Episode 145: The Staircase Murders — Why Do So Many People Fall Down Stairs at Suspicious Moments?

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Episode 145: The RPF and Rwanda — Did the Victors Write the History?

The story of the Rwandan genocide as it is taught in most of the world runs as follows: in April 1994, Hutu extremists, using the assassination of President Habyarimana as a pretext, launched a planned extermination campaign against the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus. The genocide killed between 500,000 and 800,000 people in approximately 100 days. The international community failed to intervene. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, a Tutsi-led rebel army that had been fighting Habyarimana's government since 1990, advanced from the north, ended the genocide, and established the government that Rwanda still has today, led since 2000 by Paul Kagame. In this narrative, the RPF is the force that stopped the genocide. In the alternative narrative — suppressed, its proponents argue, because it implicates the current Rwandan government and its Western backers — the story is considerably more complicated.

In this episode of The Conspiracy Theory Analyst, we examine the questions surrounding the RPF's role in Rwanda: what the evidence suggests about who shot down Habyarimana's plane — the act that triggered the genocide — and what the documented massacres committed by the RPF during and after the genocide mean for the official history of one of the twentieth century's worst atrocities.

The shooting down of President Habyarimana's plane on April 6, 1994 is the event that triggered the genocide. The question of who fired the surface-to-air missiles that brought down the plane carrying both Habyarimana and Burundian President Ntaryamira has never been authoritatively resolved, but two separate judicial investigations have pointed toward the RPF rather than Hutu extremists. A French investigation ordered by Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, which concluded in 2006 and led to an international arrest warrant for nine RPF commanders, found that the missiles were fired from a position controlled by RPF forces and that Paul Kagame bore personal responsibility for ordering the attack. A second investigation by Spanish judge Fernando Andreu Merelles similarly concluded that RPF forces had fired the missiles. Both investigations were based on extensive witness testimony and forensic evidence, and both were vigorously rejected by the Rwandan government and by Western governments that had close relationships with Kagame. The French investigation was eventually withdrawn under diplomatic pressure after Rwanda severed diplomatic relations with France.

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