I wish to add my voice to those who support a public discussion of the events in the Rwandan War that took place between October1, 1990 and July 1994 and its aftermath and to express my profound disgust at the attempt by the signatories of the letter to you of October 12, 2014 by a number of RPF propagandists and hangers-on to attack the BBC for broadcasting the documentary by Conroy and Corbin, “Rwanda, The Untold Story”.
The signatories include those who have been active propagandists for the RPF regime from the beginning such as Linda Melvern and Gerald Caplan, whose false histories of the war are infamous. It includes others such as General Romeo Dallaire whose role in helping the RPF prepare its final offensive and the murder of President Habyarimana were exposed in the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda and are part of the trial record, and Barbara Mulvaney, who was a senior prosecutor at the ICTR and who, therefore, cannot claim to be ignorant of the facts of her own case.
Others such as Mr. Monbiot et al appear to be those who Jacques Ellul described very well in his book ‘On Propaganda”; intellectuals who know little but think they have to have an opinion on everything and so are the most easily propagandized.
The signatories make the most egregious claims that were proved false in the trials many years ago. One of their claims concerns the Interahamwe. In the Military II trial at the ICTR, the trial of the Rwandan Army Chief of Staff and the Gendarmerie Chief of Staff and other officers, the prosecutor called witness 006/AOG, who was the former treasurer of the Interahamwe.
This man is now living in Canada under Canadian government protection and support. In his testimony he stated that there were only 1,500 members of the Interahamwe and most of those in Kigali and that there was no Interahamwe presence in the southern regions of Butare and Gitarama as the MRND party had little presence on those areas. He also confirmed that, like the other youth militias of other parties, they were not armed and further confirmed that the president of the Interahamwe was a Tutsi and there were other Tutsis in the organisation. Barbara Mulvaney cannot claim anything else since she was part of the prosecution team at the time this witness testified. FULL STORY
