Genocide in Rwanda and Nigeria: Manipulating facts to convict Bola Ige

Rejoinder to "The Role of Chief Bola Ige in the Destabilisation of Nigeria" and "Chief Bola Ige and Genocide in Rwanda and Nigeria" by Dr. Abubakar Siddique Mohammed

It is not the intention of this rejoinder to comment on the absurd and irresponsible charge of genocide against Chief Bola Ige, but to counter the distortion of history attempted in the two articles. There are neither villains nor heroes in the Rwandan crisis. Hutus have been as much victims as perpetrators in this tragic saga.

By portraying Hutus as the sole perpetrators of violence and Tutsis as the only victims, Siddique Mohammed has ensured that his presentation of the Hutu-Tutsi tragedy is lopsided for the purpose of making a particular point. That is an act of dishonest scholarship. That Tutsis were able to oppress a population, much larger than their own in serfdom, for more than 400 years could only have been possible through the threat and use of violence. This is an important point to remember in order to understand this crisis.

Tutsis also introduced violence into modern politics of Rwanda. The murder of some Hutu politicians by Tutsi extremists in 1959, for example, marked the beginning of this cycle of violence that has not, even today, abated in Rwanda and Burundi.

Credible analysts, including German and Belgian journalists, scholars and development aid workers, who are far more familiar with this terrain, have repeatedly warned against the simplistic and biased portrayal of the tragedy by latter-day Rwanda-experts, whose works were generously quoted in Siddique Mohammed’s articles, because it does not help the world to understand this very complex and unusual problem.

Siddique Mohammed writes:

Outlining the timeline of the massacres without providing the context in which they took place, as Dr. Mohammed has done, does not help readers to put these tragic incidents in their proper historical perspective.

First, all impartial accounts of the killings in 1963 absolved the Hutu government of Gregoire Kayibanda of having planned, organised or supported genocide against the Tutsi civil population. The killings were reprisals for the activities of armed Tutsi groups, known as the "Inyenzi", who attempted to take power by force through 3 invasions of the country (from Uganda and the then Congo) between November 25, 1963 and December 27, 1963, when they even advanced to within 20 kilometres of Kigali, the capital.

It has been argued that, because the government had only 1,000 men under arms to defend a particularly difficult border-terrain, it had to incorporate the civil population into its defence strategy, in a desperate act of self-preservation. It was this policy that essentially laid the foundation for the involvement of civilians in the war.

The violence (mutual) of 1993, resulted from the civil-war atmosphere created by the invasion of Rwanda, in 1990, by rebels belonging to the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Accounts by journalists and other contemporary chroniclers say atrocities were perpetrated by both sides in the conflict. In fact, between the invasion of a peaceful Rwanda in 1990 and before the genocide against Tutsis in 1994, more than 50,000 Hutus (according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and The Vatican) were killed in the country as a result of the war.

We must also acknowledge that Tutsi Rwandan security forces have also committed mass murders of Hutus. A UN commission comprising of Atsu Koffi Amega of Togo, Haby Dieng of Guinea, and Salifou Fomba of Mali, presented a report of the genocide against Tutsis to the world body in December 1994; in which it said that there were "serious reasons to conclude that Tutsis also carried out massacres, summary executions, violations of international humanitarian law and crimes against humanity with regard to Hutus."

And, since the genocide in 1994, more than 2 million Hutus have died as a result of this conflict; from outright violence, disease and starvation. To illustrate this point, I will briefly mention some well-documented cases of Tutsi atrocities since 1994;

- Tens of thousands of Hutu civilian refugees were killed by RPF soldiers in Kibeho and Kanama between April-May 1995. The RPF apologised to the European Union and humanitarian organisations for these massacres.

- Hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilians (mostly children, women and elderly men, too weak to flee) were killed by Tutsi soldiers of the Kabila-led rebel alliance, during their murderous crusade through eastern Congo between 1997 – 1998. In fact, it is estimated that more than 500,000 Hutus died during this period alone. The invasion of eastern Congo was meticulously planned even before Tutsis took power in Rwanda. The pretext of going into the Congo to stop the massacre of Tutsis was a ruse which has now been thoroughly exposed.

