Bernard-Henri Lévy

One day Bernard-Henri Lévy told me of the trouble he had, during the war in Bosnia in 1994, organizing a meeting in support of the besieged Sarajevans. There was always someone in the back of the crowd who, sooner or later would raise his hand and say, “That’s all very fine and well, your Bosnia, but what about Rwanda?” He had the impression someone was breaking up his meeting. He and all his friends had the impression that people were mixing everything up, and this confusion could only result in the demobilization of willing men and women, submerged by so many misfortunes and not knowing which way to turn. Until the moment, of course, when he was obliged to acknowledge the obvious: while Bosnians were dying, Rwandans were dying too, and what was going on in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, was indeed a new genocide. In Bernard-Henri Lévy’s defense, several things should be noted.

1. The blindness was general and widespread.

2. Blindness for blindness, he was among the very first, with his friend André Glucksmann, to realize the importance of the event.

(cf. Le Point, column reprinted in Questions de Principe, 5 pp 151 and 156).

“Une colère de Wole Soyinka, le grand écrivain nigérian, Prix Nobel de littérature, auquel je n’avais plus parlé depuis notre rencontre à Milan, il y a sept ou huit ans, avec Mario Vargas Llosa. Allez-vous, dit-il à peu près, recommencer, avec le Rwanda, vos erreurs d’analyse sur la Bosnie et, sous prétexte que ce sont des «Blacks », nous refaire le coup de la guerre tribale et de sa sauvagerie sans âge ? La vérité est que si les bourreaux sont bien « Hutus» et les victimes, en majorité, « Tutsis » – elles se retrouvent aussi, ces victimes, du côté des «Hutus modérés » et interdisent de réduire, donc, le massacre à je sais quel affrontement « interethnique». L’affaire, autrement dit, n’est pas tribale, mais politique. Encore, et toujours, politique. Et c’est l’analyse politique qui, sur le. Rwanda, manque le plus.

Manque aussi, bien sûr, le courage. Pas celui, forcément, de s’engager au-delà de ce que nous faisons. Mais celui de dire les choses. Simplement, de les dire et de ne pas se résigner à nos tragiques ou honteuses équivoques. Ces lignes de Bernanos dans Le Chemin de la Croix-des-Âmes. Dieu sait si Bernanos n’est pas de mes auteurs favoris. Mais ce texte, écrit en juin 1941, vaut, mot pour mot, pour aujourd’hui. «L’immense erreur psychologique », dit-il, de ceux qui «dirigent» la France «n’est pas de l’avoir fait capituler », mais «d’avoir voulu, coûte que coûte, justifier la capitulation» – elle est d’avoir donné à cette capitulation «le caractère d’un acte moral, désintéressé, vertueux» et «d’avoir fait approuver cet acte par les professeurs de droit et les archevêques ». Toujours la même histoire: pire que le Mal, la justification, la transfiguration, la sanctification, la dénégation, du Mal.”

He was, especially, the first to devote an entire chapter (entitled “Night and Fog in Rwanda”) to the event in La Pureté dangereuse [Dangerous Purity] a book published shortly after it happened, in September 1994, and thus to think about it.

Today, this chapter of La Pureté dangereuse merits re-reading. And if one does read it anew, one cannot help but be struck by the subtlety of the analysis.

Faithful to the principle that genocides can and even must be «compared» to one another, though without for all that “reducing” them one to another nor “beating” one with the other, Lévy said two things. Primo, that the Shoah remains,alas, an unsurpassed horror of absolute singularity. But, secondly, that in considering what had just happened in Rwanda in terms of the Shoah, specific and salient characteristics stand out. Among these is the «speed” of the execution, the “world record” genocide, in terms of time. And then the absence of «planning», and even of a “chief” or leader—the image of a headless and decapitated genocide. Or else, then, the fact that everyone participated in the crime; everyone, or nearly everyone, had a hand in it. The fact that there were nearly as many perpetrators of genocide as its victims, which constitutes a unique case of “autogestion of genocide”.

Bernard-Henri Lévy would never forget the genocide of Rwanda. He would come back to it several times, in particular in his book on forgotten wars, where the memory of Rwanda led him down the roads of Burundi, Angola, or South Sudan, or in Ce Grand cadavre à la renverse [This Great Upturned Cadaver],where he saw the same type of massacre that, since it did not enter into the opposition’s pre-fabricated framework between the “Empire” and its “enemies”, was of no interest to the left and its right-thinking conformists.

For Bernard-Henri Lévy, « Never again » signifies, naturally and first of all, “Never again Auschwitz”. But it also means “Never again Rwanda”.

Liliane Lazar

Translation by Janet Lizop

Photo 1 : Kigali, the Rwandan genocide memorial, photographs of victims posted on a gallery wall. (c) D.R.