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Thursday 16 May 2024
[Rwanda Forum] Africa CEO Forum i Kigali
Africa CEO Forum yateranye mu Rwanda guhera uyu munzi yitabiriwe n'abakuru b'ibihugu babiri gusa. Kagame ngo yari yiteguye abageze kuri 30. Twese tuzi Kagame aba yatumiye abayobozi bose.
Iyi nama ni ubwa kabiri ibera mu Rwanda kuko Jeune Afrique yabuze ikindi gihugu cyo kuyakira. Inama nk'izi zirahenda cyane kuko ibihugu bizakira aba aribyo bibabishinzwe budget yo kuzorganiza. Urugero ni nk'imikino ya Cammonwealth yamaze igihe izenguruka ibihugu byinshi ariko hakabura igihugu kiyishingira ngo ibere muri icyo gihugu. Ni umujyi wa Birmingham muri UK wari ugiye kuyorganiza wagezeho wisubiraho kubera kibura amafranga.
Kuri Kagame rero we amafranga araboneka yo gushora mu nama zibera mu Rwanda. Iyo abandi banze korganiza izo nama mu bihugu byayo, abayoboye izo nama biyambaza Kagame.
Urebye amafranga Kagame ashoramo hakiyongeraho abakozi, ibikoresho, transport mu gihugu no kwakira abashyitsi, u Rwanda ntacyo rukuramo. Ku mafranga abaje mu nama bariha amahoteri, u Rwanda rubona 28% ku ijana gusa kuko ni uko umusoro ungana ku bacuruzi bo hejuru mu Rwanda.
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Wednesday 15 May 2024
[Rwanda Forum] Kuki Kagame ahora avuga kwica, amaraso, n’ibindi bijyana nabyo
Kuki Kagame ahora avuga kwica, amaraso, n'ibindi bijyana nabyo. Nubwo tuzi ko umurage n'umuco w'abatutsi ari ubwicanyi, ibi Kagame ahora avuga ni iterabwoba yumvisha Abanyarwanda ko umuhutu wamusimbura azicwa nkuko byagenze i Burundi. Kagame yavuze ko se yapfuye akakwa mu buhungiro, nyina nawe arapfa. Kuki ibyo byose Kagame abyibigirwa, ugasanga akina n'urupfu n'amaraso. Kuki amaraso ayafata nk'amazi ameneka akuma bakayibgirwa. Ese abo babyeyi ntibaba baramureze nabi? Ese umugore we, twita umutegarugori ugira impuhwe abana nawe ate muri iryo terabwoba ndetse na liste y'abo Kagame yishe. Uwo mugore arishimye kubana na Kagame?
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Tuesday 14 May 2024
[Rwanda Forum] In the east of the DRC, a war is financed by blood minerals Congolese people are angry at the plundering of their country for cobalt and coltan By Bernadette Vivuya
In the east of the DRC, a war is financed by blood mineralse people are also on the frontline of a war.
For more than 20 years, the exploitation of these minerals in the east of my country has fuelled one of the continent's longest-running conflicts. It has led to the deaths of millions of people and countless human rights violations, in areas that are often difficult to access due to frequent rainfall and dirt roads that have been made dangerous by the war.
In March 2022, the M23 rebel group, which is alleged to be supported by Rwanda, resumed fighting with the Congolese army—almost 10 years after M23 was first defeated in 2013. Last year, a period of particularly intense violence came on top of more than two decades of violence of all kinds—including sexual violence. In less than two years, according to estimates by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the conflict has forced more than a million civilians to flee their homes in Northern Kivu, a province with many coltan mines. Many of them have found refuge on the outskirts of towns like Goma, creating vast camps of tents cobbled together with whatever resources were at hand.
In this decades-long conflict, rebel groups constantly wrestle for control of the mines. "In the context of insecurity in the region, mining exploitation has been developed around artisanal miners, known as 'creuseurs'," explains Roger-Claude Liwanga, a Congolese researcher and professor at Emory Law School in Atlanta, United States. Artisanal miners use basic tools to extract minerals from the earth. "The armed groups active in the region quickly realised the potential of this situation and took control of the mines. This was all it took for them to buy the arms they needed and to enrich their leaders," Liwanga tells me.
