Re: [Rwanda Forum] Re: Les opérations militaires de la France au Rwanda.

Mon cher Rugura,

On a beau établir des similitudes entre les parcours des "grands" hommes, il y aura toujours des paradoxes.

Ainsi dans les cas qui nous occupent, l'officier Jean Bedel Bokassa a servi dans l'armée française au moment où sa Centrafrique natale ( Oubangui-Shari) était une possession de la France. Mais cela n'a pas empêché la même France de le porter au trône de la Centrafrique devenue "Etat indépendant" six ans auparavent. Mais pour «l'Empereur" Kagame, celui-ci a servi comme officier dans l'armée de l'Ouganda alors que son Rwanda natal avait son ambassade à Kampala et que son drapeau flottait à côté de celui de l'Ouganda devant le Palais de verre de Manhatan depuis 20 ans. Comme dans le premier cas, cela n'a pas empêché l'Ouganda de le porter au trône du Rwanda comme avait fait la France pour Bokassa en Centrafrique. La simmilitude s'arrête là...

Nimpuguka ndakubwira ibya Gen Didier Tauzin, un officier français tellement rancunier que 30 ans plus tard il entend se vanger de ceux qui l'ont viré du Rwanda de façon d'ailleurs très justifiée.

Enfin je dirai un mot sur les dinosaures Rukokoma et Sebatware pour voir qui des deux a fait " Kugambanira igihugu" plus que l'autre.

A bientôt.

Zac

Le vendredi 16 juillet 2021, 02:26:08 UTC+1, Vincent Ndacyayisenga <rugura@yahoo.com> a écrit :

Mon cher Zac,

Comparaison n'est pas raison, et je crois que je n'ai pas encore perdu la mienne (ou qu'elle m'ait perdue!), et pour ce qui est de la suggestion il n'en manque pas qui voudraient mettre du beurre dans leurs épinards, tu as décris la grandeur et la décadence des forces armées Rwandaises, je parie que beaucoup t'en ont voulu, je me demande si notre ami aurait le même prestance à reconter la tragedie des Bamileke, ce ne sont certainement pas ces derniers qui lui en voudront, mais plutot ceux qui ne souffrent pas qu'on égratigne la grande muette ...ou son histoire et ses hauts faits.

Le regrété Minani Rwema at: siri latere riye ne pulifebure kelome ! au pays des Droits de l'homme on commémore mais ne célèbre pas le père ducode civil français (n'était ce pas une façon de le célébrer en intronisant "le vétéran du Viet Nam?" (simple officier mais dont les états de service valent largement ceux d'offiers superieurs bien nés (sur ce point l'ami O'nana (qui n'est pas irlandais) a fait un effort.

BOKASSA, VIE ET DERNIERES CONFIDENCES AVEC TEMOIGNAGE INEDIT SUR VALERY GISCARD D'ESTAING

BOKASSA, VIE ET DERNIERES CONFIDENCES AVEC TEMOIGNAGE INEDIT SUR VALERY ...

BOKASSA, VIE ET DERNIERES CONFIDENCES AVEC TEMOIGNAGE INEDIT SUR VALERY GISCARD D'ESTAING

Retour sur mes pas, j'ai soulevé ce sujet au départ à l'intention du dénommé ( ou qui s'est prénomé) Amakuru y'urwanda, sur l'intervention des gars du simple officier Kagame au Mozambique, la France a répondu bien plus vite à l'appel à l'aide de Juvenal Habyalimana, Nyusi devait-il expressément faire appel à ses collègues de la SADEC?(si Mobutu était encore vivant, l'aurait-il fait? même si l'inervention de ses hommes chez "son petit frère" n'ont pas laissé que de bons souvenirs!.

