Michela Wrong has, for over a decade, nurtured an obsessive fixation with Rwanda, one so steeped in bitterness, bias, and colonial nostalgia that it long ago ceased to resemble journalism. Her latest scavenging filing for NBC News, relying on defeated European mercenaries to indict Rwanda’s security posture in eastern DR Congo, isn’t just misleading. It is ethically bankrupt and disturbingly aligned with genocidaires and war profiteers. Wrong’s descent into ideological extremism predates her now-infamous 2021 book, Do Not Disturb. Though marketed as an exposé of Rwanda’s leadership, it was riddled with innuendo, contradiction, and clear sympathy for figures responsible for some of Rwanda’s bloodiest chapters. In it, she casts the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)—the very Rwandans that ended the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi—as a shadowy, sinister force. In her warped framing, the real villains aren’t the génocidaires hiding in capital cities of western nations, but the Tutsi-led government that halted their slaughter and continues to resist their resurgence. Wrong has never met a génocidaire she didn’t try to humanize, nor a Rwandan official she didn’t vilify. Her hero is Patrick Karegeya, a former intelligence chief exiled for plotting against Rwanda. Her villains? Rwandans who survived a genocide and now govern with a resolute “never again” philosophy. Her sourcing is not just suspect, it is ideological. She elevates the voices of fugitive generals, convicted genocide deniers, ex-FAR operatives, and now European mercenaries expelled from African soil after being caught fighting a war they were paid to escalate. These are not whistleblowers. They are actors with political and financial stakes in destroying Rwanda’s global standing. Her book tour for Do Not Disturb included joint appearances with apologists for the FDLR, a militia born directly from the Interahamwe. She didn’t bother to inform readers of these affiliations. She didn’t need to. Her narrative mirrors theirs. The disdain for Rwanda’s leadership, the obsession with delegitimizing genocide survivors in power, the denial of Tutsi suffering—they all converge in her work. Her latest commentary with NBC News is a new low. In it, she presents nearly 300 European mercenaries, defeated by the AFC alliance /M23 in North Kivu, as credible witnesses and innocent observers. They were not journalists, humanitarian workers, or civilians. They were active combatants, hired by the Congolese government to prop up the failing FARDC. These men were on the battlefield, engaged in hostilities, and were later evacuated through Rwanda under UN coordination. Even the UN Group of Experts, no ally of Rwanda, acknowledged their combat role, linking them to private military contractors like Agemira and Congo Protection. And yet, Wrong whitewashes them as “military contractors,” concealing the gravity of their involvement under international law and misrepresenting their roles to a global audience. This is not journalism. It is a propaganda effort designed to rehabilitate European soldiers of fortune and vilify a small African nation that has refused to play victim or puppet. In presenting these mercenaries as neutral sources, Wrong not only misleads her readers, she places herself in alignment with actors who prolong the misery of eastern Congo and sabotage peace. A deeper review of Wrong’s writing reveals consistent anti-Tutsi undertones. She casts suspicion on Tutsi-led institutions, reduces the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi to a “complex” civil war, and routinely elevates voices that minimize or challenge the genocide’s official designation. She has openly questioned the purpose of Rwanda’s annual genocide commemorations, dismissing them as political theater—a trope long used by genocide deniers to delegitimize survivor memory and trauma. She also treats Tutsi agency with suspicion, portraying Tutsi leaders as conspirators or pawns of Western interests, rather than people determined to protect their nation from a second catastrophe. This is not nuanced. This is the weaponization of narrative to erode the memory of atrocity and to place blame not on perpetrators, but on those who stopped them. It is soft-core denialism posing as foreign correspondence. Wrong’s worldview is frozen in the days when European journalists and diplomats dictated the narrative for post-colonial Africa. Rwanda defies that model. Its stability, independence, and refusal to bend to foreign interference offend that sensibility. Wrong cannot accept that Rwanda, a country that rose from ashes, has succeeded without relying on foreign pity or tutelage. And so, she attacks it. With bitterness. With zeal. With unrelenting obsession. This obsession now takes the form of a journalistic partnership with NBC News, which must itself answer difficult questions. Why are foreign mercenaries being given the last word on African conflicts? Why are voices from Congolese Tutsi communities, the victims of FDLR and other militias, conspicuously absent from these reports? Why does NBC allow a journalist with such a well-documented record of bias and ideological entanglement to frame Rwanda’s security posture? Western media has long struggled to shake its addiction to the colonial narrative. Michela Wrong is not an aberration. She is the embodiment of that failure. Her work reflects a Western media ecosystem still more comfortable with white saviors and black villains than with African agency. Rwanda’s refusal to conform to that caricature has made it a target. Michela Wrong’s career, once grounded in principled reporting, has collapsed into paranoid propaganda. She now platforms mercenaries, legitimizes fugitives, and echoes the language of genocide deniers. What once masqueraded as journalism has become an instrument of sabotage. Rwanda is not above criticism. But it deserves critics who come armed with facts. Not fiction, and certainly not prejudice. Her credibility is gone. Her relevance is hollow. Her collapse is not a tragedy, it is the long-overdue consequence of choosing ideology over truth.
