As Rwanda continues on its path to healing and consolidating its people’s unity, some people with nefarious agendas are working tooth and nail to derail it. Most of those destabilisation missions usually raise their heads during this season as we remember those we lost during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. We are used to the usual revisionist publications, utterances and skewed broadcasts by the same group of people. They shamelessly attempt to rewrite the Genocide history, and they do it openly. Those ones are known and over the years have lost any ounce of credibility. But there are others who use subtle, covert means of trivialising, negating the Genocide against the Tutsi. A seemingly harmless incident has been unfolding every time it comes to commemorating the Genocide at the UN regional headquarters in Nairobi. Despite the United Nations having officially termed what happened in Rwanda in 1994 as, “Genocide against the Tutsi”, the Nairobi office always promotes the use of “Genocide in Rwanda” or other terms of distortions. It is that kind of amalgamation that has seen history being rewritten; that it was the Hutu who were the victims at the hands of the Tutsi. This plays kindly into the hands of deniers who always propagate falsehoods in a bid to make amends with their conscience. So, what is driving the UN Nairobi office in its obstinate stance of defiance? What gain does it derive from trivialising that Genocide that targeted an identified ethnic group? During yesterday’s candle lighting ceremony in New York, the new UN Secretary General, António Guterres, should have been addressing his Nairobi staff when he said: “History is filled with tragic chapters of hatred, inaction and indifference – a cycle that has led to violence, incarceration and death camps”. That indifference in Nairobi has to cease.
