When on October 1st, 2014, the BBC aired a very controversial and provocative documentary entitled Rwanda: The Untold Story, the whole world was incensed and joined Rwandans in condemning the incendiary documentary.
The documentary, broadcast on BBC2 under its Panorama programme, sparked controversy by alleging that President Paul Kagame ordered the shooting down of the jet carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi on April 6th, 1994, thus triggering the Genocide against the Tutsi.
It also made several other risible assertions such as more Hutus than Tutsis were massacred during the Genocide.
Almost six years on, the phenomenon of Genocide revisionism and denialism has become global and its propagators span across the four corners of the world.
Fake survivor and wife Nelson and Yvette Muhirwa. He was a defence witness in Justin Mugenzi and Simon Bikindi’s cases at the ICTR. Courtesy photos.
In my recent analysis titled: ‘Fake Survivors and Genocide Deniers’, I exposed how cunning these deniers have become, including posing as Genocide survivors.
Their ultimate aim is to perpetuate the same murderous ideology of their fathers and grandfathers largely blamed for the Genocide of over one million Tutsi in 1994.
Today, the Rwandan diaspora communities, in particular those in the US, UK, France, Belgium and Canada are full of Genocide revisionists.
This scourge of our times has also spread to far-flung territories like Australia and New Zealand.
Australia seems to have taken a turn for the worse because it has become a haven for individuals who espouses the Hutu Power ideology.
To achieve legitimacy and further their malevolent agenda by hoodwinking their hosts, they set up the Rwandan Association of Queensland.
Looked at it closely, the organisation is comprised of Genocide revisionists and deniers, affiliates of terrorist entities, and adepts of Hutu Power ideology.
Below is the Who is Who in the organisation:
Theogene Ngabo, the current chairman of this association is a well-known MRCD-FLN mobiliser in Queensland.
The MRCD President, Paul Rusesabagina, known for the fiction Hollywood movie Hotel Rwanda, rose to fame as a humanitarian, a cover he uses to raise funds for the terrorist organisation which is sowing death and desolation both in Rwanda and in the region.
Paul Rusesabagina at the same commemoration event in Queensland.
MRCD is responsible for series of attacks in south-west Rwanda in 2018 in which several innocent civilians were killed.
Rusesabagina and his MRCD acolytes are known deniers of the Genocide against the Tutsi.
Pacifique Gakindi, its former chairman is a well-known activist for another terror group, Rwandese National Congress (RNC).
Both RNC and MRCD – FLN are part of an armed conglomerate of terrorist organisations called P5.
In a report to the UN Security Council dated 16 December 2018, a UN group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo warned about the threat represented by that outfit which has aligned itself with the terrorist Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a designated terrorist armed group.
FDLR is composed of people responsible for the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, including almost all of its commanders.
Jointly, they have all carried terror activities inside Rwanda which left many people dead and scores of others injured.
Another leader in the association is called Amiel Nubaha. He has been coordinating activities of a sham 26th Commemoration of what they callously call "the Rwandan Genocide."
It is worth noting that Nubaha’s father, Froduard Nubaha, was a former school inspector in Birenga Commune, in former Kibungo Prefecture where is alleged to have taken part in the mass-killings.
None should blame his son for those heinous acts he perpetrated, but it is very disturbing to see the young man engaging in activities of Genocide revisionism and denialism which are aimed at exculpating his father from his crimes.
Sham Genocide commemorations
This group is very brazen in the way it has peddled the revisionism and denialism agenda.
During the Kwibuka25 activities were held last year at Queensland’s New South Wales (NSW) Parliament.
Apart from Australians, the association also invited two notorious guests: Paul Rusesabagina and Gervais Condo. The former is the MRCD – FLN leader, and the latter is RNC Secretary-General.
During that mockery of commemoration, one of the speakers, Robert Mukombozi - a Ugandan national and RNC operative – instead of honouring the victims, he embarked on a six-minute disjointed speech trivialising the Genocide against the Tutsi.
He did not remember the more than one million Tutsi massacred by extremist Hutu regime and its militias but instead paid tribute to late Michael Houligan, an Australian UN Expert behind the discredited UN Mapping Report which accused the RPF of war crimes.
Mukombozi also repeated the much-discredited allegations that President Paul Kagame ordered the shooting of the presidential plane that carried former President Juvenal Habyarimana, "thus sparking the Genocide.”
Both these theories have been debunked by different expert reports, one commissioned by the government of Rwanda and another by France, which both established that the plane was shot by Hutu Power extremist within Habyarimana’s government to get an excuse to launch the Genocide which had been prepared well in advance.
These Australian Parliamentarians should therefore stop being duped.
Fake survivors
One of the many ruses deployed by Genocide ideologues is to pose as Genocide survivors.
