Open letter to members of New South Wales' Parliament in Australia

To New South Wales Parliament, 

6 Macquarie Street Sydney, NSW 2000

Australia

Honourable MPs, I am writing this letter with serious concern after learning that your August House is scheduled to give a platform on 13/05/2021, to a dangerous group of genocide revisionists living in Australia. A Rwandan man known as Noel Zihabamwe represents a group of Rwandans living in Australia who not only deny the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, but also put forward the double genocide theory that I will explain to you, in case you are not aware. 

Remembering members of the Australian army who served in the United Nations Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in what was named Operation Tamar is, indeed, a noble cause. It is worth celebrating Australians who sacrificed all their personal comfort at home to come to the rescue of Rwandans in their greatest time of need. 

Honourable MPs, the Rwandan behind this event in the so-called Federation of Rwandan Communities in Australia (FRCA) and the Rwandan Association of Queensland (RAQ) uses your Parliament, each year, to hold an event they call “Rwandan Genocide commemoration”, which is in itself a form of denial and revisionism of the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994.

Whereas the UN General Assembly GA/12000, designated April 7, every year, as the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, this community in Australia keeps commemorating the "Rwandan Genocide," to which most of your members participate. By attending this sham event, it is an implication that you as honorable MPs become used as accomplices in propping up genocide deniers, revisionists and double genocide proponents. This is like adding salt to the injuries of millions of Rwandans who are currently commemorating the loss of their loved ones, 27 years ago.

Mixing the remembrance of Operation Tamar and what this Rwandan community in Australia wants to commemorate “to keep alive the victims of Kibeho Massacre, ” is dragging Australian MPs in a dangerous trap often used by genocide deniers who claim that in Rwanda there was a double genocide of the Hutu and the Tutsi. This is completely false and criminal to the Rwandan people and the international community that cares to know the reality about the horrendous atrocities that took place in Rwanda in 1994. 

According to Gregory H. Stanton, President of Genocide Watch, denial is the final stage of genocide that follows genocide. In this phase the perpetrators, among other things, deny they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims.  Honourable MPs, I am raising a red flag in case you were not aware so that these genocide deniers should be denied to use the Australian Parliament as a venue for events  meant to kill the memory as well as hurt the victims of the genocide against the Tutsi.

Honourable MPs, allow me to shed some light on the background of the man, Noel Zihabamwe, who is behind organizing this event. I know him well because we come from the same village of Mbazi in Huye District. He is the founder of the African Australian Advocacy Centre (AAAC), a well sounding organization but with a dangerous agenda of genocide denial and sponsoring terror activities meant to destabilize Rwanda. Zihabamwe and his wife Delphine Uwamwiza confuse people by calling themselves genocide survivors yet the truth is that they are not. They do so to attract sympathy and get funds from unsuspecting Australians to fund their dubious ‘human rights’ activities.  

Noel Zihabamwe has been going around spreading rumours in the Australian media alleging that Rwanda’s security agencies abducted his siblings and they may have been killed. He in fact is not a refugee as he claims to be. He left Rwanda in 2000 on a Rwanda Government scholarship to attend university in Australia. According to available information, he went to study using his real birth name of Noel Yandamutso. But when the duration of his university course was over and he was supposed to return home, he did not. He then changed his name to Noel Zihabamwe.

That is when he began forming various organizations and   activities as a supporter, fundraiser, and propagandist for the anti-Rwanda terrorist group, the Rwanda National Congress (RNC). Australian authorities can easily trace his change of identity through immigration records. In a similar fashion like other genocide deniers elsewhere, he poses as a human rights activist and defender by associating himself with the Australian Human Rights Institute, a ticket that he uses to advocate for the remembrance of “Kibeho massacres,” as a reference to a second genocide in Rwanda that never happened.

It is also disturbing to note that one of the speakers on the list is Mr. Theophile Habarimana, another well-known genocide denier and financial mobiliser for the RNC. As a matter of fact, his relationships with leaders of this group that has carried out terrorist attacks on Rwandan soil is well known.

Millions of Rwandan citizens condemn any subterfuges used by a section of the Rwandan community to hold such a commemorative event with a clear mission of peddling genocide denial and revisionist.

Finally I appeal to you, Honourable Members of the Australian Parliament, to use your good judgment and abide by the internationally agreed upon commemoration of the Genocide against the Tutsi. There was no Rwandan genocide, neither is there any function called “to keep alive the memory of the victims of Kibeho Massacre” worth to be attended by Honourable MPs of Australia, a country that enjoys warm and cordial bilateral relations with Rwanda.

The connotations of Rwanda genocide and remembering Kibeho massacres are known code words with hideous motives used by double genocide proponents and deniers.

For the commemoration event in the name of “to keep alive the memory of the victims of Kibeho Massacre” to be sponsored by the Australian government’s department of Veteran’s affairs implies that the Australian government firmly recognizes that there was a double genocide in Rwanda and sides with the genocide deniers behind organizing the event.

Honourable MPs, I humbly request you to disassociate yourselves from the genocide denial agenda being spread in Australia by Noel Zihabamwe together with his associates. Genocide is a crime against humanity. Genocide deniers should not be given a platform in the same way Holocaust deniers cannot be entertained in the Australian Parliament.  

Sincerely,  

Grace Mukandoli

Concerned Rwandan citizen

CC:

Rwanda High Commissioner to Australia resident in Singapore

Rwanda Minister of Foreign Affairs

The Rt.Hon. Prime Minister  of Australia.