Judi Rever: Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, and Politically Protected Violence

Investigative journalist Judi Rever joins us to discuss her work on Rwanda, Congo, and the Great Lakes region. Drawing from her books *In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front* and *Rwanda’s 30-Year Assault on Congo: The Crimes, the Criminals and the Cover-Up*, Rever examines contested histories of violence, regional war, impunity, and international complicity. The conversation also reflects on her career investigating politically protected violence and the risks involved in pursuing difficult historical truths.

Judi Rever’s new book, *Rwanda’s 30-Year Assault on Congo*:
https://www.barakabooks.com/catalogue/rwandas-30-year-assault-on-congo/

References on African Rights and the construction of the post-1994 Rwanda narrative:
https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/10/04/rwanda-the-danger-of-a-sanitized-narrative/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24738036

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Opening
00:01:59 Introduction: Judi Rever and the Great Lakes Region
00:02:28 Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, and the Regional Conflict
00:08:55 Rethinking the Rwandan Genocide Narrative
00:16:25 How Rever First Questioned the Post-1994 Rwanda Story
00:25:13 Why RPF Crimes Were Not Acknowledged Internationally
00:31:33 U.S. Interests, Kagame, and Congo’s Minerals
00:38:05 Impunity and Diplomatic Protection for Kagame
00:43:49 RPF Military Strategy and Bait-and-Kill Operations
00:50:29 Mass Graves, Victim Categories, and Historical Memory
00:57:24 Victoire Ingabire and Political Repression in Rwanda
01:04:20 RPF Insiders, Sources, and the Risks of Speaking
01:11:59 When the Risks of the Investigation Became Personal
01:17:45 Advice for Scholars and Journalists Investigating Atrocity
01:22:01 Justice and Accountability for Congo
01:24:50 Public Response, Safety, and Continuing the Work
01:30:37 Closing
01:30:48 Outro

Transcript

0:00

And when I went into Rwanda after my trip to Congo, I tried to do more interviews and people were very afraid to answer my questions. But I did manage to do some. And I remember one interview in particular with a teacher, a Hutu teacher who was in a refugee camp in Rwanda who had just come back from Congo. He had lost his wife and baby daughter in Congo. Kagame's forces had killed them when Tutsi forces had come in and sprayed a refugee camp. And he said this was his second family he had lost. And I said, What do you mean, what happened during the genocide? I said, Did Hutu militia kill your family? And I asked him fairly probing questions and they were leading questions. He said no. He said, the people who are surrounding this camp, the Tutsi soldiers were surrounding the camp. He said they were responsible. Today we speak with investigative journalist Judi Rever,

author of In Praise of Blood: 2:02

The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Her new book, Rwanda’s 30-Year Assault on Congo: The Crimes, the Criminals and the Cover-Up, examines the long aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and the violence that has continued across the Great Lakes region. In this conversation, we discuss Rwanda, Congo, international complicity, and Rever’s career investigating politically protected violence. Hi, Judi. It's really great to have you today on our platform. And the reason we invited you today to speak to us is because you recently launched your book, your second book, on the subject of the conflicts in the Great Lakes region. So before we get into the very heart of the conversation, and I would like to ask you these basic questions about the conflict itself for our audience just to set the background of our discussion. Could you please tell us the connection that Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi have with each other with regards to the conflict in that region, in the Great Lakes region? Well, the conflict in Central Africa is complex. And if I may, although it's not necessarily the subject of my expertise and what I've written about, we would have to go back a few hundred years if we're going to look at the ethnic divisions and the politics of the region. If we start with Rwanda, we'd have to go back a few hundred years before colonialism. There was a system set up a Tutsi empire with few hundred years of overlords over the Hutu ethnic group. So we have a minority Tutsi group basically establishing a political and an economically exploitative system where they owned cattle and land. And the majority Hutu worked on that land for a living. And so Hutus were indentured to Tutsis under that system when colonialism started. First, Germany was a colonial power in Rwanda, in that region all over Rwanda and Burundi. And then Belgium was these two countries exacerbated the ethnic divisions and probably the injustice of the previous system; so there was a Tutsi monarchy, indentured Hutus. And in 1959 there was something called a Hutu Social Revolution, where Hutus organized themselves and took power as a majority ethnic group asserted their power. There were some help with Flemish priests helping with liberation theology in encouraging that movement. And that's what happened in 1959-1960. But at that time there were, I must say, anti-Tutsi pogroms, and there was a percentage, not all Tutsis, but a percentage of those Tutsis who fled to neighboring countries, principally to Uganda. And so what we saw in Uganda is a coalition of political but mainly military people gathering and forming a group called the Rwandan Patriotic Front. And I will refer to them as the RPF, as everyone else does. And so they formed first as one group in the 1980s. And then by 1987 or so, they were very organized in Uganda and enjoyed the political and the military assistance of the Ugandan state. So it was in 1990 that these Rwandan officers, mainly from the Ugandan army, but they were Rwandan, Tutsi intellectuals, and Rwandan officers invaded Rwanda in the north and conducted a three-and-a-half-year civil war, a war that basically was a scorched-earth campaign. And uprooting upwards of a million Hutu peasants in the northern prefecture of Byumba. And so that was some of that some of the background in the context of Rwanda, which is a country that is landlocked and has suffered from tremendous land scarcity, It still does as far as Burundi goes to the south. It's a very small country that has a similar ethnic makeup and has endured waves of ethnic divisions, coups, instabilities as well. There was a genocide carried out by Tutsi military elements and officials in 1972 against Hutus. And that looms large in the imagination and in the memory of Hutus, especially in Rwanda. So that is another contextual factor in Congo. There are important Tutsi minority groups as well in the east of the country, and their conditions and their politics have been used as a pretext for Paul Kagame, whose first invasion was in 1996. And we'll talk about some of the ways he's waged war and continued that war for now 30 years. So, Judi, I do want to point out that a few years ago, I was introduced to your work precisely because you gave a very different perspective of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, which cost officially 800,000 lives over a period of just 100 days. Now, I want to