We May Be Funding a New Rwandan Tragedy

Any student of the Great Lakes will already be familiar with the claims and counterclaims that have swirled around the region since the 1994 genocide. Well-informed analysts reject the neat theory of the ‘double genocide’, whereby killings of nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus by Habyarimana’s soldiers and militiamen were somehow morally counterbalanced by the massacres of Hutus committed by Kagame’s advancing Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel movement. But anyone who reads Jason Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters can be in little doubt there is copious blood on RPF hands, shed in both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is a complex story, without easily identifiable goodies and baddies.