I realise I’m getting repetitive now, but this is another post about Edward Herman – he just annoys me a lot. Though this is about Rwanda, not Yugoslavia, so at least that’s a change. So he recently gave an interview in which he repeated at length his denial of the Rwandan Genocide, and for the record, the interviewer, one Ann Garrison, also appears to share his point of view, perhaps even more so adopting the Hutu Power narrative. The original recording is here and a transcript is here.

EDIT: I've only just realised after posting how bloody long this is. My apologies, but good effort if you persisted and read it all.

EH: In this book, Ann, we describe the fact that Paul Kagame, the leader of Rwanda, has killed more than five times as many people as Idi Amin. He invaded Rwanda in 1990 and carried out a war of conquest there that ended sometime in 1994. He invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1996 and went in and out of that country for years, killing what the U.N. itself admitted was probably more than 4 million people.

Er, sort of. Kagame is undoubtedly a despicable man who’s committed all sorts of war crimes, I don’t disagree with that. Nor do I disagree that the Congo Wars are in large part down to him. But that doesn’t make him criminally responsible for every single death that happened in or as a result of the Congo Wars (the vast bulk of those 4 million are only indirectly war-caused deaths). For example, is he responsible for the killings committed by Joseph Kony (yes, that one) and the Lord’s Resistance Army (who, as far as there are definable ‘sides’ in this conflict, are on the opposing side to Kagame) in the Second Congo War? Seems quite odd logic to suggest he is.

He runs a dictatorship in Rwanda, where he gets 93 percent of the vote in a country where 90 percent of the people are Hutu who consider him to be a conqueror, a terrorist leader. And yet he’s considered, in the West, to be a hero, a savior. In The New Yorker, he was described as the Abraham Lincoln of Africa. For a man who has outdone Idi Amin, I think this is miraculous.

Again, sort of, but I can’t really go into the various shifts in Western attitudes to Kagame since 1994 due to R2.

AG: In other words, everything we’ve been told is wrong. And I can add that the enduring lies are so successful that that includes much of what’s been broadcast here on Pacifica Radio and published in any number of left liberal outlets.

I facepalmed again and again at the astonishing hubris of this statement. Ms Garrison, does it not occur to you that if not just the overwhelming mass of scholars, but also the vast bulk of people who share your political persuasions and even the people on the very media outlet you’re speaking on are convinced of these facts, then maybe they have a point?

Any attempt to edit the Wikipedia entry on the Rwandan Genocide triggers so many edit alerts that it starts a Wiki editing war until the Wikipedia authorities declare a ceasefire with no changes made. That Wikipedia entry is all but written in stone.

Good, then Wikipedia has at least some level of scholarly standards and prioritises reputable works and source over circumstantial crystal-balling by conspiracy theorists.

AG: Since you’ve already given us some background and context, let’s start with Chapter Two: “The RPF invasion and low-level aggressive war that never was a ‘civil war.” People who know the story of the Rwandan Genocide only through the movie “Hotel Rwanda” are likely to think that it was an explosion of tribal bloodletting that began and ended in 100 days’ time in 1994. Those who know that it was actually the final 100 days of a four-year war are likely to believe that it was the end of the Rwandan Civil War. There is an entry in the Wikipedia on the Rwandan Civil War. Why is this an enduring lie?

Apparently Ann Garrison has never seen Hotel Rwanda, or she’d know that the civil war is referred to pretty regularly in it, as are the RPF (though they’re generally just referred to as the “Tutsi rebels”). This all appears in the film substantially before the genocide part of the film starts, and the RPF themselves appear near the end. Perhaps a typical viewers wouldn’t entirely understand the context, but they’d be hard-pressed not to know that there was a war going on.

More to the point, this is laughable considering the huge amount of effort informed commentators and observers had to go to convince Western publics and politicians that the war and the genocide were indeed separate (though of course linked) phenomena, to avoid dismissal of it as an inevitable and inextricable “tribal” war.

EH: Well, there was no major ethnic conflict in Rwanda back in late 1990. What happened in October 1990 was an invasion of armed forces from Uganda. This was a group of Tutsi, several thousand Tutsi soldiers, who were part of the Ugandan army.

