Rwanda is one of the few countries in the world where virtually all ethnic and regional groups and all strata of society without discrimination, from the most powerful to the destitute, have suffered at some point in our recent history the worst known crimes against the person: human rights, from war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide to political assassinations, enforced disappearances and clandestine imprisonments.
To these crimes is added the crime of condemning most of the victims to eternal oblivion, with all kinds of theories, alibi, judgments of intent and a panoply of laws to impose it.
As much as we did not choose our ethnicities and our regional origins, neither of us chose to be the victim of the most heinous crimes on the planet. We must stop being the puppets of those who manipulate us to erase their crimes.
Let us be the generation that will undertake the path of restoring our stolen dignity, let us be those who will take this first step: that of committing ourselves, as citizens of this scorned humanity, to stop passing the torch of the torch to the next generation hatred and discord.
Let’s decide! Let us decide to stop conveying all the policies and acts which aim to erase the other from the map of the country, whether it is physically, psychologically, whether in spaces of expression or in spaces of memory.
I don’t need to specify who the other is because each of us knows which groups of people he or she has opted to erase or to let erase from his or her Rwanda.
I know that I myself am the other in the eyes of many and that as I talk about these topics I lose a lot of friends. But these losses, I count them without bitterness and without regrets because no friendship has value if it asks me to erase myself and to exist only as validation of the interior hatred carried to mine.
My dream is that during my stay in this world, I will have the joy of one day not having to define the other because we will all have become one.
Mkhonde Patrick Habamenshi
17 oct. 2020