06/11/18 Tommy Raskin on the Myth of Rwanda

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All right, you guys, Tommy Raskin is an anti-war writer from Washington, D.C.
And he's written quite a few for Antiwar.com.
And this one is really important and really interesting.
Spinning Rwanda in the Grand Cult of U.S. Empire.
Welcome back to the show, Tommy.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thank you, Scott.
Good, man.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
And happy to read this.
It looks like you read a book by Helen Epstein.
Tell us about it.
Well, in this text, she explains exactly how the United States support for Yoweri Museveni in Uganda.
Wait, what's what's the text?
Oh, this is another fine mess.
And here she explains how the United States and its support for Museveni has partaken of a whole bunch of rather nefarious activities in Africa.
How Africa has supported the RPF in Rwanda that antagonized Hutu communities.
And how Museveni has been meddling in the Congo as well.
And how there really is not a vital U.S. interest at stake.
And how there are some serious humanitarian ramifications that come from the United States involvement here.
And that the United States, nonetheless, has been very active in its support for Museveni ever since he took power in 1986.
And now, so this is the thing about it, right?
Is there's this famous movie, Hotel Rwanda, with Don Cheadle.
Which is a great flick, you know, as far as movies go about things.
And, you know, in the entire narrative of certainly the democratic, so-called humanitarian interventionists, Rwanda is everything, right?
It's like a biblical story or something at the foundation of the American empire.
That one time, back in the Clinton years, there was this horrible genocide that broke out.
And Bill Clinton, a.k.a. the USA, was so interested in himself, and we were so interested in ourselves, that we didn't even care.
And it was just the worst thing that ever happened.
X many hundreds of thousands of people were butchered to death.
And we should have done something, right?
But that's not just like something I heard on the news.
There's a real, they really ran with this.
This is the basis of Samantha Power's book, A Problem from Hell, and the entire responsibility to protect the RP2 doctrine and all this.
And this is the narrative that they embraced.
For example, you know, partially in Iraq War II on the liberal side, but especially we saw in Libya, where they directly cited Rwanda.
And it was like, this is Susan Power's chance to prove her thesis that, you know, what if there was a genocide in Africa?
And we didn't wait around for it to happen.
But instead, we intervened instead.
And it didn't matter that the DIA and the CIA said it was all BS.
And Gaddafi wasn't about to do a genocide in Benghazi anyway.
It fit within their framework.
You know, without Rwanda, think how much weaker the liberal case for intervention would be.
I mean, there really is something in it.
It's the reason I wrote the piece, Scott.
I'm sure that you have had to deal with all sorts of questions regarding the necessity of U.S. intervention in this place or that, that drew its premise from the notion that if the U.S. should have intervened in Rwanda, then it is necessary for the U.S. to intervene in Libya.
Then it's necessary for the U.S. to intervene in Syria.
Then it's necessary for the U.S. to keep troops in Afghanistan in order to ensure that there's not a bloodbath there once the U.S. leaves Afghanistan.
My point here is that we have found that the U.S. imperial cult so often draws upon various facts from Rwanda in order to argue that it is necessary today for the United States to expiate its sins by intervening in this part of the world or that part of the world.
I felt compelled to write this piece because so often the question I get is what about Rwanda?
What about Rwanda?
What about Rwanda?
If it was necessary for the U.S. to intervene in Rwanda, then why not in these other places?
And I tried to shed light on the realities of Rwanda.
And the conclusion that I've drawn is that, in fact, it was not the United States' reticence.
It was not the United States' failure to intervene.
It was not the United States' non-interventionist approach that doomed Rwanda.
It was rather the United States' willingness to support Museveni in Uganda that ultimately redounded to the detriment of people in Rwanda.
And I can delve into some of those details whenever you'd like.
Yeah, here in just one second, because I just want to make the one obvious point, right, which is this is sort of the microcosm of the same argument.
Well, what about Hitler?
And, of course, the answer to that is Woodrow Wilson shouldn't have tipped the balance so badly against the Germans and in favor of the communists in Russia, then there never would have been a World War II at all.
The Nazi Party would have never had power at all, and there would have been no Soviets for them to point the finger at as their scapegoat as they rise into power either.
