The Canadian branch of B’nai B’rith has accused author, activist, and political candidate Yves Engler of genocide denial.
Yves Engler is a Canadian activist, a candidate to lead Canada’s New Democratic Party , and the author of many books about Canadian foreign policy, including Canada and Africa, 300 years of Aid and Exploitation . Shortly after he announced his candidacy to lead Canada’s New Democratic Party, B’nai Brith produced a press release accusing him of denying the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, which others call the Rwandan Genocide. I spoke to him this week.
Ann Garrison: Yves Engler, what is B’nai B’rith , and why do you think they have suddenly attacked you over something you wrote eight years ago about the Rwandan Genocide?
Yves Engler: B’nai B’rith is the second most important Jewish Zionist organization in Canada . It’s been around for at least 100 years, and it’s an ardent defender of Israel’s interests. It has long smeared Palestine supporters, and they attacked me for something I wrote eight years ago, in 2017 , after I announced that I was going to seek the leadership of Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP), the major social democratic party in Canada.
The NDP has won seats in government provincially, but not yet federally. It has nevertheless been the official federal opposition party, and there was a fair bit of buzz and attention given to my announcing that I was going to run for the NDP leadership. I think that what’s happened since then is that B’nai B’rith has realized that claiming that someone is anti-Semitic because they oppose Canada’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza doesn’t have the same kind of weight among likely NDP members or supporters that it may have had six months to two years ago. So they chose to criticize me for something else rather than, you know, smear me as anti-Jewish. They scoured through my writings on many, many different topics, from cars to Ukraine to domestic issues and Rwanda, and they came up with an article from 2017 that they feel can sort of frame me as being, in their words, a denier of the Genocide against the Tutsi.
That is obviously erroneous and, quite frankly, libelous, but it is fair to say that I don’t agree with the highly simplistic narrative that Paul Kagame has used to justify killing millions of people in the Congo. An important part of that 2017 article is about how Canadians have assisted Kagame in crafting a very simplistic, self-serving narrative about the Rwandan Genocide to justify his dictatorship and violence in the Congo.
AG: So they’ve chosen to call you a Tutsi Genocide denier because calling you an anti-Semite or Holocaust denier would somehow not be as effective now.
YE: Yes, or specifically calling me an anti-Semite for opposing the Israel lobby or for opposing Canada’s support for Israel. That argument is worn out and no longer persuasive. They’ve accused a multitude of people of being anti-Semites over the past 21 months. It may still hold some weight in the corporate media, but it holds little or no weight among potential NDP voters. So they basically went to an issue that people don’t know much about, which is Rwanda. I think people know that something very bad happened in Rwanda in 1994, and that’s about all they can tell you.
So if you can put in people’s heads that this NDP candidate denies this really bad thing that happened, that of course would undermine my credibility, suggesting that I’m somehow unhinged or disrespectful of facts.
I should also say that before B’nai B’rith put out this public statement, there was an effort to attack me with Israel bots. I can’t prove this 100 percent, but suddenly this article from 2017 reappeared on social media. I responded to the first person who brought it up, thinking they were actually questioning its accuracy in good faith, but then suddenly dozens, probably hundreds of Israel bot accounts started calling on X to have a “community note” posted beneath my tweet suggesting that it might be counterfactual.
Then B’nai B’rith, five or six days later, followed that up with this press release, which they got a couple of Rwandan organizations to put their name to.
AG: OK, tell us about the press release.
YE: They put a statement on X that was linked to a longer statement, which said that I was a genocide denier or minimizer and that these types of ideas don’t deserve any role in official politics. B’nai B’rith clearly instigated the statement, but then they got a couple of Rwandan organizations to endorse it. So it said explicitly that I was a Tutsi Genocide denier.
This was based on this 2017 article where I began by quoting a number of Canadian media outlets who said that, in one case, 800,000 Tutsi were killed in 1994. Another outlet said a million.
I then referred to the BBC documentary Rwanda’s Untold Story , and quoted one of the academics interviewed, Professor Allan Stam, who makes the point that the higher the death toll cited for the Rwanda genocide, the greater number of Hutu who had to have been killed because the 1991 census said that there were fewer than 600,000 Tutsi in Rwanda at that time. There’s some debates about those numbers being correct, with some saying 500,000, but everyone agrees that there were at least 300,000 Tutsis who survived the genocide. Some say more.
