“They killed Habyarimana because they knew he was the only one who could stop the Hutus from killing Tutsis. That is why, every day, I say that: the genocide was not planned by Hutus, it was planned by Tutsis: it was planned by the RPF. Even after the Interahamwe killed my wife, even after all the horrible things that have happened to me, I believe the Tutsis created the genocide. And for me it was a war between brothers: the Hutus had an army and the Tutsis had an army and there was fighting at every level.”i
Rwanda has a special place in genocide scholarship as one of only three acknowledged paradigmatic examples (the others being the Shoah and the Armenian holocaust). Vahakn Dadrian refers to ‘the three principle genocides’;ii Jones refers to three ‘“classic” genocides’;iii Levene calls them the ‘prototypical examples’.ivYet one would not normally expect a survivor of a ‘classic’ and ‘prototypical’ genocide to say that the planners of the genocide were the enemies of those who actually carried out the genocide. In what other case would a victim make that claim?
The narrative known by most Westerners is deliberately and pointedly distorted. Every fatuous overprivileged liberal hack will, as if by compulsion cite the racial slur inyenzi (cockroaches). The infamous Radio Mille Collines told people to kill the inyenzi. But somehow everyone neglects to mention that this was the name adopted by Tutsi guerillas for themselves in the 1960s. They called themselves cockroaches in reference to their own ineradicability. So this idea that this radio station simply called Tutsi vermin is actually a lie. That summarises their approach quite well. They try to shape the events into something as closely resembling the Shoah as possible by elision and miscontextualisation while attacking those who overstep the line as deniers. I am not going to excuse the actions of mass murderers or of propagandists at Radio Milles Collines who fomented violence against innocents, but the fears and instability without which these crimes would not have occurred were themselves fomented by Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and his Western backers. The violence of the “100 Days” was preceded by violence and it was followed by violence and further genocide.
We are meant to believe that some unexplained racial hatred simply exploded as if randomly, but the hatred and fear were the results of actual events not primitive tribalism. After the RPA invasion Rwanda’s Juvenal Habyarimana, who had many Tutsi friends and had appointed many as colleagues, increased racial tension as a way of using the threat of massacres as a bargaining chip with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).v As will be shown this was as tragic as it was ruthless, because the equally, or more, ruthless RPF knew that their only path to power lay over a mountain of corpses of their fellow Tutsivi – showing that the chauvinist Tutsi ideology which many of their number openly espousedvii was equally contingent. Ultimately, as with other genocides, the victims of this genocide were not victims of blind hatred, but victims of political machinations which fostered and harnessed hatred, and much of that was emanating from Washington DC.
As Hitler analogies and Munich analogies wear out from overuse, ‘genocide’ has become the keystone accusation in a new discourse of ‘humanitarian intervention’. A ‘Rwanda analogy’ on the dangers of inaction has replaced the ‘Munich analogy’ on appeasement. Of course, many historians will point out that, against the wills of their own peoples, the US and UK governments did a great deal more than to merely ‘appease’ Hitler,viii and similarly it is not US inaction, but rather the fact that the Clinton administration enforced inaction on others which became their most noted contribution to slaughter which occurred in Rwanda.ix So having prevented others from intervening to stop one of the greatest slaughters in history, the US begins an elaborate hand-wringing exercise in order to give itself license to intervene wherever else it likes. The resulting discourse of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and ‘responsibility to protect’ (or ‘R2P’x) is a direct attack on norms of state sovereignty which offer some protection for weak states against strong states.
The Rwanda genocide was significant and dramatic. In terms of human suffering it should rightly be remembered as one of the most horrific events of its time. But like the Democratic Kampuchea autogenocide before it, it was so unusual as to be patently useless as any form of paradigmatic model. In fact, it is probably no coincidence that atypical genocides are such a focus, and that it is they that have become fodder for the Hollywood vision of genocide. What happened in Rwanda has no parallels. The Shoah has been described as a “uniquely unique genocide” but it can be understood as having typical characteristics taken to atypical extremes, but the Rwanda genocide not in ferocity but in complexity and confusion. The Anglophone world has created a mythological Rwandan Holocaust with cartoon villains, victims and heroes. The US, in particular, wrings its hands over its inaction, but deliberate US actions played a significant role in causing the violence that took so many lives.