And so, you know, always blame America first.
Always look for where the U.S. government intervened and made it that way in the first place.
Otherwise, we're guilty of the sin, as Robert Higgs says, of truncating the antecedents.
And that is not a fair way to prescribe, and especially because this isn't all just academic, right?
This is, again, the basis underlying the next argument for the next World War II.
Well, right.
And I would say that in the World War II example, you find that, as you point out, it was, in fact, the United States' willingness to support the Allies' bombardment of Germany that produced a great deal of resentment that ultimately led to the rise of the Nazis.
Herbert Hoover said that the blockade of Germany was one of the greatest sins that he had ever witnessed.
And this was after the fighting had ended in World War I, but the Allies kept the blockade in place in order to ensure that the Germans would sign at Versailles.
So you find that when the United States and its allies meddle in these foreign lands by tipping the scales, as you might put it, by antagonizing one population, it ultimately produces a backlash.
And throughout the interwar period, as you know, not to get too far off track, but as you know, during the interwar period, there were German Democrats who were saying to the Allies, you cannot put more demands for reparations upon us.
Because if you do, it's going to produce a tremendous backlash against the Allies altogether, and no Democrat will ever be able to get elected in Germany.
I think of this in the context of Rwanda, because so often what the United States does is it plays the role of the little kid in a village who pokes a sleeping bear and then runs away to safety while the bear attacks everybody else in the village.
By which I mean, the United States pokes its sticks in hornets' nests, gets involved in conflicts that it doesn't entirely understand.
And then when things get out of control, often it runs away and lets innocent people suffer the very grisly, very dire consequences of its involvement.
All right, so talk to me about European colonial history and Tutsis and Hutus and who's who and why are they hacking the other guy with a machete?
Sure.
Well, Rwanda became part of the German Empire in the 1890s, and Belgian troops occupied the area during World War I.
And at the end of World War I, Belgium was granted a League of Nations mandate.
The Belgians favored the Tutsis.
The Tutsis were one of the groups that was most prominent in Rwanda.
You found that they were a minority, but they were a substantial minority, and they were able to retain power largely because of Belgium's interference on their behalf.
It was the Belgians who introduced an ethnic identity card system that separated Hutus from Tutsis.
There's a lot of debate regarding the actual ethnic division between Hutus and Tutsis.
I am one of those oddballs, I suppose, in this alt-right era who thinks that race is not a biological reality.
In any event, you will find some people who claim that there really was no difference between Hutus and Tutsis, and I think there is tremendous validity to that notion.
Hutus, if they could ascend economically, would become Tutsis.
Tutsis, who were very poor, would become Hutus.
I had read back when that really it was just the taller and skinnier you were, the better the French liked you or the Belgians liked you, because you're more, quote, European-featured, as opposed to the shorter and the squatter.
So basically, the Europeans themselves invented these races out of one community of people there.
Right, yeah, yeah.
Which is just amazing, but yeah, probably sounds right.
Maybe it's oversimplified, but I don't know.
Right.
Yeah, so there were these two groups created somehow.
The Belgians ensured that there was a strict separation of the groups.
That is, there were privileges that were made available to the Tutsis that were not made available to the Hutus.
And naturally, this produced a great deal of Hutu resentment throughout the colonial era.
At the end of World War II, the UN turned Rwanda into a trust territory, and this meant that at some point Rwanda would need to get independence.
Well, the problem here is that we have two groups that are at each other's throats, and the Belgians, to a certain extent, were keeping a lid on everything.
Of course, that doesn't justify their interference.
With that being said, they created a system, and eventually, as is often the case with foreign powers interfering, the consequences of that system became too much for them to handle.
There was a document called the Hutu Manifesto that materialized in 1957 that was an anti-colonial text that also called for the Tutsis to relinquish power, to give power over to the Hutu majority.
And in 1959, a genuine revolution began, and the Tutsi king had to flee the country.
And it's simplistic to say that the Belgians always sided with the Tutsis because towards the end, actually, the Belgians realized that, in fact, it was necessary for the Hutus to gain some power.
So the Belgians started to give various political posts to the Hutus.
So the balance of power was shifting.
Tutsis started fleeing the country.
