Rwanda, DRC, and the New Scramble for Africa (Part 2): What Really Happened in 1994

AFRICA, 11 Nov 2024

Rusere Shoniwa | A Plague on Both Houses – TRANSCEND Media Service

Paul Rusesabagina, former Manager of Hotel des Milles Collines aka ‘Hotel Rwanda’, and George W. Bush during the presentation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Nov 2005.
Wikimedia Commons

“If God exists, He can’t locate Rwanda on a map.” [1]
–- Patrick Karegeya, former head of Rwanda’s external security from 1994 to 2004, before going into exile in South Africa, and being killed in Johannesburg in 2014

20 Oct 2024 – Open up a Google map of the African continent and you’re likely to have as much trouble as God in locating Rwanda. The letters making up the word ‘Rwanda’ overshadow the geographical representation on the map. And yet, despite being ninety times smaller than its neighbour, DRC, Rwanda punches way above its weight in shedding blood, not just within its own borders, but also in the DRC, as we shall see in Part IV.

On 6 April 1994, the jet carrying Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, was downed by a surface-to-air missile as it began its descent into Kigali, killing all on board. Michela Wrong, in Do Not Disturb, captures the ensuing catastrophe:

“The jet’s downing and the assassination of not one but two African presidents…served as the immediate trigger for the genocide…Within hours of Habyarimana’s death…youth militias were fanning out across the capital, on a mission to avenge their slain president and root out the enemy within: not only Tutsis, but Hutu politicians, journalists, or senior officials seen as hostile to the regime…As in the past, killing was presented to ordinary Rwandans as a patriotic duty. Out in the provinces, local bourgmestres and préfets called public meetings to pull together lists of victims, while Radio Mille Collines urged its listeners on to greater efforts.”[2]

Against the backdrop of stories describing how Rwanda’s priests and nuns had enthusiastically collaborated in the genocide, Wrong recalls an unsolicited, and perhaps guilt-ridden, response from a Rwandan nun in late 1994:

“Everyone is talking about the genocide now, but the RPF had dug big cement vats, where they were going to throw all of us.”[3]

In the context of these powerful words, it is worth considering Wrong’s eloquent summation:

“Genocides do not take place in a vacuum: there is always context and a buildup. For decades, in a ghastly mirror-imaging, ethnic pogroms in Burundi and Rwanda had echoed one another, depositing layers of emotional numbing upon each community. Serving to convince both Hutus and Tutsis the other side was morally beyond the pale, they had effectively established mass killing in the collective mind as the way in which Tutsi-Hutu tensions were resolved.”[4]

Robert Higiro, a former RPA rebel and major in the Rwanda Defence Force, now exiled from Rwanda in Kagame’s ongoing purges of dissent, underscored the point more bluntly: “The troubles between Hutus and Tutsi didn’t start in 1994. The genocide was part of a process that began much, much earlier.”

The Standard Official Narrative is that Rwandan Tutsis were brutally set upon by the majority Hutus whose ethnic hatred for the minority Tutsi group found spontaneous expression in a frenzied bloodlust that left close to a million, mostly Tutsis, dead[5]. In this narrative, the Tutsi-led RPF emerges as the heroic party that stopped the genocide, restored order in Rwanda, and reconciled the polity and society at large. Part I lays out the context and buildup to the fateful day on which the Rwandan president was assassinated. I am hoping that readers will agree that the picture painted thus far renders the Standard Official Narrative unfit for consumption by serious adults. Things get much worse for the narrative when we examine the infamous 100 days in which the genocide took place from 6^th April to 15^th July, when the RPF seized power.

To understand what really happened in those 100 days, I’ll attempt to answer a series of questions, the answers to which will upend the Standard Official Narrative:

1.       Who shot down the plane and why?

2.       How did the genocide of Tutsis take place if there was no Hutu government in place to coordinate and execute it?

3.       Did the RPF stop the genocide?

4.       Was there a double genocide?

After delving into these questions, I’ll summarise, in one paragraph, the meaning of those 100 days.

1.       Who shot down the plane and why?

If the assassination of Habyarimana set the genocide in motion, then who shot the plane down obviously matters. Understanding who did what and why, including establishing culpability for the presidential assassinations, is part of the process of getting at a more truthful account of what took place.

Truth and genocide have always made uneasy bedfellows, and the school of thought associated with the Standard Official Narrative is hostile to any suggestion that Habyarimana might have been assassinated by the RPF because that way lies the path to all manner of heresy, such as genocide denial, or equally sinful, the double genocide theory.[6] The Standard Official Narrative lays the blame for the assassination squarely at the feet of Hutu extremist factions within the Habyarimana government who, it is claimed, would never accept what they saw as the stitch-up of the Arusha Accords. This faction, and only this faction, it is claimed, had an incentive to remove Habyarimana.

