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Claudine Vidal - 05:51
à Democracy_Human_Rights
Smith n'est plus journaliste mais enseignant dans une université
américaine. Voici en attaché un article relativement récent sur le
Rwanda - Rwanda in six scenes- publié dans la London Review of Books.
Cl.V.
London Review of Books, Vol.33, No.6, 17 March 2011, Stephen W. Smith,
"Rwanda in Six Scenes", pages 3-8
Stephen W. Smith teaches African studies and cultural anthropology at
Duke University. He is a former Africa editor of Libération and of Le
Monde.
Vol. 33 No. 6 · 17 March 2011
pages 3-8 | 5765 words
Rwanda in Six Scenes
Stephen W. Smith
A number of memories connected with Rwanda play in my mind like scenes
from a movie, although I don't pretend they add up to a film. In 1994
a genocide was committed against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda. All
else about this small East African country, 'the land of a thousand
hills', is open to question and, indeed, bears re-examination.
'Freedom of opinion is a farce,' Hannah Arendt wrote in 1966 in 'Truth
and Politics', 'unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts
themselves are not in dispute.' The problem with Rwanda is not only
that opinions and facts have parted company but that opinion takes
precedence.
The first scene: I'm walking beside Paul Kagame, the current president
of Rwanda and then a rebel leader, past low picket fences and small
prefabricated houses in a residential suburb of Brussels. It's cold
and our breath mingles in the air as we speak. Kagame is swaddled in a
thick coat. Even so, he remains a spindly figure with a birdlike face.
I can't warm to him, but I know him well enough by now to hazard the
question that has been preying on my mind for a while: 'Why is it
always you, the vice-president, whom I meet when I have dealings with
the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and not Alexis Kanyarengwe?' Kanyarengwe
was the movement's president. 'Don't worry,' he chuckles. 'You're
seeing the boss. Kanyarengwe is only our front man. You'd be wasting
your time.'
This was in 1992. The RPF had been set up in 1987 in Uganda by Tutsi
exiles. Kagame's parents had fled with him to Uganda when he was four.
At the time of our meeting in Brussels, Kagame was avoiding the
French. A few months earlier, in 1991, he'd just returned to his hotel
near the Eiffel Tower from a meeting with officials at the Elysée when
the French police called him in for interrogation. They were inquiring
into a murky incident that was never entirely elucidated. Police
sources claimed that members of Kagame's delegation were 'roaming
around town with bags full of cash to buy weapons'; Kagame claimed the
police were trying to discredit him. Tensions were running high
between the rebel movement and France. The French were providing
military support - 150 soldiers, later increased to 300, plus
significant arms shipments - to the Hutu-dominated Habyarimana regime
in Kigali, which the RPF was fighting to overthrow. Rwanda was a
former Belgian colony, with eight million subsistence farmers jostling
for a livelihood in a territory smaller than Haiti, and with little in
the way of mineral wealth. It was a place where France felt obliged to
assert itself as a tutelary power in Africa, if only to maintain its
credibility as a guarantor of its local 'friends' and protégés and to
defend 'la Francophonie' in Rwanda against the RPF, which operated
from English-speaking Uganda. As for Kanyarengwe, the RPF figurehead,
events would soon show that Kagame was telling the truth: he, Kagame,
was the main man of the insurgency. Kanyarengwe, the nominal leader,
was a Hutu defector: as head of the Rwandan secret services, he had
helped Habyarimana to power in a coup d'état in 1973, but they later
fell out and in 1980 he fled Rwanda. Ten years later - and two months
after the RPF's military campaign was launched from Uganda - Kagame
offered Kanyarengwe the helm of the rebel movement to deflect the
charge that the RPF was a Tutsi organisation. Kanyarengwe accepted in
order to spite Habyarimana.