In 1962, Rwanda gained its independence.
Grégoire Kayibanda took over the country.
He was a Hutu.
But there was a hope among many Tutsis that they would someday be able to retake the country.
And we can stop there for a moment if there's anything that we want clarified.
But the bottom line here is that from the outset, there was tremendous tension between the two parties.
And it was not the case that there was one side that was attacking the other.
It went both ways.
And then so and now what we're leaving off is you say late 60s.
And at this point, a Hutu becomes the leader and the Tutsis start losing power.
But it sounds like slowly rather than in a massive upheaval.
But they they mostly see the writing on the wall and they not only leave power, but they leave the country.
Yeah.
So there were thousands who left the country.
But in 1963, as early as 1963, Tutsi exiles sought to retake Rwanda.
There was a group of Tutsi exiles in Burundi that attacked the country.
I say that's early because they had just fled.
But the emotions were so raw that there was a sense that they had to attack then and there in order to get their country back.
And it didn't work.
The Hutus retained power, but the wish of many Tutsis to return did not go away.
Then we have in Burundi, to complicate the picture a little bit, we have a Tutsi dominated army that starts massacring Hutus in 1972.
Which shows that the ethnic tensions here are not limited to one country.
We have these ethnic tensions in Rwanda, but we also have them in Burundi.
Then in 1973, a man by the name of Habyarimana.
Which, by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt here, but were Burundi and Uganda were also Belgian colonies or they belonged to others?
Germany was in here somewhere, too, you said, right?
Yeah.
So Germany lost its control over Rwanda as a result of World War I.
So Belgium swept in in 1916.
There was control of Burundi as well.
And the British controlled Uganda.
OK.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So in 1973, Habyarimana, juvenile Habyarimana ousts Kayibanda.
Now, Habyarimana is another Hutu.
He takes power and he's the guy about whom we often hear when we contemplate how exactly the Rwandan genocide came to pass.
Because he was the guy whose airplane was shot down in 1994.
And whose killing, whose mysterious killing, we can delve into that a little later, led to the genocide that followed.
It basically started the next day.
Anyway, he was in power.
And meanwhile, in Uganda, to return to the text that I was discussing earlier, in 1986, we have the National Resistance Army come to power.
Ousting a guy named Tito Okello.
And Museveni becomes a U.S. ally very quickly.
This is where the malign hand of the U.S. becomes apparent.
Museveni meets with President Reagan a few times.
President Reagan invited Museveni to his ranch.
Museveni even hired President Reagan's son-in-law, Dennis Ravel, or rather his public relations firm, in order to make it seem as though Uganda under Museveni was going to be a stalwart, staunch, devout U.S. ally.
And the U.S. totally capitulated.
That is, the U.S. gave in to all of these demands for assistance.
The U.S. started selling arms to Uganda because the idea was Museveni was going to be the leader of Africa on the United States' behalf.
And meanwhile, he's supporting some really sordid, really nefarious factions within the country, including some Tutsi killers who were ready to retake Rwanda.
So in 1990, the RPF, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, with assistance from Museveni, who's a U.S. ally, let's remember, invades Rwanda with the idea being that Rwanda would be retaken by its rightful Tutsi leaders.
Meanwhile, in Rwanda, this is an important point, the ethnic tensions had actually been dissipating.
I'm not saying that there was no ethnic tension in Rwanda before the Tutsis invaded.
I will say, though, that the ethnic tensions were not as conspicuous as they once were.
Habyarimana was a corrupt guy, like many leaders are, and he was giving a lot of assistance to some of his Hutu allies.
So it was not the case that there was a tremendous focus at the time on the Tutsi-Hutu split.
But when the RPF invaded, that all shifted.
When the RPF invaded, there was a lot of fear among the Hutus that the Tutsis were trying to reimpose their lost rule, that the Tutsis were intent on subordinating the Hutus the way they once had.
As Epstein pointed out, there were tales circulated, many of them were accurate, about the Tutsis spitting in the mouths of Hutu when the Tutsis were in power.
And this terrified the Hutu.
I can stop for a moment if you have any questions, but the bottom line at this point is just that it was the invasion of Rwanda that largely scared the Hutus back into this ethnic awakening.
