Rwanda weaponizes the Rwandan Genocide to justify its violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), just as Israel weaponizes the Holocaust to justify its violence in Gaza and the West Bank.
Rwanda is the Israel of Africa. The two nations reinforce one another in a longstanding victims’ pact, while the West reinforces both. The three commonly join forces to promote Western “humanitarian interventions” like those in Libya and Syria, which are in fact wars of aggression.
The foundation of Israel and Rwanda’s victims’ pact was laid a year after then General Paul Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) won the 1990-1994 Rwandan Civil War and seized power in July 1994. Robin Philpot, in his book Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa, from Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction writes:
Two specific events that often go unnoticed contributed to the official sanctioning of the use of the word “genocide” to describe the entire Rwandan tragedy. The first was a [1995 ] conference held in Kigali organized by the Office of the President of Rwanda attended by Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Michael Berenbaum of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others. Both were invited to make proposals on the memorialization of genocide. Efraim Zuroff then became an advisor to the Rwandan government in its hunt for génocidaires. From that point on Zionists throughout the world were prepared to share the use of the term with Rwandan Tutsis, which has never been the case for the Armenians, largely because of Israel’s strategic alliance with Turkey. [This alliance is no more .] The second event less than a year later was Paul Kagame’s official visit to Israel where he was received with all honors from Benjamin Netanyahu.
Zuroff and Berenbaum helped the RPF distill what Philpot calls the “simplistic and simple-minded tale” or, quoting Flaubert, what became “the right and proper tale.” It is the tale of demon Hutus massacring hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days time, which was later spread around the world by the 2004 Hollywood movie Hotel Rwanda. It doesn’t include the four-year war that ended in the infamous 100 days, Kagame’s army’s massacres of hundreds of thousands of Hutus, or the assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents that triggered the bloodbath. Kagame’s former staff, including his army chief, Kayumba Nyamwasa, told the BBC and other outlets that Kagame ordered the assassinations but he has never been convicted in a court of law.
The “simplistic and simple-minded tale” became the received narrative, which Kagame and the rest of Rwanda’s ruling Tutsi elite have used to justify their violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as Israel uses the Holocaust to justify its violence in Gaza and the West Bank.
For nearly three decades, Rwanda has invoked the “genocide against the Tutsi” and said it’s hunting Hutu “genocidaires” in DRC while in fact seizing Congolese territory and resources and displacing Congolese, possibly even with the goal of balkanizing DRC. Israel invokes the Holocaust and uses “destroying Hamas” as an excuse to make Gaza unlivable and ethnically cleanse it of Palestinians.
Israel points to Rwanda to reinforce its “Never again!” mantra, and Rwanda does the same in turn. However, the more complex Rwandan narrative does not lend itself to equation of the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide.
In 2012, Rwanda was one of three of 54 African member states that abstained on UN General Assembly Resolution 67/19 , which upgraded Palestine to non-member observer state status in the United Nations General Assembly.
In 2014, Rwanda was one of two African nations then sitting on the UN Security Council that abstained on a vote to call for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem and recognize a Palestinian state by 2017. (The resolution needed a minimum of nine votes and got only 8, but the US would have vetoed it in any case.)
In 2017, Kagame became the first African leader to address the American–Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual forum.
In 2019, Israel opened its first embassy in Rwanda, which Netanyahu described as “part of the expansion of Israel’s presence in Africa.”
The false equation
In the decades following the 1995 conference with Rwanda’s Zionist advisors, the Rwandan government relentlessly accused even the mildest dissenters of “genocide denial,” which, with Zionist help, it likened to Holocaust denial. The government made genocide denial a crime in Rwanda and packed its prisons with alleged perpetrators.
It also secured the West’s unflagging support for arrests, prosecutions and deportations of Hutu refugees, especially dissenting refugees like Dr. Léopold Munyakazi, who gave a lecture at the University of Delaware in which he characterized the Rwandan Civil War as a class conflict. Witnesses suddenly come forth to testify against refugees like Dr. Munyakazi decades after their alleged genocide crimes.
In 2011, I attended the “Third International Genocide Conference ” at Sacramento State University, where I filed an assault complaint against the Rwandan contingent who surrounded and grabbed hold of me after I dared to ask a few questions and cite a list of UN reports countering their narrative.
