportunistically sexually abuse black people in disaster-stricken areas.
A teenage boy was sodomised by UN soldiers in Haiti a few years ago after an earthquake took place and the encounter was caught on camera.
This capitalising on social, political and economic instability in Africa is not limited to France but all other powerful Western nations like the US and the UK.
A Rwandan woman was taken to England with promises of receiving assistance just after the genocide. Before long she was forced into sex slavery and is stuck in Europe where she contracted an illness and has no means of returning to her homeland. Cases like this one abound.
A Spanish man, Antonio, is infamous for sleeping with young black women in troubled African nations. He takes video footage of the girls while having sex with them and uploads it on a pay site online. He calls it an African sex tour.
People like Antonio usually depend on funds and perks given by being members of international organisations that have access to disaster-stricken areas in Africa and around the world. It is a fishing ground for desperate women and children.
Despite sexual abuse by way of European intervention in disaster-stricken areas, even regular European tourists are known to defile many black daughters, even underage ones, by offering them money for sex. This is especially worrisome on the east coast of Africa in places like Mombasa, Kenya, where girls as young as 10 are being drawn to this inhumane practice of prostituting themselves.
Even in places like Brazil that have a big population of blacks stuck in poverty, Europeans are found taking advantage of women. They travel from Europe and the US to commit such dastardly acts.
Africans should therefore be careful what they ask for when they request for Europeans to physically intervene in their countries when we are going through our woes. The victimisers are hard to trace and they almost always get away with it because during a time of chaos and instability, accountability is usually overlooked as the people will be concerned about more pressing issues like surviving.
But to have a European come and worsen the already bad situation by taking advantage of our women and children when they are most vulnerable is heinous.
Rather, it is important for Africans to learn from these human rights violations committed by Europeans in Rwanda and other places.
It is also just as important to acknowledge how the European Peace-keeping troops abandoned their UN Security Council mandate to protect and how it was only the African troops who chose not to abandon their brothers in their time of need.
Even more important is the realisation that whites can go so far, just to divide Africans and set brothers against brothers. They also aspire to achieve this in Zimbabwe by dividing Shona speakers from Ndebele speakers.
The Nguni and the Shona people were once one community. Furthermore the Ndebele are simply a mix of these, our Nguni kinsmen with a majority of Shona people who lived in the Matabeleland area before the coming of Mzilikazi.
I have personally felt the will to divide Shona and Ndebele people, particularly in books and articles written by whites from the colonial days. Even in Rwanda, the genocides did not start from nowhere but were the results of such instigative propaganda.
Similarly in South Africa, non-Nguni blacks like Zimbabweans are portrayed by media as the cause for job losses and underachievement among the South African blacks. Articles that blamed Zimbabweans and other groups for the poverty of black South Africans were evident as long back as 2003. These untrue claims which sought to hide the inequality between settler-whites and indigenous blacks in land and wealth distribution would explode in the xenophobic killings that would eventually take place in South Africa against Zimbabweans and so on.
Such propaganda which incites tribalism and violence is now banned in Rwanda and other Africans should take heed of this very real threat.
Lastly, only when we are divided can whites conquer us, because unity means strength. Once we start fighting each other, whites squabble for our unmanned resources. This is truly what the whites mean by the phrase ‘divide and conquer’.