Charles Onana thrives on denying the Genocide against the Tutsi.
A long overdue trial is taking place in Paris. The case began at the beginning of the month, and is scheduled to conclude before the beginning of the next. Anyone familiar with the case, and the defendant, might be tempted to place a heavy bet on a guilty verdict. That however, might be to flecklessly overlook the fact that the very system that now suffers the defendant to be tried, is the same system that emboldened him to feel sufficient impunity, to commit the crime in the first place.
The defendant, Charles Onana, is a Cameroonian-French Investigative journalist, Political scientist, essayist, to name but a few of the labels he wears. Certainly, whatever his sins, idleness is not among them. It seems that it is not only idle hands, for which the devil finds work.
Of all his activities, Onana has relentlessly devoted most of his energies on denying the Genocide Against the Tutsi. It might not be overstating it to say that he has made denying the Genocide Against the Tutsi, his life’s work. Except that that would be burdening him with a degree of sincerity he does not possess. Onana has no belief in anything he has written, he is after all a mere functionary.
There have always been Africans like Onana, Africans through whom colonial depictions of Africa and Africans are transmitted, so that the colonial masters can not only avoid getting their hands dirty, but keep those hands hidden, to maintain the pretence that they are observers rather than manipulators. Masks however do invariably slip, revealing such as Onana, as little more than programmed errand boys or girls.
Indeed, in the case of Onana, it is his French nationality, rather than his Cameroonian origins that his apparent dedication to the denial of the Genocide Against the Tutsi, begins. Somewhere at the back, if not very much at the forefront of his mind, he may be celebrating the trial, gratified that he is following in the footsteps of his French mentor, Pierre Pean.
The similarities between Pean and Onana are uncanny. This is no more surprising than the similarity between an original and its copy.
Like Onana, Pean was also an investigative journalist, and like Onana, when it came to Rwanda, in particular, Pean would never suffer the facts to get in the way of an almost desperate, neo-colonial imperative to be the one who defines Rwanda, and Rwandans.
That depiction has to show Rwandans as less than, and Europeans as their tutors. Except that the student would never, and must never be seen to rise to the level of the tutor, the master. Their positions must be irrevocable, frozen in aspic. The good student accepts this, but always strives to please the master, so, Onana toils to be Pierre Pean, knowing full well that he will never be, and in any case, never daring to imagine that he could be.
Were truth all that mattered, Onana’s defence might be that he is only playing the part allotted to him. When he refers to the Genocide Against the Tutsi, as “the biggest scam of the twentieth century” he is only echoing his masters, Pean, especially.
Rwandans and the neo-colonialists agree that the Genocide Against the Tutsi, was an abomination, but for different reasons. For the colonialists and their hand maidens, the fact of that Genocide cannot be allowed to be, for to accept the truth of it, is to necessarily acknowledge their part in it. “In such countries, genocide is not so important,” then President of France, Francois Mitterrand, is reported to have dismissively declared, about one of the most harrowing genocides of any generation, in which he himself made his country entirely complicit.
The implication in Mitterrand’s attitude of course, was that Africans are savages, and there was nothing noteworthy in their massacring each other. The irony of course, is that it reveals a fathomless degree of inhumanity in someone, who can feel nothing, except contempt, in the face of such unimaginable horror and suffering.
Over the years, Charles Onana’s works dwelled on denying the Genocide against the Tutsi, now he has to answer for it in court.
And irony of ironies, it is those he regards as savages, to whom the very idea of genocide, is a horror that is foreign, while the seed of genocide, is planted by those he anoints as the superior, civilised race.
It ought not to be forgotten that to murder their own, the planners and perpetrators of the Genocide Against Tutsi, had to first abandon their culture, their values, and follow their colonial masters into the demonic mindset, that allows, but justifies the mass murder of men, women and children.
But this fact cannot be allowed to be, it upends the order of things, where Europe is supreme, and Africa savage. And since the Genocide Against Tutsi, could only have been conceived by the supreme beings, aided and abetted by them, it cannot be allowed to be, it has to be denied. Who better to drive the campaign of denial than the good student, forever looking up to the master, the good student, like Charles Onana.
It is significant that the case against Onana, had to be brought by activist groups, who obliged the system to bring to justice someone who up until then was being lauded by that system. But for the Rwanda Community in France, lawyer Richard Gisagara, among them, Survie, an independent human rights organisation, and LICRA or Ligue Against Racism and antisemitism, IBUKA, which represents survivors of the Genocide Against the Tutsi, without these organisations, Onana, would disporting himself in yet another venue, spouting his fabrications, rather than standing in the dock, answering for them.
In a career of denial that spans over two decades, Onana has written eight books on Rwanda, each one a travesty of the truth, each intended to rewrite history, denying the Genocide Against Tutsi, albeit in subtle tones. Rather than being censured, he became a celebrity, feted, a regular speaker at august institutions.
And as well he would be, he is their finest creation, who leads them away from the inconvenient truth of who and what they are. There was no such thing as a Genocide Against the Tutsi, there was a double genocide, it was the fault of the RPF, it matters not a bit that the investigative journalist, the political scientist simply spews forth garbled contradictions. They serve a purpose. They distract from the truth of the West’s responsibility in planting and cultivating the seed of genocide.
The Rwandan-French sociologist and anti-racism activist, Jessica Mwiza, trenchantly unmasks the truth. Without the racist fantasies of the European pseudo anthropologists, with their invention of the “Hamitic” versus “Bantu” theories, there is, she says, “no Genocide Against Tutsi.”
Onana dramatised the court appearance, to pupport that his life was under threat.
It is a genocide made in Europe, from the European mind into the minds of those Rwandans, who severed the umbilical cord connecting them to their culture and values, to become the instruments of colonial murderous malignancy. The Rwandans who plan how the genocide is to be executed, must not just dehumanise the targeted community, they also needs must, disavow their Rwandan values.
The spectacle at what was at a times a chaotic trial, was instructive of the architecture of the denial of the Genocide Against Tutsi.
Onana called the who is who among the champions of genocide ideology, to speak for him. From Rwanda, came the members of the former genocidal regime of then President Juvenal Habyarimana, and their supporters. They now make France their home, and their base from which pour forth denials of the genocide they planned, and perpetrated.
There were Congolese, merchants of chaos, who have drunk deep from the well of genocide ideology, dug for them by the genocide establishment, they welcomed with open arms, into their body politic. They caused such a commotion at a trial, the judge had to halt proceedings. Outside the court, the police had to be called to stop them attacking those they saw as their opponents.
And then there were the masters, the puppeteers, for whom Onana, and all those who stood behind him, from the Congolese to the Rwandans, danced. The entire leadership of the discreditable Operation Turquoise. An exercise which in the middle of a genocide obscenely called itself a humanitarian intervention, when in reality, it was intended to come to the aid of the genocidal forces who had been defeated.
Interestingly, as Richard Gisagara observed, the gathered veterans of Operation Turquoise, were more interested in exonerating their shameful role, than in the defence of Onana. The fate that hangs over all puppets, is that given a moment, the puppeteer may snip the strings, if it seems more profitable than dangling the puppet.
Had the Congolese rioters in the courtroom managed a calm, honest thought among them, they would have realised that there, before their eyes, in the form of the Generals and Colonels, who commanded Operation Turquoise, was the cause of the crisis in their land. But there they were, baying for the blood of Rwanda and Rwandans, as the masters contentedly manipulated the puppet strings.
The fate of Onana, and what it may mean for the fight against Genocide ideology, will be known in December.
