Rwanda Genocide Deniers

It's very shocking and extremely disturbing that, there are some people who deny that there was Genocide in Rwanda; there are those who have been trying hard to spread lies and propaganda and twist real facts and the truth about the Rwandan genocide; there are those who deny that, it took meticulous planning - resulting in about 800,000 Tutsis and some Hutus, systematically being brutally butchered, in Rwanda, in 1994:

.........thousands of children butchered individually, by machete. And the massacres at hundreds of churches, mostly Catholic churches at that. Not to mention the systematic gang rapes of Tutsi women and girls which led the international tribunal to define rape as an act of genocide when part of an extermination campaign.

The genocide, while it coincided with the civil war and was clearly driven by the politics around the conflict, was mostly carried out by civilians against civilians far from the front. There was no "other side". There were the murderers and their unarmed, helpless victims. The Guardian

April 2009 marks the 15th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda of most of its Tutsi population and of many Hutu who refused to embrace violent extremism.

Yet at the same time, as in virtually every other genocide, denial is alive and kicking. Here is yet another common thread that binds the people that suffered through what many consider the three classic genocides of the 20th century - the Armenians, the Jews and the Rwandan Tutsis. The bitter and apparently never-ending fight against deniers, or revisionists, is a common cause among the survivors of all these genocides, one that will be highlighted in Rwanda in April 2009 as people from all over the world will gather to mark the 15th anniversary of the genocide of the Tutsi - Remembering Rwanda 15, or RR15.

If much of the world now remembers the genocide in Rwanda, the battle against those who deny that genocide is much less familiar though no less insidious than its Armenian or Holocaust equivalents. The persistence of Holocaust denial remains a reality everywhere in the world that anti-Semitism rears its head. In some countries it attracts elites. In the west it is the preserve of a lunatic fringe, and usually more an irritation than anything else. But there is always a well-earned fear that it could explode into something more ferocious, especially as anti-Semitism and opposition to Israeli policies sometimes become difficult to distinguish. AllAfrica

Why would any sane person deny such a horror ever happened? Perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide have been campaigning hard and spreading lies and propaganda, to gain sympathy; they are being assisted too, by other perpetrators of genocide in other parts of the world - like Bosnia. And: some Genocide defense lawyers and authors are today earning their living through negating the Genocide that left behind thousands of traumatized survivors.

They can spread lies and propaganda; they can twist and concoct facts; they can go on denying. But facts are facts. And the real truth is that: ten years ago, in April 1994, almost a million people were hunted like animals and raped, slaughtered, butchered and treated in the most inhumane and horrific ways one can imagine. No denying that: Genocide did take place in Rwanda in 1994.

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