Et comme tu sais,jaime mélanger les carottes et les grains de mais (pour passer du coq à l'ane sans effaroucher ce dernier), pour ce qui croient que je polémique pour polémiquer, voici un des anciens de Barracuda, Noroit et consort dont j'ai parlé, apparement Charles de Gaulle était plus malin, c130 avec les Africains qu'il a libéré la France, mais sa décolonisation n'a pas facilité la tache a ses successeurs, tiens c'est pendant que la France renversait Bokassa qu'elle signait les accords de cooperation avec le Rwanda!,

J'ai l'impression que tout n'a pas encore été dit (Et il y a toujours du beurre au frigo

Général Didier Tauzin - mise au point sur le Rwanda

Pour appliquer un accord, il faut que les deux protagonistes en aient la volonté et les moyens. Or à plusieurs reprises vous décrivez le président Habyarimana comme un homme dépassé, qui ne fait plus confiance à ses militaires. Vous le qualifiez de « désorienté ». Il contribue aussi à obscurcir l'analyse de François Mitterrand, et parlant d'agression étrangère. Vous-même analysez une guerre civile. Vous écrivez que le 1er octobre 1990 « c'est le début de la guerre civile ». Pourtant, en 1994, les archives de l'Elysée montrent un François Mitterrand se demandant s'il s'agit d'une guerre civile ou d'une guerre d'agression. Une posture dénuée de sens ?

Je décris Habyarimana tel qu'il m'est apparu. M'accueillant en 1992 dans ce petit salon mal éclairé de sa villa, alors que son armée ne répond plus et qu'il ne comprend pas ce qui se passe. Abattu. Effondré.

Afrikarabia » Général Dominique Delort : « Soyons clairs : au Rwanda, ce sont des Rwandais qui ont commis le génocide. Pas des Français »

Afrikarabia » Général Dominique Delort : « Soyons clairs : au Rwanda, ...

Attention mon cher Zac,j'ai l'impression que les idiots de service ont trouvé d'autres illuminateurs!

🚨Urgent ASSIMI GOITA A DEJOUÉ LE COMPLOT DU PRESIDENT MACRON ET DE SES PREFETS

🚨Urgent ASSIMI GOITA A DEJOUÉ LE COMPLOT DU PRESIDENT MACRON ET DE SES...

Mais qu'est ce que ça donne une joute de dinausores de la politique Rwandaise?

TWAGIRAMUNGU ABABWIJE INANI NA RIMWE!RWABUZE GICA AHANGANA N'UWARI MINISTIRI.ATI MWAHEMUKIYE IGIHUGU

TWAGIRAMUNGU ABABWIJE INANI NA RIMWE!RWABUZE GICA AHANGANA N'UWARI MINIS...

Et qui nous dira comment ça s'est vraiment passé à Kigali?

On Thursday, July 15, 2021, 04:12:00 p.m. EDT, 'Zac Biampa' via Rwanda Forum <rwandaforum@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Mon cher Rugura,

Il apparait que le thème du parallèle entre l'Empereur Bokasa 1er de Centrafrique et le non moins Empereur Kagame ( Xième) du Rwanda pourrait constituer un intéressant sujet de Doctorat en Sciences politiques qui n'aurait rien à envier sur celle d&fendu avec brio et Félicitations du jury par le camerounais Charles Onana concernant la France au Rwanda notamment lors de l'opération Turquoise à l'Université de Lyon en 2020.

Il suffirait que le doctorant souligne le fait que le simple officier dans l'armée française Jean Bedel Bokassa originaire de Centrafrique fut encouragé et aidé par la France pour prendre le pouvoir dans son pays d'origine. Et de souligner que Paul Kagame aussi simple officier dans l'armée de l'Ouganda, d'origine rwandaise fut aussi encouragé, aidé et soutenu pour prendre le pouvoir dans son pays d'origine qu'est le Rwanda.

Il marquerait encore un point s'il souligne que la comparaison entre les deux " Empereurs" s'arrête lè. En effet, Bokassa 1er n'a régné sur la Centrafrique que pendant 13 ans même en comptant les années où il n'était que " simple président à vie ( 1966-1979). Tandis que son homologue du Rwanda Paul Kagame règne encore sur le Rwanda depuis 27 ans. S'il parvenait à souligner que Bokassa 1er fut renversé de son trône par la même France qui l'y avait installé pour le remplacer par son cousin Dacko venu de France dans un avion militaire pour lire la déclaration de sa prise du pouvoir quand Bokassa était déjà renversé par une opération de l'armée française, mais que Kagame s'est émancipé de l'Ouganda qui l'a installé au trône et que c'est même lui, Kagame, qui est scusceptible d'installer qui il veut au pouvoir en son Ouganda national et en donner des indications sinon des preuves,, alors ce doctorant marquerait encore des points et sa thèse deviendrait un chef d'oeuvre.

Avis aux amateurs de titres universitaires!

