Voted best book on Africa
by Foreign Affairs, 2004

"The silence of those who knew about the massacres speaks eloquently of the world’s indifference. The media contributed to it by ignoring the story when it mattered most. That silence continues to be deafening."

Magnus Linklater
Times Online

“This is a fascinating, sickening book with some profoundly depressing implications as to the integrity of our political institutions”

James Urquhart
Daily Telegraph

I am sorry I never found this link before now so that I could express my
admiration for your work. I think your book is easily the best reporting
on the Rwandan Genocide and one of the best non fiction works I have
read in many years. I have said that at lectures throughout my travels
associated with Hotel Rwanda.

Terry George
Director of Hotel Rwanda

Conspiracy to Murder. The Rwandan Genocide.

A shocking indictment of those who knew what was happening and chose not to intervene.

The crime of genocide is the most serious crime against humanity, and its prevention the single most important commitment of the countries who join together as the United Nations. The Security Council of the UN is central to the application of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Genocide is a deliberate policy to reconstruct the world. In order to commit genocide a group of people must make an agreement requiring a concerted plan of action.

In Rwanda in 1994 up to one million people were murdered as a result of a deliberate government policy, designed in advance and carried out according to an explicit strategy. What happened in Rwanda is a milestone event of the twentieth century and it deserves precise documentation. Conspiracy to Murder explains how this genocide was planned and perpetrated and who was responsible.   
 
The idea behind a second book on the genocide was to examine more extensive material and a wide-range of new information obtained after A People Betrayed was published in 2000. This new material, upon which a great deal of this book relies, gives a unique insight into the minds of the genocide conspirators. In the Rwandan capital, Kigali, I gained privileged access to files and records that were found when the Rwandan government army abandoned the city. These neatly typed letters, memoranda, reports and other documents, all written in French, filed neatly in ring-binders, show evidence of the planning of genocide. These include documents from the records of the interim government whose cabinet members perpetrated the genocide.

The information in the book also includes material obtained from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The evidence produced in court by a series of prosecution witnesses, together with a documentary trail, indicates an import link between a group of colonels in the army hostile to the peace agreement, and certain Rwandan politicians who were determined to resist the path of democracy.

A picture of how the genocide was perpetrated comes from the confession of the prime minister in the interim government, Jean Kambanda. It is Kambanda who enters the history books as the first person in an international court to plead guilty to the crime of genocide. His 1,800-page interrogation has not yet been made publicly available by the ICTR. It is a remarkable document in which Kambanda describes how Rwanda’s full state apparatus was used to carry out the killing.
 
In Kigali there are soldiers from the former Rwandan government army who provided me with information and I obtained valuable accounts from interviews conducted with category one genocide convicts who have been sentenced to death by Rwanda’s national courts. The 2006 paperback edition includes a new chapter to include the first written account of the seventeen day testimony of Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, who is accused of having taken control in a coup as the genocide began.

At the UN Secretariat in New York I was allowed to study the records of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), the decision to grant access to these records provided by the Secretary General, Kofi Annan. The documents include the twice daily reports sent to UN headquarters while the genocide progressed. This archive must be one of the world’s most extraordinary collections.

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