Talk:In Praise of Blood/Archive 3

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Lead

In the lead there is:

The book argues that the RPF killing of Hutu civilians after 1990 was also a genocide, which is a minority view among historians.

It wasn't clear to me what "also" meant. Was the following meant?

The book argues that the alleged war crime of the RPF killing of Hutu civilians after 1990 was also a genocide, which is a minority view among historians.

Or was it meant that in addition to the genocide against Tutsis, there was also a genocide against Hutus? Bob K31416 (talk) 18:13, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

@Bob K31416: Would this be clearer? "The book's treatment of the 1994 Rwandan genocide against Tutsis is disputed, and its claim that RPF killing of Hutu civilians should also be described as "genocide" is a minority view among historians." HouseOfChange (talk) 20:19, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. It's not clear what "treatment" means or what about it was disputed. Here's a possible version to consider.

The book's claim that in addition to the Rwandan genocide against Tutsis there was also a genocide against Hutus, is a minority view among historians.

Bob K31416 (talk) 21:36, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

@Bob K31416: OK, thanks, taking your advice. Concerning the book's "treatment" of the Rwandan genocide, the book says very little about it, since its main topic is RPF crimes and, as the author says, "this book is not an examination of the dynamics of that 1994 genocide of Tutsis." Thus, several reviewers criticized the book for saying so little about the history of racism behind the Hutu-led government's promoting genocide against Tutsis (which they felt gave a false impression that "infiltration" by RPF intelligence played a much larger role in the genocide than it did.) HouseOfChange (talk) 23:50, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. Looking at this some more, there were some things I didn't understand. In the sentence we worked on there is "the Tutsi-led RPF". According to statements in the section Genocide referring to book reviewer's comments and excerpts from Rever's book regarding the Rwandan genocide of Tutsis,

1st para: RPF commandos "infiltrated Hutu militia and 'assisted directly in killing Tutsi at roadblocks.'"

(Tutsis killing Tutsis?)

5th para: the likelihood that the RPF had concealed Hutu genocide

(Tutsis covering up genocide against Tutsis?)

7th para: [Rever's book] negated the Rwandan genocide by blaming Tutsis for the deaths of other Tutsis

What this looks like is that Rever's book claims that Tutsis were complicit in the genocide against Tutsis and in a coverup of the genocide. Not sure what's going on here. Bob K31416 (talk) 21:57, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

The book (and I hope the article) should make clear that the English-speaking Tutsi army who invaded from Uganda (RPF) (descendants of Rwandan refugees from Hutu violence) did not consider themselves the same as the French-speaking "interior Tutsis" whose less-affluent families stayed in Rwanda under Hutu rule. The RPF's goal was to conquer Rwanda, with support from the West, as they successfully did. The RPF's intelligence arm (Ch 6 of IPOB) used "Hutu-looking" members to infiltrate Hutu militia and other groups, and as part of "blending in" they represented themselves as very "anti-Tutsi" and even took part in killing local Tutsis at checkpoints during the genocide. (The RPF estimated that a 5,000-20,000 local Tutsis would be killed--this was a price they were willing to pay for victory.[1]) From the article's book summary:

Much of Chapter 4 recounts stories from Théogène Murwanashyaka (TM), a former RPF army officer who reached out to her in 2012 and became a major informant of her book.[23] Unlike the RPF leadership, whose Tutsi families had fled Hutu rule to settle in Uganda, TM's family were what he called "interior Tutsis" – Tutsi families who had remained in Rwanda. TM came to believe that during the genocide "the RPF had sacrificed interior Tutsis" as a cost of gaining power.[19] Both TM and Belgian UNAMIR commander Luc Marchal, whom Rever interviewed, assert that the RPF could have done much to slow or stop the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus, but were more concerned with seizing power. According to Marchal, the goal was "to seize power and use the massacres as stock in trade to justify the military operations."[24]

