"Tears Flow Within"

       Photo By: James Nachtway 

Last spring, after a five-week visit to Rwanda, I produced two television news pieces for the CBC. Together, the stories challenged the prevailing view about healing and reconciliation in that Central African country, 13 years after the genocide. 

(You can find my documentary Rwanda: Out of the Darkness here.)

The stories were anecdotal. They featured two Tutsi women and one Tutsi man who survived the slaughter, and one Hutu man who had killed a dozen people with a machete, and was now free. I used their stories as a frame for my thesis:  that Rwanda was far, far away from healing, despite the platitudes of the government. My script said that for the victims I had met (and by extension, for all the survivors of the genocide), the memory of the slaughter was still too fresh to expect them to forgive the people who had carried out the killings.  

This thesis flew in the face of official orthodoxy, but the final edited stories did not quote a single high government official. In fact, there was only one pro-government voice: A low-level village-level functionary who echoed the official line on ethnicity in Rwanda, namely, that henceforth, there were "no more Hutus, no more Tutsis, no more Twas (Rwanda's third ethnic group)" in the country.

I realized, after the stories aired, that my journalism could be viewed as being unbalanced, unsupported, polemical. Where were the voices of the Rwandans who insist that they have indeed forgiven their tormentors? Where were the stories of the Rwandans who were hunter and hunted in 1994, but who in 2007 had reconciled, and now live as neighbors?

Had I not crossed the ethical line by focusing on the negative? Indeed, some Rwandan officials could even argue that I had left myself open to criminal prosecution, under Rwandan laws against “negationism” and “divisionism.”

On the surface, these criticisms are valid. But they fail to take into account the extraordinary realities on the ground in Rwanda, and the obstacles that are placed in the way of a Western reporter trying to understand the social dynamics.  I don’t say this lightly: If ever there was a story that required the application of “situation ethics” in reporting, that was it.

The Problem of Forgiveness

The essential reality of Rwanda, I believe, is obscured behind a carefully calibrated campaign based on the mantra of reconciliation and forgiveness. Survivors are expected to put the past behind them, to “make peace” with the confessed killers, even when the killers hide behind moral alibis (i.e. they were “provoked” into committing genocide by ghostly voices.)

To work effectively in Rwanda, you need special strategies, special filters. My first concern, when speaking to survivors of the genocide, was: How open will they be with a Western journalist? How honestly will they respond to my questions? In my preliminary research (while preparing for my trip, I reviewed dozens of academic papers, read scores of newspaper articles, and several books dealing with reconciliation and forgiveness) I came across a poignant Rwandan expression about how “tears flow within.” In Rwandan culture, one survives sorrow if one has a certain inner strength. Grief is often internalized, and not openly expressed, so it is traditionally understood that one can help someone by genuinely listening to his or her suffering.

In Rwanda, I met a European academic who was doing field research on the social effects of the genocide. She told me, on deep background (since she wanted to protect her sources), that Rwandans who lived through the trauma of the genocide spoke about their experiences with two different voices. The external, public voice said, “I forgive.” But the deeper voice, the soul’s voice, often expressed much more negative emotions. (My source insisted I not use her name, or even the town where she was working, lest somebody identify the people she was studying. There would be reprisals, she said.)

I spoke to students at the National University of Rwanda. They struggled with the idea of forgiveness and reconciliation. One young man, whose family was wiped out in the slaughter, said he understood why the government wanted Rwandans to forgive. But he himself could not. Why? Because he had never learned who killed his family. Until he looked the murderers in the eye, he could not even think about forgiveness.  Nor could be ever marry a Hutu woman, he said through clenched teeth. The killing, for him, had created an impassable ethnic divide.

A Rwandan psychologist told me the government was wrong when it urged genocide survivors to forgive before they were ready to do so: Forgiveness had to come in its own time, on its own terms, without compulsion.

