Anjan Sundaram, done. HRW, done. Concubine Michela Wrong, too. We Know Who’s Next?

 


The falsehoods. The fabrications. The Rwandaphobia. Ladies and gentlemen, join me in a rapturous welcome to the Genocide denial lobby unwilling to let us mourn our dead in peace.

The chorus we are seeing this week is expected. First, it was Human Rights Watch through the usual brands Lewis Mudge and his mentor Keneth Roth. Then came caste-traumatised Indian Anjan Sundaram via The New York Times. The latest, is the Patrick Karegeya pained concubine. She is definitely not the last.

The perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, their offspring, and their white backers, are running a well-oiled campaign to maintain the alternative “truth”.

The script is the same. Single out President Paul Kagame. Paint him as self serving dictator reigning over a powerless people, and solely responsible for the mess in Congo. However, those happily insulting Kagame, are quickest to petition Twitter or Facebook to ban people who come to his defense.

The other bit of the script is that “there was more” to the Genocide against the Tutsi. Such "massacres" as there had been involved both sides killing each other - the double genocide story, so any responsibility was shared; the Hutu "hate radio" station RTLM, in which many of the perpetrators held shares, was purely a "private company" that promoted free speech; and the interahamwe were mere "civil defence" units, defending the local population against foreign ("Ugandan") RPF invaders.

The third pitch of the script is the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kagame, so goes that page, with his army of Tutsis, are causing chaos in Congo so as to steal its minerals.

Indeed in some cases their virulent negationist views, promulgated at every opportunity at specially convened conferences, university campuses, media appearances and online, see them revel in the quasi-celebrity status, publicity and self-promotion that such denial gives them. As genocide has repeated itself so have genocide-deniers.

It’s a sad take on today’s world where denial of the most appalling crime (whether it be by the Ottoman state, Serbian nationalists, anti-semites, or Rwanda’s ethnic extremists and their ideological partners) seems more and more to go unnoticed by a public that tires quickly of, or is vulnerable to amnesia over, even relatively recent world events. Into such fallow - and fertile - ground, genocide denial can quickly take root: first revising the truth, then reversing it.

The facts about the actual situation in Rwanda, are left out, deliberately.

One of the lies goes that; Rwanda gets “proceeds” of “lively cross-border operations” that smuggle Congo’s minerals into the country. Of course Michela Wrong knows there is no smelting plant or factory in Rwanda for Congolese minerals. She chooses to leave out the fact that Congo’s minerals, or for that matter, Africa’s, keep afloat the world class healthcare she enjoys back home, and is the raw materials for the gadget she uses to type the fabrications.

The Foreign Affairs magazine, as with The New York Times, soon another diatribe, claim that from 2013 to 2019, “eastern Congo was relatively quiet”. It doesn’t matter that Congo’s own people and government know there are over 130 militia groups killing Congolese.

Within the Genocide negationists narrative, the terrorists, terror financers and those harbouring them, become the good guys. While the Genocide victims are the actual killers. In this line of thinking, confessed terrorism backer Pauk Rusesabagina and Congolese president Tshisekedi, are human rights campaigners, and victims of aggression. The deniers reluctantly speak about FDLR militia, minimizing its anti-Tutsi ideology.

Michela Wrong, the world knows, is not a credible source on Rwandan affairs. She pretends to be an independent observer, yet is an aggrieved woman reeling from the fact that her lover Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda’s former official, was taken away from her in South Africa. 

I can, with ultimate certainty, pinpoint to the next usual suspect to copy-paste Lewis Mudge-Anjan Sundaram-Michela Wrong. If it's not Ian Birrel, it’s going to be another usual culprit: the Flemish professor Filip Reyntjens who laid the constitutional grounds for the Genocide for Juvenal Habyarimana.  

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