Some may have been surprised when, in 2018, the Rwandan government chose not to renew its cooperation agreement with Human Rights Watch (HRW), but the recent publication titled "Justice is Unfinished Business in Rwanda” by Lewis Mudge, the Central Africa Director at HRW, offers valuable insights into the reasons why the agreement was doomed to fail, anyway. Mudge’s article has provided additional evidence to the government’s charge that HRW’s agenda in Rwanda is not about defending human rights; instead, the article proves how clear-sighted Richard Johnson, who served as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State was when, in 2013, he referred to HRW’s work in and about Rwanda as "profoundly unscrupulous in both its means and its ends.” His eloquent plea to denounce the travesty of HRW on Rwanda is still relevant today.
Mudge couldn’t miss the opportunity to add his contribution to HRW’s outrageous assaults on the memory of our loved ones. "The root of these tensions [between Rwanda and France] goes back to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Orchestrated by ethnic Hutu political and military extremists primarily (sic) against ethnic Tutsi, it claimed at least half a million (sic) lives,” Mudge writes, setting the revisionist ground for his dubious advocacy for justice.
As noted by Johnson, the "half a million” victims figure is "based on HRW’s estimate that there were some 150,000 Tutsi survivors, out of a pre-genocide estimated total of some 657,000 Tutsi inhabitants. The latter figure, which constitutes a supposed ceiling for the number of potential Tutsi victims, is an extrapolation from a 1991 Habyarimana regime census,” Johnson writes, adding, "few outside the Habyarimana regime have ever given credence to this census” and for obvious reasons.
For one thing, the census was conducted in the midst of sporadic massacres targeting Tutsis, and logically "persecuted Tutsi had incentives to pass as Hutu,” Johnson explains. For another, Johnson elaborates that the extremist Hutu regime "had a strong incentive to set the Tutsi share of the population as low as possible, since this was the benchmark for its quota system restricting Tutsi access to secondary and higher education and government jobs.”
Johnson further notes that despite subsequent scholarly research discrediting the census, HRW – which continues to use the propaganda of a racist regime to support its revisionist stance - has refused to acknowledge the figures put forward by Rwandan authorities since 2002. In Mugde’s and HRW’s world, genocidaires are more worthy of trust than those who defeated them.
HRW’s decades-old hostility – which is echoed by Mudge’s article – towards Rwanda’s criminalization of genocide denial, minimization and justification, as well as the banning of divisionism is another reason why no sustainable cooperation can be envisioned between this organization and the government of Rwanda. Clearly, their respective visions for Rwanda’s society are diametrically opposed.
Johnson also observed the contrast between HRW’s courteous attitude towards German laws – banning hate speech, Holocaust denial, and extremist right-wing groups – and its derisive attitude towards Rwanda’s laws on the same. For Germany, HRW acknowledges the tragic "historical context in which such laws were adopted” while no such context and legitimacy, let alone courteousness, are recognized for Rwanda.
Accordingly, and in attempts to camouflage these double standards, HRW has repeatedly misrepresented the facts around cases that were brought before Rwandan courts. In fact, HRW’s reports systematically present cases of genocide denial, justification and minimization as politically motivated, thereby suggesting that they are valid expressions of criticism in post-genocide Rwanda.
For instance, rather than dispute the merits of the charge of justification of genocide raised against one Aimable Karasira, Mudge prefers to dwell on Karasira’s allegations that "soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) killed several of his family members in the aftermath of the genocide.” Yet, these allegations, which Mudge takes at face value and amplifies whenever they fit HRW’s agenda to demonize the RPF, are irrelevant to the charge. This misrepresentation allows Mudge to jump on the next HRW’s obsession; that is, the "mapping report.”
They tout the report as a comprehensive and credible investigation into "the role of all the main Congolese and foreign parties” in Congo wars and use it to vilify a single party to the conflict: The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPA). As noted by the Rwandan government, this report "relies on the use of anonymous sources, hearsay assertion, unnamed, un-vetted and unidentified investigators and witnesses who lack any indicia of credibility, and alleges the existence of victims with no certainty as to their identity.”
However, HRW brushes aside serious concerns about the credibility of a report that the UN Security Council has never adopted. Rather than acknowledging the Rwandan government calls for the creation of credible mechanisms to establish the responsibilities of all parties, Lewis Mugde prefers to portray Rwanda’s position as a refusal to cooperate towards the quest for truth and justice.
"HRW called for the creation of a ‘hybrid’ DRC-international court in the DRC to conduct trials of unspecified suspects,” Johnson writes regarding that organization’s heavy investment in pursuing "justice” in an imaginary genocide against the Hutu while at the same time being either indifferent to or undermining the quest for justice in a proven genocide against the Tutsi.
As a matter of fact, over the last two decades HRW has never supported French civil society and genocide survivors’ associations in their commendable efforts to expose the complicity of French officials in the genocide against the Tutsi. It is quite remarkable that even as it implicitly calls for the indictment of unspecified Rwandan officials, HRW doesn’t call for the indictment of known French officials who provided support to the genocidal government. It is also remarkable that HRW has instead decided to lend a hand to actors in the region and elsewhere who seem hell bent on sabotaging peaceful, amicable relations between the DRC and Rwanda by exploiting the "mapping report”.
Further, HRW has never exerted any pressure on the Vatican or any part of the catholic church to address issues of accountability regarding the genocide when it has been established that a significant part of this institution provided escape routes and continues to provide safe havens to genocide fugitives.
Worst still, as amicus curiae, HRW, has lobbied international and foreign courts to deny extraditions of genocide suspects to Rwanda even when these could not be tried in their country of residence. Today, five genocide fugitives living in the UK remain free as a result of HRW’s advocacy. Yes, justice in Rwanda remains an unfinished business, and HRW has worked hard to ensure that it remains so.
Any decent person, certainly not at HRW, would agree with Richard Johnson’s view that "HRW’s discourse on Rwanda is a threat to that country and to peace and stability in Central Africa… the aura of sanctity around its professed mission deters public scrutiny of its policies and practices, and the degree of accountability of HRW to anyone is quite unclear. This situation of unchecked power is one where things can go seriously wrong. With regard to Rwanda, they have.”
Richard Johnson warned the world about HRW’s corruption long before HRW’s life President, Kenneth Roth, got caught receiving bribes from a Saudi businessman to conceal his human rights abuses. How long will this travesty continue?