And now, so what was Washington's role in encouraging Museveni to back the Tutsis in their invasion there?
Was the whole thing was a CIA plot, or this was just their guy off on another agenda?
Well, what's interesting, Scott, is that Museveni actually perhaps had the good sense, we could say, to deny that he was involved.
He knew that the United States recognized that this was not the best idea.
Now, there is some scholarship suggesting that, in fact, the United States might have been more active in supporting the invasion directly.
It's important to note that Paul Kagame, who is now the president of Rwanda, who was one of the leaders of the RPF at the time, had been in the United States and left the country in order to participate in the invasion.
The idea, though, I think, based on the scholarship that I've seen, is that the United States was just willing to turn a blind eye.
I think the United States knew that Museveni was not being entirely honest.
In any event, the United States didn't care because the United States wanted an ally in Uganda.
So Museveni supports these Tutsis who wreak havoc in northern Rwanda when they invade in 1990.
And I would be remiss not to mention that it's not as though they needed to.
Some people say that they needed to invade in order to ensure that the Tutsi exiles had a right to return to their country.
Well, in fact, Habyarimana, as early as 1988, had considered various proposals that would have allowed the Tutsis to come back into the country.
But Habyarimana was not at the negotiating table with an honest interlocutor.
Habyarimana found that the Tutsi killers in the RPF ultimately were not interested in negotiation.
The RPF was interested in overrunning Rwanda.
So in 1990, RPF invades the country and, as I said, totally rampages through the country, devastates communities.
Thousands flee various parts of Rwanda, alleging that the RPF had wreaked havoc in their communities, had burned down homes, had been attacking children, and had been attacking noncombatants generally.
It was terrible.
And in 1993, basically because he had to, Habyarimana agreed to what we today remember as the Arusha Accords.
These accords came up with a power-sharing agreement, essentially, such that the RPF would be given nearly half of the seats in the military and the Hutu government would retain the other set of seats in the military.
But as various authors have pointed out, this was not a sustainable solution.
We knew that the RPF was gaining more power under the Arusha Accords than they were entitled to.
That is, if there had been an election in Rwanda, there's no way that the RPF could have gotten as much power as it did under the Arusha Accords.
The Arusha Accords are often viewed as something of a panacea, that if they had been enforced, they really could have saved Rwanda.
I don't view it that way because I think that they were not fair to the Hutu majority.
In any event, the Arusha Accords are put in place, the RPF drags its feet, not really implementing the various provisions in the Arusha Accords.
And then the whole thing falls apart when Habyarimana's airplane is shot down in April of 1994.
And so who shot down the plane, or do you know?
Okay, so this is one of the questions on which a lot of people focus.
And it's an important question because the general consensus in the grand cult of U.S. Empire has been, for a long time, that it was Hutu extremists who shot down Habyarimana's airplane, who did it because they thought that Habyarimana was selling them out.
The argument here is that the Hutu extremists took action against Habyarimana to ensure that the Hutus did not lose power.
Well, there's some evidence, strong evidence, I might add, to suggest that in fact it was the RPF under Paul Kagame that shot down Habyarimana's airplane.
This is important because it suggests that the RPF perhaps was not interested in the Arusha Accords.
The RPF was not interested in retaining some modicum of control of the country.
The RPF wanted total control and therefore killed the president.
Shortly after that killing, the RPF began, or I should say restarted, its war against the Hutu majority and started to kill Hutus in a very grisly and egregious and wanton sort of way.
I don't know exactly where a good thinking person is to come down on the matter.
I have not seen adequate evidence to suggest one way or the other that it's certain.
There are some people...
Well, but wait, let me make sure I understand you here, just on the facts real quick.
Sorry to interrupt.
It's fine.
So you're saying that after the plane was shot down, the Tutsi militia, the extremist Tutsi side, started immediately with revenge attacks on Hutu civilians.
But I think earlier you said that it was the next day that the war began where the Tutsis were actually genocided.
So is that the same thing that you're saying?
That after the plane was shot down, the actual attacks were started by the Tutsis first?
Yeah, well, here's what I'll say, Scott.
This, as you can see...
I mean, it's not that either of us are justifying the genocide here.
