In his June 17 "review" of our book The Politics of Genocide, for Pambazuka News,1 Gerald Caplan, a Canadian writer who Kigali's New Times described as a "leading authority on Genocide and its prevention,"2 focuses almost exclusively on the section we devote to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.3 Caplan s

Like Gerald Caplan's hostile "review" of our book, The Politics of Genocide, Adam Jones's aggressive attack on our response to Caplan can be explained in significant part by Jones's deep commitment to an establishment narrative on the Rwandan genocide that we believe to be false -- one that misallocates the main responsibility for that still ongoing disaster, but dominates by virtue of political interests and intellectual conformity.1 Caplan devoted perhaps 5 percent of his "review" to our book, and the remaining 95 percent to an attack on us for our treatment of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But Jones went Caplan one better, ignoring our book altogether (which at the time of his writing Jones did not appear to have read, despite his great concern with "genocide") while focusing on our response to Caplan. The result was a series of false accusations and emotional insults that -- at least in the latter case -- we had not seen in Jones's work before.