Of late the orthodox or as genocide scholar René Lemarchand would have it, the ‘politically correct’) interpretation Rwandan history has been brought into question in broader circles than previously. Recent elections have highlighted the questionable use of the criminal charges of genocide denial, most notably when leading opposition figure Victoire Ingabire was charged with ‘association with a terrorist group; propagating genocide ideology; negationism and ethnic divisionism.’ A month later, the lawyer who flew from the US to defend her was arrested and later proffered charges which included ‘denying and downplaying genocide through his publications and conferences,’ and ‘spreading rumours that are capable of threatening the security of the Rwandan people.’xi Late last year she was sentenced to 15 years in prison. A leaked draft of a UN report claims that if proven in court, actions testified to by victims of Rwandan forces in Congo/Zaire would constitute genocide.xii And perhaps most telling of all, Tony Blair has posted an opinion piece in the Guardian praising Rwanda as a “beacon of hope”. I am not being flippant when I say that praise from Blair, a personal associate of fellow war criminal Paul Kagame, should be read as an admission of oppression and injustice.
There is some acknowledgement in the literature that Rwanda was an unusual case of genocide in that there was genuine fear amongst the perpetrators. There is even a significant article in the Journal of Genocide Research supporting the survivor testimony above to the effect that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) provoked genocide.xiii In another article René Lemarchand writes: ‘To put it baldly: Jews did not invade Germany with the massive military and logistical support of a neighboring state….’xiv But to extend the analogy, this was a genocide in which Jews were massacring Germans, in which Himmler was born a Jew, in which Hitler had Jews in his cabinet and as close friends, and in which the most celebrated rescue of Jews was carried out, in part, by the Wehrmacht. All of these factors tend to be elided in the orthodox literature, and the only reasonably contextualised narrative is found in the writings of those who are, more or less, deniers of genocide. I don’t agree with the genocide deniers, to me they are ignoring the elephant in the room, which is to say the ample evidence that there was a dramatic mass-murder of Tutsi as such in Rwanda which constitutes one of the most deadly genocides of history. Those who support the orthodox interpretation, on the other hand, deny the existence of any sort of room and call the elephant a camel.
The Genocide: Some Questions and Answers.
Former UN special rapporteur on genocide Keith Harmon Snow, in an article that won him the a Project Censored award for suppressed is news, writes, ‘Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, that’s clear. There was large-scale butchery of Tutsis. And Hutus. Children and old women were killed. There was mass rape. There were many acts of genocide. But was it genocide or civil war?’xv There are two things to consider here: First, should the events of 1994 be referred to as a genocide or as a civil war in which a genocide occurred? Second, were there mutual genocides of Hutu and Tutsi in 1994, in short a ‘double genocide’?
In the first instance, I believe any given set of events should only be characterised as a genocide if the majority of victims are victims of genocide. In this case, there are simply no trustworthy sources available to make that determination. For example, in ‘testing the double genocide thesis’ Philip Verwimp finds from household sampling that 79 of 138 deaths in 1994 (57.2%) were Tutsi.xvi Given that Tutsi represented only 8.4% of the sample (which, interestingly enough, is exactly the percentage of Tutsi in the 1991 census),xvii this certainly proves genocide. The problems with this are that the sampling is from central and southern Rwanda and that it avoids any killing before 1994. Verwimp admits on both counts that this avoids counting the victims of RPF massacres, but explains that ‘very few scholars will use the word genocide to describe the killings committed by the RPF before, during, and after 1994.’xviii So far from actually ‘testing the double genocide thesis’ Verwimp actually makes an a priori exclusion of the possibility. In terms of the problem of whether the bulk of those killed in the period were Tutsi we are left with no answers except that, given that there is such an evident bias in sampling, one might tentatively infer that the bulk of victims were not Tutsi. According to Harmon Snow: ‘Professors Christian Davenport (U. Maryland) and Allan Stam (Dartmouth) published research in 2004 that showed that the killings began with a small, dedicated cadre of Hutu militiamen, but quickly cascaded in an ever-widening circle, with Hutu and Tutsi playing the roles of both attackers and victims. Their team of researchers also found that only 250,000 people were killed, not the 800,000 plus advanced by the RPF, and that for every Tutsi killed two Hutus were killed. The research unleashed a firestorm: the media jumped on them for denying genocide.’xixShould it then be considered a civil war? That too is problematic due to the fact that only a minuscule percentage of those killed were combatants.
As for the double genocide thesis, this is nearly as difficult. Certainly before April 1994 there are good reasons to believe that RPF massacres were indiscriminate in the matter of ethnicity. Largely this seems to be because they were primarily interested in ‘refugee generation.’ According to Harmon Snow ‘The RPF practiced a scorched earth policy: they did not want to have to administer a territory or deal with local populations. The RPF displaced people, shelled the IDP camps, and marched on. They killed some captives, buried them in mass graves or burned corpses, and used survivors as porters to transport ammunition, dig trenches or cook their meals.’xx Sometimes this involved the massacre of Tutsis, as Joan Casòliva and Joan Carrero report: ‘In some regions there were attacks and killings directed against the Tutsi population. Principal amongst these were those against the Bagogwe, a Tutsi sub-group from the north, in January 1991, and against the Tutsis of Bugesera in March of 1992.’xxi Other reports, particularly from the ‘100 days’ period in which enormous numbers of Tutsis were being massacred, suggest that RPF massacres were directed against Hutu, which may well be true but might equally be a presumption. On the whole, however, the ‘double genocide thesis’ is somewhat of a red herring. Structurally, as I will show, it was more the case that having ‘provoked’ the Tutsi genocide, Rwanda’s RPF controlled Government of National Unity (GNU) exploited the initial genocide to launch a subsequent genocide of Hutu.
The initial RPA invasion of Rwanda was in effect an invasion by the Ugandan military with US backing. RPA forces were uniformed Ugandan military using Ugandan arms which were supplied throughout the civil war thanks to an increase of US and UK military aid after the invasion.xxii At this time Tutsi refugees enjoyed a stable privileged position in Ugandaxxiii while those who remained in Rwanda, or had subsequently returned, formed the ‘majority of economic operators’.xxiv The RPF attack intentionally pre-empted Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s moves towards allowing the peaceful return of all Tutsi refugees, because the RPF felt that this would be of detriment to their plan to take control of Rwanda.xxv Uganda’s military dictator, Yoweri Museveni (whom Madeleine Albright spoke as ‘a beacon of hope for Africa’),xxvi feigned shock and surprise that a massive proportion of his military forces had mutinied, but continued supplying them with arms supplied to him mainly by the US. The orthodox explanation, ascribed to even by Kuperman, is that he was going to disarm the RPA but had his feelings hurt when Habyarimana publicly accused him of involvement.xxvii In fact Museveni was deeply complicit. He even gave a speech to his military officers which, in Philpot’s words, ‘reads like a blueprint for the invasion and war that some of his officers were soon to conduct in Rwanda….’xxviii In it he said:
We had to reject the concept of ‘a small but efficient’ army…. This notion is nothing but suicidal. Insurgents do not have to do much, but they will have succeeded in their devices if they simply terrorize the population, stop them from producing wealth for the country, dismantle the network of civil administration and block communications. Once the state does not stop insurgents from doing this on a large scale, the country will rapidly lose income and find it impossible to support the army… Insurgents will be in a position to create a situation of strategic stalemate or even to launch a strategic counteroffensive to seize state power.xxix
This is a far cry from normal asymmetrical guerrilla warfare, instead it is a way for a small force (but not a noticeably inferior one) to effect an invasion and occupation of a country with a hostile population in a manner that would normally take a large superiority of forces. The FAR was a government force vulnerable to the degradation of the Rwandan state, while the RPA was superior in arms and had invulnerable external supply and a safe rear area in Uganda. Accordingly they depopulated Rwanda’s most productive agricultural region.
Two and a half years after the invasion, only 1800 people lived in an area of northern Rwanda that previously had a population of 800,000. As the “liberators” advanced, the Hutu peasants fled. By April 1993, Rwanda had more than one million internal refugees. That means one million farmers (one seventh of the total population) who are no longer producing on the most fertile lands in the country. It also means one million people to house and feed, and hundreds of thousands of children absent from school which caused great anxiety among parents.
The Rwandan Minister of Agriculture, Husbandry and Forests in 1992, James Gasana, described the situation in the war torn Byumba prefecture north of Kigali in a book published in 2002. “A prefecture that had been the country’s breadbasket now had the largest population in need of welfare and the highest mortality rate due to malnutrition.”xxx
In Kigali and elsewhere large numbers of clandestine RPF cells operated, often using ‘human rights’ NGOs as cover.xxxi They carried out sabotage, bombings of public places, and an eliticidal assassination campaign in order to terrorise the population and destabilise the government.xxxii At the same time the Rwandan government was also destabilised by what amounted to an attack by the US dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the ‘donor institutions’ of the West, who demanded that, in the midst of civil war, Rwanda must dismantle its interventionist state apparatus.xxxiii During this time the RPF avoided a peaceful settlement, despite increasingly large and clearly desperate concessions by Habyarimana and despite the fact that they knew that Tutsi massacres were an almost inevitable outcome of the growing chaos and fear.xxxiv According to testimony obtained by French prosecutor Jean-Louis Bruguiere, RPF leader Paul Kagame was consistent in telling RPA troops that he had no intention of honouring peace accords.xxxv
Then, in what one RPF defector described as ‘a macabre plan to drive the country into chaos’ the RPF assassinated Habyarimana.xxxvi A UN report describes the assassination merely as ‘a plane crash’.xxxvii Similarly Adam Jones notes only that the plane ‘was shot down’ without addressing the impolitic issue of who exactly shot it down.xxxviii Kuperman merely notes that ‘Hutu extremists’ blamed the RPF.xxxix For Lemarchand, writing in 2002, ‘responsibility remains a mystery’.xl Even for the earlier pieces this is an act of willful blindness. In 1997 an ICTR team recommended that RPF leaders be prosecuted (although the report was quashed and the lead investigator told to burn his notes, it survived and is now part of the ICTR record).xli In 2003 the ICTR itself announced plans to indict RPF leaders, but the US and UK had the chief prosecutor, who announced these plans, replaced. By 2005 a Spanish court which indicted 40 members of the RPF/GNU leadership for war crimes and crimes against humanity cited RPF responsibility for the assassination.xlii Finally, in France, Bruguiere issued a detailed indictment of 9 RPF leaders in 2006.xliii
The RPF decision to pursue violent means was not surprising. By 1993 their strategy of terror and massacre had driven away the support they initially received from Rwandan opposition partiesxliv and they had been handed a resounding defeat in election in September of 1992, showing that they could not hope to gain control of Rwanda by democratic means.xlv
What ensued definitely involved a massive genocidal slaughter of Tutsis, primarily by the Interahamwe and other militias. However, the fact that the Interahamwe leader was a Tutsi/former Tutsi, and other members were Tutsi including a district president, should be a source of considerable interest for scholars, but it is seldom remarked. Levene does mention it in his introductory volume, but only to stress its lack of import.xlvi
Beyond the fact that there were large scale massacres, little is said that is credible. Consider that there were only 650,000-800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda.xlvii Most accounts would have it that the vast majority (around 80%) were killed. This is not inconceivable, but it seems highly unusual for a 100 day period of largely civilian orchestrated massacres – especially considering that through that time the Tutsi-led RPF controlled ever more of the country. Naturally, the number of Tutsi brings into question some of the high-end estimates of total mortality. For example, Adam Jones gives the following interesting snippet:
About 80 percent of victims died in a “hurricane of death . . . between the second week of April and the third week of May,” noted Gérard Prunier. “If we consider that probably around 800,000 people were slaughtered during that short period . . . the daily killing rate was at least five times that of the Nazi death camps.”xlviii
Further, ‘[o]n April 20, at the parish of Karama in Butare prefecture, “between thirty-five and forty-three thousand people died in less than six hours.”‘xlix For someone like Jones who, no doubt, has read many accounts of mass killing, it should be obvious that ill-equipped militia led civilians could not round up such a number and could not physically kill so many in such a short space of time using small arms and machetes. Nor does anyone explain how this occurred without the same sort of compunction and reticence which people ordinarily feel on some level when it comes to taking human life – especially when in close proximity, especially for non-military, and especially when it is someone who has not killed before.l Although some writers do delve into the factors that caused 175,000 to 210,000 to participate in murder,li I can’t help but feel that such uncritical acceptance of hyperbole indicates in many a racially informed vision of orgiastic bloodletting. As for Jones’s source, it is an organisation called African Rights. According to Philpot they were involved in financing the RPF,lii and, he later quotes, Professor Filip Reyntjens: “As for African Rights, the political and historical analyses made by that group have a flagrant pro-RPF bias that is incompatible with the mission and code of conduct of any serious association devoted to promoting human rights.”liii
As surely as there were massacres of Tutsi by the Interahamwe and others, there were also massacres by the RPA during the ‘100 days’, the extent of which are likewise impossible to determine at this stage. Even Roméo Dallaire did not deny this, and originally denied any co-ordinated genocide:
On September 14, 1994, on CBC’s French language magazine, Le Point, General Roméo Dallaire answered the following question from a Rwandan who lived in Quebec City: “In your opinion, was there a genocide in Rwanda, that is the carrying out of a plan to eliminate ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda?”
