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In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front

Author	Judi Rever
Publisher	Random House of Canada
Publication date	March 2018
ISBN	978-0-345-81210-0

In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front is a 2018 non-fiction book by Canadian journalist Judi Rever and published by Random House of Canada; it has also been translated into Dutch and French. The book describes war crimes by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) that occurred before, during, and after the Rwandan genocide (against Tutsi), based on hundreds of interviews and unpublished reports by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Rever supports the double genocide theory, classifying the RPF crimes as genocide against Hutu.

Although many of the crimes discussed in Rever's book were already known to specialists, the book is highly controversial. Praised for thorough investigation at considerable personal risk to the author, the book was also criticized for sensationalism and relying on unreliable sources. According to historian Gerald Caplan, the book "had an immediate, destabilizing influence on the world of orthodox Rwandan scholarship".

Background

Since 1994, a variety of scholars and other investigators have published studies unflattering to the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), stating among other things that it started the Rwandan Civil War and is responsible for mass killings of Hutus.

Judi Rever is a Canadian journalist who has covered African affairs since the First Congo War, which she covered for Radio France Internationale. During her journalistic work, she reported on the RPF tracking down and killing Hutu in eastern Congo in 1997. At the time, US officials claimed that these Hutu were genocide perpetrators, but Rever found and interviewed malnourished women and children who told her about RPF massacres. She also wrote for The Globe and Mail, whose Africa correspondent, Geoffrey York, is a Kagame critic, and contributed the foreword to Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza's 2017 book Between 4 Walls of the 1930 Prison: Memoirs of Rwandan Prisoner of Conscience. While writing the book, Rever faced death threats against herself and her family. She separated from her husband and children to protect them from anonymous callers who repeatedly threatened to kill them. Before the book was published, she was largely unknown.

The book was published by Random House of Canada in March 2018 and in Dutch by Amsterdam University Press in 2018. A French translation of the book was originally to be published by Fayard in 2019, but this company withdrew after controversy. Subsequently Max Milo published it in 2020 as Rwanda: L’éloge du sang (Rwanda: In Praise of Blood).

Content

The truth, no matter what aid donors seem to believe, is that the RPF has never stopped the violence. Kagame killed before the genocide. He killed during the genocide. And he killed after the genocide. The West’s unbridled support only fed the regime’s sense of impunity. Journalists from outside the country rarely perceived the truth. And journalists inside the country could not report on RPF violence. If they tried, they faced injury or death.

Rever's book draws in part on unpublished reports of the Bureau of Special Investigations, part of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, sent to her unofficially. She conducted hundreds of interviews with RPF defectors, humanitarian workers, witnesses, and others. The appendices contain information on "Structure of RPF violence from 1994 through the counterinsurgency" and dozens of biographical sketches of "The criminals of the Rwanda Patriotic Front". Rever supports the double genocide theory, classifying the RPF crimes as genocide against Hutu. Historian Gerald Caplan writes that "almost every one of her 250 pages of text contains extremely damning accusations" and that Rever has "only one story to tell: The deplorable, bloody record of the RPF from the day it was founded, as it invaded Rwanda from Uganda, through the genocide, and on to the ferocious wars in the Great Lakes area of Africa thereafter".

According to Rever, the RPF's Directorate of Military Intelligence began to infiltrate both Hutu and Tutsi groups and assassinate Hutu moderates in the early 1990s. She writes that in 1994, RPF leader Paul Kagame escalated the civil war by ordering the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana; his plane was shot down using surface-to-air missiles obtained from Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. After the plane was shot down, Hutu extremists killed Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and the Belgian peacekeepers defending her, starting the genocide.

Rever estimates that there were about 500,000 victims of RPF killings, and that the organization can be considered a joint criminal enterprise. According to Rever, the difference between Hutu killings and RPF killings is that the latter were executed with more stealth and careful planning for disposing of the bodies, whereas during the genocide Tutsi victims were left outside to be eaten by wild animals. RPF defectors told Rever that the RPF organized mass killings of Hutu in the parts of Rwanda that it controlled as early as April in order to provoke the anti-Tutsi killings to a level such that no political compromise could be reached. This would eliminate the relevance of the Arusha Accords and pave the way for an RPF takeover. Another of Rever's theories is that RPF elements had infiltrated the extremist militias that carried out the genocide of Tutsi and were complicit in those killings She states that the RPF systematically killed Hutu in northwest Rwanda in order to make their land available for Tutsi refugees. Defectors also told her that killings of Congolese Tutsi refugees in Rwanda in 1997, blamed on Hutu insurgents, were actually a false flag attack by the RPF. An anonymous ICTR investigator allegedly told her that "In my life I’ve never seen a situation where so much evidence was collected and no indictment was issued", regarding the April 1994 Byumba stadium massacre of Hutu by the RPF.