delve right into the heart of this unique perspective or angle that you provided to the field. So in academia, the mainstream perspective of the genocide in Rwanda is very linear in the sense of we believe that there are certain perpetrators and these perpetrators are the Hutus. And we know and we believe, therefore, that the victims were the moderate Hutus and Tutsis. This linear categorization or understanding of the genocide has been dispelled and questioned through your works, which we will discuss in a while, and which I've really enjoyed reading. But it also brings up a series of other controversies where before we invited you on this platform and we invited other guests to ask questions because we do have a question time reserved for some of our guests. We were told not to mention their names, which we found very interesting. And as I dug deeper, I realized how people are actually afraid that if they are mentioned or associated with anything controversial about the genocide, they are scared of, for instance, not being not being able to have access to the country. So even wanted to travel to Rwanda and I was also told, be careful if you're going to ask questions about something so delicate, you might face some serious repercussions if you try to travel to Rwanda and you'll be probably questioned when you have to enter the country. So tell us about what you've done, which is revolutionary to the field and which basically makes us academics who are disconnected from the field, as in from the genocide in Rwanda. Question, whether we should continue to use the term the genocide of the Tutsis, which is technically the official way of calling it, but how some of us who are questioning that appellation have decided now to expand our understanding of the genocide and to call it the genocide in Rwanda with the Rwandan genocide instead? Well, initially the term used was the Rwandan genocide, and then over the years, because of politics, it became genocide of the Tutsi. And there was a rejoinder on there saying and of course, moderate Hutus were victims as well. But the victims of the genocide were clearly identified and they were Tutsis. But the language, the rhetoric has changed. And the weight of propaganda and has been responsible for the change in rhetoric. So, it's very interesting, though, the narrative, the official narrative was created very quickly in the ashes of the violence. Okay. So there was a genocide, but it was decided very quickly how many Tutsis had been killed and who was responsible for that. And the narrative was very clear from the very beginning, the official story that Tutsis were the only victims. They were the sole victims with a few opposition Hutu groups and that Hutus were the perpetrators. So there was this binary narrative. a story of good versus evil, really. And that is the understanding that was my understanding at the beginning as well. But as I've come to do so much research on this problem, it was clear to me that there was not only the narrative that was established in violence and under the weight of propaganda. And when I say propaganda, I'm not just talking about the Rwandan Patriotic Front. It had hired and worked with people who helped create that narrative. And I talk in my first book of a group of intellectuals, two academic researchers. and they worked for an organization called African Rights. And if you can imagine in the aftermath of the violence, within weeks of Paul Kagame seizing power in July 1994, African Rights emerges and publishes a very extensive compendium of the genocide of an account of the genocide and establishes very early on who the perpetrators were and who the victims were. And my research and others who have looked into African Rights shows that African Rights, received money from the Rwandan Patriotic Front. So from Kagame's ruling regime and worked with political cadres of the RPF to establish that narrative. by the way, the U.N. tribunal that was tasked with trying and prosecuting the most serious crimes of the Rwandan genocide has not been able or was never able to prove genocide, planning and genocide conspiracy. And there was an initial very serious influence on the prosecutions and the cases that were tried at the tribunal. So just to understand the weight of this narrative, it was Manichean, the story of good versus bad light versus dark. And that really did not reflect the reality on the ground. And there have been various people and attempts to shed light on the full reality of the violence, the dynamics of the violence that happened in 1994. But it's been very difficult. And I can tell you a little bit more about that. The difficulty and what people and what I in particular have been able to uncover. So in both your book studies In Praise of Blood and your new one, Rwanda’s 30-Year Assault on Congo, you challenged dominant narratives, the ones that we just talked about surrounding Paul Kagame and the RPF. What first led you to suspect that the internationally accepted story of Post 1994 Rwanda was incomplete? Well, I came into this story in Congo. First of all, I had been aware and read extensively about the Rwandan genocide in 1995 and in 1996, I started as a young journalist covering that region, as a reporter on the Africa desk at for Radio France Internationale. But in 1996, Kagame's troops invaded Congo and ostensibly they invaded to dismantle, destroy the Hutu refugee camps that were set up along the eastern border of Zaire-Congo. And Kagame argued that those camps full of Hutus, who had fled the genocide in 1994, were a security menace to Rwanda, trying to reconstruct and restore peace after the genocide. So he argued this, and he established he had already established moral legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. And he got the green light to go in and his troops very quickly it emerged, I was chronicling and documenting that military campaign of Kagame's. Very quickly, it emerged that his troops were systematically slaughtering Hutu refugees who were being chased across Zaire Congo. So by the time I arrived to cover the humanitarian crisis in Zaire-Congo, within a few days of Mobutu's toppling, because Kagame's army toppled this kleptocratic leader named Mobutu Sese Seko in May of 1997. I was on the ground and interviewing a lot of people, and one of the things I did was go on search and rescue missions in the Zaire, in the Congolese jungle, and the aim of the search and rescue missions were to find survivors of the attacks. Hutu refugees, survivors who could relate and tell me their stories of these attacks. And so we found many of them, and they were able to give me their devastating accounts. And it was quite frightening to see so many people who were injured on death's door, extremely malnourished with wounds. Some of them bullet wounds. And miraculously and many of these people, despite their condition, were willing to speak with me, although some, especially children were catatonic from the trauma of the attacks. And so during those interviews, when I was gathering evidence of the crimes in Congo, I got clues as to what happened during the Rwandan genocide. And it was essentially because I asked two questions. I asked these four survivors why they had fled Rwanda in the first place and why had they stayed in refugee camps in Congo for two years or more than two years? If Paul Kagame and the Tutsi