Negationist propaganda draws on a variety of strategies and techniques: the denial of facts, the alteration of motives and circumstances, blurring, blending truth and falsehood, camouflage, biased interpretation, and generalisation. By proceeding in this manner, negationism manufactures highly structured untruths and constitutes an anti-history. Among the tools of negationism, the eraser, the sieve, and the rolling mill occupy an important place. The eraser is used to erase inconvenient facts and figures. Thus, the facts never occurred, and the characters never existed. The sieve ensures the filtering of information: only the details that support a given truth are retained; the others are destroyed or concealed. Finally, the rolling mill crushes the arguments of detractors and shreds them to pieces. In addition to traditional mass communication channels such as radio and television, negationism spreads through books and other types of writing like newspapers. In recent years, negationist discourse has uniquely benefited from the massive exploitation of the Internet, which allows its rhetoric to be broadcast widely without legislative constraints. The denial of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda involves several stakes and takes various forms. The stakes are primarily political, judicial, and economic. On the political front, negationists demonise the current Rwandan regime to discredit it both internally and externally. The judicial stakes also fit into this perspective. Negationists aim to dilute the criminal responsibility of Rwandans and to acquit the international community of its complicity in the genocide. On an economic level, under the pretext that some of the current leaders have allegedly committed atrocities, certain international organizations have been advising various donors to sever economic ties with Rwanda. This manoeuvre also aims to discredit the regime and secure the suspension of international aid. Negationists hope to exploit this state of both diplomatic and economic weakness to force the Kigali regime into compromising with genocidal forces and their allies. It is within this logic that certain forms of genocide denial, including the balancing of horror , the manipulation of memory, and revisionist attitudes, developed a few years after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. These forms of denial extend the very attitudes seen in the architects and perpetrators of the genocide. These attitudes rely on anonymity while committing the crime. Shamed by the vile act of killing people they knew, the killers hid their identity and faces. They blended into the crowd and destroyed traces that could expose their crimes. They killed in groups, wore hoods (head coverings on jackets), or covered themselves in banana or eucalyptus leaves. They painted their faces with clay or travelled to distant hills to kill. To hide the true scale of the crime, the killers also tried to conceal the identity of their victims. The victims were either buried in mass graves or burned with gasoline. In other cases, they were thrown into rivers and lakes. Among planners, the refusal to name genocide (silence and the use of euphemisms) is one of the common strategies. It is well known that during the Holocaust, the Nazis used the term Final Solution as a code word to designate all measures intended to exterminate the Jews. For their part, those responsible for the Armenian Genocide spoke of deportation to camouflage the reality of the genocide. In the case of the genocide against the Tutsi, the refusal to name it was characterised by the use of everyday terms, such as 'gukora = to work', 'gukuraho umwanda = to remove the dirt', 'gutema ibihuru = to clear the bush,' and so on. In an interview given to the Belgian newspaper De Volkskrant on June 26, 1995, the former Bishop of Ruhengeri, Monsignor Phocas Nikwigize, declared that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 was something very human: “when someone attacks you, you have to defend yourself. In such a situation, you forget that you are a Christian, you are then human above all else.”
