The Frontline Doctor and the Unknown Soldier

Cpl. Kevin Megeney, a 25-year-old reservist from Stellarton, Nova Scotia, died two years ago, of a gunshot wound in the chest, in a medical tent at Kandahar Airport, in Afghanistan. More than 60 other Canadian servicemen have died in combat since then, but we still don’t know the full circumstances of Cpl. Megeney’s death.

We don’t know why he died. But we know how, in a description of graphic, hair-raising, heart-stopping detail that evokes the fiction of Dalton Trumbo, or medical reports from US Civil War battlefields. We know that his lungs bulged out of the chest incision, “inflating and deflating,” and we know that liters of blood poured out of his chest wound in a “gelatinous heap.” We know that Megeney had red hair and blue eyes and that he looked “cheerful even in death.”

The Canadian surgeon who tried to save him called the Megeney shooting “another blue-on-blue”—military jargon for “friendly fire” which is itself a distasteful jargon for the aberration of one soldier killing a comrade-in-arms, reasons unknown. (A court-martial is scheduled for this June.)

These observations into Cpl. Megeney’s death appeared near the end of a 2007 article in the San Francisco-based magazine Mother Jones, an article written by Dr. Kevin Patterson of Saltspring Island, entitled Talk to Me Like My Father: Frontline Medicine in Afghanistan.

The Canadian Forces make no apology for the fact that, two years after the corporal’s death, we still don’t know what prompted the shooting. Investigations into “friendly fire” incidents, it seems, unfold in extreme slow-motion, at a pace that seems designed to flatten adverse publicity. By comparison, the military inquiry into Dr. Patterson’s act of non-fiction was nearly instantaneous. Before the end of October, 2007, a so-called Summary Investigation found that Patterson had committed a “breach of patient confidentiality.” A copy went to the BC College of Physicians and Surgeons, Patterson’s professional regulating body.

And the College itself took more than a year before ruling that Patterson had indeed broken the doctor’s code by naming the dead soldier. He was reprimanded, fined, and told to brush up on medical ethics. As part of the deal, Patterson apologized to the Megeney family, and confessed to having made a “bad decision.”

Patterson was also put on a kind of creative probation: In any future writing, journalism or otherwise, he would not include the names of patients, or use information that that could identify patients. (Interestingly, the deal says nothing about Patterson’s freedom to divulge names, or details, with a patient’s approval.)

Patterson gets litle sympathy from fellow doctors, or from the arbitrers of professional ethics. They all fall back on Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who said, “All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession . . . I will keep secret and will never reveal.” I talked to several doctors and ethicists, and they all agreed that Patterson should not have used Megeney’s name, or details that could have revealed his identity.
Dr. Gabor Mate, a well-known commentator on social issues, said flatly that without doctor-patient confidentiality “there is no basis for a healing relationship.” And bio-ethicist Dr. Margaret Somerville of McGill University had no time for the argument that the horrors of war need greater exposure. “The problem is, that’s the argument that should have been put to the Megeney family (to get their permission) before the article was printed,” Dr. Somerville said. “It’s a valid argument but it definitely doesn’t take precedence here.”

Stephen Ward, a professor of journalism ethics at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, is not so sure. He said that telling the story of the death of Cpl. Megeney, in all its gore, may serve a “greater good”— giving citizens needed insight into the “nitty-gritty” of the soldier’s experience in wartime. “If the writing has anything to do with the pressures placed on the soldier,” Ward said, “then it’s good to know. We are too often accused of sanitizing war.”

The “we” in Ward’s quote, of course, are journalists, and Kevin Patterson is not a journalist. He is a civilian doctor who, in effect, keeps a journal, and shares this journal with his readers. (He is also an accomplished author of fiction and non-fiction.) Should he not, then, get a special dispensation from Hippocrates’ inflexible rule of “Never tell?”

Patterson put forward this argument himself shortly after his article was published in 2007, as the controversy began to build. “It is necessary,” he wrote, “to face with open eyes the grotesque nature of war trauma. The recent disengagement and fatigue of the public with these matters is itself grotesque.” Who better to chronicle the “grotesque trauma” than the nurses and doctors who have to treat the wounded, often under extreme conditions? The military, sensitive to any news that may hurt recruiting, certainly won’t tell these stories. And embedded journalists with the Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan are well aware of the price of breaking military rules about disclosure: you’re on the next flight home.