Artisanal miners use basic tools to extract minerals from the earth
Civil society in DRC and lawmakers across the world have made efforts to try to tackle the exploitation of "blood" minerals which continues to finance this endless war. In the United States, the 2010 Dodd Frank Act requires companies listed on the stock exchange US stock exchange which use minerals to prove that they don't come from conflict zones. Parts of the act were passed in response to atrocities committed in the east of the DRC. Minerals are certified through the International Tin Supply Chain Initiative (ITSCI, an industry membership body that assists companies with their due diligence).
"These new requirements have prompted miners to organise themselves into cooperatives, which have structured themselves to meet the requirements of the certification process," explains Roger Rugwiza, who works for two mining cooperatives in Rubaya, Masisi territory, 50km west of Goma. Rugwiza ensures that the mine's operations comply with the requirements of the ITSCI label and anticipates any changes that could jeopardise the precious certification.
Here, in vast deforested areas, miners follow one another from hill to hill to dig new shafts. Rugwiza, who was a miner for a long time before rising through the ranks of the cooperative, thinks that the difficult working conditions of the men who walk the extraction sites every day with their shovels and pickaxes have eased since the legislation came into place. "The adoption of international rules to regulate mining has led to a number of improvements in the lives of artisanal miners. They have been informed of their rights, and this has led to a reduction in 'tracasseries', taxes illegally collected by state agents, a very concrete expression of the corruption that plagues the country." Rugwiza tells me. (DRC was ranked 166th in the world terms of corruption by Transparency International in 2022). "Some have also set up solidarity funds to provide a minimum level of health cover, or to lay out roads to transport their produce to the trading centres."
In this decades-long conflict, rebel groups constantly wrestle for control of the mines
However armed groups still have very real strength: M23 has once again occupied several areas of the region, as have other groups such as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and the local Maï-Maï militias. In those regions in the hands of warlords, there is no question of asking for better working conditions, even less of asking for the application of rules, whether Congolese or international. The state can't apply legislation in areas where it cannot impose its authority, says Liwanga. And "armed groups that exploit the sites don't feel bound by international texts."
Discerning which materials fund armed groups is also difficult: mines are often located next to each other, and minerals from rebel-held mines are often mixed with duly certified stocks. "Clean minerals are thus 'contaminated' by blood minerals'," Liwanga says. In 2022, a report by the NGO Global Witness singled out the ITSCI certification mechanism, accusing it of "facilitating the laundering of minerals from mines controlled by militias or produced using child labour." The report alleges that "the certification mechanism, which many international companies trust to source responsibly, is also used to launder smuggled or trafficked minerals."
"This was already a reality in the past, with a border made up of rural areas and lake that were easy to cross discreetly. It's even easier now that the M23 occupies a vast area adjacent to the border," says Alexis Muhima of the civil society observatory for peace minerals (OSCMP), a local organisation that advocates transparency, accountability and best practice in the mining sector. "It is essential to extend strict control of the value chain to the DRC's neighbouring countries. That's the only way we can be sure that the products bearing the label really come from the sites indicated and are not illegal imports from the DRC." Last March, Congolese finance minister Nicolas Kazadi estimated that the country was losing $1bn dollars a year as a result of these illegal exports (out of a budget of $16bn dollars for 2023).
This trafficking provokes anger among the Congolese people, many of whom denounce the plundering of their country. "International rules governing the purchase of minerals from conflict zones allow buyers to clear their consciences, but they are not enough to put an end to blood minerals," adds Muhima. "We will only put an end to this exploitation and its consequences for the population if we adopt a region-wide approach that takes account of the problem of illegal exports of Congolese minerals via neighbouring countries."
Correction: An earlier version of this piece said Northern Kivu contained many cobalt and coltan mines. Cobalt is more extracted in the south of the country. The piece has been updated to reflect this.
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[Rwanda Forum] DR Congo accuses Apple of using 'blood minerals' from war-torn east
DR Congo accuses Apple of using 'blood minerals' from war-torn east
Paris (AFP) – The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo is accusing Apple of using "illegally exploited" minerals extracted from the country's embattled east in its products, lawyers representing the African country said Thursday.
Issued on: 25/04/2024 - 21:19
3 min
The Tenke Fungurume mine, one of the largest sources of copper and cobalt in the world, in southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo © Emmet LIVINGSTONE / AFP
ADVERTISING
The DRC's lawyers have sent Apple a formal notice seen by AFP, effectively warning the tech giant that it could face legal action if the alleged practice continues.
The Paris-based lawyers accused Apple of purchasing minerals smuggled from the DRC into neighbouring Rwanda, where they are laundered and "integrated into the global supply chain".