In the 1990s I was the Africa editor of the French daily newspaper
Libération. The combination of the paper's independence from the
notorious Franco-African networks and my US passport represented
Kagame's best chance of an unbiased hearing in France, where
government officials routinely referred to his rebel forces as the
'Khmers noirs'. At the time, French public opinion made short shrift
of small-scale military interventions in Africa. In June 1992 I
alerted readers to what the
Libération
headline called 'The Elysée's Secret War' in Rwanda - a deployment
which had not been debated in parliament and had received almost no
attention. In May 1993, 11 months before the extermination of the
Tutsis began, I warned that 'genocide' was looming. But I also fell
victim to the RPF's manipulation of the press: I wrote about the
supposed activities of the so-called Zero Network - presidential death
squads - as well as the
akazu, literally the 'small house', said to be the command structure
responsible for pre-genocidal killings of Tutsis. Habyarimana's
in-laws were said to run the
akazu
and while I didn't accuse President Habyarimana himself, I did point
an incriminating finger at his wife, Agathe, and her brothers,
accusing them of organising massacres of the 'Tutsis of the interior',
as the oppressed minority inside the country was known. It was their
way of retaliating against the Tutsis of the diaspora who had invaded
the country from Uganda.
There were indeed massacres of Tutsis before the genocide - but they
were organised by other people and at different levels of the state
apparatus. Today, with hindsight, I know that the Zero Network didn't
exist and I've come to refer to the
akazu, which continues to be used as a default category in
journalistic and academic writing, as
au cas où
- French for 'in case' - as in 'in case we find no master plan for the
genocide in Rwanda'. I can't say whether there was or wasn't a master
plan for the extermination of the Tutsis, some Rwandan equivalent of
the Wannsee Conference. Historians must lay that question to rest';
the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the special UN
court based in Arusha and charged with trying genocidal planners and
killers, has found no one guilty of 'conspiracy to commit genocide'
since it started its proceedings 16 years ago.
The Zero Network was first mentioned in an open letter published in
1992 by another defector from the Habyarimana regime, Christophe
Mfizi, who had been the head of the government's propaganda office in
Kigali. As he later explained, he was anxious to avoid a libel suit.
So he used 'Zero' as a way of fingering Agathe Habyarimana's brother,
Protais Zigiranyirazo, the prefect of Ruhengeri, the presidential
family's home province. Without giving his full name, Mfizi accused
'Mister Z' of running a network of hit squads, a charge a Rwandan
journalist called Janvier Afrika wrote up in elaborate detail the
following year.
Afrika has since recanted his testimony, explaining in similarly
abundant detail how it was suggested to him by the RPF. Whether or not
this is true, it's perhaps significant that he recanted only after the
RPF had taken power in Kigali, in November 1994, by which time he had
fallen foul of the new regime. He fled to Cameroon, where I lost his
trail in 1998. The ICTR has never summoned him as a witness. For his
part, Mfizi obtained political asylum in France in September 1996,
having resigned as the RPF's first ambassador to Paris. Ten years
later he submitted an exhaustive report on the Zero Network - nearly
50,000 words - at the request of the ICTR's Office of the Prosecution.
He repudiated the term
akazu, which, he wrote, could not take the measure of 'the political
reality, and even less so the criminal reality ... of the period between
1980 and 1994'. However, he reiterated his accusations against
Zigiranyirazo, whom he now named, although his evidence did not bring
a conviction: in November 2009, 'Mister Z' was acquitted on appeal by
the ICTR.
*
The second scene etched on my memory is set in a sombre living-room
with a low ceiling 40 kilometres south of Paris. It is 1998; I'm
sitting on a couch opposite Agathe Habyarimana, now the widow of the
former Rwandan president, whose plane was shot down on 6 April 1994,
triggering the genocide. Photographs of the slain general cover the
walls. Next to Mrs Habyarimana, now in her mid-fifties, sit four of
her eight children: Jeanne and Marie-Merci; Léon and Bernard. I've
been seeing Bernard for some time and he has persuaded his mother to
meet me on her return to France after two years in Gabon. There are
many grandchildren underfoot; eventually they're banished from the
room.
What do you ask 'the Lady Macbeth of the Rwandan genocide', as Philip
Gourevitch called her? How do you approach a conversation with someone
who's been portrayed as the latter-day incarnation of a legendary
sorceress in Rwandan dynastic history? Or as the ultimate 'Hutu power'
extremist, who some believed was behind the assassination of her own
husband for accepting a power-sharing agreement - the Arusha Peace
Agreement signed in August 1993 - with the Tutsi rebel movement? What
can you say to someone who's generally presented by journalists, human
rights activists and academics as the engineer of the 1994
extermination campaign? I ask myself a simpler question: would her
grown-up children huddle around her if there were grounds for
suspicion that she conspired to murder their father?