Leaving Cpl. Megeney’s name out of the Mother Jones article, of course, would not have protected his anonymity, since Canadian newspaper readers had already knew the soldier’s name, and knew that he died from friendly fire. All that Patterson added to the story, were the medical details of his final minutes of life.

Tom Maddix, an ethicist with Providence Health, said using Megeney’s name was unnecessary. “Stories have great power,” he said. “and the exact name of the person is not the issue.” Professor Ward disagreed. He said using the name gave the story credibility and authority.

It’s instructive that it was the Canadian Forces, and not Megeney’s family, that provoked the investigation into Patterson’s conduct. Mother Jones magazine contacted the soldier’s family in Nova Scotia before the magazine hit the streets, to alert them to what was coming.

Clara Jeffery, the Mother Jones editor, says she spoke with Karen Megeney, the soldier’s mother, by phone. As she wrote in the magazine’s blog: “She assured me that the family would like to see the article, and that she was a nurse and would read it before any other members of her family; she said it would help to have closure to know more about what happened. We heard from other members of the family who also wanted to read it, and some whom after they did expressed the desire to write to Dr. Patterson ‘to express my appreciation to him for exhausting every effort to save [him]’."

It was only later, after the Canadian Forces completed their investigation, and the College of Physicians weighed in, that the Megeneys went public with their displeasure.

The Canadian military took a uncompromising zero-tolerance approach to Dr. Patterson, even though he was a civilian volunteer a war zone. “The issue here is entirely about medical ethics, not military law or discipline,” a Canadian Forces spokesman told me. Did the Megeney family bring an official complaint to the military about the Mother Jones article? “The family was not happy,” is all the CF spokesman would say.

All arguments about the need for patient confidentiality aside, should the Canadian Forces be the sole judge of what information can and should be released about how soldiers live and die in foreign lands? Is there not a case to be made for the claim that the stories of the war dead belong to all of us, since we have a moral, physical and spiritual investment in their sacrifice? Is it not arguable that in some cases, their names, and their violent stories, should transcend our norms of “privacy?”

Is a policy of official silence not at least as grotesque as the stories of how soldiers die?

POSTSCRIPT: On July 30, 2009, a military jury found Cpl. Matthew Wilcox guilty of criminal negligence causing death. Wilcox shared a tent with Megeney at Kandahar Airport. Testimony at the hearing showed that the two men were playing a game of "quick draw" when Wilcox's pistol discharged on March 6, 2007. Wilcox argued that he fired in self-defence. Military analyst Michelle Drapeau said the ruling matched the crime and that the charges are among the harshest that a soldier can face.

"The fact that this was done (by) his hand, in a camp where ammunition should not have been available and should not have been loaded into a weapon to begin with, all that would have come to the fore and taken into account when the panel fundamentally decided he was guilty of two of the three charges," Drapeau said.

Wilcox faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

If you would like to follow the discussion of this article, please go to The Tyee.

The Bonehead Bishop

Late last year, while most of us were obsessing about Barack Obama and the collapsing housing market, tens of thousands of traditional Catholics around the world were spending hours at prayer. Over the course of a month, in fact, they tallied up 1.7 million “rosaries”—those 55 little glass beads on a string, each of which represent a “Hail Mary” or an “Our Father.”

It was a tsunami of supplication--a lobbying effort to shake up the Vatican in Rome. What these old-school Catholics wanted was for Pope Benedict XVI to lift, after 20 years, the excommunication order on a group of slightly wacky fundamentalist bishops who call themselves the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX)

Somebody Up There must have been listening because, earlier this year, the Pope did exactly that: moved by prayer, or politics, or perversity, Benedict lifted the yoke of excommunication from the breakaway clergymen, the first important step in welcoming them back into the Roman Catholic Church.

Now normally this wouldn’t be a big deal. Schisms come and schisms go, and the quarrels of bishops don’t count for too much in the modern world. But there was a wild card in this story, and his name was Richard Williamson, and his loose tongue set off an international storm that seriously scuffed the image of the 1.1 billion-member Catholic Church.

