Remediation in Rwanda. Kristin Conner Doughty

2009:80–102). Overlooking the fact that four times as many people died in the eastern DRC between 1998 and 2006 as in the genocide, in a war in which Rwanda was heavily involved (Lemarchand 2009:5), maintained the uniqueness of the Rwandan situation to strengthen the RPF’s genocide credit.

      Masking Past and Present Divisions

      The dominant master narrative emphasized externally produced ethnicity, and how a rogue political regime misused it, to the exclusion of recognizing other kinds of social identities, divisions, and misuses of political power in the past and present. In his speech, President Kagame explained:

      Genocide in Rwanda was not an uncontrollable outburst of rage by people consumed by ancient tribal hatreds as has been suggested by some western anthropologists and sociologists and even espoused by some in African scholarship. It was deliberate, calculated, premeditated, and cold blooded as a result of a distorted ideology that preached death and extermination of a section of Rwandan society.… We know that they [killers] were responding to the vicious campaign of hate by the architects of the genocide, men and women who held the highest offices in the land. This elite, which had for a long time misappropriated and controlled the government army, radio and television stations, was most instrumental in fomenting ethnic division and hatred, a strategy they subsequently transformed into genocide.