The denial of a proven crime is not only an act of solidarity with the perpetrator but also an act of complicity that contributes to the completion of the crime, according to Patrice Rudatinya Mbonyumutwa (Mbonyumutwa, 2019)
… All genocides are confronted with their denial and the Genocide committed against the Hutu people in Rwanda and in DRC by Paul Kagame’s RPF is no exception.
The genocide perpetrated against the Hutus has characteristics common to all genocides but it also has its own characteristics. The same is true of its negation.
A genocide confronted with an insidious revisionism
As for its negation, it obviously knows the same mechanisms as the negation of all other genocides. No one dares to deny the facts, that is, the systematic extermination of part of the Hutu population in Rwanda and on the territory of the Republic of Congo by the RPF, men, women and children indiscriminately. This genocide, therefore, escapes the primary form of negationism, which is just to deny the facts and say that it did not happen. But the other forms of negationism with which he is confronted are no less pernicious or dangerous.
Minimizing the number of victims
The first of these is the minimization of the number of victims, which is common to the denial of all genocides. How many times have we not read and heard, for example, that the number of Hutu victims would not exceed 500,000? As if that wouldn’t have been enough.
Take the case of the camps in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where refugees had been carefully counted by the humanitarian organizations that came to their aid in July 1994.
These camps numbered nearly 2,800,000 refugees in October 1996, on the eve of the attack and destruction of these camps by RPF troops.
In May 1997, the RPF government in Kigali boasted of having forcibly repatriated 500,000 refugees to Rwanda while the others had dispersed to the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, between the Rwandan border in the east and the Congo Brazzaville border in the west.
The number of surviving refugees counted by UNHCR in Congo in early 1998 and subsequent years was estimated at 400,000.
This figure is still put forward today and makes it possible to assess the Rwandan victims of the RPF in Congo alone, between 1996 and 1997 but also in the years that followed, at +/- 1.5 million deaths if we take into account the few survivors who were able to reach the neighbouring countries.
The distortion of the crime
Then comes the distortion of the crime of which the Hutus were victims, which is now the most virulent form of its negation.
As the crime of genocide is the most serious crime under international humanitarian law, its distortion is never intended to reduce its gravity. For example, the genocide of the Hutus by the RPF has often been described as exactions or is systematically trivialized as selective massacres or large-scale massacres. Today, the evidence of the facts leads some to accept that it is a crime against humanity without using the term genocide. However, it seems essential to qualify the crime as it should be, without misrepresenting it. Equally, it seems important to qualify it correctly by naming the victims, in the case of genocide.
Thus, generic expressions such as “Rwandan genocide”, “Rwandan tragedy”, “Rwandan drama” can rightly be considered inadequate with regard to the specificity of the genocide committed against the Hutus or the genocide committed against the Tutsis.
If this crime was committed within a general framework characterized by the commission of other serious crimes under international law, it is not correct to drown it in a generic name that only causes confusion.
That is to say, if the factual and legal observation is that there were two genocides in Rwanda, a genocide committed against the Hutus by the RPF between 1991 and 2003 but also a genocide committed against the Tutsis by the Interahamwe militiamen in the broad sense between April and July 1994, to designate everything as a “Rwandan genocide” is ultimately to deny the two genocides.
The demonization of victims
The demonization of victims is certainly the most abject form of denial of the crime of genocide and is often linked to the denaturation of the crime.
As early as 1994, a bad press, probably in the pay of those who perpetrated the genocide, began to demonize the Hutus in general by perniciously giving them a hatred image among the public. The climax was reached in 1996 when a journalist wrote, for example, while the RPF was using heavy weapons to destroy the Hutu refugee camps in eastern Congo and exterminate men, women and children under the indulgent eyes of the world, that it was finally necessary to ask whether these children were, in any case, future genocidaires who would have inherited their parents’ ideology.
For this journalist, it was a given that the Hutus as a whole were indeed genocidaires and that only moderate Hutus, who had died or remained in Rwanda, escaped this genocidal ideology transmitted to children. This expression of “moderate Hutus” was part of this campaign of demonization since it aimed to subliminally introduce the idea that Hutus would have been bad in essence but that there were moderates.
If we know that we cannot be moderate or not only in our opinions but certainly not in what we are, it is easy to understand the purpose of those who invented this expression and who are still trying to perpetuate it. This way of demonizing those who are to be exterminated for who they are, by attributing crimes globally to their national or ethnic group, such as those accused of killing Jesus Christ, has been known since time immemorial and sometimes and even always hits the mark in the minds of certain audiences.