Rever describes RPF units as "death squads" which operated "open-air crematoriums" in Akagera National Park and compares them to the Einsatzgruppen, gas vans, and extermination camps of Nazi Germany. She criticizes the United States and other countries for overlooking the RPF's crimes. Rever writes that the reason RPF crimes remain less well-known than the Rwandan genocide is that "most people simply wished to believe a more palatable construction of history. The story of a morally disciplined RPF rescuing Rwanda from the brink, to save Tutsis from a genocide…This story was easier to comprehend than what actually happened."

Reception

The book was publicized in a media campaign and quickly received international attention. Caplan credits Helen Epstein's favorable two-part piece in The New York Review of Books for popularizing Rever's work, noting that Epstein had no great credentials as a Rwanda expert. Caplan acknowledges that Rever’s book "... presses all of us to give the uglier aspects of the RPF’s record the prominence they deserve," but he concludes: "... there are too many unnamed informants; too many confidential, unavailable leaked documents; too much unexamined credulity about some of the accusations; too little corroboration from foreigners who were eyewitnesses to history." According to French sociologist Claudine Vidal, the book's publication revived efforts by "propagandists, researchers and activists" to prove that the RPF regime committed genocide, which is perceived as "the only way of gaining recognition of a mass crime and eliciting public outcry".

Political scientist René Lemarchand calls the book a "path-breaking inquest", "destined to become required reading for any one claiming competence on the Rwanda genocide". He praises Rever for thorough investigation and taking risks in order to gather as much information as possible. The book convinced scholar Filip Reyntjens of the accuracy of the double genocide theory, which he had previously rejected. Political scientist Scott Straus, a critic of the double genocide theory, calls the book "irresponsible" and states that Rever's "title is unnecessarily provocative, her tone breathless and conspiratorial, and her account of 'there is a conspiracy of silence that I broke, even if it destroyed my family,' is misleading and narcissistic". Vidal writes that "Rever’s work blurs the line between investigation and indictment" and "reads like a prosecutor's closing argument". In particular, Rever describes massacres "in such a way as to classify them as genocide". Vidal states that there are no new revelations in the book, but that Rever accumulates more evidence for charges that have already been made in earlier publications.

In The New York Review of Books, Epstein writes that Rever's "sources are too numerous and their observations too consistent for her findings to be a fabrication." Le Soir journalist Colette Braeckman praises Rever for her on-the-ground investigation but criticizes her for examining only one side of the coin, concluding that she appears in the end to be an ally of the revisionists that preceded her. According to journalist Laurie Garrett: "As journalism and creative writing In Praise of Blood is excellent". The Lancet later published a letter critical of Garrett's review, which disputes the book's conclusions and accuses Rever of victim blaming.

Regarding the new allegations raised in Rever's book, genocide scholar Samuel Totten wrote to Caplan that Rever's book fails to answer many important questions, starting with: whether other researchers heard the same rumors and tried to investigate them, and if the ICTR heard any testimony related to them. Researchers Helen Hintjens and Jos van Oijen focus on Rever's claim that the RPF operated Nazi-style extermination camps without leaving any trace. Specialists they consulted, including the Netherlands Forensic Institute, concluded that the methods described by Rever "would certainly have left significant traces of mass murder", and a Belgian journalist who visited the site when it was supposed to be in operation did not notice anything unusual. On Rever's "infiltrations"-theory, that the RPF was pulling the strings of every organization, they recall a comparable suggestion by the Rwandan ministry of defence published in 1991. Overall, they state that "Rever's book does little more than recycle... earlier denial narratives and sources".

During a promotional tour in Belgium which included speeches at three universities, a group of sixty scientists, researchers, journalists, historians and eye-witnesses such as Romeo Dallaire, published an open letter in Le Soir criticizing the universities for giving the impression that by promoting Judi Rever's book they supported her conspiracy theories and denial, noting that "Whenever the author agrees to admit that Tutsi were massacred in Rwanda in 1994, it is in reality to affirm that they were massacred by other Tutsi!"

An open letter which accused the book of genocide denial was published in Libération in 2020, signed by organizations such as Ibuka, an association of Tutsi genocide survivors, and SOS Racisme. Rever says that she is not a genocide denier because she accepts that the killing of Tutsi was indeed a genocide, but she is a "revisionist" because she questions existing historical narratives. Investigative journalist Linda Melvern notes that in her acknowledgements, Rever thanks several defence lawyers and known genocide deniers for their help.

