Recently, The New Times’ EUGENE KWIBUKA caught up with experienced journalist CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO, the Executive Editor for Africa and Digital Media for the Kenya-based Nation Media Group. Onyango-Obbo shared his views on various issues, ranging from Rwanda’s recovery and EAC integration to media and society in general. Excerpts:

Can you introduce yourself to our readers? Some of them may have read about you in the newspapers, but who is Onyango-Obbo?

Charles Onyango-Obbo is an East-African and Ugandan specifically. I am a writer and a chronicler of African History. I also like referring to myself as a digital evangelist. I am an editor with the Nation Media Group. I do our Africa and digital media programmes and I am a friend of Africa.

You have visited Rwanda many times and you are here today, how would you describe this country?

You know, my story with Rwanda starts in October 1990 when the RPF (Rwanda Patriotic Front) crossed the Uganda-Rwanda border to start a campaign to return home.

I watched that whole process unravel and watched them get the arch together. I was in Kigali at that time and I saw the Genocide, I saw the pain. I was first a journalist with The Weekly Topic in Uganda and then the Daily Monitor, where I was one of the founders.

So, you filed the RPF stories for the Monitor?

Yes. We saw the difficult moments, the moments of triumph, and the pain. This was a country that was totally broken. It was distressing and difficult to see the Rwandans trying to rebuild a community and a life, it’s amazing.

It is sometimes difficult to be objective when you saw Rwanda in 1994 and you see it today because it’s almost miraculous. I know there is still a lot of pain in this country and conversations about Rwanda’s future are ongoing. It is not easy to deal with such a difficult history. But at least you have a country worthy talking about and in the evenings, people go back home to a meal and a roof over their head. I mean, it’s really an incredible story.

Having been in the print media for many years, what do you have to say about the future of this business given the current threat of the internet-base media

You know there are some lessons which I have learnt over time. One of them is that there is virtually no African country with a history of conflict and civil war that has a successful newspaper industry.

Uganda is actually one of the few but its industry is not as big as Kenya’s or Tanzania’s which did not experience civil war. If you go to Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, most of these countries have a history of conflict and are not doing well with newspapers. My own science is that a newspaper requires an unbroken tradition in trust in personal sources.

I think war breaks the level of trust that is necessary for newspapers to work. It’s almost futile to have newspapers in societies that have a turbulent history. It’s rather better to look for opportunities in broadcasting because in broadcast, people hear a voice and connect easily.

It’s easier to connect with people on radio and television because people need to see you before they can trust you. So, there are a lot of opportunities in broadcasting but, even better, I think Rwanda offers the best opportunity for digital media.

What kind of journalist you would be if you were a young Rwandan journalist?

I am a much older person but right now, all I think about is mobile sites, websites, all those kinds of new platforms. If I were a young Rwandan journalist, I would even consider offering a mobile phone use alert.

Think about something as simple as having people subscribing for little things like a Ramadan schedule, just a mobile text message. You do not need to have a marquis, grand website. You do not even need to have a sophisticated mobile phone. Just enough to do a text service and you get people to subscribe for the equivalent of a few francs a day.

That’s what I would invest in if I was a young Rwandan starting  media operation today.

You mean Rwanda should go online in terms of forming a market for news?

Yes. Think of a news cooperative bringing together people working online. They can run a big website and you give everyone a portion of their preferred trends like business, technology, and all kind of things. If different energies can be brought together, I think something wonderful can happen here.

What are the challenges facing the print media today?

You know, I was talking to some comrades in South Africa; their market (newspaper industry) is shrinking by 15 to 20 per cent every year. This means that within five years, newspapers may not be a profitable venture. If you take one of the newspapers in South Africa, let’s say The Sunday Times, it is circulating about 450,000 copies but they lost 50,000 copies in just one year alone. So, if they keep losing 50,000 sales annually, it means the business will have shrunk by more than 50 per cent in four years and will no longer make commercial sense.

We are beginning to see the same thing in Kenya. There is no more new uptake of readers and the advertising has shifted away from print. So, our own analysis is that in Kenya, which is the most mature market in the region, we have probably no more than three years. After that we will have to push all our energy in digital and we are doing that now.

We have a digital division; our budget for next year is very aggressive around developing apps and all sorts of innovative things around the web and mobile phones.

You spoke about telling the African story at the just concluded media dialogue in Rwanda, what is that African story?

You see, I take a much simpler view. To me the African story is that the African society has a common history. We have our brilliant moments, we have our dark moments, and we have examples of starring success and examples of monumental failures.

The opportunities to seize the future and to build world leaders are as available to us as they are else where. But that’s not enough. You see, it’s not very many people who until about 15 or 20 years ago believed that that was possible because the African story was told from one angle: a doomed and a hopeless continent. And then when we had the African renaissance, we went to the other extreme in which people said ‘this is Africa’s century’.

When did that (African renaissance) start?

Particularly with presidents Thabo Mbeki (South Africa), Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria) and Abdoulaye Wade (Senegal).  It was around 1999 when Mandela stepped down and Mbeki came in. That was the momentum that actually led to the rebranding of the OAU (Organisation of African Unity) as the AU (African Union).

I think it was good for them to be so hopeful and so bold about Africa. But the mistake they made is the same mistake people who thought Africa was doomed also made. They thought Africa can only have one story, one trajectory. After that period, around 2003, is when this whole sort of African story came. People are saying you do not have to say we are doomed, you do not have to say it is going to be our century; we are a normal society.

We might succeed, we might fail, we might take longer to own the century, we might not own it; the important thing is to accept that that is us and that is the story of all societies.

And why do you think that story is not being told enough?

There is always uncertainty when a phenomenon like Africa’s happens. You know by about 2030, Africa will have the world’s largest workforce. Africa will be the largest market in another two or so decades. So, the whole thing is that it is a strange world. It takes centuries for world orders to develop.

It will be the first time the world is dominated by a force that is neither oriental nor European. So, it is understandable that there should be a lot of concern about that. Some people will be in denial, while others will be carried away by the euphoria and excitement. I think we need the proper balance in the next few years.

What does it take for that story to be taken out there?

All we need is for every African to describe their experiences. We need that noise. It is from that outpouring of various African experiences—hopes and dreams and fears—that will constitute the architecture of the 21st century African mind. But it has to come from millions of Africans.

But how do you bring those voices together? Is this where you say we need an online aggregator?

If you are a businessperson who wants to make  money out of it and you are in the media, the media model you would want is an aggregator.

I think one of the most successful contemporary examples of this is The Huffington Post. You see, if I am someone who wants to understand Africa, I do not want to deal with only what information professionals want me to see. I want a lot more, diversity. That’s why it’s important that we have hundreds of millions of people blogging, tweeting, and doing all those things. It’s those trends, the common trends which will allow someone who is standing outside to get a sense of what Africa is all about.

Let’s talk a bit about the East African Community. What do we need to do to ensure that it’s a success?

I think the EAC is already a success. You know, there are two East African Communities. There is the official East Africa of the politicians and there is the silent, unofficial East Africa of the people.

The latter is a very successful story. If you just walk on the streets of Kigali, you will see many Ugandans, and if you go to a barber shop or mechanic shop or a hotel reception, you will meet people who have been all over the place. Basically, tens of thousands of East Africans cross the regional borders every week.

Look at the students at different universities, the campuses are very East African. You know children study all over the EAC region. I think that part (the unofficial) of East Africa is working.  What is probably not working as fast enough is the one of the protocols, the one of the political chiefs (the political framework).

But that one is not going to make our lives better. To me as Charles, all I want is not to have to apply for a visa or to pay visa fees when I come to Rwanda or would like to work in Kenya. So, I think  part of it has really worked. It is the big, super structure that still needs billing. And to me whether it takes five, ten, or fifteen years, it’s not going to make a lot of difference. I think the important part is the connection, interactions between the people, the rubbing of shoulders between citizens of East Africa. That is already happening.

Anything else you would like to say about Rwanda? 

Well, there are always interesting discussions around Rwanda. Is it an African success story? Is it a democracy? Is it a dictatorship? These things go on quite a bit and I think that’s a legitimate debate. But you see, outside that debate, there is something I find more interesting.

Today we have a lot of musicians in Rwanda, there are models, art scenes and people are drawing. This is a country which a few years ago did not even have a cinema hall but now it has a film festival. It’s just incredible. If you see the extent to which individuals have freedom to make a life for themselves and if you think that that’s a very important part of how a society is other than just the question of who is President or minister tomorrow, it is to me a very heart-warming story.

That’s really the part of Rwanda that everyone else perhaps wants to experience. It has shown a society with a remarkable ability to create, to rise out of the ashes.

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In August 2012, I participated in a “Conference on Armenian, Jewish, and Tutsi Genocides Held in Rwanda”. It was a gathering which brought together scholars of genocide from around the globe. Genocide denial was central. Some ideas to remember:

Peter Balakian later stated that “denialism is the final stage of genocide, as it attempts to falsify history and create a counterfeit universe for the survivors and their legacies, and it must be studied and analyzed in order to be exposed for the ethical problems it creates.”

Read this story below:

“A French education manual for middle-school distant learners has wrongly identified Tutsis as perpetrating the 1994 Rwandan genocide instead of Hutu militias, sparking outrage among victims’ associations.

An estimated 800,000 people — mainly minority Tutsis — were slaughtered in Rwanda over three months in 1994 by extremists from the Hutu majority in one of history’s worst genocides.

But to the essay question “Is it important to recall to mind some particularly dark episodes of history?”, sent to some 3,000 middle-school students abroad, a manual published by France’s National Centre for Distance Education (CNED) cited as an example “the genocide of the Hutus by the Tutsis in Rwanda.”

“That an official document, used by many French schools abroad, and particularly in Rwanda, changes the truth to this extent is completely outrageous,” said the CPCR, a France-based organisation that campaigns for victims of the genocide.

“Of course, the authors will say it is a ‘mistake’, but still!”

A spokeswoman for the CNED, which depends on France’s education ministry, apologised for the mistake, telling AFP the centre had wanted students “to think about history.”

It will dispatch a new version of the text to students, along with a letter to the parents.

Alain Gauthier, a member of the CPCR, said a teacher at a French school in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, discovered the mistake last week.

“A lot of people were affected, especially victims of the genocide,” he said.”

In the conference I mentioned above, one of the participants and a known scholar, Deborah Lipstadt, emphasized that “Denial of genocide, whether that of the Turks against the Armenians, or the Nazis against the Jews, or the Hutu against the Tutsi, is not an act of historical reinterpretation. Rather, the deniers sow confusion by appearing to be engaged in a genuine scholarly effort. The abundance of documents and testimonies that confirm the genocide are dismissed as contrived, coerced, or forgeries and falsehoods. … Denial of genocide strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.”

(Extrait du compte rendu (signé Anastase Ngendahimana) de la 14e commémoration du génocide des Tutsi, à Genève, le 12 avril 2008 :)

« Un moment fort attendu était celui de l’intervention d’un monsieur d’un certain âge, un nommé Denis-Gilles Vuillemin, qui séjourna à Butare fin 1963-début 1964 sur un contrat signé avec l’UNESCO pour travailler comme enseignant. Ce que le jeune enseignant suisse découvre en arrivant au Rwanda le hantera toute sa vie. A la suite d’une rumeur d’une attaque en septembre 1963 de ceux qu’on appelait Inyenzi, la machine à tuer se met en marche. On rassemble ici et là de pauvres paysans tutsi qu’on extermine dans des stades à coup de fusils. Ceux qui parviennent à fuir sont rattrapés et regroupés dans des camps où on les laisse crever de faim et de maladie. Quelques individus et organisations internationales présentes, la Croix-Rouge principalement, tentent d’apporter des secours, essentiellement de la nourriture et des médicaments, mais les autorités politiques et ecclésiastiques s’y opposent ou procèdent à des manœuvres dilatoires. Au Groupe scolaire de Butare, où M.Vuillemin travaille depuis peu, des religieux, belges pour la plupart, sont au courant des crimes qui sont en train d’être perpétrés. Plusieurs d’entre eux collaborent ouvertement avec les hiérarchies ecclésiastique et gouvernementale pour parachever l’épuration ethnique. Le jeune coopérant suisse était venu au Rwanda mû par un idéal d’humanité, de justice et de solidarité. Ce qu’il découvre du Rwanda du tandem Kayibanda-Perraudin lui donne le vertige. Il entreprend d’enquêter minutieusement sur ce qui se passe réellement au Rwanda, non sans avoir travaillé clandestinement à faciliter la fuite de certains de ses élèves tutsi qui étaient en danger de mort. Petit à petit, par des recoupements d’informations, des croisements de témoignages et d’observations personnelles, l’effroyable vérité s’étale là devant ses yeux :un gouvernement est en train d’exterminer une partie de sa population, et ce dans une totale indifférence de la communauté internationale. M. Vuillemin, qui détient désormais les preuves irréfutables de ce qu’on ne saurait qualifier autrement que de génocide, prépare un rapport qu’il adresse au Département des Affaires étrangères à Berne. Il envoie aussi une série d’articles aux journaux en Europe, au journal ‘‘Le Monde’’ en particulier. Des semaines passent sans que ses alertes soit publiées. Finalement l’affaire des massacres des Tutsi finit par être connue par d’autres témoins étrangers et le journal ‘‘Le Monde’’ se résout à publier un article de Vuillemin. Entre-temps le jeune enseignant a donné sa démission à l’UNESCO. Il veut regagner sa Suisse natale autant pour retrouver un peu de tranquillité que pour échapper aux pressions que lui font subir ses collègues du GS que ses révélations dérangeaient. Mais en Suisse même, il va subir un ostracisme jusque dans les hautes sphères de l’administration fédérale. Il recevra régulièrement des appels téléphoniques et des lettres anonymes le traitant de communiste, de subversif, de terroriste, d’agitateur et d’autres gentillesses de la même veine. A cette étape précise de son récit, M.Vuillemin s’arrête, submergé par l’émotion. Il balaye la salle d’un regard vide, et s’excuse : ‘‘Vous savez, tout ça c’est du passé, d’ordinaire je sais encaisser, mais maintenant que je le raconte, il y a tout qui me revient et c’est comme si c’était hier.’’ Il y a dans la salle des compatriotes qui ont connu M. Vuillemin à Butare. C’était un jeune enseignant qu’ils apprenaient encore à découvrir. Certains ne lui doivent pas seulement d’avoir échappé à la mort, mais ils ont aussi reçu de lui des conseils pour leurs études, des bourses, du soutien psychologique et/ou simplement de l’amitié. Ils ont la gorge serrée, comme nous tous. Quand M. Vuillemin achève son témoignage, la salle hésite un moment à l’applaudir, comme si c’était une indécence: il y a un court moment de silence qui s’impose de lui-même, puis finalement, les mains claquent, quand même, longuement. »

A ce témoignage émouvant de M. Gilles Vuillemin, que grâce au compte rendu d’Anastase Ngendahimana beaucoup pourront entendre et faire entendre je puis apporter des éléments qui aident à le situer dans son contexte et à en confirmer la valeur:

— Une personne travaillant au Palais fédéral, à Berne, a constaté que Mgr Perraudin, qui savait tout sur ce Rwanda sur lequel il régnait, avait l’oreille du gouvernement helvétique, particulièrement durant la guerre froide U.R.S.S.-Etats-Unis. Et un témoin, hélas décédé durant le génocide de 1994, a vu Mgr Perraudin plaisanter et rire alors que des étudiants tutsi étaient battus à mort à quelques dizaines de mètres de lui. Difficile de croire que l’évêque suisse ignorait ce qui se passait, alors qu’il était l’inspirateur de cette politique criminelle et même génocidaire.

— Ces mêmes autorités helvétiques étaient cul et chemise avec la dictature de Kayibanda, puis avec celle d’Habyarimana. Ainsi, au début des années 70, un coopérant suisse avait la responsabilité d’une usine. Vint l’ordre de licencier les Tutsi. Il s’insurge, refuse, déclare qu’il sait qui travaille bien et qui travaille mal et que s’il y a des employés à licencier, il le fera sans tenir compte de l’ethnie .Le lendemain ou surlendemain, l’ambassadeur de Suisse au Rwanda venait en personne lui intimer l’ordre de ne pas s’opposer aux directives du gouvernement rwandais, faute de quoi il aurait à préparer ses valises pour rentrer en Suisse. « Si j’avais révélé tout ce que j’ai observé au Rwanda, me déclara ce coopérant en 1994, j’aurais pu faire voler en éclats la DDA » (on appelait ainsi, à l’époque, la Coopération suisse).