Contacted by AFP, Apple pointed to statements from its 2023 annual corporate report regarding the alleged use of so-called conflict minerals that are crucial for a wide range of high-tech products.
"Based on our due diligence efforts... we found no reasonable basis for concluding that any of the smelters or refiners of 3TG (tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold) determined to be in our supply chain as of December 31, 2023, directly or indirectly financed or benefited armed groups in the DRC or an adjoining country," it said.
The DRC's mineral-rich Great Lakes region has been wracked by violence since regional wars in the 1990s, with tensions resurging in late 2021 when rebels from the March 23 Movement (M23) began recapturing swathes of territory.
The DRC, the United Nations and Western countries accuse Rwanda of supporting rebel groups, including M23, in a bid to control the region's vast mineral resources, an allegation Kigali denies.
"Apple has sold technology made with minerals sourced from a region whose population is being devastated by grave human rights violations," the DRC's lawyers wrote.
Sexual violence, armed attacks and widespread corruption at sites providing minerals to Apple are just some of the claims levelled in the letter.
Macs, iPhones and other Apple products are "tainted by the blood of the Congolese people", the DRC's lawyers said.
-'Notoriously insufficient'-
French lawyers William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth sent the formal notice this week to two Apple subsidiaries in France, and lawyer Robert Amsterdam send them to the tech company's US headquarters.
"Apple has consistently relied on a range of suppliers that buy minerals from Rwanda, a mineral-poor country that has preyed upon the DRC and plundered its natural resources for nearly three decades," they wrote.
The DRC is rich in tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold –- often referred to as 3T or 3TG –- that are used in producing smartphones and other electronic devices.
The tech giant's efforts to ethically source its minerals are "notoriously insufficient", Bourdon and Amsterdam wrote.
"Apple seems to rely mainly on the vigilance of its suppliers and their commitment to respect Apple's code of conduct," reads the official letter.
But both their suppliers and external audits appear to rely on certification from the Tin Supply Chain Initiative (ITSCI), "which has been shown to have numerous and serious shortcomings", the formal notice said.
The ITSCI programme is one of the main mechanisms set up over ten years ago to ensure the supply of "conflict-free" minerals in the DRC, according to the British NGO Global Witness.
In April 2022, Global Witness accused ITSCI of contributing to the laundering of conflict minerals, child labour, trafficking and smuggling in the DRC.
Apple is not the only major company relying on the "flawed" system, Global Witness said.
Tesla, Intel and Samsung are among the companies that depend on ITSCI, but Global Witness's report revealed that "ninety percent of the minerals" from specific mining sites reviewed by the programme did not come from validated mines.
The DRC's formal notice to Apple includes questions about "3T minerals used in Apple products" and demands that the tech company respond "within three weeks".
"All legal options are on the table," the lawyers told AFP.
– 'Blood minerals' –
Growing demand for cobalt and copper to power so-called clean energy, including rechargeable batteries, has also led to forced evictions, sexual assault, arson and beatings in eastern DRC, according to a 2023 Amnesty International Report.
M23 rebels currently control large swathes of North Kivu and are encircling the provincial capital of Goma, where more than one million displaced by the war have crammed into desperate camps.
The UN said in 2023 that people living in eastern DRC faced unheard-of violence, naming it one of the "worst places" in the world for children.
Minerals are transported into Rwanda, where they are laundered to outmanoeuvre oversight meant to prevent the sale of "conflict minerals", according to Global Witness.
"The responsibility of Apple and other major tech manufacturers when they use blood minerals has for too long remained a black box," the lawyers told AFP.
© 2024 AFP
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[Rwanda Forum] La RDC devrait créer deux mémoriaux officiels a Goma
La RDC devrait créer deux mémoriaux officiels a Goma
1. Pour le respect et le souvenir des 15 millions de Congolais tués par Kagame
2. Pour les réfugiés Hutus Rwandais massacres par Kagame en se référant sur le UN mapping report.
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[Rwanda Forum] Re: Ouf de soulagement en Belgique
Zac we,
Iyo debarras ko atali iy'amakoti (ya hiver n'ibindi bimara igihe bidakenerwa),si l'etre Bantou (et non bantou) maitrisait l'ubuntu l'Eden ne se limiterait pas à l"outre Akanyaru"!
One génocide is too many, why plead for more than one, again should not come after never! (dans le meilleur des monde plus ne devrait pas précèder jamais)..
