Along with Yugoslavia, the other big subject that Edward S. Herman tackled in his last years was Rwanda. Ed’s hypothesis about Rwanda was this: the Western propaganda system completely flipped perpetrators and victims. The media portrayed the Rwandan situation as an attempted genocide against the Tutsis by the Hutus, but Ed and David Peterson argued that the opposite was true, and their evidence was highly impressive but completely suppressed in the American media.
Ed and David wrote a slim book on the subject and published many articles over the years. They argued that the entire affair was about interests in the USA, UK, and Canada that supplanted French interests in the region. Tutsis were the former colonial elite of Rwanda and neighboring nations, but the USA and friends worked to put them back in power. The so-called Hutu conspiracy to exterminate the Tutsis was never credibly established, even by the kangaroo court tribunal that the USA mounted in Rwanda, similar to the tribunal that the USA created in Yugoslavia, which even used the same personnel. Chris Black amazingly secured an acquittal in that court, after a death threat from the CIA and his being on Paul Kagame’s assassination list. Ed wrote that those tribunals were legal farces.
Kagame was going to military school in the USA when Tutsi forces invaded from Uganda, and he quickly returned and led the invasion. Years later, after murdering the president of Rwanda, the Tutsis conquered Rwanda in months. After securing Rwanda, Kagame then led the invasion of Zaire/Congo, to plunder its mineral wealth, which killed several million people. Instead of being described as arguably the greatest living mass murderer, Kagame was feted as some kind of heroic Abe Lincoln figure in the USA’s, UK’s, and Canada’s media and embraced by the likes of Bill Gates, as Kagame lets Gates use Rwandans as expendable guinea pigs. Bill Clinton enabled the entire affair with his usual lies. After the Kibeho massacre killed at least 8,000 people, Kagame’s “investigation” yielded less than 400 deaths, for an example of his credibility.
Just like with all such situations, there were plenty of soul-sold intellectuals willing to do the elite’s bidding, portraying Kagame in hagiographic terms and viciously attacking people such as Ed for challenging the mythology. When a BBC show very belatedly challenged the dominant narrative, a barrage of derision and calls for censorship came from those “humanitarian” propagandists.
Kagame’s “elections” as Rwanda’s dictator have all been outrageous farces, but as with all such demonstration elections, the American media turns a blind eye to their murderous irregularities. Ed spoke about Rwanda to his life’s end.