Rwandan regime and Western intelligence agencies and their media and academic assets have spread disinformation for three decades

On April 7, Rwandan President Paul Kagame commemorated the 30^th anniversary of the 1994 Rwandan genocide by lighting a flame in honor of the victims in front of foreign dignitaries, and giving a speech in which he blamed the international community for “failing all of us” because of its inaction “whether from contempt or cowardice.”

Kagame also stated that Rwandans were disgusted by critics who “questioned or revised the history of the genocide,” said to have been perpetrated by Hutus against Tutsis.

One of the dignitaries in the crowd was former president Bill Clinton, who wrote in his memoir that his administration “did not act quickly enough after the killing [by the Hutu against the Tutsi] began.”^[1]

President Joe Biden, a U.S. Senator at the time of the genocide, released a statement on April 7 emphasizing that “most of the more than 800,000 women, men and children killed in the one hundred days that followed the launching of the genocide were ‘ethnic Tutsis.’”

Biden’s claim is contradicted by the 1991 Rwandan census, which listed 596,000 Tutsis living in Rwanda, with 300,000 estimated to have survived. That would mean that 296,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu and that the rest of the dead—over 500,000—were Hutus. An overwhelming number of the latter were killed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which Kagame led.^[2]

The RPF had helped trigger the genocide by invading Rwanda illegally from Uganda in 1990 against the wishes of U.S. Ambassador Robert Flaten, starting a civil war; and by shooting down the airplane of Rwanda’s Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana to avoid implementing a power-sharing agreement between Hutu and Tutsis.

Contrary to Clinton’s claims that the U.S. did not act quickly enough, the Clinton administration had in reality “acted quickly” by a) providing military training to the RPF beginning in January 1994; b) allegedly supplying Kagame, through the CIA, with the missiles used to shoot down Habyarimana’s airplane; c) landing 330 Marines at Burundi’s Bujumbura Airport in April 1994; d) off-loading material rumored to be weapons to the RPF in Mombasa harbor; and e) deploying 800 U.S. soldiers after the genocide to rebuild and control Kigali’s airport and provide military training, satellite surveillance and arms to the RPF.^[3]

A U.S. soldier from Texas said that “we are not supposed to let our families know that we were sent to Rwanda,” while one from Connecticut said, “human rights and democracy are none of our concerns. We are concerned with making sure that Kagame’s regime is well planted and can survive.”^[4]

The myth of non-U.S. intervention in Rwanda has been used by liberal hawks like Samantha Power, National Security Adviser in the Obama administration and current USAID administrator, to initiate more “humanitarian interventions.” On the eve of the 2011 Operation Odyssey Dawn over Libya, Power claimed that the U.S. could not allow another Rwanda to happen.

The real agenda underlying U.S. intervention in Rwanda was to supplant French influence in Central Africa (France supported Habyarimana’s regime), and to establish a regional proxy that could destabilize the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and help U.S.-based investors, including prominent Clinton family donors, gain access to the DRC’s lucrative mineral wealth.

U.S. covert intelligence and guerrilla warfare operative Roger Winter, head of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, cultivated close ties with the Tutsi guerrilla exile community, beginning in the late 1980s, when Kagame emerged as a leader of the Tutsi exile force in Uganda plotting to take back power in Rwanda.^[5]

The RPF forces supporting Kagame went into exile during the reign of Habyarimana (1973-1994) and his predecessor, Grégoire Kayibanda (1961-1973), who ruled Rwanda after the triumph of the so-called Hutu Power revolution in the early 1960s.

The Belgian colonial rulers had empowered a Tutsi ruling aristocracy, which badly repressed Rwanda’s majority Hutu population, who reclaimed power under Kayibanda and Habyarimana.

Paul Kagame was one of the “’59ers” who left Rwanda in 1959 when he was a child.

The organization which in the late 1980s became the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was founded by Tutsis in Uganda who left Rwanda 1959-1967, or were the children of those. Most monarchist Tutsis chose exile over subordination to any Hutu, who they considered inferior. Kayibanda’s Hutu majority government welcomed refugees to return as long as they denounced the Inyenzi terrorism and their avowed commitment to overthrow the First Republic.