This is going to come up again. When the RPF need to be demonised, they’re a foreign Ugandan invading force. When the killings of Tutsis need to be excused, the RPF suddenly become native Rwandan Tutsis whom Tutsi civilians could therefore be a “fifth column” for. The deniers want to have their cake and eat it too.

To summarise briefly, the RPF was made up of Tutsi refugees from Rwanda, most of which had been expelled from the country into Uganda in or after 1959. Some of them, Kagame included, had aided Museveni in his seizure of power in Uganda, and thereafter been incorporated into the army (though few became Ugandan citizens). They’d formed the RPF initially as a political movement, hoping to return to Rwanda at some point. What’s more up for debate is what exactly their plans were. Some claim they always intended to use the Ugandan Army to build up their own separate militia with which they would invade Rwanda. Others maintain they would likely never have actually gone ahead with this had it not been for the rise in anti-Tutsi nativism in Uganda from the late 1980s. Regardless, in 1990, a few thousand Tutsi soldiers deserted from the Ugandan army, killed the border guards (funnily Herman and Garrison don’t mention that part), and crossed into northern Rwanda to begin the civil war.

They entered, they pushed several hundred thousand Hutu farmers out of their homes in northern Rwanda, and they were pushed back, but they kept coming. And the United States and its allies gave them assistance. They pressed the Rwandan government to sign an Arusha agreement in 1993, which gave Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and its army a lot of power in Rwanda. But it also provided for an election to be held about 22 months after the agreement was signed, and the RPF could not have won that election. So they made sure they didn’t have to win that election, Instead, they resumed the war on April 6, 1994, and by July 1994, they had conquered Rwanda.

So the US aided the RPF by pushing for a peace agreement which was bad for the RPF? Genius logic. Also the “the RPF could not have won that election” claim - Herman is going to repeat this several times over.

So the whole period from October 1990 to, say, July 1994 was a period in which the RPF was engaged in subversion and readying itself for a final war of conquest. So it was a war. I would say this was a war.

Well, I’m glad we needed Edward Herman to tell us that the period from 1990 to 1994 in Rwanda was a war. No-one else had worked that out at all.

AG: OK, now let’s consider Chapter Three: “‘Hutu Power extremists’ did not shoot down Habyarimana’s Falcon 50 jet.” Juvenal Habyarimana was the president of Rwanda from 1973 until he was assassinated in 1994, a little more than a year before these elections were supposed to happen. He was a Hutu, a member of Rwanda’s Hutu majority who had overcome centuries of Tutsi subjugation with independence in 1960. He died while returning home, along with Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, also a Hutu, when his plane was shot out of the sky above Rwanda’s capital Kigali.

OK, simple things first – Rwanda’s independence was in 1962, not 1960. Also, to talk of “Tutsi subjugation” of Hutus is either adopting the Hutu Power narrative or being incredibly ignorant of Rwandan history (or likely both). Prior to Belgian rule (1918-1962), the Tutsis and Hutus were not so much ethnic groups as social castes. The Tutsis were clearly set above Hutus, but one could move between the two – successful Hutus could become regarded as Tutsis, and poor Tutsis could become regarded as Hutus. I’m far from an expert on this process, and I don’t know the details but the central point is that before Belgian rule, it was as much the case that being a wealthy elite was what made you a Tutsi as vice versa. When the Belgians took over from the Germans (who had ruled Rwanda since the 1880s), they transformed the categories into hereditary ethnic groups, blocking mobility between the two.

After four years of war and massacres, which had driven a million Rwandans to the outskirts of Kigali, where they were camped as internal refugees, this convinced the Hutu population that the Tutsi army was coming to kill or subjugate them all again, and some Hutu began to kill Tutsi.

Well, that and the fact that the Hutu leadership were blaring anti-Tutsi propaganda similar to this and much worse at them through every medium available. Garrison unquestioningly accepts the Hutu Power narrative again. In any ethnic war, the leadership of side claims everyone of the “enemy” ethnic group is coming to kill/enslave/etc them. This isn’t a justification for killing – it’s just racism.

EH: There’s no evidence of these genocidal plans, and the Hutu would have won the upcoming election. The election was foreclosed by the assassination and conquest by Kagame.

