Continuing the Story: How the Dominant Story of the Rwanda Genocide Is Unraveling
by Steve Clemens. October 31, 2010
Who is the real pariah: The Professor or the President of Rwanda?
Peter Erlinder, the William Mitchell Law School Professor and noted human rights attorney addressed a small but attentive group at the law school Thursday afternoon. While attempting to update people about his recent arrest and imprisonment in Rwanda late this spring, he also used the opportunity to describe his role in how the story history will record is changing dramatically in the past year.
He began with a startling announcement: two days before the top prosecutor of Rwanda said he will file charges against Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of Hotel Rwanda. (In the movie Don Cheadle played the role). Erlinder said that the Kagame regime is now lashing out in all directions as a sign of desperation. It also arrested Victoire Ingabire, the Hutu opposition candidate who tried to run against Kagame for President, this month on similar charges of supporting a “terrorist group”. Certainly their relationships with Professor Erlinder didn’t help them, especially since he is the one who has “documented” that the well-known story of the Rwandan genocide is at best a half-truth if not an outright fabrication to hide the real perpetrators.
Related: The International Criminal Court and the "Black Hole"
Of the four year civil war in Rwanda from 1990-1994 most of us, if we know anything at all, know only what the victors claim happened: the Hutus carefully planned to slaughter the Tutsis and only the intervention of Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels ended it. Erlinder reminded us of Robert McNamara’s stark admission at the beginning of the documentary The Fog of War where he confesses in one of his last interviews before his death that if the US hadn’t won the war against Japan in 1945, “we would have been prosecuted for war crimes” [for the fire-bombing of Tokyo where 250,000 civilians were killed].
Up until now, there has been very little questioning of the predominate story of the Rwandan genocide. In the past 15 years, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has prosecuted only those who lost the war. “Either this was the only war in history where the crimes occurred on only one side or this Tribunal is like Nuremberg where there was only ‘victor’s justice’”, Erlinder stated. It was either a strange war or a strange tribunal, he quipped.
Fortunately, Erlinder continued, Carla Del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICTR, wrote her memoirs that were published in early 2009. In it, she describes her work for both the Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals and claims that she had enough evidence to prosecute Paul Kagame, the leader of the RPF and now the President of Rwanda, for his central role in the assassination of the Presidents of both Burundi and Rwanda on April 6, 1994, the event everyone considers to be the triggering factor in the ensuing genocide/mass slaughter. (Erlinder is very careful, as a lawyer, to remind his audience that it is not technically genocide if there is no planning or conspiracy. No one doubts there were mass killings throughout the countryside but Erlinder points out it was predominately in the areas where all semblance of law and order had broken down due to the civil war initiated by the RPF. More recent evidence shows that much of the killing occurred in the areas controlled by the RPF.)
Del Ponte also claimed that she had evidence of RPF troops killing “tens of thousands” of civilians during this period but she was ordered not to prosecute those cases by US War Crimes Ambassador Pierre Prosper. When she told him, “I work for the UN, not the US”, Prosper replied according to the memoir, “That’s what you think”. She was replaced within 6 weeks at the insistence of the US by the UN Security Council. “If you want to keep a UN career, you learn from what happened to Carla Del Ponte,” Erlinder continued.
Del Ponte’s firing caused very little media attention even though Kagame called for her resignation because of the timing: all the world was focusing on the search for WMDs in Iraq in 2003. But despite all the attention paid to Iraq, US Secretary of State Colin Powell went out of his way in a press conference to agree that she should be removed. All the outcomes have been manipulated in these cases when only one side is prosecuted. (Does this remind anybody of the aftermath of the Republican National Convention in 2008 when only the demonstrators and not the police were prosecuted?)
Erlinder described how he first got involved in the Rwanda case: while in Kenya in 2003, he was approached and asked to serve as defense counsel for General Bagosora, one of four Hutu military leaders charged with the most serious crimes of conspiring to commit genocide. Seven years later, the three Judges hearing the case against these “leaders of the genocide” rendered their judgment: a unanimous verdict of not guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide. [They were convicted of significantly lesser charges for actions of soldiers under their command for which they might not have even known about.]