Before I go on, a disclosure. I’m a (lapsed) Catholic, and this story has its roots in my hometown of Sherbrooke, Quebec. There, as a youngster, I was an altar boy, and I could recite the service of the Mass in the perfectly-enunciated Latin. Like my mother and sister, and a billion other Catholics, I obediently worshipped in a language that I couldn’t understand, but that was okay. It was ritual, it was holy, it was our version of talking in tongues.

Then, in the mid-60s, Vatican II came along and changed everything. That church council launched a whole series of reforms; most notably, the Mass would henceforth be said not in Latin, but in the language of the faithful. What that ushered in, then, was an English Mass, a French Mass, a Spanish Mass, and so on. It was a break with two millennia of tradition. (The Council also got rid of fish Fridays—the silliest tradition of them all.)

No big deal, you’d think. God understands all languages. But wrong. It was a very big deal for the traditionalists. They said No. They saw a vernacular Mass as the ugly face of modernity. It took the “mystery” out of the Mass and out of the priesthood: “Dominus vobiscum” carries a lot more holy bang that “The Lord be with you.” So the holdouts for traditional organized themselves into groups like the SSPX, and they continued to celebrate the mass in Latin. Over time the Vatican grew vexed at this challenge to its authority, and excommunicated them. (Excommunication means exclusion from the sacraments of the church. It’s a kind of exile, a holy blacklist.)

A year later, on April 5, 1989, the story really heated up. That’s when one of the excommunicated bishops, Richard Williamson-- dour, humorless, a Brit who wears his arrogance like a badge--visited the local SSPX church in Sherbrooke. Williamson was on an Eastern Canada tour to beat the drum of traditional values. There was a small congregation in attendance at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, maybe 20 or 30 people. They were there expecting the usual polemic against modernism. Instead, Williamson dropped a bombshell.

“There was not one Jew killed in a gas chamber,” the bishop declared. “It is all lies, lies, lies.”

“The Jews created the Holocaust so we would prostrate ourselves on our knees before them and approve of their new state of Israel.”

A local reporter in the audience, Rossana Coriandoli, was stunned. She’d heard that Williamson was going to say something controversial, but this was over the top. “It was very creepy,” she recollected recently, 20 years later. She didn't remember much else, except that when she looked around at the congregation “no one seemed outraged.”

Sherbrooke has a tiny Jewish population, but when one of them, Dr. Alan Fein, read Williamson’s comments in the paper the next day, he was furious. He felt the bishop was promoting anti-Semitic hate, and should have been deported. “So I called the RCMP and the anti-defamation league,” he told the local newspaper at the time.

The RCMP looked into it, but decided there was not enough evidence to prosecute Williamson for hate propaganda. They couldn’t find a tape recording of his remarks.

The next day the bishop moved on to Montreal where he decried rock and roll music, drugs, nuns “behaving like dancing girls,” and other evils of modernity. Probably aware of Montreal’s sizeable and influential Jewish community, however, Williamson had nothing further to say about the Nazi death camps.

Fast forward 20 years. It’s January, 2009, and Pope Benedict decides the time is right to invite the traditionalists of the SSPX back into the fold. So in the name of Church unity, the Vatican “re-communicates” four SSPX bishops, including Richard Williamson. But the Vatican, incredibly, fails to do a routine background check. (Or else, it doesn’t care.)

The result is a head-on collision with the Internet Age. An Israeli news agency Googles the words “Bishop Richard Williamson” and up pop the quotes from his “lies, lies, lies” Sherbooke sermon in 1989. There’s also an interview with Swedish TV last November in which he repeats his no-gas-chamber nonsense, and says that only 300,000 Jews were killed, not six million. There are headlines of outrage all over the world: What was the Church thinking when it invited this Neanderthal back in from the cold?

