Spain:Protests Make Spain PM skip Meeting With Kagame

Pres.Kagame with Ban Ki-moon in Spain

Photograph by: DOMINIQUE FAGET, AFP/Getty Images

MADRID - Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero opted out of a UN-sponsored meeting Friday with Rwandan leader Paul Kagame after protests that Kagame's regime was linked to Rwanda's genocide.
Zapatero had "received a request from certain political parties to not meet" Kagame because of Spanish legal proceedings against 40 Rwandan officers relating to the 1994 genocide, Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de He was "sensitive to that and responded" by deciding not to attend the meeting, where UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is also expected, she told public television TVE.
Zapatero's decision not to attend the Madrid meeting on advancing the fight against poverty was announced Thursday when his spokesman said he would be represented by Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos.
The meeting had also been moved from government headquarters to a Madrid hotel, the spokesman said, while Zapatero would have separate talks with Ban.
There was no reaction Friday either from Kagame or Ban to Zapatero's decision.
The meeting is the first of the MDG Advocacy Group set up last month by the United Nations to advance the Millennium Development Goals, which include halving extreme poverty by 2015, with Zapatero and Kagame named co-chairs.
The Co-ordinating Committee for Development NGOs in Spain sparked off the protests on Thursday. saying the UN's choice of Kagame for the post was "questionable".
It criticized "Zapatero's passivity for accepting without objection to work beside someone accused of genocide".
A total of seven political parties also called on Zapatero to skip the meeting, and the spokesman for the ruling Socialist party, Jose Antonio Alonso, said Friday he was uncomfortable with Kagame's presence in Spain.
"It seems he has a more than shady past in Rwanda," ex-defence minister Alonso said.
In 2008 Spain's High Court announced its intention to prosecute 40 Rwandan army officers for genocide, crimes against humanity and terrorism related to events that took place between 1994 and 2000, including under Kagame's rule.
Kagame's then rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front in July 1994 ended the 100-day slaughter of at least 800,000 people, mostly from his Tutsi minority, by Hutu extremist militias and government troops.
But the Spanish judiciary accuses Kagame of fomenting the ethnic clashes in a bid to seize power. The Rwandan officers are accused, among other things, of murdering nine Spanish missionaries and expatriates allegedly witnesses to massacres.
Under Spanish law a court can prosecute human rights crimes even if the alleged offences took place abroad.
But Kagame is immune from prosecution because of his status as head of state. His government has vehemently rejected the accusations.
A lawyer for the families of the killed Spanish nationals said Zapatero's decision not to attend the meeting with Kagame was only window dressing.
The two leaders "are not going to pose together for the photograph, not meet in an official venue," Jordi Palou said national radio RNE.
But "Zapatero has not declined, until now, the invitation to co-chair this initiative", he said.
The foreign minister would still meet Kagame "and they are surely going to negotiate and talk, of course, about the judicial process," he said.
It was also important that the talks on the MDG go ahead, de la Vega said.

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The Invasion Of Rwanda-Kigali As Told by The Taylor Report

"The vanquished always has a better memory than
the victor who tries to make us forget".
René Lévesque

As published by The Taylor Report,

The “right and proper tale ” would have it that the Rwandan Patriotic Front under the brilliant military and political leadership of current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who along with many fellow officers was trained in the best American and British military academies, ended the genocide by taking Kigali on the fourth of July 1994 and by forming a new government on July 19, 1994. A patriotic liberation movement with the right friends puts an end to the worst crime imaginable, similar to the Holocaust, and all that happens on the fourth of July.

The first problem with this part of the right and proper tale is that Kigali was not taken on the fourth of July. The decisive battle that allowed the RPF to take the capital city of Rwanda was fought on July 2. Paul Kagame marched into Kigali on July 3. Wasn’t Paris liberated when Charles de Gaulle marched in on August 25, 1944? Nobody changed that date to make others happy. But for Rwanda, important people in influential positions preferred the fourth of July. So that day chosen. It was also important not to be too close to July 1, which was Rwandan Independence Day since 1962 and still a powerful symbol of the social revolution that now had to be erased from people’s memories. The victors then just had to declare the fourth of July the new Rwandan National Day and for the pipers to play the tune. Everybody knows of course which tune was to be played.

The second problem is that the massacre of civilians did not end with the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Civilians have been massacred in Rwanda steadily ever since and massacres have continued even more seriously in the neighbouring Congo.

The choice of the fourth of July may be a minor point, but in politics nothing is left to chance, especially not the symbols. Hopefully, it will be like an alarm bell that might lead people re-read the right and proper tale with an eye out for those optical illusions so often used to distort and misinform.

The army led by Paul Kagame was never a liberation army. Most people knew that from the beginning. The Rwandan Patriotic Front and its leader were more like the paid arsonist masquerading as firemen than the patriot who saved the people from the fire as the official story would have us believe.


Until October 1, 1990, the troops that invaded Rwanda were uniformed soldiers in Ugandan National Army who marched to the orders of Yoweri Museveni, President of Uganda and commander in chief. The invading troops consisted mainly of Rwandans who had lived in Uganda since the social revolution and independence of Rwanda in 1962. They had been at war in Uganda since 1981 as part of the guerrilla forces known as the National Resistance Army until it took power in Uganda in 1986 and Yoweri Museveni became President.

On September 28, 1990, 4000 Ugandan soldiers and officers, including former army Commander and Ugandan Defence Minister Fred Rwigyema left their barracks fully equipped with weapons and vehicles. They travelled hundreds of kilometres in Uganda to the Rwandan border and attacked the few Rwandan border guards on October 1. They then advanced some 70 kilometres into Rwanda. By October 4, the invading troops were within 70 kilometres of the Rwandan capital Kigali.

Everywhere in the world, that attack on October 1 would be described as an invasion of one country by another. It was not an incursion, nor a civil war, nor an increase in ethnic tension. The word is invasion. In legal terms and according to principles established at the Nuremberg trials that are so often referred to in the Rwandan tragedy, that invasion is no less than the worst war crime because it is a crime against peace. However, that invasion has been at best trivialized ever since it happened, at worst omitted altogether from the tale of events. One of the worst examples was a long article in the New York Times Magazine on September 15, 2002, entitled The Minister of Rape. Not a word is mentioned about the invasion. We only learn that “tensions increased in 1990.” 5

A crime of that magnitude should normally have provoked a sharp international reaction, especially considering that when Ugandan troops invaded, Rwandan President Habyarimana and Ugandan President Museveni were both in New York for a UNICEF meeting. Moreover, two days earlier, on September 28, President Habyarimana told the United Nations General Assembly that his government would offer citizenship and travel documents to all Rwanda refugees wherever they were and that it would repatriate all those who wanted to return to Rwanda.

International reports on the invasion hinted that the invading army had taken or was about to take Kigali. American authorities jumped suspiciously quickly to offer President Habyarimana political asylum in the United States. Moreover, according to a story that is surely not very right and proper but still stubbornly tenacious, the late Rwandan president met the United States Ambassador in Kigali before leaving the country and asked him if the United States had any information about an invasion by Uganda. The Ambassador offered to make some intelligence inquiries–the CIA–and then informed President Habyarimana that there was no such information and that he could safely go to New York.

On learning of the invasion, the Rwandan president immediately returned home but stopped off in Belgium where, suspiciously, he also received an offer of asylum. Belgian news reports amplified the invaders’ military success. Meanwhile, Ugandan President Museveni remained in the United States even though his army had just suffered the worst mutiny in its history that involved troops, officers and military equipment. Though he is an army man to the very core and the champion of professional and disciplined armies that Africa supposedly needed so badly, the president of Uganda decided to sit back in New York while a whole section of his cherished army revolted and invaded another country wearing their Ugandan uniforms.

The same Yoweri Museveni had become the darling of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and United States Diplomacy since the middle of the 1980s. He was another of the former leftist guerrilla leaders who came over to the gospel of good governance, structural adjustment, privatization and, judging by the turn of events, the remodelling of African geography. The United States saw Uganda as a rampart against Islamic fundamentalism in Sudan, and its president Yoweri Museveni as a trustworthy ally to aid US covert operations in Southern Sudan. Former President Jimmy Carter described Museveni as “one of Africa’s most important leaders”. Madeleine Albright spoke of him as “a beacon of hope for Africa”, whereas the journalist with the New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch promoted him for years as the “éminence grise of the new leadership in central Africa”, before making a surprising flip-flop in May 2003 when he called him an “arsonist masquerading as a fireman” in a confusing article on the Congo. 6

President Museveni unconvincingly distanced himself from the invasion by pleading ignorance and surprise and by complaining about how his officers and comrades-in-arms, who became the commanders of the RPF, had tricked him in October 1990. Though totally disingenuous, Museveni’s excuses satisfied his friends in the “international community”. “The truth of the matter is,” he declared in a 1991 address, “that these people conspired, took us by surprise, and went to Rwanda, which was not particularly difficult…. We had some information that the Banyarwanda in Uganda were up to something, but we shared it with the Rwandan government. They actually had, or should have had, more information because, after all, it was their business, not ours, to follow up who was plotting what.” 7

The eminent President Museveni would like us to believe that the intelligence agency of one country–Rwanda in this case–should spy and monitor all the movements and actions of entire regiments of another country’s army–Uganda–and take the necessary action to prevent mutiny, revolt and aggression against neighbours. Let’s apply the infallible logic to other countries on other continents. What would happen if Cuba or Mexico did to the United States what Museveni said Rwanda should have done to Uganda? And what if they took action to protect themselves from U.S. interference? What if Ireland did the same in the United Kingdom? Or Algeria in France? France in Canada? India in Pakistan? China in Vietnam? It is obviously ridiculous. Are we expected to believe him just because it is in Africa?

Countries that spy on each other as Museveni suggested Rwanda should have done are asking for war. Yet we are invited to believe that the Rwandan government made a serious mistake by not spying on the Ugandan army and by not intervening to prevent it from invading Rwanda. That error was so serious that the “new éminence grise of Africa” Yoweri Museveni was justified in not punishing the mutineers in his army.

The man who refused to punish the senior officers who mutinied in his own army is the same man that US diplomacy, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund adored particularly because of his unbending leadership and his vision of a professional and disciplined army in Africa. All of Museveni’s speeches convey the message of a professional and disciplined army. He talked that way before and after he took power in Uganda, before and after the invasion of Rwanda in 1990, before and after the Rwandan Patriotic Front took power in Kigali. Museveni knew what he was talking about. He took power in 1986 after a long guerrilla war, and then, between 1986 and 1990, he mercilessly suppressed revolt in his army.

