Not even the FDLR would fall for Rudasingwa’s posturing

In his document, The Freedom and Peace Speech Kagame should have read: The Real State of the Nation, Rwandan fugitive Theogen Rudasingwa casts himself as the most double-faced demagogue, to such an extent that even the very genocidal forces he is working hard to sell himself to, will find it difficult to buy into his perverted rhetoric. While Rudasingwa’s speech would easily be characterized as a sick joke, it also offers an insight into the mind of a man grossly obsessed with himself, without any sense of value for the Rwandan people. The fact that he doesn’t see any value in anything he has stood for, in the last twenty or more years clearly demonstrates the sort of fraud that Rudasingwa is. By writing what he seeks to portray as his ideal speech, Rudasingwa turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDRL) and the broader genocide ideologue. In the most nauseating propaganda, Rudasingwa does not only seek to sanitize the forces that organized and executed the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, he shamelessly espouses the double genocide ideology. The speech would have placed him squarely in the revisionists’ corner, if it wasn’t for the fact that he comes across as more genocidaire than the originals themselves. Rudasingwa’s document hands him the virulent distinction as the first ever individual, Rwanda or foreign, to call for the release of the criminals convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), for the genocide crimes committed against the Tutsi in 1994. Not even the most rabid revisionists have ever crossed the line to call for the release of the genocide convicts. “We will release all prisoners in Rwanda and institute discussions with international community to free even those who are being tried (or have been convicted) by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda”, he declares. Rudasingwa may believe that this kind of genocidal rhetoric will endear him to the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) an other genocidal groups, but it is poor calculation on his part, as the FDLR and their supporters, have easily discerned that Theogen Rudasingwa is too good to be true, and this explains why the terrorist outfit is increasingly rejecting him and his half-brother, Gerald Gahima. While Rudasingwa and his fellow fugitives have been at pains to convince the world that they are not working with the FDLR, inspite of overwhelming evidence demonstrating how they have merged with the terrorist organisation, his document, this time, leaves nothing to imagination. His speech is unequivocal in calling for the “re-integration of armed groups”. Indeed, the most vicious and likely the only Rwandan armed group, is the FDLR, and when Rudasingwa appeals for the re-integration of Rwandan armed groups, it is evident that the fugitive is trying to make a case for a known and listed terrorist organisation, to be integrated in the Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF). By advocating the release of all genocide criminals convicted by the ICTR and calling for the “re-integration of FDLR into the RDF, Rudasingwa has put all the vocal revisionists and vicious genocide ideologues in the shade. They just can’t have a better spokesperson, that is if they believe a word of what he says. In Rudasingwa’s Rwanda, “Rwandan armed groups (read FDLR) will be integrated into a new reformed RDF that reflects the character of the Rwandan nation”. Clearly, this is a fugitive who believes the “Rwandan nation” would be reflected, if only, a terrorist outfit was made part of the Rwanda Defence Forces. Theogen Rudasingwa refers to President Kagame’s speeches as usually “arrogant and deceptive”. For a considerable period of time, he was the Director of Cabinet in the President’s Office and that meant that, to all intents and purposes, Rudasingwa was the official who supervised the writing and content of the President’s speeches. The speeches were Rudasingwa’s handiwork during his tenure at the President’s office and the question is: Who else is the fugitive arrogantly deceiving now? Indeed, this is an insult to the intelligence of whoever he is trying to sell himself to. The speech calls for “a full and independent investigation on party finances since 1990”. Rudasingwa was, for a long time in the 1990s, the Secretary General of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), way before President Kagame was elected party Chairman. If, indeed, Rudasingwa believed that the “party finances” needed to be investigated, why didn’t he institute that inquiry all those years he was running the show? This is posturing at its most obscene. Rudasingwa seeks to score what he considers political mileage from one of the most disgraceful documents the, now dead, Mapping Report on the DRC. This is a report that has been roundly denounced as a smear job, by those bent on spreading the false claim that there was a genocide committed against Hutu refugees in the DRC camps, the ultimate objective being to advance the theory that there was double genocide after all. Even after eminent officials like Aldo Ajello, who was the European Union Envoy for the Great Lakes region at the time of the conflict in the DRC, publicly disagreed with the report, explaining that “The camps were so close to Rwanda, which was a violation of international law, and there was a clear intention on the part of genocide perpetrators to violently return and complete their genocidal agenda”, Theogen Rudasingwa still thinks he can milk some residual benefits out of the document. His inherent inability to step back and think has blinded him to the fact that even the authors of the Mapping Report now wish they had not published it in first place. According to Rudasingwa, there was no genocide against the Tutsi, it was a “civil war that pitted RPF against the regime of the late Habyarimana…each side in the conflict lost many lives of young Rwandans”. This kind of revisionist rhetoric is nothing new and the Rwandan people have heard it before. From Peter Erlinder to Philippe Retjens and Victoire Ingabire, revisionism and genocide denial can never win. Ends

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Not even the FDLR would fall for Rudasingwa’s posturing