Tom Ndahiro
Africa-Press – Rwanda. April 12 of every year has a paramount historic importance. On this day, in 1994, following the capture of the peak of Mount Nyarurama also known as Rebero by the gallant Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), the genocidal government led by Theodore Sindikubwabo and Jean Kambanda as the Prime Minister flew the capital of Rwanda to the town of Gitarama, currently in Muhanga District.
Thirty years later, the genocidal leadership has not returned to our country’s capital and shall never do. The RPA was fulfilling an obligation of preventing genocide on behalf of humanity. We can mourn, remember and commemorate because genocidaires were decisively defeated.
The betrayal of legal inheritance
After the end of World War II, the determined Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, sacrificed much of his life, to bring humanity to pay just that little bit more thoughtfulness to its better angels. To give a name to a crime that had been committed against European Jewry.
Lemkin ploughed a lonely furrow, but eventually managed to move the world into adopting the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Over 75 years down the line, is the world listening to him more than we pay lip service to the truths he wanted us to keep at the forefront of all that we do?
As always, the answer is a mixed bag. The murderers of the Jewish people are now clearly regarded as a stain on humanity itself. Their sympathisers, (for astonishingly, given the inconceivable, immeasurable gravity of their crime, they still have sympathisers), now have to look over their shoulder fearfully, before they utter their hate.
While we must stay vigilant, and avoid complacency, setting in, we must nevertheless celebrate the fact that neo-Nazi feel they must stay in dark corners. But a true measure of how far we have risen to Lemkin’s call, is our response and attitudes to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
The genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda began much, much earlier. Genocidal murders began in 1959, and continued up to 1994, when the so-called Hutu-Power establishment, unleashed their final solution, to what they still term today, the “Tutsi problem.”
If you wonder how an idea, like the final solution, found relevancy and meaning to a geographically small country in the heart of Africa, the answer is, it was brought by the very same people who had coined it in their intent to annihilate the Jewish people.
This horrendous crime in Rwanda, was committed by Rwandans, against Rwandans. It was fought and defeated by Rwandans. We as Rwandans must look to ourselves for that, and we do. But it should also be acknowledged that the ideology, the original sin, was sowed, and nurtured in the minds of some Rwandans, by the European colonisers.
Without Belgian colonisation, without the Catholic Church missionaries in the congregation of the Missionaries of Africa commonly known as the “White Fathers”, there would have been no genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda. It was not for nothing that we had the so-called Hutu 10 Commandments, that the Tutsi were supposed to be devilish, snakes, even before they were further reduced to cockroaches.
Double standards
But I digress too much perhaps. So, how is the world’s response to the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the true measure of how far we still hear Lemkin’s call to our humanity?
Because Rwanda is a small country with little influence upon the world. It is easy to ignore Rwanda. The Holocaust against the Jewish people, was a crime committed in the West, a most influential part of our world.
While the deniers of the Holocaust have to whisper in dark corners, the deniers of the genocide against the Rwandan Tutsi, do so in broad daylight, rewriting history before our very eyes, speaking at established universities, and often lauded by even supposedly human rights organisations, like Human Rights Watch. I read an article in The New York Times of April 6, 2023 which was full of genocidaires’ ideological undertones. This has been the case with the BBC, VOA, The Mail and Guardian…etc. This, without mentioning the YouTube, blogs and Twitter.
A retired American diplomat, Richard Johnson’s significant work titled ‘The Travesty of Human Rights Watch on Rwanda’ rightly say: What Human Rights Watch (HRW) does on Rwanda is not human rights advocacy. It is political advocacy which has become profoundly unscrupulous in both its means and its ends. It is easily found on the internet, and I highly recommend it, for anyone who is interested in this organisation’s stance on Rwanda.
On April 6, 2023 African Union, Peace and Security Council (AU-PSC) held an Open Session on Prevention of the Ideology of Hate, Genocide and Hate Crimes in Africa. With regard to denial in her opening remarks of this important event, Wairimu Nderitu who is the UN’s Special Advisor on Genocide, had this to say: “Denial or distorting the facts of the Holocaust, and the genocides against the Tutsi in Rwanda and in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina is an extreme form of hate speech that could itself constitute preparation for another genocide.
“Let us not forget that these revisionists and deniers are often diverting attention with these claims from their own responsibility in these crimes and that many perpetrators of these genocides including those who planned, ordered, and committed them, remain at large even as their victims and survivors wait for justice.”
Some academics and journalists will opine offhandedly, that there may have been a genocide, but it was more complicated than the rest of us say. This is of course, the voice of Hutu-Power speaking through them. Especially through gullible journalists. Others, imagine themselves clever—for having discovered this gem of information, little knowing that they were now handmaidens to mass murderers. It is easy to say this, because it is only Rwanda. No one really cares, except great souls like Lemkin.
Conclusion
The obfuscation, the muddying of waters is exactly what the planners and perpetrators of genocide intended, before they murdered their first victim. Note that none of the Hutu-Power enthusiasts will acknowledge that there ever was a genocide against the Tutsi. And all these work under the cover of being members of the opposition, human rights activists, humanitarians, etc…
Pick up any newspaper, or search on the internet, any media outlet, and they will tell you, authoritatively that in100 days, “about 800,000” people were murdered. Some will tell you, “500,000.” Rwanda knows the answer.
We know because we went household to household, and counted over a million. Sadly, this number continues to rise, because many perpetrators refuse to say where they threw their victims, and some families were entirely extinguished, so that no one was left to say if they ever existed. But Rwanda is to be dismissed, because they know.
Source: The New Times
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