#3 of 3 book reviews from our favorite old Rwanda hand.  Links to review #1 and review #2.  #3 follows.  And don't neglect Tom's book, either, in the short list of good works on that period.

 

A review of:

Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide

Linda Melvern, New York: Vasco, 2006 2nd edition.

 

Reviewed by:

Thomas (Tom) P. Odom

LTC US Army (ret)

Author, Journey Into Darkness: Genocide In Rwanda

"It is called The General's Book on Rwanda, and, right, the General is Rwandan Major General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, who was the head of the Nationale Gendarmerie during the period of time in which what has come to be referred to as the "Rwandan Genocide" of 100 days (7 April to 4 July 1994) took place. And everybody knows the boilerplate of "800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus slaughtered by extremist Hutus." But, so far at least, my writing hasn't really been about any kind of personal story of the General's life. It's about what really happened in Rwanda between 1 October 1990 and sometime after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took over (or "liberated," as they would have it) the country on 4 July 1994 -- because the mainstream version couldn't be further from the truth. [1]"

Pick a tragedy and you will almost always find an alternate conspiracy theory to go with the accurate accounts. Rwanda is no different. The above extract comes from an interview with Mick Collins who holds that all that happened in Rwanda was due to US greed.  Mr. Collins is not alone in making that assertion.  Robin Philpot's book Rwanda 1994: Colonialism dies hard, as listed on the Taylor Report is another.  Keith Harmon Snow is another conspiracy theorist who pushes the US conspiracy theory as does Wayne Madsen.   The truly sad thing about these alternate theories--aside from their use of fantasy as fact--is they lend weight to the Hutu Power's mantra that they were victims of the second genocide, that the first genocide of 800,000 to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus was an unfortunate result of war between them and a foreign aggressor, namely Tutsi "aliens" bent on Hutu destruction..

Linda Melvern's Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide handily demolishes those myths because she documents the intimate planning and meticulous record keeping that went into execution of the Rwandan genocide.  Note that in 1991 Rwandan Major General Augustin Ndindiliyimana originally proposed creating the self-defense militias that became monstrous killing machines over the next three years.  That same general as commander of the National Gendarmerie was a member of the "Zero Network" used by the conspirators of the genocide.  His case is hardly unusual; there was nothing spontaneous about the Rwandan genocide.

Even as the interim government of Rwanda crossed to safety in Zaire in July 1994, Melvern quotes Prime Minister Kambanda proclaiming, "We have lost the military battle but the war is by no means over because we have the people behind us." [2] That statement and hundreds of pages of government records, testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and countless first person accounts from the genocidal killers document what the genocide was all about: continued Hutu political domination of Rwanda.

Trite commentators then and today refer to the genocide as tribal conflict, as if it is a lesser form of warfare for lesser beings. Such statements minimally miss the point that the Hutus and the Tutsis are not tribes.  Maximally they ignore the reality that ethnic struggle--especially ethnic struggle on the scale advocated, planned, and executed by the Hutu Power bloc in Rwanda--is absolutely political and terribly final in deciding who has power and who does not. The loser dies. Kambanda and his cohorts sought to use genocide as a final solution to any challenge to their absolute political power in Rwanda.  Just as the Nazis kept the trains running to the extermination camps in the failing moments of the Third Reich, Kambanda's government concentrated on killing Tutsis as they lost their fight with the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Melvern's book documents that fanatical focus on extermination.

Melvern does make a couple of errors that are likely to irritate informed readers.  Most blatant is her referral to the US parachute operation in Mogadishu, Somalia in October 1993.[3] Referring to Mogadishu as greatest humiliation to the US military since Vietnam is needless and inaccurate hyperbole. Another is over emphasizing the effect of Paul Kagame's brief and aborted sojourn at the US Army Command and General Staff College.  As a former instructor there, I doubt that many even noticed that Kagame was leaving until he was gone.  His abilities as a tactician and strategist owe little to his short stay on the banks of the Missouri River.

But those are minor faults, mentioned only in the hopes they might be corrected in a future edition.  I recommend Ms. Melvern's book to all.  It is a balanced account of a Rwanda unbalanced by war and genocide.  Don't waste your time, money, or brain cells on the conspiracy theorists.  Read Linda Melvern's work on how the true conspiracy to commit genocide unfolded.