“My worldview changed forever when I discovered the degree to which Western officials acquiesced to—and at times actively assisted—a regime that butchered women and children in the forests I’d visited. Even now, when politicians in the West speak of the democratic values they hold dear, my heart turns cold.”
—Judi Rever

”In my life I’ve never seen a situation where so much evidence was collected and no indictment was issued.”
—former investigator for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

In 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded Rwanda from Uganda in the north. An army formed by the refugee sons of the hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis who had fled pogroms in the 1950s and ’60s, the RPF was attempting to reclaim the land that had been lost years before. Since the 1960s when the colonizing Belgians had left Rwanda, the country’s government had been run by the majority Hutu ethnic group (who comprised about 85 % of the population). With the 1990 arrival of the RPF, the country erupted into a civil war, which by 1993 had reached a precarious stalemate. That year, the Arusha Peace Accords were signed, stipulating that a provisional, power-sharing government be formed. This government was to provide all concerned parties with a place at the table. Members of the RPF resided in Kigali and were part of this government. However, all was far from well.

On April 6, 1994, the presidential plane was shot down by two missiles. The Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, and the Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, were both killed—as was everyone else who’d been aboard. The crash site was never properly investigated. Whether extremist Hutus or the RPF were responsible remains a contentious issue. Either way, the genocide had been sparked. The official story is that the Hutus had launched the missiles, but as Judi Rever’s stunning and meticulously researched book shows over and over again, just about everything people think they know about the Rwandan genocide needs to be questioned and revised.

Many of us are aware that almost a million Rwandans—the majority of them Tutsi, but some of them moderate Hutu—were killed in the three months following the assassination of President Habyarimana in April 1994. The machete was the preferred weapon. An extremist Hutu paramilitary youth group—known as the Interahame—set up roadblocks in Kigali and, in broad daylight, killed Tutsis in cold blood. Neighbour turned against neighbour. Even those who sheltered in churches were not spared. General Romeo Dallaire, who headed the 25,000-strong peacekeeping mission aimed at upholding the Arusha Accord, pleaded for assistance from the U.N. and the international community. No one did a thing. The U.S. wouldn’t even agree to jamming the radio waves from an extremist Hutu station, which hour-after-hour spewed hate about the Tutsi “cockroaches” and incited violence . The killing only stopped, so we are told, when the RPF and Paul Kagame (its commander, who has been the president of Rwanda since 2000) seized control of the country.

Since the genocide, Kagame has been something of a darling in the eyes of the West. Bill Clinton, who disregarded Romeo Dallaire’s calls for assistance on the brink of and during the Rwandan genocide—and who later disingenuously claimed he knew nothing about what was really going on there—has praised Kagame as “one of the greatest leaders of our time”. In 2009, the Clinton Foundation honoured him with its Global Citizen Award “in recognition of his leadership in public service that has improved the lives of people of Rwanda”. Tony Blair is a pal; Blair’s wife, Cherie, represented a member of Kagame’s inner circle, General Karenzi Karake, when an international warrant for his arrest for war crimes was issued in 2015. Since the genocide, the West has poured a steady stream of money into Rwanda, likely to atone for its guilt. The U.S. and the U.K are the biggest donors, but even Canada has supported the Kagame regime to the tune of 550 million dollars (from the time of the genocide until now). While post-genocide Rwanda is considered an economic success story, a growing body of compelling evidence indicates that the dominant narrative—in which Paul Kagame and his men figure as heroes who stopped a genocide and brought a country back from the brink—is, according to Rever and number of scholars and investigators, a gross misrepresentation of the facts. The real story is a far more dark and complex one. It should be noted that Rever states explicitly in her book that she neither disputes that extreme ethnically motivated Hutu-on-Tutsi violence occurred nor denies that there was indeed a genocide. She has, however, done enough work to know, to expose—and to be threatened by the Rwandan government for knowing and exposing—the dark story of a parallel Tutsi-on-Hutu genocide of equal magnitude.

Rever’s first inklings of there being another layer to the official story came when, as a young journalist working for Radio France Internationale, she travelled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) in May 1997 to cover the humanitarian crisis there. Since the genocide, hundreds of thousands of displaced Hutus had been living in refugee camps in this country, too scared to return to Rwanda. Both the U.N. High Commission and scholars of the genocide estimated that 93% of these Hutus were “genuine refugees deserving of protection”. If only 7% of Hutus were perpetrators, why had so many fled Rwanda in the first place, and why were they so reluctant to return home? The RPF.

In the years immediately after the genocide, Kagame had sent his army into Zaire/Congo ostensibly to “clean out” the genocidal elements who (he claimed) were hiding in the massive refugee camps. In 1997, however, Kagame’s RPF and his Ugandan allies were dedicated to gaining control of Congo’s considerable natural resources. Coltan, a rare mineral and a critical component in electronic devices such as cell phones and laptops, was of particular interest. With the support of the West (notably the Bechtel Corporation—“one of the most powerful and secretive corporate entities in the world” and numerous big mining outfits), Kagame’s forces along with his Ugandan allies had toppled President Mobutu, the Zairean dictator who’d been in power for 32 years. These Rwandan-backed rebel forces had displaced thousands of Congolese in their pursuit of natural resources, but they had also continued their attacks on Rwandan Hutu refugees. The rebels relied on humanitarian agencies to collect refugees in one spot so that they could be efficiently massacred. Women and children were certainly still hunted in the jungles of the Congo, but having them all in one place was obviously a less energy-intensive means of eliminating them.

