Judi Rever’s remarks at the Oslo Freedom Forum in May 2025, echoing arguments from her book In Praise of Blood, revive a narrative that has long circulated in certain advocacy and media circles: that Rwanda’s post-genocide leadership and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) were principal perpetrators of violence in 1994 and destabilizers of the Great Lakes region. While framed as courageous dissent, this narrative relies on selective evidence, disregards established legal findings, and ultimately obscures responsibility for one of the most documented genocides in modern history.
The Historical Record Is Not Ambiguous
The Genocide against the Tutsi was planned, organized, and executed by Hutu Power extremists operating through the MRND regime, its allied parties, militias, and state institutions. This has been conclusively established by the United Nations, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and courts across multiple jurisdictions. Tens of thousands of pages of judgments, testimonies, and forensic evidence confirm both intent and command responsibility. Against this record, claims that blur the line between the crime of genocide and actions taken within a civil war context collapse essential legal distinctions. Genocide is defined by intent to destroy a protected group; that intent lay with the genocidal regime, not with the force that stopped it.
Rever’s reliance on leaked ICTR materials illustrates this problem. These documents were never tested in court, never subjected to cross-examination, and never resulted in indictments. After extensive investigations, the ICTR issued no charges against President Paul Kagame or senior RPF leaders—not due to political caution, but because allegations failed to meet the evidentiary threshold required under international criminal law. Elevating unproven intelligence over judicial outcomes substitutes rumor for law and undermines the very accountability standards human rights advocacy claims to defend.
The “Double Genocide” Claim and Its Consequences
Central to Rever’s framing is the suggestion of a “double genocide,” implying moral and legal equivalence between the extermination of the Tutsi and wartime deaths of Hutu civilians. This claim has been rejected by every competent international body. Acknowledging that Hutu civilians suffered does not diminish their humanity, but civilian deaths—however tragic—do not constitute genocide absent proven intent. That intent has been established only with respect to the Genocide against the Tutsi.
Historically, narratives of Hutu victimhood were deliberately instrumentalized by the genocidal regime itself. As early as 1993, political manifestos and “distress calls” framed the RPF as a foreign conspiracy bent on extermination, mobilizing fear to justify mass arming of civilians. These narratives laid the ideological groundwork for genocide and later shaped the forced refugee exodus, which was strategically engineered to shield génocidaires, weaponize humanitarian aid, and destabilize eastern Zaire—now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The consequences remain visible today. Armed groups descended from génocidaire forces, including the FDLR and its splinter factions, continue to operate in eastern DRC, openly maintaining genocidal ideology. Any serious analysis of regional insecurity must grapple with this continuity. Reducing a complex conflict involving hundreds of armed groups, weak state institutions, and regional rivalries to a single villain is neither analytically credible nor historically honest.
Critics who freeze Rwanda in 1994 also ignore what followed. Since the genocide, Rwanda has undergone a profound transformation: rebuilding institutions, expanding healthcare and education, advancing gender equality, improving security, and sustaining economic growth. These outcomes do not immunize the government from criticism, but they are part of the factual record. Erasing them serves a narrative, not truth.
Human rights advocacy loses credibility when it becomes selective—amplifying some victims while diminishing others, or recasting documented genocide as a morally symmetrical tragedy. Accountability demands precision, not equivalence; history demands context, not fragments. Platforms that claim moral authority must distinguish between legitimate scrutiny of power and the dangerous distortion of genocide. On Rwanda, the record is clear, and clarity—not revisionism—is what justice requires.
