Unspeakable horrors have plagued the tiny African country of Rwanda for better than a decade now. The effects of this conflict, to put it mildly, are profound and far-reaching. “We are the walking dead,” says Baptiste Senzira*, a native Rwandan who has lived in the U.S. since 1990 and is now seeking political asylum here. “At best, we are the walking wounded.” Baptiste left Rwanda to attend college in Washington on an academic scholarship. The day he left his home is the last time he saw any member of his family. All but his youngest sister, who is now 16, were slaughtered in the spasm of violence that ripped through the country in 1994. His sister, he is told, has been imprisoned for more than a year now.

Baptiste’s story is similar to that of the many other Rwandan refugees who have made it to the United States in one way or another. “Everyone has lost family and friends—everyone,” he emphasizes. In 1995 Baptiste moved to a small Midwestern city, where he has set up a temporary residence for refugee families. Since then, he has seen more than 50 refugees come through his house before finding a more permanent residence.

Although the brutality of the 1994 massacres shocked the world community, Rwanda’s situation may be one of the most misunderstood problems of the late 20th century. According to the refugees interviewed by this reporter, the Western media has consistently misrepresented or profoundly miscalculated the situation since the beginning of the conflict. Contrary to Western reportage, they say, Rwanda was a relatively peaceful country until 1990. Although ethnic tensions existed, Baptiste explains, the Hutu and Tutsi tribes lived together remarkably well under the dictatorship of President Juvenal Habyarimana. “There were problems, yes,” he admits, but there was no indication of ethnic tension on a scale that would lead an observer to predict the diabolical acts that followed the president’s assassination.

On April 6, 1994, Habyarimana’s plane was shot down near Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. Immediately thereafter came one of the most devastating massacres in human history. In the months following the assassination, an estimated one million Rwandans—nearly one-seventh of the country’s entire population—were slaughtered by guns, machetes, hammers, and spears.

Victor and Solange, Rwandans who are now living in the US with their four children, affirm the peacefulness of the ethnic co-existence that they knew before the terror broke out in 1994. Victor, a Hutu, married Solange, a Tutsi, without incident, and without objection from their family members. The Rwandan couple affirmed that, among the people who were not involved in the military forces of the country, there was little recognizable animosity between the two major tribes. The portrayal of the conflict in Rwanda as a “civil war” sparked simply by ethnic hatred, has visibly upset these refugees.

“Nothing can be further from the truth,” says Antoni Nyandwi, a college professor teaching in the U.S. “There is a serious lack of understanding of what has transpired.”

Historical background
The refugees all seem to agree: The real war in Rwanda—which was not a civil war, they emphasize—did not begin with the assassination of the president, as has been almost universally reported in the West. The conflict actually began four years earlier, when 3,000 Rwandan Tutsi troops from the Ugandan army invaded their ancestral homeland under the banner of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The story of Rwanda from 1990 to 1994 is one of a bloody battle for power between the RPF—backed by the US and Britain—and the country’s Hutu government, led by Habyarimana and backed by France and Belgium. Although both sides were responsible for bloodshed, Rwandan refugees in the US say the massacres of 1994 would never have erupted were it not for the RPF’s invasion in 1990, which was carried out under the false pretense of bringing democracy to the country.

To understand the RPF invasion, one must recall the circumstances underlying Rwanda’s revolution in 1959. For centuries the minority Tutsi tribe (which accounts for about 15 percent of Rwanda’s population) had dominated the country, with a monarchical rule that effectively enslaved the majority Hutus. Following World War I the Germans were forced to give Rwanda over to the Belgians, who sent missionaries to Rwanda. In the decades that followed, the country became largely Catholic; it now boasts the highest proportion of Catholic population in any African country.

The Belgian missionaries recognized that the Tutsi ruling class had failed to protect Hutu human rights; consequently, the missionary clergy helped the Hutus to gain equal representation and eventually to overthrow the minority-led monarchy. In November of 1959 the country’s first democratic elections were held, supervised by the United Nations, and the ousted Tutsi leaders fled for Uganda, Burundi, and other neighboring countries.