We're just trying to get to as much and as nuanced of the backstory as we can to, again, where we started here, which is this, you know, Democratic Party, mostly unreality, where one time a bad thing happened and we could have stopped it without any real context of how they had helped to cause it.
Look, there were atrocities committed on both sides once that airplane was shot down.
The RPF did begin, or again, I should say, restarted its war against the Hutu once that plane was shot down.
It is also true that killings of Tutsi civilians at the time began as well.
There was a fear among the Hutus that the RPF was coming back to take control of the entire country.
And that fear was not ill-founded.
I think that the RPF, if the actual history is any indication, the RPF is now in control, did in fact want to take over Rwanda.
And the Hutus started disseminating all of this propaganda, some of them did, about how the Tutsis could not be trusted, the Tutsis were not interested in peace, the Tutsis ultimately were intent on killing the Hutu majority.
So essentially they were spoon-fed, many good people, innocent people were spoon-fed this rhetoric, and some of those presumably with violent proclivities went mad and just started killing Tutsis left and right, even if they were not part of the RPF.
And it was absolutely atrocious.
But here, as in other areas, we have to recognize that it was not that there was some diabolical tendency embedded within the Hutu heart that ensured that the Hutus would start killing people in this way.
This was in response to political changes on the ground.
There was a fear that the Tutsis were coming back.
You know how war is, Scott.
In war, people lose their minds.
And this was a war that was being fought.
It was, I think, it would be a little reductive to say that this was an extension of the war, because this was clearly far worse than anything that would happen in what we might call a regular war, but this was a direct result of the war that began in 1990.
This was a direct result of the mass atrocities that were being committed by the RPF against Hutu civilians.
All right.
Now, in the article, you argue that, you know, there are things that America could have done besides sending the Marine Corps and not just going back in time and undoing all of, you know, previous government mistakes.
But what do you mean by that?
Well, well, I don't mean to say mistakes.
Yeah, because it sounds like it's all very innocent when, in fact, it's all, you know, power plays one way or the other, whether the consequences are exactly as intended or not.
No, but Scott, I'll just say before I answer that one reason that I felt the need to offer an alternative is that, like you, I'm sure people often say, all right, it's true.
The United States made mistakes in the past.
The United States shouldn't have taken out Saddam Hussein.
But now we have ISIS.
So we have to go in and destroy it.
The United States should not have supported Osama bin Laden during the Soviet-Afghan war.
But now we have the Taliban and al Qaeda.
So we have to go in and destroy it.
I don't really like that line of argument coming from others.
But there is something to the idea that we have to operate on the basis of where we are now.
So I put forth an alternative proposal, which is one that I think that leftists and libertarians can both celebrate, which is the idea that the United States should have taken in immigrants and refugees and should have encouraged other countries in the region to do the same.
We've also found that in the lead up to various atrocities, the United States has not been unwilling to go into countries and take out civilian populations that are in need of assistance or to take out troops.
We know that at the end of the Vietnam War, for example, the United States went into Saigon and airlifted some U.S. personnel and some South Vietnamese out of the country.
I think that the United States could have done the same thing in Rwanda.
We know that the United States and some of the European power sent in airplanes in order to take out European and U.S. nationals.
One of the important parts of the movie Hotel Rwanda is that it did show how the United States sent in aircraft in order to take out U.S. personnel and how the Tutsis were left on the ground.
I think that we could have gone further.
We could have taken out more people.
Some people say that we would not have been able to mobilize in time.
That is, by the time it was clear that the killings were occurring, it would not have been possible for the United States to send in aircraft.
That's not my view because there are assessments from individuals within the U.S. government dating back to the early 1990s, that is, before 1994, suggesting that the U.S. knew to a certain extent what was coming.
Perhaps the U.S. didn't know that it would be a full-fledged genocide, but the U.S. knew that the Tutsis were in danger.
The U.S. could have taken in refugees.
The U.S. could have sent in personnel in order to take out the Tutsis who were in need.
Not armed personnel, but before the killings were fully in progress, it would have made sense to help people out by removing them from this perilous situation.
Alright, hang on just one second.
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Hey, were there any powers in the region that had more influence with the Hutus that the Americans could have intervened on the side of?
