Customer Reviews

Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwanda Genocide and the International Community

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Linda Melvern's book is an exemplary accomplishment. It is the product of much research and investigation.

There are no winners, although certainly heroes and villians. Melvern lays a political (geographical) and cultural background from which genocide emerges...all the signs and symptoms.

She exposes the United Nations headquarters, the United States and other powerful nations as consummate and self-interested cowards. And France fares far worse...actively supporting Interahamwe militias. UNAMIR under the leadership of L General Romeo Dallaire tried in vein to get a couple of hundred additional soldiers who may well have averted the genocide. He was ignored. Dallaire also reported in detail plans being made in preparation of a genocide to the UN. He, again, was ignored and had to watch the genocide happen, hands tied.

Melvern presents her material methodically. This book will enrage and infuriate you. I think that is the best compliment that can be given to her and her impressive book. I'm confident you will want to know more about the subject after reading this.

If you type "ICTR" in Google's search box you can follow the trials of the Genocidaires.

Melvern's book is a deeply researched work that provides a detailed account of the events leading up to and throughout the Rwandan genocide. Her work with the International Criminal Tribunal clearly comes through in the book. This is both good and bad.

It's good because of the level of detail she provides and her strong ability to reconstruct events using an extensive collection of sources. Unfortunately the book sometimes reads like a report for the tribunal; it documents the people involved in orchestrating a particular crime and its details, but in a sterile way that doesn't seem to tap into the human emotions that the murders should evoke. Also, her familiarity with the people she documents caused the easy usage of a multitude of names in the book that were difficult for this reader to separate without a lot of page-flipping to recall their place within the story.

That said, this book won't disappoint anyone looking to understand the origins and events of the Rwandan genocide. The author does an excellent job of showing the failures of the Western response to the crisis without deflecting blame from the central characters within Rwanda who spent years planning and executing the genocide.

This book is probably the perfect compliment to `We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.' This book is less detailed than Melvern's work, but focuses on documenting the genocide through the stories of survivors and thus provides more of a human element.

spawned a rich and growing literature. This account, focused mostly on events on the ground, offers little new information about the international context and, unfortunately, covers only the first chapter of these grim events, ending with the July 1994 military victory of Paul Kagame and his Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front and the start of a chaotic exodus of hundreds of thousands of Hutus to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Despite these shortcomings, Melvern, a journalist who has written before about Rwanda and the UN, provides an authoritative account. Breaking new ground, she documents the extensive preparation for the genocide by extremists within the government of President Juvénal Habyarimana going back at least to 1991. When the genocide began, they had bought and distributed the equivalent of one machete for every three Hutu males and, with breathtaking cynicism, manipulated the media and state institutions to stoke anti-Tutsi passions to a fever pitch.

I agree 100% with the review by Mike Kerrigan, but I am a little more severe than him in my rating of the book. The book truly reads more like a factual report of who said what to whom in what location and at what time of the day than like a telling of one of the most important historical events of the last few decades.

I definitely liked the fact that the book was loaded with information, but I would have liked it to be presented differently for an easier reading. For instance, the emphasis seems to be more on who said what than on what actually happened, which makes it difficult to understand the sequence of events; too many names are constantly mentioned and one gets lost and has to flip back frequently. Another thing that forces you to flip back often is the fact that the author often skips back and forth in time and place.

All in all, if you are familiar with the whole episode, you will most likely enjoy the level of detail of this book and appreciate learning who made which decisions. However, if what you want is a good and thorough introduction into the Rwandan genocide, this book is probably not the best as it might cause too much confusion, I would recommend Dallaire's book instead.

