- CounterPunch.org - https://www.counterpunch.org -

The Empire That Cried Genocide: Washington’s Exploitation of Ethnic Brutality from Rwanda to Xinjiang

The American Empire is crying genocide again. It’s an old song that the war class loves to sing, but one that never fails to get their compliant colleagues in the mass media dancing. No matter how woke these presstitutes pretend to be they always jump at the opportunity to virtue signal over the flag of some poorer nation of color and wax philosophic about the cultural superiority of western democracy as if they’ve never smelled a dead Indian. It’s the kind of absurdly hypocritical prestige racism that only sells with perfect government-corporate synergy. This time the tragedies being sung about are that of the Muslim Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region of China and the Tigrayan minority of northern Ethiopia, and let there be no mistake, fucked up shit is certainly happening in these corners of the world even if America is shamelessly capitalizing on it.

In Xinjiang the Chinese are rounding up Uyghurs in large numbers and sending them to what the Communist Party claims are vocational camps designed to improve the employability of the local Muslim population and eliminate the root causes of local Islamic extremism. If you buy that then I have a pottery school to sell you in Treblinka. There are all manner of horror stories surfacing from the region. Stories of demolished mosques, re-education camps, and forced sterilization, and the White House is naturally jumping at the opportunity to use this for ammunition in their new Cold War with China, pulling out all the stops with a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics and fresh new rounds of economic sanctions.

America is assuming a similar posture towards the government of Ethiopia which is currently engaged in a bloody civil war with the self-styled Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The government of Abiy Ahmed has ordered an invasion of their northern Tigray Province and declared a nationwide state of emergency complete with imposed curfews and a total media blackout. Once again, the western press is buzzing like a chorus of power tools with horror stories about house-to-house raids, mass rape, and mass graves, and the US has responded by ending Ethiopia’s coveted special trade status and publicly threatening the already impoverished African nation with official declarations of genocide and all the usual sweeping economic sanctions and possible military interventions that come with it.

The only problem here is that neither one of these stories are nearly as black and white as the official government-corporate narrative and both are marred by deep-seated conflicts of interest on the part of the would-be saviors in Wahington’s imperial bubble. While there are certainly concentration camps in Xinjiang there is also a long raging war on terror in the region, one that America once openly supported during the Bush regime by designating the local Al-Qaeda affiliates in the East Turkestan Islamic Movement terrorists and excepting its combatants into our own exclusive concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay. These rugged separatists have only recently been removed from this list and reborn as freedom fighters since the Xinjiang region has become an essential highway in China’s attempts to expand their economic footprint across Central Asia and into Europe with their ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. This is when the horror stories began to proliferate and while there are some very credible accounts surfacing from individuals in the region, most of the stories of widespread abuse seem to originate from the same handful of highly suspect sources.

The most visceral share of what the American press reports about China’s Uyghur Genocide come from a German academic and noted anti-communist zealot with connections to sketchy right-wing thinktanks named Adrian Zenz, a veteran propagandist at the State Department’s Radio Free Asia named Gulchehra Hoja, and an Australian thinktank funded by the Pentagon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin called the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. And all three of these sterling sources alleged on-the-ground horror stories are furnished by the same circle of Turkic nationalist groups like the World Uyghur Congress and the American Uyghur Association who are in turn heavily funded by the State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy. Long story short, the American Empire’s favorite sources of proof that China is committing genocide against its own people come from the American Empire itself.

We face a similar wall of plausible deception in Tigray where our only real source on the ground is the Tigray People’s Liberation Front themselves, an organization made up of the former members of an American backed junta that brutally reigned over Ethiopia from 1991 until the rise of Addis Ababa’s current government under fire in 2018. It was the TPLF who launched this civil war in the first place a year ago in an attempt to regain power and while they have made wild claims of genocide against their targets since there remains at least as much proof that they have been engaging in their own widespread campaigns of ethnic cleansing in regions like Afar and Amhara which they invaded after rejecting an Ethiopian brokered ceasefire.

The UN, who has taken a major role in spreading the Tigrayan Genocide narrative is still lousy with former members of the TPLF junta themselves, like the current Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who had previously served as the TPLF regime’s Minister of Health and Minister of Foreign Affairs, and they have taken the unprecedented move of sidelining local Ethiopian UN reps in favor of instructing emergency coordinators to report directly to UN headquarters. It should also be noted that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had been on good terms with the US until his recent decision to approve a Chinese-funded railway between Addis Ababa and Djibouti as part of the aforementioned Belt and Road Initiative.