Today, the RPF is mainly composed of Tutsis who are children or grandchildren of those refugees who had flocked to Uganda between 1959 and 1962. The men who now control Rwanda’s government attended Ugandan schools and learned to speak English as a second language (unlike the Rwandans, who were taught French). During the 1980s the RPF soldiers trained with the Ugandan army and helped them wage a civil war in 1986. The current RPF leader and president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, was formerly Chief of Army Intelligence in the Ugandan army and received advanced weapons training at the US Army Command and Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

A foreign invasion
Victor says that it is fiction to consider the 1990-94 conflict, started by Ugandan soldiers, a “civil war.” The historical record proves otherwise, he argues: Rwanda was invaded by a foreign aggressor, the Ugandan Tutsis.

This invasion, carefully planned and organized, was followed by a four-year war which ended with the military victory of the RPF in July 1994. At the time when the RPF took power, the Western view of Rwanda was completely dominated by the recent mass killings, and little attention was paid to the plans of the rebel leadership. Subsequently, some facts have emerged about the RPF strategy, but these facts have been largely ignored in the Western media.

Christophe Hakizabera was one of the original RPF members. After a struggle with the group’s leadership, however, he fled the country in 1995, fearing for his life. He told investigators from the UN that as early as 1991, RPF leaders had decided to attack the Hutu regime in Kigali “on all fronts: military, political, and media.” Hakizabera also revealed that RPF leaders decided:

. . . to make false accusations against the Church, because it preaches equality of all men and helps to educate the people; to eliminate Hutu priests, and then replace them with Tutsi priests; to terrorize missionaries and force them to leave the country; to kill the older missionaries who know the history of Rwanda, because they are held responsible for what happened in 1959, when the Tutsis lost power to the Hutus.

The RPF claimed to be returning to Rwanda to “liberate” the country from the Habyarimana dictatorship. But many Rwandans did not greet the RPF troops as liberators. On the contrary, thousands of Rwandans fled in advance of the RPF arrival, and became displaced persons in their own country. Thus the refugee crisis that still troubles Rwanda began with the RPF invasion. And the presence of foreign troops divided the country into two factions: those who supported the RPF and those who supported Habyarimana’s government.

Rwanda failed by the West
Under mounting pressure from the West, the Habyarimana government reluctantly agreed to peace terms with the RPF leadership, and signed the Arusha Accords in August 1993. By doing so, Habyarimana opened up his government to include a recognized opposition, allowing Tutsi participation. The UN-supervised peace accords were drafted to allow for shared power between the Hutus and the Tutsis—which, in practice, meant sharing between the RPF and the Habyarimana government. The two armies that had fought against one another for three years were now supposed to be fused together under joint command. The RPF was to contribute 40 percent of the country’s new military force, and play an essential role in the new national government.

When UN troops arrived in December of 1993 to supervise the implementation of the accords, one of their first actions was to escort an RPF battalion to UN headquarters in the heart of Kigali. By this time, Rwandan civilian society was thoroughly polarized between the government and RPF supporters, but in the interest of peace, Habyarimana allowed 600 RPF soldiers to reside at the National Assembly building; these soldiers established themselves in Kigali under the pretext of “protecting” the Ugandan Tutsis who were returning to settle in the Rwandan capital.

For the most part President Habyarimana was willing to abide by the terms of the Arusha Accords, reports Baptiste Senzira, “but the RPF wanted nothing less than absolute control of the country.” The RPF, he insists, merely acted as if they would cooperate in the system of shared powers stipulated by the UN-supervised treaty. But he points out that the RPF surely must have known that if popular democratic elections were held, they would never be elected.

