 Good afternoon and welcome. I'm delighted to see all of you here today, and I hope that you are like me looking forward to a promise to be a very interesting presentation. I'm Susan Collins. I'm the Jonathan Sanford YLD here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And it's a real pleasure to have the opportunity to introduce our speaker this afternoon, Professor Alice Pham. I've been a professor of political science here at the University of Michigan since 2007. And he's very well-known for his extremely innovative and very relevant research on a number of topics that relate to the dynamics of armed conflict between and within states. His current projects involve developing a GIS model of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. We'll be hearing more about that today. As well as investigating political leaders' family structure and social development and their concomitant effects on the leaders' willingness to take risks once in office. He's also done work to model the effects of causality, of casualty, sensitivity, excuse me, in democratic states. Before coming to the University of Michigan, Al had been a member of the faculty's at Dartmouth College, at Yale University, and American University. He was the 2004 recipient of the International Studies Association Carl George Award, which is awarded annually to a scholar under the age of 40 judged to make the most significant contribution to the study of international relations and peace research. He's published a long list of books and articles, book reviews, and papers. He also served in the United States military from 1983 until 2002, retiring with the rank of captain. He received his master's degree and his PhD right here at the University of Michigan. It's great to claim him as one of our own. Please join me in welcoming Professor Alistair. Thanks very much. Thank you all very much for coming. It is a real pleasure to give a talk at one's alma mater, particularly one I was employed. What I'm going to talk about today is pretty obvious going by the title. I have to say it's with no small amount of trepidation that I saw that Norman Finkelstein was giving a talk about the Arab-Israeli problem. Norman Finkelstein is most notable for his work on the Holocaust. I'm going to preface my remarks here because some of the things that I'm going to say in certain circles are exceedingly controversial. My visa to Rwanda has been revoked. I am a persona non grata there for some of the research that Christian Davenport and I have done. If at any time you get the sense that I am a genocide denier, please raise your hand. And I will clarify for you that that is not the case. So let's get started because we actually have a lot of ground to cover. This is a very big complicated project. There's no way any one person could have done this themselves. Christian Davenport is my principal, collaborating colleague at the University of Notre Dame. I'm going to show you later on this afternoon some I think quite exciting animated maps of Rwanda and the Civil War that took place in 1994. Those were put together by David Gatz and he's the vice president of ESRI, which is the company that has developed and owns ArcView GIS software. It turns out his wife is a Tutsi. And he heard of our work and said, you guys are lame when it comes to presenting your work. Let me see if we can put something together that would actually make sense to people. David Armstrong is an applied statistical postdoc at Oxford. He's the person that's done most of the statistical analysis for us. There are three lawyers that have worked very closely with us on this project. Peter Erlander is a defense attorney for one of the more reprehensible human beings on the planet. Barbara Mulvaney is the former state's attorney for New Mexico and is now the chief prosecutor in the military trial in Arusha Tanzania. Donald Webster is the chief prosecutor, former district attorney in New York City, chief prosecutor in the military trial, in the political trial. I'm sorry, at the ICTR. The contribution of these two folks was critical. They enabled us to get access to 12,000 interviews that were conducted in Africa and Europe. These are confidential interviews that have been used by the ICTR. We use those interviews essentially to place the beginnings of killings in space and time. Peter Erlander was critical for us, as I'll explain in a little bit. He provided access for us to both members of the Tutsi military as well as the FAR, the Rwandan State Army Organization, a bunch of folks that are in prison to enable us to corroborate where the various military units were as time went by in 1994. Cyan Doyle, Anthony Bramante, and Nick Greenfield have been graduate students or fellows that have done a lot of the grunt work working on this. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to present a little bit of history. I'm going to show you a map, a very simple map of Rwanda. I'm going to pose some questions and I'm going to show you some more maps. Now, let's back up a little bit and review essentially what it is that people think we know about the Rwandan genocide. As professors, we tend to think in horror about Wikipedia, but it is the oracle of our age for better or for worse. And this is what's there. The Rwandan genocide was the 1994 genocide of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsi and modern Hutu sympathizers. Group was carried out by two extremist groups, at least 500,000 Tutsi and thousands of modern Hutu died in the genocide. And this is essentially, this is the story that we see in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and in most of the popular press. The, probably the benchmark publication comes from Professor Samantha Power, writing, she received the Pulitzer Prize for this in general nonfiction a few years ago, a problem from hell, American the Age of Genocide. In there, she describes in the course of 100 days in 1994, the Hutu government and its allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority, using crude implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, ordinary citizens, murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. This is what we think we know. Now, why should we care about someone, you know, somebody like Samantha Power? Well, when it comes to ideas and vision, our President Barack Obama has untapped Samantha Power. Now she was to serve a very formal role in his administration, but due to some extraordinarily impolitic remarks about Hillary Clinton, she has been reduced to a more informal advisory role. But nonetheless, Power does provide big picture advice for Obama with her deep background in human rights, failing states, and genocide prevention. Another person that is of note, who has made observations or had participated in some of the policy planning that took place during the events in 1994, Susan Rice, who is the US Ambassador to the UN. Back in 94, she was working on the National Security Council under Richard Clark. In a meeting where they were discussing what the appropriate US response should be, Ms. Rice said, if we use the genocide and our scene is doing nothing, what will the effect on the November elections be? Lieutenant Colonel Tony Marley, a staffer there, remembers saying that we could believe that people would wonder that, but we can't believe that people actually say it. Well, in fact, she did. Afterwards though, I think she recognizes that this was perhaps a bridge too far. She swore to herself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required. So this is essentially the historical and policy context for what it was that happened and what I'm gonna talk about for the next 45 minutes or so. Here's an alternative story to the Wikipedia story. This is the one that I think the data most closely supports. Most likely, and I'm gonna talk a great deal about what it is that we have to assume in order to come to this conclusion, million people died. Most likely, the vast majority of people that died were who to? At the time, contrary to shock on the part of the Clinton administration, shock on the part of the British administration, American, French, Belgian and British leaders all knew what was going on. We now have access to, these were released about four years ago, we now have access to the president's daily national intelligence estimate that he got every morning at 7 a.m. Those documents detail what was going on with astonishing precision. Bill Clinton was aware of what was happening while it was happening on a close to day-by-day basis. During the weeks of this crisis, probably on average four days