All of these geopolitical mind games conform perfectly with the American Empire’s long-standing manipulation of accusations of genocide to justify its own imperial conquests. Nobody was buying America-the-avenger-of-democracy after we lost the communist boogeyman at the end of the Cold War, so we needed to develop a new benevolent mask of sanity to sell global war behind. The Clinton’s hit gold with the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, the savage slaughter of nearly 1 million helpless Tutsis by Hutu monsters over just 3 months, all of which could have been easily prevented if America had simply been free to meddle. But America had been meddling for years. Rwanda wasn’t so much a one-sided genocide as it was a genocidal civil war that was started not in 1994 but in 1990 by a US trained army of Tutsi refugees lead by one Paul Kagame, a Fort Leavenworth trained monster who had served as Uganda’s bloodthirsty Director of Intelligence throughout the 80’s.

The self-styled Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded Rwanda from their base in American-backed Uganda and spent the next 42 grueling months wreaking havoc against the nation’s Hutu population, raping and slaughtering thousands. The Hutus only joined the bloodbath in mass after Kagame had a plane carrying Rwandan Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana shot down from the sky, creating a power vacuum and unleashing a torrent of vengeful Hutu militias to fill it with the blood of even more innocents. Even then, Kagame’s heroic RPF killed at least as many Hutus with both sides claiming hundreds of thousands of victims, all the while, Slick Willy Clinton suppressed his side of the atrocities and held off UN intervention until Kagame’s grip on power was iron tight. From his seat of power as Rwanda’s new strongman and the western media’s new darling, Paul Kagame has expanded his US-backed slaughter into the nearby Congo, killing millions more and securing a US stranglehold on the natural resources of a region heavily contested by Chinese influence.

This tragedy formed the template for America’s weaponization of the accusation of genocide on the world stage for decades to come. Anytime America wanted to declare another seemingly pointless war on another seemingly defenseless third world nation, our officials would merely utter the word Rwanda and pontificate about our god-given responsibility to protect. Anyone who even questioned this cracked logic could easily be tainted as a genocide denier and tossed upon the same heap as racist morons like David Duke. In many of these cases, America and its sorted allies actively provoked ethnic slaughter with acts of under-publicized mass murder of their very own, such as the infamous Srebrenica Massacre in Bosnia where Serbian militias killed some 8 thousand Bosnian males of fighting age. The part of this tragic story often omitted by western sources however is that the bloodbath only began after local Bosnian forces had slaughtered thousands of Serbs in nearby villages before conveniently abandoning the city of Srebrenica to be ransacked in revenge in order to justify an American bombing campaign that guaranteed a Bosnian victory.

In other cases, America simply made the genocide up as we did in nearby Kosovo in 1999, where hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were supposedly being slaughtered by the ever-villainous Serbs. It was only revealed by thorough international investigations after the brutal NATO bombing that the death toll had actually been closer to two thousand and many of them had been killed by our terrorist allies in the Al-Qaeda linked Kosovo Liberation Army who subsequently engaged in the ethnic cleansing of almost a quarter-million Serbs, Roma, and Jews once Washington had them installed in power as a dope slinging bullwork to Russian influence in the region.

The sickest thing about the American Empire’s history of crying genocide is that it turns humanity’s most despicable act into just another political football and Washington isn’t the only one who can kick it. There may very well be genocides raging in Xinjiang and Tigray, but as long as America is the one pointing the finger, the other side will always possess plausible deniability against such a lecherous liar. That’s because America doesn’t give a fuck about the Uyghurs or the Tigrayans or anyone else but themselves for that matter. There are dozens of campaigns of ethnic violence raging across the globe as we speak, from the jungles of Colombia to the mangrove swamps of Myanmar. America only chose to get self-righteous over Ethiopia and Xinjiang because they are both essential pieces of China’s Belt and Road initiative, a massive multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure project aimed at integrating the economies of Europe and Asia in a way that could further advance a new multi-polar Eurasian Century that poses an existential threat to American primacy.

Accusations of genocide should always be taken seriously, but when the primary source is a trigger-happy superpower that has literally turned both genocide and genocide accusation into a veritable industrial complex, it should also be taken with a hefty grain of salt, especially when another world war is the prescribed cure for the violence.