There used to be a time when one would have thought that all members of the international community had come to terms with what happened in Rwanda in 1994 and were even willing to bear their share of responsibility in the genocide against the Tutsi.
This was evident in President Bill Clinton’s speech on the 25th of March, 1998, when he visited Rwanda. The speech suggested that accountability and fighting genocide denial would be on the agenda of US foreign policy; or so we thought.
After reading Michael Dobbs’ "He’s been hailed as Rwanda’s hero. But is he really his country’s villain?”, a review of Michela Wrong’s book ‘Do not Disturb’, the common denominator in the official stance of both the UK and US governments with regard to the genocide against the Tutsi and the mainstream media plaudits for the book in both countries is one: genocide denial.
To his credit, Dobbs makes no secret of the political motivations behind this quest to rewrite the history of Rwanda.
"He who controls the past, controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past,” Dobbs writes, as he inadvertently reveals the reason behind this distortion of Rwanda’s history.
Dobbs helps to reveal the real objective of genocide denial by these governments and their media houses; that is ‘to control Rwanda’s future’. They hope to achieve this by assaulting the collective memory of Rwandans. In their view, the memory of Rwandans is an insurmountable obstacle to the regime change project that they are attempting to cloth in the garb of concerns for democracy and human rights.
Evidently, Dobbs and Wrong expect the full backing of their respective governments for the project they are advocating for.
But how do you control a people whose memory is built, not on a story that suits Kagame's political needs as Dobbs and Wrong deceitfully claim, but upon the testimonies of survivors, court rulings, scientific inquiries and scholarly research?
Twenty-three years ago, when the horrors of what had happened under the watch of the United Nations were still vivid, not even the President of the mighty United States could deny the facts around the genocide as Dobbs and Wrong dare to do today. They think people have forgotten.
"It is important that the world know that these killings were not spontaneous or accidental…these events grew from a policy aimed at the systematic destruction of a people,” Bill Clinton said back then, when America still claimed to be motivated by what is right. The US used its powerful voice to reject the strategy of Genocide masterminds to try to evade accountability by denying the horror they had done and claiming that the genocide was in fact ‘a spontaneous Hutu uprising caused by grief over the loss of a beloved president and over which the genocidal government had no control’.
"The ground for violence was carefully prepared, the airwaves poisoned with hate, casting the Tutsis as scapegoats for the problems of Rwanda, denying their humanity… Lists of victims, name by name, were actually drawn up in advance,” President Clinton said without any mention for the downing of the plane whose significance was rightly reduced to: a pretext for the planned extermination of Rwanda’s Tutsis.
Yet, today, major U.S and UK newspapers are allowing Dobbs and Wrong to promote the strategy of defence of genocidaires, going as far as justifying the genocide against Tutsi. Indeed, when these reviews are published in less prominent newspapers such as the New Statesman, Wrong goes a step further.
She argues that the Hutus feared for their own safety. "‘Kill or be killed’ is a motivation most of us can grasp,” Wrong is quoted justifying the slaughter of more than a million Tutsi, including women, children and babies. Despicable!
In this process, dissenting views and scholarly research are shunned by these publications while parroting and amplifying Wrong’s denialist claims. Similarly, scientific inquiries and courts rulings on the downing of the plane are dismissed.
If this is not a media conspiracy that promotes the position of two powerful countries then I don't know what it is. It aims to sell a new "Rwandan” story in which the very people who betrayed Rwandans twenty-seven years ago dispute the credentials of the heroes who saved the Rwandan nation from annihilation. It is as if they are saying 'if we can't be the heroes, we will create our own story and use our media to promote it!'
Wrong’s book is presented as an investigative work into the killing of Karegeya - a man whose skin, she says, "was a smooth honey.” However, its objective goes well beyond that issue. Her reasoning calls for isolating Rwanda but it has no basis beyond her admiration for honey. Rwanda isn’t Rwanda because the West created it. Similarly, it won’t cease to exist because donors have read Wrong’s hatchet job.
Wrong’s Projection
In psychology, projection refers to "unconsciously taking unwanted emotions or traits you don't like about yourself and attributing them to someone else.”
Wrong does this. For instance, she pushes the idea of spontaneous killings that were "triggered” by the assassination of a Hutu President for a number of reasons. First, this idea allows her to vilify those she wants to implicate in the assassination.
Second, it allows her to shove under the rug the Hutu Power ideology which underpinned the planning and execution of the genocide against the Tutsi. Third, and most importantly, it allows her to sell the idea that Rwanda is "an ethnic tinderbox waiting to explode” as Dobbs puts it in his review without any critical examination of the knowledge, or lack of thereof, invoked in making such claims.
For instance, it's only by concealing decades of state-sponsored anti-Tutsi pogroms, discrimination and dehumanization that Wrong can sell her prophecy that doom is inevitable.
Otherwise, in a state where there is no ethnic polarization taking place, where the government insists on building a national identity that transcends ethnicity, where ordinary Rwandans agree that their government, unlike previous regimes, has "pursued welfare and development equally across the ethnic divide”, and where, unlike under Hutu Power, attacks by armed groups are not followed by indiscriminate retaliation against any section of the population, there is simply no basis for Wrong to make such ludicrous claims.
Ironically, as younger generations of Rwandans - including survivors who were children in 1994, children of survivors and children of perpetrators - gather together in commemoration and commit to perfecting their unity, western journalists who prophesize doom for Rwanda seem to be oblivious to the ills of their own societies.
The Brexit, the white nationalist riots and the assault on the US Capitol, are events feeding on perceived threats on whiteness as the defining feature of western nations and show that they, not Rwandans, are the ones living in the real ethnic tinderbox waiting to explode.
If Wrong and Dobbs prophecy is not projection, then what is? The projection is even more laughable when an American and a British journalist accuse Rwanda of looting other countries!
This is done in an attempt to delegitimize Rwanda’s military interventions in DRC. On this particular issue, Bill Clinton had something interesting to tell Rwandans in his 1998 speech.
"We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers…In the northwest part of your country, attacks by those responsible for the slaughter in 1994 continue today,” Clinton said of the killers Wrong is determined to turn into victims only 27 years later.
If the UK and the US governments and their media were not feigning amnesia, they would re-read Clinton’s speech and maybe they would recover their soul. Only then would they treat Wrong's work with the contempt it deserves and Wrong as a cynical cunning liar and genocide denier who should not be given platforms in civilized nations.
Civilized nations should not continue harassing a people whose only wish is to exercise their right to live a dignified life. If there is someone in need of saving, it is certainly not Rwandans. Let the projecting stop!