There are crimes so grotesque that they appear to defy falsification. Genocide should be one of them. And yet, Rwanda’s calamity—one of the clearest cases of planned extermination in the late twentieth century—has been subjected to a relentless campaign of historical sabotage. This is not absent-mindedness or misperception. It is doubt elevated to doctrine: the calculated determination to overturn truth, criminalize those who stopped the crime of all crimes, and launder the reputations of those who enabled it. This op-ed is a demand for intellectual honesty. It is written against the rising boldness of those who rewrite history with the coolness that distance and denial with Western indifference will protect them. Rwanda deserves better. The victims deserve better than disappearing in meaningless narratives. Equally, we should accept—the living owes the dead the truth and not anything less. A dictionary as weapon The disparagement of altering Rwanda’s history reached an almost dreamlike level in September 1994, when Le Petit Robert Dictionary published a summary of Rwanda’s history that read like a guidebook of transposition. According to this text, in a respected dictionary in the Francophone world, in 1973 when President Juvénal Habyarimana ousted president Gregory Kayibanda, had pursued reconciliation with Tutsi, only to be opposed by elements within his own army. In 1990, the dictionary claimed—Tutsi refugees “invaded” Rwanda as the RPF, forcing negotiations. Then came the most obscene distortion of all: the assertion that in April 1994, the RPF assassinated Habyarimana and launched an offensive “marked by massacres,” provoking the flight of millions into a “security zone” established by France through Operation Turquoise. What a historical fraud rather than an error. In this account of events, those who planned and implemented the genocide in Rwanda against the Tutsi disappeared into abstraction. The victims melted into an unspecified mass of refugees. The culprits were rebranded as a government seeking reconciliation. And France—long associated with supporting the genocidal system—was cast as the savior. The newly-installed RPF Government of Rwanda sued Le Petit Robert Dictionary and won. The word and phrasebook was forced to rewrite its entry. That legal victory counted, but it also exposed to some degree—something far more disturbing: the ease with which authoritative Western institutions could put on a normal footing denial when African lives were at stake. The level of such cynicism here is not easily measurable. When those who stopped genocide are accused of committing it, truth itself turn out to be the first casualty. Operation Turquoise as a mission Few episodes illustrate the moral contortions of genocide denial better than the praise lavished on Operation Turquoise. Imagine Operation Turquoise branded as a salvation. Salvation? Come on! Salvation for Whom? Presented as a humanitarian intervention, it has often been credited with saving Rwanda. The reality is not merely less comforting; it is profoundly absurd. Operation Turquoise was launched late in June 1994, when the extermination of Tutsi was already well in total reality, and its geographical design was not close to being neutral. By carving out a so‑called “safe humanitarian zone”. Clarity is paramount. In the southwest of Rwanda, the operation effectively created an escape corridor for the very forces that had planned, organized, and executed the genocide. Political leaders, military officers, Interahamwe commanders, and propagandists crossed into Zaire under the eyes of an international force that neither disarmed them nor arrested them. They were not confused refugees. They were perpetrators retreating intact. To describe this as salvation is to ask: salvation for whom? For the hunted, or for the hunters? From its inception, Operation Turquoise did not mean to dismantle roadblocks where people were slaughtered. It was not meant to neutralize Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, which continued to incite murder. The operation, certainly, did not arrest any member of the interim government directing the genocide. What it did accomplish—objectively and verifiably—was the preservation of the génocidaire command structure, allowing it to regroup in exile, destabilize the region for decades, and prolong the suffering of millions in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. This was predictable and not a sheer reflection. French authorities came to Rwanda in1994 knowing whom they were dealing with. France had trained the army and Interahamwe militia, armed—and politically reinforced the same regime whose militias were now carrying out Tutsi extermination. To later present a military deployment as only humanitarian, while disregarding its strategic consequences, is not kindheartedness but narrative laundering. The eventual indecency is not just that Operation Turquoise failed to stop the genocide. It is that, in the dominant Western narrative, it is every so often credited with doing so—while the RPF, which actually defeated the genocidal army, is defamed. In this upside‑down moral universe, those who shielded perpetrators are praised, and those who stopped the genocide are placed in the dock. Petit Robert Dictionary was performing a cover-up. The failure of the international community and French complicity. Dallaire’s charge and implications No serious discussion of Rwanda can avoid the words of Roméo Dallaire, the UN force commander