So it would be statistically impossible for 800,000 Tutsis to have been killed in 1994. I pointed out this obvious statistical incongruence and point out that the inflation of the numbers of Tutsi killed allows Kagame to justify his dictatorship and his violence in Congo. He is a Tutsi and says that he has to rule to prevent another Tutsi genocide, and he also says that he has to be in Congo to keep Hutu refugees from killing Congolese Tutsi or returning to commit another genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. That’s what B’nai B’rith jumped on to call me a genocide denier.
Most of what the article is actually about, however, is Canadians’ role in shaping this simplistic narrative that Kagame uses to justify his criminal violence in Congo. And the most prominent character in that, of course, is Romeo Dallaire, the general in charge of the military component of the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Rwanda from late 1993 to 1994.
Immediately after the genocidal violence in 1994, Dallaire described it as a highly complicated descent into mass violence. That was his immediate description of affairs, but as time has gone on, he’s become a leading advocate and I would say even shaper of the official story that Kagame uses for his political purposes.
And so my article is mostly about Dallaire and then a couple of other Canadian figures including Gerald Caplan, who wrote the African Union’s report about the Rwanda Genocide in 2000. Caplan actually talks about writing that report in Toronto. This is an African Union report funded by the Americans, assisted by Canadians, and it’s literally written in Toronto, but it is framed as an African report.
I go into the important role that Canada’s played in all this, and it actually has somewhat broader implications for Canadians because the point I’m most trying to make is that Canada is a G7 country with powerful ideological capacities, and we speak the two main colonial languages spoken in Africa, English and French.
This makes it well-placed to shape international narratives, particularly about Rwanda, but not just about Rwanda. So in this piece I was trying to make a broader point about Canadian ideological power in the world.
B’nai B’rith is just trying to get some sort of “gotcha” moment against someone who has stood up to the Israel lobby in Canada and opposed Canada’s complicity in Israel’s crimes. So they latched on to this Rwanda article for those purposes.
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AG: OK, so just to highlight what they’re using to say “gotcha”; there were, on the high end, 600,000 Tutsi in Rwanda at the time of the genocide and at least 300,000 survived. I believe that’s the claim by the Ibuka Survivors Group. So if there were 600,000 and 300,000 survived, the death toll among the Tutsi could only be 300,000, but the Rwandan government, Wikipedia, and the legacy press all say 800,000 or even 1,000,000.
YE: Yes, that’s what they’re trying to nail me for, and I’m literally just using the Rwandan government census from 1991 and quoting US academics Allan Stam and Christian Davenport, who were quoted by the BBC in the documentary Rwanda’s Untold Story.
The other point I make is that Rwandan President, then General Paul Kagame is the one who shot down the plane that panicked the population and unleashed the genocidal violence. Judi Rever and Geoffrey York unearthed new evidence of this that was published in the Globe and Mail in 2018.
They traced the serial numbers on the surface-to-air missiles fired to shoot down President Habyarimana’s plane to Ugandan stocks of those missiles. So the Ugandans—and this is no surprise to anyone who followed this—gave those missiles to General Paul Kagame’s army, the RPF. The RPF used those weapons to blow up the plane, triggering a bloodbath that killed hundreds of thousands of both Tutsis and Hutus.
But B’nai B’rith doesn’t care about that or any in-depth look at the history of the Rwandan Genocide. They just seized on my questioning the statistics, and then the Toronto Sun, a right-wing outlet, published a hit piece based on their attack. They essentially called me a genocide denier and did exactly what B’nai B’rith wanted.
AG: Rwanda and its supporters would accuse you and me of genocide denial just for referring to the Rwandan Genocide instead of the Genocide against the Tutsi, which is the legally codified and enforced description in Rwanda. They even mounted a successful campaign to get the UN General Assembly to change the name of the “International Day of Reflection on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda” to the “International Day of Reflection on the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.” Has there been a naming campaign like this in Canada?
YE: I don’t believe so.
AG: French Cameroonian author Charles Onana has been convicted in France of “denying crimes against humanity” with regard to his writing about the Rwandan Genocide, specifically about Operation Turquoise , the humanitarian corridor that France set up to protect Rwandan refugees fleeing into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was then Zaire. Onana’s prosecution was based on French genocide denial laws that include any genocide recognized by an international court, including the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda. Are there any such laws in Canada that B’nai B’rith and its Rwandan Tutsi allies could use to pursue you legally?
YE: There is no similar legislation in Canada that I’m aware of, and a case like that would just end up hyping the issue in a way that wouldn’t serve their political interests.
