re posted from LA PROGRESSIVE
How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsi
On October 1, 1990, Ugandan troops invaded Rwanda from Uganda. They wore Ugandan uniforms, drove Ugandan vehicles, and carried weapons from the Ugandan arsenal. They were led by top-ranking officers in the Ugandan military who had family roots in Rwanda and called themselves the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Led by then General, now President Paul Kagame, they were determined to seize power in Rwanda and re-establish the ethno-supremacist Tutsi rule that had ended with the Hutu Power Revolution of 1959.
They succeeded after waging a four-year war, with the help of the US, and though Rwanda pretends to have ended ethnic division and exclusion, a Wikileaks diplomatic cable reveals that all top government positions are in fact held by Tutsi, and Rwanda reconciliation is a lie. Only Tutsi are allowed to publicly mourn their family members who died in the 90-day massacres of 1994, and the description “genocide against the Tutsi” is legally codified and enforced. Anyone using any other description faces prison time in Rwanda.
The invasion violated international law and Rwanda’s sovereignty, but the world barely noticed. The UN Security Council declined to even discuss it, despite the request of Rwanda’s Ambassador to the UN. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had just become President of the Organization of African Unity (OAU)—which later became the African Union—and as such, he assumed the role of “mediator” even though he was the principal aggressor and, of course, had no interest in upholding international law.
In How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsi, former Rwandan Ambassador to Paris Jean-Marie Ndagijimana writes, “Two months earlier, on 2 August, 1990, Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded its little neighbor Kuwait, and the international community went to work to put out the oil pipeline fires in what is the world’s premier oil reserve. So we poor Negroes could kill one another in silence without bothering the masters of the world who were busy elsewhere.”
The ensuing four-year war included the RPF’s horrific massacres, including targeted massacres of Hutus, but it was still barely noticed by the international community until it finally concluded in the 90-day bloodbath that included both Tutsi and Hutu genocides. Only the Tutsi genocide was broadcast around the world and later depicted in the Hollywood movie “Hotel Rwanda.”
Millions of people saw “Hotel Rwanda,” and the Rwandan Genocide thus came to be understood ahistorically, as a sudden 90-day episode of mass psychosis and bloodlust in which the Hutu majority attempted to exterminate the Tutsi minority. Hutu people have been demonized not only in Rwanda but around the world ever since. For thirty years, Rwandan President Paul Kagame has been allowed to wage a devastating war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the grounds that he is hunting Hutus who were guilty of the genocide against the Tutsi and who still threaten Rwanda.
“Stopping the next Rwanda” became the battle cry of the humanitarian warriors led by Samantha Power, who built her career on “Bystanders to Genocide,” her crusading critique of the Clinton administration for failing to stop the genocide. She insisted that we must all from hereon be “upstanders,” not bystanders to genocide, most notably in Libya and Syria, but she hasn’t called for any upstanding to stop genocide in Gaza.
How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsi is one of many important books that tell the far more complex story of both Hutu and Tutsi genocides that took place over four years in Rwanda and years after that in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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