In his address five years after taking power and four months after the invasion of Rwanda, Museveni left no doubt about his views on military discipline. “As you know, we have dealt very harshly with discipline. There is a very strict code of conduct for the National Resistance Army and a mechanism for dealing with wayward soldiers. No soldier is spared, whatever his rank may be.” 8

One month before the invasion of Rwanda, in August 1990, President Museveni addressed Ugandan army officers including, undoubtedly, those who were already preparing to invade Rwanda. His subject was combating counterrevolutionary insurgency and his main message was the importance of discipline, loyalty, military training, unity and the size of the army. He also made a plea in favour of using military intelligence however it may be obtained. All these elements converge in the fight against insurgency. 9

A month after making this speech, the strict disciplinarian, raised and trained in a world of conspiracies and rebellion, sat passively watching his own troops mutiny and invade Rwanda, thereby threatening peace and security throughout central Africa. These were not a few low-ranking officers. Entire regiments invaded, led first by Uganda’s former Defence Minister Fred Rwigyema, killed in the invasion, and then by the Ugandan Chief of Military Intelligence, Paul Kagame, who quickly returned from the United States where Museveni had sent him for military training. The invading Ugandan troops that would soon be known as the Rwandan Patriotic Army comprised many senior officers, 150 middle level officer and even some of President Museveni’s own bodyguards.

In the next three and half years, Museveni continued to watch “passively” as his former troops went in and out of Uganda as they liked. Uganda became the conveyor of men, munitions and materiel to an army dedicated to overthrowing the Rwandan government. Despite Uganda’s obvious implication in this war, no imperial power ever once threatened to punish President Museveni or to cut off support to his country.

Yoweri Museveni’s August 1990 address to the officers of the Ugandan National Resistance Army on “How to fight a Counterrevolutionary Insurgency” reads like a blueprint for the invasion and war that some of his officers were soon to conduct in Rwanda against President Habyarimana. The difference is that Museveni’s officers would soon become be calling themselves Rwandan “insurgents” or “rebels”. 10

“We had to reject the concept of ‘a small but efficient’ army…” he said. “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.”

That is exactly what happened between 1990 and 1994. Moreover, shortly after the Ugandan officers led the October invasion of Rwanda, President Museveni demanded that Rwanda agree to a cease-fire and negotiate with the insurgents, now called the Rwandan Patriotic Front. That was the “strategic stalemate” he had talked about in his August 1990 address.


Rwanda is so tiny. What in the world would the United States want in such an insignificant remote place?

The notion that Africa is, at best, on the fringe of the international community, at worst, completely cut off from it, has been common currency for centuries. Africa is supposedly of no interest to major powers in the world, except as a means to soothe guilty consciences or to receive charity and benefit from the altruism of those powers. That idea is deep-rooted. Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien echoed it in April 2002 shortly before the G8 Summit at Kananaskis when he announced that Africa would become part of the international community in the twenty-first century. It seems to have escaped Jean Chrétien that most African countries had been members of the United Nations since becoming independent in the 1960s.

In 1885, when Europe was set to pounce on Africa, the official British position was that of the “reluctant empire” that was compelled to leave the hallowed isles to look after Africa. Historians consolidated this idea. In a famous address first published in 1883, J.R. Seeley observed that the expansion of England in America and Asia was perceived to be almost accidental. It was “an empire acquired in a fit of absence of mind”. 11 Subsequently, historians showed that England was not as selfless as it let on and that expansion of the empire closely followed British commercial expansion – the flag followed commerce.

The same image of the “reluctant empire” prevails in all descriptions of the United States in central Africa at the end of the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first. Moreover, the U.S. State Department carefully and successfully cultivated that image, which could be summed up as follows: We don’t want to be there, we don’t want to be forced to intervene, we have no interests there, we are only the honest broker working for the good of humanity.

The proof that the United States succeeded in imposing that image is the virtual absence of publications dealing critically with the United States’ strategic goals in Africa. Discussion of the American role is always couched in talk of democracy, human rights, good governance, trade, and the American determination not to repeat the Somalia fiasco during which 18 U.S. soldiers were killed. Washington has adopted exactly the same tack in its approach to Liberia.

Although former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was not convinced of the United States’ strategic interest in Rwanda – “I have no real information to that effect”, he told me in a November 2002 interview” – he has no doubt about the Congo. “In the Congo, yes, absolutely! There’s tremendous wealth there.” Boutros-Ghali added that British intelligence services were very active in the region through Ugandan President Museveni. He also pointed out that the 1898 Fashoda incident, which is seen as a French defeat in Africa, “still dominates people’s minds”. 12

Facts contradict the image of the “reluctant empire. For the United States, Uganda as well as Rwanda and Burundi became increasingly important both for economic and strategic reasons in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The importance of building a front to counter the expansion of Islam in Africa through the Sudan cannot be underestimated. Uganda had a strong, experienced army and was led by a president willing to work for the Americans. U.S. support for the Christian rebellion in southern Sudan was funnelled through Kampala and with the help Museveni’s army. South Africa at that time was also unpredictable. Despite official American anti-apartheid position, South Africa remained an important ally and Washington was concerned about what might happen should that country be lost as an ally.

When Ugandan troops invaded Rwanda, the future leader Paul Kagame, who had been Uganda’s Chief of Military Intelligence, was training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, under the International Military Education and Training program known as IMET. In fact, the majority of Ugandan military personnel sent to the United States through the IMET program would soon become commanders of the Rwanda Patriotic Front.

IMET was established in the mid 1970s. It is described as an “instrument of influence” by which the United States is able to affect the internal and external policy behaviour of recipient military institutions and governments in a manner congenial with U.S. foreign policy interests. 13 The IMET program, and a modern version known as Enhanced-IMET, was also used to prepare Rwandan troops for the invasion of Zaire starting in 1996.

The United States obviously placed much hope in Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda. In addition to the military links, American non-military aid to Uganda between 1989 and 1992 totalled $183 million, which was twice what the United States granted to Rwanda during the same period.

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. The British and the Americans have coveted resources in eastern Congo since the end of the nineteenth century. With President Mobutu’s health failing and his grip on power weakening, the void foreseen whet the appetite of an American empire giddy after fall of the Soviet Union.

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. An internet search with the words “Congo AND diamonds”, “Congo AND gold mines” or “Congo AND coltan” produces numerous reliable studies with figures and details on the corporations that have snatched up Congolese wealth. Before the war, these resources belonged to Zaire and were a major source of income. Now they are under the direct control of foreign corporations protected by proxy armies set up since the 1996 invasion.

The economic determinism of these documents is their main weakness. Their eloquent and detailed descriptions of how American and European interests have taken over African wealth are undermined by credence they give to imperial cant that has allowed it all come about. That cant would have it that Western powers led by the United States are involved in Africa to defend human rights and democracy, to combat the evils of corruption, dictatorship, impunity and genocide, and to favour development. There is not much new under the sun. When England colonized Africa, people were supposed to believe the goal was to stamp out the Arab slave trade and uplift Africans through Christian civilization.

In spring 1993, the United States Secretary of State Warren Christopher declared to the African-American Institute that “The people of Africa know where their future lies: not with corrupt dictators like Mobutu, but with courageous democrats in every part of the continent. From Senegal to Benin, from Madagascar to Mali, African nations are building strong democratic institutions.”

What was Warren Christopher’s real message? First, the United States was staking out the areas it targeted. These just happened to be all countries with close ties to France - note that every country mentioned is a member of the Francophone Summit. Secondly, Washington had decided that Mobutu, who had faithfully served the United States for thirty years as an anti-Communist strongman, was now on his way out, and that the Africans’ desire for change and their revolt against Mobutu would be used to advance American pawns in Africa.

The anointed strongman in Africa would now be Yoweri Museveni, even though the Ugandan president thumbed his nose at the sacrosanct notions like human rights, democracy, multiparty systems and economic transparency. In retrospect, though a large number of Congolese wanted to get rid of Mobutu, were they to have a choice now, even the most militant among them would prefer Mobutu’s Zaire to the Congo killing fields that war launched in 1996 has foisted upon their country and their people.

The official position of the United States and of most European countries regarding Africa remained that of reluctance and disinterest. Nonetheless, their diplomatic, economic, political, legal and military involvement increased exponentially between 1990 and 2003. This involvement has became much more direct and very often bypasses the official recognized channels that should govern international relations.


The Rwandan government reacted sharply to the invasion and was supported by France, Zaire and Belgium, though the Belgians soon turned on the Rwandan government. The invasion pitted Ugandan troops that had been at war for years in Uganda against a small Rwandan army that had not seen in combat since 1969. President Habyarimana’s government also took action internally and, not surprisingly, arrested some 8000 Rwandan citizens, mainly Tutsis, holding them for periods varying from a few days to six months.

The intrepid representatives of the New York based Africa Watch (formerly Human Rights Watch/Africa) immediately claimed that the arrests provided verifiable proof of serious human rights violations. Later with their 20/20 hindsight, the arrests became the proof of the genocidal intentions of the Rwandan Government leaders. Africa Watch rang the alarm and it has not stopped ringing ever since.

Foreign diplomats from Belgium, the United States, Switzerland and Canada deplored the action of the government of Rwanda. The Belgian Ambassador Johann Swinnen rushed to the stadium in Kigali where the prisoners were held and, to the joy of those arrested, he condemned the Rwandan government for its human rights violations - would that they had been so prompt when Pinochet locked up thousands in a stadium in Santiago, Chile. Those Western powers obviously wanted to warn President Habyarimana that the going would be tough and that his days were probably numbered.

A few questions must be raised before we delve deeper into this story.

Is it normal in the search for justice to condemn one side in a war for human rights violations and not even question the morality of the aggressors, those who violated the principles of all the charters of rights humanity has ever drafted? Is it right to shout about how a government violates rights and turn a blind eye to the launching of an aggressive war?

