by ANN GARRISON
“Global power elites are silent about Hutu genocide and Rwanda’s ongoing occupation of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC),” writes Ann Garrison, “because it has served their interests for many years.”
“The truth would embarrass them.”
My first contribution to Black Agenda Report was “Madame President? No, Madame Prisoner,” a profile of Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza published in January 2014. Late Black Agenda Report Editor Bruce A. Dixon had asked me to write it after following my conversations with Victoire and other Rwandan dissidents for some years. Those conversations began in January 2010, when I looked into why no viable challengers to incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame were being allowed into that year’s presidential election. Victoire had just returned from Netherlands to Rwanda to stand as a candidate, but she had almost immediately been placed under house arrest. Why? Because upon arriving in Rwanda’s capital, where she was met by Rwandan press and fellow dissidents, she went straight to the genocide memorial and made this statement:
“We totally agree and are conscious that there has been a genocide against Tutsis and we seriously and continuously advocate that all those who were responsible be brought before the courts of justice. We also agree that there have been other serious crimes against humanity and war crimes [against Hutus]; those who committed them have to bear the legal consequences. We must all the time remember those tragedies, make sure they don’t get ever repeated. We also need to ensure that people’s lives are effectively and strongly protected by laws.”
I quoted Victoire in “Rwanda’s 1994 Genocide and 2010 Election ,” one of the first essays I wrote about what I was beginning to understand, and soon heard from International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) defense attorneys and scholars including the late Edward S. Herman, co-author, with David Peterson, of “The Politics of Genocide ,” and “Enduring Lies: Rwanda and the Propaganda System, 20 Years On .” I spoke to Ed Herman six years later for “Rwanda, Burundi and Wars ‘To Stop the Next Rwanda ,’” a Project Censored broadcast on KPFA and other Pacifica Radio stations.
Rwanda 2010 and beyond
Victoire went to prison for eight years, beginning in 2010, for “genocide ideology,” which means voicing a more complex genocide history than that legally codified in Rwanda. The legally codified history is that ethnic Hutus massacred up to a million or more Tutsis during the 100 days beginning on April 7, 1994, which ended when General Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) “stopped the genocide.” While in prison Victoire wrote “Between Four W alls of the 1930 prison: Memoirs of a Rwandan Prisoner of Conscience .”
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