Le jeudi 15 juillet 2021, 12:06:47 UTC+1, 'Vincent Ndacyayisenga' via Rwanda Forum <rwandaforum@googlegroups.com> a écrit :

Je ne contredirai pas l'observateur intéressé ..... qui ne me contredira pas non plus si je dis que au sein de cet operation NOROIT il y avait des "tombeurs" du tès Fronco-Oubanguien (et néamoins adorateur de l'empereur Napoléon, lui-mêmr auto-courroné empéreur, le premier et unique de RCA) Jean-Bedel Bokassa.(que ces tombeurs de Bokassa aient voulu anticiper et empêcher Paul Kagame de se proclamer Empéreur de l'émpire des mille collines ..... mais pas de stopper le génocide!)

Non je ne me prend pas pour Black ( je suis ) et Bald and Beardy Man! (tu vois mon cher Nikozitambirwa, ton commandant Zac il t'a donné des ordres, mais moi on a commandé ...... des bières au même comptoir de la Maisaf à Matonge-les-Bruxelles (mais pas ensemble )

J'ai l'impression que les RDF prennent à coeur les exemples de la grande muette hezagonale (surtout que les gars à Ramaphosa sont occupés à stabilizer ..... Soweto! (pourquoi ne pas demander à Jacob d'appeller au Calme?)

On Wednesday, July 14, 2021, 10:05:28 a.m. EDT, Zac Biampa <zac.biampa@yahoo.fr> wrote:

Rugura,

Vous avez dans un de vos postings en réaction aux allégations des " Amakuru et al," fait allusion à l'Opération NOROIT.

Ecoutez ce qu'en a dit un observateur intéressé des événements de l'époque.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DI6xqxxorEAI&psig=AOvVaw2xTWXXOChHXrKn0a9ot1Qc&ust=1626357443822000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=2ahUKEwj2zYDf2-LxAhVyXOUKHbF4BQwQr4kDegUIARCYAQ

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Re: [Rwanda Forum] Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post

"When the plane was shot in June 1994"? Eho is rewriting the history?

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 8:48 PM, 'Nzi Nink' via Rwanda Forum
<rwandaforum@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post
Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/12/like-us-rwanda-is-pitched-battle-over-its-history/

Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history
Controlling the historical narrative in Rwanda is key to the regime's power
Rwandan President Paul Kagame, center, and first lady Jeannette Kagame, right, arrive at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in 2019 to mark the 25th anniversary of the slaughter of 800,000 people at the urging of a government made up of the majority Hutu ethnicity. (Ben Curtis/AP)Tom Zoellner is professor of English at Chapman University and the author of "Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire."
"The question is, and this is the question we should be meditating on, day in and day out, is how do we get out of this vortex, the cycle, before it's too late? How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?"
The absurd part is what Carlson was trying to say: that the teaching of critical race theory in schools and universities would lead to oppressed people of color picking up machetes to slaughter White people, an ethnic cleansing that would resemble the 1994 genocide in the small East African nation of Rwanda, in which 800,000 people were slaughtered at the urging of a government made up of the majority Hutu ethnicity.
Story continues below advertisement
Rwanda holds an important lesson for America's culture wars today, but not in the way Carlson thinks. Rather, in Rwanda, political leaders have rewritten the country's history to gain political power, just as the right wing is now attempting to do in the United States. In fact, the greatest asset of the dictatorship in today's Rwanda is its mastery of the past. "Within Rwanda today, hegemonic power relies for much of its justification on a certain reading of history," the Smith College scholar David Newbury has concluded.
President Paul Kagame has insisted on a clean story about what happened in 1994, with no dissent permitted. The official version is that the Hutu ethnic group, driven by ancient hatreds, contrived to have a plane carrying then-President Juvénal Habyarimana shot down with a shoulder-mounted rocket. The inside-job assassination was falsely blamed on the Tutsis, touching off a period of slaughter that lasted 100 days. Kagame's army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, fought its way into the capital, took power and instituted an inclusive government in which nobody pays attention to ethnic labels any longer. The genocide perpetrators were tried and convicted in international courts, and village-level killers were brought to justice, as well. Thanks to the discipline and organization of the RPF, the country rebuilt itself into a jewel of the region, with a booming economy, clean streets and no crime. Visitors are taught this version at the many genocide memorials stacked high with the bones of slaughtered Tutsis.
But the reality is far more complicated. The genocide was sparked by a combination of factors. The Tutsi minority had dominated the country until 1959, when many fled on the eve of national independence from Belgium. Tutsis in exile formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which invaded from neighboring Uganda in 1990. When a peace deal was brokered in 1993, it didn't solve these tensions.
Story continues below advertisement
As the coffee economy collapsed, the failing regime in power was growing desperate. When the plane carrying the president was shot down in June 1994, the RPF said it was done by Hutus then in power as a ploy to start a massacre, while Hutus blamed the RPF. For 100 days, Rwandans slaughtered each other. Most, but not all, victims were Tutsi. And the RPF committed hundreds of thousands of reprisal killings during and after the official 100-day demarcation of the genocide, systematically wiping out entire Hutu villages.
Talking about any of this is a grave taboo in a society where the governing class is almost exclusively Tutsi and the genocide must be seen only as a one-way affair.
Intellectual violators can be charged with crimes like "divisionism" or "trivializing the genocide" and can be sentenced to 10 years in prison. The press is ruthlessly censored; schoolbooks omit complicated realities; there is no independent judiciary where those accused can get a fair hearing. (Disclosure: I was the co-writer of a 2006 memoir by Paul Rusesabagina, the man whose life story was featured in the movie "Hotel Rwanda." He was kidnapped by the regime in August.)
Story continues below advertisement
Disputed national histories and weaponized skeletons are nothing new, of course, and the politics of "your grandfather killed my grandfather" have long been used to fire up populist movements, cast blame and solidify power. Opinions about the status of West Bank settlements, to name but one example, are often peppered with interpretive references to who did what to whom, not just in 1948 but in the Book of Joshua. But in Rwanda, the regime's control of the historical narrative is directly connected to the country's place in the global networks of investment, aid and tourism.
Western guilt over not intervening in the 1994 genocide has turned Kagame into an international figure of renown and driven billions of dollars of corporate investment and direct aid. Bill Clinton told Kagame repeatedly that not deploying U.S. troops to halt the slaughter was the biggest regret of his presidency.
Yet a new book by British journalist Michela Wrong, "Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad," argues that this historical lever has been pulled for cynical ends. "I get shocked when people succumb to it," former regime official Theogene Rudasingwa told her. "Because at the end of the day it's Rwandans who killed Rwandans. We wreaked damage on one another, so this whole notion of the Americans and the international community and the British saying, 'Mea culpa, mea culpa,' I just don't see the basis for that."
Story continues below advertisement
Guilt also helped explain why the West turned a blind eye to Rwanda's warmongering and exploitation of minerals in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo from 1996 to 2003, a conflict that cost an estimated 5.4 million lives and enlarged Rwanda's budget. The pass given to the RPF's behavior is partly an outgrowth of how the West wants to see the primary victims of the 1994 genocide as "the good guys" in a complex neighborhood. Allowing for more historical complexity or a reckoning with RPF excesses threatens international support for Kagame's regime and for Rwanda in general.
In an environment that remains fraught, teaching unapproved history can be hazardous to an instructor's health. After Rwandan professor Leopold Munyakazi gave lectures characterizing the 1994 genocide as a conflict over political power more than ethnicity, he was jailed on preposterous charges that he had participated in the killings himself. Ethnicity has to remain at the center of the official narrative because it gives a simple — if incomplete — explanation for the genocide and for the need of a strongman like Kagame to stop it from happening again. Munyakazi was eventually cleared of those accusations but sentenced to nine years in prison for the intellectual crime of "genocide revisionism."
Western academics also feel the heat. A team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley consulted with the government on how to teach history but found "multiple points of view, debate and discussion are discouraged" in favor of a narrative that shines the best possible light on Kagame's presidency. When Colgate professor Susan Thomson did fieldwork in the rural southwestern part of the country, she found schools teaching students that "deep seated and seething ethnic hatred that Hutu have for Tutsi is the root of the Rwandan disease." After she published her research, she was declared persona non grata and told her fieldwork was "against national unity and reconciliation." This depends on a stark reading of the past that vilifies the Hutu in perpetuity and keeps them from participating in an inclusive government — which now does not exist despite propagandistic claims to the contrary. This creates widespread resentments and a threat to long-term stability.
Carlson elicited guffaws and disdain by comparing the U.S. experience of historical argument to that of Rwanda. But he may have unknowingly picked an excellent case study in how manipulations of the past can create a poisonous form of politics.