a week, the lead bulletin in the NIE was what was going on in Rwanda. Now interestingly, the CIA was aware of what was going on. Folks in the State Department were not acutely aware of what was going on. Now, in the end, the US guy wins. Paul Kagami, the current president of Rwanda had spent some time at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, not too far before the 1994 genocide. At Fort Leavenworth is the Command and General Staff College. This is where rising stars of the US military and other places go to get training as they are on track to become generals. The training that they get there is on planning large-scale operations. It's not planning small-scale logistics things. It's not tactics. It's about how do you plan an invasion? And apparently he did very well. The second part of the story is there are no good guys. The standard story that we, if you read the Wikipedia story, if you read Samantha Power's book, there is clearly a group of people wearing white hats and a group of people wearing black hats. I hope by the end of this afternoon you will be convinced that there should be a pox on all their houses. Current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagami, I suspect is very likely guilty of war crimes of a pretty extraordinary scale. Now, we're gonna back up and we're gonna go through a little bit of Rwandan history really fast. Okay, the relevant history starts off in the middle of the 19th century. Rabu Giri was the king in Central Africa. During this period of consolidation, we see essentially what emerges is feudal patronage system. Anybody that studies feudalism in Europe would be familiar with what's taking place there. It's also important because what Rabu Giri does is he centralizes control over the military. In 1890, the Europeans arrived and as is often the case, this is fraught with hazard, as we will see for the next 100 years, Rwanda becomes part of Germany's East Africa. In 1919, as a result of the Versailles Treaty, Belgium is given Rwanda Arundi, as we were referred to at the time. In 1946, now known as Rwanda Burundi, they become a UN Trust Territory to be governed by Belgium. This matters because again, in the popular story, the UN sort of seems to magically appear in the early 1990s in the Arusha process. But in fact, the UN is there from the outset. The UN is aware and party to many of the political decisions that were made throughout the second half of the 20th century that all sort of inexorably lead to the problems that take place in the 1990s. In 1957, and this is coincidental with very similar independent movement throughout the colonial world, we see the beginnings of a really powerful independence movement, the Hutu political and intellectual elite issue a manifesto. It's explicitly modeled on Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, it's 10 points, it could be sort of like a Jay Leno list of the top 10 things and why we are aggrieved. The reason why this really matters though is that Hutu ethnic-based political parties are formed. And those parties and the most important of which the Hutu power party traces its lineage back to this period, these are ethnically based political parties whose action plan is detailed in a 10 point document and it basically says we're gonna take over, we're gonna be in charge and it's our right to be so. In 1959, the independence movement gets some teeth, the Tutsi King Kigeri, a descendant of Rabu Giri and somewhere between 10,000 and 75,000 of his clan members and buddies are pushed out into Uganda. The best analogy to sort of, if you're familiar with much, not even much, the basics of modern European history, the analogy you wanna have in your mind here is the Kristallnacht before World War II. There aren't a lot of Tutsi killed in the same way that there aren't a huge number of Jews compared to what happened subsequently on Kristallnacht but if we trace the lineage the holocaust back, that was the big sign and in 1959, this is the beginning of what takes place in 1994. 1962 Rwanda formally is recognized as an independent state, they have a Hutu president, another 50,000 Tutsi are pushed out of the country. It's in this exodus from 1962 that Paul Kagami is a very, very small boy, leaves and goes to Uganda. In 1963, 20,000 Tutsi are killed in Rwanda as a result of a failed Tutsi invasion from Burundi. Rwanda and Burundi are two small states, if you picture, sort of close your eyes and think about Africa, think about what would be the pituitary gland of Africa. It's this tiny little spot in central Africa and there's two sort of sister states north south, they are roughly the same size and geographic proximity to one another as New Hampshire and Vermont are, actually in some ways very similar terrain as well. Now, Burundi is the southern half of this pair of states. The Tutsi had retained control through this period in Burundi and they tried to put in place a Tutsi restoration. In 1972, in Burundi, the Tutsi realized that their hold on power is threatened. And so the Tutsi government, the Tutsi military in Burundi, the southern half of this, tried to figure out what to do and they decide they're gonna act preventively. And what they're gonna do is put together a list of all of the Hutu that own property other than small family plots that have attended university, that own businesses or are members of the military. They make a big name list of all these people and then they kill them all. We don't know how many it is, nobody knows. Somewhere between 50 and 200,000 people. This was written about in an Atlantic monthly article that went nowhere. But the idea, and we're gonna see that this notion of targeting people on name lists, this becomes the horrifying signature note of what happens in 1994. But it wasn't the Hutu that invented it. They didn't come up with the idea. It was the Tutsi government in Burundi that first had the idea to preventatively wipe out an entire elite. And it actually works. Now, in 1973, we're jumping back up 20 miles north into Rwanda, there's a military coup led by juvenile Habir Ramana. Juvenile Habir Ramana was the guy that was president at the beginning of the genocide of Civil War in 1994. Now, he is the guy that is characterized as the moderate Hutu in the popular conception of this whole story. Samantha Power and some other people that I'm gonna tell them, Allison DeForge, who just recently died in the plant crash in Buffalo, characterized Juvenile Habir Ramana as the moderate guy. Now, if he's a moderate, boy, they got some crazy people in this country. The split here, this is a Hutu v. Hutu split. The southern Hutu, because they live next door to Burundi, feel that some accommodation and negotiation is in order. The northern Hutu tend to be a little crazier. They don't wanna negotiate with anybody. Habir Ramana decides the southern Hutu are getting a little bit too close to the Tutsi and Burundi, so there's a coup. Handful of people are killed. Keep in mind, when we think about the moderate Hutu solution, it is to kill people and replace them with yourself. That's the moderate solution. That's the historical context here. In 1988, there is extraordinary ethnic violence in Burundi again. 50,000 Hutu refugees come up from Burundi into Rwanda. Now, this matters because they bring with them stories. The stories they bring with them are about 1972 and subsequent abuses of the Hutu by the Tutsi military in Burundi. In 1990, the Rwanda Patriotic Front, this is a Tutsi military that is in Uganda. This is led by Paul Kagami and a group of colleagues of his. They had worked, the RPF had worked with and for the Americans and the British to back Musa Venye in Uganda. The RPF becomes the most powerful military in Central Africa. As a result, they become a threat to Musa Venye in Uganda. Musa Venye says, you guys gotta go. The RPF says, where are we gonna go? He says, you know, well, you might as well go home. And they say, well, that's a great idea because that's actually where we'd like to go. And so they invade. It was an interstate war. Okay, so I mean, I think we need to be clear about that. It fails. This invasion fails. Although they do not end up giving back all of the territory, as we'll see in a minute, that they captured in 1990. In 1991, there are large scale retaliatory killings in Northwest Rwanda. Now, most of the people that die here are Tutsi. Not most, probably 60%. Kristen Davenport and I went up there and talked to the people. The political system, the smallest political unit there is the hill or cell, they call it the hill. The political leader of the hill, and it's anywhere