Rethinking the Rwandan Narrative for the 25th Anniversary

Abstract:Twenty-five years after the notorious genocide of Rwanda's Tutsi, heated arguments still prevail about key aspects of the event. At the moment, the greatest dispute concerns the behavior of the Rwanda Patriotic Front, the mostly-Tutsi rebel group that drove the genocidaires from the country and ended up ruling Rwanda to this day. The prevailing school of historiography, one embraced by a majority of scholars and promoted ceaselessly by the RPF government under President Paul Ka-game, sees the RPF army as an exemplary, well-trained, and highly disciplined force, the very antithesis of the genocidaires. But a growing group of scholars and journalists now insist that the RPF were in every way as cruel, vicious, and murderous as were the anti-Tutsi conspirators themselves. This paper examines these arguments and makes some recommendations.