There were also widespread reports that the RPF was surreptitiously violating the terms of the agreement. Although the official count of RPF soldiers stationed in the capital city was set at 600, Victor says that Ugandan military men dressed in civilian clothes kept coming into Kigali. The RPF were also smuggling in arms and other supplies, concealed in shipments of firewood, he claims.

These charges suggest the rising tension between the supporters of the two political blocs. That tension came to a head with the assassination of Habyarimana. The death of the president is commonly regarded as the event which precipitated the mass murders of 1994. Habyarimana was shot down along with Burundi’s Hutu president Cyprien Ntaryamira while their plane was preparing to land at the Kigali airport—which was protected at that time by UN troops.

With one rocket, the Habyarimana government was virtually wiped out. (Several other important Hutu officials were also aboard.) Although the Western media speculated that “extremist Hutus” were responsible, Victor reports that most Rwandans felt sure the RPF was responsible for the attack: “They had already made two failed assassination attempts on the president,” he reasons. “They were the only ones who had anything to gain by the attack.”

Pandemonium
Most reports on Rwanda, even to this day, state that the plane crash remains “unexplained.” What these reports consistently fail to acknowledge is that the civil pandemonium of 1994 would never have taken place had the RPF not launched its invasion from Uganda and sought to install an undemocratic minority government.

And pandemonium did ensue, almost immediately. The previous four years of unrest had already resulted in a state of lawlessness. Bloodshed now became commonplace. Victor and Solange, who were living just two blocks from the RPF-occupied parliament building in Kigali at the time of the missile attack, were eyewitnesses to the outbreak of violence that would last for months to come.

Victor was prepared to go to work at the airport, where he was employed as a mechanic. “The RPF were slaughtering people in the streets,” he recalls, describing in detail the mayhem he witnessed. The rebels had been living in the neighborhood for several months and had come to know who opposed them, he explains. “These were the first targeted for slaughter.”

The fighting was initially between RPF soldiers and government soldiers, but later involved civilians in the area. Victor and Solange, together with other refuges, stress that the ethnic animosity that divided the country was not a serious problem within the common civilian population; it began at the military level. “It was a battle for power,” Baptiste explains—”RPF power against government power.” Although UN troops were present at the outbreak of violence, they did nothing. Claiming that they had no mandate to intervene, they withdrew from Rwanda on the very day that the massacres began.

Victor, too, fled with his family, afraid that the RPF would kill them all. “We left everything we had behind that day, even our car,” he says, explaining that if they had driven away they would probably have been stopped at roadblocks and shot. Instead, they walked five miles before taking refuge at a relative’s home in the countryside. Two months later they were refugees in Zaire (now Congo).

“The refugee camp was awful,” Solange recalls with visible disgust. Most refugees were living in makeshift huts in very poor sanitary conditions and with little food. “God was with us,” they say as they explain how, with the assistance of a friend, they were able to leave for Zimbabwe, and later for the US. They left all their relatives behind. Most of them were killed in RPF raids on refugee camps.

When the rebel soldiers entered the camps, they report, they slaughtered everyone, except for the few who escaped into the dense rain forests. Solange explains that two of her sisters were among those who were able to flee. They had no clothes and no food. For the next six months they lived on snails and roots they could dig up to eat. They walked more than 800 miles before they were discovered by the Red Cross in central Zaire. Her sisters are now in Zambia and may be reunited with Solange later this year.

The genocide card
During the years before the assassination of President Habyarimana, the Hutu military trained the young men of Rwanda to defend their families. Consequently, by the time the president’s plane was shot down, many were armed with machetes and spears, and primed to defend their country from the invading RPF. The threat of attack by the RPF, they had been told, was imminent. Refugees explain that the young men were primed for a fight, and when they received word that the president had been killed, their fury was unleashed and a general slaughter ensued.

