Hi all. If you don't know who Ann Garrison is, then that's probably a good thing, but if you want to know then check out my post a few months back. Anyway, she's back again with more nonsense on the Rwandan Genocide. Intriguingly enough, this time she doesn't even really bother to deny, just to justify it.
To start with though, it's probably worth me saying that this guy she's talking about, Dr. Léopold Munyakazi, wrong (factually and morally) as his statements about the events of 1994 might be, does plausibly sound like an innocent man. I'm not going to say that with certainty, but a sudden accusation of involvement in the genocide, 22 years after the actual events, just when he becomes unlikeable to the Kagame regime, sounds a lot like the very real abuse of such accusations by the Rwandan courts and government.
I should expand a bit here. The UN tribunal for Rwanda, ICTR, was, despite the claims of the apologists, broadly a reliable, thorough and professional court. However, it only really managed and tried the ~100 big players in the genocide. The thousands of other more minor players like Interahamwe footsoldiers, low-level civil servants and MRND party officials, etc, were left to the Rwandan local courts. There is no doubt whatsoever that these courts have been horrifically prone to corruption and abuse. Sure, they've been used for political reasons, but just as common if not more so has been their use for personal vendettas and material gain. For a few quite shocking examples of this, I'd recommend checking out the first few pages of Gerard Prunier's Africa's World War, which I've linked. Whether Munyakazi's claim that this accusation is fabricated is true or not, I can't know for sure, but it's certainly believable.
Now that's been said, time to take Garrison to pieces:
A Rwandan exile speaks out against Rwandan totalitarianism, disagrees with Rwanda’s constitutionally codified description of the 1994 massacres as “genocide against the Tutsi,”
Well, it's not just the Rwandan government that defines it as a genocide, is it? It's also a UN-established tribunal, and the vast majority of scholars on Rwanda and genocide.
Yet another challenge to the Wikipedia/Hotel Rwanda story has come from Professors Allan Stam and Christian Davenport, after 10 years of research in Rwanda. In the 2015 BBC documentary Rwanda’s Untold Story, Allan Stam had this exchange with the BBC’s Jane Corbin:
Allan Stam: If a million people died in Rwanda in 1994 — and that’s certainly possible — there is no way that the majority of them could be Tutsi.
Jane Corbin: How do you know that?
Allan Stam: Because there weren’t enough Tutsi in the country.
Jane Corbin: The academics calculated there had been 500,000 Tutsis before the conflict in Rwanda; 300,000 survived. This led them to their final controversial conclusion.
Allan Stam: If a million Rwandans died, and 200,000 of them were Tutsi, that means 800,000 of them were Hutu.
Jane Corbin: That’s completely the opposite of what the world believes happened in the Rwandan genocide.
Allan Stam: What the world believes, and what actually happened, are quite different.
Davenport and Stam are a bizarre pair. They don't deny the genocide as such, just have very odd views on it, such as the claim that the Interahamwe were massacring hundreds of thousands of both Hutus and Tutsis indiscriminately for no obvious reasons. That said, the numbers given here appear to be complete nonsense. There were far more than 500,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Even the heavily flawed 1991 census recorded nearly 600,000 Tutsis. However, it is widely accepted, including by the census report itself, that Tutsis were systematically undercounted for a variety of reasons. Prunier, for example, estimated that the real figure was probably slightly over 900,000.
And no, 300,000 didn't survive. I covered this in my previous post, but deniers and apologists seem to pick this number from a survivors group with no critical evaluation other than that it suits their ends. It's probably a feasible upper bound, but many other studies, such as Prunier, and Alison Des Forges for HRW, estimated the number of survivors at far lower, well under 200,000. And a death toll of 1 million is also an upper bound; most estimate the death toll at between 500,000 and 1,000,000. While the Rwandan government claims figures around the latter, the most commonly accepted number is around 800,000.
