- Feb 23, 2013
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This situation echoes our history. Kenya and almost every African country was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris and Lisbon, with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart.
At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later.
Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited, but we would still pursue continental political, economic and legal integration.
Rather than form nations that looked ever backward into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known.
We believe that all states formed from empires that have collapsed or retreated have many peoples in them yearning for integration with peoples in neighboring states. This is normal and understandable. After all, who does not want to be joined to their brethren and to make common purpose with them?
However, Kenya rejects such a yearning from being pursued by force. We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.
If this statement were true, they wouldn't have given back land to Egypt and Jordan.When it comes to Israel, we're not dealing with a rational actor as their foundation is based on violent settler colonialism and expansion
Have you figured out yet how to fact check all the stuff you've been posting?why are you still going back and forth with people are literally don’t know **** and follow every word of mainstream media.
Longolongo believed that he had no choice but to join the Hutu militants. They taught him how to kill, and how to kill quickly. He was told that the Tutsi had enslaved the Hutu for more than 400 years and that if they got the chance, they would do it again. He was told that it was a patriotic act to defend his country against the “cockroaches.” He began to believe, he said, that killing the Tutsi was genuinely the right thing to do. Soon, he was placed in charge of other militia members.
For Longolongo, the fact that his mother was Tutsi and that he’d had Tutsi friends became a justification for his actions; he felt he had to make a public spectacle of his executions, to avoid suspicions that he was overly sympathetic toward the enemy. He feared that if he didn’t demonstrate his commitment to the Hutu-power cause, his family would be slaughtered. And so he kept killing. He killed his neighbors. He killed his mother’s friend. He killed the children of his sister’s godmother. All while he was hiding eight Tutsi in his mother’s house. Such contradictions were not uncommon in Rwanda.
As Longolongo told me his story, we were sitting with Serge Rwigamba, who works at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. Longolongo doesn’t speak English well, so Rwigamba served as our translator. We kept our distance from others in the courtyard, unsure who might overhear what we were discussing or how they might react to it.
On April 22, 1994, Longolongo recounted, he and an armed group of men entered a chapel where dozens of Tutsi were hiding. “We killed about 70 people,” he said, his gaze fixed directly ahead. “I felt like it was my duty, my responsibility … I had no pity.” He put his fingertips to the sides of his head. “I was brainwashed.”
After Longolongo got up to leave, I turned to Rwigamba. He had been visibly uncomfortable at points during the conversation—looking down at the ground, his fingers stretching and contracting across the arms of his chair as if searching for something to hold on to. Rwigamba is a Tutsi survivor, and dozens of his relatives were murdered in the genocide.
The two men, roughly the same age, had never met before. But as Longolongo was speaking, Rwigamba told me, he’d realized that he recognized one of the scenes being described.
It was the chapel. He knew that chapel. Rwigamba himself had been hiding there when Longolongo and his men attacked. His father and brother had been killed that day. Rwigamba had barely escaped. Now he leaned back in his chair, covered his face with his hands, and took a deep breath. We sat in silence for a few moments.
Longolongo, for his part, found meaning in the opportunity to come face-to-face with the families of those he had helped kill—to admit to his crimes, and to apologize. I asked him if his conscience is now clear. “I feel so relieved,” he said. He told me that he became friends with many of the surviving family members of Tutsi he had killed after he showed them where the bodies of their loved ones had been discarded. “I feel like I fulfilled my mission,” he said.
This revelation took me aback. “You mean you are now friends with some of the people whose loved ones you killed?”
Longolongo nodded and smiled. “After realizing that I was genuine and telling the truth, I’ve got so many friends.”
I wondered if friends was the word that these Tutsi would use to describe the relationship. I thought of a comment made by a genocide and rape survivor in the 2011 Human Rights Watch report: “This is government-enforced reconciliation. The government forced people to ask for and give forgiveness. No one does it willingly … The government pardoned the killers, not us.”
On the way back to my hotel in Kigali one evening, I spoke with my driver, Eric (given the sensitive nature of his comments, I am using only his first name). Eric is Rwandan, but he was born in Burundi. His family, like many other Tutsi at the time, left Rwanda in 1959 to escape violence at the hands of Hutu extremists. They returned in 1995, after the genocide ended.
I had read that, after the genocide, the RPF—now the ruling political party in Rwanda—officially eradicated the categories of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa on the grounds that they were false differences imposed on Rwandans by colonial powers, categories that had only led to conflict and bloodshed. There were no more ethnic categories, the government said, only Rwandans. I was curious how Rwandans identify today, regardless of the government’s directive, and I asked Eric about this.
“Some of them still identify. You can’t stop that. Some people still have that ideology. But also, it’s not something that is official.” He paused and began to speak again, then stopped abruptly. “It’s not allowed.” As he talked, I realized that, privately, Eric still seemed to think in terms of Tutsi and Hutu.
“I live together with someone who was in jail for 18 years. Someone who killed people. I know him,” Eric said. “He’s my neighbor.” Eric told me he doesn’t feel angry at this man—he has even hired him to do construction work on his house, and has had the man’s children do small tasks for him.
But as Eric went on, I noticed that he seemed to see this as a gesture of generosity, and a way of showing the Hutu that Tutsi are superior—that despite what the Hutu did to the Tutsi, the Tutsi were still willing to help them. That they would never do to the Hutu what the Hutu did to them, because they are more evolved.
Would you say that you’ve forgiven him? I asked.
“Yeah. I have forgiven him,” Eric said, nodding. But then he reconsidered. “You know, you can’t say that you have forgiven him 100 percent, but you have to move on,” he said. “We are not like them.”
I was struck by the texture of Eric’s voice when he said “them.” It was laced with a bitterness I had not yet encountered during my time in Rwanda. “Naturally, Tutsi and Hutu are not the same in their hearts,” he continued. “You will see. We are not the same. They have something bad in their hearts. They are naturally doing bad. That’s how they are.
“We leave them alone,” Eric said. “We give them what we’re supposed to give them. We try to live—to survive, to live with them. That’s it. That’s all. Still, we have to be careful, because we are not sure if their hearts have changed.
“Thirty years is not enough to trust them,” he continued. “We work together. We live together. But we don’t trust them.”
In an interview recorded on Monday, but broadcast on Saturday, Macron told France Inter radio: “I think that today, the priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop supplying weapons to lead the fighting in Gaza.”
“France is not supplying them,” he immediately clarified, indirectly turning the spotlight on the US, Israel’s main arms supplier. He also warned about “a resentment that is being born, a hatred that is being fuelled by this” . Lebanon could not be turned into another Gaza, he added.
Repeating his call on Sunday, Macron’s office said he favoured a halt to arms exports for use in Gaza because a ceasefire is needed to stop the mounting violence and “clear the way to the political solutions needed for the security of Israel and the whole Middle East”.
Macron also announced he was convening an international conference on aid to Lebanon and the establishment of Lebanese government armed troops on the border with Israel.
The Israeli attacks on Lebanon are designed to destroy the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group that has been firing rockets into Israel in support of Hamas, which mounted the attack on Israel from Gaza on 7 October 2023.
Macron’s remarks, welcomed by the Lebanese, Qatari and Egyptian governments as well as the Palestinian Authority, may reflect French concern that some officials in the White House appeared to be willing to be relaxed to the point of welcoming the Israeli rejection of the French-US plan for a 21-day ceasefire. Few US officials have condemned Israel for escalating the conflict.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-amid-fears-middle-east-conflict-could-spread
The headline row about arms sales comes amid diplomatic efforts to end a two-year deadlock in Lebanon about the election of a president. With Hezbollah having sustained heavy losses to its leadership from Israeli strikes, there is pressure on the group’s political wing to let the election go ahead and for the military wing to accept a peace deal decoupled from a ceasefire in Gaza. Hezbollah’s stated position until recently has been no elections preceding a ceasefire in Lebanon, and no ceasefire in Lebanon without a ceasefire in Gaza.