Rwanda is right to prosecute an American law professor who suggested 1994 killings not a genocide

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA - On June 20, 1994, the BBC’s Marc Doyle sent a stern memo to his London-based editors.

Writing from the streets of Rwanda, where defenseless men, women, and children were being slaughtered at the rate of 10,000 a day; the journalist cautioned that “It is a very serious misrepresentation of the situation in Rwanda to describe the killings simply as ‘the slaughter of civilians’ or ‘the mass killings,’ without explaining who is killing whom […T]he government militia and the government armed forces are responsible for the bodies being found in mass graves in Rwanda and floating in rivers.”

Doyle, who spent more time on the ground throughout the genocide than any other foreign reporter, recalls the frequent calls from London requesting that he submit “balanced reports”. “[Show] the other side!” he was told.

The BBC editors maintained that whatever crimes the Hutu Interahamwe militia and the government army were committing were almost certainly replicated by their opponents, the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF)