On February 27, 2024, I joined a panel discussion on the podcast Aesthetic Resistance (episode 100). We discussed a wide range of topics, but after the session was over, I could see that all of them were connected by a single theme: dispossession. Whether it was genocide in Gaza, genocide in Congo and Rwanda, or homelessness in Los Angeles, the theme was conflict over housing, land, and the right to live and work in a healthy human community—not in an open-air prison like Gaza, not in a refugee camp in Eastern Congo, and not in a car parked overnight in a shopping mall parking lot.

“France does not know it, but we are at war with America. We are. It’s a permanent war, a vital war, an economic war, a war without death it seems. The Americans are very tough. They are greedy. They want undivided power over the world. It is an undeclared war, a permanent war, seemingly without death and yet it’s a war to the death.” – François Mitterrand in 1996, president of France, 1981-1996.

The Rwandan genocide had been mentioned briefly in an earlier episode of the podcast, and after that, I suggested that this subject should be covered in more depth because April 2024 will mark thirty years since the horrible events in Rwanda. It is a chapter of recent history that was poorly recorded by the media of that time. This false narrative of the tragedy is sure to be trotted out again this April for a brief run through the news cycle, so we thought it was worthwhile to get in front of it and discuss the research of the last fifteen years that should have put to rest the simple Manichean narrative propped up by the Atlanticist power bloc. The following text is a revised version of a passage that I read aloud on the podcast.

The official narrative of the Rwandan genocide is a simplistic tale about inter-group hatred that erupted suddenly in April 1994 for reasons put down to ancient “ethnic” or “tribal” rivalries. In this account, powerful outside forces are nowhere to be seen. One side was good and one side was evil, the victims prevailed in the end, and they established a just society where ethnic identity no longer mattered. One can find hundreds of media and academic articles and graduate theses that deliver this narrative. Unfortunately, it is a deliberate or ignorant version of history that leaves out half of the story. The academic works fail to cite the numerous sources that have debunked the official narrative.

The official narrative does not address the wider causes and the ultimate causes of the mass atrocity. How does a society go berserk like this in the space of a few years? How could the same thing happen anywhere to any ethnic group or “tribe,” yours included? Why is homo sapiens prone to this phenomenon? People who lived in Rwanda in the late 1980s say they never could have imagined the events of 1994, but in the space of a few years, everything changed.

There are competing historical narratives about the feudal order that existed before Rwanda became a German colony in the late 19th century. Belgium took over this colony after WWI, then decolonized it in 1959, leaving a democratic republic to replace the feudal Tutsi dynasty. Rwanda was unusual as an African colony because the Germans and Belgians did not rule it directly. They realized that there was a competent ruling class, so they ruled indirectly through the Tutsi ruling class (“cops on the beat” as Richard Nixon liked to describe such arrangements). The Hutu (the commoners) were the majority, so in the 1950s, when decolonization was happening and the plan was to create a democratic republic, the Tutsis were destined to be out of power if they insisted on retaining their status. The Tutsis who stayed in the country accepted the new order, and that is an important distinction. The Tutsis who fled (mostly to Uganda) were the ones who wanted to come back someday to their position of power. There was violence and dispossession against Tutsis at this time—real atrocities that should not be minimized—but this violence occurred because the ruling class was resisting its place in the republic as a minority that would have no special privileges and also because it was resisting against unjust acts of retribution and dispossession. Violent upheavals continued to occur in Rwanda and Burundi in the period between 1959 and 1994, but they never caught the world’s attention or reached the levels of atrocity that occurred in the spring of 1994.

The exiled Tutsis who conquered Rwanda in 1994 minimize the narrative described above. They claim that the Tutsis-Hutu divide was never that significant, and to the extent that it was, it was the fault of the European colonizers who hardened the distinction. They claim they wanted to overthrow the authoritarian regime, have a just settlement for losses inflicted thirty-five years earlier, and form a government that would erase group distinctions and govern democratically. Hundreds of scholars and journalists in the West have helped them purvey this narrative as the official account of Rwandan history.

However, nothing went so smoothly in the 1950s when Belgium was attempting to leave its African colonies. In the case of Rwanda, one might expect that when there is an attempt to do decolonization and an anti-feudal revolution at the same time, the transition does not go smoothly. Like France in the period between 1789 and 1814, the transition was chaotic and violent. France didn’t really achieve any stability until the Third Republic was founded almost a century after the revolution. Like exiled monarchs in Europe, the Tutsis never gave up their dream of returning from exile and seizing power and lost property. A sort of Zionist ideology took hold, with a very sophisticated international public relations campaign to go with it.

