Every year during the commemoration of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, Rwandans are at the receiving end of aggressive and vile attempts to rewrite their country’s history. Rwanda’s crime is its stubborn rejection of unwarranted western prescriptions on how to run its affairs, whose punishment has no moral borders, often going as far as belittling the genocide and mocking its survivors. In this quest, editors at the New York Times, in defiance of common sense, decided to publish Anjan Sundaram’s article "He’s a Brutal Dictator, and One of the West’s Best Friends.” Sundaram’s rant is not only an insult to the memory genocide’s victims, it betrays the desperation of those who cannot fathom the idea that an African nation embodies the very best values of humanity and compassion that the Western world claims to promote but can’t live up to.
As one of the winners of the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Prize that was created by the leaders of RDR (a political criminal organization created by genocide fugitives in 1995 in Zaire where they had found sanctuary), Sundaram could not help but engage in genocide revisionism. In reference to President Kagame, Sundaram writes: "The self-styled hero who supposedly ended the Rwandan [sic] genocide,” basically denying an incontrovertible fact any sane person holds to be true beyond any shade of doubt. Sundaram goes on to blame Kagame for "sparking” the genocide and "doing little to prevent” it, an accusation whose responsibility he passes on to a supposedly credible political opposition to the Rwandan government. His article is littered with hearsay, from discredited individuals with an axe to grind like the former Rwandan Ambassador to the US, which he attempts to excuse by the claim that "accurate information of the country is hard to come by”. If Sundaram has no accurate information, why is the NYT publishing his hit job?
Any editor of sound mind would question the mental state of a writer who disputes Kagame’s credentials as the military commander of the army that stopped the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994. But the NYT is after an agenda in which the means – denial, revisionism and minimization of genocide – are justified by the end: to discredit an African leader who refuses to bend the knee to the powers that be and their liberal ideology, one who constantly holds the mirror for the lecturers to look at an image of themselves they cannot bear. Sundaram is a mere pawn in this agenda and his rewards is the 15 minutes of fame as well as the ability to someday tell stories at the bar of how he once appeared in the NYT.
Hence, in this wicked western world, Kagame’s most unforgivable crime was to stop a genocide whose existence western nations, namely the US, the UK, and France, denied at the UN Security Council even as genocidaires went on a killing spree. Saving people is, Afterall, the responsibility of the West. How dare!
Instead, Belgium pulled its UN troops out of Rwanda, leaving thousands to die in the hands of genocidaires, while France sent reinforcements under the guise of a humanitarian operation to save the ousted regime and, later, continued to send arms shipments to the defeated genocidal forces in the former Zaire. This is the story the West does not want in the history books, one which they hope will die once Kagame is removed from power. Their frenetic attempts to rewrite history is not driven by the fear of eventual demands for reparations, which is as far as Sundaram’s emaciated imagination stops. Rwanda has not asked for any money; even after France recognized its overwhelming responsibility in the genocide no money was demanded of it.
Instead, the West is driven by the fear of losing the moral high ground – a vintage position of privilege from which western countries hurl their sanctimonious lectures about human rights and democracy. Clearly, losing this position would greatly undermine their ability to control and influence other nations. Hence, Kagame – the man who saved millions of lives – has what is theirs and they want it back!
In this desperate attempt to retain the moral high ground, the western world (governments, media outlets, human rights organisations, and academics) presents an inverted reality of its interactions with Rwanda in particular and Africa in general. Examples of this abound.
When President Macron came to Rwanda in May 2021 to recognize and ask forgiveness for "France’s overwhelming responsibility” in one of the most heinous and devastating crimes of the 20th century, the western world was, instead, urging him to condemn Rwanda’s human rights record. Apparently, France’s complicity in the genocide against the Tutsi was of little consequence and it could at once retain its ‘moral authority’ in its dealings with Rwanda. As ridiculous as it sounded then, and now, Macron, who was representing the accomplice of the killers, the French state, was urged to speak as the leader of a virtuous country that had something to teach Rwanda (its victim) about human rights and governance.
Worst still, today, as the western world grapples with its own intolerance to asylum seekers, Rwanda is vilified for offering help. An unpopular UK policy is renamed the Rwanda policy, the blame for racism is apportioned on the Good Samaritan, and countries that imprison thousands of asylum seekers in cages, euphemistically called "migrants detention centers,” are urged to denounce Rwanda’s human rights record.
In other words, while these countries are harassing and detaining asylum seekers without any due process, the hot topic for the western world is the human rights record of the country offering a safe haven for those persecuted in Europe, Libya, DRC, and even Afghanistan. Yet, Kagame is "reliable”, as Sundaram is forced to admit, which is why western leaders ask him to solve problems that they have failed to find answers for. But, since the western world hates the face it sees in the mirror, it projects its ills and crimes onto Rwanda.
But Sundaram is not done making a fool of himself. He writes that Kagame has "won his way into the West’s good graces”. Again, this is an inverted reality that solely rests on the dubious assumption that the wealthy, not the morally upright, grant favors. In fact, westerners are lucky that one of the most emblematic African freedom fighters graces them with his presence, and shakes hands with them, despite their horrendous crimes against Africans. These crimes are the very reason why the western "world [is] desperate for African success stories,” as Sundaram puts it. A plunderer who wishes to conceal his crimes is indeed desperate to prove that Africa is well off despite the plunder.
But Rwanda is not the plunderer’s refuge; its success story does not aim to soothe his conscience, if any. Indeed, Kagame’s greatest endorsement is not the UK or any other western nation as Sundaram seems to believe; it’s the confidence his people have in him.
Kagame, as a former refugee himself, is only concerned with the wellbeing of asylum seekers. In the process, however, he unwittingly rewards incompetent European leaders by giving them solutions to their problems, and with that they are able to extend their hold on power.
Only those capable of ridding themselves of delusions of grandeur and self-righteousness – a "garden” operating on jungle morality – would appreciate this irony.