Thread by @DavidHundeyin

Anyone who has actually bothered to read in depth about the Great Lakes conflict in East Africa and not get their history from Hotel Rwanda or Sometimes in April would know that Paul Kagame and the RPF are the furthest thing that exist from heroes.

They are literal war criminals

And furthermore, it is extremely unhelpful to see the Rwandan Genocide as a standalone event caused by simple-minded ethnic resentment.

The Hutu psychosis that led to Tutsi slaughter in Rwanda did not in fact come out of nowhere. It doesn't excuse it, but it explains it.

The 1993 murder of Burundi's first Hutu president Melchoir Ndadaye in a coup attempt by a Tutsi faction of the military led to the slaughter of up to 150,000 Hutu civilians in Burundi.

If you don't know this, you know nothing about the Rwandan conflict.
refworld.org/docid/469f3873…

It was the events in Burundi that created Hutu psychosis in Rwanda a year later when the country's own first-ever Hutu president (Juvenal Habyarimana) was assassinated.

Again it does not excuse what happened next, but it explains it. Things don't just happen out of nowhere.

It benefits the disingenuous strongman that is Paul Kagame for the world to think that Rwandan Hutus were a group of weak-minded morons who just fell into a murderous frenzy out of nowhere, as against the reality that like any other people, they were responding to stimuli.

If the world believes that simplistic, ahistorical and profoundly dishonest narrative, it means Kagame gets a pass no matter what he does because "Hey maybe they need a strong hand to keep them in check so they don't wake up one morning and start slaughtering Tutsis again."

A brief primer on the subject is available here.
theguardian.com/news/2017/sep/…