Rwanda marks 30 years of grief
KIGALI: Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame said the international community had “failed” his country during the 1994 genocide, as he paid tribute to victims 30 years after Hutu extremists tore apart the nation.
“Rwanda was completely humbled by the magnitude of our loss, and the lessons we learned are engraved in blood,” Mr Kagame said in the capital during a solemn ceremony to commemorate the 100-day massacre that claimed the lives of 800,000 people, largely Tutsis but also moderate Hutus.
“It was the international community which failed all of us, whether from contempt or cowardice,” he told an audience that included African heads of state and former US president Bill Clinton, who had called the genocide the biggest failure of his administration.
In keeping with tradition, the ceremonies on April 7 – the day Hutu militias unleashed the carnage in 1994 – began with Mr Kagame placing wreathes on mass graves and lighting a remembrance flame at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where more than 250,000 victims are believed to have been buried.
The tiny nation has since found its footing under the iron-fisted rule of Mr Kagame, who led the rebel militia which ended the genocide.
The international community’s failure to intervene has been a cause of lingering shame, with African Union chief Moussa Faki Mahamat saying in Kigali that “no one, not even the African Union, can exonerate themselves from their inaction. Let us have the courage to recognise it, and take responsibility for it.”
French President Emmanuel Macron released a video saying he stood by his comments in 2021 when he acknowledged France’s failure to heed warnings of looming massacres, but stopped short of an apology.
At the time of the genocide, the French government had been a longstanding backer of Rwanda’s Hutu-dominated regime, leading to decades of tensions between the two nations.