A l'Ouest rien de nouveau! ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80_l%27Ouest,_rien_de_nouveau )
Paul Bäumer est un jeune Allemand de 19 ans. Après avoir été soumis à un bourrage de crâne patriotique par leur professeur, Kantorek, tous ses camarades de classe et lui-même s'engagent "volontairement", en réalité poussés par leur professeur dans l'armée impériale allemande5
Après dix semaines d'entraînement, la rencontre avec un caporal maltraitant (Himmelstoss) puis la brutalité de la vie au front font découvrir à Paul et à ses amis que leurs idéaux de patriotisme et de nationalisme se résument à des clichés inadaptés au monde réel. Sous le révélateur de la guerre, le jeune soldat se sent trahi par ses maîtres :
On Tuesday, May 14, 2024 at 11:41:12 a.m. EDT, Zac Biampa <zac.biampa@yahoo.fr> wrote:
Bon débarras!
Reste qu'en France le diabolique couple A& D. G. continue de sévir contre l'être Bantou!
[Rwanda Forum] Ouf de soulagement en Belgique
Bon débarras!
Reste qu'en France le diabolique couple A& D. G. continue de sévir contre l'être Bantou!
Monday 13 May 2024
[Rwanda Forum] Métamorphose
[Rwanda Forum] The Virtue of Lying? Unmasking the Truth About the Rwandan Genocide
The Virtue of Lying? Unmasking the Truth About the Rwandan Genocide
Michela Wrong on Obfuscation and the Impact of Polarizing Narratives
Throughout the writing of my book about the murder of Patrick Karegeya, I kept thinking about the Epimenides paradox. The one that runs: "'All Cretans are liars,' says Epimenides, the Cretan." It came to mind because Rwandans kept telling me that deceiving others, being economical with the truth, was something their community reveled in, positively prided itself upon.
Especially when dealing with Western outsiders. A proof of superiority, not shame, when successfully achieved. So much so, that the practice had worked itself into the language. Naïf comme les blancs (Naive as the white folk), Rwandans will say of someone, in the same way that other cultures will say "as thick as two short planks," or "as dumb as a post."
One of Rwanda's prime ministers, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, shocked the head of a UN peacekeeping force by telling him: "Rwandans are liars and it is a part of their culture. From childhood they are taught to not tell the truth, especially if it can hurt them." She was one of the first victims of the 1994 genocide, murdered by interahamwe thugs.
A successor told me the same thing over coffee in a Brussels hotel lobby many years later: "In Rwanda, lying is an art form. When you, as a white journalist, leave a meeting, they will be congratulating themselves: 'We took her for a ride.' Lying is the rule, rather than the exception."
It was an accusation tossed into conversations with Tutsis and Hutus, Rwandans and Ugandans, diplomats and military men, lawyers, and journalists. "You spoke to so-and-so? Oh, he's the most terrible liar."
It was not, it seemed, a recent practice. Dip into the history and you quickly stumble upon gleeful deceits. One is the story of German explorer and naturalist Dr. Richard Kandt, who arrived at the gates of the Rwandan royal court in 1898. When Dr. Kandt asked to see the Mwami, King Yuhi Musinga, the courtiers did what they always did when presumptuous white men ventured into this land of misty volcanos and rolling green hills: they presented him with a kinsman and awaited his reaction, laughing among themselves at the German's anticipated stupidity.
Dr. Kandt, however, had not only bothered to learn the local language, he had done some research. He knew that the Mwami was a teenager. Expressions changed as he shifted into Kinyarwanda, pointing out that this fully grown "Mwami" must be a fake and asking to see the real king. His eventual reward was to be made Resident in Rwanda, a mediator between the Rwandan Tutsi court and a renascent Germany hungry for an African empire. His house in Kigali is now a national museum, a fitting tribute to one of the first westerners to beat a Rwandan at his own game.
English adventurer Ewart Grogan, a contemporary of Kandt's, after an 1899 trip to "Ruanda-Urundi," as it was then known, railed bitterly against the mendacity of local guides, who would deny the existence of a mountain, he claimed, even when it virtually stared him in the face. "Lies, lies, lies, I was sick to death of them," he wrote. "Of all the liars in Africa, I believe the people of Ruanda are by far the most thorough."
