Rwandan Genocide survivors have successfully blocked a planned public lecture at a Belgian University by people in it calls Genocide revisionists.Louvain Catholic University was due to host a conference on ‘Hotel Rwanda’, a controversial movie, which critics say dramatised the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, while only promoting the interests of its controversial central figure, Paul Rusesabagina, who was acting manager of Kigali’s Hotel des Mille Collines during the 1994 Genocide.“They first misled the university authorities about the theme of their debate but after we explained to them what the conference was about, which was promoting negationist ideologies, the university decided to deny them room,” Benoit Kaboyi, the Executive Secretary of Ibuka, a Genocide survivors’ association, said yesterday.Among the planned panellists at the conference which was due to take place at Louvain Catholic University were Rusesabagina and Pierre Pean, a French author and the lawyer of Genocide convict Bernard Ntuyahaga, who is serving 20 years in prison.Ibuka was particularly bitter with the invitation of Pean who it describes as a ‘caricatural example of this negationsism.’ Genocide survivors last year filed a lawsuit in a Paris court against Pean, the author of Noires Fureurs, Blancs Menteurs (literally translated to mean ‘black furies, white liars), which denied that Genocide took place in Rwanda.In order to block the conference, Ibuka filed a protest note through its Belgian-based chapter, Ibuka-Memoire et Justice.“The Ibuka section of victims and witnesses of the Genocide already alerted you in their March 21, 2006 correspondence following the negationist speeches after the projection of Hotel Rwanda film on March 15, 2006”, reads part of their letter addressed to the university’s Vice Rector, Professor Xavier Renders. “It is for these reasons that we ask with insistence the academic authorities not to authorise the holding of this hate meeting that will jeopardise your values defended by your institution,” Ibuka said in its Monday letter.ENDS