###
"Hate Cannot Drive Out Hate. Only Love Can Do That", Dr. Martin Luther King.
###

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[Rwanda Forum] Re: Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post

Komera Rugura.

Iyo ni diversion as usual. We're talking about whether the US (and Rwanda) should be teaching critical race theory in schools.

For your info…

*Critical race theory*

Critical race theory (CRT) is a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of civil-rights scholars and activists in the United States that seeks to critically examine U.S. law as it intersects with issues of race in the U.S. and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice.[1][2][3][4] CRT examines social, cultural, and legal issues primarily as they relate to race and racism in the United States.[5][6]

CRT originated in the mid 1970s in the writings of several American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams.[1] It emerged as a movement by the 1980s, reworking theories of critical legal studies (CLS) with more focus on race.[1][7] CRT is grounded in critical theory[8] and draws from thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. DuBois, as well as the Black Power, Chicano, and radical feminist movements from the 1960s and 1970s.[1]

While critical race theorists do not all share the same beliefs,[2] the basic tenets of CRT include that racism and disparate racial outcomes are the result of complex, changing and often subtle social and institutional dynamics rather than explicit and intentional prejudices on the part of individuals.[9][10] CRT scholars also view race and white supremacy as an intersectional social construction[9] which serves to uphold the interests of white people[11] against those of marginalized communities at large.[12][13][14] In the field of legal studies, CRT emphasizes that merely making laws colorblind on paper may not be enough to make the application of the laws colorblind; ostensibly colorblind laws can be applied in racially discriminatory ways.[15] A key CRT concept is intersectionality, which emphasizes that race can intersect with other identities (such as gender and class) to produce complex combinations of power and disadvantage.[16]

Academic critics of CRT argue that it relies on social constructionism, elevates storytelling over evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merit, and opposes liberalism.[17][18][19] Since 2020, conservative lawmakers in the United States have sought to ban or restrict critical race theory instruction along with other anti-racism programs.[10][20] Critics of these efforts say the lawmakers have poorly defined or misrepresented the tenets and importance of CRT and that the goal of the laws is to silence broader discussions of racism, equality, social justice, and the history of race.[21][22][23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory

###

"Hate Cannot Drive Out Hate. Only Love Can Do That", Dr. Martin Luther King.

###

On Jul 15, 2021, at 10:07 PM, 'Vincent Ndacyayisenga' via rwandanet <rwandanet@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Tell me more Mr Nzinink ..... about the greatest president of the United States of America, and his beautiful people, Un certain Louis XIV a dit: L'Etat c'est moi, et outre-Atlatique il y a un monsieurs qui fait tout pour prouver que le parti Répblicain c'es lui, le croyez vous toujours?

On Thursday, July 15, 2021, 08:51:40 p.m. EDT, 'Nzi Nink' via Rwanda Forum <rwandaforum@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post
Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/12/like-us-rwanda-is-pitched-battle-over-its-history/

Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history
Controlling the historical narrative in Rwanda is key to the regime's power
Rwandan President Paul Kagame, center, and first lady Jeannette Kagame, right, arrive at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in 2019 to mark the 25th anniversary of the slaughter of 800,000 people at the urging of a government made up of the majority Hutu ethnicity. (Ben Curtis/AP)Tom Zoellner is professor of English at Chapman University and the author of "Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire."
"The question is, and this is the question we should be meditating on, day in and day out, is how do we get out of this vortex, the cycle, before it's too late? How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?"
The absurd part is what Carlson was trying to say: that the teaching of critical race theory in schools and universities would lead to oppressed people of color picking up machetes to slaughter White people, an ethnic cleansing that would resemble the 1994 genocide in the small East African nation of Rwanda, in which 800,000 people were slaughtered at the urging of a government made up of the majority Hutu ethnicity.
Story continues below advertisement
Rwanda holds an important lesson for America's culture wars today, but not in the way Carlson thinks. Rather, in Rwanda, political leaders have rewritten the country's history to gain political power, just as the right wing is now attempting to do in the United States. In fact, the greatest asset of the dictatorship in today's Rwanda is its mastery of the past. "Within Rwanda today, hegemonic power relies for much of its justification on a certain reading of history," the Smith College scholar David Newbury has concluded.
President Paul Kagame has insisted on a clean story about what happened in 1994, with no dissent permitted. The official version is that the Hutu ethnic group, driven by ancient hatreds, contrived to have a plane carrying then-President Juvénal Habyarimana shot down with a shoulder-mounted rocket. The inside-job assassination was falsely blamed on the Tutsis, touching off a period of slaughter that lasted 100 days. Kagame's army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, fought its way into the capital, took power and instituted an inclusive government in which nobody pays attention to ethnic labels any longer. The genocide perpetrators were tried and convicted in international courts, and village-level killers were brought to justice, as well. Thanks to the discipline and organization of the RPF, the country rebuilt itself into a jewel of the region, with a booming economy, clean streets and no crime. Visitors are taught this version at the many genocide memorials stacked high with the bones of slaughtered Tutsis.
But the reality is far more complicated. The genocide was sparked by a combination of factors. The Tutsi minority had dominated the country until 1959, when many fled on the eve of national independence from Belgium. Tutsis in exile formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which invaded from neighboring Uganda in 1990. When a peace deal was brokered in 1993, it didn't solve these tensions.
Story continues below advertisement
As the coffee economy collapsed, the failing regime in power was growing desperate. When the plane carrying the president was shot down in June 1994, the RPF said it was done by Hutus then in power as a ploy to start a massacre, while Hutus blamed the RPF. For 100 days, Rwandans slaughtered each other. Most, but not all, victims were Tutsi. And the RPF committed hundreds of thousands of reprisal killings during and after the official 100-day demarcation of the genocide, systematically wiping out entire Hutu villages.
Talking about any of this is a grave taboo in a society where the governing class is almost exclusively Tutsi and the genocide must be seen only as a one-way affair.
Intellectual violators can be charged with crimes like "divisionism" or "trivializing the genocide" and can be sentenced to 10 years in prison. The press is ruthlessly censored; schoolbooks omit complicated realities; there is no independent judiciary where those accused can get a fair hearing. (Disclosure: I was the co-writer of a 2006 memoir by Paul Rusesabagina, the man whose life story was featured in the movie "Hotel Rwanda." He was kidnapped by the regime in August.)
Story continues below advertisement
Disputed national histories and weaponized skeletons are nothing new, of course, and the politics of "your grandfather killed my grandfather" have long been used to fire up populist movements, cast blame and solidify power. Opinions about the status of West Bank settlements, to name but one example, are often peppered with interpretive references to who did what to whom, not just in 1948 but in the Book of Joshua. But in Rwanda, the regime's control of the historical narrative is directly connected to the country's place in the global networks of investment, aid and tourism.
Western guilt over not intervening in the 1994 genocide has turned Kagame into an international figure of renown and driven billions of dollars of corporate investment and direct aid. Bill Clinton told Kagame repeatedly that not deploying U.S. troops to halt the slaughter was the biggest regret of his presidency.
Yet a new book by British journalist Michela Wrong, "Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad," argues that this historical lever has been pulled for cynical ends. "I get shocked when people succumb to it," former regime official Theogene Rudasingwa told her. "Because at the end of the day it's Rwandans who killed Rwandans. We wreaked damage on one another, so this whole notion of the Americans and the international community and the British saying, 'Mea culpa, mea culpa,' I just don't see the basis for that."
Story continues below advertisement
Guilt also helped explain why the West turned a blind eye to Rwanda's warmongering and exploitation of minerals in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo from 1996 to 2003, a conflict that cost an estimated 5.4 million lives and enlarged Rwanda's budget. The pass given to the RPF's behavior is partly an outgrowth of how the West wants to see the primary victims of the 1994 genocide as "the good guys" in a complex neighborhood. Allowing for more historical complexity or a reckoning with RPF excesses threatens international support for Kagame's regime and for Rwanda in general.
In an environment that remains fraught, teaching unapproved history can be hazardous to an instructor's health. After Rwandan professor Leopold Munyakazi gave lectures characterizing the 1994 genocide as a conflict over political power more than ethnicity, he was jailed on preposterous charges that he had participated in the killings himself. Ethnicity has to remain at the center of the official narrative because it gives a simple — if incomplete — explanation for the genocide and for the need of a strongman like Kagame to stop it from happening again. Munyakazi was eventually cleared of those accusations but sentenced to nine years in prison for the intellectual crime of "genocide revisionism."
Western academics also feel the heat. A team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley consulted with the government on how to teach history but found "multiple points of view, debate and discussion are discouraged" in favor of a narrative that shines the best possible light on Kagame's presidency. When Colgate professor Susan Thomson did fieldwork in the rural southwestern part of the country, she found schools teaching students that "deep seated and seething ethnic hatred that Hutu have for Tutsi is the root of the Rwandan disease." After she published her research, she was declared persona non grata and told her fieldwork was "against national unity and reconciliation." This depends on a stark reading of the past that vilifies the Hutu in perpetuity and keeps them from participating in an inclusive government — which now does not exist despite propagandistic claims to the contrary. This creates widespread resentments and a threat to long-term stability.
Carlson elicited guffaws and disdain by comparing the U.S. experience of historical argument to that of Rwanda. But he may have unknowingly picked an excellent case study in how manipulations of the past can create a poisonous form of politics.

