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Kwibuka 30: The uncalled for assault by Anthony Blinken was painful but… c’est la vie
On April 7, 2024, Rwandans,
and the whole world commemorated, for the 30th time, the 1994 genocide against
the Tutsi. On that day, Rwandans received solidarity messages from around the
world. While most messages were appreciated by Rwandans, some were controversial,
and sad.
The authors of such sad
messages adamantly refused to provide the clarity on the terminology of the
Genocide. One example being Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of State.
Blinken expressed the
solidarity of his government with the people of Rwanda “in remembering the
victims of genocide”, mourning “the many thousands of Tutsi, Hutus, Twas, and
others whose lives were lost during 100 days of unspeakable violence”.
As Rwandan President Paul
Kagame pointed out in his Kwibuka 30 speech, helpless Tutsi men, women and
children were left to be slaughtered by the authorities out of “contempt or
cowardice”.
Blinken displayed the same
degree of contempt as French President François Mitterrand did in the middle of
the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 when he said: "Genocide in Africa
is not a serious thing."
But would he have spread the
same message if it was the Holocaust? Would he have tweeted that; “The United
States stands with the people of Israel during the 90th Commemoration in
remembering the victims of the Holocaust. We mourn the many millions of Jews,
Nazi Germans and other Europeans whose lives were lost during five years of a
horrendous war”? Would he?
Rwandan survivors are hurting
but they shouldn’t forget that even their brothers in suffering, who are white,
the Jews, were not treated any better. Their sufferings and extermination were
ignored to the last minute.
Worse still, the same French
who aided and abetted the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, were arresting
Jewish families, women and children who had fled from eastern Europe and
Germany, to ship them to Nazi death camps.
In June 1939, a ship, the M.S.
St Louis, carrying 937Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, tried by all means to get
asylum in Havana, Cuba, but were rejected. They tried their luck with the
United States which closed all the ports of entry. They finally had to go back
to Europe to be slaughtered like Rwanda's Tutsi.
If Jewish people who are white
could be treated so inhumanely, what about the Rwandans who are black? To add
insult to injury, it is an American of Jewish descent who offended Rwandan
survivors. According to Blinken himself, his stepfather, Pisar, was the only
holocaust survivor of the 900 children in his school in Poland. It is
unimaginable how such a man would offend Rwandans on purpose.
The same level of contempt
directed to victims of the genocide is a way of life in the USA. Author James
Baldwin wrote that: “a black American recovers his humanity after dark in the
privacy of his home, and loses it again when he steps out of the house in the
morning”.
Research has shown that to be
a black person in America is a health condition fraught with depression,
stress, hypertension with all the attendant illnesses like diabetes, heart
diseases and others.
Who are Rwandan victims and
survivors if even US black citizen are not treated any better?
We live in a cruel world where
the principle of survival of the fittest applies. Rwanda has proven remarkably
that it can fight back and rise from the dead against the odds. It is pointless
to feel pity for oneself; you face the danger or get crushed.
Quoting the famed poem by
Alfred de Vigny, La mort du Loup (The Death of the Wolf):
Weeping or praying - all this
is in vain. Shoulder your long and energetic task,
The way that Destiny sees fit
to ask,
Then suffer and so die without
complaint."
Chris Harahagazwe is an English-French Translator resident in Nairobi, Kenya.
