It is obvious from the poverty of their responses that I have much to teach them.

Ibuka

8. Hutu must stop taking pity on the Tutsi.

I recommend a reading if you missed this sequence before.

Article 14
The State shall, within the limits of its capacity, take special measures for the welfare of the survivors of genocide who were rendered destitute by the genocide committed in Rwanda from October 1st, 1990 to December 31st, 1994, the disabled, the indigent and the elderly as well as other vulnerable groups.

In my understanding, anyone who contests above defined period for the Rwandan genocide becomes a revisionist or a genocidaire according to Kigali. Of course, one must assumes that the only victims who are referred to in that official text are Tutsi, as it was written in the spirit of the fact that officially there hasn't been any Hutu victim or survivor who was worth taking care of.

The entire logic of segregationist policies by the Kagame government are based on those premises which reflect the conditions under which Hutus lived before the independence of the country (1961). And people need to remember that Kagame, fled the country aged 3 only with his family and other Tutsis aristocrates and members of the royal family after the Hutu revolution of 1959. This revolution overturned the supremacy of Tutsis in favor of Hutus who had been slaves of the former for more than four hundred years.

Another point I would like to highlight for Andrew is the political context which prevailed between October 1990 and July 1994. With the invasion of Rwanda by Kagame and his RPF rebel movement, and enabling multiparty political system, administrative authority eroded gradually up the point where that just before the assassination of Juvenal Habyarimana, the limited authority which remained was only in his hands. After his death, the country was in a total vacuum of authority. It was total chaos.

The caretakers who came together as Interim Government under Jean Kambanda, begged several times Dallaire and his UN Mission to call a ceasefire and bring together RPF and the government side to stop massacres, but Kagame refused, because he was winning the war and better armed and equipped both in personnel and weaponry than his opponent.

It is also important to remember that during the 4 years of civil war RPF had staged against Habyarimana government, RPF had managed to infiltrate all areas of the country with agents in all sectors of national life you can think of, occupying strategic positions that could guarantee them victory in case of resuming war. Which they did and won at their own terms.

After July 1994, when RPF was declared the victor, as any other victor in any war, they narrated events in their own language. Until today, they are still doing that.

The Roma, on the other hand, always were and continue to be a powerless minority, seemingly "born to be victims" and having few to speak for them (then or now).

talking of Hutus's and Tutsi's masskillings (itsambatsamba), but

Individuals legitimately or illegitimately seizing command of government agencies in the chaos of presidential assassination and an invasion force in position to strike Kigali do not fit the usual description of "government policy and planning". Indeed, if the government had an intent to kill all Tutsis, why did it not do so when it had unquestioned command of its forces and its territory? Why wait until a force capable of stopping such a program was in place?

Certainly, also, agents outside the government (Interahamwe, e.g., and Impuzamugambi) were involved, but as these were party-affiliated militias and these parties WERE the government at the time, for all intents and purposes, and certainly once the prime minister was assassinated on April 7, I have a hard time coming to any other conclusion.

Finally, while Kambanda's role in all this remains far from clear, it IS clear that any contender to lead the government between the PM's assassination and the RPF taking the country was vetoed by Bagosora et al. — at least at some level.

All that is perhaps a difference without a distinction (or is it the other way around), but there it is. I appreciate, again, your input on this.

However, if one includes the rest of 1994 and who ended up in refugee camps or fled into the Congo, I think we have to consider a more ethnic-based pattern of killing. Certainly, as the pursuit of "excrement" in the Congo (Kagame's term), the long-suppressed UN report and other reports suggests a genocidal program in which Hutus were the major victims.

As for Davenport & Stam's methodology, as a practicing scientist I appreciate the difficulties of confronting masses of data in unexplored conceptual territory and developing some way to organize and quantify it, and I admire their ingenuity in doing this. It is to their credit that they lay out their methods and the ranges of estimates from varied sources very explicitly and in detail, so that others may choose what they consider to be appropriate "confidence intervals".

I should point out that they explicitly address mass killings BEYOND "the genocide" and differentiate (explicitly) several different kinds of killings during this period, some with political significance and some not (e.g. people taking advantage of the chaos to kill for personal or financial reasons or simply the panic and madness of the moment).

As for genocide "by the government", I do not buy it. The record we receive (including that from the tribunal set up by victors to punish losers) is that extremists within and without government planned and executed genocide and in some cases early attempts to initiate genocide were put down by the government. In the US, border-patrol vigilantes, skin-head-Aryan, Tea Party, KKK groups might run amok in a period of panic (imagine invasion by Russia or China via Cuba!) and government collapse. This was what happened in Rwanda after assassination of its president (and the president of Burundi).

No, I do not think I am being exploited by anybody. I certainly will not allow myself to be exploited by the US government (which does not have clean hands in this affair — nor now, in Congo) just because I am (or should be) overjoyed at seeing in my lifetime first a Catholic and now a Negro elected president, each with marvelous "liberal" rhetoric covering their practical activities.

Certainly Kagame had and has no regard for human life. I agree that he is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not genocide. In the case of Rwanda, that "distinction" belongs to the provisional government and its allies in the aftermath of the assassination of Habyarimana.

It is likely, given the period from 1990 to the present, that more Hutus have died than Tutsi. I only take issue with the notion that the specific period of the genocide was not primarily targeted against Tutsis and that they did not make up, in fact, the vast majority of the victims.

I did an interview with Keith Harmon Snow recently on the topic of why the period from April to July 1994 constitutes genocide and the other periods of the civil war and its aftermath, including in DR Congo, do not. With any luck, you'll have a chance to see it. It's a bit lengthy to get into here.

I would image that Davenport and Stam play some part in your reading of the genocide. I would caution you that their numbers are not wholly reliable and are dependent, to some extent, on properly defining the genocide. No, they are not génocidaires, nor would I call them that. I just question their methodology a bit. Certainly, however, they are being exploited by génocidaires, as many good-hearted lefties in the U.S. are (including yourself?).

Again, thanks for a thoughtful response. I do appreciate it.

-Andrew