###
"Hate Cannot Drive Out Hate. Only Love Can Do That", Dr. Martin Luther King.
###

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Re: [Rwanda Forum] Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post

Tell me more Mr Nzinink ..... about the greatest president of the United States of America, and his beautiful people, Un certain Louis XIV a dit: L'Etat c'est moi, et outre-Atlatique il y a un monsieurs qui fait tout pour prouver que le parti Répblicain c'es lui, le croyez vous toujours?

On Thursday, July 15, 2021, 08:51:40 p.m. EDT, 'Nzi Nink' via Rwanda Forum <rwandaforum@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post

Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/12/like-us-rwanda-is-pitched-battle-over-its-history/

Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history

Controlling the historical narrative in Rwanda is key to the regime's power

Rwandan President Paul Kagame, center, and first lady Jeannette Kagame, right, arrive at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in 2019 to mark the 25th anniversary of the slaughter of 800,000 people at the urging of a government made up of the majority Hutu ethnicity. (Ben Curtis/AP)Tom Zoellner is professor of English at Chapman University and the author of "Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire."

"The question is, and this is the question we should be meditating on, day in and day out, is how do we get out of this vortex, the cycle, before it's too late? How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?"

The absurd part is what Carlson was trying to say: that the teaching of critical race theory in schools and universities would lead to oppressed people of color picking up machetes to slaughter White people, an ethnic cleansing that would resemble the 1994 genocide in the small East African nation of Rwanda, in which 800,000 people were slaughtered at the urging of a government made up of the majority Hutu ethnicity.

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Rwanda holds an important lesson for America's culture wars today, but not in the way Carlson thinks. Rather, in Rwanda, political leaders have rewritten the country's history to gain political power, just as the right wing is now attempting to do in the United States. In fact, the greatest asset of the dictatorship in today's Rwanda is its mastery of the past. "Within Rwanda today, hegemonic power relies for much of its justification on a certain reading of history," the Smith College scholar David Newbury has concluded.

President Paul Kagame has insisted on a clean story about what happened in 1994, with no dissent permitted. The official version is that the Hutu ethnic group, driven by ancient hatreds, contrived to have a plane carrying then-President Juvénal Habyarimana shot down with a shoulder-mounted rocket. The inside-job assassination was falsely blamed on the Tutsis, touching off a period of slaughter that lasted 100 days. Kagame's army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, fought its way into the capital, took power and instituted an inclusive government in which nobody pays attention to ethnic labels any longer. The genocide perpetrators were tried and convicted in international courts, and village-level killers were brought to justice, as well. Thanks to the discipline and organization of the RPF, the country rebuilt itself into a jewel of the region, with a booming economy, clean streets and no crime. Visitors are taught this version at the many genocide memorials stacked high with the bones of slaughtered Tutsis.

But the reality is far more complicated. The genocide was sparked by a combination of factors. The Tutsi minority had dominated the country until 1959, when many fled on the eve of national independence from Belgium. Tutsis in exile formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which invaded from neighboring Uganda in 1990. When a peace deal was brokered in 1993, it didn't solve these tensions.

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As the coffee economy collapsed, the failing regime in power was growing desperate. When the plane carrying the president was shot down in June 1994, the RPF said it was done by Hutus then in power as a ploy to start a massacre, while Hutus blamed the RPF. For 100 days, Rwandans slaughtered each other. Most, but not all, victims were Tutsi. And the RPF committed hundreds of thousands of reprisal killings during and after the official 100-day demarcation of the genocide, systematically wiping out entire Hutu villages.

