Genocide is the first, last and most serious crime against humanity, and its prevention the single most important commitment of the countries who in 1945 joined as the United Nations.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was voted by UN member states two years later, and it enshrined into international law the promise of Never Again, the world’s response to the Nazi Holocaust in Europe.

It was the first human rights treaty, the first truly universal, comprehensive and codified protection of human rights. And it stood for a fundamental and important principle: an attack on any group, nation or people, was a matter of concern not just for that group but for the entire human family. 

International cooperation was the only hope. Without this legal protection, no people on earth was safe. 

The father of the Genocide Convention, a Polish lawyer called Raphael Lemkin, believed that outlawing and eradicating the crime of genocide could only come through the cooperation of nations.

His belief was that "an attack on one, was an attack on all”.  Lemkin saw an obvious and urgent need to review international law to account for any state policy to exterminate a people based on their ethnic identity.

He described how genocide was the result of a coordinated plan of action, a conspiracy to be put into effect against people chosen as victims, purely, simply and exclusively because they were members of the target group. Genocide was not a sudden and an abominable aberration, Lemkin wrote, genocide was a deliberate attempt to reconstruct the world. 

To prevent and punish genocide, the Genocide Convention relies on the UN, on its procedures and institutions and the Security Council is central to that purpose. But in April 1994, the governments on the Security Council ignored their treaty obligations under the Genocide Convention to prevent genocide, while knowing it was being committed on a scale that fully justified, even compelled, intervention. 

A modest show of force by the Security Council at an early stage might have prevented the terror from spreading. Instead the Genocide Convention was diminished, and the treaty ignored.

The genocide of the Tutsi exposed as nothing had before the gulf that exists between reality and UN rhetoric, between international promise and the practice of self-interest.

That the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda proceeded unhindered, accompanied by near universal indifference, will remain one of the greatest scandals of the 20th century.

The failure to intervene amidst revelations about the speed, scale and brutality of the killing, and the suppression of information about what was actually happening is a shocking indictment of those governments and individuals who could have made a difference and yet chose not to do so.

The United States, the UK and France, these permanent members of the Security Council, who professed to care about human rights simply played politics, and while refusing any help argued about the definition of the word genocide, using debate to delay or completely avoid moral and political imperatives and international legal obligations.

The enormity of the failure, the intolerable negligence and inexcusable apathy is without compare. It undermined every one of the UN’s founding principles, rendered quite worthless the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as all the celebrated human rights treaties including the Genocide Convention.

The phrase Never Again appeared no more than futile. The genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda was the defining calamity of the age, a moral test everyone failed.  The abandonment of the people of Rwanda by the UN Security Council defined for a generation the cost of not intervening in the face of mass human rights abuses.

No tragedy was heralded to less effect. The careful preparation of the genocide of the Tutsi was hardly a secret. Most people who knew anything about Rwanda knew what was threatened. The crime of genocide does not begin with mass killing.

It begins with racism, hatred and division. It begins with the promotion of an absurdist ideology. It begins with a quota system for certain people and an identity card bearing an ethnic designation.

Genocide progresses with hate speech, with vile and racist rhetoric, incitement to murder and the publication of material intended to dehumanize the victims. The crime of genocide is a process and during that process, the target group suffers discrimination, exclusion, marginalisation, registration, brutality, fear and terror.

The 1994 genocide of the Tutsi is a terrible milestone. It is made worse because the true nature of events continues to be deliberately distorted and confused. There are those who even today, a quarter of a century on, with the wealth of evidence available, deny any careful planning and maintain the mass killing of civilians to have been "spontaneous”.

There are those who promote ridiculous theories about two genocides, and a noxious claim the victims brought the catastrophe upon themselves.  Yet the facts of the genocide of the Tutsi are capable of immediate verification.

There is overwhelming evidence that the extermination of the Tutsi had been premeditated and planned. The basic facts are documented and detailed in international inquiries, by journalists and contemporary historians, and these facts might seem incontrovertible.

This has not prevented an on-going pernicious campaign to undermine these facts, to minimise what occurred. This is genocide denial, and in its aid, facts are reversed, disinformation and fake news promulgated, and phoney science given credence. 

From the moment when they took control of the state in their coup d’état, the génocidaires of Rwanda tried to alter the story, tried to disguise the true nature of their gigantic crime.

With contempt for factual evidence, the perpetrators of this genocide tried to diminish the death toll, claimed the massacres were carried out in self-defence.

Today, these same génocidaires from the luxury of international prison cells continue to maintain there had been a ‘spontaneous uprising’ and continue to propagandise to obscure and diminish what happened. 

They have found no shortage of support for their lies. In their trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), there was a list of Western scholars, regional experts, journalists and French military officers who helped the defence case.

They found support in Western academia, found enthusiasts among scholars who craved attention for their work. The ideology of Hutu Power knows no borders. This is an international campaign of denial and includes journalists who are strangely dismissive of factual evidence and rely instead on material provided by the supporters and acolytes of the ideologues.   

The pernicious influence of the ideology of Hutu Power lives on in rumour, stereotype, lies, propaganda and fake news. The movement’s campaign of genocide denial has confused many, recruited some, and shielded others.

With the use of seemingly sound research methods, the génocidaires wherever they are – in prison cells or living in numerous countries as fugitives -- pose a threat, especially to those who might not be aware of the historical facts. 

The denial of the genocide of the Tutsi needs an international response. It needs to be confronted by all nations and challenged wherever it occurs. We should recall that to honour the twentieth commemoration in 2014, resolution 2150 of April 16 was voted by the UN Security Council. 

In the resolution the Council: "condemned without reservation any denial of this Genocide, and urges Member States to develop educational programmes that will inculcate future generations with the lessons of the Genocide in order to help prevent future genocides”. 

In all cases of genocide, denial is the final stage of the process. An integral part of genocide, denial ensures the crime continues.  Denial denies the dignity of the deceased. It mocks those who survived. It causes the gravest offence to survivors.

For them, the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi is not an event commemorated once a year but something they live with every single day. For them, genocide lives on in grief, pain and anger.  

The author is a seasoned British investigative journalist and researcher. She extensively covered the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi and has written three books on the subject: A People Betrayed, Conspiracy to Murder and her latest one, a Conspiracy to Deceive.

Copyright: Linda Melvern