At the same time, academics are casting a critical eye on the Kagame government's policy of de-ethnicization. Writes Andrea Purdekova of Oxford University: "Today, the Rwandan government tries to impose co-existence by pretending that there
is no reason not to coexist. The government tries to attract to the pole of unity by prescribing its own vision of it and by forbidding anything that runs against. It thus creates a ‘false togetherness’ by swamping individuality and discouraging dissent." (January 2008)

Words Behind Words

All of this information came into play when I met survivors, and turned on the camera. It cast a special light on their answers, and how I framed these answers in my script. It informed my reaction when one of my interview subjects, Pelagia, told me, with downcast eyes and a halting voice, that she had forgiven a notorious killer, Eric, who was now her neighbor. “We are like brother and sister,” she told me. But her demeanor projected an altogether different message; she seemed perplexed, afraid. I was convinced she was saying the very things that local officials wanted her to say. It was Rwanda’s “culture of obedience” prompting her public voice.

Was it presumptuous or paternalistic of me to characterize her answer this way in my script? I don’t think so. A reporter in the field, especially in a post-conflict zone, must be more than a stenographer. It’s our job to give context, to paint the grey zones, to listen and observe with our hearts and a quality of discernment. Had I just recounted the words verbatim, I felt it would have been a lie. Context is the deep tissue of journalism.

Another possible criticism of my journalism in Rwanda is that I did not spend enough time getting the official version of things. I didn’t interview the president. I didn’t interview the official survivors’ organization. I made no effort to counterbalance the negative things I was hearing from survivors.

This is true. And intentional. The government’s position is well known, and didn’t need me to amplify it. Kagame’s information machine (some critics would call it a propaganda machine) is very effective. He controls the print and broadcast media. When the New Times newspaper published a photograph of Kagame that he found unflattering, the reporter was summarily fired, and the staff put on notice. The relationship between the government and the newspaper, they were told, would be like “husband and wife”. An editor who published an article highly critical of “Tutsi justice” was jailed for a year. Reporters critical of the government have been badly beaten.

News and Guilt

Meanwhile, his government’s warm and fuzzy message of reconciliation between Rwanda’s Tutsis and Hutus has gotten wide international press, in a West still burdened by guilt for its indifference to the 1994 genocide when it was happening. Well hidden behind Rwanda’s new, modern image, are some harsh realities: Overcrowded prisons, a limping economy that cannot help many of the 300,000 genocide survivors, a Hutu majority that is woefully under-represented in government, and lingering distrust between the two dominant groups.

Against this backdrop, how would I apportion the few minutes of air time the CBC was giving me? What would stay? Who would I leave out? In a choice between the official with his polished message, and the broken widow struggling to keep a family alive on $30 a month, it was an easy call. There wasn’t room for both. My guiding principle in difficult parts of the world has always been this: To follow the humanity, to value the Anecdote over the Big Picture.

And it’s not only a journalist’s social sensitivity that leads me to this principle. It’s also practical. The Big Picture stories, the ones that carry the voice of authority alongside that of the victims, are often complex and difficult to verify. The small stories, the tightly focused human narratives, are far more reliable guides to the truth.

Is this classic “balanced” journalism as we know it? Perhaps not. But I believe that in the final analysis, it is just as valid. Because it relies on the journalist’s most important skills: discernment, integrity . . . and the ability to verify from the gut.

 NOTE: The Rwandan proverb is: "les larmes coulent dans le ventre" which translates literally to "tears flow in the belly".

I found this in an academic paper written by Deogratias Bagilishya, a psychologist at the Transcultural Psychiatry Clinic of the Montreal Children's Hospital. The paper is personal testimony from a Rwandan father whose son was killed in the Rwandan genocide and is titled "Mourning and Recovery from Trauma: In Rwanda, Tears Flow Within."

A disturbing story

December 10, 2007

In October, 1998, Belgian journalist Peter Verlinden spent three hours interviewing an African-born Belgian rancher, Marcel Gerin, and his Mexican-born wife Gloria Martinez. The couple managed the Mpanga Ranch in southeastern Rwanda, a popular tourist stop near the southern extremity of Akagera National Park.

Gerin and Martinez were witnesses to (and almost consumed in) a little known episode of the Rwandan genocide. The episode raises serious questions about the behavior of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, in its campaign to crush the Hutu regime and end the 1994 genocide. And it begs the larger question: When does military action to stop genocide, become genocide itself? And why has no tribunal ever formally investigated the actions of the army that “won” the 1994 war?