regime had restored peace, stopped the violence, and were responsible for this African renaissance, which is what the overarching theme of the official narrative was. And to be honest, I had believed a fair amount of the propaganda as well. So but I still wanted to interview these people because they had been victims in Congo of Kagame's regime. And I had seen I gathered so much evidence. I was beginning to see the real face of Tutsi military forces. And so in asking those questions, they told me and one after the other that they fled Rwanda in the first place because the RPF had killed their families during 1994. They were afraid of the RPF. And that was the first time that I had heard that this was a revelation to me. And they said that they had stayed in the refugee camps because some of the other refugees who were being pushed home or encouraged to go home by the UNHCR, the High Commissioner for Refugees, many of the Rwandans who were returning were disappearing or their homes were not available anymore. They were ending up in jail or the men were being killed. And that was a story that I hadn't heard either. So it was very confusing to me. But it the accounts were fairly compelling. And because these people, the survivors had nothing to lose and really were so weakened and fragile. And I had documented, as Amnesty and Doctors Without Borders and all these other groups, I had documented the violence in Zaire quite assiduously. It I really felt it was imperative and very important to investigate this further. And when I went into Rwanda after my trip to Congo, I tried to do more interviews and people were very afraid to answer my questions. But I did manage to do some. And I remember one interview in particular with a teacher, a Hutu teacher who was in a refugee camp in Rwanda who had just come back from Congo. He had lost his wife and baby daughter in Congo. Kagame's forces had killed them when Tutsi forces had come in and sprayed a refugee camp. And he said this was his second family he had lost. And I said, What do you mean, what happened during the genocide? I said, Did Hutu militia kill your family? And I asked him fairly probing questions and they were leading questions. He said no. He said, the people who are surrounding this camp, the Tutsi soldiers were surrounding the camp. He said they were responsible. And so this was very chilling to me. And over the years, I kept interviewing Hutu in the diaspora. So it took me a long time to and incrementally to establish a wider and more accurate record. But certainly the army deserters, the people who had broken free from Kagame's regime, the Tutsi officers and soldiers that I was able to meet up with and get testimony from and build confidence with, they really enlightened me and validated so much of what the Hutus had told me, but gave me even greater detail about some of these atrocities. So that is really how it started and how it evolved. Thank you, Judi. So obviously, we discussed earlier that you look beyond the rigid categories of perpetrator and victim and hence question that simple binary that we conceive of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. And we also know about how the U.N. retreated from Rwanda. It retreated its troops from Rwanda at the start of the 1994 genocide. And today we can retrace documents that were classified then and are now declassified, which actually showed the knowledge that the U.N. and the US had of the upcoming, the imminent conflicts that would break out the war that would break out as a result of the political tension over there. The question I think, which ought to be asked at this juncture is why you think the international community was so resistant to acknowledging the crimes committed by the RPF? Well, first of all, the events that should enable us to understand the dynamics of violence have been removed from the public record. And so I will get to that in a minute. But I think the biggest reason that we do not understand what really happened in 1994 in Rwanda is that the international court, the U.N. court, and we call it the ICTR, that's the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, did not do its job. There was a judicial malfeasance, a breach of trust at the ICTR. It should have prosecuted the RPF for its crimes. It did not. All of the indictments and all of the convictions by the ICTR are of Hutus who are linked to the former regime. And so Kagame has enjoyed a shocking impunity. He was granted judicial immunity by this court. And if the court had done its job, we can talk about impunity later in the conversation. But if the court had done its job, we know that a true historical record would have been established and the knowledge of these crimes would be available for everyone. And so we, the world at large, doesn't understand. Because the events have been, to some extent, erased. The United States has been a sponsor of Paul Kagame for decades and Yoweri Museveni who is Kagame's organic ally in Uganda. Those two men and those countries have been used as geopolitical lynchpins in the region and the United States. Quite some time ago at the level of the court, managed to bury evidence of massive crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front. And it used politics to do so. And it's quite a sordid story. But the primary culprit here is the U.N. court. Secondly, as I mentioned, the crime scene in the wake of the genocide. But during the genocide and after the genocide, the crime scene was controlled by the Rwandan Patriotic Front. So people who went in to investigate or look at their experience was mediated to a large extent by political cadres who were working with the RPF. And so it was clearly a victor's justice. Also, I have to say, the early truth tellers, Hutus who had been victims, who had survived and possibly fled Rwanda, they were truth tellers, whistleblowers, people who had courage, ultimately one by one. By and large, they have been blackmailed, jailed, silenced or killed. And one of the most startling examples of that was a man named Seth Sendashonga. Seth Sendashonga was a Hutu who had actually joined the RPF prior to the genocide, and he was part of the first government established by Kagame. And that got a tremendous amount of support after the genocide. So he's part of that post-genocide side government. And he had actually documented because he received so much evidence from people he knew of the crimes that had been committed during the genocide by the RPF, a movement that he was a part of egregious crimes, mass crimes. And so he was slowly documenting this and into 1995, where the RPF continued to commit crimes against Hutus, groups of Hutus in displacement camps and in other areas. And finally he fled. He left the government, fled, went to Kenya and ended up being assassinated just prior to his appearance, where he had this evidence and he was tabling it to the ICTR, to the U.N. Court. So there are so many whistleblowers and truth tellers who have lost their lives in trying to tell their stories. So obviously the immediate question is with this partisanship approach towards Paul Kagame and his allies, the next question that I would want to ask you is what are the practical interests that the US has in supporting Kagame? I'm wondering, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, but through my reading there is definitely a connection with the ongoing economic interests that the US has within that region with respect to mining specifically. Well, I mean, I tackle this subject more clearly in my latest book, which is Rwanda's

