7th April (tomorrow) is coming and, with it, the memory of the day that hell descended on Rwanda with its full load of demented demons.
That morning the sun rose and froze and watched as, amid groans of over a million (not the negation of over 500) men, women and children, blood began to flow and to wash over the million (not the underestimation of a thousand) hills and valleys of this land and to burst the banks of rivers and lakes and descend into the deserts of North Africa.
We in Rwanda must keep that memory alive for, if we don’t, who will? Many are they that want to avert their eyes and we know why. We know why because, if we were not witness, we have read. And reading, we know which hands have been bloodied through the passage of history and are not ready to acknowledge responsibility. Responsibility of ancestry, if not of self.
From the very beginning of mankind, these hands are many. Starting with those responsible for the elimination of the Neanderthals, they have practically been everywhere: USA, Australia, Argentina, the Philippines, German South-Africa, Ireland, the Russian Empire, Qing Empire. We know the story of Armenians; Assyrians; Dersim Kurds; Holodomors; Chechens. We know Nazi Germany down to Croatia; Eastern Galicia down to Darfur.
Victims, we have all been there, to “the abyss on the very fringe of humanity” (to quote Dr I.P. Olwoch, as I always will). We have been to the place where was committed the crime with no name until 1943. And with no name, therefore no early recognition. We’ve been there and cannot allow the world to ignore those memories.
We must keep the flame burning that they may not succeed, those who seek to couch the name of the crime of genocide in less horrible sounds like “tribal in-fighting”, “revenge killing”. The effort of which is to bury the horror of the crime in mésentente, revision and negation. This history must be kept alive that those who sought to exterminate their kin all may bear the burden of historical responsibility.
The manifestation of revision and negation of genocide is all too familiar to Rwandans.
Our kin who participated in the orgy of killing in a depraved drive to exterminate their kindred and have this far managed to elude justice and those who had the intent and who still nurse it. They are freely traversing the stretch of the earth and the internet, abusing hapless victim and fellow perpetrator-turned-to-honour, owning up to their wrong. And the world has the temerity to allow them to freely spread their poison.
However, we draw comfort from the fact that abuses cannot last. It won’t be for long that they’ll continue to sow their venom. Slowly but surely, the truth is turning history in the direction of sanity and juctice. The gullibility of the world that Rwandan genocide-promoters hoped to exploit forever is vanishing.
Everybody is beginning to see that death in crossfire during a war of liberation is different from genocide. That a people who put their lives on the line to save their fellow country folk cannot turn into killers when they cross into the jungles of D.R. Congo. And that stories of impressive socio-political harmony and modest economic improvements are putting to shame accusations of invented despotism, rights-suppression, ethnic-favouritism, inequality-promotion and many similarly improvised tools of division and negation.
And if the world is beginning to see the speck (though not so speck-size) in the eye of the Rwandan genocide denier and revisionist, it should begin to see the log in its own eye. As long as the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide are freely touring the cities and jungles of Africa as well as the cities of Europe and North America, these countries should know that they stand accused of delivering a slap in the face of world justice.
They should know that forces of genocide-promotion will thrive for as long as everybody is shying away from denouncing them and confronting the monster of genocide-promotion to vanquish it once and for all.
Countries of the Western World especially, for taking it upon themselves to be the leaders of the world in establishing a universal democratic culture, must first dare lead the way in eradicating the threat of genocide on this globe. They must know that we can see through their shallow ploys of genocide negation that attempt to shield the bloodied hands of their ancestry.
We reject endless visits to Rwanda of French emissaries who come to make “investigations” that come to naught, while the country continues to be a safe haven for genocide fugitives. We rebuff all the excuses that other European countries give of not extraditing genocide fugitives in the deceptive name of protecting their democratic rights, as if the dead of Rwanda did not deserve these rights. We denounce the half-hearted, euphemised “immigration fraud” prosecutions in USA and Canada that only serve to protect genocide fugitives. We know all these to be ploys of genocide denial.
But in spite of them, we are marching determinedly forward in the bright light of the hope for a better future that our departed may not have died in vain. Even then, we shall never forget the hell with its load that for a 100 days engulfed Rwanda in 1994.
We have been to that “final limit of destructive human experience” and we shall ceaselessly pursue justice. For if we don’t milk justice out of this reluctant world, who will? Who?
@butamire
