The recent television interview of a Genocide convict by a British television network was again the subject of heavy criticism, this time from renown author and Genocide expert, Linda Melvern. Jean Kambanda, who is serving a life sentence in a Malian high security prison, was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for his active role in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. The former prime minister in the Genocide regime recently appeared on commercial television station, ITV, where he said that his “conscience was clear” and that he had been tricked into making a confession. Melvern said Kambanda should not have been given a platform to cleanse his and fellow conspirators’ image as it was distressful to Genocide survivors. She noted that the convicted former prime minister had openly asserted in his interrogation by ICTR investigators that they had “discussed the evolution of the massacres in each prefecture” during Cabinet meetings. “We should question the wisdom of giving an unrepentant génocidaire any air-time and ask whether or not we should encourage attempts at the falsification of history,” Melvern wrote in The Guardian. “Kambanda’s claim of innocence is no surprise. He is a past master at genocide denial. “In April 1994, when the evidence of genocide was emerging from Rwanda in the form of bodies washed down the rivers, the Kambanda government organised a campaign of diplomatic news spin to try to persuade the world that the deaths were due to “fighting” in a renewed civil war,” she said. Linda Melvern has written extensively on the Genocide against the Tutsi and her book “A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide” is highly regarded as a very authoritative account of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
