Editor,

RE: "It could be worse: Rwanda vs France Part II” (The New Times, October 12).

They are in fact involved in that old magicians’ trick: misdirection. This is a desperate stratagem which they hope can kill two birds with one stone:

1. Shift the centre of discussion from the Genocide against the Tutsi (and their role as accomplices before, during and after) and to cover up their own role in bringing down the aircraft as a necessary spark for the Genocide that was their joint project with the Bagosora gang of coup-makers and genocidaires.

Were their own role in bringing down an aircraft piloted by their own people to become public knowledge the backlash for such a monstrous crime would be such that it would bring the entire 5th Republic crashing down around them.

Remember, the crimes, that of the bringing down of the aircraft and the Genocide were carried out in a co-habitation government of a ‘socialist’ president and an RPR prime minister, which means both sides of the political establishment are responsible for them and neither can attack the other and use it to make political hay with. If anything, both share an imperative need to perpetuate this misdirection. The truth coming out would benefit only Le Pen.

2. What a better way of continually smearing their perpetual enemy, now the government in Kigali, by using mirror accusations against it. They count on the apathy of their public about matters of foreign policy as well as the global public not caring that much about what happened to a segment of a black population somewhere in the middle of Africa (as Francois Mitterrand said in his characteristic cynicism: ‘In such countries, genocide is not too important’) to succeed in creating sufficient confusion around the roles of the different parties in this crime to cover their own culpability, or even better to inverse the roles of the victims and the perpetrators.

They are also trying to ensure that their country shall never be held responsible for this crime as that might open the floodgates from others who might sue France for reparations for its long list of international crimes.

And, finally, they hope that with time, many of the principal protagonists will no longer be alive, and time will blur the memory of France’s and their senior officials’ individual roles in one of recent history’s greatest crimes.

In keeping their victim off balance—which is what they hope they are doing with such continuous judicial harassment efforts with contrived testimonies—they calculate their victim won’t have time to launch and sustain his own action against them, despite the fact that their adversary has more concrete evidence because it is based on facts, not mere spin.

Mwene Kalinda