Corrected on November 20th:
On November 27th there will be a panel at Emory University regarding Rwanda genocide denial. These deniers cannot, of course, deny that the killings took place but they try to depict them as the "normal" course of business in Rwanda.
The mantra of these deniers is: Tutsis have been killing Hutus for years. This was an example of the Hutus striking back.
Other than simply being incorrect, this mantra essentially blames the victims for their own brutal deaths. What will surprise most readers of this blog -- it certainly surprised me -- is that one of the people who has been most active in spreading this form of denial is Paul Rusesabagina.
If his name does not ring a bell, think Hotel Rwanda. He is the central character. He is speaking on college campuses, including Emory and serious scholars in many fields are deeply worried. At Emory these scholars include people who worked in Rwanda for years prior to the genocide and who witnessed the horrors up close.
This is not simply a matter of historical revisionism but also an attempt to destabilize the current government of Rwanda which has, apparently, made tremendous strides in creating stability and reinvigorating the economy.
On November 27th there will be a high powered panel to address this issue:
Beyond Hollywood’s Rwanda: Truth and Justice, Security and Development
Location: Glenn Memorial Auditorium, Emory University
Time: Tuesday, Nov. 27 6-8 PM
Participants:
Andrew Young Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN and Mayor of Atlanta, Chairman, Goodworks Intl
James Kimonyo Rwandan Ambassador to the U.S.
Deborah E. Lipstadt Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies
Egide Karuranga Virginia State University Professor, Genocide survivor at the Hotel des
Miles Collines
Gregory S. Gordon University of North Dakota Law Professor, Former legal Officer for International Criminal Court Tribunal for Rwanda
Jeffrey Richter Senior Historian, US Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations
Limited Seating. Free Tickets available at DUC information desk, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory School of Law, and other Atlanta locations.
Details at
www.rzhrg.org
Ticketing Information:
http://www.rzhrg.org/Ticketing_information.pdf
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INDEPTH: ROMEO DALLAIRE
Romeo Dallaire
CBC News Online | Oct. 24, 2003 Updated March 9, 2005
The ordinary demands of life are now a comfort to retired general Romeo Dallaire.
His children, Catherine and Guy, look for chances to spend time with their father, such as the annual Quebec ritual of assembling the winter garage. They missed a lot during his years as a soldier and again during his painful recovery. When nothing gave comfort. When his heart and mind were thousands of kilometres away in another land.
Dallaire's searing memory of his time in that other land is now a book. Shake Hands With the Devil – The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.
He describes the machete-wielding government-sponsored forces who went on a killing spree in 1994 and murdered 800,000 people in 100 days. It's a damning indictment of world leaders and UN bureaucrats who failed to stop the genocide. Even to write the story was painful.
"I actually think it's having relived that year in Rwanda and the four months of the genocide through writing the book. I mean, I actually had to relive it. You can't write it unless you relive it," Dallaire says.
After Rwanda, Dallaire blamed himself for everything. He sank deep into despair. He attempted suicide. Three years ago he sat on a park bench in Ottawa and drank from a bottle of alcohol. He's forbidden to drink because of the drugs he takes for depression. The mixture almost put him into a coma. Police had to take him to hospital.
It was a low point in his life. But soon after, he began to write the book and to give shape to the events that haunt him. He feels the park bench is behind him now.
Dallaire has confronted the demons, some of whom were real-life ones.
"They were devils. And I couldn't see them as human," he says. "Just as I know there was a presence of a superior being on a couple of occasions, present as a physical vibrating sense to help me through very, very difficult moments. That same reality came through with those people. I was not discussing with humans. They had erased themselves."
Which created in itself an ethical dilemma, do you negotiate with the devil? Or do you just take out your pistol and shoot him between the eyes.
"I describe at one point in the book where I walked in and for a second or whatever, long enough to be conscious of it, I wasn't sure if my hand would go take my pistol out or would move to shake their hand. It was that strong," Dallaire says.
