Judi Rever is a conspirator, genocide denier, and a historical revisionist. She is a Canadian journalist specializing in the Great Lakes region, particularly Rwanda and DRC. She is a former contributor to various media outlets in North America and Europe, including television (CBS), radio (RFI) and print media such as AFP, Montreal’s Globe and Mail and Le Monde diplomatique.
In March 2018, her book In Praise of Blood was published in Canada and the English-speaking world, before being translated and published in French in 2020, under the title L’éloge du sang. Interspersed with biographical anecdotes, the book claims to offer a new reading of the genocide committed against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. Judi Rever recycles several features characteristic of the negationist literature that has developed over the last thirty years:
- Reversal of responsibility: at the heart of In Praise of Blood is the idea that the 1994 genocide was in fact triggered by Paul Kagame. This accusation, as old as the genocide itself, holds the leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), (who in fact is the one who stopped the genocide in July 1994), responsible for the April 6, 1994 attack on the plane of the then Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana.
- The reversal of guilt: Judi Rever breaks new ground by going as far as to accuse the soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) of having infiltrated the genocidal militias and of having taken part in the killings, at Bisesero (May-June 1994) for example.
- The counter-condemnation: at the cost of this historical twist, the book suggests the perpetration of not one but two genocides with Paul Kagame as their mastermind. Indeed, in addition to the genocide against the Tutsi, another, was supposedly committed against the Hutu.
The conclusions of this book, described by its French publisher as a “breathtaking investigative work”, are based on numerous methodological biases : in addition to a lack of critical distance from ethnic categories and the lack of credibility of her sources (when they are named), Judi Rever ultimately resorts to the conspiracy card. Paul Kagame obsesses the Canadian author, who sees him behind every event of regional or global scope, as the orchestrator of the genocide against the Tutsi and the two Congo wars, as well as the master of the European and North American chancelleries, from whose backstage he dictates a supposed “official history”.
Judi Rever’s fallacious theses are promoted by several media channels in the French-speaking world, including the magazine Marianne, directed by Natacha Polony, France 24 and Sud Radio. They are also disseminated by military personnel who took part in Opration Turquoise in June 1994 – the France Turquoise association, for example – or by political figures, such as the 1994 Secretary General of Élysée, Hubert Védrine, always anxious to divert attention from the troubled role played by France during the genocide.
On October 9, 2020, Judi Rever took part in a colloquium organized by two French senators (and former ministers), the socialist Alain Richard and Gérard Longuet, former Defense Minister under Nicolas Sarkozy. Entitled “L’Afrique des Grands Lacs: 60 ans de tragique instabilité” (Africa of the Great Lakes: 60 years of tragic instability), the event featured the genocide denier Charles Onana and the former Rwandan ambassador to France from 1990 to 1994, Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana, promoter of the double genocide theory.
Although she claims not to deny the genocide against the Tutsi, Judi Rever renders this event illegible. Reduced to the thickness of a plot, the genocide against the Tutsi becomes under her pen a propaganda weapon forged by Paul Kagame, aimed at concealing another genocide – targeting the Hutu – and his supposed involvement in the Tutsi genocide itself. In other words: in her theses, the victims of the Tutsi genocide are the perpetrators of the genocide against the Tutsi.