By: Tom Ndahiro
Fighting genocide—its ideology and denial, requires proper knowledge of who is who among its ideologues and deniers. Majority among the former are Rwandans who happen to in both categories. Once a genocide ideologue, one also automatically becomes a denier. The latter category includes many foreigners who have been duped by Rwandan genocidaires and their non-Rwandan disciples. A majority among the non-Rwandan category served the genocidal regimes; others are trapped by ignorance or relationships—of family or friendship.
Since the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) brought the genocide to an end, efforts to subvert the truth have not only intensified but have gained new adherents.
These include journalists, academics, lawyers, and even some self-styled human rights activists. Few have been as active as Judi Rever, author of ‘In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Penguin Random House, Canada 2018). It is extremely challenging to fathom the depth and cause of the hatred of the likes of Judi Rever, Charles Onana, Jane Corbin and others towards Rwanda’s current government and the RPF without understanding how genocidaires’ pre-planned their crime’s denial. One such plan was explained by Jean Kambanda in 1997, the year Judi Rever is said to have started working on her ‘In Praise of Blood’, which can rightly be called ‘In Praise of genocidaires’.
Kambanda’s revelations
It is few a minutes before four o’clock, 22 September 1997 in a secure house located in Dodoma, the capital of Tanzania. Jean Kambanda, the genocidaires’ Prime Minister between April-July 1994 who had been arrested in Nairobi, Kenya, on 18 July 1997, is sitting with ICTR investigators Pierre Duclos and Marcel Desaulniers. He had accepted to tell it all—an exercise which lasted more than a year.
In the first few minutes of his first day of his confessions, Jean Kambanda re-counted in detail how the genocide, its denial and accusations against the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) were planned and executed: “Those who were likely to be accused of having committed genocide, crimes against humanity and/or human rights violations were doing everything to deny even the obvious…” Kambanda sounded surprised that his fellow genocidaires denied the crimes that they had committed, going as far as contesting that people were killed during the period between April and July 1994. To this end, he says, “we fabricated all kinds of alibis in which lies had pride of place.”
One of the activities which members of his genocidaire government (in exile) considered to be of utmost urgency was to establish “the responsibility of the RPF and the international community in the Rwandan catastrophe.” Kambanda explained: “Contrary to what one may think, this was the easiest part to prepare since everyone was willing to make contribution and more especially since it was easier for me to sell the idea to the refugees. I had therefore started by gathering elements to constitute a file on the role of the RPF and of the international community in the Rwanda tragedy in general and from April 94 in particular.”
Then Kambanda told the investigators what he personally did to implement the plan to implicate the RPF in the crimes committed in Rwanda: “I set in motion, from the beginning of our exile the intelligence services or the remnants thereof to investigate among the refugees on the role played by the RPF and the international community during the war.”
As they embarked on this project, there was a reliability issue to their findings. “I was well aware that the result we were going to obtain were not going to be given any credibility by the international public opinion, considering the credibility we ourselves enjoyed,” Kambanda told the ICTR investigators.
He then narrated how they fabricated the lies against the RPF: “In conjunction with others, I encouraged the creation of refugee associations for the publication of the investigations. This led to the formation of SOLIDAIRE –Rwanda a.s.b.l, which published the findings of the investigations in South-Kivu, Burundi and Tanzania in three volumes entitled: ‘The Untold side of the Massacre in Rwanda’. The second association was called LIRDHO (Rwandan Refugees Human Rights League) and published mostly findings on acts of violence committed after July 1994. The third association AJPR (Association for Justice and Peace in Rwanda) was formed in the refugee camps of North Kivu, and was opposed to centralising the findings of the investigations by SOLIDAIRE-Rwanda a.s.b.l, preferring to publish them itself, even though the investigations had been carried out by teams set up by my intelligence service. These results were published under the title ‘The Other Side of the Genocide’
After the publication of these reports, Kambanda says, “a team of legal experts was set up to study the procedures of the ICTR and the attitude to be adopted by those appearing before it. They produced a document entitled Vade Mecum for those appearing before the ICTR”. (..)On this point he says, “The idea was to deny every single thing, including the genocide and the massacres themselves. As I had said earlier, I was personally aware that it was not by denials that I would be absolved of my responsibility as Prime Minister during that period. But I could not mention it because it would have been interpreted as treason, and I was well placed to measure the consequences thereof. Since I knew that in any case I was going to get the opportunity to have my say, I played for time; I decided to wait.”
To make sure denial sunk deeper, “meetings were organised on this ‘Vade mecum…’ to categories, ranging from members of government to meetings per prefecture…” This level of sensitisation was fruitful.
In-Praise-of-Criminals
Judi Rever is a special case among the foreigners who have in the recent past distinguished themselves as espousing the genocidaires’ ideology to the core. But many, including publishers of her book are clueless about her source of inspiration. On the opening part of her book’s jacket, the publisher describes Rever’s book as “A stunning work of investigative reporting by a Canadian journalist who has risked her own life to bring us a deeply disturbing history of the Rwandan genocide that takes the true measure of Rwandan head of state Paul Kagame.”
In the publisher’s assessment, the book is a masterwork because of “unparalleled interviews with RPF defectors, former soldiers and atrocity survivors, supported by documents leaked from a UN court, Judi Rever brings us the complete history of the Rwandan genocide.” And then asks why the larger world community hasn’t recognized this truth.
On the back side of the book’s jacket is a brief review by a journalist—Terry Gould, who is also an author of ‘Worth Dying For’ and ‘Murder Without Borders’. Gould says ‘In Praise of Blood’ is “compulsory reading for a world that has acknowledged only half the story of the Rwandan genocide” and that, “We owe a debt of gratitude to Judi Rever for risking her life to bring us the whole truth of that genocide in this great work of investigative journalism.”
After reading Rever’s book, reviewer Linden MacIntyre, another journalist and author of ‘The Bishop’s Man’ says he has discovered the unknown and the ignored ‘truth’ thus commending: “If you thought you understood the genesis of the Rwandan genocide, think again.” Linden’s claim that the world was actually hoodwinked echoes Alan Stam in the BBC’s ‘Untold Story’ that “what the world believes and what actually happened are quite different.” It also coincides to Jane Corbin’s belief that “The senseless barbarity of the genocide still shock us. We think we know the story, but do we?”
The subtitle of Rever’s book is “The crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front”, which is exactly what genocidaires and their intelligence apparatus struggled to accomplish, finally finding credence by a Canadian writer. What Kambanda doubted would ever be credible was believed by Penguin Random House, Canada in 2018—and was earlier aired by the BBC2 in 2014.
The real source of the BBC documentary ‘Rwanda, The Untold Story’ is the refugee camps in Zaire, 1994-95. The broadcaster basically reprised “The Untold side of the Massacre in Rwanda” and “The Other Side of the Genocide,” which is exactly the same as what Terry Gould termed ‘half the story of the Rwandan genocide’.
This is how genocidaires’ disciples like Judi Rever have managed to dupe unsuspecting publishers and reviewers.