Is there any evidence that the RPF did in fact down the plane and, if so, what form does this evidence take?

The evidence revealed by Wrong is uncomplicated and yet would carry significant weight in a court of law. It takes the form of a confession from the ill-fated protagonist of Do Not Disturb, Patrick Karegeya, former head of Rwandan external security, exiled to South Africa and assassinated in 2014. Having just served a jail sentence in November 2007 for a trumped-up charge of insubordination, and realising that his days were numbered in Rwanda, Karegeya fled to neighbouring Uganda, where he had grown up. Once in Kampala, he headed to the British High Commission, where he told the resident MI6 intelligence officer:

“I was part of the team that brought down the plane.”|7|

Filip Reyntjens, Emeritus Professor of Law and Politics at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, has researched and written on the African Great Lakes Region extensively. He noted a curious consistency in the identity of witnesses offering firsthand testimony in connection with the downing of the plane:

“Isn’t it interesting. Since 1994 there have been a steady drip, drip of leaks and semi- disclosures about the downing of the plane from insiders within RPF, while not a single one of the Hutu extremists blamed for it by the government has ever leaked or disclosed anything.”|8|

The UN established International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) initially saw fit to include the plane’s downing in the scope of its investigation. In 1997, ICTR investigators were approached by three former RPF fighters claiming direct knowledge of Kagame’s responsibility. The ICTR chief prosecutor, Canadian Louise Arbour, was initially receptive but performed a rapid U-turn which investigators speculated was the result of US pressure to leave well alone.

In November 2006, French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, who had been asked by the relatives of the dead French flight crew to investigate the plane’s downing, caused shock waves by announcing that he was issuing international arrest warrants for nine of Kagame’s closest aides, Kagame excluded owing to immunity under French law as head of state. Bruguière stated in his accusation:

“The final order to attack the presidential plane was given by Paul Kagame himself during a meeting held in Mulindi on March 31, 1994.”|9|

This was aggressively dismissed by the RPF, who ascribed the accusations to French sour grapes at being marginalised by the Anglophone powers. Yet, in a conversation with Wrong, Karegeya marvelled at why anyone would fall for the standard Kigali regime line that the Hutu extremists did it:

“It’s obvious. All you have to do is look at who supplied the missiles and there you have your answer. They had to come from somewhere.”

He explained to Wrong that the missiles that downed the plane were Soviet-made and had been supplied to Uganda by Russia. Only one side in the conflict had access to Ugandan weaponry: the RPF.[10]

Asked by another journalist about whether Kagame knew that so much carnage would flow from the decision to assassinate Habyarimana, Karegeya replied:

“No. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t give a damn.”|11|

Theogene Rudasingwa, former RPF general and Kagame’s chief of staff, one of numerous exiled Rwandan dissenters, also came clean once in exile. While asserting his own innocence, Rudasingwa later admitted that Kagame himself had told him that he was responsible, motivated by the goal of derailing the Arusha peace accords and grabbing absolute power.[12] In 2018, he wrote:

“In 2011, I affirmed that Paul Kagame was responsible for the shooting down of the plane in which President Juvenal Habyarimana and President Cyprian Ntaryamira of Burundi and all their entourage died. In 2012, I testified before Judge Trevidic in the French investigation, and subsequently to a Spanish judge in the indictment of 40 RPA officers. I sought to give expert testimony at the ICTR in Arusha but was never given an opportunity.”

The leader labelled in the West as “the man who ended the genocide” may be the man who actually started it.

RPF culpability for shooting down the plane does not exonerate Hutus who vengefully targeted innocent Tutsis. But the assassination of Habyarimana is clearly a terrorist act that had far-reaching implications. It was also the first act in an RPF coup d’etat that jettisoned the Arusha Peace Accords and laid the path to chaos that allowed the RPF to seize power. And here is our segue into why the plane was shot down.

The ICTR top secret report leaked to Rever revealed that according to the testimony of a former member of Kagame’s intelligence network, senior RPF officials had met a week before the plane attack to “prepare for a big battle and a major cleaning of the Hutu population.”[13] Kagame’s RPF had already committed grave crimes in the ethnic cleansing of communes in the North with the invasion that had begun in October 1990.