To enable the RPF’s reconquest of Rwanda, the Bush I administration had provided $183 million in economic aid to Uganda—a higher amount than in the previous 27 years combined. The aid was channeled to the RPF, enabling it to carry out its invasion of Rwanda that provoked the genocide.

Further, the Bush administration increased the military training budget for Uganda and procured TOW missiles for the Ugandan military, which assisted the 1990 RPF invasion of Rwanda.^[6]

While being groomed for power, Paul Kagame was trained in psychological warfare tactics at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas—a training that has paid off handsomely.

Kagame has legitimated his rule and repeated invasions of the DRC by claiming to be a hero for saving his country from genocide carried out by Hutu militias (Interahamwe) under orders from extremist leaders who spread anti-Tutsi hatred over the radio.

However, this story is contradicted by the census data and on numerous other levels.

An alleged “genocide fax” warning of a premeditated plot by Hutu extremists sent by General Roméo Dallaire, commander of UN peacekeeping forces, to another Canadian general, Maurice Baril, in January 1994, has all the markings of a fabrication.^[7]

The fax was not seen until November 1995 when it was mysteriously sent to UN headquarters bearing the address of the British military academy at Sandhurst. The informant upon whom Dallaire based his information, Jean-Pierre Turatsinze, a Hutu Interahamwe (paramilitary) defector, was an RPF agent who was conveniently killed in Tanzania after joining the RPF there.

After Habyarimana’s plane exploded in mid-air, Kagame’s RPF forces circled around Kigali rather than heading south where most of the Interahamwe killings were taking place.

Kagame refused the Rwandan government forces’ repeated requests for a cease-fire to allow civilian protection measures. An International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) witness recounted examples of General Kagame ordering his troops not to intervene to save civilians and of officers being removed from their command for attempting to do so.

Kagame’s apparent calculation was that the greater the massacres, the better their justification for seizing power, a goal the U.S. and UK governments shared.

To help correct the historical record and undercut government disinformation, CovertAction Magazine Managing Editor Jeremy Kuzmarov interviewed Keith Harmon Snow, a UN human rights investigator and journalist who covered Central African political affairs.

Below is the transcript of the interview:

Jeremy Kuzmarov: Can you comment on the distortions of the popular commemorations of the 30^th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide by:

a) Paul Kagame and the Rwandan government;

b) Bill Clinton (a U.S. delegate for the commemoration) and the U.S. government;

c) the U.S. media?

Keith Harmon Snow: There is nothing the Rwandan regime says that can be trusted. The regime continues to advance a fraudulent narrative about war, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Uganda, Rwanda and Congo [Zaire] that completely distorts and misrepresents reality. The RPF narrative extant today is also universally perpetuated by Western media and Western intelligence agents (often one and the same), by Western academics, think tanks, and by Non-Governmental Organizations and their leaders. Of course, the U.S., Canadian, British and Israeli military intelligence institutions also feed this narrative. 

The paid propaganda agents and sycophants for the regime—the equivalents of Joseph Goebbels, but not nearly so brilliant [because they don’t have to be]—such as Tom Ndahiro, Kennedy Ndahiro, Phil Clark, Andrew Young [yes, that same Andrew Young who was on the balcony when MLK was assassinated), Joshua Hammer [Newsweek, The New York Times, others], Philip Gourevitch [The New Yorker], Christiane Amanpour [CNN, ABC], Elizabeth Rubin [Council on Foreign Relations, etc.], and too many others to mention—are able  to place their nefarious, dark, pro-proxy regime propaganda just about anywhere and everywhere they want—which does not at all suggest a diminished role played by the editors of these hack journals in commissioning and producing the propaganda. 

Then, once the propaganda has been disseminated, using the standard Bernaysian tactic of repetition, the Western propaganda apparatus draws on these base pieces in other ways, over and over, like some sinister AI-driven octopus, to further indoctrinate the already entirely miseducated nationalistic Western media consumers [who by now think they know something reasonable about what really happened in Rwanda but don’t]. 