— Le Suisse Lukas Bärfuss, qui précise que « dans ce livre, les faits historiques sont authentiques, les personnages sont imaginaires », conclut son roman « Hundert Tage » (Wallstein, 2008), traduit en français sous le titre « Cent jours, cent nuits » (L’Arche, 2009) par cette réflexion au sujet du rôle de son pays au Rwanda : « Notre chance fut toujours que pour chaque crime auquel un Suisse avait pris part, une crapule encore plus grande avait trempé dans l’affaire, qui attirait sur elle toute l’attention et derrière laquelle nous pouvions nous cacher. Non, nous ne faisons pas partie de ceux qui causent des bains de sang. Cela, d’autres le font. Nous, nous nageons dedans. Et nous savons exactement comment il faut bouger pour rester à la surface et ne pas couler dans la sauce rouge. »

— Pendant le génocide de 1994, les interhahamwe avaient leurs entrées dans l’Ambassade de Suisse à Kigali, notamment grâce à un lien d’ordre familial.

— Surnommé « le financier du génocide », le richissime homme d’affaires hutu Félicien Kabuga, bailleur de fonds de la sinistre Radio-Télévision des Mille Collines (RTLM) qui au printemps 1994 lança les ordres exigeant de massacrer tous les Tutsi, y compris les bébés, s’enfuit du Rwanda en juin 1994, devant l’avancée du Front patriotique, et se rendit… en Suisse, où il fut discrètement averti qu’il devrait être arrêté, ce qui lui permit de s’éclipser, non sans avoir effectué une transaction financière portant sur plusieurs millions de francs.

— Un des membres du Hutu Power, soupçonné de génocide et accueilli sans problèmes en Suisse, a pour avocat un ancien conseiller fédéral (= ministre), qui fut ministre des Affaires étrangères et qui était très proche de François Mitterrand, qu’il rencontra du reste, discrètement, pendant le génocide, en mai 1994. Les Hutu, qu’ils soient prétendument « modérés » ou extrémistes, sont chez eux dans l’Eglise catholique, en Suisse comme ailleurs, et certains ont même réussi à s’infiltrer dans des Eglises protestantes (pas seulement chez les adventistes). CB

Voici ce qu’écrit avec lucidité, dans le document d’octobre 1994 « La tragédie du Rwanda et les Eglises d’Afrique de l’Est », Wolfgang Schoeneke, secrétaire général du Département pastoral de l’Association des Conférences épiscopales d’Afrique de l’Est (AMECEA), à propos de ce qu’il qualifie d’obsession du pouvoir à tout prix : « Le conflit du Rwanda concernait à l’origine une volonté, assez absolue, de conserver ou de reconquérir le pouvoir pour justifier n’importe quels actes. D’après un recensement effectué en 1991, 90% des Rwandais se disent chrétiens. L’Eglise catholique est, après le gouvernement, l’institution la plus puissante à travers son réseau d’œuvres sociales, éducatives et médicales dirigées par de nombreux groupes religieux. Elle a dès le début entretenu d’étroites relations avec l’administration coloniale et la maison royale et la hiérarchie est toujours restée étroitement liée au régime en place. Ses nombreuses – mais tardives et faibles – déclarations pendant le génocide n’étaient ni significatives ni suffisantes. Les événements du Rwanda renforcent une leçon de l’histoire : une Eglise qui s’identifie trop étroitement à un régime partage son destin. Il y a une distance indispensable à maintenir avec les partis, les mouvements politiques et l’Etat. Comment l’Eglise peut-elle résister à la tentation de se servir du pouvoir pour accomplir sa mission et, en retour, d’être utilisée par les pouvoirs politiques ? Parlons-nous en faveur de tout groupe traité injustement, ou seulement quand les intérêts de l’Eglise sont menacés ? Comment développer au sein de l’Eglise un mode de responsabilité plus participative qui puisse servir à inspirer un modèle plus démocratique en politique ? »

Le regretté Jean-Paul Gouteux avait vu juste quand il dénonçait et déplorait le rôle criminel de l’Eglise catholique dans le génocide des Tutsi : relisez, dans « La Nuit rwandaise » nº 2 (7 avril 2008), les excellents articles de Jean Damascène Bizimana et d’Yves Cossic. Pages 267-268, on y retrouve notre Joseph Matata négationniste, qui s’autoproclame défenseur des droits de l’homme, et dont le témoignage lors d’un procès à Lausanne indigna les femmes rwandaises et suisses présentes (voyez dans la partie Dignité de la femme et génocide au Rwanda). Et où le retrouve-t-on ? Comme par hasard lors d’une soirée habilement organisée par des « associations catholiques et prétendument humanitaires ». Jean-Paul Gouteux a démontré p.ex. que dans l’Eglise catholique, le missionnaire belge Guy THEUNIS avait une influence décisive sur les informations qui parvenaient au Vatican – lequel semble toujours être attaché à la théorie négationniste du double génocide. (Voir ci-après: L’AFFAIRE THEUNIS.)

(Depuis 2007, reprenant le titre du livre de Jean-Paul Gouteux, « La Nuit rwandaise » publie un volume par année, qui paraît le 7 avril, date du déclenchement du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda. Son site web est www.lanuitrwandaise.net et son adresse 38, rue Keller, F 75011 Paris.)

Rendons aussi hommage au courage de la revue catholique de gauche « Golias », qui fait preuve d’une liberté de pensée dignes des meilleurs esprits protestants. Elle aussi a dénoncé ce rôle criminel de l’Eglise catholique dans le génocide des Tutsi, et publié notamment, en 1999, le livre « Rwanda, l’honneur perdu de l’Eglise » sous la direction de Christian Terras, avec la collaboration de Mehdi Ba (Editions Golias, BP 3045, F 69605 Villeurbanne Cedex, www.golias-editions.fr).

Subtiles et sournoises, en effet, sont les actions menées par l’Eglise catholique contre le nouveau Rwanda, dont l’homme fort est le Tutsi Paul KAGAME – un Rwanda qui désormais interdit le clivage Hutu/Tutsi et s’efforce de surmonter le traumatisme du génocide. Ainsi, avant Noël 2009, on a vu dans la presse des communiqués des « Rebelles de Noël » : le but, fort sympathique en soi, est d’inviter nos sociétés marchandes à fêter la naissance du Christ de manière fraternelle et non commerciale. Mais en faisant des recherches, on tombe sur des invitations à financer des séminaires destinés à promouvoir les droits de l’homme, sans qu’aucune précision d’ailleurs soit donnée. Et en poussant encore un peu les recherches, voilà qu’apparaît un texte où le Rwanda, comme par hasard, est épinglé pour sa façon de rendre la justice : les juridictions Gacaca ne trouvent pas grâce aux yeux de nos « Rebelles de Noël », mais quand on découvre qu’ils sont eux-mêmes liés à Caritas, donc à l’Eglise catholique, « c’est un peu comme si Dutroux critiquait la façon dont on juge les pédophiles », s’exclama un de mes amis, à qui je rétorquai qu’il allait un peu loin, car si beaucoup de prêtres catholiques – ainsi que certains pasteurs adventistes – ont activement participé au génocide, ce n’est pas le cas de tous. Aux yeux de beaucoup d’enquêteurs, l’Opus Dei, dont auraient fait partie le roi des Belges Baudouin Ier et peut-être le dictateur Habyarimana, est une force d’autant plus redoutable qu’elle est occulte ; et l’une de ses forteresses est le Luxembourg (voir mon livre SOLIDAIRES ! et le livre « Révélations$ » publié en 2001 par Denis Robert et Ernest Backes aux courageuses éditions Les Arènes, à Paris (www.arenes.fr). Sur l’Opus Dei, voir ci-dessous.

By Philip Gourevitch

I almost didn’t see the roadblock in time to stop. It was early afternoon, but it was dark as dusk in the rainforest, with low inky clouds hovering over the treetops, releasing a wild downpour. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. It was hard enough to make out the road ahead, and the roadblock was understated—just a narrow line of rope strung a few feet above the pavement—as if it were intended to be invisible. This was in southwestern Rwanda, in May 1995, one year after the genocide in which nearly a million people were massacred by their fellow citizens in a hundred days. After the slaughter, most of the army and militias of the genocidal regime had fled to neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), which is where I was heading with my friend Annick on a reporting trip. I hadn’t really felt how alone we were there until Annick remarked, “Yah, it’s a roadblock,” as if, in her stolid Dutch way, she’d been making a leisurely study of the rope that I hadn’t yet noticed. “Yah,” she said. “I really think it’s good to stop so they don’t shoot us.”

The scene was pretty much the distillation of the popular Western image of third world terror: As I hit the breaks, a half dozen men emerged from the trees on either side of us, gaunt figures moving slowly and silently, dressed like outlaws from a Clint Eastwood western in dark, dripping slouch hats and ankle-length coats but with Kalashnikovs. It was unnerving, but I knew from experience that in a typical military police state, there was a ritual to de-escalating such encounters, a drawn-out negotiation at the end of which you would hand over a pack of cigarettes or a couple dollars’ worth of local banknotes and they would let you pass. Your hostage crisis had just become a tollbooth. What made life in such a system most oppressive was not the possibility of violence so much as the certainty of corruption.

Although I had been in Rwanda for only a few weeks when I came to the roadblock in Nyungwe, I also knew that things tended to work differently there. During the genocide, roadblocks had functioned throughout the country as killing stations, where people slated for death were collected and butchered. Yet if these men with guns weren’t infiltrators but soldiers of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF)—the rebel movement that brought the genocide to an end and has run the country since—I was almost looking forward to seeing how they’d conduct themselves. The RPF was ruthless when it deployed violence, but it was also known for ruthless discipline, and as the new leadership established control, it promised that the bribery and corruption that defined so much of the public’s interaction with officialdom throughout central Africa would be a thing of the past in Rwanda.

A finger tapped at my window, and I opened it. A soldier leaned into the car and asked for our passports. The other men stood at the edge of the forest watching. They could’ve done anything they wanted with us; that was understood. And they had nothing. They were unpaid, barely supplied with food and sleeping rough under lean-tos made of jungle foliage. We had cameras, computers and cash, and we had a carton full of food, a case of bottled water, whiskey, cigarettes—and a decent shortwave radio.

The soldier with our passports poked through my luggage. When he opened Annick’s bag, she said, “It’s not very nice to go through a lady’s things.” He stepped back and said, “Sorry.” There were more questions: where we were going, where we were coming from, if we were married, why not, if Annick was married to someone else, why not. Then he gave us back our passports. “It’s okay,” he said, and the rope was lowered.

By contrast, at the crossing into Zaire the next day, I had to pay at least six bribes. The entry procedure was an assembly line of graft. Each predatory official—the immigration man, the customs man, the policeman, the military man, the motor vehicle man and the public health man—sat in his own little shack and demanded a payoff: $10, $20. The customs man was efficient: Instead of inspecting our car or our luggage, he flipped open a briefcase on his desk and shifted it so that we could see a big handgun inside. He took our money and got out his rubber stamp and sent us on to the motor vehicle man.

“Spare tire?” the motor vehicle man asked. I showed him the spare tire. “Just one?” he said.“Oh, that’s very serious. This is a country of laws. You can’t just come in here and trample them.” And so on. The two-spare-tire law didn’t exist, of course; but as he developed the fictional device, he came to believe in it and worked himself into a frightening state of outrage at my noncompliance. I asked him how much it would cost for a waiver, and he cheered up considerably: “Well, it’s very serious, but I think it can be arranged.”

Nearly 20 years later, the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains a desperately corrupt country, very nearly as bad as when it was Zaire. Rwanda, meanwhile, has shot up the rankings on the world Corruption Perceptions Index of the watchdog group Transparency International to win the title, in 2013, of second-least corrupt country in Africa. It stands ahead not only of its neighbors and most of Asia and South America, but also such European countries as the Czech Republic, Italy and Turkey.

So what is it about Rwanda? The country has established a strong tax base; been ranked one of the most improved countries on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index since 2006; privatized parastatal industries; and streamlined immigration procedures to facilitate its burgeoning tourism industry and attract investors and skilled employees from around the continent and abroad. At the same time the RPF government has made tremendous strides in reducing extreme poverty and in establishing nearly universal public education and health care. And yet nearly half the population continues to subsist in extreme poverty, and with the exception of a very thin upper-economic crust, the sheer financial need—to say nothing of greed—of Rwandans is no less than it is elsewhere. In fact, there have been a number of high-profile corruption scandals in Rwanda recently, implicating public figures in the pocketing of public resources—including a fund for needy genocide survivors. But we know these stories because they have been investigated, exposed, and the offenders have been held to account. They are told as stories of progress.

Corruption is not always at odds with efficiency—at least in the short term. One of the main reasons people say they give bribes is to expedite transactions. Last summer a Congolese colleague told me he was driving to Rwanda when I was there, and we fixed a time to meet. He arrived three hours late. I expected to hear the usual story about being held up on the Congolese side of the border, but no; with a fistful of dollar bills, he had breezed through there in record time. “It’s knowing I can’t pay off the highway patrol in this country that slowed me down,” he said. “Rwanda’s crazy—it’s too!”

I’ve heard similar complaints from Rwandans. They know that the traffic policeman, the court official or the immigration officer would all enjoy the extra income that graft brings their counterparts next door in Tanzania or Uganda. And I’ve heard it suggested that Rwandans are simply governed by greater fear within a more controlling state than their neighbors. But some of the most authoritarian states in history have been among the most brutally corrupt. In fact, corruption breeds fear and runs on it: In a corrupt system you always have to pay some higher extortionist for the protection needed to keep extorting those below you.

Corruption—or the lack of it—is never just a matter of money. It’s also a reflection of the public’s sense of the overall fairness or unfairness of a society, and perhaps above all, it’s a measure of the public trust. Not long ago, the highly respected World Values Survey found, much as Transparency International did, that Rwandans expressed exceptionally high confidence in their police, courts, parliament and other public institutions, and the Gallup organization’s Global States of Mind report found that of all the peoples on earth, Rwandans were the most likely to feel safe. Reading such figures, and considering the individual and social trauma of the genocide, you might wonder whether Rwandans just have a habit of responding with exaggerated enthusiasm to surveys. But there’s one statistic that casts all the rest in a different, more meaningful light: According to the World Values Survey, Rwandans’ extraordinarily high level of trust in public institutions is matched by their extraordinarily low trust of one another. Only 5 percent of Rwandans believe that “most people can be trusted.”

Such extreme distrust of one’s fellow citizens is a powerful indicator of the genocide’s enduring poison. If it were not equaled by extreme trust in the public sphere, there would be nothing to hold the society together. Resisting corruption then becomes what corruption is in societies where the public trust is broken: a survival strategy.

Philip Gourevitch is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His second book on Rwanda will be out next spring from Penguin.

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By Paul Hiebert

Almost 20 years have passed since the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when politicians, doctors, miners, merchants, and farmers killed over one million of their fellow politicians, doctors, miners, merchants, and farmers in the East African nation of just 12 million. To this day, the 100-day horror remains one of the most appallingly efficient cases of systematic murder in modern history, and Rwanda, at least in the eyes of the West, remains synonymous with the chaos of its not-too-distant past.

Now, however, Rwanda is gaining attention for something else. Under President Paul Kagame—who put an end to the genocide with his then-rebel group the Rwandan Patriotic Front when the world hesitated to intervene—the country’s GDP has grown by an average of just over 8 percent every year since 2001, raising a million people out of poverty. The World Bank ranked Rwanda as the second-most business-friendly place on the continent (32^nd globally), behind the island nation of Mauritius; Transparency International named it the least corrupt state in the region (49^thglobally); and the advocacy organization ONE, co-founded by Bono, placed it in the lead alongside Mali as the closest to fulfilling the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, which cover everything from increasing education to reducing poverty to expanding health care. And when it comes to gender equality, at 64 percent, Rwanda currently has the highest proportion of female lower-house MPs in the world.

Yet all these achievements appear humble in comparison with the country’s long-term aims. The government’s mission statement, Rwanda Vision 2020, lays out a path for the nation to reach middle-income status by skipping an industrialization period altogether, fostering an economy based instead on communications and information technology.

This might not sound so audacious, except that Rwanda’s chief activity is subsistence agriculture, over 40 percent of the population still lives in poverty, and only one in two Rwandans was able to read and write as of 2000. Plus, without having undergone substantial industrialization, the nation still lacks much-needed infrastructure: Only 16 percent of homes in Rwanda have electricity, which is hardly a promising number for a society gambling on a high-tech future.

But Rwandans do have access to mobile phones—or about 60 percent of them do, up from 6 percent in 2006. They also have decent Internet access, especially in comparison with other African countries: According to the Guardian’s recent interactive tool that contrasts Internet speeds from around the world, downloading a 5MB photo in Rwanda takes about five seconds, compared with nearly 10 seconds in South Africa. (In the U.S., it takes just short of two seconds.) In September officials launched free wireless hot spots throughout the capital of Kigali. And last summer Rwanda signed a deal with KT Corp., South Korea’s largest telecommunications provider, to bring a 4G LTE broadband network to 95 percent of the Rwandan population within three years. And Visa recently gave the nation a strong stamp of approval by choosing it for the rollout of a pioneering mobile-payment system meant to replace cash and better connect residents in rural areas who traditionally haven’t interacted with financial services.