from eight to 25 families, is what's referred to as a Nimbia Kumbi. And what we did was we went around and we talked to these local hill chiefs. And we said, wait, what happened in 1991? What's the local story? And the common theme was what had happened in this area, and this is right up along the border with Uganda, that the Hutu army went up and they basically killed collaborators. The Nimbia Kumbis all said, the problem that they faced was they had to pick sides. As the invasion was beginning, the Nimbia Kumbi had to decide who do we side with? Do we decide with the RPF or do we decide with the FAR? Well, it looked like the RPF was gonna win. And so locally, most of the local hill chiefs sided with the RPF or looked the other way as the RPF came through. France then intervened, an exogenous shock, that the local Nimbia Kumbi had not anticipated. Now it happens to turn out that in this particular area, the reason why the RPF started their invasion through there is because there were a fair number of Tutsi in this particular area. They thought that there would be a relatively sympathetic audience. But the key is that many of the people that are killed in this area also happened to be Hutu. The Hutu that decided the RPF was gonna win and sided with the RPF, they were targeted also. So the basis for targeting here, at least the story on the ground, was that basically you got targeted if you bet wrong. Now in 1993, in August, the Arusha Cords are signed. This is the U.S. forced, U.N. sponsored conflict resolution mechanism to work out a cooperative solution to the Civil War. The RPF, these are the same people that invaded from Uganda three years previously, are given five out of 21 ministries. They've been controlled by troop count, 40% of the control of the Rwanda military. Now, this is a pretty good deal. The Tutsi and Rwanda make up about eight and a half percent of the population. These characters just invaded, I mean they violated international law. So all in all, this is a pretty sweet deal for it. Invading force representing a very small minority in the country. Now, as always, there is a certain ying and yang here. The U.N. also says in 22 months we will have free and fair democratic elections. That's why the Hutu power party formed in 1957 matters because political parties in 1993, they're the same parties. They have the same sets of preferences and the preferences are to vote along ethnic lines. So the RPF knows in 1993, they have 22 months to come up with a solution because in 22 months they're gonna be voted off the island. In October of 1993, the Burundi president, who's a Hutu at this point, the Hutu have gotten control in Burundi and his entire cabinet are assassinated by Tutsi soldiers. But the coup attempt fails. Now interestingly, there is no investigation. Excuse me, you'll see this is a common theme. Six months later on April 6th, juvenile Habir Rahmanah, the new president of Burundi, the FAR, the Hutu military in Rwanda, the chief of staff and eight other cabinet members are assassinated. Plain there flying and returning from Arusha is shot down as it is making its final approach into Kigali International Airport. Now, you would think we've got one, two, three presidents that have been assassinated. We have an army chief of staff, an entire cabinet and eight other new cabinet members, all assassinated in the space of six months. You would think there would be a public investigation. But this is Central Africa. The UN conducts an investigation and ends it. It has never made public. Now, moments later, the RPF, literally moments within somewhere between 90, 60 and 120 minutes after this plane is shot down, the RPF invades. Now, we could characterize this invasion as, wow, a spontaneous reaction to go in and defend our allies. The problem is, this invasion looks staggeringly like the United States invasion of Iraq in 1991. It is exactly the same features. There is a central drive, in this case, due south towards Kigali, very much like the central drive towards Baghdad. There is the sweeping left hook, but in this case, because the map is reversed, there's a sweeping right hook. This was a plan that was not worked out on the back of an envelope. 50,000 soldiers move into action on two fronts in a coordinated fashion spontaneously. Now, simultaneously with this, a genocidal killing campaign begins in Rwanda. This is by the FAR, the so-called genocide heirs. This killing campaign is modeled after the campaign that took place in the 1970s in Burundi. There are name lists, individuals are tracked down in a staggeringly sophisticated but low-tech manner. By August 1st, there are 2 million externally displaced people, this is a great jargon for refugee, 1 million internally displaced people, and there's basically a million dead people. Now, why does this matter? Well, 50% of the population of Rwanda in 90 days has been made a refugee or has been killed. This matters extraordinarily because ethnic identity is local knowledge, as I'm gonna try and show in a few minutes. Now, from 94 to 96, the refugee camps in the Congo that have some million and a half people in them fall under control of the Hutu militias that have fled the country. In 96, the RPF invades and attacks refugee camps in the Congo. Somewhere between 50 and 150,000 people are killed. The model you might wanna have in your mind here is Shebronica, but there some 2,000 people were killed. Here, 50 to 150,000, but in both instances, the UN was there. In July of 1996, there is a coup in Burundi. Boyoya, this is a guy that was a Tutsi that had previously tried to take control 10 years earlier, finally managed to succeed. The Tutsi restoration in Central Africa is now complete. We have returned back to a full cycle to the Rabugiri military political consolidation of the mid-19th century. From 1998 to 2000, the RPF gains control of the Eastern Congo all the way to Kissingani or what is formerly known as Stanleyville. This is the last navigable point on the river coming up from the Atlantic Ocean. As the crow flies, Kissingani is 470 miles from Kigali. By the roads, it's about 800 miles. We interviewed the defense minister and the Solicitor General of the Rwandan Supreme Court and Christian and I asked these guys, what are you guys doing in Kissingani? It's kind of far. It's sort of like going from Washington D.C. to St. Louis. And he said, well, we have security concerns. There are who to militias in the jungle. And we said, yeah, we went there. And we saw them, but you don't have to go to Kissingani to find them. They're five miles over the border. So why are you guys 500 miles into the Congo? And there's this long pause and the Solicitor General is the guy that really lost it. And he says to me, he says, I went to the University of Chicago. I have a master's degree in international relations. I've read Hans Morgenthau. I'm a realist. I know that the United States doesn't give a shit about what we do in this country, in this part of the world. We're gonna do what we think we need to do to guarantee our security and well. His words. Christian and I looked at each other. Christian just shaking his head like, I can't believe you just got this man to swear at you. And I was like, wow, this is great. I can't believe this guy just admitted to occupying the eastern third of Africa to enrich him and his buddies. Now, how does all this go down? Well, there's essentially four principal ethnic groups. There's another one, the TWA. They make up about two-tenths or 1% of the population. We can safely ignore them, not because they're not a good decent people, but because they don't have much power here. Amongst the Hutu, there are essentially two groups. There's the Hutu Power Party, linked very closely to the Interahomwe, which is a sort of catch-all phrase for bad guys. Some of them are organized into militias. Some of them are gangs of young kids, but they're bad guys. Then there are the Hutu Moderates led by Habir Ramana. The difference between the Hutu Power Party and the Hutu Moderates is that the Hutu Power Party lost the election and they want to get back in power. The reason why Habir Ramana is moderate is because moderation is working for him. He's got a good deal with the UN through the Arusha Courts. He gets to be president. And he gets an election that if he can figure out how to fix the election, he'll get to stay president too. So there's no need to be anything other than moderate at the time. Now, the Tutsi are two, they're basically two groups also. They're the Tutsi and Rwanda. Their elite, as they are, are Francophone. And they're the Tutsi X Patriots in