Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses substack. Also published on Real Left’s substack. Please consider subscribing if you haven’t already done so.
In light of the conclusion reached in Part II, what then are we to make of the title of the Corbett Report video – The Rwanda Genocide Is A Lie? Whether or not the video title is accurate depends on what Corbett means by “lie”.
If he means that the Standard Official Narrative of the genocide omits and obfuscates vital information and context, the effect of which is to conceal RPF criminality and many other disturbing facts about US involvement in Rwanda, then yes, it is a lie. Corbett is saying that, and I agree with him. But he says more than that.
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If he means that a genocide of Tutsis did not take place, then I am not persuaded by that argument. Corbett acknowledges that hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and he also clearly states: “Yes, there were Hutu extremists who did kill Tutsis.” That statement is immediately followed by the qualification: “But there were also Tutsis that killed Hutus.” Corbett then asks:
“Isn’t it a strange genocide that results in more deaths of the genociders than of the genocidees?”
Corbett then uses certain facts – anomalies, obfuscations and omissions in the Standard Official Narrative – to arrive at a certain interpretation. It’s an interpretation about which he is quite clear:
“These sorts of things are not peripheral parts of the story. They are essential to even beginning to get a grasp of what the Rwanda genocide really was. Spoiler, it wasn’t a genocide. That is not the right way to think of it. Yes hundreds of thousands of people died, but it was not a genocide in the straightforward way that is portrayed.” [timestamp 18:10] [emphasis added]
Thus Corbett throws a number of anomalies in the Standard Official Narrative into a general pot of other severe defects in the narrative, such as the absence of context and omission of key events in the buildup, which I totally agree with and have dealt with in Part I and Part II. These key anomalies seem to form the basis for a consistent reference to the entire event as “the so-called genocide”.
So let’s deal with the key anomalies that led Corbett to state: “it wasn’t a genocide”. I do not believe these anomalies form a valid basis for concluding that there was no genocide against Tutsis.
More Hutus died than Tutsis
The first anomaly is that more Hutus died than their Tutsi victims, which would obviously be highly problematic if, according to the Standard Official Narrative, Hutus were supposedly the only perpetrators of the genocide. I have made my position clear – I think both sides committed genocide. This isn’t just a personal opinion. All the versions of the counter-narratives that I’ve seen also cite evidence of a pattern of violence directed at Tutsis by Hutus. Corbett himself, while acknowledging that Hutu extremists killed Tutsis, does not explain why he thinks this crime was not genocidal in nature. Perhaps he thinks that this killing was too sporadic and does not warrant characterisation as genocide. I don’t object to the claim, but if that’s the thinking, I haven’t seen the evidence to back it up. For my part, what I can’t do is advance arguments for a claim for which I can’t find any evidence.
I do not think it’s necessary to prove which side suffered more deaths since genocide responsibility is not based on a mathematical or numeric equation. But I believe Corbett is correct that more Hutus died given the differential in population size between the two groups, the sheer length of time that the RPF engaged in reprisals against Hutus, both during the primary genocide event and subsequently, and the ruthlessness of the RPF’s operations in Rwanda and the DRC. The key point I want to make about Corbett’s claim that more Hutus died than Tutsis is that I don’t think it nullifies a genocide against Tutsis. And, obviously, nor does it nullify a genocide against Hutus, which is now beyond doubt.
The government and military had high-level serving Tutsis
Corbett also highlights another anomaly to support his negation of a Tutsi genocide – namely that the government accused of perpetrating the genocide contained members of the group who were its primary victims. This certainly reduces the likelihood of a high-level government plan to commit genocide, but I don’t think it should be used to conclude that the ethnic divide in Rwanda was magically cured by Tutsi representation in a Hutu-dominated cabinet.
A party governing over a population with a large minority will, if it has even an ounce of common sense, appoint minority members to senior positions. This doesn’t just happen in ‘democracies’. It also happens in dictatorships for precisely the same reason that it happens in democracies – it’s a political manoeuvre to widen the base of support, thereby increasing the stability of the government by fostering greater national cohesion. But it is not a magical formula for ethnic harmony, particularly when other factors are working against it, such as an invasion by a rebel force led by people of the same ethnicity as the minority officials in government. It is precisely at these moments of tension when the extremists on both sides come to the fore to sideline the moderates. The RPF was, in its inception, a violent group with a supremacist ideology, and it played a significant role in catalysing Hutu extremism.
