Kagame was a client of Washington even before he claimed to have “saved Rwanda from further genocide” by overthrowing the Hutu government of Rwanda in July of 1994. In fact, Kagame had served as the director of Ugandan military intelligence in the 1980s. He had also been trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (the US Army’s elite “commander general staff college” devoted to the planning of high-level invasion scenarios) and had received constant US material and diplomatic support from the moment he had assumed control of the RPF.
We also reviewed a 1994 report by Robert Gersony, an employee of USAID, who was at the time attached to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Gersony’s report to the UN Commission of Experts on Rwanda questioned the entire “Hutu government genocide conspiracy” by noting that most of the killings were committed, not by the Hutu government of Rwanda, but by the invading Tutsi forces under Paul Kagame, a force that was backed by the United States, Britain, Canada, and a number of neighbouring states in Africa.
A further piece of evidence surfaced just recently when one of us (Christopher Black) discovered a letter (unwittingly handed over to the defence by the prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) via their vast Electronic Disclosure System). The document appears to implicate Paul Kagame, fellow Burundian Tutsi leader Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, and “our Belgian, British and American collaborators” in a plan to take over Rwanda and eventually secure The Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).
We further noted that all of these documents had, effectively, been suppressed by Western authorities for years. However, these represent but a small portion of the evidence demonstrating that the official narrative surrounding the tragic train of events in Central Africa since 1990 is propaganda from start to finish.
Who Killed Habyarimana?
The “triggering event” in the Rwandan “genocide” of 1994 is generally agreed to be the shooting down of the plane carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, the Hutu president of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi on April 6, 1994. The official story is that unidentified “Hutu rebels”, for unspecified reasons, were the assassins who targeted their own ethnic countrymen in some vague attempt to gain power. No evidence was ever produced to support this threadbare thesis; if this were so, the official murderers spectacularly failed in their objectives. The country quickly fell to invading Tutsi forces leaving a small minority population of Tutsis to rise to their former position of national privilege and dictatorial control. No one in the Western mainstream media has ever commented on the exceeding peculiarity of this bizarre turn of events – events, in fact, never ever witnessed before – where the supposed victims of a “genocide” become the victors.
It makes sense to consider a more logical scenario: the decapitation of the state leadership was the first stage in a planned invasion by RPF forces, intent on a coup d’etat. It makes even more sense when one remembers that the first president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, had been assassinated by Tutsi officers within his own army in October 1993.
Evidence to support this alternative narrative came from a unlikely source. The investigator charged by the ICTR with looking into the destruction of Habyarimana’s plane turned out to be an honest man who actually did his job. Reporting back to the court in 1996 – 1997, Australian lawyer Michael Hourigan not only found evidence pertinent to the crime, but managed to obtain testimony from three RPF informants who claimed “direct involvement in the 1994 fatal rocket attack upon the President’s aircraft”.
When Hourigan presented his findings, the ICTR’s lead prosecutor, Louise Arbour (later, a Canadian Supreme Court Judge), grew aggressive and hostile; Hourigan was told the “investigation was at an end”. The report never saw the light of day – until much later, that is, whence it found it’s way into the hands of Christopher’s defence team at the ICTR.
Hourigan’s report would have its findings further corroborated by French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere. Bruguiere had been called in to investigate the deaths of the three French nationals who had been aboard the plane along with Habyarimana and Ntaryamira when it was shot down. His investigation, which spanned eight years, concluded that the plane had indeed been destroyed by the RPF and that the assassination was part and parcel of Kagame’s plan to take over Rwanda by force following Kagame’s rejection of the Arusha power-sharing accords of August 1993 (more on this in part 3). Bruguiere went on to issue nine warrants for the arrest of high-ranking members of the RPF and a request for the ICTR to prosecute Kagame.
The ICTR, however, not only refused this application, but studiously avoided any indictments of RPF officers, or even any mention of RPF involvement in the killings of April – July 1994. Moreover, it became the policy of the ICTR to limit its mandate solely to the investigation of genocidal intent by Hutu government figures.
This policy continued throughout the trials. When Carla Del Ponte replaced Louise Arbour, she was quickly terminated as Chief Prosecutor after calling for a “Special Investigation” into the actions of the RPF. It is interesting to note that Del Ponte’s request was presented to Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the UN. Annan’s refusal to look into the crimes of the RPF should come as no surprise since he was handpicked by the US to replace Boutros Boutros-Ghali as Secretary-General. Annan’s predecessor had come uncomfortably close to thwarting the US/RPF invasion and overthrow of the Rwandan Hutu government.
In May of 1994, Boutros-Ghali proposed sending 5,500 UN troops to Rwanda (to reinforce the 500 already stationed there) in order to stabilize the country at a time when reports of growing “chaos” were issuing forth daily in the world press. His efforts were categorically rebuffed by the Clinton administration that used its veto power to counter his proposal. Instead, the UN troops already stationed there, far from being reinforced, were withdrawn. The Western media, naturally, remained dutifully silent to this glaring contradiction of reason and action. Later, Boutros-Ghali, in conversation with author and Rwandan expert Robin Philpot, said, “the genocide in Rwanda was 100 percent the responsibility of the Americans.” Hardly any wonder, then, that in 1996 US Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, would veto his re-election, making Boutros-Ghali the only UN Secretary-General in history not to be granted a second term in office.
More Inconvenient Truths
Early on, evidence surfaced indicating that the official genocide narrative was in sharp disagreement with reality. Since then, independent reports have continued to corroborate this finding. In both a 2004 paper a 2009 report, US academics Christian Davenport and Allan Stam concluded that of the more than one million deaths (possibly as high as two million) that occurred in Rwanda from April through July of 1994, the “majority of victims were likely Hutu and not Tutsi.” It is interesting to note that Davenport and Stam were initially sponsored by the ICTR – that is until their findings contradicted the official narrative causing them to be summarily dismissed by the court.
Davenport and Stam may have uncovered truth regarding the victims, but they did not go so far as to name Kagame as the man responsible. When it comes to critiquing the official narrative, academics have been content to sit on the fence. An “ordinary”. However, Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the movie ‘Hotel Rwanda’ – a film unashamedly promoting the official narrative – has himself, in numerous interviews, completely condemned that narrative.
Rusesabagina has repeatedly denounced the RPF as the real genocidaires, and has called Kagame a “war criminal”. According to Rusesabagina, Kagame is a dictator responsible for mass killings not only during the takeover of Rwanda in July 1994, but ever since, both in Rwanda and in his US-backed invasions of the Congo. Indeed, so fervent have the denunciations been that Kagame has been provoked into counter-accusations, labelling Rusesabagina a “terrorist” and “genocide denier” (a punishable crime in Rwanda).
Next month, we will set to fanning the flame by recounting a coherent, alternative narrative of what really happened in Rwanda up to and through 1994.
