Herman Chomsky genocide

To quote their research paper: ‘[c]learly evidence of genocide is evident within this analysis but it is also clear that a variety of other activities exist as well, which merit discussion and consideration within journalistic, scholarly, legal and political circles’.[2] As the two have noted elsewhere, ‘we have never denied that a genocide took place; we just noted that genocide was only one among several forms of violence that occurred at the time’.[3]

We surely owe it to the victims of the violence of 1994 to develop as accurate and nuanced a picture as possible of what exactly took place during those terrible months. Gerald Caplan’s arguments make this harder to achieve. By downplaying the diversity of opinion among those who accept a genocide was carried out aimed at the Tutsi population, and by denouncing those who draw attention to the diversity of modes of violence that existed in Rwanda throughout 1994, Caplan encourages a polarisation of discussion over Rwanda, as readers accept the parameters of the debate that he presents. This will only make it easier for those who do actually deny a genocide took place to characterise those who disagree as RPF or American imperialist stooges. Such a polarisation could also have damaging consequences for the viability of holding President Kagame and members of the RPF to account for their actions over the last two decades, both in Rwanda and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kagame’s government is only too happy to see the debate polarised, since this makes it much more difficult to ensure that all forms of violence – and, crucially, its perpetrators – are documented.

Among the 'genocide deniers' and 'Kagame haters' who find the Mutsinzi report completely unpersuasive are René Lemarchand, the distinguished scholar on Rwanda, and Luc Marchal, the former chief of the Kigali Sector of UNAMIR (who was working in Kigali in April 1994). Lemarchand finds Caplan’s understanding of the distribution of benefits of the Arusha Agreement badly off the mark – Arusha was not a 'huge victory' for the RPF, he writes, as it gave the Hutu parties 'an overwhelming majority,' and how the shoot-down of Habyarimana’s jet was 'extremely functional' to Hutu extremists is a logic that 'escapes my grasp.'[xxiii]

aplan may not understand our point or, understanding it perfectly well, may reject it and therefore prefer to muddy the waters around it. But the general point we make about the foreign-policy tool of focusing on the alleged human rights abuses committed by a target of US destabilization and regime-change, while ignoring the abuses of the armed forces attacking it, is unmistakable, and cannot be dismissed as claiming a 'great American conspiracy in Rwanda.'

Erlinder has never denied that mass-atrocities and genocide were committed in Rwanda, and that a large number of Tutsi as well as Hutu were slaughtered there. However, Erlinder finds these terrible events centred in Kagame’s RPF invasion and takeover programs and efforts – as we do. Yet as Caplan cannot even allow the possibility of a debate on this subject, Erlinder is simply a 'genocide denier.'

The UN rejected the RPF's rationale that its armed forces' continued presence in the Rwanda-controlled area of the eastern DRC was needed to defend Rwanda against hostile Hutu forces terrorizing the border region and threatening to invade it. '[T]o use the term employed by the Congo Desk of the Rwandan Patriotic Army,' the UN's 2002 report countered, the 'real long-term purpose is…to 'secure property'.'[xlvii] By September 2002, the UN was estimating that 3.5 million more people had died in the five eastern provinces of the DRC than would have died, had the wars launched by Rwanda and Uganda for the DRC's mineral wealth never occurred.

Gerald Caplan has long downplayed the catastrophe in the DRC and especially the Kagame regime's role in causing this catastrophe. In his 2004 essay, 'The Genocide Problem: 'Never Again' All Over Again,'[li] Caplan refers to genocide in Rwanda and genocide in Darfur – but never once to genocide in the DRC. Instead, Caplan refers merely to the 'ongoing calamity in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo;' and in a passage that made him no enemies in the Kagame regime, he laments how 'Not a single French politician has been held accountable for allowing the [Hutu] genocidaires to escape from Rwanda to Zaire/Congo, thereby setting in motion the catastrophic wars that have since plagued the African Great Lakes region.'

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.

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.)

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:

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rwanda's Genocide Law criminalizes what it calls "creating confusion aiming at negating the genocide which occurred. . ." (Article 3(2)).  Indeed, Rwanda's 2003 Constitution14 even states that "Revisionism, negationism and trivialization of genocide are punishable by the law" (Article 13) and commits the Rwandan government to "fighting the ideology of genocide and all its manifestations" (Article 9).

Of course, this is straight out of Kafka, as a compelling case can be made that Kagame and his RPF were the major genocidaires in Rwanda, and in alliance with Uganda's Yoweri Museveni dictatorship, with both under U.S. and U.K. protection, have extended and enlarged their genocidal operations to the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.  Peter Erlinder has never denied that mass atrocities were committed in Rwanda in 1994, and that a large number of Tutsi were slaughtered.  But in his seven years as a defense counsel before the ICTR, he has shown that a much larger number of Hutu were also slaughtered, and, more important, that it was the Tutsi Paul Kagame and his Tutsi insurgency, the RPF, that acted as both initiator and main perpetrator of the mass-bloodletting known as the "Rwandan genocide."