“I would say there was a national genocide, a genocide based on a political basis, not only ethnic,” replied Roméo Dallaire. “Many Hutus and many Tutsis were killed… I think that the explosion we saw could not have been planned. I don’t think that anybody could ever have planned an explosion of that magnitude.”liv
Bear in mind that Dallaire was anything but neutral:
“Romeo Dallaire was very close to the RPF”, says Gilbert Ngijol, political assistant to Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh. “He let the RPF get arms. He allowed UNAMIR troops to train RPF soldiers. United Nations troops provided the logistics for the RPF. They even fed them.”
The [UN] Secretary General’s Special Representative to Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh confirmed this when he broke 10 years of silence regarding Rwanda in an interview published in Africa International. “In the field, he abandoned his work as military commander and got involved in politics; he violated the principle of UNAMIR’s neutrality and became the objective ally of one of the parties in the conflict.”lv
There are also suggestions that RPF massacres have wrongly been blamed on Interahamwe:
The Belgian Marcel Gerin concluded … that in 1994 he and his wife were left trapped by the Rwandan war. They were witnesses to the indiscriminate killings in the area they lived in and they were able to confirm, through the fact of having been held prisoners, how those who apparently seemed to be Interahamwe militia were no more than mercenaries in the pay of the Tutsi army. … Although they state that in their residential zone the Interahamwes killed a thousand people in the church, the majority of the massacres were carried out with the arrival of those mercenaries who killed whoever they met without any ethnic discrimination, in a clear operation of whole-territory cleansing. Whatever images of the situation emerged gave one to believe that the authors were the Hutu Interahamwe militia. Santos Ganuza, a Navarrese missionary, was the rector of the Kiziguro parish, also in the east of the country. He says:
“For many years I was the parish rector in the east of the country. In 1994 the Interahamwearrived and killed some 1,000 Tutsis who had taken refuge in the church without my being able to do anything to prevent it. A few days later, the Tutsi military arrived and killed 10,000 Hutus. The Western world’s televisions broadcast pictures of these Hutus assassinated in my parish, identifying them as Tutsis”.lvi
Deniers, Distorters and Hypocrites
Among those who are ‘more or less’ deniers of genocide are Edward Herman and David Peterson. In The Politics of Genocide the 18 pages which they devote to events in Rwanda and what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo have provoked considerable criticism.lvii The problem I have is that Herman and Peterson never actually come out and say that there was never a genocidal mass-murder of Tutsi. Instead they imply as much with statements to the effect that the orthodox ‘propaganda line on Rwanda … turned victim and perpetrator upside down.’lviii Perhaps I read too much into this lack of a positive stance because the authors themselves do not counter allegations of genocide denial in responding to Caplan and to a short piece by Adam Jones.lix On the other hand, they quote with approval a study which found that 300,000 Tutsi were killed, around 50% of the population.lx How that could have happened in a matter of 100 days and not constitute genocide is rather hard to fathom
It is also the Rwanda/DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) section of the book which I find most problematic. The authors have no problem in levelling very accurate criticisms of the orthodox narrative. On the other hand they often overstep the mark. For example, all of the complexities of Ugandan and Anglo-US support for Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front, which are detailed below, are reduced to the statement that the RPF was ‘a wing of the Ugandan army’.lxi Perhaps it is unfortunate that one cannot make such a statement baldly when it probably gives a perfectly accurate understanding of the underlying situation, but it is nevertheless a prima facie falsehood. This leaves the authors open to critiques like that of Gerald Caplan who uses this to mock the very idea that the RPF was effectively a proxy force for the US.lxii Interestingly, Herman and Peterson are able to refute this by citing Caplan’s own earlier work,lxiii but that still does not make the RPF a literal and overt ‘wing’ of the Ugandan army. In fact, authors undermining their own arguments is a very minor matter. More important is the fact that it is symptomatic of a narrative of events which is the mirror-image of that which it opposes. The authors over-simplify in this matter and others because they, as much as their opponents, seem driven to produce a childish vision of simplistic moral significance.
The whole polarised debate over Rwanda reveals something very rotten pervading the discourse of genocide and genocide denial. There is an intellectual reason for avoiding the attachment of a particular moral weight to the concept of genocide in that it can only confuse analysis. There is also, however, a psychological reason. The moral weight given to genocide also seems to produce what can only be described as an atavistic or childish manichaean narrative of victim and perpetrator populations as essences of good and evil. The dangers of this can be seen in the strikingly similar, but diametrically opposed, narratives produced by Adam Jones with regard to RPF killings of Hutu, and that of Herman and Peterson with regard to Interahamwe and/or Forces Armées Rwandaise (FAR) killings of Tutsi.
