Editor, RE: “How to save France from being a bully” (The New Times, November 8). Nothing angers and makes extremely spiteful those who have done their damnest to annihilate you, than that you have not only survived their worst efforts but are even thriving much better than ever before. It is infinitely worse when the would-be annihilator is a powerful country like France, and its target for destruction is a small “inconsequential” country like Rwanda, which, despite France’s best bullying efforts, refuses to knuckle under and accept its “designated place”. Worse, France’s failure to impose its will on Rwanda gives any of its other client states “dangerous” ideas that they too can break their neo-colonial shackles. It also effectively nullifies France’s propagandistic message of being the cradle of and a primary promoter of human rights across the world. Rwanda is a standing reminder of the contrary: that France was a direct player in the conception, in the planning and in the execution of the Genocide against the Tutsi, and the primary purveyor of efforts aimed at denying, trivialising or revising the history of that abominable crime. Given how France likes to present itself and the reality of its role in the Genocide against the Tutsi, we shouldn’t be surprised with its attempts at intimidation. Were the country an individual, psychoanalysts would long ago have diagnosed a clear case of cognitive dissonance from attempting to present itself as the very opposite of what it really is. Mwene Kalinda
