There are echoes of Turkey and Armenia in the revisionist view of the Rwandan genocide

Kenya

It’s a long time since I thought of Thaddee, our Kigali stringer when I was covering Rwanda for Reuters. I remembered him because a recent fashion in western universities is the revision or even denial that a genocide against the Tutsis occurred in Central Africa in 1994. In recent months academics and some journalists have contacted me to attack my eyewitness testimony, saying what I saw was not Hutus like Thaddee murdering countless Tutsis but something else entirely. They claim either that people like me vastly exaggerated the number of Tutsi victims, or that we hid the truth, which was that most victims were in fact Hutus like Thaddee being butchered by Tutsis. We were happy to go along with this big lie, they reason, because we were ‘embedded’ with Paul Kagame’s Tutsi forces, blinded by our own stupidity and bias in favour of Anglophone rebels fighting for hegemony in a Francophone region rich with minerals. The view that the true story of Rwanda has been hidden or concealed is taken seriously enough for the BBC to quote its believers, as it did in a recent documentary. Academics deny they are revising history, but from my point of view I feel echoes of Germany and Armenian Turkey. ‘People will say the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed,’ Simon Wiesenthal recalled the SS telling Jews in the Lagers. ‘They will say they are …propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you’. But Thaddee’s story is proof of how complicated truth is. I remember Thaddee as a lovely man, a Hutu, married to a Tutsi, who in the early 1990s had been jailed for his journalism in local papers. His byline was over much of Reuters’ early coverage of the killings in April 1994. But we got separated in the fighting in Kigali and in May we lost touch when he was on the other side of the Hutu militia roadblocks with their pyramids of Tutsi heads and Tutsi hands.