The double genocide thesis functions as a form of interpretative and implicatory genocide denial. It claims that the 1994 atrocities against the Tutsi in Rwanda were matched by a reciprocal, planned counter-genocide committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) against Hutu. This creates a false moral equivalence to shift blame and distort established historical and legal facts. This refusal to correctly name the ongoing crime was also notably observed within the international community. All these statements show that the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi was presented as a normal self-defence reaction. This normalisation strategy appeared very early on and largely contributed to obscuring the causes of the genocide. It thus hindered reflection on the premeditation and organisation of the crime, as well as on the responsibility of both the State and the Church in the ideological process that led to the genocide. Rejecting any notion of genocide preparation and blaming the RPF, the Democratic Rally for the Return of Refugees (RDR), in its communiqué of October 22, 1996, presents the genocide committed against the Tutsi in 1994 as a violent reaction of the angry Rwandan people to the political ambitions of the RPF. It asserts that it was the discovery of RPF’s brigades and arms caches that partly explains the violence and the intensity of the reaction of the populace and not the premeditation of genocide claiming such reaction is rather of self-defense. The form of denialism expressed through the double genocide thesis, or the balancing of horror in Rwanda, can be summarised as follows: in Rwanda, there were two genocides; first, in 1994, the genocide against the Tutsi committed by the Hutu, and, during the years that followed, the genocide against the Hutu committed by the Tutsi. On one hand, the theme centres on crimes allegedly committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) between 1990 and 1994 against Hutu populations in the territory under its control. On the other hand, the arguments revolve around the theme of massacres and other crimes allegedly perpetrated by RPF armed forces since 1994 against the Hutu, both inside and outside Rwanda, notably in Zaire (the current Democratic Republic of the Congo. During the Franco-African summit in Biarritz on November 8, 1994, French President François Mitterrand used the plural term genocides in the written version of his speech. Over the years, various press releases have sought to reclassify the regional violence. However, international justice and historical consensus clearly establish that the 1994 genocide was systematically targeted against the Tutsi. The comparison of war crimes or massacres to a double genocide in Rwanda is a revisionist narrative. It is rejected by international institutions and historians. The UN and international courts recognise only one genocide in Rwanda: the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) confirmed and established the existence of the Genocide against the Tutsi right from its first judgment rendered on September 2, 1998, against Jean-Paul Akayesu. Paragraph 18 of this judgment asserts firmly: “It then appears clearly that the massacres committed in Rwanda in 1994 had a specific target: to exterminate Tutsi, selected specifically because they belonged to the Tutsi ethnic group and not because they were RPF fighters. What transpired in Rwanda in 1994 was genocide against the Tutsi as a group.”
