Rwanda: The Danger of a Sanitized Narrative

By Judi Rever | Oct 4, 2016 | Africa, News & Analysis, Politics | 9 |

President of Rwanda Paul Kagame at the World Economic Forum in Cape Town,
South Africa, June 11, 2009 (Matthew Jordaan/WEF)
How a British NGO changed the course of Rwandan history and helped fuel
impunity in Africas Great Lakes region
The passion of war has long inspired propagandists. Some have sought to
influence public opinion for pecuniary or career reasons. Others have claimed
loftier motives, like promoting human rights or addressing humanitarian
emergencies. One of the most notable crusaders to emerge in recent times is
Rakiya Omaar, the co-founder of the London-based rights group African Rights.
She is also author, with British scholar Alex de Waal, of the defining
book Death, Despair and Defiancea colossal compendium of Hutu-on-Tutsi
violence published just weeks after the Rwandan genocide ended. Observers
eager to understand this three-month killing spree relied on their astonishing
750-page creed published in September 1994; it offered in real time a list of
perpetrators and a sweeping narrative of how Hutu ideologues conceived years in

advance their genocidal project against the Tutsi. African Rights, a new NGO
from London, appeared to have set history in motion, and quickly so. Its impact
on legal proceedings was substantial, at least initially. Death, Despair and

Defiance was considered the bible by the UNs International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda (ICTR).
But just how did Omaar and de Waalneither of whom spoke Kinyarwanda or
were versed in Rwandan historyproduce such an authoritative, insider-driven
opus on the mechanics of killing? How did they get access in so little time to a
massive archive of witness testimony? With the help of the Rwandan Patriotic
Front (RPF), of course.
Luc Reydams specializes in international criminal law and justice and teaches
politics at Notre Dame University in the United States. His groundbreaking
research on African Rights, recently published, is both a feat in investigative
journalism and academic scholarship. His article NGO Justice: African Rights as
Pseudo Prosecutor of the Rwandan Genocide in Human Rights

Quarterly deconstructs the NGOs murky operations and methods. Reydams also
provides compelling evidence that African Rights became a RPF front
organization and its account of the genocide was produced with the full and
active support of the RPF. The RPF, under Paul Kagame, won the war and has
been in power since 1994.
Eventually African Rights ended up on the RPF payroll, working closely with
intelligence operatives and even moving to a building that housed the
Directorate of Military Intelligence, Reydams reveals. By that time, de Waal had
left the organization. Yet even before de Waal and Omaar parted ways, African
Rights had become enormously prescriptive and influential; it scolded the
international community about who was morally right during the war, who should
be arrested and why. It staunchly defended the RPF against reports that its
troops had engaged in violence and shamed other human rights investigators and
journalists for calling attention to RPF abuses: Allegations that the RPF was
massacring civilians were hysteria and journalists who ran such stories were
not doing their work properly. Reydams aptly points out that human rights
reports usually do not defend a warring party. Yet, Death, Despair and
Defiancedoes exactly that. The RPFs resumption of the war is presented as
humanitarian intervention and, therefore, a ceasefire was out of the question.
Not surprisingly, African Rights work, which provided a one-sided, sanitized
version of the Rwandan genocide, did not stand the test of time.

A former ICTR investigator had this to say: After a few months, we realized
that Death, Despair and Defiance was not so accurate, some incidents (not the
major ones though) were impossible to verify; the accounts in the book, very
precise, were not confirmed by our witnesses. At that time, Death, Despair and
Defiance was seen as not very reliable and clearly Rakiya Omaar was not
considered an expert witness who could be used in court. To my recollection, she
was met by ICTR investigators at the beginning of the work in 1995. The
request to access her sources was never successful and the relation with her
became difficult. She did not shy from criticisms against the ICTR. Her links to
RPF became quite obvious in subsequent reports on protection of witnesses and
other stuff, with no words at all on the RPFs own crimes.
The work of Omaar and de Waal should have been discredited publicly long ago,
but it wasnt. And the impact of their research has been nothing short of
devastating. Their book primed public opinion on the conflict and shaped the way
the world saw the RPF as moral victors and Hutus as perpetrators. Their
research has been absorbed and regurgitated uncritically by experts and human
rights organizations. Human Rights Watchs seminal account of the
genocide, Leave None to Tell the Story was published in 1999 and became the
subsequent bible at the ICTR. That book cites Death, Despair and Defiance a
record 42 times.
Most troubling is how the NGO has fueled RPF impunity over the years. African
Rights categorically denied RPF crimes, helped shield Paul Kagames government
from prosecution, and even defended its war of aggression in Congo.
In a separate interview I conducted, a Tutsi survivor who worked for African
Rights on the NGOs second edition of the bookpublished in 1995told me he
collected testimony from Hutu peasants on RPF killings. When he went to Omaar
to discuss incorporating this research, he said she told him flatly: now is not
the time. In later years when he was doing research for African Rights ahead
of traditional Gacaca court proceedings, he emphasized the issue of Hutu
accounts of RPF massacres. Again she told him to let it go. Now is not the time,
she insisted. The Tutsi survivor was eventually threatened by the RPFs chief
intelligence enforcer Jack Nziza, and was forced to flee the country to escape
death.
At a minimum, Omar could come clean about what she may have observed in RPF
zones where she traveled with RPF cadres in places such as Rusumo in May 1994.
Aid workers reported that Kagames Tutsi forces called Hutu refugees to a
peace meeting in Rusumo then proceeded to tie up men, women and children

