Once you start a lie it becomes imperative to keep on lying to cover your tracks or to give up the intrigue for the sake of honesty which is the best policy.
When Kagame violated the Arusha Peace Agreements by crashing his predecessor President Juvenal Habyarimana, it was as if he was shifting to the point of no return where he was going to stay in the heights of lie till the day of his frantic fall. Guilt continually haunts him and nightmares create an atmosphere of a load of self-contradictions on his inside. At several instances, he admitted that he was responsible for the assassination of President Habyarimana meaning that he is the author of the tragedy that befell Rwanda in 1994. At other occasions, he denied it. And so on.
During the so-called liberation war Kagame decimated civilians and when he came in power he promised a guarantee of peace and freedom to all Rwandan nationals; Hutu, Tutsi and Twa irrespective of any creed. However, he didn’t keep his word. When it was time for the United Nations Organization to determine the cause of the 1994 genocide, Kagame realized that he was to blame because he triggered it from the fact that he assassinated the then incumbent President and he deemed it better to pass the buck. The hideous Prince scapegoated Hutu masses on the altar of his lie and to consolidate his power he introduced an apartheid rule as a strategy to reduce the vanquished to nobodies.
In 1994 our nation bathed in blood to be born in a rampant genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the majority of Rwandans being the Hutu were an inferior ethnic group. Even before there was a thirty-five years’ rule of Hutu (1959-94), the scar of ethnic hatred left by the sword of Tutsi monarchs from 1090 to 1959 A.D had already fragmented Rwandan society. From the eleventh century onward, the Tutsi hegemony caused blood to flow in battles over ethnic supremacy. They killed all Hutu kinglets and enslaved the survivors. According to the history of settlement in Africa, Rwandan kingdom by Tutsi patriarchs was perhaps the only one in Africa which emerged as a matter of cruel policy to wipe out its pioneering Hutu monarchs.
Moreover, the Tutsi aristocracy has elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. In fact, even today Kagame and his junta have not permitted themselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode of our history. They brag about it and tell their children that bloodshedding is synonymous with heroism. Like Islamists who preach their disciples that to kill an infidel is no sin before God, Kagame and his entourage tell their descendants that to decimate Hutu people is the due thing to do in order to perpetuate their rule. Their politics, literature, films, drama, folklore all exalt it. Up to the present day, their children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a sedentary people of an earlier culture into a nullified ethnic group confined to an impoverished countryside. That’s why the saga of Rwandan economic and social resiliency after war and genocide is a fabulous story because two wrongs don’t make a right. You can’t develop any society as long as you segregate an important part of it.
The RPF regime itself is a failure inasmuch as it has failed to promote interethnic cooperation as evidenced by the ongoing ethnic cleansing, mistrust among Rwandans, political monopoly, social injustice, exceeding oppression, suspicion and mutual hatred among the nationals. You cannot negotiate with Kagame and his men who always thrive to show a holy self-image while their hands are stained with innocent blood of Rwandans counted in millions. Kagame and his sycophants have failed to maintain total peace both inside and outside the country. The RPF system has a very narrow scope built on differences and conflicting ideologies, selfish interests of its leaders and lack of patriotism. Whether they be young or old, members of the RPF Party never give up their arrogance which leads them to call other Rwandans rubbish. Worst of all, Kagame’s paranoid intelligence and complex of inferiority caused by the lack of education paralyze the regime’s modus operandi.
Written by:
Jean Rukika
A London-based activist
Wednesday, 7 March 2018
