General Manuel Antonio Noriega was a military governor of Panama from 1983 to 1989. In the 1989 invasion of Panama by the United States he was removed from power, captured and flown to the United States. Noriega was charged and tried on counts of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering in April 1992.
General Noriega was a career soldier but a politician too. Like President Kagame , he was a darling of the United States and most European countries that are allies to the United States. Gen. Noriega received part of his military training in intelligence and counterintelligence at the School of the Americas at the U.S. Army base Fort Gulick in 1967, as well as a course in psychological operations (psyops) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina USA. President Kagame had also course in the United States at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,he returned to lead the RPF after the death of the RPF leader Gen Fred Rwigema before the end of his course.
What do these two gentlemen have in common (Kagame and Noriega)?
Like Gen Noriega, President Kagame was not meant to be the next leader of RPF’s hierarchy of the chain of command but with tricks he managed to jump the queue by exterminating all his comrades who were or just perceived to be in the line of succession to the RPF leadership or those he thought will challenge his authority, the trend is still on today.
Kagame’s relationship with the West and particularly the United States, according to Edward S. Herman and David Peterson in their article Paul Kagame “Our Kind of Guy” Kagame is a double-genocidist, and one who ended any social democratic threat in Rwanda, firmly aligned Rwanda with the West as a U.S. client, and opened the door to foreign investment. Later, and far more lucratively, Kagame helped carve out resource-extraction and investment opportunities for his own associates and the U.S. and other Western investors in neighboring Zaire (Congo), the massive, resource-rich Central African country renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1997 during the First Congo War ( July 1996 – July 1998). …….The UN Panel estimated that by September 2002, some 3.5 million excess deaths had occurred in the five eastern provinces as “a direct result of the occupation of the DRC by Rwanda and Uganda” . Although the number has risen to 6 million according to the new statistics by Human Rights Organisation.
This report also rejected the Kagame regime’s rationale that its armed forces’ continued presence in the eastern DRC was needed to defend Rwanda against hostile Hutu forces terrorizing the border region and threatening to invade it; instead, the “real long-term purpose is…to ‘secure property’,” the UN countered . Though this 2002 report was not ordered suppressed the way the 1994 Gersony report was, it was nevertheless ignored in the Western media, despite the fact that 3.5 million deaths greatly exceeds the highest toll attributed to the “Rwanda genocide” of 1994. This suppression was surely a result of the fact that Kagame is a U.S. client, whose deadly efforts in the DRC were actually in line with the U.S. policy of opening up the country to U.S. and other Western mining and business interests.
It is therefore unfortunate that a country that is accused by different Human Rights Organisation all over the World is allowed a seat on the Security Council, despite Kagame’s continuation of interfering in the domestic affairs of Congo through his proxy the M23.
As Gen. Noriaga was nearing his end, the United States shifted its allegiance to another group which was determined to challenge Gen. Noriega because of his dictatorial policies and murdering innocent people.
In October 1984, Noriega allowed the first presidential elections in 16 years. When the initial results showed former president Arnulfo Arias on his way to a landslide victory, Noriega halted the count. After brazenly manipulating the results, the government announced that the PRD’s candidate, Nicolás Ardito Barletta Vallarino had won by a slim margin of 1,713 votes. Independent estimates suggested that Arias would have won by as many as 50,000 votes had the election been conducted fairly.
Many people in Panama were not stratified with the outcome of the elections and of course the international community including USA. About this time, Hugo Spadafora a vocal critic of Noriega who had been living abroad, accused Noriega of having connections to drug trafficking and announced his intent to return to Panama to oppose him. He was seized from a bus by a death squad at the Costa Rican border. Later, his decapitated body was found, showing signs of extreme torture, wrapped in a United States Postal Service mailing bag. His family and other groups called for an investigation into his murder, but Noriega stonewalled any attempts at an investigation. Noriega was in Paris at the time of the murder, which was alleged by some to have been at the direction of his Chiriquí Province commander, Luis Córdoba.
A conversation captured on wiretap between Noriega (in Paris) and Córdoba had a similar camouflage like that one in which Gen .Jack Nziza was instructing his commanders in South Africa to shoot Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa. These are the words Noriega was instructing to his Commander Luis Cordoba in Chiriqui Province.
Córdoba: “We have the rabid dog.”
Noriega: “And what does one do with a dog that has rabies?”
The former director of BRD was found murdered in Mozambique and his arms and legs tied in what many believe to be the work of Gen. Jack Nziza and Minister James Musoni on the orders of President Kagame because of the money they robbed from BRD. Kagame through his spy network all over the world with all the money they have, they can strike anywhere at any time. They have murdered Rwandans in Nairobi (Kenya) and in Uganda; the Journalist of Inyenyeri News was murdered, just to mention a few. Therefore in the next article I will explore how Noriega ended his political career disgracefully or his career was ended by those who supported him in the same way president Kagame might end his political career.

Jacqueline Umurungi

Brussels.