Victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide at the Genocide Memorial in
Nyamata, inside the Catholic church where thousands were slaughtered.
PHOTO | SIMON MAINA | NATION MEDIA GROUP
By EDMUND KAGIRE
In Summary
- Speaking at the 23rd commemoration event at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre on April 7 President Kagame described attempts to redefine the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi as “semantics” and “absolute nonsense.”
- The Rwandan leader said that genocide has an existing definition, noting that there shouldn’t be a probably matching what happened in Rwanda with the definition of genocide.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame has cautioned against debates
centred on defining the killings that happened in Rwanda in 1994, noting
that those who failed to do anything at the time are the ones
intentionally trying to water down the magnitude of the massacres.
Speaking at the 23rd commemoration event at the Kigali Genocide
Memorial Centre on April 7 — attended by the African Union Commission
chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat — President Kagame described attempts to
redefine the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi as “semantics” and
“absolute nonsense.”
Rwanda considers the “1994 Genocide against the Tutsi” the
official definition of the killings that happened in 1994, which was
later on adopted by the United Nations Security Council in January 2014,
20 years after the massacres which started on April 7, 1994 and swept
across the country for 100 days.
A seemingly angry President Kagame said that the debates around
the right definition, whether it is “the Rwandan genocide, genocide of
the Tutsi and moderate Hutus” are all meant to divert people from the
real issue of the death of over a million innocent lives and the actual
planning of the genocide.
“Today you hear people around the world talking about what
happened here. It is now about the words, the names, what do we call it?
It is no longer about the lives lost. Some say ‘is it the 1994
genocide?’ or is it the genocide of Tutsis?”
“Then there is another group which comes with an improved
definition, saying that you see we can’t call it the genocide of the
Tutsi, it is the 1994 Genocide or the Rwandan genocide and they stop
there, struggling to be vague,” President Kagame said, adding that these
are simply semantics.
President Kagame said that he has a problem engaging in such debates because it is “absolute nonsense.”
“Those deciding what it should be called are the same people who got involved in it,” he noted, adding that the discussion around what the killings in Rwanda should be called is of no substance.
“Those deciding what it should be called are the same people who got involved in it,” he noted, adding that the discussion around what the killings in Rwanda should be called is of no substance.
“We lost people. We lost over one million people and it wasn’t a
natural disaster. It happened by the hands of some people and politics
was the cause, whether local or international. How can people keep
playing around with what names to call it? This is absolute nonsense,”
he said.
The Rwandan leader said that genocide has an existing
definition, noting that there shouldn’t be a probably matching what
happened in Rwanda with the definition of genocide. He said that the
Tutsi ethnic group was targeted for decades up until the genocide
happened.
President Kagame yet again faulted the international community for failing to intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda.
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