AG: OK, lastly, is there anything further you’d like to say about General Romeo Dallaire and the central role he’s played in Canadian perception of the Rwandan Genocide?
YE: Yes. Five months ago, I saw that Romeo Dallaire was speaking at the Salon du Livre here in Montreal. And so I went there debating about whether to ask him about Kagame’s war in Congo or to ask whether he believes there is a genocide in Gaza.
The person in front of me asked him about the role of Rwanda’s M23 militia in Congo and whether it had changed his assessment of Kagame, so I asked him about Gaza. And I recorded Dallaire’s remarkable responses to both questions.
I don’t have all the words in front of me, but I wrote a story about this right after it happened. Dallaire basically said that Kagame is totally justified to go into the Congo because the genocidaires are in Congo and you gotta hit them where they are.
This is a position that’s no longer held by the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, or even the New York Times. It used to be how they justified Rwanda’s role in the Congo, but it’s become less and less acceptable framing. Dallaire nevertheless continues to make this argument for violence in Congo, which has left literally millions of people dead over the past 30 years. It’s the argument used to justify Rwanda and Uganda’s invasion of Congo in 1996, its re-invasion in 1998, and its constant destabilization in Eastern Congo for the past 30 years.
The Canadian government funds the Dallaire Institute , so it helps Dallaire promote this narrative. They train Rwandan forces for the purpose of ending the use of child soldiers, but Rwanda’s M23 use child soldiers in Eastern Congo.
So Dallaire plays a key role in ideologically enabling Kagame’s crimes in Congo, but he also has a concrete relationship with the Rwandan military. He meets with Rwandan military officials and with Kagame.
In Canada Dallaire is considered this great hero and humanitarian. He is probably one of the more famous Canadians outside of the official politicians and maybe outside of sports athletes, but I think that the history books will eventually tell that Romeo Dallaire enabled some of the most horrific crimes committed in Africa over the past 30 years.
Back in 2016, I published a book, A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media, and Academia Sell War and Exploitation , in which I examined the dominant media’s bias in favor of power. It’s all about different ideological institutions in Canada and their foreign policy coverage. The single most impressive propaganda instance in Canadian foreign policy that I’m familiar with is the coverage of Romeo Dallaire’s book, Shake Hands with the Devil , versus Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh’s book, Le patron de Dallaire parle – révélations sur les dérives d’un général de l’ONU au Rwanda .
Booh-Booh, a former Cameroonian foreign minister, was the head of the UN mission in Rwanda in 1994, so he was Dallaire’s boss, and he was far, far, far more knowledgeable about Rwandan affairs than Dallaire was. Dallaire admitted that he didn’t even know where Rwanda was on the map before going off on the mission.
In his book, Booh-Booh talks about Dallaire favoring the RPF forces in 1993 and 1994, but that book is all but entirely ignored by the Canadian media, while Dallaire’s book comes up thousands of times in a search of Canadian newspapers.
I wrote a whole book called Canada and Africa, 300 years of Aid and Exploitation where I go into, not just Canada’s role in Rwanda and Congo, but all the way back to the transatlantic slave trade.
AG: Regarding Dallaire, he is also hugely lionized in American accounts, including the “Bystanders to Genocide” piece that humanitarian imperialist Samantha Power kicked off her career with.
In most of these accounts, including Power’s, Dallaire’s heroism and pain are highlighted. He’s in the foreground with all his psychic suffering, his PTSD, his anguish at the failure of his mission, while the death and the suffering of millions of Rwandan people is the background. It’s all about this heroic white general.
YE: There’s something of an analogy with those in Canada who support Israel’s crimes in Gaza and frame themselves as the victims in this whole tragedy.
AG: Okay, Yves Engler, thank you for speaking to Black Agenda Report and good luck with your campaign to lead Canada’s New Democratic Party. We’re all rooting for you.
YE: Thank you.
(Black Agenda Report) by Ann Garrison
Ann Garrison
Ann Garrison is an independent journalist who also contributes to the San Francisco Bay View, Global Research, the Black Agenda Report and the Black Star News, and produces radio for KPFA-Berkeley and WBAI-New York City. In 2014, she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize by the Womens International Network for Democracy and Peace.
Yves Engler
Yves Engler is Montreal-based writer and political activist. In addition to ten published books, Engler's writings have appeared in the alternative press and in mainstream publications such as The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, and Ecologist.
