April 7 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, denounced this Sunday the passivity of the international community during the 1994 genocide that cost the lives of some 800,000 people during one hundred days of extermination of the Tutsi population and moderate Hutus, in the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the massacres.
“The international community failed us all, either through contempt or cowardice,” Kagame said during the ceremony taking place in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.
The president presided over the ceremony accompanied by numerous African leaders, as well as former US president Bill Clinton and the president of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, whose country is recognized by the Rwandan authorities as one of the few that openly denounced the genocide in its first days. days.
A devastating report by the NGO Human Rights Watch published in 1999 extended part of the responsibility for the massacres to both UN staff and the three foreign governments mainly involved in Rwanda.
To the former, “for not having provided adequate information and guidance to the members of the Security Council”; to Belgium, for having “precipitously withdrawn its troops and for having advocated the complete withdrawal of UN force”; to the United States “for having put saving money before saving lives and for stopping the sending of a relief force”; and France, “for having continued to support a government involved in genocide.”
The Rwandan president ended his speech by assuring that, 30 years later, his country is still shocked “by the magnitude of this loss.” “And the lessons we learned,” he stressed, “are engraved in blood.”
