‘To those who teach us freedom, democracy and human rights while protecting those who killed one million of our people, we say to you: Rwanda has changed for good and forever. We are a people who stand up for our right and give ourselves dignity. No one else will fight for our right to live.’ – Paul Kagame. Last week I introduced Jambo ASBL, the new face of genocide denial by a group of youth in Europe, whose parents are in jail, wanted for the crime of Genocide or dead. While their parents, former dignitaries in past genocide regimes, flatly denied the genocide against the Tutsi, and formed a militia in the D.R. Congo to fight the post-genocide government, all with no success; their children - the new face of genocide denial – have European citizenship, express themselves in polished French and is draped in NGO ‘rightoric’. ‘Rightoric’, as you may have guessed, is a combination of rights and rhetoric used by all African populists to attract western favors. At a time when democracy is facing legitimacy crisis globally, western NGOs and media are happy to ‘whitewash’ any agenda, so long as it parrots the right rhetoric: ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘Freedom of expression’, etc. I also last week introduced Makau Mutua’s ‘Victims, Savages and Saviors’, the Metaphor of Human rights’. In the metaphor, the Kenyan Scholar explains how the so-called ‘human rights watch dogs’ and ‘experts’ make a living on selling a narrative that African leaders are ‘Savages’ oppressing their own people, whom are powerless ‘Victims’ waiting for western ‘Saviors’ to help them bring human rights. Jambo ASBL is an NGO by offspring of genocide perpetrators, whom, having grown up in Europe, have missed out on the journey of reconciliation and awareness that Rwandans have been going through since the end of the genocide, under the leadership of the man who led the army that stopped the Genocide. In that regard, I feel sorry for them and I blame their parents for having insulated them from the reality in Rwanda and their supporters for misleading them that having western citizenship somehow affords them special privileges in or on Rwanda; Their conception of Rwanda is outdated, or like I like to put it, they are ‘stuck in the nineties’. The story of Jambo ASBL reminds me of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the genocidaire woman who embarked her 24 year old son Arsene Shalom Ntahobali in her killing frenzies; a mother who presided over her own son’s raping of innocent Tutsi women. Today, they are both imprisoned for life. Western Media and NGOs are calling them ‘survivors’. It is cynical to say that children of the executioners are survivors. The right word in Kinyarwanda is: ‘gushinyagura’- taunt survivors. Unlike their parents who denied it outright, Jambo ASBL uses ‘genocide against the Tutsi’ in every other sentence. Then they add a ‘but’, after which they carry out their revisionist and double genocide theories, until the next ‘we recognize the genocide against the Tutsi’, and so on. What do they want? The famous: ‘Dialogue inter-Rwandais’. Every denier or ignorant you meet in the west tells you Rwandans should have a dialogue inter-Rwandais. That we had Gacaca process for a decade, from 18th June 2002 to exactly 18th June 2012, and Village Urugwiro discussions for nine months before that, from May 1998 to March 1999 (Kimonyo, Rwanda Demain, 2017), is unknown to them. Why? Because in both processes it emerged unequivocally that one genocide, the Genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi occurred in Rwanda. Furthermore, with 63 million pages of documents, contained in 18 thousand boxes, and 8,000 audiovisual files, collected by 169,422 community judges, who tried 1,958,634 genocide related cases, over a period of 10 years, the Gacaca is the only process that comprehensively documented genocide deaths and it has established that 1,074,017 persons were killed in the genocide. Not 800 thousand, not between 500 and 800 thousand. (http://gacaca.rw/) These facts have also been confirmed by a Judgment of an International Court (ICTR), followed by a UN Security Council Resolution (Resolution 2150). We can have ten more dialogues inter-rwandais, it wouldn’t change anything. In last week’s article I also reminded that the Genocide regime was defeated. Militarily. By the RPF. And that the RPF is still in power. In other words, Jambo ASBL, their parents, relatives, supporters, etc., have no conditions to pose. That the RPF accepted to hold dialogues with everyone, including killers during the two afore-mentioned processes, stems from its willingness to build a unified nation. I remember genocide survivors were not all upbeat for it at the time. But they accepted. Genocide ideology is retrograde. If the true human panacea is love, genocide ideology walks in the opposite direction. What’s sad is when children of genocide perpetrators espouse genocide ideology. It is hoped that the next generation will make the world a better place. However genocide ideology conceives a better place as one where a particular minority would be extinct, either socially or physically. In reality a better place is one with thriving diversity. For that Genocide ideology must be fought militarily and eviscerated intellectually. In last week’s article I showed why genocide regimes fall. The same reason the FDLR never made headways in their mission to take over Rwanda. Their relatives from Jambo ASBL have taken the battle on an intellectual field, there too they will not succeed. Let me tell them how this story ends. Since they live in Belgium, I invite them to pay a visit to Odetta Dusabe, the notorious nurse at the Butamwa health center who opened Tutsi women’s wombs and killed their unborn babies. She is sentenced in absentia to 25 years in prison. In all these years while she lived in hiding in Belgium, she indoctrinated her daughter, Victoire Ingabire with revisionist propaganda and promised her that if she disguised genocide ideology into human rights and democracy rhetoric, she could bring it to Rwanda: ‘no one will dare touch you! Moreover you have Dutch citizenship’ she told her. They should ask the mother where her daughter is today…