In 2019, the Atlantic Monthly ran a quip by Kennedy Ndahiro, the editor of the RPF regime government mouthpiece, The New Times. Ndahiro explained how years of cultivated hatred could lead to death on a horrifying scale. “In Rwanda,” he wrote, “we know what can happen when political leaders and media outlets single out certain groups of people as less than human.” Ndahiro claimed that Joseph Habyarimana Gitera, one of the revolutionary Hutu leaders, had in 1959 openly called for the elimination of the Tutsi. Ndahiro claimed that Joseph Gitera referred to the Tutsi as “vermin.” This is pure Tutsi extremist fabrication. 

To begin with, it does not matter who Joseph Gitera was or what he did or did not say, or do, in 1959. The readers know nothing about Rwandan history or, if they do, they are laughing at the ridiculous inversion of reality, unless they are Rwandans who managed to survive the extremist Tutsi terrorism of the past 60 years.

In November 2023, Peter Wehner—a “frequent essayist for the New York Times and Atlantic Monthly”—resurrected Ndahiro’s agitprop for another Atlantic Monthly article warning about the dangers of Donald Trump.

Peter Wehner served in the Reagan, Bush41 and Bush43 administrations. A speaker at the Karsh Institute of Democracy (sponsors include: The Atlantic Monthly), he was speechwriter for George Herbert Walker Bush (during the RPF invasion and civil war 1990-1994 years). This is how the RPF propaganda is recycled. In fact, Joseph Gitera—who founded an organization called APROSOMA distinct from the majority PARMEHUTU party—called for all Tutsi, Hutu and Twa to unite together to form the First Republic. 

The Atlantic used Kennedy Ndahiro to produce their agitprop, in 2019, and they did not vet him then and did not vet him as a source in 2023, but he is a Tutsi extremist, and he offers a prime example of Ubwenge put into practice.

Ubwenge is the Kinyarwanda term that describes a very sophisticated, studied and inculcated practice of lying. The term also includes an element of pride that the user demonstrates in their ability to pull something over on the victim [typically, but not only, the white man].

Ndahiro’s original piece in The Atlantic was what I would call a coup d’état achieved by the RPF propaganda machine, except that it really was nothing more than regurgitated distortion recycled, repackaged, reconstituted in a new form. The RPF won the propaganda war.

U.S. intelligence and defense attache’s who facilitated the RPF “victories” in Rwanda and Congo-Zaire—some of them on the ground with the RPF—during the multiple genocides (1994-1998) include Lt. Col. Thomas P. Odom, Richard Skow, Lt. Col. Richard K. Orth, Lt. Colonel Bud Rassmusen  and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s “Mr. Africa” spymaster William G. Thom. These guys must be very proud of their accomplishments.

The extremist Tutsi narrative has evolved over the years from the UNARist lies supporting their Inyenzi terrorism in the 1960s to the next extremist Tutsi incarnation of the 1970s to the next in the 1980s until we arrive at the RPF lies that attended the illegal invasion of October 1990 and the subsequent terrorism that followed.

Related to the question about Clinton and the U.S. government response, the people of the United States will some day actually recognize the obvious fact that virtually every U.S. president from at least Eisenhower on [and, arguably, each one before that] had a propensity to practice their own [North] American form of Ubengwe. 

William Jefferson Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s interests in Central Africa followed a trajectory that began with their organized criminal activities in the diamond sector [and others] in Arkansas long before Bill began hosting diamond kingpin Maurice Tempelsman at the White House or on Templesman’s yacht moored off Martha’s Vineyard.

The RPF was the U.S./UK/Canadian/Belgian/Israeli proxy guerrilla army dispatched from Uganda to Rwanda to unseat French [and other entrenched] interests in the region. From the moment he assumed the role as president, Clinton uttered one lie after another about Rwanda. 