In one passage from the book, Dallaire describes a visit to a village he had hoped had not been wiped out by the genocidaire.
In the book, Dallaire describes the scene on a hill, where even the peace had been murdered.
"It's interesting, at times, when you say there's no finger-pointing. There's no help to point fingers and to lay blame..." he says.
So, who does he blame?
"I blame the American leadership, which includes the Pentagon, in projecting itself as the world policeman one day and a recluse the next," Dallaire says.
"In fact, vulgarly stating in the General Assembly three weeks before the Rwandan genocide and civil war started, I mean, president Clinton saying in the General Assembly that through his Proposition 25 that Americans would go only if it was in their self-interest."
Dallaire's main line of communication with the world was through the department of Peacekeeping Operations at the UN in New York City. Before the war began, Dallaire asked for leave to take pre-emptive action against those he suspected of plotting the genocide. New York told him to back off.
"I think 'let down' is a bit of a soft statement," he says. He feels betrayed. "Undermined. Poorly assessed. Putting into question my skills in the field as a commander, realizing what I was doing and the full consequence of my actions.
"Well, that came through from different sources but it was very much like I wasn't fully grasping the depth of risk to my people. And we had taken some high risks previously in moving the rebel battalion into Kigali and a number of things like that. But it seemed to me I was being assessed as not having thought out my plan appropriately, recognizing that these soldiers are not mine."
As the death toll mounted, General Dallaire submitted a detailed plan for a Rapid Reaction Force. He needed 5,000 soldiers to dismantle the killing machine of the genocidaire and to stop the Hutu power movement. The UN Security Council rejected the plan. The United States even refused to acknowledge the genocide to avoid any legal obligations to help.
On the first night of the war, Rwandan government forces were murdering Tutsi and Hutu moderate politicians. Dallaire dispatched one unit of 10 Belgian peacekeepers to secure the home of Rwanda's prime minister. The Belgians were by far the most experienced of his soldiers. But they were ambushed, taken prisoner and later tortured, mutilated and murdered.
The whole battalion was pulled out of Rwanda while Belgian politicians and the Belgian public blamed Dallaire for failing to take care of his soldiers first, Rwandans second. Dallaire has always lamented those 10 deaths. But in his book he says it was, overall, the Belgians who let him down.
"I think it will give them enough food for debate. Whether they will say that I as commander did not accomplish my duty particularly to those 10, that it will very much depend on where their hearts and their brains meet. But they will not be happy with what I write.
"There's no happiness there. It's blunt and it's nasty?because at the same time they were my best. They had the potential to be so much more. They helped a lot, you know, other contingents... what they could make available. But they could have been far more than what they were. They could have been a leading atmosphere amongst the troops and the contingents. And then, ultimately, being undisciplined, haughty, unnecessarily aggressive, bordering on racism and even at times undermining the advancement of the progress."
"I failed, yes. The mission failed. They died by the thousands, hundreds of thousands. That's why it's [the book] subtitled the Failure of Humanity.
It was overridden by the hatred and the racism and the fear and all the incredible horrific ways that human beings can destroy other human beings."
After Rwanda, Dallaire was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In December of 1999, when he was 53, Dallaire was told he was not responding to treatment. The Canadian Forces medical staff reported that he was trying to kill himself through work. The chief of defence staff told Dallaire he had to forget Rwanda or forget the army. Dallaire was medically dismissed.
Dallaire says, "The medical report said, it was just a very short phrase and it said General Dallaire cannot command troops in any operation, or cannot command troops in operations any more. My whole life had been commanding troops. And that's when I fully realized the impact of what Rwanda had done to me? I literally was not able to do what my whole career had taught me to do."
Dallaire's military family is in his past. His own family is front and centre. The children and his wife Elizabeth have worked to put the pieces back together over the past nine years.
Dallaire is at Harvard on a fellowship - at the prestigious Carr Center - where he is studying and writing about conflict resolution. He also works with the Canadian government on war-affected children.
He is filled with a new idealism.
