It’s not often I praise the BBC for producing real journalism. Further, it is with some disbelief that I find myself applauding\u00a0Jane Corbin, who I will struggle till my dying day to forgive for her\u00a0despicable piece of Israeli propaganda parading as reportage a few years back on the Israeli navy’s attack on the Mavi Marmara aid ship to Gaza.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless,\u00a0Corbin has now fronted a truly disturbing revisionist documentary on Rwanda, called Rwanda’s Untold Story. The programme’s argument is that the official story about a straightforward\u00a0genocide by the Hutu majority of Rwanda’s\u00a0Tutsis 20 years ago is highly selective and entirely misleading. One scholar\u00a0suggests that the\u00a0narrative we have been fed\u00a0is the equivalent\u00a0of reducing the Second World War to the Holocaust and claiming nothing else of significance happened.<\/p>\n
What the documentary demonstrates forcefully\u00a0is that Paul Kagame, the hero of the official story of Rwanda’s genocide, was almost certainly the biggest war criminal to have emerged from those horrifying events. Kagame led the\u00a0Tutsis’ main militia, the RPF. He almost certainly ordered the shooting down of\u00a0the Rwandan president’s plane, the trigger for a\u00a0civil war that quickly\u00a0escalated into\u00a0a genocide; on the best estimates, his RPF was responsible for killing 80% of the 1 million who died inside Rwanda, making the Hutus, not the Tutsis, the chief\u00a0victims; and his subsequent decision to extend\u00a0the\u00a0civil war into neighbouring Congo, where many Hutu civilians had fled to escape\u00a0the RPF, led to the deaths of up to 5 million more.<\/p>\n
Not surprising then that Kagame is championed\u00a0by Britain’s own biggest war criminal, Tony Blair. But the rot has spread much further. Rwanda, now praised as a model democracy under Kagame, is in truth\u00a0a police state, where the president kills or locks up all opponents, fixes the elections, and has made any questioning of the\u00a0official story he created \u2013 that the Tutsis were the exclusive victims of the genocide \u2013 a crime.<\/p>\n
The BBC has not had to dig up any new information to make this programme. It’s all been available for years. But no one apart from a few experts \u2013 academics, UN military personnel who were there, UN investigators, and Kagame’s former, and disillusioned, inner circle \u2013 have dared to speak out.<\/p>\n
The real criminals, as ever, it seems, have been the western powers and the UN. They have happily paraded their remorse at failing to intervene at the time of the genocide (presumably because their self-confessed error\u00a0helped to justify the subsequent wave of bogus “humanitarian interventions” in the Middle East). But what the documentary makes clear is that Blair, Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan and many others have helped to whitewash Kagame’s crimes against humanity and provide a veneer of\u00a0legitimacy\u00a0to his current oppressive rule. Anyone who has threatened to blow the lid, like Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at the UN’s international tribunal on\u00a0Rwanda, has been forced\u00a0out.<\/p>\n
But as I watched the\u00a0programme,\u00a0one\u00a0thing\u00a0struck me forcefully in particular, though it was not\u00a0referred to\u00a0by Corbin: what\u00a0were the\u00a0journalists who crawled all over the Rwanda story for\u00a0years doing? How were Blair, Clinton and Annan allowed\u00a0to forge the myth of a simple Hutu genocide of Tutsis without serious challenge from serious reporters working for serious newspapers that were supposed\u00a0to be making sense of these events for us?<\/p>\n
From my own experience covering Israel-Palestine, I can guess what happened. The reporters on the ground feared straying\u00a0too\u00a0far from\u00a0the consensus in their newsrooms. Rather than telling their editors what the story was (the model of news production most people assume to be the\u00a0case), the editors were creating the framework of the story for the reporters, based on the official\u00a0narrative\u00a0being promoted in political and diplomatic circles. Correspondents\u00a0who cared about their careers dared not challenge\u00a0the party line too strongly, even when they knew it to be a lie.<\/p>\n
Rwanda also offers a telling example of how such group-think works, and how a non-expert far from real events but schooled in a kind of London or Washington consensus on foreign affairs ends up policing the limits of possible thought in a way that strips\u00a0us, his readers, of the right to hear a counter-narrative.<\/p>\n
The guilty party in this case was George Monbiot, often seen as one of the most radical and original thinkers publishing in the British mainstream liberal media. Two years ago he wrote an ugly attack, entitled “Naming the Genocide Deniers<\/a>“,\u00a0on two scholars, one of them the renowned Ed Herman. Monbiot\u00a0eventually dragged in<\/a> a host of other thinkers, including Noam Chomsky, accusing them of being “genocide belittlers” for not turning on the pair at his instigation.<\/p>\n The\u00a0crime committed by this tiny group was\u00a0that they had raised the possibility that the official story of the genocide in Rwanda \u2013 as well as of some of the massacres in the Balkans \u2013 might not be entirely historically \u00a0accurate, and that the accounts might have been distorted\u00a0for political\u00a0advantage. Monbiot, uninterested in assessing their claims or addressing the facts, abused them for straying from the official narrative. Monbiot might like to reconsider his behaviour, for which I and others criticised<\/a> him at the time, and issue a long-overdue apology.<\/p>\n That aside, Monbiot’s disgraceful accusations\u00a0are\u00a0a useful\u00a0illustration\u00a0of how powerful is the emotional, imaginative and possibly financial grip of the mainstream media on journalists, even those feted for their independence.<\/p>\n It is with that context in mind too that one should tip one’s hat to the BBC and, reluctantly, to Jane Corbin for doing their jobs for once. Rwanda’s Untold Story reminds us\u00a0how rarely journalists actually engage in the myth-busting, truth-telling work they claim to be\u00a0bedrock of their\u00a0craft.<\/p>\n Sadly, the Youtube link I watched\u00a0this on\u00a0was quickly removed, on copyright grounds. Those in the UK should be able to watch it on iPlayer for a while longer. Others will need to keep their eyes open online or hope it is shown on BBC World.<\/p>\n For the\u00a0time\u00a0being, this\u00a0link to the\u00a0video\u00a0seems to work:<\/p>\nUPDATE:<\/h4>\n