On the front lines of Rwanda’s Vision 2020, however, stands kLab. Located in Kigali, kLab—short for “knowledge Lab”—is a unique collaborative space where young tech entrepreneurs and engineers can access free Wi-Fi, attend workshops, participate in hackathons, or simply swap coding tips while hovering over a game of foosball, as Katie Collins wrote in Wired in October. The center also has 21 experienced mentors available to nurture nascent ideas and offer business advice for new companies attempting to break into the industry.

At the moment, kLab hosts 85 tenants and 11 startups, many of which already have products on the market. Foyo, for example, created an app that sends users daily diet and health information, while TorQue is known for its cloud-based inventory system geared toward small-to-medium-size businesses. One of kLab’s most successful companies is GiraICT, which makes tablets and smart phones by the likes of HP and Samsung affordable to lower-income customers through a monthly payment system. Since launching, GiraICT has also opened branches in Burundi and Ghana.

Another development that fills kLab’s future with promise is its alliance with Carnegie Mellon University’s relatively new research-based campus, located just one floor below. “You say, ‘I have entrepreneurs here, I have a world-class university, I have IT businesses, and I have IT infrastructure’—that looks to me like a mini–Silicon Valley,”said Michael Bezy, associate director of Carnegie Mellon University–Rwanda, at the official opening of kLab in October. “The only thing we are missing are venture capitalists.”

Since an estimated 60 percent of Rwanda’s population is under the age of 25, government officials have heavily supported the One Laptop per Child initiative, a partnership between two U.S.-based nonprofit organizations that aims to put low-cost computers in the hands of the world’s poorest youth. So far OLPC has distributedmore than 200,000 laptops to more than 400 schools across Rwanda, placing the country third in the world, behind Peru and Uruguay, in terms of total units provided.

Aptly for a small country aiming to become a beacon of technology, the Twitter-friendly Kagame is often dubbed the “Digital President.” But there are reasons to doubt that Rwanda is stable enough to reach its goals. For one, the nation has the highest level of inequality in the region, with the richest 10 percent earning 3.2 times the income of the poorest 40 percent in 2011, according to a report from the Society for International Development. And Kagame’s style is authoritarian, holding elections without the presence of an opposing party and justifying limits on a free press by arguing that words could rekindle the genocidal flame. In the past, advocacy group Human Rights Watch and the United Nations have accused Rwanda of backing the now-defunct armed rebel group M23, which were formerly situated in the neighboring and much-troubled Democratic Republic of Congo. Although Rwandan officials have consistently denied the claims, Western nations such as the U.K. and U.S.have a history of reacting by suspending foreign aid—aid that Kagame’s government relies on to cover 40 percent of its annual budget. (In 1995 Rwanda reportedly depended on foreign aid to cover 100 percent of its budget.)

Ultimately, Rwanda’s investments in both technology and its own people have inched the state toward its goal of creating a middle-income society through an ICT-based economy. With the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Information Technology Report ranking Rwanda as the most network-ready nation in East Africa, and the World Health Organization finding that the country spends the continent’s highest proportion of its budget on health care, the once-failed state is setting itself up for success.

In the eyes of Carter Crockett, a co-founder of the Kigali-based consulting firmKarisimbi Business Partners and the founding director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at Gordon College in Massachusetts, Rwanda has a fighting chance. “The best thing Rwanda’s IT strategy has going for it is its bold vision for the future,” Crockett said over the phone. “It’s a very small country that likes to dream very big. People are attracted to big visions, and that’s what Rwanda’s got going for it.”

Paul Hiebert is the editor of Ballast, a Canadian-centric website.

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Still haunted by its failure to forestall genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica nearly 20 years ago and confronted by ongoing bloodshed in Syria and the Central African Republic (CAR), the United Nations is revamping its preventive strategies under a new initiative called ‘Rights up Front.’

“The need for early action, and the crucial role of responding early to human rights violations, is at the heart of the ‘Rights up Front’ initiative,” Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson told an informal session of the General Assembly yesterday as he presented a six-point action plan.

It includes training UN staff on the world body’s core purpose of promoting respect for human rights; providing Member States with the information needed to respond to human rights violations; and ensuring that UN personnel around the world are more attuned to situations where there is a risk of serious human rights abuses and are equipped for the responsibilities that such potential crises entail.

The strategy, initiated by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, also includes achieving a more coherence by strengthening engagement with the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council and providing earlier and more coherent support to teams on the ground before a crisis emerges; and better organization of human rights staff so that they can identify risks of serious violations of human rights that could lead to atrocities.

Finally, underpinning all these activities will be better information management on threats and risks to populations for planning operational activities and for sharing with Member States.

“A lack of broad and timely political support has been a key obstacle to early and effective action to prevent human rights crises,” Mr. Eliasson said. “Together with Member States we will need to explore ways of strengthening our collective political will to react and act when crises are unfolding. It is irrefutable, and needs repeating, that serious human rights violations are the best early warning of impending atrocities.

“If we fail to act early, the human, political and economic costs can be devastating as we know far too well. This calls for a more alert, flexible and coordinated UN System, both on the ground and at headquarters. This is what the ‘Rights up Front’ initiative aims to accomplish.”

He stressed how the UN System failed to prevent genocide in Rwanda, where at least 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed during a span of three months in 1994, and in Srebrenica, where at least 6,000 Muslim men and boys in a UN protection zone were massacred in 1995 during the wars in former Yugoslavia.

“Those horrendous events led us all to say ‘never again’,” Mr. Eliasson said. “We said we would have to do more to prevent serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Despite much effort, since 1995 hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of mass atrocities and tens of millions have been displaced.”

But steps forward have been taken. “World leaders endorsed the ‘responsibility to protect in 2005. And Member States have over the years articulated an increasingly detailed agenda for the protection of civilians,” he said.

Yet, the crises in Syria, where over 100,000 people have now been killed and 8 million driven from their homes in the nearly three-year civil war, and in CAR, where thousands have been killed and over 600,000 displaced in a conflict increasingly marked by inter-communal clashes between Christians and Muslims, are reminders that serious human rights abuses are often the clearest early warning of emerging conflict, he added.

“When people in today’s world are at risk or subject to serious violations, they expect and request the United Nations to act – and we do,” Mr. Eliasson declared. “However, in practice, our response to crisis often comes when a situation has deteriorated to the point where only a substantial political or peacekeeping mission can deal with the problems.”

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Rwanda’s Genocide survivors’ community has protested against the publication of an instruction manual by France’s Ministry of Education, which affirms that the Genocide perpetrated in Rwanda in 1994 was committed by Tutsi against Hutu.

The survivors who subscribe to an umbrella organization (IBUKA) have written up an official letter to the French Minister of Education, Vincent Peillon, requesting him to rectify the forgery of the gloomy episode of the Rwandan history.

A copy of the letter, which was written on December 18, 2013, has also been sent to French President François Hollande and to the Guard of the [National] Symbols, Ms. Taubira.

Below is the letter by Ibuka (Rwanda’s Genocide survivors’ umbrella organization) in France:

It is both with sadness and indignation that France-based Ibuka has learnt that the prestigious institution of CNED [France’s National Center for Distance Learning] has been teaching all over the world, since last summer, that the Genocide perpetrated in Rwanda back in 1994 has been committed by Tutsi against Hutu.

In a document spread by this institution on June 30, 2013 and directed to professors with the title “French 3^rd year. Booklet of reviewed work”, one can read the following, under the title, “Memory can allow to determine the responsibilities and to deliver justice”:

“To this regard, the Genocide against Hutu by Tutsi in Rwanda illustrates well the following […]:  The fact of reviving the memory by reminding the violence of machete-enabled executions, the regime of terror, all that work together to allow for a collective consciousness for historic horror to develop”.

Hence, the document takes a deliberate stance against what has been declared a fact well-known to the public by International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 2006: “A Genocide has been committed in Rwanda against the Tutsi ethnic group”.

This revision of history is even worse given the fact that the instruction manual is a source of teaching (learning) for the whole world.

We are often confronted with waves of [Genocide] deniers linking the denial to the thesis of double Genocide. We were, however, far from imagining that an official French institution could also echo that to such an extent.

An instruction manual is not a document one can write up in any way. Meant to help professors, it must rely on up-to-date work (information).

Given the number of books published in France on the Genocide against Tutsi, it’s scary that the National Education dares teach such cruel mistakes!

This instruction manual which violates the memory of victims is a shame for many French young people who, over the last ten years, have published excellent theses about the subject.

From which sources did the National Center for Distance Learning get its information? Has this institution remained using the blackmail propaganda which preceded and accompanied the Genocide? Which specialists have been consulted?

The National Center for Distance Learning can’t get this wrong. A Genocide is not a detail of history. The instruction manual by the National Center for Distance Learning transforms the victims into culprits of Genocide!

They [victims] are outrageously offended. Would you imagine an instruction manual in which it would be written that the Jews would have been the authors [perpetrators] of the Shoah [Holocaust]?

Is it because it has been committed in Africa against Africans that it can be treated with such a level of negligence and taken this lightly? The subject is serious. If one cannot give it the attention it deserves, one would rather keep quiet.

In the name of survivors of the Genocide against Tutsi, in the name of the humanity which has been tarnished by this crime, in the name of the community of French researchers of whom I know the quality of work about the subject, we request you to:

• Retract the circulation of the whole edition;
• Publish, in a reference journal, an announcement to suggest this retraction;
• Put in place, in France, a complete programme of the teaching of the history of the Genocides, including the one against the Tutsi of Rwanda.

Please do accept, Honorable Minister, the assurance of our distinguished consideration and receive our kind regards for the forthcoming end-of-the-year feasts.

Marcel Kabanda

President of Ibuka in France

C/O Secretary General, Ildephonse Ngaruye

I don’t recall a single Conservative who is coming to the defence of these guys’ comments on Blacks? Sure they are defending his comments against gays but the guy also commented on African Americans and not a peep out of them on that?

Phil Robertson claims Leviticus is what he lives by and if that is true than it’s an abomination to eat shellfish according to Leviticus. You can sell your daughters in the Bible and adultery is a sin and you can be stoned to death for it. Did anyone tell Newt Gingrich that part when he was defending this guy?

It doesn’t say one sin is any worse than the other. I am pretty sure Robertson eats shellfish so whats that make him….a hypocrite perhaps? It does say that God judges folks not man. Have Conservatives read that part?

PHIL ROBERTSON: It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! … But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. … Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality.

PHIL ROBERTSON: I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. … They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word! … Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.

Funny because they were singing the blues, they invented them back then. I guess Conservatives like Phil haven’t listened to the words. They were not better off under slavery and I can only imagine that Black folks that hear that would assume the same thing A&E did…..that this is racist, whether or not that was his intention or not, it was still racist.

You can adopt a black kid as Phil Robertson’s son has and still say racist things, just as Sarah Palin who is alleged to have slept with a black man can still say racist things. Maybe he isn’t a racist per se, but don’t you think his comments on both these topics were inappropriate?

They are defending his religious beliefs yet show where it says Black were happier as slaves or without the right to vote?

I thought that these may have been taken out of context but after reading the entire transcript, I do not think they were.

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I think most South Africans would agree that institutionalised apartheid, as designed and implemented by the Nationalist Government, has been buried. Regrettably, many of the products of apartheid remain, like inequality, poor education, disparate economic freedom and disparate opportunities, still exist. Of great concern is that racism still seems to be freely in play.

Apartheid was a fertile breeding ground for racism as it was based on the belief that the sense of justice and desire for recognition of black people and white people are somehow different. The superiority of whites embedded in the apartheid system promoted the belief that the sense of justice of blacks was not as strong as that of whites and they did not have the same desire for recognition or the same need for self-assertion. This belief damaged the entire social basis of humanity among both whites and blacks and is still now implicit in the attitude of a black person who denies that it is possible for a white person to ever understand what it means to be black. The legacy of the hierarchical separation by culture, experience, recognition and worth within which each group was nurtured, and across which there was only the most limited of communication, is still imprinted on our society.

The roots of racism are sociological not biological. There are no such things as ‘human races’ in the way that biologists might previously have thought of them. Any description of a particular ‘race’ is only a casual social designation.

Humans have an innate sense of justice that is the psychological stimulus for all noble virtues like morality, courage, self-sacrifice and honour. It provides them with emotional support for setting values and for determining what they believe to be right or just. They use this sense to evaluate and assign worth to themselves in the first instance but are also capable of assigning worth to other people. They are capable of feeling indignation for themselves and on behalf of others where they evaluate something to be not right or unjust. This can occur when an individual feels that the group to which it belongs is being treated unjustly, for example, a member of a minority group who feels its rights are not being upheld. The indignation that victims and non-victims feel against racism is a manifestation of this sense of justice. The indignation arises because the victim of racism is not being treated with the worth that the person feeling indignation believes they are due, that is, because the victim of racism is not being recognised and valued.

The inner sense of justice of people, and the desire for recognition that arises from it, is a form of self-assertion. It outwardly projects a person’s values. Feelings of anger will arise when such values are not recognised by other people. There is no guarantee, however, that one’s own values will correspond to those of others. What may seem right and just for a victim of racism may seem quite different to a racist, and vice versa.

Racism is thus an offence against human morality and only by emphasising this will we ever eradicate racism in our society. In his much-quoted speech, Martin Luther King visualised a society in which people would “not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. King did not say that they should be judged according to their status or talent but by their moral character and human dignity. He viewed all people equally as ‘moral agents’ irrespective of their intelligence, skill, talent or position in society.

Our fledgling democracy that is based on free market principles and a global economy will not prosper while natural barriers to equality exist. These begin with the unequal distribution of abilities or attributes within our population and the necessary division of labour within the economy. A modern economy cannot be productive without creating winners and losers as capital shifts from one industry to another or from one region to another. Our democracy is unlikely to grow if perceived differences in the equality of constituent groups cause a distorted view of nationalism or ethnicity. If this happens, and there are many signs that it is still happening, we will not be able to share a sense of nation or be able to accept one another’s rights.

To nurture our inner sense of justice and our need for recognition does not mean that we need to recognise everyone as equal. In fact, true freedom and creativity can only come about if we have a desire to be recognised as being better than others. We would never push ourselves to our limits if we simply wanted to be like everyone else. What is necessary, however, is that we need to recognise fairly and with a sense of justice the talents of others, irrespective of their status and perceived equality, and, most importantly, acknowledge their moral character.

South Africa has the potential to be a flourishing developing country with a strong emerging economy. As an emerging society, however, we are not doing ourselves justice. While there may be many other factors, residual racism is undeniably a negative one. We owe it to ourselves to eradicate this scourge and to put it behind us as soon as we can. As a start, the government needs to act with strong moral character. It is not enough just to ensure that the demographic features of our population are catered for in public sector appointments but that all appointments must be based on the strongest levels of moral character.

The eradication of racism may seem to be best undertaken by a ‘bottom-up’ process, i.e. by diverse individuals and individual communities mixing more freely with one another, which, it must be said is indeed happening. But, until the government shows high moral character, and embarks on a ‘top-down’ process to ensure high morals, just and ethical behaviour, racism, I’m afraid, will still be with us for a long time.

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Australia’s leading Holocaust denial group has backed the Abbott government’s intention to water down the nation’s race-hate laws.

The Adelaide Institute, founded by convicted Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben, says section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act and other laws on racial vilification stifle ”legitimate” historical debate.

Attorney-General George Brandis and newly appointed Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson have both publicly called for the abolition of laws, last used against News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt over articles about light-skinned Aborigines.

Mr Wilson described the views of Dr Toben and his institute as ”repugnant” and ”fantasyland rubbish” but said he believed the courts were not the way to confront them.

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Adelaide Institute director Peter Hartung said he did not have a view on Mr Wilson’s appointment to the commission but that the denialist group supported the repeal of section 18C. “These laws stop discussion of things that can be proved with facts and figures so it cannot be debated,” he said.

”These laws were brought in to shut people up when they have no rational argument against what they’re saying.”

Critics have branded 18C the ”Bolt laws” after the News Corp columnist’s prosecution in 2011 for his ”inaccurate and offensive” attack on a group of Aborigines. However, Section 18C has mostly been used by Australian Jewish groups against Holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathisers.

Mr Hartung said the Adelaide Institute was sympathetic to Mr Bolt’s cause. ”What Andrew Bolt said was basically true and factual.”

Mr Wilson said that free and untrammelled public debate was a better way to confront Holocaust denial than anti-hate speech laws.

”Rather than hide in their caverns of hate, these people should be exposed for the stupidity and absurdity of their commentary in public debate so their names can be dragged through the dirt for all time,” the newly appointed commissioner said. ”I disagree with people having recourse to the law to shut down public debate because there is a big difference between recourse to the law to protect yourself from physical violence, and protecting yourself from stupid and childish ideas.”

