Editor, Refer to the article “BBC-Kinyarwanda indefinitely suspended”, published in The New Times on May 30). The decision for RURA to indefinitely suspend the BBC-Kinyarwanda/Kirundi programme, or BBC Gahuza, was long overdue and I am in full support of it. Rwandans will certainly not miss BBC Kinyarwanda. Apart from continually entrenching ethnicity and stoking the furnace that this scourge in Rwanda and the Great Lakes is; apart from investing in keeping the ethnicity candle in this volatile region ever burning; apart from never imagining Rwandans’ unity in their very superficial diversity; apart from seeing Rwandans as nothing more than humans in ethnic compartments merely co-existing (not living together as a nation) in a geographical space called Rwanda mapped out at the 1884 Berlin Conference, I am not aware of any other thing to associate BBC Kinyarwanda with. A comparison with VOA’s Kinyarwanda service tells it all. Al-Jazeera is critical and does controversial subjects. Even France 24 does. But BBC-Kinyarwanda’s insensitivity to the danger of stoking ethnic divisionism has bordered on recklessness for long. To distinguish some of its broadcasts from those of RTLM or Kangura could quite often require microscopic effort. Urunana (an entertainment-educational soap) is about all that is useful on the service. I hope it will open shop somewhere else. Hope *************************** Any selective application of our country’s anti-genocide statutes where the BBC is concerned would have seriously undermined the rule of law, and the sacrosanct principle of equality before the law. And what, exactly, would have been the purpose of such a derogation from the full force of the law for the BBC? The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in our country is so critical an issue that has blighted virtually every life that we cannot allow anyone to play around with it. If the BBC have chosen to provide a platform to a well-known circle of Genocide deniers, trivializers, revisionists and denigrators of Genocide victims, then the entire broadcaster (or any who act like them) have no place on our airwaves. Let us hope this is a lesson to their confreres, that Rwanda will apply all its laws—including and especially its anti-genocide statutes—fully without favour to anyone no matter how powerful they believe themselves to be. Mwene Kalinda
