FILLIP REYNTJENS: STUCK WITH THE OLD LENSES

FILLIP REYNTJENS: STUCK WITH THE OLD LENSES

Dr. Jean Damascene BIZIMANA

FILIP RENTYJENS was a senior advisor to the late President Habyarimana and the Dean of the Faculty of Law in the National University of Rwanda. He was the sole author of the1978 Rwandan Constitution that institutionalized one party state. It is under this system that the genocide ideology and regionalism were solidified and later to culminate in 1994 genocide.  Despite the tremendous progress and achievements since 1994 Tutsi genocide in various sectors of all the nation life, Filip RENTYJENS is still stuck with old lenses that make him fail to see any good in the new Rwanda.

Fillip RENTYJENS was last in Rwanda 1994 during the genocide, however he continues to proclaim himself as an expert even on the new Rwanda.

He has since published many articles deliberately distorting facts on Rwanda.

For example in his article “Constructing The Truth, Dealing With Dissent, Domesticating The World: Governance In Postgenocide Rwanda” (2010).

In this article, Filip asserts that “there is consensus in the international scholar community that Rwanda is run by a dictatorship with little respect for human rights, little attention to the fate of the vast majority of its population made up of ever poorer peasants, and little awareness of the structural violence its ambitious engineering project engenders”. Filip REYNTJENS conveniently forgets that Rwanda’s development policies are cited as ground-breaking innovations towards poverty alleviation in Sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, during the last MDG Summit, Rwanda emerged as a top-performer. Instead of growing rural poverty, Rwanda’s Rural Development Policies such as Ubudehe, Girinka, Health Care, SACCO, have empowered the rural population marginalized by the former government advised by Filip REYNTJENS

Filip REYNTJENS falsely states that ‘the only noticeable exceptions [in the scholar community] are Phil Clark and William Schabas’.  However, by his own admission Filip deplores that ‘Kagame travels from one award ceremony to the next’. Furthermore, Fillip REYNTJENS only cites scholars belonging to his school of thoughts.

In one of his books published immediately after the genocide “Les Risques du Métiers” Filip writes that “I have proved that I never trust RPF at the beginning of the war”. This clearly demonstrates how Fillip was not prepared from the beginning to see anything different from the genocidal regime that he served.

It also shows why Filip has been hostile to the RPF led government since 1994 to date.

Given Filip’s intimate background with the regime that planned and committed genocide in Rwanda, Filip will never see anything positive in Rwanda today.