"The problem isn't the equipment, it is always the man behind it.
Determined and well-disciplined fighters,
motivated by coherent ideas of political improvement,
can always best the soldiers of a corrupt regime
that stands for nothing but its own power."

KAGAME'S ARMY RWANDA'S HEROES

"You don't allow armed people freedom to do what they want.
If you are equipped to use force, you must use it rationally.
If you are given a chance to use it irrationally
you can be a very big danger to society.
There's no question about it.
Your objective is to protect society."
~ Paul Kagame

To Orwell Today,

Hi Jackie,

I am new to your Web. I came in Three weeks ago and I took my time to read what other People said about you especially the ones that are about to kick you off due to your position about the current RWANDA's President HE Paul Kagame.

I was among the forces that were with him by the time Genocide took place! I can tell you the whole Story just from the beginning of 1991 up to today through which Rwanda went through!

I have lost about 97% of my family during Genocide, and its like I am living alone on this crazy World, being an active soldier and armed, within a country that seemed like a failed state. The first thing one living my experience can do at those very critical circumstances, was to revenge but this could not happen due to only ONE MAN: KAGAME.

I will never forget fellow Comrades who tried the game! They were always caught and publically fired on trees. I remember the scene just 12 Soldiers with 30 bullets each one for one Comrade!!! This was public everywhere in our Country!

I remember also that due to that very severe attitude of our leadership we were all afraid of not only attempting the game but even at thinking about it!!! The discipline went on until the established Members of Parliament, Parents, Churches, NGO's and different international Organizations including those ones that today declare the President to be a Dictator or killer....Yes all these came in front of Him and implored Him to be a little bit flexible on how We were treated once caught in Crimes!!!!!!

But today I am very estoneshed on all these nonsense accusations against HIM. Yet they are the ones who cancelled his disciplinary move in the name of the so called HUMAN RIGHTS and RULE OF LAW!

All I can testify and do believe is that Life resumed in our country after Genocide and still goes on today for me and some other reasonnable People becauze of THAT VERY MAN's strong philosophy, an oriented vision and personal and focused full command and control over the People of Rwanda, including me considering myself familyless and homeless!

I appreciate your Stands. Be strong and don't get into a well organized trap made by Genociders and their Co. who are trying by all means including to hire or buy some of our Comrades or manipulate poor habitants and corrupting materially some survivors so as to help them cultivating an ideological move that there was DOUBLE GENOCIDE! This is a new move since the one to deny the existance of TUTSI Genocide was fruitless!

This is again one of the last strategies put forward in denying, confusing, minimizing, puzzling and rejecting Genocide. We know it's planned, heavily sponsered, implemented and done everywhere Genocide took place!

Last, they should agree on one principle: That hundreds of thousands of Civilians, wives, Men and children (Interahamwe, Impuzamugambi, MDR Power, PL Power,...) were trained by French Army, French merceneries. Regular Rwanda forces armed them, brought them on frontline, under a parallel Command supported by Media and Puplic Radios the most known being Radio des Mille Collines, and for sure Films, books, photos and physical testimonies are there to prove them out!

Once we met, I assure you that We couldn't make miracles and help them transform their Machetes, grenades, AK 47 guns, hoes, nta mpongano y'umwanzi,...INTO neither BIBLES nor NOVELS nor ROSES!!! We are very sorry it couldn't be possible! Even if Jesus could be there, I don't think it would have been easy with all his mighty!

Don't drive People in lies, when you know the truth, instead rely on it then you shall be saved and delivered from the evil!

Leave KAGAME and the one trying to understand how An extra Ordinary Man He is, in Peace. He marked the difference when the rest of the World had failed and I think this is Why JACKIE is by his side.

Dear Jackie, You are in the right side, keep it up and you will never be disappointed. I'm sure, you do not need to come to Rwanda to see the things you're talking about!

I'd like to tell all these attacking you deliberatelly that they will fail because truth has ever won no matter how strong and speedy lies can be!

At the appropriate time you will see, the truth will speek by itself!

-Janvier

Greetings Janvier,

Thank you so very much for being a soldier in the true sense of the word, both with your actions and your words, with a gun when you had to and now with a pen when you want to. They say "the pen is mightier than the sword" and that is true in many ways. But for us weaklings who know nothing about real fighting in the trenches, you brave soldiers are all our heroes.

In the book WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES Philip Gourevitch described General Kagame's army this way:

"...I once asked if he liked fighting. 'Oh, yes,' he said. 'I was very annoyed. I was very angry. I will still fight if I have reason to. I will always fight. I have no problem with that.' He was certainly good at it. Military men regard the army he forged from the ragtag remnants of Rwigyema's original band, and the campaign he ran in 1994, as a work of plain genius. That he had pulled it off with an arsenal composed merely of mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and, primarily, what one American arms specialist described to me as 'piece of shit' secondhand Kalashnikovs, has only added to the legend.