Decapitation of government leadership and absence of planning
The third claim is that a genocide of Tutsis was precluded by the decapitation of the top level of the government – not just by the presidential assassination, but by purges of moderate Hutus that quickly followed. This claim speaks to the absence of “planification” mentioned by Keith Harmon Snow, someone who has studied the conflict and whom Corbett interviews to provide context. Firstly, all the evidence put forward in Corbett’s video by Christopher Black, the ICTR trial lawyer, is compelling in proving an absence of planning by top government or military officials. However, while being able to prove planning would certainly bolster the chances of high-level convictions in a genocide case, it is only one type of evidence that can be used to prove the necessary mental elements of intent and knowledge on the part of the perpetrators. It’s also true that, the higher up the chain of command you go, the less likely it is that a perpetrator actually commits an act of violence. At this level, we’re probably looking at a different charge – specifically a charge of conspiracy to commit genocide, incitement to commit genocide, or complicity in genocide. The key point is that the absence of planning to commit genocide does not rule out the crime of genocide by killing. It just opens up the possibility that a genocide took place with minimal or no high-level organisation. This may reduce the overall lethality of the violence, but it does not rule it out.
I return to the evidence revealed by Rever in testimonies from RPF soldiers on how intelligence units infiltrated Interahamwe militias and egged on the violence. Both the claim of high-level Tutsis in government and the absence of planning imply that only the very top level of an all-Hutu government cabinet could successfully greenlight the genocide of Tutsis. But the idea that complex and diffuse administrative systems would be totally paralysed by cabinet assassinations is overly simplistic. It’s hard to imagine applying that reasoning in say the US or Britain, so why apply it to Rwanda? This thinking can actually be turned on its head. Whereas Corbett and his guests imply that the decapitation of the government would preclude a genocide of Tutsis, that very decapitation triggered the chaos that actually fuelled the violence. Rever explains how local rural structures quickly stepped in to fill the power vacuum at the top, and egged on the violence. The national radio station also played its part. This is explored more fully under the heading in Part II: How did the genocide of Tutsis take place if there was no Hutu government in place to coordinate and execute it?
As Judi Rever correctly states:
“Whether or not various Hutus conspired to commit a genocide against Tutsis in advance of the assassination of President Habyarimana does not negate or lessen the reality that there was a clear intent to exterminate Tutsis once the presidential plane went down.” [emphasis added][i]
A point worth highlighting is the one that Christopher Black makes regarding the presence of Tutsis in the military, both senior and regulars. His view, a reasonable one, was that this makes it unlikely that orders would easily be given to butcher Tutsis. Aside from anything else, the Rwandan army would have been preoccupied with repelling the RPF invading force. By the same token, it’s even more unlikely that a Tutsi RPF invading force would follow orders to butcher interior Tutsis. This is why the claim that the RPF “did all the killing” is not credible. The infiltration scenario – the RPF fuelling Hutu Interahamwe violence against Tutsis – is far more plausible than the RPF doing “all the killing”. To which I would add: the diabolical fuelling of violence by RPF infiltrators does not nullify a genocide against Tutsis by Hutus, but it does complicate it.
It’s worth dealing with the issue of how much culpability is borne by the RPF for the massacres of Tutsis as a result of its infiltration of Interahamwe militias. Here, we are essentially engaging in a counterfactual by asking whether Hutus would have engaged in the genocidal killing of Tutsis in the absence of RPF infiltration operations. However, you cannot use a counterfactual to legally exculpate Hutu extremists from genocide charges if they had blood on their hands and if the mental elements of intent and knowledge were present during the act. We can’t know the answer to the counterfactual question, but answering ‘No’ also implies that Hutus were sitting idly by until they were worked up into a frenzy by the RPF infiltrators. My research and the evidence I’ve cited in this series of articles does not support that.
The Hutu-Tutsi divide – ethnic or class?
There is one final point of difference to address, which may have a bearing on the international law definition of genocide. If Tutsis and Hutus were not members of different ethnic groups, then one could contest whether the crimes committed were technically crimes of genocide under international law.
The question of whether the Hutu-Tutsi divide is ethnic is thrown into a pot of issues that Corbett states are important to consider when deciding on how to characterise the killings in 1994. He introduces the issue [timestamp 17:15] by stating that the Tutsi-Hutu distinction was “reinforced and reinvigorated” in colonial times. He then asserts that the Hutu-Tutsi classification pre-colonial times “wasn’t a racial or ethnic category…it was a class distinction…essentially a wealth distinction”.
Whether to view the classification as an ethnic or class grouping is described by Corbett as belonging to a set of issues that are “not peripheral parts of the story” but “are essential to even beginning to get a grasp of what the Rwanda genocide really was.” He then immediately adds: “Spoiler, it was not a genocide.” It is therefore safe to assume that he thinks the Hutu-Tutsi classification is not ethnic in nature, and this is one of several factors that nullifies the genocide label for Corbett.