What do you mean, “the Hutu” would have won the election? Rwanda, by this point, had several political parties, some of which were not explicitly Hutu or Tutsi. It’s quite possible moderate Hutu parties might have gone into coalition with the RPF. Indeed, that’s one interpretation of what caused the Rwandan genocide – a desperate measure by Hutu extremists to prevent an alliance (or at least, understanding) between Tutsis and moderate Hutus that would have forced the extremists from power. The Arusha Accords were implicitly (only explicitly in the transitional period) about power-sharing. Thus, in theory, the RPF would be no more trying to “win” the election than Sinn Fein attempt to “win” Northern Irish elections.

But we don’t have to speculate about this. The Rwanda tribunal actually carried out an investigation of who shot the plane down back in 1996 and 1997. They appointed a 20-man group to carry out this study. These investigators hired by the tribunal came up with a report in 1996, based on what they thought to be credible witness testimony by members of the RPF, that Kagame had planned the assassin when the tribunal found that theation and carried it out. When this report was presented to the prosecutor of the tribunal, she consulted the United States and then canceled the investigation. And, from 1996 to the present, although the shoot-down of this plane is widely thought to be the event that triggered the genocide, the tribunal hasn’t looked into it and the U.N. hasn’t looked into it beyond that. These investigators hired by the Rwanda tribunal produced a report, in 1996, based on what they thought was credible witness testimony by members of the RPF, that Kagame had planned the assassination and carried it out. When this report was presented to the prosecutor of the tribunal, she consulted the United States and then canceled the investigation.

Ironically, this point that Herman is so obsessed with is actually the one that least goes against scholarly views. While it’s far from being an accepted position, many reputable scholars have posited the idea that the RPF shot Habyarimana’s plane down. Michael Mann, for instance, in his excellent and respected work on genocide The Dark Side of Democracy, argues that it was probably the RPF that shot it down.

AG: And even, whether you believe the evidence or not, Paul Kagame and his forces were the only ones who stood to gain by Habyarimana’s assassination and what happened afterwards, right? Otherwise they would have lost to Habyarimana and his party in the next year’s election. EH: Yes, he’s the only gainer from it.

Well, apart from this election assumption which I’ve already been through, this is all assuming that the RPF would win the war, something that was far from certain. They’d failed to defeat the Rwandan Army (FAR) since 1990, what had suddenly changed now? The factors that gave the RPF the decisive advantage were genocide-related ones – the loss of French support to the Hutu government and, most importantly, the fact that the FAR were spending huge chunks of resources, time and effort on hunting and killing Tutsis rather than fighting the RPF.

This is a gaping hole in the deniers’ argument. They make huge claims and implications about the RPF’s military superiority – indeed, elsewhere Herman portrays the FAR as utterly useless and incompetent – yet cannot explain why this supposed clear RPF superiority led to a stalemate from 1990-93.

AG: OK, let’s move on to Chapter Four: “Rwandan genocide by the numbers.” When Professor Allan Stam wrote to a U.N. official to ask how he estimated that the dead in Rwanda were 500,000, the U.N. official responded that he couldn’t quite remember, but they knew they needed a really big number.

Allan Stam is an odd character who will come up again. He and his regular collaborator Christian Davenport are not deniers as such – they fully accept that a genocide was committed against Tutsis by Hutu Power forces. However, they do hold unwarrantedly revisionist and bizarre views on the genocide that leads to their work being mined by denialists. For example, Stam and Davenport are convinced (due to a misinterpretation of sources) that the Interahamwe and other paramilitaries embarked not on a specifically anti-Tutsi genocidal campaign, but on an indiscriminate bloodbath of anyone, Hutu or Tutsi. This is a long-winded way of saying a likely distorted anecdote from a figure who is not an entirely reputable source himself is not something I’m inclined to accept as evidence.

The numbers that eventually came to be most widely accepted were that 800,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi and a few Hutu moderates who tried to protect them died at the hands of Hutu extremists. Why is this impossible?

No, the accepted range is 500,000-1,000,000, with 800,000 being the most accepted number. This may seem pedantic, and to most people I’d just chalk this up as a small and inconsequential mistake, but for the deniers it serves their purposes to exaggerate the accepted estimates.