(You can find my documentary Rwanda: Out of the Darkness here.)

Verlinden, a reputable Dutch-speaking journalist and writer, produced a documentary based on the couple’s testimony, called “The Killing Fields.” It drew considerable attention in Europe, but almost none in Africa, or North America . One can only guess at the reason: Perhaps allegations of atrocities by the “good guys” in the conflict--the RPF--only serve to confuse (or render overly complex) the accepted narrative of the events of 1994.

In any case, Verlinden summarized the story, and his researches around the story, in a statement, dated September 28, 2004, which he offered to the International Tribunal in Arusha. He said he was acting as an “intermediary and spokesperson” for the couple, who had left Rwanda, and were no longer willing to talk about the events they witnessed in 1994, for “very personal reasons.” One can only guess what those reasons are.

Here are the main elements of their story.

One week after the shooting down of Hutu President Habyarimana’s airplane in Kigali--the event that launched the genocide--Gerin and Martinez found themselves with 1500 to 2000 refugees at Mpanga Ranch. “They were counting on the two whites to protect them.” Verlinden writes. “There were no Rwandan soldiers (in the vicinity) and no Interahamwe. "

Around the 22nd or 23rd of April, they heard heavy gunfire a few kilometres away. Three days later a small group of soldiers arrived at the ranch. They spoke English and Swahili. Gerin described them as soldiers, but they were not in uniform. He concluded they were Ugandan. They arrested the couple, and their Rwandan helper, by the name of Innocent Katete. A short time later, one of the group fired three bullets into Katete, and ordered that no one should help the young man, because he was a “dying dog.”

The rebels (they were clearly members of Kagame’s army, advancing from bases in Uganda) took the couple into custody and brought them along on the route to the town of Mulindi. “There were barricades all over the road,” Verlinden writes, “manned by English-speakers.”

In Mulindi, Gerin and Martinez saw “a very large number of bodies. The corpses were obviously fresh.” It was April 26. The couple noticed that a lot of the armed militia were children. Later that day, the column decided to return to Mpanga. Martinez was with them when they stopped at the home of a man getting ready for bed, without interrogating him, cut off his head. They told her he was a traitor and a member of the Interahamwe.

Back at the ranch, Martinez says the leader of the rebel group, whom she named as George Kelinde, gave instructions to the rebel group that they should “wipe out everyone who moved.” No one, he said in Swahili, should be left alive. “She immediately alerted her husband,” Verlinden writes, “but for reasons of personal security, they were not able to intervene.”

Back again in the town of Mulindi “there were many corpses.” Verlinden quotes Gerin as saying that “the blood was still flowing, that these were people who had just been killed.” They numbered in the hundreds. The odor of death was “overwhelming.”

“He (Gerin) told of a child who was crying. A commander ordered a soldier to ‘make it keep quiet.’ Immediately after, the child was killed by a bullet.”

The couple pleaded with their captors to let them go. On the night of April 27, the militia agreed to take them to Kibungo.

“Along the road Gerin and Martinez saw with their own eyes how child-soldiers killed with machetes those whom they found on the roads (mainly the elderly, woman and children.) The rebels accompanying the couple told them, speaking about the Hutus: ‘We’ll win the war with their uniforms and their methods; we’ll do the same thing (as they do)’.

“On the main road, on the way to Kinbungo, Mr. Gerin drove through the blood of the victims who had just been killed. He said freshly killed bodies could be found all along the road. He insisted they were fresh corpses, because the blood was still flowing . . . The next day, the corpses had been taken away, and placed in common graves along the road.

“In Kibungo, again, a large number of fresh cadavers. The couple heard shooting everywhere during the night of the 27th and 28th. They saw no soldiers who spoke anything other than English and/or Swahili, and according to them, all the Interahamwe had left the area and all the barricades were occupied by new soldiers, and they could only conclude that these soldiers were responsible for a large number of the killings. The killers were not uniformed, but were well armed.

“According to the couple, at the same time as they were being questioned, Rwandans were being interrogated by the rebel soldiers and executed, the bodies added to those already in the church at Gahini. They insisted these were fresh bodies, added to the older corpses already in the church.”

