Jos van Oijen - search results

Jos van Oijen writes about the release of Paul Rusesabagina – the ex-hotelier of ‘Hotel Rwanda’ - from prison in Kigali at end of March. He argues that with very few exceptions, the media use the Hollywood movie, Hotel Rwanda, as factual information. Yet the story is largely fictional. Van Oijen argues that journalists (and many researchers) are as ignorant about genocide today as they were in 1994.

Jos van Oijen writes that Michela Wrong in her new book moves around real and imagined facts and witnesses, revives a double genocide theory based on inflated casualty numbers, re-labels victims, discredits bona fide genocide experts and promotes layman’s opinions as irrefutable evidence, while revising the history of the genocide against the Tutsi. Van Oijen makes an appeal for properly corroborated and verified research.

Jos van Oijen writes how in the first two decades after the Rwandan genocide, alternative facts and conspiracy theories were the almost exclusive domain of marginal figures and members of the former regime. Today these previously peripheral myths are being fed to a world audience by apparently reputable authors.