Phase 2 of the “clean out” had now begun with the assassination of the Hutu president. A prominent lawyer who worked at the ICTR explained the logic of Kagame’s final thrust. There was no turning back since, by now, Kagame and the RPF had too much blood on their hands. Accepting a peace agreement would have led to an unravelling of the power grab, because up to the moment the plane was shot down, the Hutu militias had not yet committed their crimes, but the RPF had. And these crimes would have been revealed pretty quickly. Kagame succeeded in burying RPF crimes while laying a diabolical trap for Hutu militias, who would take the rap not only for their own crimes, but Kagame’s as well.[14]

2.       How did the genocide of Tutsis take place if there was no Hutu government in place to coordinate and execute it?

The Corbett report on the Rwanda genocide references work by Christopher Black, a Canadian lawyer who received a request in June 2000 to defend the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Gendarmerie against genocide charges levelled against him at the ICTR. Black’s jaw-dropping account of the workings of the international criminal justice system reads more like a John Le Carre novel than a description of a supposedly reputable institution. Infiltrated as it was by CIA agents posing as investigators and issuing death threats (and probably following through on them in some cases), and staffed by judges prepared to deviate wildly from the most basic principles of due process and evidence, the ICTR was in many respects a kangaroo court nobbled to prosecute one side in the conflict.

Black provides a glimpse into the question of how the genocide unfolded without central coordination when he recounts how the ICTR removed testimony inconvenient to the predetermined trial outcome. When Antoine Nyetera, son of the last Tutsi king and a well-known personality in Rwanda, testified that the RPF had done all the killing, not the government, and that he was a witness to it, judges and prosecutors held a secret meeting which was followed by an announcement by the judges in court that they were going to eliminate his testimony from the record. Clearly outrageous.

Had Nyetera’s testimony been admitted into evidence, it would still not have been sufficient on its own to rule out a genocide against Tutsis by Hutus, but its dismissal is highly irregular to say the least. One would need to corroborate it with other sources and evidence to claim that Hutus did not perpetrate a genocide against Tutsis.

The fact that the ICTR failed in its prosecution of someone as high-ranking as the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Gendarmerie provides a hint that the Tutsi genocide may not have been as planned and coordinated by the Hutu-led government as the Standard Official Narrative portrays. The Corbett Report strongly suggests that a genocide against Tutsis could not have taken place without high-level, centrally planned coordination. It also posits that this coordination was absent owing to the decapitation of the government by the presidential assassination immediately preceding the genocide, followed by the assassination a few days later of Hutu moderates appointed to lead the government . As appealing as this argument sounds, I am not so easily swayed by it.  I tend to agree with Judi Rever when she points out that “the dynamics of violence in Rwanda” were “much more complex”:

“After the presidential plane went down, Hutu elites in rural areas – drawn from military, political and administrative structures – operated in a political vacuum at first. Some of them resisted the call to kill Tutsis, but many others urged Hutu militia and civilians to murder and rape. These crimes were committed publicly, in broad daylight, and with little or no sense of remorse or concern about repercussions.”|15| [emphasis added]

More on the complexity of the violence is revealed by an ICTR report leaked to Rever, which provided evidence that RPF commandos had “not only infiltrated the Hutu militias, but helped murder Tutsis at roadblocks in Kigali in a bid to fuel the genocide”.[16] [emphasis added]

Based on interviews with former RPF soldiers and officers, Rever gives a detailed account of how the RPF used its formidable intelligence apparatus, built up over the years preceding the 1994 genocide, to infiltrate all four Hutu militias. These Tutsi infiltrators, mainly Tutsi soldiers from the RPF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), “ignited violence and stoked extremist sentiment among the Hutu militias and parties they infiltrated.” RPF hit squads also assassinated prominent Hutus, which led to bloody reprisals against Tutsi civilians.[17] [emphasis added]

The evidentiary power of these accounts emanates from their source – RPF soldiers and officers who were involved. But why did so many confess? In confronting the horror of what they had done, their consciences got the better of them, and confession is a form of penance. In the words of Rever’s most reliable source:

“I realised in fairly short order what had actually happened: the RPF had sacrificed interior Tutsis. There was no doubt about it. Their campaign was well planned. They wanted power and were willing to resort to every deception and crime to attain it.” |18| [emphasis added]

Why was the Tutsi-led RPF prepared to sacrifice its own people? This is effectively answered in question 1 – why was the plane shot down? But it’s worth repeating to understand why the Tutsi leadership had decided that Tutsi lives were a price worth paying to gain power. The Tutsi leadership had not risked their lives for five years in the Ugandan Bush War to oust Obote, and then for another four years in the invasion of Rwanda to implement a multiparty democracy envisaged by the Arusha Accords, in which numerous parties would vie equally for power. As Ann Garrison explains:

“The Arusha Accords laid out a timetable that would lead to the multi-party elections that the international community had insisted on. However, Paul Kagame and and the RPF, as a minority Tutsi party, could not have won those elections, so he had to find an excuse to seize power by force of arms with the support of the US.” [emphasis added]