Madeleine Albright’s Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs was James Rubin, who married Christiane Amanpour in 1998. His sister, Elizabeth Rubin, was dating Philip Gourevitch, who wrote an influential book promoting the RPF narrative, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.^[8]

Albright—the U.S. Secretary of State under Clinton—allegedly dated Tempelsman, although some dispute this. This group and others in the Clinton administration were pivotal in the dissemination of the RPF propaganda whilst supporting RPF crimes, and covering up the RPF coup d’état in Rwanda and the double presidential assassinations of April 6, 1994, the massive inhuman RPF “grinding machine” and the most horrible mass slaughter [by the RPF and UPDF] in Rwanda and Zaire.

The above group were all part of the conspiracy regarding Rwanda. It was a very real conspiracy according to my understanding and I have done a substantial amount of research into it. A key was the fabrication of the so-called “genocide fax” that very suspiciously and magically turned up at the ICTR in Arusha, Tanzania. The above group helped mold public opinion in the U.S. and aided the prosecution, run by the RPF machine with Pentagon lawyers called Judge Advocate General (JGI), who were prosecuting the losers in Rwanda’s civil war—the Hutus.

ICTR defense attorneys Christopher Black and Peter Erlinder were both adamant that the so-called genocide fax was a complete forgery and had actually been produced by British MI6 [intelligence agency] as part of a military intelligence operation in England. The point is that there was a conspiracy to frame the Hutu leaders and Hutu for the genocide. The Hutus were demonized and The New York Times set it up so that they could all be massacred in Zaire and nobody cared because they were considered the devil and they were getting their just reward. 

The English-speaking Tutsi RPF shot and massacred and burned^[9] its way to power in Rwanda from 1990 to 1995, not caring about its role in facilitating the genocide of the French-speaking Tutsis (the so-called 100 days of genocide in 1994). The RPF also committed genocide against the Hutus in Rwanda, prior to 1994, and those Hutus who got away from the RPF [and the rest of its Ugandan military brotherhood] in Rwanda were then hunted and slaughtered in Zaire [1996-1998]. 

Zaire was the big prize. Rwanda offered a very unique military beachhead. So, under Clinton’s watch, with his complete knowledge and oversight, the “low-intensity” guerrilla war in Rwanda was carried out and won. The Clintons and Tempelsman got their diamonds [from Zaire], a mansion on a remote lake in Rwanda, and a permanent license to appear in the public eye and act the part of humble, compassionate and penitent America[ns]. 

As the African proverb goes: “Until the lion tells his story, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” And that’s why it is a very distorted, false, victor’s [U.S./RPF/etc.] narrative that is deeply seated in the establishment literature, institutions, and the public mind, at once glorifying the RPF and portraying them as the victims. 

Jeremy Kuzmarov: How do you think the horrific events of April 1994 should accurately be remembered by people in Africa and the United States? What really occurred?

Keith Harmon Snow: There should be an honest and comprehensive Truth and Reconciliation process. But too many people in power [e.g., academics and “journalists” and mining magnates and diplomats and many others] have too much to lose. On the other hand, Rwanda will explode again.^[10] It is arguably the world’s most entrenched nefarious surveillance state running. The Directorate of Military Intelligence and its network have established complete control over the hills and, in Rwanda, land of a thousand hills, everything revolves around the hill. 

Jeremy Kuzmarov: Was the U.S. a bystander to genocide, or an active instigator and participant in it?

Keith Harmon Snow: The “bystander” thesis gave Samantha Power plenty to work with along with her partner in academic crime at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Robert Rotberg. Rotberg was involved in Central Africa [Congo and Ruanda-Urundi] in the 1960s. He’s definitely a U.S. intelligence “asset” too. [Power was a professor at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard before she was appointed to high-level positions by Barack Obama. Power is author of the 2002 book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which Kuzmarov critically reviewed here.]

