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From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net

The Mass Murder We Don’t Talk About

Helen Epstein

New York Review of Books,7 June 2018 issue

Review of:
In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front

by Judi Rever
Random House Canada, 277 pp., CAN$32.00

During the 1990s, unprecedented violence erupted in Central Africa. In
Sudan, the civil war intensified; in Rwanda, there was genocide; in
Congo millions died in a conflict that simmers to this day; and in
Uganda, millions more were caught between a heartless warlord and an
even more heartless military counterinsurgency.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Although the US had for decades backed dictatorships and right-wing rebels across the continent, George H.W.
Bush had declared in his 1989 inaugural speech that “a new breeze
[was] blowing…. For in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the
dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing…. Great nations of
the world are moving toward democracy through the door to freedom.”

Bush and his successors supported peace on much of the African
continent by funding democracy promotion programs and sanctioning, or threatening to sanction, South Africa and other countries if their
leaders didn’t allow multiparty elections and free political
prisoners. But in Uganda, Ethiopia, and a small number of other
countries, the Bush and Clinton administrations lavished development
and military aid on dictators who in turn funneled weapons to
insurgents in Sudan, Rwanda, and Congo. In this way, Washington helped
stoke the interlinked disasters that have claimed millions of lives
since the late 1980s and still roil much of eastern and central Africa
today. The complicity of the US in those disasters has not yet been sufficiently exposed, but Judi Rever’s In Praise of Blood explores how Washington helped obscure the full story of the genocide that
devastated Rwanda during the 1990s and cover up the crimes of the
Rwandan Patriotic Front (PF), which has ruled the country ever since.

The familiar story about the Rwandan genocide begins in April 1994,
when Hutu militias killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, mostly with
machetes and other simple weapons. The RPF, a Tutsi-dominated rebel
army, advanced through the mayhem and finally brought peace to the
country in July.

The RPF’s leader, Paul Kagame, eventually became president of Rwanda
and remains in power today. He has overseen a technocratic economic
revival, the installation of one of the best information technology
networks in Africa, and a sharp decline in maternal and child
mortality.

Political dissent is suppressed, many of Kagame’s critics are in jail,
and some have even been killed—but his Western admirers tend to
overlook this. Bill Clinton has praised Kagame as “one of the greatest leaders of our time,” and Tony Blair’s nonprofit Institute for Global Change continues to advise and support his government.

Over the years, less valiant portraits of Kagame and the RPF have
appeared in academic monographs and self-published accounts by Western
and Rwandan academics, journalists, and independent researchers,
including Filip Reyntjens, André Guichaoua, Edward Herman, Robin
Philpot, David Himbara, Gérard Prunier, Barrie Collins, and the BBC’s
Jane Corbin.

Taken together, they suggest that the RPF actually provoked the war
that led to the genocide of the Tutsis and committed mass killings of
Hutus before, during, and after it. In Praise of Blood is the most
accessible and up-to-date of these studies. Rever’s account begins in
October 1990, when several thousand RPF fighters invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda. The RPF was made up of refugees born to Rwandan
parents who fled anti-Tutsi pogroms during the early 1960s and were
determined to go home. Its leaders, including Kagame, had fought
alongside Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni in the war that brought
him to power in 1986. They’d then been appointed to senior Ugandan
army positions—Kagame was Museveni’s chief of military intelligence in
the late 1980s—which they deserted when they invaded Rwanda.In August
1990, two months before the RPF invasion, the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government had actually agreed, in principle, to allow the refugees to
return. The decision had been taken under enormous international
pressure, the details were vague, and the process would likely have
dragged on, or not occurred at all. But the RPF invasion preempted a potentially peaceful solution to the refugee conundrum. For three and
a half years, the rebels occupied a large swath of northern Rwanda
while the Ugandan army supplied them with weapon, in violation of the
UN Charter and Organization of African Unity rules.