30-Year Assault on Congo: 32:15

The Crimes, the Criminals and the Cover-Up. And it's a very short book, and the first third of it deals with U.S. conducted regime change in Congo in 1996-1997, the period that I went to Congo. And what I basically show is how the U.S. established a military task force that enabled Paul Kagame's invasion and toppling of Mobutu Sese Seko. And then I break it down and look at the rationale for the regime change, to answer your question, you have to go back to the 1980s, when the U.S. began to militarily and politically support Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Kagame's political and military movement was based in Uganda in the 1980s, and at that time the United States wanted linchpins. They chose, particularly Yoweri Museveni, to help the United States ward off Islamic interests in sub-Saharan Africa, but particularly in settings in Central Africa. So with the rise of Omar al-Bashir and a possible Islamic influence in Sudan and possibly encroaching Islamic influence throughout further south, they wanted, Yoweri Museveni to help them stem that influence. Okay, that was one reason. The other reason is the United States and its allies, but particularly the United States, was interested in opening up the economic corridor in Congo. And Congo is a country that has an estimated$24 trillion in natural resources. It's an unfathomable amount, in terms of resources. And at the time in the late eighties and early nineties, because I've been able to track this, the mineral output in Zaire-Congo had been plummeting. So we have cobalt and copper plummeting under Mobutu. And these are two essential minerals and metals essential for the global economy and also the artisanal minerals which are essential for the global economy as well for electronics and defense industries. And so the United States saw in these two men, Yoweri Museveni and Kagame as people who could help them open up this economy for the Americans, but for multinationals in general. And this what Kagame was able to do, and he was certainly rewarded for it. And if you see what has happened since the toppling of Mobutu, the record levels of production of cobalt and copper, already we know that Congo is the first producer in the world, the biggest producer in the world of Cobalt, because it is essential for the functioning of our economy, not only battery operated cars but everything. And we've seen the extraction of 3T, as they call them, artisanal minerals, tantalum, tungsten and tin, but also gold from the eastern provinces of Congo, where Kagame has principally waged his wars over the last 30 years. So what that has done is he has essentially ensured a cheap, steady supply of the artisanal minerals, the 3T for, the global supply chain. And he's done it because that cheap price the Congo has not been sovereign over the last. It's been more than 30 years. But certainly it's been at war. It's a broken country. And so the lack of sovereignty has enabled, I think, the global, global purchasers of these minerals to get them at a cheap, steady price. And the reason why I say Kagame's ensured that supply is that those minerals that have been trafficked from the mining areas in the east are exported and are taken and sold through Rwanda. So Rwanda is a principal exporter of something called coltan, whose derivative is tantalum, and that is essential for everything from defense applications to iPhones, cellphones, all of it. And the world is getting it for cheap because it's into trafficked goods from Congo. I think that's one point which always strikes the audience. When I watch anyone speaking about coltan and its use, because that means this genocide that's happening in a part of the world most of us are not aware of is actually directly supplying us with the possibility to use our iPhones and things that we're dependent on a daily basis. One of the striking scenes, Judi, across both books that you've written is impunity. Why do you believe Kagame's government continue to receive diplomatic protection despite mounting evidence of atrocities in both Rwanda and Congo? And I know we've covered that already plentifully, but if there's anything like to add to this question, you're open to it. Well, the international community is complicit as I said, the judicial the legal immunity that Kagame was afforded in from 1996-1997 onward, after the tribunal was set up, internationals are complicit in this. And so there are continuing efforts to hide the scale and nature of his crimes. So I do think because of the complicity of the international community, but as I just described, there is this economic incentive to continue to protect him. He is untouchable. And currently his troops are there. Upwards of 7000 Rwandan troops in Congo occupying the eastern provinces like the North and South Kivu province, provinces in eastern and his troops and the militia he sponsors, the M23, have plundered, raped, killed. I mean, the human rights violations are atrocious. And by all accounts and by all measures, Kagame, who is their godfather, the godfather of these militias and the troops committing these crimes, he should have been arrested. And I mean, this has been going on so long and taken to The Hague from 2002 onward because the ICC was established and could have started to prosecute Kagame for command control responsibilities for sponsoring these militias who are committing crimes in Congo of even earlier, but certainly under that jurisdiction from 2002 onward. But it chose not to. So there's systematically not only the part of the ICTR but the ICC has protected him. And so there are vested interests, there are vested interests in protecting the perpetrator, and they go to how the economy is built. And this idea, of course, that somehow if Kagame were arrested, if an indictment were issued, and if he were taken to The Hague, then Rwanda would fall apart and so would, the global supply chain. I think that is not true. Of course, I would like to see him prosecuted, but it does come down to economic and political interests. And I don't think the United States is ready to drop Kagame. We've seen the United States develop and nourish ties with so many dictators across the world and then turn around and arrest them when it suited them. So we saw it, they dropped Mobutu. Ties with Saddam Hussein, while and then that changed, back and forth with Moammar Gadhafi. But I'm not seeing any there is some frustration on the part of the Trump administration with Kagame. And you see the Trump and his entourage and all of his business friends, they are pivoting and showing a lot more interest in Tshisekedi's government and the resources directly in Congo. So they're doing deals directly with the Congolese. And it seems to me that Trump and his entourage seem to be realizing that perhaps Kagame's days may be numbered or he's less useful. But I haven't seen tangible evidence that they would be interested in prosecuting him or isolating him to the extent he should be, because ultimately, I think there's just so much complicity. So let's talk about the military strategies adopted by the RPF specifically because denialist accounts and when I say denialist accounts