One of the protagonists of the revisionism is Charles Onana, a prolific Franco-Cameroonian writer, who, through his small Paris-based publishing house, Duboiris, has published twenty-six books, at a rate of more than one a year for two decades.
Onana’s popularity has risen in the DRC in recent years by surfing on the latest Rwanda-backed M23 offensive, which began in November 2021. In March 2024, he was invited as a guest of honor by the Congolese government, welcomed by police fanfare and the deployment of a heavily armed military guard, for a series of lectures at public universities and Parliament.
His latest book can be found everywhere in Kinshasa – on parliamentary desks, and in bookshops that are not very well stocked. Posters with enlarged versions of his book cover can also be seen at certain events organised by Congolese in the diaspora.
Few serious academics consider this latest book to be a solid scientific work. Like many conspiratorial thinkers, Onana passes off speculation, innuendo, and lies as scientific conclusions, with elaborate footnotes and references to documents from U.S. and French government archives. But rarely do these sources actually back up his claims.
Given the complexity of the Congolese conflict, Onana’s greatest rhetorical asset is perhaps his simplicity. According to him, the Congolese crisis has been orchestrated from the outset by the Rwandan government, which is itself in the service of the United States, members of the French elite, and multinational corporations.
Since 1990, when Kagame’s RPF launched its offensive on Rwanda from Uganda, “the main idea was to install at the head of Rwanda a leader capable of invading Congo-Zaire and seizing its wealth for the benefit of Western mining companies and Anglo-American private interests supported by certain Western leaders”, he writes.
The result, according to him: 10 million Congolese killed, half a million women raped, millions of tons of minerals looted and 110,000 square kilometers of forest destroyed. These figures were echoed by the Congolese president himself in an interview with the French daily Le Monde in March 2024: “In the Congo, there have been 10 million deaths,” he asserted.
Onana is in the right ballpark but lacks nuance and rigor. Several mortality studies and statistical analyses suggest that the number of deaths due to the humanitarian consequences of conflict runs into the millions.
Direct killings are probably far less numerous, even if they number in the hundreds of thousands. It is also likely that tens of thousands of women have been raped by armed groups, although data on this is scarce.
Onana is no stranger to hyperbole and distortion. He has argued that “the theory that a Hutu regime planned the ‘genocide’ [sic] in Rwanda is one of the greatest swindles of the twentieth century.”
His version of events in Rwanda has been contested in France: he was indicted in 2022 for public denial of the existence of a crime against humanity. In October 2019, on the LCI news channel, the author declared that “between 1990 and 1994, there (had been) no genocide against the Tutsis, nor anyone else.”
His most recent writings extend these theories to the wars in the DRC. Here’s the condensed version of his argument: the plan of Kagame’s RPF rebels was from the outset to drive a large part of the Rwandan population to flee to the Congo, as this would provide him—and his U.S. allies and industrialists—with a good excuse to invade Zaire, overthrow Mobutu and pillage Congolese minerals.
Like any good conspiracy, it’s hard to refute some of the elements put forward, even if the author provides little evidence. He mixes well-known facts with half-truths and lies. In 1994, some 1.3 million Rwandan refugees did indeed flee to the DRC (many more fled to Tanzania). But was this part of a plot to alter Rwandan demographics in favor of the Tutsis, and a ploy to create a pretext for invading Zaire? Despite the documents he cites, he lacks proof.
And circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise: in 1996, when the new Rwandan army (controlled by Kagame) invaded Zaire, the vast majority of refugees returned home to Rwanda. Those from neighboring Tanzania eventually did too. If the aim was to radically alter Rwanda’s ethnic proportions, it didn’t work.
Concerning the role of the United States, the Clinton administration, which felt guilty for having played a decisive role in the withdrawal of peacekeepers during the genocide, showed understanding towards the new RPF government. It provided humanitarian support and helped set up a campaign to persuade refugees to return home, created a demining program, and, most controversially, trained Rwandan officers in counter-insurgency.
This policy was short-sighted. Support for the new regime and empathy for the traumas suffered by Rwandan society blinded Washington’s policy, leading it to turn a blind eye or ignore reports of massacres committed by the new Rwandan authorities and the RPF inside the country and in Zaire (renamed DRC in 1997).
The words of the U.S. defense attaché in Kigali at the time, Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Odom, commenting on a massacre of displaced persons in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1995, are revealing: “The deaths were tragic… Compared to the 800,000 deaths of the genocide, the 2,500 deaths were a mere speed bump.” Nevertheless, the evidence for a preconceived, U.S.-backed master plan to plunder Congolese resources, as Onana asserts, is weak.
In the second part of his book, ethnicity occupies a prominent and troubling place. According to Onana, since the 1980s, Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni have been intent on creating a “Tutsi-Hima empire” stretching from Uganda to Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC.
The aim of this “Tutsiland”, as he calls it, would be to enable the Anglo-Saxon powers to exert influence over the whole of Africa. Their tentacles would be far-reaching: “A powerful Anglo-Saxon lobby has been working on this issue for years, with close links to the office of the UN Secretary-General, other UN agencies, Germany, the U.S. Congress, Great Britain and the office of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) (renamed the African Union in 2002, editor’s note),” writes the Franco-Cameroonian author.
He also suggests that Kagame has used women to win the trust of heads of state in Congo-Brazzaville, the Central African Republic, and elsewhere. The roots of this stereotype are reminiscent of genocidal propaganda: Tutsi women were often portrayed as a fifth column, an intimate enemy, always seeking to defend their “race” by devious means.
Examples can be found in Kangura, the publication that disseminated hate messages in the run-up to the genocide. A February 1994 cartoon, for example, suggests that Roméo Dallaire, general of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (Minuar), chose the RPF camp because he was seduced by a Tutsi woman. (Reuters/NANFeatures)
