Good evening.
I first salute Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, legendary fighter for democracy, reconciliation and peace in Rwanda, the martyr republic of Africa’s Great Lakes.
The Prize Democracy and Peace, the 2025 edition of which is awarded to me this evening, and which also commemorates the International Women’s Rights Day, bears her famous name – and I am proud of it.
I also salute two great friends of Rwanda and Africa, the Canadian brothers John and Robin Philpot. They are the ones who sponsored my candidacy for this honor.
This happiness surprises me as I am in my 80th birthday. It suddenly took me back 35 years, to the fateful year 1990 when the Western Empire triumphed over the Soviet Union. The Empire was convinced it was the only master of the world, destined to reign without partner nor rival for 1000 years.
I was born in Mauritius, a jumble of archipelagos at the heart of the Indian Ocean commonly called ‘Mauritius Island’. It was a French, then English, slave-based plantation colony. I grew up under an apartheid system (Mauritius attained one person, one vote only in 1958).
I emigrated to Canada in 1970 after studying there as a Commonwealth scholar. In 1970, in Montreal, I started a 40-year career as an international journalist.
The first 20 years were anchored to the Global Post-WW2 order, within the legal framework based on the UN and shaped by the ‘Cold’ war. My priorities were the global south, overshadowed by the East-West conflict. My bearings were the rights of the Palestinian people, and those of the South African people.
As 1990 approached, I had the opportunity to make three memorable reporting trips: a tour of southern African ‘front line’ countries; a visit to Occupied Palestine during the 1st Intifada; and a tour of Namibia for the 1989 elections.
While I was there, the Berlin Wall fell, and all Western media left Windhoek for Berlin – except me! The end of the Cold War was expensive for the Global South – the protections of the UN order were weakened, and the ‘peace dividends’ went up in smoke. The West had a more urgent priority: unipolar hegemony.
The Empire fell under the reign of George Bush Sr, former CIA chief. His team quickly hunted Noriega from Panama, trapped Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, but left South Africa to its black majority (under continuing Economic Apartheid).
At the same time, the Empire prepared Tutsi refugees from Rwanda living in Uganda since the 1960s, and assembled and trained in the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), to invade and steal Rwanda from its democratic majority. The Empire, under Anglo-Saxon control, turned the RPF Rwanda into an ‘African Israel’ it has used since 1994 to destabilize the African Great Lakes region, and reset the systemic looting of the DRCongo after-Mobutu.
In 1990, a Canadian official of Rwandan Tutsi origin approached me to say the RPF was preparing to invade Rwanda from Uganda – and that it was counting on my support as a jounalist. I replied that it was madness. That history would not forgive the RPF for driving Rwanda into a civil war. But until October 1990, he came almost every week from Ottawa to Montreal to try to convince me.
Great Lakes Africa of the went from genocide in genocide, in Rwanda, Burundi and DRC, documented by Quebec filmmaker Yvan Patry. The mining linked to Rwanda and Uganda organized the looting of the Congo, while the Empire destroyed Yugoslavia.
In the absence of counterweights, and taking advantage of the absenteeism of Russia and China, the Empire accelerated its thrust by invoking the September 11 attacks as pretexts for aggressions against Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya …
This nihilist and triumphant vertigo lasted only a time – from 1990 to 2011. Analysts speak of the ‘unipôular moment’ of the Empire, whose momentum was countered by a rebalancing led by the awakening of China and Russia.
As early as 2011, the Empire wanted to destroy Syria as it had destroyed Libya. He asked the UN a ‘No Fly Zone’ against Syria. He struck a double Russian-Chinese veto with the Security Council. The NATO machine has derailed-and that is getting worse with the break between the United States and the European Union, and disoriented NATO …
There is more and better: Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa have founded the BRICS-which has become BRICS-Plus, a cooperation area of 10 states, with almost half of humanity and the quarter of the world’s PNB. Bearer of a multipolar dynamic, the BRICS is called to expand – possibly to the DRC, the ‘Brazil of Africa’.
