2556) French Participation of Genocide in Rwanda

There were headlines a couple of days ago about the French participation of genocide in Rwanda.

As a member of a nation who severely suffers from the alleged Armenian genocide blames which, by the way, mainly comes from France, my first reaction was to say 'Now, France will understand what it is like to be accused of genocide'. . .

But then it stroked me; 'Could this genocide accusation make France suffer as the Turkey suffered from Armenian accusations over the years?'

However, I started losing faith quickly due to the reason of lack of interest from the general public for these headlines. It got me thinking though; why the genocide accusations do not always receive the same level of attention from public?

Does it have something to do with the characteristics of the accusing parties (Black Rwandans, Christian Armenians), or the characteristics of the accused parties (Christian French, Muslim Turks)?

Well, let me tell you a story first.

There was a television game show a couple of years ago which was called 'The Weakest Link'. I think it first came out in England or the United States where it became very popular in a short time then imported to Australia. The game included 6 to 8 contestants and competes for a single cash jackpot. After each round, every contestant votes to eliminate one other (supposedly unsuccessful) contestant. However, some contestants felt they're discriminated in the voting process.

For this reason, the statisticians carefully analysed the voting data from 160 episodes of that show. They thought that the key to measure the 'Weakest Link' voting data is to tease out a contestant's playing ability from his/her race, gender and age such as African Americans, White Anglo-Saxons, Latinos, women, men, old, young etc.

As it surprisingly turned out that neither African-Americans, nor women faced any discrimination on the Weakest Link as many would have expected. But, this finding was not surprising at all for some who knew for a fact that two of the most potent social campaigns of the past century were the civil rights movement and the feminist movement, which demonized discrimination against blacks and women, respectively. Nowadays, these groups are automatically getting protection from the general public.

However, the investigation of the Weakest Link voting data also revealed that Latinos consistently faced discrimination in the voting process. According to analysts, Latinos discriminated based on a perception that Latinos has poor skills, and acts accordingly. There was never a social campaign or civil rights movements for Latinos and in turn no protection from public.

Now back to my original question. Does this have something to do with the characteristics of the accusing parties and/or the accused parties?

The answer is definitely 'Yes'.

France, for example, heavily practised cultural imperialism for centuries where they promoted and injected their language and cultural values into other nations. These cultural values included literature, music, religion etc. As a result, France has one of the highest publicity ratings in today's world. It is now almost impossible to make people believe once France committed genocides in Rwanda, Algeria and Northern America.

The ill propaganda that created negative image for Turks around the world, portrayed French as romantic and the English as gentlemen. But in truth, nearly every corner of our world carries a footprints of the colonialist English and French atrocity and brutality on civilian populations.

People who is finding hard to believe the fact that French committed genocide, will not have any difficulty to believe when it comes to Turks due to same reason as Latinos in the Weakest Link game show.

To cut a long story short, the lack of social campaigns and not enough good publicity makes us more prone to discrimination and more vulnerable to genocide claims.

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Halit Şindi
turkausadmin@gmail.com
http://www.network54.com/Forum/407087


08.08.2008

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