Rwandans deserve better than this

It remains shocking to me that reports like Caplan's are given such priority in respected publications. This is the type of incendiary reporting that characterises the Rwanda socio-political landscape. Much of what Caplan writes is unbalanced in favour of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and is a dangerous thing as the RPF tightens its grip on political life in Rwanda in advance of the August 2010 presidential elections.

The Mutsinzi Report raises as many questions as it claims to resolve. Caplan supports the independence of the report without remarking on the one-sideness of the available evidence. As an academic, this is abhorrent. Good critical research is contextually situated and historically balanced. Instead, Caplan treats as solid the evidence ‘proving’ the complicity of Hutu extremists with little regard for any written or oral evidence pointing in the direction of the RPF.

Knowing that the political situation in Rwanda is tense, and the free speech is virtually non-existent, it is difficult to accept wholesale the testimony of the hundreds of witnesses. Note the RPF's silencing of Joshua Ruzibiza, the man who claims to have affected Kagame's order to shoot down the plane. He was harassed and threatened into submission in late 2008. His recanting is available on YouTube. His book is titled, Rwanda: L’histoire secrète and was published in 2005 by Editions du Panama.

Of identified informants, at least two dozen are members of the former government army, were interviewed under extreme pressure in the presence of RPF officials, in full awareness of what they were expected to say, and of the price to be paid if they did not. The validity of the narratives gathered by the report needs to be considered by any serious academic.

The Mutsinzi Report sets up a straw man and then proceeds to attack Hutu extremists. This is exact same tactic that was used by those in power before the genocide to argue for its implementation! Caplan is but fodder in this debate that presents half-truths as facts and fails to substantiate any of its claims.

Given Rwanda's history of the elite manipulation of the past for political
gain, Caplan's analysis is dangerous and thoughtless. Rwandans deserve
better than this.

* Susan Thomson is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.