Agathe Habyarimana recounts what she saw in Rwanda during the
genocide, from the moment she and her family heard the explosion of
the presidential jet, which was hit by a missile right above their
heads at 8.25 p.m., with debris raining into their garden, until her
evacuation by the French army three days later. 'We collected the body
parts and gathered them on plastic sheeting or carpets. We were able
to identify my husband, Elie' - she's referring to one of her
half-brothers - 'and several other members of the delegation. But our
efforts were hampered as we were under constant gunfire. I didn't
speak to any civilian or military authority, still less issue orders.'
In addition to her only brother, 'Mister Z', Agathe Habyarimana had
two half-brothers. Elie Sagatwa was one of them; he was also her
husband's private secretary. If the
akazu
really was the nerve centre of the genocidal project kick-started by
the president's assassination, would Sagatwa and his sister have
hatched a plot that involved Sagatwa's own death, in order to kill a
man they were both intimate with, and could easily have eliminated in
some other, simpler way?
A few months and several meetings later, I published an interview with
Agathe Habyarimana in
Libération. The interview was a scoop, but the prospect of providing a
platform for a notorious
génocidaire had prompted a ruckus in the newsroom. One of my
colleagues had described my piece as 'revisionism'. I told the
editor-in-chief that I was always eager to revise what I or others had
got wrong and suggested my colleague should write a profile of Agathe
Habyarimana containing all the incriminating facts he could muster,
which could be printed alongside my interview. After ten days, the
face-off ended with a bad compromise. There wouldn't be a profile but
my interview had to be kept short. So in fewer than a hundred words,
headlined 'I'm not afraid of the truth,' Mrs Habyarimana said that she
was ready to appear before the ICTR at any time, that the
akazu was a portmanteau word, a term of convenience, and that her son
Jean-Pierre had never been a 'pal' of Mitterrand's son,
Jean-Christophe, who was his father's Africa hand at the Elysée in the
1980s and early 1990s. 'So much has been invented without ever giving
me a fair chance to reply.' That was the only sentence I felt
uncomfortable about publishing.
In the same year, 1998, the French judiciary opened an investigation
into the downing of Habyarimana's plane at the request of relatives of
the French crew members who had died in the crash. This marked the
beginning of a long legal tug-of-war between Paris and Kagame's RPF
regime in Kigali. Relations between the two reached their nadir in
November 2006, when a French judge issued international arrest
warrants for nine key members of Kagame's entourage. Rwanda severed
diplomatic ties with France. Much was written about the
self-aggrandising investigative magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, and
about France's hostility to the RPF regime. The Spanish judiciary,
widening an investigation into the murder of some Spanish
missionaries, reached even more grievous conclusions. In 2008, a judge
in Madrid, Fernando Andreu Merelles, issued international arrest
warrants for 40 RPF leaders on counts of 'acts of genocide, crimes
against humanity, war crimes and acts of terrorism'. The Rwandan
leaders, first among them Paul Kagame, were held responsible for 'the
attack on the life of President Juvénal Habyarimana ... with a view to
preparing the final offensive to seize power and to create a situation
of civil war'.
The Kagame regime fought back. In August 2008 it accused France of
having played an active role in the 'preparation and execution of the
1994 genocide', and threatened to issue 33 arrest warrants targeting
French politicians, including three former prime ministers - Balladur,
Juppé and Villepin - and the army top brass. Since then relations have
improved; France and Rwanda restored diplomatic ties towards the end
of 2009. In February 2010, President Sarkozy spent four hours in the
Rwandan capital to seal the reconciliation. He admitted to France's
'errors' and, more specifically, 'a form of blindness when we failed
to discern the genocidal dimension' of the Habyarimana regime.
Speaking about the génocidaires.
still at large on French soil, he mentioned the government's decision
to refuse asylum to 'one of the persons concerned' - a transparent
reference to Agathe Habyarimana, whose request had been definitively
rejected by the Conseil d'Etat four months earlier. Only days after
Sarkozy's return to Paris in March, she was briefly taken into custody
as a result of an international arrest warrant issued against her by
Kagame's government in October 2009. It was an event staged for the
media. She was released the same day on condition that she report
regularly to the police. Nine months later, in December 2010, a formal
request for extradition had still not been submitted by the Rwandan
judiciary.
