On Saturday's front page, the LA Times explores in depth the allegations by a French court that Rwandan President Paul Kagame was responsible for shooting down the plane of his predecessor, Juvenal Habyarimana. I've touched on this issue a couple of times before. The downing of the plane, of course, was immediately followed by the Rwanda genocide, during which some 800,000 civilians were murdered, including about 3 out of every 4 members of the country's Tutsi minority. Kagame is a Tutsi, and like most of the members of his Rwanda Patriotic Front grew up in exile outside of Rwanda. The genocide was planned and executed by extremist leaders of the country's Hutu majority.

To be honest, I'm not sure that the allegations of the French court have any more validity than Oliver Stone's docu-fantasy JFK, which suggested that a vast conspiracy including Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the assassination of President John Kennedy. But what if Kagame did orchestrate the downing of the plane? I think that would raise two separate questions. The first is what it would say about Kagame himself. The second is what it would say about the Rwanda genocide as a whole. As to the first question, it would suggest that Kagame is a ruthless leader, willing to use violence to achieve his goals. That should come as no surprise. He was, after all, a leader of the RPF when it launched an armed invasion of Rwanda in October 1990. And he also ordered bloody incursions into the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996 and 1998.

But assuming that Kagame ordered the downing of Habyarimana's plane, does that change anything we know about the genocide? Not really. The inescapable fact of the genocide is that it was planned in advance and executed in a most determined manner by identifiable individuals, many of whom are being tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania. There was nothing spontaneous or organic about the genocide. If the extremists who planned and orchestrated it did not kill Habyarimana themselves as a signal to start the violence, as many believe, they undoubtedly would have found another signal. They were bent on mass murder in order to protect their own power and privilege, and mass murder they committed. The search for truth in Habyarimana's killing is important, but we shouldn't let that search obscure the truth of the hundreds of thousands of killings that followed.