In November 2012, a UK Parliamentary committee published my account of that incident when they were reconsidering aid to Rwanda because of its M23 militia’s war and atrocities in Congo. The June 2012 Addendum to the 2012 UN Group of Experts on DRC Report, which can be accessed here , had concluded that Rwanda “directly assisted” in the creation of M23, recruited Rwandan youth to join M23, provided weapons and ammunition to M23, allowed M23 to move in and out of Rwandan territory, and sent Rwandan troops into DRC to reinforce M23.
The UK suspended some aid to Rwanda that year, as did the EU, the US, and other European countries, but only briefly.
The received narrative about the Rwandan Genocide was also reinforced by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), which was generously funded and largely controlled by the US, the undisputed global hegemon upon its founding in November 1994. The court assumed it prima facie, then prosecuted only Hutus from its creation in 1994 to its dissolution in 2015, then in the residual legal mechanism created thereafter. At least one Chief Prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, attempted to investigate Kagame’s army for war crimes, but she was summarily fired .
This is not to say that there was no Tutsi genocide. However, there is abundant evidence that there was also a Hutu genocide . The RPF killed hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutus before, during, and after the final 100 days of the Rwandan Civil War, as documented by Canadian author Judi Rever in her book “In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front ,” and her extensively documented Mail & Guardian exposé written with Benedict Moran.
Kagame and his ruling elite so rely on the world’s acceptance of the “genocide against the Tutsi” narrative that they threatened not only Rever but even her two grammar school age daughters as she was working to finish the book. On a research trip to Belgium, secret service operatives appeared to warn her that Rwandan operatives were in the country to assassinate her and that they would be at her side for the remainder of her trip. She finally developed a stress-induced auto-immune disease, but finished the book nevertheless.
US Support for the “Genocide against the Tutsi” narrative
The US backed the Tutsi army that prevailed in the four-year Rwandan Civil War. Shortly after its victory, President Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake made it clear that the US was prepared to embrace its “genocide against the Tutsi” narrative even before it was further crafted, with Zionist help, at the 1995 Kigali conference.
During a July 29, 1994 press conference about new US military operations in Rwanda, Lake was asked whether Tutsis and Hutus would both welcome US troops arriving to secure the Kigali Airport, and he responded, “My understanding is that the RPF, who are, as I said, in control of Kigali and who were the apparent victors in the conflict, have said that they would welcome this. The rump Hutu government we are not in touch with and in my view we should not be because, as we have said before, many of them were responsible for genocidal acts in Rwanda and we do not consider them to be in a position of authority in Rwanda and indeed, in a physical sense, they are not now.”
Two years later, in 1996, Rwanda invaded Congo, which was then Zaire, pursuing Hutu refugees, then joined a coalition of forces that drove out Mobuto Sese Seko, the dictator that the US and Belgium had installed after assassinating Congo’s first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Newsweek described the conclusion of that campaign in a report titled Washington’s Africa Move , which said that the US had used Rwandan and coalition proxy forces to establish its primacy in Congo, which was then Zaire, and Central Africa.
Stopping “the next Rwanda”
The West also, in supreme irony, made Israel and Rwanda cornerstones of its Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine even as Israel committed ever escalating atrocities in Gaza and Rwanda did the same in DRC.
In the run-up to the 2011 US/NATO wars on Libya and Syria, the corporate press was filled with exhortations to “stop the next Rwanda.”
While the war on Libya was underway, Obama produced his Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities , which read, “Sixty six years since the Holocaust and 17 years after Rwanda, the United States still lacks a comprehensive policy framework and a corresponding interagency mechanism for preventing and responding to mass atrocities and genocide.”
In November 2011, just over a month after the assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Susan Rice flew first to Libya, then to Rwanda. There, in a speech at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, she likened the danger that Qaddafi would have committed genocide to the danger that Rwanda had faced 17 years earlier, when the world failed to intervene. “Many of us heard strong echoes of 1994 when Muammar Qaddafi promised he would root out the people of Benghazi and go house to house killing innocents like ‘rats’ as he called them.
In May this year Rwanda and Germany presented a resolution to the UN General Assembly to create an international day of remembrance for the Srebrenica Genocide, helping shore up another cornerstone of the West’s Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Though no one, including Serbia, disputes that a mass atrocity was committed at Srebrenica, many dispute its characterization as genocide. The resolution passed with 84 in favor, 19 against, 68 abstaining, and 22 not present. Some voted no because they disagree with the genocide characterization of Srebrenica and/or because the ongoing genocide in Gaza is unacknowledged. DRC’s ambassador voted no because Rwanda had submitted the resolution while, he said, committing genocide in DRC.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com. You can help support her work on Patreon .