The rejection of Agathe Habyarimana's asylum request in France was
largely based on
akazu-linked charges brought against her brother before the ICTR. The
ruling was made a month before the ICTR acquitted Protais
Zigiranyirazo. As for Mrs Habyarimana's surviving half-brother,
Séraphin Rwabukumba, both the UN tribunal and the courts in Belgium,
where he lives, have abandoned proceedings against him. It's just
possible that the
akazu was a women-only conspiracy, or that Agathe Habyarimana acted on
her own. But if so, why hasn't the ICTR indicted her? And why did the
RPF regime wait 15 years before issuing an international arrest
warrant in 2009? It could be that there are simply no legal grounds
for prosecution, or that Rwanda's tardy arrest warrant was just a way
of intensifying the pressure on France. It could also be that no one -
least of all the RPF leadership in Kigali - is interested in a trial
in which the downing of Habyarimana's jet in 1994 would inevitably
come under scrutiny.
*
A third scene, May 1994: I reach Butare, the biggest town in southern
Rwanda, by car from neighbouring Burundi. On the way, I'm stopped at
numerous Hutu roadblocks. The barriers are manned mostly by young
people with clubs, hammers or machetes. At one, a small boy is holding
a nail-studded cudgel with tufts of bloody hair. The smell of
putrefying bodies by the roadside is sickening. The starter of my
dilapidated car is defective and the militiamen lay down their weapons
to give me a push. Being French - or French enough - I'm regarded as a
friend. 'Vive la France!' They wave their hands, which I'd just shook,
as I make for the next roadblock.
In Butare, the Catholic bishopric is a safe haven. The priests allow
me in and provide me with a room for the night. From my window, I can
see the imposing red brick cathedral built by the Belgians just across
the street. I walk over there, knock at the presbytery door, stay for
a while and then return to my room. The last surviving Tutsis in
Butare hiding out in these two buildings, the cathedral and the
bishopric. Whichever of the two they're in, they believe the one
across the street is 'safer'. A young woman in tears begs me to hide
her in the boot of my car and drive her out of the country. 'I really
can't. We wouldn't even reach the edge of town.' 'You want me to die.'
Throughout the night, I hear noises in the streets - drunken
militiamen - and also above my head, when from time to time the Tutsis
hiding in the double ceiling drag their numb bodies across the floor
in an attempt to stretch or get a breath of fresh air. Twice in the
night, furious fists batter at the wooden entrance door and coarse
voices vow to return in search of 'cockroaches'. When they finally go
away, the ceiling weeps.
In the morning, over breakfast, I talk to the priests. They're
prepared to die with their 'guests' at the hands of the militia; they
describe the militia as 'God's children who've lost their way'. I
don't like to leave without a modest offer of hope. 'The RPF is
advancing rapidly. Soon they'll reach Butare, and it'll all be over.
Just hold out for a few more days!' I stare into bitter smiles.
'That's no solution,' someone says. 'Why not?' 'Because they'll kill
us.' 'But why on earth would they want to kill you? You've stuck
together, Hutus and Tutsis!' 'Precisely for that reason.' I drive away
dispirited and bewildered. It'll take me a long time to grasp that,
for many of the exiled Tutsis who are now returning, especially the
generation raised or born abroad, the genocide is not only what
happened over the hundred days between April and July 1994, but an
entire history of violence, discrimination and hardship that began
with the so-called Social Revolution of the Hutus in 1959. In their
eyes, Hutus and Tutsis can't live together on equal terms because,
unless the minority keeps the majority in check, Tutsis will always be
humiliated or killed. To pretend otherwise, as the 'Tutsis of the
interior' did when they stayed in the country after 1959, is to betray
the dead among your kith and kin.
*
A change of location: Nairobi, February 1996, two years into the new
RPF dispensation in Rwanda. As I speak to Seth Sendashonga, his vivid
eyes are glazed with sadness. I have just spent several weeks in
Rwanda, and have returned bearing notepads full of crimes. It isn't as
if he doesn't know what happened: on the contrary, I'd leaned heavily
on Sendashonga's contacts in Rwanda. In 1991, when he joined the RPF,
Sendashonga was the only eminent Hutu-turned-rebel who was not a
defector from the Habyarimana regime. He undertook to rewrite the
rebels' political platform, to explain to the children of exile what
the land of their fathers was like and, more important, to build
bridges with opposition parties in Rwanda. 'Our agenda is not revenge
but true democracy,' he assured them. Under the new regime,
Sendashonga became Kagame's minister of the interior. But he could not
accept the RPF's reprisals for the genocide, including planned
massacres and systematic killings. Kagame failed to respond to any of
the 700 letters documenting abuses which Sendashonga sent him.
