A great deal of effort has been extended to make sure the focus stays exclusively on the Francophone Tutsi victims and their Hutu executioners. But of the estimated one million people killed, between 300,000 and 500,000 of them were Tutsi, according to best estimates. What about the other 500,000 to 700,000 people? Who is responsible for their deaths? [7] [8]
In 2009, scholars Christian Davenport of the University of Michigan and Allan C. Stam of Dartmouth College argued that the anti-Tutsi genocide constituted only part of the slaughter of spring and summer 1994; that the RPF was "clearly responsible" for another major portion of the killings; that the victims were "fairly evenly distributed between Tutsi and Hutu"; that the majority of the dead were Hutu, rather than Tutsi; and that, "among other things, it appears that there simply weren't enough Tutsi in Rwanda at the time to account for all the reported deaths". [9]
In October 2014, a BBC documentary, Rwanda: The Untold Story , was aired featuring interviews with Davenport and Stam. It suggested that Kagame's RPF was involved in the shooting down of Habyarimana's plane. It aroused considerable controversy. [10] Following this, the Rwandan government banned the BBC's Kinyarwanda-language radio broadcasts from the country [11] before conducting a three-week inquiry into the documentary. [12]
In 2018, the Canadian journalist Judi Rever released a book titled In Praise of Blood . Based on interviews with RPF defectors and top-secret documents that were leaked from the ICTR, Rever argued that ethnically targeted killings of Hutus by the RPF, beginning in 1990 in Rwanda and in 1996 in Zaire, should also be called "genocide." [13] Scholars had mixed reactions to Rever's description of these killings as "genocide." René Lemarchand called the book a "path-breaking inquest", "destined to become required reading for any one claiming competence on the Rwanda genocide". [14] Political scientist Scott Straus was critical, writing that in his opinion the evidence showed that the RPF killings of Hutu civilians constituted crimes against humanity, but not a double genocide. [3] Similarly, Gerald Caplan said that RPF had committed "war crimes" against Hutus but those crimes did not meet the definition of genocide. [2]
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