Africa-Press – Rwanda. As usual at this time of the year, those with keen interest in promoting a revisionist history of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi have stepped up their activities. They are ratcheting up the noise to drown truth out.
Remarkably, this year the loudest of this group is France-based Jean-Luc Habyarimana, the son of none other than Juvenal Habyarimana, the former president of Rwanda who was the principal architect of the 1994 Genocide – one of the twentieth century’s worst atrocities. I say “remarkably” because of the shamelessness, and sheer lack of human decency it takes for the son of one of history’s great criminals to be out there, saying the things he does.
Jean-Luc not only is uttering propaganda to absolve his parents of their monstrous crimes, he actively is trying to tarnish President Kagame – the very person that stopped the genocide and other crimes against humanity authored by the Habyarimana regime. Habyarimana’s son, who has the support not only of the usual networks of deniers and revisionists of the 1994 Genocide, but also support by a couple of state actors within this region, has a louder megaphone than most now. He also has become a regular visitor to Kinshasa, as a guest of Felix Tshisekedi, president of DR Congo.
In his efforts at re-writing Rwanda’s history to fit his agenda (and that of his close backers), Habyarimana Jnr is partnered most closely by one of his cousins Antoine Mukiza, son of Protais Zigiranyirazo. That is the notorious “Mr. Z” who in the Habyarimana era sowed terror through extra-judicial murders, abductions or disappearances of regime critics, opponents, or anyone that posed the slightest threat to the financial interests of regime bigwigs.
Antoine Mukiza, like almost all Europe-based offspring of authors of the greatest crime in Rwanda’s history, works relentlessly to upend the truth. Their method is to utilize this period when Rwanda commemorates the 1994 Genocide as the ideal time to flood different media platforms with misinformation, disinformation, and outright falsehoods about that terrible time.
These people, and others from big families of perpetrators of the Genocide against the Tutsi fight tooth and nail to defend their ideology, and to delegitimize the Government of Rwanda. They have the help of organizations such as Jambo ASBL, a Belgium-based pseudo-NGO that exists to promote the genocide-denialist narrative that amplify their propaganda. They have the help of various sympathetic networks of which Western-based journalists, publications, or media houses, and now a couple of state actors within the Great Lakes.
Multitudes of writers, journalists, social media “influencers”, and “bots” are on the payroll of one of the aforementioned state actors, to disseminate the denialist narrative.
Their repertoire of tasks include: feeding a narrative that attempts to sanitize the authors or perpetrators of genocide, so as to render them innocent even as they attempt to turn the real victims into perpetrators. It is an old, failed playbook, but that has never stopped them trying.
Next in the deniers and revisionists’ list of tasks is to try to reframe history by pushing false equivalences. The most monstrous example of this is the “double genocide” theory – which was invented to smear the liberating Rwandan Patriotic Front with false accusations that it (RPF) too committed genocide, “against the Hutu”.
It is utterly ludicrous, but these deniers and revisionists know exactly what they are doing: which is to muddy the waters of truth, enough to at least cast doubts about the (current) Rwandan leadership in the minds of the not-so-well-informed.
They even have the audacity to call Agathe Kanziga a “wronged widow” whose husband was “assassinated by Paul Kagame”, trying to turn her into a victim.
This is the ultimate insult to victims and survivors, for this woman was the leader of the “Akazu” – the informal ruling clique in Rwanda during the latter years of the Habyarimana regime. Kanziga together with Theoneste Bagosora, alias “Col. Apocalypse”, who was in charge of the day-to-day affairs of the defense ministry, know best who fired the two missiles that brought down Habyarimana’s plane.
It occurred in a zone totally under control of their governments’ forces, right in the vicinity of the airport. But even then, whatever the facts of Habyarimana’s demise, why would it be reason to massacre over a million people?
What is indisputable is that in 1994 those that benefitted from the ideology of genocide calculated they could gain from the extermination of a whole community. They were the ones that used the death of a single individual as pretext to carry out the hideous crime planned in advance. Not surprisingly, now they are at the forefront of pushing revisionist, denialist versions of events.
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