On December 21, 2019, Marianne magazine opened its columns to Judi Rever. Described as a freelance journalist by the English-language Canadian daily Globe and Mail, for which we are told she has published “numerous articles“, Rever is also the author of the book In Praise of Blood. The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (published in 2018), which Fayard did not publish in France deemed controversial.
The book develops a denialist thesis that Alain Léauthier complacently summarizes in his short introduction. The author claims that the Rwandan Patriotic Front, whose armed wing was then led by current President Paul Kagame, “took part in the massacres of the Tutsis, by infiltrating the Hutu-Power militias. Their cynical political objective was to establish themselves as the only legitimate recourse against the genocidaires.”
It contends that to take power, Paul Kagame would have orchestrated a genocide in which RPF commandos would have participated, so as to put an end to it, and pose as savior in the eyes of the world and establish his domination over the country. Rever’s article in fact continues the work begun in 1994 by the genocidaires’ defense lawyers to “reverse the roles, to relativize, to trivialize, to lie about the reality of the facts“. It also raises questions about the appropriateness of its publication in a French weekly that is well established in the media landscape.
But from the credit given to the idea of a “genocide against the Hutu” as early as 2000, namely in “Le nouveau scandale du Rwanda”, to the comments of its current editor-in-chief, who maintains that the 1994 genocide involved “bastards facing other bastards“, Marianne has long demonstrated its obsession with rewriting and falsifying the history of the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Rever’s article and its presentation by Alain Léauthier, represent a textbook case of the fallacious rhetoric used by the denialist nebula, a composite language mixing conceptual confusion, lack of methodological rigor, and manipulation of the facts.
The factual errors of Rever’s article have been exposed by Raphaël Doridant, in a recent, well-founded and implacable article. The present analysis focuses on the formal devices used to make absurd statements plausible, a strategy common to all genocide denial, but which takes on a specific twist in the case of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
We will first describe the article’s blatant falsification of the history of the massacres committed in Bisesero. We will then demonstrate how the tools used by Judi Rever, through their lack of relevance and rigor, contribute to blurring the general reading of the planning and unfolding of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Finally, we’ll take a look at the conspiracy motives that make Rever’s article a model for conspiracist discourse, which Marianne seems to embrace.
A deliberate falsification of history
In “Revelations on the Bisesero massacres” Judi Rever aims to challenge a supposed “official history” about the extermination of the Tutsi who took refuge in the heights of the Bisesero hills in south-western Rwanda. Between late April and late June 1994, tens of thousands of Tutsi were the target of daily assaults by the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), militiamen, and Hutu civilians armed by the local authorities. However, Rever maintains that this is innaccurate. Her denial is built around two complementary ideas: the rewriting of the history of the Bisesero massacres, in order to exonerate the institutional organizers; the reversal of responsibilities by naming other culprits.
Judi Rever concedes that “tens of thousands of victims were killed with axes, guns or burnt to death by hordes of killers“. Later, one of her anonymous witnesses explains that “bandits arrived like locusts and mixed with the local Hutu“. The latter suggests that the genocide was the result of a “spontaneous explosion of violence” which became impossible for a failed and impotent government to control.
However, the organized nature of the 1994 massacres in Bisesero is unmistakable. Jacques Morel explains :
“When the assassination attempt on President Habyarimana was announced, it was not popular anger that triggered the Tutsi genocide. It was the local authorities, led by prefects and burgomasters, who set it in motion by mobilizing their subordinates, including gendarmes, communal police, militiamen and the Hutu population”.
Likewise, the planning and organization of the massacres are evidenced by official documents from the period. For example, on June 18, 1994, the Minister of the Interior of the Rwandan Interim Government (GIR), Édouard Karemera, reported by mail to the Gisenyi command (north-west of Bisesero) that:
“The Government has decided to ask the Gisenyi Operational Sector Command to support the Gendarmerie Group in Kibuye to carry out, with the support of the population, the combing operation in the Bisesero sector of the Gishyita Commune, which has become an RPF sanctuary.”
