The Untold Stories: Kagame the War Criminal President, BBC TWO Documentary
The BBC TWO revealed to the world what many of us knew about the Rwandan President. This is a man who is praised and supported by some personalities in the West, although they cannot tolerate a person of this kind in their own respective countries for a single day. Why then do they think his good for Rwandans?
This is the question the former Rwandan Army Chief Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa asked reporter Jane Corbin in a lengthy program that exposed the most horrifying incidents of massacres of innocent Rwandans both in Rwanda and Congo by Kagame.
In this documentary there are many distortions of facts on what might have happened in the hundred days during genocide. While Kagame and his Western backers put the blame entirely on the Hutus, the two American researchers have questioned the statistics of the population of Tutsis before and after genocide. They argue that before genocide Rwanda had an estimated 500,000 Tutsis and after genocide it is estimated that 300,000 survived. If the number of people died in the genocide is around One Million (1,000,000) it follows that 200,000 Tutsis and possibly some Hutus who were sympathetic to the RPF cause or wanted to protect the Tutsi where killed by interahamwe.
Who are the remaining 800,000 and who killed them?
A UN report expressing similar concerns was suppressed by RPF agents in the international community and whoever dares to question the accuracy of RPF gospel on genocide is labeled a genocide denier or is simply killed or incarcerated.
A Belgian historian Prof Filip Reyntjens suggested that Kagame could be one of the “most important war criminals still in office today”. This is echoed by many legal experts who argue that there is no equivalence whatsoever with the Darfur atrocities in Sudan or massacres in Kanya after the 2007 disputed elections in which many people died. The international criminal court has issued indictments to both leaders of Kenya and Sudan respectively.
Why Kagame has survived all these storms? Is it guilt of the west for the inaction in Rwanda during Genocide? Are they accomplice in all these crimes of Kagame which makes them silent for fear of being exposed?
The bottom of the truth is not yet known, as the former Rwandan Ambassador to Washington and one of the founders of the RPF Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa said: I don’t know why Mr. Blair really supports President Kagame and letdown the Rwandan people, may be in the future he will realize that he made the most serious mistake”.
This has reminded me the another British man Robert “Bob” Astles who was the right hand of President Idi Amin of Uganda in 1970s, while all people and governments had abandoned Idi Amin Robert “Bob” Astles remained his closest advisor until the demise of Amin’s regime in 1979.
The legal questions for the crimes leading to genocide are, did Kagame shoot the plane? If the plane was not shot would genocide have happened? Or would it have happened on the same magnitude?
Here we shall apply the rule of causation in Criminal law; the defendant must be proved to have caused the victim’s death (although the defendant’s act need not be the sole or the main cause of death). Two matters need to be considered: did the defendant in fact cause the victim’s death, and if so, can he be held to have caused it in law? Further problems may arise where, after the defendant has inflicted an injury on the victim, some other act or event intervenes before death; or where the defendant receives negligent medical treatment. The victim may also die attempting to escape from the defendant. We have to apply two sub rules in the rule of causation;
- A) Causation in fact
To establish causation in fact, the “But for” Test established in R v White [1910] 2 KB 124 must be applied. It must be proved that, but for the defendant’s acts, the death of the victim would not have occurred:
R v White [1910] 2 KB 124. The defendant placed poison in a glass containing his mother’s drink. She drank the contents of the glass, but died of heart failure before the poison could take effect. The defendant was charged with murder but convicted of attempted murder. With regard to causation in fact, the defendant’s act in placing poison in his mother’s drink did not in any way cause her death. If one were to ask, “But for the defendant’s act would his mother have died?”, the answer would obviously have to be yes; she would have died anyway, thus disproving causation in fact.
In the above rule of causation in fact the former Rwandan Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa who said he was in possession to know that Kagame ordered the shooting the Plane of the former Rwandan President, gave an example that if it’s a dry season and an arsonist lights a match on the dry grass, who would be blamed if the fire burns and destroys peoples property?