One commonly held thesis in Rwanda, says Baptiste, is that the RPF leaders knew that if they shot down Habyarimana’s plane, the Hutus would retaliate against the Tutsis. But although they would later be portrayed as defenders of the Rwandan Tutsis, Baptiste believes that the Tutsi leaders of the RPF, born and bred in Uganda, had no compunction about unleashing the Hutu violence against their ethnic brothers. He explains:

It was all a part of their plan to assume total control of Rwanda and beyond. They acted with total disregard to the common Tutsis whom they knew would be killed.

Since the horrendous massacres of 1994, the RPF has consistently repeated that the Hutus were engaged in a “planned, orchestrated genocide” to rid the country of its entire Tutsi population—approximately 15 percent of the people of Rwanda. The refugees—Hutus and Tutsis alike—deny the existence of any such heinous plan.

Such a genocidal program would have been impossible, observes Baptiste, because prior to 1994 the Hutus and Tutsis got along quite well, and communicated with each other constantly. Intermarriage was common, and if the Hutus had planned a genocide against the Tutsis, everyone would soon have known about it. “The country is too small,” he adds, “for something of that magnitude to go undetected.” Furthermore, the idea that the Habyarimana-led government could quietly plan the systematic execution of an entire tribe—at a time when that same government could not even organize the sale of coffee beans—seems absurd.

No one denies that a massacre took place, but while government militia massacred civilians in terrible circumstances, this was not a premeditated genocide of one tribe by another. In fact, on closer examination it appears that the killings were motivated more by the victims’ military allegiances (real or suspected) than by their ethnic identities. Those who were targeted by the government militia were Tutsis (and sometimes Hutus) who were suspected of supporting the RPF invasion. Likewise, those targeted by the RPF were suspected of opposing the invasion. Both sides were guilty of bloodshed.

Nevertheless, the RPF’s claim to credibility with the world community is the claim that the Hutus were executing a genocidal plan. Consequently, the world’s focus on the genocide has both classified an entire community as criminal and obscured the real causes of the Rwandan tragedy.

Another kind of terror
The current government, under the leadership of the guerilla warrior Paul Kagame, is constantly displaying evidence of the 1994 massacres. In interviews with the influential Western media Kagame has said, “We need to preserve the remains of the genocide so that people will not forget. It is fair to those who died and to those who remain.” Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated government in Rwanda currently is disinterring hundreds of thousands of bodies from mass graves around the country and laying them out in piles for the public to see and remember.

In an effort to implicate the Church in the alleged plans for genocide, Kagame decided to confiscate ten Catholic church buildings and convert them into memorials for the 1994 victims. After a strong protest from Church officials, a compromise was reached: the buildings could continue to function as churches, but signs would be erected to memorialize those killed in the slaughter. The remains of those killed would be buried in church crypts.

Other public places, such as schools, are also being turned into “genocide memorials” for Westerners to tour. A school in Gikongoro in southern Rwanda, for instance, has thousands of slain bodies laid out in its former classrooms.

Today, the official obsession with the need to punish those guilty of the “genocide” has resulted in a country that is still polarized, and still gripped by fear. The Hutus who carried out the killings of 1994 were responding to foreign aggression—launched by Ugandan troops wearing Ugandan uniforms, carrying Ugandan arms, and riding in Ugandan army trucks. And while those who committed atrocities should be held accountable, the RPF has replaced the search for real justice with a one-sided zest for punishment.

Many of those who have been arrested on genocide charges in Rwanda in recent years have been implicated on the word of one or two accusers. In Rwanda today, “if you don’t like your neighbor, or would like his land, the thing to do is accuse him of involvement in the genocide,” says one refugee. The fate awaiting those who are accused is grim. Even if they escape summary execution, they are thrown into overcrowded jails, in which people are almost literally rotting to death for want of space.

