Don't demonise Rwanda's Hutus. They've often been the victims

Don't demonise Rwanda's Hutus. They've often been the victims
For centuries, Tutsi leaders have oppressed and brutalised the country's majority people

Chris McGreal produced a good-versus-evil caricature of the situation in Rwanda and eastern Congo (We have to kill Tutsis wherever they are, May 16). The reality is that criminal individuals can be found on all sides.
McGreal writes that "nowhere on the continent are [child soldiers] as driven by hate and ideology as among the Rwandan Hutu refugees in eastern Congo. Here ... a second generation of killers is being imbued with the mind-altering ideology of extermination and reared to hate and murder Tutsis."
Is it credible that Hutu children allegedly being fed hate propaganda are the root of the war in Congo? Are African children so mindless as to be so easily incited by such savage hatemongers? This is undoubtedly, for the west, a convenient stereotype. But what if the child soldiers had been "imbued" with the following facts: that after the 1960 accession to majority rule in Rwanda, following centuries of rule by a Tutsi slavocracy, the exiled Tutsi aristocracy formed brutal guerrilla forces; that in 1990 Ugandan armed forces, together with Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF, the heirs of the guerrillas), invaded Rwanda and that this was a war crime which has gone unindicted?
What if they had also been told that by 1993 Kagame's invasion had led one million Rwandan citizens to flee their homes; that the event which precipitated the mass killings of April to June 1994, namely the assassination of Rwanda's president, was - according to an investigation team for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) prosecution - carried out by the RPF and directed by Kagame, the current Rwandan president; or that since its accession to power in July 1994 the ruling RPF clique has chased two prime ministers out of the country and arrested a Hutu president to replace him with Kagame himself? That would all have been quite true. There are several reasons, based on facts not mentioned by McGreal, for the disfranchised and exiled majority being so opposed to the Kagame regime.
McGreal also writes that the ICTR "has established that there was an extensive conspiracy at the highest political and military levels of the Hutu regime to exterminate the entire Tutsi population". The ICTR has not established, on the evidence, any such thing. A ruling it made in 1998 was based entirely on a guilty plea by the former prime minister Jean Kambanda, which he later retracted. Indeed the government and military trials expected to address this question are still ongoing.
In a judgment released last month, the ICTR condemned Rwanda's human rights record, finding that the government uses the Orwellian offence of "genocidal ideology" to imprison those who express opposition to Kagame's regime. The ICTR voiced concerns about reports of witnesses being murdered by the government, and found that there was no guarantee of a fair trial for those accused of genocide.
Did Rwanda, one of the best-armed regimes in Africa, invade Congo twice and overthrow the Congolese regime because it was fearful of indoctrinated children? Is that what millions in Congo have died for? Is it not a more likely explanation that Rwanda, and the British government which arms and funds it, wishes to gain access to Congolese wealth?

· David Jacobs is a lawyer who has been representing defendants accused of genocide before the ICTR; Dr Alexander Zahar is a former judicial legal adviser at the ICTR, and co-author of International Criminal Law djacobs@wjm-law.ca