When it comes to the RPF led slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hutu, Jones is very keen on emphasising the agency of the ‘Hutugénocidaires‘ who had, in his interesting turn of phrase, ‘staged a mass evacuation’. Translated, this means that millions fled in the face of the RPF takeover of Rwanda. When the RPF led an invasion of Zaire (later the Democratic Republic of Congo) it was because the génocidaires had ‘reconstituted themselves as a terrorist force, brutally controlling the refugee population and launching attacks against Tutsis in both Congo and Rwanda.’ They invaded again because the man they themselves had put into power in Kinshasa ‘fell under the sway of Hutu representatives in Kinshasa, supporting renewed cross-border killing operations in Rwanda.’ Jones writes this even though he acknowledges that both Rwanda and Uganda ‘have experienced miraculous leaps in their export of key commodities – diamonds, gold, timber, and coltan (an ore used in computer chips and cell phones) – at levels that exceed total domestic production, providing vivid evidence of the pillaging.’ Jones uses génocidaire to mean anyone who was in a position of power in Rwanda before the RPF takeover. More than that he means the ‘double-plus bad’ people. He doesn’t concern himself with issues like which among them actually were guilty of committing genocide. The impression he gives is that it is the evil génocidaires who are ultimately responsible for the RPF having entered Zaire/DRC and having massacred hundreds of thousands while Rwandan sponsored Congolese rebels, according to Jones himself (citing a 1999 UN report) were “running torture centers that amounted to ‘extermination’ sites.”lxiv Much of his contextualisation of Rwandan aggression and genocide is exactly that given by the Rwandan government. Thus it is deeply ironic when Jones writes of Herman and Peterson: “Herman and Peterson none-too-subtly adopt Hutu Power’s justification for slaughtering Tutsi civilians: that they constituted a ‘fifth column,’ indistinguishable from the invading RPF. This casual parroting of the most virulent Hutu-extremist propaganda effectively blames Rwanda’s Tutsis for their own extermination. It is a disgraceful ploy, and by itself it casts Herman and Peterson’s ‘analysis into utter disrepute.”lxv
Herman and Peterson are more blatantly partisan than Jones. Despite apparently believing that hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were slaughtered, as mentioned above, they create a simple narrative of good Hutus and bad Tutsis. It is worth quoting Jones at length:
“Would it not have been incredible for Kagame’s Tutsi forces to conquer Rwanda in 100 days, and yet the number of minority Tutsi deaths be greater than the number of majority Hutu deaths by a ratio of something like three-to-one? Surely then we would have to count Rwanda 1994 as the only country in history where the victims of genocide triumphed over those who committed genocide against them, and wiped the territory clean of its ‘genocidaires’ at the same time.”
Of course, no mainstream authority has ever claimed that the Tutsi “victims of genocide” in Rwanda in 1994 were drawn from “Kagame’s Tutsi forces.” The latter were invading from Uganda, as Herman and Peterson themselves emphasize. They were outsiders with no connection to, and apparently no particular sympathy for, the Tutsi civilian population of Rwanda. It was the Rwandan Tutsi population which, by all serious accounts, bore the overwhelming brunt of the Hutu Power genocide.
