Pambazuka - The politics of denialism: The strange case of Rwanda - 0 views
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The 1994 genocide of the Rwandan Tutsi never happened. This is this unfounded and disturbing allegation at the heart of a new book by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, writes Gerald Caplan. Instead the authors claim that that it was part of an elaborate American conspiracy to “gain a strong military presence in Central Africa, a diminution of its European rivals' influence, proxy armies to serve its interests, and access to the raw material-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo”.
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all are true, all are appalling, and all have been thoroughly documented. No doubt it's good for a new generation to be reminded of these atrocities, invariably distorted or ignored by the mainstream media. But I'm not at all sure that it's helpful to explore these issues against a frame of genocide, and it's supremely destructive that incontrovertible incidents of American crimes, such as the above, are included with bizarre fictions that have poisoned the authors' minds, such as below. This was decidedly unexpected from Edward Herman.
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In this Grimm fairy tale, everyone who contradicts their fantasies is an American/RPF pawn – Paul Kagame, human rights investigator Alison des Forges, the head of the UN military mission in Rwanda during the genocide General Romeo Dallaire, and entire human rights organisations.
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The main authorities on whom the authors rest their fabrications are a tiny number of long-time American and Canadian genocide deniers, who gleefully drink each other's putrid bath water. Each solemnly cites the others' works to document his fabrications – Robin Philpot, Christopher Black, Christian Davenport, Allan Stam, Peter Erlinder. It's as if a Holocaust denier cited as supporting evidence the testimonies of David Irving, David Duke, Robert Faurisson or Ernest Zundel. Be confident Herman and Peterson are now being quoted as authoritative sources on the genocide by Robin Philpot, Christopher Black, Davenport and Stam, Peter Erlinder.
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Erlinder has shamelessly distorted a ruling of the ICTR on which he's based so many of his attacks on Kagame and company beyond the Tribunal. A 2008 judgment ruled that there was not sufficient evidence to find that Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, seen by many as the mastermind of the genocide, had engaged in a conspiracy to exterminate all Tutsi. In a series of speeches and writings, including one of his better-known articles ‘Rwanda: No Conspiracy, No Genocide Planning…No Conspiracy?’ (Jurist, Dec. 24, 2008), Erlinder milked the decision for all he could. The title of the article said it all, and the question mark of course really doesn’t exist in his mind. As he said shortly before leaving America, there ‘was no conspiracy or planning to commit genocide or other crime’. No planning, no genocide. What could be simpler? (Once arrested, however, he found it far more prudent to declare that he in fact did not deny the genocide.)
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On the other hand, there are other writers on Rwanda on whom Herman and Peterson do not rely. They are many in number and they are totally ignored, except for the late Alison Des Forges, who is shabbily denigrated. In fact they include the overwhelming number of those who have ever written about the genocide. They include academics, human rights activists, journalists who were in Rwanda during the genocide or soon after, and others whose work brought them in close proximity to the events of 1994. Without exception, every single one agrees there was a genocide planned and executed by a cabal of leading Hutu extremists against Rwanda's Tutsi minority. Except for Des Forges, plus Linda Melvern, whose indispensable oeuvre merits a lonely footnote, not a single one of the following authors is cited by Herman and Peterson:
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Before we dismiss all these authors as tools of Yanky imperialism, it needs to be added that several of the most prominent – Des Forges, Uvin, Prunier, Lemarchand, Kuperman – are (or were) fierce critics of the post-genocide Kagame government in Rwanda. Yet none has thought to retract their original views on the reality of the genocide.
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As for Alison Des Forges, until her untimely death perhaps the most prominent scholar and activist on the Rwanda file, she is dismissed as following: ‘[Prior to 1993], des Forges had worked for the US Department of State and National Security Council.’ Nothing more is said to disqualify des Forges, so we must conclude that simply working for these bodies demonstrates the unreliability of her views on the genocide. That her MA and Ph.D. theses were on Rwandan history, that she knew the country for 30 years before the genocide, that she was among a tiny number of outsiders who spoke Kinyarwanda, that she spent five years after 1994 researching the crisis, that her ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’ is a highly-respected encyclopaedic history of the genocide – all this is irrelevant to Herman and Peterson.
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As a matter of fact, ‘the Hutu members of Rwanda's power-sharing government couldn't possibly have planned a genocide against the Tutsi.’ In fact, President Habyarimana repeatedly refused, until literally the end of his life, to implement the power-sharing agreement set out in the Arusha Accords. In any event, why the Hutu members of the government ‘couldn't possibly have planned a genocide against the Tutsi’ is never remotely explained.
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Dupes like me and most other writers believe the US and its allies betrayed Rwanda by refusing to reinforce the UN military mission there, as general Dallaire was pleading with them to do. Eyewitnesses in Rwanda believed they witnessed for themselves what was developing. The media actually played a deplorable role in the first month of the genocide, confusing a planned extermination with racist views of ‘primordial African savagery’.
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They cite the sensational estimate by Christian Davenport and Allan Stam that one million deaths occurred from April to July 1994, and that ‘the majority of victims are likely Hutu and not Tutsi.’ That the methodology employed to arrive at such an Orwellian assertion has been totally discredited is of no interest to our authors and never mentioned.