The vast majority of Western human rights organisations and their representatives appear to consider it perfectly normal to whitewash the invaders and denounce the invaded country, its leaders and its people. At the top of the list is Alison Des Forges, an ubiquitous American Rwanda activist who has written reams of reports including the Africa Watch report on the arrests. In a statement made under oath in a 1995 Montreal hearing, Ms Des Forges declared that human rights activists “do not examine the issue of who makes war. We see war as an evil and we try to prevent the existence of war to be an excuse for massive human rights violations.” It is like an armed break and entry during which the homeowner defends himself. The Justice Department arrests the home owner for possession of arms and lets the robber off scot-free.

The refusal of human rights organizations to condemn the worst human rights violation, namely the invasion, invalidates all the reports they have published and weakens the foundations on which the “right and proper” tale has been built. It bears sad witness to the lightness with which many of theses groups undertake their work, and also reveals the tacit agreement between them and the big Western powers who wield much more influence than the Rwandan government could dream of having. Worst of all, however, is the blatant double standard they have in respect to Africa. The same groups would never dare apply the same criteria in cases of war in or by their own countries.

In his important Discourse on colonialism published in 1955, Aimé Césaire denounced a similar double standard observed among European humanists. Though many humanists were anti-nazis in the Second World War, they avoided taking up the fight against colonialism. “And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism,” wrote Césaire. “For too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been - and still is - narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist”. 14

Eight thousand Rwandans were arrested by the Habyarimana government, but all were released within six months. For a country that has been invaded, neither the number of arrests nor their duration is excessive, especially considering the revelations of former leaders and collaborators of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. One such leader is Valens Kajeguhakwa, a business man and one of the RPF’s main financial backers. In 2001, his former comrade-in-arms Paul Kagame forced him to leave the country. Kajeguhakwa, who had also been close to President Habyarimana before he joined the RPF in 1990, published a book in which he described himself as the “bridge that clandestinely united the action of patriots outside and within Rwanda.” 15 He boasts of the invaluable role of his vast network of civilian and military informers that he had carefully developed and who were infiltrated throughout Rwanda up to the highest echelons of the Government of Rwanda.

“They were placed in the army, in the Gendarmerie, in government ministries, in all the main public and private companies, in the National Bank of Rwanda, in parishes, in markets in Kigali, Butare, Ruhengeri, and Gisenyi, in the University in Butare and Nyakinama, in the prisons in Gisehyi and Ruhengeri.” Valens Kajeguhakwa left Rwanda for Uganda just before the invasion in October 1990. He points out in his book that he ensured his network would continue working for him and the Rwandan Patriotic Front in his absence.

Leaders of the Rwandan Patriotic Front claim that they had 36 clandestine cells operating inside Rwanda on October 1, 1990. The number of cells grew steadily as the invaders gained ground and especially as they gained international recognition and support. The same sources boast that by 1993 the RPF could activate 146 clandestine cells in Kigali alone. 16 Ever since the Spanish Civil War, an expression accurately describes such cells: a fifth column. In Rwanda, however, that fifth column was and still is conveniently qualified as innocent human rights activists.

The number of arrests and their duration were limited. Since memory is always selective and always very poor in powerful dominating countries, a few comparisons would be helpful.

According to Professor Panikos Panayi who has studied the question of minorities in wartime, “Some of the most systematic persecution of racial and ethnic minorities in recent history has taken place during the two World Wars. Anyone studying the twentieth century cannot avoid this conclusion. In fact, the historian dealing with any period of human development would find that the years 1914-18 and 1939-45 witnessed unprecedented heights of intolerance towards outgroups.” 17 Professor Panayi also deplores the lack of research conducted about minorities in wartime.

In 1914, Canada was automatically drawn into the First World War by England when it declared war on August 4, 1914, but the country was not invaded. In fact, it has not been invaded since 1812. Nevertheless, two weeks after the war began in Europe, the Parliament of Canada adopted the War Measures Act granting the government power to arrest, detain, exclude and deport individuals. Under the Act, the government could refuse release on bail and suspend habeas corpus for any person suspected of being an enemy alien. Canada interned 8579 people in “concentration camps”–the term coined in the Boer War was still fashionable. Most were Ukrainians that Canadian officials mistook for Austrians.

As war progressed, naturalized German Canadians including many born in Canada soon went from being “among our best immigrants, white people like ourselves” as J.S. Woodsworth noted, to “sub-human” or “blood-crazed madmen”. 18 In 1917, to the applause of much of English Canada, the Parliament adopted the War-time Elections Act that took away voting rights from tens of thousands of naturalized Canadians, most of whom were Ukrainian.

During the Second World War, Canada interned 21,000 of the country’s 22,086 residents of Japanese origin. Ninety-one percent of those interned were Canadian citizens. Officially, Canada “evacuated” the Japanese Canadians, who were dispersed throughout Canada, sometimes up to 5000 kilometres from their homes. All their property was confiscated, farms, homes and fishing boats, never to be returned. When the war was over, none was allowed to return to British Columbia, and 3000 Japanese Canadians were deported to Japan.

The United States interned all Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbour. Pearl Harbour, it should be noted, was not an invasion and did not touch continental United States. The 1940 U.S. census established that 116,947 American residents were of Japanese origin. Sixty percent were born in the United States. In 1942, that country interned - evacuated according to the official euphemism - all the 119,803 men, women and children of Japanese origin. 19

Countries are obsessed with the loyalty of their citizens in wartime. Every minority and every internal nation becomes suspicious. In 1917, Londoners rioted against Jews who were they accused of being opposed to conscription. In the United States, suspicious minorities were tarred and feathered or even lynched. In Canada, the loyalty of French Canadians was immediately questioned in both World Wars, as it was during the Boer War. French Canadians were called Zombies during the Second World War because of their opposition to conscription.

Former colonial possessions are inevitably among the first suspects of countries at war. Ireland, for instance, was independent from England since 1922 and remained neutral during the Second World War. When Winston Churchill suspected these former subjects of Her Majesty to be sympathetic to the Germans, he threatened to bomb all the ports in Ireland.

The treatment of minorities in wartime requires much further study. Suffice it to say that self-righteous human rights activists in Europe and North America would have been well advised to look closely at their own countries’ records before pouncing on Rwanda.


The invading army known by the “right thinking” as a liberation army, settled in for a prolonged guerrilla war when they realized that the Rwandan army was tougher than had been expected. At the end of October 1990, the RPF pulled partly back into Uganda which it used as a base to launch guerrilla attacks. In November, however, Belgium joined Uganda in calling on Rwanda to negotiate with the invading army. Here was the “strategic stalemate” Ugandan President Museveni had talked about on August 1990. The United States and Britain soon joined the chorus of calls for negotiations.

Though the RPF was talking liberation and human rights in all its international press relations in English and French, its writings in Kinyarwanda left no doubt as to its desire to return Rwanda to a pre-independence situation in which the Tutsi minority would dominate. 20 This was confirmed as the RPF behaved like all occupation armies do. They attacked and terrorized civilians, forcing them to flee in large numbers, and targeted the Hutu peasants rather than the Rwandan troops.

What liberation army can boast that it emptied one of the country’s, and the world’s, most densely populated areas? 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.” 21

When have we seen a people flee from its liberators? It didn’t happen in France (1940-1945), nor in Cuba (1951-1959), nor in Algeria (1954-1962). The “right and proper tale” would have us believe, however, that the invading RPF army were “liberators”.

These “liberators” were also able to count on a powerful ally. That ally known as the Structural Adjustment Program or SAP was being imposed in unison by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and USAID. Acronyms have a canny way of transmitting messages, and in this case it is particularly eloquent, both in English, SAP, and in French, PAS (Programme d’ajustement structurel). The message could not be clearer: PAS d’argent (no money) unless you SAP the very foundations of the society you built since 1960. That means deregulating the economy, devaluating currency, eliminating agricultural subsidies, privatizing utilities and state-owned corporations, laying off civil servants and more.

The impact in Rwanda was felt immediately. Inflation increased from 1 percent in 1989 to 20 percent in 1991. Devaluation of the currency was even more brutal. In 1990, one U.S. dollar was worth 82 Rwandan Francs. In 1993, it was worth 183 Francs.

The taskmasters at the World Bank, the FMI and USAID knew exactly what was happening. They could see an offshoot of the army led by their friend Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni pitted against a government led by Juvénal Habyarimana. Whereas Museveni was calling on Africa to abandon its anti neo-colonial rhetoric and state loud and clear that Africa’s problems were of its own making, Rwandan President Habyarimana had a relatively prosperous and stable economy but was not as favourably disposed to the new dogma brought down by the by the Bretton Wood institutions.

Privatization and a totally free-market economy presented specific problems for Rwanda. The social revolution of 1959 and independence combined with the growth of a public sector had enabled Rwandan Hutus to gain some economic power and prestige. The private sector, where incomes were much higher, remained largely dominated by Tutsis. The aggressive privatization and deregulation imposed by the Structural Adjustment Program meant an inevitable return towards what had been rejected since the 1960s and a reinforcement of the Tutsis’ power in the economy.

Structural adjustment had another perverse effect on Rwanda. Funds would be given to countries for downsizing their armies. When Ugandan troops invaded Rwanda, the country officially reduced the size of its army. On paper all those Ugandan troops at war in Rwanda were no longer part of the Museveni’s army. Funding to Uganda therefore increased proportionally. Under the same policy, funding to Rwanda was cut since the Habyarimana government increased the size of its army threefold in order to fight the invaders. These were the funds used by Uganda to finance the war in Rwanda. James Gasana, who became Rwandan Defense Minister until he left the country in 1993, wrote a scathing criticism of that policy. “It is no secret that funds granted to two poor countries at war are used to procure weapons. That undercover funding by international development banks prevented international public opinion from understanding the international nature of the war.” 22

Each time the government of Rwanda hesitated to negotiate with the invader or showed reluctance during negotiations, the bankers in New York and Washington would put the pressure on Kigali by refusing to provide the funds the government needed and counted on. Each time the RPF would gain new international recognition, the moral of the Rwandan armed forces would plummet as they increasingly got the impression they were fighting against the whole world. As could easily be predicted by anyone who cared to look, the war aggravated latent hostility between Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority.

As could be expected, the expression “peace process” had quietly crept into the vocabulary of the international community led by the United States and Britain. The “peace process” was to be initiated at Arusha in Tanzania. Peace process essentially means war, a war in which the sponsors of the process choose the winner before the meeting they call takes place. They then pretend to be neutral during negotiations. Having bought time, they tighten the noose on the designated loser and prepare the ground to install a government that is totally subjected to their will. Peace process was on the lips of all the right thinking people, as of course was multiparty democracy.