Relations between the Vatican and Jews have never been very good. This made things much worse. Vatican officials pleaded that they were unaware of Williamson’s Holocaust heresy. The bishop is told to recant his most outrageous remarks--to wear the figurative hair shirt--or risk spending the rest of his life in that wilderness occupied by defrocked and disgraced clergymen. (Meanwhile, the notorious Swedish interview already has more than 100,000 hits on YouTube, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6C9BuXe2RM)

Is the Williamson affair a blip, an honest oversight by the Vatican, or is there a discernible pattern here? You be the judge: Two weeks ago, Pope Benedict promoted an Austrian bishop, Gerhard Maria Wagner, who believes that homosexuality is curable, and that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God to clean out the “spiritual pollution” of New Orleans. Anyone who’s visited the poor black neighborhoods that were submerged by Katrina knows how offensive this comment is. On Feb. 15, after another firestorm of controversy, Wagner had the good sense to resign.

Although I no longer practice the faith, I’ve never lost my fascination with the way the world’s oldest institution manages its affairs. One of its tactics, in moments of stress, is Earnest Denial. I contacted the Catholic archdiocese in Sherbrooke to get their take on the Williamson scandal. Sorry, they said, nobody remembered a thing about the bishop's 1989 visit. I called the local chapter of the SSPX and they mumbled “no comment.” They directed me to the order’s Superior-General in Ontario, but he was “unavailable due to travel.” It’s almost as if everybody was hoping this little incident would fall between the cracks of history.

Here in BC, the SSPX has only a few hundred followers, with churches in Langley and in Nanaimo. When I asked the regional prior, Fr. Loren Gerspacher, about the Williamson affair, his voice dropped to a whisper, he said the bishop was a “very respected” member of the society, but he was not at liberty to say anything more.

I had other questions, like, why would the Roman Catholic Church invite a bigoted Holocaust-denying misogynist back into the fold, and excommunicate people like the American Catholic activist, Father Roy Bourgeois, who advocates for the ordination of women into the priesthood? The answer, I fear, is obvious: Williamson’s thinking is more aligned to the mindset of the old boys in Rome with the funny hats, than is the thinking of an activist priest who believes in the equality of women. A strain of anti-Semitism, prompted by the false conviction that the Jews killed Jesus, has never been far from the heart of traditional right-wing Catholic orthodoxy.

It is so, and always has been thus. The Williamson affair was triggered by simple-minded historical revisionism, but it’s really about the age-old struggle within Christianity of yesterday versus today, pope-ocracy versus democracy, the mediaeval versus the modern. And to the discredit of the Catholic Church, the medieval rarely goes without a fight.

Postscript: Following the controversy, Williamson was sacked from the directorship of the Le Reja seminary in Argentina by the head of the Latin American chapter of the SSPX. Days later, the Argentinian government ordered him to leave the country, or face expulsion. The suggestion was that he had not been forthright about his “true motives” for being in the country.

Haitians in Flight: A TV Script

Produced, written and narrated by Claude Adams
Co-producer and cameraman: Reed Lindsay

Aired: September 28, 2008, on Our World with Brian Stewart

Stanley Desmoulins should be a model for Haiti’s future. He’s young, politically active, an electronics engineer who speaks three languages.

Stanley lives in a nice apartment overlooking Port au Prince, and drives a late-model SUV. He earns $1000 US a month. By Haitian standards, he’s part of the country’s elite.

But Stanley, 29, is unhappy. He’s applied for a visa to live and work in Canada. As soon as it’s approved, he will leave.

He’ll be joining Haiti’s Brain Drain, a phenomenon that makes a poor country even poorer.

CLIP (Stanley) “When I look to the future, it’s important for me to go outside to try to have more knowledge and to make some money and after come back to help the country. If I work hard I will have a future in Canada.”

Stories like Stanley’s are repeated many times, every day—an exodus of an entire educated generation to countries like Canada and the United States.

(Jean V.Geneus, Minister of Haitians Living Abroad) “It is a hemorrhaging, a bleeding we cannot stop.”

(Patrick Elie, adviser to Haitian President) “I am seeing a drain, a massive drain.”

(Wilson Laleau, university vice-rector) “It’s a catastrophe for the country, it’s a waste of resources”

We call it economic immigration. In Creole, the term is “li chape”—someone who escapes, who breaks out, as if from prison.

Haitians have been escaping since the Duvalier dictatorship in the 1950s and 60s, —escaping from violence, from political instability, but mostly from a crushing poverty that never seems to end, despite billions in foreign aid.

