Re-Writing History in Rwanda

In Rwanda, Hutu nationalists had come to power in the “Hutu rebellion” of 1959–1962, during the last years of Belgian colonial rule. They overthrew the traditional Tutsi kingdom and its ruling class, resulting in the death of around 20,000 Tutsi and the exile of another 200,000 to neighboring countries. Independence from Belgium in 1962 marked the establishment of a Hutu-led Rwandan government. The RPF was formed in 1985 by Tutsi nationalist exiles who demanded the right to return to their homeland. They attacked Rwanda from neighboring Uganda in 1990; though the invasion failed, Hutu fear of losing power paved the way for mass murder four years later. Pro-genocide propaganda ran in newspapers, dominated public gatherings, and was broadcast across the country.  On Aug. 3, 1993, when President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda signed the Arusha Accords, which would have weakened the Hutu hold on Rwanda. Eight months later he was dead. On April 6, 1994  Habyarimana  was returning from a summit in Tanzania when a surface-to-air missile shot his plane out of the sky over Rwanda's capital city of Kigali. Hutu extremists in the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development blamed the Tutsis for the assassination. From April to July of 1994, upwards of perhaps one million Tutsi were massacred by Hutu-led gangs and the country’s army. It ended when Tutsi exiles in Uganda, organized in the RPF, invaded the country, marched into the capital of Kigali, and defeated the perpetrators of the genocide. Some two million of the genocidaires, known as the Interahamwe, fled into the vast rain forests of the eastern Congo, from where they have periodically launched attacks into Rwanda. Since 1994, the RPF-led government has been dominated by a small clique of anglophone Tutsi who had been in exile in Uganda, and who blamed Belgium and France for having supported Hutu rule.

In 2010 Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda since 2000 and candidate of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), won a second term with 93 per cent of the vote, in an election marred by repression, murder, and lack of credible competition. Some potential opponents were disqualified or failed to enter the race, because they would have been charged with “divisionism.” References to “Hutu” and Tutsi” in public discourse is a crime, as part of  “unification” policies designed to create a national identity. Offenders can be prosecuted, newspapers shut down, and political parties banned. The government insists that all of the country’s citizens are simply “Rwandans.”

The history books have been rewritten to stress the “harmony” of its pre-colonial past. This form of what the sociologist Stanley Cohen, in his book “States of Denial,” refers to as “social amnesia,” is an attempt to allow the country to separate itself from its horrific past. According to the new historical discourse, prior to the arrival of, first the German, then Belgian, colonialists, the labels “Hutu” and “Tutsi” referred to wealth and social status, not “essentialist” ethnic groups, and hence they were fluid. Insofar as there was inequality between the royal court and ordinary Rwandans, both Hutu and Tutsi were equally victims of subjugation.  It is now claimed that it was the Europeans who introduced the “Hamitic hypothesis” — the idea that the Tutsi were actually immigrants to Rwanda from Ethiopia, whereas the “Bantu” Hutu were indigenous to the region. The Europeans thus elevated the Tutsi as the supposedly “superior race,” breeding resentment among the Hutu. They were the creators of ethnic dissension.

After 1934, the Belgian government introduced an identity card system, which identified each person as either a Hutu, Tutsi or Twa (a very minor ethnic group). And by having defined the Tutsi as more recent arrivals, the colonialists also allowed Hutu nationalists to argue that the country should be restored to its “original” owners. With independence, Tutsi could thus be portrayed as a foreign minority who were enemies of the country.

Hence it’s necessary to eliminate the colonial discourse about ethnic identity — which, by happy coincidence, also obscures the predominance of the minority Tutsi, now some 15 per cent of Rwanda’s 12 million people, and allows them to run the state without official reference to that fact, even though everyone knows it!

From here 

French War Criminals

France played an active role in the 1994 Rwanda genocide, a report unveiled Tuesday by the Rwandan government said, naming French political and military officials it says should be prosecuted. The 500-page report alleged that France was aware of preparations for the genocide, contributed to planning the massacres and actively took part in the killing.

It named former French prime minister Edouard Balladur, former foreign minister Alain Juppe and then-president Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996, among 13 French politicians accused of playing a role in the massacres.Dominique de Villepin, who was then Juppe's top aide and later became prime minister, was also among those listed in the Rwandan report.The report names 20 military officials as being responsible.

"French forces directly assassinated Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis... French forces committed several rapes on Tutsi survivors," said a justice ministry statement

"The overwhelming nature of France's support to the Rwandan policy of massacres... shows the complicity of French political and military officials in the preparation and execution of the genocide," the statement said.