Washington knew what was going on but did nothing to stop it. On the
contrary, US foreign aid to Uganda doubled in the years after the
invasion, and in 1991, Uganda purchased ten times more US weapons than
in the preceding forty years combined. During the occupation, roughly
a million Hutu peasants fled RPF-controlled areas, citing killings, abductions, and other crimes. An Italian missionary working in the
area at the time told Rever that the RPF laid landmines around springs
that blew up children, and invaded a hospital in a town called
Nyarurema and shot nine patients dead. According to Alphonse Furuma,
one of the founders of the RPF, the purpose was to clear the area,
steal animals, take over farms, and, presumably, scare away anyone who
might think of protesting.

The Ugandan army, which trained the RPF, had used similar tactics
against its own Acholi people during the 1980s and 1990s, so these
accounts seem plausible.

At least one American was angry about the RPF invasion. US ambassador
to Rwanda Robert Flaten witnessed how it sent shock waves throughout
the country, whose majority-Hutu population had long feared a Tutsi
attack from Uganda. Flaten urged the Bush administration to impose
sanctions on Uganda for supplying the RPF, noting that Saddam Hussein
had invaded Kuwait only two months earlier and been met with
near-universal condemnation, a UN Security Council demand that he
withdraw, and a US military assault.

By contrast, the Bush administration, which was then supplying most of Uganda’s budget through foreign aid, treated the RPF invasion of
Rwanda with nonchalance. When it took place, Museveni happened to be
visiting the US. He assured State Department officials that he’d known nothing about it, and promised to prevent weapons from crossing the
border and court-martial any defectors who attempted to return to
Uganda. He then did neither, with the apparent approval of US
diplomats. In 1991 and 1992 US officials met RPF leaders inside Uganda
and monitored the flow of weapons across the border, but made no
effort to stop it, even when the Rwandan government and its French
allies complained.

Years later, Bush’s assistant secretary of state for Africa Herman
Cohen expressed regret for failing to pressure Museveni to stop
supporting the RPF, but by then it was too late. At the time, Cohen
maintained that the US feared that sanctions might harm Uganda’s
robust economic growth.

But he hasn’t explained why Washington allowed the RPF—by invading Rwanda—to ruin that country’s economy, which had previously been
similarly robust. Robert Gribbin, a diplomat then stationed at the US
embassy in Kampala, has claimed that sanctions weren’t considered
because they might have interfered with Uganda’s “nascent democratic initiatives,” without mentioning that Museveni’s security forces were torturing and jailing members of Uganda’s nonviolent opposition and
also pursuing a brutal counterinsurgency in northern Uganda that would
claim hundreds of thousands of Ugandan lives.

The UN may also have turned a blind eye to Museveni and Kagame’s
schemes. In October 1993 a contingent of UN peacekeepers was deployed
to help implement a peace agreement between the RPF and the Rwandan government. One of its mandates was to ensure that weapons, personnel,
and supplies didn’t cross into Rwanda from Uganda. But when the peacekeepers’ commander, Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, visited the Ugandan border town of Kabale, a Ugandan officer told him that his
peacekeepers would have to provide twelve hours’ notice so that
escorts could be arranged to accompany them on patrols. Dallaire
protested, since the element of surprise is crucial for such
monitoring missions. The Ugandans stood their ground, and also refused
to allow Dallaire to inspect an arsenal in Mbarara, a Ugandan town
about eighty miles from the Rwandan border, which was rumored to be
supplying the RPF.

Dallaire has not said whether he brought Uganda’s obstruction to the attention of the Security Council, and he didn’t respond to my
interview requests. But in 2004 he told a US congressional hearing
that Museveni laughed in his face when they met at a gathering to
commemorate the tenth anniversary of the genocide. “I remember that UN mission on the border,” Dallaire said Museveni had told him. “We
maneuvered ways to get around it, and of course we did support the
movement [i.e., the RPF invasion].”

The likely reasons why Washington and the UN apparently decided to go
easy on Uganda and the RPF will be explored in the second part of this article. But for Rwanda’s President Juvénal Habyarimana and his circle
of Hutu elites, the invasion seems to have had a silver lining. For
years, tensions between Hutus and Tutsis inside Rwanda had been
subsiding. Habyarimana had sought reconciliation with Tutsis living in Rwanda—so-called internal Tutsis—by reserving civil service jobs and university places for them in proportion to their share of the
population.