With this verdict on February 8, 2009, for the first time in the public record was a significant chink in that wall erected of the dominant story of the genocide. If these 4 military leaders had not planned and conspired to commit the genocide, maybe there were other parts of the Kagame-is-a-hero story that were not true either. The second shoe to drop was the leaking of the draft of the United Nation’s Report from the High Commissioner for Human Rights (otherwise known as the Mapping Report), a 600-page report that had been held in secret for almost a year while Kagame was given a copy allowing him to comment on it before it was officially released. This act of civil disobedience by UN staffers in leaking it is reflective of the disgust and frustration that is growing for allowing Kagame to continue to act with impunity.
Part of that growing awareness of something seriously wrong with the glowing praise of Kagame’s “economic miracle” and his hero-status was his administration’s thuggish arrests of his political opponents – anyone who dared to challenge him. It was one thing to arrest Victoire Ingabire; after all, she is Rwandan. But when Kagame’s government overreached to arrest Peter Erlinder, a westerner with a strong network of legal and activist colleagues, much more attention came to bear on what was going on in Kigali.
The leak of the draft of the Mapping Report forced the hand of the UN officials and the final report was issued this month. Although the focus of the report was on what happened in Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from 1993-2003, it showed a clear pattern that completely negated the narrative that Kagame has spun: the killings of civilians in the Congo (and the genocide in Rwanda) were the work of the Hutu. The UN Report states that the RPF, Kagame’s military force, is responsible for many of the 6 million killed to date in the Congo. The primary victims? : Hutu civilians from Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo.
As Erlinder was preparing his defense in front of the ICTR, he noticed that virtually all the “evidence” against his defendants was “apocryphal”. There didn’t seem to be any documentation, just statements or stories by others claiming, “I saw this” or “I heard that”. When questioning UN peacekeeping force leader, General Dallaire, a Canadian, the ICTR prosecutor asked about his telegram to NY on January 11, 1994, four months before the mass killings. Dallaire said “folks in New York didn’t respond to my warnings.” On cross-examination by Erlinder, he was asked if he had “any documents” and he mentioned statements by informers in his “personal files”.
So Erlinder asked for any documents the UN had relevant to the case. Told he was allowed to “inspect” UN files at the UN headquarters, he was escorted to a room that had a wall of documents arranged like a library. He was told he couldn’t take in his computer, camera, or even a notepad and pen or pencil. But he was instructed that if he put a “Post-It” note on any pages he needed a copy of, it would be given to him and the UN legal department staff would review it to see if it could be released to him. The professor told us he went downstairs “and bought a whole gross of Post-It Note packets” and literally spent a week putting a sticky note on every page. He said the UN staff are good bureaucrats and just followed orders. He received copies of thousands of documents by the end of 2004.
He also stumbled on “the archives”, a warehouse in NJ that also had relevant documents that he could use. Included in them were declassified documents from the Pentagon, US State Department, and the CIA. After arranging all the documents into chronological order, he converted them into PDF format and placed them on a website he created so they would be available to other researchers and the public. At the site, www.rwandadocumentsproject.net, Erlinder has assembled UN documents, US documents, evidence used in the Tribunal trial of his defendants, the Defense brief, articles about Rwanda, documents about Erlinder’s arrest, and a copy of the UN Mapping Report. The documents allowed him to assemble close to a minute-by-minute account of what happened during the 100-days of the genocide. It created a completely different narrative of what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Erlinder claims what he has put together is what historians will ultimately report once the dominant narrative is exposed as fraudulent. The documents are now in the public record –exposure will come.
Erlinder then proceeded to give us a brief outline of the events as they unfolded. Explaining that Rwanda was about the size of the State of Maryland and that historically the richer, minority Tutsi raised cattle and the majority, poorer Hutus grew crops. The Tutsis had the spears, they were the warriors in that society.
Between 1980-1990, Paul Kagame was the Ugandan rebel leader Museveni’s Military Intelligence Chief and then part of the Ugandan Army when Museveni became head of state with US assistance. Kagame himself received training at Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas. In 1990 he took about 25% of the Ugandan Army, renamed them The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and led a guerilla-style terrorism campaign to destabilize Rwanda.