Regarding your comments re Rusesabagina, I believe it's important that people are reminded that the killing did not begin in 1994. Genocide is not "normal" in Rwanda but there is a context--large-scale killings, assassinations, etc. perpetrated by Tutsis upon Hutus, as well as vice versa. To remove the 1994 genocide from its contextual history, and to analyze it outside this context, as a completely unique phenomenon, is its own form of revisionism.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's "A Moral Reckoning," proves that two popes and the Roman Catholic church are "morally, legally, and ethically culpable of the Holocaust. Were, in fact, the Hutus predominantly Roman Catholic? And the Tutsis not?
Reply to American . . .
Even though clergymen and women of all faiths were among the victims AND the perpretators of the genocide, religion per se was not a factor. Both Hutus and Tutsis are predominantly Roman Catholic, and worshipped together.
To quote Dr. Susan Allen of Emory's School of Public Health who ran a clinic in Rwanda for many years and lived there for numerous years:
There have never been systematic killings of Hutu by Tutsi in Rwanda, period. Other than individual retribution killings, estimated at the outside as 1-2% of all genocide related deaths, there have been no such killings of Hutu by Tutsi in Rwanda.
Dr. Allen is technically right, but the systematic killing of Hutus by Tutsis that "never . . . period" happened in Rwanda, did indeed happen, on a very large scale, in neighboring Burundi in 1972, when (Tutsi) President Micombero declared martial law and dispatched his army to kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of Hutus, beginning with the educated, and the elite, and continuing on into the general civilian population. Half a million Hutus fled to Rwanda, Zaire and elsewhere, and they remembered. The invasion of Rwanda by Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front in the early 1990s awakened those Hutu memories, and made it easier to mobilize the masses into the madness of the '94 genocide . . . As for the events AFTER the genocide, there is a mass of documentary evidence, from Human Rights Watch, from the UN, and from the suppressed Gersony report, showing that the RPF (normally characterized as a "highly-disciplined" fighting force) was unsparing in its attacks on Hutus, both ex-militia AND civilian, throughout Rwanda in the immediate months after the genocide, and in subsequent years in the Congo . . . This is BY NO MEANS an attempt to minimize the events of 1994. What I AM arguing is that genocide is not necessarily a Hutu phenomenon that began and ended in the spring of 1994.
From Professor Peter Brown, Professor of Anthropology, Emory University:
This comment about historical context is important. Indeed, 1994 was not
the first time that there were well-documented mass murders of Tutsi
minority conducted by the Hutu majority. Systematic killing of the
minority group happened in 1959. 1962, 1963, 1964, 1967, 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993. All of these massacres were documented by UN Commissions. Outside of Rwanda, for example in Burundi in 1972, there were massacres of Hutu by Tutsi; but with severe and non-proportional retaliation.
To me this comment reflects the kind of confusing "soft" genocide denial tactic that Deborah Lipstadt describes.
I've seen Rusesabagina's supposed genocide denials mentioned here and other places, but I have yet to see anyone cite any actual quotes he's made. A quick spin through Google doesn't turn up anything either, though I did find some mentions that his opposition to Kagame's government has made him persona non grata in Rwanda today.
Can someone please point me towards Rusesabagina's comments?
i truly support deborah's fight aganist genocide negationists.
Suppliment to deborah lipstadt's comment:
The praise that is being attributed to Paul Rusesabagina is an unfortunate fate of circumstances at best, emanating from the award-winning movie on the genocide, Hotel Rwanda. Paul Rusesabagina is enjoying the windfalls of this Hollywood success, coupled with an audience in the international community that is either naive or deliberately willing to accept the Hollywood picture for reality if this might in some way help take away some of the guilt of having failed to act when Rwanda desperately needed help.
Paul Rusesabagina portrayed in the movie Hotel Rwanda is little more than pure Hollywood fiction, certainly a far cry from the reality of the course of events in those three months in Kigali.
