Trained as an aeronautical engineer, my life changed when I understood, through the work of researchers and journalists, that my country, France, could have been involved in Rwanda in a Genocide. The importance for me of this question comes, even if it took me long to admit it, from the history of my family : my mother, Charlotte, has been, when she was four years old, caught in 1942 with her own Polish mother, Shana, by the Parisian police, both being taken to the Veld’Hiv. My mother will get out of it, otherwise I would not be here today in front of you, thanks to a French nurse, which was not the case of her mother who was murdered by nazis in Auschwitz. For more than fifteen years, it has been impossible for me to give up the Rwandan affair. I have worked on the evolution of post-genocidal Franco-Rwandan relations on which subject I have written a lot. I have also collected, in Rwanda, the testimonies of lots of people, whatever survivors or former genocidaires, gathering them into in a book, all the witnesses speaking with their faces uncovered so that whoever wants hearing them after me has their name to do so. All of this led Mr Richard Gisagara to consider that my point of view on this matter might interest you.
Before starting my testimony, I would like to express the interest I generally have in listening to the various analyses of Ms Polony. I say this so that you know I have personally nothing against her. Thus, even if her words, which create confusion between victims and killers, deeply shocked me in the context of a genocide, I first imagined she did not know the subject enough (Indeed I still wonder how journalists manage to have something to say on every subjects) and that she could have been manipulated.
But it does not fit with the activism of the magazine Marianne to falsify the History of the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi of Rwanda, not only since 2004 but since Ms. Polony was her director in 2018. And we cannot, in my opinion, properly analyze her words without taking this context into account. So when she says that « we had bastards in front of bastards », this sentence should be analyzed in the light of the article she will let Judi Rever write a bit later in Marianne. In this article, Rever will explain that the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi of Rwanda would have been partly executed by the current Rwandan leaders (in majority Tutsi at the time when the Rwandan identity cards still indicated the ethnic mention). An accusation identical to the one that would have consisted in affirming that the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gourion, would have planned and implemented the Shoah in order to become president of a State to be born from the ashes of this genocide ! How to dare such an accusation ! Moreover, when Ms. Polony tells us she had only talked about the leaders, not the population, is she forgetting that Judi Rever is writing that thousands of Tutsi genocidaires would have been directly involved in the genocide of Tutsi ? They are not leaders. Then I wondered what to think of what says Mrs. Polony when she affirms not denying the existence of the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi of Rwanda, and when at the same time she denies so crudely its mechanism. That is why I started suspecting it could be a strategy.
A strategy that is far from new. Since it was no longer possible to deny the existence of this crime against humanity (once it has been recognized by the ICTR [International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda] and before its denial was punished by the french law of 2017), deniers would not deny explicitly its existence anymore, but would still follow the idea of the former genocide communication plan consisting in preventing us from seeing it clearly. It is the case of Védrine’s attempts to explain that this genocide was not planned but was only the result of the gradual transformation of spontaneous popular anger. It is the case of Villepin’s attempts to explain that the genocide against the Tutsi would have come with another genocide against the Hutu, thus recycling the old thesis of inter-ethnic conflict. This is the case of the attempts of the magazine Marianne, then directed by Ms. Polony when this media tries, through the article of Judi Rever, to explain that this genocide would have been partly executed by the current leaders of Rwanda.
The fact that Ms Polony chose to publish such an article clarifies, at least in my eyes, the words she pronounced a bit earlier on France Inter radio. Because publishing this article makes her pursuing the strategy of Marianne which will have, for fifteen years, vainly tried to falsify the History of this genocide. I insist on this « vainly » and will explain it because this is the heart of my point. I take this opportunity to say I do not understand why we are still listening, on this subject, to the theories of the journalists of this media after their intention to distort history has been publicly proved, what I am about to remind us. And if I consider of course that Mrs Polony is not responsible for Marianne’s communication on this subject before she became her director, her decisions, now that she is at the head of this media, make her, in my eyes, endorse this past. Consequently, her words pronounced on France Inter cannot be considered as having for a moment exceeded her thought, but as totally assumed in that they are perfectly coherent with a constant communication strategy for fifteen years.