Keith Harmon Snow, someone who has studied the conflict and whom Corbett interviews to provide context, also dismisses the ethnic nature of the Hutu-Tutsi classification. [timestamp 25:15]. He says: “it’s an economic and a social status thing. It’s not anything having to do with tribe…the Tutsi elites are the people we need to be concerned with. The Tutsi elites are the people that committed genocide in Rwanda in 1994…the Tutsi elites are the killers. The Tutsi elites slaughtered Hutu people.” [emphasis added]
Hold onto the statement in bold above as you read the next paragraph.
I agree that Tutsis committed genocide, although I wouldn’t characterise the criminals collectively as ‘elites’ because I don’t think the class distinction in 1994 was relevant, and I certainly wouldn’t class RPF army regulars with blood on their hands as elites. Tutsi RPF soldiers did kill Hutus and they didn’t kill on the basis of class hatred. I’ve also made clear my view that there was a double genocide, which both Corbett and Harmon Snow do not acknowledge. If Corbett acknowledges, as he has done, that “there were Hutu extremists who did kill Tutsis”, and if he agrees with Keith Harmon Snow’s assertion that Tutsi ‘elites’ slaughtering Hutus is genocidal, then he is arguing against himself by asserting that the same violence in the other direction – Hutus against Tutsis – is not genocidal. They have, in effect, made the class vs ethnic distinction a red herring by way of this contradiction.
I could stop there and say the argument is settled by Corbett’s and Harmon Snow’s self-contradiction. But, in the spirit of never-ending questioning, let me question the questioner of the Questioner – me! What if they are right in principle that the Tutsi-Hutu divide is not ethnic, notwithstanding that they believe Tutsis can commit genocidal violence against Hutus. I’ve been a stickler for definitions for good reason – if we’re going to argue about a genocide, we need to have an agreed definition of genocide as the framework. But what about the definition of ethnicity? That’s an important component of genocide.
At this point, I will be the first to admit that I am not as sure about Hutus and Tutsis being distinct ethnic groups as Corbett and Harmon Snow are sure that they’re not!
My uncertainty starts with the difficulty in finding a coherent definition of ethnicity. It is a complete and utter minefield, with different disciplines applying different criteria and emphases. If you’re in the mood for total befuddlement, skim this scholarly article. But you don’t need to because the determination of belonging to an ethnic group has been settled for the purposes of the crime of genocide. The matter was, as you’d expect, adjudicated on in ICTR cases. Here’s a summary of what I found on an ICC case law website [point 1.1.1 Objective evidence of the existence of a protected group]:
“The Chamber notes that the Tutsi population does not have its own language or a distinct culture from the rest of the Rwandan population. However, the Chamber finds that there are a number of objective indicators of the group as a group with a distinct identity. Every Rwandan citizen was required before 1994 to carry an identity card which included an entry for ethnic group …, the ethnic group being Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. The Rwandan Constitution and laws in force in 1994 also identified Rwandans by reference to their ethnic group… Article 57 of the Civil Code of 1988 provided that a person would be identified by “sex, ethnic group, name, residence and domicile.” Article 118 of the Civil Code provided that birth certificates would include “the year, month, date and place of birth, the sex, the ethnic group”… Moreover, customary rules existed in Rwanda governing the determination of ethnic group, which followed patrilineal lines of heredity. The identification of persons as belonging to the group of Hutu or Tutsi (or Twa) had thus become embedded in Rwandan culture. The Rwandan witnesses who testified before the Chamber identified themselves by ethnic group, and generally knew the ethnic group to which their friends and neighbours belonged. Moreover, the Tutsi were conceived of as an ethnic group by those who targeted them for killing.” [emphasis added]
I could just stop there and say that the argument was settled by ICC case law relating very specifically to the Rwandan genocide. But I’d have to accuse myself of being contradictory because I have cited evidence by Christopher Black and others who were involved in the ICTR process that the ICTR was a stitch-up to prosecute Hutus and let the RPF off the hook. They would cynically contrive a legal basis for ensuring that a key component of genocide was present – namely targeting on the basis of ethnicity. At this point it is for you, the reader, to decide what the ICC got wrong and what they got right. I think they got the ethnicity issue right, and I’ll explain why.
