No sooner had I returned from the twentieth anniversary commemorations of the Rwandan genocide in Kigali than I saw Howard French’s assault on the man universally credited with stopping the mass killings, President Paul Kagame. I would have welcomed discussing French’s allegations against Kagame directly but could not find him among the hundreds of international dignitaries and heads of State who set aside time in their busy schedules to pay their respects by traveling across the world to honor the dead.
In his Wall Street Journal op-ed (“How Rwanda’s Paul Kagame Exploits U.S. Guilt”, 19 April 2014) French re-roasts old chestnuts against the Rwandan leader bringing us an unoriginal rehash of all the Monday-morning quarterbacks convinced they could have done a much better job of bringing Rwanda back from the brink after the fastest mass murder in history, claiming the lives of 10,000 people each day, 400 per hour, and 7 each minute.
The genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda was not tribal violence. Less so was it a civil war. Rather, it was an orchestrated project by extremists in power who were motivated by a deeply racist ideology. The Hutu may have been willing instruments of the genocide but they were tools in the hands of a Rwandan government who wished to see all complicit so that none could be tried.
I am mystified by French’s efforts to obscure these truths and, as Jew who has watched the growing trend of holocaust denial, I am even more troubled. When I was in Kigali I told President Kagame that if he was not careful in ten years time the world would say there was no genocide but merely ethnic strife. He responded, “Ten years? It’s happening already today.” As outrageous as it would be to describe the Armenian, Cambodian, Jewish, or Bosnian genocides as occurring without agency, the Rwandan genocide is no different. There were good guys and really, really evil guys. Kagame is the acknowledged hero of the plot.
French contends that American guilt over its inaction to stop the genocide causes our government today to overlook alleged crimes of the Kagame government. That may be so, although you would be hard-pressed to make the case that the Obama Administration refuses to, say, call for an international indictment against Bashar Al-Assad for gassing children because the United States still feels guilty that it did not stop his father from crushing 30,000 people to death in Hama.
Might it not occur to French that the reason the United States is very friendly toward Rwanda – amid the substantive disagreements and criticisms that occur between any two nations – is because they are amazed that in a continent marked by war, starvation, and corruption Rwanda has the fastest growing economy, the highest immunization rates, a celebrated war on corruption and, as any visitor can witness, is a model for racial harmony and integration? FULL STORY