EDITORIAL: The Rwandan spirit will prevail against Genocide revisionism

Lately, Burundi has been in the headlines for the wrong reasons. While regional leaders and the international community are vouching for the voice of reason to prevail and peace to return to Burundi, a string of high profile assassinations have rocked the country. But what is rather disturbing is that in all this, the leadership in Burundi has deliberately attempted to shift blame for their woes, instead of finding a lasting solution through dialogue with the opposition and other key political players. As has been the case for the last few months, Burundi’s ruling party, the CNDD-FDD, issued another communiqué on the political situation in the country. This time they took off the gloves on any form of decency and took a swipe on survivors of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and on the person of Rwanda’s Head of State. Their ridiculous assertions are not worth the space in a national paper, one of which was the boxes full of simultaneous translation head sets and receivers which they purported to be military communication hardware intercepted from Rwanda. That could be forgiven as cheap propaganda, but when the head of Burundi’s ruling party resorts to dragging survivors of the Genocide in the murk, it passes as the worst form of revisionism and public undressing. And the timing itself was not sheer coincidence as Rwanda is just a week away from commemorating the Genocide. Such statements can only cause traumatic harm to the survivors. But the spirit of Rwandans and especially the survivors cannot be broken by Genocide deniers. Even in the face of such provocation Rwanda will not be diverted from going forward and ensuring that Genocide never happens again and that peace, unity and transformation continue to shape the destiny of Rwanda.

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EDITORIAL: The Rwandan spirit will prevail against Genocide revisionism