Your editorial provides an excellent summary of the issues that keep on arising in France and Belgium as a result of these two countries’ shameful role during the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda; the first as an active accomplice, the second as a result of its military contingent’s cowardly desertion of a people they knew would be massacred once they left.
Editor,
RE: "Many are beginning to learn the hard way that Genocide is not a laughing matter” (The New Times, March 25).
Your editorial provides an excellent summary of the issues that keep on arising in France and Belgium as a result of these two countries’ shameful role during the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda; the first as an active accomplice, the second as a result of its military contingent’s cowardly desertion of a people they knew would be massacred once they left.
There is, however, a mistaken reading of what has been communicated by the head of France Inter (not RFI, by the way) regarding Ms Natacha Polony’s Genocide revisionist ‘they were all (expletive) trash-talk (this was not a ‘gaffe’, but a deliberate insult of the memory of Genocide victims and the only force that saved any who survived from the genocidaires France backed in every way).
Far from apologising, Ms Laurence Bloch’s communication on the matter is a legalese and PR-laden apologia for Ms Polony, whom she calls a person of ‘perfect integrity’.
And, we should expect no different from an official mouthpiece of the government of the country that abetted the Genocide before, during and after its perpetration, especially during this commemoration period.
Mwene Kalinda