Exhuming the Past

Andrew Rice of The New Republic has a written a fascinating article on NBC's new painfully troubling new show "The Wanted" in which alleged do-gooders race around the world confronting alleged war criminals. Rice's piece focuses on the episode of "The Wanted" that tracks down Leopold Munyakazi, a Rwandan exile, professor of French and alleged genocidaire.

And this is where the story gets interesting, because the article is not so much a critique of the show (which is a easy task), but rather an exploration of competing world views--one where the world is black and white and evil will always be evil and one where shades of gray cast shadows over everything. A quote:

After class, a swirling retinue of about ten cameramen, technicians, and professional interrogators descended on Munyakazi, a broad-faced middle-aged man with an accented, lilting voice. The professor, who had been given little notice, was stunned and refused to talk on camera. After some time, two members of the faculty who knew Munyakazi, a philosophy professor and the director of the school's peace-studies program, joined the standoff, which only heightened the tension. The professors angrily challenged the Rwandan prosecutor. "They kept talking about 'competing narratives' of the genocide," Ciralsky [a producer of the show] says. "Which really could be considered code for denying the genocide."

What was happening was a collision of two different worldviews: the investigative mindset of journalists and prosecutors, with its normative emphasis on evidence, guilt, and verdicts; and the academic mode of inquiry, which is more discursive and wary of definitive judgments. The disdain between the two sides was mutual.

Anyone who closely follows human rights and/or development will know that questions about the commonly accepted narrative of Rwandan genocide have existed for many years. Mamdani has questioned the extent to which there was a clear delination between Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities. More recently, Scott Strauss has debunked the idea that Radio Mille-Collines was a driving force behind the killings. As Rice notes, Des Forges and others were vocal critics of Paul Kagme and the RPF.

There is a certain odious aura around genocide deniers, people who refuse to believe that slaughter happened. But this is not what Munyakazi is. He is a man asking us, imploring us, to dig a little deeper, to ask tough questions. The victims of genocide deserve justice, yes, but they also deserve the truth. It may not be something they will ever get. And is certainly something an hour long television episode will never give them.