Friendship

Edited 26 May 2023

THÉRÈSE NYIRABAYOVU stated that “IN RWANDA, ONE PERSON’S GOD IS ANOTHER PERSON’S SATAN”. The late 20 th history of Rwanda explains her viewpoint. I understand why she wrote the quote, after I visited Rwanda in 2011. I find it very disturbing that my journalist colleague, Ralf Bodelier, abuses this quote to accuse me of satanism in a Dutch newspaper, May 2023.

Scroll to “The Cultivation of Violence” pages, 174, 175 & 176, by Armartya Sen, in his book Identity & Violence. The Illusion of Destiny, 2006, Penguin.

Overview of translated news items and self-written (some of them published) articles

Starwink Foundation

This blog is dedicated to Donatien and his family. Donatien lives in Rwanda (Gasabo, Remera). He and I met in the summer of 2011 in Kigali when I was working there as a drawing teacher. After I had returned to the Netherlands, Donatien traced me, and ever since we app and we mail. Regularly we share memories about our first encounter.

This blog collects information about genocides, starting with today’s (15-12-2020) disturbing news about the Uyghurs of China. Read about it in the thesis by Henrietta Störig, published in the spring of 2020, Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society.

2021- 2022 Autumn. Donatien informs me that he jumps from one job to another job. Among other things, he worked for a construction company, and sent me some pictures about the house they were building in the autumn of 2021. He had an eight month contract at the time. It was not prolonged. Donatien and his fiancee couldn’t get married because of COVID-19 regulations.

2011 – 2022 Donatien and I speak each other on regular basis. He lost his job, but found another. He wants to marry his girlfriend, but they do not have the financial possibilities to start a family life. Donatien cherishes the pictures of his parents, and sent some of them to me. Donatien resembles his father.

2023 will become a memorable year for Donatien and his fiancée Salama. They got married on March 18th and gave me permission to share.

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“The idea of telling the story of the Armenian genocide – or, really, any other genocide – and repeating those stories is really important. I also think it’s important to always be exposing the warning signs for what was leading up to it. Those tend to always be the same.” Chris Cornell

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Quotation: “The Cultivation of Violence” pages, 174, 175 & 176, byArmartya Sen, in his book Identity & Violence. The Illusion of Destiny, 2006, Penguin.

“Sectarian violence across the world is no less crude, nor less reductionist, today than it was sixty years ago. Underlying the coarse brutality, there is also a big conceptual confusion about people’s identities, which turns multidimensional human beings into onedimensional creatures. A person being recruited to join the Hutu killing mob in 1994 was being asked, if only implicitly, not to see himself as a Rwandan, or as an African, or as a human being (identities the targeted Tutsis shared), but only as a Hutu who was duty bound to “give the Tutsis their due.” A Pakistani friend of mine, Shaharyar Khan, a highly respected senior diplomat who was sent by the secretary-general of the United Nations to Rwanda following the slaughter, told me later, “You and I have seen the beastliness of the riots in the subcontinent in the 1940s, but nothing had prepared me for the colossal magnitude of the killing that had occurred in Rwanda and for the comprehensiveness of the organized genocide there.”1 The butchery in Rwanda, and the related violence between Hutus and Tutsis in neighboring Burundi, took many more than a million lives within a span of a very few days.

Hating people is not easy. Ogden Nash’s poem (“A Plea for Less Malice Toward None”) got this just right:

Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,

But hating, my boy, is an art.

If we nevertheless see a great deal of hatred and violent conflict between different groups of people, the question that immediately arises is: “How does this ‘art’ work?”

The illusion of singular identity, which serves the violent purpose of those orchestrating such confrontations, is skillfully cultivated and fomented by the commanders of persecution and carnage. It is not remarkable that generating the illusion of unique identity, exploitable for the purpose of confrontation, would appeal to those who are in the business of fomenting violence, and there is no mystery in the fact that such reductionism is sought. But there is a big question about why the cultivation of singularity is so successful, given the extraordinary naïveté of that thesis in a world of obviously plural affiliations. To see a person exclusively in terms of only one of his or her many identities is, of course, a deeply crude intellectual move (as I have tried to argue in earlier chapters), and yet, judging from its effectiveness, the cultivated delusion of singularity is evidently easy enough to champion and promote. The advocacy of a unique identity for a violent purpose takes the form of separating out one identity group —directly linked to the violent purpose at hand—for special focus, and it proceeds from there to eclipse the relevance of other associations and affiliations through selective emphasis and incitement (“How could you possibly talk about these other things when our people are being killed and our women raped?”).

The martial art of fostering violence draws on some basic instincts and uses them to crowd out the freedom to think and the possibility of composed reasoning. But it also draws, we have to recognize, on a kind of logic—a fragmentary logic. The specific identity that is separated out for special action is, in most cases, a genuine identity of the person to be recruited: a Hutu is indeed a Hutu, a “Tamil tiger” is clearly a Tamil, a Serb is not an Albanian, and a gentile German with a mind poisened by Nazi philosophy is certainly a gentile German. What is done to turn that sense of self-understanding into a murderous instrument is (1) to ignore the relevance of all other affiliations and associations, and (2) to redefine the demands of the “sole” identity in a particularly belligerent form. This is where the nastiness as well as the conceptual confusions are made to creep in.” End quotation

Timeline Tilburg violation OECD guidlines, ook in Nederlands

Autobiographical sketch Cora

Hashtag to my lobby on Local Human Rights Committees, January 2022 – present, ook in Nederlands

Overview of translated news items and self-written (some of them published) articles, tweetalig

In 2011 I met Eric Kabera. I honor his work on my Pinterest Project. I wish he and his loved ones are living healthy and (cyber)safe.