If one inherent certainty of life is that truth is the first casualty of war, another is that after genocide comes denial and revision. The killers, planners, organisers and supporters of genocide will seek to hide the crime, distort its statistics, deflect attention and even rebrand themselves as heroes not villains, saviours not savages. Armenia, the Holocaust, Srebrenica, Cambodia and Rwanda: each is a lesson in human depravity, yet each genocide has been followed by determined and continuous efforts to nullify, downplay and revise the perpetrators' role.
Peter Balakian, a writer on the Armenian genocide, noted at the time of its centenary this year: "Genocide denial is the last phase of genocide. It denounces the victims and rehabilitates the perpetrators. It also robs the victim's culture of all moral order." Today, the rise of social media contributes another weapon to the denialists' armoury. Its particular climate allows anyone to pose as an expert with an objective, or at least plausible, view (often with links added to impart a sense of evidence-based authority). Such contributions are often a disguise for well-orchestrated (though "anonymous") public-relations (PR) campaigns of disinformation. The blizzard can be of such momentum that its lies and propaganda are taken as the "new" truth by credulous sections of the public, even as incredulous survivors look on horror.
Rwanda is a powerful illustration of this trend. Here, an insidious and creeping rise of denial has made the truth of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis an unwanted battleground. Perpetrators have sought to hide their crimes and responsibility, and made unlikely alliances with those who seek only an opportunity to make easy capital (political or personal) from the horror of 1994. The result has been to implant and cultivate a narrative of genocide denial, merging past horrors and present-day Rwandan politics and condemning the victims to new pain and suffering.
