A long, rambling, sanctimonious self regarding missive from the eldest son of the genocidal former Rwanda President, Juvenal Habyarimana, brings to mind a thought by researcher, Dr Golooba-Mutebi, in an interview on the Rwanda Beyond the Headlines podcast. Who he asked, was liberated in the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF)’s war of liberation for Rwanda?
It is naturally tempting to see Kwibohora (Liberation), from only the perspective of those whom the parents of the said son had condemned to be wiped out from the face of the earth.
It should be borne in mind however, that the RPF launched its liberation struggle to deliver Rwanda and Rwandans of all backgrounds from the dead hand of leaders for whom independence meant not sovereignty of their nation and people, but shilling for the colonisers, allowing them to move seamlessly from full throated colonialism to neo-colonialism.
Startlingly but instructively, the RPF struggle for liberation included emancipating even those whose minds were still imprisoned in the ideology of genocide, bequeathed to them by the colonialists. For the thinkers of the RPF, there could have been no other way. You could no more have partial liberation than you could be half pregnant.
But as goes the saying, you can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. Kwibohora, literally, to unbind or unchain yourself, was for every Rwandan. Once at the well, the overwhelming majority welcomed the opportunity to quench a thirst which until they had been conducted to the well, they had accepted as their immutable condition. Some, however, look in the well and see not water but reflections of their genocidal forebears urging them to follow in their footsteps.
Difficult as it may be to imagine, in Rwanda today, there are perpetrators of genocide, who after serving their sentences have been rehabilitated back into the community. Most saliently, the RPF led leadership is unequivocal that crime, any crime, including that of genocide, is individual. No one, especially no young person, should ever suffer stigma because their forebears were mass murderers. Treated as they are like any other young Rwandan, children of planners and perpetrators of the Genocide Against the Tutsi, are known only to neighbours and friends who knew their parents. To anyone else, they remain their individual selves.
This would be true of children of the chief architects of the Genocide Against Tutsi, like Habyarimana’s son. They, however, have opted to continue where their parents left off. Jean-Luc Habyarimana’s nauseatingly emoting letter, serves only to reveal the pernicious strategy of the next generation of genocide ideologues.
He, his siblings and other groups of young Rwandans, notably those who organise themselves under the umbrella of JamboAsbl, have made it their life’s mission to wash away the stain of the blood of innocents from their parents’ names, a stain of over a million men, women and children, murdered in ways whose utter cruelty and inhumanity defy the imagination of any half decent human being.
Their efforts, however, are an exercise in futility. Not even if they, their children and their children’s children, spend every waking hour and even dream of genocide denial, will their parents’ crimes ever be forgotten.
“Panick in Kigali,” Habyarimana junior begins his handwringing letter. The words, “Panick in Kigali” now beloved of all the groups who make common cause with the planners and perpetrators of genocide, always in hope rather than expectation that their shrill, incessant anti Rwanda attacks, will somehow be noticed by Rwanda’s government, which in their desperate effort to deligitimise, they constantly refer to as the “Kigali regime.”
“Why is the Rwandan regime, clearly running out of steam, targeting my family 31 years after assassinating President Habyarimana?” he claims, in a sentence burdened with so much hope.
Many of these sons and daughters of the former genocidal establishment, would convince anyone gullible enough to lend them an ear, that in this era of social media, responses to their febrile anti Rwanda attacks, could not possibly come from other young Rwandans, in support of their government, it must be “the regime.”
Every credible evidence points to Habyarimana’s wife’s clique, known as Akazu, planned and executed the murder of Habyarimana. Now the son hopes against hope that he can convince both himself and everyone else, that it was the “regime.”
“For the past few days” he complains, “the Kigali regime has been engaging in an outdated smear campaign through its controlled media, accusing me of participating in an alleged ‘military coalition’ with DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] President Felix Tshisekedi, and various Rwandan opponents with the aim of overthrowing the regime in power…”
The “smear campaign” of course, is based on the verifiable efforts by dare one say the Kinshasa regime, to pour money into the pockets of anyone willing to demonise Rwanda. The Habyarimana son, who has made several trips to sit at the feet of Tshisekedi, has reportedly been engaged to be the Congolese President’s “adviser.”