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Nairobi - A prominent media rights group called on Wednesday on the European Union and other donors to suspend financial support for Rwanda's "repressive" regime ahead of next month's presidential polls.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres) said Rwanda's government, led by President Paul Kagame, was responsible for "a series of grave press freedom violations" in the African country.

They included the arrest and detention of journalists, closure of Rwanda's two leading independent newspapers for six months, and blocking access to another publication's website.

"How much longer will the international community continue to endorse this repressive regime?" it asked in a statement.

"The international community is becoming its accomplice by supporting next month's election, for which the preparations are being accompanied by widespread harassment and abuses.

"If the European Union stopped disbursing its funding, it would be clear sign of opposition to the Rwandan government's practices."

RSF said journalist Agnes Uwimana was arrested July 8 after publication of "sensitive" articles about the murder of newspaper editor Jean-Leonard Rugambage and the attempted murder of exiled general Kayumba Nyamwasa in South Africa.

Rugambage, who had accused the Rwandan government of being behind an assassination attempt on a dissident general in South Africa, was gunned down near his house in Kigali on June 25.

According to Rwandan newspaper reports, two other journalists from Uwimana's privately-owned fortnightly, Umurabyo, were detained on Tuesday.

Kagame, who has led the central African nation since the end of the 1994 genocide, is widely expected to win the August 9 election.

- AFP

Rwanda Arrests Second Journalist From the Umurabyo Newspaper

July 13 (Bloomberg) -- A second Rwandan journalist working for the Umurabyo newspaper has been arrested under laws aimed at reducing tensions between the Central African country’s Tutsi and Hutu tribes.

Saidati Mukakibibi, a reporter, was charged with “divisionism and for likening President Paul Kagame to Hitler,” police spokesman Eric Kayiranga said today in a phone interview from the capital, Kigali. She worked for the newspaper without being registered as a journalist, the spokesman said.

Under Rwandan law, it is an offense to denigrate the president, deny the 1994 genocide of the minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus by ethnic-Hutu militias, or to create “divisionism” between the tribes. Rwanda also requires journalists to be registered with the Media High Commission, which is controlled by Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front party.

Umurabyo published a picture of Kagame superimposed on a Nazi swastika, Kayiranga said. Umurabyo editor Agnes Uwimana was arrested July 9 and may face 30 years in prison if found guilty of genocide denial, the state-owned Rwanda News Agency has said. The government describes Umurabyo as an opposition newspaper.

Opposition figures in Rwanda have said a number of recent arrests in Kigali, and the defection of a senior general to South Africa, are connected to presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for next month. Kagame has denied the accusations, and Kayiranga said the arrests of the two Umurabyo journalists aren’t “in any way” connected to the elections.

Jean-Leonard Rugambage, a journalist for the banned Umuvugizi newspaper, was killed by an unidentified gunman June 25. Umuvugizi, a tabloid published in the local Kinyarwanda language, was banned over allegations it printed lies in April.

As many as 800,000 people, more than a 10th of Rwanda’s population, died in a 100-day slaughter of minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus by ethnic-Hutu militias in 1994. The massacre began after the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana, whose plane was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali on April 6 of that year.

--Editors: Heather Langan, Digby Lidstone

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Latham in Durban at blatham@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Antony Sguazzin in Johannesburg at asguazzin@bloomberg.net.

Rwanda president Paul Kagame tiptoes around democracy

Gwynne Dyer: Rwanda president Paul Kagame tiptoes around democracy
By Gwynne Dyer

First Published by Straight.com
Rwanda president Paul Kagame will not risk real democracy, despite a remarkable economic growth rate of 11 percent last year.

Did Paul Kagame really stop the genocide in Rwanda 16 years ago, or did he just interrupt it for a while?

That question frightens him so much that he will not risk everything on the outcome of a democratic election.

Kagame is running for reelection to the presidency of the traumatised central African country next month. If economic success automatically brought political success, he would be a shoo-in: Rwanda’s economy grew by 11 percent last year.

But in fact, his resounding election victory in 2003 was the result of ruthless manipulation, and this one will be the same.

In recent months, opposition party leaders in Rwanda have been arrested and charged with denying the genocide.

An opposition newspaper was banned and its co-editors attacked. (One died, one survived.)

Leading generals in the Rwandan army have been arrested or have fled into exile. (One was wounded last month in an attempted hit in South Africa.)

So is Kagame over-reacting? Maybe.

If you cut Kagame open, you would find engraved on his heart William Faulkner’s terrible truth: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

One-tenth of Rwanda’s population–at least 800,000 people, Tutsis and those who tried to protect them–were murdered by their neighbours, mostly with machetes, only sixteen years ago.

Not nearly enough time has passed yet for generational turnover to take the edge off the grief and the hate. Everybody pretends it’s over, but of course it isn’t. How could it be?

Kagame’s whole life has been shaped by genocide. He grew up in Uganda, where his parents fled when an earlier wave of violence killed about 100,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in the early 1960s.

He became the leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a mainly Tutsi exile organisation dedicated to overthrowing the Hutu extremists who ruled the country, and he led the RPF army that marched in to stop the great genocide of 1994.

He knows, of course, that Tutsis and Hutus are not really separate ethnic groups.

All of Rwanda’s 19 major clans includes both Tutsis and Hutus. They speak the same language and they live in the same villages.

The term once distinguished cattle-herders from farmers, and later the wealthy from the poor. Rich Hutus could become Tutsis–but the Tutsis naturally always remained a minority of the population.

He also knows, however, that the colonial authorities exploited those class differences and gave the Tutsis political authority over the Hutus in return for their loyalty.

By the later 20th century the Tutsis and Hutus had become ethnic groups for all practical purposes, with a constant undercurrent of resentment by the Hutus against the Tutsis.

After independence in 1960, the killing got underway very quickly. It peaked in 1994.

This past will not leave Rwanda alone. The very words “Tutsi” and “Hutu” have now been banned in Rwanda, but a ministerial investigation in 2008 found anti-Tutsi graffiti and harassment of Tutsi students in most of the schools that were visited.

The army is exclusively Tutsi and the government almost entirely so, because Kagame does not really believe that this generation of Hutus can be trusted.

To make his position even more precarious, Tutsi solidarity is breaking down.

The arrests, exile and attempted assassination of various generals may be in response to real plots.

Most Tutsi generals belong to the Nyiginya clan, which traditionally provided the country’s king. Kagame is from the Umwega clan, and some of the Nyiginya think that power has remained in the wrong hands for too long.

It is an awful situation, and Kagame has only one strategy for avoiding a return to genocide: hang on to power, and hope that rapid economic growth and the passage of time will eventually blur the identities and blunt the reflexes that have made this generation of Rwandans so dangerous to one another.

His model is Singapore, an ethnically complex state that avoided too much democracy during the early decades of its dash for growth.

If Rwanda could become the Singapore of central Africa, then maybe its citizens would eventually come to believe that their stake in the country’s new stability and prosperity was more important than the history.

But Singapore did not have so far to travel, and its history was not drowned in blood.

The logic of Kagame’s strategy obliges him to stay in power: his first duty is to Rwanda’s Tutsis, at least half of whom have already been murdered.

But he must provide prosperity to the Hutu majority too, in order to reconcile them to Tutsi survival, and his relatively corruption-free government has made impressive progress towards that goal.

Nevertheless, in a free election, most Rwandans would vote along ethnic lines.

His Rwandan Patriotic Front would instantly be replaced by a Hutu-led regime of unknowable character and purpose. He dares not risk it, so real democracy is not an option.

If Kagame is now killing opposition journalists and dissident generals, then he is making a dreadful and probably fatal mistake, but it may not be him.

In the ruthlessly Machiavellian world of Rwandan politics, other possibilities also exist. Either way, he has the loneliest, scariest job in the world, and he must know that the odds are long against him.

The new edition of Gwynne Dyer's latest book, Climate Wars, has just been published in Canada by Random House.

Gerald Caplan and the politics of genocide

Gerald Caplan and the politics of genocide
Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
2010-07-08, Issue 489
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/65773

In his June 17 'review' of our book The Politics of Genocide, for Pambazuka News,[i] Gerald Caplan, a Canadian writer who Kigali's New Times described as a 'leading authority on Genocide and its prevention,'[ii] focuses almost exclusively on the section we devote to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.[iii] Caplan says virtually nothing about the rest of the book: Nothing about the analytic framework that we apply throughout, nothing about the wealth of data that we report about usage of the term 'genocide' for different theatres where atrocities have been committed, nothing about our criticisms of 'responsibility to protect' doctrine and the International Criminal Court, and almost nothing about the many other conflicts that also serve to corroborate our thesis.[iv] Instead, Caplan uses his 'review' to falsely identify the main locus of responsibility for the mass killings known as the 'Rwanda genocide,' falsely deny the central and ongoing US role in the catastrophic events in Rwanda and the DRC from 1990 to the present, and maliciously label anyone who disagrees with him a 'genocide denier' and member of the 'lunatic fringe.' Caplan even defends Paul Kagame's dictatorship, including Kagame's suppression of free elections and free speech. All of this, we believe, makes Caplan not only a genocide denier, but as he helps divert attention from Kagame's mass killings and pillage in the DRC, a genocide facilitator as well.

