Despite thousands of 1994 Genocide deniers in USA and elsewhere in the world, U.S permanent representative to the UN Susan E. Rice has come up with what she witnessed six months after the Genocide.
Rice testified what she saw then at Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) while addressing a gathering of senior government officials, students and faculty members.
Below is the verbatim testimony extracted from her seven pages speech;
I have come to Rwanda to bear witness to the remarkable progress you have made against all odds.
Rwanda holds its own tragic place in the 20th century’s grim litany of mass violence. As you know so well, the evil of genocide came swiftly, home by home, in the form of men with machetes, calls to murder hissed out over transistor radios, lists of innocents for slaughter. Deliberate, direct cruelties that still leave us shocked and shaken.
Rwanda did not suffer from so-called “ancient hatreds.” It suffered from modern demagogues: from the ex-FAR, the Interahamwe, Radio Mille Collines. It suffered from those who were willing to kill in the name of difference, from those who saw division and death as the path to power.
And it suffered from the indifference of neighbors, international institutions, and individual governments – including my own – that failed to act in the face of a vast, unfolding evil.
Tomorrow, I will take my husband and two children to the genocide memorial here in Kigali, so they can experience what I have learned in my prior visits.
We will pay our respects both to those forever lost and to the brave survivors, who challenge us all even to comprehend their enduring sacrifices and extraordinary strength.
Today, I am here as an American ambassador. But I also will speak for myself, from my heart. I visited Rwanda for the very first time in December 1994, six months after the genocide ended.
I was a young Director on the National Security Council staff at the White House, accompanying the then-National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake.
I was responsible then for issues relating to the United Nations and peacekeeping. And needless to say, we saw first-hand the spectacular consequences of the poor decisions taken by those countries, including my own and yours, that were then serving on the United Nations Security Council.
I will never forget the horror of walking through a church and an adjacent schoolyard where one of the massacres had occurred.
Six months later, the decomposing bodies of those who had been so cruelly murdered still lay strewn around what should have been a place of peace.
For me, the memory of stepping around and over those corpses will remain the most searing reminder imaginable of what humans can do to one another.
Those images stay with me in the work I do today, ensuring that I can never forget how important it is for all of us to prevent genocide from recurring.
Here, after three long months, the genocide finally ended. But the destruction was hardly over. Up to a million dead.
Another million refugees scattered across borders, including thousands of genocidaire eager to resume battle.
Zaire was their rear base, and the refugees in UN-supported camps were their hostages. Rwanda, according to the World Bank, in just a few months had become the poorest country on earth.
And within a few short years, it sent forces into neighboring Congo. “Africa’s first world war,” as it was called, claimed millions more lives from battle and disease.
Yet, even as war still raged, another story was beginning to play itself out. The people and the new government envisioned a different Rwanda, one where reconciliation replaced division, where healing helped salve deep wounds, where self-sufficiency could eventually defeat despair.
Having endured the worst, you nonetheless aspired for the best.
First, you worked to address the past, so your future could come sooner. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is finally winding down.
Gacaca courts, adapting traditional justice practices to the overwhelming task of separating the innocent from the small fish, and the small fish from the most guilty planners and perpetrators, brought a measure of justice and reconciliation.
Many former ex-FAR-Interahamwe militants have been reintegrated into society.
Though much more remains to be done, the processing of cases, the commuting of sentences to community service, and the building of new jails have combined to reduce the number of prisoners by half over the past decade.
The speech read in parts.
Ends
