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What a refreshing and
insightful artcle, and most rare for the told truths. I was impressed with
somebody else finally taking Silly Samantha Power to task, and particularly revealing was the
Rwanda section. I thought Rwanda was one of the few cut-and-dried episodes
when we took a look in our The Rwandan
Genocide and the Armenian "Genocide" page, but nothing is
ever cut-and-dried in the deceptive world of genocide, is it?
A few more articles like this, and the inevitable backlash against the
political and profitable, hatred-spreading genocide industry may soon begin.
Thanks to Stephen.
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Genocide Inflation is the Real Human Rights
Threat: Yugoslavia and Rwanda
by Edward S. Herman
October 26, 2007, Znet
We have all heard about “genocide denial” and “holocaust denial” as very bad
happenings that have focused attention, indignation, and concern to the point of laws
passed to criminalize such behavior in Austria, Belgium, France, and elsewhere. But very
little attention has been paid to genocide inflation, where killings are wildly
exaggerated and claims of genocide are made based on hearsay, rumor, knowing lies, and
otherwise problematic “information.” No indignation has been expressed even over its
more egregious illustrations, and no laws have been proposed or passed to punish its
practitioners. This is because the focus on denial has been useful to powerful groups and
countries in the West, whereas the critics and victims of genocide inflation have been
weak and with no political or media leverage. It will be shown below, however, that this
pattern not only fails to protect anybody’s human rights, but instead allows the
powerful to kill and violate human rights more easily.
Genocide Denial
Genocide denial has received its greatest attention in relation to the occasional
questioning of the Nazi destruction of the Jews during World War II. Those denying this
horrendous set of real events have almost always been powerless eccentrics who posed no
threat to existing Jewish populations, and in fact the outcries against them have gotten
louder as real antisemitism has declined (although hostility to Israeli policy has
increased). This was surely true in the famous case of Robert Faurisson in France, where
his denial in the late 1970s, which aroused great indignation, led to legal action, and
elicited great publicity, occurred in a country where antisemitism had demonstrably fallen
sharply. [1] A powerless individual, he and his crank
opinions posed no threat whatsoever to French Jews. It was pointed out at the time that
similar crank views by the U.S. academic Arthur Butz had simply been ignored, and in
consequence he was unknown here and completely lacking in influence. Why did the French
(mainly Jewish) activists give Faurisson such free publicity? They talked about “insults”
and “honor,” but one thing they omitted: that Israel was being increasingly criticized
for its intensifying ethnic cleansing programs involving Palestinians, and bringing
attention once again to the Nazi Holocaust would deflect attention from the ugly present
in which Jews were victimizers to the time when they were massive victims.
In recent years as well, Israel has been subject to increasing criticism for its harsh and
illegal treatment of its own untermenschen, and the response of many individual and
organized Jewish groups in the United States and Europe has been once again to cry about
genocide denial and an alleged increase in antisemitism (more and more identified with
hostility to Israeli policies). This has been happening in a period where real
antisemitism (as opposed to hostility to Israeli ethnic cleansing) and holocaust denial
are at a low level, but where the power of Western Jewish elites and lobbying operations
are unprecedentedly high. [2] This has allowed them to
get substantial but completely unwarranted publicity for their current victimization
claims, including even the passage of laws outlawing Holocaust denial and legislative as
well as private efforts to rein in critics of Israeli policy. [3]
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The human rights impact of this set of campaigns, including those featuring and
trying to constrain Holocaust denial, has been negative. As Jews are not under
threat in the West, the campaign does not help their human rights. On the other
hand, by featuring Jewish victimization these campaigns build support for Israel and
hence contribute to the astonishing willingness of the West not only to allow
massive human rights violations of Palestinians and Lebanese by the Israeli Defense
Forces and Israeli settlers but to actively support these by punishing the victims. [4]
It has of course been argued that Iran President Mahmoud Ahmanidejad has posed an
existential threat to Israel with his reservations about the Holocaust and alleged
desire to “wipe Israel off the map.” [5] But
his Holocaust doubts prove nothing about prospective Iran policy, and his “wiping
out” threat has been shown to have been a mistranslation of an expressed position
favoring regime change from racist to non-racist state. The most clear and direct
threats involving Iran are those by the United States and Israel in favor of regime
change in Iran itself, and with the use of force-even nuclear weapons-very much “on
the table.” It can never be expressed in the Free Press, but not only does Iran
lack a single nuclear weapon, even if it had a few using them would be an act of
national suicide. On the other hand, that would not be true if the United States or
Israel used such weapons, and both are openly threatening a military attack on Iran.
