The U.S.A.’s Martin Luther King Holiday, today, is also the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The U.S.A. should now, during the presidency of Barack Obama, finally apologize for its role in Lumumba’s assassination.

The USA should also stop supporting African dictatorships who are suppressing the basic voting rights that King fought for here, in the Deep South, including Museveni’s Ugandan regime, Kagame’s Rwandan regime, and Kabila’s Congolese regime.

Now Congo has an anti-gay bill on the table, proposed less than 30 days after release of the UN Mapping Report on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Congo, 1993-2003, ongoing crimes because of impunity. I.e., ongoing because the perpetrators have never been prosecuted, never been “brought to book.”
This may be the most ridiculous distraction from the report yet, even more ridiculous even than Rwanda’s charges against Peter Erlinder, Paul Rusesabagina, and Victoire Ingabire, who now sits in Kigali’s infamous 1930 Prison, in pink prison garb, with her head shaved …

How will the USA’s first African American president respond to the detailed and widely publicized U.N. documentation of genocide in the heart of Africa, committed by the USA’s longstanding military proxies, the armies of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni?

Investigative Photo Journalist
Keith Harmon Snow
is coming to New York
Saturday October 30, 2010
7pm
THE BRECHT FORUM

This week, in breaking news, Spain requested South Africa to extradite exiled Rwandan general, Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, who it wants on charges including genocide and killing four Spaniards in Rwanda in the 1997.

“He took part in systematic and planned attacks on the civilian population, in forced disappearances and crimes against international law, also, organizing and executing terrorist attacks,” Spanish justice ministry statement said.

In breaking news, the Spanish Justice Ministry said Spain has requested on Friday that South Africa extradite exiled Rwandan general, Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, who it wants on charges including genocide and killing four Spaniards in Rwanda in the 1990s.

He took part in systematic and planned attacks on the civilian population, in forced disappearances and crimes against international law, also, organizing and executing terrorist attacks,” a ministry statement said.

The United Nations has accused Rwanda of wholesale war crimes, including possibly genocide, during years of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. An unprecedented 600-page investigation by the UN high commissioner for human rights cataloged years of murder, rape and looting in a conflict in which hundreds of thousands were slaughtered.

Keith Harmon Snow, war correspondent, photographer and independent investigator joins AfrobeatRadio on WBAI 99.5 FM on September 4, 2010 to discuss and respond to the 600 page UN Report based on his own experience working in the field.

A river ferry disaster in the Democratic Republic of Congo has left at least 140 passengers dead, after the overcrowded boat hit a sandbank and capsized, officials said Thursday. There were conflicting reports about how many people have survived. The boat overturned Wednesday on the Kasai River, a tributary of the Congo River, in Bandundu province in the west of the vast central African country. A local official in the Bandundu governor’s office said that at least 140 people had died.

A group of paraplegic street musicians from Kinshasa, Congo, Staff Benda Bilili, which roughly translates to “look beyond appearances”, creates music that affects people across various cultures and music traditions. Vitality and authenticity, their music contains, combines sounds and feel of rumba, soul, blues with hints of funk and reggae. Their lyrics often include applicable social messages. The former homeless musicians managed to grab the attention of listeners from Canada, through several European countries, to Japan filling the concerts’ roster of the troupe.