As with everyone else, I watched in shock as Hamas fighters invaded southern Israel, killing and abducting civilians and engaging in running gun battles with Israeli police and army units. As of yesterday, The Guardian reports 800 Israeli deaths and 2,616 injuries, and 560 dead and 2,900 injured on the Palestinian side. This number will obviously rise, especially on the Palestinian side, if Prime Minister Netanyahu is to be believed. He’s promised blood and thunder, and I have no reason to doubt him. It’s been ugly for decades now, and in the next few days and weeks, it will become even uglier still. This latest escalation of the 60-year conflict has taken all global media attention. It’s taken attention from even the Ukraine-Russia war. That isn't surprising. Why? Because it was brazen (it took place right in the middle of the day), perfect for the world of social media (with X videos and breathless commentary on TikTok), and politically polarizing (depending on your political leanings, what Hamas did was either an act of terrorism or an act of liberation). What has surprised me, however, is just how much attention and genuine feelings Hamas’s actions have garnered right here in Rwanda, thousands of kilometers away from the Middle East. I’m not saying that people are wrong to have strong feelings about the events of Saturday; I‘ve just been slightly bemused by it all. I was left wondering, what was it about these events that made a Rwandan, who's probably never been to Israel (or Gaza and the West Bank) or ever met a Jew or a Palestinian, feel so strongly that they would use their social media handles to #StandWith whatever side they supported? Was it because it was a fad they were jumping on? Was it because they genuinely cared about the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics? Was it because of the death toll? Was it because of our own history of genocide? Or was it virtue signaling? Was it because every single Western media organization told us it was important? Or was it a combination of all these reasons? These events and our strong reactions to them reveal something quite eye-opening, i.e., what we react to and why we react to it. Presently, hundreds of Rwandaphone Congolese are flooding into the country, fleeing targeted rape, murder, and pillage. Kivu Press journalist, Marc Hoogsteyns, someone I have spoken to on various occasions to help me better understand what has been happening in Eastern DRC, has used his media platform to give a voice to the Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese who’ve fallen victim to murderous hordes. I can comfortably call them murderous because all their acts of violence has either been dutifully recorded and shared on social media (by them), or their victims have survived to live to tell their stories. A case in point is what occurred last week in the North Kivu settlement of Kirolirwe. Houses belonging to Tutsis were intentionally set ablaze by Government-backed FDLR and Wazalendo militia, in an action that can only be called ethnic cleansing. How did we find out? Someone, probably from the militia, shot videos of the homes being burnt to the ground. If you have the stomach for it, you can watch an interview that Kivu Press shot in Nkamira Transit Camp (available on Youtube) where an elderly Congolese Rwandaphone man recounts the horrific murder of his daughter-in-law. In the same clip, a lady speaks about the horrific sexual violence she underwent. In all the interviews, the people accused of this violence are either FDLR, Nyatura (or Wazalendo as they call themselves now), the Congolese army (FARDC) or all of them. This violence that Kivu Press reported isn’t breaking news. This violence, meted against men, women, and children, has been going on for longer than two decades. It has generated about 800,000 refugees, with Rwanda hosting about 80,000 of them. But where, my fellow Rwandans, my fellow Africans, where is their hashtag? Why are you not #StandingWithThem? Are they any less human than the people of Gaza? Do they deserve less peace than residents of Tel Aviv? Is it because CNN isn’t putting a spotlight on their plight? Is it, and I hate to say it, because they are not white and therefore less deserving of our sympathy? We need to question not just ourselves but a world that picks and chooses who is deserving of human emotion. The writer is a socio-political commentator
