President Paul Kagame has expressed gratitude to the government of Czech Republic for the role the country played to call on the international community to stop the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. “The Czech Republic played a prominent role in calling for action to stop the genocide. We will always be grateful for Ambassador Karel Kovanda and to the Czech Republic,” he remarked shortly after holding a bilateral meeting with Czech President, Petr Pavel. Ambassador Karel Kovanda to whom President Kagame expressed gratitude to in particular was the Permanent Representative of Czech Republic to the United Nations (UN) in 1994 when the genocide was underway. At the height of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi when the UN could not recognize the killings, Kovanda became the first diplomat to publicly use the word ‘genocide’ at an official UN meeting to describe what Rwanda was experiencing at the time. Only after then and several weeks of delay did the UN Security Council even start to come to grips with the fact that Rwanda was experiencing a genocide. “This spirit of solidarity and of speaking up against injustice creates lasting bonds of friendship and respect,” Kagame told members of the press on Saturday, April 6, at Village Urugwiro. ALSO READ: Eight things to know ahead of commemoration week In his personal memoir published in 2010, Kovanda repeatedly highlighted the insufficient and biased information provided by the UN Secretariat on one hand, and on the other hand, the detailed, accurate, and timely information his delegation received from non-governmental organisations. Kovanda estimates that during the first weeks, the Security Council gave perhaps 80 per cent of its attention to the fighting between the genocidal forces and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and 20 per cent to how to handle the difficult position of UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), the peacekeeping operation then on the ground in in the country. The UN has been accused several time for failure to stop the Tutsi Genocide despite repeated calls from different people including its own representatives. One person who made such calls then was the Canadian General Romeo Dallaire who was leading the UN peacekeeping mission to Rwanda. On January 11, 1994, Dallaire sent a critical telegram from Kigali, in which he described what he had learned from one of his sources: that Hutu paramilitary militias were gathering weapons and compiling lists of Tutsi in order to kill them all off at a suitable moment. Dallaire asked for permission to intervene, for example, to take over illegal weapons storage areas. The Security Council never learned about this telegram and the UN Secretariat did not give Dallaire the go-ahead to intervene. As a result, more than a million Tutsi were massacred in a short span of three 100 days from April 7. ALSO READ: Kwibuka not only about lost loved ones; but involves remembrance, prevention – Kagame ‘Lessons not learnt’ Thirty years down the road, President Kagame said the UN has not learned lessons from the tragic events of 1994, saying that time and again countries have continued to experience destruction and loss of lives as the UN watches. “If lessons were learnt, there are situations you look back and say, this problem could have been prevented or could have been stopped immediately if only there was a will to look at the root causes and then fixing that,” he noted. This, Kagame said, is always a result of competing interests that some members of the UN have in other countries, which blinds them from deliberately focusing on addressing real issues and instead focus on prioritizing their own interests. “There is always an interplay with interests, with different distorted views that only add fuel to the fire than actually reigning in what you have to bring to an end,” he told the press ahead of the 30th commemoration. The commemoration of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi will be held on Sunday, April 7, in Kigali during which a series of activities will be held for a period of one week, including laying wreaths to the mass graves across the country in honor of the victims. “We are here to take part in the 30th commemoration of the Genocide in Rwanda, which we have to remind ourselves for not to repeat such horrible events,” President Petr Pavel told the press in Kigali. Pavel, who’s in Rwanda on a three-day state visit, echoed Kagame’s sentiments, indicating that the UN and the wide international community have not truly learnt lessons from the 1994 tragic events. “It seems that humanity is very resistant to learning lessons from their own mistakes,” he said, adding that, however, there has been progress from like-minded countries to adopt meaningful principles and resolutions at the United Nations. Pavel added: “We have seen that during the last couple of UN General Assemblies where countries from Latin America, Asia, Africa agree on some principles. This is encouraging.” The Czech President said it was important for countries to seek like-minded partners wherever they are and try to achieve significant weight or come up with sufficient counterbalance against the big actors if they make mistakes.
