It can happen again…
30 years ago today, the Rwanda genocide changed the way
we look at the world. It ended the starry-eyed optimism that had followed the end of the Cold War about the progress of internationalism. It showed that we always need to be vigilant, and that the international community has a huge responsibility when hatred turns to mass scale violence.
Writing that today, with one eye on Gaza and another on Ukraine, that is a painful thing to consider…
Rwanda changed me as a person.
Finding out, as a senator in the late 1990s, what role my country had played in the response to the genocide, struck me more deeply than any international event ever before.
The resulting Rwanda Commission, of which I was co-rapporteur, was part of me ‘growing up’ as a politician. And it led to the apologies I extended to the Rwandese people in 2000, as Prime Minister.
Rwanda still has major issues. 30 years is not long, where trauma of such magnitude is concerned.
Like all of us, it needs to keep learning the lessons of the past, in order to face the future.