Eventually, the couple were “rescued” by a Reuters news team in the area, and taken to the Tanzania border, and safety.

Concludes Verlinden:
“From a journalistic point of view, this testimony is very important, and probably also from the point of view of justice and of history. Marcel Gerin and Gloria Martinez did not stand to gain anything from these declarations—quite the contrary. For them this is a fight against the general opinion of the Rwandan tragedy. Accordingly they, and more and more academics and journalists, are beginning to better understand that what we know today (about the full story of the Rwandan genocide) is incomplete.

“Based on my researches of 1998-99 into this story and other researches on other aspects of the Rwandan story, I dare to conclude that we do not yet know all those responsible for what happened in 1994. If my testimony on this story can contribute to the completion of the dossier, I am prepared to give it.”

* * * * * * * * * 

Witness to Genocide -- A Personal Account of the 1995 Kibeho Massacre
by Paul Jordan

This excerpt is taken from an article which can be found in its entirety at http://www.anzacday.org.au/history/peacekeeping/anecdotes/kibeho.html

It is an account of what 32 members of the Australian Defence Force Medical Support Force witnessed at the Kibeho displaced persons' camp, a refuge for Rwandan Hutus, in April 1995. At the time the camp was surrounded by two battalions of Tutsi troops from the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), formerly the RPF, which regarded Kibeho, five hours west of the capital city Kigali, as a sanctuary for Hutu perpetrators of the 1994 genocide.

"On one side of the road, my half-section covered the hospital that contained fifteen corpses. In the hospital courtyard we found another hundred or so dead people. A large number of these were mothers who had been killed with their babies still strapped to their backs. We freed all the babies we could see. We saw dozens of children just sitting amidst piles of rubbish, some crouched next to dead bodies. The courtyard was littered with debris and, as I waded through the rubbish, it would move to expose a baby who had been crushed to death. I counted twenty crushed babies, but I could not turn over every piece of rubbish.

"The Zambians were collecting the lost children and placing them together for the agencies to collect. Along the stretch of road near the documentation point, there were another 200 bodies lined up for burial. The other counting party had seen many more dead than we had. There were survivors too. On his return to camp, Jon saw a baby who was only a few days old lying in a puddle of mud. He was still alive. Jon picked the baby up and gave him to the Zambians. At the end of our grisly count, the total number recorded by the two half-sections was approximately 4000 dead and 650 wounded. . . .

" . . . At 2.00 p.m. that day, we were rotated out of the camp. We felt sick with resentment at leaving the job incomplete, but there was very little that we could have done for those people. We estimated that at least 4000 people had been killed over that weekend. While there was little that we could have done to stop the killings, I believe that, if Australians had not been there as witnesses to the massacre, the RPA would have killed every single person in the camp."

Guilt, power, Rwanda

“Your guilt is our power.” Shelby Steele, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and Harvard University.

Oct. 21, 2007

In four decades of journalism, I’ve been called of a lot of things. But no one has ever accused me of harboring genocidal tendencies. Until now.

(You can see my documentary Rwanda: Out of the Darkness here.)

A Rwandan man who lives in Kigali and who calls himself a teacher and newspaper columnist posted a message on a U.S. Christian website. He said that my reporting on Rwanda’s post-genocidal politics was of the kind that was “in great part responsible for our country’s shameful history.” The man, who signed his name Ingina, warned that if I wasn’t careful, I might be counted among Rwanda’s “primitive genocidaires”--the term used for the organizers of the catastrophe in that country that left nearly a million people dead in 1994.

Normally I would copy and paste this kind of thing into the “Crackpot” folder on my desktop, and forget about it. It’s part of the junk mail in every journalist’s inbox, especially in the digital age when the printed word circumnavigates the globe in a nano-second.

But Ingina’s message had a special resonance. There was the distinct smell of something bigger here than just a spontaneous personal attack. I’ve found that anybody who challenges even small details of what I call Rwanda’s “genocide orthodoxy” comes in for special attention from the government. Some of that attention can be quite nasty.

Let me backtrack a bit.

