Intent to Deceive: Denying the Genocide of the Tutsi

by Linda Melvern

In fact, there was a large amount of documentary evidence. Most of the National Archives of Rwanda survived the civil war. It was a prodigious amount of paper and a legacy of Belgian colonial rule, the remnants of a vast bureaucracy created by the colonisers. The system required multiple copies of every decision in every institution of state, and daily reports written to the office of the president on the decisions made in all government offices. The archives included documents, sound recordings and photographs, classified secret and confidential intelligence reports, government memoranda, letters, faxes, invoices and diplomatic cables. The archive included the transcripts of interrogations and of listening devices and telephone intercepts. Written in business French, these were perfectly typed records of state.