CAPLAN AS BOOK REVIEWER

Caplan is a careless reviewer. He accuses us of neglecting to cite a lengthy list of 45 authors ('Except for [Alison] Des Forges, plus Linda Melvern,…not a single one of the following authors is cited by Herman and Peterson'), at least seven of whom we actually do cite, four positively: Gérard Prunier on the Gersony affair in Rwanda, Fergal Keane on the Bruguière report, and Alex de Waal and Mahmood Mamdani on the conflicts in the Darfur states of the western Sudan. The fifth and sixth are William Schabas and Philip Gourevitch, both on Rwanda, neither positively. The seventh, Ingvar Carlsson, we mention in passing. (One scholar on Caplan's list who we didn't cite in our book but are more than happy to cite here is René Lemarchand. In a recent letter to Pambazuka News raising doubts about Caplan's 'credentials in commenting on the merits of the Mutsinzi report' [for our treatment of this, see below], Lemarchand writes that 'the misinformation conveyed by [Caplan] is enough to cast the strongest doubts on [the Mutsinzi report's] veracity.'[v])

Indeed, Caplan does not even maintain consistency with his own previous writings, including one work about which he seems especially proud: The 2000 report on behalf of the Organization of African Unity, titled Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide.[vi]

Caplan criticizes us for contending that the Rwandan Patriotic Front's '1990 invasion of Rwanda from Uganda was carried out not by Rwandans but by Ugandan forces under Ugandan President Museveni, the RPF being ‘a wing of the Ugandan army’.'[vii] He adds that 'There is no source given for this assertion, which contradicts almost all other histories of the invasion.' But in reality there are many sources for this assertion – and one of them is Caplan himself. Thus in his OAU report, Caplan wrote that on 'October 1, 1990,…the RPF struck with a large, well-organised force led by former senior officers of Museveni's [National Resistance Army],' with the RPF's leadership to be assumed shortly thereafter by 'Paul Kagame, Museveni's former deputy head of military intelligence….' 'Museveni's Uganda had been the birthplace of the RPF,' Caplan pointed out in the same report, 'and his government had continued to support [the RPF] as they fought their way to victory….'[viii] Taken together, Caplan's assertions go well-beyond ours in claiming RPF-origins within the Ugandan army. Yet when we assert this, Caplan accuses us of an 'extraordinary re-writing of history.'

In a similar vein, Caplan mocks us for asserting that the Rwandan field-work by the US investigator Robert Gersony in1994 belongs to a 'whole body of important but suppressed research'[ix] – 'in fact,' Caplan counters, 'the so-called suppressed research by Gersony has been well-known for years.' But looking once again at Caplan's 2000 report for the OAU, we find Caplan writing that Gersony's team 'apparently gathered the first convincing evidence of widespread, systematic killings by the RPF; the UN, however, for reasons never announced, decided to suppress the information….Gersony was told to write no report and he and his team were instructed to speak with no one about their mission….'[x]

Why Caplan would assail us over what we write about the origins of the RPF as 'a wing of the Ugandan army,' as well as the 'suppression' of Gersony's research into RPF killings, when eleven years ago, this was what Caplan himself was writing, is an intriguing question.

CAPLAN’S VERSUS THE ALTERNATIVE VIEW OF THE RWANDA GENOCIDE

The answer, we believe, is that Caplan's real purpose in writing about The Politics of Genocide is simply to discredit it for rejecting the party-line on which Caplan has staked so much of his reputation. In Caplan's words, this party-line claims that 'The signing of the Arusha agreement in 1993 proved the last straw for the Hutu Power extremists….Just before 8:30 p.m. on April 6, 1994, a private jet carrying President Habyarimana…was blown out of the sky. Logic says the deed was organized by Hutu extremists, afraid the president was selling them out….Over the next 100 days, in a carefully coordinated assault organized from the very top of the Rwandan Hutu hierarchy, at least 600,000 and perhaps closer to a million Tutsi were slaughtered….'[xi]

The counter-theme of the relevant section of our book contends that 'all major sectors of the Western establishment swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside-down,'[xii] with the Tutsi Paul Kagame and his Tutsi military force, the RPF, acting as both the initiators and the main perpetrators of 1994's mass blood-letting, and subordinating all else to its seizure of state-power in Rwanda. The consequences of this plan include one million or more deaths in Rwanda, several million more in the DRC, perhaps the worst protracted human crisis on the planet over the past two decades – and a supremely well-entrenched dictatorship that now celebrates its 16th year in power, preparing yet again to stage a fake election in August 2010 to rival the one it put on seven years ago, with opposition Hutu parties and candidates prohibited from running against the incumbent, and Kagame's victory by a landslide guaranteed. (Kagame was awarded 95 per cent of the reported vote in 2003.) But as our account of these real and still-ongoing genocides in Central Africa's Great Lakes region is unacceptable to a Kagame-apologist, Caplan attacks us with no holds barred.

CAPLAN’S VERSUS THE ALTERNATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE GENOCIDE’S 'TRIGGERING EVENT'

One central problem for Caplan and the faction that advocates the Kagame-as-savior party-line[xiii] is the evidence on the responsibility for the April 6, 1994 shoot-down of the Falcon-50 jet carrying the Hutu President of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, the Hutu president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, and ten others. Most observers – including Caplan – agree that this was a 'triggering event' or 'immediate cause' of the sequence of mass killings that followed. For Caplan et al., the Habyarimana assassination was carried out by 'Hutu extremists,' but not only is there no serious evidence for this claim, there is very substantial evidence that the shoot-down was organized by Kagame.

As far back as 1996, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) investigated the assassination, and its chief investigator at the time, the Australian lawyer Michael Hourigan, presented then-ICTR Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour with evidence that Kagame and his RPF were responsible for it.[xiv] Arbour, apparently after consultation with US officials, quickly terminated the investigation, alleging that responsibility for the assassination was outside the jurisdiction of the ICTR. This was false, as the ICTR's mandate covers events taking place in Rwanda from January 1 through December 31, 1994;[xv] but Arbour's quashing the investigation was consistent with her long-standing service to US power, both in its war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and its support and protection of the Kagame regime.[xvi] As Hourigan told the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende in 2006, 'The only time the prosecutor [Arbour] said it was not within the [ICTR's] mandate was when I implicated Kagame.'[xvii]

Caplan explains-away the Arbour-Hourigan episode on the ground that Hourigan's witnesses were merely 'disaffected RPF soldiers,' who later recanted their testimonies. But Hourigan was an experienced investigator capable of evaluating witness evidence. Furthermore, this does not explain why Chief Prosecutor Arbour dropped the subject in early 1997, long before any witness-recantation had occurred. Nor does it explain why the ICTR never again took-up investigation of this 'triggering event' in the 13 years since – unless it was because credible evidence points to Kagame and the RPF.

The French anti-terrorism Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière's inquiry into these events concluded that Kagame needed the 'physical elimination' of Habyarimana in order to seize state-power within Rwanda before the national elections called for by the Arusha Accords,[xviii] elections that Kagame most certainly would have lost, given that his minority Tutsi were greatly outnumbered by the majority Hutu. Bruguière also noted that the RPF alone in Rwanda in 1994 were a well-organized military force, and ready to strike. And the politically weak but militarily strong Kagame-led RPF did strike, resuming their assault on the government of Rwanda immediately following the Habyarimana assassination. In less than 100 days, the Kagame-RPF controlled Rwanda. On the assumption that the shoot-down was central to the larger plan of Hutu Power and genocide, this would have required a miracle of Hutu incompetence; but it would be entirely understandable if it was carried out by Kagame's force as part of their planned program to seize state-power.

There is also the fact that the RPF launched its final assault on the government of Rwanda within two hours of the shoot-down,[xix] which suggests prior knowledge as well as plans and an organization ready for action, whereas the Hutu planners in Caplan’s mythical construction seem to have been disorganized, overmatched, and quickly overpowered. Allan Stam, a Rwanda scholar and former US Special Forces officer, has called attention to the extent to which the military maneuvers by Kagame's RPF after April 6, 1994 were 'staggeringly like the United States invasion of Iraq in 1991,' which he implies Kagame might well have learned in his stay at Fort Leavenworth.[xx] Caplan of course sneers at Stam's credentials, and pretends that he has 'no idea what this means.' But Caplan never explains how the alleged Hutu planners of the 1994 genocide were routed so quickly, while the US-supported and trained Kagame-RPF drove them from power.

Although Kagame runs a violent totalitarian state, and his regime has jailed, driven into exile, and killed dissidents at home and abroad, Caplan does not question the credibility of the witness recantations that he believes undermine the Hourigan case or the regular production of fresh witnesses that support the official Kagame (and Caplan) line. Caplan also finds the 2009 results of the so-called Independent Committee of Experts (i.e., the Mutsinzi Report[xxi]) that Kagame appointed to investigate the assassination to be 'largely persuasive,' as they (needless to say) 'pin the blame directly and fully on a group of Hutu extremists who were simply not prepared to accept the power-sharing provisions of the Arusha Accords.' Typical for Caplan, he adds that only 'genocide deniers, Hutu extremists and Kagame-haters' would reject the findings of investigators appointed by Kagame.[xxii] But these, again, are the words of a Kagame apologist, and they allow us to understand why a disciplined Kigali newspaper such as The New Times would refer to Caplan as a 'leading authority on Genocide and its prevention.'

Among the 'genocide deniers' and 'Kagame haters' who find the Mutsinzi report completely unpersuasive are René Lemarchand, the distinguished scholar on Rwanda, and Luc Marchal, the former chief of the Kigali Sector of UNAMIR (who was working in Kigali in April 1994). Lemarchand finds Caplan’s understanding of the distribution of benefits of the Arusha Agreement badly off the mark – Arusha was not a 'huge victory' for the RPF, he writes, as it gave the Hutu parties 'an overwhelming majority,' and how the shoot-down of Habyarimana’s jet was 'extremely functional' to Hutu extremists is a logic that 'escapes my grasp.'[xxiii] Luc Marchal’s co-authored 'Analysis of the Mutzinzi Report' is devastating, showing convincingly and in detail the lack of independence and limited expertise of the so-called 'Independent Committee of Experts,' and the fact that the Committee 'postulates that the authorities in post-genocide Rwanda had nothing to do with the attack of 6 April 1994,' which begs the most important question and shows the Committee to be 'motivated by ideology.' And Marchal’s analysis describes in detail the Committee’s carefully biased selection of witnesses and crude management of 'evidence.' It was 'a parody of an investigation, the script of which had been written in advance,' the 'sole intention of which was to demonstrate the total innocence of the RPF and the Machiavellian guilt of the Extremist Hutus.'[xxiv] No scholar or honest journalist could have taken the Mutsinzi Report seriously, but Gerald Caplan does.

CAPLAN’S MINIMIZING THE US ROLE IN CENTRAL AFRICA

Caplan objects to our attempts to show the very important role of US policy in Kagame's ascent to power, his takeover of the Rwandan state, and the mass killings that ensued. Caplan does this partly by flamboyant language ('elaborate American conspiracy,' 'obsessive anti-Americanism') and foolish sarcasm ('since thousands of officers from nations around the world have passed through Fort Leavenworth [as did Kagame], you'd think that the thousands of large-scale invasions they would return home and orchestrate would be better-known to the world than they are'). But mainly he does it by suppressing evidence and failing to tie things together. As noted, we mention that Kagame took instruction at the US military base in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Caplan counters that Kagame's stay there was 'very brief' and that 'it was no secret.' Would Caplan find it politically meaningless if it were 'no secret' that a Canadian youth stayed at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan for even a very brief period?