Once the victims have been demonized, the crimes committed against them then become excusable, even justifiable, but in any case lose their gravity to become reprisals or revenge, if anyone is still interested.
The latest find of the RPF government in Kigali is this programme entitled “Ndi umunyarwanda” (I am Rwandan), aimed at young Hutus who are massively called to ask forgiveness for alleged crimes committed by their parents since they can no longer be prosecuted for having committed genocide before birth.
The RPF government is now trying to explain that it is allegedly fighting a genocidal ideology that has been transmitted to Hutu children, i.e. those who denounce the genocide committed by the RPF.
The victims are therefore demonized as criminals in a totally pernicious logic that consists in trying to conceal the reality of the genocide committed against the Hutus by systematically brandishing the fight against the denial of the genocide committed against the Tutsis.
Mirrored Denial
Indeed, the campaign to deny the genocide committed against the Hutus, which we see comes from those who committed it, i. e. the officers of the RPF still in power in Kigali, essentially consists in muzzling all those who are fighting for the recognition of the genocide committed against the Hutus and for justice for its victims, by accusing them of being negationists of the genocide committed against the Tutsis.
Those who fight to have the genocide committed against the Hutus recognized and its perpetrators punished are freely accused of “negationism” because they are “supporters of the thesis of double genocide”. However, logically, it is not the one who claims the existence of a second genocide that is likely to be denied, but the one who openly and with impunity denies one of them without any factual or legal argument.
The genocide committed against the Hutus is not the result of a thesis or the work of partisans but a horrible reality whose supreme horror is to continue to terrorize its victims rather than to bring them justice. This campaign is obviously absurd and illogical, but it is nevertheless supported by intellectual and political circles in Europe, even if they are only second-rate personalities for the time being. In short, to openly engage in negationism by accusing the other, the one we deny, of negationism, is the height of the world upside down.
All of the above does not mean that there is no room for legitimate discussion or even negation and that the genocide committed against the Hutus must be accepted as an indisputable and undeniable dogma. Everyone is free to demonstrate to us how the two elements of the crime of genocide against the Hutus would not be fulfilled. Indeed, any crime, whatever it may be, always requires a moral element and a material element, i.e. an intention on the part of its perpetrator and acts.
For the crime of genocide, in particular against a national or ethnic group, the intent required by article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 9 December 1948 is to destroy all or part of that group, but that intent is not questionable in this case. It is the result of the very facts and confessions of those who committed it, except that they wrongly believe that they did not commit genocide because they did not want to exterminate all Hutus but only a part of them. And the acts required are listed in the same article and consist, inter alia, in the murder of members of this group, or in serious bodily harm to its physical integrity or in the intentional subjection of this group to living conditions intended to bring about its total or partial destruction.
These acts are established in this case and it is only for this reason that it can be said that there was genocide against the Hutus in Rwanda. Since the contrary cannot be demonstrated clearly, propaganda and intimidation of the victims have taken over, to the point that the greatest particularity of the denial of this genocide committed against the Hutus comes from the fact that it is probably the only one to be denied by the victims themselves, some of whom refuse to qualify as genocide what they have been victims.
It is neither the height of alienation nor the most successful illustration of Stockholm syndrome, but rather the consequence of this impunity that pushes survivors to deny themselves the crimes they have been victims of in a form of survival reflex designed to soften the perpetrators of whom they are still at the mercy.
The denial goes even further when some victims, now enrolled under the RPF banner in Kigali, are forced to publicly endorse the RPF’s crimes as officials of the regime and thus to endorse in their own name the crimes of which they have been victims. The current challenge is not even to have this genocide recognized by others, but to have it recognized by the Rwandans themselves, Hutus and Tutsis, starting with the Hutus who have been victims and who must be able to bear open witness to it without hiding in fear.
Conditional approval
How many have we not heard people in good faith pleading that if a tribunal were to qualify the crimes that have been committed against the Hutus as genocide, then we would have to accept it and face it? However, this is nonsense because the existence and qualification of a crime do not depend on judicial recognition. On the contrary, the fact that no Tribunal has ever prosecuted these crimes is a humiliation to all humanity.
Mbonyumutwa, P. R., 2019. Rwanda : la négation du génocide commis contre les Hutus. JamboNews.