Indeed the world did fail Rwanda as the author points out in the book about the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. First off, Egypt and France sell huge quantities of arms to a government in a civil war. The French even send military advisers to train the Hutu Power militias. This advisory team has the intials C.R.A.P., something easily indentifiable with the French. The British and Americans downplay the fact that a genocide is about to occur and even urge no U.N. peacemakers be sent to the country. Boutros Ghali-U.N. Secretary General and one of those who earlier sold weapons to the Rwandan Hutus downplays the possibility of large scale killings and genocide. When the genocide does occur, they are in disbelief and don't react for two months while 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus are killed. Finally when the bankrupt Hutu Power regime is in its last gasp, the French send humanitarian assistance to the Hutus.
As the author shows, there is plenty of blame to go around. The Americans and British prevented help from being sent to prevent a genocide. The French supported a genocidal regime, and in my opinion don't even deserve to be on the Security Council. Hutu Power hopefully has been consigned to the dustbin of history. The U.N. is a paper tiger with feckless authority. The world did indeed turn its back on 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. A good read about a tragic event.

This book is a difficult read with all the acronyms for various parties that were involved in the on-the-ground genocide. But while Melvern's account is quite clinical and damning (particularly to the UN, Belgium and France) in her report, she also offers a great reference for anyone who is wanting to study up on the failures of the United Nations in its alleged efforts to push humanity forward in civilisation and not backwards.

This is not your casual read, but persisting the read will offer one view (more on a political spectrum) of what happened in Rwanda and why it seemed no one in the outside world was willing to step in. It reinforced my knowledge that the UN was little more than another League of Nations.

Melvern offers reasons leading up to the Genocide of 1994, from Belgium initiatd ID cards with tribal ethnicity, to racial propaganda and arms supplies to fuel the flames kept burning by the local radio station spewing out hate over the airwaves.

Rwanda has been overlooked by many and many, like myself, would never have heard of the country until the genocide. Reading this book will show you that in 3 months, nearly 1 million lives were lost - not to gassing, nuclear weapons etc - but often in hand-to-hand combat (machetes and guns). If the people had been white westerners, there probably would have been a different reaction from the UN and other groups around the world.

Original interview on Small Wars Journal.com
"It is called The General's Book on Rwanda, and, right, the General is Rwandan Major General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, who was the head of the Nationale Gendarmerie during the period of time in which what has come to be referred to as the "Rwandan Genocide" of 100 days (7 April to 4 July 1994) took place. And everybody knows the boilerplate of "800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus slaughtered by extremist Hutus." But, so far at least, my writing hasn't really been about any kind of personal story of the General's life. It's about what really happened in Rwanda between 1 October 1990 and sometime after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took over (or "liberated," as they would have it) the country on 4 July 1994 -- because the mainstream version couldn't be further from the truth. [1]"

Pick a tragedy and you will almost always find an alternate conspiracy theory to go with the accurate accounts. Rwanda is no different. The above extract comes from an interview with Mick Collins who holds that all that happened in Rwanda was due to US greed. Mr. Collins is not alone in making that assertion. Robin Philpot's book Rwanda 1994: Colonialism dies hard, as listed on the Taylor Report is another. Keith Harmon Snow is another conspiracy theorist who pushes the US conspiracy theory as does Wayne Madsen. The truly sad thing about these alternate theories--aside from their use of fantasy as fact--is they lend weight to the Hutu Power's mantra that they were victims of the second genocide, that the first genocide of 800,000 to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus was an unfortunate result of war between them and a foreign aggressor, namely Tutsi "aliens" bent on Hutu destruction..

Linda Melvern's Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide handily demolishes those myths because she documents the intimate planning and meticulous record keeping that went into execution of the Rwandan genocide. Note that in 1991 Rwandan Major General Augustin Ndindiliyimana originally proposed creating the self-defense militias that became monstrous killing machines over the next three years. That same general as commander of the National Gendarmerie was a member of the "Zero Network" used by the conspirators of the genocide. His case is hardly unusual; there was nothing spontaneous about the Rwandan genocide.

Even as the interim government of Rwanda crossed to safety in Zaire in July 1994, Melvern quotes Prime Minister Kambanda proclaiming, "We have lost the military battle but the war is by no means over because we have the people behind us." [2] That statement and hundreds of pages of government records, testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and countless first person accounts from the genocidal killers document what the genocide was all about: continued Hutu political domination of Rwanda.

