Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa: From Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction

by Robin Philpot

Former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared to author Robin Philpot that “the Rwandan Genocide was 100 percent American responsiblity.” Yet a more official narrative would have it that horrible Hutu génocidaires planned and executed a satanic scheme to eliminate nearly one million Tutsis after the Rwandan presidential plane crashed in the heart of dark Africa on April 6, 1994. Where do these two contradictory narratives come from? Which is true? Robin Philpot’s vast and methodical research, extensive interviews, and close analysis of events, testimony in courts, and popular writings on the subject show not only that that official narrative is false, but that it was edified to cover up the causes of the tragedy and to protect the criminals responsible for it. What’s more, to make that story more believable, the storytellers have unfailingly reproduced the literary traditions, clichés, and metaphors that provided the underpinnings of slavery, the slave-trade, and colonialism. Nearly 20 years later, the facts about the Rwandan tragedy have been so distorted and the adjudicated facts ignored that Rwanda is now used everywhere to justify so-called humanitarian intervention throughout Africa (and the world). It has become a “useful imperial fiction,” and for that reason, this book seeks to find out what really happened there.

Genres: Africa, Rwanda, Nonfiction

273 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Came across this book at the place I was staying in Musanze. At first, there were some interesting points made by the author regarding the time period between October 1990 and April 1994, the lack of interest in who really shot down President Habyarimana’s plane, and the lack of real criticism of now-President Kagame. But as you get into the book, you realize the author has an incredibly strong anti-American/anti-Canadian (he is French Canadian and wrote a book about Quebec’s struggle for independence)/pro-French bias, which colors his entire argument. He is a conspiracy theorist in the same vein as Noam Chomsky where everything the United States (especially the CIA) does is with evil intent and is responsible for the ills of the world.

Specifically, he thinks the US and other western powers backed the RPF lead by Kagame in order to erode French influence and eventually claim the resources of neighboring Congo. How he gets there is a web of insinuations and assumptions that lack any evidentiary support.

Other problems (not an exhaustive list):
1. He first says there were no lists of Tutsis to be killed leading up to the massacres, but later says, okay, maybe there were lists, but it was only a few indeed people and they were spies connected to the RFP, so the Hutu regime had every right to have a murder list. Horrifying.

2. He never discusses the Radio Mille Collines that was used to broadcast incendiary rhetoric (calling Tutsis “cockroaches”) and propaganda to incite Hutus to kill Tutsis.

3. Likewise, even if you take his claim that the RPF broke international law to enter the country from a Uganda in October 1990 and that a civil war was going on leading up to April 1994, the author fails to address why ordinary people turned into mass killers. This wasn’t killing of RPF members or politicians, this was people slaughtering their next door neighbors and friends because they were Tutsis. He simply glosses over it and says Tutsis killed Hutus too, so this was really just a lot of bloodletting during a civil war, not a genocide.

4. The author also fails to tell his audience that his brother, John Philpot, represented a defendant accused (and later convicted) of genocide that the author spends an entire chapter defending. Philpot’s brother is mentioned earlier in the book, but not in relation to Jean-Paul Akayesu’s charges and how he was really innocent.

All in all, it was an interesting read more because you get a view of the author’s political convictions more than any new information about Rwanda or the genocide.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've run across a number of strong scholarly critiques of the Balkan(s) and Gulf war of in the 1990s (Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention for example) but not so much for the Rwanda/DRC wars. Robin's book fills a critical whole in the literature by presenting primary source documents, UN voting records, and UN/US quotes to critically challenge the official 'commonsense' narrative of the Rwanda genocide and subsequent RPF invasion of the DRC. This is especially troubling in the era of R2P, of which, the Rwanda genocide serves as case and point for the necessity of unilateral state aggression by the great powers. This rarely challenged case study calls for further examination and questioning of why in one case, Rwanda, the US and its allies call it a genocide, while in the DRC, the US blocks prosecution of what was called a genocide by the UN mapping report.


I'd recommend Enduring Lies and The Politics of Genocide by Edward Herman for further readings.

[Zach Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an eye-opening read for me. Challenging the prevailing wisdom about the 1994 tragedy in Rwanda, Philpot explains the history that has been purposefully silenced, and how that has allowed U.S. and other Western powers to create what he calls "imperial fiction" and a "new scramble for Africa". Focusing heavily on the lead-up to the '94 massacres, including the October 1990 Ugandan invasion of Rwanda and the set-up of the RFP, it was incredibly enlightening to see how this story actually unfolded and the consequences still seen today in The Congo. As he alludes to, the massacres were in fact preventable, and the U.S. (with Canada and others) purposefully and coercively set the stage for what has become one of the most well known tragedies in modern history.

[John Seno · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting counter narrative from what you come across in mainstream media.