The military and humanitarian Operation Turquoise carried out by the French in Rwanda between June and August 1994 abetted the killings perpetrated by militia.

The 1994 genocide in the central African nation left around 800,000 people -- mainly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus -- dead, according to the United Nations.

Socialist Banner has previously reported on ther blood stained hands of Mitterand and more background to the actual events of the genocide here

The blood-stained hand of Mitterand

Documents in today's Le Monde for the first time confirms long-held suspicions against France's president François Mitterrand supported the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide despite clear warnings that mass killings of the Tutsi population were being orchestrated , according to The Independent .

Previously secret diplomatic telegrams and government memos also suggest the late French president was obsessed with the danger of "Anglo-Saxon" influence gripping Rwanda. In three months from April 1994, at least a million Rwandans - mainly Tutsis - were systematically slaughtered in killings engineered by the Hutu regime to exterminate its ethnic rivals and repel the Uganda-trained Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The documents, obtained by lawyers for six Tutsi survivors who are bringing a case against France for "complicity with genocide'' at the Paris Army Tribunal, suggest the late President Mitterrand's support for the Hutus was informed by an obsession with maintaining a French foothold in the region. One of the lawyers, Antoine Compte, said France was aware of the potential danger of its support for the pre-genocide Rwandan government.
"Massacres on an ethnic basis were going on and we have evidence that France knew this from at least January 1993. The French military executed the orders of French politicians. The motivation was an obsession with the idea of an Anglo-Saxon plot to oust France from the region."

Among the evidence to suggest France was informed of the mounting genocide is a diplomatic telegram from October 1990 in which the French defence attaché in the Rwandan capital Kigali alerts Paris of the "growing number of arbitrary arrests of Tutsis or people close to them". The cable adds: "It is to be feared that [it could] degenerate into an ethnic war.''

Another diplomatic memo, quotes a Rwandan informant as saying that thepresident of the country, Juvenal Habyarimana, had suggested "proceeding with a systematic genocide using, if necessary, the army''.

Even though Rwanda was Belgian for most of the colonial era, France took a strong interest in the country after independence, seeing it as a bulwark against the powerful influences of English-speaking Uganda and Kenya. In the 1980s, French involvement in Rwanda was limited to two dozen military advisers. But when the Uganda-based RPF began launching attacks against President Habyarimana's regime in 1990, France sent arms and troops. Critics claim French troops stood by and watched as Rwandan Hutu soldiers massacred Tutsi civilians.

See Rwanda Genocide and also La Francafrique

The Rwanda Genocide

The instability that has plagued the Great Lakes region has always been distorted by both the perpetrators of the crisis and ignorant political analysts. This article presents a socialist viewpoint of the problem .

As Rwandans prepare to mark a decade of the genocide that was imposed on them by a tiny section of the international community, the real perpetrators of the massacre are still making frantic efforts to conceal the truth. France is leading the crusade with the tacit backing of the other world powers through their ubiquitous media. The strategy, as is always the case, is to reduce the whole affair to insignificant issues. In this present attempt, they are doing all they can to demonise the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame as the sole cause of the genocide. He is said to have been the one who ordered the shooting down of the late President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane - an act that sparked off the killings. But what is never mentioned is that the massacre was so well organised that it could not have occurred just because someone shot down an aircraft or a president was murdered. The genocide was a premeditated, not a spontaneous, act and therefore its cause cannot be reduced to what the world is being told.
The real reason for the genocide cannot be properly understood until a broader perspective of the scenario is appraised. The killings that took place in Rwanda are only one aspect of a much wider design. It was only a link in a long chain of activities engulfing the whole of the Great Lakes region. Here is an area generously endowed with huge deposits of minerals and other natural resources. It is perhaps the richest area on the continent where one can boast of immense quantities of gold, diamond, coltan, copper, cobalt, zinc, oil, gas, and such forest resources as timber, coffee, etc.

To have easy and cheap access to these vital resources, the capitalist companies in Europe and America need not only to have puppet regimes in power but they also need to keep the region in perpetual turmoil and instability. This was the reason for Patrice Lumumba’s assassination way back in the sixties by Mobutu and that under the supervision of the western powers and their United Nations. It was also for the same reason that Yoweri Museveni was sponsored to wage the bush war, which culminated in the overthrow of Milton Obote in the eighties. The same goes for Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Army, whose war was bankrolled by American and European governments on behalf of big business interests. Museveni and Kagame were carefully hand picked, groomed and helped to ascend the throne and then thrown into D R Congo to do the dirty work of looting for the western companies. There is a staggering wealth of evidence to prove the active involvement of the UA, UK, France and Belgium and corporate business interests based and or owned by members of these countries. Uganda and Rwanda prop up (to this day) almost all the rebel groups in DR Congo from funds donated by their masters abroad.

