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Revisionist accounts
The context of the 1994 Rwandan genocide continues to be a matter of historical debate. There have been frequent charges of revisionism.

A "double genocides" theory, accusing the Tutsis of engaging in a "counter-genocide" against the Hutus, is promulgated in Black Furies, White Liars, the controversial book by French investigative journalist Pierre Péan. One 2009 study of central and southern Rwanda, based on 8 months of field research in Rwanda over a period of 2 years, found, however, that the absolute number of Tutsis killed was double that for Hutus, and that the patterns of killing for the two groups differed. Jean-Pierre Chrétien, a French historian whom Péan describes as an active member of the "pro-Tutsi lobby", criticized Péan's "amazing revisionist passion".

Another person accused of genocide revisionism is the Montreal writer Robin Philpot, whom Gerald Caplan identified in a 2007 Globe and Mail article as believing that "many people were killed in 1994 by both sides making those who carried out the genocide and their enemies morally equivalent." He further charges that Philpot argued "[t]here was no one-sided conspiracy by armed Hutu forces and militias against a million defenceless Tutsi, he says."

In 2009, Christian Davenport of the University of Michigan and Allan C. Stam, the Daniel Webster Professor of Government at Dartmouth, posed the question: "What really happened in Rwanda?" The pair do not question that an anti-Tutsi genocide took place in 1994, but their investigation led them to conclude that "conventional wisdom was only partly correct". They argue that the genocide constituted only part of the slaughter of spring and summer 1994; that the RPF was "clearly responsible" for another major portion of the killings; that the victims were "fairly evenly distributed between Tutsi and Hutu"; that the majority of the dead were actually Hutu, rather than Tutsi; and that, "among other things, it appears that there simply weren't enough Tutsi in Rwanda at the time to account for all the reported deaths." They said that the whole truth, however inconvenient it may be for the RPF-led government of Paul Kagame, must come out. Davenport and Stam have been threatened by members of the Rwandan government and individuals around the world, and—despite their repeated and explicit statements acknowledging the genocide of the Tutsis—labeled "genocide deniers".

In October 2014, a BBC documentary, Rwanda: The Untold Story, was aired featuring interviews with Davenport and Stam and that suggested Kagame's RPF was involved in shooting down Habyarimana's plane. It aroused considerable controversy, as well as earning the ire of the Rwandan government, which banned the BBC's Kinyarwanda-language radio broadcasts from the country before conducting a three-week inquiry into the documentary. In November 2014, Emmanuel Mughisa (also known as Emile Gafarita), a former Rwandan soldier who said he had evidence that Kagame had ordered Habyarimana's plane shot down, was abducted in Nairobi hours after he was called to testify at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, "join[ing] a long list of Mr Kagame's opponents who have disappeared or died."

Revisionism and the Rwandan constitution
Under the Rwandan constitution, "revisionism, negationism and trivialisation of genocide" are criminal offences. Hundreds of people have been tried and convicted for "genocide ideology", "revisionism", and other laws ostensibly related to the genocide. Of the 489 individuals convicted of "genocide revisionism and other related crimes" in 2009, five were sentenced to life imprisonment, a further five were sentenced to more than 20 years in jail, 99 were sentenced to 10–20 years in jail, 211 received a custodial sentence of 5–10 years, and the remaining 169 received jail terms of less than five years. Amnesty International has criticized the Rwandan government for using these laws to "criminalize legitimate dissent and criticism of the government." In 2010, even an American law professor and attorney, Peter Erlinder, was arrested in Kigali and charged with genocide denial while defending presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire against charges of genocide.