Untold Story: Judi Rever Exposes Kagame’s Genocide in Congo & Rwanda

#TRANSCRIBED : (UNTOLD STORY) 𝗞𝗔𝗚𝗔𝗠𝗘 𝗜𝗦 𝗡𝗢𝗧 𝗔 𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗢 𝗕𝗨𝗧 𝗔 𝗠𝗔𝗡 𝗪𝗛𝗢 𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗜𝗧𝗧𝗘𝗗 𝗚𝗘𝗡𝗢𝗖𝗜𝗗𝗘 𝗔𝗚𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗦𝗧 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗚𝗢𝗟𝗘𝗦𝗘 𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗥𝗪𝗔𝗡𝗗𝗔𝗡𝗦

In an explosive and deeply personal address, Canadian investigative journalist Judi Rever took to the stage at the Oslo Freedom Forum to dismantle what she calls “one of the biggest lies of modern times”: the global myth of Rwandan President Paul Kagame as a hero.

Rever, who has spent nearly 30 years documenting war crimes in the Great Lakes region, delivered an unflinching indictment of Kagame’s violent legacy, one she claims has been deliberately buried by world powers, global corporations, and the media.

READ FULL TRANSCRIBED UNTOLD STORY BELOW.

I'm here today to tell you about one of the biggest lies of modern times, and about someone who's been posing as a hero for a very long time, someone who's everywhere in plain sight from Davos to the Olympics, when in reality he's been taking you for a ride. That person is Rwanda's dictator, Paul Kagame. In 1996, as a young Canadian journalist, I landed a dream job in Paris covering the African continent. At the time, I was hungry for life experience and eager to learn. It turned out that Africa was the best teacher. Almost immediately into that job, I was drawn into covering the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.

Paul Kagame, who had been hailed a hero for supposedly stopping the genocide against Tutsis committed by Hutus, was now launching a military invasion of Congo. Ostensibly, his objective was to root out Hutu genocidaires who were living in the refugee camps inside Congo's border. But for those of us who were paying attention, we realised that Paul Kagame's Tutsi troops were systematically massacring Hutu refugees in Congo. In May and June of 1997, I went to Congo, a country the size of Western Europe. With the help of Congolese aid workers, I went into the forest, and what I saw was devastating.

Hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilians had been chased across the country and hunted down like animals by Paul Kagame's Tutsi forces. I met wounded, traumatised, and starving women in the forest. I saw catatonic children emaciated and covered in scabies. The testimony that I collected from the forest of Congo and the pictures I took of mass graves convinced me that Paul Kagame's forces had committed a genocide against Congolese and Rwandan Hutus in 1996 and 97. The United Nations would later classify these crimes as a possible genocide.

After Congo, I crossed over on foot into Rwanda and interviewed more Hutu survivors who had just come home. I essentially asked them two questions, the same questions I had asked Rwandans in Congo. Why did you flee Rwanda in the first place in 1994 and decide to stay in Congolese refugee camps, enduring brutal conditions instead of going home, where Paul Kagame had reportedly stopped the genocide in 1994, stopped the violence, and was restoring peace and prosperity to Rwanda?

These Hutu survivors told me one after the other that, in fact, Paul Kagame's Tutsi army had slaughtered Hutus during the genocide. Their relatives had been massacred. They were afraid of Kagame's army. They also told me that many Hutus who returned from Congo to Rwanda were disappearing. This was astounding to me. Remember, these were early days. I'd never heard these stories before, but I knew that I had to keep researching this story. These interviews were very dangerous to do inside Rwanda. But I realised that the official genocide narrative of one category of perpetrator, one category of victim, was a sham and Kagame was no saviour.

I have since spent almost 30 years of my life investigating the crimes that Kagame's forces committed before, during, and after the genocide. I've interviewed hundreds of victims, witnesses, defectors from Kagame's own army, UN officials, and whistleblowers. And one of those whistleblowers leaked to me a confidential UN document which revealed that Kagame's Tutsi commandos actually slaughtered Tutsis during the genocide. These were false flags, staged operations. This evidence, and other types of evidence like this, completely disrupted the established doctrine of the Rwandan genocide.