Yes, fifteen years is the time separating Judi Rever’s article from another one also published by Marianne, both following exactly the same line of communication according to which the Genocide against the Tutsi would have been planned and executed by the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebellion movement mostly composed of Tutsi who returned to Rwanda through a guerrilla war launched on October 1, 1990]. On April 12, 2004, Marianne prepared us to read the testimony of a man named Ruzibiza by writing that « Paul Kagame believed that only an apocalyptic solution could lead him to take power. » By evoking « damning documents », Marianne therefore prepared the public to adopt the thesis of the one who would soon become french Judge Bruguière’s « key witness » in the investigation relating to the attack against Rwandan President Habyarimana plane, attack which was part of the genocidal plan in that it was the first event of a sequence of events triggered one after the other : according to this thesis, Kagame would have been the organizer of this plane attack. In the testimony that Marianne made available as an exclusive on her website, Ruzibiza claimed that « the bodies buried in the mass graves were not only those of Tutsi », made us appear the genocidal Interahamwe militias as militias of self-defense, mentioned « an authorization (to massacre) coming from a single man: Kagame » that he compared to Hitler. Among others.
Four years later, in November 2008, Ruzibiza withdrawn from his testimony by publicly admitting that everything he had written and said so far about the plane attack was false. Therefore the whole structure of Judge Bruguière’s investigation collapsed, making collapse all those who had participated in promoting this thesis : Marianne, Pierre Péan, Claudine Vidal and André Guichaoua, who respectively signed the preface and the postscript of Ruzibiza’s book in which he wrote the lies he had already written in his first report published by Marianne, a book which they presented to Science-po thank’s with the help of Philip Reynjtens and Rony Brauman.
Two years later, Ruzibiza died and, the day after his death, on September 23, 2010, Marianne published a new document : the minutes of a hearing held three months earlier by Ruzibiza, and in which he was suddenly returned to his first accusations against the RPF. But in this document, he denied that he had eyewitnessed the plane attack, what he had affirmed both in his report and in his book : this time, he said to have been some one hundred kilometers from the place of the attack ! The title of Marianne’s article in which the content of this document was published stated that « before dying, he explained that he had been threatened by Kagame’s men. » Why the magazine Marianne waited three months until he died to publish this document ? And why Marianne published it the day after his death ?
Reminding this affair allows us to make appear the intentions of those who spread these lies. Because if this kind of accusations can create some illusion when they are launched, which is the case during each commemoration of this genocide when these accusations aimed at diverting us from the accusations against French leaders, they can not resist at the patina of time. And I do not see how Mrs. Polony, at the time when she expressed herself on France Inter radio, could ignore that the intention of Marianne to lie on this subject had been publicly proved. And let’s not forget she was working for Marianne from 2002 to 2009. So we have to consider her words pronounced on France Inter in the light of her determination to keep on promoting a thesis that I consider to be the worst way to deny this genocide.
As a conclusion, I would like to say that accusing the victims of a genocide to have somehow participated in their own extermination is inflicting them much worse than the denial of the genocide they have been the target of. Considering that the french law against genocide denial would be a « yes or no game » is not only playing with this law but is also insulting the intelligence of the judges. Making the victims of a genocide guilty of the genocide they suffered from is the worst way to deny a genocide. Because what is a crime but suicide when the killer is the victim ?And don’t tell it’s not the same. According to the Polony/Rever tandem, a Tutsi from the RPF would have killed his Tutsi blood brother who remained in the country? A nephew killed his uncle? But from what sick mind have such a theory come from ? And how can we spread it?
What I fear above all is that, without any sanction, other media will be offered a precedent enabling them to establish a bit more, in public opinion, these thesis of inversion of victims and killers. That would even reinforce the slogan which was the leitmotif of the Genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda in 1994. We remember that RTLM called on the Hutu population to kill the Tutsi before they kill them themselves, according to an alleged plan of Tutsi to do so. Have we already forgotten the Protocols of the Elders of Zion ? And what about remembering of its use within the exhibition « The Jew and France » in 1941 which aimed at making Parisians believe that the Jews had a plan to dominate the world ? This exhibition lasted until January 1942, only a few months before the Veld’Hiv roundup, in a Paris whose inhabitants had been previously brainwashed in order to facilitate it. What we are judging today is the use of this type of inversion for deadly purposes. I dream that this trial will help put a stop to these mirror accusations which, one day or another, will lead us to new exterminations.
{{Serge Farnel
Web site of Serge Farnel’s inquiry : [www.bisesero.net/en->https://www.bisesero.net/en/]
Serge Farnel is an aeronautical engineer, professor, journalist and writer. His writings explore novel, poetry, theater, investigative journalism as well as scientific pedagogy.}}
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