Six months ago, I visited Rwanda for professional reasons. I’d been contracted to do some volunteer media training for a Canadian non-governmental agency. The visit allowed me free time for some freelance journalism (for CBC television) and for some blogging to my personal website. One of those blogs contained mildly critical comments about the country’s president, Paul Kagame. Kagame is a widely-respected leader who, 13 years earlier as commander of a rebel Tuts army, was instrumental in ending Rwanda’s genocide.

In the blog, I said that the Rwanda’s annual genocide commemorations, which last a full week, have a distinct political dimension. I expressed sympathy for hundreds of people who were made to sit under the hot sun for hours of speech-making, under the watchful eye of police, while VIPs sat comfortably in the shade, drinking bottled water.

My comments weren’t offensive enough to get me thrown out of the country, but they did have repercussions. A day or two later, word came down from the president’s office that I was not welcome in the newsroom of TV Rwanda, where I was supposed to do some media training. The country’s intelligence services keep a close eye on all communications in and out of the country by foreigners, especially those using the Internet. Rwanda remains uniquely conscious of its image in the West, even though the indifference by Western governments to the 1994 genocide remains a sore point here.

Anyway, I’d stepped on some tender feet, and I knew I was being watched. No big deal. I would find other things to do.

THE CONTROVERSIAL “HERO”

While in Kigali, I also made a point of reading the country’s only daily newspaper, the English-language New Times. The paper (like TV Rwanda) takes its editorial cues from Kagame’s office, and it is especially harsh on anybody who questions the president’s authority and style of government. (The newspaper recently fired an editor for publishing an “unflattering” photo of the president.) One of the most vocal critics, curiously enough, is Paul Rusesabagina. He’s the man at the centre of the movie Hotel Rwanda. Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle in the film) was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom by George Bush in 2006. The movie, and his autobiography, claim that Rusesabagina saved more than 1200 Rwandans for almost certain death, when he was manager of an important Kigali hotel. But that, say his critics, is a Hollywood fantasy. In his home country, he’s seen by many as an opportunist, a “divisionist,” a thief and even a gun-runner. Rusesabagina today lives in self-imposed exile in Belgium.

Rusesabagina’s “offense” is that he has called Kagame a ruthless dictator. He maintains that Kagame and his army are responsible for genocidal actions of their own against Rwanda’s majority Hutus, both before and after 1994. (See posting above, "A disturbing story.") Rusesabagina, who is much in demand as a speaker internationally, says that Kagame and his Rwanda Patriotic Front army have gotten away with mass murder--the killing of hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilians in Rwanda and the Congo between 1990 and today. These, he says, were reprisals for the bloodbath in 1994, and he says they amount to a “second genocide” which the world is, unconscionably, ignoring.

Rusesabagina thinks the West is reluctant to take Kagame to task for these atrocities, because it still feels guilty about doing nothing to prevent the 1994 genocide, and because Kagame is a strong, effective politician whom they believe they can work with.

Rusesabagina, it must be said, is given to hyperbole. For example, he likens the mood in Rwanda today with that of 1959, when a Hutu uprising ended Tutsi minority rule, at a great cost of human life. “The same kind of impunity that festered after the 1959 revolution,” Rusesabagina told the Reuters news agency last year, “is happening again, only with a different race-based elite in power. We have changed the dancers, but the music remains the same.”

He believes that Kagame is, even today, fomenting another genocide, this time against the majority Hutus, but that most Rwandans are too terrified to resist. “It frightens me to death when my countrymen are not talking,” Rusesabagina writes in his 2006 autobiography, An Ordinary Man. “We could be witnessing the roots of a future holocaust.”

Rusesabagina’s fear of another impending “holocaust” has some credence among European Africa-watchers, but here in North America, that kind of language is viewed as wildly over-the-top, bordering on hate speech. Gerald Caplan, a Canadian public policy analyst and co-ordinator of the “Remembering Rwanda” project, calls Rusesabagina malicious, dishonest and even “delusional.” “This is no honest and decent man any longer,” Caplan told me in an email. Caplan feels Rusesbagina will say anything to embarrass Kagame, a man he “loathes,” and he suggests that the hero of Hotel Rwanda has a hidden agenda--presumably to bring down the Kagame government through a mix of international pressure, spearheaded by an insidious alliance of Hutu expatriates with murky backgrounds

On a personal note, Caplan was annoyed with me for writing a ”warm, positive” article about Rusesabagina for an Ontario newspaper, and said he didn’t want to talk to me anymore because I had not given enough weight to his contention that Rusesabagina has a nefarious agenda.