Hence the decision to eliminate Habyarimana on 6^th April. The RPF leadership calculated that the only way in which Western opinion would favour a Tutsi-led government was to firmly establish that it was the only party with moral authority to lead the country. To them, that entailed instigating chaos and a bloodbath, out of which victimised Tutsis would rise like a phoenix from the ashes, with the ruling Hutus playing the role of sole villains in the piece. Aided and abetted by a brain-dead media machine trained to rend the heartstrings of an infantilised public with good-guy, bad-guy narratives, the RPF succeeded in putting a halo on its own head and horns on the heads of Hutus.

The picture that emerges from Rever’s account is not the Antoine Nyetera picture of the RPF doing all the killing, but one of chaos in which Hutu militias certainly took part in a pattern of killing that was genocidal in nature, but was also fuelled by the RPF. Crucially, it seems that RPF violence against Hutus was far more organised, and deployed in a way that concealed the true extent of its horror and scope.

Rever’s investigation reveals that:

“in areas seized by the RPF or already under its control, its soldiers and intelligence agents worked with similar ethnic zeal, but they were more discreet…They brought large groups of Hutus to areas where NGOs and UN agencies were not permitted to go. Under cover of night they transported displaced Hutus by truck, killed them, and burnt their bodies with gasoline and gas oil…Portions of the [Akagera National Park] became outdoor crematoriums, and human ashes were spread in its lakes. It was mass murder leaving barely a trace”.|19| [emphasis added]

This was in the period of April 1994 to October 1994, in which 2 million Hutu refugees were forced out of Rwanda into Zaire.

There was a genocide of Tutsis. For reasons outlined by Rever, it did not require high-level planning and organisation by the Hutu government leadership. It was instigated by the RPF not only in the act of assassinating the president but also by fuelling the violence through infiltration of Hutu militias. In drawing a distinction between the crimes on either side, Rever says: “one side [Hutus] killed…openly and with abandon, without concern for the consequences; the other side [RPF] mass murdered meticulously , and covered up its heinous crimes.”

A key objective of any standard official narrative is to fix and then repeat the pillars of the narrative in such a way that the information presented is beyond questioning; stone tablets brought down from the mountain. The death toll seared into the consciousness of the average citizen in the West (those who have any knowledge at all of Rwanda, that is) is 800,000, mostly Tutsis.

After studying the genocide for 20 years, Christian Davenport, Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and Allan Stam, Professor of Public Policy and Politics at University of Virginia, have estimated through their GenoDynamics project that “the best death toll estimates for the Tutsi in 1994 are around 500-600k, not the 1-2 million that the current Rwandan government puts forward”.[20] [emphasis added]

In this video discussion between the journalists whose books I have referenced and the GenoDynamics academics, Wrong reveals that the Rwandan government is formally revising its genocide death toll upwards to 2 million with no scientific basis for doing so. GenoDynamics notes that:

“The current Rwandan government has outlawed the discussion of any other form of violence – especially if the number of casualties begins to approach the number of ethnic Tutsi killed in the genocide.  Accordingly, under the Rwandan constitution, ‘revisionism, negationism and trivialisation of genocide’ are criminal offences.”

The authors also note soberly that:

“In 2010, even an American law professor and attorney, Peter Erlinder, was arrested in Kigali and charged with genocide denial while defending presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire against charges of genocide.”

There are obvious parallels between Rwandan thought crime and thought crime in the West, and not just in relation to genocide. The Rwandan ‘democracy’ is merely holding itself up to the same standards of ‘democracy’ as the West applies to itself.

The GenoDynamics project’s latest update also finds that: “the current Rwandan government’s complicity in violence during 1994 and after this time has revealed a clear pattern of violent behavior”, [emphasis added] which provides a segue into the next question.

3.       Did the RPF stop the genocide?

We have seen that Rever provides testimony from former RPF soldiers and officers that tends to support a military objective of fuelling chaos by a strategy to, in Rever’s words, “infiltrate, instigate and obfuscate.”[21] This does not accord with an effort to stop the genocide. You could argue that we’ve now answered the question of whether the RPF stopped the genocide in points 1 and 2 above, and the answer is a resounding No. But, for the sake of thoroughness, let’s pretend that we’re starting at this question without all the facts laid out above. How would we answer it?