One damning piece of evidence uncovered by Erlinder is an internal memorandum drafted in September 1994 for then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher (now archived at Erlinder's Rwanda Documents Project at the William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota), in which Christopher was informed that a UN team on the ground in Rwanda "concluded that a pattern of killing had emerged" there, the "[RPF] and Tutsi civilian surrogates [killing] 10,000 or more Hutu civilians per month, with the [RPF] accounting for 95% of the killing." The memorandum "speculated that the purpose of the killing was a campaign of ethnic cleansing intended to clear certain areas in the south of Rwanda for Tutsi habitation.  The killings also served to reduce the population of Hutu males and discouraged refugees from returning to claim their lands."17 

Yet, here is an internal U.S. document alleging "10,000 or more Hutu civilians" butchered per month by Kagame's forces to cleanse the ground for Tutsi resettlement, and not only is the leading butcher not imprisoned, but not a single Tutsi member of Kagame's RPF responsible for these acts has ever been charged with a crime at the ICTR.

It is now conclusively established that these political assassinations were carried out by Kagame's forces.  When International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda investigator Michael Hourigan had assembled compelling evidence showing this, then-ICTR Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour quashed his investigation on orders from U.S. officials.  This official line of inquiry has been suppressed ever since, though it was amplified and confirmed by the French magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, whose own inquiry concluded in late 2006 that Kagame and the RPF, fully aware that they would lose the elections scheduled by the Arusha Accords due to the overwhelming majority enjoyed by the Hutu in the country, opted for the "physical elimination" of Habyarimana and reopening their assault on the Rwandan government to achieve their goal of an RPF-takeover of the country.20

"Insecure governments are arresting Americans and accusing them of espionage, sowing dissent or treachery against the state," the editorial voice of the Chicago Tribune once said about a superficially similar case -- the early 2009 arrest by the authorities in Iran of Northwestern University journalism school graduate Roxana Saberi.30  Her arrest "[fit] an increasingly familiar plot line," the Tribune noted, like that of its former correspondent Paul Salopek, arrested by Sudanese authorities in 2006, the journalist Parnaz Azima and the academic Haleh Esfandiari, arrested by Iranian authorities in 2007, and the journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, arrested by North Korean authorities in 2009, each of them charged in one form or another with crimes against the stability and security of the arresting states.

Christopher Black, a Canadian attorney and signatory of the ICTR defense counsels' declaration, observes: "The lack of outrage by the Obama administration and at the United Nations is maddening.  It does not matter whether one believes the RPF version of events or the evidence of the reality of the war as set out in the trials at the ICTR.  Surely Barack Obama and the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon believe in free speech?  Surely they accept that history must be reexamined continuously in light of new facts?  The stench of hypocrisy is nauseating.  We all know what would happen if an American dissident lawyer was arrested by the Iranians for disputing their version of the killings in Tehran in the aftermath of last year's presidential elections -- the Obama crowd would be demanding his immediate release and more sanctions.  But Obama and the Pentagon want to keep their three big bases in Rwanda, so nothing happens but a pro forma 'tut-tut' and then on to other business."31 

Even when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked by a reporter with Africa Action to address Peter Erlinder's arrest, Clinton declined to state that Erlinder had been unjustly arrested, and declined to call for his release.  Instead, almost the first words out of her mouth were: "We really don't want to see Rwanda undermine its own remarkable progress by beginning to move away from a lot of the very positive actions that undergirded its development so effectively.  We still are very, very supportive of Rwanda.  The kind of development that has taken place in Rwanda is really a model in many respects for the rest of the continent."34

The fact that a well-armed Bosnian Muslim regiment of several thousand men was located in Srebrenica, and retreated without putting up any defense against a Serb attack force of 200, shows that the charges against the lightly armed Dutch peacekeeping contingent of 69 men are ridiculous and misdirected. 

Another Srebrenica memorial myth is that the memorial and political actions associated with it are necessary for real peace.  In the words of the EU resolution, "there cannot be real peace without justice," which means getting Mladic into court, and this is essential for "reconciliation" so that "civilians of all ethnicities may overcome the tensions of the past."  But how about justice for the thousands of Serbs killed from the UN-protected Srebrenica base between 1992 and July 1995, the 250,000 driven out of Krajina in Operation Storm, and the thousands of Serbs and Roma driven out of Kosovo since the NATO takeover and installation of the KLA in power?  NATO's bombing war against Yugoslavia in March-June 1999 was in violation of the UN Charter, killed many hundreds of civilians, and involved the use of illegal weapons (cluster bombs, depleted uranium).  Don't we need criminal prosecutions in these cases for justice and reconciliation?