Good Tyrant, Bad Tyrant: How and Why Britain Protected Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Helped Depose Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi

Alford: Britain does good things in the world, like its international aid programme.

Coles: There’s a kleptocratic system in place, where the British public hands tax money over to the Department for International Development (DFID), which pretends to be an international aid programme. Under DFID, foreign resources are privatised, including land, water, and electricity. British companies make a mint from low-cost resources and international markets. Take the cases of Rwanda and Libya. The invasion of Libya by NATO in 2011, which acted as an air force for the anti-Gaddafi terrorists, was sold to the public as a humanitarian intervention by the Prime Minister who led it, David Cameron.

As part of the pro-war propaganda Cameron pointed out that former PM Tony Blair (Labour) had previously made a deal with Libya’s leader, Gaddafi, and BP energy to explore Libya’s oil and gas. Cameron said: “While Labour were doing those dodgy deals with dictators in the desert,” meaning with Gaddafi, “we – the people of this party,” meaning the Tories, “were out volunteering in Rwanda, building schools and teaching English, showing what real compassion means in practice.”

This is why nobody but elites takes Britain seriously.

The leader of Rwanda at the time, and today, was Paul Kagame, an ethnic Tutsi. Kagame makes Gaddafi look like a small-time thug by comparison. Kagame fled Rwanda and lived in Uganda, where many Rwandan Tutsi refugees were based in the 1980s. He joined the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) with the intention of “returning” to Rwanda, which meant invading and taking over. He was trained by the US at Fort Leavenworth and armed by France, among others.

Kagame played a significant role in two – not one, but two – genocides. The first was Rwanda 1994, when the RPF invaded and starting slaughtering 800,000 Hutu, men, women, and children – not just with machetes as the propaganda said, but many with assault rifles and rocket-launchers.

The other was the ongoing genocide in Congo, which is not targeting a specific group but is such a bloody civil war that it’s reached the levels of genocide – about 4 million people killed. So here you have Britain’s PM Cameron praising Britain’s role in Rwanda by working with a double-genocidist, a dictator, and a guy opening the country to British land privatisation via DFID. Only an ignorant and well-indoctrinated public could hear Cameron’s attempt at self-aggrandisement and not fall open-mouthed in astonishment. Even today, the BBC has articles on its website with headlines like, “Rwanda’s Paul Kagame – visionary or tyrant?” Imagine the BBC praising Gaddafi for making Libya the best country in Africa in terms of human health indices and then asking, “Gaddafi – visionary or tyrant?”

While the Arab Spring was happening in Libya in early-2011, Cameron praised it, saying that the people of Libya should rise up against oppression. That’s because we wanted Gaddafi overthrown at that point. At the very same time, Cameron was in Kuwait telling the Kuwaiti government to do whatever is necessary to maintain order. That’s because we didn’t want the regime in Kuwait overthrown. He said: “It is not for me, or for governments outside the region, to pontificate about how each country meets the aspirations of its people. It is not for us to tell you how to do it, or precisely what shape your future should take.” That implied killing protestors if necessary.

Alford: But you just said that BP had a deal with Gaddafi. So wouldn’t our governments want him in power?

Coles: No, because part of the deal was to make “reforms” – meaning open the country to US, British, French and Italian oil and gas companies. Libya has the largest reserves of oil in North Africa. But Gaddafi wasn’t making the ‘reforms’. Technical publications, like oil journals, and investment brochures, like the European Union’s Libya 2020 strategy, said the reforms were only “cosmetic,” so Gaddafi had to go. In fact, WikiLeaks emails reveal that Cameron and French President Sarkozy were in meetings with the anti-Gaddafi terrorists, whom our media call “rebels,” to ensure that oil and gas companies could still get their mitts on the only thing that matters.

Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s advisor, Sidney Blumenthal, wrote an unclassified but confidential email to Clinton:

“During mid-September 2011 French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron traveled to Tripoli to meet with and express support for the leaders of the new government of Libya under the National Transitional Council (NTC). According to knowledgeable individuals, as part of this effort, the two leaders, in private conversations, also intend to press the leaders of the NTC to reward their early support for the rebellion against Muammar al Qaddafi.

Sarkozy and Cameron expect this recognition to be tangible, in the form of favorable contracts for French and British energy companies looking to play a major role in the Libyan oil industry. According to this source, Sarkozy feels, quite strongly, that without French support there would have been no revolution and that the NTC government must demonstrate that it realizes this fact. For his part, Cameron appears most concerned that despite British support for the rebels during the fighting, certain members of the NTC remain focused on the fact that the British government and oil industry had good relations with the Qaddafi regime, particularly the firm British Petroleum (BP).”

T.J. Coles is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University’s Cognition Institute, a columnist with Axis of Logic and the author of several books, including Human Wrongs (Iff Books).

Matthew Alford is a teaching fellow at Bath University and the author of several books, including The Writer With No Hands (Drumroll) and Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy (Pluto Press).

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This post was written by T.J. Coles and Matthew Alford