Talking about any of this is a grave taboo in a society where the governing class is almost exclusively Tutsi and the genocide must be seen only as a one-way affair.

Intellectual violators can be charged with crimes like "divisionism" or "trivializing the genocide" and can be sentenced to 10 years in prison. The press is ruthlessly censored; schoolbooks omit complicated realities; there is no independent judiciary where those accused can get a fair hearing. (Disclosure: I was the co-writer of a 2006 memoir by Paul Rusesabagina, the man whose life story was featured in the movie "Hotel Rwanda." He was kidnapped by the regime in August.)

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Disputed national histories and weaponized skeletons are nothing new, of course, and the politics of "your grandfather killed my grandfather" have long been used to fire up populist movements, cast blame and solidify power. Opinions about the status of West Bank settlements, to name but one example, are often peppered with interpretive references to who did what to whom, not just in 1948 but in the Book of Joshua. But in Rwanda, the regime's control of the historical narrative is directly connected to the country's place in the global networks of investment, aid and tourism.

Western guilt over not intervening in the 1994 genocide has turned Kagame into an international figure of renown and driven billions of dollars of corporate investment and direct aid. Bill Clinton told Kagame repeatedly that not deploying U.S. troops to halt the slaughter was the biggest regret of his presidency.

Yet a new book by British journalist Michela Wrong, "Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad," argues that this historical lever has been pulled for cynical ends. "I get shocked when people succumb to it," former regime official Theogene Rudasingwa told her. "Because at the end of the day it's Rwandans who killed Rwandans. We wreaked damage on one another, so this whole notion of the Americans and the international community and the British saying, 'Mea culpa, mea culpa,' I just don't see the basis for that."

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Guilt also helped explain why the West turned a blind eye to Rwanda's warmongering and exploitation of minerals in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo from 1996 to 2003, a conflict that cost an estimated 5.4 million lives and enlarged Rwanda's budget. The pass given to the RPF's behavior is partly an outgrowth of how the West wants to see the primary victims of the 1994 genocide as "the good guys" in a complex neighborhood. Allowing for more historical complexity or a reckoning with RPF excesses threatens international support for Kagame's regime and for Rwanda in general.

In an environment that remains fraught, teaching unapproved history can be hazardous to an instructor's health. After Rwandan professor Leopold Munyakazi gave lectures characterizing the 1994 genocide as a conflict over political power more than ethnicity, he was jailed on preposterous charges that he had participated in the killings himself. Ethnicity has to remain at the center of the official narrative because it gives a simple — if incomplete — explanation for the genocide and for the need of a strongman like Kagame to stop it from happening again. Munyakazi was eventually cleared of those accusations but sentenced to nine years in prison for the intellectual crime of "genocide revisionism."

Western academics also feel the heat. A team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley consulted with the government on how to teach history but found "multiple points of view, debate and discussion are discouraged" in favor of a narrative that shines the best possible light on Kagame's presidency. When Colgate professor Susan Thomson did fieldwork in the rural southwestern part of the country, she found schools teaching students that "deep seated and seething ethnic hatred that Hutu have for Tutsi is the root of the Rwandan disease." After she published her research, she was declared persona non grata and told her fieldwork was "against national unity and reconciliation." This depends on a stark reading of the past that vilifies the Hutu in perpetuity and keeps them from participating in an inclusive government — which now does not exist despite propagandistic claims to the contrary. This creates widespread resentments and a threat to long-term stability.

Carlson elicited guffaws and disdain by comparing the U.S. experience of historical argument to that of Rwanda. But he may have unknowingly picked an excellent case study in how manipulations of the past can create a poisonous form of politics.

###

"Hate Cannot Drive Out Hate. Only Love Can Do That", Dr. Martin Luther King.

###

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Re: [Rwanda Forum] Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post

Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history

Controlling the historical narrative in Rwanda is key to the regime's power

[Rwanda Forum] Re: Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post

Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history

Controlling the historical narrative in Rwanda is key to the regime's power

Re: [Rwanda Forum] Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history - The Washington Post

Like the U.S., Rwanda is in a pitched battle over its history

Controlling the historical narrative in Rwanda is key to the regime's power

[Rwanda Forum] Re: Police Discover Skull Inside Nairobi-bound Bus from Rwanda

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