So Herman and Peterson’s mocking reference to the “minority Tutsi” population supposedly bearing the brunt of the massacres, then assuming “complete control” of Rwanda, is pure sleight-of-hand. To repeat the indisputable: it was the foreign-based RPF that took “complete control” in July 1994 and “wiped the territory clean of its ‘genocidaires’”….lxvi
It seems likely that the understandable anger that Herman and Peterson feel at the misuse of accusations of atrocities, fuelling far greater atrocities, causes an over-identification with the villainised attacked in Western propaganda. However, this should not be a reason for excusing the crimes committed by members of a denigrated group against members of another group, even if that group has members who are even greater perpetrators of atrocities. Caplan evinces great indignation that Herman and Peterson should call him a ‘genocide facilitator’ when he has ‘spent the past decade immersed in genocide prevention,’lxvii but the description aptly fits Caplan and many others who may genuinely believe that they are working to prevent genocide. Even Jones, who tries very hard to avoid siding with the predominant discourse of apologism and denial of Western crimes, is pulled by emotionality and the very weight of the orthodoxy into the position of minimising the most deadly genocides perpetrated by recidivists who are still very powerful and emphasising the crimes of official enemies of the West who no longer pose a threat to anyone. As Herman and Peterson write regarding Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction:
Jones’s chapter on Bosnia and Kosovo also flies in the face of his claim that he “adopt[s] a comparative approach that does not elevate particular genocides over others, except to the extent that scale and intensity warrant special attention.” Measured by “scale and intensity,” the civil wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo were not remotely in the same league as the U.S. assault on Vietnam, the killings in Indonesia (in the mid-1960s, during and after the overthrow of Sukarno), the two phases of the Iraq genocide (the sanctions era and then war of aggression-occupation), or the still ongoing invasion-occupation of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Furthermore, his treatment of numbers in Bosnia is deceptive. Jones asserts that “a quarter of a million people died in Bosnia and Herzegovina” in the years up to the Dayton accords in late 1995. But by the time Jones wrote this, two important establishment studies had shown that the total number of war-related deaths on all sides, soldiers as well as civilians, totalled approximately 100,000. Of these deaths, some 40,233 are now reported as non-soldiers (39,199 civilians, and 1,035 policemen). So Jones suppresses information that would show the earlier standard claim of 250,000 deaths to have been an inflation of wartime propaganda.lxviii
Simply glancing at the contents page of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction confirms that Jones comes nowhere close to basing his emphasis on ‘scale and intensity’. A chapter is dedicated to Bosnia and Kosovo, while none of the larger genocides mentioned above get similar treatment.
With regard to Rwanda, there is no question, however, that killings occurred on a scale warranting considerable attention, the problem is rather, as I have written the creation of a highly politicised mythological narrative of the genocidal killing of Tutsi which is problematic. Here, once again, Jones is merely one of the better of an extremely bad lot. The ‘Rwandan holocaust’ is rather like the mythic and equally political creation based on the Shoah which Norman Finkelstein calls ‘The Holocaust’: ‘Like most ideologies, it bears a connection, if tenuous, with reality.’lxixFinkelstein’s ‘The Holocaust’ has its origins in imperial geopolitics: ‘Impressed by Israel’s overwhelming display of force, the United States moved to incorporate it as a strategic asset. (Already before the June war the United States had cautiously tilted toward Israel as the Egyptian and Syrian regimes charted an increasingly independent course in the mid-1960s.) Military and economic assistance began to pour in as Israel turned into a proxy for US power in the Middle East.’lxx In Rwanda the geopolitical imperatives existed before the genocide actually took place, and the resulting myth, which would have it that what happened in Rwanda was very similar to the Shoah, has a far more tenuous connection with reality than the mythical ‘Holocaust’.
Kagame’s “Beacon of Hope”
After the RPF takeover the Tutsi genocide was exploited to create what ‘even Britain’s Economist has called “the most repressive in Africa.”‘lxxi This has been recognised by some in the genocide field including Kasaija Phillip Apuuli,lxxii and Lars Waldorf.lxxiii The GNU claimed that it governed a ‘criminal population’.lxxiv According to the GNU themselves, there were 109,499 imprisoned by 2000 awaiting genocide charges.lxxv They widely accused any political opponents of being génocidaires and when that label ceased its usefulness, switched to accusing people of ‘divisionism’, ‘negationism’ and ‘genocide ideology.’lxxvi The latter, of which the GNU accuses those such as the famed rescuer Paul Rusesabagina for having denounced RPF atrocities and two of their own government’s former Prime Ministers, now attracts a 10 to 50 year prison sentence in Rwanda.lxxvii
Though many thousands suffer terribly due to this form of genocide exploitation, this pales in comparison with the hundreds of thousands who died when the RPF used the Tutsi genocide to launch their own genocide. One might think that this would be of considerable interest to genocide scholars, but apparently it is not. When the RPF took over Rwanda 2 million people fled, 1.2 million of them into Zaire.lxxviii Meanwhile, the US was advancing certain plans:
At the very moment the tragic refugee operation was underway, French journalist Jean Daniel was meeting the assistant Secretary of State, John Kornblum, in his Washington office. His account of that meeting is hair-raising.
“France? We want to get along with France. Chirac? A man of good will. We like him. But: (1) no question of keeping Boutros-Ghali; (2) no question of keeping Mobutu in power… … Let’s get together again in six months time. We’ll see if I am mistaken. Watch out for Africa: France has it all wrong. The strong man is in Uganda, not in Kinshasa.”