The book's claim that RPF intelligence provoked and took part in killing local Tutsis has been over-inflated, particularly by sources originating in Rwanda, into such obviously-false claims as "She consents to recognize that some Tutsis were massacred in 1994 in Rwanda – but by other Tutsis."[2] Even very critical reviews by experts such as Gerard Caplan, Linda Melvern, and Claudine Vidal, who found many faults with the book, never claimed it had denied the reality of the 1994 genocide or that it had blamed the 1994 genocide on the RPF. The article tries to recount fairly the major criticisms against the book. But your suggestions are welcome--there are lots of links to articles where you can read more about the book's reception. HouseOfChange (talk) 23:00, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Do you have any thoughts on the "5th para" item in my message? Bob K31416 (talk) 04:22, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@Bob K31416: Based on your query about it, I re-phrased its first sentence to "Researchers Helen Hintjens and Jos van Oijen contested the likelihood that the RPF had concealed their killings of Hutus by cremating tens or hundreds of thousands of victims in Akagera National Park." Does that meet your concern or did I misunderstand it? HouseOfChange (talk) 14:01, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

That works for me.

Getting back to the sentence in the lead, I was looking for info regarding the timing of the alleged genocide against Hutus relative to the Rwandan genocide against Tutsis. Bob K31416 (talk) 16:04, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

RPF Tutsi versus "interior Tutsi

Chapter 4 of IPOB describes a perceived division between English-speaking RPF Tutsis (who invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990) and Francophone "interior Tutsis" (whose families had stayed in Rwanda despite Hutu rule.) Other authors have described the same paradoxical distinction, for example:

• "“When the genocide did start, saving Tutsi civilians was not a priority,” Prunier writes. “Worse, one of the most questionable of the RPF ideologues coolly declared in September 1994 that the ‘interior’ Tutsi”—those who had remained in Rwanda and not gone into exile in Uganda years earlier—“deserved what happened to them ‘because they did not want to flee as they were getting rich doing business'” with the former Hutu regime. He also notes that the RPF “unambiguously opposed” all talk of a foreign intervention, however unlikely, to stop the genocide, apparently because such intervention could have prevented Kagame from taking full power." [3] (Kagame’s Hidden War in the Congo, 2009.)
• "R Dallaire (n 57) 358 writes that when he expressed concern about the fate of the Tutsi, and mentioned the ability of the RPF to save them, Kagame responded: ‘There will be many sacrifices in this war. If (they) have to be killed for the cause, they will be considered as having been part of the sacrifice’ [4] (Let’s Be Friends; The United States, Post-Genocide Rwanda, and Victor’s Justice in Arusha, 2013.)
• "As a party that is made up predominantly of returning Tutsi refugees, one might expect the RPF to be sympathetic with Tutsi genocide survivors; yet, the opposite seems to be the case. Survivors are often referred to by returnees as bapfuye buhagazi meaning “the walking dead” and looked on with suspicion, (Prunier, 2009)...Reyntjens (2004) argues that Tutsi genocide survivors feel that they have become 'second-rate citizens who have been sacrificed by the RPF' (p. 180)."[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311955/ "Posttraumatic growth and religion in Rwanda: individual well-being vs. collective false consciousness" (Mental Health, Religion, and Culture, 2014.) HouseOfChange (talk) 20:02, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Timing of the alleged genocide against Hutus

Bob K31416 The alleged genocide against Hutus is mentioned in the lead because it is controversial, but I don't think the lead is the place to discuss that claim in detail. Rwandan genocide is killing of Tutsis by Hutus that occurred in few months of 1994. It is attested by multiple experts that RPF's ethnically-targeted mass killing of Hutu civilians began in 1990, continued throughout the Rwandan Civil War inside Rwanda, and later included killing Rwandan Hutu civilians who had fled to Zaire. Our article Double genocide theory (Rwanda) misinterprets IPOB as saying "genocide" by RPF began in 1994. It is citing the book's page 232 which says the Habyarimana plane crash triggered killings in 1994, but previous pages described earlier mass killings of Hutus.