Trite commentators then and today refer to the genocide as tribal conflict, as if it is a lesser form of warfare for lesser beings. Such statements minimally miss the point that the Hutus and the Tutsis are not tribes. Maximally they ignore the reality that ethnic struggle--especially ethnic struggle on the scale advocated, planned, and executed by the Hutu Power bloc in Rwanda--is absolutely political and terribly final in deciding who has power and who does not. The loser dies. Kambanda and his cohorts sought to use genocide as a final solution to any challenge to their absolute political power in Rwanda. Just as the Nazis kept the trains running to the extermination camps in the failing moments of the Third Reich, Kambanda's government concentrated on killing Tutsis as they lost their fight with the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Melvern's book documents that fanatical focus on extermination.

Melvern does make a couple of errors that are likely to irritate informed readers. Most blatant is her referral to the US parachute operation in Mogadishu, Somalia in October 1993.[3] Referring to Mogadishu as greatest humiliation to the US military since Vietnam is needless and inaccurate hyperbole. Another is over emphasizing the effect of Paul Kagame's brief and aborted sojourn at the US Army Command and General Staff College. As a former instructor there, I doubt that many even noticed that Kagame was leaving until he was gone. His abilities as a tactician and strategist owe little to his short stay on the banks of the Missouri River.

But those are minor faults, mentioned only in the hopes they might be corrected in a future edition. I recommend Ms. Melvern's book to all. It is a balanced account of a Rwanda unbalanced by war and genocide. Don't waste your time, money, or brain cells on the conspiracy theorists. Read Linda Melvern's work on how the true conspiracy to commit genocide unfolded.
Thomas Odom
Aurthor, Journey Into Darkness: Genocide In Rwanda (Texas a & M University Military History Series)

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[1] Mick Collins, Interviewed by John Steppling, Rwanda: The General's Story A Conversation at the Swans Café..., [...] June 20, 2005. Collins continues his claim with, " First, the short version of how and why the media disinformed and continues to disinform: Unlike what Clinton and Albright pissed and moaned about -- how they were sorry they didn't pay more attention to Central Africa until it was too late -- the U.S. was 100 percent behind the destruction of Rwanda (see Robin Philpot's interview with Boutros Boutros-Ghali). It was part of a larger plan to bring down Mobutu and open the region to total dependence on Western financial, commercial, and military institutions. The bookends to this monstrous nation-o-cide were the invasion of Rwanda from Uganda by forces of the RPF on 1 October 1990, and the shooting down of the Falcon 50 business jet that was carrying the Hutu presidents of Rwanda (Juvenal Habyarimana) and Burundi (Cyprien Ntaryamira) on their way home from peace talks in Dar-es-Salam on the evening of 6 April 1994; again, by the RPF, on the order of their commander and the current president (military dictator's more like it) Paul Kagame."

[2] Linda Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide, New York: Verso, 2006 edition, p. 248.

[3] Melvern, 79.

A couple of years ago, I realized that I had not educated myself on the tragedy of Rwanda, so I picked up this book. It's very helpful, but could be much better if it were better organized chronologically and also if it had a "scorecard", i.e. a basic outline of the major players. To its credit, it has maps, a chronology, and extensive notes, but the names of the major players are really confusing and that makes it hard to follow from time to time.

I would also have liked to see more substantive interpretation. There are repeated suggestions that the French government was supportive of the murderous Hutu regime, but that is never really explained or explored sufficiently. I would also have liked to see more discussion and analysis of the role of Christian churches.

But this, along with the films "Hotel Rwanda" and "Sometimes in April" is probably a pretty good place to start if you want to know what happened in Rwanda and what is happening still in other parts of Africa.

Conspiracy to Murder is a brilliant book.

It is both sad and disgusting that the world has turned its back on Rwanda.

Recent events show how ironic things are. Yassir Arafat kills thousands of innocents and he is branded a hero. Yet hundreds of thousands of innocents die in Rwanda and no one cares.

This book should be read by anyone with a heart.