Lately, reviews of Michela Wrong’s latest book have been flourishing in Western media but none is as insightful as Howard W. French’s "The Dark Underside of Rwanda’s Model Public Image”. To be precise, it is insightful only in as far as it captures well the driving force behind Wrong’s work, which is grief for a man who declared war on his people and suffered a mysterious death in a South African hotel. French’s sympathy for a grieving Wrong prevents him from challenging many of her manipulations.
"There is a taut, cinematic quality to Wrong’s account of Karegeya’s killing, and a mournful, hurt tone as well — mournful because Karegeya, a skilled, seductive handler of Western reporters, had been a key source for Wrong while he was in government,” French writes, without drawing the obvious conclusion. That is, Wrong never freed herself, as she would professionally have been expected to do, from the influence of the "seductive handler” she encountered in Rwanda.
As a result, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she was supportive of the RPF- led government, of which Karegeya was a prominent figure as head of external intelligence, and became hostile after the same Karegeya betrayed his country and declared war on Rwanda. In other words, Wrong never embraced Rwanda, the country. Instead, she embraced the man who, in her captured imagination, represented Rwanda. And her rewriting of history regarding the war in former Zaire, which she blames on Rwanda, attests to this fact. Yet, Howard French, who claims to have been a reporter in Africa at the time the war broke out in 1996, failed to highlight this manipulation.
"I struggled to understand how a rebel group that no one had heard of three months earlier could have morphed into the army that would soon march across the country and drive from power its dictator and longstanding American client, Mobutu SeseSeko” French recalls, as he tries to make sense of Rwanda’s implication in that war.
Yet as a reporter in Africa, French was supposed to be informed on the realities of the region, unless he didn’t read newspapers because as early as August 1994, right after the end of the genocide against the Tutsi, the then Rwanda’s Vice- President, Paul Kagame, warned Zaire against allowing genocidal forces to launch attacks against Rwanda. "Kagame has told the same thing [there would be serious consequences for the Mobutu’s regime] to U.S diplomats,” Steve Vogel of The Washington Post reported on August 17, 1994. Vogel added that there was evidence that these genocidal forces were regrouping and rearming, despite the Zairian government deceitful pledge to disarm them. Kagame - who according to U.S diplomats cited in Vogel’s article had no plan to invade Zaire and only wanted stronger diplomatic action put on the Zairian government - made no secrets of his options if the destabilization of Rwanda persisted.
"Launching punitive raids into Zaire is one possibility, or we can simply train the Zairian opposition to fight, and even arm them” Kagame said. It is surprising that Howard French is suddenly struggling to understand the events that unfolded two years later, in 1996. Otherwise, he wouldn’t allow Wrong’s depiction of Rwanda as "the main destabilizing force in the region for the past decades”to go unchecked.
Fortunately, leaders of DRC have rejected these revisionist manipulations that are peddled by Wrong and genocide deniers. As a testament to this, DRC authorities have announced plans to strengthen military cooperation with Rwanda in a bid to eradicate terror groups causing havoc in eastern DRC and threatening Rwanda’s security; and these include the RNC that Karegeya co-founded as he declared war on Rwanda.
Howard French promotes Wrong’s bitterness as sound analysis because it confirms his biases. Yet, her depiction of Rwanda defies reason. Wrong can’t seem to make up her mind why a country whose economic success is a result of "plundering mineral rich DRC” still remains "aid dependent.” If Rwanda needs aid it is because it doesn’t have any country to plunder as much of the West did to get rich. Moreover, to believe Wrong’s discredited assertions that Rwanda’s "economic success is based on crudely falsified data” is to believe that global economic institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, have been fooled on the one hand, and that Wrong and a bunch of fringe Rwanda bashers, are smarter on the other hand.
If one were to believe Wrong’s manipulations over the views of the world’s top finance institutions, her determination to blame the RPF for the genocide against the Tutsi should cause alarm.
Wrong’s vengeful determination against those she accuses of killing her "seductive handler” is demonstrated by a pathetic quest, throughout her book, to implicate the RPF in the shooting down of the plane that was carrying President Habyarimana, which served as a pretext for Hutu extremists to set in motion their genocidal plan.
Wrong relies mainly on RPF renegades with an axe to grind, as sources. Howard French fails to note that even a vindictive judge from France could not present them as credible witnesses in court as they recanted one after the other. As she does for economic data, Wrong brushes aside the French inquiry of Judges Trevidic and Poux that put to shame these revisionists. The inquiry concluded that the missile that downed the plane was fired from an army base under the control ofHutu extremists. Moreover, the released Duclert report on the role of France in the genocide against the Tutsi, which relied on information provided by French external intelligence following the assassination of President Habyarimana, confirmed that indeed the Hutu extremists killed their president. Facts are damning and quite stubborn.
Evidently, if economic data approved by world finance institutions and scientific inquiries conducted by French judges cannot satisfy Wrong, one cannot expect the decisions of South African courts - to shelve criminal proceedings around Karegeya’s death due to inadequate investigations - to be of any value to her.
Ironically, Howard French came close to exposing Wrong’s intentions when in his review he referred to her book as "Wrong’s highly personal remembrance of the former Rwanda spy chief, Patrick Karegeya”. But he was seduced by his preconceived biases.