The Hotel Rwanda movie enjoyed unexpected fame so did the hero of the movie, Rusesabagina. Though in the beginning the portrayed hero was humble to recognize the genocide, by the effect of megalomania, Rusesabagina misappropriated the composite characters built in him and deliberately put confusion between facts and fictions surrounding the movie, by claiming that he saved more than 1,268 people at the Mille Collines Hotel.
His claims have been rebuffed by the Genocide survivors who were in the Hotel including those portrayed in the movie. Rusesabagina did not play any role in helping people survive at the Mille Collines Hotel. He simply helped some of his friends to get to the Hotel Mille Collines.
In a move to clarify the controversy surrounding Rusesabagina’s portrayed heroism in the movie, a Rwandan private radio station Contact FM organized, on February 5, 2006, a show wherein Rusesabagina had agreed to debate with some survivors of the Mille Collines Hotel. At the last minute, Rusesabagina decided not to participate in the debate. In the “Crossfire” show, the survivors rebutted the “heroism” of Rusesabagina:
Pasa Mwenenganucye, a survivor who worked at the hotel recounts: “after taking the hotel keys from me, Rusesabagina started charging money from people camping in the hotel… He immediately cut off all telephone lines in the hotel leaving only one in his office for which he would charge people making calls…”
Rusesabagina is also said to have thrown out of hotel rooms people who could not afford to pay. Senator Wellars Gasamagera, also a survivor at the Hotel recalls: “He charged me Frw 180,000 (US$1,509 then) for four days in a single room I shared with 23 family members. I later decided to get out of the room and stay in the hotel corridors,” the Senator said, adding that he arrived at the hotel on April 18, 1994.
After his arrival at the Hotel on 15 April 1994 in the genocide, he cut off the free phone service that was helping people to call for rescue. He only spared one phone and fax machine in his room which would be used by either his friends and relatives or the rich”. He also began to reject those who could not pay the hotel.
“Rusesabagina availed rooms in the hotel to a few of Kigali’s well-to-do who could afford to pay him,” Senator Odette Nyiramirimo, a survivor at the Hotel who was also a personal friend to Rusesabagina revealed. Senator Odette Nyiramirimo revealed that she personally paid for her stay at the hotel. She said that she signed a cheque of US$600 from her Rwanda Commercial Bank (BCR) account, and she realized that the amount was transferred from her account to the account of the hotel after the genocide.
Rusesabagina himself in his autobiography agrees that some people signed cheques promising to pay Sabena: “Some guests of mine who were wealthy came to me with a proposal that they would sign a letter of guarantee promising to pay Sabena when the trouble was over, and I accepted this.” (Paul Rusesabagina, An Ordinary Man, p. 137) If they were not asked money, why should they volunteer to sign letters promising to pay Sabena? The proposal of signing letters resulted from pressure exerted on them by Rusesabagina to pay.
At hotel Mille Collines, Rusesabagina started charging people and chasing out of rooms those who were not capable to pay. Some of those who fell victims include; Jean Pierre Muligo, Chantal Mugabushaka and Isidore Mulindahabi (all are still alive).
Mr. Christopher Shamukiga said that on the April 30, 1994 while at Hotel Mille Collines, he discovered large stocks of food and drinks in the Hotel basement. He started distributing this food to the hungry refugees. When Rusesabagina learnt of it, he summoned him to his office and charged him 500,000 Rwandan francs.
He never supplied food or drinks to the refugees at the hotel as he claims. Instead, he tried to hinder food supplies by NGO’s in an attempt to sell the stock of food left in hotel and make money”, says Tatien Ndolimana, a genocide survivor.
On May 18, 1994, Mr. Michel Houtart, the President of Sabena hotels instructed Rusesabagina to stop rejecting those who could not afford payment. He however refused and instead hosted those who could afford to pay. The rest were chased away.
The family of the Late Anselme Sakumi (who died during the genocide), spent over two hours outside the hotel pleading with Rusesabagina to be allowed into the Hotel. He refused them entry until someone called Muvunyi gave him a cheque as a guarantee of payment.
