Editor, 

We all feel for our Kenyan brethren in their hour of pain. Rwandans know all too well the pain of losing loved ones from this type of senseless terror through the indiscriminate throwing of grenades in crowded places in the name of bankrupt "politics” by our enemies.

We are all one with the bereaved families and friends of the victims. It will not have escaped anyone’s notice that the first thing Western governments have done in response to these attacks is naturally to advise their nationals to leave Kenya. Which is understandable as the security of their nationals is their primary concern.

By the same token such governments should also understand that the security and safety of Kenyans must be the Kenyan Government’s foremost duty. And it should be up to the Kenyan Government to determine how, within its own national laws, to go about ensuring that it meets that duty. 

This is what the Rwandan Government has been telling anyone who cares to listen, or even those who refuse to.

When the chips are down, each Government’s duty is to look after its own. Foreign officials, critical NGOs or anybody else, may make as much noise as they wish about how any government goes about ensuring that it meets this primary responsibility, but at the end of the day, each government—whether that of the US, the UK, France, Germany, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, or Tanzania—must fulfill this primordial role.

Without basic security for its citizens and all the other residents on its territory, no government can assure any of the other rights for which it is responsible whether in the economic, political, cultural or social domains.

The most interesting thing about those who split hairs about how our governments go about quelling real and demonstrated threats to our security is that they have no qualms whatsoever about any methods their own governments apply to crush real, perceived or even only potential threats to their own nationals, whether in their own countries or anywhere else on earth.

We have choice terms for those who hold those kinds of contradictory positions on essentially the same phenomenon with the difference only whether the targets are either themselves and theirs or others, and hypocrites are only the most polite of them.

Mwene Kalinda, Rwanda

Reaction to the story, "Rwandans commiserate with Kenyans after attack” (The New Times, June 17)