Renegades: Dr Kambanda Defends the Indefensible:

Perhaps the most intriguing part of these so-called experts that flee the country for various wrong reasons, and turn into experts claiming all sorts of knowledge that never was, is rather surprising. Kambanda has recently coined himself an expert on Rwanda. This US based ‘expert’, who is a former Rector in the Faculty of Political Science at the National University, left the university due to poor performance, and now claims to be an expert on Rwanda. That he left in 2005 and attained seven degrees in a period of less than five years, raises doubts over their authenticity and by extension, his own position on all issues, least Rwandan. This is a man who claims to hold several academic credentials including Dip Phill, BA, LLB, MA.ETPM, MBA, MA.HRT, LLM, and then a PhD. Those in the faculty, who know him albeit as a failed academic have questioned the possibility of having attained six degrees in a span of just five years, degrees which he did not posses when he was at the National University. If a doctoral degree takes an average of three years to attain, one wonders how these other degrees from which he claims ‘expertise’ were attained. If this is not academic corruption or forgery or both, then Kambanda’s ‘credentials’ tells his story louder than his flat statements devoid of logic, substance and authenticity typical of an unaccomplished scholar. However, in his recent interview (published Monday, 19th April) with yet another self proclaimed ‘expert’ on Rwanda, Ann Garrison, on the eve of genocide memorial, one gets the impression that, these so-called ‘experts’ hold a horrendous thesis that is far removed from our reality, least from our history. Listening to his interview with Ann Garrison, one wonders whether Kambanda knows his own country’s history, let alone being an ‘expert’ on Rwanda. His radio interviews especially on Voice of America (VOA), print, electronic and new media, leaves one wondering what an academic he pretends to be. Kambanda exhibits intentionally predetermined, but very distorted reality of Rwanda, and adopts a position of ‘an outsider looking into issues ‘Rwanda’ to build a body of literature that is by far removed from reality in Rwanda. His attempts to take this route using an academic platform will soon become void. For such social scientists, unless they present their facts in a verifiable, consistent and logical prescriptions of reality, they soon become irrelevant and of no consequence to the cause they purport to support/defend using the academic platform. A partner of denial of reality as it is in Rwanda, and obstruction of truth is un-academic, which is why Kambanda’s line of flat and distorted arguments coated with academic rhetoric will soon catch up with him, and put him where he intrinsically belongs. To disgraced academics that only appeals to themselves, which is a dead end in itself. For deprivation of truth and distortion of body of knowledge is one sure way to end one’s academic career, which Kambanda has done in the name of defending renegades. A political ‘career would have been a better choice. Thus, in his interview with Ann Garrison, Kambanda argues that “The conflict in Rwanda goes back before colonial times, it goes before independence. These two people failed to share power” (read Hutus and Tutsis). For Ann Garrison’s information, Rwanda was an absolute monarch before independence and as such, the issue of power-sharing Kambanda alludes to, did not arise. Kambanda goes on to deny the Tutsi genocide arguing that, both Tutsi and Hutus died during the genocide, and that accepting double genocide would put Rwandan leadership in problems of accountability. I guess, the problem lies squarely on both Ann Garrison and Kambanda in their appreciation of Rwanda genocide, for any genocide is planned and executed with a view of exterminating a given people either due to their race (as is the case of Jewish, Rwandan, and Serb genocides) faith, briefs, belonging/association etc. The case of the Rwandan genocide targeted Tutsi, who were hunted and killed for their identity. It was planned and executed in 1952, 1973, and finally in 1994. Hutus who died during the war to stop genocide were war causalities rather than victims of genocide, for RPA (Rwanda Patriotic Army now RDF-Rwanda Defence Forces) did not at any point in time plan and kill Hutus just because they were Hutus. Indeed, the 1997 repatriation of Hutus by RPA from DRC Congo was an act aimed at safeguarding the livelihood of Hutus who had fled to DR Congo as hostages of ex-FAR genocidal forces. The same RPA could not have turned to be their killers at the same time. RPA’s record before, during and after the war was clear; non combatants were never legitimate targets at all. In this very deceptive interview, Ann Garrison, takes on Kambanda’s hard currency, and argues that the main reason he fled to USA is because: “he was disillusioned (disagreed) with President Kagame, and had to flee in 2005”. Surely this is the height of vanity and deception by a person using the academic platform to advance an unguided political agenda, and defend the indefensible renegades using the same platform of St. John’s University in New York City. For a start, where did a lecturer at a University functionary meet the President so as to disagree with him, let alone get disillusioned with him? At the very best, Kambanda could have been disillusioned with his faculty Dean, and certainly not even his Vice Chancellor. This has been his selling point in all his interviews/’critique’. One would be very assumptuous, least, terribly ignorant, as to the working of government systems and institutions that, a lecturer would cross the Ivory tower bureaucracy so as to have proximity to the President of a country so as to disagree or get disillusioned with him. If this is the hard currency Kambanda is selling to shape up his claim to ‘expertise’ and political leverage, he has fallen into anti-thesis of academic ethos and this seriously questions his scholarship. Absurdly, Kambanda’s intellectual insincerity holds the view that “There is total lack of power sharing in Rwanda. And that is the reason why the 1994 genocide surfaced.” The question Kambanda and Ann Garrison and other likeminded deniers of genocide should have told the leaders that it is the extremism of the government in power that sparked (final solution) off the 1994 genocide, and others before it, which arose out of hatred of a people (Tutsis) not because of their power dominance at that time (they were not in power anyway). If the theory being advanced by Kambanda and Ann Garrison was to be validated, then it would have been a Hutu genocide, since these did not share power at all. Today in Rwanda, there is equity both in government and public sectors, where power is shared on the basis of ability rather than ethnicity, for there is no established relationship between ethnicity and performance. But such flat and highly distorted statements are the hallmarks of renegades, who Kambanda wishes to support using academia, but which he has only succeeded to distort, and misrepresent, at extremely high costs to his ‘scholarly’ claim, and to that of renegades. That these renegades are bedfellows with known genocidal characters still leaves Rwandans in awe as to what they can/cannot do. That Gahima met with Agathe Kanziga (wife of late president Habyarimana and a radical genocidaire) whom Gahima put on a list of hardcore genocidaires in 1996 for follow up. That his half brother Rudasingwa recently met with Jerome Nayigiziki, the son in-law to former Rwandan President of Rwanda, Kayibanda is all telling in respect of all the most unholliest alliance these renegades can have, and Kambanda, cannot be a worse ally. Ends