I totally get why a certain segment of the alt media who have delved into the Rwandan Genocide would question the ethnicity issue. If so much else was wrong, why believe the spin doctors on this issue? The key phrase that crops up again and again in counter-narratives is that ethnicity in Rwanda was, and is, a “total construct”. And guess what? They’re right! It is a construct, as is race and so many other classifications that humans construct to build individual and group identities. But if a philosophical construct leads people to divide themselves into ‘ethnic’ camps which then have very real concrete consequences for their lives, such as the loss of life, then the construct becomes very real. The ‘construct’, applied in very practical ways, moves out of the philosophical realm and into the concrete world.
You have to be prepared to navigate the grey here and acknowledge that ethnicity in Rwanda was both constructed and real. The question then is not whether ethnicity in Rwanda was a philosophical construct. The question is whether there were two distinct groups of people in Rwanda who had been assigned an ethnic identity and who ended up hating each other enough to want to destroy each other on the basis of that assigned identity. If the answer is yes, then the criteria for the crime of genocide has been met.
My view is that it is possible to both acknowledge the fluidity between both groups and admit that this fluidity did not eliminate ethnicity as an identity grouping. If anything, the logical consequence of the Hutu Peasant Revolution of 1959 and the mass exile of Tutsis was to bring ethnicity to the fore, and to cause class to recede as an identity marker. A post-1959 Rwandan politician who served in government would be at the top of the socio-economic strata but still identify as Hutu. Similarly, any Tutsis who remained in Rwanda after 1959 might not have attained high socio-economic status and yet would still identify as Tutsi. Rwandans understood what group they belonged to, even if they didn’t like it.
Grave crimes were committed, and if they weren’t driven by ethnic hatred, one has to be able to describe the class-based mechanisms for both groups singling each other out for violent reprisals. I have not seen a convincing explanation of ways in which Rwandans in 1994 applied a conception of class or elitism to identify victims and carry out the massacres that occurred. If one believes that Hutus, in the first days of the chaos sown by the RPF, sought out, identified and killed Tutsis (Corbett acknowledges that Hutu extremists did kill Tutsis), how did they do this? How did neighbours know who was a Tutsi and who wasn’t? The ICC answered that question but so did Rwandans themselves, and that’s the most important evidence to consider.
Ultimately, it’s not up to me or Corbett to decide this one. It’s up to Rwandans, and they as a nation did recognise ethnic groups. Ethnicity is now heavily suppressed in Rwanda but, as this Jewish visitor to Rwanda discovered, it doesn’t stop people from knowing who they are. The suppression of the historical ethnicity groups in Rwanda, combined with the genocide narrative fostered in Rwanda, has very weirdly led some Tutsis to reconstruct themselves as ‘Jews’ or ‘Israelites’, so much so that the Jewish visitor to Rwanda encountered Tutsis who assured him they were fellow Jews. The visitor learned that the attempt to suppress ethnicity in Rwanda led to ‘Jew’ becoming short-hand for ‘Tutsi’. That’s a strong indicator that at least Tutsis themselves see the divide through an ethnic lens. Part IV looks a little more at this particular form of madness, and how it has played out in Rwandan foreign policy.
The words of those Rwandans who actually were involved either directly or indirectly in the genocide speak louder than any arguments I or Corbett could make. The RPF founder, and defector Alphonse Furuma, whose views on creating a “Tutsiland” I referred to in Part I, confirmed that the RPF assassinated “Hutu elites”.[ii] Which again serves to negate the elite label as something applying exclusively to Tutsis and reinforce the ethnic roots of the antagonism.
Inter-marriage didn’t seem to solve the ethnicity dilemma either. It just seems to have made it more difficult for people who didn’t want to be defined by ethnicity, as illustrated by the story of a young man with roots in both camps. In In Praise of Blood, Rever relates the experience of a Rwandan of mixed ethnicity for whom “looking like a Tutsi allowed him to evade capture” in the first few days of the RPF’s invasion of his commune. In the young man’s words, he had inherited “classic Tutsi” features from his mother.[iii] His self-identity in this life threatening situation was clearly not class-based.
When the RPF forces marauded through the refugee camps in the DRC to kill Hutus, they had a policy of filtering out educated male Hutus to ensure they did not survive. This was a tactic to decrease the chances of effective political resistance arising in the Hutu population – something that was also done in Burundi. Thus, the primary identifier was ethnicity. Education, as a subset, was then targeted as an additional threat. The sick thinking behind the Tutsi genocidaires in DRC was that a few Hutus might be allowed to survive, but under no circumstances should an educated Hutu be allowed to live. Here, ironically the so-called ‘upper-class’ Tutsis were eliminating ‘upper-class’ Hutus. If the divide was purely a class distinction, those men either ought to have been welcomed into the Tutsi fold, or they should not have fled in the first place.