means denialist accounts of the complexity of the genocide in that region seek to represent any attacks or any persecutions by the RPF as mere acts of revenge, sporadic acts of revenge that should not count as anything concerted. And yet I do know that in the recent months, the U.N. has been discussing the possibility of starting an investigation about regarding the plane crash of Habyarimana, which technically started that genocide in 1994. And looking into who was behind it, I do know how far they are into really investigating it and starting and launching that investigation. But there's been talk of it. So my question to you is, what were your findings that went on to show that the RPF’s strategy was by no means based on sporadic acts of revenge, but were much more concerted and planned? Well, the bait and kill operations that I mentioned in my first book and also in my second book occurred in Congo. And so essentially those operations were part of attempts to lure and kill refugees, Rwandan Hutu refugees in the jungle. And essentially what they're trying to do is exterminate and reduce the Hutu population. And that's what they did. The refugees, every time there was attack an attack, they would flee further into the bush, into the jungle. They were also crossing mountains in very inhospitable terrain. But what was happening is there were international NGOs and humanitarian organizations there. Most of the people who are on the ground working for those organizations were locals. So you have Congolese workers with megaphones and with medical packages and food. And they were working for World Vision, Doctors Without Borders, the UNHCR, WFP (World Food Program), and they were trying to help these refugees who were starving or wounded from the attacks. They were finding the survivors in the forests. And those are part of the search and rescue missions that I went on. I was privileged enough to join and report on. And what was happening is that, so these humanitarian workers, largely Congolese, were attending, were finding the survivors in groups in the forest, and they were essentially inviting them and providing them with food and medical assistance. So the refugees were lured to some extent to areas where they knew they could get help. And the communications that the aid workers were using, which were largely walkie talkies and other types of cell phone, but Sat phones essentially, because I was there and these Sat phones were very heavy. But this was the kind of communications they were using in the Congolese jungle. Those communications were being monitored by the RPF. They had access to all kinds of communications of aid organizations. And they had the ability to monitor movements because the United States government gave them all that satellite equipment, technology and communication phones in this military task force that was set up. And the United States admitted in a document that I refer to in my latest book that they helped, the RPF, identify, locate, figure out the motivation and of the refugees in Congo. And they passed on that information to the RPF. So the United States was directly complicit. So the bait and kill is the bait that was used was the medical and aid in the forest that was used as bait to some extent, although the humanitarian organizations were good willed and they were just trying to help. But that was still bait to get the refugees into certain areas, and then the RPF would move in for the kill. So they'd go in, make sure all the Congolese aid workers moved out of the zone. They had the guns, they had all their weapons, and they said, move, leave the premises. And these are in dense areas of the jungle. And then they literally went in for the kill. So those were some of the bait and kill operations. But those kinds of tactics, I have to say, were more flagrant and easier to investigate and became more well known. There was, the aid workers gave accounts, survivors who might have survived those attacks. They fled deeper into the bush. They told their accounts to people like me and others. The U.N. set up an investigative team many years later, came out with something called the U.N. mapping report. And they described this UN mapping report provided extensive evidence of these crimes and said that the Rwandan troops under Paul Kagame may have committed a genocide. And if proven by a U.N. court. But lo and behold, that report came out and that classification came out in 2010. And no U.N. court was ever set up to try those crimes. One of the most disturbing aspects of your reporting involves the concealment of bodies and manipulation of victim categories. So what I remember reading is how many mass graves were filled with bodies of Tutsis as well as bodies of Hutus. So tell us more about the significance of burying Hutu victims alongside Tutsi victims and how that affected historical memory. So, yes, that's something that happened during the Rwandan genocide and after the genocide. And so the methods of concealment, the strategy that you allude to or you want to know more about, were more covert In Rwanda. As I said, in Congo, we know more about their crimes because the U.N. has done a better job investigating there. But in Rwanda, as I mentioned before, Kagame and his RPF, controlled the crime scene. And so, yes, his commando forces, special forces that operated behind the regular military front went in and massively killed Hutus. Sometimes they did it. They would invite Hutus to meetings and lure them with food and other things they needed, and then they killed them. And those bodies and those victims, they would be put in mass graves with Tutsi victims, Tutsis who had been killed by Hutu militia principally. And so there was a masking of the number of victims, Hutu versus Tutsis. And there is still a debate that rages to this day about how many victims there are of the Rwandan genocide. Most scholars who have done rigorous work on the number of Tutsis who were killed during the genocide have said there are about 600,000 Tutsis who were killed during the genocide. And that is a huge number of Tutsis who were killed, but no quantitative and qualitative investigations have been done on the number of Hutus who were killed during that cataclysm violence. We've had estimates of numbers of Hutus who have disappeared, but there's never been a classification, an empirical study, an investigation of how those Hutus would have been killed, who killed them and the a better idea of those numbers. But you know, putting victims in both Tutsis and Hutus in graves were actually one technique, but there were more mass murders of Hutus using other strategies. The Akagera park which is in the east of Rwanda, I describe this park and this killing ground in my book In Praise of Blood. Hutus were loaded on trucks from April, June, July, August onward, and even after the genocide, and they were brought to remote areas of Akagera Park, where they were killed put in mass graves and in most instances they were burned. So there were mass burnings in Rwanda during the genocide, open air crematoriums and some of this evidence, of course, was given by testimony from Tutsi insiders who were working and were present at these operations. And in the Akagera when the RPF was massively burning Hutus. I mean, it's really macabre. And so some of this evidence from accounts from Tutsis emerged came out in exculpatory