Contrary to what Ms. Rever’s prose insinuates, the organization and execution of the Bisesero massacres by the Rwandan Interim Government (GIR) leaves no room for doubt. Even at the end of the genocide, the administrative apparatus, from the highest levels of the State down to the prefectures and communes, operated with formidable efficiency.
Judi Rever’s falsification is not limited to exonerating the institutional organizers of the genocide. She asserts that it was “the RPF that finally crushed the resistance of the Tutsi at Bisesero, ensuring their deaths by the thousands at the end of June“. According to one of her witnesses, Paul Kagame and two of his lieutenants “gave the RPF commandos the orders for the killings in Bisesero, and in Rwanda in general“.
While the official propaganda of the genocidaires made every Tutsi in Rwanda an RPF infiltrator to be exterminated, the Canadian journalist now explains that the Tutsi massacred were killed by Paul Kagame’s men. Through the magic of this verbal operation, the criminals become the victims of a historical error.
To justify this tour de force, she admits that the Interahamwe took part in the Bisesero massacres. The portrait she paints of these militias is in line with her desire to exonerate the genocidaires: “The Interahamwe militia was the young guard of the ruling party […] many of whose recruits were unemployed, exiled and starving“. She in other words justifies their actions by describing them as thugs and… foreigners. The nature of their links with the presidential party inspires no further reflection in Ms. Rever. However, historian Florent Piton describes the genesis and role of this militia in greater detail:
“At the end of 1991, a group of supporters of the Loisirs soccer team transformed themselves into a structure for mobilizing young people in support of the MRND: thus, were born the interahamwe, soon to become the first recruitment relay for the former single party. […] From 1992 onwards, local branches were set up throughout the country, but the legal status of the movement was never settled […]. This lack of legal status, which is quite exceptional in Rwanda, enabled the interahamwe to cover up their abuses, which, because they had no real official existence, could not be brought before the courts.
In fact, the interahamwe […] were at the heart of the political violence, attacks and anti-Tutsi pogroms. […] On the evening of April 6, the interahamwe were on the front line with the presidential guard and loyal army units at roadblocks and in operations to hunt down opponents and Tutsi.”
The author also points out that other militias had existed since the opening of the multiparty system, but that they joined forces with the interahamwe as soon as the genocide began: “Moreover, the term interahamwe […] came to uniformly designate all the genocidaires.”
The coordination of the genocide’s political, military and civilian actors negates the hypothesis of an Interahamwe militia adrift. But this concern for reality remains peripheral to Marianne‘s article. Indeed, the general argument is based on a definitive assertion: “it is also a fact that RPF commandos had infiltrated the militias of the Hutu parties“, going as far as mentioning the participation of “mixed militias” in the massacres. Rever supports the implausibility of this scenario. She makes no effort to prove the nature of these assertions. likewise, the strong solidarity that bound the militiamen, recruited locally and enrolled in the same social networks, makes the idea of their infiltration literally unbelievable. It was therefore with these radically anti-Tutsi militias, devoted to the GIR, that the RPF is said to have carried out the genocide, thanks to the deployment of commandos whose “strength […] reached several thousand“. The RPF was therefore according to her not responsible for stopping the genocide against the Tutsi, but became its principal executor.
Judi Rever’s falsification is undermined by documents from the period. For example, in a note dated June 17, 1994, the DGSE refers to the assistance provided by the RPF to Tutsi refugees at the Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali, threatened by “Hutu militias”.
Despite these documented facts, Judi Rever supports her fallacious version by playing one last card: the testimony, in June 1994, of the inhabitants of “Gishyita, northwest of Bisesero, [who] explained to the French soldiers that the RPF had completely infiltrated the Kibuye hills and were ‘trying to cut the country in two’.” Indeed, UN Resolution 929, dated June 22, 1994, authorized a French intervention in Rwanda – Operation Turquoise – with an officially “strictly humanitarian […] purpose, to be conducted in an impartial and neutral manner and not to constitute an interposition force between the two parties”.