More than two million people have fled, mostly to the United States. But in recent years, the cream of the crop—the best doctors, teachers, engineers and other professionals—have come to Canada.

You see them lining up every weekday morning, documents and bank statements in hand, in front of the Canadian Embassy on Rue Delmas.

(ADAMS): Canada makes no apologies for the fact that it welcomes the best and the brightest of Haitian immigrants. The free movement of people, it says, is one of the hallmarks of a democratic system. That may be true, but there’s a terrible contradiction at play here: because the brain drain is helping to turn Haiti into a beggar state, even while Canada pours in millions of dollars to put the country on its feet.

Patrick Elie is an adviser to Haitian President Rene Preval. He likes Canada. He spent several years here as a political exile.

But Elie is furious at the Canadian government for what he calls an intentional policy to extract the best Haitians—especially in recent years.

“We have more Haitian doctors in North America than we have in Haiti and the vast majority of them studied here in Haiti, were fed by their family, went through the school system and that did not cost the US or Canada a penny.”

Cabinet Minister Jean Geneus also points an accusing finger at Canada.

(Geneus): “For the past 8 years I can tell you that the Canadian government has attracted thousands of Haitians . . . the best ones, doctors, engineers. What’s wrong with that? The state of Haiti spent millions of dollars to form these people and now they all gone. And what do we receive in return?"

What Haiti receives in return is foreign aid. Lots of it. Canada sends more money to Haiti than to any other country in the world except Afghanistan. The Harper government has pledged half a billion dollars up to the year 2011.

That seems awful generous. But how much of that money actually gets to the poor who really need it?

Consultant Jean-Sebastien Roy has worked 25 years in development projects, including a number of Canadian ones.

(Roy) “My opinion is that about 10% of any budget of a developmental program actually reaches what we call the ground, the field . . . “

This makes people like Patrick Elie wonder how humanitarian donors like Canada and the US really are.

“Every time this country is in turmoil people leave, every kind of people leave, but then the US and Canada throw back those that do not fit their need, but accept and entice those that fit their needs.”

(SU from English classes)

Learning English is a priority for any young professional in Haiti—the first step to leaving. At the Haitian-American Institute in downtown Port-au-Prince, hundreds come out every Saturday morning to learn what they need to know to integrate into North American society.

“Which city has the highest population?”

Emile Dorismond is 23. He wants to study medicine or music overseas— he’ll do almost anything to escape.

Emile “The real problem is Haiti . . . that’s my opinion. You can see that when you go somewhere in Haiti . . . that’s really really ugly, a lot of garbage in the street, insecurity, gunshots everywhere . . . “

Many of the young people we talked to mention violence. In reality, Haiti is less violent today than two years ago, thanks to the efforts of 9000 UN peacekeepers. Nevertheless, these Haitians have lived almost their entire lives amid political and social chaos. A sense of insecurity has become part of the fabric of their lives. And they want to be free of it.

Director Philippe Mantas says 80% or more of these students will leave Haiti at the first opportunity.

My question: “Does it not concern you that most of these people will be lost to the country?

Answer: “In a sense it would concern me, but the problem is that there are no facilities here for them to have an opportunity to reach their potential. So you might even say they were lost anyway.”

Many of the students we talked to were torn between self-interest, and concern for their country’s future.

David Jonathan: “It’s important to sacrifice, I think it’s difficult but we must sacrifice just to start, to try to develop it. I know it’s difficult, but we must do it. Q. Would you be willing? Answer: I would like to try, I don’t know if I can resist, but I would like to try .”

Gary Narcisse: “In Haiti, our nation, our people don’t respect us. When you go overseas you study and make some experience and come back, they have more respect for you. Q. So you want to get more respect? Answer: “Exactly.”

Herve Denis, Haitian Canadian Chamber of Commerce: “You have to put that in perspective. Those people, they are young, they have nothing to do, they have no money, so what they have to do? And when they look at TV they see something that looks like paradise for them. Put yourself in those situations, in their shoes.”

Stanley Desmoulins takes little comfort in his own relative affluence. His car may be comfortable, but the roads are dreadful—there’s no money in the treasury to even fix potholes.

SU Radio newscast

When he turns on his radio on his way to work, the news is almost always bleak.

And the cost of living is going through the roof: Gasoline approaching $7 a gallon. Stanley worries endlessly about making ends meet.

Stanley“What will happen if I lose my job, if my wife loses her job? And in the future I will have to have my own car, my own house. With the money that I have I cannot build a house or buy a house. I think that if I have more knowledge, if I have a Masters (degree) I could find a better job and I could earn more money. And this could help me build a better future.”

(demonstrators shouting “a bas MINUSTAH”)
It’s a vicious circle. Just as Haiti seemed to be on the road to political stability, a food crisis erupted earlier this year over the rising price of rice.

This kind of violence accelerates the brain drain, which brings more poverty, which in turns causes more people to leave.

Haiti’s extreme poverty also leaves it highly vulnerable to natural disasters, like the recent hurricanes that killed hundreds of people in flooding.

STANDUP (Adams): There ARE some ideas for reversing the brain drain. A few years ago, for example, the Cuban government took hundreds of young Haitians, trained them in medicine and agronomy, and sent them home. That program has worked pretty well.

Dr. Michel Maxene spent 7 years studying medicine in Cuba. Today, he sees patients in a bare-bones office that doesn’t even have proper hinges on the door.

He earns about $300 US a month, but he says he has no plans to leave Haiti.

CLIP Maxene (translation from Spanish) “It’s true, we could be more comfortable in another country. But we have to think of our people. I think it’s a huge crime to leave these people, to stop helping them in order go to another land, in spite of all our difficulties.”

Dr. Maxene embodies what’s missing in Haiti: a sense of civic responsibility.

Of course, it’s hard to have much faith in an economy notorious for its sweatshop labor. The country has many factories like this one. There’s not much scope here for ambitious and educated young professionals.

Planners say that what Haiti needs is a lot more large-scale development, financed perhaps by Haitians living in Canada and the US. And at the same time, Canada could open vocational schools in Haiti. That way these people now taking English courses might be encouraged to train for the kinds of jobs this development would produce.

Because Stanley Desmoulins would love to find a reason to stay at home. On his morning drive to work, I asked him what he will miss most about Haiti when he leaves.

 Stanley: “I will miss the people, the smell of the land. When it is raining, our land has a special odor.”

It’s an odor, and a way of life that he’ll likely never find in Canada. Like tens of thousands of other Haitians who are the Brain Drain, Stanley only wishes he had a choice.

The Pitfalls of "Official" History

“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.”
W. H. Auden “September 1, 1939”

For 14 years, there has been no history taught in Rwandan schools. In a sense, the 1994 genocide that wiped out more than 800,000 people also effectively erased the available records (or at least, scrambled the prevailing notions) of a people’s past. The genocide obliterated memory.

Soon that will be corrected. Within the next few weeks or months, new history textbooks will be introduced in Rwanda’s schools. This is a vitally important event for the Central African country. After all, says Deo Byanafashe, the Rwandan professor largely responsible for the reclamation project, “history is where we find our identity.”

This should be cause for celebration. But is it? Will Rwandan schoolchildren be getting an authentic history text that honestly traces the roots of the ethnic violence that tore their society apart? Or will the New History be just another official mythology, a narrative born of political expediency, or political necessity?

The government, controlled by the minority Tutsis (who make up less than 15 per cent of Rwanda’s population), argues that an agreed-upon history is critical to reconciliation. Indeed, the slogan of the new history program is “Education for Reconciliation.” This offers a clue to the question of authenticity: Can history be “used” as a remedy for social disharmony? Aren’t we talking here about “designer history” as a form of therapy?

To its credit, the government brought in outside experts to help. A group of American researchers, working under the auspices of the University of California/Berkeley Human Rights Centre, proposed a secondary-school curriculum that would “invite discussion and debate so students can think critically about competing views of history and ethnicity.”

The New Orthodoxy

It’s a brave and brilliant idea. It recognizes there is no last word in history. Re-analysis, and re-reframing of the past, is a never-ending process, and so it should be. And if it is to function, this process requires absolute freedom of investigation and interpretation. It requires the right to dissent. In Rwanda, however, there is little or no open discussion and debate about things like history and ethnicity. For example, Rwanda’s new orthodoxy, enforced by Tutsi law, is that there are NO separate ethnicities at all. Tutsis, Hutus and Twa—the old groupings that became so critical in determining who would live and who would die in the genocide-- no longer exist. Rwandans have, in a sense, been “de-ethnicized” by government decree. You can go to jail (and people do) for insisting otherwise. Any dissent from this orthodoxy violates the laws against “divisionism” and “genocidal ideology.”

