The Rwandan Senator Bizimana Jean Damascène is crisscrossing the Southern Province in the project of remembering the Tutsi who were killed in 1963. According to him the word Genocide was first used in 1963 in what he calls the research work done by researchers although he does not mention the source of his findings. He asserts that killings that happened in 1959 in which many Tutsis families were massacred and their properties taken by the killers who were supported by the government of the time (Kayibanda) would also constitute to genocide.

Where’s this approach might sound good, the objective and the manner in which is done is questionable. Why Bizimana is conducting this remembrance without conducting the research and remembrance of other Rwandans who were killed by previous governments who led Rwanda before independence or after the post genocide so that both groups are remembered and honored?

Bizimana Jean Damacene being a researcher and senator has he taken time and courage to tell Rwandans on what happened in Kibeho massacre in which hundreds of thousands of women and children were butchered by Gen Fred Ibingira on the orders of his boss Kagame?

Has this Hon Senator questioned his boss on the resent utterances of killing his dissents even in exiles? This Hon Senator should be reminded of many Rwandans who have been killed or disappeared on the watch of the Rwandan government and specifically on the orders of President Kagame. Indeed, without mentioning some of the RPF commanders who have been killed by Kagame the list of innocent people who were killed during the insurgence in what was then Ruhengeri and Gisenyi between 1995 and 2000 is immense, what does he call it?

It is interesting that the current PM was launching his book on what he calls the Rwandan history, according to him from the bad governments to the RPF savior and messiah. This is not only distortion of the Rwandan history but destructive and with serious consequences on the future of our country.

There is little you can learn from the PM book apart from political opportunism and discourse, obviously this shapes the idea that any government that comes into power will use its means and resources to write its political ideology in form of History. Col Muamar Khadafy the late president of Libya wrote his philosophy book but after his demise the books were burnt or used in flash toilets, why because they just contained political philosophy of the regime of the day.

It’s unfortunate that Kagame has created an environment that will leave no one on the stage of the Rwandan political platform, in fact he has made it a policy to include as many as possible in his dirty policies of political madness that will make it difficult for the successive governments to survive in the same way his predecessors influenced many Rwandans in the crimes of genocide and other crimes against humanity.

The mapping report in which there is overwhelming evidence of the crimes committed by Kagame is not mentioned at all in the so called Rwandan academics and the elites in the Rwandan academia.  Again the RPF project is superfluous that they have a group of people they have to front for the project of selling the brand of victim v the killer so that the right to demand political sanity and correctness is curtailed by guilty and criminalizing a section of Rwandans but also exterminating those who sympathize with those smeared with guilty.

It should be submitted that even the previous regimes used the same tactics where they could call people ( Inyenzi) during the RPF Struggle so that they could kill them or tragically  even those  who opposed these killings were labeled sympathizers or collaborators. Therefore,   the history of Rwanda should be left to academics not politicians because they distort it and make it dangerous for the future of our generations.

The likes of Bizimana and the PM are not only dangerous to the future of Rwandan’s coexistence but are making the reconciliation hard to achieve and indeed, the strides of development achieved unsustainable.  It would not be wrong to say that the direction of the RPF regime is slowly taking back Rwanda to the past where ethnicity was a prerequisite to get a service.

Jacqueline Umurungi

Brussels.