Whistleblowing No.2 — MORE THAN DENIAL, POLARIZATION IS BADLY THREATENING NOW AND NEEDS BEING ADDRESSED URGENTLY TO AVOID ANOTHER GENOCIDE IN RWANDA

On June 24-25, 2021, Lonzen Rugira, Alice Kirezi and Gatete N. Ruhumuliza on Twitter sounded an alert inviting to uphold Denial and treat it as the priority of priorities to be fought against in order to avoid the occurrence of another Genocide in Rwanda, and to this cause they argued respectively as follows:

● “I hold the view that denial is not just the last stage of genocide. It is also simultaneously the first. If deniers win, a genocide has started. I’m eager to take part in this conversation on a life or death subject of genocide denial. Tune in tomor[row] 4pm Kigali time” (Lonzen Rugira). Said by Muck Rack to be “the publisher and editor in chief of panafricanreview.rw”, Panafrican Review further states that “Dr Lonzen Rugira is a Rwandan independent consultant in applied policy research and a public affairs commentator. He is a former academic at Howard University and at the University of Rwanda”, whereas Aegis Trust on its part writes of him that “Dr Lonzen Rugira conducted his PhD at Howard University in the United States. His doctoral thesis investigated security and peace issues in the Great Lakes region of Africa, and he is now affiliated to the Centre for Conflict Management”.?

● “You are right, denial to me is a primary stage of another more prepared Genocide; this time, more disguised & more accepted. Criminalizing & legislating denial is the way forward. Fighting deniers, & exposing them is a strong & winning tool. War vs war. They rise, We rise” (Alice Kirezi). Alice Kirezi is the Operations Manager of the University of Kigali [UoK] and, according to one UoK tweet indeed, “She is a CPA with vast experience in the field of Strategic Policy Formulation, Financial Planning, Operations and Project management. She is an MBA Graduate from Oklahoma Christian University-USA @alicegahiiga”.

● “Thank you for this, Dr. Rugira. Indeed denial is not a last stage; it is the channel, the enabler of the genocide, before, during and after” (Gatete N. Ruhumuliza). While Gatete N. Ruhumuliza self-identifies as a “Business Attorney: Investment | Regulation | Real Estate | Business Intelligence | Political Analyst | Blogger”, according to Fair Observer “Gatete Nyiringabo Ruhumuliza is a business lawyer and a writer. He is senior fellow at the Institute of Policy Analysis and Research, a think tank that evaluates the Rwandan government’s performance, and a member of the Rwandan Bar Association. Nyiringabo Ruhumuliza is also a ghostwriter for African heads of state and senior executives, and a book reviewer for African authors”.

● Other protagonists who either took part in the tweeting thread that involved the above-mentioned three key tweeps or were tagged onto that thread include the following: @RwandaUN (The Permanent Mission of Rwanda to the United Nations); @RwandaRemembers (National Commission for the Fight against Genocide or CNLG); @DodoPicard (Doris); @Fiona_Kamikazi (Fiona Kamikazi Rutagengwa); @raimamug (Raima Mug #teamPK); @awozdeya (Jeanine Munyeshuli); @EugeneRwubaka (RWUBAKA EUGENE); @0Ghissy2 (Ghissy2.0); @MugaboLiban (Mugabo Liban); @TuratsinzeJame6 (Turatsinze James); @NIYIRORAChrist1 (NIYIRORA Christian); and @gasemma23 (Emma GAS).

The above-evoked alert was actually inviting (“Tune in tomor[row] 4pm Kigali time” – Lonzen Rugira) to uphold Denial and treat it as the priority of priorities to be fought against in order to avoid the occurrence of another Genocide in Rwanda by the means of engaging in an online debate to be hosted the next day by the UN Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, which debate Lonzen Rugira, for a reason I failed to grasp, was considering to be a long awaited collision through the following words: “People have always looked forward to this collision. It’s now here, free of charge”.?

Notwithstanding the said debate being considered to be a long awaited collision however, the issue at hand as was set out to be debated in the above-evoked alert is an issue which, contrary to the tweet of Fiona Kamikazi Rutagengwa claiming that Lonzen Rugira’s “intro tweet is already challenging Gregory H. Stanton’s 10 Stages of Genocide”, has already been addressed by the same Dr Gregory Stanton founding president and chairman?of Genocide Watch though, especially through the following precautionary observation he made at the very beginning of his Ten Stages of Genocide’s introductory paragraph by formulating the said observation’s last two sentences both bolded and underlined, but with a special focus being herein put on the very last of these sentences hereafter written in capital letters:?