proceedings during the regular trial proceedings. But I got access to some of these materials. And when I saw this and when I approached and got more detailed accounts from a lot of the Tutsi insiders that I reached out to it was it was devastating. It enlightened me and it showed me like what the true nature of the violence was committed by the RPF against Hutus. And there was one other aspect of my research that is considered controversial but is very evidence based as well, is that Kagame's commandos infiltrated Hutu militias and participated directly in killing Tutsis as well. And so that revelation I first discovered in a document that was leaked to me. It was a confidential, top secret document leaked to me by someone at the office of the prosecutor of the ICTR. And when I went to some of my sources and asked about this, they told me it was true that the RPF had infiltrated before the genocide all the prefectures of Rwanda and had infiltrated Hutu militias, not only the Interahamwe but others, and actively participated in killing Tutsis. And so they potentiated the genocide. That doesn't mean that Hutus did not commit genocide. Of course they did. And Hutu, particularly local forces elements of the state, committed genocide against Tutsis and they were responsible for that genocide. But the RPF had a very clear hand in that genocide against the Tutsi. And this a bitter pill to swallow for people to understand believe. But is true. We would be remiss not to discuss Rwanda's ongoing domestic political affairs, especially the repression of opposition figures. And one illustrative case is the 2025 arrest of Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza. Who is Victoire Ingabire, and what does Ingabire’s case reveal about the political order Kagame has built? And how does it connect to Rwanda's conduct in Congo? Well, a Victoire is a Hutu opposition politician, and she returned to Rwanda in 2010. She was not present in Rwanda during the genocide. She spent many years her family's Rwandan, and she spent many years outside the country in the Netherlands. Again, as I said, she's Hutu. She came back to country in 2010 in order to run and challenge Kagame in potential elections. And she visited shortly after her arrival, visited a memorial site where she made a statement saying that all victims of violence in 1994 should be recognized and honored. And so it was for many people, especially Hutus, this was a sign that a person of integrity was urging for ethnic reconciliation. And that after all these years, maybe both Hutus and Tutsis could be honored and recognized for the trauma they went through and the loss of their families. She was quickly arrested after that statement and under the genocide denial and revision laws and hate speech laws that Kagame has passed, she was tried in a court and accused of state security offenses. She was convicted of four state security offenses and she was accused of denying the genocide and revising the genocide. And then, of course, those were trumped up charges. And this was a political case. And she stayed in prison until 2018. She was released through a presidential pardon. She then tried to politically organize and one by one from 2018 until the current day, she hasn't been allowed to leave Rwanda in order to see her family back in the Netherlands. But she has tried to politically organize and possibly run against Kagame. It hasn't been possible. She can't register officially register her party, but one by one, people who have supported her and work with her political colleagues have disappeared. And it's been very tragic. And a new stage, you mentioned in 2025, she was arrested again on bogus charges. People who she works with were found reading a book about peaceful organizing and revolution and that sort of thing. And so she's at once again charged with state security offenses. And she has been essentially in detention and in jail awaiting trial since last year. And she's a victim of injustice. And she is seen as somebody who is a reputable, morally reputable person. And all of the her treatment by the judicial system and by authorities speaks to this serious level of repression and lack of space, not only political space, but free speech. And there is there seem to be one victim after another in Rwanda over the last several years. This month, on May 6th, a man named Aimable Karasira was who had been in jail for five years. Also been accused of genocide, revisionism, denial. He's a Tutsi survivor, if you can imagine. He had recounted publicly that his family had been killed, his Tutsi family had been killed by the RPF in 1994. And it is very dangerous to utter such a thing in Rwanda. To tell the truth, it's very dangerous to challenge the official narrative. He was put in jail and he was about to be released on May 6th, and that day, the day of his release, he was found dead. And authorities have said that he overdosed on some medication, but nobody believes that. Most Rwandans believe that he was killed because of the risks he posed to the regime for telling the truth. I mean, he's not the only one. There have been other Kizito Mihigo he was a gospel singer who was killed in 2020, much beloved person, a Tutsi genocide survivor who preached for ethnic reconciliation and who wanted the crimes, the RPF, but particularly the trauma and the violations of human rights, but also the killings of the Hutus during the genocide. He wanted to raise awareness about that history. And they authorities arrested him and put him in jail and he was found dead in detention. So it's a place where people are not free. People are not free to criticize the government. People are not free to talk about the past. It's a country that will never be reconciled. But it is a very dangerous place for people who want to exercise their full rights. So you mention in line with the complexity of what we are talking about right now. The first means in which readers and analysts or skeptics basically analyze a person who's produced controversial work is to test the person's sources and methodology. And, obviously all the other tools that we read, we learn about during research as academics. I was there for a while reading your work, very interested in the sources that you drew your information from. And one of the sources you mentioned were members of the RPF themselves who reached out to you to challenge the official narratives. And in the process they turned on their own former allies. By doing so, what risks did these insiders in Informers face, and why do you think some eventually decided to speak? They face enormous risks, and some of the first wave of Tutsi insiders, especially officers and soldiers who had worked with Kagame in the Rwandan Patriotic Army and Front some of the first wave of people who fled were in the early 2000s, and they fled to Uganda. At first. And they're all over. But there have been many who have been killed, sought out, tracked down and killed, and they particularly face dangers if they are suspected of revealing past military secrets, political and military secrets, of this regime. And so the first people that the RPF went after were those people who ended up testifying, giving testimony to what I described in my first book as the special Investigations unit that was set up at the tribunal. So there were attempts. There was an attempt by a special unit at