“Rwanda is now going to be a member of the UN Human Rights Council. This is a body which is always against Israel, unfortunately. So we welcome all those, all those who are prepared to speak for us. And we appreciate your support very much.”
Kagame’s totalitarian regime is infamous for human rights abuse inside Rwanda, including the murder and imprisonment of journalists and political opponents, and the imprisonment of Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, who dared to challenge him for the presidency in 2010. It’s also infamous for crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as confirmed in the UN’s own UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2003 to 2010, which says that the Rwandan army’s massacre of hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees would be charged as genocide if brought to court. Kagame’s powerful friends have of course made sure that’s never happened; as Bill Clinton says, “It hasn’t been adjudicated.”
The UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in their 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2008 reports, documented Rwanda’s invasion and plunder of Congo. The 2012 UN Panel of Experts reportidentified Rwandan Defense Minister James Kabarebe as the top commander of the M23 militia then ravaging the native populations of eastern Congo.
So, after all these damning UN reports, how could Rwanda have been elected to the UN Human Rights Council? How could it now be pledging to use its seat in defense of Israel?
That wasn’t difficult at all, and no more fraught with contradiction than other elections to UN officialdom. In 2014, the UN General Assembly’s Special Political and Decolonization Committee elected Israel’s representative Mordehai Amihai to serve as its vice chair. The Jerusalem Post actually managed to expand on that Orwellian illogic by calling it “an island of relative normality in the raging sea of injustice and outright absurdity that characterizes the UN’s workings.”
Also in 2014, the General Assembly elected Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa to serve as its president for the next year, even though the UN Charter criminalizes wars of aggression against sovereign member nations, and Uganda has invaded three of them—Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan—over the past 27 years, leaving millions dead. No matter how many human rights abuses, wars of aggression, and mass atrocities member nations may have to their names, they move into UN positions of moral authority when it’s deemed to be their turn.