- B) Causation in law
In R v Smith [1959] 2 QB 35, it was held that the defendant’s act would be regarded as the cause in law if it could be shown that it was the operating and substantial cause of the victim’s death. All the indications in the Rwandan genocide indicate that Kagame knew or ought to have known that the downing of the Rwandan presidential plane would have caused chaos and unnecessary death of innocent people.
Killing and massacres continued even though RPF had captured almost the whole country. It is also estimated that RPF military under the instructions of President Kagame killed more people than those killed during the genocide in different places in Rwanda.
For example the Kibeho massacre which is not even disputed by Kagame himself although he disputes the number of people killed by his man Gen. Fred Ibingira. The Four Bishops who were killed in Gakurazo and were buried in the mass grave without even prayers is a vindication of not only Kagame’s crimes against humanity but a systematic killing of innocent civilians.
Therefore Kagame is not only a war criminal but a serial killer who has continued to terrorize his own people both in his country and even abroad where they sought protection from his murderous regime. The international community and his admirers like Mr. Tony Blair, President Bill Clinton and Pastor Rick warren should review their relationship at the earliest time possible.
Jacqueline Umurungi
It is true Kagame is a terifying killer. We are all surprised to see the International Community quiet about this. Bill Cliton is suspected to be at the origin of Kagame\\\’s protection; therefore, he is one way or another responsible of what is going in the Congo as well.
Kabila Kabange is Kagame\\\’s soldier. He is killing many in Congo, thanks to Obama whose decision is to remove Kabila from power in 2016. After that, justice will take over in Congo.
Kabila has just killed Mamadou Ndala\\\’s driver because he refuses to tell lies as Kabila\\\’s wanted. Kabila\\\’s days are numbered
If there is one thing that sparks serious disagreements about the genocide and war crimes that took place in Rwanda is the correct version of history. This entails coming to a common understanding of who did what and to what degree. Most Rwandan officials tend to assign the status of perpetrators to the majority Hutu; and that of victims to the Tutsi, thus ignoring the considerable number of Hutu killed by other Hutu during the genocide, Hutus who were killed to create a climate of terror in the country, Hutus who risked their lives to save helpless Tutsis and Tutsis who killed their fellow Tutsis.
More importantly, Hutus who were killed by the RPA during the war happen to have no historical reference. ”The experience of others has taught us that nations that do not deal with their past are haunted by it for generations”, remarked Nelson Mandela, in “After Such Crimes, What Forgiveness?”. Mandela’s reasoning finds an echo in Valérie Rosoux’s observation on ”the work of memory” as a central aspect of post-conflict strategies: ”The question raised in the aftermath of conflict is not only ‘how are we going to handle the future?’, but ‘how are going to handle the past?”.
She notes three possible options – one can either emphasize the memory of past conflict, conceal it, or, engage in the work of memory. The attitude of Rwandan officials is perhaps best described as a combination of the first two, but with the first looming decidedly larger: there is, on the one hand, a conscious effort to obliterate the past by erasing ethnic identities, while at the same time leaving no doubt that the roles of perpetrators and victims are assigned respectively to Hutu and Tutsi, and are by no means interchangeable.
At another level, concealing one’s feelings about past conflict is sometimes seen as a rational option. Such is the price Rwandans have to pay in order to live in peace with each other. Since the memory of the genocide is not a unifying factor, as disagreement prevails over the clear demarcation of victim and perpetrator, majority of the majority Hutus choose to forget their feelings. The cumulative pressures of government coercion, fear of the other, pragmatism combine to make amnesia the preferred option.
Pretending peace has become the norm. At the center of the problem is that the exclusion of Hutu memory for the sake of a dictated unifying official memory can never bring the people of Rwanda any closer to national reconciliation, or, at the very least, peaceful co-habitation.
The imposition of an official memory, purged of ethnic references, institutionalizes a mode of thought control profoundly antithetical to any kind of inter-ethnic dialogue aimed at recognition and forgiveness. This is hardly the way to bring Hutu and Tutsi closer together in a common understanding of their tragic past, and as Nelson Mandela argued, this is a ticking time bomb.