The U.S. backed Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni and trained Kagame at Ft. Leavenworth. Uganda proxy wars for the U.S. and allies included Sudan, Rwanda, and Zaire. Then Congo and still Congo [today], Darfur, and now Mozambique. The USA instigated, supported, facilitated and participated in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi committed by Hutu extremists and by RPF infiltrators. Ditto the genocides against the Hutus pre-1994 and post-1994. More specifically, we are talking about war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

As a rather simple but poignant example of the RPF’s manipulation of reality, the inversion of reality and manipulation of language, in service to their one-sided nefarious propaganda, consider the term Inyenzi. Almost all modern literature about Rwanda (including the previously mentioned Atlantic article) has something about that term, and it is always in the framework that the Hutus adopted that term in the 1990s, that is, meaning cockroach, and applied it to the Tutsis.

True, but also not. The origins of the term Inyenzi are from the early 1960s, meaning 1960. When the elite Tutsi monarchists, the UNAR was the name of their organization, refused to accept any moderate transfer of power to the Hutu majority and the Belgian colonial apparatus under decolonization from 1959 to 1962, the Tutsi extremists resorted to terrorism. The Tutsi who attacked in this way, meaning it was a guerrilla insurgency, against the First Republic of Rwanda, called themselves Inyenzi.

It was a term in the Kinyarwanda language that was intended to strike terror in the hearts of the Hutu people, and it did. The Tutsis attacked under cover of night committing the most horrible atrocities and, each time that they did, there was usually some retaliation. The Tutsi monarchists, UNAR and Inyenzi distributed tracts and posted flyers on trees all over the countryside that resorted to the language of what would today be considered genocide. The language was one of dehumanization, calling the Hutu dogs and snakes and other terms that dehumanized them. The Inyenzi then went about killing, bombing and assassinating Hutu leaders.

The Inyenzi knew that their every attack would result in retaliation against Tutsis who had not yet fled Rwanda, and that was part of their plan to whip up international sympathy. Every time the Inyenzi attacked, there were reprisals. At first—contrary to the hysterical Western media reports of The New York Times and their duly authorized sources—the Hutu masses only responded by burning the huts of the most extremist intransigent Tutsi supremacist chiefs and their henchmen. But when the Inyenzi attacked over and over, the terrified and terrorized and newly [psychologically] liberated Hutus responded by killing.

Who were the henchmen for the extremist Tutsi chiefs? They were the Mwamis’ (kings’) elite commandos, the Twa, and the many still-indoctrinated Hutu loyalists who collaborated and benefited from the Tutsi monarchists’ complete control over the Hutu. [Think institutionalized white Klu Klux Klan (Tutsis) antebellum southern USA gulag over black/brown slaves (Hutus).] When Bertrand Russell screamed “genocide” over the plight of the Tutsis in 1964 (and grossly misrepresented the statistics, winners, losers, etc.), he was reacting to the propaganda campaign of the monarchist Tutsis: He had no idea what he was talking about. He was hysterical and self-righteous.

Sound familiar? Fast forward to the 1990s: Every attack by the RPF led to more death and despair. Like the Inyenzi in the 1960s, they did not care about Tutsis. They wanted total and absolute control. The Inyenzi in the 1960s wanted to force more Tutsis to leave Rwanda. The RPF wanted revenge on the Tutsis who never left.

The First Republic, which was born out of the independence from Belgium, was a situation where one people, the Hutu, were emancipated from the minority Tutsi extremist monarchist system. Previously, you had the Tutsi overlords in control of the Hutus who were the slaves, were lynched, and had their balls cut off—among other atrocities.

When the Tutsi applied the term Inyenzi to themselves, this term had a deeply inculcated mythological stature in the minds of the Hutus and poor Tutsis. It was associated with the Abiru, the monarchist Tutsis closest to the king, the keepers of royal secrets and the esoteric code, the Tutsi mythmakers.

The king himself was a mythological god who descended from heaven. The indoctrination in myth and mythological superstition and belief was incredibly deep in the Hutu psychological structure. On top of hundreds of years of domination by their overlords, the Hutu people had to contend with this new category called Inyenzi that would attack at night, slip in under cover of night, commit atrocities and disappear. The people were superstitious. The Hutu actually believed in superstition and mythological beings and they probably believed that these UNARist monarchist Tutsi extremists really were transforming themselves into cockroaches. 

