Photos: YouTube Screenshots
In late November, Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), traveled to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for meetings with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and DRC President Felix Tshisekedi.
The stated purpose of the meetings was to try to de-escalate tensions in eastern DRC, which has seen stepped up attacks by M23 and other Rwanda-sponsored militias after Kagame announced a new war against the DRC in advance of elections scheduled to take place in the DRC on December 20.
Headed by Laurent Nkunda, a Kagame loyalist implicated in the massacre of civilians, M23 earned the distinction as among the worst perpetrators of human rights abuses in the world, according to former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay. In October, Doctors Without Borders treated on average 70 sexual assault victims victims every day at its clinics in Goma, the regional capital of eastern Congo, after its main roads had been seized by M23.
Journalist Keith Harmon Snow, a human rights investigator for the UN and Project Censored award winner who has covered Central African politics and exposed U.S. covert machinations there, said in an interview with CovertAction Magazine that Haines’s visit to Rwanda and the DRC and meetings with Tshisekedi and Kagame (which were held separately) “is a joke.”
According to Snow, “Haines is a muzungu [Swahili term for white person] who knows nothing. Kagame is a pathological liar and sociopathic killer. Rwanda is the problem behind everything in Central Africa, followed closely by Uganda.”
The U.S. has closely aligned with Kagame and Rwanda since Kagame came to power following Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. Roger Winter, a suspected CIA agent who was head of the U.S. Committee for Refugees aided significantly in Kagame’s rise to power and received a decoration on the 16th anniversary of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)’s victory in Rwanda’s civil war.
