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Commemorations to mark the 19th anniversary this month of the genocide against the Tutsi people of Rwanda have been taking place everywhere throughout the world. But not quite everywhere.

Human nature remains an often cruel and capricious creature. Just as there remain deniers of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, so there are various groups who, each for its own squalid reasons, deny the truth of what happened in Rwanda. The pain this causes to survivors and their families hardly needs elaborating.

The truth is simple enough: While the world stood by (where it wasn't complicit), a high-ranking cabal of Hutu extremists in 1994 came perilously close to achieving its deranged goal: the extermination of all Tutsi from the face of Rwanda.

Most Canadians now know the answer to the question general Romeo Dallaire once asked thanks, unhappily, to one of history's great man-made tragedies. Yet for half a century before the 1994 genocide, some Canadians, especially Quebec Catholic missionaries and certain federal civil servants, were close to Rwanda, a country where the elite spoke French. It might have been better were they not, for many of these old Rwanda hands made themselves handmaidens of an ethnic Hutu dictatorship that ended up planning and executing the near-extermination of the country's Tutsi minority.