Uganda. They are Anglophone. Now, the Hutu Extremists and the Tutsi X Patriots both prefer no power sharing. They want 100% control of the country. Now, the Hutu Moderates and the Tutsi and Rwanda, they're willing to accept the Arusha Courts. These guys, the Francophone Tutsi, they think this is the coolest thing that's ever happened. These were essentially the Tutsi that were the not elite Tutsi, all the elite Tutsi left in the late 50s and early 60s. These are the folks that got left behind. Now, all of a sudden, the Arusha Courts come along and actually guarantee them something, which they think is pretty awesome. Now, what happens is the Hutu Extremists bet wrong. They thought that these two Tutsi groups would have the same preference. They actually believed that if they started to kill off these people, that the Tutsi X Patriots from Uganda would care. It turned out they were wrong. Now, here's a map of Rwanda, up here is Uganda, here's Tanzania, over on this side down here is Burundi and over here is the Congo. Actually, I'm not supposed to say the Congo anymore. I'm supposed to say Congo. Now, each of these little area here, this is a political commune or prefecture the number in there, which you can't see, don't worry about it, it doesn't matter. That's why I've cleverly color coded. That's the number of people that died in that political unit. This is essentially like the size of a town, a New England town, each one is political units. Each of these areas in the bigger area would be like the equivalent of an American county. There's two things to note about this. One is, people died everywhere. This looks like a map of World War II in Europe. People are dying everywhere. It's a civil war, but there's something else to notice. There's a couple of red spots. Things got crazy in a few spots. If you looked at a map of Eastern Europe after World War II, you'd see a very similar pattern. You would see there's killing everywhere and then there's a few hotspots like Dachau, Auschwitz. Well, same thing here. Now, how many people died? You, an expert, evaluated the population of Rwanda, estimated that 800,000 Rwandans had died between April and July. Seltzer, he's the expert, estimated the number of persons killed as at least half a million. Professor Girard Prunier estimated that 130,000 Tutsi were alive in July. But there's another 20,000, perhaps, in Zaire or Tanzania. We're not really sure. If this number of 150,000 is subtracted from an estimated population of 657,000 Tutsi, this leaves 507,000 Tutsi killed, close to Seltzer's minimum assessment. This comes from Human Rights Watch, the organization that Allison DeForge was very closely associated with. So, we tried to replicate Mr. Seltzer's study. My name is Christian Davenport, we're writing to Professor Seltzer. I've been studying this stuff for about 10 years. I was curious how you generated your estimation of half a million killed during the violence of 94. Is there a paper? Can you tell us how you did it? I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Christian, thank you for your question and your interest. In answer to your first question, the key feature of my estimate of more than 500,000 deaths was not the specific figure of 500,000, but the words more than. The figure more than 500,000 was modeled on the notion that an estimate of about or at least six million died in the Holocaust was sufficient for the Nuremberg prosecution. I can no longer recall why I settled on 500,000 as the lower anchor of my estimate. I do remain interested in the subject, however. Thanks for your interest, regards Bill, William Seltzer. This is the UN expert. This is the estimate that everything is based on. Samantha Power, Wikipedia, Gervitch, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, everywhere. They made it up. Why? Because they were outraged. Allison DeForge and Bill Seltzer were outraged that there wasn't gonna be a tribunal like Nuremberg. They wanted the perpetrators to be held accountable. They wanted to round it up and put in jail. And they felt, what did it take to get Nuremberg? Well, it took a big number to get Nuremberg. So we need a number. We need a big number. We need a compelling number. And so they came up with one. Now the question is whether that's a plausible number or not. So we have data, a lot of it. Most of it is really bad. And I'm gonna explain in a minute why. So we have some data that's only large-scale killings. We have some data that covers the whole country, some not. Physicians for Human Rights, these are some really crazy guys. They actually exhumed a mass grave. And they counted up the numbers of bodies in the grave. They identified they were able to separate them by age, sex. But the key was, based on thigh bones, they could come up with an accurate number of people that were in that mass grave, okay? Now the reason why that matters is, the Ministry of Youth Culture and Sport, it is an odd name I have to say, sort of European actually, in America we would not call the Ministry of Youth Culture and Sport the group responsible for doing the Mass Grave Identification Project. But in this case, that's who does it. So what we did was these guys, the Ministry of Youth Culture and Sport, cataloged all of the mass graves in the country. About 130 of them. Christian and I visited 85 of those to make sure that the list was accurate. Every single place that was on the list that we went to exists. The number of bodies that are in those mass graves, we only have one that's been exhumed, but the exhumation numbers are pretty darn close to what's on the mass graves identification project claim of what should have been in there. Now, Human Rights Watch, they interviewed people. They did, Alison DeForge, her collaborators and colleagues there, went around and interviewed people, refugees at the borders of Burundi and Tanzania to get estimates of how many people had died. We also have the Ministry of Education did a country-wide survey going house to house, asking people about what took place in large-scale massacres. The Ministry of Local Affairs, Minoloke, did a household census a few years afterwards and cataloged individual deaths. Ibuka is the Tutsi Survivor Organization, the indigenous group. They did an exhaustive effort in collaboration with the Ministry of Local Affairs and a fellow named Philip Verwimp, who was a professor at Leuven University, to catalog what took place in one of the 13 provinces. They did an exhaustive study there. Africa Rights Ages Trust and ICTR witness testimony. We used all of these pieces of information to come up with essentially a weighted average. We took the witness testimony. As I said, we had some 12,000 witness statements. We wrote software to go through and look for key words. We then had, once we had key words based on rape, killing or assault, we then assigned undergraduate research assistants to go through and document what took place at what date and what location. We use these as our start dates that I'll show you in a few minutes. What we do is we take all this information and our applied statistician tells us what we're doing is just the right thing. We have a very sophisticated weighted average. And what we do is we weighted by some pieces of information we have great confidence in. Other pieces of information we have less confidence in. And so then what we can do is we can come up with a range of estimates of how many people die, subject to assumptions. If we assume the Rwandan government's surveys are reasonably good, we can tell you what that number would be. If you believe human rights organizations estimates based on other methodologies, we can tell you what that number would be, okay? I don't think we're ever gonna actually know specifically what happened. But I do think that the Rwandan government for a variety of politically good reasons made a good faith effort to document what happened both at the individual household census level and at the mass graves level. And they came up with some pretty darn big numbers. Now, let's come up with some victim counts here. We'll start off with a set of assumptions. We start off with a population driven by the 1991 census. We have a population of about 7.6 million. Tutsi population in 1991 is about 650,000. Now, the question is how many Tutsis survive? Human rights watch estimated 150,000. That's from Girard-Prunier's estimate of 130,000. We've contacted Mr. Prunier several times. It's an estimate. It's a back of the envelope. I sat down, I thought about it. I'd seen a lot of things happen. I talked to a lot of people. It's an estimate. Ibuka has an