More important, Caplan does not tie Kagame's Fort Leavenworth stay to a large spectrum of other supportive acts and relationships. The United States was a long-time arms supplier to Uganda and the RPF, and it did nothing in the Security Council or otherwise to interfere with the Uganda-RPF invasion of Rwanda in October 1990. (We even cite former Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen, who naively wondered why the first Bush administration didn’t '[inform] Ugandan President Museveni that the invasion of Rwanda by uniformed members of the Ugandan army was totally unacceptable….'[xxv]) Caplan ignores the fact that the Arusha Accords[xxvi] of August 1993 forced the government of Rwanda to allow the RPF invading forces to further penetrate Rwanda and participate in (and subvert) the government, and he fails to see that the US support for a reduction in UNAMIR troop levels in April 1994 was not an unfortunate or even reckless error, but consistent with the US policy of facilitating Kagame’s conquest. The government of Rwanda wanted more UN troops, and we cite Rwanda's UN Ambassador Jean-Damascène Bizimana, who on April 21, 1994 told the Security Council that 'in view of the security situation now prevailing in Rwanda, UNAMIR's members should be increased to enable it to contribute to the re-establishment of the cease-fire and to assist in the establishment of security conditions that could bring an end to the violence.'[xxvii] But Paul Kagame didn’t want more UN troops. Hence, the United States didn’t either. In consequence, the Security Council greatly reduced UNAMIR's troops – a bit hard to reconcile with the standard account that the locus of primary responsibility for the 100 days of killings resides with 'Hutu Power' (and killers) and their genocidal plan.

Caplan makes much of the highly publicized expressions of remorse by high-ranking members of the Clinton administration, who 'shamefacedly admitted abandoning the Tutsi,' he writes, and 'consider it perhaps the greatest regret of his/her time in office.' But expressions of regret are cheap and can cover over policies of seeming neglect that are quite purposeful. (Clinton was noted for his sympathetic 'pain' over suffering he inflicted.[xxviii]) Caplan fails to mention that Kagame and his RPF did not want any military intervention that might derail their plans to overthrow the government of Rwanda, so that what he calls 'abandoning the Tutsi' never really happened – four successive US administrations have supported Kagame and the Tutsi, and therefore the monumental mass killings under him, from the RPF’s invasion of Rwanda in 1990 through its 100 day conquest in 1994, all the way to the present. In fact, 'abandoning the Tutsis' is a form of apologetics for the actual US policy of supporting Kagame and his shoot-down and conquest – he was stopping 'genocide' and the United States should have intervened more aggressively to support this leader who was 'saving' Rwanda from Hutu genocidaires!

In short, the Clinton administration viewed the monumental losses of life from April through July 1994 and beyond in both Rwanda and neighbouring countries to be 'worth it,' in the words Madeleine Albright once used when responding to a question about 'half a million' dead Iraqi children from the US-imposed 'sanctions of mass destruction.'[xxix] As then-Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs (now the US Ambassador to the United Nations) Susan Rice reportedly told her colleagues after visiting Central Africa late in Clinton's second term: 'Museveni and Kagame agree that the basic problem in the Great Lakes is the danger of a resurgence of genocide and they know how to deal with that. The only thing we have to do is look the other way.'[xxx] Look the other way – the long-standing US response to what in The Politics of Genocide we call 'benign' bloodbaths, benign because perpetrated by US allies and clients, and serving US interests. Unmentioned in Caplan's 'review' of our book, but worth emphasizing here, we found that a greater disparity exists between the number of deaths (5.4 million) and the attributions of 'genocide' (17) to the killings in the Democratic Republic of Congo than in any other theatre of atrocity we surveyed. Along with the monumental losses of life suffered by the Iraqi population first during the US-UK sanctions regime (1990-2003) and then the US-UK war of aggression and military occupation (2003-), and the few times the establishment media and intellectuals used the term 'genocide' to describe them, we doubt that three finer examples of the politics of genocide can be found in the contemporary world.[xxxi]

CAPLAN MANAGES THE RWANDA NUMBERS

Caplan derides the 'sensational estimate' by Christian Davenport and Allan Stam that one million deaths occurred from April to July 1994, and that the 'majority of victims are likely Hutu and not Tutsi.' The 'methodology employed to arrive at such an Orwellian assertion has been totally discredited,' Caplan adds. But although the Davenport - Stam methodology has never been discredited, and The Politics of Genocide makes important use of their work,[xxxii] Caplan's preferred numbers and assignment of victims, based on no discernible methodology, have long been institutionalized, and Caplan can routinely regurgitate them without fear of rebuttal.

In their 2009 article for Miller - McCune, Davenport and Stam reported the 'most shocking result' of their research: 'The killings in the zone controlled by the FAR [i.e., the Armed Forces of Rwanda] seemed to escalate as the RPF moved into the country and acquired more territory. When the RPF advanced, large-scale killings escalated. When the RPF stopped, large-scale killings largely decreased.'[xxxiii] When we keep in mind the counter-theme of our treatment of Rwanda, that all of the 'widely-accepted facts' defended by Caplan and the rest of 'serious' scholarship turns perpetrator and victim upside-down, the shock dissipates immediately. As the 'only well-organized killing force within Rwanda in 1994,' whenever the RPF advanced, a lot of Rwandans died; and whenever the RPF halted its advances, fewer Rwandans died.

For Caplan, however, as one of his section-headings states, we are merely taking the 'Hutu genocidaires' and turning them into 'dead Hutu victims.' This is hardly the case. But as Caplan himself reports that the 'lowest estimate by serious scholars of Tutsi killed during the 100 days is 500,000 - 600,000,' with some (Caplan included) who 'believe it could be closer to a million,' skepticism towards the standard model of the 'Rwanda genocide' is unavoidable. 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. If ever a prima facie case existed for doubting the collective wisdom of 'academics, human rights activists, [and] journalists' whose opinions the establishment respects, we find it here, with the alleged Hutu perpetrators routed and fleeing for their lives in neighbouring countries, and the alleged Tutsi victims in complete control.

Caplan does acknowledge Tutsi killings of Hutus, but he fails to mention our citation of a memorandum to the US Secretary State from September 1994 that '10,000 or more Hutu civilians per month' were being killed by Tutsi cadres. That is a lot of civilians per month – and these killings continued into 1995 and well beyond, as both Rwandan Hutu refugees and the Congolese Hutu already living in eastern Zaire became targets of cross-border RPF attacks. But this State Department memorandum was never made public (except as part of the defence exhibits at the ICTR),and its content did not in the least affect Clinton administration support of the RPF killers, who were busy at work in the eastern DRC at the very time President Bill Clinton delivered his fraudulent but no less celebrated apology in Rwanda. Also striking, the ICTR has never indicted a single Tutsi for any crime that falls within its mandate. This tells us a great deal about the real role played by the ICTR in securing impunity for the RPF – including its treatment of the Hourigan evidence and the 'triggering event' – while relentlessly pursuing its targets. For Caplan, this role is taken as a given and presumably just.

CAPLAN ON THE ROLE OF THE 1993 HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

Caplan objects to our comments about the 1993 International Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Abuses in Rwanda. But he neither quotes nor summarizes the case we make: that this commission participated in a destabilization and regime-change campaign in which the spotlight and accusation-propaganda of the United States and the many NGOs that flock to its side were directed at the Habyarimana government. Despite its name, the commission's actual inquiry was not into human rights abuses inside Rwanda, but rather into human rights abuses allegedly committed by the government of Rwanda, whose national territory had been under assault by the invading RPF for close to two-and-one-half-years. As commission co-chair Alison Des Forges observed (and we quote), the March 8, 1993 release of the commission's report 'put Rwandan [sic] human rights abuses squarely before the international community'[xxxiv] – that is, it put the Habyarimana government's alleged abuses squarely before the 'international community,' the invading RPF's human rights abuses barely mentioned.

We also point out that William Schabas, the Canadian member of the commission, issued a press release in conjunction with the commission's report that bore the title, 'Genocide and War Crimes in Rwanda.' ('[G]enocide is,' Caplan writes elsewhere, 'the crime of crimes.') To quote The Politics of Genocide: '[W]ith the brunt of its findings coming down against the Habyarimana government, the commission's work served to delegitimize the government of Rwanda and enhance the legitimacy of the armed forces of the RPF. As the RPF quickly used the commission's claims to justify a new killing spree, we believe the case can be made that the overall impact of this report…was to underwrite the mass killings to follow….'[xxxv] True, Caplan may not understand our point or, understanding it perfectly well, may reject it and therefore prefer to muddy the waters around it. But the general point we make about the foreign-policy tool of focusing on the alleged human rights abuses committed by a target of US destabilization and regime-change, while ignoring the abuses of the armed forces attacking it, is unmistakable, and cannot be dismissed as claiming a 'great American conspiracy in Rwanda.'

CAPLAN’S ACCOMMODATION TO VIOLATIONS OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Caplan finds no serious problem with Kagame's laws criminalizing 'genocide denial' and a litany of similar thought-crimes, [xxxvi] laws which allow someone who defends political targets accused by Kagame of promoting 'genocide ideology' to be charged with exactly the same crimes. US attorney Peter Erlinder was arrested on the basis of these laws in late May, after he flew to Kigali to take up the defense of Victoire Ingabire Umhoza, the leader of the United Democratic Forces - Inkingi party, who herself had been arrested on 'genocidal denial' charges in April.[xxxvii] Caplan justified Erlinder's arrest on the ground that Erlinder entered Rwanda with the full-knowledge that he was guilty of 'questioning the Kagame version of events,' in Erlinder's words.[xxxviii] Caplan ignores the fact that Kagame's 'genocide denial' laws and the arrests of his critics and opponents are the work of a totalitarian regime, but Caplan contends that Ingabire and Erlinder had it coming – Ingabire because 'she [told] reporters she doesn't know whether more Tutsi or more Hutu were killed' in 1994, and Erlinder because '[his] presence is like a sharp slap in the face to all survivors of the genocide.'[xxxix] Caplan shows himself to be completely committed to the version of history embedded in Rwanda's 'genocide denial' laws, and he is willing to see them enforced by state power.