THE UNITED NATIONS

It is important to understand the role of the UN in the Great Lakes region. But first of all it is worth noting that the UN is kept alive through the contributions of the Western capitalists through their governments. And since it is the one who pays the piper who calls the tune, it is not strange to realise that the UN is at the beck and call of the capitalists. A typical example is seen in the recent refusal by American capitalism to listen to the UN and to then go ahead and attack Iraq. Long before the massacre in Rwanda in 1994, the UN was fully aware of the intention and plans of the perpetrators of the genocide and refused to act. In fact it even deliberately smothered all information on the impending atrocity. Kofi Annan was then in charge of peace keeping operations at the UN. But as if that was not enough, the UN went ahead, against expert advice, to dissolve the small military mission in Rwanda (MINUAR) during the peak of the mayhem.

That the UN was merely obeying its master’s directives can be deduced from the actions and words of Kofi Annan (now the Sec. General) almost a decade after his criminal and inhuman action and inaction. In 2003, he removed Carla Del Ponte from her post as prosecutor at the Rwanda Genocide Court. The reason? She was treading on dangerous ground: she had decided not only to carry out her duty of prosecuting suspects but also to look into the part played by Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Army in the massacres. This would have exposed real forces behind the killings – the Western capitalists. Naturally, Annan was ordered to act swiftly. He quickly put the matter before the UN Security Council, which unanimously voted her out of Rwanda. Another proof of guilt is seen in his belated apology to the people of Rwanda on Monday 29th March 2004.

THE CAPITALIST MEDIA

The capitalist controlled media also played and continue to play its historically determined role in this sordid affair. Corporate journalists initially maintained an irreverent silence on the genocide, but when it was no longer possible for them to do so they were at their negative best on their reports on the mayhem. They completely reduced the obvious capitalist war to a trivial tribal conflict. Their masters dictated to them what to report in return for the cash. They refused to acknowledge the fact that what was happening in Rwanda was the killing of innocent, helpless and poor Tutsis and Hutus by a combined force of trained RPA militia and Rwandan government soldiers. These militia and soldiers were themselves forced to kill because they were fed deceit and false propaganda. They had absolutely nothing to gain from the killings. In fact those they were deceived to kill were actually their relatives, neighbours and friends with whom they previously lived together in peace and harmony. This fact was so palpably glaring that the media found it hard to neglect and so they had to couch it in such terms as "Hutus killing Tutsis and moderate Hutus". Moderate, of course, being a misnomer for those who had realised the hollowness in the reasons advanced for the internecine war and refused to take in it.

The fact of the matter is that there has always been a class conflict in that society, just as in any other society. In Rwanda, it was reflected in the antagonistic relations between a minority of feudal lords, mostly Tutsi, and the commoners comprising both Tutsi and Hutu. These feudal lords lived off the toil of the mass of peasants. This generated, however latent, resentment for the ruling classes by the masses. And as is usually the case, the poor masses, in times of hardship, ignorantly vented their anger on their fellow sufferers instead of on the exploiting tribal rulers. In Rwanda this confused situation was further aggravate by the colonialists through their policy of divide and rule. A pernicious wedge was driven between the Tutsi, who were accorded a more privileged status, and the Hutu. Then, with the attainment of the so-called independence and the subsequent introduction of the World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies with its attendant biting effects, the animosity and mutual hatred heightened. Thus, the society became an ethnic time bomb ready to explode at the least prompting. And that was exactly the situation that the leadership of both groups exploited.

It follows from the above that at the heart of the Rwandan genocide and indeed the other massacres going on in the whole of the Great Lakes region is the quest for raw materials. It was the same search for raw materials that brought the Europeans to Africa and the resultant colonialism. These raw materials are not needed for their own sake; they are the means to super profits that constitute the ultimate aim of the capitalists. Thus, profit is the underlying cause of all our woes. The driving force of capitalism is profit and there is no way the world’s people can do away with killings, war, hunger, suffering, disease, etc until that profit system is done away with.

[Reference: New African, November & December 2003, Congo Panorama – A pamphlet of the Congo Solidarity Campaign.]

From African Socialist 7