It's not surprising, perhaps, that historically, dissimulation and secrecy became prized in an incestuous court beset with intrigue, where nobles lived in constant fear for their lives. Ritualists relayed messages from a Supreme Being only they could decipher, earthly power rested with a Queen Mother who sat invisible behind a screen, and the aristocracy exerted feudal dominion over the peasantry, obliging each hamlet to spy on its own inhabitants and report back to the throne.
Around the personage of the Mwami, who was never publicly seen to eat or drink, swirled a haze of euphemistic terminology. "The King is seated" indicated he was performing bodily functions; "The King has given his person" was the closest a courtier came to indicating the Mwami might have died. To be elliptical, layered, intellectually opaque—these were signs of good breeding. The crudeness of direct speech was reserved for peasants.
Kinyarwanda itself is a language infused with subtle wisps of meaning, hidden references its intended audience immediately picks up but foreigners miss. "Oh, if only you spoke Kinyarwanda you'd understand, it's as clear as day," a Rwandan will often exclaim in frustration, after translating a politician's content-packed speech, which, when converted into English, appears, disappointingly, to say nothing terribly significant. To the Rwandan's ears, the threats are direct, the promises crystal clear.
Kinyarwanda itself is a language infused with subtle wisps of meaning.
Look up the word ubwenge in a Kinyarwanda dictionary and the translation reads "wisdom," or "sense." But it can also be translated as "cunning," "deception," a quality Rwandan children are encouraged to develop, seen as the ultimate sign of maturity. It goes hand in hand with the concept of intwari, which French historian Gérard Prunier defines as "the quality of impassivity, aloofness, being beyond and above events, implacable."
Intwari was expected of young Tutsi boys destined to become warriors. Dignity before spontaneity: "In this respect," adds Prunier, "the culture the Rwandans most resemble are the Japanese." But what he is describing also echoes the "stiff upper lip" made famous by English aristocrats, a characteristic associated in both countries with an upper class groomed from birth for leadership and military service in defense of the nation.
As a Rwandan psychologist once told me: "To show emotional reserve is considered a sign of high standing. You do not just pour out your heart in Rwanda. You do not cry. It's the opposite of Western oversharing, a form of stoicism."
A culture that glories in its impenetrability, that sees virtue in misleading: to someone proposing to write a nonfiction account embracing many of the most controversial episodes in Rwandan history, it posed a bit of a challenge.
Two deadly secrets squat at the base of Rwanda's modern history: the circumstances in which the charismatic commander of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) met his end in 1990; and the question of who shot down the plane carrying the Rwandan president and his Burundian counterpart, a double presidential assassination that set the 1994 genocide in motion. Few contemporary histories are so thoroughly contested. With the passage of the years, a variety of analysts, commissions of inquiry, and investigating magistrates have changed their minds on key points, angrily contradicted one another, or simply given up on the attempt to establish the truth, opting for a bland: "No one will ever know."
The conflicting narratives would be understandable if the events in question dated back thousands of years. The fact that they concern episodes that took place in the last quarter of a century, involving players often still available for interview, highlights the problem posed by the calculated unreliability of key witnesses.
When it came to embroidering the truth, Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda's former head of external intelligence, knew more than most. During one of our most intriguing conversations, he explained some of the characteristics of the political lie. We'd been talking about Muammar Gaddafi, whom Patrick (almost everyone referred to him by his first name) had met several times. For decades, African rebel groups routinely turned to the Libyan leader for arms and funding—and he often obliged. Like many despots, Patrick said, Gaddafi possessed an elephantine memory for faces and names. "He was like a library, he knew everything about Africa, about every African leader. He was not good at analysis, but he knew everything about everyone."
I mentioned that both Mobutu Sese Seko and Haile Selassie possessed similar memories: contemporaries and biographers remarked upon it. What explained that prodigious retention of detail?
"Because he had evil intentions," was Patrick's simple answer. "When you are lying, you focus on the lie you are telling, because you know you need to remember it when you next meet that person. You remember the encounter, because you were lying all that time. Whereas if I try in a year's time to remember this coffee with you, I won't be able to recall when exactly it took place or what we said or did. Because I was just being myself." Deceit, if it is to be sustained, requires focus.
It was said with rueful self-knowledge. In his latter years, Patrick—like many of those interviewed for my book about his murder—was trying to undo a knot of his own tying. He and his closest colleagues in the RPF were responsible for a compelling narrative peddled to journalists, diplomats, human rights workers, Western officials, and ordinary Rwandans throughout the 1990s and aughts. They had sold that story with passionate energy, driving aggression, and a sophisticated understanding of their respective audiences' guilt complexes and pressure points.