EH: It’s impossible because the number of Tutsi in Rwanda, back in 1994, was way under 800,000. In fact, the best figure one could come up with in those early years was based on the census, the Rwandan census of 1991, which gave the Tutsi numbers at about 590,000. So if all of them were wiped out, it wouldn’t come anywhere near 800,000. But all of them weren’t wiped out. After the war, the best estimate, which was by a Tutsi survivors’ group, was that there were 400,000 Tutsi still there. So let’s say there were 600,000 beforehand and afterwards there were 400,000, that means 200,000 dead Tutsi. If there were 800,000 killed and 200,000 of them were Tutsi, 600,000 of them must have been Hutu. If it was a million, 800,000 of them must have been Hutu.

Rwanda deniers absolutely bet everything on the 1991 Census. It’s their only piece of actual hard evidence that appears at first sight to contradict accepted accounts, rather than highly circumstantial information or distorted sources. But it’s been widely accepted that the census systematically undercounted Tutsis and overcounted Hutus. Both because local governments tried to overplay the number of Hutus in their areas to get more money from the pro-Hutu government, and because Tutsis often tried to pass as Hutus. The Rwandan government itself acknowledged the latter problem when it gave a report on the census in 1994, just prior to the genocide, and concluded that Tutsis were being undercounted. Gerard Prunier, who analysed the 1991 census with these issues in mind, concluded that the Tutsi population on the eve of the genocide was in fact 930,000.

As for 400,000 survivors. Well, for a start, Herman is not consistent on this number. Elsewhere he cites what appears to be the same source as 300,000 survivors. But what’s 100,000 people between friends, right? Besides which, Herman gives no reason why either this or the census figure are the best estimates. OK, I suppose a non-expert might just assume a census to be reliable. A survivors’ organisation, on the other hand, has no special significance. Maybe its estimate is a proper, scholarly one, but if so then give me a reason why it is more accurate than other scholarly estimates – to give just a couple of examples, Prunier estimates 130,000 survivors, while Alison Des Forges gives 150,000 as an estimate. There are plenty of reasons a survivors organisation might exaggerate the number or survivors – to win more government funding, more international charity, more compensation in a damages suit, etc.

And it’s completely logical that the Hutu were the greatest victims by number, because this was an invasion by a Tutsi army.

So now they’re a Tutsi army, co-ethnics with the Tutsi civilians killed, rather than a foreign Ugandan army?

I conclude, as do Christian Davenport and Allan Stam, who did a very careful study of the killings in 1994, that many more Hutu were killed than Tutsi.

No mention that Davenport and Stam also concluded that the killers were overwhelmingly Hutus, not the RPF.

AG: OK, and because this is a very sensitive subject, I want to add that this was a tragedy for everyone in Rwanda. Hutus and Tutsis died. Now let’s move on to Chapter Five, “The West’s alleged ‘failure to intervene.’” The story of the West’s failure to intervene to stop the Rwandan genocide has become the starting point of all the campaigns to go to war to “stop the next Rwanda.” What’s wrong with this story? EH: What’s wrong with it is that the West was intervening from the very beginning. The West supported Kagame’s invasion in 1990. He was trained at Fort Leavenworth.

Kagame trained at Fort Leavenworth (for a few weeks on a course he never finished, but Herman doesn’t mention that), ergo he was always a total American puppet. Well by that logic I’m concluding that the Milosevic-allied Yugoslav Army in the Croatian and Slovenian Wars was also an American puppet, as it was commanded by the Fort Leavenworth-trained General Veljko Kadijević.

Just before the shoot down of the plane on April 6, 1994, the United States caused the U.N. to withdraw some of its troops. That was an intervention.

You heard it here first, folks – the US ‘intervened’ by withdrawing troops.

This is something that permeates throughout Herman’s work, both on Rwanda and Yugoslavia. He attacks accounts that describe “intervention” as coming late or not at all, and he claims it came earlier. It doesn’t even seem to occur to him that they are talking specifically about military or at least peacekeeping interventions, while he broadens the term to just about anything he doesn’t like. In his writings in Yugoslavia, for example, he repeatedly misquotes David Owen to portray him as annoyed by US meddling and involvement in the peace process, when Owen was actually merely annoyed by US vagueness and ambiguity in the peace process.

