Mr. Obote-Odora's statement that he has seen no evidence that the RPF shot down the plane is astonishingly bizarre since the evidence for it has been in the prosecutor's hands at the ICTR since 1997 when Louise Arbour ordered an investigation into the shoot down of the presidential plane.

Ambassador Erica Barks-Ruggles
The United States Embassy in Rwanda
2657 Avenue de la Gendarmerie (Kacyiru)
P.O. Box 28
Kigali
RWANDA

Your Excellency,

Alex Obote-Odora, a former Chief of Appeals and Legal Advisory Division at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), must take the readers of Pambazuka News as extremely gullible.

Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the University of Pennsylvania. He is attributed with having written extensively on economics, political economy and the media. His co-author, David Peterson is an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago.

For Western governments, financiers and opinion leaders, Rwandan president Paul Kagame offers a Faustian bargain: Overlook my brutal behavior, and I will offer you a model for economic growth in an African nation.

The process of investigating and prosecuting serious international crimes is complex, imperfect and still a work in progress.

In an article written in the Guardian in April 2014, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair called Rwanda ‘ A beacon of hope ”.

On October 1, 2014, a remarkable event occurred in Britain.

On 6 April 1994 the plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and his Burundian counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down while approaching Kigali airport. Returning from a regional summit in Tanzania, the two statesmen died when two surface-to-air missiles downed the aircraft.

We all know that Kagame committed and is still committing: