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University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida.
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Well, the overview about the remote origins of the genocide can be broad indeed, but one can summarize it in a few words by saying that the genocide came as a kind of result to bad leadership, which characterized Rwanda for a number of years, as from the time where we had colonizers taking up the administration of the country. The kingdom of that time was a highly structured kingdom they had found, and this is the time the colonizers came and tried to change the institutions in the administration of the kingdom. Automatically, we had very different leadership, and that leadership was not meant to maintain the country or the nation as it was, but rather to divide for a better rule. And that went on even worse when the political authority came in. So, that was the main—that’s the main topic I really think of, if you talk about the background of the genocide. Bad leadership is definitely the key to the genocide.
In fact, if you look at the close family, my mom was killed. I saw her dying, actually, when she was in Kibuye. I saw it on the screen when I was commenting on the events in Kibuye for the BBC at that time, on television. When they showed a clip of what we see, I saw that and said, “Oh, hang on, that’s my mom. That’s my mom.” And there were other people who were hurt as well, some of whom I had departed from Zaire at that time; today it is known as the DRC. The close relatives as well who were in the country, they all perished, actually. I have a brother, an older brother, who was in Tanzania—that’s why he survived, with his children; and a younger sister who was in Burundi, that one survived; and me ’cause I was in Britain. So we survived, but those who were on the ground, nobody survived.