Deployed in the south-west of the country, it was here that the French soldiers referred to by Rever took the word of the villagers of Gishyita, near Bisesero. She fails to note their perfect conformity with the propaganda of the genocidal GIR, which, to disguise the crime it has been perpetrating for nearly three months, presents the Rwandan Tutsi as potential enemies, or even members of the RPF who have infiltrated the country. Nor does it mention the fax from the intelligence services of the Turquoise command, which describes the massacres in progress at Bisesero as follows: “on the 27th, at around 11 a.m., a strong element of around one hundred armed militiamen supervised by soldiers attacked […] 200 Tutsi, originally from the commune, [who] were grouped together in the area”. Nor does it mention the statement made on June 29 by Lieutenant-Colonel Duval to the then Minister of Defense, François Léotard, to the effect that “there were no RPF elements infiltrating the area and that it was the Hutu militias who were responsible for the massacres.”
Nor does it question the identity of the “villagers” whom the French meet. And yet, after three months of genocide, isn’t it likely that these informants themselves took part in the atrocities? In a short video of June 28, 1994, revealed in 2018 by Mediapart – which Rever must not ignore – a French non-commissioned officer reports, for example, to Colonel Rosier on the massacres he witnessed on patrol and adds: “the guide who accompanied us, obviously, was one of the guys who […] guided the militias in the days that preceded.”
Rather than questioning the passivity of the French army at Bisesero, between June 27 and 30, 1994, while massacres were being carried out against the last survivors, Judi Rever rejects any examination of Turquoise’s (in)action – “anti-French accusations” – and embraces the genocidal credo of “infiltration of the whole country” by the RPF.
This last example is emblematic of the analytical dishonesty and conceptual vagueness deliberately fostered by the Canadian journalist, and further reinforced by the editorial apparatus put in place by Marianne, to contribute to the falsification of history.
Organizing confusion
In one sentence, Judi Rever sums up the entire body of research focused on the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda as a dead end: “Researchers all over the world have tried, with great difficulty, to understand how so many Tutsi could have been exterminated.” By referring to the extermination of “so many Tutsi“, it seeks to avoid the accusation of genocide denial; by speaking of “researchers”, it suggests exhaustive knowledge of this field of study, while at the same time positing the axiom that their research has gone astray in general – they have “tried” to understand, without success, as far back as Rever.
In a single sentence, then, the author revokes twenty-five years of historical work, without bothering to demonstrate her statements. Her readers have to be content with a bleak portrait of their intellectual activity – “with great difficulty” – and accept the failure of their attempt. And yet, a cursory examination of the bibliography on the subject is enough to shatter this commonplace of a subject that remains incomprehensible to its specialists.
Judi Rever is cautious in this respect, as she goes on to explain: “According to the official story, as told in books and by the survivors of Rwanda under Kagame’s tight control, it was the previous Hutu government and its willing executioners who decided to exterminate the Tutsi minority with machetes, in a desperate attempt to stay in power“. The label “official history” disqualifies in advance any substantiated response to his judgment on the state of knowledge about the 1994 genocide. At the same time, the author presents researchers on the subject as hard-working fools and/or liars intent on suppressing the truth. By framing her argument in this way, she departs from the accepted method of the social sciences, i.e., the publicity of an approach based on the critical reading of various sources. She thus draws a new space according to her needs, giving pride of place to the struggle between a concealed truth and an established lie. This deliberate confusion is reflected in the “concepts” used in her article.
In both Alain Léauthier’s introduction and Judi Rever’s article, the expression “Rwandan genocide” is taken for granted. The genocide took place on Rwandan territory, against Rwandans. Nevertheless, this lexical choice evacuates the characteristic of this event by overlooking the people targeted by the extermination process: the Rwandan Tutsis, who had to die because they were born Tutsis. As Mehdi Ba writes, “one can deny the essence of an event without denying the event itself.”