Genocide is a process that develops in ten stages that are predictable but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop it.?

The process is not linear [sic].?Stages MAY [emphasis and capitalization added, just to highlight Stanton did not use MUST] occur simultaneously.?Each stage is itself a process [sic].?LOGICALLY, LATER STAGES ARE PRECEDED BY EARLIER STAGES.?BUT ALL STAGES CONTINUE TO OPERATE THROUGHOUT THE PROCESS [bolding, underlining and capitalization added].?

Nevertheless, it is perfectly in order that, since the perception of almost all the above-mentioned tweeps particularly converges towards the stage of Denial being the key issue needing urgently to be handled now —— and here we need to remember the psychological principle that “perception is always selective” (Brown: 1999, p.227; ?oga?: 2013, slide 9; in this perspective still, more detailed explanations on the concept of ‘Selective Perception’ may be found from PsycholoGenie, Wikipedia, ExploringYourMind, and ScienceDirect[1]) —— those tweeps are actually attracted by the stage of Denial (i.e. Stanton’s stage no.10) above all the other stages because Denial is perhaps the stage that seems more critical to them. Someone else may however also acceptably be attracted by another stage above all the other stages depending on where he/she lays importance. In this respect for instance:

● For Brooks (2021, webpage), it is the stage of Dehumanization (i.e. Stanton’s stage no.4) which is more critical, and she expresses this idea by writing that “it was the dehumanising propaganda that motivated extreme violence” of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. And currently too, Dehumanization is back on the rampage as was the case in the lead-up to 1994 as can be seen from here and here.

● As for me, because I find the lack of Social Cohesion to be more critical insofar as prevention is concerned, I am?personally more attracted by the stage of Polarization (i.e. Stanton’s stage no.6) instead of the stage of Denial, not to mean that Denial is not important but simply to mean that, TO ME AS A PEACE EDUCATION PROFESSIONAL WORRIED BY MY COUNTRY’S PEACEFULNESS, the now all-around and pervasively threatening issue of Polarization (see for instance here, here, and even here; I have also particularly denounced this issue of Polarization in a previous Whistleblowing here) more straightforwardly needs to be addressed in priority as compared to Denial. Again, to me, once Polarization would be addressed, Denial would be addressed too ipso facto because Social Cohesion’s enabling mutual understanding, mutual empathy and mutual compassion would have been developed into the respective antagonizing groups of people. In this regard, National Unity and Reconciliation Commission [NURC] (2016) makes the following two chief statements both of which expressly call for the above-mentioned Social Cohesion’s induced mutuality or [positive] reciprocity:

● “Full successful reconciliation cannot take place without an adequate degree of genuine dialogue of a mutual [emphasis added] and interactive nature. That is to say, the conditions and outcomes of successful dialogue lay the groundwork for the reciprocal [emphasis added] enactment of the necessary elements of reconciliation: Acknowledgment of transgressions, apologies of these, forgiveness of these, and assurances that such acts will not occur in the future[2]/589” (Idem, p.135).

● “Mutual trust is thus the chief ingredient in social cohesion [emphasis added]” (Idem, p.144).

Once proceeding in the above-described way, we shall be ensuring ‘Never Again’ not only for any one particular group of people now antagonizing against their fellow Rwandans from the other side of the Polarization, but for all the groups of people from the two sides of the Polarization. This whole idea was actually once expressed in the public address Mr Alphonse Munyantwali, then Governor of Western Province in Rwanda, delivered to the people who had attended the 25th anniversary of remembrance of the victims of the Genocide against the Tutsi held April 12, 2019 at the Memorial of Commune Rouge in Gisenyi Sector, Rubavu District, Rwanda’s Western Province, which public address’ full transcript in Kinyarwanda (VOA Radiyoyacu, April 12, 2019 at 17:30, audio file available here, segment running from VLC Player’s 10:28 to11:16)[3] but now translated in English for the purpose of the present article is as follows:

As for us, our responsibility today, building on the hope we have, is we want never again to be real. Because it has been said at that time I told you subsequently to the genocide perpetrated against the Jews, but it got perpetrated later on afterwards, against the Tutsi. What I was just saying is that one who fights genocide fights a crime against humanity, and such a person here has come to protect him/herself too. All who have come here, all of you, all of us, we too have come here to protect ourselves, so that genocide never happens again. But what I am saying is, genocide was perpetrated against the Tutsi but genocide was not created for the Tutsi, the one perpetrated against the Jews was not because genocide was perpetrated against the Tutsi but genocide was not created for the Tutsi, the one perpetrated against the Jews was not because genocide was a particular making for the Jews, genocide was not created for them. Genocide was created neither for the Tutsi, nor for the Jews against whom it was perpetrated. It may be perpetrated against any human being whomsoever. So, anyone preventing it should be well aware they are protecting themselves too. The whole point is we are not fighting it in order to avert it from being perpetrated against the Tutsi once again. It may actually be perpetrated against the Tutsi, or against any other people whomsoever, since it gets perpetrated against the human being. So, whoever prevents it protects him/herself too [emphasis and underlining added].

At this juncture after being prompted to scrutinize in more depth Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide, I came up with the NOVEL organization of the said 10 stages into the following 4 categories:

→ Category 1: The Necessary 5 Stages, i.e. Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization.?

→ Category 2: The Sufficient 3 Stages which build upon the Necessary Stages, i.e. Polarization, Preparation, Persecution. And as one would argue that the more protracted Polarization is, the more likely Preparation and further Persecution (for instance, see here, here and here[4]) get the chance of being realized too, it is to be noted that Polarization (at least Polarization along Hutu-Tutsi ethnic lines, with the “reversal and confrontation” of 1959-1962 [Sellstr?m & Wohlgemuth: 1996, p.29; see also Majka: 1979] as well as the crisis that started with a war in 1990 and culminated in a genocide in 1994) has actually ALWAYS prevailed in both pre- and post-genocide Rwanda (McDoom: 2012; Alder & Yang: 2021) such that it qualifies now to be called a ‘protracted Polarization’.

→ Category 3: The 1 Stage of the Genocide’s actual implementation which builds upon the Necessary and Sufficient Stages, i.e. Extermination.

→ N.B.: Generally speaking, the concept of ‘Stages of Genocide’ may actually be understood as ‘Stages leading to Genocide’, or also ‘Causes or Conditions required to be fulfilled for Genocide to occur’. So, it is in this perspective that the following specific statement by Texas State University’s Department of Philosophy may be argued to clear the confusion which usually exists between Necessary and Sufficient Conditions, or Causes, or even Stages: “A necessary condition is a condition that must be present for an event to occur. A sufficient condition is a condition or set of conditions that will produce the event. A necessary condition must be there, but it alone does not provide sufficient cause for the occurrence of the event. Only the sufficient grounds can do this”. At this specific juncture however, to set in motion all that the Necessary and Sufficient Conditions or Causes made ready to start, there is also need for what is called ‘a trigger’ in the sense of “an event […] that causes something to start” (Cambridge Dictionary).?This whole latter provision is otherwise expressed by Jaworski (2017, webpage) when she equates the set of Necessary and Sufficient Conditions/Causes to what she designates as a set of Standing Conditions/Causes by suggesting that, for example, “when a match is lit in the presence of a volatile gas, it triggers an explosion. The gas was there already, and so it was a standing cause of the explosion. Hence, a triggering cause is a new factor introduced under a standing set of conditions [or causes], and that combines with the standing conditions [or causes] to bring about the effect. If you’re already in a bad mood, and a rude comment sends you into a tirade, then your bad mood was a standing cause of the tirade, and the comment served as the trigger”.

→ Category 4: The 1 Stage of Denial which is rightly qualified by Gatete N. Ruhumuliza as “the enabler” of the Genocide spread throughout the whole genocidal continuum at all its moments of before, start and during as well as, even much more concretely and more importantly, after the perpetration of an initial Genocide when the latter is actually denied by its perpetrators as per the specification of Gregory Stanton’s last section titled Afterword that: “Impunity after previous genocides or politicides is evidence of Denial”.

In the final analysis therefore, given the above-evoked now all-around and pervasively threatening issue of Polarization among Rwandans (see for instance here, here, and even here; I have also particularly denounced this issue of Polarization in a previous Whistleblowing here), it appears most effective to uphold the first stage of Category 2 above (i.e. Polarization which, for Rwanda, proves to be protracted) and treat it as the priority of priorities to be dealt with in the first place in order to avoid the occurrence of another Genocide in Rwanda given that due to it being ‘protracted’, Polarization (see Genocide Watch’s assessment updated February 2021) is currently the most threatening issue in comparison to Denial.