who witnessed abandonment firsthand. In his Shake Hands with the Devil, the Canadian General wrote: “Still, at its heart the Rwandan story is the story of the failure of humanity to heed a call for help from an endangered people. The international community, of which the UN is only a symbol, failed to move beyond self-interest for the sake of Rwanda. While most nations agreed that something should be done they all had excuses why they should not be the ones to do it. As a result, the UN was denied the political will and material means to prevent the tragedy.” This is an indictment not just of institutions, but of moral imagination. Rwanda did not lack warnings. It lacked courage from those with power. Yet even Dallaire’s account, as powerful as it is, omits a crucial chapter: the RPA’s rescue operations in Kigali. While the United Nations Security Council was endlessly busy debating mandates and force levels, RPA units secured locations where thousands of rescued civilians were sheltered. They organized safe routes under fire. They transported survivors to safety in Byumba. These were not emblematic gestures. They were life-saving operations. In doing so, the RPF liberators demonstrated what the United Nations could have done—had political will been matched with logistical capacity. The difference was not resources. It was determination. A day the world shouldn’t forget On December 28, 1993, Kigali witnessed a moment pregnant with promise—and heavy with foreboding. The guests who entered the city that day did not arrive from Nairobi, London, Paris, Madrid, Washington, or Brussels. They came from Mulindi, in Byumba Prefecture, in the north of Rwanda. They were not tourists but politicians and cadres of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), escorted by 600 soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), exactly as stipulated by the Arusha Peace Agreement of August 4, 1993. The journey took almost eight hours, with these guests escorted by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) forces. From Nyacyonga through Gatsata and Kinamba, all the way to the Parliament building in Kimihurura, thousands of Rwandans lined the road. They cheered, not because they were naïve, but because they were desperate for an end to a politics of exclusion that had already destroyed generations. This was the human layout of hope. The Arusha Accords promised a Broad-Based Transitional Government (BBTG) and a Transitional Parliament. It was an arrangement designed to end monopoly rule, neutralize extremist factions, and reintegrate refugees who had been exiled for decades. But this government never saw the light of day. Not because the RPF refused it. Not because power-sharing was impossible. It failed because Hutu Power ideologues never intended to share power with anyone—least of all Tutsi refugees they had spent years portraying as existential enemies. Arusha was not just a compromise to them; it was a threat. The RPA soldiers’ battalion stationed in Kigali were not a force on a study tour. They were a liberation and a peacekeeping contingent agreed upon by both parties, lodged at the Conseil National de Développement (CND) building. Their presence was meant to stabilize the transition. Instead, they would become the thin line between life and death for thousands when the state itself turned genocidal. When the genocide was unleashed in April 1994, Kigali became a killing field. The Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), the Presidential Guard, and the Interahamwe militia were not acting impulsively. They were executing a plan refined over years—one lubricated by hate propaganda and administrative efficiency. In that inferno, the RPA battalion in Kigali did what the world’s most powerful institutions like the UN refused to do: it acted. Against overwhelming odds, surrounded by thousands of hostile forces, and cut off from reinforcement, those soldiers contained the genocidal army in the capital. From April 7 until at least April 11, 1994, they held positions, secured corridors, and mounted rescue operations that saved thousands of lives. This fact alone defeats the lie—repeated unceasingly in deniers’ circles—that the RPF’s primary objective was conquest rather than rescue. Had conquest been the goal, the RPA battalion would have attempted an immediate breakout. Instead, it prioritized civilians. It protected those who had been hunted—whether Tutsi or politicians and other individuals who were against the genocidal killings. It created islands of safety in a city sinking in abandonment. What these soldiers did was not theoretical humanitarianism. It was applied, hands-on, disciplined, and costly action. That truth will outlive denial. *These are Rwandans who Saved Rwanda* The fact remains, stubborn and unyielding: Rwandans saved Rwanda. Not the United Nations. Not Western powers. Not last-minute gestures wrapped in humanitarian language. Under the leadership of the RPF, Rwandans stopped a genocide that the world looked at with folded arms. What followed, after defeating the genocidal forces, was equally unparalleled. The movement that ended the genocide formed a Government of National Unity. It fought the intoxicating pull of collective vengeance. It rebuilt national institutions in a country where the same institutions had been weaponized against citizens. It was a deliberate choice. Consider the historical analogy that best captures the magnitude of this restraint: imagine a Jewish-dominated army defeating