Eventually, Sendashonga had to face the fact that he was only another
front man. Six months before we met in Nairobi, he resigned and went
into exile.
Poring over a table strewn with papers, Sendashonga and I compare two
independent lists of people killed in Gitarama province, central
Rwanda, during the first 11 months after the RPF took power. We move
forward line by line, name by name, address by address, cross-checking
dates. One list has been compiled by parish priests throughout the
prefecture; the other established at neighbourhood level for 11 of the
17 communes in Gitarama. The two lists largely tally. The first
comprises about 25,000 dead, the second 17,000. Assuming RPF reprisals
were equally severe everywhere in Rwanda this leads to an extrapolated
figure of 150,000 people killed between July 1994 and April 1995 in
the entire country. Based on research completed in August 1994 in 41
of the 145 Rwandan communes, Robert Gersony, a UNHCR consultant,
estimated that 'between 25,000 and 40,000 persons' were killed during
the first 100 days of RPF rule. The Gersony report - in fact just
briefing notes - was leaked to the press. Under intense pressure from
Kigali and its allies, the UNHCR went on the record denying its
existence. No Gersony report, no dead.
In February 1996, Libération published my investigation into the
killings allegedly committed by the post-genocide regime. I estimated
that 'more than 100,000' Hutus had been murdered during the RPF's
first year in power.
Libération also published an interview with Gérard Prunier, a
specialist on the Great Lakes region, and the eyewitness account of a
Rwandan nurse who had described to me two sites where he claimed he
had been forced to work: one near Kigali where, he said, prisoners
were put to death (their skulls were crushed), and another in a game
reserve, the Akagera National Park, where scores of Hutus were
cremated. There wasn't much of a reaction to the dossier, though the
Rwandan embassy in Paris issued a strongly worded denial. The wire
services picked up the story but it disappeared very quickly. It was
just a sour note in a concert.
Seven months later, in October 1996, the Rwandan army dispersed the
Hutu camps in eastern Zaire, today's Democratic Republic of the Congo.
More than a million Hutus streamed back into Rwanda, while 300,000
fled deeper into Zaire. Of that 300,000 nearly two-thirds died over
the next six months, according to a field study by Médecins sans
frontières. They were killed or died of disease, exhaustion and hunger
as they made their way across the African interior. The UNHCR spoke of
'crimes against humanity', but, again, there was hardly any response.
Twelve years later, in August 2010, a fresh investigation by the UN
put the number killed at 'probably in the several tens of thousands':
The extensive use of edged weapons (primarily hammers) and the
apparently systematic nature of the massacres of survivors after the
camps had been taken suggests that the numerous deaths cannot be
attributed to the hazards of war or seen as equating to collateral
damage. The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly
people and the sick ... the apparent systematic and widespread attacks
described in this report reveal a number of inculpatory elements that,
if proven before a competent court, could be characterised as crimes
of genocide.
The new regime in Kigali went after Sendashonga in exile. In 1996, the
day before
Libération published the dossier on the RPF killings, he was ambushed
and sustained two bullet wounds. He identified one of the two
attackers as his former ministry bodyguard in Kigali. The other was
Francis Mgabo, an official from the Rwandan embassy in Nairobi, who
attempted to dispose of his firearm in the toilet of a nearby petrol
station. The Kenyan authorities asked Rwanda to lift Mgabo's
diplomatic immunity, so that he could go on trial, but Kigali refused
and for a time the two countries broke off diplomatic relations. On 16
May 1998 in Nairobi, during the evening rush hour, gunmen armed with
AK-47 assault rifles opened fire on Sendashonga's car, killing him and
his driver. As his wife later revealed, he had been scheduled to
testify before the ICTR. He had also set up an armed opposition group
(Forces de résistance pour la démocratie), which attracted both Hutus
and Tutsis. His wife claimed that the acting Rwandan ambassador in
Kenya at the time, Alphonse Mbayire, had organised Sendashonga's
assassination. Mbayire was recalled by his government, only to be shot
dead by unidentified gunmen in a bar in Kigali a month later.