Erlinder has never denied that mass-atrocities and genocide were committed in Rwanda, and that a large number of Tutsi as well as Hutu were slaughtered there. However, Erlinder finds these terrible events centred in Kagame’s RPF invasion and takeover programs and efforts – as we do. Yet as Caplan cannot even allow the possibility of a debate on this subject, Erlinder is simply a 'genocide denier.'

Caplan also takes issue with what he calls Erlinder's 'intellectual dishonesty.' According to Caplan, Erlinder, a lead defence counsel for the Hutu former Major Aloys Ntabakuze in the Military 1 trial, is guilty of falsifying the trial chamber's December 2008 Judgment in this case. As Caplan describes it:

in none of his frequent references to this judgment has Erlinder thought it worth including the following statements from the judgment: 1. ‘Indeed, these preparations [by the accused] are completely consistent with a plan to commit genocide.’ 2. ‘It cannot be excluded that the extended campaign of violence directed against Tutsis, as such, became an added or an altered component of these preparations.’

Both of the sentences to which Caplan gives the numbers 1 and 2 occur in paragraph 2110 of the December 2008 Judgment. In-between these two sentences, however, there appear two other sentences that Caplan himself omits. These sentences read: 'However, [these preparations] are also consistent with preparations for a political or military power struggle. The Chamber recalls that, when confronted with circumstantial evidence, it may only convict where it is the only reasonable inference.'[xl]

Caplan thus omits the reason given by the trial chamber for acquitting the four Hutu defendants in Military 1 of the most serious charge that can be brought against them at the ICTR: Conspiracy to Commit Genocide. As the government of Rwanda's response to the assassination of Habyarimana and the renewed military offensive by the RPF was consistent with both a 'plan to commit genocide' and a 'political or military power struggle' (the defence arguing the latter), the 'conspiracy to commit genocide' charge was rejected by the trial chamber. As we showed at the outset with respect to his carelessness as a reviewer, here Caplan recklessly accuses Erlinder of 'intellectual dishonesty,' when it is Caplan who clearly is guilty of the charge.

CAPLAN, RWANDA, AND MEDIA ACCESS

Caplan wants readers to believe that challenges to the 'Rwanda genocide' model that he guards so zealously are few and far between, that none of them are intellectually serious, and that it is only the 'vast power of the internet [which] makes them seem ubiquitous and forceful.' The 45 authors he says 'agree there was a genocide planned and executed by a cabal of leading Hutu extremists against Rwanda's Tutsi minority' may seem large in number, but Caplan worries that the internet greatly extends the reach of the 'genocide deniers,' and fringe crazies such as Erlinder, Robin Philpot, Christopher Black, Christian Davenport, Allan Stam, and Michael Hourigan (not to mention the two of us) enjoy a 'vastly disproportionate pride of place.'

To test Caplan's claim about the disproportionate coverage of the alleged 'genocide deniers,' we used the Factiva database to assemble a modest media universe, and found that whereas Caplan has had at least 22 bylined articles related to Rwanda within this media universe, not a single article by any of these six critics turned up.

Not only does Caplan himself thus enjoy a disproportionate access to the establishment media, but he has used his access to attack the so-called 'deniers' by name: Robin Philpot in three of his articles, Christian Davenport in two, and Michael Hourigan in two as well.[xli] 'Google Rwanda and you're quite likely get a deniers' rant featuring the tiny band of usual suspects,' Caplan wrote in 2009, disguising himself as a lonely voice in the wilderness, 'French Judge Bruguiere, former UN Rwanda chief Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, Robin Philpot, former Australian investigator Michael Hourigan, American academic Christian Davenport – each enthusiastically citing the others as their proof that the entire so-called genocide was really an American imperial plot.'[xlii] The data show once again that Gerald Caplan misrepresents reality.

It is also of interest that that the poor victimized Caplan not only dominates the 'deniers' in the establishment Western media, he has access to and is appreciated in The New Times, the Kigali-based English-language newspaper that is friendly with and possibly sponsored by the Kagame dictatorship. As we noted earlier, that paper profiled Caplan as a 'leading authority on Genocide and its prevention.' This all fits our framework of analysis: the United States steadfastly supports Kagame, establishment US and Western media support also flows to Kagame, and Caplan enjoys media access while the 'deniers' are marginalized – and of course Kagame's media appreciate Caplan too. Whether in the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, or Kigali's New Times, it is the man who repeats the institutionalized truths about Rwanda whose voice is privileged.

Caplan makes another serious error of fact, claiming that the Rwanda genocide has been given scant attention in the West. Readers of The Politics of Genocide will see the use of the word 'genocide' in the establishment media has been far greater for the Rwanda case than any other arena of mass killing in recent decades – 3,199, as compared with only 17 for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 80 for the 'sanctions of mass destruction' era in Iraq, and 13 for the period of the US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq, both of which caused Iraqi deaths in numbers comparable to that in Rwanda 1994.[xliii]

CAPLAN, KAGAME, AND THE DRC

From the very first UN report in 2001 on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo,[xliv] the invading Rwanda Patriotic Army as well as Ugandan military commanders and civilians have been identified as leading the mass-scale looting of the DRC, and the bloodshed that accompanied it. As the two major foreign state actors at work inside the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda long had established what the UN calls 'elite networks,' structures parallel to and working in conjunction with Rwandan and Ugandan authorities, and organized to manage the 'mechanisms for revenue generation,…once their troops have departed.'[xlv] At their core, these 'elite networks' are comprised of political, military, business, and even false militia and 'rebel' fronts, and maintain their control of territory through intimidation, threats, and violence. By the late 1990s, they had already 'built up a self-financing war economy centred on mineral exploitation,' with the 'looting that was previously conducted by the armies themselves…replaced with organized systems of embezzlement, tax fraud, extortion, the use of stock options as kickbacks and diversion of State funds….'[xlvi]

The UN rejected the RPF's rationale that its armed forces' continued presence in the Rwanda-controlled area of the eastern DRC was needed to defend Rwanda against hostile Hutu forces terrorizing the border region and threatening to invade it. '[T]o use the term employed by the Congo Desk of the Rwandan Patriotic Army,' the UN's 2002 report countered, the 'real long-term purpose is…to 'secure property'.'[xlvii] By September 2002, the UN was estimating that 3.5 million more people had died in the five eastern provinces of the DRC than would have died, had the wars launched by Rwanda and Uganda for the DRC's mineral wealth never occurred. 'These deaths are a direct result of the occupation [of the DRC] by Rwanda and Uganda,' the UN's 2002 report concluded. 'Extensive mortality, especially mortality among children, is the consequence of a cycle of aggression, the multiplication of armed forces, a high frequency of conflict and its consequences, especially displacement.'[xlviii] In The Politics of Genocide, we cite a later mortality survey that estimated 5.4 million deaths in the eastern DRC through April 2007, but even this estimate is more than three years old.[xlix] Moreover, as we point out, the DRC's 'foreign exploiters are the United States, Britain, France, and other African states allied with the West – most notably Rwanda and Uganda. Hence, it is the Congo's vastly greater death toll over ten years that has been truly ignored….'[l]

Gerald Caplan has long downplayed the catastrophe in the DRC and especially the Kagame regime's role in causing this catastrophe. In his 2004 essay, 'The Genocide Problem: 'Never Again' All Over Again,'[li] Caplan refers to genocide in Rwanda and genocide in Darfur – but never once to genocide in the DRC. Instead, Caplan refers merely to the 'ongoing calamity in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo;' and in a passage that made him no enemies in the Kagame regime, he laments how 'Not a single French politician has been held accountable for allowing the [Hutu] genocidaires to escape from Rwanda to Zaire/Congo, thereby setting in motion the catastrophic wars that have since plagued the African Great Lakes region.'