Nazi Germany, liberating the death camps, and then being accused—by international commentators—of having orchestrated the Holocaust. The irrationality of the comparison reveals the moral bankruptcy of Rwanda’s detractors. Most RPA commanders in 1994 were amazingly young. Many were in their early or mid-twenties; few were beyond their mid-thirties. These were not hardened old-timers of never-ending wars. They were young men and women advancing through towns and hills where they inevitably encountered the bodies of their families and friends—killed for the crime of being Tutsi. The sadness or sorrow they carried is impossible to measure. Yet discipline held. Orders were obeyed. Civilians were protected. The restraint shown by these soldiers remains one of the least acknowledged moral achievements of the post–Cold War world. It is easier, perhaps, to invent myths of equal culpability than to confront the reality that victims can act with dignity—and that perpetrators often hide behind narratives of complexity to escape judgment. Refusal: against forgetfulness This article ends where comfort ends. It ends in refusal—refusal to allow the Genocide Against the Tutsi to be dissolved into vagueness, moral equivalence, or diplomatic euphemism. It refuses the lazy language of “complexity” when what occurred was a clear, state‑organized project of extermination, resisted and defeated by Rwandans whom the world had already written off. There is something especially outrageous about watching institutions that failed Rwanda later claim authority over its memory. The same international community that withdrew peacekeepers, discussed semantics while bodies filled churches, rivers and roadsides—and hid behind procedural excuses now feels entitled to arbitrate truth. We often hear lectures to survivors about restraint—and those who question the motives of those who saved lives. We also witness efforts to rehabilitate the reputations of governments that stood on the wrong side of history. This is not neutrality but continuity of indifference, dressed up as balance. The rewriting of Rwanda’s history is not an academic exercise. It has consequences. It emboldens denialists. It legitimizes genocidal ideologies under the guise of dissent. It teaches future perpetrators that if they lose militarily but win the narrative war, time will soften their crimes and confuse their victims. Against this, the facts remain immovable. The genocide was planned and executed by a Hutu Power state and its militias. The United Nations knew, was warned, and chose inaction. France supported the regime that prepared the killings and later enabled its retreat. And the RPF—demonized precisely because it shattered this chain of impunity—stopped the genocide and then did something history rarely records: it refused to govern through revenge. That refusal is crucial. It is because the army that ended the genocide belonged to the same political movement whose people had been marked for annihilation. It matters because restraint was not the absence of pain, but mastery over it. Young commanders, advancing through landscapes littered with the remains of their own families, chose discipline over reprisal. They chose to rebuild a state rather than avenge its destruction. Those who minimize this achievement reveal more about themselves than about Rwanda. They cannot imagine victims acting with moral clarity, because doing so would expose the bankruptcy of those who watched from a distance. It would force an uncomfortable reckoning: that courage was available in 1994, and it was not found in the chambers of powerful countries. History will not be kind to cynicism. Dictionaries and other books can be rewritten, editorials can beat around the bush, and fabricated symmetries can be taught for a time. But the record endures. The mass graves endure. The survivors stand firm. And so does the truth that Rwanda was abandoned—and then saved—by its own. History is not merely a record of events. It is a moral ledger. When it is fabricated, the consequences ripple outward—into policy, memory and future violence. To rewrite Rwanda’s history is to teach the world the wrong lessons. The memory of the victims, the profound suffering of survivors, and the restraint of those who ended the slaughter deserve a central place in how Rwanda is remembered. Not as footnotes. Not as contested claims. But as settled truth. We should honor those—Rwandans and non-Rwandans alike—who sincerely helped the post-genocide government heal, rebuild, and rise from the ashes. But gratitude must never become amnesia. Assistance does not erase prior complicity, nor does it entitle anyone to rewrite the past. This is why memory must be defended without apology— as an obligation. Because when genocide is deliberately distorted, the dead are killed again, and the living are warned that their suffering is negotiable. Rwandans are not asking the world for absolution. They are demanding honesty. And honesty requires saying, clearly and without fear, that when humanity failed, Rwandans acted. When excuses multiplied, the RPF chose responsibility—and when history was later held hostage by cynicism, truth remained the last form of justice. The international community did not save Rwanda. It failed Rwanda. And history, however cynically manipulated, will remember that when the world chose pretexts, some determined Rwandans chose obligation to save their country’s future. That choice—and its consequences—must remain beyond distortion.