During her frightening 1997 trip to the D.R.C.—even then she had been threatened because of the information she was gathering— Judi Rever spoke to many refugees, most of them seriously ill: diseased and severely malnourished. Theirs was a narrative of terror, of being chased and hunted by the RPF, first in Rwanda during the genocide, and now in the Congo. Among those Rever interviewed were a number of orphans.

Over the years, Rever continued to meet Rwandans and hear their testimonies, but a turning point for her came in 2007 when she attended a conference on genocide held in Montreal and met Gregory Stanton, who had been employed by the U.S. State Department, had been a U.N. human rights monitor, and had worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He told her that aid agencies and governments were aware of the massacres in 1996 in Zaire/D.R.C., and that he and his investigative team had found evidence of the cremation of bodies in and around Kisangani (DRC) where a number of the massacres had occurred. Stanton also told her that he believed the American government helped to plan the invasion of Zaire.

In 2015, after years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews with Rwandans (many of them former RPF soldiers and officers who had fled Rwanda and were haunted by the past), Rever received a secret document from a Rwandan whistleblower who was associated with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The e-mailed file was a compendium of crimes against civilians, the vast majority of them Hutu, committed by members of Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front during the Rwandan genocide. The information had been gathered by criminal investigators in the Office of the Prosector of the ICTR. While the ICTR eventually convicted 61 individuals—the war crimes related only to Hutu-on-Tutsi violence. The evidence of a parallel Tutsi-on-Hutu genocide (involving hundreds of thousands of civilians) would be suppressed by the criminal court, allowing the incomplete, widely accepted narrative to continue. The leader of the Rwandan government, a war criminal, who was running an increasingly repressive, surveillance state could continue in his ways with impunity.

Based as it is on hundreds of interviews, ICTR testimonies, and documents—U.N. and other—Rever’s book tells a story the world needs to know: Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front embarked on a series of planned, discreet, systematic massacres a mere 36 hours after President Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down on April 6, 1994. As the RPF moved through and gained control of the Rwandan countryside, its preferred technique was entrapment. This consisted of notifying Hutu peasants that they would receive food, drink, and security when they gathered at a designated spot, sometimes a stadium or a school. Once the victims were in place, soldiers lobbed grenades or sprayed them with machine-gun fire. Weaker victims could be eliminated with more low-lech methods: hoes to the head. Eventually, killing fields were set up near Akagera National Park, along the Tanzanian border, where the evidence could be disposed of—i.e., the bodies of the Hutu victims could be incinerated. Rever states that the U.S. (and the U.N. by extension) with its sophisticated satellite and remote sensing surveillance technology was certainly aware of the mass graves, the bulldozers being used to dig pits, and the ongoing burning that was taking place. Peacekeepers on the ground did not have access to these RPF controlled areas.

But why would the RPF kill completely innocent people? Ethnic cleansing. Territories needed to be cleared for the hundreds of thousands of Tutsis who would be returning to Rwanda from Uganda, Tanzania, and Zaire where they’d lived in exile for decades. Livestock of the Hutu victims was not killed, as it would be valuable to the repatriated Tutsis. Only the human owners were exterminated

This book is a harrowing read. The little I have related here barely scratches the surface of its contents. Rever discusses much more, including post-genocide attacks on Tutsis along the country’s eastern border perpetrated by the RPF itself. Kagame blamed these “false flag attacks” on extremist Hutu insurgents living in nearby Zaire. In this way, he could justify (to the international community) the RPF’s entry into Zaire to “clean out” genocidal elements from the Hutu refugee camps there. Among other topics covered (in no particular order) are the following: the structure of the RPF, its recruitment and training of Tutsi civilians within Rwanda; the suppression of criminal tribunal investigators’ reports (about the multitude of heinous crimes that ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutus); the highly irregular relationship between the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the United States; the West’s embrace of the monstrous Kagame; the April 6th, 1994 presidential plane crash; and, finally, the Rwandan government’s ongoing attacks on dissidents, ex-RPF, and journalists like Rever herself. This is a very brave book, the writing of which has quite understandably taken a toll on the author and her family.

Rever assumes her audience has knowledge of the generally accepted narrative about the Rwandan genocide. I had read Roméo Dallaire’s book as well as a few other memoirs and nonfiction pieces about Rwanda several years back, so I knew the “official” narrative. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s not hard to find a basic outline online. Rever’s book does place demands on the reader. She tends to circle topics several times, and I wonder if the book could have been organized differently for greater clarity. However, this feels like a minor quibble. Rever consistently writes well and clearly. She provides a chart detailing the structure of the RPF as well as a list of the central characters/perpetrators in the appendices. I would have appreciated the inclusion of a map so that I could locate the many significant sites as I read about them.

Given the West’s guilt about its inaction during the Rwandan genocide its complicity in the looting of the Congo, and its willingness to turn a blind eye to the documented atrocities committed by Rwandan forces in the Congo, it is perhaps not surprising that there has been so little press coverage of this stunning and disturbing book. Two big Canadian papers, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star have run excerpts of In Praise of Blood in recent weekend editions, but as of this writing, I am unaware of any Canadian newspaper or magazine actually reviewing the book. Is it possible that its contents are just too challenging and explosive to touch? Is it perhaps unacceptable to consider a narrative that provides a perspective so different from the one Dallaire presented in his Shake Hands with the Devil? Is it related to the fact that Canada is one of the many countries that has cordial relations with Rwanda and continues to offer aid to Kagame’s repressive regime? I don’t know. What is clear is that Paul Kagame knows who Judi Rever is. He doesn’t like what she knows.

For those interested, I am providing links to two excellent interviews with Rever:

http://www.cpac.ca/en/programs/perspective-with-alison-smith/episodes/59589508#p...

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-full-episode-1.4602119/... ( )