Dr. Munyakazi stated what seemed obvious to many who have studied the history of Rwanda and Burundi. He said that Hutu and Tutsi speak the same language, share the same culture, eat the same food, and even marry each other, with membership in one group or the other determined patrilineally. Ninety-three percent of Rwandans are Christian. They are distinguished instead, by historical class privilege. Prior to colonization, the Tutsi were a cattle owning, feudal ruling class, the Hutu a subservient peasant class. Belgian colonists reified this divide by issuing ID cards that labeled Rwandans and Burundians as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa.
This is a mangled version of the truth. Yes, Tutsi and Hutu were initially social classes. At that point, like all social classes, that status did not transmit patrilineally, but depended on your wealth and prestige. And yes, it's likely true that fully being accepted into the upper class didn't fully happen over the course of just one generation, and those who became wealthy over the course of their lifetime may well have been seen as parvenu upstarts. But in general, it was a vague, relatively fluid class system.
That changed when the Belgians took charge after WW1. Hutu and Tutsi became fixed hereditary statuses, governed by the Belgians as (and thus becoming) ethnic groups rather than social classes. At first, the Belgian government maintained and supported the Tutsi elite. Nevertheless, there did develop a class of wealthy Hutus. However, in 1959, a couple of years before Rwanda was granted independence, Hutu leaders seized power and drove many Tutsis out of the country into Uganda. For the next 35 years, Hutus (or their political elites, at least) would be the dominant ethnic group, with Tutisis marginalised.
In short, by 1994, Hutu and Tutsi have not been traditional social classes for nearly 80 years, and the case of
historically privileged Tutsi and the historically oppressed Hutu.
has not been the case for 35 years.
There is nothing like the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide to prevent and punish class war. Article II of the Convention says that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” It says nothing about preventing or punishing the murder of masses of people in order to claim, reclaim or defend wealth and privilege. Nor does it say anything about the murder of masses of people in order to steal what they have, such as oil, land, water or mineral riches.
It also doesn't say anywhere "if there are any motives of personal enrichment involved, then that's totally fine and OK and discounts everything else in this document". Garrison here is playing on a common theme in genocide apologia - playing on popular misconceptions about genocide and what it actually means, in particular implying what I'd call a purist or hard-intentionalist view of genocide; that it only counts as genocide if the killings are motivated purely by the perpetrators' ethnic/racial hatred of the victims. This is quite emphatically untrue; virtually every major text on genocide will point out the significant roles of personal vendetta and material gain as motives for perpetrators. In fact, I'm sure you're well aware of another case where genocide was committed against people in order to steal land and natural resources from them - as the product of that process is a country called the United States.
Also, the Interahamwe didn't simply kill Tutsis because they were rich. They continued to hunt and kill Tutsis who'd run from and abandoned their homes and property. On the other hand, they didn't go after wealthy Hutu businessmen, many of whom were involved in the Interahamwe - if you've seen Hotel Rwanda, then you know the example of George Rutaganda, a wealthy Hutu businessman who was Interahamwe vice-president.
Trouble is President Bill Clinton did not “fail to intervene” in Rwanda. He refused to intervene and stopped the UN Security Council from organizing an intervention, because the U.S. and UK had already intervened in support of General Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Army that invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990.
Really? Where were all the British and American forces then? As I've said before, this is what most people generally consider to be "intervention" - not Washington voting a particular way on the Security Council or providing some encouraging language to a particular side.
The evidence of this is laid out in Robin Philpot’s Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa, Ed Herman and David Peterson’sEnduring Lies: Rwanda in the Propaganda System 20 Years Later, Peter Erlinder’s Accidental Genocide, Carla Del Ponte’s Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity and Jean-Marie Ndajigimana’s How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsi.
With the exception of Del Ponte, these are all Garrison's fellow traveller apologists. To paraphrase Gerard Caplan, it's like a Holocaust denier telling you to read Zundel, Irving and Faurisson, or a Creationist referring you to AnswersinGenesis and Creation Ministries International, to support their argument.
ここには何もないようです