The expression is widely used in the media, either through carelessness or ignorance. In the logic of the article by Rever, who is presented to us as an expert, this choice can only be assumed. However, misnaming the subject of one’s research is a fundamental error in any work of journalism or social science, the aim of which is to enable the most accurate understanding possible. To speak of “Rwandan genocide” instead of “genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994” tends to erase the racist nature of the crime and, with it, the responsibility of the executioners who were supporters of the “Hutu power” ideology.
Judi Rever does, however, mention the participation of “Hutu scoundrels” – referred to later as “Hutu brigands” – in certain massacres. The choice of these terms, with their moral rather than analytical content, serves the fundamental thesis of the Canadian journalist: to disqualify the idea of a planned, organized genocide involving a significant proportion of the civilian population. In other words, these “scoundrels” appear to be predisposed to crime, easily manipulated. We thus return to the commonplace of the ontological monstrosity of genocidaires – necessarily very few in number – separated from the common humanity of “normal” people. A cliché certainly reassuring, but closer to an act of faith than to a historical or sociological approach.
In the absence of a historical method, Judi Rever relies on linguistic analysis to defend her thesis of a genocide organized and carried out by the RPF. Her key witness claims to have heard Mr. Kagame’s henchman utter the word “abatabazi“, which she explains is “the code word for commando“. However, in his book on the genocide against the Tutsi, Florent Piton explains, in a very clear paragraph, that the term “abatabazi” is the nickname used by the members of the extremist GIR, formed on April 8, 1994, and that it means “the saviors”. This lack of methodological scrupulousness is also reflected in the article’s lexical framework, which is largely based on discourses produced during the colonial era and taken up again, after independence, by the governments of the First and Second Rwandan Republics.
Basically, this “sometimes” indicates the exceptional or extraordinary nature of the case. It implies that, in the majority of cases, a Hutu can be easily distinguished from a Tutsi by the naked eye. By what criteria? The Canadian journalist doesn’t say, but the answer is as old as the European irruption of Rwanda. In the language of the colonists, the Tutsi, “straight nose, high forehead, thin lips”, is contrasted with the Hutu, “thick-set nose, thick lips, low forehead”; these physical characteristics, theorized by the colonists, were supposedly accompanied by psychological properties: compared with the “shy and lazy” Hutu, the Tutsi was described by “a background of deceit, under the guise of a certain refinement” as written by Jean-Pierre Chrétien in “Hutu et Tutsi au Rwanda et au Burundi”
In fact, the Marianne article reproduces this lexical field of cunning, characteristic of the official propaganda conveyed by the First Rwandan Republic. The supposedly atavistic hypocrisy of the Tutsi is summed up in the following insert: “Infiltrate, dissimulate, deceive“. This mantra attributed to the RPF’s supposed actions is completed a little later by the following sentence: “Kagame’s Tutsi soldiers hid under the uniform of the Hutu militia to attack civilians.” The portrayal of the Tutsi as “dissimulators” links the two threads of the same story of state discrimination: that orchestrated by the first independent Rwandan regime and that unleashed at the turn of the 1990s by the media close to the government of Juvénal Habyarimana, which earned the Rwandan Tutsi the animalistic nickname of “snakes”. Mingled with sexism, this register was reactivated by Kangura, an extremist magazine close to the regime, in order, for example, to disqualify Roméo Dallaire, the commander of the UN forces on the ground in 1994, by caricaturing him under the sexual sway of Tutsi women.
