Melvern’s book is outstanding. She writes clearly and with no attempt at cheap dramatisation of horror. Her research has been exhaustive and the clarity of her chronology is the most damning of all indictments against those who looked the other way in the years leading up to 1994. ...objectivity subsidises credibility. In this way her work ranks with the 2003 book, Gulag.

For a chronicle of the events that unfolded between April and June 1994, the book is unsurpassed. It is hard to image that there could be any significant facts...that would contribute to your knowledge of what happened.. the book is really a starting point for considering crucial questions about the meaning of the genocide.. Melvern’s text will no doubt in future become indispensable to those who do ask questions about the genocide’s appalling excesses and the unspeakable extremities of the violence perpetrated... It is thorough, uncompromising in its attention to detail.

I'd like to thank you for your book Conspiracy to Murder, which I've just read. I think you succeed admirably in giving an economical linear narrative of the key events surrounding the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which is not an easy thing to do. Your book helped me considerably in that respect. I had read the Prunier book, and other accounts by involved witnesses, but I found that they got over-involved in the detail of the Hutu political in-fighting, or quite understandably in the emotional issue of the Tutsi-Hutu divide, or were just too journalistic. So thank you for your account.

Conspiracy to Murder, published in April 2004. The author expands and extends her analysis, drawing from material that has only recently become available. This includes files, letters, memoranda and records left behind by the génocidaires when they fled Rwanda, and the transcript of the interrogation of Jean Kambanda, prime minister of the government that planned and orchestrated the genocide.

So densely factual a book could make for heavy reading, but this one does not. Within the cool, unsensationalised narrative are the voices of Rwandans, the comments and testimonies of victims and perpetrators alike. The facts are presented alongside the experiences of recognisable individuals. We hear their words. From the 1970s (and earlier) through to the nightmare of 1994, the background, causes, reactions and associated events are clearly laid out. As the horror unfolds, the numerous strands are held firmly together to give a comprehensive picture. The underlying theme remains the West’s failure to act.

All the appropriate adjectives have been over-used in connection with Rwanda’s genocide – but still it’s hard to get away from “appalling”, “incomprehensible”, “chilling” and “horrifying”. The power of Conspiracy to Murder is doubled by the fact that Linda Melvern tells her story without using such words. It took my breath away.

Breaking new ground, she documents the extensive preparation for the genocide by extremists within the government of President Juvénal Habyarimana going back at least to 1991. When the genocide began, they had bought and distributed the equivalent of one machete for every three Hutu males and, with breathtaking cynicism, manipulated the media and state institutions to stoke anti-Tutsi passions to a fever pitch.

Linda Malvern’s second book on this genocide, updated to include recent information from the International Criminal Tribunal, shocks twice. First, she reveals the careful preparations the Rwandan army made in advance. Second, she explores the shameful roles of Western powers in stalling the United Nations Security Council’s already cumbersome responses. Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire, the heroic head of the UN’s pitifully impoverished peacekeeping force in Rwanda, accused Britain, the US and France of leading the UN “to aid and abet a genocide.

It is a devastating account of the West’s failure to act, in the face of clear evidence that a planned genocide was taking place. The British role is a deeply troubling one. Silence, as Melvern points out, was the worldwide response to mass murder. The media contributed to it by ignoring the story when it mattered most. That silence continues to be deafening”.

Linda is one of our finest investigative journalists. She was first to obtain and publish the secret minutes of Security Council meetings, revealing how the UK – perhaps at US instigation but probably not – took the lead in pretending that this was not genocide and in blocking any Security Council response other than to withdraw blue berets and to betray the people they were protecting. I can think of no more irresponsible act of a British government in modern times and it is a shameful thing that there has been no kind of enquiry into how or why the UK thus became complicit in genocide.