*
The fifth scene: Kigali, January 2002. For six years, I've been
persona non grata in Rwanda. Finally, I managed to persuade the
foreign ministers of France and Britain, Hubert Védrine and Jack
Straw, to take me on their plane as they make a joint tour of four
African countries - the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda - and to drop me
off in Kigali. Though it means they have to give up a seat for a
reporter covering their
entente cordiale, they agree. For the Rwandan authorities, it is
tricky to deny me a visa as part of a Franco-British delegation.
Védrine is the first French minister to visit Kigali after the
genocide. The UK accounts for half of Rwanda's foreign aid. So here I
am, an unwelcome visitor, on sufferance and under surveillance after
the ministers' departure. To meet ordinary people means putting them
at risk while RPF officials, many of whom I knew when they were still
rebels, won't return my calls. Finally, Charles Murigande, who is in
charge of foreign affairs, comes to my hotel. I launch into a lengthy
profession of good faith. He replies with a Rwandan proverb: 'There's
no use drinking milk on a stomach full of hatred. It'll throw up
blood.' With this, he draws his chair back and leaves.
In a town you know, there's sure to be someone who wants to see you.
Not that Pasteur Bizimungu and I are especially close, but the former
head of state badly needs a friend. Before joining the RPF in 1990, he
was the director of Electrogaz, a coveted post in Habyarimana's
dispensation. He gave up the position to become the rebels' spokesman
and then a member of their negotiation team in Arusha. Finally, the
RPF picked him as the Hutu figurehead for the post-genocide government
of national unity. He became president while Kagame effectively ran
the country. The pretence came to an end in 2000, when Kagame took the
top job for himself. Bizimungu created his own political party,
Ubuyanja ('Renewal'). It was a more ambitious idea than the RPF could
allow: he was accused of rekindling ethnic hatred and placed under
house arrest. So I am sure to find him at home.
The soldiers at the gate are taken by surprise: a white man, tailed by
security agents in a car - probably from the Directorate of Military
Intelligence - nervously fingering their cell phones. 'M. Bizimungu
doesn't want to see anybody!' But I'd already rung the bell. Pasteur
Bizimungu shoots out and welcomes me. 'Yes, I want to see him,
absolutely!' he tells the soldiers and whisks me inside. He locks the
door and leans against it, breathing heavily. A volley of accusations
about Kagame follow; I remember the expression 'the dark side of
power'. When it is clear that no one will order me out, Bizimungu
leads me into his library. We talk until we are both exhausted. 'You
know, they were right,' he says finally. 'The explorers, the
missionaries, the colonisers, about the Tutsis being liars. They
are liars.' I am thrown clean off balance. Bizimungu climbs a
stepladder to reach down a book from a high shelf. In no time, he
finds the passage he's looking for, about the 'Tutsi culture of
duplicity', which he reads out, stressing key words. I make my excuses
and leave. Bizimungu has been driven mad.
After my visit, he was entirely cut off from the outside world. Two
years of solitary confinement at home preceded his sentence, in 2004,
to 15 years in jail. In 2007, the former president was pardoned by
Kagame, who had by then won his first election with 95 per cent of the
vote. No one could have mistaken the poll in 2003 for an exercise in
democracy. After the legislative elections of 2008 even the RPF found
the machine score - 98.39 per cent - embarrassing and lowered it to
78.76 per cent. The EU electoral observers duly documented this
self-restraint, but the head of their mission, Michael Cashman, agreed
with the EU delegate in Kigali, David MacRae, not to go public about
it - it might have raised uncomfortable questions. For his re-election
in August 2010, Kagame approved a slight erosion of his Soviet-style
popularity, allowing his vote to drop to 93 per cent. Rwanda's
burgeoning Democratic Green Party had lobbied against the country's
admission to the Commonwealth, citing the regime's gross human rights
violations. Its vice-president was found decapitated but that didn't
stop Rwanda joining the postcolonial club, the 18th African
Commonwealth state and - after Mozambique - only the second member
that is not a former British possession. In 2008 Kigali had made
English - instead of French - the official teaching language at all
levels of the Rwandan educational system.