On April 12^th 1994, six days after the assassination of Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, Rever reported that “a dozen senior Hutu officers from the Rwandan armed forces formally requested the RPF join forces with them in bid to stop the carnage. The Hutu officers called for an immediate ceasefire.” Astonishingly, the RPF would not agree to it.[22]

Wrong’s perspective also suggests that the RPF was uninterested in cooperating to end the carnage:

“Despite the RPF’s ubiquitous modern-day label as the ‘former rebel group that stopped the genocide’, the movement’s priority at this juncture [immediately after the assassinations] was capturing power, not saving lives. When, ten days after the presidents’ assassinations, the UN discussed reinforcing its demoralised international peacekeeping force in Kigali, the RPF fiercely objected. Afraid such an intervention might save the Habyarimana regime’s skin in the nick of time, the rebels said they saw no point. ‘The genocide is almost completed. Most of the potential victims of the regime have either been killed or have fled,’ RPF spokesmen…claimed.” [emphasis added]

According to Human Rights investigators, the RPF claim wasn’t true – there were thousands in harm’s way looking to be rescued. The RPF objected once more in June, under the same pretext they had used to reject help in April.[23]

The RPF stance was fully supported by the US, as Ann Garrison explains:

“The most widespread and pernicious myth about the Rwandan Genocide may be that the US stood by and let it happen, but nothing could be further from the truth. The US in fact intervened aggressively—to make sure there would be no UN intervention—as Robin Philpot explains in Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa: From Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction. This book is a classic history, as important this year, the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, as it was upon its English publication in 2013.” [emphasis added]

In his book, Philpot quotes the UN Secretary General at the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who said:

“The genocide in Rwanda was one hundred percent the responsibility of the Americans!…The US effort to prevent the effective deployment of a UN force for Rwanda succeeded with the strong support of Britain.”

Philpot refers to Pentagon memoranda at the time that predicted with chilling accuracy what would happen without intervention. And yet the US pushed for a reduction of peacekeepers.

Why?

“Because the US wanted to see its imperial proxy, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) led by General Paul Kagame, seize power in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali… It wanted ready access to the immense mineral wealth of Rwanda’s neighbour, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which Rwanda and Uganda would invade two years later. ” – Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report

I think this is obvious and explains the shooting down of the presidential plane as the opening act in a coup d’etat. This view is supported by a high-ranking UN military officer stationed in Kigali as events were unfolding. Luc Marchal, the Belgian contingent commander of the UN peacekeepers Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), was astounded at how fast RPF forces moved into position after the plane was shot down. He told Rever that the major offensive launched by the RPF immediately following the downing of the plane would have required weeks of preparation. Equipment, food and ammunition from Uganda were already in place. Marchal was clear:

“The downing of the presidential plane was directly related to the RPF’s military offensive. You cannot improvise such matters. It is impossible.”|24|

4. Was there a double genocide?

Seth Sendashonga served as interior minister in the first post-genocide government, and was assassinated in exile in 1998. He was, by all accounts, a forward-thinking Hutu who was eager to promote a vision of a Rwanda capable of moving past the Hutu-Tutsi divide. Knowing that a political party formed by a minority group would struggle to gain political power in Rwanda, the RPF courted Hutu leaders in 1990 to join their ranks. The aim was to use Hutu politicians who sincerely believed in power sharing to create a veneer of ethnic unity, while the levers of real power – the military and the economy – remained firmly in Tutsi hands.[25]

Sendashonga was taken in but, before he joined, he insisted on a revision to the RPF constitution which, as Wrong describes, “depicted Rwanda’s pre-colonial kingdom as something akin to the Garden of Eden, free of ethnic antagonism until the arrival of the dastardly whites with their divide-and-rule policies.”[26] Sendashonga made it clear that the RPF had to admit that there were genuine grievances before 1959.

While in exile in Kenya in 1996, Sendashonga held a press conference, attended by Wrong, in which the author recounts:

“he unrolled reams of teleprinter paper, on which were typed not hundreds , not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of names: Hutus he said had been slaughtered by the RPF both before and after the fall of Kigali [in July 1994]. Pointing to the tallies for district after district, he estimated that the RPF was responsible for at least half a million deaths. Many of the killings, he said, had been perpetrated during the rebel movement’s advance across the country, when no international human rights observers had been present to bear witness.”|27|

To the French-speaking journalists in the room, the notion of a double genocide was already familiar territory. To the English-speaking journalists, “briefed by American and British diplomats”, it smacked of “mischievous disinformation”. The divide in the community of foreign journalists mirrored French suspicions that the RPF invasion was part of a sinister project by the US and UK to expand their influence in central Africa.

Wrong had interviewed Sendashonga in August 1995, just after he had been removed from the new RPF-led government in a cabinet reshuffle. He had made no mention then of the double genocide theory, leading Wrong to ask:

“Why hadn’t Sendashonga said something back in 1995? Why wait till now, when the claim smacked of aggrieved revisionism? Whom was I to believe, the 1995 Sendashonga, or this 1996 version?”