Caplan’s animus towards Rusesabagina is understandable. They disagree fiercely about where, and how, Kagame is leading his country. Caplan, who has traveled widely in Africa, says that Rusesabagina’s claims about a “second genocide” are actually a threat to stability in the Central African nation, and that he is unable to prove his claims of large-scale government-ordered killings of Hutus today. Rusesabagina, however, is implacable. “All those voices are crying, seeking justice, and justice has got to be done,” he told me last June. “When Hutus killed Tutsis, I never kept quiet. How can I keep quiet when Tutsis are killing Hutus?” (Note: A number of other reputable Rwanda-watchers have no hesitancy in using the term "counter-genocide" when discussing RPF reprisals against Hutus.)

Whatever the merits of his case, Rusesabagina no longer subscribes to what many observers call a “culture of silence” that is pervasive in Rwanda. He talks loudly and often and, worse in the eyes of his critics, he gets paid for it. Largely on the basis of the success of the film Hotel Rwanda, Rusesabagina is very active on the US and Canadian lecture circuit. He says he's made "about 300" public appearances in the last three years. He’s also an able fundraiser. In his speeches, he’s sharply critical of Kagame. But in the Rwandan president he’s found a powerful enemy. Rusesabagina learned just how powerful in early September, when he was invited to speak at a fund-raising event in a suburban Chicago Anglican church. Three days before the event, the parish got an urgent long-distance call. An influential Anglican churchman, Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, wanted the invitation rescinded. Kolini had been contacted directly by the Rwandan president: Rusesabagina was a troublemaker, Kolini was told, and he should not be given a platform in a church. The Chicago parish, unwilling to be drawn into a political dispute, agreed, and Rusesabagina’s talk was moved to another location.

Since then, Rusesabagina has had more problems. Last September, the Rwandan ambassador to Washington, James Kimonyo, shocked a meeting organized by the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition in Chicago, when he publicly accused Rusesabagina of raising money to buy arms for an invasion of Rwanda. The ambassador also implicated two former US ambassadors to the Great Lakes region, who were at the meeting.

Kimonyo offered no evidence, and Rusesabagina laughed off the charges, but the slander campaign was having an effect. In November, a meeting in Brussels to discuss his appeal for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda had to be relocated when the host institution, the Universite Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, came under pressure from Rusesabagina's enemies and "dis-invited" him.

THE QUESTION OF RPF "ATROCITIES"

Rusesabagina’s credibility must, perforce, rest on the answer to the question: Is Kagame guilty of human rights crimes that approach the genocidal? Did he and his Rwandan Patriotic Front initiate policies that led to the systematic and deliberate extermination of Hutu men, women and children, beginning in the early 1990s and continuing even to the present day? And if these killings are indeed taking place, are they happening in a climate of impunity?

The record is incomplete, but at the very least, it’s clear that Kagame and the RPF were not too concerned about the niceties of humanitarian behavior in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide. Human Rights Watch, for example, compiled a sobering record of civilian killings by RPF soldiers throughout the countryside in 1994. By not prosecuting the soldiers responsible for these extra-judicial killings, HRW said in a 1999 report, the government of Paul Kagame “signaled that the killing of civilians, if perpetrated in the aftermath of a genocide, was understandable and would be tolerated, so opening the way to the further slaughter which took place in the months and years after.”

Marie Beatrice Umutesi, a Hutu woman who survived months of horror in the jungles of the Eastern Congo after the genocide, says that this selective justice by the Kagame regime “is reinforcing in the minds of Rwandans that whoever has power has all rights, even that of murder.”