Rever recycles one last commonplace idea, as old as the colonization of Rwanda, when she describes the hill of Bisesero as a “Tutsi stronghold“. Recourse to the vocabulary of feudalism takes a singular turn in the Rwandan context, where it is assigned to the pre-colonial monarchy by the first Europeans to cross the region, despite a very approximate knowledge of it. Based on this adulterated source, a colonial narrative was constructed, making the Tutsi the masters and possessors of Rwanda, by right of conquest, with the Hutu as their slaves. At the turn of the 1960s, this discourse saturated the official ideology of independent Rwanda. Presenting the Tutsi of Rwanda as feudal lords lent a revolutionary coloration to the new government, and also served to justify the massacres committed from 1959 onwards against the Tutsi, tens of thousands of whom went into exile in neighboring countries.
In the words of Rever, the expression “Tutsi stronghold” is a pleonasm. However, such an expression does not allow us to understand the singularity of Bisesero and the reason – of a historical nature – why thousands of Tutsi sought refuge there during the 1994 genocide. The author makes no mention of the early organization of centers of resistance to the massacres of 1959, 1962-1964 and 1973 in the Bisesero region, nor of the transmission of this experience through the generations, nor of the tactical advantages of the site.
Judi Rever’s words thus echo the colonial, post-colonial and contemporary construction of racial antagonism in Rwanda, helping to render unintelligible the political, historical and sociological dimensions that presided over the organization of the genocide against the Tutsi. Compensating for the lack of rigor in his conceptual arsenal with the rhetoric of truth concealed by an “official history”, his article adds confusion to error, as demonstrated by his use of witnesses.
Judi Rever bases most of her demonstration on first-hand testimonies, but whose dubious reliability is recalled as follows by Raphaël Doridant:
“Judi Rever, however, is content to present indirect, anonymous testimony, or testimony of non-existent credibility. One of the witnesses she quotes says that “those who took part in the operation told her so, and that they were members of Kagame’s battalion commandos“. Another heard RPF people talking in bars “about what they had done, how many Tutsi had been killed“. Unspecified sources “establish that hundreds of members of the RPF commandos carried out a raid on Bisesero and the surrounding areas.”
Among these anonymous sources, fearing for their lives, one witness agrees to divulge his identity: James Munyandinda, presented as “having left Rwanda over ten years ago“, a former member of the “High Command Battalion, one of Kagame’s close guards“. Such a pedigree, making this witness a model of courage, must arouse the sympathy and confidence of the readership.
Yet, here again, Rever seems to take some liberties with the imperatives of investigative journalism by omitting to specify other biographical aspects concerning Mr. Munyandinda. The inconsistencies in his deposition, in 2017, as part of the French investigation into the April 6, 1994 attack on President Habyarimana’s plane, are also glossed over. Judi Rever, despite her claim to defend and illustrate historical truth, does not sacrifice the elementary requirements of verifying the credibility of her witnesses. No matter what the political motivations of her key witness, her word is sufficient in itself, as long as it validates the thesis previously posited as true. This conception of research, placing the result before its hypothesis, is at the heart of the conspiracy mechanism that Judi Rever comfortably develops in Marianne.
Conspiracy recipes
Under the guise of “reason” and the quest for “truth”, one will find very little interest in the victims of the genocide in Rever’s statements. When they do appear, it’s to support his central thesis that “the Tutsi of the interior, i.e. those living in Rwanda as opposed to those who grew up as refugees in Uganda, Burundi, Congo and Tanzania, were sacrificed” by RPF leader and current Rwandan president, Paul Kagame. He is accused of having used the genocide “as a gateway to power“. This metaphor used by one of the mystery witnesses quoted in the article illustrates, with tragic irony, the author’s very utilitarian relationship with this subject.
In order to establish Paul Kagame’s status as a master conspirator, she paints an indirect portrait of him by mobilizing a supposed international consensus: “Kagame is well regarded by the whole world because he has made people believe that a majority of Hutu killed the Tutsi.” The generalization induced by such a sentence mobilizes the connivance between author and readership necessary for a conspiracy narrative. Judi Rever presents herself as a one-woman journalist, inviting us to join her struggle. As it happens, a quick search of newspaper sites “around the world” is enough to verify the fragility of this axiom. Articles with the keyword “Kagame” paint a less flattering picture than expected.