After the shoot down and the mass killings really started, the government of Rwanda called repeatedly for a ceasefire repeatedly, but Kagame did not want it because he knew he could win. And therefore the United States did not support any ceasefire and it recognized Kagame’s government after three more months of war.

Prudence Bushnell, the main State Department official following the events in Rwanda (I think her official role was Deputy Secretary of State for Africa, or something like that), called Kagame a few times to try to persuade him to wait rather than continue with an offensive, as did UNAMIR commander Romeo Dallaire – both believed (wrongly, as it turned out) that they could persuade Clinton to endorse and intervention force. As for recognition, that’s what the world generally does – it recognises the government in power. This is particularly true for Africa. There’s plenty of reason to criticise that practice, but it’s not unique to Rwanda.

AG: I think that really needs emphasis. People have been led to believe that the massacres began and Paul Kagame and his army moved to stop them. What actually happened was that the massacres began and Paul Kagame resumed the war to win, at all costs.

Kind of hard to know that for sure. Did Kagame respond to the massacres, or did he plan to attack regardless of them? Frankly, does it matter that much?

EH: Yes, that’s true. In fact one could say that all the dead people were collateral damage. The aim of the United States was to support Kagame’s takeover, and if vast numbers of people were killed, it was a cost that we were prepared to accept. But it doesn’t look good, so we have to say that we failed to intervene; we failed to stop it. Well, in fact, we not only failed to stop it, we actually supported the mass killing. One could say that all the dead people were collateral damage. The aim of the United States was to support Kagame’s takeover, and if vast numbers of people were killed, it was a cost that we were prepared to accept. We not only failed to stop it, we actually supported the mass killing.

AG: Yes, Professor Allan Stam has reported that the Pentagon estimated collateral damage of 250,000 people, a quarter of a million. It turned out to be closer to a million. EH: I can believe it.

Bullshit to the nth degree. Brutal as Kagame was, there’s no way he could have inflicted 250,000 (let along a million) deaths just by collateral damage. I don’t think they realise it, but Garrison and Herman are essentially positing that this was the worst war in terms of the civilian casualty ratio of all time by a long way. So you know, World War II had a civilian:combatant casualty ratio of about 2:1. Particularly brutal wars see that go up to 4 or 5 to 1. The First Chechen War, considered one of the most astonishingly bad wars for civilian casualties in the modern era, reached 10:1 according to some estimates. The RPF and FAR combined lost about 10,000 men in the 1994 RPF offensive – a ratio of 25:1 at least if we accept the 250,000 figure they give here. You don’t kill half a million people just on military indifference, or even emotional bloodlust – it takes deliberation and planning.

AG: And that was Rwandan gospel singer Kizito Muhigo, a Rwandan Tutsi who is now serving 10 years in a Rwandan prison for singing those lyrics for both Hutu and Tutsi who died in the Rwandan massacres.

Muhigo is also a genocide survivor who, needless to say, does not endorse anything like Herman and Garrison’s views. The fact that one can both accept the reality of the genocide and be a strong opponent of the Kagame regime weakens the deniers’ argument rather than strengthening it.

It did deliver victor’s justice. The first part of that statement is therefore correct. That it was a great triumph of international justice is a complete fallacy because victor’s justice is not international justice. Victor’s justice is a kind of revenge and, in fact, the ICTR served as a virtual arm of Kagame and the Rwandan state. It went after only Hutu, although, as I pointed out a while ago, the majority of killings were killings of Hutu in Rwanda. But of course the RPF could not be brought to trial.

Nuremberg also only tried the defeated, you may recall. But it is a fair criticism to make of ICTR that it only tries Hutu Power figures, rather than also RPF figures guilty of atrocities. That said, I doubt Herman would be any happier if ICTR did try RPF figures as well – he has no respect for ICTY in Yugoslavia, for example, despite the fact that it has tried and convicted Croats, Bosniaks and Kosovans as well as Serbs.

Also, even if more Hutus had been killed, that would not by any stretch automatically mean that killers were not also mostly Hutu – indeed, the authors Herman depends on to conclude that more Hutu were killed – Davenport and Stam – do conclude that the killers were overwhelmingly Hutu.

