Blaming victims, backing perpetrators: Sanctions and narrative power in a France 24 interview and beyond

A recent France 24 interview, conducted by Marc Perelman with Massad Boulos, Senior Advisor to President Trump, on the Washington Accord and the ongoing crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, raises a troubling question: At what point does journalism stop examining events and start building a case? In this circular reasoning, or petitio principii, the conclusion is already assumed in the premises. The verdict is embedded within the journalist’s questions themselves. What unfolds is no longer a search for understanding, but a process in which the interviewee is invited to assume the conclusion and accusation included in the questions and responds within their confines. The structure resembles courtroom logic. In a trial, the prosecutor advances a theory of the case, gradually narrowing responsibility, tightening the frame, and guiding the jury toward a verdict. The interview here mirrors that arc: The subject is not merely examined but progressively positioned and prosecuted. The common thread? Sanctions, sanctions, and more sanctions. Beyond the interview, a broader question remains: By what moral reasoning does the Western political order invert responsibility, blaming the marginalized and persecuted community while backing their perpetrators? Boulos is placed in a question-driven position. Rather than being invited to analyze a complex geopolitical situation, he is repeatedly pressed to affirm, endorse, and internalize the implications of increasingly loaded questions, leaving little room for independent analysis or nuance. The interview, in effect, guides him toward predetermined conclusions instead of engaging with the multidimensional realities on the ground. At its extreme, the interview turns into an echoing monologue, as the journalist repeatedly interrupts Boulos, prompting him to turn questions into statements. President Kagame’s name resurfaces as a haunting metaphor, revealing an underlying logic in which the progression of questions is structured by a scapegoating mechanism: “Would you say this is a failure?” “Who is to blame?” “So, President Kagame betrayed...?” “Do you still trust President Kagame?” “You are not sure?” “There is pressure...[for] sanctions?” “[There] should be sanctions against President Kagame...” “President Kagame does not care about sanctions.” “Could it be Kagame himself?” “It is not out of the question [the case against of Kagame]?” “So, there is a case against President Kagame?” This sequence unfolds as a clear narrative escalation, moving step by step from tentative evaluation to implicit accusation. What begins as a question of performance (“failure”) quickly shifts toward the attribution of responsibility (“blame”), then toward moral rupture (“betrayal”), before culminating in the language of punishment (“sanctions”) and judicial implication (“a case against”). Each question narrows the interpretive horizon, progressively foreclosing alternative explanations and guiding the listener toward a predetermined conclusion. Within this structure, the name “Kagame” functions as a refrain, recurring with insistent regularity. Its repetition anchors the exchange around a single figure, transforming a complex and multidimensional political reality into a personalized narrative centered on individual culpability. Through this rhetorical pattern, structural conditions, historical context, and collective dynamics recede into the background, while agency is symbolically condensed into one proper name. The interview progressively constructs the structure of an indictment, systematically enumerating alleged failures, assigning blame, and implicitly calling for judgment and condemnation. The journalist thus assumes the dual role of both prosecutor and judge, presenting the accusations while simultaneously positioning himself to evaluate guilt and pronounce judgment. The architecture of the exchange follows a recognizable logic of indictment, unfolding in a sequential pattern that may be summarized as follows: Diagnosis ? Accusation ? Moral breach ? Discrediting the accused ? Punishment The trajectory is unmistakable. Evaluation quickly turns into accusation; accusation morphs into moral condemnation; condemnation prepares the ground for punishment. The interview adopts the cadence of cross-examination. The crisis in eastern Congo long predates President Kagame and the more recent cycles of war. The marginalization of Tutsi communities did not arise overnight; it unfolded over decades, shaped by colonial-era racial and ethnic classifications, post-independence political crises, regional conflicts, and recurring challenges to the nationality of Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese — at times codified in constitutional provisions and reinforced through the stigmatizing label of “dubious nationality.” This historical trajectory cannot be understood without also acknowledging the profound impact of the presence of the Interahamwe and the FDLR in Congo since 1994, as well as the resurgence and cross-border circulation of genocidal ideology. The concern deepens when examining how the interview was subsequently reframed on the France 24 website. The companion article does not merely recount the exchange; it reshapes it. By pairing the video with a written summary, France 24, the journalist, and the visual editor guide viewers and readers alike into a largely passive role, steering attention toward selected interpretations rather than conveying the full complexity of the situation. Presented in distilled form—sharpened, condensed, and selectively arranged—the text steers interpretation. Rather than leaving space for the audience’s own judgment, it pre-structures the terms and interpretive codes through which the interview is to be watched, heard, and understood, marking the boundaries of meaning in advance. Expressions such as “serious breach” and “did not rule out sanctions” stand in bold relief, while Boulos’s steady insistence that the Washington Accord is a process—a threshold rather than a terminus—recedes into the margins. The cadence of caution, the discipline of refraining from speculation, and the deliberate restraint of tone are compressed, if not altogether muted. Boulos’s measured remarks become emphatic; what was nuanced becomes declarative. The interviewee’s restraint, and those spaces where thought is allowed to breathe, are flattened into the rigid geometry of headlines. To condense is to choose; to choose is to privilege; and to privilege is to shape the horizon within which meaning unfolds. Editorial selection inevitably shapes interpretation. Yet in volatile contexts, where tensions are already high and perceptions fragile, such framing risks intensifying polarization and reinforcing hostile narratives—not only toward Rwanda and Rwandans, but also toward Congolese Tutsi, whose position is already marked by historical vulnerability and contested belonging. Even more striking is the asymmetry of attention. While Rwanda’s alleged actions are subjected to intense scrutiny, the violence unfolding on the ground is largely unreported. At the time of the interview, Banyamulenge villages in South Kivu were under drone bombardment, and in the days that followed, the same coalition continued