In an article in the London-based Guardian newspaper titled: “Why the reluctance to recognise Israel’s genocide in Gaza?”, Kenneth Roth performs a tired sleight of hand: dragging Rwanda into a wholly unrelated context, to recycle his long-standing vendetta against the post-genocide Rwandan government.
Roth’s piece claims “Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Kagame alike invoke historical genocide, the Holocaust and the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, to deflect from current atrocities” in Gaza and eastern DRC.
This is propaganda rooted in decades of bias.
Since taking over as Human Rights Watch’s Executive Director in 1993, Roth has consistently targeted Rwanda, even after stepping down in 2022. What Roth averred and implied in this latest piece can be distilled into four commands addressed to post-genocide Rwanda: let genocidal parties back in; don’t outlaw their ideology; limit prosecutions to a handful of perpetrators; and, above all, admit moral equivalence with the génocidaires who slaughtered over a million Tutsi.
This grotesque false equivalence frames Rwanda’s defensive actions against the FDLR, a militia founded by the very masterminds of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, as predatory invasions driven by greed for Congolese minerals. Yet Roth never asks why the FDLR still exists on Congolese soil three decades later, or why Tshisekedi’s regime hasn’t dismantled them. Instead, he blames Kigali, as though Rwanda created the FDLR or benefits from its genocidal terror. His stance toward the FDLR is telling: minimise its genocidal roots, oppose forceful disarmament, and call for Rwanda to open “political space” wide enough to include its genocidal leaders.
Roth also recycles the evil fiction of “six million Congolese deaths” attributed to Rwanda.
This fictitious count (widely circulated), conflates conflict-related mortality, mostly from disease and famine in zones under Kinshasa and allied Mai-Mai militia control, with the “supposed” intervention by Rwandan forces. Roth never acknowledges that the initial Rwandan interventions in then-Zaire had the stated purpose of neutralising génocidaires threatening renewed slaughter in Rwanda, a threat ignored by the international community.
Moreover, Roth criticises Rwanda for criminalising “genocide ideology.” But post-genocide Rwanda’s approach isn’t an abstract restriction of speech: it’s a measured defence against the reemergence of the same hate propaganda that led to the mass murder of Rwandan Tutsi. Roth effectively demands that Rwanda invite the architects of genocide back into national politics, an unimaginable position in any society emerging from comparable horror.
The bitter Roth’s hit piece in The Guardian is less about human rights than about erasing history’s context to attack a government he has targeted for 30 years.
ellenkampire