New York – Louise Mushikiwabo, the self-styled, hard talking Rwandan Minister of Foreign Affairs gave an interview to New York Times published on April 28, 2010 (see here) around unprecedented repression unleashed by the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) against the opposition. The RPF is dominated by the ethnic Tutsi minority, that has been repressing the majority ethnic Hutu for decades. The repression has increasingly raised an outcry within the international community.
Faced with an overwhelming condemnation, the RPF enacted sweeping laws denying the existence of ethnic groups and made it a crime of “genocidal ideology” the fact of mentioning ethnic groups in Rwanda. Meanwhile, in order to maintain and tighten its grip on power, the RPF had to perpetuate ethnic divisions and keep ethnic Hutus under oppression. To extend the perennial financial windfall from genocide the RPF changed Article 14 of its constitution and created the concept of “Tutsi genocide”, claiming that only ethnic Tutsis were targeted by ethnic Hutus. The Rwandan judicial system is setup so that ethnic Hutus pay for these alleged crimes for generations to come and cannot claim any civil rights in Rwanda. Yet, many prominent ethnic Hutu politicians were killed during the 1994 Rwandan civil war, some because they collaborated with the Tutsi rebels. The majority were Hutu targeted by RPF and systematically massacred.
AfroAmerica Network was puzzled by the contradiction..
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