Dr Toben went to jail in 2009 for defying Federal Court orders to remove material from his website that claimed there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, and describing the murder of millions of European Jews during World War II as the ”Holocaust myth”. He was convicted and jailed in 1999 in Germany for the specific crime of Holocaust denial.

Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council spokesman Jeremy Jones, who has prosecuted Dr Toben using 18C , said he was ”not surprised” the denialists wanted the laws scrapped. ”The minimum you would expect in a country like Australia is that people who are vilified by this material have some recourse to the law,” Mr Jones said. ”The recourse that we’re talking about is asking people to stop what they’re doing; nobody was suggesting that people have any sort of onerous penalties.

”Under 18C you do not have an untrammelled right to destroy the quality of life of any other Australian with your words.”

A spokesman for Senator Brandis said he wanted to stop section 18C being used to stifle ”freedoms of speech”. ”The government wants to ensure that laws which are designed to prohibit racial vilification are not used as a vehicle to attack legitimate freedoms of speech,” the spokesman said.

”The two values – protecting people against racial vilification and defending freedoms of speech – are not inconsistent.”

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The Central African Republic (CAR) is in turmoil. The Republic of Mali is still delicate. South Sudan, having hived itself from Sudan, is unravelling. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) sits astride an iffy peace. The old African tar baby is once again spilling out of its cradle, and the babysitters have their work cut out.

It is an uncanny scenario that keeps repeating itself without African politicians being able to draw the lessons that other specimens elsewhere might have drawn.

Congo and South Sudan have been at war with themselves ever since I was wearing khaki shorts, with the Simbas of Pierre Mulele in the former and the Anyanya in the latter battling it out with the respective governments in Kinshasa and Khartoum they considered to be impositions.

The CAR, for its part, has known many skirmishes over time, though these did not qualify to be called civil wars. But that country found another way to distinguish itself when it allowed one of its sergeants to take power in Bangui, declare himself general and later crowned himself emperor, necessitating the restyling of his country as an “empire.”

If Jean Bedel Bokassa had been a clown in a pantomime, we would have laughed ourselves sick, so comical was he. Unfortunately there was nothing to make one laugh, even when he was placing the crown on his own head a la Napoleon, or when he went to Paris to mourn Charles de Gaulle where he showed himself inconsolable with cries of “papa! papa!”

He was a murderer and a thief, just like his neighbour, Mobutu Kuku another sergeant turned general — nay, field marshal — in Congo, which he renamed Zaire and plundered more thoroughly than King Leopold ll before him.

When I had the misfortune of meeting this Kuku in Kinshasa in the 1970s, the megalomaniac was talking to us about “cet homme zaïrois que je suis en train de façonner…” (This Zairean man that I am in the process of creating…)

It was also about the same time that I met another megalomaniac by the name of Moussa Traore, who received our delegation, which had gone to Bamako to plead for the release of a former colleague of ours at the Panafrican Youth Movement who had had the stupidity of angering the big man.

He wanted to assure us that he would honour his word, but I was not impressed by his assurance, “Je ne peut pas mentir, d’abord en tant que soldat, et puis en tant que malien…” (I cannot lie, first as a soldier, and secondly as a Malian.)

Soon the Malian people tired of his lies and consigned him to the dung heap of history, but I suspect the rot had seeped to the bone marrow of that nation. As I behold the thoughtless destruction of priceless ancient monuments and scripts in the name of a demented theology, I cannot help but feel that a nation led by liars and thieves will eventually pay dearly.

Which is no doubt what has befallen South Sudan. For it is clear now, it was not the freedom of the South Sudanese people that the SPLM was fighting for for so long, but rather the self aggrandisement and self enrichment of the new rulers.

Shorn of the religious and racial divides of the old Sudan, the power struggle has been ethnicised as the black, Christian and “animist” — where did they get that one from? — bigotries have found new expressions to box themselves in and fight for.

Time was when the whole of Sudan was administered under what the Brits called, euphemistically, the Condominium, which had khedival Egypt as superintendent under London’s thumb.

Time was, too, when Mali was known as French Sudan, Congo was Leopold’s shamba and CAR was actually an empire under the little toad who thought he was Napoleon.

The DNA from those sad days informs African behaviour today, and that’s why the babysitters of yesteryear have not as yet worked themselves out of their jobs. Our rotten politics, inordinate appetites and just plain ugly still mark out our countries as in-conflict, post-conflict or pre-conflict.

By Jenerali Ulimwengu

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Hashize imyaka 50 umugabo w’Umusuwisi witwa Denis-Gilles VUILLEMIN, avuze ko atakwihanganira gukorera leta ikora jenoside.

Uyu mugabo wafashe icyo cyemezo yari mu Rwanda mu mpera za 1963 n’intangiriro ya 1964, akaba yari afite amasezerano n’Ishami ry’Umunyamuryango w’Abibumbye Rishinzwe Uburezi, Ubuhanga n’Umuco (UNESCO) yo kwigisha muri Groupe Scolaire ya Butare.

Akihagera ngo VUILLEMIN yasanze abafurere b’iryo shuri, abenshi b’ababiligi, bari bazi itsembabwoko ryakorerwaga abatutsi “epuration ethnique” ndetse bamwe babigiramo uruhare.

Uyu mwalimu wari woherejwe na UNESCO, avuga ko imikoranire ya Perezida Gregoire KAYIBANDA na Musenyeri Andre PERRAUDIN yamuteye isereri , hamwe na mugenzi we wari expert wa ONU, bahitamo gusezera. Myr. Perraudin yari uwa diyosezi ya Kabgayi.

Mu nyandiko ya VUILLEMIN mu kinyamakuru Le Monde cyo ku wa 17 Mutarama 1964 yaravuze ati: “Sinakwihanganira gukomeza kureberera ntavuga. Sinumva ukuntu abanyamahanga bose bakorera ibihugu byabo cyangwa imiryango mpuzamahanga mu Rwanda binumira. Ndabifata nk’ubufatanyacyaha. Byashoboka bite ko nkomeza kwigisha mw’ishuri ubutegetsi buza bukavanamo abana bakajya kubica? Nakomeza gute kwigisha abana bashobora kwicwa ejo cyangwa ejobundi”?[1]

Muri iyo nyandiko akomeza avuga ko kuva muri Nzeri 1963, PARMEHUTU yakusanyije abatutsi bose bajijutse, bakabarunda muri za gereza nyuma bakabicisha inzara. Muri Cyangugu ngo bapakiye ikamyo abagera kuri 80 babajugunya mu mikoki yo mu ishyamba rya Nyungwe bamaze kubarasa.

VUILLEMIN yongeraho ko ibyakozwe na ba Perefe na Burugumesitiri hagati y’uwa 24 na 28 Ukuboza 1963, byo ari jenoside nta gushidikanya, kuko icyo gihe hafashwe abagore n’abana babicishisha impiri n’amacumu, babajugunya mu nzuzi babambitse ubusa.

N’ubwo ntawamenya neza umubare w’abishwe, ahamya ko muri Gikongoro honyine abishwe barenga 14.000. Ariko, akongeraho ko n’ahandi ariko bigomba kuba byaragenze: “il y a lieu de craindre qu’il en soit de meme pour d’autres prefectures, et qu’un plan de nettoyage soit etabli.” Amakuru arambuye kuri http://umuvugizi.wordpress.com/

Iyo amakuru yatanzwe n’uyu muzungu ukomoka muri Suisse tutayasanga mu gitabo cyanditswe na Sixbert MUSANGAMFURA ubarizwa mu Ishyaka FDU Inkingi cyitwa: “LE PARTI M.D.R. PARMEHUTU: INFORMATION ET PROPAGANDE, pg 201-204”, byashoraga gufatwa nko gukabya.

Muri icyo gitabo cye cyo mu 1987, MUSANGANFURA yemeza ko  kuva ku wa gatandatu tari ya 21 Ukuboza 1963, Police Nationale yatangiye umukwabu mu mujyi wa Kigali no mu zindi perefegitura, hafatwa abayobozi benshi b’amashyaka y’abatutsi (UNAR, RADER), abenshi muri bo bicirwa muri gereza ya RUHENGERI nta rubanza rubaye. [2]

Ubwicanyi bwabaye muri ibyo bihe bya Noheri ya 1963 bwanditswe kandi n’ibinyamakuru mpuzamahanga byinshi.

• L’Afrique Nouvelle No 862 du 14 au 20/2/1964: “la tragique elimination d’une race”.
• Le Monde du 21/2/1964: “Le Rwanda insulte”.
• Le Figaro du 11/2/1964: “massacres au pays des 1000 collines”.
• La Revue de presse Suisse du 10/2/1964: “Halte aux massacres”.
• France Soir du 11/2/1964: “Nous avons tues a peine 12.000 geants TUTSI, les cafards”.
• Tribune de Lausanne du 12/2/1964: “Veritable genocide au Rwanda”.
• La Suisse, Geneve du 3 mars 1964: “Pourquoi j’ai denonce les massacres du Rwanda”.
• Jeune Afrique du 172/1964: “L’immence pogrom du Rwanda et Un Neron du Rwanda”
• Washington Post, Feb 6^th, 1964: “10.000 slain in few weeks, watutsi press suicide March:
• Sunday Nation, Feb 9^th, 1964: “watutsi appeal launched”, (fleuves rouges de sang).
• Le Figaro du 25-26/1/1964: “7% de la population Rwandaise massacres”.
• New York Times Jan 22^nd, 1964: “8.000 watutsi killed”.
• L’Etoile du Congo No 188 du 4/2/1964: “les massacres du Rwanda”.

PARMEHUTU yagerageje kuvuguruza ibyo binyamakuru ivuga ko bayibeshyera abo yishe atari 20.000 nk’uko ibyo binyamakuru bibivuga, ko ahubwo abo yemera YISHE ari  abantu 870 mu nyandiko yise: “ Toute la verite sur le mouvement terroriste Inyenzi”.

Mu bisobanuro byatanzwe na PARMEHUTU, ntaho bavuga na hamwe icyo n’abo 870 baziraga, cyane ko abenshi bari abaturage basanzwe. Umwanditsi Domique FRANCHE mu gitabo cye: Genealogie du Genocide Rwandais. Hutu et Tusi: Gaulois et Francs avuga ko uwabaye Guverineri Generali wa nyuma w’u Rwanda-Urundi, Jean Paul Harroy, yabaruye abantu bari bafite ubutegetsi muri 1959 agasanga batagera kuri 10.000 ushyizemo n’abakozi basanzwe.

Ibihumbi birenga by’abatutsi byari bifite ibibazo bimwe n’abahutu. Ariko kandi, ukuri ni uko n’abo bitwaga ko bafite akazi, bose bari abakozi bal eta y’ubukoloni bw’Ababiligi.

Ibinyamakuru byavuzwe ntabwo byamenywe na benshi muri twe. Ikigaragara gusa ni uko nta gushidikanya ko ibyabaye mu bihe bya Noheri 1963 n’Ubunani bw’1964, byari JENOSIDE.

Aho gushaka gahunda z’iterambere ry’igihugu cyari kikibona ubwigenge, gahunda za PARMEHUTU yari urwango rushingiye ku bwoko!!!! Nibyo VUILLEMIN avuga: “le gouvenement rwandais…faute d’idees sur le developpement…la haine raciale lui tient de programme”.

Igitangaje kandi kibabaje ni uko amahanga yanze kwemera no kwemeza ko icyo cyaha ndengakamere cyakorewe abanyarwanda. Nyuma y’imyaka 30 (1963/4-1994) hongeye kuba ubwicanyi bushingiye ko bwoko noneho bukemerwa n’amahanga (jenoside yakorewe abatutsi).

Dominique FRANCHE asanga abanyarwanda batazabona ubarogora uburozi banyowe igihe cyose bazaba bakirebera mu moko yabo, atari na yo ahubwo akomeza kubatanya: “…un poison dont on n’a pas encore trouve l’antidote, que les rwandais ne pourront pas trouver tant qu’ils resteront tournes vers de mythiques origins, vers un passé fausse qui exacerbe leurs differences communautaires”.

Umuti wo kuturogora (l’antidote) umaze kuboneka ni “NDI UMUNYARWANDA”. Ni umuti uzaduha gufata ingamba nshya zo kubaka u Rwanda rushya, tukava mu bikorwa n’imyitwarire idutanya, naho ubundi nta gaciro twaba twiha nk’abanyarwanda.

Hagati aho mu gihe twitegura kwibuka ku nshuro ya 20 jenoside yakorewe abatutsi kuva Mata 1994, hakwiye no kwibukwa JENOSIDE yakozwe mu myaka 50 ishize, ihereye mu mpera z’Ukuboza 1963.

Na: Valens Munyabagisha

In a sermon on Sunday, Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee advised atheists and humanists to “take your Walkman and stuff it into your ears” or just “leave the country” if they don’t like hearing “Merry Christmas” or carols like “Joy to the World,” according to a video of Hagee’s speech hosted on Right Wing Watch.

“Planes are leaving every hour on the hour. Get on one,” Hagee added, speaking from his Cornerstone Church in San Antonio.

Sunday’s sermon was not the first time the televangelist suggested nonbelievers leave the country. In a June 2012 sermon, Hagee, who is also the CEO of Global Evangelism Television, told the “atheist watching this telecast” that “this country was not built for atheists nor by atheists.”

“It was built by Christian people who believed in the word of God. … If our belief in God offends you, move,” Hagee said before informing atheists that “we don’t want you and we won’t miss you, I promise you.”

Hagee, who endorsed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for president in 2008, has alsodeclared on multiple occasions that God sent Adolf Hitler as a “hunter” to kill Jewish people for “disobedience and rebellion.”

In a 2006 interview with NPR, he also claimed that Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people, was an “act of God” to punish a Gay Pride parade scheduled in New Orleans.

“And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades,” Hagee said. “I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment, sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.”

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It is a known fact that the media we consume shapes our perception of the world: after all, media has economic, political, social and aesthetic purposes. Martin Gilens wrote a book some time ago, for example: Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty, which explores the role of media in the shaping of myth and misconception of welfare policy.

And what about the shaping of misconception of racism? We all know Fox News has a nice handle on that, as far as “news” media goes. But what about pop culture? Hollywood? How do the films we flock to theatres to see shape our world? I can think of more than a few examples, as I’m sure any thinking person can. But one in particular comes to mind: films about slavery and the way they shape perceptions of racism in white audiences. Namely the idea that racism is a thing of the past and only existed on Southern plantations a long, long time ago.

Since the release of 12 Years a Slave I’ve had many conversations about films that are about slavery. The conversations that stand out to me the most are the ones where the consensus is, “Why do all the films in Hollywood that feature black people have to be about slavery?” and my own undying question about the underrepresentation of black people in Hollywood, “Why does a film need to be about the subjugation of black people in order for it to have more than a one solitary black character?” And also, “Why did so many more white people go to see 12 Years than Best Man Holiday?”

While films like 12 Years a Slave are extremely important in understanding the past and the effect it has on the present, they have an interesting effect on white audiences whose ideas of racism are of the “post-racial” or “colour blind” variety: the effect is almost one of relief. When I left the theatre of 12 Years a Slave, the kind of words I heard from the lips of the other white people leaving were things like, “God, it was just so bad back then.” And even things like, “Those people were horrible. Fuck those slave owners.” So, in a sense, relief. “It was so bad back then” translates as “Things are so much better now,” and “Those people were horrible” translates as “We don’t do that anymore.”

And they’re right. Things are better now. White people don’t own slaves in the United States. But this cousin of relief presents, to me, a sort of cognitive dissonance about the reality of racism in America. When white audiences see movies like The Help and The Butler and 12 Years a Slave–and indeed, when the vast majority of mainstream films featuring black people are movies like The Help and The Butler and 12 Years a Slave–and not films like Best Man Holiday, their perception of racism (and even blackness) is shaped in a way that lacks a wider context and an awareness of present-day racism. This is what racism looks like, white audiences come to believe: chains and lynchings and the American South. And while they’re not wrong, that understanding is stunted.

In a way, films like 12 Years a Slave, even with its horror and brutality, serve as a comfort to white people seeking to feel a distance between the monster that is racism and the life they lead in 2013. “Progress!” we congratulate ourselves, proud that America has overcome its brutishly violent history. “We used to be horrible people that owned other human beings and now we don’t! We’re a post-racial society now! Go America!” But if we’re talking about reality, the reality of racism in 2013, a reality that generally doesn’t make it to the silver screen, we have to talk about things like environmental racism and structural racism in our systems of education, employment, criminal justice, and more. We have to talk about Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander and we have to talk about Oscar Grant and Renisha McBride. We have to talk about what racism looks like now and not let ourselves off the hook with the tired mantra of “But we’ve come so far!”

