The American intern is back again looking for attention, probably bored by the Covid-19 confinement somewhere in Washington DC. Neil Edwards, an intern at the formerly prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, is also allowed some intern privileges to blog for John Campbell of the same institute.
How Campbell thinks it’s alright for his intern to play around with Genocide to make some infantile points against Rwanda is beyond mind-boggling.
The intern basically writes that Rwandans need to get over the genocide because a lot of time has passed. This callow youth thinks President Kagame pursued "strict policies” and "justified them” by genocide and that the United States, out of alleged guilt for "failing to act” to stop the genocide, "accepted this logic.” Then he brazenly and condescendingly asks, "when does that grace period end?”
This young man doesn’t know how the genocide was stopped. Moreover, he seems to think that the country that failed to act in the face of so much evil was so gracious enough to give a "grace period.” This has to be the height of conceit. Do Rwandans know that all this time they have been existing thanks to America’s grace? "Time is up,” thunders the haughty intern!
More intern logic is on display. The majority of Rwandans were infants during the genocide and shouldn’t have to "endure the strict policies of Kagame’s regime,” he lambastes. What is the right age for enduring Kagame’s policies? These policies are either good and should be enjoyed by everyone, or they are bad and no one should endure them.
A logic that sacrifices one-third of the population has no merit for the two-thirds. The intern may be excused for not knowing this, but his mentors should read through his drivel before publishing them. Otherwise, they embarrass everyone linked with the institution.
But the young man isn’t done embarrassing himself and the people who let him use their internet. He accuses parliament of being loyal to the RPF "rather than to the constituents who elected them” and the judiciary for not being independent.
One, Rwanda’s parliament is not headed by Kagame. In fact, the constitution forbids the president and speaker of parliament from belonging to the same political party. Most importantly, Rwandans vote for political parties not for individuals meaning all MPs are representatives of all Rwandans rather than a specific constituency.
During the last legislative elections in 2018, RPF and its coalition won only 40 seats out of 80. The other 40 seats are shared amongst other political parties, as well as women, youth and disabled representatives. Only an ignorant, pompously self-important American intern would imagine such a distribution of seats is evidence of a parliament that is beholden to RPF.
A foreigner who had visited Rwanda for the first time once told me that Rwanda’s elections are rigged. I asked how come. She said that a woman who had run for MP had told her that she won the election but her competitor was announced as the winner.
I told her that that was not possible. It is her own party that probably bumped her and replaced her with another person because only the party can sponsor an individual candidate. She was shocked and said she was sorry she had been misinformed and had been unknowingly sharing this story with her colleagues.
The intern is doing the same thing. As for the judiciary being corrupt, the intern gives the example of the Diane Rwigara case. From the way he tells it, one would be forgiven to think that she is serving a life sentence. This is someone who was acquitted by the same courts the young man is bad-mouthing.
Neither is Victoire Umuhoza on death row despite the mountain of evidence that implicated and convicted her for providing funding to the FDLR that came out of the Force Armee Rwandais and Interahamwe militia that were the spearhead of the forces that implemented the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 and whose young people who were the "infants” he alludes to at the time, say they are committed to "finishing the job” started by their parents, some of whom are aging alongside them in the DRC jungles from where they remain armed and dangerous.
The intern is clearly all at sea about how genocide ideology is transmitted between generations.
On the same day the intern decides to write about Rwanda, The New York Times published concerns over voter fraud in the United States. As someone who lives in DC, America’s political capital, Neil is properly placed to report on a topic he would probably know something about better than he does anything Rwandan.
However, as no one seems to be supervising or is advising him at his current place of internship, he needs to come back to Kigali. I promise to set aside some of my time to mentor him; something he desperately needs in his life but one that no one seems to be carrying out in Washington, DC.