Right from the introduction, Alain Léauthier states : “Kagame’s hands are not as clean as he claims. Judi Rever knows that Paul Kagame is the real mastermind and executor of the genocide from James Munyandinda, whose reliability is more than questionable, who explains that, at the end of June 1994, he was heard on a military radio station asking: “What news?” and “if the massacres had succeeded“. These equivocal and unverifiable remarks should be enough to convince the world, despite all the evidence compiled since 1994.
From 1973 to 1991, Rwanda was ruled by a single party organized around its leader, General Juvénal Habyarimana. In 1991, a multi-party system was authorized in the country, and several opposition parties were formed. From then on, the presidential party still in power faced fierce political opposition from the new formations, which it sought to circumvent by mobilizing the theme of Hutu ethnic solidarity against the “Tutsi enemy”, a vague formulation enveloping the RPF and the Tutsi living in Rwanda, accused by the extremist media of representing a fifth column.
Judi Rever claims that Paul Kagame’s RPF took advantage of this crucial moment in the history of the march to genocide to prepare “one of its most diabolical operations” [the genocide] by infiltrating the country, and that “representatives of the opposition took part in this infiltration, hand in hand with the RPF“. Such a revelation is bound to flabbergast the reader, and flabbergasting is an appropriate effect of conspiracy talk, since it conveniently makes one forget the need to produce evidence.
With Rever, facts bend to the form that suits the moment of her narrative. When necessary, opposition figures to the ruling power are assassinated by the RPF; when inconvenient, opposition figures become accomplices of the RPF in carrying out the genocide, with the gracious concession that “it cannot really be established that these Hutu opponents were fully aware of the strategy aimed at extermination.”
In this vagueness that she likes to maintain, perhaps the author is thinking of Agathe Uwilingiyimana, Prime Minister of the transitional government between 1993 and April 1994, assassinated on the morning of April 7, 1993, along with part of her family and the ten Belgian Blue Helmets responsible for her protection? Caricatured and reviled by the Hutu Power press, portrayed as an enemy of the Hutu “majority people”, accused of playing into the hands of RPF “cockroaches”, she was probably not “fully aware” of her participation in the machinations hatched long ago by RPF strategists…
Once Paul Kagame has been portrayed as the great orchestrator of the genocide and manipulator of the Rwandan political class, Judi Rever sets out to reveal the accomplices of his actions. The article reveals the identity of the man who allegedly carried out Paul Kagame’s dirty work at Bisesero, a certain “Kiyago“. She paints a disturbing portrait of him, based on two documents: firstly, his Facebook page, on which photographs are displayed:
“There are also peaceful photos of his mother, his children, some of the women he has been close to, and a photo of Kagame with his son and daughter in military fatigues. There are also simple photos from his youth and more recent, relaxed portraits in middle age. It refers to his time in Darfur as a driver for the United Nations and displays the bloody photo fakery of a masked man ripping out his heart to offer it to a woman. A 2018 tagline reads, “It’s only in the night that you see the stars,” a variation on a Martin Luther King Jr. quote.”
But also a “dormant Twitter account via which he publicly thanks Paul Kagame for what he has done for him.” Here again, the suggestion must compensate for the lack of conviction induced by these meagre clues. The Twitter account, with nine subscribers, limited to two Tweets and the Retweet of a message sent by Paul Kagame in 2011, inactive and without a profile photograph, becomes a “sleeping account“. However, this concept, worthy of an episode of The Office of Legends, seems to fly in the face of the Canadian journalist’s own thesis. After postulating close proximity between Paul Kagame and Kiyago, it now seems that the latter needs to communicate with the former via an open-access Twitter account…
After this ambiguous portrait, Judi Rever turns to the accusations against Kiyago. Kiyago is “cited as the perpetrator of serious crimes in a confidential UN report“. This confidentiality is opportune, since it discourages any possibility of verification, but it is also highly relative when the author states, in the same paragraph, that Kiyago is “known, among others, to have infiltrated the Hutu militia for the […] RPF“. To these charges, she adds that “he is suspected of the assassination of Félicien Gatabazi” and that “testimonies also cite him as having helped massacre Lando Ndasingwa, his wife Hélène Pinsky, a Canadian, and their two children once the genocide had begun.”
