Rwandese must never be left for dead ever again
On Sunday, Big Brother in Rwanda took to the podium in Kigali to lament the supposed global indifference to the 1994 genocide that unfolded in “the land of a thousand hills”.
“It was the international community which failed all of us, whether from contempt or cowardice,” president Paul Kagame said in a speech after lighting a flame of remembrance and laying a wreath at the memorial site where the remains of 250,000 genocide victims lie.
America and France, through their respective head honchos Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron, had by Sunday, in statements, accounted for their lack of action.
It is gratifying to know we did our bit to help in Rwanda, and the recipients of our largesse are eternally grateful. In a moving speech, Kagame said in part: “A notable example of solidarity came to us from South Africa, one among many. …As SA ended apartheid and elected Nelson Mandela president, in Rwanda the last genocide of the 20th century was being carried out.
“The new South Africa paid for Cuban doctors to help rebuild our shattered health system and opened up its universities to Rwandan students, paying only local fees. Among the hundreds of students who benefited from SA’s generosity, some were orphaned survivors; others were the children of perpetrators; and many were neither. Most have gone on to become leaders in our country in different fields. Today, they live a completely new life.”
The Hutu have never known peace so much so that they could be inured to the Orwellian slogan: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery.”
It is under Kagame that the vanquished Hutu and, to some extent, the Tutsi aggressors, have tasted a semblance of normalcy in their relations, at least in Rwanda.
“In 1972 in Burundi, more than 200,000 Hutus, the majority tribe, were slaughtered in barely two months, … by the government run by the Tutsi, a minority tribe. August 1988 witnessed a repeat of the massacre, with some 10,000 Hutus slain, some reportedly machine-gunned from army helicopters,” one of many reports chronicling the Broedertwis says.
Does it really matter if Kagame is not everyone’s favourite uncle?
Wherever he may take the country after 30 years in power (and counting), the Rwandese are better off as characters in George Orwell’s 1984, with him as Big Brother at the helm. The opposite of the relative calm under Kagame is too ghastly to contemplate. Concluding his speech, Kagame said,: “Our people will never – and I mean never – be left for dead again.”
Rwanda’s ethnic composition remains largely unchanged since 1994, with the Tutsis accounting for 14% of the Hutu-dominated population of 14-million. Reports say Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated government has outlawed any form of organisation along ethnic lines, as part of efforts to build a uniform Rwandan identity.
National ID cards no longer identify citizens by ethnic group, and a tough penal code prosecutes those suspected of denying the genocide or the “ideology behind it”. Some say the law has been used to silence critics of the government’s policies. Who cares by what means a new Rwanda is achieved? The Rwandese must never be left for dead ever again.