by ANN GARRISON
Rwandan President Paul Kagame
The man most responsible for the death of six million Congolese – the worst genocide since World War Two – holds periodic celebrations in cities all around the world to celebrate the accomplishments of his regime. Rwandan President Paul Kagame is armed, financed and protected by the United States. When Kagame showed up in San Francisco last month, the author was there to mark the occasion.
Rwanda Day-San Francisco, September 27, was a bad day for identity politics. Rwandan President Paul Kagame stepped to the podium and said that he was happy to be in San Francisco because it’s so diverse, seeming not to understand that his guest speaker, Reverend Rick Warren, champion of the 2008 Prop 8 ballot measure banning same sex marriage, wouldn’t appeal to San Francisco’s diverse population. The city and surrounding Bay Area communities include the nation’s highest concentration of men and women who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
Then Reverend Rick Warren himself got up and told the audience that he might look like an American, but he’s really a Rwandan, and that he may have white skin, but he’s Black on the inside.
Neither the Black president nor the Black-on-the-inside preacher took note of how rapidly gentrification is disappearing San Francisco’s Black neighborhoods.
Though President Kagame forever plays the race card, claiming that his critics are racists who hold Africans in contempt, his dependence on the political, diplomatic and military support of the U.S. and NATO make it arguable that he himself is Black on the outside and white on the inside. His Rwanda Days are unique; no other nation holds anything like these annual promotions in one Western metropolis after another.
The first Rwanda Day was staged in Chicago in 2011, while Rwandans and Congolese protested outside. Other Rwanda Days — in Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Boston and Atlanta — inspired similar protests outside and/or along the president’s travel route. Hotel security at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis told me they’d prepared for a protest but none materialized. There aren’t many Rwandans in the Bay Area and Friends of the Congo’s Maurice Carney told me that Congolese were fixated on the election year violence in their homeland.
Fellow San Francisco Bay View journalist Jeremy Miller and I registered to attend Rwanda Day, but we had to watch President Kagame and Reverend Warren’s remarks on video because we were both ejected, with the help of three San Francisco Police officers and the head of Marriott Marquis hotel security. No surprise there because I’ve been denounced in Rwandan newspapers a number of times. For example, “Look at who the Rwanda haters have recruited now” and “Deniers of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi on Rampage.”
A genocide denier is anyone who characterizes the Rwandan war and massacres of 1990 to 1994 in any way that varies from the Rwandan government’s constitutionally codified, legally enforced description — “Genocide against the Tutsi.” I’ve done that and I’ve interviewed scholars and International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda defense attorneys who have as well.
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