before stabbing and killing them. The bodies were placed on trucks and
eventually dumped in the Kagera River, according to a UN protection report
released by Refugees International in mid-May. I can imagine that Omaar could
fill another book on the secrets she has kept.
De Waal, for his part, dutifully transcribed Omaars survivor accounts. He now
teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is
considered an academic powerhouse for his extensive work on Rwanda, Sudan
and the Horn of Africa, and has long held sway in British media, having published
in The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement and being regularly cited by
the BBC. In his interview with Reydams, de Waal brazenly takes credit for
creating a narrative of the genocide. He admits he met with senior RPF officials
such as Theogene Rudasingwa and Patrick Mazimpaka in the spring/summer of
1994:
The dominant narratives in the media for the first part of April were tribal
killing and chaos, de Waal told Reydams. Journalists and quite a number of aid
workers were contributing to this. The point of the Who is killing, who is dying
report, and an article I wrote in the Times (Rwanda genocide took three [sic]
years to plan) was to remedy that. I also wrote a piece The genocidal state for
the Times Literary Supplement at the same time but they held on to it until July
and only published it then (to my enormous frustration as it was the most
serious piece.) It was quite an uphill struggle, and in order to do it, as you will
see, I decided it was necessary to craft an alternative narrative.
When I first discussed it with Rwandese in London (almost all Tutsis; some
were RPF and some not) their focus was on the politics of the interim
government and a different set of narratives. One of them was Mazimpaka: he
was flailing. They provided me with documents such as the Hutu Ten
Commandments but said they werent that important. When the genocide-asconspiracy narrative took off, the RPF took it up, for obvious reasons.
As Reydams points out, Theoneste Bagosora, the Hutu colonel who African
Rights named as the architect of the Rwandan genocide, was acquitted of
conspiracy and any direct role in the genocide by the ICTR, as were three other
accused individuals who stood trial in the Military I case. No one, for that
matter, has been convicted of conspiracy before April 7, 1994. The genocide-asconspiracy narrative, which African Rights helped to propagate, failed to
convince the judges, Reydams writes.

As though this wasnt shocking enough, de Waal used his formidable intellectual
skills to critically shape the way the West viewed Rwandan Hutus and the
menace they posed to the Tutsi-led government in Rwanda. In one of his more
rabid essays in November 1996a few weeks after Rwandan troops had invaded
Zairede Waal openly advocated war. In an op-ed in The Guardian titled No
Bloodless Miracle, de Waal said there could be no bloodless political solution
to the conflict in Central Africa. He launched a passionate plea for an armed
attack against refugee camps that housed more than a million Hutus in eastern
Zaire. He claimed that the inhabitants of Mugunga refugee campwhere some
175,000 Rwandan men, women and children were livingdid not have a wellfounded fear of persecution in Rwanda, were not bona fide refugees, and should
not qualify for protection under the Refugee Convention. The Hutus there, he
said, were fugitives from justice or migrants.
He argued that peaceful negotiations would be a chimera and that Hutu
extremists in the camps could not be disarmed. War cannot be stopped, he
warned. If we are not prepared to go and destroy the Hutu militias, we should
not stand in the way of the people who are prepared to do so.
De Waals dualist approach to conflict in the Great Lakesone side was good and
the other was evilshamefully served to fuel the violence.
We know how it ended of course. Kagames troops attacked the camps, sending
hundreds of thousands of refugees further west into the Zairean jungle, where
Tutsi soldiers eventually hunted them down, hacked and shot them, and buried
them in mass graves. In 2010, the United Nations said the Rwandan Patriotic
Front may have committed genocide against Hutus in Congo.
In June 2016, likely pre-empting the release of Reydams investigation, de Waal
wrote a lengthy essay in the Boston Review titled Writing Human Rights and
Getting It Wrong. He admitted he was wrong about the genocide being planned
years in advance, but said he did not regret his role in helping to write the
genocide narrative for Rwanda in 1994 or transcribing and publishing survivors
testimonies. They are uncooked and authentic.
What he does regret, he admitted, is his silence in 1997 as the RPF spun the
singular genocide narrative to justify its emergent dictatorship and its
escalating military operations in Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo.
De Waals mea culpa drew immediate praise from his legion of academic
followers. However his words rang hollow to many. His confession was too little,

too late for Kagames victims in Rwanda and Congo, whose suffering over the
course of 22 years has been incalculable.
Tags: Genocide, Paul Kagame, Rwanda, UN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Judi Rever
Judi Rever is a Montreal-based freelance journalist.