[6]
It should also be noted that there is a systematic “genocide [or holocaust] denial”
when it comes to treating Western-based genocidal operations, but this is invisible
because the West does it. The most prominent illustration at present is the U.S. and
“coalition of the willing” mass killing in Iraq. The million Iraqi deaths from
the “sanctions of mass destruction” of the 1990s is unmentioned in Samantha
Power’s ludicrous treatise on genocide (“A Problem from Hell”: America and
the Age of Genocide), just as she fails to deal seriously with the Indonesian
massacres in East Timor. [7] The U.S.-coalition
invasion-occupation of Iraq from 2003 has added another million to the Iraqi toll,
but the idea that this is “genocide” is inexpressible in the U.S. mainstream
media, which is focused on the more politically convenient killings in Darfur-attributable
to a Western target, the Arab government of the Sudan, hence subject to the
invidious word genocidal. This is implicit but real denial, which follows from the
political basis of naming and concern.
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Genocide Inflation
Yugoslavia. All through the Yugoslavia wars of the 1990s there were cries of
genocide-first in Bosnia, then in Kosovo, with the Serbs as villains and the Bosnian
Muslims and then Kosovo Albanians as the victims. The numbers of Bosnian Muslim civilians
allegedly killed by the Bosnian Serbs reached 250,000 or 300,000 by 1993, the source of
this information being Bosnian Muslim officials who were both notorious liars and working
as hard as they could to make a case for NATO armed intervention on their behalf.
Throughout the period 1992-1995 propaganda claims of Serb massacres, death camps, and rape
camps were profuse, pushed not only by Muslim and NATO officials but by an
enthusiastically gullible Western media. [8] By 1995,
war campaigner David Rieff was asserting that the “genocide” of Bosnian Muslims “is
all but complete.” [9]
But awkwardly for Rieff and his fellow war campaigners and propagandists, in 2005 and 2007
two studies made their appearance, one by Ewa Tabeau and Jacub Bijak published in 2005
under the auspices of the Western-organized Yugoslavia Tribunal, the other in 2007 by the
Bosnian Muslim lawyer Mirsad Tokaca and funded by the Norwegian government, both claiming
that the total Bosnian war deaths on all sides, military and civilian, was in the order of
100,000, of which some 40-55,000 were civilians (including thousands of Serbs). These new
values penetrated into mainstream reporting slowly and grudgingly, because the inflated
numbers had fitted so well the needs of U.S. and NATO policy and the closely related
biases of the Western media. [10]
While the Bosnian “genocide” has taken a beating, the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995
has survived as a now institutionalized “genocide.” But it has done so in the face of
intractable problems: the NATO-organized and compliant Yugoslav Tribunal identified it as
such by finding that there could be genocide in one small town, where the genocidists had
bussed to safety all the women and children of their target population, and where the
claims of 8,000 executed have never been verified by forensic or credible witness evidence
of anything like this scale of killing. [11] It lives
on by virtue of its political utility and aggressive challenges to its truthfulness as “revisionism”
and “denial.”
This same inflation process occurred before and during NATO’s 78-day bombing war on
Yugoslavia and takeover of Kosovo. The pre-bombing propaganda barrage claiming Serb
misbehavior was massive, and then during the war itself there was a stream of hysterical
claims of indiscriminate killing, official U.S. claims of Bosnian Muslim deaths reaching
500,000, with a very profuse use of the word “genocide.” After the war, the claimed
deaths quickly fell to 11,000, and one of the greatest forensic body searches in history
produced only 4,000 bodies (with some 2,000 still reportedly missing). [12]
Needless to say, there has been no apology, or any call for reprimand let alone
punishment, for participation in these processes of genocide inflation. But in contrast
with the genocide denial cases mentioned earlier, these inflation processes had real and
substantial negative human rights consequences. By helping demonize U.S.-NATO targets,
they readied Western publics for a refusal to negotiate with the demons, helped bring
about an ensuing burst of ethnic cleansing and eventually NATO military intervention, and
they helped cover over the NATO commission of war crimes. Michael Mandel made an excellent
case that the main point of the Yugoslavia Tribunal’s operations from its inception in
1993 was to demonize the NATO target (Serbia) and to allow the demand for “justice” to
trump peace settlements, which the United States and its allies did trump from 1992 till
the Dayton Accord in late 1995 [13] The genocide
inflation helped to this end. The same was true in the Kosovo case, where the inflated
claims of Serb violence against the Kosovo Albanians both before and during the bombing
war-including the fabricated threat of a Serb mass ethnic cleansing under Operation
Horseshoe-helped make publicly acceptable the carefully engineered avoidance of
negotiations and plunge into a bombing war.