targeting civilians and burning homes across North Kivu. This grim reality stands in stark contrast to the narrative presented during the interview, revealing a profound disconnect between what was happening and what the audience was shown – a disconnect that silences complexity, flattens accountability, and obscures the human toll of ongoing conflict. What are the consequences when government officials repeatedly portray certain citizens as less legitimate than others? What results when political rhetoric draws boundaries between “real” and “false” Congolese? And when targeted communities, feeling abandoned or unprotected, organize for self-defense? Is this simply insurgency — or is it a symptom of unresolved crises rooted in exclusion, persecution, and recurring patterns of mass violence that erode equal citizenship and weaken the social contract itself? As one seasoned regional analyst once observed, “without Leopold II, there would be no M23. Without the Hamitic myth, there would be no M23, no Twirwaneho (Let us defend ourselves). Without the persecution of Congolese Tutsi in the DRC, there would be no M23, no Twirwaneho.” The statement serves as a reminder that communities’ impulse toward self-protection does not emerge in a vacuum; rather, it often reflects the accumulation of unresolved historical legacies, including colonial engineering, racialized ideologies, cycles of exclusion, episodes of sponsored violence and persecution by successive Congolese governments, and grievances left unaddressed over decades. Ignoring that chain does not simplify reality — it distorts it. A serious interview would have required a fundamentally different, non-one-sided approach: The precise identification of which specific clauses of the Washington Accord were allegedly breached, particularly given that the track addressing the conflict between M23 and the Congolese government is being handled separately in Doha, not under the Washington Accord. It would have required reference to established monitoring and verification mechanisms, careful differentiation between state responsibility and the actions of non-state armed groups, and a balanced examination of compliance by all signatories. It would also have required addressing the continued drone attacks on Banyamulenge communities in Minembwe, as well as on other civilians in North Kivu, reportedly carried out by the DRC government coalition. This lack of balance ultimately returns us to a fundamental question about the role of the journalist — and about France 24 itself. Does covering the crisis in Eastern Congo mean covering its root causes and the persecution of Congolese Tutsi in a shroud? Was the prosecutorial tone of the France 24 interview driven by editorial positioning, lingering historical bias, or a commissioned narrative? When the line between questioning and judging blurs, the media does not merely report conflict; it participates in shaping it. And in regions where a single story has already fueled hatred in Congo and enabled genocide in Rwanda, words are never innocent. To silence the repeated massacres of the Banyamulenge, to overlook violence inflicted by a government against its own Kinyarwanda-speaking citizens, or to erase a layered history by collapsing and caricaturing it into a single figure is not a neutral act. It is a choice. In such a context, words can determine life or death. When “realist” or “strategic” choices normalize state violence yet condemn acts of self-preservation, the very grammar of justice is exposed as fractured and ethically inverted. The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi is reduced to a footnote—barely seen, scarcely read—while Congolese Tutsi today are consigned to precariousness, if not outright expendability. To understand this enduring crisis, one must examine its root causes across a set of interconnected and historically unfolding axes. These include: (i) colonial legacies sedimented in social structures and political institutions; (ii) reified identity categories and exclusionary narratives; and (iii) the conflation of citizenship with ethnic or tribal belonging. These structural foundations generated (iv) entrenched systems of political and social exclusion, which in turn fostered (v) processes of ideological radicalization and (vi) the cross-border diffusion and normalization of genocidal narratives and hate speech, whose metastases continue to appear across the region. They have been further reinforced by (vii) converging local and international political-economic interests that sustain instability, and by (viii) recurrent and proximate security threats that perpetuate cycles of violence. Compounding these dynamics are (ix) patterns of selective justice and modalities of international complicity, all operating within the enduring (x) weight of mythologized and wounded memories. Only by examining these ten axes in their totality can we fully apprehend the moral contradictions embedded in both local and global responses and commit ourselves to the path of sustainable peace. The France 24 interview reduced the crisis to the figure of President Kagame. Yet a deeper question lingers: Do the recent sanctions imposed on certain Rwandan army officers by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control follow the same selective and reductive logic? Three decades after the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, Congolese Tutsi communities continue to live under the shadow of an existential threat—systematic hate speech, the burning of homes that dominates daily life, and continued targeted massacres of these same communities—while those who orchestrate such crimes walk with impunity. To punish those who act in self-defense or to fault Rwanda for measures taken to safeguard its people while the government of the DRC freely incites and carries out violence against Tutsi civilians reveals a deeper perversity: Being Tutsi becomes the original offense, and the most basic acts of self-preservation seem to operate as subsidiary offenses. To exist is guilt, to survive is transgression, and to defend oneself is crime—each condemned, condemned further, condemned most of all. Jean-Pierre Karegeye, PhD, Director, Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center, Boston, USA. Boubacar Boris Diop, Writer, author of Murambi. The Book of Bones, 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature laureate, Dakar, Senegal Nicki Hitchcott, PhD, Professor of French and African Studies, University of St Andrews, Scotland. Gatsinzi Basaninyenzi, PhD, Retired Professor of English, Alabama A & M University, USA Yolande Mukagasana, Genocide survivor and writer, Kigali, Rwanda Tim Horner, PhD, Teaching Professor, Humanities Department, Villanova University, USA Richard Gisagara, Attorney for Victims of the Genocide Against the Tutsi, Paris, France, Paris, France. Deogratias Nzemba, Attorney, Member of Canadian Institute for International Law, Quebec, Canada. Suchismita Pattanaik, PhD, Researcher and Policy Specialist, Bhubaneswar, India Mahwa Aloys, Researcher, Human Rights activist and John Lewis peace fellow, Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center, Kigali, Rwanda.

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Blaming victims, backing perpetrators: Sanctions and narrative power in a France 24 interview and beyond