However, these assertions, based on “testimonies“, do not emerge unscathed from a factual cross-check. With regard to the assassination of Félicien Gatabazi, Linda Melvern in “Preface”, Rwanda. The betrayal of Human Rights Watch recalls that an investigation by CIVPOL (the civilian police of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda) led to “the arrest of a presumed accomplice – the manager of the Las Vegas cabaret – who was the leader of a local group of Interahamwe militiamen”. Landoald Ndasingwa’s death was attributed by the ICTR to “soldiers of the Presidential Guard” and included in the verdict against Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, one of the central instigators of the genocide.
Conclusion
In September 1994, the French version of Kangura magazine carried an unequivocal front-page headline: “Pourquoi le FPR a commis des massacres!” (Why the RPF committed massacres!). Founded in May 1990 in Rwanda, this magazine is distinguished by the violence of its editorial content and its appeals to hatred against the Tutsi, through, for example, the “10 Commandments of the Hutu”.
Among the many grievances levelled against Paul Kagame’s group in this issue, printed in Nairobi, one of the headings claims to demonstrate the RPF’s “direct responsibility for the death of Tutsi“. What does it say? Firstly, that while “Tutsi were killed by the population, militias and members of the Rwandan army […], reliable witnesses […] report that the interahamwe were made up of Tutsi“. Secondly, that the RPF had “infiltrated the rear lines of the Rwandan army“. Finally, that, far from saving the Tutsis “it has now been established that the RPF fired, with precision and in a sustained manner, at places it knew to be home to large groups of Tutsi“, such as the Church of the Holy Family in Kigali.
The subject of this article, its organization and the use of anonymous “direct witnesses not linked to the massacres, but rather themselves, victims of massacres” inevitably evoke Judi Rever’s text published in Marianne. The journalist’s supposed “revelations” mimetically follow in the footsteps of a version promoted by the genocidaires themselves, casting a murky light on her approach.
Of course, Alain Léauthier prepares the readership of his magazine: defenders of “official history” label Rever a “negationist […] despite years of research on the subject.” The author herself rejects this label, graciously admitting that Rwandan Tutsi were indeed murdered in 1994 – she only insists that they were victims of the RPF – a synonym for Judi Rever and Alain Léauthier of Tutsi.
By pretending to think that the definition of “negationist” is limited exclusively to denying the death of the Tutsi in Rwanda, the falsifiers of history believe they are effectively exonerating themselves. So by means of asking the question in a number of ways: what qualifier should be used to describe the process of deliberately falsifying the history of a genocide, in order to exonerate the perpetrators, despite the abundance of readily available evidence? What word can be used to describe an approach designed to confuse the reader by flouting the elementary rules of historical method? What word will the apostles of Rever use to describe the development of an absurd thesis based entirely on the implementation of a perfect conspiracy that is, in the final analysis, quite practical because it is impossible to disprove?
The historian Yves Ternon in “La négation du génocide. une approche comparative” seemed to be able to answer these questions, evoking the deformation induced by these procedures, resulting in “an anamorphosis”: “the narrative of the ‘alleged genocide’ is then reordered: […] the evidence presented as that of the crime was fabricated by propaganda, etc. Everything was a sham, a mystification: public opinion was gullible; it was given false currency”. For want of a better term, we’ll use the word “negationism” to describe Judi Rever’s statements, not as a mere “accusation” but as a fact – another word with which the Canadian author seems irrevocably at odds.