International
KWIBUKA29, and the Mutation of denial of the Genocide against Tutsi
Each
year, As Kwibuka approaches, it has always been expected that the planners and
perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, and their fellow
travelers, will raise genocide denial, and attacks intended to further wound
the survivors, to fever pitch. This year, at Kwibuka29, with even more Western
allies behind their camp, they are not only louder still, but their tactics are
morphing into a more sophisticated campaign.
The
naked, overt hatred, so graphically exulted by Radio Television Libre
des Mille Collines (RTLM), still echoes through the
decades. With the advent of digitisation, however, it is metastasizing to every
corner of the world. Social media is saturated with it. But there is a
discernible change. The rabid hatred is painted in softer, even nuanced tones,
the better to be embraced by Western politicians, parliamentarians, academics
and of course media.
A
Belgian based organisation, JamboAsbl, established precisely to deny the
Genocide against Tutsi, and promote the Hutu Power ideology, is now worming its
way, slowly but surely into the Belgian establishment. Its leadership and most
of its membership, is composed of descendants of the leaders of the genocidal
PARMEHUTU (Party for the Emancipation of Hutu), and its even more extreme
offshoot, Hutu Power.
It
is an organisation that has everything needed, to be proscribed and shunned by
any decent person. Instead, some of its members are campaigning to enter the
European parliament. If successful, they will no doubt use the platform to
continue their hateful anti Rwanda diatribes, and to advance the PARMEHUTU
agenda. And their success is likely.
This
Kwibuka, one of their leaders, Gustave Mbonyumutwa, was boasting of the
invitation to his orgnaisation, to the commemoration of the Genocide against
Tutsi, and the murdered Belgian peace keepers. It is a grotesquely offensive,
cynical sham. An organisation whose entire reason for existence, is to deny
Genocide against the Tutsi, invited to pretend to commemorate the victims of
that genocide.
It
is the first time that any member of the organisation, which, like all the
adherents of the HutuPower ideology, who seek to deny the Genocide against
Tutsi, by promoting the notion of a “double genocide,” has been persuaded to
use the correct term, Genocide Against the Tutsi. It is undoubtedly a price
JamboAsbl felt was worth paying, in exchange for being recognised at an
official commemoration, in particular for the Belgian peacekeepers. With their
political ambitions, they could not be seen not to commemorate Belgium’s
murdered peacekeepers.
As
JamboAsbl, is given a platform to make speeches about a genocide it pretends
never happened, across the waters in America, another HutuPower ideologue and
genocide denier, Claude Gatebuke, disports himself, as a genocide survivor,
before a rapt American audience, at the Jesuit Loyola University.
“Our
stories of surviving the Rwanda Genocide are painful but powerful. Despite
perpetrators like Paul Kagame trying to silence us, we’ll never stop seeking
justice for ALL victims” he tweets, before inviting his readers, to “check out
over 100 authentic survival accounts in our book…” Like some slick salesman at
a bazaar, “check out our range of woven carpets…for you at the knockdown price
of…”
And
Mr Gatebuke is in every respect a salesman, although his wares are more snake
oil, and manufactured lies than goods. He sells himself as a survivor of
genocide. Note the “our stories of surviving genocide…” Not Genocide Against
the Tutsi, the only known genocide in the Great Lakes region of Africa, but an
imagined genocide he is trying to superimpose on the actual one.
There
are many survivors of this dreamed up genocide. They include journalist Venuste
Nshimiyimana, an important figure in setting up the hate radio, RTLM and
latterly of BBC Gahuzamiryango, and Voice of America (VoA).
At
the height of the genocidal murders in Rwanda, Nshimiyimana, was touring the
country, advising the genocidal leadership on the best way of increasing the
numbers in the Interahamwe militia. Gatebuke’s parents are fugitives from
justice, for crimes of genocide.
It
is clear that the quieter, more discreet Nshimiyimana’s purpose in claiming to
be a genocide survivor, is to create a story behind which he can conceal his
past. Gatebuke on other hand, is a tireless proselytiser for what has been
termed, Accusation in a mirror (AiM).
This
is defined as “mirror politics, mirror propaganda, mirror image propaganda, or
mirror argument…a hate speech incitement technique…AiM refers to falsely
imputing to one’s adversaries the intentions that one has oneself and/or the
action one is in the process of enacting…”
This
technique began early, at the planning stage of the Genocide against the Tutsi.
Listen to RTLM broadcasts, detailing the tortures and murders that were being
committed, which they attributed to the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF).
As
the propaganda arm of the planners and perpetrators of murders, RTLM
broadcasters knew the minutiae of these crimes, in a way that the RPF would
learn only later. Post genocide, the technique is making great us of digital
technology. So, Gatebuke becomes a genocide survivor, who refers to the then
commander of the RPF forces who halted the genocide, as a perpetrator.
Anyone
who has read Anjun Sundaram’s book on Rwanda, will not have failed to notice
this device. For him, the mass murderers who had fled to the then Zaire, now Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC), and were waging an insurgency against the RPF led
government, were the heroic rebels, fighting against the “repression.”
Similarly
in her much publicised book, journalist and writer, Michela’s Wrong, who, like
a number of other Westerners, has turned into a virtual HutuPower activist,
promotes the genocide planners and perpetrators’ audacious lie, that somehow,
it was the RPF that was responsible for the genocide.
The
motivation for the likes of Gatebuke, Nshimiyimana, JamboAsbl, in perverting
the truth with AiM, is clear. What is not so clear is why so many in the West
not only tolerate it, but support and encourage it.
Does
Loyola University in America, believe Gatebuke, when he postures as a “genocide
survivor” and President Paul Kagame, as a “perpetrator”? Do the BBC, and Voice
of America, believe Nshimiyimana’s claim that he is a genocide survivor?
We
are in the first week of Kwibuka, the 29th year of
commemorating the over a million men, women, and children, victims, of crimes
so harrowing, the human mind automatically shields itself from trying to
imagine them. The survivors of those crimes however, do not have that option,
they have to relive it all, and somehow find a way of keeping their minds, a
way to go on.
But,
if you expected that any decent person, would rally to the support of Rwandans
during this time, you would be sorely mistaken. One of the world’s major
newspapers, the New York Times, chooses this particular moment to give a
platform to Anjun Sunduram, to continue his obsessive diatribe against the
Rwandan President.
Longtime
director of Human Rights Watch, Ken Roth, chooses this exact moment of
remembrance, to rally to the Hutu Power campaign of demonising their perennial
hate figure, the Rwandan head of state, Paul Kagame. Loyola University, a
Catholic institution, invites a rabid genocide denier, a charlatan who claims
to be a genocide survivor, to address them on the genocide he denies.
Jambo
asbl, an organisation designed to carry the Hutu Power torch into the future,
is invited by the Belgians, to give a speech about the Genocide Against the
Tutsi, which they proclaim never happened.
Are
all these people, these organisations, and institutions simply misled into
supporting genocide ideology and genocide denial, or is something altogether
more pernicious at play?
To
put it in a way that Westerners will readily understand, it is as though on
Holocaust Memorial Day, major newspapers, journalists, academics, education
institutions, like Loyala University, were to choose that moment, to amplify
neo-Nazi campaigns to twist the truth of the genocide against the Jewish
people.
If
such a thing is unthinkable in the case of the Jewish Holocaust, should it not
be equally unthinkable, in the case of the Genocide against the Tutsi?