Amnesty International reported in 1995 that in Gitarama Prison nearly 7,000 Rwandans, including more than 100 children accused of genocide, were being held in a building that allows adequate space for only 600. Sylvester Niyigena, another refugee now living in the US with his wife and one of his four sons (two were killed in Rwanda, one escaped to Belgium), laments the inhuman prison conditions. He reports that in one of the Rwandan prisons, the inmates—most of them innocent civilians, he believes—are sometimes made to stand in water up to their ankles or knees for days at a time. The swelling of their legs that results is both painful and incapacitating. Justice in Rwanda today under the RPF regime means revenge, the refugees charge. “Rwanda is now a country run by criminals,” Baptiste laments.

The killing continues
However, what few in the West know, say refugees, is that the RPF itself has been engaged in massive and systematic killing of civilians, out of sight of the cameras and foreign observers. There is substantial evidence that the RPF has massacred tens of thousands of unarmed persons. While most of the killing took place during 1994, it has continued on a smaller scale.

The refusal of the West to see the RPF government for what it is—a violent military dictatorship—is the product of a severe form of “political correctness,” which the RPF hopes to fully exploit by continuing to play the genocide card, to hide its own past and current crimes. One of the most unhappy consequences of the focus on the genocide is that human-rights abuses by the RPF are now being tolerated, and even justified, by Western human-rights groups and journalists. Killings such as the RPF massacre of 13 priests and two bishops in June of 1994, are presented as understandable acts of revenge.

When asked what drives the RPF, Baptiste says he believes they want to even up the numbers of Hutus and Tutsis in the country. “And to do that you need to kill a lot of Hutus.” That is what continues to happen each month in Rwanda, he says. “It is an untold story.” The RPF, say refugees, is known to call meetings where political officials distribute food to the people. Once a large number of people has gathered, militiamen surround the place and toss in grenades. After the 1994 massacre, wherever the RPF militias went, the pattern was the same: meetings, killings, then burning of the bodies and burial. They were killing innocent people, and —the refugees now insist—they continue to do so to this day. “The kind of slaughters that keep happening every few months seem like indiscriminate killings,” Baptiste comments. “Most have no real rhyme or reason, except to kill.”

Lonely voices
One Rwandan bishop last year called attention to human-rights abuses perpetrated by the RPF. He was virtually ignored by the West—except for the Vatican. Bishop Kizito Bahujimihigo of Rhungeri accused the government of putting ethnic Hutu families in concentration camps, while claiming that it is “for their own protection.” The bishop asked, “People are turned out of their homes to rot in a makeshift hut, and this is called progress?” He said the Kigali government has decided to confine Hutu families in “protected sites,” to save them from imaginary attacks from anti-government groups. These sites, he said, are little short of concentration camps, in which to keep control of Rwanda’s Hutu ethnic majority.

The refugees describe a similar situation: In some cases helicopters have destroyed whole towns and villages. The villagers were rounded up by the RPF, told that they would no longer be living in their own houses, and sent to a larger city to build new houses. Many families could not build, however, because they had neither the resources nor the manpower to do so. So many men have been killed during the past decade that most families are now fatherless.

Baptiste believes that it may never be possible to reunite Rwanda after what has happened in the past ten years. This is a “deep tragedy,” he says. Many people, he reports, have literally lost their sanity as a result of the mayhem. Baptiste can understand how people are driven to such extremes. “How can they go on living, how can they sit down to eat, how can they go to sleep at night, knowing that their family has been slaughtered?” he asks.

The key to establishing peace in his country, Baptiste asserts, is alerting the West to what has really transpired in the small African country. This is difficult to do, adds Jean-Marie, another Rwanda refugee, “because the US is participating in the terrorization of Rwanda.” Baptiste explains that Madeleine Albright is a “staunch ally” of Uganda and that the US has long backed the Ugandans and the RPF, who are now looking to add the mineral-rich Congo to their growing political base.

When President Habyarimana was Rwanda’s dictator, the military leader “basically preached peace for the country,” says Baptiste. He favored allowing the minority Tutsis to have full rights. “He helped and protected the minorities,” Baptiste explains. “The country was truly on its way to unity. Now, all of that is destroyed.”