Again, the First Republic was completely under attack by the Tutsis who were aligned with the Lumumbists in Congo and with a faction in Belgium and they had the ear of the United Nations. They were screaming: “oppression, oppression, white people oppressing black people, Belgians oppressing Rwandans.” However, the bigger problem for the majority of the Rwandan people was the Tutsis oppressing the Hutus. 

The true historiography of the Inyenzi attacks from 1961 to 1968 is almost completely inverted, twisted or erased entirely from academic books on Rwanda. Rwanda experts like René Lemarchand (USA) and Filip Reyntjens (Belgium) both exhibit very particular anti-Hutu biases, and the pro-RPF academic faction that included Linda Melvern, Gérard Prunier, Gerald Caplan and so many others, distort the entire picture. Alison des Forges, another pro RPF academic, worked for USAID, and so did René Lemarchand.

All of these academics completely omit the role of the U.S., Canada, Britain and Israel in the invasion of Rwanda and the genocide there—genocides really should be plural considering the RPF genocide against Hutus and their invasion of Zaire and the genocides committed there as well.

Back to Inyenzi: When the RPF attacked Rwanda in 1990, and from 1990 until 1995, but especially during the “pro-democracy” window of 1991-1994, the RPF spread their propaganda about themselves using the term Inyenzi to instill absolute terror in the Hutu people. It worked. 

In the RPF publications, which have been completely disappeared from the public record, they used dehumanizing terms all the time, but they twisted the story around to make the Hutus the ones who invented the term Inyenzi to mean cockroach to dehumanize the Tutsis. Do you see how the whole thing is twisted upside down and/or distorted beyond reasonable application? 

The Hutu people, for example, in their publications of the 1990-1994 era, and on Rwandan radio and RTLM, the so-called Rwandan hate radio, certainly use the term Inyenzi and they use the term cockroach and these were accurate according to the RPF’s own ideology and linguistic terminology. When somebody like Kennedy Ndahiro, or The Atlantic writer who cited Ndahiro’s previous article, uses the term Inyenzi they are weaponizing it against the Hutu people.

All sides and all parties from 1991 to 1994 used dehuminizing hate speech against their political opponents. All parties: RPF, MRND, CDR. It’s impossible to overstate the mythological, ideological, political and almost celestial significance of the term Inyenzi as it existed in the psychology, the mass psychology, of the Hutu people. The Inyenzi were terrorists, and they prided themselves on their subterfuge, their capacity to terrorize and blame it on the Hutus, destabilize the country, and inculcate fear in their enemies.

Oh, imagine some other culture where this kind of thing occurred. Where one warring faction spread and inculcated myths that were then used to aid them in their invasion. No reason or need to fight if the enemy is too afraid, and runs away.

Jeremy Kuzmarov: Can you end by elaborating on the distortions in the U.S. media, including the so-called alternative media related to the 20^th anniversary commemoration of the Rwanda genocide?

Keith Harmon Snow: An example of the bias is a segment on April 9 aired by Democracy Now [flagship show in alternative media whose segment was re-run on truthout]. There is nothing about the Democracy Now clip on the “commemoration of the genocide” that educates anyone. It is disinformation. From the first words of the introduction it is a reductionist over-simplification and caricature of reality.

They play the numbers game: over a million Tutsis dead [almost double the number of Tutsis actually living in the country, according to the 1991 census].^[11] Over 250,000 women raped. This is genocide porn. Oh, don’t forget the “moderate Hutus.” What kind of genocide is it where the victims—Tutsis—are also the victors and the Hutus are also the victims?

I challenge Amy Goodman to a debate. Now look at the sources Democracy Now chooses. The propaganda system manages its narratives and “the spectrum of allowed debate” in great part by its selection of authorized sources.

1. The Rwandan refugee Noel Zihabamwe is a genocide survivor. He was a child in 1994. His first language is Kinyarwanda: He is hard to understand (even for people accustomed to African speakers like me). He is obviously a trauma survivor and he can’t be blamed or criticized for his English. He does not offer any solid facts that help listeners understand the nuance, or the complexity, that has all been reduced to the establishment narrative. And that’s not his fault. He likely can’t speak. openly for fear other relatives remaining in Rwanda will be killed as were his two brothers (2019). There are much more articulate Rwandans (or other Africans) Democracy Now could have chosen, but my heart goes out to Noel Zihabamwe who is a dedicated human rights defender who has suffered. 