And anyone with a social media presence willing to use it to attack Rwanda, is assured of Tshisekedi’s largess. It’s no wonder that of late, anti Rwanda groups have mushroomed, new ones being hastily formed to join or compete with long established ones. It is seems the season of plenty for them. Jean-Luc Habyarimana, to give him his due, does give every impression of earning whatever Tshisekedi is paying him, but he is also closely following the genocidal HutuPower playbook.
Three decades after they turned Rwanda into a hell on earth, where even those still in their mothers’ wombs would not be spared, mothers made to watch as their unborn children were murdered before they themselves died agonising deaths, the defeated demons that planned and perpetrated these crimes, now try to reinvent themselves, demanding “negotiations.” Habyarimana junior who has chosen to be the inheritor of these unspeakable crimes, parrots the same obscene language.
He informs us that “Habyarimana is a symbol that frightens the regime…” “The regime” he says, with total irony impairment, “targets what my name embodies and represents in the collective memory of Rwandans and in the region…The name Habyarimana, like it or not, is a reminder of another Rwanda: a country at peace with itself; respected by its neighbours; where the wellbeing of citizens, education, national unity, and regional cooperation took precedence over wars of influence and politics of fear…”
“This is the memory that the current regime seeks to erase, because it directly contradicts the governance imposed by the RPF for 30 years: repression, repeated conflicts, and an aggressive foreign policy.”
It is a breathtaking lack of self awareness that verges on the unhinged. Could it be that he and others like him have undergone some process where they actually believe that mass murderers are the very acme of virtue. The reader is tempted to pinch themselves to remember that this is the son of planners and perpetrators of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed by human beings.
But the world has been here before of course. Listen to any neo-Nazi, and the Holocaust against the Jewish people was “propaganda” and if only the world was not so blind, it would see the greatness of Adolf Hitler. Rwanda’s genocidal establishment has been referred to as “Tropical Nazis,” and now, thirty-one years after their defeat, younger tropical neo-Nazis are devising new ways of carrying their parents’ ideology, in a digital age.
With apparent absolute conviction, Habyarimana’s son declares that his father’s name evokes a time when Rwanda was at its happiest, at its best. Up becomes down, a genocidal policy becomes “a country at peace with itself,” a hell where one section of Rwandans was targeted to be wiped out from the face of the earth, becomes a country “where the wellbeing of citizens, education, national unity and regional cooperation took precedence…”
“By targeting me personally, the regime seeks to strike at a symbol, but also to demonise any free opposition, any voice demanding truth, justice, and dignity for all…”
Could it be that that is how the cheerleaders of genocide ideology live with themselves, in the grip of a pathological self deception, where they wash their minds of reality and replace it with an imagined world, from where they tirelessly call the rest of the world to join them.
But it is a pathology they consciously choose. Having extolled the virtues of his genocidal parents, Habyarimana is shrewd enough to sing the praises of his benefactor, Tshisekedi, parroting the latter’s talking points about Rwanda “the aggressor.”
He concludes with what he calls his “struggle.” He demands the “return of refugees” except that the only refugees Rwanda has are those on its soil from other countries, primarily those fleeing persecution from the DRC, where the genocide ideology that gripped Rwanda, under the leadership of his father and mother, has permeated society.
Not since the liberation of Rwanda, from the genocidal forces led by his parents, in 1994, has any Rwandan had cause to call him or herself a refugee. When he and others who seek to cloak support for sectarian politics in fine sounding words like “freedom” “Democracy” talk of refugees, they mean fugitives from justice, like his mother, a woman who almost certainly had a hand in his father’s murder. When they talk of “reconciliation” they mean rewriting history and erasing the memory of the crimes of genocide, and when they talk of justice, they mean impunity for the planners and perpetrators of crimes of genocide.
It is long past high time, when these obscene attempts to sanitise one of the most unthinkable crimes against humanity were brought to an end, and the nations that harbour the new generation of genocide ideologues called upon to cease their support of impunity.
Just as these nations have rightly no tolerance of revisionism about the Jewish Holocaust, there should not be the indifference to revision and outright denial of the Genocide Against the Tutsi.
