Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs: Rwanda 1990–1994
(Furious Blacks, Lying Whites: Rwanda 1990–1994)
By Pierre Péan
544 pages, Paris: Mille Et Une Nuits, 2005 (in French)

Between April and July 1994, I spent most of my time reporting on the genocide in Rwanda for the BBC. One day I would be counting cadavers piled high in a rural church; on another, I would interview perpetrators or victims. I remember looking out from a half-destroyed Kigali hotel at red-hot tracer bullets forming an arc in the night sky. I recall interviewing the International Red Cross representative—one of the few foreign aid workers not to have run away—who said into my microphone, “I stopped counting at 500,000 dead.”

What happened in Rwanda in 1994 is now fairly common knowledge. Just for the record, though, here are the facts as I understand them: The genocide was perpetrated by an extremist ethnic Hutu regime that responded to a military attack by ethnic Tutsi rebels by trying to murder all Tutsis—as well as those Hutus prepared to make peace with the minority Tutsis.

For several years prior to the genocide, the majority Hutus had received French diplomatic and military backing. By contrast, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), who led the rebellion, had been brought up in exile in neighboring, English-speaking Uganda. By the end of July 1994, an estimated 800,000 were dead, the vast majority of them Tutsi. The operation was extremely well organized. The Hutus killed at a rate faster than the Nazis killed Jews in World War II.

Thus far, I think the author of Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs Rwanda 1990–1994 (Furious Blacks, Lying Whites: Rwanda 1990–1994) would hardly disagree with me.
But in this controversial new book, French...