Hotel Propaganda

What Really Happened in Rwanda in 1994

Published in Mayday Magazine - By Tony Black

We all know what transpired in Rwanda just over a decade ago, right? That is, we 'know', without any shadow of a doubt, that some mysterious virus of irrationalism and murder swept inexplicably through the dark heart of Africa and carried off the tidy sum of 800,000 souls or so from this good Earth. Score one more 'genocide' under ‘tribal conflict’. Case closed.

Nagging Questions
Now, of course, there were always a few irritable little facts, a few grimy little flies, in the informational ointment that refused to square exactly with the official story.

Why, for instance, were the thousands of UN troops (principally, Belgian under Canadian command), ordered, against all reason, to depart the country just as the crisis began? Why, when they had more than a brigade's worth of crack fighting forces on the ground, when they controlled the major airports and runways, were they not, instead, simply and easily reinforced?

And why did the vaunted 'free press' not once, not ever, effectively question these bizarre strategic political and military manoeuvres?
Even more to the point, why were we never informed of the highly relevant political context of the situation?

That is, why was the murder of the Hutu presidents of both Rwanda and Burundi, just hours before the troubles began, essentially suppressed by the Western media? And why were we not told that a 30,000 man Tutsi force, armed and supported by the United States and Britain, had simultaneously invaded Rwanda from Uganda? That another 10,000 Tutsi forces, having been previously infiltrated into Kigali (the Rwandan capital), had commenced hostilities?

Why were these fundamental contextual facts considered (as they are to this day) utterly irrelevant and without the slightest meaning or import to the civil war that then ensued?
Well, thereby, as they say, hangs a fascinating tale.

Context, Always Context
Our story begins in the early 1960's when Rwanda’s Hutu majority (85% of the population) first gained independence from Belgian colonial rule. At that time much of the Tutsi elite (who had previously ruled as a comprador Belgian puppet regime) subsequently fled to neighbouring Uganda from where they began machinating over the next thirty years to undo the Rwandan state. A state which, as it turns out, became largely socialist in its political leanings.

Anything, of course, smacking of socialism inevitably becomes a target of Western, principally US, imperial interests and so it was with Rwanda. But it was not just Rwanda’s socialism that lured Washington. The US also sought, both to replace the French as the major power-brokers in East Africa, and to overthrow the Hutu government in Rwanda. The latter because Rwanda was refusing to play ball in cooperating with US aggression against Mobutu in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

The Congo, after all, was and is a vast cornucopia of vital resources including, amongst other things, the precious metals so necessary for much modern high-tech weaponry. [To this day the Congo remains a charnel house of Western inspired war and death, with estimates of up to 3 million war-related dead in the last 4 years alone.]

Fast forward to Uganda, 1990, where a army of Tutsi exiles, armed and organized by the United States and Britain, began incursions into Rwanda. This Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), as it was called, was initially repulsed, though several other major attacks occurred over the following three years. Eventually, under pressure from the Western allies of the RPF, the Rwandan government was pressured to seek terms with theTutsi force culminating in the signing (in Arusha, Tanzania) of the Arusha Accords.

The Accords forced major concessions on the Rwandan government including a transitional power sharing arrangement with the RPF. Elections were subsequently to be held to determine a final government. Significantly, it was understood by one and all that the RPF could never win those elections, representing as they did, only 15% of the Rwandan population.

In fact, they never intended to win by the ballot box, and under cover of the Accords (and of the UN force - UNAMIR - that was sent to facilitate and enforce them), the RPF soon began infiltrating armed forces into Kigali.

Of Trojan Horses, Murder, and Canadian Complicity

Though the Accords called for a neutral UN force to broker the peace process, UNAMIR was anything but neutral. Thus, as UN documents show, Canadian General Romeo Dallaire (the chief military force commander of UNAMIR) was aware, at least from December 1993, that the RPF, with the support of the Ugandan Army and the Belgian contingent of UNAMIR, was routinely violating the Accords by secreting into Rwanda men, material and weapons in preparation for a final offensive. These same documents show that Dallaire kept this vital information from his immediate superior, Jacques Roger Booh-Booh, and from UN Secretary General, Boutros-Ghali.

