Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwanda Genocide and the International Community (Hardcover)

by Linda Melvern (Author) "On 1 May, 1998, an immaculately dressed man in a blue suit, with a neatly trimmed beard and spectacles, stood in a court room to..." (more)
Key Phrases: outgoing code cable, further arms deal, weapons secure area, Presidential Guard, Security Council, President Habyarimana (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
With testimony from witnesses and access to documents previously unseen, she tells an epic and shaming story. -- John Pilger

Product Description
On the tenth anniversary of the horrific genocide in Rwanda, an expert witness tells the first full story of the massacre's planning, with damning details of Western inaction.

April 2004 sees the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, an event generally acknowledged to be one of the most appalling of the twentieth century and potentially avoidable.

Linda Melvern's new book, the result of a decade of investigative work, is a damning indictment of almost all the key figures and the institutions involved. It reveals how the French military trained the killers, how the US is still withholding wiretap and satellite evidence that the genocide was about to begin, how the John Major government ignored vital warnings that the genocide was planned, how much Boutros Boutros-Ghali and the French government knew prior to the genocide and how the Security Council's shameful decision to evacuate the peacekeepers came about. In addition to these official sources, the author draws on dozens of witness statements yet to be heard at the International Criminal Tribunal, at which she will be an expert witness, and a sixty-hour confession from the prime minister in the government that presided over the genocide never before made publicly available and currently locked in the safe of the chief prosecutors at the ICT court.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Verso (April 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859845886
• ISBN-13: 978-1859845882
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #878,906 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Incredible Book, May 28, 2004

By A Customer

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent investigative reporting, August 7, 2005

By	Mike Kerrigan (Ottawa, ON Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Rwandan genocide of the spring and summer of 1994 has, January 9, 2005

By	Kaushik "Dance to the tension of a world on edge" (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews

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.