Even before the genocide ended, HRW says, the RPF and Kagame had developed a military strategy that was focused less on saving Tutsi lives, than achieving a conclusive victory in the field. “The genocide," concluded Human Rights Watch, "took place in the context of war and the RPF wanted to win the war, not just save the Tutsi . . . Rather than striking hard at (the) area of enemy strength, the RPF advanced rapidly through weaker regions in the east and south, then headed west and northwest again, building pressure on the capital and the northwest. The RPF strategy, praised by other military experts, may have offered the best chance for military victory but did not present the best possible plan for rescuing Tutsi.”

Without in any way seeking to excuse the genocide, but rather to clarify the context, Alan J. Kuperman elaborates on this thesis in a paper submitted in 2004 to The Journal of Genocide Research. The paper is provocatively titled "Provoking Genocide", and concludes: " . . . The genocide was foreseeable--and avoidable if the RPF had been willing to compromise either its aspirations or means of pursuing them. The evidence also demonstrates that the international community, by supporting the rebels' intransigence, inadvertently helped trigger the genocidal backlash."

The West’s pathetic record of indifference during the genocide is well-documented. Not so well known, however, is the fact that, a month into the holocaust, it was the RPF itself that was determined to keep foreign soldiers out of the country, even at the cost of Tutsi lives.

Human Rights Watch notes that when the Security Council discussed sending a peacekeeping force into Rwanda with a mandate to protect civilians, the RPF responded with a vigorous “thanks, but no thanks.” Kagame may have been worried that the French military would get in the way of his plans to sweep into power. So he had his lieutenants issue a message to the world that it was far too late to save any Tutsis. Indeed, an April 30 statement from the RPF political bureau said bluntly: “Most of the potential victims of the regime have been either killed or have since fled.” (The statement is highly questionable: the genocide still had weeks to run.)

 Concludes Human Rights Watch: “The tragic reality that hundreds of thousands had already been slain in no way negated the need to rescue tens of thousands of other who were still alive . . . We understand very well the reasons why the RPF would not want to accept an intervention force. But we cannot see any legitimate reason that the RPF might invoke to oppose a solution which would bring the necessary help to the civilian population without interfering with ongoing military operations.”

In subsequent years, the death toll of Hutus mounted, especially among those several millions who fled to neighboring countries, expecting they would be beyond the reach of the avenging RPF. Here, again, is Beatrice Umutesi:

“In October, 1996, the RPF invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo and destroyed refugee camps. Thousands of Hutus were killed during these attacks; others had to re-enter Rwanda, while still others found refuge in the mountains and forest of the Congo. The RPF and its allies followed this last group all the way to Mbandaka, 2000 milometres from Bukavu. Approximately 200,000 Hutu refugees were killed in this pursuit. The massacres of the Hutu refugees in he DRC were described as independent and UN committees of inquiry as ‘acts of genocide’.”

The Kagame administrations prefers to characterize these cross-border incursions as search-and-destroy missions to wipe out the fleeing Interahamwe and other Hutus with genocidal blood on their hands. That may be the partly true; yet among the victims were many women and children who had never swung a machete in homicidal anger. The former US ambassador to Burundi, Robert Kreuger, tells of visiting a Hutu refugee camp in 2004 where 8,000 of the 45,000 inhabitants were orphaned children. "These were Hutus fleeing the Tutsi counter-genocide," Krueger said in a recent interview on Chicago public radio.

Umutesi warns that these unprosecuted, and uncondemned crimes may well be the seeds of future cataclysmic violence in Rwanda. “Kagame’s political opponents and other democratic forces find themselves at an impasse. In such a situation, the reaction in the past has always been the same--people take up arms to make themselves heard. The creation of armed movements that ally with political opposition abroad represents a logic of violence that risks sweeping away the logic of peace and reconciliation.”

The Revolution Eats its Own

The risks of speaking out aggressively against post-genocide atrocities can be severe. Seth Sendashonga, once a dedicated comrade-in-arms of Paul Kagame and Minister of the Interior in the new Tutsi government, became progressively more distressed about the anti-Hutu excesses of the new government, and protested loudly. He later fled to Nairobi where, in 1998, he was assassinated. His wife Cyrie is convinced his former Tutsi bosses ordered his execution. Amnesty International suspects the same. 

For more on the AI findings, please see http://www.amnesty.org/en/alfresco_asset/e361bac7-b276-11dc-b033-974214843c58/afr470191998en.html

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