In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front is a 2018 non-fiction book by Canadian journalist Judi Rever and published by Random House of Canada; it has also been translated into Dutch and French. The book describes alleged war crimes by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), Rwanda's ruling political party, during its ascent to power in the 1990s.
Although many of the events described in Rever's book were already known to historians, the book is controversial. Praised for thorough investigation at considerable personal risk to the author, the book was also criticized for sensationalism and relying on unreliable sources. According to historian Gerald Caplan, the book "had an immediate, destabilizing influence on the world of orthodox Rwandan scholarship". Rever argues that, in addition to the Rwandan genocide by Hutus against Tutsis, the war crimes against Hutus by the Tutsi-led RPF should also be labeled "genocide", an opinion that differed from existing historical narratives.
Background
In Rwanda, the two major ethnic groups are Hutu (85%) and Tutsi (14%). European colonial policies promoted and racialized the higher status of cattle-raising Tutsis over farming Hutus. European policies, including their support for a Tutsi monarchy, increased tension between the two groups. In the 1959 Rwandan Revolution, a Hutu-led movement killed many Rwandan Tutsis and drove hundreds of thousands into exile.
Descendants of Rwandan Tutsis whose families had fled to Uganda gave armed support to a rebellion by Yoweri Museveni. Then in 1990, their Tutsi-led political and military force, Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), challenged the Hutu-led government of Rwanda, setting off the Rwandan Civil War.
Judi Rever is a Canadian journalist who has covered African affairs since the refugee crisis of the First Congo War, which she covered for Radio France Internationale. A three year stint as correspondent for Agence France Press (AFP) in Ivory Coast followed. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Globe and Mail and elsewhere. She contributed the foreword to Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza's 2017 book Between 4 Walls of the 1930 Prison: Memoirs of Rwandan Prisoner of Conscience. In the book, Rever describes threats against herself and her family, some of which were reported in 2015 news stories documenting threats against Rever and four other Canadian critics of Paul Kagame.
Content
In Praise of Blood follows the timeline of a Canadian reporter who in 1997 stumbled on a big "story" about the RPF and later pursued it. The book describes events in Rwanda and Zaire (later the DRC) that according to Rever's sources were crimes committed by the RPF during the rise to power of Kagame, now Rwanda's president. The book discusses several periods during which these events took place: the Rwandan civil war including the 1994 Rwandan genocide (1990–1994); the counterinsurgency period in Rwanda (1994–1997); RPF participation in two Congo wars (First and Second); and more recently, deaths of Rwanda dissidents. RPF massacres of Hutu civilians described in the book include Byumba, Kibeho, Karambi, Gabiro, Gikongoro.
The book's fifteen chapters follow the sequence of Rever's research, beginning when Rever was a young reporter traveling with humanitarian workers into the Congolese jungle to cover the refugee crisis there, and tracing her later research parallel to events in her life, including her marriage and raising two daughters. Each chapter centers around one event, presented (according to Rever) as a cinematic scene.
Origins of the project Chapters 1 and 2 cover 1997, beginning when Rever accompanied humanitarian aid workers into the jungles of Zaire. After meeting women and children who said they were Hutu refugees being hunted by RPF troops from Rwanda, Rever wonders why western countries did not step in to stop the violence. Based on her research, Rever concludes that western countries were less interested in helping refugees than in keeping the good will of Rwanda's new RPF government—first to get rid of Mobutu and later to exploit the Congo's resources.
In Chapters 3 and 4, Rever decides to spend time away from Rwanda with her husband and starts raising a family. In 2010, after she has the opportunity to interview war-crimes prosecutor Luc Côté about the recently leaked "UN mapping report" (a report on war crimes in the DRC), she resumes writing about Africa. The book then briefly catalogs some other RPF-related events that took place between 1998 and 2010, including French arrest warrants (2006), the Second Congo War (which Rever describes as a "looter's war"), and the Gersony report (leaked in 2010).
Full-time investigation after 2012 From 2012 onwards Rever devotes her career to a full-time investigation of RPF war crimes. Much of Chapter 4 recounts stories from Théogène Murwanashyaka (TM), a former RPF army officer who reached out to her in 2012 and became a major informant of her book. Unlike the RPF leadership, whose Tutsi families had fled Hutu rule to settle in Uganda, TM's family were what he called "interior Tutsis" – Tutsi families who had remained in Rwanda. TM came to believe that during the genocide "the RPF had sacrificed interior Tutsis" as a cost of gaining power. Both TM and Belgian UNAMIR commander Luc Marchal, whom Rever interviewed, assert that the RPF could have done much to slow or stop the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus, but were more concerned with seizing power. According to Marchal, the goal was "to seize power and use the massacres as stock in trade to justify the military operations."
Each of chapters 5 through 9 covers a different aspect of RPF actions during the Rwandan Civil War. Chapter 5 describes the RPF's use of military intelligence to destabilize the Habyarimana government and undermine the Arusha Peace Agreement. According to ICTR, these intelligence groups were responsible for most of the massacres of Hutu civilians attributed to the RPF. They successfully infiltrated Hutu political parties and the extremist militia during the early 1990s. Citing ICTR testimony, the book says that before and during the genocide, RPF members who had infiltrated Hutu militia fueled the genocidal violence, including helping to kill Tutsi civilians at roadblocks.
