Every year, supporters of the Hutu Power ideology and sympathisers of genocide perpetrators regrouped in a shadowy organisation called the International Women’s Network for Democracy award a prize dubbed “Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Prize” to individuals they deem to be in line with Ingabire’s genocide denial and revisionist agenda.

This phoney prize was created in 2011 by the International Women’s Network for Democracy and Peace led by Perpetue Muramutse, daughter of the grandpa of the Hutu extremist ideology, Dominque Mbonyumutwa.

She also created another prize for the youth called “Prix Jeunesse Engagee,” or “Committed Youth.”

The funders of this prize purport that its aim is to award a prize to any person or association promoting peace and reconciliation in the African great lakes region and educate its population on non-violent strategies of resistance and achieving change.

But looked at closely, it is a front for promoting genocide denial and revisionism, given the kind of recipients who have received this fantasy prize. They are all genocide deniers, or active supporters of genocidaires.

Ingabire herself was the first awardee. For the youth prize, the jury gave it to Ruhumuza Mbonyumutwa, son of Shingiro Mbonyumutwa, who was director of cabinet for the genocidaire Prime Minister Jean Kambanda. Ruhumuza is an active member of Jambo asbl, an organisation of the descendants of Rwandan tropical Nazis living in Europe.

Rwandans, and especially survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, never forget the call on Radio Rwanda by Shingiro during the genocide on the Hutu to exterminate the Tutsi for good because if the RPF won, it would rule over them for a thousand years.

The goal of Jambo is to minimize the genocide against the Tutsi by talking of a double genocide which also claimed, allegedly, the lives of thousands of Hutu. They infiltrated many media houses and international organisations which they persuade to promote their evil cause.

Placide Kayumba, another member of Jambo asbl, who is currently president of FDU-Inkingi, part of the P5 armed terror grouping, an offshoot of the Rally for Democracy in Rwanda (RDR) which was formed  by former senior officers of the genocidal army and some cadres who were at the helm of the mass-killings of Tutsi such as Charles Ndereyehe, a fugitive currently holed up in The Netherlands.

Kayumba is the son of a known mass-murderer, Dominique Ntawukuriryayo, who was sentenced for 25 years, for being a ringleader in the massacres of the Tutsi in former Gisagara Sous-Prefecture in Southern Rwanda.

On paper, the RDR pretended to fight for the refugees to return to Rwanda. But in reality it fought to bring back the same Hutu Power ideology behind the genocide against the Tutsi. Ingabire became its president in 1997, before becoming FDU Inkingi president from 2003 to 2006.

This award scheme was created to serve the RDR’s agenda and is little more than a cover for the transmission of genocide ideology from generation to generation, often in the same family.

The evidence is in the kind of people given the prize, members of the jury which determine who gets the “prize,” and people who present them. They inhabit a genocide denial echo chamber in which they reinforce each other’s prejudices.

In the words of Canadian historian and academic, Gerry Caplan, who has researched and written about Genocide deniers, they are people “who gleefully drink each other’s putrid bath water.”

Some of recipients of Ingabire’s award include, Judi Rever, a Canadian Journalist known for her close friendship with Rwandan genocidaires and distinguished haters of the RPF.

There is also Anneke Verbraeken, a Dutch investigative journalist, who has shown zeal in defending genocidaires such as Jean Baptiste Mugimba and Iyamuremye Jean Claude who were deported from The Netherlands to Rwanda to face trial on genocide cases. One of the recipients of the prize, Fred Holt (Norwegian) suggested that Ingabire “should be proposed as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.”  There is the family affair of Christiaan de Beule, and wife Martine Syoen. They run the SOS-Rwanda/Burundi website and are staunch supporters of genocidaires.

Other recipients include Cameroon-French polemist Charles Onana, whose genocide denial is well-documented, and Kenyan Lord Mutai who actively slanders Rwanda’s leadership on social media.

Two other notorious recipients of the same ludicrous prize are Canadian brothers, Robin and John Philpot.

In his acceptance speech on September 3, 2019, Robin Philpot peddled all sorts of genocide revisionism and denial conspiracies, including the shooting down of the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana as the cause of the 1994 genocide.

Robin Philpot claimed that 25 years on, we continue to wade through the same muddy lies about the shooting down of the plane yet, according to him, all the evidence is there to prove that it was the Rwandan Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame that shot down the plane.

Without any shred of evidence, he blamed the shooting down of the plane on President Kagame.

These laureates and the team awarding this so-called prize prove abundantly, that this prize is a front for propping up personalities linked to Hutu Power ideology and pro-genocidaires.

John Philpot, the 2022 laureate of this bogus prize is now an ardent advocate of the nine Rwandan convicts in limbo in Niger. He is working tirelessly to have them reunited with their families in the West.

His dedication to defending genocidaires is nothing new. Following the death of Col Theoneste Bagosora, the architect of the genocide against the Tutsi, in Mali in September 2021, John Philpot sent a condolence message to his son, Achille Bagosora.

It read: “Your father was a hero for Rwandan population.”  The main goal of this scheme is to make Ingabire a normal political creature, and to normalise genocide denial and revisionism.

The goal is, in the thinking of those who founded RDR, to make the world forget about their horrendous crimes and, instead, to turn the good people who stopped the genocide into mass killers.