Professor Susan Thomson co-writes New York Times op-ed about Rwanda
BY MATT HAMES ON JUNE 17, 2014
Susan Thomson studies and writes about Rwanda as part of her research
at Colgate.
Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies Susan Thomson held
numerous events this past semester that examined the genocide in
Rwanda that happened 20 years ago.
In her book Whispering Truth to Power: Everyday Resistance to
Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda, Thomson talks about the quiet
opposition in Rwanda. She explores how some of the nation's most
celebrated post-genocide policies have failed to garner the grassroots
support needed to sustain peace.
The argument continues with an op-ed in the New York Times that asks:
Why Are Rwandans Disappearing?
Thomson and Lara Santoro report on the people missing in Rwanda:
"Human Rights Watch attributes the disappearances to sweeps by the
army and the police targeting people suspected of being critical of
the government, and cites 14 cases in one district alone."
Read the entire op-ed in the Times.
http://www.google.ca/gwt/x?gl=CA&source=s&u=http://news.colgate.edu/2014/06/professor-susan-thomson-co-writes-new-york-times-op-ed-about-rwanda.html/&hl=en-CA&ei=FU6jU6a9I9TysQe58YHACA&wsc=yh&ct=np&whp=378
and based in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Traveling to Congo on
business or to visit relatives could be enough to cause a person to
fall under suspicion, according to anecdotes in the report. The State
Department expressed concern and urged a return to "due process of
law." But President Paul Kagame remained defiant, saying at a recent
state function: "We will continue to arrest more suspects and if
possible shoot in broad daylight those who intend to destabilize our
country."
Photo
Credit Edel Rodriguez
To observers with years of experience in the country, Mr. Kagame's
stance is no surprise. American censure, on the other hand, comes as a
breath of fresh air.
The "genocide guilt card" has been played expertly from Mr. Kagame on
down. Nearly $800 million flows into Rwandan government coffers every
year from foreign donors still haunted by images of discarded machetes
released after the genocide of half a million people 20 years ago. Mr.
Kagame continues to be regularly celebrated at American universities
and black-tie events in Aspen and Davos, where he is presented as a
visionary committed to radical economic modernity.
To be fair, some progress has been made. Rwanda's gross domestic
product has grown since 2001 at an estimated annual rate of 7 percent.
Literacy rates have soared, while fertility rates have plummeted.
Alone in the Great Lakes region of Africa, the country has a national
health care policy that provides coverage for less than $100 per
person per year. Once a dusty, garbage-strewn city, Kigali is now a
bustling metropolis with soaring glass buildings separated by vast
stretches of manicured grass.
But as the report by Human Rights Watch makes clear, something
unsettling is happening beneath this shiny surface.
In January, the BBC reported that Mr. Kagame's former intelligence
chief Patrick Karegeya, who had fled to South Africa and was advising
intelligence officials there, was found strangled in Johannesburg. The
brazen murder led to the expulsion of three Rwandan diplomats from
South Africa. Mr. Kagame officially denied involvement, but the BBC
reported that he remarked soon afterward at a prayer meeting, "You
can't betray Rwanda and not get punished for it."
Among foreign aid workers, the level of fear is so high that no one
dares to talk about the government in public. "We call it the 24/20
rule," a health expert said in an interview in Kigali in April. "You
say something wrong and you get 24 hours to leave the country with 20
kilos worth of stuff." The political activist Paul Rusesabagina, who
saved the lives of at least 1,200 people during the genocide,
providing the inspiration for the film "Hotel Rwanda," said in a phone
interview: "It's like this government is swallowing people who
disagree."
In the 20 years since the genocide, Mr. Kagame and the governing
Rwandan Patriotic Front have built an excellent public relations
machinery portraying the ruling Tutsi elite as the "good guys" who put
an end to the genocide and the faceless Hutu masses as the "bad guys"
who did the bulk of the killing. But research conducted by numerous
respected scholars, among them Timothy Longman at Boston University
and Brian Endless at the University of Chicago, shows that Rwandans of
all ethnicities were caught up in the violence. Human rights groups
have found that the R.P.F. killed many Rwandans before, during and
after the 1994 genocide.
Many Rwanda scholars share the conviction that the R.P.F.'s
disinformation campaign predates the genocide, and that its first
public relations coup came on the night of April 6, 1994, when the
plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down over
Kigali, triggering the massacre.
At the time, suspicion fell on the R.P.F. The former chief of the
Rwandan Army under Mr. Kagame, Kayumba Nyamwasa, who is currently in
exile in South Africa, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Kagame's
order to shoot down the plane was "an open secret" known to "everyone
who was in the army at the time." In the space of 90 days, however,
that assumption was replaced with a conspiracy theory laying the blame
with Hutu extremists determined to get the genocide underway.
The result is that the distortion has become the truth. Only the
French, who had their own troubled history of interference in Rwanda,
have formally accused Mr. Kagame of shooting down Mr. Habyarimana's
plane. Americans, both in government and in the reception lines at
events where Mr. Kagame speaks, have been keen to support a government
that claims to represent the victims of the genocide, without
realizing that no alternative narrative has been allowed to emerge,
creating a vacuum in which Rwandan citizens are now demonstrably at
risk.
"A few unidentified individuals have been released" since the Human
Rights Watch report, said Carina Tertsakian, a researcher for the
rights organization. But for any genuine change to occur in a
dictatorship as entrenched as Rwanda's has proved to be, donors will
have to apply strong and sustained pressure. The United States alone
provides over $200 million in bilateral aid a year. It should make
every penny conditional on receiving an accounting of every person who
has been detained, apprehended or otherwise disappeared, and insist on
confirmation by local and international monitoring groups. Until that
happens, Rwandans just don't know who may be next.
Lara Santoro is a novelist who worked as a journalist in Rwanda from
1996 to 2004.
Susan Thomson is a professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate
University and the author of "Whispering Truth to Power: Everyday
Resistance to Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda."
A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 18, 2014, in The
International New York Times.
http://www.google.ca/gwt/x?gl=CA&wsc=yh&source=s&u=http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/opinion/why-are-rwandans-disappearing.html&hl=en-CA&ei=N06jU_aAH-iiswfhm4CgCA
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