Conspiracy to Murder (review)

In Conspiracy to Murder, Linda Melvern offers a highly readable account of the 1994 Rwanda genocide that draws on, and synthesizes, a wide range of source materials. Melvern proves her worth as an investigative journalist by bringing to light incriminating documents from the military archives in Kigali, the U.N. Department of Peace-Keeping Operations in New York, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha. This revised edition adds new material, including witness testimony from the ICTR's ongoing trial of Colonel Theoneste Bagasora, the presumed architect of the genocide.

Melvern's book is particularly useful in debunking two distressingly persistent misconceptions of the Rwandan genocide: that it was an atavistic outbreak of African "tribalism" and that it was a spectacular instance of state failure. Rather, as is now abundantly clear, Hutu extremists seized control of a highly administered state and then launched an extermination campaign against the Tutsi minority as war resumed with the Tutsi-dominated rebel movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

Melvern is less successful, however, in proving a genocidal conspiracy. That is hardly surprising, as the ICTR has not yet proved it either because most of the high-level trials are still going on. Melvern contends that Hutu extremists had a longstanding conspiracy to commit genocide, but she relies heavily on the testimony of one unnamed prosecution witness. This argument also suggests the genocide was a foregone conclusion. Yet, as Melvern shows, and as Scott Straus explicitly argues in The Order of Genocide (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), large-scale genocidal violence was made possible by the assassination of President Habyarimana, the resumption of war with the RPF, and the withdrawal of the international community.

Though everyone agrees that the downing of Habyarimana's plane triggered the genocide, there is no consensus on who was responsible. Melvern scrupulously canvasses the competing theories (Hutu extremists, Tutsi rebels, and French soldiers), but remains sensibly agnostic. In late 2006, a French antiterrorist judge charged Paul Kagame, the former RPF commander and current president, with ordering the assassination. Melvern's depiction of the disarray among the Hutu military elite after the crash certainly suggests the assassination was not part of the extremists' plan. Indeed, moderate officers blocked Colonel Bagasora from staging a coup d'état, but their position was quickly undermined by the killing of Hutu moderates, renewed fighting, and the drastic reduction of U.N. peacekeepers.

The emphasis on a genocide conspiracy also demonstrates the limitations of a top-down, state-centered account for understanding mass violence. The book largely neglects local-level dynamics, which would help explain how and why tens of thousands of ordinary Rwandans participated in the genocide. Somewhat surprisingly, it even tends to overlook the role of national elites (particularly, government ministers) in helping to incite the genocide at the local level—something the ICTR has documented in several ongoing and completed trials.

The main weakness of the book is that it leans far too heavily—and far too selectively—on testimony and written statements from prosecution witnesses at the ICTR, without acknowledging the very real possibility of bias, coaching, or plain forgetfulness. For example, it quotes Omar Serushago, one of the few named witnesses for the prosecution, without ever mentioning that his testimony was part of a plea bargain with the prosecutor and that ICTR judges refused to rely on his uncorroborated testimony in another case. More problematically, it occasionally presents assertions in the prosecutor's opening statement and indictment—legal argument, not evidence—as historical fact.

Nonetheless, this book helpfully clarifies what we know and still do not know about the planning and execution of the Rwandan genocide. Some answers will probably have to wait until 2010 when the ICTR concludes all its cases—and then hopefully throws open its archives.