It’s true that hostility towards RPF fuels Genocide indifference

Editor, REFERENCE IS made to Lonzen Rugira’s article, “Hostility towards RPF fuels genocide indifference” (The New Times, March 31). Mr. Rugira is right up to a point that animosity towards the RPF, much of it deliberately planted and so skillfully cultivated, explains a little of the indifference in the West regarding the Genocide against the Tutsi. But at a deeper level, his theory inverses the causal relationship: it is in fact the indifference about the fate of Rwanda’s Tutsis, much of it as a result of racism, that explains why the genocide was allowed to happen and would have been total had the RPF not defeated the génocidaires and effectively neutralised the plans of their backers. Never forget that when – at the height of the genocide – then French President François Mitterrand brazenly and callously said that, “In such countries, genocide is not too important”. Despite that, none of his peers in the West, any so-called human rights organisations, nor any media organisation condemned him for such blatant racism. The RPF’s sin is to have defeated the goal of one of the Western world’s more important powers to help its client Hutu Power regime to implement their “Final Solution” for what they considered their “Tutsi Problem”. The French had madsie no secret of the fact their allies were planning the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. When they invited the then commander of the RPA to Paris for talks in 1992 and then erupted into his hotel room and detained him, they warned him that if he did not put an end to the rebellion immediately he would be putting all Tutsis in Rwanda at risk of extermination. It is clear they knew of what they were talking because they were already in the middle of those plans. That the so-called international community can still talk lyrical about “Never Again” and about the “Responsibility to Protect” given their continued shameful siding with the French on everything to do with our region, despite the French track record, including in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, tells me that the racism that informed decisions in New York and the world’s major capitals before, during and since the Genocide remains fully potent. Nothing the RPF could do will change that. Mwene Kalinda, Rwanda ********************* MR. RUGIRA expresses his arguments in an awesome presentation. However, numerous other causes of what you call “genocide indifference” exist, which could potentially twist and turn the overall implications in one way or another. Genocide indifference could, for instance, translate into different things including outright ignorance, or a simply misplaced condescending approach to non-power countries like Rwanda matters of universal morality. Each of these causes of indifference presents a debate of its own kind. Nonetheless, your particular vantage point-hostility towards RPF swallowing up the more pressing necessity to fully face, and attend to, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, is as valid as it gets, and indeed, deserving of all serious reflection. Natasha, United States

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It’s true that hostility towards RPF fuels Genocide indifference