Could Rwanda’s Paul Kagame be Africa’s worst ‘serial killer?’ We belatedly bring our readers the last section of the amazing revelations concerning the leadership of President Paul Kagame of Rwanda. The authors of this article, Edward S Herman and David Peterson have written a book ‘Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later (The Real News Books, 2014), which is now on sale in good bookshops around the world. In the final part here, they accuse Kagame of having been involved in the killing so far, of three African leaders. In addition to having already agreed with a BBC documentary on Rwanda that it was indeed Paul Kagame whose actions started the 1994 Rwanda genocide, the authors believe he is also not only responsible for assassinating Rwandan exiles but has ‘personally’ ordered the killing of at least 17 Rwanda Patriotic Army officers. Read on: The list of former Kagame associates who eventually testified to Kagame’s responsibility for the shoot-down [of President Habyarimana’s plane in 1994] is impressively large; Peter Erlinder, the U.S. defense attorney and former lead defense counsel before the ICTR, estimates that the number “now exceeds eight,” but we suspect the total is considerably higher. But any number is especially impressive, given that former members of Kagame’s inner circle who provide such testimony, place themselves at great risk, as Kagame and some of his underlings have been regularly engaged in the permanent silencing of critics [e.g. Patrick Karegyeya].Estimates vary of the number of former allies who were later killed on orders from Kagame. Particularly vulnerable and at highest-risk are figures who possess “knowledge of the regime’s darkest secrets and had themselves been involved in its crimes,” as Reyntjens puts it. Reyntjens quotes a former RPF member “exiled in Europe” who claims he was ordered to assassinate Kayumba Nyamwasa (who in fact has survived four assassination attempts), and could name 17 other former RPF officers “murdered on Kagame’s orders.” Anyone “considered a threat, Hutu and Tutsi alike, were physically eliminated.” Exiles from Kagame Power were eliminated either because they had knowledge of Kagame’s responsibility for the assassinations of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents in April1994, or because Kagame suspected them of disloyalty and plotting against him, or of leaking sensitive information to the world outside his base of supporters. According to Reyntjens, Ruzibiza claimed the “physical elimination of over twenty military, in addition to several foreigners working in Rwanda who were suspected of having leaked information on RPF abuse….” Kagame is also implicated in the January 2001 assassination of yet a third head-of-state, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, Kagame’s handpicked successor to Mobutu after Rwanda and Uganda drove Mobutu from power in May 1997. In 2010, many of the most prominent surviving exiles from Kagame Power went on to found the Rwanda National Congress, and called for the end of the Kagame dictatorship, once and for all. But the establishment U.S. and U.K. media have rarely given Kagame’s regime of terror and assassination the attention that it deserves, paralleling the United States’ and Britain’s longtime support of Kagame, and of course the 38 slavishly follow the same apologetic silence on this matter. The 38 attempt to support their belief in “Hutu Power” responsibility for the shoot-down by claiming that this “carefully planned genocide” was followed immediately by “roadblocks…all over Kigali” and a rapid targeting of Rwanda’s political opposition, which was allegedly opposed to Habyarimana because they feared power sharing with the RPF under the Arusha Accords. This is what we might call streaming lies. As we feature in our recently published book, Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later, even the US and UK-vetted ICTR uniformly rejects the charge that Hutu political and military figures engaged in a “conspiracy to commit genocide” against the country’s minority Tutsi population prior to the April 6, 1994 shoot-down of the Habyarimana jet. But this has never prevented Linda Malvern and the open letter’s co-signers Roméo Dallaire, Gregory Stanton, Gerald Caplan, Frank Chalk, George Monbiot, Andrew Wallis, et al., from repeatedly asserting that such a conspiracy was fairly adjudicated and determined to be real by the ICTR’s trial and appeals chambers, and this repetition of the “conspiracy to commit genocide” fraud feeds into the lie-stream here. While Malvern and the other 37 claim a readiness to spring into action by the alleged “Hutu Power” conspirators as of April 6, the fact of the matter is that the Hutu military and political leadership was completely unprepared for the post-assassination crisis, the Armed Forces of Rwanda (FAR) were in immediate retreat from the advances of the vastly militarily superior RPF, and were unable to prevent Rwanda from being conquered by the RPF in less than 100 days—let alone putting a stop to localized killing sprees. By contrast, Kagame’s RPF—including armed RPF cells in hiding across the country—was ready to initiate a military offensive at the moment that the shoot-down of Habyarimana’s jet was confirmed. The further lie by the 38 is that the Hutu conspirators carried out their nefarious plans because they feared power-sharing with the RPF, and the loss of privileges this would have entailed. But as Bruguière and many others have pointed out, it was Kagame and his RPF that was confronted with losing everything via the free and fair elections scheduled by the Arusha Accords, given the ethnic voting blocks that had prevailed in Rwanda for decades. The 38 contest the finding of University of Michigan academics Christian Davenport and Allan Stam that more Hutu than Tutsi were killed in Rwanda in 1994. But they refute it solely by mentioning “eye-witness testimony” and by listing the names of alleged research reports by Amnesty International, UNICEF and others, while failing to cite any specific findings of estimated numbers killed and the ethnic composition of the deaths. The 38 also resort to the conventional accusatory tactic of charging Davenport and Stam with “attempts to minimize the number of Tutsi murdered, a typical tactic of genocide deniers”—when the going gets tough, sling mud. Davenport and Stam use an aggregating methodology that we find logical and plausible in dealing with a very confusing environment—working from data estimating total pre-April 6, 1994 Tutsi and Hutu members of the population, and post-July 