EH: Actually, the belief that there was a conspiracy to commit genocide is swallowed by the ICTR, by Human Rights Watch and many, many commentators. But the tribunal itself, when it had to come to grips with this, couldn’t find any such conspiracy. They did believe that there was a genocide, and certainly there was mass killing, but a conspiracy to commit genocide would have had to take place before the shoot-down of the plane on April 6, 1994. And so when high level people in the Hutu government were brought to trial and there was an attempt to find that they actually had a plan, the tribunal couldn’t find it. In this book, we studied 15 top trials where the prosecution attempted to prove a conspiracy to commit genocide, and in all 15 the tribunal found that there was no evidence for a conspiracy. There was killing, which they called genocide, but they could not find any pre-April 6, 1994, plan to commit genocide. So they rejected this argument, but the defenders and apologists for Kagame continue to talk about this conspiracy to commit genocide.

I’m not well-versed enough in ICTR verdicts to properly address this, though I have read others claim that Herman distorts the meaning of verdicts. I would raise a couple of points, however. Firstly, the lack of a pre-existing detailed plan is perfectly consistent with a functionalist view of the genocide. Secondly, he’s confusing legal burdens of proof with historical method. A court cannot judge someone guilty simply on what evidence suggests probably happened, they need to be certain. A historian can (and indeed, often should) make such judgements.

AG: Now, Chapter Nine: “Africa’s World War: Kagame’s alleged pursuit of ‘genocidaires’ in Zaire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the death of millions.” What’s wrong with Kagame’s claim that his troops and proxy militias were in DR Congo for nearly 20 years to hunt down the Hutu genocidaires guilty of killing Rwanda’s Tutsi in 1994? EH: Well, one problem is there were no “genocidaires.” There were members of the Rwandan army that had been beaten and dispersed, but they were not genocidaires. That’s baloney. And he knows who did the killing, that he himself with his forces did most of the killing. But also, the army that was in the Congo, the old Hutu army, was no longer a real force. It had been defeated and these people had been dispersed in the Congo. They did not constitute a real threat to Rwanda.

Well, of course Herman believes there were no genocidaires, as he believes there was no genocide. But did the Hutu Power forces in eastern Congo pose a threat to Rwanda? Well, that’s debatable, and depends what exactly you think constitutes a threat. Did they stand any chance of taking over Rwanda in an invasion? Almost certainly not. Could they potentially enter western Rwanda and cause a decent bit of chaos, death and damage? Probably. They certainly weren’t the hopeless disparate crowd that Herman makes them out to be – they had formed armed and organised paramilitaries. The Hutu refugees in Congo were, in comparison to most refugee populations, very organised and regimented – Hutu Power forces maintained considerable control over them.

It’s almost certainly true that wanting to loot eastern Congo played a part in Kagame’s decision to go in, I don’t deny that.

EH: Well, the United States has been the superpower that has dominated what has happened in this area in the Congo and in Rwanda. The American people know almost nothing about the area, and since the United States has had a strong position of support for Kagame and for the invasion of the Congo, that dominated all the institutions that were associated with it. The U.N. – most of its reports – were really supportive of the invasion. They swallowed the conspiracy to commit genocide line. They provided the tribunal. It’s true that they did have some reports, like these reports I mentioned, that talked about mass killing in the Congo, but they couldn’t avoid that because this was such an enormous volume of killing, and there were millions of refugees. So the U.N. had to confront it, and they had to speak a certain amount of truth. But essentially, the U.N. supported the U.S. position. And even during the Rwanda crisis in 1994, the U.N. did nothing when Kagame put a lot of military people right in Kigali. They let him get away with it. The human rights groups also did poorly. Human Rights Watch was an outrage from the beginning, following the standard line. And the media, moving forward to April 2014, and the 20th anniversary of the 1994 massacres, have supported the Western propaganda line. When that anniversary made headlines, the bias of the mainstream media was dramatic. Thus 20 advocates for the standard model were given ten times as many bylined articles ad distinguished dissenters from that model; most of the dissenting experts couldn’t get into the mainstream media at all. And particularly terrible were the U.S. and British media. Of the 20 dissenters from the standard model, there were a grand total of 17 articles, and most of them were in France. And most of these experts that were dissenters could never get into the mainstream media at all. And particularly terrible were the U.S. and British media.