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Rwanda. A less well-known and less well-understood case of genocide
inflation--and possibly even more important, misapprehension of the true source and
major direction of the killings-- is that of Rwanda. In the establishment narrative,
genocide irrupted suddenly following the April 6, 1994 shooting down of a plane at
the Kigali airport that killed the Hutu presidents of both Rwanda (Juvenal
Habyarimana) and Burundi (Cyprien Ntaryamira). According to the narrative, the Hutu genocidaires
and the Interahamwe militias unleashed a huge pre-planned killing spree
against the minority Tutsi population that wiped out some 800,000 to 1.2 million
people, mainly Tutsis. In the myth structure, Bill Clinton made a regrettable error
in pressing for the withdrawal of UN forces that might have protected civilians, for
which he apologized. In a major article of September 2001 in the Atlantic Monthly,
Samantha Power and others dubbed the United States “bystanders to genocide,”
which is also a myth. [14]
Contrary to the establishment narrative: (1) The plane was shot down by Paul Kagame
and his Tutsi associates, [15] with active or
tacit help from the Belgians, UN representative Romeo Dallaire, [16] and possibly the CIA. This act was part of the Kagame-Tutsi
final assault to seize power after a four-year war, with the assistance of the
U.S.-sponsored Ugandan military. When the chief investigator for the Rwanda
Tribunal, Australian Michael Hourigan, reported solid evidence on this locus of
responsibility for the April 6th assassination to Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour in
1997, she immediately closed down the investigation and ordered him to destroy his
files. This finding, which does not comport with the idea of a pre-planned Hutu
murder program, has been suppressed in the Free Press. [17]
(2) The two leaders whose plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, were Hutus. A third
Hutu leader, Melchior Ndadaye, an earlier president of Burundi, was assassinated by
his Tutsi military in October 1993, which was followed by an anti-Hutu pogrom that
killed tens of thousands and drove hundreds of thousands of Burundian-Hutu refugees
into Rwanda.
(3) Clinton and his Western allies (UK, Belgium) sponsored the U.S.-trained Kagame,
supported his invasions of Rwanda from Uganda and massive ethnic cleansing prior to
April 1994, and via their control of the Security Council refused to allow
additional UN troops into Rwanda in April 1994, in fact forcing a reduction of the
UNIMIR contingent in Rwanda from 2,500 to 270, not because of caution but because
Kagame didn’t want them there to interfere with his conquest of Rwanda, which
Clinton and his allies supported.
(4) The Hutu authorities urged more UN troops-and in light of the Kagame/U.S. (etc.)
opposition to such civilian-protective assistance, this once again calls into
question who it was that did the main killing in Rwanda.
(5) A suppressed 1994 UNCHR (Gersony) Report documented massacres of civilians in
Kagame-controlled areas of Rwanda, which was confirmed by contemporaneous Amnesty
and HRW reports.
(6) A University of Maryland research team led by Christian Davenport and Allan Stam,
sponsored by the Western-organized Rwanda Tribunal, initially found that only about
250,000 civilians had been killed in Rwanda and that two out of three victims were
Hutus. This caused a great deal of dismay and the authors have been under attack and
in retreat ever since. The 800,000 (and higher) figures have no basis in any other
scientific studies but are essentially the Kagame regime’s numbers.
