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TOPIC: rwanda

In The News

Putin Goes To Belarus, Thai Warship Sinks, World Cup Front Page

👋 Dumêlang!*

Welcome to Monday, where Vladimir Putin heads to Belarus amid reports the neighboring country may join Russia’s war against Ukraine, 31 are missing as a Thai warship sinks during a storm, and we see how Argentina’s World Cup victory looks on the front page. Meanwhile, also in Argentina, Agencias Presentes profiles Ana Belén Kim, a rising star in Latin America's electronic music club scene — daughter of conservative Korean immigrants.

[*Northern Sotho, South Africa]

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How Rich Western Countries Pay To Send Refugees Away

Western countries are shipping refugees to poorer nations in exchange for cash.

The UK government was due to begin its first deportation flight to remove asylum-seekers to the East African country of Rwanda on June 14, 2022, exactly two months after signing the UK-Rwanda agreement. The asylum-seekers were from several war-torn and politically unstable countries, including Syria, Sudan and Iran.

Each year, thousands of people – many fleeing repressive governments or poverty – attempt to cross the English Channel in fragile boats in the hope of starting a new life in the UK.

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Syria, Victim Of Western Errors Of The Recent Past

We should not be proud of of the insufficient response against the Damascus regime, but total inaction would be even worse.

-Analysis-

PARIS — When it comes to interventions, military as well as humanitarian, things work in cycles. The massacres in the African Great Lakes region in 1994 played a decisive role in the U.S. decision to intervene in Kosovo five years later. You could perhaps even factor in the 1994 release of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. I still remember a conversation I had at the time in Washington, a few days before the intervention took place, with a senior American official. "We don't like people being forcibly put on trains in Europe over here," he told me. "It brings back bad memories."

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From Rwanda To Kenya, Beyond The Game Of Thrones In Africa

-Analysis-

"If I have been unable to mentor a successor or successors that should be the reason I should not continue as president. It means that I have not created capacity for a post-me Rwanda. I see this as a personal failure."

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Rwanda
Evariste Mahamba

Rwandan And Congolese Youth United Against Stereotypes Of Genocide

Though peace is far secure between the Democratic Republic Of Congo and Rwanda, organized efforts to bring their youth together are multiplying.

GOMA — "The wound will not heal as long as the knife keeps twisting," reads a profession of faith by four young Congolese and Rwandan artists trying to shatter stereotypes between the two neighboring peoples of the Great Lakes region.

Through their group, Simama Africa, they mobilized some 30 young people from both countries for a day of reflection last month at the Protestant Welcome Center in Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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Rwanda
Chloé Hecketsweiler

African Startup Hub, Rwanda Attracts Ubers And Universities

KIGALI — About a 20-minute drive from the Rwandan capital of Kigali, there's a barren road that leads to a construction site amid cornfields and banana trees. A single blue sign from the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation indicates the entrance to the location, which stands at the top of a hill. There, across a stretch of red earth, a hundred workers finish constructing the first building of the "Kigali Innovation City".

By mid-2017, the site is slated be home to a offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University, the first African campus for the American higher education institution.

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Rwanda
Pierre Lepidi

The Poop On How Rwanda Turned Prison Feces Into Energy

Overrun with prisoners sentenced for their roles in the country's 1994 genocide, Rwanda had to find a way to deal with its massive prison waste and reduce energy costs. It managed both with a biogas system.

RWAMAGANA — They're sitting on the floor in close ranks, facing the door. There's about a hundred of them. In their orange uniforms, most of them barefooted, the convicts are waiting under a scorching sun, waiting to be counted and re-counted before entering Rwamagana's penitentiary, the biggest prison in Rwanda.

Among the 8,597 prisoners crammed inside its high walls, more than half are still being imprisoned for crimes they committed during the genocide that killed more than 800,000 people, most of them Tutsi, between April and July 1994. During the commemorations that will officially end on July 4 but also on billboards and on television, the word kwibua, or "remember," is everywhere.

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Geopolitics
Jean-Philippe Rémy

In Burundi, Where Anti-Government Protests Are Tamed With Guns

BUJUMBURA — When she goes out alone of Burundi's capital, Valerie has started wearing trousers in case she has to run or is dragged to the ground. On this day, Bujumbura is sunny with a light breeze coming off Lake Tanganyika — still her heart is beating fast.

Valerie (not her real name) is always bracing herself for the "violence and blows" she anticipates will come from security forces, just like the last protest she attended, when women who were already on the ground were kicked in the face, the back, all over their bodies.

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Botswana
Christian Putsch

Three African States That Are Doing It Right

John Kerry had some friendly words to say at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit held in Washington last month. The U.S. Secretary of State flattered participants by noting that the discussions were very different from those a decade ago when the continent's crises had pushed Economist magazine to characterize Africa as the "hopeless continent."

In the late 1990s, the region had suffered another economic crisis. Then a senator from Massachusetts, Kerry spearheaded legislation to supply Africa with medicine to combat the HIV-AIDS epidemic, which had become something of a symbol for the continent's woes.

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Rwanda
Philippe Bernard

France's Moral Obligation To Open Its Archives On Rwanda

-OpEd-

PARIS — From Vichy France to the Algerian War, the demand that France “open the archives” resonates every time the country struggles with one of its “pasts that don’t pass.” Twenty years after the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi people, researchers are once again singing this refrain, especially in light of the provocative declarations from Rwandan President Paul Kagame accusing France of involvement in the tragedy.

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Rwanda
Fanny Kaneza

Sons Of Rwanda Genocide Rapes Hunt Down Their Fathers

KIGALI — The shocking thought is said out loud, and repeated. "I can only be relieved when I kill my father." The 19-year-old who calls himself DG seethes with rage when talking about his father. "He's a coward, a torturer who doesn't deserve anything but death," he insists.

The truth about his conception, birth and upbringing have scarred this young man in the deepest of ways. During the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, DG's mother was only 17. Members of the government-backed militia Interahamwe slaughtered most of her family. One of them however "protected" her and took her with him. From the very first night, he raped her. And thus began months of violence and misery.

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