12 Years a Slave was an incredible film. I think everyone should see it. But I encourage people with skin like mine to not watch it with the idea that the work is done. The fact that white people no longer own, rape, and murder black bodies is not a sign of progress we should congratulate ourselves on: our standards should be higher. Widen your scope. Racism looks like this. And this. And this. And this. Don’t allow Hollywood’s narrow line of vision to trick you into believing that violent racism is just something that happened in the 1800′s and looks like the horrific lava of lashes on a black human being’s back while everyone stands around wearing corsets and smoking pipes. It looks like Charlotte police shooting Jonathan Ferrell to death after he was in a car accident and asked for help. It looks like Riley Incognito calling Warring Sapp the N-word. It looks like Trayon Christian being arrested for buying a belt at Barney’s because the NYPD didn’t think he could afford it on his own. It looks like celebrities and well-known magazines showcasing blackface in 2013 and every year before that.

In a nation where so many white people have their “one black friend” and little personal contact with people who don’t look like them–yes, segregation is still “a thing:” New York City had the same level of racial segregation in 2012 as it did in 1910.–it is easy for these audiences to consume movies like The Help and 12 Years (especially given the fact that there are so few alternatives when it comes to mainstream movies featuring black people and their lives) and think “This was racism. I don’t know any black people here in 2013, but I do know that slavery isn’t around anymore. So that’s that!” And–slam–close the book. But that’s not all. That’s not the end, fellow white folks. Why did you watch The Help but not Do the Right Thing? Why 12 Years a Slave and not Boyz in the Hood? Is it because one talks about racism in the past where you’re comfortable with it, and the other talks about issues affecting black people right here and right now? Spoiler alert: they’re the same thing. The racism you see in 12 Years has mutated and transformed and grown tentacles and developed camouflage, but it’s right here with us. Right here with you. We’d be foolish to ignore it; foolish to watch the story of Solomon Northup and think that his suffering was not inherited, that the ugliness of the system that enslaved him doesn’t still linger.

I wonder if white America as a whole will ever be able to empathize with present-day struggle. Looking back with sympathy and indignation is easier than looking around, isn’t it? I just wonder what we are looking toward.

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The roots of the Marikana massacre lie in the ANC’s deep antipathy to those it relied upon to rise to power: the black working classes.

Since the massacre of 34 striking miners in the Marikana region of South Africa last month, there has been a lot of handwringing about the underlying causes of the outrage. Many have located the massacre in the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) failure to deal with the enduring legacy of Apartheid, but in truth the roots of the tragedy lie elsewhere – in the reality of South African capitalism, and in the politics of the ANC and its alliance with the South African Communist Party (SACP).

In trying to understand how something like the Marikana massacre could happen, it is important to grasp that the leaders of the ANC have always had a contradictory attitude towards their mass base, the black working class. That the ANC’s leadership is now acting with hatred and violence towards the very constituency that it allegedly represents (and upon whose sacrifice it rode to power), has surprised many commentators. But in reality, Marikana has merely brought to the fore the class interests and tensions at the heart of post-Apartheid South Africa and its ANC-led governing alliance.

The roots of the Marikana massacre can be traced back to the formation of the alliance between the ANC and the SACP in the early 1950s. Following the Apartheid regime’s brutal crushing of the ANC-led defiance campaign in the 1950s, the black masses had always been the key to the ebb and flow of the liberation struggle. But the tragedy of South Africa is that they were never able to develop an independent perspective. Instead, they became the adjunct of political interests that were largely hostile to the real interests of the black working class.

Before examining this in more detail, it is worth reflecting on the fact that it was the black masses’ resilience that brought about the end of Apartheid. When outgoing Apartheid-era president FW De Klerk claimed that he ‘won the liberation struggle’ because the decision to end Apartheid had been made ‘long before’ Nelson Mandela had been released from prison, his absurd assertion went unchallenged. Indeed, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet there would never have been any change in South Africa, let alone non-racial elections, had it not been for the determination of the black majority to liberate the country from Apartheid. De Klerk, and his Western backers, would never have contemplated change if they had not been forced to by the resistance of the black masses.

De Klerk’s attempt to write the black resistance struggle out of South African history was never contested by the ANC. It is often forgotten that during the first post-Apartheid election campaign in 1994, the history of Apartheid and the role of the National Party was the subject of considerable revisionism. Indeed, under a clause forbidding ‘unfair criticism’ of political opponents, the Independent Electoral Commission prohibited candidates from saying the National Party built and ran the Apartheid system – despite the fact that it did.

Effacing the role of the black masses in the liberation struggle in the post-Apartheid era was more than an abuse of historical record. The new ANC political elite also had every interest in marginalising its own ‘Trojan Horse’. So the more that the white ruling class was able to insist that it, and not the masses, had brought about the end of Apartheid, the easier it was for the old elite to secure its status and relationship with the new aspirant black elite represented by the ANC as part of the new rainbow-nation South Africa. And it was this political marginalisation of the black working class, in which the new and old elites were complicit, that set the scene for the massacre in Marikana.

This is a bold assertion. But it is one that is based upon an understanding of the reality of how the market operates in a country like South Africa.

A lot of rubbish has been written about South Africa. For example, one of the most enduring myths is that Apartheid resulted from the backwoodsmen prejudices of South Africa’s Afrikaner minority. Yes, members of that minoriy benefited from Apartheid and many of them were racists. But Apartheid – the forcible denial of democratic rights to South Africa’s black majority – was never simply an irrational racist system. It was also essential to the accumulation of vast wealth in South Africa. Apartheid was the form that the market took in South Africa at the time, a form of capitalist organisation for extending the boundaries of exploitation and wealth creation. Violent repression and political oppression were as necessary to the market as foreign capital.

And the form capitalism took in South Africa had fundamental consequences for all sections of society.

The consequences of Apartheid

Apartheid temporarily solved a problem for the tiny white elite in South Africa: how to exploit the black masses economically, while denying them political influence. So under the doctrine of ‘separate development’, blacks were told they could not vote, live in white areas or travel anywhere without permission. Instead they were made ‘citizens’ of remote ‘tribal homelands’, and forced to operate as an impoverished army of migrant workers. Apartheid facilitated the exploitation of 23million blacks on a scale that was the envy of the capitalist world.

De Klerk’s forefathers – the architects of Apartheid – created conditions in which a carefully controlled labour force could produce wealth on the scale needed by South African capitalists if they were to compete in the international market. They took advantage of a host of racist institutions inherited from the British administration of South Africa to realise their capitalist ambitions and simultaneously attract much-needed foreign investment. The steady supply of cheap black labour guaranteed by the Apartheid state, together with massive subsidies and import restrictions, led South Africa’s real gross domestic product to grow by 67 per cent in the decade up to 1960. South Africa’s annual growth rates were second only to Japan’s in the Fifties and Sixties. Apartheid was no obstacle to these developments. On the contrary, it was the mechanism upon which South African capitalism relied.

Because Apartheid relied upon racial oppression, the colour of one’s skin determined one’s existence. Legally enshrined ‘separate development’ reduced the lives of blacks to a totalitarian nightmare. The ruthless imposition of the pass laws created a permanent state of terror, dictating where blacks could move and work in the white-owned economy. And while black life was strictly controlled and policed, concessions to white workers helped to integrate these workers into the racist system of domination. ‘Petty Apartheid’ – the system of whites-only restaurants, beaches, hotels, public transport and the ban on racial intermarriage – cemented an alliance which gave working-class whites an interest in cooperating with white employers to maintain racial discrimination.

The consequences for the tiny black middle class that began to emerge properly after the Second World War were equally harsh. Racial oppression ensured that allblacks faced the same discrimination and exclusion from the spoils of capitalism. There was no chance of accommodating the emerging black middle classes’ moderate, pro-market demands for equal participation in South African society.

What is infrequently acknowledged is that the ANC’s nationalist politics, and its leaders like Nelson Mandela, were initially rabidly pro-market. Theirs was a narrow and conservative nationalism, which in many ways aped postwar Afrikaner nationalism. The unfortunate historic accident of South Africa is that the success of Afrikaner nationalism meant African nationalism could not be accommodated into the system and instead was ruthlessly repressed.

The real problem facing the emerging African nationalists was that on their own, they stood little chance of generating any significant political pressure to affect change. In short, they needed the black majority on their side to press for political change. But to do this they could not use their own narrow political and pro-market aspirations, which would have flatly failed to enthuse or mobilise a movement overwhelmingly made up of urbanised wage labourers. And this is where the South African Communist Party came in: it furnished the ANC with the radical credentials it needed to mobilise the black masses.

The ANC developed a long and close relationship with the Communist Party, which the moderate ANC leadership used to consolidate its relationship with the militant black masses. The ANC’s Communist Party-inspired ‘Freedom Charter’, which embraced state control of the economy and made promises to ‘return the wealth of the people to the people as a whole’, gave it the language and tools to legitimise its campaign in the eyes of working blacks.

Yet, caught between its own insignificance as a social force and the uncompromising Apartheid regime, the ANC’s pragmatic embrace of Stalinism led the ANC to become unacceptable to South African capitalism. Conflict and struggle were the order of the day. It would take the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the discrediting of ‘African socialism’ to alter the South African political climate sufficiently to allow the Apartheid regime to contemplate bringing the ANC into government, where its pro-market roots could be teased away from its state-socialist rhetoric.

The two-stage theory of revolution

It is impossible to understand how the national-liberation struggle evolved and culminated in the negotiated compromise of 1994 without understanding the politics of the ANC-led alliance against Apartheid. The role of the SACP cannot be overstated. Its theoretical and programmatic influence shaped the strategy and tactics of the liberation struggle with disastrous consequences. Remember, this is the Communist Party that was famed for its slogan in the 1920s which called upon the workers of the world ‘to unite to keep South Africa white’ – an expression of support for a colour bar prohibiting black workers from skilled jobs. The party’s justification for this at the time was that the white workers were the ‘vanguard’ of the struggle. This was just the start of the grisly twists and turns that characterised the development of South African Stalinism.

Central to the SACP’s theory, which was later codified by its leading Marxist activist and academic Harold Wolpe, was that the central contradiction in South Africa was not the wage-labour/capital relationship but, in its own obscurantist language, the ‘articulation between two modes of production’. This suggested that South Africa was a pre-capitalist social formation that needed a national democratic revolution, which would, in turn, allow the full development of capitalist social relations. Only then could the classic class struggle – between labour and capital – be undertaken and society transformed into a socialist state. This was the foundation of the ‘two-stage theory of revolution’, where the first stage was the democratic struggle to be followed by the second, the socialist transformation of society.

But Apartheid wasn’t a pre-capitalist phenomenon. It was the form that capitalism took in South Africa for historic and political reasons. By confusing the form of South African capitalism with its essence (the wage labour/capital relationship), the SACP provided the theoretical justification for the separation of the struggle for democratic rights from the anti-capitalist struggle. This introduced a tension between short and long-term goals in the ANC programme. In the past, the struggle against Apartheid for black-majority rule was the ‘immediate goal’, while the socialist transformation of South African society was the ‘long-term’ one. The separation of these stages in theory, when it was impossible to separate them in reality, meant that the ‘long-term’ goal of socialism was always put off indefinitely. This separation, which reflected the separate class interests of the social forces making up the national-liberation movement, contained the seeds of all the compromises and betrayals that followed in 1994.

The critical role of the two-stage theory of revolution was that it gave the ANC the radical credentials to appeal to the black masses. It also, incidentally, enabled the ANC to use recondite Stalinist jargon about objective reality and the mysterious ‘balance of forces’, to ‘educate’ the masses as to why the political goal of a limited democratic transition was necessary.

The compromise that the ANC negotiated in the early 1990s revealed what the two-stage theory of revolution meant in practice: a compromise that would not even realise the first stage of the two-stage revolution, the development of democracy. The constitution agreed upon by the National Party and the ANC ensured that the outcome of the first democratic election would not result in black-majority rule. Instead, it guaranteed a coalition government with De Klerk as vice-president and other ex-Apartheid leaders in top cabinet jobs. Similarly undemocratic arrangements were built into the new South Africa at every level of government. The overall effect was to defraud the masses of their democratic rights, and to shield the old Apartheid state from popular pressure. The two-stage theory of revolution postponed not only the socialist transformation of South Africa, but black-majority rule, too.

Betrayal and ‘Marikanas’ waiting to happen

The compromise of the new constitution was always a possibility in South Africa. The socially insignificant black petit-bourgeois political elite was always predisposed to accepting a compromise as long as it could gain access to political power and the right to participate in the market economy. Prior to De Klerk’s willingness to reform Apartheid, the ANC leaders had little choice but to uphold their Stalinist rhetoric about ‘socialist transformation’ to maintain their appeal to their working-class base. They knew, as did the Apartheid regime itself, that the real power to force change was the black masses.

But the collapse of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of ‘African socialism’ more broadly in the 1980s and 1990s changed all that. Around the world, liberation movements were put on the defensive. The ANC soon toned down its programme, accepting the market economy and dumping the armed struggle. The changed political context persuaded South African capitalists that they could do business with Mandela without putting their wealth and social power at risk. As a consequence, the National Party conceded reforms.

Indeed, the remarkable thing about the lead-up to the first post-Apartheid elections in 1994 was how the ANC under Nelson Mandela increasingly demonstrated to the old rulers of Apartheid that they had little to fear from an ANC-led government. The ANC unilaterally gave up its armed struggle, renounced its state-socialist policies and embraced the market economy. It also pledged not to interfere with the repressive machinery of the Apartheid state, a fact that has become all too apparent in recent weeks. Most importantly, it accepted a constitutional arrangement that institutionalised power-sharing and minority rights at every level of government, effectively abandoning its commitment to real black-majority rule. Post-Apartheid South Africa gained a black government, but the white-minority capitalist class, and its international backers, continued to exercise social power. The ANC effectively abandoned its base to get a piece of the action.

President De Klerk’s entire strategy of negotiation was geared towards moderating the ANC, separating it from its mass base while protecting the white privileged minority. His National Party was reconciled to seeing black faces in government. De Klerk’s strategy was always about drawing the liberation movement – or at least sections of the ANC leadership – into a relationship with the state. It followed the classic decolonisation strategy perfected by British imperialism, first in Ireland and then used to great effect in Africa and Asia. By rewarding moderation while brutally cracking down on those unwilling to compromise, De Klerk succeeded in moderating the ANC to the point where it dropped all talk of fundamental economic and social change, and even abandoned black-majority rule, the democratic principle at the heart of the liberation struggle.

The retreat of the ANC was perhaps the greatest in the history of national-liberation movements. In 1969, the ANC conference in exile at Morogoro, Tanzania, adopted the document ‘Forward to freedom: strategy and tactics of the African National Congress’. The ‘Morogoro Declaration’ signalled the ANC’s intention to be a liberation movement committed to mobilising the black masses and overthrowing the Apartheid regime. In appealing to the black working class, the document spelled out that liberation meant more than electing a black government: ‘[T]o allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not even represent the shadow of liberation.’ It was a measure of De Klerk’s success and the ANC’s complicity that even such a ‘shadow’ as power-sharing and the institutionalisation of minority rights could be celebrated as a victory and the achievement of black liberation.

Compromise is always a reality in political struggles. But the ANC presented its betrayal of the black masses as a victory. All the sacrifices the black masses made over the years – sacrifices that allowed the ANC leaders to get where they are today – were effectively signed away in the post-Apartheid constitution. Yes, blacks got the vote, but these were now votes for a system which continued to keep them at the bottom of the pile in the factories, mines, farms and townships of Apartheid capitalism. It has taken 18 years for that reality to be murderously demonstrated at Marikana. Not only has the ANC government invoked the use of Apartheid laws, and labelled those fighting for trade-union rights and a living wage as ‘agitators’ (much as the Apartheid regime used to), but it has also deployed and used the armed power of the state to gun down striking workers in a way that Apartheid-era leaders would have applauded to the rooftops.

Marikana has demonstrated just how hostile the ANC government is towards its own working class. It clearly illustrates that the problem in South Africa was never simply the denial of democratic rights, but the capitalist system itself. Apartheid is dead, but the economic system which it nurtured remains in place. It is not Apartheid laws that keep black South Africans in their place, but economic realities. Having the vote has not allowed millions of impoverished blacks to escape from the grim townships and move into the leafy white suburbs. Having the vote has not diminished the power of the state that is prepared to gun down its own citizens in order to protect the rights of the minority capitalist class, which now contains some black faces.

Post-Apartheid South Africa has begun to destroy many myths. What has come as a shock to many, however, is just how closely the new African elite share the hostility of the old regime towards those who made change possible in the first place – the black working class. But despite the fact that the ANC effectively marginalised its mass base and deconstituted them politically, Marikana has also demonstrated that South Africa’s black working class has begun to make its presence felt in the new South Africa.

Charles Longford is a London-based writer on South African current affairs. He is the author of South Africa: Black Blood on British Hands.