He also got cheques from different people, which cheques he would withdraw from Banque de Kigali - Gitarama branch as testified by Louis Kigerinyange who used to work with the bank.
Rutaganda Georges, the ICTR inmate, revealed in a testimony made in March 2005 that Rusesabagina didn’t play any special role at the Mille Collines Hotel.
According to many witnesses, the survivors at the hotel were not saved by Rusesabagina. On the contrary, Rusesabagina strives to present himself as the single hero during the genocide and downplays the role of other individuals and forces in saving people. He refuses to recognize various factors that led to the survival of people in the Hotel, among others:
The Hotel Mille Collines was declared the UN protected site. In addition, the visit at the Hotel by international high ranking officials such as José Ayalala-Lasso, the then UN high commissioner in charge of human rights and Bernard Kouchner, the then French militant on humanitarian action at the hotel turned the attention of the international community on the Hotel.
The Sabena Company business interests in the Hotel, coupled with some members of the international community who occupied the Hotel were major factors which spared the Hotel from the attacks of the Interahamwe militia. The Sabena group put a lot of pressure on the extremists to spare the Hotel.
The genocidal forces, confronted by the military triumph of the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA), had ulterior motives in maintaining a number of Tutsis in a known site like the Hotel des Mille Collines, so that they may use them as the ransom and bargaining power for possible negotiations with the Rwandese Patriotic Front since the RPF had captives from the genocidal regime in its hands. Therefore, Tutsi were strategically maintained at the Hotel and their lives were saved for this purpose.
PAUL RUSESABAGINA’S CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH GENOCIDAIRES
Considering Rusesabagina’s close relationship with dignitaries of the genocidal government, such as Théoneste Bagosora and Gen. Augustin Bizimungu, the circumstances in which he helped his friends should not be considered as extraordinary. In any case, he never risked his life in saving people since he was not the target of the genocide. Some people tend to believe that he should be considered like a hero because he didn’t kill any body whereas he had every possibility to kill or deliver victims to the killers. Should people praise him for not having done so as if killing a Tutsi was legitimate?
Given his friendship with the genocide masterminds who, at a given extent, contributed to his fame, it is not surprising that Rusesabagina has become their advocate and that he tries to minimize the magnitude of their crimes or discharge them from the genocide.
Rusesabagina created a political party known as PDR-Ihumure which is largely composed of Hutu extremists. The top leadership of this political party is composed of people suspected for their role in the genocide or people who have relatives detained for their role in the genocide.
While traveling for public speaking events, Paul Rusesabagina always takes the opportunity to meet genocide suspects to bring back confidence among them and to assure them that he will use his public speaking events to ensure that they will not be prosecuted.
Rusesabagina is a close buddy and associate to some of the cream of genocide architects, who designed the plan that was to guarantee the extermination of a section of Rwandans. Some of such genocidaires include; Georges Rutaganda, Augustin Bizimungu and Théoneste Bagosora. He admitted this himself in an interview at Borders Bookshop in North London, May 25, 2006. In his interview offered to the VOA TV, he said that he “never saw Gen. Bizimungu killing people, that he instead saw him saving people.” In a conference held at the Concordia University, on 12 January 2006, he expressed his readiness to go to the ICTR to defend Gen. Augustin Bizimungu.
He has also conducted numerous meetings with members of FDLR, a group which conducted the 1994 genocide and listed among international terrorist groups. To illustrate this, one could mention the meeting held in Cape town (South Africa) in January 2007 where he promised that he will get military support for them; and the numerous affidavits he signed for genocide suspects hiding throughout the world (the most recent being on Emmanuel Munyambuga held in the United Kingdom).
Rusesabagina’s political party (PDR – IHUMURE) has been actively lobbying through the media to prevent the arrest of genocide suspects. Rusesabagina has also created a network composed of political allies based in the US and Belgium whose main role is to tarnish the image of Rwanda and to distort facts in the media. This network is led by people such as Providence Rubingisa and Pio Ngilikesha, well known genocide negationists.
