For survivors of the 1994 genocide against Rwanda's Tutsis, it seems there can be no closure, no dignity, no respect.
Just as this month's 10th anniversary brought some international attention to the genocide for the first time in a decade, the deniers came out to play.
It was to be expected in France, of course, where négationnisme (denial) diverts attention from the well-documented complicity of the French government and military in the genocide.
It's been more surprising in Canada, where denial, until now, has been the perverse cult of a tiny coterie of Canadian lawyers who have defended accused genocidaires being tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), based in Arusha, Tanzania.
Now, however, twice within one week, opinion pieces in The Globe have appeared denying the genocide. One was Rick Salutin's regular column, in which Mr. Salutin claimed Rwanda ”was not genocide in the sense of the Holocaust.”
Once you say, in his words, that Rwanda ”was more a crude manipulation of traditional tribal hate” than a sophisticated and systematic genocide, you're left with colonial ”heart of darkness” stereotypes, implying that mindless slaughter is the normal African way of life.
Since Mr. Salutin doesn't believe any of that, it's even more bizarre that he should suddenly trot out a baseless argument that leads to no other conclusion.
The Salutin column was followed only days later by an opinion piece by Gail Cohen, ostensibly about the working of the ICTR. The tribunal has been controversial from the moment of its inception, criticized by all sides, including me, for a legion of problems.
A fair and balanced assessment of the ICTR is an important exercise; many hope the new International Criminal Court can learn from the experiences of the two war-crimes tribunals in Arusha and The Hague (for Yugoslavia).
Then Ms. Cohen makes you wonder about her real agenda. Under the guise of examining the ICTR, she includes blatant denials that a genocide ever took place. She refers to the extremist Hutus who ”are alleged to have committed mass killings of Tutsis.”
She says there's ”no DNA evidence proving that most of those murdered were Tutsis; it may be that the Rwandan conflagration was more of a civil war than a genocide.”
She quotes some anonymous lawyer, who tells her that, ”The closer you get to it, the less it looks like a planned genocide, the more it looks like Ugandans and the RPF [rebels] planned an invasion to take over the government.”
What are the limits of free speech? Some issues somehow just get resolved in mainstream opinion, so that they're no longer open to public debate. That's why the sickos and bigots who still deny the Holocaust don't get media space to put their case. Why is the Rwandan genocide different?
Every outsider who was in the country during the genocide, including Canada's own General Roméo Dallaire and Médecins sans frontières director Dr. James Orbinski, as well as the few journalists who remained, agree completely on what happened.
Every foreign official who flew in to investigate, from skeptical UN bureaucrats to Robert Fowler, then deputy minister of Canada's Department of Defence, agree on what happened.
Every investigation undertaken since 1994 agrees there was a conspiracy by a handful of Hutu extremists to exterminate all Rwanda's Tutsis, and more studies documenting the case in ever-greater detail continue to appear; I would be happy to provide a list.
Rwandans don't need outsiders to speak for them: I offer to introduce Mr. Salutin and Ms. Cohen to as many survivors of the genocide as they can bear to listen to, right here in Toronto, who will tell their own stories of the eight or 24 or 73 family members they lost to Hutu genocidaires. They can then tell those Rwandans to their face that there was no genocide of the Tutsis.
The deniers have no case whatever, as all the evidence makes incontrovertibly clear. Even if it were ever to be proved that the RPF shot down the Hutu president's plane — which has never been done — the fact of the genocide remains indisputable.
The parallels between the Holocaust and the genocide of the Tutsis are far greater than the differences. In both cases, the research abundantly demonstrates that a small clique of extremists planned and organized, in Mr. Salutin's description of the Holocaust, "the bureaucratized elimination of a group," planned at various meetings, "and based on a well-developed, pseudo-scientific ideology of race."
In both cases, the mission of the extremists was to eliminate in its entirety a minority, based not on anything they had done but on who they were. In both cases, the genocidaires came diabolically close to total success.
We know the kind of people who deny the Holocaust. What interest anyone has in denying the genocide of Rwanda's Tutsis remains to be discovered.
Gerald Caplan is author of the Organization for African Unity report, "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," and co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Studies devoted to recent scholarship on the Rwanda genocide.
