The love story between Mrs Ingabire Victoire and Al Jazeera is flourishing as the convicted criminal goes to great lengths to present herself as a victim fighting for democracy. It is the second article in only five months that Ingabire runs to Al Jazeera in a desperate attempt to whitewash her criminality - with the latter playing the part of a laundromat. Unsurprisingly, “My story: Being an opposition figure in Rwanda,” is riddled with blatant omissions that distort the entire picture of the journey that inevitably led her to prison. Ingabires story, like the one before, is aimed for a gullible newspaper and audience. Ingabire presents herself as an opposition figure who was in exile before deciding to take her political activism back home, to Rwanda. “In 1994, I was in the Netherlands, studying business management and economy, when a genocide against the Tutsi took place in my home country, Rwanda,” Ingabire writes. But she fails to explain why someone who did not take part in the killings and was not even present during the genocide remained in exile until 2010 before returning home, long after many others had decided to do so voluntary through government-led programs (such as “Come and See, Go and Tell) that encouraged Rwandan refugees who had not taken part in the killings to return and help rebuild their country. There are two main reasons for the deliberate omissions behind her delayed return. One, Ingabire is the daughter of Therese Dusabe, who fled the country after it was liberated from genocidaires and joined her daughter in the Netherlands. Ingabire’s mother was convicted in absentia for, among other genocide crimes, killing Tutsi women who came to give birth at the health centre of the former Butamwa Commune (current Mageragere sector), where she was a nurse. Ingabire’s story is, therefore, not unique despite her efforts to make herself an exception. Relatives of such perpetrators that have found refuge in foreign countries have tended to delay their return to Rwanda. Some choose to see for themselves what the New Rwanda looks like; others remain under the influence of the perpetrators and stay away while cursing their home country. Ingabire belonged to the second group. Two, although Ingabire herself did not commit genocide, she got heavily involved with genocidal forces in eastern DRC long before she decided to return to Rwanda in 2010. This is her second deliberate omission; it is also the second reason behind her delayed return to Rwanda. This reason has major implications as far as her criminality is concerned. “I watched the reports of political upheaval, suffering and death coming from my beloved country in horror. Despite being miles away, I felt compelled to do something, so I founded a political party called The United Democratic Forces of Rwanda (FDU-Inkingi),” Ingabire tells uninitiated Al Jazeera readers. But she skips another significant and embarrassing part of her dark past. Before founding FDU, Ingabire had been appointed, in 1998, as the Netherlands coordinator of the Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy in Rwanda (RDR), a “political” party formed in Mugunga refugee camp in former Zaire. Those who appointed her were the masterminds of the genocide against the Tutsi; their armed wing made up of ex-FAR and Interahamwe militias remained active in the camps. Two years later, in August 2000, during the 3rd congress of the RDR in Bonn, Germany, Ingabire was elected President of the RDR. In other words, it is by taking the leadership of the movement formed by mass killers that Ingabire intended “to do something about the suffering and death coming from her beloved country.” Among the founding fathers of RDR were none other than the notorious genocide masterminds and ideologues, respectively, Col Theoneste Bagosora and Dr Ferdinand Nahimana. The latter led the Cameroonian branch of the party. Both would later get arrested and convicted by the International Criminal Court for Rwanda (ICTR). Hence, when Ingabire tells Al Jazeera readers that her detractors have no evidence against her other than her “Hutu ancestry”, she shows her true colors. She has never been one to let facts get in the way of a self-serving story. Its narcissism at its exemplary. It takes narcissism to imply, as she does, that her detractors are all Tutsis and that Hutus are collectively victims of persecution. It’s her usual tactic to deflect attention away from the serious issues about her dubious past, while framing the debate in terms of ethnic confrontation. In this, Ingabire sounds like a German whose links with Nazi and Nazism would be exposed and in turn the German would accuse his or her detractors of being Jews. It is as if being Jewish is the crime when at issue is the links to Nazism. Ingabire fails to address the issues around the ideology she harbours, one that is evident not only through her political associations since 1995, but also through her past and recent speeches. Just like the RDR, FDU-Inkingi - the political party Ingabire founded in 2006 - is made of genocide fugitives. For instance, in 2010, the past caught up with the vice-president of FDU, Joseph Ntawagundi, who had returned in Rwanda in Ingabire’s company. He came face to face with damning testimonies, including that of his own wife, and was brought to justice. Ntawagundi pleaded guilty to direct participation in the Tutsi genocide for having called for the killing of eight persons. Joseph Mushyandi, another genocide fugitive currently living in France, is in charge of FDUs Commissariat of Human Rights at FDU. The list is long and gives a clear picture of what FDU-Inkingi stands for, to Ingabires great displeasure when the facts are mentioned. It is for this reason that she decided to part ways with an organization that could not dupe Rwandans with regard to her objective, which is to reintroduce ethnic politics in Rwanda. She has been rebranding herself since but without abandoning her criminal political ideology. Ingabire’s speech at the Gisozi memorial, which she distorts in the Al Jazeera story, isnt the only speech which gives insights into her advocacy for ethnic confrontation and violence. “Our message is that if nothing is done to bring about a representative government which in turn would bring about fair justice, there will still be problems, which will be bloodier than those of 1994. […] The UN sits idle and Rwandans could decide to stand up and solve their own problems violently, when the UN could have intervened long before to help them find a solution,” Ingabire said in 2005 during a demonstration outside the headquarters of the European Union. It is both this advocacy for violence and the minimization of the Genocide against the Tutsi in her speech at the Gisozi memorial that led her to prison. Indeed, her links with violent armed groups, such as the FDLR, was proven beyond a reasonable doubt in court; substantial evidence against her was provided by Dutch authorities, as a result of judicial cooperation of Rwanda and the Netherlands. This happened despite the spirited dilay tactics on the part of her husband who, attempted in vain to challenge the court decision to transfer the evidence found at their home in the Netherlands to Rwandan judicial authorities. Ingabire’s deliberate omissions in the article are many and cannot be exhausted in a single article. But since she decided to challenge the denialist character of her speech at the Gisozi Memorial, I feel compelled to expose her one more time. In that speech, Ingabire says that a second genocide against the Hutu took place in Rwanda. “This memorial limits itself to the victims of the Genocide against the Tutsi. There is no memorial for the victims of the genocide that was perpetrated against the Hutu, who are also suffering,” Ingabire says before asking: “When is our turn?” Those unfamiliar with Rwanda’s history struggle to understand why this is genocide denial. But a common tactic of deniers is to relativize genocide by pointing to other crimes that might have been committed although they are not classified as genocide. It is not different from a Neo-Nazi saying that Holocaust memorials limit themselves to Jews victims and that they fail to include Germans who died during World War II. A German cannot ask that now that we see the Holocaust Memorials, when is our turn? Moreover, as Jos van Oijen reminds us in his review of In Praise of Blood, “the double genocide theory is not new. It was used by genocidaires in their trials and has been promoted by their acolytes and supporters. Hutu hardliners have accused the RPF of genocide throughout the Rwandan civil war of the early 1990s.Then in May 1994, with half a million Tutsi killed at the time, the extremist regime accused the RPF of having slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Hutu.” In other words, Ingabire - like a good protege - is only rehashing the talking points her acolytes in RDR and FDU made during and after the Genocide against the Tutsi. All of this would be evident to Al Jazeera if their editors cared to verify who they are promoting. If they did, Ingabire would not be able to conceal her criminality behind the veil of freedom of speech and democracy. Al Jazeera should check the sell by date of its product.