Wrong does not answer her question; at least not right away, and not directly. After a brief detour, she reintroduces the subject with this sentence:

“The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had first begun receiving reports of mass killings of refugees by the rebel movement in May 1994.”

Getting independent confirmation was difficult because reporters entering Rwanda from the North were embedded with RPF forces. Journalists were under the protection of guerillas who were “smarter and better resourced than the journalists they were dealing with.” A Ugandan journalist recalled that “they told us the story and we relayed it. In a way we were public relations officers, not journalists.” Fleeing Hutus rarely spoke any English and the RPF troops did the translating. The Ugandan journalist recalls interviewing a Hutu who had seen a killing. As soon as he said “RPF”, the journalist was told by the RPF officer: “Oh, don’t write that down. He’s Interahamwe [Hutu militias responsible for slaughtering Tutsis].”

In order to assess the prospects for repatriating refugees, the UN hired an experienced consultant, Robert Gersony, with decades of human rights experience, to carry out a survey.

“Between August and September [1994], Gersony and his researchers conducted 200 one-on-one, extended interviews in 41 of Rwanda’s 145 communes and 9 refugee camps, only to be stunned by their own findings, which challenged the unfolding narrative of a disciplined, plucky little rebel movement halting an unfolding obscenity in its tracks. Far from staging individual, sporadic reprisals, the RPF, Gersony came to conclude, had killed tens of thousands of people in areas falling under its control – he put the number at a likely 30,000 – months after the genocide. A favourite technique was for RPF soldiers to encourage villagers to attend a ‘peace and reconciliation meeting’ with the new powers-that-be, then open fire on those conveniently assembled in one place.” |28| [emphasis added]

When Gersony briefed Sendashonga, then interior minister in the new government, Sendashonga confirmed that Gersony’s account was “100 % accurate”, adding, “I’ve been receiving reports like this for months and I’ve sent hundreds of memos to Kagame and have yet to receive a response.” While there is clear evidence of mass killing by the RPF, I have not tried to conduct research to reconcile Gersony’s early estimate of 30,000 fatalities with Sendashonga’s later claim in 1996 of half a million. This difference, though huge, would not expunge a charge of genocide committed by the RPF. Under the international law definition of genocide by killing, all the grisly ingredients are there – a patterned and systematic targeting of one ethnic group by another, with intent to destroy the targeted group, in this case, in part.

To the act of killing, one might argue a case for adding two other genocidal acts to the charge sheet: causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, and; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Recall that beginning in July, 2.1 million Rwandan refugees fled to refugee camps in neighbouring countries where, as Wrong records, “some 50,000 Hutus died from [cholera] and a plethora of other diseases.”[29]

The Gersony report is an account that most in the UN did not want to hear. Of all the global institutions conceived to serve the globalist agenda of a centralised technocratic control of humanity, the UN is the most sinister and cynical of them all because, unlike, say, the World Economic Forum, it is the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Note that the UN has a formal partnership agreement with the WEF. The UN’s Kumbaya humanist rhetoric has succeeded in convincing most of humanity that it has its best interests at heart, while insidiously serving the agenda of a fascist public-private partnership. Wrong reveals that when a special rapporteur on Rwanda for the UN Commission on Human Rights asked for a copy of the Gersony report in April 1996, he was infamously told, “We wish to inform you that the ‘Gersony Report’ does not exist.” [emphasis in original]

But it does exist, and you can read a summary of it here. Its suppression by the UN signifies the UN’s alignment with global power structures which effectively backed an RPF coup in Rwanda. That is the conclusion I have come to, as has Ann Garrison, who has reported extensively on conflict in the African Great Lakes region:

“The evidence of all these crimes was suppressed because Kagame was the USA’s new man in Africa, and the Tutsi were the new managers and local beneficiaries of Congo’s vast resource wealth chosen by the US and its resource extraction corporations.”

The stage for RPF crimes against Hutus was set at the beginning of the Rwandan war  in 1990. Wrong in Do Not Disturb observed that “as early as 1991…Tutsi refugees in the camps of Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania had started packing up and occupying lands being captured across the frontier by the advancing RPF – in the process helpfully making it impossible  for the Hutus who had fled to return.” After July 1994, “that trickle became a rush.”