It was in October 2024 that the Rwanda FPR regime relaunched its war of division and looting against its rich Congolese neighbor, started in 1994. These 30 years were those of genocides and ‘biblical’ evictions of the Hutue majority which was dispossessed under the governance of the Anglo-Saxon Empire.
Thirty years, it was the duration of the Mobutu regime in Kinshasa after the assassination of Lumumba by the Empire in 1961. Thirty years, it is a cycle, it is the end of the mandate granted to the RPF by the Empire-which itself is in decline, causing Kagame in its fall.
Driven by his bosses, Kagame revived the war via the rebels of the M23, as usual – but Africa has mobilized to defend the DRC and help the government of Tshisekedi to protect the interests of the Congo.
In 2025, no one was fooled: the M23 is just a lure to hide the expansionist ambitions of the Tutsis of the Great Lakes. It is an old monarchist, militarist and hegemonist aristocracy, but minority and anti-democratic.
Selon l’ONU, les effectifs militaires rwandais dans l’est du Congo sont passés de 4.000 hommes en décembre 2024 à 12.000 hommes en mars 2025. Ils occupent Goma et Bukavu, capitales du Nord et du Sud Kivu, chassant des centaines de milliers de Congolais de leurs foyers comme ‘déplacés internes’.
Permettez-moi de signaler que Goma et Bukavu furent les centres de mon dernier reportage de presse en 2009, avant ma retraite. Ce reportage fut facilité par la Commission Justice et Paix de l’Église congolaise – qui voit les guerres du FPR menées dans l’est, non pas comme des conflits ethniques, mais comme une résistance décoloniale du Congo.
Les responsables des Kivu m’ont parlé du FPR comme ‘Israel, pion de l’Empire, qui attaque ses voisins arabes avec impunité’.
Aujourd’hui l’Empire s’essouffle. Il se réduit comme une peau de chagrin. Alors que le Reste du monde se dynamise, et la multipolarité rassemble l’Eurasie, l’Afrique et les Amériques au sud du Rio Grande.
En Afrique se lève une nouvelle vague de décolonisation contre l’Occident, appuyée sur les BRICS. Aux SADC d’Afrique australe, et EAC d’Afrique de l’Est, s’ajoutent les alliances sahéliennes, du Sénégal jusqu’au Tchad, qui reprennent le contrôle de leurs ressources, et leur destin en mains. Et la RDC bénéficie du soutien de l’Union africaine et de toutes ses instances pour sa souveraineté et son intégrité.
L’Occident global, qui inclut le Japon et la Corée du Sud, ne représente que 13% de l’humanité (1 milliard sur 8, ou ‘le milliard doré’). La part du BRICS-Plus dans l’économie mondiale atteindra 45% en 2040, plus que le double de la part prévue du G7.
Le régime FPR du Rwanda est de plus en plus impopulaire en Occident. Le Parlement et l’Union européens ainsi que le Canada ont décrété des sanctions contre Kigali.
L’UE a suspendu son entente sur les achats des métaux au Rwanda, et gelé son appui militaire, budgétaire,et sécuritaire.
Canada has declared itself in solidarity with African peace efforts in the region (SADC, Luanda and Nairobi processes), and it has suspended all its discussions, public and private, with Kigali.
On February 13, 2025, the newspaper The Rwandan specified that the whole West, including the United Kingdom post-Brexit, revised its relations with Kigali, not hesitating to resort to financial and diplomatic sanctions.
The DRC is not foreign either to the potential of the BRICS-Plus-having participated in the 15th congress of August 2023 in Johannesburg.
President Tshisekedi told a journalist whom he preferred to deal with China and Russia rather than with the West. However, he has just offered Donald Trump America a bilateral agreement for the supply of rare strategic metals.
Like the rest of Africa and the world, he too understood that Paul Kagame is less and less useful for his bosses, and that he has become dispensable.
To militants of democracy, justice, truth and peace in Rwanda Martyr, and first of all to the great combatant Ingabiré victory Umuhoza, I say, in conclusion, and from the bottom of my heart, in Haitian Kreol: ‘Kenbe-la, pa Lagé’ (hold on, do not let go). In Kreol Morisyen, we say ‘tchombo, pa largué’!