Is Kagame-led Rwanda turning into a country that seeks regional dominance and exterminates its rivals?
In an upcoming Fabian session, Joseph Kimenyi, a Rwandan New Zealander, will be hosting Dr Michela Wrong and Dr Maria Armoudian as they consider the evidence for this.
Via Zoom, Dr Armoudian, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, will firstly provide context on the role of the media. She has written extensively about the role of the media in international affairs and her book, Kill the Messenger: The Media's Role in the Fate of the World, highlighted the role of the media in the Rwandan Genocide.
Dr Wrong is a journalist who has written best-selling books on Africa. Her latest book, Do Not Disturb: The story of a political murder and an African regime gone bad, focuses on Rwanda and the activities of its President, Paul Kagame.
In the mid to late 1990s she covered the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath as a young reporter for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. Like many of the journalists, aid workers and diplomats commenting on those turbulent events, she initially saw the Rwandan Patriotic Front and its leaders as benign players whose intervention spelt a welcome end to grotesque levels of inter-ethnic violence.
Her book is in many ways a reckoning with her own naivety, a careful critique of the lazy narrative to which too many members of the international community still stubbornly cling.
Joseph Kimenyi will be hosting Michela and Maria on Zoom in our Auckland studio at the Trades Hall. Local Congolese-New Zealander activist, Red Tsounga, with a background in Conflict and Terrorism Studies at the University of Auckland, will introduce the Seminar and offer a final commentary.
Trades Hall
Grey Lynn, AUK
New Zealand