These were men supremely skilled at seduction, intellectual, emotional, or sexual. American diplomats weary of negotiating with sleazy Great Lakes politicians thrilled at the puritanism of these thin, driven young men in camouflage. NGO workers who were new to Africa's Great Lakes listened to their tales, hearts pounding with sympathy and outrage—initially, at least. Reporters, photographers, and filmmakers became lifelong friends or ended up jumping into bed with them. Intensity, along with imminent danger—and the Great Lakes has always been a dangerous place to live and work—is one of the great aphrodisiacs.
These were men supremely skilled at seduction, intellectual, emotional, or sexual.
One journalist I know, working for a mainstream news agency, covertly joined the RPF's intelligence payroll; another confessed, many years later, to carrying a top-secret message for the movement to a Congolese minister in Kinshasa: the conflict of interest this represented never crossed his mind. After the genocide, Rwanda could so easily be viewed through the prism of the Holocaust and the pledge of "Never Again." And to the Anglo-Saxon world, at least, it seemed clear who the Good Guys were: the insurgent RPF.
It was a storyline that required careful curation by officials like Patrick, and the history of the period is littered with deliberately leaked memos, suppressed reports, and many a daring forgery. The men I spoke to went on to challenge and undermine the account, only to discover—irony of ironies—that they had done their original work rather too well. Having superbly marketed the narrative of the underdog turned moral crusader returning home, they found, when they tried denouncing it, that their listeners preferred the lie to its teller. When Cretan Epimenides tells you not to believe the Cretans, why would a sane person listen?
The debate over the Rwandan narrative has always been polarized between those—often Francophones—who saw the RPF as invaders willing to sacrifice millions in their ruthless quest to return Tutsis to power in Rwanda, and those—usually Anglophones—who saw them as warrior-liberators who, tracing a giant geographical and historical boomerang, overturned one of Africa's most evil regimes.
The level of hatred and contempt felt by each side for the other is astonishing. Perhaps only the Israel-Palestine debate can equal it for venom. The vitriol is in part explained by the stakes involved, the extraordinary amount of blood shed at every stage. Who can contemplate all those hundreds of thousands of dead—not just in Rwanda, but in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—and remain coolheaded?
As Paul Kagame gradually emerged as one of Africa's uncontestable autocrats, damning evidence kept surfacing of RPF atrocities. At first it could be brushed aside, using the classic justifications of realpolitik: Rwanda was situated in a rough neighborhood, the argument went; its government, trying to restore peace and security to a traumatized society, could not be held to the standards of Sweden or Switzerland.
Then the movement that had seemed to outsiders so united began splintering, and key members quit and ran. The RPF's self-imposed oath of Omertà, rigidly observed up till then, began to crack, and as it did so, people like me who had seen the RPF as implacable, certainly, but a disciplined, highly effective movement with a farsighted leadership and a progressive agenda, felt our certainties begin to tremble.
As examples of RPF human rights abuses and unaccountability accumulated, I was not the only previously supportive journalist who winced, frowned, and was quietly grateful to be writing about other things. My career had taken me elsewhere, Rwanda was no longer my beat. Still, it was painful to accept that I might have unwittingly misled my readers.
When Cretan Epimenides tells you not to believe the Cretans, why would a sane person listen?
On the few occasions when I met up with Patrick Karegeya during these years, I avoided asking him certain questions. Of course, I kick myself for that now. I told myself it was out of politeness. Reminding an exiled spy chief that he had once told the media the exact opposite of what he was now saying seemed, well, rude. The guy was down on his luck, beleaguered in every sense of the word, why rub salt into his wounds? But my concern was also for myself: I didn't want to confront the truth of just how thoroughly I might have got it wrong.
Political philosopher Frantz Fanon captured that disinclination perfectly: "Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."
The greater the effort that goes into forming a belief, the more reluctant those who hold it are to adjust their lenses. The investment a shamefaced outside world poured into Rwanda after the genocide—financial, emotional, intellectual—was enormous, given the country's tiny size and population. No wonder so many are reluctant to reassess.
What I discovered, however, was that whatever the conscious mind decides to engage with—or bypass—one's cognitive process continues to churn heedlessly along in the background. There came a day when, with a near-audible mental ping, I realized I no longer believed most of the key "truths" upon which the RPF had built its account, and hadn't for ages. It felt like a relief. Shibboleths can weigh heavy on the soul.