I mean, and maybe mix in part of your answer here, and you mentioned this a little bit, but in the common narrative, the backstory, if there's a backstory at all, it's just that the Hutus demonized the Tutsis.
I mean, they do say, I guess, that the Tutsis were this former minority ruling caste, and then so this was the revenge, but never with any of the nuance like you've said.
But what they talk about endlessly, and this is easy to portray in a movie too, is a guy on a radio station on the FM radio saying cut down all the tall trees, kill all the cockroaches, and this and that, where it's that level of demonization, which as you said, it did.
People picked up machetes and went right to work based on that.
But I wonder in terms of things Americans could have done, were there neighboring powers or anyone on the Hutu side that the Americans could have used their influence to say, hey, listen, enough with the cockroaches and the machetes here.
We're going to try something else or figure out something.
Well, one of the awkward facts about this whole set of atrocities, about the pandemonium that unraveled in that country, is that Belgium and France, both of which were somewhat involved in the country throughout its history, were in a way on different sides.
And one reason that has been posited that there might not have been a European intervention is that the Belgians and the French were actually sympathetic to different sides in this conflict.
The French were largely supportive of the Hutu government.
The Belgians, as we know, for historical reasons, we can put it in an historical context, were supportive of the Tutsis.
Whether there could have been pressure put upon the Hutus to stop the killings by the French government, I'm not sure.
I tend to think that.
Look, I got to say, when I was saying neighboring powers, I wasn't thinking France, one of the greatest powers in the history of humanity.
I was just thinking like, hey, maybe somebody in the Congo or something could make a phone call.
So when your answer is, oh yeah, actually, the power that was friendly with the Hutus were the French, then yeah.
Now tell me again how they didn't have enough influence to do anything about this?
Well, it's a fascinating point.
I know that there are some scholars who have honed in on this fact and who ask whether the Hutu government would have worked at the behest of the French government to stop the killings.
I'm not sure, Scott.
I think that one of the unfortunate facts here is that the killings were largely out of the control of the organized forces of Hutu power at a certain point.
I think there were people who were intent on killing no matter what.
It was pretty organized at the top, though, with the whole cockroaches and the cut down the tall trees is your code word and all this kind of stuff, right?
Or not?
Is that all overplayed?
Well, I don't think I would say it's overplayed.
I do know and it is certainly the truth that the Hutu government was in on it.
But I might add that there were attempts on the part of the Hutu government to reach a ceasefire with the RPF.
I don't have reason to think that that came at the behest of the French government.
Whether there are strings that could have been pulled there, I'm just not as confident in saying yes or no.
And by the way, I'm sorry, because this is my fault.
I should have talked about this or asked you to describe right at the setup here for people who don't remember.
I mean, I still remember the pictures and I guess Newsweek or Time back then were really a river or a pretty damn big and deep stream anyway.
Yeah, no, I think even a river, like maybe a minor river, literally tinted red with blood.
Hundreds of thousands of people.
How many hundred thousand people killed in how short of a period of time here?
Well, it was done mostly in three months.
There are various estimates to this day regarding precisely how many were killed.
But we can say confidently that it was in the hundreds of thousands.
Yeah, yeah, really something.
And, you know, actually, three months is a longer period of time than the way I remembered it.
So that's a lot of hacking people to death with everybody else standing around watching.
So I can see how it makes such a powerful narrative for the Democrats, because those who did want to intervene, like, you know, Samantha Power and them, they must have been absolutely beside themselves as this was all playing out.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, yes.
And most of it was in the earlier portion of that three months.
But let me just say regarding the pieces by Samantha Power and Susan Rice and some of the other, quote, unquote, humanitarian interventionists, there seems to be no awareness whatsoever or no willingness to acknowledge whatsoever.
The United States supported Museveni, who supported the RPF, whose members rampaged through the country and rekindled Hutu fears of the Tutsi minority.
It just doesn't seem to appear on their radar.
There is, I think, a reason for it, and it serves imperial purposes, which is that the United States, to the extent that it transgresses, to the extent that it messes up, always messes up by doing too little.
That is the idea that we are being fed.
We are told we are expected and asked and demanded to believe that the United States is not always perfect, but when it makes mistakes, it makes mistakes because it lacks conviction.