estimate based on a 1998 count, household count, that there were 283,000 Tutsi survivors living in the country in 1998. Aids in a variety of other pathologies are endemic in this part of the world. So we say, if we take the survivor organization's estimate, we think that probably 300,000 Tutsi survived. Now, that gives us the human rights watch estimate of 500,000 conveniently. At least their math works out roughly. That's a good thing to see. Or if we use the survivor's organization estimate of how many people survived, and there's a reason they would bias it upwards, the fewer indigenous Tutsi there are that survived, the less claimed political control they have. So everybody here has a reason to fudge the truth. But if we use the Tutsi victims story, we end up with 345,000 Tutsi dead. That's a lot. And a significant proportion of those people that are dead out of that number died because their name was on a list. They were deliberately targeted because they were Tutsis of a particular ilk. So where does this leave us? Well, we have a bunch of different data sources that cover the whole country. The mass graves project identifies 800,000 victims. If we subtract the Tutsi victims, that gives us 490,000 Hutu dead. If we take the government census from the year 2000, we have about 900,000 victims, 570,000 Hutu dead. If we use the human rights watch estimates, we end up with a slight smaller figure. Ministry of Local Affairs estimates 1.3 million dead. We come up with an estimate of about 900,000 Hutu that are dead. Our base weighted statistical estimate, if we privilege some of the government information, we end up with an estimate of roughly a million people that are dead. 700,000 Tutsi, Hutu of victims. Now the key here is not that any of these numbers I think are right. I don't think we know. What we do know though, I think with almost complete certainty, is that the standard story of a bazillion Hutu and a few, a bazillion Tutsi and a few Hutu isn't true. Everybody dies in this story. There are no good guys. Now, here's the problem. Who's a Hutu and who's a Tutsi? This is the fundamental problem here. This is Juvenile, the late great Juvenile Habir Ramallah. He's a good looking guy. This is the President of Rwanda, Paul Kigami. Now, if we're thinking archetypes, if we're thinking, what is the sort of the ideal type Hutu and Tutsi look like? These two guys are them. He is Mr. Tutsi. This guy right here, he is the most beautiful Hutu if you're putting together a Hutu ad campaign. But the problem is, the degree of variation in Rwanda is extraordinary. In the 1920s and 30s, the Belgians put together a phrenology project. They wanted to, we found this in the archives of the National University. Christian and I spent a week there digging around just looking to see what was what. And it turns out, the Belgians had tried to put together a crude multi-dimensional scale of Hutu-ness based on physical measurements, weight, height, density, forehead, hair height, nose width, dozens of indicators. Now, it is true that there is a difference of means. They had hoped that the difference of means and the variance within the groups would be big difference of means, small variance. So you could give say, I'm 98% sure that you're a Hutu based on your physical measurements. Problem is, it turned out like this. The Belgians drop the phrenology model. Why? Because it didn't work. They tried for 15 years to come up with a way to identify these people through physical measurable attributes. And they failed miserably. It was not for Rwanda trying though. Now, who's responsible? Well, that's an interesting question. What we've got going here is, this is gonna be an animation of the movement of the RPF coming from Uganda in 1994. We've got a little calendar down here. This is April, May, and June. And what we did was, we started off with first, the Defense Intelligence Agency estimates as published by Alan Cooberman in his book. Then we updated those with the CIA's National Intelligence Estimates. We then took those and we made maps, daily maps. And then we took those and we gave them to Peter Irlander who took them to both members of the RPF planning group from 1994. And then he took them to the guys, the senior officers in the FAR who were all in jail. And he said, my colleagues have come up with these maps of where you guys were on these dates. And so we got corrections from the actual two militaries themselves. And we went back and forth iteratively. And then we have a consensus about, this is where the front line was, day by day, during this whole period. Now, one of the things you're gonna notice is, the RPF moves and fits in stars. This is not a continuous movement, okay? Now, they come down from the north. This is very much a sweep here. Over the course of two days, they cut off, this is a major road out of Kigali. They cut off the road to make sure that heavy equipment can't come out. They leave open assailant though, so that the Hutu can flee on foot. They then move down, and this is a large north-south road. And they take an overwatch position over the road. And then they sit and wait, and wait, and wait. Now, one of the things that we're gonna see is, they walk. Okay, Bill, you gotta remember, this country, this is about 60 miles across. From Kigali overland to here, is a two day walk, okay? This is think Vermont. Think hoofing it over Vermont with footpaths like Ireland and England. There are footpaths everywhere, okay? So by blocking the roads, they prevent the movement of trucks and equipment, but it doesn't slow down or bar the movement of individual people, okay? They can just, they can walk out. Now, the movement over here on the left, that was the French army, Operation Turquoise, coming in to save the folks. Now, what we're gonna see next is we're gonna overlay the killing data with the troop movements. We have up here, this is April 5th, April 6th. Purple is really, really bad. Pink is bad. The starting dates and the locations come from eyewitness testimony. This all comes from the ICTR testimony. The scale of the killing in each of these locations comes from the aggregate data from both the mass grads identification project and the household census conducted by the Rwanda government. Now, during this pause, there are negotiations going on in Kigali. Romeo de Lair says at this point to Paul Kagami, look, obviously the FAR is not gonna stop the entire Hamway. You need to do it then. Kagami's response according to Romeo de Lair is, no. I'm not gonna put any of my men's lives at risk. And so the process that the RPF follows is essentially the consolidation. They move forward and then they consolidate. They know what's going on, it's not FAR. Everybody knows in this country what's going down. But the RPF doesn't do anything to stop it. Now, one of the things that's of great interest is once the RPF moves down and occupies the land along this road between Ghitaram and Bhutari, they sit there. And you'll see there's a lot of killing that's going on not far away. This is a scale, this is zero to 60 kilometers. The difference from Ghitaram to Kabui is about 25 miles, less than the distance from Ann Arbor to Detroit. It's not FAR. These guys sit there. Now, through Peter Erlander, we interviewed some of the small unit commanders, lieutenants and captains in the RPF. And we said, why didn't you get just out of curiosity? I mean, you know, it's your country, but why didn't you guys do anything? Why did you just sit there? And their response was, well, actually we did. But all of the small unit leaders that took the initiative to cross over the line were relieved of command directly by Kagami. Kagami by this point has been told that the United States will intervene. Kagami then replies through intermediaries to Bill Clinton and says, if US troops arrive, I cannot guarantee that my troops will not fire on them. That was the point at which Bill Clinton said, screw it. We're not doing anything. The French come in. Now all of a sudden, the French arrive and the RPF suddenly manages to be able to move rather quickly. Over the course of four or five days, they're able to move across an area that they had sat and watched for close to a month. And that's the end of the war. Except that, then over the course of the next two years, another 150,000 people die in this area in the Congo when the RPF invades over here. How do people die? A lot of different ways it turns out. These estimates come from witness testimonies, both from the ICTR as well as human rights organizations that went around and deposed people and asked people what had happened in