Editor, 

I wish to respond to Dr. Jean-Paul Kimonyo’s article, "‘Qui est génocide?’ or ‘Who is genocide?’” (The New Times, March 25).

Genocide never just happens from the blue; it takes time and extensive conditioning of both the would-be killer population and its designated victims. The first to completely shed the normal human inhibition against killing people with whom one has no personal quarrel and the second to accept their fate to be killed as a normal order of things. 

Both states of mind require a long gestation period, the eventual realisation of the killers of not only their total impunity, but in fact that such killings are seen as the highest form of civicism likely to be rewarded by the state and blessed by the church. 

The targeted population must also be made to understand and accept their role as designated victims whose continued survival represents no more than a stay of sentence which could be executed any time the state and their allied militia  so wish without anyone standing in the way. 

Mwene Kalinda, Rwanda