It lacks the moral fortitude and confidence necessary to take steps on behalf of those in need.
What I try to say in this article is, no, if the United States had not supported Museveni, it's likely that none of this would have happened.
If it still would have happened, the United States could have taken other steps before the genocide in order to save the Tutsi minority in Rwanda.
It is not the case that we should have gone in, as Bill Clinton says in his memoir, in order to save people.
There's one additional fact.
I know I keep coming out with these additional facts, but it's just so convoluted and complex, I must.
This is crucial.
The RPF, under Paul Kagame, did not want a foreign power to intervene.
It was said to the Belgian on the ground, the UN peacekeeper Dallaire, Romeo Dallaire, that if there is a foreign force sent in, the RPF will fight it.
And this makes sense, Scott.
The RPF was trying to win a war.
The RPF did not want to be forced to the negotiating table at the hands of a foreign interlocutor.
RPF was worried that if there was going to be a UN force or a US force that came in, this force would try to create another power sharing agreement, much like the Arusha Accords.
How's that for public choice theory for you, folks?
Where your Tutsi security force is willing to get your entire population butchered to death rather than share power.
Well, yes, exactly.
See, we're told that the US didn't go in, and it's a terrible shame because the Tutsi forces were demanding that we go in.
Wrong.
False.
Incorrect, Scott.
That's not what happened.
Paul Kagame did not want the US to go in.
And this is the current president that you're talking about.
Yes, that's right.
That's absolutely right.
Yeah.
Because he was trying to win a war.
There are some scholars.
I think one of them is an associate of Noam Chomsky who passed away.
Edward Herman is his name.
He's the co-author.
He's really the primary author of Manufacturing Consent.
Right.
That's right.
And he also wrote a book called The Politics of Genocide, which is a very controversial piece.
People allege that he is a Rwandan genocide denier.
Again, I don't know where a good thinking person is to come down on that, but the merits of other parts of his case, in any event, are very strong and undeniable.
He says that after the Rwandan genocide ended, whatever the genocide looked like, the Hutus largely fled the country.
About 1.5 million Hutus fled the country during this period.
Many of them fled to Zaire.
And in 1996, Kigali, under the new Tutsi government, intervened in Zaire and started killing Hutus.
There were perhaps 200,000 Hutu deaths during this period.
In the Grand Cult of U.S. Empire, we are asked to believe that the Rwandan government had to go into Zaire in 1996 in order to kill off Hutu genociders who were interested in killing Tutsis again.
I think that is largely bogus.
I have come to the conclusion, based on the evidence that I've seen, that, in fact, the Tutsi government was trying to expand its control in the region.
We know that Zaire has many resources.
It is a mineral-rich area, and the government of Rwanda went in and started killing people, massacring people in refugee camps.
To this day, there are folks at the U.N. who have acknowledged that throughout this period, throughout the 1996 through 1998 period, and then after that, the Rwandan government committed acts that, if proven in a court of law, could be characterized as genocide against the Hutu.
I see no reason to doubt that that is true.
Kagame's government has committed some of the most barbarous abuses in the region, and he has received assistance from the United States in doing it.
And how odd is it, Scott, that our beloved humanitarian interventionists have virtually nothing to say about it?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, same thing with Somalia, where, oh, they're the ones who caused it.
So, yeah, if anything, they'll blame al-Shabaab, but mostly they don't talk about it at all.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, it's exactly right.
And it's interesting how, in the grand cult of U.S. Empire, we select certain cases of atrocities on which to focus.
Let's remember, what befell the Tutsis was absolutely disastrous, and what Hutu genociders did was utterly contemptible.
It cannot be justified.
I think there is a danger, though, in reducing this to a conflict in which one side was entirely right and another side was entirely wrong.
The RPF, as we know, stoked the ethnic tension, and in neighboring Burundi in 1993, Melchior Endadai, who was the president at the time, was killed by Tutsis who alleged that he, a Hutu, was threatening genocide against the Tutsis.
And a lot of Hutus at that time fled into Rwanda.
And many Hutus in Rwanda were saying, look what they did to Endadai.
Look at what they're doing to the Hutus in neighboring Burundi.