particular locations. These data are highly unreliable. But we do have some confidence that lots of people died in lots of different ways. Some of between 25,000 and 100,000 people probably died as a result of being explicitly named and hunted down and tracked. I interviewed a dozen people in prisons in Rwanda that were military commanders. And what they described was pretty horrifying. The political system they have there is built around the hill. 10 hills make up a commune, 10 sectors make up a district, 10 districts make up a province. It's a very sort of pyramid-based system. Every day, the local Nibbia kumbis in a political cell, maybe about 10 of them, would get together and they would share information of who was new into their hill and who was missing from their hill. These name lists would then be rolled up and twice a week reported to the commune leader. In this way, they were able to track the movement of people very effectively in and out of political cells across the entire country. I found this out personally. I was following a graduate student around. We were doing a household survey in southern Rwanda. And all of a sudden, a guy comes up to me and says, by the way, your driver's been arrested. And I said, oh, well, why would that be? And the guy says, well, because I think the local police chief wants to talk to you. And he doesn't want to walk out here. So he figures if he arrests your driver, you'll go find your driver so you can get back to where you want to go. I said, that's pretty clever. So I walked a couple of miles to the local police chief and the local police chief says, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've been following you for five days. And I said, how can you be following me for five days? I've been in a bunch of different political units here. And he's really angry because this was at the district level, the district police station. I didn't have a letter from the district level sous chef, the local chief. I had a letter from the presidential level all the way down to below the district, but I didn't have the district level. And he was very angry about this. But what I learned from this was, after being interrogated for several hours, a couple of things was very funny. The thing that got me out, I tried everything. I tried my driver's license. I got to the point where I lay out my US passport. The guy just like tosses in the side. And then I pull out my Dartmouth College ID. And he became fascinated with my Dartmouth College ID. And for some reason, that was adequate for him. But the thing that I really found with fascinating was how they had tracked me. And he said, every day, different people in his district would come and tell me that a tall white man has arrived in his district, told me every single house I had we had gone and interviewed. He knew exactly where I'd been for five days. Well, it turned out that when I interviewed people in prison, this is exactly how they tracked down people on the name lists. Roadblocks, a lot of people died at roadblocks. Roadblock would be a footpath with two trash cans and a stick across it. Roadblocks were manned by young boys between the ages of eight and 17. Most of these kids were stone cold drunk. The policy here was to bring to these groups of kids every night a Jerry can filled with banana beer. Now, we know that these places were terrifying because the handful of journalists that actually were operating during this period described coming across these roadblocks saying that they were absolutely terrifying. And these are essentially, these are white guys that are obviously not part of the problem. But the problem is you have armed kids drunk out of their minds that have been participating in during the day killing sprees. So anybody that shows up in the dark is subject to be killed. Now you might say, well, people had identification papers and everything. Well, it turns out they did have identification papers. They had a slip of paper. The identification card for these folks is a slip of paper. This is a pretty warm and sweaty place. Imagine a thin slip of paper being all that you have. It's not like a U.S. passport that's waterproof or anything like that. Mass killings we think somewhere between around a half million people died there. There's a lot of local violence. There's a lot of people that Stathis Kalevis describes this in his book about focusing on the Greek Civil War. There are a lot of grudges in this country, land grudges, personal grudges. Once the RPF invades, there is a total breakdown in civil authority. People do what people have done. Think about the English Civil War. Why does Hobbes go to France? Because it's nasty in England. RPF retribution killings we guess somewhere between 100 and 150,000 people died as a result of this. These are the air, the number of people that we estimate die in the areas where the RPF has solidified control after they've moved into an area. The RPF killed in the Congo externally displaced people somewhere between 50 and 125,000 people. Total death count ranges from somewhere around 600,000 to 1.3 million. So what are our best comparison cases? How might we want to think about this? Turns out what took place in 1994 is on the one hand simpler, but on the other hand way more complicated than the standard story. The simpler story is it was a civil war that went really badly and it just got totally out of control. The complicated story is there's a genocide, there's a politic side, there are people behaving beastly to their neighbors and family, all kinds of data-generating processes that we like to refer to them as a social scientist are going on. This isn't like the Holocaust. Part of it was. But that's not the majority of the deaths. This is like the Hundred Years' War, the English Civil War, the Russian Civil War, the Chinese Civil War. In all of these civil wars, millions of people die, some of them deliberately by the state, but a huge proportion of them as a result of the total and utter complete breakdown of order. The Lord of the Flies sort of rings true here. Now, February 7th last year, Spanish judge indicted 40 Rwandan Army officers, these are RPF officers. Uncharges of mass murder and crimes against humanity in the aftermath of 1994 genocide. Fernando Andreo of Spain's National Court City had sufficient evidence to implicate current Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, a long string of reprisal massacres. But he can indict Kagame because as president he has immunity. At the end of the day, at the cost of several billion dollars, the ICTR has now convicted some 30 genocide heirs. Taken 10 years, several billion dollars, 30 people are in jail. Interestingly, Christian and I have tried for years to get permission to interview the convicted genocide heirs that are being held in a prison in central Mali. In case you didn't know, that is probably the most God forsaken place on the planet. The UN refuses to allow us to see these people. They won't let us interview them. The story we've been told is these guys haven't been talked to anybody. They haven't let on anything. They haven't broken trust with each other and they haven't spoken to the UN about anything that happened. The UN is holding them in Mali with the promise of transferring them to a prison in the Hague so they might be able to see their families, all of whom live either in the suburbs of Toronto, Washington D.C. or Belgium. And on that uplifting note, I'll stop and see if you guys have any questions. Correct. Were they? And but then when I was watching your graphic, were they being largely killed by the invading, by false agamia, I guess, basically? Or are they being killed sort of during all the rest of the violence? It's Hutu on Hutu violence. A lot of it is. Yeah, our best guess is that a lot of the Hutu were killed by Hutu. Okay, so one of the things that happened, there have been numerous incidents of large scale killing, not on this size, but by any other country or place of the world, you would consider 10,000 people killed, a lot of people. And what had happened previously was that when violence would break out, people would move to municipal facilities, schools, community centers, churches, monasteries, and they would be safe in these municipal facilities. So when the violence goes down, people of both ethnic groups head to these places. Everybody's, in most of these places, when the Interahamwe shows up, the Interahamwe comes from another part of the country. The Interahamwe, they can't tell who's who. They just kill everybody, literally, okay? So we think, we don't know. I mean, this is the