Why is the truth about Rwanda so elusive? | Jonathan Cook's Blog
It’s not often I praise the BBC for producing real journalism.
Further, it is with some disbelief that I find myself applauding Jane
Corbin, who I will struggle till my dying day to forgive for
her despicable piece of Israeli propaganda parading as reportage a few
years back on the Israeli navy’s attack on the Mavi Marmara aid ship to
Gaza.
Nonetheless, Corbin has now fronted a truly disturbing revisionist
documentary on Rwanda, called Rwanda’s Untold Story. The programme’s
argument is that the official story about a straightforward genocide by
the Hutu majority of Rwanda’s Tutsis 20 years ago is highly selective
and entirely misleading. One scholar suggests that the narrative we have
been fed is the equivalent of reducing the Second World War to the
Holocaust and claiming nothing else of significance happened.
What the documentary demonstrates forcefully is that Paul Kagame, the
hero of the official story of Rwanda’s genocide, was almost certainly
the biggest war criminal to have emerged from those horrifying events.
Kagame led the Tutsis’ main militia, the RPF. He almost certainly
ordered the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s plane, the trigger
for a civil war that quickly escalated into a genocide; on the best
estimates, his RPF was responsible for killing 80% of the 1 million who
died inside Rwanda, making the Hutus, not the Tutsis, the chief victims;
and his subsequent decision to extend the civil war into neighbouring
Congo, where many Hutu civilians had fled to escape the RPF, led to the
deaths of up to 5 million more.