His speeches as well as those
of his sympathizers have mainly rotated around reviving hatred of
Hutus against Tutsis like it happened slightly before the 1994 genocide.
Rusesabagina has also been meeting defense attorneys of genocide suspects held in Arusha. The most recent is a secret meeting held in Philadelphia on 11th February 2007 with Peter Erlinder, president of ICTR defense attorneys. The meeting was meant to exchange ideas on how they can lobby for the extension of the mandate of the ICTR.
He also works closely with Charles Onana and Pierre Péan, well known for their negationism and who are in close contact with all the people behind PDR – Ihumure. The motive behind their close association is to deny the preparation of the genocide, and depict genocide as a mere result of popular furor caused by the death of President Habyarimana.
RUSESABAGINA’S HIDDEN AGENDA
Today, Rusesabagina continues to take a stand for humanity as he travels the world seeking to raise money and awareness allegedly to end the suffering of the people left in Rwanda. He started the Rusesabagina Foundation purportedly to bring 'hope' and aid to Rwandan widows and orphans.
When Hotel Rwanda was being worked on, Paul Rusesabagina promised to avail 6% of its profits to Rwandan genocide survivors. This support has not been availed up to now.
Under the guise of being a humanitarian and after amassing hefty sums of money from the movie “Hotel Rwanda”, Rusesabagina swiftly changed his carrier and became a politician hoping to topple the current regime in Rwanda. He has invested in the PDR-Ihumure party, composed of genocidaires, and he is progressively portraying himself as the only choice.
The real intention behind his public speaking events is to prepare for future election campaigns in Rwanda. He has undertaken a marathon of public appearances so that the publicity surrounding him could make him the official spokesperson of the Rwandan opposition.
The movie Hotel Rwanda may have helped to raise public awareness of the Rwandan genocide, and that is a good thing. But it remains a movie nonetheless, a product of Hollywood in which some characters may be real or fictitious. We must be careful to make the distinction and not be quick to move with the wind.
My own assessment is that Rusesabagina is clearly using his Hollywood manufactured heroism to simply to make a personal fortune. He is also trying to elevate his status by comparing himself to personalities that changed the course of history in their countries such as Nelson Mandela.
To me he remains simply a cheap, immoral and dishonest man making a fornut and advancing his personal status using the one million genocide victims. He should be denounced in the strongest terms by all who cherish the memory of genocide victims all over the world.
Robbie, I will bring to your attention undisputed quoted remarks showing Rusesabagina's regrettable genocide denials.
The movie "hotel Rwanda" was well-construed to raise global awareness about the genocide in Rwanda but Paul rusesabagina is simply riding on the success of this film to satisfy ulterior motives.
He has emerged as the main proponent for revisionism and denial of the Rwanda genocide. His current rhetoric at various meetings is ethnically divisive; this is potentially dangerous for a country painstakingly trying to bridge the rifts considering that the same language was used to incite ethnic tensions in the build up to the genocide.
RUSESABAGINA IN HIS OWN WORDS:
In his biography, “An ordinary man” he noticeably labels the Rwanda genocide as “mass killings” clearly trying to stay away from accepting that what in reality occurred in Rwanda was genocide.
In a February, 2007, interview with Keith Harmon Snow, a Chicago-Illinois journalist, Rusesabagina virtually denies the genocide calling it “revenge killings on everyone…on Hutus and Tutsis.” Here, he emerges as trying to find a soft landing for the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwanda genocide as well as attempting to justify/validate the brutal murders that occurred then.
More misleading, outrageous and hate inciting messages being stretched by Paul Rusesabagina include:
“Rwanda went through 400 years of Tutsi domination over Hutus”; this is false and an attempt to re-write Rwandan history. On the contrary,
pre-colonial history shows a harmonious and cordial co-existence among the different ethnicities of Rwanda.
