"Chagoury also contributed $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to its list of donors. At a 2009 Clinton Global Initiative conference, where business and charity leaders pledge to complete projects, the Chagoury Group's Eko Atlantic development -- nine square kilometers of Lagos coastal land reclaimed by a seawall -- was singled out for praise. During a 2013 dedication ceremony in Lagos, just after Hillary Clinton left her post as Secretary of State, Bill Clinton lauded the $1-billion Eko Atlantic as an example to the world of how to fight climate change."
[Eko Atlantic is in fact an elite, gated, and guarded city. The Guardian wrote that it "augurs how the super-rich will exploit the crisis of climate change to increase inequality and seal themselves off from its impacts."
4. John Dick, the founder of multi-billion dollar satellite internet company, O3b, and Rwanda's Honorary Consul to the autonomous island nation of Jersey.Kagame's newspaper credits Dick with "connecting Rwanda with global business leaders leading to fruitful investment ties," and calls him a "'bridge-builder to opportunity." Jersey made recent headlines as Apple Computer's newly preferred tax haven .
In Tax Haven Cash Rising, Now Equal To At Least 10% Of World GDP, Forbes situates it within a web of murky financial networks: "a large fraction of the money held in Switzerland belongs on paper to shell companies, trusts, foundations, and personal holding companies incorporated in other tax havens. A significant percentage of the offshore wealth managed by Swiss banks belongs to people whose primary accounts, or entities, are based in the British Virgin Islands, Panama, or Jersey."
5. Partners in Health founder Dr. Paul Farmer. Dr. Farmer was honored in absentia "for his efforts in improving the local health sector and drastically reducing mortality rates."
He is the author of a good book about structural violence titled "Pathologies of Power," but in its pages on Rwanda, he repeats the legally enforced "genocide against the Tutsi" description of what happened in Rwanda, citing Samantha Power's The Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocideas the authoritative account. For Power, as for Kagame's Israeli allies, Rwanda is a reminder that the US must "intervene" militarily to keep its "Never again" promise to stop genocide.
Farmer in no way criticizes Kagame, but to be fair, he wouldn't be able to work in Rwanda if he did, or if he voiced any qualification of "the genocide against the Tutsi."
His Partners in Health organization has received millions from the Clinton Foundation.
6. Alain Gauthier and his wife Dafroza Mukarumongi-Gauthier. Gauthier and Mukarumongi-Gauthier were honored for pursuing fugitives from justice for the "genocide against the Tutsi" in France and fighting "the growing global tolerance for genocide denial." In other words, they collaborate in the relentless witch hunts that make refugee Rwandans fearful of criticizing Kagame or voicing a dissident account of what happened in 1994, even from abroad. In March, Rwandan political asylum seeker Joseph Nwakusi was extradited to Rwanda to stand trial for denying genocide on his blog in Norway. In other cases, like that of Professor Leopold Munyakazi, anonymous Rwandan witnesses suddenly appear to accuse dissidents of genocide crime and initiate their extradition. Professor Munyakazi had dared to say that the Rwandan war and massacres were a class conflict, not an ethnic conflict, and therefore not genocide.
7. British "investigative" journalist Linda Melvern. Kagame's newspaper describes Melvern as an "archaeologist of the truth" and thanks her for "producing meticulously researched accounts of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi." Whenever anyone, Rwandan or not, mounts a public challenge to that description, Melvern is the first to respond, most often in the London Guardian. After the BBC documentary "Rwanda's Untold Story, " a groundbreaking challenge to the dominant narrative, Melvern joined other writers and academics in filing a complaint alleging that it promoted genocide denial, but it was rejected by the BBC's editorial complaint unit.
Belgian scholar FIlip Reyntjens responded to a Melvern defender in the comments on his Twitter post about Saturday's awards, which he called "white liars' medals."
8. Joseph Ritchie, Chicago options and commodities trader, international businessman, Co-chair of Kagame's Presidential Advisory Council, and former CEO of the Rwanda Development Board. Ritchie organized the first "Rwanda Day" promotional event in the US, and Kagame's newspaper reported that he "was honored for his role in bringing multiple business people into the country to facilitate economic transformation."
However, according to Rwandan economist and exile David Himbara, author of Kagame's Economic Mirage , there's been no transformation for Rwanda's rural peasant majority, who live in "a world frozen in time."
"Kagame," Himbara says, "has grossly exaggerated his social and economic accomplishments of the past 23 years. He says he has built an African economic lion -- the Singapore of Africa. In reality Rwanda remains the poorest country in East Africa, except for Burundi. Its per capita income stands at $697.3 versus Kenya's of $1,376.7; Uganda, $705; and Tanzania at $879. Burundi is poorer than Rwanda with per capita of $277. Rwanda receives $1 billion a year in foreign aid, which is half of its annual budget of $2 billion. This is hardly a spectacular success."
Ritchie tirelessly promotes the miracle story nevertheless, and the Western press never seems to get enough of it. Reports of political repression, summary executions, assassinations at home and abroad, and flagrant election fraud are always qualified with effulgent accounts of Rwanda's economic gains, as though they were shared nationwide.
Is it strange that a white options and commodities trader from Chicago would become Co-chair of the Rwandan President's Advisory Council and CEO of the Rwanda Development Board? Not really. There are similar bonds in other neocolonial kleptocracies, such as Congolese President Joseph Kabila's with Israeli diamond and mining billionaire Dan Gertler. It makes sense if the Euro partner deals in raw stuff: diamonds, minerals, commodities, options and the like, and Ritchie and Gertler are both deft with the offshore instruments.
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