What Frantz Fanon says here applies to the attitude of the Rwandan government and all of his most fanatical supporters each time they are confronted with irrefutable evidence of the numerous crimes the regime has committed inside and outside the country for many years.The massive killing of Hutus inside and outside Rwanda, the one that concerned people continue advocating to be called officially genocide and remembered as such, and which the Rwandan government and the international community fear and oppose to recognise, because of their involvement in committing then covering up, followed a history textbook.
Particularly if they are outsiders to RPF circles, they can not tell when or how it all started. The modus operandi to kill and cleanse RPF controlled-zones of Hutu populations has been ongoing for so long. When was the plan devised and then finalised for implementation? Once in motion, it was, unfortunately, going to continue until this day. Was it before the invasion of Rwanda on October 1st, 1990? Was it during the period of the civil war running from the initial invasion to April 6th, 1994? Only few in the inner circle of RPF know.
It goes without saying that this latter question seems somehow irrelevant. In fact, prior to that fatal date, that saw the assassination of two seating African presidents, namely Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, atrocities credited to RPF had already been reported. They were the outcome of the RPF killing strategy and freeing entire regions of Rwanda for Tutsi returnees. The fear the rebel group had created, had made almost a million of mainly Hutu people from Byumba and Ruhengeri flew their homes. They were living miserably at the outskirts of the capital Kigali. They were Hutus chased from their ancestors’ land, contrary to being Tutsis returning home that Linda Melvern assumed them to be.
Judi Rever in her book “In Praise of Blood: the crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front,” [p.229] demonstrates how RPF, almost word for word, applied what the Nazis did to the Jews during World War II, while killing Hutus.
“The RPF leadership was cognisant of history and appears to have studied the methods of the Third Reich. In 1941, mobile killing units followed the German army as it advanced into Soviet territory. These killing units were called Einsatzgruppen, and were composed of German SS officers and police personnel who relied on civilian support to identify Jews and eliminate them. The Einsatzgruppen also targeted the Roma, the mentally ill, homosexuals and Communists. Like the mobile units of the Third Reich that fanned out across the occupied Soviet Union, the RPF’s death squads ranged from Rwanda’s northern border with Uganda to the south, along the border with Tanzania. The trucks carrying Hutus to Akagera National Park and the open-air crematorium in the forest there recalled Second World War’s death wagons and extermination centers,” she explains.
On the same page of the book, the author also goes on to indicate the principal motives behind RPF ethnic-related killing of Hutus during the early years of occupation of the country. This happened immediately after controlling a fraction of the Rwandan territory in 1992 and way after July 1994 when RPF took over the whole country from the previous regime.
“We know what the motives were for these ethnic-based killings because former members of the RPF have testified to their aims. One of the principal goals was to remove Hutus from political and military power and replace them with Tutsi leaders. Once the core military, political, economic and cultural leadership of the previous regime was gone, they also targeted Hutu teachers, artists, business people, lawyers and judges, so they could govern with little resistance. The RPF also ordered its military to exterminate as many Hutu peasants as possible, cleansing regions, especially in the north, because it wanted not only to mold the population map but also to secure properties for Tutsi returnees who had been living for decades in Uganda, Congo and Burundi.
These Rwandans who grew up in Ugandan refugee camps were mostly impoverished. They were landless and stateless. They were desperate. They had been used and abused by the Ugandan regime. …’ This is not about reprisals for the 1994 genocide against Tutsis. What the RPF did to Hutus is revenge for 1959,’ a prominent Tutsi opposition activist … told me,” the writer elaborates.
If there was any plan of genocide to kill Hutus (and Tutsis who had chosen to stay in Rwanda after 1959), it looks like the RPF started following one at the very beginning of the armed conflict in 1990. Reminiscence of the plan still is in implementation across a variety of malicious policies of the Rwandan regime. As long as people agree on the fact that, on the part of the RPF, there have been acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” Hutus fell victims from such acts, and these are called Genocide.
