The latest video series featuring Agathe Habyarimana, released on the YouTube channel Mémoire Habyarimana – Officiel, is presented as a gentle act of remembrance: a personal story shaped by faith, marriage, suffering, and exile.
Stripped of political language, the production leans heavily on intimacy, nostalgia, and spirituality. Yet viewed in historical context, this project is not an innocent family memoir.
It is a carefully curated exercise in what Rwandans aptly call “kuzura akaboze” — attempting to perfume a legacy burdened by unresolved responsibility.
Selective Silence
No one disputes Agathe Habyarimana’s right, as an individual, to speak about her life. The issue is not speech; it is selective silence.
The series deliberately avoids the single defining reality that frames her public significance: the central role attributed by numerous researchers to the Akazu — the inner circle of power around President Juvénal Habyarimana — in cultivating the ideology, networks, and institutions that culminated in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
Agathe Habyarimana has long been described by investigators and expert witnesses as a key figure within this informal power structure.
Members of the Akazu included her close relatives and allies such as Protais Zigiranyirazo and Colonel Élie Sagatwa, individuals later implicated by international investigations in extremist politics and violence.
While scholarly debate continues over the degree of centralized planning within the Akazu, there is no serious dispute that this network played a significant role in normalizing anti-Tutsi ideology, influencing state appointments, and shielding extremist actors.
Historical Exoneration
The video series gains additional weight given Agathe Habyarimana’s legal history in France.
A judicial investigation into allegations of complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity, opened in 2008, was closed by French judges in 2025 on the grounds of insufficient evidence to proceed to trial.
That decision did not amount to exoneration on the facts; it reflected prosecutorial thresholds and evidentiary limits, decades after the crimes.
For survivors and many Rwandans, the case’s dismissal reinforced a long-standing perception of delayed or denied justice.
This media effort does not emerge in isolation. It appears amid renewed instability in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where the FDLR — a group formed by remnants of génocidaire forces — remains active.
Allegations, though unproven in court, continue to circulate about links between genocide-era networks and contemporary armed groups.
Whether or not individual family members are legally culpable today, the historical continuity of ideology and networks makes attempts at reputational rehabilitation deeply troubling.
History Cannot Be Perfumed
To international viewers unfamiliar with Rwanda’s history, the series may appear as a benign personal documentary. To Rwandans — particularly survivors — it resonates very differently. The avoidance of genocide, the absence of acknowledgment, and the careful framing of victimhood echo earlier patterns of denial and minimization that preceded 1994. This is not neutral storytelling; it is narrative engineering.
None of this denies the complexity of human lives or the reality of personal suffering. But genocide is not a private tragedy; it is a collective crime with enduring moral consequences. Faith, family, and grief cannot be used as substitutes for truth. They cannot overwrite documented history, nor can they dissolve the responsibilities attached to proximity to power.
There is a clear distinction between remembrance and rehabilitation. Genuine remembrance confronts the full record — uncomfortable, painful, and unresolved. Rehabilitation seeks emotional absolution without reckoning. What this series attempts is not dialogue or accountability, but a cosmetic makeover of a decomposing truth.
History cannot be healed by soft lighting, solemn music, or selective storytelling. It cannot be cleansed by prayer alone. As Rwanda has learned at an unbearable cost, silence and distortion are never neutral acts.
And some legacies, no matter how delicately presented, cannot be perfumed.
