4th July, 2020
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets”. “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. Those are the words of Francois-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), the famous French writer, historian and philosopher (1694-1778).
Hundreds of years later President Paul Kagame confirms Voltaire’s first statement, by being the longest living mass murderer in modern history, while President Emmanuel Macron of France fulfils the second by presiding over the most treasonable miscarriage of justice against Rwandans for the second time in 26 years.
An appeals court has turned down a request to reopen the case that has been closed, in the matter of the 1994 shooting down of the plane in which President Habyarimana of Rwanda, a Hutu, and President Cyprian Ntaryamira of Burundi, also a Hutu, and all their entourage that included French citizens perished. The shooting down of the plane was masterminded and executed by Paul Kagame, then Chairman of High Command of the Rwandese Patriotic Army (Rwandese Patriotic Front’s armed wing), Kayumba Nyamwasa (then Kagame’s Director of Military Intelligence), and other Tutsi military officers under their command. The architects of the shooting down of the plane are the same perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against Hutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. None of them have been brought to account for their crimes, fueling the cycle of impunity that continues to ravage Rwanda and the Great Lakes region.
The shooting down of the plane on April 6,1994, like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, was a powerful and historic trigger. In the former, approximately 1.5 million Rwandans, both Tutsi and Hutu, were killed in genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
These crimes were committed by a genocidal elite of the Habyarimana MRND regime (Hutu), and the Kagame’s RPF regime (Tutsi). The First World War that followed Ferdinand’s assassination led to an estimated 50-80 million deaths. The grievances born at the conclusion of the war in 1918, among other things, led to the Second World War that claimed the lives of 70-85 million people. The Jewish Holocaust, in which six million Jews were killed, was one of worst crimes committed during WWII by the rabidly racist and genocidal elite of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. France was lucky to have allies who helped it at its most perilous hour overcome Nazi occupation. Rwanda has not been as lucky. Twice in a quarter a century worldly powers choose to side with genocidal regimes against the interests of Rwandan people.
The Jewish Holocaust and the genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda are remembered and have been acknowledged, investigated, prosecuted and punished. The genocide, war crimes and crimes committed by the Kagame’s RPF regime (Tutsi) against Hutu people have not been acknowledged. Hutu people are not even allowed to remember their dead. It is only recent that the United States and United Kingdom, both allies of the Kagame regime, in rather timid and half-measured manner, publicly expressed that Hutu should be included among the victims of genocide, thereby resisting the Kagame regime’s false narrative at the UN General Assembly calling genocide in Rwanda a crime exclusively against Tutsi.
France was allied to Habyarimana’s genocidal MRND Hutu regime. This was a strategic and historic blunder that Kagame’s regime has manipulated to blackmail France’s ruling elite. Kagame has callously heaped scorn and national guilt on France, taunted every successive French President since 1994- Francois Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, Francois Hollande and Emmanuel Macron- until France has had to make another historic and fatal blunder of allying itself to the Kagame Tutsi minority genocidal regime.
It is an irony of history that the same nation that has offered the world supreme ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity would also generate the racist mindset that is at the heart France’s imperial enterprise, powerfully exhibited in Indochina, Algeria, and Rwanda. In each of these cases, a racist and white supremacist ideology, pursuit of power, plunder, sheer greed and geopolitical interests drove France’s ruling elite to negate the very principles on which the French Republic is founded.
President Macron has dragged France into the quagmire of a shameful act of history. He may assume he is succeeding in making Rwandans and the rest of the international community to believe the absurd miscarriage of justice. He has even gone the extra mile to reward almost 50 million Euro as a gift to the Kagame regime as it celebrates its 4th of July, the regime’s Liberation Day, effectively the RPF-led revolution that dangerously lost its way, like the French Revolution of 1789. The two poisoned gifts- closing the Habyarimana case and pocket money- are invitations to Kagame and his Tutsi cohort of murderers to continue committing atrocities. Voltaire was prescient.
President Macron and France’s ruling elite have forgotten history again, betrayed Rwandans, abused the rightful conscience of the French people and France, and join the ranks of friends of a genocidal regime that distorts history. France has chosen to close a case that is absolutely indispensable to understanding the tragic story of Rwanda, and building a bridge of truth among all Rwandans to a shared journey of restorative justice, healing and reconciliation.
Africa’s, and International community’s silence and acquiescence is scandalously troubling, reminiscent of 1994.
For Rwandans, the case remains open. The struggle continues till all truth is told, and justice is done. It is the urgent and important task of all Rwandans, Africans, French people and the international community to resist the Macron-Kagame treasonous alliance.
We must not allow the assassination of two black Heads of State and 1.5 million black deaths in Rwanda be trashed in Emmanuel Macron’s, and France’s ruling elite’s dustbins.
History will have its time to cast its truthful and harsh verdict on President Emmanuel Macron and the French ruling elite.
Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa
Chairman,
Rwanda Freedom Movement-ISHAKWE
Washington DC
USA
Contact: [email protected]