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By Ernesto Aquilar

Television reports and pundits this fall raised the specter of the so-called knockout game—one in which youths, implicitly or explicitly Black, were claimed to be attacking strangers with the goal of knocking them unconscious with a single punch. However, a Houston-area hate crime and other alleged knockout game incidents which have been proven false have now put a spotlight on the demonization of youth of color by the capitalist media.

Even as police told the New York Times that the knockout game may be little more than an urban myth or, at worst, random acts of violence that have long been a part of city life, exaggerated coverage has ruled the news cycle. Viciously racist media stories, in which African-Americans are portrayed as aggressors against whites, can’t hide that Black people are being victimized under the knockout game rubric.

A judge denied bail Dec. 27 to Conrad Barrett, of the Houston suburb of Katy. Charged with a hate crime, Barrett is alleged to have sought out African-Americans for assault. He was arrested after bragging to strangers and showing off cell phone video of himself attacking an elderly Black man.

On Dec. 6, a St. Louis couple, Ashley DePew and Justin Simms, were charged with falsifying a police report for claiming DePew had been a knockout game victim. Simms, they later admitted to investigators, was the one who had actually assaulted DePew.

These incidents are, on their own, troubling. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics released Nov. 28 note nearly 6,000 hate crimes were reported, with fully 77 percent of those crimes being assaults or acts of intimidation. In particular, violence against women is at epidemic levels, and many perpetrators avoid jail by emotionally manipulating survivors into lying to protect them. Yet it is the use of the media’s knockout game hysteria to obscure the criminal system that prompts further inspection.

Capitalism’s fear of Black youth, historically disenfranchised by generations of racism, is no secret. Racial segregation is increasing, studies indicate. Stop-and-frisk police policies; racial disparities in education, healthcare and employment; and politicians’ singling out youth of color for criticism and punishment are enduring symptoms of a corrupt system built on white supremacy. From the “superpredator” media labeling of a generation ago—when locking up Black youth was justified as a means of dealing with their alleged predisposition to violence—to “quality-of-life” law enforcement aimed at gentrifying communities and marginalizing Black people in cities, African-Americans are continually treated with suspicion.

Moreover, white privilege has effectively derailed any discussion of “white crime” from the larger public debate. In the wake of the George Zimmerman acquittal, a case that hinged on insinuations that Trayvon Martin was a thug who deserved to die, racists have again shifted the cultural discourse to one where people of color are to be feared.

Press reports have taken many extremes, from the arch-conservative WorldNetDaily promoting self-published “Black mob violence” writer and white supremacist underground darling Colin Flaherty to mainstream conservatives trotting out claims of “race war” against whites and racial double standards premised around the idea that African-Americans assault whites while the “liberal media” covers it up. Such ideas regularly seep into news reports. In August, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel claimed “dozens to hundreds of black youths attacked white people.”

The implications against African-Americans are more than rhetoric, but have created a climate that permits politicians to railroad to prison, kill and shut out Black people from political life. When society is taught by the ruling class that African-American youth are intent on unprovoked attacks, the outcomes are sure to be disastrous for Black communities around the United States.

It is unclear at this writing what justice Barrett, DePew and Simms, all facing prosecution, will see for assaulting or scapegoating African-Americans. However, one thing is clear: the racist capitalist system and its political operatives are undoubtedly guilty of criminalizing Black youth in the knockout game hysteria.

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Hassan Mutabazi was one of the many Genocide victims that gathered in a small house in the village of Kabuga last week.

The Best Hope Rwanda charity was holding a meeting to collect the names of mothers whose children were born of rape during the time of the Genocide against the Tutsi.

Mutabazi’s father was killed in the Genocide while the mother died in 1998 of HIV/Aids. He is here to support his younger brother whose birth is linked to Mutabazi’s reason for surviving the Genocide against the Tutsi.

“My mother was very beautiful and the militia repeatedly raped her in front of us. That is why they spared us,” Mutabazi recounts.

Mutabazi’s youngest brother was born as a result of the rape, and for the past 15 years, Mutabazi has been acting as his parent.

How it all began

Best Hope Rwanda aims at easing the resentment the mothers and children feel for one another as a result of the past. The organisation assists with healthcare, counselling and education for both the women and the children.

Best Hope Rwanda is assisting 80 women and 110 children. The founder of the organisation, Dieudonne Gahizi Ganza, decided to start Best Hope Rwanda after shooting a documentary on the suffering the families were subjected to for the past 19 years.

“Some women were still suffering physically and emotionally from rape during the Genocide. Many of them were still bleeding because they had not received proper medical care,” Ganza says.

Ganza also lost many relatives during the Genocide, and at the age of 26, he decided he could not walk away from these women.

“Before, these children were called “little killers” and “children of bad memories” but this is now changing,” he says.

Bringing people together

The names of the growing number of beneficiaries were taken down. Canadian journalist Sue Montgomery had come along to connect with the women and children through cooking.

“Rwanda has the most incredible vegetables and I wanted to show the women how to make the most of this,” Montgomery says.

The chopping of carrots, tomatoes, celery and green peppers began, with intermittent laughter, food fights and the exchange of cooking techniques dominated the afternoon.

“Cooking is a way of bringing people together. Everyone loves eating,” Montgomery says.

At the end of the meeting and cooking, Montgomery thanked everyone for their involvement and emphasised the importance of a media presence at such events.

“Media will help inform the world about the plight of these women and children because one cannot imagine how difficult it is to be a rape survivor,” Montgomery adds.

The blurred lines for victims

For someone like Mutabazi, the lines guiding post-Genocide support are slightly more blurred. He has no mother to attend the Best Hope meetings, nor was he born out of rape.

After school, he trained as an electrician but he is yet to find a job. Both him and his brother are HIV-positive.

“Ganza helps my brother with schooling and medicine,” Mutabazi says. But the question remains, who will help Mutabazi?

The role of FARG

Ezra Mutwara is the Director of Finance and Administration for the Fund for support of Genocide survivors (FARG).

Beginning in January, FARG has earmarked Rwf60 million to help women victims of the Genocide.

According to public policy, the children born out of rape after 1994 are not considered Genocide victims.

However, Mutwara believes the children are indirectly affected by the funding and support FARG provides to the mothers.

“Although we cannot fund an organisation that is not working within the FARG framework, if a charity like Best Hope was to work closely with local administration, we could help with phase-by-phase funding to make sure the charity is working within the standards of FARG,” Mutwara says.

Mutabazi’s dilemma

Mutabazi’s story is relayed to both Ganza and Mutwara.

“The question surrounding Mutabazi is a valid one. We hope to help all victims of the Genocide in the future. For now, we are working on getting funding, both from FARG and private donors,” Ganza says.

Mutwara says Mutabazi is clearly a victim of the Genocide and, therefore, qualifies to be a FARG beneficiary.

“He should approach FARG for further training. Our aim is to assist victims in all possible ways,” Mutwara says.

Future collaboration

With the growing number of Genocide victims reaching out for help, the value of both public and private assistance is of equal urgency.

“We applaud organisations like Best Hope,” Mutwara said.

He realised that there is only so much that each organisation can achieve. Fully aware of this limitation, Ganza was one of the speakers at the National Dialogue earlier this month. His message was pressing.

“The counselling of women and children is something that has been overlooked. If this is not dealt with now, the impact of this trauma on the children will become a bigger problem in the future,” Ganza said.

Mutabazi’s story is a lesson for organisations and Genocide victims alike. With the SURF Survivors Fund estimating 300,000 to 400,000 survivors of the Genocide, the collaboration of a variety of organisations is vital for Rwanda’s continued journey of reconciliation and healing.

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My recent article on conducting field research in Rwanda (“The price of admission”, 28 November) generated two critical responses in these pages – an article by Erin Jessee (“Subtle as foxes for prey”, Opinion, 19/26 December 2013) and a letter signed by 10 academics and a journalist (“Truly hostile environment”, Letters, 19/26 December).

On Twitter on 28 November, one of the authors of the letter, Boston University scholar Timothy Longman, described my article as “thoughtful” and defended it against the sort of denigration that is now reflected in the missive he co-authored.

According to the letter, I argued that all “researchers who have fallen out with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the country’s ruling party, have exaggerated the intimidation and interference that they have experienced” and set out “a false dichotomy between those who can no longer conduct research in Rwanda and those who can”.

Both claims misrepresent my argument. Acknowledging the “inevitable tensions, divisions and trauma” associated with researching in the country, I argued that some foreign academics exaggerate the difficulties they face in the field (some do so to protect their own patch). Most importantly, a large number of critical commentators on Rwanda (including some well known to the letter’s authors) continue to research there, adopting a wide range of creative, time-honed techniques. It is a pity that the letter writers chose to respond in such a defensive and barbed manner rather than engaging with the issues raised in “The price of admission”.

Jessee’s article is a more thoughtful contribution, highlighting the Rwandan government’s use of bureaucratic measures (particularly the Rwanda National Ethics Committee) to hamstring research. However, her own account of dealing with this system – which is common in many East African countries, including Uganda, where the red tape is much more extensive (and expensive) – highlights that, despite the challenges at hand, it is possible to research in Rwanda.

Depressingly, Jessee also defends those senior scholars who try to dissuade their students from conducting research in Rwanda. Since the publication of my article, I have received numerous emails from postgraduates lamenting this tendency among their elders. The more productive approach is to counsel students about the challenges involved while emboldening them to find ways around or through them – as Jessee and countless others have done.

Phil Clark
SOAS, University of London

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By: Tom Ndahiro*

Why do they eat my people as they eat bread? (Psalm 14) 

All over Rwandan hills, valleys and mountains, thousands of crosses mark mass graves of genocide victims of 1994. During the genocide, many Tutsis were massacred in or around places of worship, including Catholic churches – paradoxically, in a country which was the most Christianised in Africa, with Christians representing more than 80% of the population. Catholic bishops in Rwanda have sometimes claimed that all Rwandans believe in God.[1] There are hundreds of churches and chapels everywhere and almost every day followers repeatedly recite the prayer, “Our Father who art in heaven”, pleading with the Father to deliver them from evil (Matthew 6:13). From where, then, did the malevolence at the root of the genocide come? How and by whom could it have been overcome? Part of the answer to these questions is the Church and its members.

According to the scripture, “To reject evil and do what is good” (Isaiah 7:15) is the authentic deliverance. It is an unfortunate fact that most of those involved in organising the whole process leading to the genocide were people who were baptised Christians. Many were in the church hierarchy, especially in the Roman Catholic Church, which is the focus of this paper.

By omission and or commission, the Church leadership was, involved in the genocide against Tutsis. Considering what genocide is – by definition or as a crime – the involvement of an institution like the Church demands painstaking analysis.

The role of the Church in the creation of exterminationist ideology

According to Jean-Pierre Karegeye, a Jesuit priest, genocide is morally hideous, an evil expressed in forgetting God, and hence a new form of atheism. Karegeye asks several pertinent questions which merit consideration: “Christians killing other Christians? How could Rwandan Christians who manifested commitment to their faith have acted with such intense cruelty? How did ordinary people come to commit extraordinary evil…? Does the sin of genocide disturb the relationship between God and the perpetrators in official Catholic Church discourse? How can we explain the strange situation of priests involved in the crimes of genocide who are still running parishes in Western countries? Why are they protected by the Vatican against any legal proceedings?” He concludes: “The Church’s attitude towards genocide seems to suggest that the hierarchy of religious values is not usually in proportion to the hierarchy of moral standards.” On the issue of priests who are accused of genocide, and currently living in Europe and may be other parts of the ‘developed world’ see Le Dossiers de Golias- Rwanda: L’honneur perdu de l’Église (Édition Golias-France April 1999)

Generally, in Rwanda, the leadership of the Christian Churches, especially that of the Catholic Church, played a central role in the creation and furtherance of racist ideology. They fostered a system which they introduced.  The building blocks of this ideology were numerous, but one can mention a few – first, the racist vision of Rwandan society that the missionaries and colonialists imposed by developing the thesis about which groups came first and last to populate the country (the Hamitic and Bantu myths); second, by rigidly controlling historical and anthropological research; third, by reconfiguring Rwandan society through the manipulation of ethnic identities (from their vague socio-political nature in the pre-colonial period, these identities gradually became racial). From the late 1950s, some concepts became distorted: thus democracy became numerical democracy or demographic.

The philosophy of ‘rubanda nyamwinshi’ a kinyarwanda expression which politically came to mean ‘the Hutu majority’ prevailed after the so-called social revolution of 1959, ignored the basic tenets of democracy. In my view, recurrent genocides in Rwanda since 1959 were meant to maintain the ‘Hutu majority’ in power, by killing the Tutsi. Distributive justice became equivalent to regional and ethnic quotas; and revolution came to mean legitimised genocide of the Tutsis.

Church authorities contributed to the spread of racist theories mainly through the schools and seminaries over which they exercised control. The elite who ruled the country after independence trained in these schools. According to Church historian Paul Rutayisire, Church authorities maintained a tight network of communication with many ramifications. Church teachings culminated in massive conversions (irivuze umwami) and in the establishment of Catholicism as a state religion, especially from 1947 with King Mutara III Rudahigwa’s consecration of Rwanda to Christ the King.[2]

King Rudahigwa, a replacement for his exiled father, was baptised in 1943, and a wave of conversions (including those of chiefs) followed his baptism. But these conversions were not the result of profound faith; the missionaries were only interested in baptising as many people as possible.[3] As a result, there was an increase in the number of geographical centres to disseminate Christianity, as well as an increase in Church personnel. In these circumstances, the evangelisation could not reach the hearts of the people; it was superficial. This quantitative rather than qualitative growth became another source of future disaster.[4]

It is unfortunate, says Rutayisire, that these bearers of good news promoted and legitimized political regimes which supported the racist ideology: first, the colonial regime, based on racial discrimination between the coloniser and colonised, and on the division of Rwandans into “races” or “castes”; then the First and Second Republics which prided themselves on being “Hutu” regimes.[5]

In colonial times (1930s) missionaries used their influence and power to help secure the banishment of the King of Rwanda, Yuhi Musinga, for the simple reason that he refused to be converted to Christianity. The colonisers following the advice of Bishop Leon Classe, advisor of the colonial administration, exiled the King.[6] The King later died in Belgian Congo, thousands of kilometres from his country of birth.

Triumph of evil

The stereotypes that were used to dehumanise Tutsis, were the brainchild of some influential clergymen, bishops and priests, before and after the genocide. The Catholic Church and colonial powers worked together in organizing racist political groups like the Party for the Emancipation of the Hutu (Parmehutu)[7]. When the first acts of genocide were carried out in Rwanda, at the beginning of 1959 and the early 60s, there were brave voices against them, notably that of Bishop Aloys Bigirumwami who wrote several Pastoral Letters condemning the ‘devil’s projects’.

In his Pastoral Letter of 15 November 1959, Bishop Bigirumwami expressed his exasperation at those who were to blame for the atrocities in the country. He also warned about the dangers of racism. “The greatest culprits are those (my emphasis) who advised others to kill, to burn houses; those who allowed themselves to be tempted to take part in violence, massacres and arson are the greatest accomplices, they are the enemies of Rwanda, they have sinned against God and against their neighbour… Those who put the country to fire and blood, may be they will not face any consequence here on earth, but they will not commend themselves to God’s mercy and even man’s mercy; they will not get off lightly on the day of judgment of the truth… Reasonable people, especially Christians, should not hold it against others for their birth and origin; …”[8]

Again on 25 January 1960, the same bishop wrote another letter, which this time, referred to the guilt of Christians and tackled the issue of racist-related crimes and attitudes.

