Senator Marie Rose Mureshyankwano urging Rwandans to bring clarity to genocide
Photo from The NewTimes ything to go by , the vast majority of Rwandans agree with the RPF that this would be a dangerous path to take . This can also be seen in the pressure against government to “ do something ” whenever would-be politicians or political activists take to sectarianism-laced political discourse as some do on YouTube .
Here is a predicament , however . Given that stopping the genocide is the RPF ’ s moral centre of gravity , those who seek to remove it from power know that this is what they must destroy precisely because they cannot make an equally potent counter claim in their pursuit of political power .
If you can ’ t outcompete the RPF on the moral plane , you are left with only one option : destroying the ground on which it stands . The double genocide conspiracy aims to do just that . It is a classic case of trying to trade places .
The claim that there were two genocides aims to create a moral equivalence between the RPF -and perpetrators of the genocide against the Tutsi . It is supposed to culminate in the claim that given both sides killed , neither can claim any moral pedestal . Further , it seeks to free the genocidaires and their supporters , among them relatives , from the burden of shame they carry ever since the mass atrocity they seek to disown or dissociate themselves from .
As the RPF appeals to the offspring of genocide perpetrators to dissociate themselves from the crimes of their parents , those who seek to demystify the RPF make the opposite appeal , calling on them to justify the actions of their parents and to even defend their “ honour .” Ambiguity around the facts of the genocide against the Tutsi and its outright denial are in effect used as tools to hold the relatives and children of genocide perpetrators hostage .
In such a context , those who are eager to establish the facts constitute the biggest threat to this movement . This was evident when a young man , Innocent Habumugisha , recently testified that he had been lied to by his parents and others about what really transpired in 1994 . In his own esti-
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