If that's any indication, it seems that we might have a genocide coming our way.
Of course, that does not justify what they did, but it gives us some context.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, as you said, and as we talked about at the beginning here, I love this title of this book, I mean, of this article.
And I love the title of this article, Spinning Rwanda in the Grand Cult of U.S. Empire.
It is almost like World War II.
It's this major chapter in the civic religion, in the foreign policy religion of the United States, where, you know, regardless of, you know, what you might be able to remember about Iraq War II or the CIA in Syria the last few years or whatever, America is still basically Christopher Reeve as Superman here to save the kitten from the tree and help the poor people.
Because as one major example, remember that time we stopped Hitler?
And remember that time we failed to stop the genocide in Rwanda?
These are very simple and easy to understand narratives for people who, you know, after all, it's their neighbors that go into the service.
It's not like they're evil kids, right?
So they join up to be brave and heroic and fight for freedom and goodness and justice.
And so it all seems to fit, you know, as long as you don't look back at how actually things got that way in the first place.
Well, Scott, let me list for you three genocides on which we often focus in the United States.
When we talk about genocide, we often talk about the Holocaust.
We talk about the Cambodian genocide and we talk about the Rwandan genocide, all of which are absolutely necessary for us to study, all of which were grisly, all of which were committed by people who were truly heinous.
But it must be said that in all three of those cases, the United States was meddling in the areas in question in such a way as to ensure essentially that there would be a backlash.
We saw that this was the case in Germany when the United States starved the country in a submission at the end of World War I.
We saw that this was the case in Rwanda when the United States supported Museveni, who supported the RPF, whose members wreaked havoc.
And this was the case in Cambodia.
The United States ousted Sihanouk, put Lonol in power during the Vietnam War, dropped 500,000 bombs on the country.
And as many dispassionate scholars have argued today, one of the primary recruiting tools for the Khmer Rouge was all of the devastation that was brought upon the country by the United States of America.
The Khmer Rouge relied on so much disenchantment with the West in order to argue that we need something different.
And ultimately, many innocent people, many innocent Cambodians suffered as a result of it.
But we're not told any of this usually.
Every so often, we'll hear some acknowledgment from the neocons and neolibs that the United States probably should not have hit Cambodia so hard.
Perhaps the United States was unfair to Germany at the Treaty of Versailles when that was signed.
But we don't really get the sense that there's any honest, sincere, candid reckoning with what occurred.
The notion is, yeah, mistakes were made, but now we have to go in in order to stop any future Cambodia, any future Rwanda, any future Holocaust.
I love that example, too, because when Vietnam, when communist Vietnam, which had driven the Americans out, invaded Cambodia to stop the genocide and the refugee crisis, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan took Pol Pot's side and backed the Khmer Rouge because they still hated the communist Vietnamese.
And all this, of course, launched in the name of preventing the dominoes from falling over and turning.
We've got to prevent Cambodia from going communist.
That's why we're killing all these people in Vietnam in the first place.
And then, as you said, it was that war that brought communism to Cambodia and the world's worst horse show.
I mean, it was a microcosm, I guess, of communist China, but it was pretty damn bad going to year zero there under Pol Pot.
Right.
Yeah.
Millions killed, right?
Two million people or something.
Almost as many as the Vietnam War itself.
Yeah.
And one point I would make also is that all of these genocides must be studied, but you don't find any at length treatment of, say, the ethnic cleansing of East Timor in the text by Samantha Power.
You don't hear people in the humanitarian interventionist cult talk that much about the way that the United States supported Suharto and, I mean, really supported him.
It was it was proven that just two days before Suharto intervened in East Timor that Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford had basically given him the go ahead.
Right.
And U.S. weapons were used in the process.
In any event, we're not told about that.
We're not asked to lament the fact that that occurred in the way that we're asked to lament the fact that the Rwandan genocide and the Cambodian genocide occurred because these were genocides that were not committed by U.S. allies.
All right.
Well, listen, we got to leave it there.
But thanks so much for coming on the show and for writing this great article.
It's really important and and I really appreciate a lot.
It was my pleasure, Scott.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that's Tommy Raskin writing at Antiwar.com, spinning Rwanda in the grand cult of U.S. empire.
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