In his own words, Jean Daniel left that meeting “dumbfounded by the cynical detailing of events to come, and the arrogance of the vocabulary used”lxxix
Kornblum was prophetic. To revisit Jones’s orthodox rendition:
Hutu génocidaires staged a mass evacuation of populations under their control, across the Congolese border to the city of Goma. Ironically, it was this humanitarian crisis that galvanized the world, not the genocide against Tutsis. Ironically, too, the outside aid that flooded in was instrumental in permitting the génocidaires to reconstitute themselves as a terrorist force, brutally controlling the refugee population and launching attacks against Tutsis in both Congo and Rwanda.
In the face of this threat, in 1997 Rwanda assisted the overthrow of the Mobutu regime by Laurent Désiré Kabila….lxxx
Jones doesn’t bother with details such as how or why a campaign against some guerillas turned into the invasion of the massive country the DRC – then known as Zaire.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees were killed or starved to death with 50% of the victims being under 15 years of age.lxxxi A UN report on the genocide mysteriously dropped the use of the word in its final draft. ‘In the UN it is explained that ‘following deep discussions’ in New York the report’s authors ‘themselves’ decided to retract the term ‘genocide’.’lxxxii It is reasonable to expect that the more recently leaked draft UN report on the genocide was leaked because it too was unlikely to be released in unadulterated form. As of the time of this writing it seems that the report may never be released in any form. Meanwhile, Western interests were amply served. As Philpot puts it:
It has been said that the invasion of Rwanda by Ugandan troops in 1990 was aimed at Kinshasa not Kigali. The war that has followed in the Congo and the scramble by Western corporations for control of the vast Congolese natural resources makes that interpretation very plausible. …
Since the war began in the Congo in 1996, the rush of American, Belgian, Canadian, British and French corporations for diamonds and gold and other natural resources in the region has been widely documented and denounced.lxxxiii
Despite the space I have devoted to it, this is by no means a full account of just how problematic the Tutsi genocide/’Rwandan genocide’ is as a paradigmatic exemplar of genocide, less still of the role of Western complicity and of hegemonic distortion of unwanted truth. My point is that, for all of their seeming ignorance, genocide scholars know enough to know that the events of 1994 in Rwanda do not warrant inclusion as one of the three main genocides of the 20th century, yet somehow none challenges that. Jones even as much as accuses François Mitterand of genocide denial:
The president (François Mitterrand) of the same French state that prosecuted Robert Faurisson not only actively supported Rwanda’s génocidaires – before, during, and after the 1994 catastrophe – but when asked later about the genocide, responded: “The genocide or the genocides? I don’t know what one should say!” As Gérard Prunier notes, “this public accolade for the so-called ‘theory of the double genocide’ [i.e., by Tutsis against France’s Hutu allies, as well as by Hutus against Tutsis] was an absolute shame.” It advanced a key thesis of genocide deniers: that the violence was mutual or defensive in nature.lxxxiv
But though Jones equates Mitterand’s failure to unequivocally toe the line with denial, he himself makes the observation that in the former Yugoslavia genocidal acts were ‘implemented in systematic fashion – primarily, but not only, by Serb military and paramilitary forces.’lxxxv The mythical ‘Rwandan holocaust’ must be defended stridently, not so much because the construction of the genocidal mass-murder of Tutsi is tenuous (I think there is considerable uncertainty about that issue) but because even if the central events of the myth are all portrayed accurately, the events surrounding them cannot be mentioned. Why? Because the RPF were acting as agents of the US and they ‘provoked’ one genocide and committed another, bringing death to anything between 450,000 and 1.5 million people. Along with Uganda they committed 3 acts of aggression, described at Nuremberg as ‘the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’lxxxvi Those acts of aggression have brought about 10 million deaths or more. This makes it even more imperative that we view the RPF as heroic leaders of a victimised people – the ‘Jews of Africa’. Why? Because if it is admitted that Museveni and Kagame are war criminals then we are brought one step closer to having to admit that Albright, Clinton, Bush and Blair (to name a few) are guilty of crimes far beyond the scale of which Jean-Paul Akayesu or those in Rwanda have been convicted.
The discourse of the ‘Rwanda holocaust’ suffers from exactly the same selective failure to ask or answer the obvious questions that afflicts the scholarly discourse about US genocides. As Orwell has his character Syme (who ‘sees too clearly and speaks too plainly’) say: ‘Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’lxxxvii
On Genocide 