"See, here’s what I’ve discovered over the years of working with small business. Most strategy is guessing and while you need to start there, your strategy isn’t worth much until you get out there and throw some tactics at it, listen to the real world and and then change your strategy to meet reality. If you sit around trying to create reality in your garage you’ll never be right."
"President Kagame and I talked about importance of translating Rwanda's domestic innovation into a leadership role on the continent"
"asked Kagame about the genocide in the Congo."
"He (Paul Kagame) said he didn't know."
"has become a specialist in the use of technology to advance American interests throughout the world. During June 2009 he intervened to keep the Twitter network online, delaying scheduled engineering work, so that supporters of the Iranian opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, favoured by the U.S., could continue using the network to plan anti-government activities ""(wikipidia)"I tweeted him:
interesting timing of your #RememberRwanda tweet, while ignoring solid facts concering Kagame's massive Killings in CongoTo which he tweeted back:
@coloredopinions to look at remembrance as a zero-sum game with other events in the world is a very dangerous line to take.I can understand the desire for oversimplification of history in US Government circles. Their desire to ignore or minimize the crimes that were committed by Paul Kagame's soldiers inside the Congo (and before that in Rwanda). The role of the State Department in the great lakes region could also be put into question at some point in the near future. And it could be indeed a very dangerous line for some people who work or who have worked at the Pentagon once we understand why investigation of RPF crimes in the great lakes region has consistently been hampered by the US administration.
"The Security Council this evening condemned the massacres, other atrocities and violations of international humanitarian law committed in Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo and especially its eastern provinces, including crimes against humanity. In a statement read out by its President, Sergey V. Lavrov (Russian Federation), the Council deplored the delay in the administration of justice and called on the Governments of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda to investigate immediately allegations contained in the report of the Secretary-General's investigative team. It called on the Governments to bring to justice anyone found to have been involved in those crimes.The Council expressed its readiness to consider additional steps to ensure that the perpetrators of the crimes and atrocities were brought to justice"This resolution was based on a report by a special investigation team working directly under the Secretary General of the UN that investigated human rights violations and crimes against humanity in the DRC. One of the investigators and co-signers of the report, Reed Brody, stated at the time:
"Some questions remain unanswered at the level of the United Nations (and here is the million dollar question, colored opinions): Who ordered the mass killings of hutu refugees during the war, Laurent-Désiré Kabila or Paul Kagamé?"
The silence behind the Congo massacreThe guardian reported back in november 2007:
Ruaridh Nicoll's report ('The hidden massacre', Focus, last week) is the first account I have seen of the mass killings of Hutu people at Shabunda in eastern Congo in February 1997. I was by that bridge in May or June that year and I asked a villager about the killing. He thought that more than 1,000 people had died at that spot.
What Nicoll does not go into is the international context of these killings. While France trained and supported Hutus who became killers before and after the genocide of 1994, the British and Americans supported the Tutsi army in exile and in government.
Reports of the massacres and starvation of refugees made by an American missionary were ignored and, in effect, suppressed. The Anglophone policy seemed to be that it was necessary to defeat the Hutu paramilitary Interahamwe in exile lest they reinvade Rwanda, but the great majority of the victims of this policy were innocent women and children.
The United Nations was guilty of negligence amounting almost to complicity in this counter-genocide. As far as I know, this wider story has not been investigated. It should be.
Jasper Elgood
Dolgellau, Gwynedd
"The United Nations is preparing to send a 16-strong team into the Democratic Republic of the Congo to map human rights abuses, 11 years after 200,000 refugees disappeared and following a continental war that has cost the lives of an estimated four million people. "
Payne Activity Center at the Oklahoma Christian University, Edmond Oklahoma: April 30, 2 Pm.A great opportunity considering the fact that Lawyer Kurt Kerns from Witchita Kansas (two hours drive from Edmond Oklahoma), has been on a fact finding mission, trekking through Tanzania, Congo and Burundi, visiting refugee camps to find witnesses that can prove 83-year-old Lazare Kobagaya from Kansas did not participate in mass killings during the genocide in Rwanda and that he is falsely being accused by Kagame's regime.
The Congo, like Somalia, is what poliscientists call a “failed state”…i’m you sure you all know but there’s LITERALLY no rule or law or government and of course no stability. His lecture really put into perspective the rwandan genocide in the context of the crises of the Great Lakes Region, an area that has been through atrocity after atrocity for the past many years. After the RPF invaded Rwanda in october of 1990, and defeated the government to stop the genocide at the end of the summero f 1994, allied with Uganda in 1996, they invaded the congo (Zaire at the time… which means “authenticity”..Mobutu rejected anything western including banning certain styles of dress) to overthrow Mobuto—who supported Hutu Power. They instated Laurent Kabila who they hoped would be a fruitful leader..alas like so many other corrupt and greedy people put into a position of power, he did not turn out to be much better than Mobutu . In terms of its relationship to rwanda, it was mainly Tutsis who were fighting in the allied rebel forces to defeat Mobutu. The RPF is alleged to have committed mass atrocities throughout the Congo , including mass killings of Hutu refugees along the border towns of Congo and Rwanda . In 1997 Kabila completely turned against his Rwandan allies and rejected the Tutsis who had fought with him to try and restore some form of control in the Congo. This paved the way for the Second Congolese War, which people call Africa’s World War…considering it’s called this it’s remarkable how few people actually paid attentiona nd continue to pay attention to what is going on in...So for bloggers, researchers and other US citizens who don't have the time or money to travel across Africa and would like to ask Paul Kagame some questions, don't despair.He is coming to town!