His forces grew tenfold from 2,500 to 25,000 fully armed troops in those three years, obviously with outside help at a time when the Soviet empire was collapsing and the US was “concerned” about the socialist leanings of the Hutu President in Rwanda. In February 1993 the RFP attacked and advanced close to Kigali, the capital city. One-sixth of the population (1.2 million people) was displaced during this attack. A power-sharing agreement was reached in July that included the RPF because of their military superiority even though the Tutsi were only about 15% of the population. Pressure in the UN led to the removal of French and Belgian UN Peacekeepers who had helped keep the RFP out of Kigali and less-trained UN forces replaced them. An election for President was scheduled for the following August. Meanwhile neighboring Burundi elected a Hutu president by a landslide.
That Burundi president was assassinated by his own army consisting primarily of Tutsis in league with the RPF. The Burundi Army proceeded to kill between 100,000-250,000 predominately Hutus and another 300,000-500,000 refugees fled north to Rwanda. In November of 1993, US Ambassador Bob Flaten (now a resident of Northfield, MN) warned Kagame and the Rwandan president that if either side renewed the civil war there would be massive bloodshed. On April 6, 1994, RPF forces shot down the airplane carrying the Rwandan President and the new Burundi President and within two hours the RPF made a blitzkrieg assault to control much of the country. By July 19 they declared victory.
By September and October some reports of RPF crimes began to surface. Robert Gersony spent six weeks investigating the massive killings and his oral report to the UN claimed “systematic and sustained killing and persecution of the Hutu civilian population by the [RPF]” between April and August. His report was treated as “confidential” and suppressed. To this day (but hopefully not too much longer) the dominant narrative claims virtually all the victims were Tutsi and “moderate Hutu” although none of the statues or memorials today in Rwanda depict Hutu victims. And the “crime of genocide denial” was put into law by the victorious Kagame regime to prevent any other account from being raised.
From Erlinder's account, it appears to me that most of the Tutsi-on-Hutu killing was done by the RPF military forces in the areas they controlled while the Hutu-on-Tutsi killing happened in the ensuing chaos of a complete breakdown of the society rather than as a military-led strategy. The killings on both sides must be condemned and be a part of the history. There are crimes on both sides in any war. But, in all likelihood, only one of those sides received US military aid and it was not the Hutu government which was overthrown.
Erlinder points out there were crimes on both sides in any war. For the US government to continue to allow Kagame’s false narrative to be dominant dishonors all the victims of the war. US foreign policy has aligned us with some really reprehensible leaders for political and economic reasons. Our support for Mobutu in Zaire was shameful and embarrassing. A few years from now the world will have a similar perspective about Paul Kagame. Hopefully our foreign policy will prioritize human rights over the resources we covet in the eastern Congo which Kagame has profited from. Time will tell. Meanwhile, the Professor, while a pariah to some in power in Kigali, is a prophetic voice calling us to do the right thing.
For a video of Peter Erlinder’s talk soon after being released from prison: http://ourworldindepth.org/archives/311
To view actual documents from the UN files on Rwanda: http://www.rwandadocumentsproject.net/gsdl/cgi-bin/library
Comments
What a shame?
Who is the real pariah: The Professor from Minnesota was had never done any work on Rwanda until he became a Defense Attorney for some of the people involved in the Rwandan Genocide or the Professors who have been working on Rwanda for the last 40years?
TC-IMC has been building a reputation as a serious progressive media outlet. Thanks to the work it did and continues to do; especially recently on the RNC. But this article is one of the most terrible things I have seen on an African issue anywhere in the US; even in the most reactionary media outlets.
People; do not have any bit of decency? How could someone in their right mind make this a feature on an indymedia website without taking some time to read on the Genocide?
With statements like:
“that the well-known story of the Rwandan genocide is at best a half-truth if not an outright fabrication to hide the real perpetrators.”
Did the author of this article try to look around for what other critical progressive groups have to say about this issue? Or Erlinder’s words were good enough. Whether he slurred 800,000 Rwandans killed in a PLANNED mass killing it doesn’t matter?