problem. There's no way to know for sure. We think that in these instances, this is where a lot of the Hutu die. A lot of Hutu die at roadblocks. And then there is a lot of Hutu on Hutu violence a la the Greek Civil War breakdown of order in civil wars that are neighbors stealing their neighbor's property. Neighbors going through and wiping out their neighbor's family, opportunistically. And so that's what we think accounts to this. Yeah, follow up? Yeah, I think about this kind of legalistically. But then that doesn't mean that there wasn't a genocide. I mean, I think genocide is sort of like a fairly narrowly defined crime. So we'd say that in this circumstance, Hutu on Tutti violence with the aim of wiping out the Tutti population in this particular place was a was criminal genocide. Absolutely. And Hutu on Hutu violence then is sort of like a separate issue. That's correct. And large scale retribution killings by the occupying force is again a crime against humanity, okay? So under international law, the RPF has responsibility to protect given that they are the invading force. They have a legal, and some people say moral, responsibility to protect people within the area that they control. And the RPF troops engage in large scale retribution killings. Yeah, one more. Last one, and then we're gonna. Last one, I'll shut up. Another part of sort of the Samantha Power story is that basically like the Ann Arbor Police Department could have intervened and stopped this thing. I mean, is that without too much resource expended by a modern Western army, we could have tried to crack this down pretty quick. Yeah, absolutely. So this is what motivated me to get involved in this. My military experience, I spent three years in the United States Special Forces. I then spent 10 years in the Army Reserves as a armor officer. One of the things that we did when I was in the Special Forces, we would actually plan, fix it down and draw detailed plans for how to go into a place and either take control of indigenous troops or stop them from doing what they're doing. And so the thing that I wanted to do was to say, well, you know, is this true or not? You know, how hard would it have been? So what we did was, Christian and I went to a bunch of locations where there were large scale killings, where 25,000 or more people died. And so we wanted to see how hard would it have been to defend those places if we sent, say, a squad of American Marines or members of the 82nd Airborne. And it turns out most of the places where the large scale mass killings took place, not all, but most of them, are in fact on open exposed hilltops with a single road approach to the hilltop. If you've ever been to the West Bank, kind of open rolling terrain, long sight lines. So we concluded, huh, well, it certainly wouldn't have taken very many people. It's a very small country. Blackhawk helicopter can carry 14 guys in their gear. So basically one helicopter load probably would have been, maybe two, would have been enough to secure many of the places where between five and 40,000 people were murdered. The problem was, and the United States had troops available to do this, there's a Marine unit in Djibouti that was ready to roll, 3,000 Marines. Kagami said he'd shoot on him. And that was the point at which the American president said, we're not doing this. This is crazy. The American people post Somalia have no stomach for American troops being fired at while we're trying to do the right thing. And so we did nothing. I don't think there's any question that within six days of this starting, people in the government in Germany, Britain, France, Belgium and the United States all were aware of what was going down and how this was gonna play out. The CIA's estimate before the plane is shot down is that between 75,000 and 150,000 people are gonna be killed in the violence that they think is coming. So they're off by a couple, a few 100,000, but they basically knew this was gonna happen. And they made a choice not to do it. Now the question then becomes, was that the right thing to do? That's a thornier one. Yeah, then we'll go ahead. You mentioned that there are, before the large-scale killing starts, there are kind of warning signs where there's crystal-marked high violence. And it seems that when this happens, there are people who just leave, that they can anticipate to some extent what's gonna happen, but others stay behind. Do you have an idea about who it is that leaves, who stays behind, but why some flee and why some stay behind to get killed? Because this could have a major impact on the overall outcome, like how effective that initial wave of part of violence is for clearing the area of potential. Yeah, that's right. People leave in 57 and 62 are members of the Tutsi elite. It's essentially the clan, a couple of clans that are descendants from Rabogiri. And Kagami is a member of this clan. The people that are left behind are the poorer, less well-connected Tutsi. No, they do not. No, that has been a common theme. Right now, she's working for the CDC. And I told her I was coming to yours to talk and kind of said your presentation. And she said, she's very skeptical, and they'd be skeptical. And right now, I just sort of want you to try to have you make a connection between what's happening in Kagami right now with their transfer from French to English and all the schools. And the fact that they seem to be kind of moving away from the French influence. The woman that was arrested in Europe, according to Caitlyn, my daughter, deliberately got herself arrested to bring attention to the French bias, the French connection with the assassination of the president, it's, can you highlight any of that connection? There's a bunch of different things there. Rwanda becomes during the Cold War, sort of like a, there's the US, Soviet communist capitalist tension, but there's also tension between former colonial powers, okay, and there's the Anglophone, Francophone split that plays out in Africa. The Hutu are backed by the French. The Tutsi are backed by the English and the Americans. The English speaking people that have been in Uganda, they win. Having won, they intend to turn Rwanda into an Anglophone country. They wanna drive out the French, they wanna drive out French influence, they wanna drive out the French language because the French have been backers of the Hutu. It is a not so subtle but defensible way of saying ethnicity doesn't matter. Most of the Tutsi and Hutu in the country don't speak anything other than Kenya or Rwanda, okay? So essentially a choice of language is a choice of which group of elites will be empowered. And what choice does an individual who has essentially aspirations for influence, wealth, or whatever in the future, what kind of choice, identification choice do they have to make? And the current government is framing this as you gotta choose to be amongst us and we are Anglophone Tutsi. Now the dilemma here is that the Kagami government, I mean clearly the Kagami government, they took control of a country by force, okay? So they invaded and took control. They weren't doing this to free the indigenous Tutsi. They invaded Rwanda to get Rwanda. They wanted control of this country. And now they have it, okay? So if we could sort of bracket how you feel about territorial conquest for a moment, personally I don't think it's a good idea but we'll set that aside. Relative to their predecessors, the Kagami government is doing a relatively good job, making things sort of making the trains run on time. At the same time they've received a ton of dough from the Europeans and the Americans. Several billion dollars have been transferred to these people, big checks have been written. The checks are being starting to be withheld. USAID money is drying up, Belgian money is starting to dry up, French money is gone, okay? And what we're starting to see as a result is an increase in authoritarianism in Rwanda. Rwanda today is basically close to being a totalitarian state. People's movements are monitored. Any room you go into that's like this or a bank or anything, there's a picture of Paul Kagami on the back. It's very Soviet. At the same time, they're maintaining order. When we went and interviewed the president of Ibuka, he asked us, you know, what are you doing? You guys are crazy. And we said, well, you know, we're truth seekers or something like that, some crazy story like that. And he pulled out a series of pictures and he said, you know, these are all the indigenous people that tried to do what you're doing. And we said, wow, those are great guys. Can we talk to