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To an amazing degree, the Western media and NGOs swallowed the propaganda line and lies on
Rwanda that turned things upside down. They made the prime aggressors and genocidists, who
were responsible for the dual assassination of April 6, 1994 that precipitated the mass
killing, into heroic defenders against the de facto victims. The dictator Paul Kagame, one
of the great mass murderers of our time, was made into an honored savior deserving and
receiving strong Western support. Philip Gourevitch and the New Yorker whipped up
sympathy in the West by labeling the Tutsis the “Jews of Africa;” the label stuck, and
it garnered even greater support for Western anti-“genocide” intervention. [18] These big lies are now institutionalized and are
part of the common (mis)understanding in the West.
Because the Western propaganda machine succeeded so well in making the Hutus the villains
and killers, and Paul Kagame the defender/savior of Rwanda, this cleared the ground for
Kagame and Yoweri Musevemi--Kagame’s ally and fellow U.S. client and dictator (of
Uganda)-to periodically invade and occupy the Eastern Congo (then Zaire) and beyond
without “international community” opposition as they were allegedly cleaning out the
genocidaires. The Pentagon very actively supported this on the ground, even more than it
supported the Kagame machine’s drive in Kigali. This led to the killing of hundreds of
thousands of civilian Hutu refugees in a series of mass slaughters, and also provided
cover for a wider Kagame-Musevemi assault in the Congo that has led to the deaths of
literally millions. [19] This was again compatible
with Western interests and policy, as it all contributed to the replacement of Mobutu with
the more amenable Kabila and the opening up of the Congo to a new surge of ruthless
exploitation of its mineral resources by Western companies-a fine illustration of “shock
therapy” with murderous human consequences but large gains to a small business and
military elite. [20]
In sum, Rwanda offers an outstanding illustration of how genocide inflation and lies can
have immense, even catastrophic, human consequences. Thus, not only did the West fail to
intervene to prevent “genocide,” it intervened both before April 6th and after to
ensure that the right killers took over and in support of genocide. This also ensured
preferential treatment in both Rwanda and the Congo for the killers’ sponsors in the
West. This history also shows how magnificently the Western media and NGOs can adapt even
in the grossest cases to serve Western political-economic interests. With media and NGO
help genocide claims now function as a tool of U.S. expansionism, appropriately labeled
“genocidalism,” [21] regularly applied to
virtually any target and helping clear the ground for bombing attacks, invasions,
occupations and regime change by the United States itself or one of it proxies or clients.
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Notes:
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1. This was the conclusion of a conference at
Brandeis University in 1983 on “The Jews in Modern France”--see “Decline Seen
in French Anti-Semitism,” Reuters, Boston Globe, April 20, 1983.
2. See John Mearsheimer and Stanley Walt, The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); James
Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity Press, 2006; also
Petras, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/05/the-pro-israel-
lobby-and-us-middle-east-policy/.
3. For a discussion of the systematic
attempts of pro-Israeli-occupation supporters to curb debate on the relevant issues,
see, e.g., the audio-links of the presentations at the "In Defense of Academic
Freedom" conference held in Chicago, October 12, 2007, http://www.academicfreedomchicago.org/?q=node/32.
4. "Ethnic Cleansing and the 'Moral
Instinct'," Edward S. Herman, Z Magazine, March, 2006, http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Mar2006/herman0306.html.
5. Ahmadinejad’s remarks on the Holocaust
have mainly been complaints that Europe has addressed the problem of the
mistreatment of European Jews by imposing Israel on the Palestinians. He doesn’t
deny that the Jews were targeted for expulsion and death by some of the European
states. On his non-existent wipe-out line, see, e.g., Jonathan Steele, "Lost in
Translation," The Guardian, June 14, 2006, http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_steele/2
006/06/post_155.html; and Arash Norouzi, "'Wiped Off the Map' -- The
Rumor of the Century," DemocracyRising.US, January 18, 2007, http://democracyrising.us/content/view/736/164/.
6. See, e.g., John M. Donnelly, "Item In
War Request Stokes Fears Of Iran Strike," Congressional Quarterly Today,
October 23, 2007, http://public.cq.com/docs/cqt/news110-000002611347.html;
and John H. Richardson, "The Secret History of the Impending War With Iran That
the White House Doesn't Want You to Know," Esquire, October 18, 2007, http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102407B.shtml
7. Edward S. Herman, "The Cruise
Missile Left (part 5): Samantha Power And The Genocide Gambit," ZNet, May 17,
2004, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5538.
8. Peter Brock, Media Cleansing: Dirty
Reporting--Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia (GM Books, 2005).