Though desultory, this program was modestly successful, and the
greatest rift in the country was between the relatively small Hutu
clique around Habyarimana and the millions of impoverished Hutu
peasants whom they exploited as brutally as had the Tutsi overlords of
bygone days. While the elites fattened themselves on World Bank “anti-poverty” projects that created lucrative administrative jobs and other perks but did little to alleviate poverty, they continued to
subject the Hutu poor to forced labor and other abuses.

Habyarimana, like the leaders of Malawi, Ghana, Zambia, and other
countries, was under pressure from the US and other donors to allow
opposition parties to operate. Many of these new parties were
ethnically mixed, with both Hutu and Tutsi leaders, but they were
united in criticizing Habyarimana’s autocratic behavior and nepotism
and the vast economic inequalities in the country.

The RPF invasion seems to have provided Habyarimana and his circle
with a political opportunity: now they could distract the disaffected
Hutu masses from their own abuses by reawakening fears of the “demon Tutsis.” Shortly after the invasion, Hutu elites devised a genocidal propaganda campaign that would bear hideous fruit three and a half
years later. Chauvinist Hutu newspapers, magazines, and radio programs
reminded readers that Hutus were the original occupants of the Great
Lakes region and that Tutsis were Nilotics—supposedly warlike
pastoralists from Ethiopia who had conquered and enslaved Hutus in the seventeenth century.

The RPF invasion, they claimed, was nothing more than a plot by
Museveni, Kagame, and their Tutsi coconspirators to reestablish this
evil Nilotic empire. Cartoons of Tutsis killing Hutus began appearing
in magazines, along with warnings that all Tutsis were RPF spies bent
on dragging the country back to the days when the Tutsi queen
supposedly rose from her seat supported by swords driven between the
shoulders of Hutu children.

In February 1993 an RPF offensive killed hundreds, perhaps thousands
of Hutus in the northern prefectures of Byumba and Ruhengeri, further
inflaming anti-Tutsi sentiment. At the time, the Organization of
African Unity was overseeing peace negotiations between the RPF and
the government, but the process was fraught. Habyarimana knew
the RPF was better armed, trained, and disciplined than his own army,
so under immense international pressure he agreed in August 1993 to a
peace accord that would grant the RPF seats in a transitional
government and nearly half of all posts in the army.

Even Tutsis inside Rwanda were against giving the RPF so much power
because they knew it would provoke the angry, fearful Hutus to rebel,
and they were right. Hutu mayors and other local officials were
already stockpiling rifles, and government-linked anti-Tutsi militia
groups (including the notorious Interahamwe) were distributing
machetes and kerosene to prospective génocidaires. In December 1993, a picture of a machete appeared on the front page of one Hutu-chauvinist publication under the headline “What Weapons Can We Use to Defeat the
Inyenzi [Tutsi Cockroaches] Once and For All?” The following month, the CIA predicted that if tensions were not somehow defused, hundreds
of thousands of people might die in ethnic violence. This powder keg
exploded four months later, when on April 6, 1994, a plane carrying
Habyarimana was shot down as it was preparing to land in Kigali, the
capital.

The French sociologist André Guichaoua happened to be in Kigali that
evening. The country was tense, but peaceful. But Hutu military
personnel panicked when they heard about the crash. That night they
began hastily erecting roadblocks around government and army
installations, while militiamen, many from the presidential guard,
began moving into position.

The killing of Tutsis began the following afternoon. According to
Guichaoua, Tutsis suspected of collaboration with the RPF, which the
killers blamed for the plane crash, were sought out first, but soon
the militias were killing every Tutsi they could get their hands on.
The vast majority of the victims would turn out to be internal Tutsis,
who had nothing to do with the RPF.

For decades, blame for the plane crash that set off the genocide has
fallen on members of Habyarimana’s army who were believed to be
unhappy about the terms of the August 1993 peace accord. However, a
growing number of academic studies, judicial reports, and other
investigations now suggest RPF responsibility. They are based on
eyewitness testimony from multiple RPF defectors who say they were
involved in the planning and execution of the plot, as well as
evidence concerning the origin of the missiles.

It’s unclear what motive the RPF would have had for shooting down the

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