Review Essay: Controversy within the Cataclysm

On the ever-expanding shelf-space occupied by books on Rwanda, those two clearly belong to the revisionist section. Both are decidedly out of joint with the commonly accepted Gourevitchian vision of ethnically defined bad guys sending the good guys to their graves in an orgy of genocidal killings. They each call into question such conventional pieties and point to the heavy responsibility of President Paul Kagame in creating the conditions that led to the ghastly carnage.

Their shared revisionist agenda notwithstanding, it is difficult to imagine a more striking contrast than between Lt. Abdul Ruzibiza, a former officer and defector from Kagame's Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF)—a member of the crack unit known as the Network Commando and assigned to the Department of Military Intelligence (DMI)—and Pierre Péan, a French journalist noted for the quality of his investigations of various and sundry scandals relating to the French presence in Gabon (in Affaires Africaines) and more recently for a devastating inquest into the inner circles and professional failings of Le Monde (in La face cachée du Monde, 2004). Their radically different backgrounds and personalities are palpably mirrored in the very different tone and format of their narratives. Ruzibiza's book is an extraordinarily detailed, sometimes day-by-day personal account of the author's participation in the RPF's military operations since the 1990 invasion, including the tactical maneuvers leading to, and preparing the ground for, the shooting down of President Habyalimana's plane on April 6. Péan's book reads like nothing so much as a settling of scores. He glories in personal stabs at a broad range of political and academic personalities (such as the historian Jean-Pierre Chrétien, excoriated for an entire chapter), journalists (Colette Braeckman of Le Soir and Marie-France Cros of La Libre Belgique), human rights activists (the late Xavier Verschave), philosophers (André Glucksman), and NGOs. Their alleged pro-FPR sympathies or pro-Tutsi biases are presumably sufficient grounds for indictment. To describe the book as polemical is the least that can be said of a diatribe that has been denounced as a scandal (most notably by Francois Soudan in "Le scadale Péan"). Yet, as we shall see, to dismiss it out of hand is unwarranted.

Of the two, Ruzibiza's story is by far the more significant. His narrative—sandwiched between an illuminating preface by Claudine Vidal and a post-face by André Guichaoua—leaves few doubts in the reader's mind that Kagame bears a direct responsibility in the crash of the presidential plane. The author is meticulous in reporting on his battlefield experiences; he shows intimate familiarity with the RPF's operational code; and he is precise in his information about who did what, where, and when—and with surprisingly few scruples about naming names, places, and dates. All this produces a crushing body of evidence in support of his central argument: that the crimes committed by the FPR are no less horrendous than those attributed to the Hutu génocidaires.

This was already made clear in 1995 by S. Desouter and F. Reyntjens' book Rwanda: Les violations des droits de l'homme (1995). Two years later a report by Physicians for Human Rights prepared for the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee denounced the "widespread atrocities against civilian populations in eastern Congo" by Kagame's army (but failed to note that similar atrocities had been committed in Rwanda, according to a 1997 article by Thomas Lippman in the International Herald Tribune.) But Ruzibiza goes further, making his case in meticulous detail. In a section titled "The Genocide of Hutu," he freely acknowledges the "the massacres perpetrated by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA)." These, he writes, "were always planned. They had nothing to do with acts of vengeance or mere accidents as some claim. . . . The task of systematically massacring the population was assigned...