Rwanda, as a recent document has it,
is a one-party authoritarian state, controlled by President Kagame
through a small clique of Tutsi military officers and civilian cadres
of the RPF from behind the scenes. The majority Hutu community remains
excluded from a meaningful share of political power. State
institutions are as effective as they are repressive. The government
relies on severe repression to maintain its hold on power ... Rwanda is
less free today than it was prior to the genocide. There is less room
for political participation than there was in 1994. Civil society is
less free and effective. The media is less free. The Rwanda government
is more repressive than the one that it overthrew.
This is not the preamble to a new Hutu manifesto but an excerpt from
the 'Rwanda Briefing' published last year by four senior figures in
the Kagame regime who've now fled abroad: the former secretary general
of the RPF Theogene Rudasingwa; his brother Gerald Gahima, one-time
prosecutor general and vice-president of the Rwandan Supreme Court;
the erstwhile chief of external security services Colonel Patrick
Karegeya; and General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, the ex-chief of staff
of the Rwandan army. Nyamwasa survived an attempt on his life last
June, when a commando opened fire on him in Johannesburg, where he now
lives in exile. The South African authorities laid the blame with the
government in Kigali.
The authors of the 'Rwanda Briefing' may not be trustworthy advocates
of freedom and democracy, or paragons of ethnic inclusiveness, but
they describe a system they're familiar with and a leader they know
well. To his many Western admirers they have this to say: 'President
Kagame is a very polarising figure. His policies continue to divide
Rwandan society along the lines of ethnicity and to fuel conflict. The
likelihood of a recurrence of violent conflict, including even the
possibility of genocide, is very high.'
*
A final scene: on 21 September 2006, President Kagame lectures on
'Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development in Africa: The Rwandan
Experience' at Princeton. The country he describes - 'different from
the old system which plunged Rwanda into mayhem', with 'checks and
balances' in place after a 'decisive break with exclusivist practices'
- is not one I recognise. Even in a packed auditorium, I have the same
unsettled feeling in Kagame's presence as I've had in the past. He
seems unchanged: taking questions from the audience, he refers to 'the
genocide in the 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s', as if 'the one in 1994'
were merely one in a series - a hair-raising denial of the singularity
of events between April and July 1994. But Goethe was right: 'Everyone
hears only what he understands.' The students ask questions about
gender equality in Rwandan politics, the fight against corruption and
atrocity - a genocide? - in Darfur. How many of them have been moved
by
Hotel Rwanda, and how many know that Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life
hero played in the film by Don Cheadle, is now a thorn in Kagame's
side? Rusesabagina continues to speak out for the ideals that led him
to save more than 1200 lives during the genocide in Kigali. For
Kagame, however, he is a 'fabricated hero' and a collaborator of the
die-hard Hutu
génocidaires exiled in Congo.
I am not arguing that we should all know everything there is to know
about Rwanda. My point is that we don't seem to want to know what
happened in 1994, or what's happening now. We've learned the wrong
lesson from the organised massacre of 800,000 people, which we failed
to prevent. Eager to pay off our moral debt, we're blinded by guilt.
The near total lack of media coverage of the ICTR trials and findings
suggests that we're happy to waive our best chance of grasping the
inner workings of the genocide. We clamour for international justice
but the detailed proceedings of the tribunal don't interest us. At the
same time, the denial of freedom and rights under the previous regime
in Rwanda impels us to shower Kagame with leadership awards and aid
money even as he denies them again. We are hypnotised by the 1994
genocide, and oblivious to the atrocities of a regime we regard as
exemplary. Aid, we say, must be conditional on good governance - but
post-genocide government is an exception.
La Francophonie
is at best ridiculous and at worst a vector of France's influence, but
the Commonwealth is honourable as it embraces a dictator who favours
English over French. Democracy is a precondition of peace - but not in
a post-genocidal state. Justice, truth and reconciliation heal - but
not the wounds of exterminatory hatred. The invasion and plunder of
eastern Congo are criminal - but not when they're carried out by
genocide survivors. Hutu power is bad, but Tutsi chauvinism is
acceptable. We hold these opinions not because they're right but
because they put us on the right side. This makes Rwanda a more tragic
place than it needs to be.
--
SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
Google+: https://plus.google.com/110493390983174363421/posts
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http://www.youtube.com/user/sibomanaxyz999
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