2. Look at Clinton’s body language, eyes, tone and demeanor: classic evidence he is lying and knows he is playing the role of an actor maintaining a charade. The U.S. was not a “bystander to genocide.” Clinton is a war criminal and should be tried for his role in aiding and abetting the Rwandan Tutsi and Hutu genocides, the Congolese genocide(s), and the war crimes and crimes against humanity in Congo-Zaire. By choosing to replay that Clinton statement, Democracy Now is, again, saying as much as they can [that is meaningless], without saying anything at all [meaningfully]. This is gloss. It is also totally false.

3. Using “Mad Maddy” Albright as a source offers only a regurgitation and perpetuation of the shallow false narrative: Genocide is a technical term, a precise term, that has to meet certain standards. Blah blah blah. Worthless filler of space that will not offend Democracy Now’s sponsors or censors. 

4. The last speaker of the segment, Kenneth Roth, perpetuates the myth that Hutu extremists carried out all the killings and that Clinton did nothing to “stop the genocide”—when in reality, the Clinton administration was supporting the RPF takeover of Rwanda and the mass killings. Kenneth Roth ran Human Rights Watch throughout the era when more than 10 million people were killed, slaughtered, or died by secondary causes in Central Africa, but gave all this short shrift. In fact, Roth has always run cover for the U.S. military and should be deposed under oath, at the very least, for his role in the politicization and hegemony of the human rights nexis, and his continued denial of U.S. military involvement.

Alison Des Forges worked under Roth as Human Rights Watch’s primary operative, and she produced Leave None to Tell the Story, which is meant to further the false narrative about the Rwandan genocide. There is, of course, no mention of the U.S. military involvement, arms shipments to and through Uganda, or of the Israeli spy master David Kimche’s role or Israel’s covert role.

Frank Smyth was another dubious Human Rights Watch figure who demonized the Habyarimana government and weaponized the human rights sector against Hutus in support of UPDF and RPF, Museveni and Kagame.

Somalia-born Rakiya Omaar and her liberal pal Alex de Waal founded the Africa Watch section of Human Rights Watch but parted ways with Human Rights Watch and then founded African Rights. African Rights became the most significant source for presenting pro-RPF “facts.” They—along with Des Forges and Gourevitch and Roger Winter—moved the RPF narrative (the brain child of Roger Winter and company) forward, cementing it in place. 

Then two other key factors came into play that further elaborated and fixed that narrative:

1. The Tutsis as “the Jews of Africa” narrative. The implication being that the Tutsi were a historically persecuted group and that Kagame was a Moses type figure who led their liberation from exile by allowing them to reclaim their homeland.

2. The genocide “credit” or “pass” that everyone [the so-called international community] gave — and continues to give! — Kagame’s gang out of guilt, or supposed guilt, for having “done nothing to stop the genocide” [of French speaking Tutsis, who Kagame and his Ugandan cadres hated for staying behind after 1959-1960]. Meanwhile, Kagame and the RPF were killing everyone in their path and infiltrating the Interahamwe militias and provoking more killing. Roger Winter and Alison des Forges and Rakiya Omaar were calling on the U.S. government to “stop the genocide” but that was coded language for “send in U.S. troops to support the RPF.” The Clinton administration with Thom and Odom and so many others were involved in an invasion and a coup d’état: they did not want to stop their proxy warriors (the RPF) or let any “genocide” charge get in the way of their plans (that proved to be very successful). 