the office of the prosecutor to collect evidence of RPF crimes. And initially, as I understand it, there were indictments that were issued under Chief prosecutor named Carla Del Ponte, but she was fired. And when she wanted those indictments to be issued and she wanted prosecutions to begin. So those indictments were based on very detailed testimony from these young people and some more senior people who broke with the regime. You asked me why and some of them disappeared. It's very interesting to me and tragic at the same time that when I spoke to investigators at the tribunal, these are Westerners who did investigations. They told me what was devastating was to hear about these young men who came to them and gave them testimony and sworn witness signed testimony and then disappeared and or were kidnaped and brought back to Rwanda, tortured and possibly killed. So that is a great tragedy. Why have these men spoken out and how did I gain their confidence and why were they interested in speaking to me? Variety of reasons. I think many of them are tired of this terrible grip Kagame has on power inside Rwanda and how he has exported that transnational repression across borders. I mean, he created I mean, one after another. So many of the Rwandan Tutsis were being killed in other areas in. The region who fled. There are also reasons, I think, as some of the younger guys I spoke with told me, that they're conscious it's led them to speak to me. A few of them said they were tired of committing crimes for Kagame. And some of these guys had been child soldiers. They had been in their teens when they joined the RPF and they did not want to live the rest of their lives, forced to commit crimes for this regime. And it was heinous and they wanted it to stop. Other people felt that there needed to be the establishment of a true historical record. And most Rwandans I speak to, whether they're Hutus or Tutsis, have been are tremendously I mean, they're very much interested in ethnic reconciliation and truth and establishing that truth, the real historical record. And so I think there were a number of reasons, but certainly I felt in the last 10 years to 15 years, that the Tutsis, because of the knowledge they have, the inside knowledge that they have been first and foremost targeted by Kagame, I mean, and interior Tutsis, especially because there are what we call interior Tutsis. These are the Tutsis who did not flee after the Hutu revolution. They stayed in Rwanda. They made their lives under the Habyarimana regime. They cooperated with the Hutus, they formed friendships, they married Hutus. And even though some of them joined the RPF for various reasons, complex reasons, most of them did not agree with how the RPF ended up waging its war and what it did and how it eviscerated Rwanda and how it's ruled the country since. And so the interior Tutsis are they see themselves as a very separate group. Then the Ugandan-raised Tutsis or the Burundian-raised Tutsis who came back and worked with Kagame. So it's a very complex place because the Ugandan-raised Tutsis are the ones who have largely benefited from the spoils of power and who have ruled Rwanda since 1994. So whatever you engage in the whole research due to its controversy and due to its terrible moments that I experienced, even just as a reader of dread when you had to face sent, situations where you were vulnerable in every possible way. Even being a woman researcher in a foreign land where violence could break out at any time, someone could harm you without any kind of accountability. My question is, looking back, what were the moments when you realized the risks of pursuing this story had actually become very personal? Well, I didn't see it at first. I mean, when I was in Congo, in Rwanda was much younger. And I didn't have a sense of the danger, even though I had I faced serious security risks, even collecting some of the evidence that I did. But it was when I was able to understand reexamine and expose what Kagame's troops had done in the genocide. And I had published a feature in a magazine, an online magazine. It was after that my family was threatened, my young daughter at the time, and it gave me such pause. And it was so frightening for us. And we had to completely reconfigure our lives, essentially try to set up all sorts of measures, of vigilant measures to keep the children. And I started to work differently, and it was very hard. But, I was living, I still am living in Canada doing a lot of my research from Montreal, traveling here and there. And it still was inconceivable to me that living in North America, I could become a target of a foreign state. I could potentially be assassinated or one of my children could be harmed. At the same time, I got protection to some extent from local police and something called the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, which is the equivalent of the FBI and provincial security services and also national. So I did get some support and I made it known that I had become a target. But I still don't think I realized the extent to which I was in danger until I went to Brussels in 2014. And I was still traveling and meeting witnesses, especially Tutsis, who had broken with the regime and, collecting evidence about the assassination, the plane attack that triggered the genocide. And I was really breaking ground and so was gathering as much evidence as I could to write my book, which came out in 2018. And when I arrived in Brussels in 2014, I'll never forget there were armored Mercedes vehicles outside my hotel and people dressed in suits when I went to the reception to check in. And I was approached by people who said they were working for the Belgian state security and they told me they had a mandate from the government to provide me with around-the-clock protection, which included armed bodyguards and armored vehicles during my weeklong stay in Belgium at that time, because the Rwandan embassy posed a threat to my life. So somehow the Belgian intelligence had picked up, through their tapping, wiretapping or phone surveillance, the possibility of a plan to harm me. And the risk level, they told me, was very high. And so I had to decide very quickly whether or not to stop my research, go home and, rethink everything or continue and I decided to continue. I felt compelled because I had come so far and I just needed I always felt like I just needed to do a few more interviews in order to write my book. But I really think I didn't fully measure the organization and the nature of the criminality of the Rwandan embassies worldwide and how they operate outside of Rwanda with all their political cadres and how they target people. And I understand that better now. But at the time, I didn't. Judi, for younger scholars and journalists researching mass atrocity. What lessons does your experience offer about investigating politically protected violence? Well, that's a good question. And, from a very young age and this has served me well, I have always learned to be skeptical and to ask. And I was taught this by some of the best journalists and professors, people who worked in the industry. And I think is how I'm wired to some extent. I was always told to try to figure out whose interests are being served by any decision or by any event. But it's taken me a long time to apply that in journalism, we don't become journalists