“…Christians, know well that it is not the tragedy that has befallen Rwanda that is the worst of disasters.  What is the worst disaster is rather to persevere in the evil and to brag about it wickedly.  The worst disaster for Rwanda was that the proponents of the acts of stupidity, were not pagans, nor notorious apostates who have abandoned Christianity, but rather Christians who were illustrious, as good elements among others.  These Christians who incite others to evil, who preach hatred in Rwanda, they never miss mass on Sunday, and worse still, they do not fear to receive communion often.  This is the worst disaster in our country and in our church. These Christians discredit us in front of pagans and members of other religions.”[9]

The Bishops’s appeal at the time also went beyond Pastoral Letters.  In his Memorandum of 15March 1960 to the United Nations Mission to Rwanda, he said that Rwanda was under the “road roller”.  Yet again, racism and hate propaganda was the crux of the matter.  “…One thinks that internal violence and subversive propaganda are all out to spark off hatred, divisions between Hutu, Tutsi and Twa – real racism, whatever one may say – and yet these three social groups have always lived together in symbiosis and should continue doing so in a better manner.”[10]

As things turned from bad to worse, and the involvement of priests and nuns in the cataclysm became more discernible, the Bishop wrote another letter on June 10, 1960, this time more focused on the religious: “Fellow Rwandans, priests and the religious… and you the missionaries…” He pleaded with those who gave in during the “recent events” to examine their consciences, to open their eyes and ears, free themselves from temptations, renounce the temptation to sow discord in families by claiming that this was the best way to save Rwanda and its inhabitants.  In strong terms, he demanded:

“Let us fight wickedness and hatred because they will sink Rwanda and weaken the Church.  Evil and hatred continue to increase; it is said that a Muhutu cannot live with a Mututsi, that he must no longer be the teacher of his child at school, that they can no longer meet, share, trade, buy from each other, be in solidarity.  This disaster that has befallen us, ward it off through the God of Rwanda, conquer it through the Gospel of love, truth and justice… Let us stop being divided into parties, which disseminate the Hutu–Tutsi ethnicity because this would mean us sinking in the worst filth.  Things have gone wrong and we keep quiet, we remain bystanders, we laugh it off, how will this end?  People are tracked in every corner, refugees of all sorts flock in such numbers that there is nowhere to put them and we tell them to move on while they do not know where to go.  How is this going to end?  This happened first in Rwanda and now it is happening in Congo.  Rwanda has known no peace since November.  What are the consequences of these elections?  If we have praised Rwandans who chased other Rwandans, are we going to frown on those who will chase non-Rwandans?  With what is happening in Rwanda, and if this continues, do you think that people are going to live together?  Let us start by saving what is lost; let us stand up and look for friendliness of Rwandans among themselves; let us look forward, the sky is getting dark, the storm is brewing, let us put under shelter what is not covered… Let us strengthen the links of unity… if we do not succeed at home, we will have nothing else to do except to sink into the sea with a stone hanging around our necks…”[11]

The Bishop wrote this letter at the time when the referendum to bring the monarchy to an end was drawing close.  Many Rwandans (including myself) were either already refugees or would soon be.  Bishop Bigirumwami’s supplications vanished into the wilderness.  Why?  His colleague, Bishop André Perraudin[12], had a more “audible” voice and was the mentor of Parmehutu, formed on 16November 1959.[13]

It is significant that Bishop Perraudin’s language echoes that of the sponsors and perpetrators of genocide.  Talking about genocide in his book Mgr. André Perraudin – Un Evêque au Rwanda[14], and referring to the attack by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in October 1990, Perraudin states: “Tutsi leaders have never abandoned the idea of returning to power as manifested by the attack on 1October 1990 from Uganda… This unshakable will of returning to power, is the cause of all the events that plunged Rwanda in a blood-bath, including the genocide of Tutsi which was sparked off by the killing of Habyarimana on the evening of 6 April 1994… The argument often put forward that they (RPF) attacked to protect the Tutsi inside Rwanda is only a pretext; the true motive was to retake power.  It cannot be overemphasised enough, yet this is the explanation of everything that happened.  Without any doubt, it must be stated that the first and main cause of the genocide of Tutsi in April 1994 was the attack by the Tutsi themselves.  Without it and the killing of president Habyarimana, the genocide of Tutsi would not have happened…” It is disquieting to note that a church leader of that calibre, instead of conveying a message of consolation to the victims of the 1994 genocide, implies that the Tutsi were the cause of their own extermination.

Archbishop Perraudin remained influential in all regimes. On June 20,1976 he was replaced in the archdiocese of Kigali, by Archbishop Vincent Nsengiyumva,[15] a staunch member of the ruling MRND’s Central Committee in General Habyarimana’s regime. Bishop Perraudin, retired in 1989, and was replaced in his diocese of Kabgayi by Bishop Thaddée Nsengiyumva on October 7, 1989.   MRND was the party which in the mid-1970s had introduced and institutionalised policies of racial discrimination which they termed “équilibre éthnique et régional” (ethnic and regional equilibrium, a quota system).  It was a system advocated by Catholic priests in April 1972 including by André Havugimana, the current vicar-general of the Kigali Archdiocese. [16]

The letter read in part: “After the defeat of the counter-revolutionaries, the ‘Inyenzi’, one would have thought that reasonable people, consecrated to God’s service, would bow down before the irreversible reality of the victory of the people. Far from it, because they are still nurturing bitter regrets or still hoping for revenge… The Hutu seems to have fallen asleep on the laurels of victory while the Tutsi is working very hard in order to again become master of events. How long can we allow our dear [Tutsi] brothers to make fools of us and to ignore us and the people from whom we are descended?”

In the same letter they advised their bishops not to maintain vocation as an important element in recruiting and maintaining their seminarians. Asked by a journalist, Chris McGreal, on what he thought about the 1972 letter, Monsignor Havugimana replied it without any sense of contrition that it “was written in the context of what existed then …since it had relevance at the time…” He remained unremorseful.

The Church fully supported the quota system, as expressed in the Bishops’ letter of 28 February 1990: “…One hears, at times, people complain that due to their ethnic origin, employment or admission to school has been refused them.  They are either deprived of an advantage, or justice has not been impartial in its treatment towards them…You do not ignore the fact that the law of ethnic balance in employment and schools is aiming to correct this inequality that favoured one, to the detriment of the other.  It is evident that such policy cannot please everybody, and is unable to produce all the results they were hoping to gain.”[17]

On 30April 1990, five Catholic priests from Nyundo diocese broke the silence.  In a letter to the Church’s bishops in Rwanda, they called the quota system ‘racist’ and urged that it was high time “the Church of Jesus Christ established in Rwanda proclaimed aloud and tirelessly” to denounce it, since it constituted “an aberration” within their Church.  They maintained that the only sure justice in schools and employment was the one, which only took account of individual capacities, regardless of people’s origins, and that it was on this condition that the country could have citizens capable of leading it with competence and equity.

In conclusion, they said: “The Church should not be the vassal of the secular powers, but it should be free to speak with sincerity and courage when it proves necessary.”[18] The authors of this letter were Fr. Augustin Ntagara, Fr. Callixte Kalisa, Fr. Aloys Nzaramba, Fr. Jean Baptiste Hategeka, and Fr. Fabien Rwakareke.  All but the last two were killed during the genocide.

Within the Catholic Church, this discriminatory policy had long been introduced in the seminaries.  According to Fr. Jean Ndolimana, the enrolment of Tutsis in the Nyundo diocese was limited to 4%.  On the school card, every seminarian had to indicate his father’s ethnic group.[19]

Racial discrimination is something that has to condemned because, as it has been stressed: “…any doctrine of superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust, and dangerous and there is no justification, in theory or in practice, anywhere… [it] is an obstacle to friendly and peaceful relations among nations and is capable of disturbing peace and security among peoples and the harmony of persons living side by side, even within one and the same state. Its existence is repugnant to the ideals of any human society …”[20]

The Church should have been aware of this, instead of condemning those who were against the racist system.  Instead, they played an important role in institutionalising injustice by convincing their congregants to accept a morally condemnable policy.  The Church regrettably took the side of the political regimes, and thereby could not exercise its prophetic role.  It did not denounce political and social injustices, nor did it condemn the first mass killings, nor those, which followed.

After 1 October 1990, the Government’s ideologues launched a hate campaign intended to polarize Rwandan society as preparation of the genocide was underway.  The trigger was the publication of the so-called “Hutu Ten Commandments” in the magazine Kangura, [21] whose chief Editor, Hassan Ngeze, was a Moslem.

The last three ‘Commandments’ are significant.  The eighth Commandment said that the “Bahutu should stop having mercy on the Batutsi,” while the ninth read: “The Bahutu, wherever they are, must have unity, solidarity and be preoccupied by the fate of their Hutu brothers; the Bahutu, both inside and outside Rwanda, must constantly look for friends and allies for the Hutu cause, starting with our Bantu brothers; they must constantly counteract the Tutsi propaganda.  The Bahutu must be firm and vigilant against their common enemy who are the Batutsi.”

The tenth Commandment went back to the roots. “The 1959 social revolution, the 1961 referendum and the hutu ideology must be taught to every muhutu and at all levels.  Every muhutu must spread widely this ideology.  We shall consider a traitor any muhutu who will persecute his muhutu brother for having read, spread and taught this ideology.”

President Habyarimana’s speech to the MRND Congress of 28 April 1991 alluded to Hutu unity, saying: “It is imperative that the majority forge unity, so that they are able to ward off any attempt to return them into slavery.”[22] Again in September 1991; the President conveyed the same idea – that the opposition parties should form a coalition against the RPF. For Habyarimana and others who believed the same ideology, the “RPF” meant Tutsis.  When launching the Hutu extremist party, the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR), its President, Martin Bucyana, said he was convinced that “the unity of the bahutu will stop violence and will bring the excess ambitions of the minority Tutsi to their acceptable level”.[23]

The issue of Hutu Unity was the key.  The front cover of Kangura of May 1991 (Issue No. 16) read, “Hutus’ Unity is their only hope.” (Ubumwe bw’abahutu niyo mizero yabo.)  Referring to the party line that the Tutsis premeditated the extermination of the Hutus, the front cover of Kangura (Issue No. 17) bore the message “If it was not for the God of Rwanda who is always on the alert, the Hutu would be in great danger.”  Again, on the front cover of Kangura Issue No. 25, there was a portrait of President Habyarimana wearing a Bishop’s chasuble and mitre with the word “Ubumwe” (Unity).[24]  He said that his “Christian faith” had made many Rwandans consider him a “Catholic priest” and added, “The ungrateful should know that the Hutus would take action if he (President Habyarimana) removed his priestly clothes.”

Hutu extremists who, may be, wanted the extermination of the Tutsis earlier than April 1994, portrayed president Habyarimana as soft, with sympathy to Tutsis although he was not.  During the peak of genocide, in a long exhortation, the RTLM announcer Valerie Bemeriki said that what was going on was holy: She claimed that before the beginning of the war many Hutus believed that Tutsi were ‘disturbing’ them because of the support they had from President Habyarimana. And adds: “ And yet they killed the father for no good reason, for the Blessed Virgin Mary said recently that he was in fact a father, that he was our father, that she had received him… I will repeat the words of the Holy Mother; such as she said…”[25]

In January 1992, Kangura’s front cover featured a conversation between Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and her husband St. Joseph about how Hutu unity could be achieved.[26]  Not a single protest came from either the Catholic or Protestant Churches.  In 1991, priests from the diocese of Kabgayi had initiated a Pastoral Letter, which audaciously condemned the evil practices in the country, but they did not get sufficient support from their superiors.[27]

In the same year, a Catholic journal, Kinyamateka, published an article that challenged the Church to act or be declared “asleep” or “dead beat”.[28]  The Church remained silent.  By then, genocidal killings in Bugesera, Kibuye and Gisenyi were occurring with impunity.  In the same month, November 22, 1992, Dr. Leon Mugesera, the vice-president of the ruling party MRND in Gisenyi prefecture, overtly called for the extermination of Tutsi, for them to be sent to Ethiopia (their alleged country of origin) via the Nyabarongo River.[29]

It is difficult to describe the position taken by the Church just before and during the genocide. It is appropriate to take note of a declaration made by some “Christians” who met in London in 1996: “The church is sick.  The historical roots of this sickness lie in part with the “mother churches”.  She is facing the most serious crisis in her history.  The church has failed in her mission, and lost her credibility, particularly since the genocide.  She needs to repent before God and Rwandan society, and seek healing from God.”[30]

This diagnosis offers a good summary of the situation.  The Church lacks a sense of remorse and therefore cannot repent; hence its active involvement in the last stage of genocide – denial. At the time when the Church’s voice was needed most, its authorities abided by the Commandment to maintain Hutu “unity” in order to fight the common “enemy”.  Since October 1990, the church had employed the official language of hate propagated by the government.  The minor difference was in the medium of communication.  While the government used national radio and other print media, the Catholic Church made use of Pastoral Letters.

The writings of the Catholic bishops just after 1 October 1990 read like an official text from the state house publishing house.  After the attack by the RPF, President Habyarimana continually referred to them as “aggressors” or “assailants”. The official media followed suit.  The French fortnightly, La Relève, commented: “…During the morning of October 1st, 1990, Rwanda was attacked by assailants including Rwandan refugees, members of the Ugandan army who rallied with Ugandan elements, members of this army.” [31]

In the Catholic bishops’ letter of 7 November 1990 entitled “Happy are the artisans of peace, for they will be called Sons of God,”[32]. The same words were used, with some emphasis to confirm that the President had spoken nothing but the truth in his speech on 5 October 1990.  But that was not the only similarity.  The President had also said: “Aggression against our country is not only of military nature.  It also rests on international media manipulation and disinformation…we were surprised by the violent manipulations, being prepared, a long time ago, as we know now, by certain media from the West and not of the least minimal.  Our country is still being subjected to attacks and calumnies, to systematic lies, that we can only qualify as diabolic in nature.”[33]   And in their letter, the bishops said: “In these difficult times, it is our duty to remain in solidarity for the defence of the truth.  False information and rumours and libel, and lies, have taken place in Rwanda (…) We strongly deplore disinformation, cleverly and maliciously organized by those who have attacked Rwanda on certain facts, and events, as some of the media have reverberated.”

Remaining in solidarity with the government that planned genocide was not limited to speeches in the name of defending “the truth”.  The “comité de contacts”, bringing Catholics and Protestants together, was created as a messenger of the government.  This ecumenical movement is hailed in several documents as proof that “the church did something” during the genocide.  Fr. Ngomanzungu recently dedicated almost a whole book to this committee.[34]  His publication exhibits the failures and complicity of an institution he is trying to defend.

On 2March 1993, a delegation of the “Comité de contacts” met the RPF at the Papal envoy’s residence in Bujumbura, Burundi.  The aim was for the representative Church leaders to discuss with the RPF ways and means of bringing the collapsed peace process back on track.  Deliberations centred on the circumstances that had led the RPF to attack the government forces on 8 February that year, and what could be done to reverse the trend.  This twelve-hour meeting followed another that had brought together the RPF and the four opposition parties.  In the latter meeting, it had been agreed that: “Despite the content of the ceasefire accord concluded between the Rwandese Government and RPF on 12July 1992, the blood of innocent persons continues to be shed in all regions of Bugesera, Ruhengeri, Gisenyi and Kibuye.  This organised terrorism, which has totally paralysed the government, has been transformed into a real genocide which has shocked and revolted the universal consciousness and which constitutes a serious violation of the cease-fire accord.”[35]

Despite explanations and requests to the bishops at least to condemn what was happening, there was no positive response.  With the exception of Bishop Alexis Birindabagabo of the Anglican Church, who proposed that there had to be a statement to condemn the killings that were by then common knowledge, others remained indifferent.  It is disquieting to read that in that meeting, Bishop Augustin Misago of the Diocese of Gikongoro said that the death of Tutsis was not enough reason to justify the usurpation of power.[36] Misago’s comments in fact give the impression of a racist without scruple, who attached no value to the life of Tutsis.  He remained committed to the Hutu rather than to God’s commandment. During the genocide, he refused to hide any Tutsi, for “lack of space” in his bishopric.[37]  Except for Bishop Birindabagabo, this “comité de contacts” whose president was Bishop Thaddee Nsengiyumva of Kabgayi, remained loyal to the regime that committed genocide.  Their statements, available today in the publications of Father Joseph Ngomanzungu, are a testament to the team’s sympathy with the perpetrators of genocide – before, during and after the genocide.

Like Archbishop Perraudin, Bishop Focas Nikwigize of Ruhengeri was unequivocal in supporting the ideology of genocide.  While in exile in Goma, Zaire, he told a Belgian newspaper, “The Batutsi would like to restore their power and to reduce the Bahutu to slaves!  Their objective was to take Kigali by force, whatever the cost; not to share power, but to govern.  In order to fulfil this objective they used two sorts of weapons: their guns, which came from Europe, and their women.  They gave their women to Europeans and so remained in a strong alliance with them.  That is how bad they are!  A Muhutu is simple and right but a Mututsi is cunning and hypocritical.  They seem fine, polite and charming, but when the time comes, they force themselves on you.  A Mututsi is deeply bad, not because of her education, but because of her nature.” [38]

The above statement bears witness to the racist views of this priest.  Considering a people as naturally bad is similar to the explanation used by the Nazis to justify the extermination of Jews in order to maintain the purity of the Aryan race.  Bishop Nikwigize continues: “What happened in 1994 was something very human.  When someone attacks you, you have to defend yourself.  In such a situation, you forget that you are a Christian; you are first a human being.” [39]

There has been no condemnation of Bishop Nikwigize’s denial and endorsement of the genocide from the Church hierarchy as a whole, nor has there been admonition from any individual Bishop.  Since ‘silence implies consent’, one might rightly say that the Church leaders who have said nothing have espoused Nikwigize’s ideas.  It was all more disquieting that the justification of the genocide came from a senior Church leader whose influence was great among refugees.

