Tea at Trianon: Can We Ever Know How Many People Were Killed in Rwanda?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, July 28, 2025

Can We Ever Know How Many People Were Killed in Rwanda?

From It Can Always Get Worse:

While the incentives for perpetrators to be deceptive in interviews are obvious, the incentives for survivors are no less apparent, especially in the years after 1994 when such stories are being told in the context of Paul Kagame’s stiflingly despotic Rwandan government having made speech that deviates in any way from the official narrative a crime under the laws against “genocide ideology” that can carry a life sentence. People making, or wishing to keep open the possibility of, asylum claims to try to escape the Kagame regime likewise have incentives to shade their stories.
But make the heroic assumption that data gathered from survivors is not polluted by wilful deception: the frailty of human memory and finding a representative sample—even for a prefecture, let alone if results from one area are going to be generalised to a national estimate—mean the confidence in any resultant estimate should be low.
The authors highlight six sources of data:
African Rights, an NGO founded in 1993, produced a report in September 1994, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, compiling “all available eyewitness accounts” and in its 1995 second edition reached previously inaccessible prefectures. Purporting to cover the whole country, it documented about 130,000 fatalities.
Human Rights Watch released, Leave None to Tell the Story, in 1999, again mostly from oral accounts: of Rwandans on all sides, diplomats, and United Nations officials. HRW’s intention was overtly activist—to “educate” and “bolster public support” for the trials of the accused genocidaires—but it ostensibly also gathered data from the whole of Rwanda. It documented about 40,500 fatalities.
IBUKA (“REMEMBER”), a Tutsi advocacy group formed in late 1995, undertook the “Kibuye Dictionary Project” from 1996 to 1999 that tried to identify all the victims in that prefecture and the circumstances of their deaths. Over 25,500 fatalities were listed.
The Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research, and Culture—a Cabinet Ministry of the Rwandan government—gathered data, in collaboration with other ministries, from November 1995 to January 1996 in a project called, “The Commission for the Memorial of the Genocide and Massacre in Rwanda”. The nationwide survey recorded approximately 755,500 fatalities.
The Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Sport was deputised—for reasons best-known to the Rwandan government—to identify and excavate mass-graves. Other ministries helped, including Defence. Forensic evidence was gathered and the country-wide project was completed the same year it was initiated: 1995. Nearly 823,500 fatalities were reported.
The Ministry of Local Administration and Department of Information and Social Affairs began, in 2000, an effort to count and name the victims of the 1994 killings, with the goal of discovering the most impacted zones for the purposes of deciding on aid allocations. Survivors and neighbours of the dead—or, in practice, missing—were interviewed and the 2002 report, “The Counting of Genocide Victims”, estimated nearly 940,000 fatalities. (Read more.)