them? He says, no, they're all dead. Kagami had all those people killed. Allison DeForge, to her great credit, recognized after a number of years that the standard story that she had put forward in a human rights-willed book probably didn't get the whole truth. And as a result of speaking out about the abuses of the Kagami government, she was barred access to Rwanda. I coincidentally met a woman in the education school at Berkeley. We're sitting on an airplane. I gave this talk at Stanford last year and I sit down and talk to this woman and she says, what do you do? I said, I'm a political scientist. She goes, oh my God, I just heard about this political scientist who gave the coolest talk about Rwanda. And I said, oh, that was me. And so we started talking about things and she says, well, you know, we used to do a lot of work in Rwanda but now they won't let us back. The schools have been purged. That over the last two years, she said that she, I've not been back in four or five years. But she said that in the last two years it's become an edgier place. One of the things that we learned, Christian and I, we interviewed a bunch of people. There's an underground Hutu power movement in Kagali in Butari. It's great. It reminds me of stories about the Soviet Union. It's run out of bookstores. And we would go through intermediaries and stuff. We'd get to meet these crazy little guys in the basements of bookstores and talk with them about what they wanted to see happen. And every single one of them said what we sort of euphemistically refer to people down in the American South with the saying, the South will rise again. These people believe the Hutu power party will return. And they're adamant about this. It's palpable. Yeah, sure. How volatile the situation remains today with her there, you know, isn't it? Yeah, sure, it's a moment. Actually, honest or not? Yes. It's one of these crazy things. It's a very safe place. It's a very safe place. I've traveled in not a lot, but a fair number of crazy dangerous places. And the amazing thing about Rwanda was when we were there, I went there three times, you could walk around at midnight, almost anywhere in Kigali and I felt totally safe. I never had any sense of unease there. Apparently that's not the case today, that this has changed. But there is not a great deal of property crime. Now, everybody that has any money is armed to the hilt. Everybody has their own private security guys with AK-47s or M4 carbines. All houses, everybody lives in a compound. Order is being maintained. At one point, Christian and I, we couldn't figure it out. We were walking around. We spent a fair bit of time there. We're like, you know, million people got killed. Not everybody dies. A lot of people hacked up. We're all the invalids. We couldn't figure it out. You would think with the degree of violence that there would be disabled people all over the place. You don't see any. And then we found them. They're kept in villages like leper colonies. They take them aside so that nobody can see them. And so we said, oh, well, there you have it. We couldn't figure it out. We're like, where are the really tough guys? You know, we walked around and we said, it seems like anybody that would be physically capable of hacking somebody to death is gone. Where did everybody go? And then I went to the prisons. And I saw literally tens of thousands of five foot six inch guys that looked like Laurence Taylor, the wine backer for the New York Giants. And I said, oh, that is my question. Everybody that could be a physical threat to the system has been incarcerated. So on the one hand, I think it's still actually a very safe place. So for the mom and you, you know, as long as she's not gonna be there for 10 years, it's probably a very safe place. It's sort of like the, I think an analogy that might work would be the San Andreas Fault. There's a lot of tension building up at the San Andreas Fault right now. There's an area, I was just watching this on, so if you say, you know, God, you people are geeks. Yeah, so I was sitting around watching the Discovery Channel two nights ago. And so apparently there's this area south of Los Angeles that's supposed to have an earthquake every 150 to 200 years, and that hasn't been one in 300 years. And they know underneath the ground how far things are out of whack with the surface. It's about 28 feet. And so they say, well, you know, at some point the surface is gonna catch up with the ground that's moving underneath. And I think that's true in Rwanda as well. The problem is, we don't know. You know, who knows when the big one's gonna happen outside of LA? It's gonna happen. I mean, it always has. You know, unless you think the world's gonna stop rotating on its axis, it's gonna happen. But people who live in Los Angeles blithely happily and go on and, you know, and ignore the fact that at some point it's all gonna come crashing to the ground. So as long as your daughter's there for a little longer, it'll be totally fine. I think we have time for, like, one more question. Yeah. Individuals that are in the president's modeling, in a larger sense, what are the largest outstanding research questions and how much longer do you plan to continue doing this work? Okay, so here's the question we wanna ask these guys. When I came to graduate school in 1988, we studied deterrence. Nuclear deterrence was the big thing. At the end of the Cold War, and we talked about throw weights and the size of the bus, and mirbs, and all this kind of great bombs and rocket stuff. But it was all about the threat to kill everybody to deter something terrible from happening. We know with certainty that the Hutu military in Rwanda, the FAR, began developing plans for the genocidal campaign somewhere between 18 and 36 months before it actually went down. People in the United States were aware of these plans. People in Rwanda were aware of these plans. The plans, basically, everybody knew that there was a plan out there to kill a significant proportion of the Tutsi. Now, the United States had plans for 30 years. The United States had a plan to annihilate the Soviet Union, kill everybody. And the whole idea of having the plan was that we planned to kill everybody so we don't have to. Paul Kagami knew when he invaded that there was a plan in place that was gonna lead to the death of somewhere between 50 and 500,000 Tutsi. He knew it. Everybody knew it. What I wanna know from these guys is when they hatched this plan, and I'm not sure who knows what they'd actually tell you sincerely or not, but I wanna ask the question. What were they thinking? If the plan had worked, would it have been a deterrent plan or did they actually really want to kill all these people the way Hitler did? In my comp, Hitler lays out a plan to get rid of all the Jews because he wants to get rid of the Jews. From conversations I've had with a small number of Hutu, prison and elsewhere, lower level people, their belief was that it didn't have to happen. They wanted control. And then once the killing started, they followed through with their plan in the same way that if a nuclear war happened between the United States and the Soviet Union, we would have followed through with the plan. When I was an undergraduate, I'd just come off a special forces team. Our job was strategic reconnaissance. The plan for us was that we would jump out of a helicopter and then walk to a railroad transload site in what is today Ukraine in the Odessa Military District. And we would put a laser beam on this transload site so an F-16 could come by and drop a nuclear weapon on that site. And when I was taking these classes in undergraduate and graduate school on deterrence, some of my professors said, oh, that was stupid. Nobody in the Army would be ever dumb enough to do that. And I said, well, actually, yeah, we would have for a variety of reasons, some good, some not good. But we would have done it. I have friends that were commanders of nuclear artillery batteries in Germany. They would have done it. So that the killing took place is not evidence that they wanted to do it. It's evidence that there was a real plan to do it. The intention of the plan, I think, is as yet unknown. It's an open question. And that's, from my perspective, somebody that studies deterrence, that is a fascinating question. Is the Rwandan Civil War a failure of deterrence? Or is it essentially another example of people should a red mine come? And there's a handful of people that have a diminishing lifespan that actually know the answer to that question. So I guess we'll stop there. Come to the other side.