Did you even google General Bagosora
Before writing this plain lie on an indymedia website:
“Seven years later, the three Judges hearing the case against these “leaders of the genocide” rendered their judgment: a unanimous verdict of not guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide. [They were convicted of significantly lesser charges for actions of soldiers under their command for which they might not have even known about.]”
Because the full judgement is online and in fucking English.
Lots of the progressive groups that have criticised and continue to criticize Kagame make sure they make the distinction before hand between Kagame and the Genocide; to avoid ending up with garbage like this.
The Human Rights Watch work on Rwanda and their critic of Kagame is a good example of such work.
“Hotel Rwanda” is not a documentary; it is a Hollywood drama. And if you listen to the filmmaker he said, he made some parts of the movie up for dramatic effect.
You want to watch a film about Rwanda watch the documentary by Josette-Alice BOS.
On the work of the Citizens Commission of Inquiry on the role of France on the Rwandan Genocide. Maybe that will help you know some real things about the genocide.
Or better still read the full report with all the declassified documents showing the planning and execution of the genocide at:
http://cec.rwanda.free.fr/
Thanks Sphinx
The above article is a combination of
a report on a recent event featuring Peter Erlinder,
statements about history,
and statements of opinion.
We really need people like you, Sphinx, to volunteer as fact-checkers for the stories that are submitted by the public to our site.
We currently have no volunteer fact-checker for featured articles, but the collective does read & briefly discuss each feature article before it's featured.
We appreciate both your contribution & Clemens' contribution to awareness on this topic;
in the future, we hope people who want their article to be featured will do some fact-checking, attribute quotes, and include references to sources in their articles. Especially when extensive history & background of the story is used.
Thank you both...
publish it!
Sphinx, can you write an article about the issue, or have access to one someone else has written? If so and if it meets our typical feature guidelines (local relevance, timeliness, coherence, etc.) we'd likely promote it to the front page too. As you know, Indymedia is based on open-publishing and depends on submissions from the community for our content; we very rarely have the capacity to send our own people to cover the issues we want; we also don't have a party line and frequently feature things with which some or all collective members may disagree.
So to anyone upset with content on Indymedia, the solution is simple - DIY!
Steve Clemmons
Who wrote this article is not a peace activist.
He is a Democrat. That means that he simply supports his wing of the war machine.
Lots of that going on these days though. All of you with the blood of innocents on your hands.
Does not matter a damn what excuses or rationalizations or attempts to wring pretezels of logic about "11th Degree of Chess."
Oh well, when the results of your cowardice becomes evident and we slip over the edge into unchecked global warming, I will smile annd say "Fuck You. We tried to warn you all."
Especially you Steve Clemmons. You and your Democrtat Apologist friends. The ones with the blood of innocent Iraqis, Afghans etc etc on you hands.
Am I bitter? Your goddamned right I am.
Covert CIA ops in Africa staged genocidal episode
To call attention to the side of this which I think Cavlan & Sphinx are not approaching (?), there is a lot of material suggesting the RPF was basically a CIA-backed front with a goal of destroying Rwanda as an independent, francophone & socialist leaning country, to torch it and make it English-speaking and cooperative to Wall Street geopolitical efforts to capture the resources (and we see how the rest of the Congo region is dominated this way now). The SAM-16 missiles which shot down the plane were held in a warehouse of a Swiss company working with the CIA. Some notes from Wayne Madsen nearly a decade ago -
http://cryptome.org/us-africa-wm.htm
Although he is not an Africanist, Wayne Madsen was intrigued by the taking down of the airplane of Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, on April 6, 1994. He started his own investigation. The non-governmental organisation Epic tracks down invasions of privacy in electronic data transmissions. Madsen focuses on the activities of intelligence services. He knows their working methods from the inside, as he worked for the US Navy on monitoring technology for the NSA. The poacher became a forester: "I know where they hide their corpses," he jokes.
Madsen travelled to Uganda and Rwanda where his suspicions were confirmed by informal talks with US soldiers: "Apart from my investigation which pointed out the American military intelligence service DIA as the brain behind the attempt, the French parliamentary committee of inquiry Quiles reached the same conclusion in 1998. Which suffices for some to call me an agent of the French intelligence service DGSE."
