Rwanda’s Formula for Success: Murder Your Neighbors and Steal Their Wealth

"The relative prosperity of the minority Tutsi political and business elite, is built on the bones of 6 million dead Congolese."

The New York Times touts Rwanda as a place of economic miracles, a country with almost no mineral resources that nevertheless plans to “leapfrog” straight to an information economy. What the Times fails to mention is that Rwanda’s relative prosperity is based on the extermination of its Congolese neighbors and the expropriation of their natural resources.

By Glen Ford

“Rwanda’s so-called ‘New Economic Model’ is simply pillaging and massacre, theft and murder on a huge scale.”

In the years since 1996, at least 6 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a direct result of an invasion by two U.S. client states: Rwanda and Uganda. It is the greatest slaughter since World War II, yet only a small fraction of the American public is even aware that the genocide occurred. The public remains ignorant of the ongoing crime – in which the United States is fully complicit – because the U.S. corporate media have successfully covered up the murder of millions of Congolese. More than that, organs like the New York Times act as PR agents for the perpetrators of the genocide, especially Rwanda – as exemplified by a puff piece that appeared in the Times, this week, titled “Rwanda Reaches for New Economic Model.”

The article boosts Rwanda as an African economic success story, a country that is growing at 8 percent a year, even though it has “no oil, natural gas or other major natural resources” and no real industry. The Times takes us on a tour of Rwanda’s fledgling little commodity and stock exchanges, and quotes a government minister bragging that the country’s development plan is to jump directly from an agricultural base to an information economy, “leapfrogging” over the industrial stage of development, altogether.

“Uganda became a significant diamond exporter, even though it previously produced no diamonds, at all.”

In fact, the relative prosperity of the minority Tutsi political and business elite, is built on the bones of 6 million dead Congolese and the natural resources looted from their country. Rwanda’s so-called “New Economic Model” is simply pillaging and massacre, theft and murder on a huge scale, in concert with multinational corporations and under the protection of the United States.

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