Of course, in his references to the genocide in Rwanda, Caplan means only the killings attributable to Hutus, not the vast numbers slaughtered by Kagame. (Recall the '10,000 or more Hutu civilians per month' referred to in an internal State Department report.) This stress on Hutu villainy repeats the Kagame regime's rationale for its military presence in the DRC, allegedly chasing down the fugitive genocidaires. But if the UN and other reports are correct, and deaths in the Kagame- (and Museveni-) controlled areas of the eastern DRC have run into the several millions, then Caplan's evasions about their source, and the intellectual cover he provides for whatever Kagame does, make Caplan not merely a genocide denier – they make Caplan a genocide facilitator, who all these years later, is still hard at work providing cover for Kagame.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article was originally published by Monthly Review.
* Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and has written extensively on economics, political economy and the media. David Peterson is an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago. Together they are co-authors of 'The Politics of Genocide', recently published by Monthly Review Press.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[i] Gerald Caplan, 'The Politics of denialism: The strange case of Rwanda. Review of 'The Politics of Genocide',' Pambazuka News (No. 486), June 17, 2010.
[ii] We take this description of Caplan from Edmund Kagire, 'Author Calls for Upholding 'Never Again' Principle,' The New Times (Kigali), January 8, 2010. Caplan was visiting Rwanda to deliver a lecture before the country's National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide.
[iii] See Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), pp. 51-68. For an electronic copy of this section of our book, see 'Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System,' Monthly Review 62, no. 1, May, 2010.
[iv] On the analytic framework that we use to explain (largely) US media coverage of different mass atrocities around the world, see Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, pp. 15-17; and for three tables that represent attributions of 'genocide' to different theaters of atrocities, see p. 35, p. 38, and p. 72. In focusing on our treatment of Rwanda and the DRC, Caplan ignores the fact that we apply the same analytic framework to Iraq, Darfur, Bosnia - Herzegovina, Kosovo, the Israeli - Palestinian conflict, Croatia, Afghanistan, Turkey, East Timor, El Salvador, and Guatemala. In the three paragraphs that Caplan devotes to our book's thesis, he writes that he is 'not at all sure that it's helpful to explore these issues against a frame of genocide.' In fact, we study the actual usage of the term by others, as they apply it (or not) to different theaters of atrocities. But as readers of our book ought to recognize, its content is irrelevant to Caplan's 'review.'
[v] René Lemarchand, 'Doubts on the Veracity of Mutsinzi Report,' Pambazuka News (No. 467), January 28, 2010.
[vi] See Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, International Panel of Eminent Personalities, Organization of African Unity, 2000.
[vii] Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, p. 53.
[viii] Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, para. 6.17, para. 6.12, and para. 20.23.
[ix] See Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, pp. 57-59, where we assess the work not only of Robert Gersony (including its synopsis by a September 1994 memorandum for US Secretary of State Warren Christopher that reported the RPF was '[killing] 10,000 or more Hutu civilians per month'), but also the valuable work of the US academics Christian Davenport and Allan Stam.
[x] Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, para. 22.9, para. 22.12, emphasis added.
[xi] Gerald Caplan, 'The Rwandan Genocide,' in The Betrayal of Africa (Toronto: Groundwork Books, 2008), pp. 78-80; here p. 79.
[xii] Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, p. 51.
[xiii] For one example of what we mean by the Kagame-as-savior party-line, see Philip Gourevitch, 'The Life After,' New Yorker, May 4, 2009. To this day, Kagame is feted in the Western metropolitan centers, but nowhere near as obsequiously as in the United States and Canada.
[xiv] See Affidavit of Michael Andrew Hourigan, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, November 27, 2006. For other sources that discuss the suppression of the Hourigan memorandum, see Robin Philpot, Rwanda 1994: Colonialism Dies Hard (E-Text as posted to the Taylor Report Website, 2004), esp. Chap. 6, 'It shall be called a plan crash'; Mark Colvin, 'Questions unanswered 10 years after Rwandan genocide,' PM, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, March 30, 2004; Mark Doyle, 'Rwanda 'plane crash probe halted',' BBC News, February 9, 2007; Nick McKenzie, 'UN 'shut down' Rwanda probe,' The Age, February 10, 2007; and Tiphaine Dickson, 'Rwanda's Deadliest Secret: Who Shot Down President Habyarimana's Plane?' Global Research.com, November 24, 2008.
[xv] See Statute of the International Tribunal for Rwanda, Annex, UN Security Council Resolution 955 (S/RES/955), November 8, 1994. Article 1 of the Statute states: 'The International Tribunal for Rwanda shall have the power to prosecute persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of Rwanda and Rwandan citizens responsible for such violations committed in the territory of neighbouring States, between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 1994,...' The qualification 'in the territory of neighbouring States' ought to be especially troubling for the Kagame-RPF, as many of the Hutu it killed were refugees who had fled Rwanda for what was then eastern Zaire (now the DRC).
[xvi] In 1996, the Canadian Louise Arbour was vetted for the job of Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and in this role, Arbour did everything that could b asked of her to expedite the US-led NATO bloc's war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. See Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes Against Humanity (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004), pp 131-132, citing Carol Off, The Lion, the Fox, and the Eagle (Random House, Canada, 2000), p. 289.
[xvii] Bjørn Willum, 'Terrorattentatet FN ikke vil høre om,' Berlingske Tidende (Denmark), December 10, 2006. (»Det eneste tidspunkt chefanklageren sagde, det ikke var indenfor mandatet var, da jeg implicerede Kagame.«)
[xviii] Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, Request for the Issuance of International Arrest Warrants, Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, November 17, 2006, p. 12 (as archived by the Taylor Report website).
[xix] See Allan C. Stam, 'Coming to a New Understanding of the Rwanda Genocide,' a lecture before the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, February 18, 2009, shortly after the 22:30 mark.
[xx] Ibid, shortly after the 22:30 mark.
[xxi] See Dr. Jean Mutsinzi et al., Report into the Investigation of the Causes and Circumstances of and Responsibility for the Attack of 06/04/1994 Against the Falcon 50 Rwandan Presidential Aeroplane, Registration Number 9XR-NN (a.k.a. The Mutsinzi Report), Independent Committee of Experts, Republic of Rwanda, 2009.
[xxii] Gerald Caplan, 'Who killed the president of Rwanda?' Pambazuka News (No. 466), January 21, 2010.
[xxiii] Lemarchand, 'Doubts on the Veracity of Mutsinzi Report.'
[xxiv] Luc Marchal et al., 'Analysis of the Mutsinzi Report,' CirqueMinime, February 8, 2010.
[xxv] Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, p. 53.
[xxvi] See the Peace Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Rwanda and the Rwandese Patriotic Front, signed at Arusha on 4 August 1993 (A/48/824-S/26915), U.N. General Assembly, December 23, 1993. A total of seven documents were gathered together as the 'Arusha Peace Accords,' the earliest the N'Sele Cease-fire Agreement dating from 1991.
[xxvii] 'The situation concerning Rwanda,' UN Security Council (S/PV.3368), April 21, 1994, 6.
[xxviii] 'The international community,' President Bill Clinton said in Kigali, 'together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.' ('Clinton's Painful Words Of Sorrow and Chagrin,' New York Times, March 26, 1998.) But from the point of view of genuine contrition, admitting to which ethical and legal lapse is more serious: crimes of omission or crimes of commission? The speaker of these words admitted the former, not the latter. As we note above, Kagame and his RPF did not want any military intervention that might derail their plans to overthrow the government of Rwanda, so that what Caplan calls 'abandoning the Tutsi' never really happened.
[xxix] Lesley Stahl, 'Punishing Saddam,' 60 Minutes, CBS TV, May 12, 1996.
[xxx] In Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 339. Note that Prunier himself attributes this quote to an anonymous 'member of [Susan Rice's] staff' (p. 339). The claim that the 'gist of Prunier's anecdote is correct, except that participants have confirmed to me that it was Rice herself who spoke these words,' we take from Howard W. French, 'Kagame's Hidden War in the Congo,' New York Review of Books, September 24, 2009.
[xxxi] Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, p. 68, and pp. 29-38. Also see esp. Table 1, 'Differential attributions of 'genocide' to different theaters of atrocities,' p. 35.
[xxxii] Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, pp. 58-59.
[xxxiii] Christian Davenport and Allan C. Stam, 'What Really Happened in Rwanda?' Miller-McCune, October 6, 2009.
[xxxiv] Alison Des Forges, 'Leave None to Tell the Story': Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), p. 93; in Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, p. 65.
[xxxv] Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, p. 66.
[xxxvi] See Constitution of the Republic of Rwanda, June 4, 2003, and its Amendments (as posted to the website of the Rwandan Ministry of Defense), specifically Article 13, 'Revisionism, negationism and trivialization of genocide are punishable by the law,' and Article 9, which commits the Rwandan government to 'fighting the ideology of genocide and all its manifestations.' Also see Law Relating to the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Ideology (No. 18/2008), Codes and Laws of Rwanda, Ministry of Justice, Republic of Rwanda, July 23, 2008.
[xxxvii] See Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, 'Peter Erlinder Jailed by One of the Major Genocidaires of Our Era – Update,' MRZine, June 17, 2010.
[xxxviii] See Peter Erlinder, 'The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: International Justice or Juridically-Constructed 'Victor’s Impunity'?' May, 2008. As Erlinder also pointed out in the same article: 'The Rwandan Government, with US and UK support, is actively campaigning to have ALL of the ICTR cases transferred to Rwanda. No one at the ICTY is suggesting transferring Croats to Serbia when the ICTY shuts down. The Kagame Regime also wants at ICTR records to be transferred to Kigali and has issued 40,000 warrants for 'genocidaires' in the Rwandan diaspora, both Hutu’s and Tutsi’s, who are making common cause to bring down a regime that the Economist called the 'most repressive in Africa' in April 2004.'
[xxxix] Gerald Caplan, 'The Law Society of Upper Canada and genocide denial In Rwanda,' Toronto Globe and Mail (Web exclusive), June 11, 2010. Also see Caplan, 'The Politics of denialism,' para. 8-12. Caplan's Globe and Mail defense of Kagame's totalitarian laws received a sharp rebuttal by the University of Texas at Austin Professor Alan J. Kuperman, 'Interpreting genocide,' Letter, Toronto Globe and Mail, June 14, 2010.
[xl] Judge Eric Mose et al., Judgment, The Prosecutor v. Theoneste Bagosora et al. (ICTR-98-41-T), International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, December 18, 2008, Sect. 2.1, 'The Conspiracy to Commit Genocide,' para. 2084-2112; here para. 2110.
[xli] Factiva database searches carried out for five sources on July 1, 2010, for all available dates. The five sources were All Africa, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Globe and Mail, and Toronto Star. The basic search parameters were rst=(afnws or mtlg or otct or glob or tor) and Rwanda and [name]. The results were then checked for items appearing under the individual's byline. Of the seven individuals whose names we used Factiva to check (Gerald Caplan, Christopher Black, Christian Davenport, Peter Erlinder, Michael Hourigan, Robin Philpot, and Allan Stam), the only bylines that we found belonged to Gerald Caplan.
[xlii] Gerald Caplan, 'Memory And Denial – the Genocide Fifteen Years On,' All Africa, April 8, 2009. This same article first appeared in Pambazuka News ('Memory And Denial – the Genocide Fifteen Years On,' No. 426, April 2, 2009), and then The New Times (Kigali), from which All Africa re-circulated it.
[xliii] See Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, Table 1, 'Differential attributions of 'genocide' to different theaters of atrocities,' p. 35.
[xliv] See Safiatou Ba-N'Daw et al., Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo (S/2001/357), UN Security Council, April, 2001; Mahmoud Kassem et al., Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo (S/2002/1146), UN Security Council, October, 2002; Mahmoud Kassem et al., Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo (S/2003/1027), UN Security Council, October, 2003; and Jason Stearns et al., Final Report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo (S/2008/773), UN Security Council, November, 2008.
[xlv] Kassem et al., Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo (S/2002/1146), UN Security Council, October, 2002, para. 13.
[xlvi] Ibid, para. 12 - 21; here para. 21, para. 12, and para. 19.
[xlvii] Ibid, para. 65 - 96; here para. 65. As this 2002 report also states: 'The elite network's operations in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo are managed centrally from the [Rwanda Patriotic Army] Congo Desk, which serves to link the commercial and military activities of the RPA' (para. 70).
[xlviii] Ibid, para. 96.
[xlix] Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, p. 43, citing Benjamin Coghlan et al., Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An Ongoing Crisis, International Rescue Committee - Burnet Institute, January, 2008.
[l] Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, pp. 43-44.
[li] Gerald Caplan, 'The Genocide Problem: 'Never Again' All Over Again,' The Walrus, October, 2004.