Surprisingly up to now there was not a single publication on the military aspects of the Rwandan civil war. (One exception is a book that was largely unnoticed, including by Kegel: Ntaribi Kamanzi, Rwanda. Du genocide à la défaite, Editions Rebero, 1997.) This book at last fills that gap to some extent. It addresses the origins and nature of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) and the history and implications of the civil war. By the end of the 1980s, around 600,000 Tutsi refugees were living in exile, most of them in neighboring countries. Their leaving Rwanda was the consequence of the 1959–61 revolution, which replaced a Tutsi-dominated monarchy by a Hutu-dominated republic. Later anti-Tutsi violence and discrimination led to further departures into exile. The immediate causes of the RPF’s decision to attack the country militarily were increasing anti-Banyarwanda sentiments in Uganda and the reluctance of the Rwandan government to allow the massive return of refugees.

As a war involves at least two armed parties, the limitation to the study of the military operations of just one party, the RPF/RPA, is regrettable. In light of the author’s methodology it is also inevitable. The only belligerents interviewed were “RPF political cadres and RPA veterans” (12). Not a single former government army FAR (Forces armées rwandaises) officer’s information is included, although the author gave them “the chance to be interviewed,” but they did not “seize this opportunity” (18). Kegel doesn’t say which former government cadres and officers refused to talk to him, while it is this reviewer’s experience that many of them are keen to offer their views. This imbalance has two main repercussions. On the one hand, only one side of the military front is examined, thus rendering the history of the war incomplete. On the other, the author acknowledges that “it is impossible not to develop personal bonds and friendships” with the interviewees (18). As I will show later, this proximity has led to a pronounced pro-RPF/A bias.

The initial phase of the war, during the first months following the October 1, 1990 attack, was marked by lack of preparation and a great deal of improvisation and confusion. On the second day of the war, the RPA commander Fred Rwigyema was killed, followed by his successors Chris Bunyenyezi and Peter Bayigana on October 23. Around that period, Paul Kagame returned from a course he was attending in the United States as a Ugandan army officer. These were strange events that up to this day give rise to considerable speculation in RPF ranks. Why was Kagame, “the natural choice to replace Fred Rwigyema” (133) in Fort Leavenworth, unaware of the start of the war? Why did it take him over two weeks to return, even spending a few days in Addis-Ababa? It is disappointing that Kegel accepts the official version of Rwigyema’s, Bunyenyezi’s, and Bayigana’s death at face value, without further examination.

After Kagame picked up the pieces of a profoundly disorganized and discouraged RPA, he reorganized and transformed it during the brief period from late October 1990 to January 1991. This paved the way for holding and increasingly gaining ground against the poorly organized, motivated, equipped, and led FAR. Successive offensives allowed the RPA to extend the area under its control, although that still covered a small portion of the country’s territory when the war entered its final stage in April 1994. Only the battle of Kigali of that stage is studied in detail, while the military evolution elsewhere is hardly addressed.

The pro-RPF/A bias is striking throughout the book. The “good guys” react to violence and provocations by the “bad guys” (228–40). On “accusations of sporadic RPF and RPA human rights abuse” (238), Kegal finds that sources on these crimes “are often problematic and should be avoided or, at the very least, handled with care” (297), thus overlooking the fact that massive war crimes and crimes against humanity have been widely and convincingly documented. Violent attempts at destabilization by both sides in the run-up to the genocide “remain shrouded in mystery, because their objective and perpetrators are impossible to pin down” (244), yet many were well documented. Unlike the government side, the RPF negotiated the Arusha accord in good faith and was not to blame for its collapse (261–75). According to Kegel, the hypothesis that the RPF downed President Habyarimana’s plane, the act that ignited the genocide and the resumption of the civil war, “does not make sense on several levels” (277), but no coherent argument is offered to that effect. Anyway, “the affiliation of those who shot down the plane is in fact irrelevant to the issue of the genocide” (179), a strange view given the consequences of this terrorist attack.

This book is at the same time a useful contribution to our understanding of an insufficiently known facet of the Rwandan civil war and a missed chance. On the one hand, it is the first research that focuses on the military aspects of this crucial period, and thus offers hitherto unknown information and analysis. On the other, by only researching one side of this military episode, it diminishes that very understanding. In the absence of information on issues such as operational, tactical and strategic choices, military capacities, and the quality of command on the side of the FAR, it remains unclear why the outcome of the war has been the RPA’s victory and the RPF’s seizing of political power.