In conjunction with the military build-up by the RPF and its allies - and a series of political and civilian assassinations carried out by the RPF - a full-scale propaganda campaign was launched against the Rwandan government by Western journalists and by Western intelligence forces operating under the cover of ‘human rights’ organizations.

This war-related powder-keg of tensions was further exacerbated by mass unemployment, a large internal refugee population fleeing RPF attacks, and the crippling of governmental revenue due to the collapse of the coffee and tea export markets. The spark that would ignite this powder-keg soon came.

On the night of April 6, 1994, on its final approach to Kigali airport, the plane carrying Presidents Habyarimana of Rwanda and Ntaryamira of Burundi, the Rwandan Army Chief of Staff, and a French military crew, was shot down by anti-aircraft missiles.
Though the Western press attempted, rather lamely, to blame the assassination on ‘extremist’ Hutu forces, a later report (the Hourigan Report) commissioned by then chief prosecutor for the Rwanda War Crimes Tribunal (ICTR), Louise Arbour, concluded unequivocally that it was the RPF that shot down the plane. Indeed, Hourigan (an Australian lawyer) and his colleagues were able to find several members of the shootdown team who claimed that they were assisted by various foreign powers - and they had documents to prove it.
Arbour, confronted with these facts, summarily ordered the investigation closed. Nevertheless, a number of additional and unimpeachable sources (including: former US intelligence operatives, a French anti-terrorist judge assigned by the UN to investigate the matter, radio intercepts from the RPF, and several books written by former RPF officers) later confirmed Hourigan’s conclusion.

Attack and Diversion
The shooting down of the plane (and thus the effective decapitation of the Rwandan government) was, however, only the first part of a three pronged assault. On the same night, April 6, a 30,000-man RPF army invaded Rwanda from Uganda. Simultaneously the 10,000 plus RPF fifth-column force inside Kigali commenced hostilities against government forces who were out numbered there three to one.
Now from the very beginning of their offensive the RPF deployed a propaganda campaign claiming that they were merely responding to a 'genocide' in the making. However, there are multiple problems with this claim (a claim which, in any case, was never critically questioned, not even for a moment, by the Western media).

First, the rump Rwandan government several times requested cease-fires with the RPF so as to address the mushrooming attacks of civilians on civilians. The RPF refused all entreaties.

Second, the government then asked for a further 5,000 UN troops to help in containing the erupting civilian panic and violence, a request that was flatly turned down at the instigation of the Clinton Administration in Washington (and with the full compliance, it should be noted, of the Canadian government). Instead, the existing UN troops were withdrawn!

Third, in the only independent study to date of the numbers killed in Rwanda in 1994, a team of researchers at the University of Maryland concluded that approximately 250,000 people had been killed, not the 800,000 claimed by the RPF. Indeed, the researchers then went on to say that for every Tutsi death, another two Hutus had been killed - and these mainly by the RPF!

Fourth, the only documentary evidence of a government plan to commit genocide is contained in just one single fax supposedly sent by General Dallaire to a colleague in New York. A fax that purports to detail a UN informant’s claims of the Rwandan government’s genocidal intent. The problem with this ’genocidal fax’ - apart from its singular singularity - is that it is fraudulent, having been (as demonstrated by defense counsel at the ICTR) unequivocally doctored.

Black is White
It is not, of course, the result of some strange cosmic quirk that a small minority population that apparently suffered through - not a bloody political civil war - but a ‘genocide‘, is now risen like the Phoenix to its former position of privilege; now firmly and dictatorially in control of the nation. Nor is it due to some bizarre quantum aberration that none of the Tutsi RPF forces have ever been indicted for their role in the ‘genocide’. No. It is, instead, a simple consequence of imperial geo-strategic design. Of Western realpolitik.

Moreover, it is purely to this end that the present Rwandan war crimes tribunal (ICTR) is patently bent. That is, like the NATO kangaroo court at the Hague now attempting to justify, ex post facto, its own criminal attack on the former Yugoslavia, so the ICTR is dedicated, not to the seeking of justice, nor even the reaping of revenge, certainly not the ferreting out of truth.
Rather, it is consecrated to eliding completely from the historical record any trace of the true actors in, and their ultimate responsibility for, the Rwandan tragedy of 1994.

Antony Black
tal@interlynx.net

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