Historian Marian Hodgkin, writing in the Journal of International Affairs, argues that this is wrong. Efforts by the government to impose what she calls an "official" truth are actually "harmful to the building of sustainable peace and a meaningful reconciliation process."

"The creation of a single narrative and interpretation," she continues," will in affect deny or repress the memories of each subgroup within Rwandan society.”

What the Kagame government is trying to do is not new. It’s a political fact of life, as old as Machiavelli, that governments, whether in Russia, Rwanda, or Rhode Island, are in the business of monopolizing “knowledge construction.” He who writes the history is assured of the most favorable storyline for posterity. Those who control the past determine the future. In Rwanda, it obviously serves the interests of President Paul Kagame and his Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front to obscure, and even eliminate ethnic distinctions. This disguises the "problem" of Tutsi minority rule, and the fact that 85 per cent of the country’s inhabitants are poorly represented in government, and in the legal system.

The government would like to retroactively remove ethnic politics from Rwanda’s history. It’s part of the new national mindset (and it will presumably be part of the New History) that Rwanda’s Tutsis and Hutus lived in Arcadian harmony until European colonialists arrived at the beginning of the 20th Century. These intruders proceeded to drive a socio-economic wedge between them, elevating the Tutsis into the ruling class, downgrading the majority Hutus, and instituting the notorious identity-card system.

But this version of history is disputed. “Overt ethnic friction may not have existed at the close of the nineteenth century,” writes European anthropologist Johan Pottier, an African specialist, “but the ethnic divisions and . . . (the Hutus’) ‘obvious hatred’ toward the Tutsi overlords, were well entrenched by 1898, the time Germany colonized Rwanda.”

As in many other African countries, ethnic rivalry figured prominently in pre-colonial Rwanda. In spite of a common language and a shared religion, a Tutsi king, and a Tutsi aristocracy, had long ruled over a Hutu majority. There was, admittedly, some mobility between the two groups, but, by and large, the Hutus remained peasants. This rivalry was exacerbated by German (and then Belgian) colonialism, but by no means did the Europeans invent the ethnic division.

Will this subtlety be reflected in Rwanda’s revisionism history? It’s not likely, given the Kagame government’s self-serving narrative of “no more Hutus, no more Tutsis.”

History as Propaganda

The new non-ethnic orthodoxy borders on propaganda, or what one writer calls “normalising the abnormal (and) naturalising the perverse.” How do you tell the Hutus their shared memory is no longer valid, and their group identity was fabricated or falsified by outsiders? “History,” writes Marian Hodgkin, “has been experienced very differently by different groups within society.” In 1959, when the Tutsi aristocracy wanted independence, but refused to extend full democracy to the Hutu majority, the Hutus revolted, overthrew the monarchy, and reversed the power balance in the country. At a stroke, the Tutsis became the underclass.

How will this event be framed in the New History? Will it be portrayed as a people rising up against the yoke of oppression to institute majority rule (the Hutu view) or as an act of violent “political change” that presaged the 1994 genocide (the Tutsi view)? Or will it be painted as a bloody eruption of black-on-black bloodletting inspired by the evil Belgian overlords? Even today, each of these scenarios has its proponents. Reconciling these points of view in one narrative will be a daunting task.

“Change doesn’t necessarily mean revolution,” says Deo Byanafashe, the man putting the new historical text to paper. Given this belief, how “neutral” can the New History possibly be? How will it be received by the post-genocidal Hutu majority?

Hutu Massacres

There are other hard, and more immediate questions. For example, there is considerable evidence that in the months before, and after the 1994 genocide, many thousands of Hutu noncombatants--men, women and children--were killed by the Tutsi rebel army, the so-called Rwandan Patriotic Front. (Some put the figure in the hundreds of thousands.) These revenge massacres, corroborated by eyewitnesses, Western investigators, and assorted human rights organizations, took place both inside Rwanda, and in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. In some circles this has been called Rwanda’s “second genocide."

