South African freedom fighter Steve Biko once said, ‘The most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor, is the mind of the oppressed.’

Last week, the South African paper Mail & Guardian gave platform to known genocide revisionist Judi Rever and another man, who was unknown to me, one Benedict Moran to ‘reveal’, ‘exclusive top-secret testimonies’ implicating Rwanda’s president in war crimes’.

There was nothing "exclusive” or "recently leaked” in the M&G article, but a rehash of Judi Rever’s book which most of us didn’t read, and whose content she has been pushing on social media for months.

In a bizarre e-mail sent to the Rwandan presidency and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, Benedict Moran engaged in peculiar throwaway questions, asking the receivers to confirm his accusations directed at them.

Obviously no one responded, in fact, one commentator remarked that the letter looked like a parody note from the Onion! This is called the reverse of burden of proof, making claims then requesting for evidence. The alleged ‘recently leaked’ Moran claims are mere revisionist hearsay ginned up by lawyers of genocide perpetrators in the early 2000s which ICTR judges made a general ruling to squash

These lawyers worked with so-called investigators (for defence) who turned out be Genocide perpetrators that had schemmed their way to ICTR payroll. Some ended up being tried and convicted for genocide by the same tribunal.

Thes fabrications were further debunked by an inquiry of French judges, and announced witnesses have since retracted their fake testimonies.

When these allegations were first raised over twenty years ago, famous journalist Nick Gordon took a trip to the alleged ‘crime scene’ in Gabiro, where the RPF allegedly burned their Hutu victims. Gordon found, in his own words, "only three primitive army barracks, and nothing remotely resembling a death camp.”

In an upcoming scientific rebuttal of Judy Rever’s book, which I have seen, the author, a renown academic explains how Judy Rever transposes Nazi practices during the holocaust to describe how the RPF may have disposed of bodies.

She remarks that Revers accusations are far-fetched, because such cremation practices took the SS five years and a whole enterprise to set up and still death camps were discovered. It is impossible that the RPF could have killed people and make them vanish in a matter of days or months.

That genocide perpetrators continue to enjoy impunity in South African cities, 25 years after their crimes should be the subject of concern to every normal human being and any decent newspaper. That they find receptive audiences and platforms to justify their deeds, by accusing those who defeated them as well as their victims, defeat basic human decency. That a journalist in search for eccentricity, chooses to side with them, defeats the object and purpose of the once noble journalism profession.

Just to be clear, I do not debate with genocide revisionists. It is a principle I share with all colleagues, products of Rwanda’s liberation. Across this article I will share previous publications where all these issued were canvassed here and here.

There is a fundamental problem, when a newspaper overlooks rulings from an international tribunal, ignores UN resolutions, world renown historians and authors, and dismisses testimonies of genocide survivors, to vend conspiracy theories from a self-proclaimed journalists with no affiliation to a known journal, quoting ghost witnesses and unsubstantiated ‘secret’ documents.

Just like hate media of the genocide era, South African media has a mixed past. During the apartheid, some journalists and newspapers sided with the apartheid regime, referring to Nelson Mandela and his ANC comrades as ‘Terrorists’, quoting dubious scholars to establish through ‘research’ the superiority of the white race, and misleading the world about what was happening in South Africa.

Alas Apartheid has ended legally in South Africa, but racism hasn’t. The ghosts of hate still inhabit many, as a foreign student there I experienced it first-hand. 

While it is illegal to peddle Apartheid-apologists in South Africa, it seems their racist media has found a new outlet: double genocide in Rwanda. Since the accession to power of the Rwandan Patriotic Front by putting an end to the genocide against the Tutsi, South African media has picked sides, not with the heroes or the survivors, but with the killers, publishing everyone who claims to have proof that Rwanda is an open prison.

Last year, when Rwanda Development Board (RDB) signed a deal with English club Arsenal to promote its tourism industry, M&G’s Simon Alison wrote an impassioned fake news, quoting a vastly debunked Human Rights Watch report. Known here as 'The Walking Dead’ report, in July 2017, just before Presidential elections in Rwanda, Human Rights Watch published a report with a list of persons alleged to have been 'summarily executed by Rwandan security forces' for petty crimes such as stealing goats, etc.

Seven persons reportedly executed in the HRW report, namely: Nsanzabera Tharcisse, Majyambere Alphonse, Nyirabavakure Daphrose, Karasankima Jovan, Habyalimana Elias, Nzamwitakuze Donati and Hanyurwabake Emmanuel, appeared a few days later in a press conference; It was a MIRACLE!

Others had died of natural causes and their relatives threatened to sue Human Rights Watch for tarnishing their memory by accusing them of being petty thieves. We haven't heard of HRW ever since, but South African media has taken its place.

Alison’s opinions were obviously ignored because Arsenal likely ignores his very existence, and in the same year, Kigali rose to second place in MICE business, almost catching up with Cape Town, and to quote RDB CEO, ‘these people are either ill-informed or ill-intentioned, either way they are ill.

For many years South African media put pressure on South African Judges to declare the Rwandan government guilty in the death of late Rwandan spy, Patrick Karegeya, strangled in Johannesburg. For seven years they sustained the story in the media, quoting Rwandan terrorists on the run, quoting the wife, the children of the deceased, but most interestingly quoting the lawyers of the deceased and the prosecutor in the case and referring to them as ‘the court’.

Not once did they name the allegations what they are: allegations, until a South African judge, tired of the protracted circus, decided to strike the case from the court’s role.

It is uncanny that allegations of RPF massacres do not mention the Chairman of the RPF, the several Commissioners of the movement and army commanders, who joined from the beginning and along the struggle. Indeed, only racists, with little or no knowledge of the history of Rwanda, can define the RPF as a Tutsi movement. ‘Umuryango w’Abanyarwanda’ as it is known was led by Tutsi, Hutu and Twa leaders.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed ’, Paulo Freire speaks of the danger of indoctrination and its alienating effect on peoples, especially in schools, in public opinion (meaning the media). The Brazilian author recommends as a remedy, an educational action aimed at promoting among indoctrinated peoples a clear awareness of their objective situation, that is to say, to equip them to regularly take the measure of the cultural, political and social issues of the contemporary world.

In Freire’s spirit, allow me offer a free Rwandan history class, as a remedy to these people’s alienation, if it is not too late… In 1959, it is not Tutsi who were chased , it is UNAR-ists, members of UNAR: ‘Union National Rwandais’. Unarists were members of a party of nationalists who were fighting for two things: