adminKIGALI. — Rwanda’s president on Tuesday accused the BBC of “genocide denial” after it aired a controversial documentary on the country’s leadership and the mass killings of 1994. “Rwanda’s Untold Story”, broadcast this month, highlighted growing criticism of President Paul Kagame and revived allegations that his rebel group was behind the shooting down of a plane that sparked the genocide.
The British broadcaster said the programme challenges “the accepted story” of the massacres as well as the portrayal of Kagame as “the man who brought an end to the killing and rescued his country from oblivion”. But prominent international academics, experts and diplomats have accused the BBC of being “recklessly irresponsible” by allegedly promoting a revisionist account of the genocide in the documentary.
Kagame told parliament on Tuesday that the BBC had chosen to “tarnish Rwandans, dehumanise them”. He said the BBC would never challenge the accepted history of the genocide in Bosnia or the Holocaust, “but to Africans and Rwandans they do it and then claim freedom of speech”.
An estimated 800 000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, were killed in just 100 days — a rate of killing that was far faster than the Holocaust in World War II.
A spokeswoman said the BBC “strongly refutes” the claim but would not comment specifically on Paul Kagame’s comments. — AFP
Online Reporter