Silly, silly me

For weeks i’ve been wondering why i haven’t had any comments on this blog for ages.

That’s when I discovered the ‘Publish Comments’ option, and was finally able to see how people have been responding to my shameless self-publicity.

There have been some notable contributions, amongst some very disturbing ones. One, presumably myopic, person accused me of having a ‘shapely arse’ but declined to leave their name, giving me the impression that somewhere out there is a stalker with a pair of binoculars trained on my backside. Scary.

In any case, get commenting, because the way has now been cleared of the obstacle that was my technological incompetence.

Standing up to the bullies

When i was about seven, i had a nanny who offered me a piece of unconventional advice.

She said, ‘If any bigger boys try to bully you or call you names, just smack them in the gob and they won’t do it again.’ She was of course wrong, as I repeatedly found out to my cost in the playground over the next few years.

Even so, there is some pride to be had in holding your own against those who are more powerful than you. Which is why it’s good to see little old Rwanda standing up to this ludicrous attempt by the French to implicate President Paul Kagame in the events leading up to the 1994 genocide.

It seems unlikely that the truth will ever be known about who exactly was responsible for shooting down the plane carrying the then Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, the short-term cause of the violence. The French claim that only the Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Kagame, had the weapons or the expertise to do so.

This is an all-too convenient hypothesis, especially given that Belgian intelligence officials reported that ethnic cleansing began in some parts of Rwanda within half an hour of the assassination. Odd, in a war-torn country with a relatively sparse communications network.

But of course, the French should know best when it comes to the supply of weapons and training to African troops. After all, it was our Gallic chums who were instrumental in arming and training the Rwandan ‘Interahamwe’, who perpetrated the mass slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Furthermore, there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that the slaughter had already been in the pipeline for months, with weapons as well as misinformation about RPF atrocities diligently dispersed amongst the Hutu population.

This latest effort to find someone new to blame for some 800,000 murders is little more than a diversionary tactic, designed to draw attention away from the somewhat dubious role played by France in the run-up to the genocide.

Somehow it is always easier to assume blame on the part of some relatively unknown African leader thousands of miles away than it is to accept the abject failure of the international community.

So hats off to Kagame for responding with appropriate anger by closing the French embassy in Kigali. My nanny would have been proud.

For further information on theories surrounding the Rwandan genocide, read Linda Melvern’s work ‘Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide’, as recommended by the Great Lakes Centre for Strategic Studies.