Besides the writings of Fr. Ngomanzungu’s, there is a letter written by an interdenominational group called ‘Representatives of the Church of Christ’ in Katale Camp, in former Zaire.  Written on 10 November 1995, the letter was full of praise of the Church and condemnation of the RPF, which was accused of all the crimes committed in 1994.  The letter says that during the “war” and “tragedy”, the church did not cease to appeal to “the people to live in love, harmony, and mutual respect, despite menaces from the RPF and its supporters who aimed at taking power by force to the point when they started eliminating politicians who did not share their opinion.” The word genocide does not appear in the letter.[40]

The letter’s signatories are Rev. Archdeacon Canon Charles Samson Muzungu and Rev. Archdeacon Alphonse Barasebwa of the Episcopal Church of Rwanda, Father Jean Baptiste Rwamayanja of the Roman Catholic Church, Rev. Paulin Nkezabera and Rev. Simon Pierre Bimenyimana of the Baptist churches association in Rwanda, Pastor Jonas Barame of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, Rev. Innocent Mukumira of the “Communauté des Eglises de Dieu en Afrique Centrale au Rwanda”, Rev. Joël Nkeramihigo of the “Eglise biblique de la vie profonde au Rwanda,” Rev. Joseph Habineza of the Pentecostal Churches Association in Rwanda, Rev. Uziel Nkenyereye of the Evangelical Churches Community in Rwanda and Daniel Mugema, an evangelist in the Free Methodist Church in Rwanda.

On the role of the Church in Rwandan society, the letter’s authors say that the missionaries’ presence was considerably felt in “the educational and socio-cultural sectors” without discrimination.  Here, they add, the church accomplished its mission in the light of the gospel, appealing to the people to live in brotherhood, love and trust.  On the Church and politics, they claim, the Church never failed in its mission of love and truth at the “political level” until the “murderous and devastating invasion of the RPF in 1990.”  It is true that the Church had built more schools than any other institution, including the government.  But, it was in these very schools that the hate ideology was taught.

Fr. Rwamayanja, one of the letter’s signatories, was also among the twenty-nine Rwandan Catholic priests who, from Goma, Zaire, wrote a letter to the Pope in August 1994 demanding that the Rwandan government should allow all refugees home and then hold a referendum to determine the country’s political future.[41]   The authors of this letter had no good programme for the country.  All they wanted was to hold in contempt the Pope’s acknowledgment of the genocide.  As early as 15 May 1994, the Pope had declared that the massacres in Rwanda were indeed genocide.[42]

The priests wrote to the Pope: “Everybody knows, except those who do not wish to know or understand it, that the massacres which took place in Rwanda are the result of the provocation of the Rwandese people by the RPF.”  These priests, contaminated by the genocidal ideology, placed His Holiness the Pope in the category of ‘those who did not wish to know’ to cover up their own shortcomings and those of the government they served.

Amongst the signatories of that letter, there was also a vicar general from the diocese of Ruhengeri, Monsignor Simon Habyarimana, who was clear-cut in denying the genocide.  In early 1995, from his residence, room 119, in the Major seminary of Buhimba, a few kilometres from Goma, he was asked what he thought about the genocide.  For him, it was simply RPF propaganda to mould international opinion and the Tutsi had perished because of “la colère populaire” – meaning “popular anger” following the death of president Habyarimana.  This is a view shared by many genocide deniers.  As if giving the position of the Church, Monsignor Habyarimana said: “There may be talk of a genocide of Tutsis.  It was not so, it wasn’t deliberate… what you had was a hidden genocide of Hutus.”[43] While in Rome he keeps on reinforcing a hate discourse to justify his stay in exile. “The plan of present government of Rwanda is to destroy the Hutu intelligentsia, to get rid of people who are educated. Clearly, they want to eliminate us.”[44]  When he says the “present government” he refers to the government they identify with Tutsis.

Almost seven years later, Fr. Serge still held the same views of the priests in Goma when he appeared as witnesses before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Desouter replicated the words of the so-called ‘Church of Christ’ The Church will continue to play its role of witness, to give the truth…” Fr. Desouter, an influential White Father and a known genocide denier,[45] had gone to Arusha, Tanzania, to testify for Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and his son Gerard Ntakirutimana.  The two suspects were found guilty and convicted by the tribunal for genocide and related crimes.

Desouter told the ICTR that the “real” problem in Rwanda had nothing to do with ethnic hatred.  “The invasion of 1990 [by the RPF] was a catastrophe for two reasons.  The ethnic aspect was introduced into the politics of Rwanda and weapons were also introduced… the fight for power by extremists on both sides is what destroyed Rwanda.”  He also commented that after the death of Burundi’s President Melchior Ndadaye, you could not trust Tutsis.” [46]

Fr. Desouter, who was at one time accused of being a racist and a revisionist by a Catholic journal, Kinyamateka[47] publicly states his dislike for the idea of making Rwanda for Rwandans, rather than for Hutus, Tutsis and Twa.  In a paper entitled “The usurpation of the term genocide,” published in March 2002, Desouter says, “Denial of ethnic character often serves to establish a sordid agenda… Replacing a majority regime with a minority regime that is even more intolerant and cruel resolves nothing.”[48]

In that paper, Desouter insists that his congregation is more knowledgeable, that others who have analysed and tried to be part of solutions to Rwandan problems are simplistic and base their judgment on conventional wisdom.  In his view, it is the missionaries “who have a better understanding of the reality of the situation, of the culture and the local language”.[49] In 1996, Father Desouter, then president of the Committee of Belgian Missionary Institutions, claimed, like Monsignor Habyarimana, that he did not know if the genocide of the Tutsi was planned.  And commenting on the estimate death toll, he said: “[T] hey talk about a million dead Tutsis… There have never been that many Tutsis in Rwanda.”[50]  This is the language often used by many genocidaires and apologists, who play about with victim numbers to blur the criminal act.

Accepting failure is a virtue.  Even so, it is difficult for institutions like the Catholic Church that are known to command respect world wide – above all when such institutions, have been party to policies of racial discrimination and genocide.  The Church decided to adopt silence and slander as defence mechanisms.  The question is why the Vatican has accepted or tolerated such tendencies.

The call for remorse and repentance still seems unnecessary and problematical for the Catholic Church.  In March 1996, Pope John Paul II told the Rwandan people, “The Church… cannot be held responsible for the guilt of its members that have acted against the evangelic law; they will be called to render account of their own actions.  All Church members that have sinned during the genocide must have the courage to assume the consequences of their deeds they have done against God and fellow men.”[51]

Had this been accepted and done, it would have helped to end a culture of impunity that has characterised Rwanda for more than thirty-five years.  This could have been an established warning to anyone who harboured the archaic racist ideology.  It could have acted as a deterrent to foreign mentors, warning that continuation of such politics contravenes the principle of natural justice and is liable to be punished by law.  Thirdly, it offers the only premises on which durable reconciliation; rehabilitation and reconstruction could take place or be cemented.

In April 2001 a magazine called Fête & Saison published by Aide à l’Eglise en Détresse (AED), a powerful Catholic organisation[52] specified the countries in the world where the Church was persecuted.  On a world map, a number of countries were marked in red, including Rwanda, Afghanistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, etc… implying that somehow the government in Kigali was no different from that of the Talibans!  In that fund-raising advert, AED called for a minute’s silence on 10 April,in memory of martyrs and Christians under persecution.  Incidentally this is also the time when Rwandan genocide survivors mourn their murdered relatives and remember their darkest days of their lives.

The hostile propaganda against the Government of Rwanda started immediately after the genocide.  Papal envoys in Kigali, the lobby group of White Fathers and other church organisations, like the MISNA News Agency, went so far as accusing Rwanda of persecuting the Church.[53] They were well aware that the Church was not persecuted, but they were trying to avoid the repugnant facts about the failures of their institution.  Far from being persecuted, the Church was being challenged over its responsibility.

In 1999, Bishop Augustine Misago was arrested and subsequently tried for the crime of genocide.  After some months, a court in Kigali acquitted him – for lack of evidence, not as the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Salvatore Penacchio claims, that Misago was innocent.[54]  On several occasions Misago told the press that through him the Government was targeting the Church.[55]  Cardinal Josef Tomko, one of the Pope’s close lieutenants, also said that the Church was “targeted” in the trial, but the Church was not afraid – “welcoming even the destiny of martyrdom”.[56]  Both concocted such distortions that were disseminated with impunity by the Vatican’s propaganda machine.

The protection of Bishop Misago was not the Church’s only move to shield it from the arm of the law.  The most common move was to facilitate the departure of the accused to foreign countries.  Others include Fr. Munyeshyaka, who is in one of the Parishes in France,[57] Monsignor Simon Habyarimana, living in Rome, and many others who are fugitives around the world. On many occasions, whenever a member of the clergy was arrested and imprisoned, the Church alleged that they were innocent without any credible proof.[58] In Obstruction of Justice: The Nuns of Sovu in Belgium (African Rights, February 2000) clergymen are among those accused of trying to cover up crimes committed by the two nuns, Sr. Julienne Kizito and Sr. Gertrude Mukangango, who were found guilty of genocide and related crimes, and convicted by a Belgian tribunal.

Given their moral authority and role as educators of society’s sense of right and wrong, Church leaders would commit Christians to a genuine path of repentance, if they themselves recognised the role played by the Church in contributing to divisions and conflicts in Rwandan society.  After repentance, the Church could then preach reconciliation.

On 20 June 1994, a Rwandan radio announcer, Kantano Habimana of Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM), called upon his listeners to join him in singing a song praising genocide.  “Friends, let us rejoice…All Inkotanyi have perished…Friends, let us rejoice-God is fair.”  On 2 July, the same announcer was not only praising genocide, but also using God’s name to justify it.  “Let us rejoice: the “Inkotanyi” have been exterminated!  Oh dear friends, let us rejoice, God is equitable… The Good Lord is really equitable.  These evildoers, these terrorists, these people with suicidal tendencies will end up being exterminated… In any case, let us stand firm and exterminate them, so that our children and grandchildren do not hear the word “Inkotanyi” ever again.”[59]

Soon after the genocide, Protestant or affiliated Churches recognized and confessed their collusion with the powers that carried out the genocide, their silence and the involvement of their members in the massacres.  The Catholic Church did not do this immediately, even though some of its leaders spoke out as individuals.  It was only at Christmas 1995 that the Rwandan Episcopal Conference, officially but vaguely, acknowledged that there had been genocide – more than a year after the Pope and international community had acknowledged it.  In February 2001, a confession of collective accountability was formulated in nebulous language.  Since then, as Rutayisire says, investigations conducted in Catholic communities have never ceased to show the existence of revisionist tendencies among them.[60]

Conclusion

I chose to write about the Catholic Church and the genocide in Rwanda because it is the only institution involved in all the stages of genocide.  As a layperson, it is astounding to hear about the “love, truth and trust” that the church has achieved in a country where genocide took more than a million lives in just a hundred days, and to see the institution protecting instead of punishing, or at least denouncing its workers who are accused of genocide.

There is no doubt that Church leaders have had ties with the political power throughout the history of Rwanda.  The Church was also involved in the policy of ethnic hatred.  In order to succeed in its mission of uniting people, it must now change its vision on the ethnic issue.  If all Christians belong to the same family of God whose head is Jesus Christ, the message has to prevail that there are no more Hutu, Twa, and Tutsi – but simply Rwandans.  The Church should emulate St. Paul who says: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for all you are one in Christ.” (Gal 3: 28)

When the sexual abuse scandal by Roman Catholic priests hit the headlines in 2002, Pope John Paul II issued a very strong statement: “As priests, we are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of ordination in succumbing even to the most grievous forms of evil at work in the world…”[61] It was effective.  Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston (USA) was forced to resign because of how he mishandled the cases of priests in his diocese who had been accused of paedophilia.[62]

And that is not the only recent time that Church leaders have taken strong positions.  In April 2002, Bishop Olivier de Berranger of France accused Jean Marie Le Pen of being “the heir to a totalitarian and anti-Christian” tradition. [63]   Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo of Zambia faced excommunication for misbehaviour according to the Church rules.  Paradoxically, Rwandan priests accused of genocide and related crimes still celebrate masses in Rome, and in countries like France, where priests are infuriated by Le Pen’s racist rhetoric.

Church leadership should be on the side of the victims and justice rather than that of genocide perpetrators and deniers.  The Church must reconsider this illogicality and recognise genocide as the worst crime, remembering what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in his essay on “The Church and the Jewish Question” in April 1933.   As he wrote, one way in which churches could fight political injustices was to question state injustices and call the state to responsibility; another was to to help the victims of injustice, whether they were church members or not.  To bring and end to the machinery of injustice, he said, the Church was obliged not only to help the victims who had fallen under the wheel, but also to fall into the spokes of the wheel itself.[64]

Since justice is an unavoidable integral element of the process of reconciliation, the Church should be among those asking for the perpetrators to be judged.  If the Church contributes to the process of justice, unity can be re-established among Rwandans, in general, and among Christians, in particular.  It is the only way that the Church can restore its credibility, and hence be a witness to truth and help the state to save Rwanda from future suffering and bloodshed.

* This article was published in a book ‘Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches?’ (2004) Quotes from reviews and contributors read http://www.paragonhouse.com/product.php?productid=327

Notes

Wednesday morning, Rwanda’s former spy Chief Mr Patrick Karegeya was found dead in a hotel room in South Africa. It wasn’t long before the finger was pointed at Rwanda. Why not? It seems like the logical explanation. Fred Mwasa reports

Mr Karegeya fled the regime – and 20 years in jail – claiming he was not safe, and by his own standards he was Kagame’s greatest foe. It seems the case was closed before his body reached the morgue. Kigali is silent.

But who is Karegeya? 

It seems Mr Karegeya was no angel. In fact, quite the contrary, he was a ruthless opportunist who would sacrifice the lives of ordinary Rwandans to gain the one thing he wanted most: power.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

During his time as the chief of external intelligence, Mr. Karegeya began to forge alliances with people like Felicien Kabuga, the man currently on the US most wanted list for financing the genocide against the Tutsi of 1994.

Through two of Kabuga’s children, Donatien Nshimyumuremyi alias Nshima and Seraphine Uwimana who visited Rwanda between October and December 2003, Kabuga was able to regain the rights to family property. Under the directive of Mr. Karegeya, an officer of external Security accredited to the Rwanda Embassy in Belgium Mr Janvier Mabuye granted powers of attorney to both Kabuga’s children.

Mr Karegeya provided all the necessary documentation and protection to the two women. Kabuga’s family obtained ownership of the building next to City Plaza in downtown Kigali, and the building that houses Banque Populaire Muhima branch.

Details obtained from ground-breaking investigation show that the two women stayed at the Mille Collines and invoice No. 105620 was forwarded to National Security Service (NSS) External Security Organisation (ESO) for payment. The payment was effected from the NSS-ESO account by cheque number 438099 dated February 25, 2004 and signed by Patrick Karegeya.

With Mr Karegeya’s help, Kabuga has been able to continuously evade justice. According to insiders working with International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, investigators uncovered a network involving Mr. Karegeya who always tipped off the fugitive billionaire to run before the agents arrived at his door. Kabuga, the man largely responsible for how efficient the genocide was, is still at large thanks to Mr Karegeya.

So close they are, Kabuga’s son in law Dr Paulin Murayi has been the leader of the Belgium chapter of the Rwanda National Congress since 2012.

Working with FDLR

His links to those who participated in the genocide don’t end there. The UN Group of Experts show that he repeatedly met with high profile FLDR leaders including …… in 2009

He has been meeting them ever since, in the Congo, in Tanzania, in South Africa.

His objective: overthrew the government by any means necessary. By any means means hand in hand with the group that exterminated over one million people.

It means using grenades to kill the very Rwandans whose rights Karegeya and the RNC claim to represent. It wasn’t hard to connect to FLDR. He was never a Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) soldier. He lied his way into the army in 2010?

It is easy to kill people you never fought to save nor protect with your very life.

Karegeya was certainly no saint. No one in Kigali is mourning him.

In another comment “The Violins Don’t Drown out the Opportunistic Politicking” Sonia Uwimana says:

“I have no idea who killed the exiled former spy chief, a man who spent his days planning grenade attacks targeting innocent civilians. I assume he had a lot of enemies. People who oversee acts of terror, not to mention advocate the violent overthrow of governments, usually do.  The theory that it was carried out by a government sanctioned Flying Ninja Death Squad is as predictable as it is baseless. (Would such ruthlessly efficient killers stuff the murder weapon in the safe of the hotel room where the murder took place, I can’t help but ask myself).

Anyway, for the same reasons I don’t know who murdered Karegeya, the yawn-inducing parade of self-anointed experts and media prognosticators can’t possibly know either.  There is a police investigation that promises to be very fruitful. More actual facts will be available soon.

In the meantime, please — oh puhlease — spare us the fiction that Karegeya is a slain and martyred hero. It’s hard to imagine someone less befitting the description. Put down your violins.”