There is a danger that these travesties will slip through the cracks of history, that what New York Times correspondent Howard W. French calls the "wild adventurousness" of Tutsi leader Paul Kagame will never be acknowledged, because it does not fit his accepted profile as a politician whom Washington can work with. In his book A Continent for the Taking; The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, French points an accusing finger at Kagame, charging that with his insurgency from Uganda starting in 1990, Kagame "primed a country that had already long been an ethnic powder keg for a sharp escalation in violence and hatred."

The Rwandan government vehemently denies that the massacres of Hutus ever took place. Foreign journalists who publish such stories (like Peter Verlinden of The Netherlands) are forbidden entry into the country. European judges who seek to bring indictments against Tutsi military officers for their role in these massacres (like the French Judge Jean-Louis Brugiere, and the Spanish Judge Fernando Andreu) are roundly vilified by Kagame’s cronies. And high-profile Rwandan expatriates who demand that ALL of Rwanda’s human rights violations should be investigated and prosecuted (like Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the film Hotel Rwanda) are called traitors and revisionists.

When, in the spring of 2007, I put the question of RPF massacres of Hutu civilians to Prof Byanafashe (who, it should be said, insists he is completely neutral and objective in his evaluation of Rwandan history), the esteemed academic answered this way: “If you look at the region where the war started (in northern Rwanda, near the Ugandan frontier) it’s a region populated almost 100% by Hutus. But they were not killed systematically. It was those who tried to stop the (Tutsi) rebellion from advancing who were killed, militant supporters of the government were killed, those against whom (the RPF) were fighting. That can be verified.”

This, of course, is the official government line.

The professor went further, giving his version of the familiar Fog of War. “When you fire a bullet, how does it choose? When soldiers fire their weapons, it is always civilians who die. But this is not genocide.”

In other words, uncounted thousands of Hutus perished in an accidental crossfire, collateral damage in a rebellion. There were no acts of deliberate large-scale vengeance. It is a view of recent history that flies directly in the face of credible contrary evidence.

Professor Byanafashe, the Dean of the School of Arts and Letters at the National University, concluded our interview by insisting there was not the slightest taint of political coloration in the New History text. “If the politicians meddle in this, we will not accept it. They can publish a history in their name, but not in our name.”

The Case of South Africa

History as a means to social cohesion is not necessarily a bad thing. It worked, to a degree, in South Africa, largely through the efforts of Nelson Mandela. He understood that if the country’s post-apartheid society was ever going to cohere, the worst excesses of white rule would have to be, if not forgotten, then at least relegated to deep memory where they could not longer be allowed to impose themselves constantly on the present. Michael Chapman, a professor of English in Durban, South Africa, has written that the healing process required citizens “to infuse with new contexts of complexity our ongoing interpretations and reinterpretations of memories.”

Benedict Andersen put it less academically: If a nation is to stay together, it must learn not only what to remember, but also what to forget.

However, this is not quite the same as the truth-shaping that is taking place today in Rwanda. There, the government seems to be deliberately misrepresenting important events in its recent history, in an apparent effort to consolidate power, and to put a new, and unreal, face on Rwandan society. In so doing, it glosses over the terrible emotional complexity and confusion one still finds among survivors of the genocide. It ignores the fact that many Tutsis and Hutus still view one another with dread and suspicion--feelings that will not be expunged with a new, selective history.

As Rene Lemarchand has written, reconciliation in Rwanda will not be possible without a nuanced, shared understanding of history. The key words here are “nuanced” and “shared”—characteristics that can only be achieved through a prolonged national dialogue involving all Rwandans.

To be fair, Rwanda’s new history text has not yet been published. But given the government’s very tight control on information and the media, given Kagame’s determination to somehow force his version of reconciliation and ethnic harmony through the school system, and given his impatience with political opponents and dissenters, it’s hard to imagine the government approving a neutral, balanced account of Rwandan history.

A history in the service of a political goal is propaganda by another name. And if this is what Rwanda’s next generation of schoolchildren can expect from their new history curriculum, they, and the generations after them, will be the losers.