There’s no evidence to prove the Rwandan Patriotic Front killed the president, writes Linda Melvern ; and James Smith adds that blaming victim groups for atrocities inflicted on them is inaccurate and dangerous

Helen C Epstein claims “evidence” to prove the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) assassinated President Juvénal Habyarimana (America’s hidden role in the Rwandan genocide, 12 September). But this claim is unsupported and ignores witness testimony. That night, a Belgian doctor, Dr Massimo Pasuch, at home in the Rwandan army-controlled Camp Kanombe, was close enough to the missile launch to hear its telltale “whoosh”.

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Epstein claims the missiles were fired four miles away at Masaka Hill. The weapon, she claims, was a Russian-made Sam-16 because “two SA-16 single-use launchers” were found near Masaka Hill, a place more “accessible” to the RPF than Camp Kanombe. She relies on French investigative magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, whose inquiry claimed serial numbers on the Masaka launchers were from a consignment shipped from Russia to Uganda. But her information about the launchers comes from unreliable sources – convicted génocidaires Bruguière interviewed in prison.

When Judge Marc Trévidic took over the investigation, he visited the crash site with six scientific experts whose reports, together with witness testimony, showed the missiles came from Camp Kanombe. Epstein, so keen to inculpate the RPF, dismisses these substantiated conclusions as “inconclusive”.

Having the RPF assassinate the president is a revisionist masterstroke. It serves to obscure a coup d’état, turns génocidaires into victims and their extermination programme into a preventive war. A cornerstone in the trial defences of génocidaires, it is actively promoted by implicated French officials and conspiracy theorists. Not a scrap of credible evidence has ever substantiated it.

Linda Melvern

Dulverton, Somerset

• Inferring victim groups are to blame for atrocities inflicted on them is inaccurate and dangerous. Epstein claims the fundamental differences between the genocide against the Tutsis and the Holocaust is that no Jewish army posed a threat to Germany and that terror was part of the powder keg in Rwanda. There may have been no Jewish army, but fear of terror played a central role in mobilising the European population against the Jews. Nazi propaganda asserted Jews were waging war through Bolshevism.

Just as the vast majority of Holocaust victims were not armed, neither were the Tutsi women, children and men who were butchered in the genocide. Perpetrators of neither of these crimes should be let off the hook. As disenfranchised Muslims have taken up arms in Myanmar and western media fosters fear of migrants, now is the time to warn governments there is never justification for collective punishment of civilians.

Dr James Smith

Chief executive, Aegis Trust

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