President Paul Kagame has explained how his cousin sister was killed in the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi.
In his Kwibuka30 message, the president said: I want to share a personal story which I usually keep to myself. My cousin, in fact a sister, Florence, worked for the United Nations Development Program in Rwanda for more than fifteen years.
After the genocide started, she was trapped in her house near the Camp Kigali army barracks, with her niece, and other children and neighbours, around a dozen people in total.
The telephone in Florence’s house still worked, and I called her several times using my satellite phone. Each time we spoke, she was more desperate. But our forces could not reach the area. When the commander of the U.N. peacekeeping mission, General Dallaire, visited me where I was in Mulindi, I asked him to rescue Florence. He said he would try.
The last time I talked to her, I asked her if anyone had come. She said no, and started crying. Then she said, “Paul, you should stop trying to save us. We don’t want to live anymore anyway.” And she hung up. At that time, I had a very strong heart. But it weakened a bit, because I understood what she was trying to tell me.
On the morning of May 16th, following a month of torture, they were all killed, except for one niece, who managed to escape, thanks to a good neighbour.
It later emerged that a Rwandan working at the UNDP betrayed his Tutsi colleagues to the killers. Witnesses remember him celebrating Florence’s murder the night after the attack.
He continued his career with the United Nations for many years, even after evidence implicating him emerged. He is still a free man, now living in France. I asked General Dallaire what had happened. He said that his soldiers encountered a militia roadblock near the house, and so they turned back, just like that. Meanwhile, he conveyed to me an order from the United States ambassador to protect diplomats and foreign civilians evacuating by road to Burundi from attack by the militias.
These two things happened at the same time. I did not need to be instructed to do something that goes without saying. That’s what I was going to do. I do not blame General Dallaire. He is a good man who did the best that could be done in the worst conditions imaginable, and who has consistently borne witness to the truth, despite the personal cost. Nevertheless, in the contrast between the two cases, I took note of the value that is attached to different shades of life.
In 1994, all Tutsi were supposed to be completely exterminated, once and for all, because the killings that had forced me, and hundreds of thousands of others, into exile three decades before, had not been sufficiently thorough.
That is why even babies were systematically murdered, so they would not grow up to become fighters.”
iriba.news@gmail.com
