The year 2015 marks the 21st commemoration of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. For 100 days, more than one million people were slaughtered for the simple fact that they were born Tutsi. In April of 1994, the killers set out to destroy the cultural and moral foundations of a society. They murdered their Tutsi neighbors in their homes, churches, hospitals, schools and streets, going as far as tracking down members of their own families when these were deemed to be of Tutsi descent. These massacres were the result of a national policy of extermination based on racist ideologies. This political mission to radically erase all traces of the existence of Tutsis was developed, promoted and implemented by the then government and intellectual elite of the country and was supported by certain foreign entities and religious groups whose own agendas condoned genocide ideologies. The killers said “Tutsis must disappear in time and space”. This horror happened under the passive eyes of the international community, even though the latter had said “Never Again” after the Holocaust of the Jews.
Today, Rwanda is rebuilding daily, and has become a country with the rule of law thanks to its leaders who have restored political stability and social order. It is now time to repair and heal, as a tribute to our loved ones who perished and to support the survivors. Survivors are without doubt in the best position to know the impact of the genocide in their lives, health, families and careers. They are also better positioned to understand the challenges facing our country and our history to ensure we never again relive the horror of genocide. In order to fight against the erasure intended by the executioners, genocide survivors and members of the Rwandan diaspora continue to be active in commemoration activities around the world.
Edouard Kayihura, author of Inside the Hotel Rwanda: The Surprising True Story.. and Why It Matters Today reflects on this year’s commemoration: “The Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda represents an historical occurrence beyond human comprehension. Survivors’ testimonies help us to remember and to make sense of how this tragedy happened. Their testimonies teach and serve as a moral lesson. Today, we are facing a growing number of people with indifference and lack of empathy who are trying to rewrite our history. Because of them, facts are changed, abbreviated, and conflated, like in the film “Hotel Rwanda,” or to an even more troubling degree, the BBC documentary, “Rwanda’s Untold Story.” Let our commemoration be designed specifically to keep the survivors’ voices heard truthfully and completely, and let death not silence the tales of the slaughtered innocents.”
The struggle against forgetting must not remain confined to Rwanda alone since genocide is universal in its essence. Members of the Rwandan diaspora also continue to seek places of memory through building memorial sites and stones that contribute to teaching tolerance to young generations, promote respect for life and human rights and support the fight against forgetting, denial and trivialization of the genocide. In solidarity with European nations such as Belgium, the United Kingdom, and many other countries, erecting and maintaining these memorial sites and monuments embody a form of resistance to the extermination utopia. The presence of such monuments in France is of particularly strong symbolic dimensions since France has often been the breeding ground for genocide denial speeches that impair the memory of the victims.
We reached out to Professor Gatsinzi Basaninyenzi, who is currently writing a book to decode the discourse on Tutsi genocide denial in North America. In his own words he stated: “A mere twenty-one years since the genocide against the Tutsi took place, deniers of that genocide are numerous, loud, and ubiquitous. That should not surprise us. As Gregory H. Stanton has observed, denial “always follows a genocide.” Here in the United States where I live, deniers of the genocide against the Tutsi include freelance journalists like Ann Garrison and Keith Harmon Snow; academics like Edward Herman, Christian Davenport, Peter Erlinder, Charles Kambanda, and Allan Stam, who was featured in ‘Rwanda’s Untold Story’; a politician, former US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney; and of course the self-proclaimed humanitarian, Paul Rusesabagina, who has one of his residences in Texas. Clearly, if these deniers and their methodologies are not exposed, their nefarious distortion of history and of historical facts will greatly undermine the education about the genocide of Tutsis that is being carried out by numerous teachers of social justice and by such institutions as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), particularly its Echoes and Reflections curriculum, The Memorial Library in New York City, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and The USC Shoah Foundation, just to name a few, making the American public, students in particular, susceptible to the worst kind of miseducation. Indeed, we, especially those of us who teach in the humanities, cannot afford to be silent in the face of this assault against the memory of those who were killed simply because of who they were.”
As Rwandans in the diaspora, we remain committed to being a strong voice to keep the memory of the victims alive around the world and to support the survivors who were at the edge of the abyss and whose souls and bodies bear permanent scars. We thank the government of Rwanda and several countries and their leaders as well as organizations around the world that continue to support us in fighting against genocide denial.
The Rwandan Diaspora Global Network
Executive Commitee
www.rwandaglobaldiaspora.org
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