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Christopher Black is prominent among the small notorious band of deniers who cite each other so faithfully and who alone are the sources for Herman and Peterson's chapter 4. Even among the lunatic fringe of deniers, Black inhabits a universe of his own. Not only is the genocide of the Tutsi a ‘myth’, not only did France have nothing to do with it, not only did the RPF rampage ‘across the country massacring hundreds of thousands of Hutu and any Tutsi who were seen as non-reliable.’ As well, he asserts, before 1994 there was no ethnic problem in Rwanda, then 'a semi-socialist country considered a model for Africa’. For perspective, I note that this authority on Rwanda visited North Korea in 2003 and emerged to describe it as ‘a progressive, socialist country deserving the support of all progressive peoples around the world.’ Black also considered Slobodan Milosevic completely innocent of the charges brought against him and believes Milosevic was consistently committed to a multi-ethnic Yugoslavia during his time in government.
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Samantha Power found a large number of President Clinton's senior advisers who contritely explained to her why they failed to support General Dallaire's urgent cries for reinforcements. Madeleine Albright, Clinton's ambassador to the UN, has abjectly apologised for her role in leading the Security Council to decimate Dallaire's puny military mission, and has righteously claimed that behind the scenes she attempted to get the White House to change its position. Non-permanent members of the Security Council later complained they were kept in the dark about the real situation in Rwanda by those who resisted intervention, including UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali. All of this is now well known.
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The 6 April plane crash, as is entirely predictable, features prominently in Herman and Peterson's Orwellian version of Rwanda. The plane, a gift from French President Mitterrand to Habyarimana, was bringing from Dar es Salaam to Kigali not only Habyarimana but the President of Burundi as well. Both were killed, along with everyone else on board. In what we have seen is a typical trick of the authors, they state that ‘It has also been important to suppress the fact that that the first Hutu president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, had been assassinated by Tutsi officers of his army in October 1993.’ That this assassination happened is true; that anyone has ever tried to suppress it is ludicrous. Why Herman and Peterson insist on it is incomprehensible. For the record, this incident is included in my own report, ‘Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide’, in Rene Lemarchand's chapter on Rwanda in ‘Century of Genocide’, in Gerard Prunier's ‘The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide’, in Stephen Kinzer's ‘A Thousand Hills’, and in Linda Melvern's ‘A People Betrayed’, just to mention the few volumes that I took down at random. Far from being suppressed, virtually everyone who writes about Rwanda recognises the great impetus given to Hutu Power advocates in Rwanda by Ndadaye's untimely murder.
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Edward Herman and David Peterson have written a very short book that's not nearly short enough. It should never have seen the light of day. It brings shame to its two American authors, its publisher Monthly Review, and all those who have provided enthusiastic jacket blurbs, many of them prominent in progressive circles – Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Norman Solomon, David Barsamian. If this is what Anglo-American Marxism, or socialism, or anti-imperialism has degenerated into, we can hang our heads in shame for the future of the left.
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Though my site is primarily devoted to Balkan issues, its inspiration is opposition to oppression wherever it exists. Indeed, that is why when we first read of the new book by Herman and Peterson, 'The Politics of Genocide', many of us on the left may at first have been encouraged, because it promises to discuss the important issue of how the imperialist media has double standards - the oppression, terror and genocide carried out by governments that at some point become official enemies of the main western imperialist states is called oppression, terror and genocide, while the oppression, terror and genocide carried out by imperialist states and their puppets and allies is either glossed over or given full support. After all, our hatred of oppression is precisely a reason we become anti-imperialists. I mean, we would be encouraged at the appearance of such a book, that is, if we did not already know who the has-been crackpot, Ed Herman, and his sidekick blogger, someone called David Peterson, were. But unfortunately we know them well-enough.
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even some of them have apparently been surprised that they now go so far as to regurgitate the truly awful genocide denial regarding the far larger genocide of at least 500,000 Rwandan Tutsi in 1994. This author, however, was not the least surprised; I was just waiting for it to come out more in the open from the various hints they had earlier dropped. Much of this story derives from another crackpot of similar ilk, a lawyer named Chris Black, who has acted previously to both defend and to build disgraceful political apologia for Serbian war-criminals and genocidists. For many years now Black has shifted his attention from the Balkans to Rwanda. Herman and Peterson mostly regurgitate Black's stuff.
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I would hope that people read Herman and Peterson on the Balkans (that is, if they must read their trash at all) with this fact in mind. I am also very pleased that such a useful deconstruction has been done of their garbage on Rwanda. Monthly Review has lowered itself to producing a chapter of this crap book (but then again, it also allowed Herman a whole book-length series of articles a couple of years ago to display his horrible Balkan revisionism). Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, who have both written wrong things about the Balkans in trying to "relativise" the crimes of "all sides", but who ultimately earn more respect than Herman and others because they at least condemn, in no uncertain terms, the terror and oppression launched by the Serbian side, here also discredit themselves by giving this new book eulogies. That is a great shame.