One thing I never doubted, not for a second, was that a genocide had occurred in Rwanda in April 1994. I'd seen the bodies, gagged at the unmistakable aroma that comes off a hurriedly buried mass grave, registered the bloody handprints left on the walls of classrooms and church buildings by Tutsi men, women, and children scrabbling to escape their executioners. Images of that kind are hard to forget.
What I no longer believed was the RPF's explanation of how the country had come to reach that terrible point, or the movement's depiction of itself as not just a morally blameless actor during the buildup to that episode, but the rebel equivalent of a knight in shining armor, cantering in to lance the dragon of ethnic slaughter.
https://lithub.com/the-virtue-of-lyng-unmasking-the-truth-about-the-rwandan-genocide/
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[Rwanda Forum] The truth about the Rwandan genocide 7 April 2024, 6:00am
The truth about the Rwandan genocide
- 7 April 2024, 6:00am
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Today a solemn ceremony takes place in Rwanda's capital. President Paul Kagame, flanked by international dignitaries – including our own development secretary Andrew Mitchell – will light a flame of remembrance at Kigali's genocide memorial, where the bones of more than 250,000 people are interred.
'Kwibuka' ('Remember' in Kinyarwanda) – this act of commemoration – happens every April. But this time it's special. It has now been 30 years since the genocide, and is thus an opportunity to assess the tenure of one of Africa's most controversial leaders. Cue a flood of pre-prepared broadcasts, articles and declarations from journalists, politicians and institutions.
The problem is not what the memorial shows, but what it omits
Many will contain a reference to the genocide memorial. Rightly so. The brainchild of James and Stephen Smith – two brothers from the north of England who set up the Aegis Trust, a British charity dedicated to preventing genocide – it's a remarkable site. Almost every tourist who goes there emerges shaken and deeply moved. Every potential investor, diplomat and foreign official – especially those trying to negotiate peace between Rwanda and the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – is obliged to make a stop.
I've visited several times over the years and have watched it change. At first its displays were gulp-inducingly graphic: shattered skulls, clothing stained with browning blood. Later, they became less in-your-face. Some of the Rwandan staff had visited Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial site, and clearly picked up tips there on how to make the displays simultaneously less gruesome and more poignant.
There's a commendable determination to remember the slaughtered men, women and children as individuals, rather than anonymous numbers. 'The last display is a children's room, with photos of the children who died,' a recently-returned friend told me. 'It's incredibly powerful. I came out with tears streaming down my face.'
I used to be a fan, but no longer. For the Smith brothers' well-intentioned project has become part and parcel of Rwanda's problem, it seems to me. It has served to airbrush an inconvenient history, cementing in place a government narrative which actively undermines Rwanda's professed commitment to reconciling majority Hutus and minority Tutsis.
The problem is not what the memorial shows, but what it omits. Quite correctly, it remembers the hundreds of thousands of Tutsis who were macheted, shot and clubbed to death by Hutu extremist militias and army soldiers in schools, churches and at checkpoints after President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane was shot out of the sky on 6 April 1994.
But that's only part of Rwanda's story, and there's the rub. Little time at the memorial is wasted on the build-up to the genocide, when Kagame's Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded from Uganda and swept south, ethnically cleansing the population as it moved.
Predictably, there's no mention of the Kibeho massacre of 1995, when Kagame's troops shot dead around 8,000 displaced Hutus under the eyes of UN peacekeepers. The slaughter in 1996 and 1997 of tens of thousands of Hutu refugees who had fled into the DRC – massacres carefully documented by the UN – don't feature, either.
Kagame needs relations between Hutus and Tutsis to remain toxic, poisoned by mutual suspicion
Staff would no doubt argue that these things happened after the memorial's chosen cut-off point. But the glossing over of Rwanda's civil war means the genocide appears to come out of nowhere, a bolt from the blue. Context is all, and here context is missing.
These are taboo topics in modern Rwanda, where Kagame, who has been in power since 2000, always posits himself as 'the man who stopped the killing'. After Hutu opposition leader Victoire Ingabire, returning from exile, drew attention to this lacuna in 2010, she was rewarded with eight years in jail for terrorism and 'genocide denial'. She is now barred from running in this year's elections, making them a shoo-in for Kagame.
Ingabire is not the only person jailed for insisting that the RPF, too, has blood on its hands. As Human Rights Watch documents, Rwanda's prisons are full of poets, bloggers, citizen journalists and academics whose mistake was to publicly raise the issue of RPF past crimes.
