Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System - Monthly Review

Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System - Monthly Review

Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

Excerpted from The Politics of Genocide (Monthly Review Press, 2009).

bloodier and more destructive invasions, insurgencies, and civil wars that have ravaged several countries in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa over the same years may have been subjected to even greater misrepresentation.

Western establishment swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside-down.

In the much-cited 1999 study, “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda, on behalf of Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights in Paris, Alison Des Forges writes that “By late March 1994, Hutu Power leaders were determined to slaughter massive numbers of Tutsi and Hutu opposed to Habyarimana,” and that on April 6, 1994, with the assassination of Habyarimana, “[a] small group of his close associates…decided to execute the planned extermination.”

We know little about who assassinated Habyarimana.” This is a false statement, as we show in detail below.

“We know more about who used the assassination as the pretext to begin a slaughter that had been planned for months” is true enough, but in exactly the opposite sense reported by Des Forges.2

after the Habyarimana assassination, the RPF did not simply respond in self-defense to a Hutu-organized killing spree, but initiated its own killing spree.

after the Habyarimana assassination, the RPF did not simply respond in self-defense to a Hutu-organized killing spree, but initiated its own killing spree.