Laurent Nkunda: War Nerd Hero

If you ever want to find a real hero, here’s one way to recognize him: the TV news will be making him into a monster 24/7. Today’s monster hero is the Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda, the leader of the “rebel” forces that are supposedly “closing in” on Goma in Eastern Congo.

The BBC, the only news agency that even pretends to take Africa seriously, has its number-one ghoul reporter, Orla Guerin, on Nkunda’s case every day.

You may not know Guerin’s name but if you like war news you’ll recognize her, because you’ve probably seen her reporting from some African death zone. She fits right in in those places, really comes into her own. She’s got the face of a skull, except skulls smile, and some creepy accent that makes you think of cold porridge and leftover damnation. Wherever she’s from, they must have had a party when she left.

In this BBC video you’ll see Orla talking about what a shame it is that the “refugees” at Kibati Refugee Camp have to stampede for food, worried as they are about being overrun by Nkunda’s “rebels.” The way Orla and the other networks are telling it, everything was just fine in Eastern Congo until the bad “rebel” leader Nkunda ordered his troops to advance. When the innocent “refugees” heard Nkunda was coming, they started running, creating a “human rights crisis.”

The print media is getting in on it too, with the Brit rag The Guardian saying that Nkunda’s troops may have actually “killed civilians,” as if that was anything unusual in Central Africa.

The Guardian’s account barely mentions that the “civilians” killed were in a “stronghold of Hutu militias”—the same militias that killed most of the Tutsi population in Rwanda back in ’94. It’s like if the Jews had formed an army to push back the Nazis, and when the poor Nazis fled next door, the Jews did an occasional incursion to discourage the Nazi “refugees” from returning to their genocidal ways. And that’s an atrocity. Except the Nazis, give them their due, were brave as Hell and fought to the last man; the Hutu “militias” were only good a hacking babies and raping little girls, and fled at the first rumor that the enemy was approaching. That’s why they’re still around.

Every word, every disgusting damn word, of these BBC and Guardian stories is bullshit. actually makes me sick, listening to these stupid lies over and over. The reason Nkunda’s little army (estimates range from 5000 to 10000 men) advanced into Eastern Congo this week is that the Hutu gangs were getting a little too aggressive about jumping ethnic-Tutsi villages in eastern Congo, killing the men and kidnapping women and girls as sex slaves. Nkunda knows very well nobody else will protect the Tutsi, for the simple reason nobody ever has. So he went in to do it himself.

Nkunda is a great man, a brilliant man, a hero, a military genius who speaks four languages and has beaten the biggest armies around with a force of less than 10,000 men. He’s the only decent leader that part of Africa’s ever seen. It’s worth looking at the way they’ve been slandering him, because you’ll see the same techniques used to slam any real hero.

Let’s start with the oldest trick in the book, calling somebody you don’t like a “rebel.” How did the BBC decide that Nkunda is a “rebel”? Doesn’t there have to be a government, law and order, before you can rebel against it? Who is Nkunda supposed to be rebelling against? There’s no law in the forests of Eastern Congo. The UN has a pitiful token force of blue helmets wandering around slapping mosquitoes and bargaining for blow jobs with the local girls, but the real power there before Nkunda’s forces marched in was held by the leaders of the Hutu “refugees.”

“Refugee”; now there’s another wonderful word, a good match for “rebel.” It makes the Hutu the innocent victims, shivering in fright at the approach of the bad ol’ Tutsi. Well, of course that’s another do-gooder lie. These “refugees” are gangs run by the worst people in the world: the leaders of the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambe, the Hutu “militias” who massacred 800,000 Tutsi men, women, children and babies in Rwanda in 1994.

In fact, “militia” is way too good a name for these overgrown death squads. You’ll find the BBC and the other networks have a whole range of names for kill groups: “terrorist” if they hate you, “paramilitary” if they’re not sure but wouldn’t invite you to their kids’ birthday parties, and “militia” if they like you. Calling the Hutu genocide squads a “militia” is like calling Columbine a kids’ prank.

The reason these Hutu are out in the jungle is simple: they massacred almost a million fellow Rwandans in less than four months, back in those happy Clinton years, and then ran when the Tutsi, who’ve always been braver than the Hutu, formed a small army, the RPF, and chased the much bigger “militias” out. The truth is that the Tutsi behaved so well through the whole thing that the world ought to be cheering them. I tell you, if I’d been in command of the RPF when it marched back into Rwanda stepping over piles of stinking corpses chopped up with machetes, I would have taken my cue from Foday Sankoh’s name for his nutcase army’s advance on Freetown up in Sierra Leone: “Operation Kill Every Living Thing.” But the Tutsi didn’t do that. They took no revenge, let the Hutu live and even tried to set up a decent government from both tribes. They’re fucking saints, and they’re supposed to be the bad guys here?

Let me remind you again, since nobody seems to want to remember: eight hundred thousand Tutsi civilians chopped to death with machetes in less than four months. It was a real community effort by the Hutu, like one of the Amish barn raisings, only bloodier. If you want a good look at how they did it, I recommend a book called Machete Season.