Most of these detainees are Hutus, but, surreally, 'genocide denial' is also an accusation made against Tutsis who lost family members during the slaughter. One tragic example was Kizito Mihigo, a gospel singer known as 'the Dove'. He was jailed after questioning the official narrative and talking to exiled opposition party members. Amnestied, he was rearrested while trying to flee the country and died in a police cell in 2020. I don't know many Rwandans who believe he committed suicide – the official version given by the authorities.
These are individual examples, but they take place against a wider backdrop of ethnically-skewed blame and punishment. After the genocide, when its prisons were crammed to bursting point with suspected killers, Rwanda experimented with a form of grassroots justice called 'Gacaca', in which villagers tried and sentenced their neighbours. It was a practical way of dealing with an intractable problem. While Gacaca dealt with perpetrators low down in the administrative and army echelons, an international tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, simultaneously tried Habyarimana's top militia commanders, government officials and generals, the men who ordered the killings.
But this, too, has not been even-handed. Crimes committed by RPF officers and soldiers barely featured during Gacaca. The same went for the Arusha tribunal process. In both cases, those prosecuted were overwhelmingly Hutus.
Justice in post-conflict societies is always a rough and ready affair. In Europe after the Second World War, former Resistance fighters often found themselves living next door to Fascist collaborators who had either got off scot free or served the lightest of sentences. While Hitler's henchmen were hanged at Nuremberg, Churchill never had to answer for the bombing of Dresden.
Yet justice biased in the victor's favour is not just repugnant, but positively risky when the community being told it bears collective responsibility for one of the 20th century's worst atrocities, and has its nose constantly rubbed into past crimes in myriad small and petty ways, represents the majority.
This raises the question of whether what Kagame is doing is a clumsy miscalculation, a minority-pleasing blunder, or, in fact, entirely deliberate. Whatever he says when addressing a Western public – and Kagame's message always varies dramatically depending on whether he is speaking English or Kinyarwanda – I believe he needs relations between Hutus and Tutsis to remain toxic, poisoned by mutual suspicion, because that's the foundation on which his rule is premised. If you listen to his speeches and those of his nearest colleagues – particularly those of the pugnacious former defence minister James Kabarebe – you notice how enthusiastically they talk up the 'genocidal forces' raging in DRC, in Hutu refugee camps scattered across southern Africa, and even – supposedly – in Europe.
Rwanda's army is so well trained and armed it is regularly relied on by the West to send peacekeepers to places like Darfur, Central African Republic and Mozambique. Yet if you listen to Rwanda's leadership, you would think it could be toppled at any moment by the FDLR, a militia of ageing genocidaires operating across the border. Analysts estimate that force at just 600 men.
Kagame's support for a Tutsi rebel group – the M23 – laying waste to eastern DRC in recent years hardly sends out a message of ethnic reconciliation, either. The hatred against Congolese Tutsis that he decries is of his own making. As he well knows, nothing polarizes public sentiment like an armed invasion.
Years ago, key members of Rwanda's Tutsi elite – men who have known Kagame since he was a geeky young rebel – decided he had betrayed their movement's founding principles and clung to power far too long. Those dissident Tutsi voices were systematically silenced, with the men concerned either jailed, driven into exile or assassinated abroad.
Having sidelined his former brothers in arms, Kagame can present the contest in Rwanda not as a quarrel over which a member of a Tutsi elite gets to hold ultimate executive power, but as an existential struggle by a beleaguered ethnic minority over which only he can extend a shining, protective shield. By constantly telling his audience they are surrounded by enemies desperate to complete unfinished business, he underlines his own indispensability: 'You may not like me,' reads the message put out by every Rwandan newspaper, radio station and that poignant genocide memorial. 'But I'm the only thing between you and Armageddon.'
As a recipe for presidential survival, it makes sense. As a recipe for domestic and regional stability and peace, it's a disaster.
The Aegis Trust commented: 'Michela Wrong's assertion that the Kigali Genocide Memorial 'actively undermines' Rwanda's commitment to reconciliation overlooks its role as birthplace of peace and values education developed by the Aegis Trust, now built into Rwanda's national schools curriculum. This has led to both Tutsi and Hutu students giving up plans for armed violence, writes Aegis founder Dr James Smith in this response, which addresses Wrong's critique in more detail.'
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WRITTEN BY
Michela WrongMichela Wrong is the author of Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, published by HarperCollins.
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