So this time too as I did with my previous Whistleblowing (see here), AS A PEACE EDUCATION PROFESSIONAL WORRIED BY MY COUNTRY’S PEACEFULNESS I hereby convey the present Whistleblowing No.2 over to anyone willing and able, and further seek from everyone well thought-through proposals as to how effectively resolve the critical issue of ‘protracted Polarization’ currently threatening to serve as a context conducive to the occurrence of another Genocide in Rwanda in case, this time too as it especially so happened against the Tutsi in 1994, a critical event likely to shake up the balance of the now existing power and thus serve as a trigger suddenly erupted in the above-evoked current context of a ‘protracted Polarization’ the way the shooting down of President Habyarimana’s Falcon 50 plane did in 1994 (see for instance: BBC; Boston College Third World Law Journal Vol23 No2; African Union’s Panel of Eminent Personalities; UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals - Legacy website of the ICTR since the closure of the latter on 31 December 2015; and United Nations’ Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda). ALL THIS BECAUSE, AFTER ALL, WHAT IS GENOCIDE?

● In actual fact, one of Genocide’s simplest definitions but conceptual — i.e. not operational like the legal definition given in Art.II of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide —?is the following:?

Melson (1982, p.483)[5]: “Genocide is a kind of mass murder perpetrated by the state against civilians for political ends [emphasis added], but it differs from massacre in the nature and scope of its aims. Genocide is a kind of massacre which seeks physically to eliminate or extirpate a communal group from the social structure, thereby transforming that structure” [emphasis added].

● Not far from Melson (1982), US Naval Academy political scientist Professor Barbara Harff also finds the term ‘genocide’ to be closely related to the term ‘politicide’ such that she always uses both terms alongside each other and defines both of them, according to Human Security Report (2005, p.40), “as acts perpetrated by governments (or in civil wars, by their opponents) that are ‘intended to destroy in whole or in part a communal, political or politicized ethnic group’”.

● And finally referring to the particular observation once made by Professor Barbara Harff according to which ‘prior genocides and politicides’ increase many times the likelihood of occurrence of future genocides and politicides (see Harff: 2012a, p.54; and Harff: 2012b here or else here, p.6), Aegis Trust CEO Dr James Smith on his part comments as follows:

Smith (2015, webpage): “One risk factor for genocide, as identified by political scientist Barbara Harff, is the occurrence of previous massacres of the group at risk. It is clear that a state of impunity for initial offences will not reduce the risk of further atrocities allowing perpetrators time to consider how they might execute more radical solutions for what they view as their troublesome ethnic or religious problem, should the opportunity or need arise”.

References

Alder, S. & Wang, Y. (2021) Divide and Rule: How Political Elites Polarize Society. Paper produced and published February 15, 2021 with the Financial support from the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant IPCDP-229883), available here.

Brooks, N. (2021) Burundi vs. Rwanda: Potential for a Future Genocide. Article published 24 January 2021 in Australian Institute of International Affairs’ Australian Outlook, available here.

Brown, C., Hanc B.-L., & Pangsapa, N. (1999) Cognitive Dissonance and Selective Perception: Their Relevance to Advertising. Chapter 20 in J. P. Jones [Editor] The Advertising Business: Operations, Creativity, Media Planning, Integrated Communications. London: Sage Publications, pp.225-234. Available here.

?oga?, Z. (2013) Attention: The Role of Parietal Cortex. Lecture’s PowerPoint Presentation available here.?

Harff, B. (2012a) Assessing Risks of Genocide and Politicide: A Global Watch List for 2012. Available here.

Harff, B. (2012b) Countries at Risk of Genocide and Politicide in 2012. In Guiding Principles of the Emerging Architecture Aiming at the Prevention of Genocide, War Crimes, and Crimes Against Humanity, pp.5-12. A report of the Genocide Prevention Advisory Network (GPANet) Conference held March 14-15, 2012 in The Hague, The Netherlands. Available here or else here.

Human Security Report (2005) “Targeting civilians”. Section published in Part I: The Challenging Face of Global Violence spanning pp.40-46 and available here.?

Jaworski, J. (2017) PHIL Exam 6 (85 Terms in 6 Flashcards). Created in December 2017, available here.

