Rwandan youth should not be bystanders to genocide ideology, deniers

Author: Emma Mukasa

• 2023-04-03 05:02:00

It is now 29 years since Rwanda rose from the ashes of the tragic history of the Genocide against the Tutsi.

The first genocide in the world’s history to be committed in a very short time, in a small territory, and perpetrated by neighbors and took the lives of over a million people.

Despite the country’s remarkable progress to unity and reconciliation, there are still people who continue to deny and distort facts around the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. They spread lies, divert the real cause of genocide in order to demonize victims and cleanse the perpetrators, many being their relatives or friends.

Genocide deniers target the youth – over 65 per cent of Rwanda's population – to propagate their genocide ideology.

They do it through social networking, taking advantage of the youth’s little knowledge or experience about what happened. Many youths were born few years before, during and after the Genocide.

The genocide ideologues hide their denialism agenda behind ‘activism to poison the young generation’s minds and weaken their ability to detect the dangerous re-emergence of a hateful rhetoric similar to what led to the atrocities in 1994.

Some unethical international intellectuals (academicians, authors, researchers and journalists) from different nations also joined them. They write books, articles and produce documentaries, portraying the 1994 Genocide as a civil conflict was not planned and blame the RPF for the Genocide.

They rehabilitate the image of the killer, advance the double genocide narrative, and question the number of people who were killed during the Genocide perpetrated against Tutsi. They are so determined to deny the facts and will leave no stone unturned.

Some of them include Canadian journalist Judi Rever who wrote a book, “In praise of blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front,” where she criminalized the liberators and purified the genocide perpetrators, British journalist and filmmaker Jane Corbin who produced a documentary film, “Rwanda's Untold Story,” and Edward Herman and David Peterson who labeled the RPF as the génocidaires, and called Interahamwe militia the RPF’s actual victims, in their book “The politics of Genocide.”

For the youth, such archives are poison. They should not accept to be vulnerable and swallow everything they hear or read. They need to learn Rwanda’s history, reading books that narrate the true history of Genocide, visit Genocide memorial sites and attend different discussions, so that they can be fully equipped to counter any misleading stories from genocide deniers.  

Knowledge is power, they say. And Rwandan youth should hunger for knowledge.

Since the 1960s, Rwandan youth were engaged in the process of persecution and segregation which led to Genocide against the Tutsi. Yet it’s the youth in the RPA who played a decisive role, fighting to stop the Genocide in 1994. They later allowed millions of Rwandans to return home, after decades in exile.

This time, Genocide deniers want to use them to sow seeds of division among Rwandans the same way Hutu power extremists did.

The youth must remain alert and not let any propaganda, fake information or distorted message about Genocide against the Tutsi, or Rwanda’s history, pass unrepelled.

Despite the suffering Rwandans experienced before and during the Genocide, today’s youth must have one mission. They must struggle to promote unity, protect what resilient Rwanda has achieved.

They need to fight anyone who wants to take the country back into the dark past it went through three decades ago.