or researchers or investigators to make friends, and I haven't made a lot of friends. But with mainstream academics and journalists, I'm thrilled to speak to you. And I stand by every all of my work. And I am thrilled and touched by the outpouring from Rwandans and Congolese who tell me my work has amplified their voices and validated their experiences. But if I had any particular advice, it would be, listen to people who flee regimes and flee authoritarian regimes or who flee war and who can speak freely with or without the specter of violence, punishment or reward. I feel it's not enough to go to a crime like Rwanda in the aftermath of war, where the victor tightly controls what people say. This is a country that is violently controlled by the state. And so I say to researchers and to journalists, there's only so much you can understand from doing research in Rwanda. It's very important to go outside and interview people who have fled. And I have to say that there has been a colossal failure on the part of journalists, researchers, investigators, human rights people in failing to interview Hutus who fled in the hundreds of thousands after the genocide. There were no empirical studies that, you know from accounts from Hutus, where we asked them what they experienced during the genocide. I mean, I've tried to interview and I have interviewed hundreds of people, but empirical studies should have been done as soon as those people fled. There are no, to my knowledge, quantitative or qualitative studies with people who fled and who are free to speak not only Hutus but Tutsis for that matter. And so the this a point that I want to emphasize. There's been a colossal failure on the part of all of us and I sometimes I described it as historical gaslighting. It's been a failure in establishing a historical record. And concerning those affected by the conflict. After decades of violence in Congo and continued instability in the region, especially bordering Rwanda, what forms of justice or accountability do you believe are still possible, if any, for The millions affected by these conflicts? Well, because the ICTR did not do its job and has wound down, that was not possible. I've said the ICC decided not to prosecute Kagame, even though it still could. We haven't seen any moves in that direction. I have urged and I think it is truly possible using universal jurisdiction laws that people who were complicit in enabling or assisting or abetting somehow these crimes. So whoever aided, assisted or even concealed some of the crimes and had knowledge of them as they were going on the crimes that were committed by Rwanda by Kagame in Rwanda, but specifically in Congo, because it's easier to do Kagame had, as I mentioned, the military political assistance of the security, Pentagon and security agencies and political establishment. And so these people could be found to face criminal liability in potential proceedings if some were brought on. And I do think that a court case that is very important and has just wrapped up in Sweden could be a model for Congo. There's a court case where Lundin Oil and its subsidiaries, a Swedish oil company who was accused of aiding and abetting war crimes in South Sudan in the late 1990s, early 2000. These senior executives have been put on trial and the verdict is going to be announced in December. But I think there are a lot of lessons that can draw from that trial. And clearly people who are in who give financial assistance or political or military assistance to perpetrators in this case, Paul Kagame should face justice in our jurisdiction in Canada, in the U.S. or in Europe. And the last question to you, Judi, is something probably more personal and feel free to, answer it as you'd like. But we are wondering, because of the nature of this controversial conversation and all that you have unveiled, which is really so courageous of you. And I think it should be an example to all of us who try to tiptoe around sensitive subjects, especially in this now era of censorship, of self-censorship. And I feel this, Luis, and I feel this all the time, especially when we deal with all the topics and subtopics that have been censored by the government currently in the United States. Our question to you is what is life like right now in the sense of how do you implement measures in your everyday life to be safe? Do you feel that you're threatened? Do you feel that you need to tiptoe around certain matters? And what is the response of the public at large to your work? Well, one of the most rewarding aspects of this work has been the reaction of Rwandans and Congolese and their feedback means more than possible praise from academic or media circles. And so people from Rwanda, inside Rwanda have contacted me, but many of them outside and people from Congo inside that country continue to encourage me and really stir and give me motivation to continue this. And I have to say, in terms of the risks involved, I feel that there are a lot than they were in 2013, ‘14 and ’15. That was the most dangerous period because it was before my book came out. I mean, the point of the threats and the attempts at my life, if there were any, and if they were trying to kill me or shut me up or scare me, those were to prevent me from coming out with my book. And so once my book was out there for people to read, the evidence is there, the story is there. What happened after were attempts to discredit my work and some people in mainstream media or mainstream academia who wanted to protect their careers and sometimes their careers were based on the official narrative. they had reputations to maintain. And so there were attempts to marginalize or dismiss or discredit me and those, were a nuisance and sometimes discouraging. But I've continued because work and the stories and the evidence and the people, the victims are more important than my reputation. And I think the worst risks are behind me. I'm also at a stage in my life and my career where, what people say matters less. What you what people say about me matters less. And I think the most important thing for me now is to crystallize what I know to be true and to keep telling people I have three layers of evidence victims, perpetrators who have broken with the regime and can validate those. And then, of course, the documents that were leaked to me from the tribunal and people still come to me and give me evidence and documents. And it's extraordinary. And so I am buoyed and it's fascinating work. And I know that people who are younger have more of an open mind. And so they will continue this work. People who open and in the spirit of inquiry, they will continue this work. And I also think that when Kagame leaves power because he is not immortal, he will die someday or he will leave power. Somehow I will disappear as well. I won't be here forever. And someday all of these stories, the true stories will come out and there will be a Rwanda, and there will be an international community who that will be willing to hear it. And so a true historical record will be will be established someday. Thank you. Thank you very much, Judi, and good luck with your work. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. This was Not to Forgive, but to Understand with our guest, Judi Rever. To our listeners, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and stay tuned for more discussions.