The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
The French act with such impunity not just because of the power they wield on the global scene. That is a small part of the explanation. It is largely because of the cultural reasons as Prof. de Walle gave me. Let us face it, the current global system promotes the cultural hubris of the West against the Rest; the idea that the West decides what is right, the Rest only have to accept and abide. Thus when Western powers kill civilians indiscriminately through air raids, it is called collateral damage. When non Western agents do the same, it is called terrorism or crimes against humanity.
For example, the French parliament passed a law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide by the Turks. Yet those who deny the Tutsi genocide like Habyarimana’s widow and her family live and deny it in France. Priests who committed genocide live and still administer Holy Communion in France. And France is not alone in this. Only three weeks ago, Germany released a former Rwandan priest accused of genocide, Callixte Mbarushimana. Now, in a strange twist of logic, German authorities are arresting those who actually stopped the genocide.
The French understand this Western cultural hubris. They can issue arrest warrants aimed at avenging the death of a president who organised genocide against his own citizens by arresting the very people who were both victims of that genocide but also the people who ended it. And they can depend on the Germans, Belgians, Dutch, Italians'” all European countries'” to hide behind European Union law to implement such an unjust and inhumane act'” because Rwanda is poor, is African (should I say non Western) and has little significance in global politics.
As an African largely socialised, educated and schooled through Western ideas and institutions, it took me long to come to terms with this contradiction. The European mindset seems to me to carry a ruthless will to dominate others; all the other values seem secondary and expendable. Thus it seems to me that what we (‘the Rest’) see as the best in Western values'” liberty, freedom and social justice have never been meant to inform real Western practice. Instead, the purpose of these values has been the ancillary one of image-making to make the West look good to others even when it is inflicting untold harm on them.
This ruthless urge to dominate others seems the prime cultural value that has made the Western attitude to all other values (liberty, equality, social justice, democracy etc) strictly instrumental'” only called upon as and when they are expedient. That is why, during the conquest of other peoples and lands, one European side called for civilisation and Christianisation as the other carried out genocide against native populations and pushed others off their lands, many into forced labour, slavery and amputation akin to what Joseph Kony has done northern Uganda today.
Of course when I generalise using the word ‘Western’ or’European’, I do not mean that every individual in the West behaves in this ruthless and callous style. There are many people of European descent who get as revolted as the rest of us at this hypocrisy. The young generation of Westerners, for example, reject this Manichean approach to world politics. It is these that bolstered the coalition that elected Barack Obama as the first non-pure Caucasian president of the United States.
Indeed, the history of Western civilisation is rife with this contest'” between those who defended values like social justice, freedom, equality and liberty out of moral commitment and those who paid lip-service to them and only used them instrumentally. However, the coalition in support of these ideals has always been marginal to the overall project of the West to dominate and subjugate the Rest. This coalition has never captured power, and when some of its idealists did, they were either foiled in their attempts to reform the system, won over by its demands or, in mute despair or pragmatism, simply embraced it. It is this fact that has made me sceptical about Obama’s claims to’change.’
Yet there is some hope that the young generation of people in the West will continue to ally with those among their parents who genuinely believe in the values of justice, liberty and equality to push for change. In any case, it is not clear whether this urge to dominate others has ever enjoyed majority support among the citizens of Western democracies. Certainly it has been a dominant value among those who control the power of the state. But states do not always represent the values of the societies over which they preside. They represent the values of the most dominant classes or interests'” which are often a minority.
The lessons from this are clear although the solutions are difficult to organise. Africa needs to coalesce and speak with one voice. Yet our leaders seem to be driven by ignorance, petty jealousies, Western bribes of aid and other trinkets to unite'” as happened in the 19th century paving way for colonial conquest. The African Union condemned the arrest of Kabuye. All African governments should have followed Rwanda in packing German ambassadors out of the continent in a show of moral defiance.