1994 numbers of Tutsi survivors. We use a similar method in Enduring Lies, taking Rwanda census data breakdowns of Tutsi and Hutu numbers as of August 1991, and post-July 1994 estimates of Tutsi survivors ranging from 300,000 to 400,000. Without going into too many details here, we found that, for example, on the assumption of 800,000 total deaths for the period April through July, 1994, plausible estimates of Hutu and Tutsi deaths ranged from between 100,000 and 200,000 Tutsi deaths, and between 600,000 and 700,000 Hutu deaths. We also show, again relying on the logic of Davenport and Stam’s method, the crucial lesson that (quoting from our book) “the greater the total number of deaths, the greater the number of Hutu deaths overall, and the greater the percentage comprised of Hutu.” Hence, the following crucial exchange between Corbin and Stam: Allan Stam: If a million people died in Rwanda in 1994—and that’s certainly possible—there is no way that the majority of them could be Tutsi. Jane Corbin: How do you know that? Allan Stam: Because there weren’t enough Tutsi in the country. Jane Corbin: The academics calculated there had been 500,000 Tutsis before the conflict in Rwanda; 300,000 survived. This led them to their final controversial conclusion. Allan Stam: If a million Rwandans died, and 200,000 of them were Tutsi, that means 800,000 of them were Hutu. Jane Corbin: That’s completely the opposite of what the world believes happened in the Rwandan genocide. Allan Stam: What the world believes, and what actually happened, are quite different. Notice the conditional “if” with which Stam begins his explanation. He could have stated “If 500,000 people died,” or “If 2 million people died,” and their method would have generated different results. It is also notable that the 38 dismiss Davenport and Stam simply as academics who “worked for a team of lawyers defending the génocidaires at the ICTR”. In fact, Davenport and Stam started work in Rwanda under the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and at one time Stam served in the U.S. Army Special Forces. And the defense counsels before the ICTR often were defending clients eventually found to be innocent of all charges, but here the same clients are found guilty in advance by the 38, who call all of them “génocidaires,” and would presumably deny them the right to defend themselves. The 38 are also pained by the BBC2’s raising doubts over whether Paul Kagame’s RPF stopped the genocide. They quote Lt Gen Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian force commander of UNAMIR, as the “authority on this subject.” “Dallaire is categorical,” the 38 write. “‘The genocide was stopped because the RPF won and stopped it’, he says.” This is actually a bit ambiguous because the mass killings could have stopped because the powerful army then conquering Rwanda—the RPF—had won its war and could itself stop doing the killing. We have elsewhere cited the report by Robert Gersony to the United Nations claiming that in several of Rwanda’s southern prefectures he found an “unmistakable pattern” of “systematic and sustained killing and persecution of their civilian Hutu populations by the RPF,” with between 5,000 and 10,000 Hutu killed per month. We should also note that Dallaire is hardly a neutral observer on the recent history of Rwanda, and in fact is one of the 38 signatories to the letter to the BBC which, as we are showing throughout, is error-laden and biased. We may also point out that there are not one but two Dallaires—one in his term as force commander of UNAMIR (1993-1994), and the other subsequently acting as a spokesperson for the standard model of the “Rwandan genocide” and an apologist for Kagame Power (1995- ). In the earlier role, while biased in favor of the RPF, he at least could recognize and acknowledge the relative weakness and demoralization of the FAR and the military superiority and readiness of the RPF; about the RPF, Dallaire had reported to the United Nations as early as September 1993 that it “displayed the potential to easily defeat the [FAR].” The 38 devote considerable space to charging the BBC2 documentary’s producers and guests with “genocide denial,” which they describe as the “final stage” of genocide which “ensures that the crime continues. It incites new killing.” Recall that after conquering Rwanda in 1994, Kagame invaded Zaire-DRC two years later, with estimated subsequent killings there running into the millions. This was not a result of any “genocide denial,” it was justified on the basis of the need to clean out the “génocidaires.” That is, the new killings were built on the claim of a Hutu genocide of Tutsi that required what turned out to be large-scale massacres of an allegedly genocidal Hutu population that had fled to Zaire-DRC. If the Hutu were the primary victims in 1994, and the April 6, 1994 assassination of President Habyarimana was attributable to Kagame, both of which we believe to be true, these extended killings in Zaire-DRC would be harder to rationalize. By misrepresenting the reality of that history, the 38 help justify this further and larger genocide. CONCLUDING NOTE: MANY UNTOLD STORIES So in fact the 38’s cry of the immorality of “genocide denial” provides a dishonest cover for Paul Kagame’s crimes in 1994 and for his even larger crimes in Zaire-DRC. The 38 thus belong to a sizable contingent of apologists for Kagame Power, who now and in years past have served as intellectual enforcers of an RPF and U.S.-U.K.-Canadian party-line. We may note here the amazing claim by the 38 that the events of 1994 “should be treated by all concerned with the utmost intellectual honesty and rigour.” Their own violation of this appeal in their open letter is both systematic and comprehensive. We have seen that the 38 have a penchant for slander as well as straightforward misrepresentation. It is for committing the grave intellectual and moral crime of providing an alternative but, we believe, entirely credible and evidence-based reinterpretations of what really happened in Rwanda in 1994 that the 38 would like Rwanda’s Untold Story expunged from the BBC archives, and its production team sent to the woodshed. Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA and has written extensively on economics, political economy, and the media. David Peterson is an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago. thelondoneveningpost/could-rwandas-paul-kagame-be-africas-worst-serial-killer/
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 15:30:11 +0000
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