Denying Rwanda: A response to Herman and Peterson

To readers of Pambazuka News

Many of you will have followed the exchange among Gerald Caplan, Edward Herman & David Peterson, and myself concerning allegations that Herman & Peterson are engaged in a systematic campaign to deny the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Herman & Peterson's most recent contribution to this debate, posted to the Monthly Review website, took the form of: 1) a restating, and indeed deepening, of their denialist position on the slaughter of Rwandan Tutsis; and 2) a personal attack on me and my work on Rwanda and genocide in general.

I have now responded at length to Herman & Peterson's contentions and denialist fabrications. The full text of this response, along with links to the earlier correspondence and relevant online sources, is available on my ‘Genocide Studies Media File’ at http://jonestream.blogspot.com/2010/11/denying-rwanda-response-to-herman.html

An excerpt of this response follows. I urge Pambazuka readers to do what they can to spread word of Herman & Peterson's denialist enterprise, and to counter it in the forums available to them.

Adam Jones, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Political Science
University of British Columbia
Kelowna, BC, Canada

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From the response:

‘[...] On the basis of [Herman & Peterson's] casual abandonment of scholarship, we are supposed to reject and invert the entirety of the scholarly literature on the 1994 Rwandan genocide; all major human-rights investigations; and the immense wealth of survivor testimony. Herman & Peterson's hubris is awe-inspiring. But it prompts me to ask: just whom do they expect to buy their swill? The authors include passing citations of a small handful of distinguished Rwanda scholars -- Gérard Prunier, René Lemarchand, Linda Melvern, Filip Reyntjens. None of them supports (to say the least!) the denialist interpretation advanced by Herman & Peterson, depicting the RPF/Tutsis as the principal agents of the mass killing in Rwanda in 1994, ordinary Hutus as the primary victims, and ‘Hutu Power’ as an utterly disorganized and victimized entity. Nor do I know of any human-rights report that asserts it, and Herman & Peterson cite none in their supporting notes.

So let us face it. This brand of extreme revisionism and denial of the 1994 Rwandan genocide is shared by only ‘a tiny number of long-time American and Canadian genocide deniers, who gleefully drink each other's putrid bath water,’ as Gerald Caplan so aptly phrased it in his review of The Politics of Genocide. Like Herman & Peterson, the deniers cherry-pick a few useful factoids and declamations from serious scholarship on Rwanda (or halfway serious, like [Christian] Davenport & [Allan] Stam), while dismissing the vast bulk of the scholarly and human-rights literature as hopelessly corrupted by nefarious (western/imperialist) interests. This has the additional advantage of cutting down on what would otherwise be an onerous reading list, since the literature on Rwanda is now so extensive, detailed, and utterly contrary to Herman & Peterson's formulations.

I confess I wondered, when preparing my first response to Herman & Peterson, whether their depiction of events in Rwanda in 1994 resulted from ignorance and incompetence, rather than actual malice. Their latest post rules this out, I'm afraid. In first criticizing their framing, I drew special attention to a passage to which they had given considerable analytical weight (it appears in very similar form in their book, pp. 56-57): ‘Would it not have been incredible for Kagame's Tutsi forces to conquer Rwanda in 100 days, and yet the number of minority Tutsi deaths be greater than the number of majority Hutu deaths by a ratio of something like three-to-one? Surely then we would have to count Rwanda 1994 as the only country in history where the victims of genocide triumphed over those who committed genocide against them, and wiped the territory clean of its 'genocidaires' at the same time. If ever a prima facie case existed for doubting the collective wisdom of 'academics, human rights activists, [and] journalists' whose opinions the establishment respects, we find it here, with the alleged Hutu perpetrators routed and fleeing for their lives in neighbouring countries, and the alleged Tutsi victims in complete control.’

I responded: ‘By conflating Rwanda's civilian Tutsis with 'Kagame's Tutsi forces' -- Herman and Peterson none-too-subtly adopt Hutu Power's justification for slaughtering Tutsi civilians: that they constituted a 'fifth column,' indistinguishable from the invading RPF.’ It was, I asserted, ‘a disgraceful ploy [that] ... by itself ... casts Herman and Peterson's 'analysis' into utter disrepute.’

It is frankly nauseating to witness Herman & Peterson retreating not an iota from this calumny against a defenseless civilian population. Indeed, they press the point further [in their latest post]: ‘Jones fails to mention the long historic class division and warfare between Tutsi and Hutu, and the creation of many hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees after the RPF invasion of Rwanda,’ along with similar irrelevancies and imputations of guilt-by-ethnocultural-affinity, all intended to support a framing that -- yes, Rwandan Tutsis were intimately in cahoots with the murdering RPF. So they really were responsible for their own genocide ... except that, of course, Herman & Peterson deny they ever experienced a genocide. At which point words fail me. [...]’

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