Week of genocide commemoration begins, Kagame in plea to international community

Rwanda began on Sunday a week of commemoration of the 1994 genocide, with President Paul Kagame urging the international community to show more commitment in acting swiftly to intervene in volatile situations that could result in mass killings of civilians.

"When genocide takes place, the international community should not shy away from its responsibility, it should take strong and immediate action including military action if need be," Kagame said when he opened an international conference in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, on genocide prevention.

Weeklong activities to commemorate the genocide include events to honour and dignify the victims of the killings as well as seek universal acknowledgement that the world must never allow genocide to occur again.

In his opening speech at the conference, Kagame said what happened in Rwanda in 1994 was due to "sheer reluctance" on the part of the international community to rescue innocent lives. He added that the occurrence of genocide in any part of the world represented the failure of the international community.

The conference, whose theme is "Preventing and banishing genocide forever through universal active solidarity", is being held 10 years since extremist Hutus killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

Kagame called on the international community to consider ways of fostering the will to act appropriately and on time to halt atrocities.

"The international community should monitor [the situation] early enough and put in place measures that combat systematic discrimination, dehumanisation, and persecution which all precede the genocide," he said.

Nightmare for survivors

Kagame said that 10 years on, Rwanda was still struggling to cope with the destructions of the social, political and economic sectors caused by the genocide.

"The genocidaires, not only murdered a million people, they also destroyed our physical and social economic infrastructure, government, legal system, businesses and the whole economy," he said. "They destroyed everything that supported human life."

He said life had been a nightmare for survivors who now lived in abject poverty.

He added: "The survivors of the genocide have suffered in silence during the last 10 years. They lost their loved ones, their property and everything they called theirs, they were tortured, raped and infected with the HIV/AIDS and now live in abject poverty."

"As if all this was not enough, we are over burdened with the need to forgive, to reconcile, and to live with their former tormentors," Kagame said.

Revelation

Kagame stunned the audience when he said that at one point, during the genocide, after the head of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, Gen Romeo Dallaire, had told him that his mission had no mandate to protect the masses, he contemplated forcefully taking arms from UN troops.

"I really contemplated taking those arms by force from them and using them to protect the people who were being killed," he said. "But of course we knew that would open for us another front to fight when we still had another complicated situation to deal with."