It is not controversial that the RPF did mass killings of Hutu civilians, first in Rwanda and later in Zaire. What is controversial is Rever's calling those killings "genocide." Claudine Vidal, whose review strongly criticized IPOB for describing RPF mass killings of Hutus as "genocide" had herself written previously, "Under the politically motivated leadership of General Kagame, the RPF engaged in the organized slaughter of Hutus - after, during, and even before the genocide of the Tutsis."[5]

The book does not say that there was a back-and-forth genocide in 1994, with everybody genociding everyone else. The book does say (p 223):

The truth, no matter what aid donors seem to believe, is that the RPF has never stopped the violence. Kagame killed before the genocide. He killed during the genocide. And he killed after the genocide.

Do you think the article could somehow make this clearer? HouseOfChange (talk) 18:11, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Maybe. Did the book explicitly say when genocide against Hutus started, i.e. used the word genocide and gave a start day or year? Bob K31416 (talk) 21:18, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@Bob K31416: No, it doesn't. The book uses the word "genocide" almost exclusively to refer to the 1994 genocide committed against Tutsis by Hutus. Rever does, in passing, during her fifteen chapters on various RPF crimes, quote several examples of claims by others that the RPF committed genocide:

1. On pp 51-52, she directly quotes a passage from DRC Mapping Exercise Report about war crimes in DRC/Zaire: "the systematic and widespread attacks described in this report reveal a number of damning elements that, if proven before a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide."
2. p 97 directly quotes a cable sent from UNAMIR to UN "Gersony put forward evidence of what he described as calculated, pre-planned, systematic atrocities against Hutus by the RPA whose methodology and scale, he concluded (30,000 massacred) could only have been part of a plan implemented from the highest echelons of the [now Tutsi-led] government. In his view, these were not individual cases of revenge and summary trials but a pre-planned, systematic genocide against the Hutus."
3. p 147: 2008 Spanish indictment Judge Fernando Andreu Merelles issued "arrest warrants for forty of Kagame's senior commanders on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, terrorism, and other serious offenses. The warrants related to the murders of the Spaniards but also to the mass killings of Hutus by Kagame's Tutsi army in Rwanda during the genocide and in Congo in the late 1990s."
4. p 165 directly quotes British judge Douglas Marks Moore, who worked with ICTR, describing RPF actions as genocide, "'I saw it quite specifically as two genocides there was a mini genocide and a larger one.'"

IPOB is short, with its two Appendices starting on 237. It is not until page 231 that Rever states her own opinion that, in addition to the Hutu genocide against Tutsis, RPF crimes against Hutus should also be considered "genocide," saying "The legal definition of genocide has nothing to do with numbers killed" and citing the UN definition "the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." (emphasis in IPOB, not in UN original.)

In the very next sentence, she begins to describe RPF-coordinated killings of Hutus that began immediately after Habyarimana's plane went down, saying that RPF troops were followed by "mobile death squads..committing genocide against Hutus." She cites what informants told her about the motives of ethnic-based killings, etc. Page 234 mentions pre-1994 killings of Hutus that the RPF needed to hide from Western observers and alleges that RPF troops "continued to commit genocide against Hutus in 1994 and in the following years."

Short answer: IPOB clearly claims post-1994 actions by the RPF were "genocide," a claim first made on page 231 out of 237 pages of text. IPOB describes elsewhere pre-1994 events where the RPF killed Hutu civilians, but it does not explicitly label those events as "genocide." HouseOfChange (talk) 02:19, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Near the end of your message there are the following two comments,

Page 234 ... alleges that RPF troops "continued to commit genocide against Hutus in 1994 and in the following years."

IPOB describes elsewhere pre-1994 events where the RPF killed Hutu civilians, but it does not explicitly label those events as "genocide."

