On April 21, more than 250,000 people were killed in the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi. This is almost 25 percent of all the victims. As Rwanda remembered the fateful day this year, however, some well-known scholars who have made it their mission to distort history made it about themselves and their narratives. When one looks at Gregory Stanton’s ten stages of a genocide, there is not a single one that Rwanda has not seen. What is more striking, the way he describes the last stage, genocide denial, is similar to what Rwanda is going though today. He argued that the perpetrators of genocide cover up evidence to intimidate witnesses, and we have seen this happen over and over. Up until today, thousands of bodies of victims are exhumed, and many survivors still don’t know where their loved ones’ bodies are. Meanwhile, the perpetrators and sometimes their families being accomplices, withhold this information as a way to further destroy and intimidate the survivors. Another form of denial is blaming the victims, which is done by deniers all the time, even going as far as accusing RPF-Inkotanyi that stopped the Genocide to have actually orchestrated it. Other forms include refusing to acknowledge that a genocide happened and targetted a specific group, and that it is not so many people that were killed anyway, so they deny the intent to destroy. In the case of Rwanda, many people, even those deemed credible, willingly refuse to say the correct statistics of the Genocide victims. Some say close to 500,000, others say 800,000. Nevertheless, a 2004 report by the Government of Rwanda specifies that by the year 2000, there were 1,074,017 genocide victims declared, and 934,218 victims actually counted. Every victim of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi has a name, and they need to be counted. If one is sincerely keeping the memory, they need to be accurate with the facts they present.
