The RPF was also hunting a legitimate target -- the genocidaires who had fled across the border, reconstituted themselves as the ex-FAR/Interahamwe, mingled with refugees in the giant, ill-governed camps of eastern Congo, and found fresh recruits among them. But the report finds that each time they routed the genocidaires, the soldiers turned on civilians. In one typical episode, after killing a number of ex-FAR in the vast northeastern province of Orientale, RPF forces kidnapped refugees, many of them women and children, and brought them to a camp, allegedly under the pretext of returning them to Rwanda. The refugees were then brought out in small groups. From the report: "They were bound and their throats were cut or they were killed by hammer blows to the head. Their bodies were then thrown into pits or doused with petrol and burned. The operation was carried out in a methodical manner and lasted at least one month."
What has enraged the Rwandans, of course, is the claim that the victims of genocide became its perpetrators. The report offers no evidence of political control, though the Rwandan army is a famously disciplined, top-down force. But the study does adduce extensive evidence that RPF forces targeted all Hutus, including the Congolese Hutu known as Banyarwanda. The report notes that soldiers erected barriers that allowed them to separate Hutus from other groups, sparing the latter and slaughtering the former. Without in any way diminishing the unique monstrousness of the 1994 genocide, the report essentially puts an end to Rwanda's victim status. The Great Lakes region, comprising Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo, has been engulfed since the 1970s in a politics of genocide, in which groups seek to gain and retain power by destroying their rivals. Kagame's RPF, and perhaps Kagame himself, drank from this poisoned stream.
And this is not, like the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, a matter of strictly historical significance. Since the 1990s, Rwanda has played a dangerous game in Congo, backing brutal warlords and helping raise ragtag armies, siphoning off natural resources, even trying to rearrange borders to seize Congolese farmland. All of Congo's neighbors have nibbled at this vast carcass, but Rwanda gets away with it. In the late 1990s, the United States and Britain blocked efforts, largely by France, to raise the issue of Rwanda's behavior in the Security Council. Carla Del Ponte writes in her memoirs that in 2003, Annan refused to reappoint her as chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda when she outraged Kagame by investigating allegations of Tutsi crimes against Hutu civilians after the genocide (so much for Annan's alleged blame-shifting campaign). Kagame has refused to permit the tribunal to interview Rwandan witnesses.
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