9. David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and
the Failure of the West (Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 17.
10. See Herman and Peterson, “The
Dismantling of Yugoslavia: A Study in Inhumanitarian Intervention (and a Western
Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse),” Monthly Review, October,
2007, pp. 22-26, http://www.monthlyreview.org/nfte0907.htm.
11. See Michael Mandel, How America Gets
Away With Murder (Pluto Press, 2004), pp. 153-160.
12. Herman and Peterson, “Dismantling
Yugoslavia,” 27. See also "Kosovo: ICRC publishes new edition of Book of the
Missing," International Committee of the Red Cross, August 29, 2007, http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/htmlall/koso
vo-news-290807?opendocument.
13. Mandel, How America Gets Away With
Murder, pp. 124-129.
14. Samantha Power, "Bystanders to
Genocide," Atlantic Monthly, September, 2001, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200109/power-genocide.
15. On November 21, 2006, the French Judge
Jean-Louis Bruguiere issued a lengthy report on his investigation into the April 6,
1994 shootdown of the aircraft carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents back to
Kigali from their summit meeting earlier that day in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. More
important, Judge Bruguiere called for arrest warrants to be issued for Rwanda
President Paul Kagame and nine of his associate[s], on suspicion of masterminding
the assassinations. To date, no arrests have been made. See Chris McGreal,
"French judge accuses Rwandan president of assassination," The Guardian,
November 22, 2006; and Fergal Keane, "Will we ever learn the truth about this
genocide?" The Independent, November 22, 2006.
16. Dallaire, who has attained heroic
status for allegedly “resisting” the genocide, and who has been a “fellow”
of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, was actually a virtual agent of the
invading Kagame forces. He closed one axis of the Kagali airport runway to make the
shootdown easier, refused to allow a nearby French investigative team to investigate
the crime, failed to warn the Rwanda government of the military buildup of the
Kagame forces, and was charged by his direct superior, Dr Jacques Roger Booh-Booh,
with working in collaboration with the RPF and also taking orders from the US and
Belgian embassies in Kigali. (See his Le Patron de Dallaire Parle (Paris:
Duboiris, 2005) -- in English: "Dallaire's Boss Speaks".)
17. Some accessible basic sources
supporting this analysis are Robin Philpot, Rwanda 1994:Colonialism Dies Hard
(The Taylor Report, 2004), www.taylor-report.com/Rwanda_1994; Barrie Collins, “Rewriting
Rwanda,” Spiked Online, April 7, 2004, http://www.spiked-online.co.uk/Articles/0000000CA4BD.
htm; and Keith Harmon Snow, “Hotel Rwanda: Hollywood and the Holocaust in
Central Africa,” January 10, 2006, http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/html-135Hotel%20
Rwanda%20Final%2010%20Jan%202006.htm.
18. On Gourevitch and other Western
intellectual apologists for the Kagame assassinations and slaughterhouse, see
Philpot, Rwanda 1994, Chapters 9-12.
19. See "The Lancet Publishes IRC
Mortality Study from DR Congo; 3.9 Million Have Died: 38,000 Die per Month,"
News Release, International Rescue Committee, January, 2006, http://www.theirc.org/news/page-27819067.html;
and Simon Robinson and Vivienne Walt, “The Deadliest War in the World,” Time
Magazine, May 28, 2006, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1198
921,00.html.
20. Steven Da Silva, “Revisiting the ‘Rwanda
Genocide’,” Center for Research on Globalization, June 1, 2007, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid
=5848; and Michel Chossudovsky, “The Geopolitics Behind the Rwanda
Genocide,” Center for Research on Globalization, November 23, 2006, http://www.globalresearch.
ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20061123&articleId=3958.
21. Aleksandar Jokic, “Genocidalism,” The
Journal of Ethics, Vol. 8, No. 3, September, 2004, pp. 251 - 297, http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/joet/2004/0
0000008/00000003/05256293; and Aleksandar Jokic and Tiphaine Dickson,
"Globalization and Genocidalism: Fictional Discourse Without Borders (for Fun
and Profit)," Sociological Review (Belgrade), 2006, pp. 323 - 346, http://www.socioloskipregled.org.yu/Tekstovi/3(2006)/ 1%20Jokic.pdf.
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