Some Western journalists realized later that they were deceived by this smooth PR project, but most could not admit their error. An interesting way to see which side of the issue a researcher takes is to look for Gérard Prunier’s 1997 book (The Rwanda Crisis) in the references. He is a respected Africa expert who at first lent support to the official narrative. Yet the more he studied it, the more he realized he had misunderstood the nature of the regime that took over Rwanda in 1994 and its responsibility for inflaming the conflict before 1994. He became a critic of Rwandan president Paul Kagame and quickly fell out of favor. I’ve surveyed dozens of academic papers written after Prunier published a renunciation of his original views (Africa’s World War, published in 2008), yet the recent works endorsing the official narrative cite only his 1997 book. This is an indication that most of the academic papers written about the events of 1994 are derivative repetitions of the media reporting, academic studies, and Rwandan government propaganda that was produced in the 1990s. They take no account of the new research that points to alternative interpretations of history.

It must be emphasized that this is alternative account is not “genocide denial.” There is no doubt that Hutu extremist groups carried out an organized campaign that killed of hundreds of thousands of people in the spring of 1994. But these extremists were never in power before April 1994. Ironically, they had gained strength as a minority party after the authoritarian president was pressured by France to democratize and allow opposition parties to run against him. No one was able to stop their killing because the government collapsed when the president was assassinated on April 6, 1994. For a short period, this collapsing government had a military that it wanted to use to stop the domestic terror, but it was preoccupied with defending itself from a foreign invasion by the exiled Tutsi army, the RPF. That war started in 1990, but it intensified after the president’s plane was shot down, most likely by the RPF. The Rwandan government pleaded with the UN peacekeeping forces and foreign diplomats to call off the RPF invasion, but for mysterious reasons, this foreign invasion was allowed to proceed. The Rwandan government soon collapsed and the country fell into a state of anarchy.

The role of the RPF was, in fact, not a mystery. France had given much support to Rwanda in recent years, but the French government saw what the American-British objective was and was hesitant to escalate a conflict with its NATO allies. The regime that they had supported was gone, and they could not support any of the extremist groups committing mass murder of civilians. There is much evidence showing that the RPF victory was the covert goal of the US all along via military aid to Uganda and the RPF that was based in Uganda. This is why all through the spring of 1994 the “international community” did not intervene. This is not to say that the US government knew a genocide was going to happen, but it failed to see the atrocities as a likely outcome of their foreign policy objective in Africa. They let the RPF invasion proceed according to plan and considered that force to be the intervention that would end the genocide. Critics have alleged that the RPF actually advanced toward its conquest only when there was “no one left to kill” in each region it passed through.

The debate over the historical narrative is concerned with how much of the mass killing of civilians was done by Hutu extremists and how much was done by the invading RPF, and how much the RPF and Western powers are responsible for creating the crisis through years of destabilization, invasion, and infiltration of the domestic Tutsi population that made all Tutsis suspect. The official toll of about 800,000 killed in 1994 is about 300,000 higher than the number of Tutsis living in Rwanda in the early 1990s. (Rwanda had very good census records.) In addition to this toll, there had been Rwandans who were forced to flee the country or who were killed in the war between 1990 and 1994. It does not include the 400,000 killed in Eastern Congo in the years immediately after 1994. The “African World War” (which no one seems to have heard of) in the region lasted for a decade and had an estimated death toll of six million. The conflict still lingers in the Eastern Congo. The RPF and the Rwandan government (post 1994) have been supplied with modern American and European weapons (anti-drone missiles and radar, for example) for the last thirty years to wage war in Eastern Congo and keep the country destabilized so that its resources can be exploited at low cost.

A rare break from the official narrative in Western state media was a BBC documentary, Rwanda’s Untold Story, that was broadcast in 2014. There was a storm of official and unofficial protest against it, but it was based on solid research, United Nations reports, and witness testimony. One Rwandan commenter, Justin Bahunga, commented about the controversy:

“I would like to reiterate that no one should ever play down the heinous nature and monstrosity of the crime of genocide, but picking it as a credit card and using it as a political tool to silence critics, commit other crimes, or using it for other personal interests is a cynical and abhorrent betrayal to our dead. This is why some of us have decided to come out at the risk of our own lives, to fight such cynicism as a sign of homage to the loved who have left us; relatives, friends, Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa and to build a reconciled Rwanda for our children, where every Rwandan will be judged by his/her character not by her ethnic or regional affiliation.”[2]