Awards

The book received the 2018 Quebec Writers' Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction and the 2018 Huguenot Society of Canada Award. It was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction

References

1. ^ Caplan 2018, p. 168.
2. ^ Epstein, Helen (2018). "The Mass Murder We Don't Talk About". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 10 November 2020.
3. ^ Braeckman, Colette (30 September 2020). ""L' Eloge du sang", une enquête fouillée mais controversée sur les crimes commis au Rwanda". Le Soir Plus (in French). Retrieved 10 November 2020.
4. ^ Hintjens, Helen M.; van Oijen, Jos (2020). "Elementary Forms of Collective Denial: The 1994 Rwanda Genocide". Genocide Studies International. 13 (2): 146–167. doi:10.3138/gsi.13.2.02.
5. ^ Garrett, Laurie (2018). "Rwanda: not the official narrative". The Lancet. 392 (10151): 909–912. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32124-X.
6. ^ Vidal, Claudine. "Debate: Judi Rever will not let anything stand in the way of her quest to document a second Rwandan genocide". The Conversation. Retrieved 10 November 2020.
7. ^ "Génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda : le livre controversé de Judi Rever paraîtra en France". Jeune Afrique (in French). 9 July 2020. Retrieved 10 November 2020.
8. Rever, Judi (2018). De waarheid over Rwanda: het regime van Paul Kagame (in Dutch). Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 978-94-6372-360-2.
9. "Judi Rever's disputed book on Tutsi genocide to be published in France". The Africa Report.com. 10 July 2020. Retrieved 10 November 2020.
10. Rever, Judi (2020). Rwanda : L’éloge du sang: L’inconnu (in French). Max Milo. ISBN 978-2-315-00987-9.
11. ^ Lemarchand, René (25 June 2018). "Rwanda: the state of Research". Violence de masse et Résistance – Réseau de recherche. Sciences Po. ISSN 1961-9898. Archived from the original on 19 November 2018. Retrieved 13 December 2018.
12. Caplan 2018, p. 172.
13. ^ "Canadian journalist challenges Rwandan genocide narrative in new book | CBC Radio". CBC. Retrieved 10 November 2020.
14. Caplan 2018, p. 171.
15. Cronin-Furman, Kate. "The Insistence of Memory". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 10 November 2020.
16. Caplan 2018, p. 181.
17. Caplan 2018, p. 184.
18. Reyntjens, Filip. "Un " second génocide " au Rwanda : retour sur un débat complexe". The Conversation. Retrieved 10 November 2020.
19. Reyntjens, Filip. "De dubbele genocide van 1994". De Standaard (in Flemish). Retrieved 10 November 2020.
20. Straus, Scott (2019). "The Limits of a Genocide Lens: Violence Against Rwandans in the 1990s". Journal of Genocide Research. 21 (4): 504–524. doi:10.1080/14623528.2019.1623527.
21. Binagwaho, Agnes; Hinda, Ruton; Mills, Edward (2019). "Rwanda and revisionist history". The Lancet. 393 (10169): 319–320. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(19)30121-7.
22. Caplan 2018, pp. 170–171.
23. "Rwanda: pétition contre des conférences révisionnistes sur le Rwanda". LeSoir (in French). 9 October 2020. Retrieved 17 November 2020.
24. "Rwanda: "L'éloge du sang", ouvrage polémique sur le rôle du FPR pendant le génocide". RFI (in French). 27 September 2020. Retrieved 10 November 2020.
25. Caplan 2018, p. 169.
26. Melvern, Linda (2020). Intent to Deceive: Denying the Genocide of the Tutsi. Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-78873-328-1.
27. "The Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction – Quebec Writers' Federation". Quebec Writers' Federation. Retrieved 11 November 2020.
28. "OHS Huguenot Award Recognizes Judi Rever for In Praise of Blood" (PDF). Ontario Historical Society. 19 June 2019. Retrieved 10 November 2020.
29. "Judi Rever | Writers' Trust of Canada". Judi Rever | Writers' Trust of Canada. Retrieved 10 November 2020.

Sources

• Caplan, Gerald (2018). "Rethinking the Rwandan Narrative for the 25th Anniversary". Genocide Studies International. 12 (2): 152–190. doi:10.3138/gsi.12.2.03.

Further reading

• Rever, Judi (2018). In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Random House of Canada. ISBN 978-0-345-81210-0.
• Rever, Judi (2020). "The Legacy of RPF Violence and Why Rwandan Refugees Refuse to Return". Repatriation, Insecurity, and Peace: A Case Study of Rwandan Refugees. Springer. pp. 37–51. ISBN 978-981-15-2850-7.
• Robertson, Tim (2018). "Cows for peace: The aftermath of the Rwandan genocide". Meanjin. 77 (4): 194.

External links

• Interview about writing the book

• 2018 non-fiction books
• Books about Rwanda
• Canadian non-fiction books
• Rwandan Patriotic Front
• Random House books
• Amsterdam University Press books