Editor,

RE: "Rwanda: Our downfall” (The New Times, November 25).

Despite being an understanding individual, I will never understand how this actually happened... I mean I know how France and the regime and a very anti-Tutsi decades-long attitude made it happen, but how did people actually agree to this?

Who lives in a universe where something like this is even remotely OK?

Ali Rukariza

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Their crime is so great that those involved in its perpetration recoil and hit out with exceptional savagery at any who dares remind them of it. But no matter what they do their names are forever and inextricably tied to such infamy that it is akin to having the indelible sign of Cain emblazoned on their foreheads. Not even death – that usually final release from worldly burdens – will erase the self-inflicted dishonor from their blackened names.

Their only path to finding some measure of internal peace and lightening the burden of their dishonor lies down the path they are determined not to embark on: openly acknowledging the abomination of their acts and asking for forgiveness from those they wronged.

But don’t hold your breath that the demented will be able to recognize that their only path to salvation: they are in too deep, and denial of their crimes – obvious to everybody else but themselves – is by now so ingrained it is hard to break free from its shackles.

Psychopaths in expensive suits in positions of leadership with power that has gone to their heads who believe they can do whatever they choose to black people – up to mass extermination – without any consequence (remember Mitterrand openly psychopathic views: "In such countries, genocide is not too important...”).

They have, after all, been murdering or oppressing black and other non-white people for centuries without any consequence. How could they ever have expected that this time around their designated victim, with the RPF at the cutting edge, would refuse to be annihilated and thus prevent them from completing their extermination project, presenting them with a never-ending situation in which survivors would forever represent living witnesses of the French state’s abominable crime?

Mwene Kalinda