A weakness of the official narrative is evident in the tone and style of the writing that supports it. These voices in the Western media have a suspiciously shrill outrage aimed at their critics, as if they are barking on command to a high-frequency cue. They are not interested in delving into the murky gray areas of the geopolitical forces that have been at work for decades (centuries, actually) in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. They react instantly with the charge of “genocide denial” or “genocide collaboration” against people who have well established reputations as advocates for peace—for example, people like Edward Herman (Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System 20 Years Later). When that argument fails, they call their targets naïve dupes or useful idiots. They even accuse an allied European nation like France, which sent peacekeeping forces to Rwanda in June 1994, of having the same bloodthirsty intentions as Hutu extremists—eager to join in on the massacres in June and July of 1994, as if they had anything to gain from being associated with such a mass atrocity. The charge against France magically disappears, of course, when the discussion turns to France’s collaboration with European and U.S. operations in Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Syria, and Libya. In those instances, France is a loyal and necessary ally playing its proper role in “humanitarian” military missions.

Alexander Zahra is one researcher who described this tendency well. Citing works such as Philip Goureveitch’s We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Alison Des Forges’s Leave None to Tell the Story and Mahmood Mamdani’s When Victims become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, he calls their accounts “naive, tendentious, and derivative, written in a judgmental or didactic style foreign to scholastic endeavors.” Zahra states that they tend to “reduce national defense to criminal conspiracy, political disagreement to ‘tribal’ tension, and a war involving regular and irregular forces, to genocide.” I would add to that quote that it was a war that also involved several powerful military forces and governments from outside of Africa supporting the RPF to overthrow the Rwandan government and playing the long game for control of Central Africa, particularly the Congo.[3]

References

Articles tagged “Rwanda” on this blog.

Black, Christopher. “Kagame’s Mass Atrocities in Rwanda and the Congo,” Global Research, August 26, 2012. 

Conroy, John (director, producer) and Corbin, Jane (producer, narrator). Rwanda’s Untold Story. BBC Productions, 2014.

Davenport, Christian and Allan C. Stam. “What Really Happened in Rwanda?” Pacific Standard, October 6, 2009.

de Miramon, Marc. “Brutal from the Beginning: The Truth about Everyone’s Favorite Strongman,” Harper’s Magazine, August, 2019.

Desvarieux, Jessica (producer). “Rwanda 20 Years Later: Genocide, Western Plunder of Congo, and President Kagame,” (Interview with Claude Gatebuke and Andre Vltchek), The Real News Network, April 8, 2014.

Epstein, Helen. “America’s Secret Role in the Rwandan Genocide.” The Guardian. September 12, 2017.

Esquivel, Adolfo Perez. “The Kidnapping of Justice.” English translation of the preface in Onana, Charles. Enquêtes sur un attentat—Rwanda 6 avril 1994 : vingt-cinq ans d’investigations pour un non-lieu. L’Artilleur, 2021.

Fagiolo, Nicoletta. “Rwanda’s Untold Story: A Commentary on the BBC Two Documentary,” RESET, December 17, 2014.

Garrison, Ann. “How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsi,” Black Agenda Report, March 20, 2024.

Herman, Edward S. and Peterson, David. Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System 20 Years Later. The Real News Books, 2014.

Prunier, Gérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. C. Hurst and Company, 1997.

Prunier, Gérard. Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Rever, Judi. In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Vintage, 2018.

Riches, Dennis. “A Tale of Two Kingdoms: Rwanda and the Hawaiian Kingdom in the Age of American Hegemony. Kindle, 2022.

Snow, Keith Harmon. “The Grinding Machine: Terror and Genocide in Rwanda—Keith Harmon Snow Talks with Paul Rusesabagina, the Ordinary Man who Inspired the Film Hotel Rwanda.” April 20, 2007.

Vltchek, Andre (director). Rwanda Gambit (2013). This documentary is exceptional for its segment on the atrocity at the Kibeho refugee camp in 1995. 

Notes

[1] David Himbara, “Kayibanda, Habyarimana, Kagame and the Weaponization of Genocide,” Medium, May 6, 2020.

[2] Justin Bahunga, Rwanda the Untold Story, Letter of Mr. Justin Bahunga to BBC, November 14, 2014. Link to the source defunct as of 2024/02/19, cited in Nicoletta Fagiolo, “Rwanda’s Untold Story: A Commentary on the BBC Two Documentary,” RESET, December 17, 2014.

[3] Alexander Zahar and Susan Rohol, The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Genocide at the Millenium, Samuel Totten editor, Routledge 2005. p 221.