The Americans are after the mineral wealth, urge for the huge telecom market in Africa and new outlets. Did they want to take Africa because of the then rising "Century of Asia"?
WAYNE MADSEN. "There is a race going on between French and American intelligence services to grab the open market for wireless telecommunication via partner companies. However, France is under pressure to give up itschasse gardée on other fields as well. The French guilty conscience after the genocide in Rwanda was a good means to clip their wings, whereas precisely the American plan to get rid of Mobutu via Rwanda ended up in a human tragedy. The United States were interested in the country without mineral wealth because Kugame’s RPF was the ideal vehicle to fill up the wish list of its companies: Barrick, American Mineral Fields (AMF), Banro Resources,Bechtel, Tempelsman & Sons, Halliburton (editorial note – of which present vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney, was CEO). Microsoft was on the look-out for coltan ore. Walter Kansteiner, whose father is a trader in tropical raw materials in Chicago, now is assistant secretary of State for Africa in the Bush administration. On October 16, 1996, he made a plea for the splitting up of Zaire in The Forum for International Policy. At about the same time Laurent-Désiré Kabila started his Blitzkrieg towards Kinshasa – with the active co-operation of American intelligence services. Nowadays that man determines the US Africa policy."
You see this US offensive as one big conspiracy. Wasn’t the tragedy rather the consequence of the terrible ignorance of overconfident geostrategists?
MADSEN. "Hilary Clinton showing off a diamond ring of American Mineral is just the tip of the iceberg. Companies active in Africa also hung about Clinton’s electoral campaign. Business interests do not only control Congress, but the White House as well. As for that, there is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. There was a strategic plan for Africa. In a CIA report of January 1994 the number of possible deaths involved in taking down Habyarimana’s airplane was estimated at minimally 500, maximally 500,000. The latter figure became reality. They were prepared to take the risk. Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, was officially in Rwanda to clear away land mines. In fact, they trained Kagame’s men, as Brown & Root is linked to Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), a private mercenary supplier from Virginia, which guarded diamond concessions of American Mineral Fields in Angola. The American military intelligence service DIA recruits amongst MPRI people. You can keep going on like this; read my book."
In Genoa G8 claimed they wanted to tackle Africa’s crucial problems.
MADSEN. "What are Africa’s crucial problems? Colin Powell, the current Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, is in favour of private militias like MPRI. They used to be called "mercenaries", now they are called PMCs: Private Military Contractors. They are efficient and cheaper than an official army. Kansteiner, Powell’s right hand for Africa, said in August 1998 – at the time of the second invasion of Congo against Kabila – that "the disintegration of Congo is now more probable than it was thirty years ago". The opposite is true. Whoever keeps a little track of Congo, knows that the Congolese population, from the north to the south and from the west to the east, are now more than ever devoted to that one great nation. Richard Armitage as well, Powell’s number two, considers Africa to be a sandpit, in which you can play all you want. Armitage was directly involved in Irangate. Colin Powell is an African American, but he brings continuity: in first instance intelligence services serve American business interests. The E-IMET programme (editorial note – Enhanced International Military Education and Training) and the intelligence service DIA accompanied Laurent Kabila’s march on Kinshasa in 1996 and in 1998 they supported the rebellion against the same Kabila."
Western politicians plead as excuse for their incapacity the fact that the current African leaders determine the agenda themselves.
MADSEN. "To cover up their responsibility in this drama, they like to forget who set the fire to the fuse. It took Mobutu and the likes of him decades to become the so-called "monsters of Frankenstein"; Kabila senior only needed two years. Even the firmest of pawns got out of control: Kagame and Musevani put each other through hell; the exemplary leaders of Ethiopia and Eritrea did the same. Dictator Charles Taylor of Liberia is a thorn in the flesh of Washington. However, he was Jesse Jackson’s favourite, Clinton’s official envoy to put forward democracy in Africa. The puppets quickly started living their own lives. But the assassination of the president of Rwanda was the igniter of an adventure, which the Pentagon no longer controls. Nevertheless, Kagame remains the favourite. Two weeks after the assassination of Laurent Kabila he got round the table in Washington with George W. Bush and Joseph Kabila. The body of daddy Kabila was still warm."
