Kigali, Rwanda
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Victoire Ingabire arrives at court for her arraignment
Photo: J. Mbanda
The news hit me yesterday on the blog Texas in Africa like a sucker punch: Rwandan presidential candidate Victoire Don Consolation Ingabire Umuhoza was arrested Wednesday April 21 in Kigali. Though Texas in Africa was bouncing a news item of Radio France Internationale, I somehow thought it wasn’t true. So I went to my other reliable sources on Rwanda’s news and issues: Colored Opinions, where I got confirmation of the ominous news—here and here.
On the same day of her arrest, according to a story by reporter Edmund Kagire published today in the New Times of Kigali, Ingabire appeared for her arraignment at the Gasabo Intermediate Court where she was “charged with association with a terrorist group [FDLR], propagating the Genocide Ideology, Revisionism and Ethnic Division.” Indeed, a "doppelganger anticitizen" (Comaroff and Comaroff).
Excerpt from the same New Times story:
“Prosecution pointed to a speech she delivered at Kigali Memorial Centre at Gisozi, upon her arrival, where she lamented that the memorial site only honours the Genocide against the Tutsi but Hutus were left out.
It added that through her declarations and utterances, Ingabire not only engaged in Genocide denial, but also promoted ethnic divisionism.Shortly after Ingabire’s return to Kigali on January 17, I wrote a prophetic post published here on January 19 and entitled “Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, Servilien Sebasoni and New Rwanda in the middle” that pretty much predicted this outcome.
Since her arrival in January, Ingabire has uttered revisionist statements suggesting that there was double Genocide in 1994.”
In that post, I urged Ingabire to leave Rwanda immediately as a rambling sexist and anti-Western manifesto against her published by the end of
In all seriousness, I wrote:
“Madame Victoire, Don:As for the charge of “revisionism,” a word with a Stalinian tinge, I’ll direct readers to check out my article published in OpEdNews in November 2007 entitled “The 1997 U.S.-sanctioned counter-genocide of Hutu refugees in DRC.”
Please, move to Kinshasa and get Congolese nationality. It’s easy, believe me. It will be yourConsolation prize for returning to Africa… Time isn't ripe in New Rwanda for your kind of discourse...Maybe never!... To speak in tongue like Servilien Sebasoni, there's a massive semiotic fraud taking place in New Rwanda, just like under Mobutu's Authenticity in Zaire... It's a waste of time... You belong in the DRC, where no one would ever dare get us back to that sham... Even in the darkest moments when Kisangani was under the boot of Rwandan and Ugandan occupational forces... There's a direct flight from Kigali to Kinshasa, I believe or via Nairobi... Think about it... That’s where you stand the chance of fulfilling your destiny of another kind of Obama of the African Great Lakes region.”
In that article, I quoted Laurent Kabila who, in an interview with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir after his falling out with his one-time Rwandan allies, said:
“Victims [Hutus] were in the thousands. Never did we expect these people to be so cruel, so bloody, it was revolting. Our fellow citizens were shocked as the [Rwandan] soldiers were asking for their help, to put bodies into bags, to throw them into mass graves. They had to promise not to reveal where they had buried them. We didn’t authorize these massacres, we weren’t even informed.”Analysts persist in calling these atrocities “massacres” (Gérard Prunier for example) instead of a planned “counter-genocide,” as if it’s the body count that should matter, rather than the intent of people in power rationally planning and ordering the obliteration of members of an ethnic group.
Ingabire’s unforgivable sin, in the eyes of the Rwandan regime, is to have sought the completion of the process of “grief work” and “closure” for the thousands of Hutus killed in the DRC—just as, according to Congolese blogger Boma Omena Henri who often comments on my blog in French, Sophocles’ Antigone (Ancient Greek = “one who holds an opposite opinion”) who buries her brother Polyneices despite the express order of Creon, the ruler of Thebes. We all know what happens in the end: Antigone is entombed alive in a cave where she dies. Let’s hope that Ingabire wouldn’t die in prison!
Today, in a stinging comment against Sarkozy and his Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner for their silence following the arrest of Ingabire, the French journalist Alain Léauthier writes in Marianne en ligne:
“[…] Victoire Ingabire is paying the price for her refusal to submit silently to the only orthodoxy permitted by the powers that be. The [orthodoxy] that makes Hutus, as a whole, the only ones responsible for the genocide and Tutsis, the exclusive victims.
[…]
One would thus allow anything to Kagame and write History under his dictation in order to assure a pacified future. One has the right to believe in that or to pretend to. Would Kagame be present at the next Franco-African summit of Nice? Is this really a victory [of diplomacy]?”
This comment goes to the core of the hijacking of the history of the African Great Lakes region by the RPF regime.
Recently, the cooperation between Burundi, DRC, and Rwanda has intensified within the regional framework of CEPGL, including cooperation in the judiciary and parliaments of these three countries.
The danger in this regional cooperation is that Burundi and the DRC might be dragged down by the abysmal standards of Rwanda, particularly in matters of due process of law.
What’s more, isn’t strange that the international community confines its lessons in democracy to the DRC and suddenly can’t make head or tail of it in the face of the routine egregious violations of citizens’ fundamental rights in Rwanda?
Antigone
Unknown student actress
1953 Season Harkte Theater Production
The Catholic University of America , Washington D.C.
Department of Drama
(Credits)
1953 Season Harkte Theater Production
The Catholic University of America , Washington D.C.
Department of Drama
(Credits)
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