XPost: soc.history, soc.rights.human, soc.culture.african   
   XPost: alt.books, rec.arts.books   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   The Mass Murder We Don’t Talk About   
      
   Helen Epstein   
      
   New York Review of Books,7 June 2018 issue   
      
   Review of:   
   In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front   
      
   by Judi Rever   
   Random House Canada, 277 pp., CAN$32.00   
      
   During the 1990s, unprecedented violence erupted in Central Africa. In   
   Sudan, the civil war intensified; in Rwanda, there was genocide; in   
   Congo millions died in a conflict that simmers to this day; and in   
   Uganda, millions more were caught between a heartless warlord and an   
   even more heartless military counterinsurgency.   
      
   This wasn’t supposed to happen. Although the US had for decades backed   
   dictatorships and right-wing rebels across the continent, George H.W.   
   Bush had declared in his 1989 inaugural speech that “a new breeze   
   [was] blowing…. For in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the   
   dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing…. Great nations of   
   the world are moving toward democracy through the door to freedom.”   
      
   Bush and his successors supported peace on much of the African   
   continent by funding democracy promotion programs and sanctioning, or   
   threatening to sanction, South Africa and other countries if their   
   leaders didn’t allow multiparty elections and free political   
   prisoners. But in Uganda, Ethiopia, and a small number of other   
   countries, the Bush and Clinton administrations lavished development   
   and military aid on dictators who in turn funneled weapons to   
   insurgents in Sudan, Rwanda, and Congo. In this way, Washington helped   
   stoke the interlinked disasters that have claimed millions of lives   
   since the late 1980s and still roil much of eastern and central Africa   
   today. The complicity of the US in those disasters has not yet been   
   sufficiently exposed, but Judi Rever’s In Praise of Blood explores how   
   Washington helped obscure the full story of the genocide that   
   devastated Rwanda during the 1990s and cover up the crimes of the   
   Rwandan Patriotic Front (PF), which has ruled the country ever since.   
      
   The familiar story about the Rwandan genocide begins in April 1994,   
   when Hutu militias killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, mostly with   
   machetes and other simple weapons. The RPF, a Tutsi-dominated rebel   
   army, advanced through the mayhem and finally brought peace to the   
   country in July.   
      
   The RPF’s leader, Paul Kagame, eventually became president of Rwanda   
   and remains in power today. He has overseen a technocratic economic   
   revival, the installation of one of the best information technology   
   networks in Africa, and a sharp decline in maternal and child   
   mortality.   
      
   Political dissent is suppressed, many of Kagame’s critics are in jail,   
   and some have even been killed—but his Western admirers tend to   
   overlook this. Bill Clinton has praised Kagame as “one of the greatest   
   leaders of our time,” and Tony Blair’s nonprofit Institute for Global   
   Change continues to advise and support his government.   
      
   Over the years, less valiant portraits of Kagame and the RPF have   
   appeared in academic monographs and self-published accounts by Western   
   and Rwandan academics, journalists, and independent researchers,   
   including Filip Reyntjens, André Guichaoua, Edward Herman, Robin   
   Philpot, David Himbara, Gérard Prunier, Barrie Collins, and the BBC’s   
   Jane Corbin.   
      
   Taken together, they suggest that the RPF actually provoked the war   
   that led to the genocide of the Tutsis and committed mass killings of   
   Hutus before, during, and after it. In Praise of Blood is the most   
   accessible and up-to-date of these studies. Rever’s account begins in   
   October 1990, when several thousand RPF fighters invaded Rwanda from   
   neighboring Uganda. The RPF was made up of refugees born to Rwandan   
   parents who fled anti-Tutsi pogroms during the early 1960s and were   
   determined to go home. Its leaders, including Kagame, had fought   
   alongside Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni in the war that brought   
   him to power in 1986. They’d then been appointed to senior Ugandan   
   army positions—Kagame was Museveni’s chief of military intelligence in   
   the late 1980s—which they deserted when they invaded Rwanda.In August   
   1990, two months before the RPF invasion, the Hutu-dominated Rwandan   
   government had actually agreed, in principle, to allow the refugees to   
   return. The decision had been taken under enormous international   
   pressure, the details were vague, and the process would likely have   
   dragged on, or not occurred at all. But the RPF invasion preempted a   
   potentially peaceful solution to the refugee conundrum. For three and   
   a half years, the rebels occupied a large swath of northern Rwanda   
   while the Ugandan army supplied them with weapon, in violation of the   
   UN Charter and Organization of African Unity rules.   
      
   Washington knew what was going on but did nothing to stop it. On the   
   contrary, US foreign aid to Uganda doubled in the years after the   
   invasion, and in 1991, Uganda purchased ten times more US weapons than   
   in the preceding forty years combined. During the occupation, roughly   
   a million Hutu peasants fled RPF-controlled areas, citing killings,   
   abductions, and other crimes. An Italian missionary working in the   
   area at the time told Rever that the RPF laid landmines around springs   
   that blew up children, and invaded a hospital in a town called   
   Nyarurema and shot nine patients dead. According to Alphonse Furuma,   
   one of the founders of the RPF, the purpose was to clear the area,   
   steal animals, take over farms, and, presumably, scare away anyone who   
   might think of protesting.   
      
   The Ugandan army, which trained the RPF, had used similar tactics   
   against its own Acholi people during the 1980s and 1990s, so these   
   accounts seem plausible.   
      
   At least one American was angry about the RPF invasion. US ambassador   
   to Rwanda Robert Flaten witnessed how it sent shock waves throughout   
   the country, whose majority-Hutu population had long feared a Tutsi   
   attack from Uganda. Flaten urged the Bush administration to impose   
   sanctions on Uganda for supplying the RPF, noting that Saddam Hussein   
   had invaded Kuwait only two months earlier and been met with   
   near-universal condemnation, a UN Security Council demand that he   
   withdraw, and a US military assault.   
      
   By contrast, the Bush administration, which was then supplying most of   
   Uganda’s budget through foreign aid, treated the RPF invasion of   
   Rwanda with nonchalance. When it took place, Museveni happened to be   
   visiting the US. He assured State Department officials that he’d known   
      
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