Granted, the belief that ethnicity was the dominant driver of violence in 1994 Rwanda is not shared by all Rwandans. The view of Rwandan scholar Dr Leopold Munyakazi is that the Rwandan Genocide was “a civil war for political power”, and a “fratricide” rather than genocide. He based this on the belief that Rwandans are one people who speak the same language, eat the same food, and share the same culture. I too recognised the civil war characterisation, but I argued that it was the crucible for two genocides.
As for ‘fratricide’, he could be right, but Rwandan history has repeatedly shown that the simmering Hutu-Tutsi fault line violently erupts at crucial moments to obliterate any brotherly bond that may have existed. If you opt for something as nebulous as fratricide in the context of 1994 Rwanda, you then have to explain the basis on which this culturally unified people singled out nearly a million of their own brethren for slaughter. You also have to explain the basis on which the RPF established a Tutsi fifth column in Rwanda during the years of the invasion leading up to the 1994 genocide. When you scratch the surface of Rwanda’s conflicts, the words Tutsi and Hutu pop up consistently in neon lights, and you are forced to confront what they signify. Regrettably, they signified a deep-rooted ethnic divide.
I’m not aware of an international law definition of a crime of fratricide, but I do believe that the crimes committed in Rwanda technically fit the international law definition of genocide. I think in this case, fratricide is just another name for genocide that took place as a result of an ethnic split within one nation. So I haven’t explored Dr Munyakazi’s thesis in more depth. I also regard it as an outlier based on my research. The sad part of Dr Munyakazi’s story is that he was jailed by the Rwandan dictatorship. This cruel suppression of free speech was aided and abetted by the so-called ‘land of the free’, the US, which was happy to deport Mr Munyakazi to its satraps in Kigali. Proof, if it were needed, that dictatorships all around the world are merely taking their cue from the West, which has stopped pretending that it ever valued the civilised norms it claimed to champion.
Conclusion
On one side, Hutus were primed to be enraged by the RPF’s invasion from the North, and the consequent displacement and resettling of that land by Tutsi refugees outside Rwanda. The presidential assassination was the last straw, triggering a violent genocidal response directed at Tutsis. On the other side, looking at the RPF crimes, we should ponder Paul Rusesabagina’s[iv] very pertinent question: “Who benefitted?” The RPF leadership, in their calculations for a successful power grab, were motivated to create a more favourable demographic balance by driving out and killing Hutus, which is exactly what happened. Here we have the formula for two genocides. The Corbett Report sees the horror of it all, but deletes the crime of genocide against Tutsis and does not fill the void.
All the anomalies highlighted by Corbett do indeed reinforce the complexity of the story, but I just can’t see how they negate a genocide against Tutsis. I believe there was a provable pattern of Hutu-directed violence towards Tutsis to destroy that group in part or in whole, and this applies in the other direction as well.
Nearly all the above points of difference lie in how to interpret agreed facts to arrive at a characterisation of events that is accurate and truthful. Nearly all of them are complex issues, and I am not going to insist that I am right because the truth is, I’m not 100% sure. It is certainly not my intention to get into an argument with Corbett over it, because I happen to think Corbett is brilliant. I want to be very clear on something: anyone who cares about the truth is indebted to Corbett and others for greatly expanding our understanding of this incredibly significant and tragic event. He has undoubtedly torn the Standard Official Narrative to shreds by unearthing hidden facts and invaluable context.
Why then have I bothered to write so many words to quibble over whether there was a genocide or not? Because the word ‘genocide’ isn’t just the biggest piece of the official narrative; it is the whole official narrative. Deleting that word, or completely reversing the victim and perpetrator (as opposed to introducing a reciprocation of crimes), calls for a watertight argument, and I never saw it.
I can’t help thinking that, having exposed the gaping holes in the official narrative, some may have, in good faith, fallen into a binary trap, the trap being: if there is indeed so much more to this story, then surely it’s not a genocide? I don’t think it’s a binary choice between genocide or something else. Rather, it was a genocide, two in fact, and so much more.
I’d be interested to get feedback in the comments section on whether you think there was a genocide of only one group and, if so, which one?
Or do you think there was a double genocide?
Or do you think there was no genocide – i.e. that the crimes committed do not fall under the Genocide Convention?
Or do you have no idea what to think?
In Part IV, we’ll explore Rwanda’s role in the New Scramble for Africa and the destruction of the DRC. We’ll also look at the supposed BRICS/NATO opposition through the lens of the evolution of great power politics in the DRC.
[i] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Conclusion, pg. 230
[ii] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 15, pg. 220
[iii] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 9, pg. 125
[iv] The famous manager of the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali who subsequently fell out of favour with the Kagame regime for contradicting the government’s narrative.