"'The problem isn't the equipment,' Kagame told me. 'the problem is always the man behind it. Does he understand why he is fighting?" In his view, determined and well-disciplined fighters, motivated by coherent ideas of political improvement, can always best the soldiers of a corrupt regime that stands for nothing but its own power. The RPF treated the army as a sort of field university. Throughout the war, officers and their troops were kept sharp not only by military drill but also by a steady program of political seminars; individuals were encouraged to think and speak for themselves, to discuss and debate the party line even as they were also taught to serve it. 'We have tried to encourage collective responsibility,' Kagame explained. 'In all my capacities, in the RPF, in the government, in the army, my primary responsibility is to help develop people who can take responsibility indiscriminately.'

"In tandem with political discipline, the RPF earned a reputation for strict physical discipline during its years as a guerilla force. Across much of Africa, a soldier's uniform and gun had long been regarded--and are still seen--as little more than a license to engage in banditry. During the four years of fighting in Rwanda, marriage and even courtship were forbidden to RPF cadres; thievery was punished with the lash, and officers and soldiers guilty of crimes like murder and rape were liable to be executed. 'I don't see the good in preserving you after you have so offended others,' General Kagame told me. 'And people respected it. It brought sanity and discipline. You don't allow armed people freedom to do what they want. If you are equipped to use force, you must use it rationally. If you are given a chance to use it irrationally you can be a very big danger to society. There's no question about it. Your objective is to protect society'.

"At the end of the war, in July of 1994, even many international aid workers regarded the RPF with awe and spoke with stirring conviction of the righteousness of its cause and conduct. The RPF had hardly gone to war for humanitarian reasons, but it had effectively been the only force on earth to live up to the requirements of the 1948 Genocide Convention. That RPF elements had carried out reprisal killings against alleged genocidaires, and committed atrocities against Hutu civilians, was not in dispute; in 1994, Amnesty International reported that between April and August 'hundreds--possibly thousands--of unarmed civilians and captured armed opponents' had been killed by RPF troops. But what most vividly impressed observers in the waning days of the genocide was the overall restraint of this rebel army, even as its soldiers were finding their ancestral villages, and their own families, annihilated.

"'The RPF guys had this impressive clarity of purpose about them,' James Orbinski, the Canadian doctor who worked in Kigali during the genocide, told me. 'They had ideas of right and wrong that were obviously flexible--I mean they were an army--but basically their ideas and actions were a hell of a lot righter than wronger. Armies always have a style. These guys--their uniforms were always ironed, they were clean-shaven, and their boots were shined. You'd see them walking around behind their lines, two guys holding hands, sober, proud to be there. They fought like hell. But when they came into a place, you didn't see the usual African looting. I remember when Kigali fell, a guy took a radio from a house, and he was immediately taken out and shot.'...

"Heroes, Saviors, Heralds of a new order. Kagame's men--and boys (a lot of them weren't clean-shaven, just too young for a razor)--were all those things in that moment. But their triumph remained shadowed by the genocide, and their victory was far from complete. The enemy hadn't been defeated; it had just run away. Everywhere one went, inside Rwanda and in the border camps, to RPF leaders and to Hutu Power leaders, to relief workers and to foreign diplomats, in the hills, in the cafes, even inside Rwanda's packed prisons, one heard that there would be another war, and soon. Such talk had begun immediately after the last war, and I heard it almost every day on each of my visits. ...The only way it might be avoided was for a no-nonsense, battle-ready international force to overwhelm and disarm the fugutive Hutu Power army and militias in the UN border camps, and that was never going to happen; instead we were protecting them. So one waited, and wondered what the war would be like, and with time it occurred to me that this anxious expectation was a part of it: if the next war was inevitable, then the last war never ended..." [end quoting from WWTIYTTWWBKWOF, by Gourevitch]

When I first read the above excerpt about Paul Kagame's army, the RPF, I not only admired him but I also admired all of his soldiers and so it is a great feeling for me to now be hearing from one of them.

This talk of "double genocide" that is being spread all over the international press these days is, as you say, just another Interahamwe, French, Belgian and United Nations slander meant to further arm the enemies of true and great Rwandans who stopped the genocide and lived through it.

That's why it's important that people read and see the TRUTH about General  Kagame and the wartime Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) and President  Kagame and the peacetime Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA). The TRUTH is, as you say, far more powerful than the lie. And also the truth gives comfort and hope and is something to search for and cling to when we find it.

All the best,
Jackie Jura

RWANDA'S ROSE (joined the fighting forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, an opposition movement and guerrilla army)

RWANDA'S WARRIORS (reader says Janvier is telling the truth)

RWANDA'S GOOD MAN KAGAME and HOW KAGAME BECAME LEADER

Jackie Jura
~ an independent researcher monitoring local, national and international events ~

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