Majka, T. (1979).?Review of Leo Kuper’s book of 1977 titled “The Pity of It All: Polarization of Racial and Ethnic Relations”. In Humboldt Journal of Social Relations?Vol.6 No.2 pp.200-204, especially p.200 available here.

McDoom, O. S. (2012)?The psychology of threat in intergroup conflict: emotions, rationality, and opportunity in the Rwandan genocide.?In International Security Vol37 No2, pp.119-155, available here.

Melson, R. (1982) A Theoretical Inquiry into the Armenian Massacres of 1894-1896. In Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.24, No.3, pp.481-509, available here.

National Unity and Reconciliation Commission [NURC] (2016) Unity and Reconciliation Process in Rwanda. Kigali, Rwanda: NURC. Available here.

Sellstr?m, T. & Wohlgemuth, L. (1996) The International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience — Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, Study 1) Historical Perspective: Some Explanatory Factors. Uppsala, Sweden: The Nordic Africa Institute. Study made with contributions by P. Dupont & K. A. Schiebe, edited by D. Millwood, published by the Copenhagen Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, and available here.

Smith, J. (2015) Armenian Genocide: Truth Begins to Erode 100 years of Impunity. Comment from Aegis CEO, Dr James Smith. Available here.?

Endnotes

[1] “The concepts of selective exposure,?selective perception [emphasis added], and selective recall all point to the fact that people’s attitudes help to determine the kind of information that is available to them. People are more likely to seek out and be exposed to information that confirms their existing attitudes and to perceive and remember new information in ways that fit into their preexisting cognitive framework. The various models of cognitive consistency (e.g., Heider’s theory of cognitive balance, Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance) suggest that, in the interest of maintaining consistency, people tend to screen out information that is incongruent with their existing beliefs and attitudes. Although inconsistent information may also instigate attitude change, it is more likely to be resisted when the existing attitudes are strongly held and have wide ramifications, as is the case with enemy images” (International Conflict – Chapter contributed by Herbert C. Kelman, in Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology, 2004; passage excerpted from ‘3.2.2 Resistance to Contradictory Information’ available here).

[2]/589 Fisher, (2001:28) — A precision provided by the author of the present article is that, unfortunately, the full reference for this source was not provided and could even not be retrieved by any other means.

[3] Hereafter transcribed for the purpose of the present article, the original address in Kinyarwanda may read as follows: “Noneho twebwe inshingano dufite uyu munsi, dushingira ku cyizere dufite, ni ukugirango kuvuga ko jenoside itazongera ukundi bibe ingiro. Kuko byaravuzwe cya gihe nababwiye nyuma y’iyakorewe Abayahudi, ariko nyuma irongera iraba, ikorerwa Abatutsi. Icyo navugaga yuko urwanya jenoside arwanya icyaha gikorerwa inyokomuntu, nawe aba yaje kwirengera. Abaje hano mwese, twese, natwe twaje kwirengera, kugirango jenoside itazongera kuba ukundi. Ariko icyo mvuga ni uko, jenoside yakorewe Abatutsi ntabwo yaremewe Abatutsi, iyakorewe Abayahudi ntiyakorewe Abayahudi, ntiyabaremewe. Ntiyaremewe Abatutsi, ntiyanaremewe Abayahudi bayikorewe. Ishobora kuba ku kiremwamuntu icyo aricyo cyose. Uyikumira wese rero, ajye amenya ngo na we arirengera. Ntabwo ari ukuvuga ngo turiho turayirwanya kugirango itazongera kuba ku Batutsi. Ishobora kuba ku Batutsi, cyangwa ikaba ku bandi bantu abo aribo bose, kuko ikorerwa ikiremwamuntu. Uyikumira wese rero, na we arirengera” [emphasis and underlining added] (VOA Radiyoyacu, April 12, 2019 at 17:30, audio file available here, segment running from VLC Player’s 10:28 to11:16).

[4] Indeed, Gregory Stanton’s last section titled Afterword specifies that: “Massive violation of human rights is evidence of Persecution”.?

[5] According to Wikipedia, Robert Melson (born 1937, PhD in Political Science from MIT in 1967) is?“professor emeritus of political science and a member of the Jewish studies program at Purdue University, in Indiana, United States. From 2003 to 2005, he was the President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). In 2006 and 2007, he was the Cathy Cohen-Lasry Distinguished Professor in the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. Melson survived the Holocaust in Poland, escaping a pogrom with his parents and later living under false papers[1]. His primary area of expertise is in ethnic conflict and genocide”.