Volgens Kuiper in 'EO op zaterdag' biedt de ChristenUnie antwoord op vragen wat de ziel van de samenleving is.De burger is ondanks de welvaart ontevreden over de politiek. Dat is volgens hem voor een deel te verklaren vanuit het zoeken naar identiteit:
,Als je luistert naar PVV stemmers, dan hoor je vaak “het moet maar eens anders”. Ik zie dat als een mislukking van partijen in het centrum om een nieuw verhaal te vertellen over waar we naar toe gaan met Nederland.”Zoals ook in het artikel "The State As Unifier" valt op dat hij sterk de nadruk legt op "de natie staat" als onderdeel van de oplossing voor integratie problemen. Hij durft de stelling aan dat de staat voorziet in de behoefte aan cohesie en integratie. Hij voert Dooyeweerd aan als de grondlegger van deze gedachte.Tegelijkertijd geeft hij toe dat bij Abraham Kuyper juist een sterk wantrouwen tegen "de staat" leefde. Aan het einde van dat artikel komt de aap uit de mouw waar Roel Kuiper zelf naar toe wil:
"National identity arises through the intercourse of a community of citizens under the leadership of a state. It is because of this that the USA can state that it is a ‘great nation'. Dooyeweerd's view of the role of the state in the formation of a national political community is highly relevant today -not only to the issue of racial integration within nation states such as the Netherlands, but also to the integration and governance of the peoples of the European Union."Het valt op hoe hij hier de nationale identiteit als oplossing aandraagt voor het oplossen van integratie problemen. Als hij echter verwijst naar de Verenigde Staten dan moet hem toch niet ontgaan zijn hoe de raciale tegenstellingen daar niet opgelost zijn door het benadrukken van de "greatness" van de verenigde staten, maar dat het juist nauw luistert bij het invullen van die "greatness". Martin Luther King geeft in zijn speech "Drum Major Instinct" de oplossingsrichting ook van raciale segregatie aan als hij Jezus citeert:
"But so shall it not be among you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your servant: and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all."Als het eerste kamerlid het begrip nationale identiteit verder invult door te stellen dat kiezen voor Nederland betekent kiezen voor een bruid uit Nederland , en dat de grenzen voor importbruiden dicht moeten omdat "deze personen de groei en ontwikkeling van de samenleving remmen", dan krijg je een beeld bij het type "greatness" waar hij op doelt als hij verwijst naar de Verenigde Staten.
Almost everything the diamond industry tells us about their product is a lie. For one thing, diamonds are not particularly rare. They are found all over the world (just as Basenji's) and in such quantities that the only way the diamond cartel can keep prices up is by putting more than 70 percent of all diamond production into a vault.
En kon men voorheen wel eens de indruk krijgen dat de ChristenUnie wat naïef opereerde inzake de integratieproblematiek, sinds Gert Jan Segers een nieuwe richting gaf aan de bezinning daarop is dat veranderd. Zonder de christelijke grondwaarde van de gastvrijheid uit het oog te verliezen wil men tegelijk stevig inzetten op de plicht tot inburgering en serieuze participatie van nieuwkomers in de samenleving.
De CU zal weliswaar niet zo gauw met de SGP zeggen dat Wilders een punt heeft, want men heeft Wilders niet nodig om de risico's in te zien van een onkritische multicultibenadering. Segers woonde lange tijd in Caïro, is zich zeer bewust van de cultuurverschillen met Nederland, maar wist vanuit zijn ervaringen toch haarfijn aan te wijzen waar ook voor onze rechtsstaat mogelijke risico's liggen. Met de terechte koersbijstelling die hij inzette, neemt de ChristenUnie Wilders dus wellicht juist enige wind uit de zeilen.
"As it is raining ... most of them are gone," said Rwandan, Lin Muyizere, one of the protesters. He said there were easily seventy people or perhaps even eighty. “Now we are only a small forty…”As we have seen during the election campaign in Gabon, African diaspora voiced their opinion in Paris and Washington DC, hoping for some outside support to their opposition candidates. Europeans and Americans will consider these protests as some "far from my bed show" (translated Dutch expression). Great Lakes politics is such a mess, who to turn to for an impartial and balanced analysis?