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1. Quoted in Jeremy Kuzmarov, Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the US Trajectory from Bush II to Biden (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2024), 348. ↑

2. A Spanish judge issued a 182-page report which determined that the RPF killed 320,000 civilians. ↑

3. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1999), 148; David Himbara, Kagame’s Economic Mirage (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016), 85; Michael Wines, “U.S. Sending Force of 200 to Reopen Rwandan Airport,” The New York Times, July 30, 1994; Remigius Kintu, “The Truth Behind the Rwandan Tragedy,” January 4, 2009. The number of U.S. Special Forces commandos in Rwanda may have exceeded 800. ↑

4. Kuzmarov, Warmonger, 356. See also Kintu, “The Truth Behind the Rwandan Tragedy.” ↑

5. According to Snow, Winter cultivated deep ties with Tutsi intelligence in the diaspora through Alexandre Kimenyi. In 1988, Winter organized a D.C. Beltway conference where the Banyarwanda declared their intent toward armed intervention out of a desire to reclaim their hiomeland from the Hutu. Kimenyis’ bio claims his entire (tutsi) family was killed in the genocide of 1973 and 1994. see: https://usflibexhibits.omeka.net/exhibits/show/speakingout1/interviewees/kimenyi. However, this is a lie. There was no genocide in rwanda in 1973! Further, after getting his degree in Rwanda duringthe 1960s and early 1970s, Kimenyi left of his own (1971) to study at UCLA . (He was not forced out by the Hutus and could have gone back to Rwanda at any time.) Kimenyi was editor and publisher of IMPURUZA, a Banyarwanda (Tutsi) journal published in Kinyarwanda, French and English, circa 1985-1989, funded by the USCR, distributed in the USA, Canada, Europe and Africa. 

6. Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni was a key U.S. strategic proxy in Central Africa who backed the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which the U.S. also supported in an attempt to gain influence in the oil-rich country. ↑

7. Hazel Cameron, Britain’s Hidden Role in the Rwandan Genocide: The Cat’s Paw (London: Routledge, 2013), 126; Christopher Black, “The Dallaire Genocide Fax: A Fabrication,” December 7, 2005, www.sandersresearch.com. ↑

8. Gourevitch later married Larissa MacFarquhar, a New Yorker “journalist” who insinuated herself into the personal lives of Noam and Carol Chomsky, gained their trust, spent time in their home, and then published a New Yorker hit piece on Noam that really upset them (KHS: I talked to them both about it, at the time, and Carol was very sincere, very forthcoming, and really very hurt).   ↑

9. The RPF set up crematoria to “disappear” the dead bodies. These were in Akagera National Park and other remote places. The skulls on display claimed to be Tutsi victims of genocide. According to Snow, “there’s many problems with that charade too.” ↑

10. The New York Times recently reported that “ethnic Tutsis dominate the top echelons of Mr. Kagame’s government, while the Hutus who make up 85 percent of the population remain excluded from true power, critics say. It is a sign that ethnic division, despite surface appearances, is still very much a factor in the way Rwanda is ruled. ‘The Kagame regime is creating the very conditions that cause political violence in our country,’ Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, his most prominent political opponent, said by phone from Kigali. ‘Lack of democracy, absence of rule of law, social and political exclusion—it’s the same problems we had before.’ Ms. Ingabire, a Hutu, returned to Rwanda from exile in 2010 to run against Mr. Kagame for president. She was arrested, barred from taking part in the election and later imprisoned on charges of conspiracy and terrorism. Released in 2018, when Mr. Kagame pardoned her, Ms. Ingabire cannot travel abroad and is barred from standing in the election in July.” The Times further reported that “a survey published last year by Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian professor and outspoken Kagame critic, found that 82 percent of 199 top government positions were held by ethnic Tutsi — and nearly 100 percent in Mr. Kagame’s office. American diplomats reached a similar conclusion in 2008, after conducting their own survey of Rwanda’s power structure. In the West, Mr. Kagame is a firm favorite at gatherings of the global elite such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in January. But at home, those who publicly challenge him risk arrest, torture or death.” ↑

11. According to the census, there were only 596,000 Tutsis living in Rwanda, with 300,000 estimated to have survived. Keith Harmon Snow states that the best estimates place the number of Tutsis killed in the genocide at around 500,000 to 600,000, not the 1 – 1.5 million that the Rwanda genocide industry often states (Democracy Now says one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus).↑

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