Putting on a mask of a Genocide survivor is a means of gaining credence and legitimacy to their Genocide revisionism and denialism agenda.
One such odious individuals are the couple of Nelson and Yvette Muhirwa. They are ardent diehard revisionists posing as Genocide survivors. If one has any doubts, they should listen to the interview Muhirwa had with a one Claude Gatebuke on the latter’s YouTube channel on 20th April 2020.
Like Muhirwa, Gatebuke is also a fake Genocide survivor.
The latter has emerged as the over-zealous leader of this despicable attempt to re-write history. For Genocide survivors like myself, it is obscene and insane to see such an ignominious character engaging in an unbridled distortion of the truth.
It took me all the courage on earth to listen to the chain of lies he and his host put out in that interview. He claimed that he was continually hounded by Hutu extremists because he looked like a Tutsi.
But because he had an ID which showed that he is Hutu, he always managed to survive.
The most disgusting part is where he reveals that at the height of the bloodshed in 1994, while hundreds of Tutsis were being killed every day, he kept going to work as a banker in the town of Gisenyi in northwest Rwanda.
He also brags about how he attended a barbecue party at a place in town in the middle of the Genocide.
That is a fake survivor. He has no moral compass, just like all his colleagues.
It is not surprising that the same Muhirwa was a defence witness in the trial of Justin Mugenzi, former Minister of Commerce in the genocidal government and a key architect of the Genocide.
In Mugenzi’s defence, he said: "I do not see how he could give such instructions (to kill Tutsis) to the Prefet as he had a Tutsi wife,” he said (Hirondelle News Agency, 4 April 2006).
Mugenzi, who was at the epicentre of the Hutu-Power movement in PL political party, was eventually acquitted by the UN court.
This defence of mixed race sounds hollow given the fact even Gregoire Kayibanda, the first Hutu President had a Tutsi wife. But he organised repeated pogroms of Tutsis between 1957 and 1973.
It has also emerged that he was also a defence witness in the trial of Simon Bikindi, a genocide ideologue who used music to inculcate hate and inspire killing of the Tutsi.
Bikindi was sentenced to 15 years of prison by the International Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 2008 for his hate songs which incited for the killings of Tutsi.
Hutu Power disciples
Apart from genocidal denialism, the activism of some members of this Rwandan Queensland Association has individuals like Eric Udahemuka, who openly defends a Genocidal propaganda behind the 1994 Genocide.
Udahemuka is a prolific social media user and his writings and interviews are full of the same venom spread by hate propagandists who incited mass-killings of Tutsi in the period leading to the 1994 Genocide.
He features on online hate radios like Ikondera Libre TV, a medium regularly used by the negationists.
One of his interviews is titled in Kinyarwanda: "Kuki abatutsi bo mu Rwanda bahora biyenza bazura akaboze, bakabangamira ubwiyunge?" loosely translated; Why do the Tutsi in Rwanda always provoke by resurrecting the rotten (past), thus hindering national reconciliation?.
Without bothering to delve into the content, the title tells it all about the kind of wicked and twisted mind we are dealing with.
In his twisted thinking, Udahemuka, a former journalist of Isimbi Newspaper in Rwanda, the annual Kwibuka ceremony to honour the victims of the 1994 Genocide is unearthing some stinky past, which should not take place.
This is not only wrong, but also extremely callous and insensitive. During the interview, he claims to be a "neutral guy” who has no ethnic bias because his mother was a Tutsi and his father a Hutu. But goes on the claim that during the Genocide more Hutus than Tutsi were massacred.
In some of his writings published in negationist publications, Udahemuka defends artiste Bikindi.
He claims that one of Bikindi’s songs "Njyewe Nanga Abahutu" (I hate the Bahutu"), which disparaged Hutus who were accommodating of the Tutsi, and incitement to Hutu extremism. He does see anything wrong with such an appeal and claims that the song was misunderstood.
Because of his deep-seated Hutu Power ideology, he is also attacking people who unlike him support the government Ndumunyarwanda Programme which aims at cementing national unity and reconciliation like Edouard Bamporiki, the Minister of State in the Ministry of Youth and Sports.
It is high time that efforts were made to end the spread of Genocide revisionism and denialism in Australia and to repudiate any attempt to propagate the Hutu Power ideology.
RNC operative Mubarak Kalisa, (left) Genocide denier and Catholic priest Thomas Nahimana and Marc Kayumba, a son to Rwandan renegade Kayumba Nyamwasa
A banner showing the very revisionist theme of event held earlier this month in Australia.
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The writer is an International Consultant in Human Rights and International Development based in Oxford, UK.
Contact: jbkayigamba@yahoo.com