Again, it’s the “I’m right and everyone else is wrong” hubris. Creationists and Holocaust deniers also get less space in decent media than experts on evolution and the Holocaust. The reason the “dissenters” get so little space is because they have such low scholarly standards, and many of them have brazenly apparent vested interests in being biased – at least two of the figures Herman cites as “dissenters”, Christopher Black and Peter Erlinder, are defence lawyers at ICTR, and a third, Robin Philpot, is the brother of another. The figure who accounts for the vast bulk of media space (9 of 17 articles – no-one else has more than 2) on his “dissenters” list is Pierre Pean, who I suspect gets more space due to being a particularly despicable denier; unlike the others, who don’t appear to have any anti-Tutsi attitudes (they’re largely just contrarians for the sake of it, or else have a vested interest in denial), Pean routinely voices astonishing racism against Tutsis. And I don’t mean the RPF, I mean he’s claimed that all Tutsis are inherently deceivers and liars by virtue of being Tutsi, among other things (which include adapting traditional anti-Semitic tropes to the Tutsis).

Also, he conflates in his “advocates” list (people who accept the facts of the genocide) people who are indeed experts on the topic, such as Gerald Caplan, Linda Melvern, and Philip Gourevitch, with people who have zero specialist knowledge of it, like Daniel Goldhagen (who has limited scholarly credibility in the only relevant field he has some expertise in, the Holocaust) and Tony Blair (who, at the time of the genocide, was not UK Prime Minister or even leader of the Labour Party, but merely Shadow Home Secretary).

EH: Well, one very important similarity is that the United States and its allies are trying for regime change in Burundi, just as they did in Rwanda. They wanted to get rid of the Habyarimana government, a social democratic government in Rwanda. They don’t like the social democratic government in Burundi and they’re trying to get rid of it. Another thing is that they’re talking of intervention here based on the fact that the head of state of Burundi has taken a third term, which is contested on a constitutional basis. And it’s ridiculous that the great powers should be upset about a third term, when they’re supporting Kagame, who is a dictator and who has his chief contestant, Victoire Ingabire, in jail and claims to get 93 percent of the vote.

So Kagame is a dictator because he claims to get 93% of the vote in elections. That’s a fair argument, and I agree with it. Kagame is a dictator, and his elections are fraudulent. But funnily enough, Herman doesn’t apply this logic to his Hutu predecessor Habyarimana, who Herman trumpets as a social democrat. He supposedly won three elections, in 1978, 1983 and 1988. His claimed results in those elections? 98.99%, 99.97% and 99.98% respectively. But no doubt Herman will claim he was just really popular. Pierre Nkurunziza, the Burundian President who he claims leads a “wonderful democracy”, allegedly won 92% of the vote in 2010.

EH: Well, what I’d like to say is that this issue on Rwanda and the struggles there and the work of the ICTR, it’s a very complicated issue, so I would urge people to get this book that we put out, which has a lot of detail. But there are also some other really excellent books on the work of the ICTR and other international courts. There’s a very good book called “Justice Belied: The Unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice,” and it’s an anthology edited by Sébastien Chartrand and John Philpot. “Justice Belied” – it’s a critical work on the workings of the international justice system. And many of the writers are very familiar with Rwanda and the issues in Africa and it’s even argued by some of the writers that the international justice system, as it’s now working, is really an arm of U.S. foreign policy.

So apparently, these authors are all “very familiar with Rwanda”, which qualifies them to write on it. Interestingly, this apparently doesn’t apply to those they disagree with. Romeo Dallaire, despite living through the genocide as commander of the UN forces, knows nothing about it according to Herman. Alison Des Forges, who received a PhD from Yale in Rwandan history and was considered the world-leading expert on Rwanda at the time, as well as being fluent in Kinyarwanda (a skill whose holders in the Western world could probably be counted on one hand at the time), knows nothing about the country because she worked for the State Department one time. Philippe Gaillard, the head of the Red Cross staff in Rwanda in 1994, who lived in Rwanda all through the genocide, knows nothing about the country. The arrogance is astonishing.

This is why it’s impossible to convince deniers. Everyone who disagrees with them becomes the “establishment”, which they can then dismiss purely for that reason.