It’s very simple, totally straightforward, just interviews with a gang of Hutu farmers who spent three months making daily expeditions into the local swamp, where surviving Tutsi civilians were trying to hide. They all tell the same story: “Every morning we got up, took our machetes and looked for Tutsis to hack to death. Sometimes we gang-raped the pretty girls, because those Tutsi girls have such soft skin from all the milk they drink. But we’d kill them too when we were done. After weeks of killing the Tutsi didn’t even resist any more. They just stood there and waited for us to finish them off. We had the time of our lives.”





If you have friends or relatives who believe people are basically good or any such nonsense, give them this book for Christmas. It’ll straighten them right out. People talk about “the banality of evil” but this is so much gnarlier than that. These guys wouldn’t even get that notion. The only people they feel sorry for are themselves, because they have to sit in prison for a while before the UN lets them go. They talk about their “misfortune” meaning the fact that they got arrested. In a way they’re right, because they’re just about the only Hutu murderers who got caught and punished at all.

The rest fled into the forests of Eastern Congo. They’re the “refugees” that Orla Guerin feels so sorry for: the frickin’ monsters who did their best to kill the whole Tutsi population of Rwanda in ninety days, like they were on one of those timed shopping sprees.

They didn’t change their ways in Congo, either. The Hutu militias kept their machetes (“pangas”), kept tight control of their people, and kept in practice by raiding local villages for women and girls. They’re famous for branding the women they capture like cattle, marking them as sex slaves forever. Sometimes they let them go, when they’re pregnant, so they can go back to their villages with a Hutu rapist’s baby in their belly. That must be a fun homecoming. But most of the time, when they get tired of the woman they drag her into the forest, hack her to death, and leave her there for the animals.

You might be wondering where these fine specimens of humanity get their food and water. Well, the UN, always ready to take the wrong side in any conflict, was right there to help them with food and water as soon as they fled from Rwanda when the Tutsi RPF advanced and retook the country in a few weeks.

It’s a funny thing, the way the UN was there so fast to help these miserable pigs, because nobody did a thing while almost a million Tutsi were being killed. It takes a while to kill that many people by hand. It’s downright aerobic. And nobody, absolutely nobody, did a thing while machete season was in progress. Oh, but the second the defeated Hutus, still dripping babies’ blood, fled across the border, the blue helmets and white trucks were there with sacks of rice and consolation.

Until recently there was no real explanation for this. Me, I didn’t think we even needed one: that’s how it is, especially in Africa. The bad guys always win, and the virtuous BBC reporters always take their side. Well, I still think that’s generally how it is, but one piece of the puzzle has gotten a lot clearer lately. I’m sad to say that the French were knee-deep in blood themselves, all through machete season, according to an independent report that came out in August 2008. Even I was shocked by how bad it was. According to this report,

“France was responsible for killing some of the 800,000 people slaughtered in Rwanda between April and July 1994, most of them minority Tutsis or moderate Hutus killed by Hutu militias.

“French soldiers themselves directly were involved in assassinations of Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis,” the report said. “French soldiers committed many rapes, specifically of Tutsi women.”

France’s late president, Francois Mitterrand, and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin were among a dozen French officials fingered in the report for providing support of ‘a political, military, diplomatic and logistic nature.’”

I wish now I’d never defended the French’s military rep the way I did back when all the NeoCons were bashing them. Got a ton of abuse for that, and for what? So they could help wipe out the Tutsi, “the tall people,” one of the bravest, smartest, most soldierly tribes in the world. And all because the French liked the way the Hutu spoke French. That has got to be the most fucked-up reason for backing a genocide I’ve ever heard: “Ah, M’sieu, eez true zey killed babeez, but zey are so fluent! Zee Hutu would nev-air use zee wrong pronoun; when zey said, “We have come to Keel you, leetul child,” it was al-vays ‘tu’ and when zey said ‘Now we will keel you, old man,’ or ‘old woman,’ eet was zee respectful ‘vous’! And zeir accent, so Parisian!”

Yeah, a little revenge for the French I had to take in high school. The pious Europeans love to talk about how Central Africa is the heart of darkness, how deep and dark and existential it all is, but they never want to mention how much they help keep it that way by always, always, always backing the most evil fuckers in the whole forest. I knew that about the Brits; they’ve done things so awful in Africa that there’s a whole publishing industry in London with the job of making sure the truth never comes out. Which is why you get stories like Orla Guerin’s or that crap in the Guardian. And the funny thing is that the “progressive” newspapers and networks over there are the biggest liars, the best genocide-enablers around.

Well, now I see better that the French are just as bad. I kind of thought they might not be; there’s always been this joke among military buffs that the French lose wars because they actually believe in fighting by the rules. I remember reading this furious letter Queen Elizabeth sent to Henri IV—a really great man, greatest man of his time—cursing him for not wiping out the whole population of this Catholic town during the wars of religion. But nah, this current crop of French, they’re just as bad.

Nkunda will be dead soon. You can count on it, when all the “good” people are lined up against him. And those poor, poor “refugees” will be free to kidnap Tutsi girls and rape them and hack them up with their beloved pangas, and Orla can report that peace has returned to Congo now that the “rebel” is gone.