You claim to have evidence that the missiles with which the airplane of the president of Rwanda was brought down were delivered by the US?
MADSEN. "James Lyons, who led the UN investigation, presented evidence to the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (ICTR) corroborating my proposition. The SAM missiles were seized during Desert Storm in Iraq and brought from Cairo to Kigali. The missiles were stored in warehouses of a Swiss company working for the CIA. Two RPF soldiers fired the SAM-16s from Massaka and the Gasogi hill. These soldiers were trained in Phoenix, Arizona to work with this kind of projectiles. I proved this, apart from Lyons’ investigation and from the French Quiles committee. Everyone comes to the same conclusion, Rwandan witnesses as well. But ICTR judge, Louise Arbor, closed the case when she felt Madeleine Allbright breathing down her neck.
And further notes from 2008 - http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5342.shtml(WMR) -- The admission of Rwanda to the Commonwealth of Nations, headed up by Queen Elizabeth II, caps off a campaign engineered by the intelligence services of Britain, the United States, and Israel to transform Rwanda from a Francophone country with close ties to France into an English-speaking country with close links to Washington, London, and Jerusalem.
The operation to claim Rwanda as a client state of the United States and its allies began when Rwanda’s current president was enrolled as a student at the U.S. Army’s Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, before his Rwandan Patriotic Army forces invaded Rwanda from Uganda.
In 1994, Rwanda’s pro-French Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, along with Hutu President of Burundi Cyprien Ntaryamira were assassinated in a missile attack carried out by Kagame’s U.S. and mercenary-backed forces on the Rwandan presidential aircraft, plunging Rwanda into genocide and civil war.
In the succeeding years, U.S. intelligence used Rwanda as a base for two invasions of Zaire/Congo that saw the overthrow of one-time U.S. Zairean client Mobutu Sese Seko and an attempted overthrow of his Rwandan- and Ugandan-installed successor, Congolese President Laurent D. Kabila. The plan of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was to set up a group of central African states loyal to the economic and military interests of the United States, Israel, and Britain, particularly the diamond mining interests of Albright’s diamond tycoon Belgian-Jewish boyfriend, Maurice Tempelsman.
Today, Rwanda is a dictatorship whose president, Kagame, consistently receives the praises of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. However, Rwanda is a dictatorship that oppresses freedom of speech, opposition political movements, and will accuse opponents of being “genocidaires,” participants in the killing of Tutsis in 1994, if they dare criticize Kagame’s regime. Many Hutu Rwandans have been forced to flee the country, creating a Hutu diaspora that receives scant attention and even abuse from Kagame’s friends and supporters in the international “Holocaust” community.
Before his assassination in 2001, Kabila was also trying to transform Congo into an English-speaking country. The “Anglophone conspiracy” is outlined in this editor’s book. “Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999”:
“Some of the Kinshasans who turned out to welcome Kabila’s [Kagame-backed] rebel forces became uncomfortable when they discovered their “liberators” spoke only Swahili, English, Portuguese, and Kinyarwanda, tongues as foreign to the Lingala speaking people of western Zaire as was Russian, Finnish, and Polish to Italians. The Congolese then experienced another language shock. Long a Francophone country, Kabila proclaimed English as an official language of the country. His ally, Kagame, had earlier made a similar pronouncement for French speaking Rwanda. Furthermore, Kabila’s six bodyguards were said to be non-Zairian “tall, English speaking gentlemen.” France’s fears of an ‘Anglophone conspiracy’ did not seem to be totally without merit. In addition, most of Kabila’s government ministers were foreign citizens. They carried passports from Germany, the United States, and Rwanda. Kinyarwanda-speaking troops posted outside the Finance Ministry in Kinshasa were unable to read the French ID cards of ministry workers. Never before in history had so many foreign citizens occupied the top government posts of an independent country.”
Showing his own sycophantic loyalty to the Anglo-American axis, French President Nicolas Sarkozy quickly restored diplomatic relations with Rwanda after the African nation announced it was joining the Commonwealth.