Once the RPF forces had effectively defeated government forces in early July 1994, Wrong reports that:

“in one of the quickest human exoduses in history, 2.1 million refugees crossed into [then] Zaire, Burundi, and Tanzania in the space of three months. In a neatly ironic about-face, Rwanda’s Hutus and Tutsi communities had swapped positions.” |30|

Canadian journalist Judi Rever, in her book In Praise of Blood, showed convincingly that as the RPF advanced on the capital of Kigali, they were committing atrocities against Hutus and ethnically cleansing Hutu regions to claim land for returning Tutsi settlers, displaced in the early 1960s. The Byumba Stadium massacre committed in April 1994, to which Rever dedicates an entire chapter, is illustrative of the scale of RPF massacres and the motivation behind them.[31] Theogene Rudasingwa, former RPF general and Kagame’s chief of staff, yet another exiled Rwandan dissenter, reviewed Rever’s book and, while refuting certain aspects of her thesis, agreed that there had been a genocide against Hutus, effectively agreeing with the ‘double genocide’ theory:

“From available public sources, interviews with Rwandans and non-Rwandans, Judi Rever provides a counter-narrative to RPF’s dominant yet false narrative about the 1990s war and 1994 genocide. She puts RPA’s Directorate of Military Intelligence(DMI) as the mastermind of crimes against Hutu in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. These crimes, she asserts, as I do, amount to genocide… With my other Rwandan colleagues in Ishakwe-Rwandan Freedom Movement and The Rwanda Truth Commission, I have called the crimes perpetrated by Paul Kagame and his associates… in DMI /RPA/RPF as genocide against Hutu. In 2016, I named most of the criminals listed in In Praise of Blood as perpetrators of the genocide against Hutu.”

A UN investigator who probed crimes committed during the genocide observed of the Byumba Stadium massacre:

“In my life I’ve never seen a situation where so much evidence was collected and no indictment was issued.” |32|

About the RPF crimes against Hutu’s more generally, he observed:

“We had 108 witnesses on operations that targeted Hutus, transported their bodies and got rid of them in Akagera Park. Everyone knows this story. The UN knew. This happened everywhere.” |33|

The investigator estimated that Kagame’s army killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in 1994.

A 560-page UN report on an investigation into RPA crimes covering the period 1993 – 2003 concluded that “the systematic and widespread attacks described in this report…if they were proven before a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide.”[34] The call for a full judicial investigation was stifled by pressure from the Rwandan government and its allies in the US.

Following Rwanda’s invasion of Zaire in 1996, its renamed Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) hounded Hutu refugees who had fled RPF terror in 1994 with “bait and kill” operations. They used humanitarian organisations to locate refugees, cordon off the areas where the refugees had taken shelter, and attack or chase them into more remote areas where they were then slaughtered.[35] Gregory Stanton, who worked for the US State Department’s Human Right’s Bureau, revealed to Rever that an investigation by his team found evidence of cremation of bodies south of Kisangani in DRC. We will never know the true number of Hutus slaughtered by the RPF both during the 1994 takeover in Rwanda and its subsequent invasion of Zaire, but the testimonies of investigators and leaked reports collated by Rever indicate that is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Let me underscore the double genocide theory with this final point, already alluded to in the above references to UN reports and investigations into RPF crimes. The UN ICTR was set up primarily to prosecute Hutu genocidaires and the former Hutu government in the wake of the dominant narrative that emerged in the first days of the Rwandan massacres. When the magnitude of the crimes in the other direction became clear, the UN set up a Special Investigations Unit in 1999 under the auspices of the ICTR to investigate the role of the RPF leadership in crimes against the Hutu population. That unit was staffed by highly experienced investigators – in the words of the man who led the team, “the best we had”. The results of that investigation should have led to charges being brought against senior RPF leaders, but that team was betrayed by political intrigue, and its work was blocked by the US State Department, in collusion with the Kagame regime.[36]

However, the unit’s report was leaked to Rever and is dealt with in chapter 11 of In Praise of Blood – “An Illegal Deal”. What is clear to Rever is that the ICTR lawyers and investigators believed they could prove that the RPF had also committed genocide. I have chosen to summarise that report by quoting the man who was the unit’s senior counsel, Douglas Marks Moore, who is now a judge in Britain and was an experienced trial attorney when he was part of the unit. He told Rever:

“I saw it quite specifically as two genocides. There was a mini genocide and a larger one. How can you just prosecute one side? I think it’s unwise, bluntly. I’m a man from Northern Ireland, so I’ve been brought up with cultures that are split irreconcilably. I would be amazed if a genocide did not repeat in Rwanda.” |37| [emphasis added]

Conclusions

Insofar as the whole tragic saga called “The Rwandan Genocide” can be summed up in one paragraph, here is my attempt at it:

An RPF-led coup d’etat was launched by the presidential assassinations of 6 April 1994. This event was necessarily preceded by the RPF’s invasion of Rwanda in 1990, fully backed by Uganda. The coup d’etat sparked a civil war in which Rwandan government forces were routed by a far better organised, equipped and disciplined RPA force with superior intelligence capabilities. That civil war was the crucible of two genocides in which innocent civilians were deliberately targeted by both sides on the basis of each other’s ethnicity – a genocide against Tutsis perpetrated by Hutu militias and Hutu civilians, and a genocide against Hutus perpetrated by Tutsi RPA forces. The genocide of Hutu refugees who fled to neighbouring DRC continued with the subsequent invasion of that country by Rwanda and Uganda from 1996 to 2003 in two Congo wars. All of this took place with the full backing of the US-NATO empire, which provided a combination of military and intelligence support, and political cover. Its aim was to install a Rwandan regime that would act as its proxy in controlling the DRC’s vast mineral wealth.

NOTES:

[1] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 1, pg. 36

[2] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 11, pg. 237, 238

[3] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 11, pg. 240

[4] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 11, pg. 240

[5] By 1994, Rwanda’s population stood at more than 7 million people comprising 3 ethnic groups:
the Hutu (who made up roughly 85% of the population), the Tutsi (14%), and the Twa (1%): https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/historical-background.shtml

[6] National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC), History of Rwanda, NURC, 2016, Ch 6 – Denial and Revisionism, pg. 560

[7] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 16, pg. 361

[8] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 17, pg. 367

[9] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 17, pg. 370

[10] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 17, pg. 373

[11] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 17, pg. 373

[12] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 17, pg. 375

[13] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 13, pg. 182

[14] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Conclusion, pg. 234

[15] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Introduction, pg. 3

[16] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Introduction, pg. 2

[17] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 4, pg. 60-61

[18] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 4, pg. 57

[19] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Introduction, pg. 4

[20] Link to GenoDynamics project obtained by following this link provided in Corbett Report show notes: https://news.nd.edu/news/research-sheds-new-light-on-rwanda-killings/

[21] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 4, pg. 58

[22] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 4, pg. 62

[23] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 11, pg. 242, 243

[24] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 4, pg. 62

[25] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 12, pg. 256-258

[26] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 12, pg. 256

[27] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 12, pg. 253

[28] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 12, pg. 266

[29] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 11, pg. 244

[30] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 11, pg. 243

[31] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 6, pg. 72-80

[32] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 6, pg. 76

[33] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 6, pg. 77

[34] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 3, pg. 52

[35] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 2, pg. 36

[36] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 11, pg. 153-165

[37] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 11, pg. 165

________________________________________________

READ PART 1 – PART 3 – PART 4

In Part III, I’ll try to answer the question posed by the Corbett Report video title: Is the Rwandan genocide really a lie?

Rusere Shoniwa is founder of A Plague on Both Houses, a non-ideological analysis of the dystopian reality we’re living in. Ideas for understanding and resistance. Promoting the Great FREEset.

Go to Original – plagueonbothhouses.substack.com

Share this article: email mastodon facebook 🔗 copy link

DISCLAIMER: The statements, views and opinions expressed in pieces republished here are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of TMS. In accordance with title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. TMS has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is TMS endorsed or sponsored by the originator. “GO TO ORIGINAL” links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “GO TO ORIGINAL” links. This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

One Response to “Rwanda, DRC, and the New Scramble for Africa (Part 2): What Really Happened in 1994”

1. Jim Brown says:

   13 Nov 2024 at 10:03

   Reality like exploding pagers and walkie-talkies or even exploding toothbrushes and razors is leaving espionage fiction in the ashtray of history. Why not forget about fictional agents like Bond and Bourne dashing to save the world from disaster and forget about CIA and MI6 officers reclining on their couches dreaming up espionage scenarios to thrill you. Check out what a real MI6 and CIA secret agent does nowadays. Why not browse through TheBurlingtonFiles website and read about Bill Fairclough’s escapades when he was an active MI6 and CIA agent? The website is rather like an espionage museum without an admission fee … and no adverts. You will soon be immersed in a whole new world which you won’t want to exit.

   After that experience you may not know who to trust so best read Beyond Enkription, the first novel in The Burlington Files series. It’s a noir fact based spy thriller that may shock you. What is interesting is that this book is apparently mandatory reading in some countries’ intelligence agencies’ induction programs. Why? Maybe because the book is not only realistic but has been heralded by those who should know as “being up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”. It is an enthralling read as long as you don’t expect fictional agents like Ian Fleming’s incredible 007 to save the world or John le Carré’s couch potato yet illustrious Smiley to send you to sleep with his delicate diction, sophisticated syntax and placid plots!

   Reply