In foreign countries, mechanisms of denial of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi should be understood at the highest level of all states, as well as within their judicial systems, and should be punished.
This is according to Jessica Gerondal Mwiza, the Deputy Chairperson of Ibuka-France.
She was explaining her thoughts on what needs to be done in the fight sustained battle against Genocide denial outside Rwanda.
"It will be necessary, above all, to greatly accelerate the processes of extradition and judgment or trial of genocidaires living in Europe. This is the prerequisite for everything. No fight against negationism in a context of impunity,” Mwiza said.
Regarding her personal experience when fighting the scourge of Genocide denial, Mwiza told The New Times that in France, the difficulty is that the genocidal discourse was developed at the highest level of the State, through the voice of President François Mitterrand who was in power in France during the 1994 Genocide.
"Thus, it is the people of power, more than ordinary citizens, who give power to the numerous lies. Genocide denial has been so elaborate and repeated at the highest level, for years, that it is transmitted in many more spheres other than the political one: in NGOs, among French journalists, majority who are not as independent as they claim, and among politicians of the new generation,” Mwiza said.
She noted that they have all heard "noises” as Patrick de Saint Exupéry says, so repeated, that they ultimately say to themselves that "there is no smoke without fire.”
French journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry has written numerous articles about the role of France in the Genocide.
"So when I want to elaborate something on the Genocide against the Tutsi, I often hear and read epidermal and immediate reactions like ‘yes, but what about the Congo?’ Here we recognize the sad power of the conspiracy discourse on ‘double-genocide,’ one of the most powerful weapons of negationism.”
Scores to settle
According to Felix Ndahinda, a Netherlands-based researcher, there are different categories of backers of the people who tell a revisionist story and not all are Genocide perpetrators; some are descendants of perpetrators, others are sympathizers of the genocidal regime.
Ndahinda whose research area is in international law, conflict studies and victimology noted that some are duped by the stories told by the Rwandan revisionist movement for lack of facts.
"Others are captivated by the language used such as defence of democracy and human rights that are claimed to be lacking in Rwanda, while others support the cause of the revisionists because they feel that they have scores to settle with current Rwandan authorities for one reason or another,” he said.
An additional motivation, he said, may be that since the start of the 1990 liberation struggle, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has always been characterised by the promotion of anti-colonial policies.
"Such policies tend to run against certain established structures and siding against them by supporting Rwandans who fight them seem to be the logical course of action for these people,” Ndahinda explained.
The Ambassador of Rwanda to the Netherlands, Olivier Nduhungirehe, noted that genocide denial is mainly spread by Rwandan Genocide fugitives but there is another category of deniers there.
The Netherlands is known for hosting a number of Genocide suspects including Charles Ndereyehe, alias Karoli, and Venant Rutunga. Both oversaw massacres of the Tusti at ISAR Rubona, an agricultural research institute located outside the southern district of Huye, formerly known as Butare prefecture.
The duo and many others there belong to the FDU-Inkingi party founded by Victoire Ingabire.
The party, one of the organisations hell-bent on denying the 1994 Genocide "is very active” in the Netherlands.
In some countries, Genocide fugitives tend to hide behind the cover of dual citizenship to commit the crime yet in most instances, their second citizenship was obtained basing on false evidence.
"The deniers in the Netherlands are not only Rwandan fugitives. When the fugitives arrive, they join their network or communities; family, friends, and the locals they convinced to believe in their ideology,” Nduhungirehe noted.
"Here we have a number of Dutch citizens who support them. A woman called Anneke Verbraeken [a journalist] is very active when supporting any Genocide fugitive who is arrested,” he said, noting that she passionately went to the Dutch parliament and other places to try halt the extradition of Jean Baptiste Mugimba, the Secretary General of the extremist political outfit, CDR, extradited to Rwanda from The Netherlands in 2016.
Verbraeken was also, among others, fervently supporting Genocide suspect, Jean Claude Iyamuremye, alias Nzinga, who is believed to have been involved in the mass murders at ETO in Kigali where close to 2,000 Tutsi were massacred in April 1994.
Despite her efforts, in 2016, a Dutch court eventually ruled in favour of the deportation Iyamuremye and Mugimba.
Besides Verbraeken, Joël Stephanus Voordewind — a Dutch politician and former development aid worker — supports all genocide deniers in his country.
Other virulent Dutch deniers include lawyers Caroline Buisman and Jan Hofdijk. The latter is Ingabire’s former lawyer.
Ensure accountability, commemorate, and criminalize genocide denial
The dynamics in the Netherlands and France are almost similar elsewhere where the Genocide fugitives and deniers are holed up. As such, the crusade against Genocide denial in the Netherlands, Nduhungirehe noted, is not so different from the battle elsewhere.
First, he said, there is ensuring accountability by working with the Netherlands to make sure that fugitives are brought to book. In this regard, he said, the Netherlands has "done a good job compared to many” other European countries.
In 2013, Yvonne Basebya, was convicted of inciting Genocide before moving to the Netherlands in 1998. The case made Basebya the first Dutch citizen to be convicted of crimes related to the Genocide. She died in prison in February 2017. Denis Ntirugirimbabazi died in 2016 before he was arrested. Augustin Basebya died in jail in 2017 while Joseph Mpambara is serving a life sentence.
In addition to deporting Iyamuremye and Mugimba, the country also arrested Venant Rutunga and Joseph Mugenzi in 2010 and 2013, respectively, and there are now pending judicial processes including that of Rutunga and Ndereyehe.
"The Netherlands has done something. But there are still around nine or ten genocide fugitives still here. We continue to work with Netherlands to ensure that accountability is done because genocide denial is spread by the lack of accountability and the promotion of impunity.”
Besides accountability, Nduhungirehe said there is "the work of preserving the memory to ensure that we continue to remember and commemorate and promote awareness in Dutch society about Genocide so that deniers cannot hide behind freedom of expression and opinion because this is what they say when denying Genocide.”
"All this goes hand in hand with the activism the Rwandan community is doing in telling our story. We are, for example, encouraging Genocide survivors to write books, and tell their stories so that people know better what happened in Rwanda because we may know it but in other countries people, especially the youth here in Europe, don’t know exactly what happened.”
"It is also important for the community here to be committed and active on social media to really push back this genocide denying movement.”
There is much more yet to be done, the envoy said, to be more efficient in the fight against genocide denial.
He put emphasis on two things they are working on – first, liaising with Ibuka-Netherlands and Dutch authorities, to see about establishing a monument of the 1994 Genocide there as has been done in a few other European countries.
"A memorial is also an important tool in telling the story of the Genocide.”
The second thing to do, he said, is also about laws to criminalize genocide denial.
"France and Belgium have adopted such laws. We have other countries that criminalized the denial of the Holocaust but the Netherlands is yet to adopt such laws. This is one area we want to work on and see happen, depending on their context because each country has its own philosophy and context.”
"For every crime, prevention is not enough. You can prevent it but there will still be people who will trespass and commit the crime. This is why it is important to have a law criminalizing genocide denial in the Netherlands and all European countries as a whole.”