The love story between Mrs. Ingbire Victoire and Al Jazeera flourishes as the convicted criminal tries too hard to present himself as a victim fighting for democracy. This is the second article in only five months that Ingbire took part in a desperate attempt to get Al Jazeera to erase his criminality – the latter playing the part of a laundromat.
Unsurprisingly, “My Story: Being an Opponent in Rwanda,” is filled with blatant omissions that distort the whole picture of the trip that inevitably landed him in prison.
Ingbire’s story, as before, is aimed at a gullible newspaper and audience. Ingabire presents himself as an opposition figure who was in exile before deciding to take his political activism back home to Rwanda.
“In 1994, I was in the Netherlands, studying business management and the economy, when there was a genocide against Tutsi in my home country, Rwanda,” writes Ingbire. But she fails to explain why someone who did not take part in the killings and was not even present during the massacre remained in exile until 2010 before returning home, until several others took part in government-led programs. The medium had decided to do so voluntarily (as in “come and see, go and tell”) encouraging Rwandan refugees who had not participated in the killings and to help rebuild their country.
There are two main reasons for his delayed return due to intentional omission. One is the daughter of Ingabire Thérse Dusabé, who fled the country after being freed from the genocide and joined her daughter in the Netherlands. Among other genocidal crimes, Ingbere’s mother was convicted in absentia of the murder of Tutsi women who had come to give birth at the health center of the former Butamwa commune (present-day Mageregere sector), where she was a nurse. Therefore, Ingabire’s story is not unique, despite attempts to make himself an exception.
Relatives of criminals who have taken refuge abroad are delaying their return to Rwanda. Some choose to see for themselves what New Rwanda looks like; Others live under the influence of criminals and keep away cursing their country. Ingabire belonged to the second group.
Two, although Ingbire herself did not commit genocide, she joined genocidal forces in eastern DRC long before she decided to return to Rwanda in 2010. This is his second willful omission; This is another reason for his delayed return to Rwanda. The reason has huge implications as far as his criminality is concerned. “I watched with horror the reports of political upheaval, suffering and death coming from my beloved country. Despite being miles away, I was forced to do something, so I founded a political party called The United Democratic Forces of Rwanda (FDU-Inkingi),” Ingabire tells Al Jazeera readers.
But she omits a more important and embarrassing part of her dark past. Prior to the founding of the FDU, Ingabire was appointed, in 1998, as the Netherlands coordinator of the Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy in Rwanda (RDR), a “political” party formed at the Mugunga refugee camp in former Zaire . Those who appointed him were the masterminds of the Tutsi genocide; Their armed wing, made up of former FAR and Interahamwe militias, remained active in the camps.
Two years later, in August 2000, during the Third Congress of the RDR in Bonn, Germany, Ingbere was elected President of the RDR. In other words, Ingabire intended to “do something about the suffering and death that came from his beloved country” by leading a movement created by mass murderers. The founding fathers of the RDR were none other than the infamous genocidal mastermind and ideologue, Colonel Thioneste Bagosora and Dr. Ferdinand Nahimana, respectively. The latter headed the Cameroonian branch of the party. Both would later be arrested and convicted by the International Criminal Court for Rwanda (ICTR). So, when Ingbire tells Al Jazeera readers that her opponents have no evidence against her other than her “Hutu ancestry”, she reveals her true colors. She has never been one to let facts get in the way of a self-serving story. This is narcissism at its exemplary.
This complacency implies, as she does, that her opponents are all Tutsis and that the Hutus are collectively victims of persecution. It’s his usual tactic to divert attention from serious issues about his questionable past, while framing the debate in case of ethnic conflict. In it, Ingabeier sounds like a German whose ties to Nazism and Nazism will be exposed and the German in turn accuses his opponents of being Jewish. It is as if it is a crime to be Jewish when there is an issue of affiliation with Nazism. Ingabire fails to address the issues surrounding her ideology, which is evident not only through her political associations since 1995, but also through her past and recent speeches.
Like the RDR, the FDU-Inkingi – the political party Ingabire founded in 2006 – is made up of genocidal fugitives. For example, in 2010, the past caught up with the vice president of the FDU, Joseph Natawagundi, who had returned to Rwanda in the company of Ingabier. He came face to face with damaging testimonies, including his wife, and was brought to justice. Natwagundi pleaded guilty to direct involvement in the Tutsi genocide for calling for the killing of eight people. Joseph Mushandi, another genocide fugitive currently living in France, is in charge of the FDU’s Human Rights Commission in the FDU. The list is long and gives a clear picture of what FDU-Inkingi means, much to Ingabire’s great displeasure when the facts are mentioned. That is why he decided to break away from an organization that could not betray Rwanda with respect to its objective, which is to restart ethnic politics in Rwanda. She has since rebranded herself, but without giving up her criminal political ideology.
Ingbire’s speech at the Gisozzi memorial, which she distorts in the Al Jazeera story, is not the only speech that gives insight into her advocacy for ethnic confrontation and violence.
“Our message is that if nothing is done to bring in a representative government which in turn will bring about fair justice, there will still be problems, which will be bloodier than in 1994. […] The United Nations sits idle and Rwandans may decide to stand up and solve their problems violently, when the United Nations could have intervened long ago to help them find solutions,” Ingabire told the European Union in 2005. Said during a demonstration outside the headquarters.
It led both to prison in his speech at the Gisoji Memorial for advocating for violence and to reduce genocide against Tutsi. In fact, his links with violent armed groups such as the FDLR were proven in court beyond a reasonable doubt; As a result of the judicial cooperation of Rwanda and the Netherlands, substantial evidence was provided against him by the Dutch authorities. This happened despite zealous diligence tactics on the part of her husband, who tried in vain to challenge the court’s decision to transfer the evidence found at their home in the Netherlands to the Rwandan judicial authorities.
Ingbire’s intentional omissions in the article are numerous and cannot be summed up in one article. But since she decided to challenge the denialist character of her speech at the Gisoji Memorial, I feel compelled to expose her one more time. In that speech, Ingbire states that the second genocide against the Hutu took place in Rwanda.
“This memorial is limited to the victims of the genocide against Tutsi. There is no memorial to the victims of the genocide committed against the Hutu, who are also the victims,” says Ingabire, before asking: “When is it our turn?
Those unfamiliar with Rwanda’s history struggle to understand why this denial of genocide. But a common strategy of denialists is to relative the genocide by pointing to other crimes that may have been committed, although they are not classified as genocide. It is no different from a neo-Nazi one in that Holocaust memorials confine themselves to Jewish victims and they fail to include Germans killed during World War II. A German cannot ask, “When is it our turn now?”
Furthermore, as Jos van Ojen reminds us in his review in praise of blood, “The theory of double genocide is not new. It was used by narcissists in their trials and has been promoted by their followers and supporters. Hutu extremists have accused the RPF of genocide during the Rwandan civil war in the early 1990s. Then in May 1994, with half a million Tutsi killed at that time, the extremist regime accused the RPF of killing hundreds of thousands of Hutus. In other words, Ingbire – like a good protégé – is speaking of her acolytes in the RDR and FDU during and after the genocide against the Tutsi.
It would all be clear to Al Jazeera if their editors cared to verify what they were promoting. Had they done so, Ingbire would not have been able to hide her criminality behind the veil of freedom of expression and democracy. Al Jazeera should check the “sale” date of their product.
