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.