To talk or not to talk about the Genocide?

Genocide evokes discomfort within and among us. Me and you – Rwandans. We don’t like talking about it. Some of us wish we could develop collective amnesia about it. We want to be known for reasons other than genocide. “There’s more to us than genocide,” we say, as we emphasise the abstract ‘more’ and obscure what is left, what precedes it. And thankfully, there’s ‘more’ to talk about now: one of the fastest growing, stable, economies in the world; a star performer on MDGs, the safest and cleanest; a country with the highest proportion of women in parliament; fastest developing, etcetera. There’s more to us, indeed. This is the emerging unifying narrative that all of us are comfortable with, which is fine. But it begs the questions: why are we so uncomfortable with the genocide, and why has it not become a unifying narrative the way the Holocaust is for the Israeli’s or the Germans for that matter? I can think of three reasons. For starters, Rwandans don’t like to talk about the genocide because of the pain it brings them on the one hand and, on the other, because of the potential that doing so could mislead others into thinking that they are seeking pity from them. That the perception of self-pity would undermine who they really are: a resilient people who were once down but not out. That while they seek empathy, this may be misperceived for sympathy, along with the ascription of an identity of victimhood onto them. So, they’d rather talk about how they’ve beaten the odds to become Africa’s shining star – winners not whiners. While noble, it is an attitude whose effects are not always good. How so? I invite you to read on. Second, there’s a clique of cynics in Europe that, for one reason or another, is hostile to President Kagame (and the RPF) and accuse his government of benefiting from “the genocide credit.” Here they mean donor support, which benefits Rwandans. Thus, in their disdain for the man, they’ve decided to insult an entire nation: it is simply offensive to suggest that Rwandans invited tragedy onto themselves in order to benefit from it. Even as they hide behind the veneer of freedom of speech, they would never dream of saying that “Bibi” Netanyahu benefits from “the Holocaust credit” for the support that his country receives from the United States and their other allies, and that he exploits the guilt around the Holocaust. Thus, one of the not so good effects of our attitude towards genocide is that cynics have been able to benefit from our own discomfort around it. It has emboldened them into bastardising, and bringing indignity onto, all of us. To put it another way, our inability to take ownership of the genocide has prevented us from developing the kind of collective consciousness needed to make it costly for cynics to offend us – as, say, Israel has done with those who minimise the Holocaust. Most importantly, Israel didn’t achieve any of that by shying away from the Holocaust. On the contrary, it is by embracing the Holocaust as part of its national DNA that it was able to mobilise solidarity around it; Israel makes it clear to any and everybody that what they went through is the reason they are who they are, and why they do what they do. And that if you don’t like them for it you can go hang. This is how they built global solidary. But it all started internally, then grew to continental Europe and ultimately to the world. Today, there’s clarity around the Holocaust and its denial is criminalised, if not socially unacceptable, a taboo. The wisdom in their strategy is that they were able to establish a rear-guard upon which to mobilise the rest of the world into solidarity around the Holocaust. Which leads to the third and final point. Deniers of the Genocide against the Tutsi persist because our strategy to confront them, lacking a strong rear-guard, has been hollow. We have put all our energies into pleading with Europe and America to recognise our tragedy, and to criminalise its denial or minimisation, when the resources could have been better spent on erecting such a rear-guard. Consequently, little effort has been placed in building solidarity in our region let alone on the African continent. As a result, we have not benefited from potential pan African solidarity the same way Israel has done with continental Europe – and America by extension. In practice, a moral force of more than one billion people has been ignored; it is immobilised. Any wonder, therefore, that genocide masterminds, the likes of Felicien Kabuga and Protais Mpiranya are able to reside in, and roam, Africa unmolested? Or that France continues intercourse with Africa as if it has no case to answer in Rwanda. Genocide is a sensitive matter that induces considerable discomfort for many of us. We may decide that we are better off ignoring it altogether and choose to place emphasis on other things that unite us better than it does. But at what cost?

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To talk or not to talk about the Genocide?