- Tens of thousands of Hutu civilians were murdered by Tutsi troops in Nyakinama, Bugoyi in 1998.

The situation in neighbouring Burundi also played an important part in the crisis in Rwanda and contributed to the disaster of 1994. Since the senseless murder of Melchior Ndandaye, a Hutu and the first democratically elected president of Burundi in October 1993, by Tutsi soldiers, an act which provoked widespread protests by Hutus, more than 250,000 Hutus have been killed, according to the international humanitarian community.

If one delves a little deeper into the past, more than 500,000 Hutus were murdered in the same country between 1972 – 1973.

The appalling accounts of the killings will show the terrifying similarity in the ways violence is mutually perpetrated between the two peoples. The following excerpts are quoted from an article entitled "Rwanda and Burundi" by Stanley Meisler as originally published in "The Atlantic Monthly", September 1973:

"The enormity and horror of it all are exposed by what a visitor does not see in Bujumbura. Bujumbura, a languid, colorless, nondescript town on Lake Tanganyika, is the capital of Burundi, a central African nub of a country in which 85 percent of the population is Hutu. Yet a visitor can find few Hutus in Bujumbura. It is a little like entering Warsaw after World War II and looking for Jews. A visitor would not need a tour of Treblinka to know that something terrible had happened."

"A year ago, the government, run by the minority Tutsi tribe, tried to eliminate, in a chilling and systematic way, the entire elite class of the Hutu people -- all those with some education, government jobs, or money. The death toll was perhaps one hundred thousand, perhaps as great as two hundred thousand. Since then there has been even more killing, the latest in May and June of this year."

"The killings began in late April, 1972, reached their height in May, and ended, more or less, by August. Many Tutsis killed because they had been frightened by the Hutu uprising, in which a few thousand Tutsis died. But it would be misleading to blame the massacre of Hutus on a savage frenzy of Tutsi fear. There was some wild, indiscriminate killing – the devastation in the south is proof of that. But most Hutus were wiped out in a cold and calculated way by a Tutsi government that seemed to feel that it could guarantee itself power for at least another decade by eliminating all potential leaders of the majority tribe. The repression was far out of proportion to the provocation."

" First, the government tried to kill almost every Hutu who had a government job, including Hutu soldiers. Many of the death lists were simply lifted from civil service rolls. Second, the government tried to kill all Hutus who had enough wealth for potential leadership. Wealth is a very relative term in Africa."

"Although many Hutus were taken from their homes, there are stories of others simply accepting summonses and reporting to the police at the scheduled time even though they knew that death awaited them. There are other stories of officials loading Hutus on trucks and, when the trucks were full, ordering the remaining Hutus to come back the next day. The Hutus obeyed."

Many sources say that the so-called wealthy Hutus were any who owned a shop, had a bank account, or lived in a house with a corrugated iron roof instead of a thatched one. Finally, the government tried to kill all educated Hutus. Almost all Hutu university students, many Hutu secondary school students, and perhaps half the country's Hutu teachers were killed. In one incident, six women teachers were killed in front of their students. The categories of victims explain why a visitor sees hardly any Hutus inside Bujumbura but will see many trudging along the road, with hoes on their shoulders, in the countryside."

"It would be foolish now to be optimistic about the future of Rwanda and Burundi. Systematic murder of the ethnic enemy has become a legitimate political weapon in both countries. Since neither has solved its ethnic problems, it is a safe guess that slaughter will be used again. The ease with which it was renewed in Burundi this year is proof enough of that."

The heightened violence between the two peoples in the last decade can be traced to the assumption of power of Yoweri Museveni, a Tutsi, in Uganda 15 years ago, after his then rebel National Resistance Army (NRA) drove out a democratically elected government. During his inaugural speech on January 26, 1986, Museveni said that he wanted to spend only 4 years trying to bring order to Uganda because he had, what he described as, "other continental commitments".

It should be recalled that Museveni has many times questioned the sanctity of colonial borders in Africa, in speeches and press interviews since 1986. His "continental commitments" have now been revealed as a desire to create a Greater Tutsi Reich in East Africa, encompassing Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Congo, countries in which Tutsis live.

As soon as Museveni assumed power, he placed Tutsis in every strategic positions in the army, government and economy with the intention of enabling them to consolidate themselves in power first in Uganda, before taking power in the other countries. It, therefore, did not come as a surprise when, in 1990, the Tutsi members of Museveni's NRA in Uganda attacked Rwanda under the command of the then Uganda's Minister of Defence, Major General Fred Rwegima. Upon his death, Major General Paul Kagame (now president of Rwanda), who was at the time Uganda's Chief of Military Intelligence, took over.

In 1993, Tutsi soldiers, with Museveni's support, planned and assassinated Burundi's democratically elected Hutu President Ndandaye with the intention of installing a Tutsi in power. In 1997, having taken power in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, the Tutsis finalised a plan they had initiated ten years earlier to control the mineral-rich Congo.

A recently published study conducted by the US-based International Rescue Committee ‘cautiously’ estimated that nearly 3 million people have died as a result of the Rwandan and Ugandan invasion of Congo in 1998. "Between August 1998 and April 2001, approximately 2.5 million deaths have occurred because of this conflict," the non-governmental organisation said in a report released in May. One need not add that the victims are almost all non-Tutsis.

Since the occupation of eastern Congo by troops from Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda, the three countries have become exporters of gold, diamond, coltan and other minerals which they do not produce. A report, released in April, by the "UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of Congo" indicted the three countries for "illegal exploitation" of Congo’s mineral resources, which it added is "taking place at an alarming rate". The main beneficiaries of this bare-faced robbery of the Congolese people are Tutsi government officials, army officers and business people in Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, including relatives of Museveni.

From the tragic invasion of Rwanda in 1990 by Tutsi rebels, trained and armed by Museveni’s government in Uganda, to the assassination of Burundi's Hutu President Ndandaye in 1993, to the double murder of Juvenal Habyarimana, President of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, President of Burundi, both Hutus, when the plane in which they were both travelling was shot down by Tutsi soldiers near Kigali in 1994, to the mass murder of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, to the genocidal impasse in the eastern Congo today, the result is that more than 5 million people are estimated to have been killed in this region in 10 years.

This devastating tragedy is the product of a mad Napoleonic crusade driven by ethno-hegemonical ambitions of Tutsi leaders.

Leaving all these facts out, as Dr. Mohammed has done, is deliberate and amounts to manipulating the evidence to obtain a conviction of Bola Ige.

Moreover, if the CEDDERT chief wants to prevent genocide from happening in Nigeria AGAIN, we must ensure that justice is done to tens of thousands of Igbos who were "beheaded", "slaughtered like rams", "burnt to death" and murdered in other various bestial ways during the pogroms which took place in many cities in northern Nigeria between May and October 1966. After all, charity begins at home. Nobody, not one person, has been brought to justice since that catastrophe occurred.

How about Siddique Mohammed and Bala Usman finding out what could possibly have been said or done to have unleashed such a ferocious passion of eliminatory hatred against Igbos?

That the violence was instigated and partly organised is not in serious dispute. One prominent Fulani politician recently boasted of the North’s record of inflicting "organised violence".

That Dr. Mohammed did not refer to the 1966 pogrom amounts to a tacit denial that there was genocide in Nigerian history, reflecting the dominant opinion in the North.

When will the Fulani power establishment apologise for the murder of defenceless children, women and men, whose only crimes was sharing the same ethno-national identity with General Ironsi and Major Izeogwu? These were defenceless victims who could not have had any influence on the actions of the army officers, or who could not have been responsible for the alleged antics of Nelson Ottah’s Drum magazine, which are said to have provoked northerners into carrying out the genocide against them. Even now, leading Fulani politicians have refused to show remorse, claiming the mass murders were just reprisals for a provocation.

In conclusion, I suspect that the articles "The Role of Chief Bola Ige in the Destabilisation of Nigeria" and "Chief Bola Ige and Genocide in Rwanda and Nigeria" are meant to blackmail all of us from critically examining the role of Fulanis in Nigerian history and politics, and the crucial part that role plays in our contemporary woes.

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