"Pretending that the gap between Hutus and Tutsis is bridged is like saying that there is no difference between White and Black"
Such statements are meant to frustrate and undermine efforts at unity and reconciliation currently being manifested in Rwandan society
Further in his biography, Rusesabagina restores and promotes conceptions of ethnic identity that precipitated the 1994 genocide and demeans Rwandans trying to embrace unity and reconciliation by labeling any Hutu cooperating with the Tutsi as “an empty suit”.
Such confrontational statements meant to turn Rwandans against each other in order to satisfy personal egos and dreams could shatter the delicate reconciliatory strides Rwanda has made.
Ironically however is the fact that such devastating speech is being propped up by an "acclaimed humanitarian" – Paul Rusesabagina
This last post by Nicholas is so wrong, so propagandic, that I don't know where to begin. I have spoken to the people he quotes--Michel Houtart, Senator Odette--and I have spoken at length with Paul Rusesabagina, and with people who were with him in the hotel during those dreadful days (including journalist Thomas Kamilindi). I wonder if Nicholas has done the same. I think not. There is a very obvious campaign of character assassination out there, politically motivated, and I'm surprised, Deborah, that you would lend your site to such malice and mean-spiritedness.
it seems that there are a lot of people bent on denying that the current regime in Rwanda is filled with murderous "genocidaires" themselves. they were killing in the early 70s and in the 80s, killing in the 1990s both before 1994 and AFTER, yet most people seem to forcibly deny these facts by claiming that anyone who brings attention to their hand in the genocide is denying that tutsis died in 1994. they died in 1994 like hutus died in 1994. research surfacing shows that in fact for every tutsi that died, two hutus were killed. research shows that both hutus and tutsi played both victim and attacker. yet people become outraged but such claims, and continuously deny genocide against hutus. it's a very curious phenomenon actually. one wonders why these concerned mostly "liberal whites" wouldn't want to investigate further, or actually READ THROUGH the research being found by various sources, but hold on to the notion that there were never any tutsi perpetrators or counter genocide that happed, that actually instigated the events of 1994, and continues up to today. innocent refugees are being murdered everyday in camps, in various places around the globe, both in africa and abroad by the current government, yet everyone insists that it's the hutus who did all the killing. it's unbelievable.
as far as paul, he's taking a premier step to bring recognition to this "cold war" against hutus and tutsi against the current governemnt or anyone who held or has potential to hold a legitmate position enough to threaten the rpf's power, and could actually bring them to justice, and all the hutus, who had nothing to do with the genocide AT ALL are relegated to "killer" status, when they are being targeted as we speak. it's AMAZING!!!
Could someone help me out?On 5 th feb 08,I was at Johns Hopkins University,BLTM where Rusesabagina gave his so called "true story' At the end he only accepted 3 questions from none Rwandese and Rwandans were denied a chance to ask Qns.Never showed up for the Contact FM debate with those who were present in the hotel during genocide.I wonder if Rusesabagina is telling the truth to his audience if he can't face Qns of or debate with those who know as much as he does in this case.!! Vibro.
There is a lot of misinformation roaming on the internet and in supposedly historically-correct books. Its hard to know, for sure, who is telling the truth about Rwanda. Having read the book "surviving the slaughter- the ordeal of a Rwandan refugee in Congo" I am tempted to think that the Rwandan story is never told in full.
While its true that some Hutu people may try to belittle the 1994 genocide, its absolutely necessary for historians to stick by the facts. The number consists of a minority Tutsi and is therefore not an attempt to destroy a particular race. Rather, it is an attempt to eliminate a political/militant group.
The events in Rwanda cannot be discussed out of context. Rwanda was at war with the RPF which was predominantly composed of Tutsi. Its fair to say that it was a war between Tutsi and Hutu.
Any attempt to compare the genocide against Jews with the Rwandan drama is wrong, insensitive and uninformed. The Jews were not at war with the Germans, neither were they a political group. Also, they didn't seize power after Hitler's defeat.
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