Intent to Deceive: Denying the Genocide of the Tutsi

by Linda Melvern

The idea of two genocides in Rwanda, the first nearly wiping out the Tutsi minority and the second secretly committed by the Tutsi-dominated RPF, would have been a sensational news story, if true. There were numerous rumours. Following the RPF military victory in July, a US journalist, Mark Fritz, spent nearly a month looking but he never found any evidence of the systematic killing of Hutu.7 The UK journalist Mark Huband of the Observer noted only ‘secondhand reports’ from the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) from the camps about RPF killings.8 A BBC journalist, Mark Doyle, who reported from Rwanda, wrote a dispatch to London explaining there was no convincing evidence of the RPF massacring civilians.