Chapters 6 through 10 describe alleged massacres of Hutus committed inside Rwanda by the RPF. Chapter 6, based largely on ICTR information, describes a 1994 massacre of Hutu peasants in Byumba's football stadium. Chapter 7, based largely on interviews, describes massacres of Hutus by RPF that allegedly occurred in Byumba's Karambi Trading Center, Murambi, and near Akagera National Park, where, according to Rever's informants, dead Hutus were concealed from satellite photography by being first burned and then buried. In Chapters 8 and 9, the book describes events at Giti, where the RPF allegedly massacred Hutus but then created a cover story about what happened. Rever also describes the participation of some non-RPF Tutsis in killing their Hutu neighbors, saying, "In 1994, Rwanda was awash in fear, mistrust, and paranoia." Chapter 10 describes alleged RPF killings of Hutus inside Rwanda in 1996–1997, justified as "counterinsurgency" against Hutu genocidaires.
Chapters 11 and 12 deal with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), an international court established by the United Nations Security Council to judge people responsible for the Rwandan genocide and other serious violations of international law during 1994. In addition to its work identifying Hutu génocidaires who had committed war crimes against Tutsi, the ICTR gathered evidence of crimes by high-level RPF officers, but was then forbidden to indict RPF suspects. Instead, the ICTR was pressured by the US and the UN to hand over to Rwanda its evidence concerning RPF crimes. As a result, Rwanda prosecuted only two low-level soldiers for the killing on June 5, 1994 of several Hutu Catholic priests and a small child.
Chapter 13 presents the theory that the RPF, not Hutu extremists, shot down President Habyarimana's plane on 6 April 1994, using the ensuing chaos and mass killings to generate sympathy for its military campaign to seize power.
In Chapter 14 "Becoming a target", Rever describes threats against her safety and her family as she continues to publish articles criticizing the RPF. In 2015, she determines to fight back, by going to the press about the threats and by finishing the book.
Conclusions Chapter 15 surveys a range of charges against the RPF beginning in 1991 and continuing to the 2019 conviction of Bosco Ntaganda for eighteen charges that included rape, murder, recruitment of child soldiers and sexual slavery of civilians. Rever criticizes many early reports from the 1990s as neglecting or even justifying deaths of Hutu civilians. Western nations, valuing Kagame's achievements as leader of Rwanda, remain donors and supporters despite the RPF's record on human rights.
The book's conclusion stresses that bad actions by the RPF do not in any way justify or diminish the horror of the Rwanda genocide against Tutsis, saying:There is no part of this book that denies the genocide...There is no question that after Habyarimana's death, the [Hutu] hardliners chose genocide...But this book is not an examination of the dynamics of that 1994 genocide of Tutsis. But she says that RPF "policy of ethnic murder" against Hutus should be considered a genocide as well.
Her final message is that Rwanda cannot have true reconciliation as long as its government enforces secrecy about crimes committed by the RPF. While suspects of the genocide against the Tutsi were tried and convicted by the ICTR, the crimes committed by the RPF have been left unpunished.
Publishing history The book was published by Random House of Canada in March 2018. and in Dutch by Amsterdam University Press in 2018.Judi Rever The Truth about Rwanda A French translation of the book was originally to be published by Fayard in 2019, but this company withdrew after controversy. Subsequently published it in 2020 as Rwanda: L’éloge du sang (Rwanda: In Praise of Blood).
Reception Mainstream reviewers In Rever's native Canada, the book's launch got attention, and Rever became a frequent interview subject, both on the book's contents and on her methods for writing it.Cable Public Affairs Channel "Rwanda’s Hidden History: Investigation of a Second Genocide" (April 15, 2018) Both The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star published book excerpts.The Globe and Mail "Excerpt: In Praise of Blood and new revelations from the depths of the Rwandan genocide" (March 22, 2018)Toronto Star "Did Rwanda's Paul Kagame trigger the genocide of his own people?" (April 18, 2018)
One of the book's earliest reviews came in the LA Review of Books, "The Insistence of Memory," where political scientist Kate Cronin-Furman described the Rwandan government's use of memorial events "to remind Rwandans and the world that the Tutsi are never safe and that whatever the Kagame regime does is necessary for their protection"; in this context, she called In Praise of Blood "explosive."
Helen Epstein, whose favorable two-part review for The New York Review of Books may have helped popularize the book, wrote that Rever's "sources are too numerous and their observations too consistent for her findings to be a fabrication." Epstein predicted, however, that the book would provoke significant pushback: Versions of Rever’s story have been told by others. While all contain convincing evidence against the RPF, some are marred by a tendency to understate the crimes of the Hutu génocidaires or overstate the RPF’s crimes. But some, including the work of Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian professor of law and politics, have been both measured and soundly researched. Kagame’s regime and its defenders have dismissed them all as propaganda spouted by defeated Hutu génocidaires and genocide deniers.