Pambazuka - Genocide denial and facilitation - 0 views
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Caplan is a careless reviewer. He accuses us of neglecting to cite a lengthy list of 45 authors ('Except for [Alison] Des Forges, plus Linda Melvern,…not a single one of the following authors is cited by Herman and Peterson'), at least seven of whom we actually do cite, four positively: Gérard Prunier on the Gersony affair in Rwanda, Fergal Keane on the Bruguière report, and Alex de Waal and Mahmood Mamdani on the conflicts in the Darfur states of the western Sudan. The fifth and sixth are William Schabas and Philip Gourevitch, both on Rwanda, neither positively. The seventh, Ingvar Carlsson, we mention in passing. (One scholar on Caplan's list who we didn't cite in our book but are more than happy to cite here is René Lemarchand. In a recent letter to Pambazuka News raising doubts about Caplan's 'credentials in commenting on the merits of the Mutsinzi report' [for our treatment of this, see below], Lemarchand writes that 'the misinformation conveyed by [Caplan] is enough to cast the strongest doubts on [the Mutsinzi report's] veracity.'[v])
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The counter-theme of the relevant section of our book contends that 'all major sectors of the Western establishment swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside-down,'[xii] with the Tutsi Paul Kagame and his Tutsi military force, the RPF, acting as both the initiators and the main perpetrators of 1994's mass blood-letting, and subordinating all else to its seizure of state-power in Rwanda. The consequences of this plan include one million or more deaths in Rwanda, several million more in the DRC, perhaps the worst protracted human crisis on the planet over the past two decades – and a supremely well-entrenched dictatorship that now celebrates its 16th year in power, preparing yet again to stage a fake election in August 2010 to rival the one it put on seven years ago, with opposition Hutu parties and candidates prohibited from running against the incumbent, and Kagame's victory by a landslide guaranteed.
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The French anti-terrorism Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière's inquiry into these events concluded that Kagame needed the 'physical elimination' of Habyarimana in order to seize state-power within Rwanda before the national elections called for by the Arusha Accords,[xviii] elections that Kagame most certainly would have lost, given that his minority Tutsi were greatly outnumbered by the majority Hutu.
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