What these two excerpts from your message suggest to me is that IPOB first described pre-1994 killing of Hutus without using the word genocide, but later in the book referred to them as genocide. If I understand this correctly, it says that IPOB refers to genocide against Hutus beginning before 1994 and continuing in 1994 and in the following years. Bob K31416 (talk) 15:44, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

@Bob K31416: In its last chapter, the book explicitly describes post-1994 events as "genocide." It was widely criticized for using the word "genocide" to describe any actions by the RPF. It wasn't clear to me from re-reading the book, and it is not mentioned by any of the RS discussing the book, whether IPOB implied a distinction whereby targeted killing of Hutus before 1994 was not genocide but targeted killing of Hutus later was genocide. IPOB doesn't specify a date at which alleged genocide started. Do you think it's important enough to the book, or to the controversy about the book, that the article needs to go there? HouseOfChange (talk) 16:42, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

In the lead, the Rwandan genocide of Tutsis is given as 1994 so it seems natural for the reader to want to know the year or years of the alleged genocide against Hutus. One way around that is to delete "1994" in the lead and leave that for the rest of the article. Also in the rest of the article would be mention of the various killings of the Hutus and when they occurred, and then saying that Rever referred to a genocide against Hutus. Bob K31416 (talk) 19:24, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

The article's Content section is already quite detailed, but here are the book's main allegations of RPF mass-murders:

• Chapters 1-2 describe RPF killing Hutus in Zaire in 1996-97, described from many other sources as "Massacres of Hutus during the First Congo War," which cites IPOB p 12 blaming RPF for deaths of "200,000 Rwandan Hutu and Congolese Hutu in Zaïre/DRC in 1996-97 and countless Hutus who returned to Rwanda from refugee camps between 1995 and 1998."
• Chapter 5 introduces the RPF's Intelligence group, which Rever says organized most killings of Hutus.
• Chapters 6 - 10 focus on RPF violence against Hutus inside Rwanda 1994-1997. (Chapters 11-14 focus on alleged RPF crimes other than mass killings of Hutu civilians.)
• Chapter 15 begins with stories from a retired Catholic missionary about RPF violence against Hutus in 1991, soon after they invaded from Uganda, and continues with many other accounts of RPF violence, quoting extensively from an RPF co-founder named Alphonse Furuma (Gerard Caplan was skeptical of Furuma's claims) but also from NYT and Amnesty International.
• It is in the concluding section, beginning on page 228, whose title is "Conclusion: Remembering the dead," that Rever sums up the main message of her book, which is that "All sides of the story must be told, and nothing can remain hidden, if Rwanda is ever to heal." She outlines the story of the genocide against Tutsi, laying the blame for it solidly on Hutu hardliners and Hutu militia. Then she returns to her theme of RPF war crimes (including accusing them of promoting 1994 killings of internal Tutsis) , concluding with a paragraph on pages 234-235 where she accuses the RPF of literal "genocide" against Hutus in 1994 and thereafter. The section ends with the story of a single death, on April 11, 1994, of a Hutu politician, allegedly tortured and shot by the RPF. His widow says that the family never knew what happened to his body, was not able to seek justice for his death, and "We have to pretend that nothing is wrong. But I will never accept it." Maybe I am losing the thread of your question, so feel free to restate it. HouseOfChange (talk) 01:03, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Regarding the last sentence in my message, "Also in the rest of the article...", it looks like the Content section already covers it. Bob K31416 (talk) 21:21, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

After your recent edit, for reasons similar to "1994" discussion, consider an addition with the result "100 day Rwandan genocide", or equivalently removing "multi-year".

Just noticed another thing about the recent edit. With the new construction, I don't think it's as clear that the claim only refers to the genocide against Hutus and not also to the Rawanda genocide against Tutsis. Bob K31416 (talk) 23:02, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Good idea, thanks. HouseOfChange (talk) 01:03, 11 February 2021 (UTC)