In May 1998, inside the chambers of the United States Congress, a hearing took place that should have permanently shaped international policy toward Central Africa. Titled “Rwanda: Genocide and the Continuing Cycle of Violence,” it was not just a backward-looking exercise. It was a warning—clear, documented, and ethically unambiguous—about the consequences of misnaming evil, accommodating perpetrators, and mistaking genocidal movements for legitimate political actors. Nearly three decades later, that warning reads less like history and more like prophecy disregarded. Today, as the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to convulse under violence, as the FDLR—a direct descendant of the genocidal machinery of 1994—remains more than active. As diplomatic processes led by actors such as the United Nations, the African Union, the United States, and Qatar attempt to broker peace, the record of that 1998 hearing stands as an indictment of present-day complacency. What was said then was not vague. It was flawless and unconcealed. It was spoken in plain language, under oath, in one of the most powerful legislative bodies in the world. And yet, it has been willfully forgotten. We heard clarity On May 5, 1998, Richard McCall, then Chief of Staff at the now disbanded United States Agency for International Development, testified before the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights. His words cut through diplomatic euphemism with surgical accuracy: “Genocide is a historical event that informs history from the day it begins and forever into the future. We have a problem. The international community initiated its long-term engagement with Rwanda by accommodating violence, and we allowed the genocidaires to set up shop in the camps.” This was not guesswork or hearsay. It was an admission of failure. The “camps” he referred to were not humanitarian sanctuaries in the neutral sense often invoked. They were not camps in Tanzania or Burundi. They were, particularly in eastern DR Congo, incubators of renewed extreme violence—safe havens where perpetrators of the 1994 genocide reorganized, rearmed, and rearticulated their ideological mission. McCall continued with a warning that should have become doctrine: “The solution to that problem is to be unequivocally clear about the genocide and its perpetrators.” This is the heart of the matter. Precision. Moral, political, and linguistic clarity. Without it, everything collapses—policy, justice, and ultimately, human lives. One of the most revealing exchanges during the hearing occurred between Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and McCall. When asked who led the insurgents destabilizing Rwanda’s northwest—forces that would later evolve into what we now know as the FDLR—McCall replied: “I don’t know who the leader is, and I don’t consider them rebels; I consider them genocidaires. There is a difference between a rebel and a genocidaire.” That distinction, so compellingly emphasized in 1998, has since been systematically eroded. Today, the same ideological lineage is often dressed in the language of insurgency, rebellion, or even “armed opposition.” The semantic shift is not unintentional—it is politically convenient. To call them rebels invites understanding and negotiation. To call them genocidaires imposes obligation: to isolate, disarm, and prosecute. The tragedy of the present lies in the international community’s withdrawal from this precision in naming. The very actors McCall warned against have been normalized within diplomatic frameworks. In some cases, they are even indirectly legitimized through processes that treat them as stakeholders rather than crime perpetrators. And, this is not pragmatism at all—but capitulation disguised as diplomacy. The illogicality of negotiating with Genocide Congresswoman McKinney pressed further, asking a question that echoes painfully in today’s policy circles: “Do you think a negotiated settlement is possible with a genocidaire?” McCall’s response was instant and unmistakable: “No. In the history of this kind of murder, would anybody ask you to negotiate with your killers whose primary purpose in life is to finish the job?” Nonetheless, the exchange did not end there—and it is precisely what followed that exposes both the moral stakes and the institutional instincts that must be guarded against. In a pointed follow-up, Cynthia McKinney raised a deeply troubling concern: “It is my understanding at one time the U.S. Government was asking the RPF to negotiate with the genocidal leaders.” This was not a spontaneous question. It was an indictment—suggesting that even after the horrors of 1994, there were currents within policy circles willing to shadow the line between justice and expediency. Richard McCall’s reply was not diplomatic. It was intuitive, illuminating both personal conviction and the gravity of the issue: “It certainly didn’t come up in the context of any of the interagency meetings we had. I would have, since I have a volatile temper anyway in these meetings, you would have seen an explosion that would have ripped off the top of the building if it had come up. I am not aware that that was ever done. But I find it totally offensive that we would even contemplate asking for something like that.” There is a decent clarity in that humble statement that has all but disappeared in today’s policy discourse. McCall did not hedge. He did not qualify. He did not retreat into the safe language of “engagement” or “inclusive dialogue.” He called the very idea offensive. And, he was just right. To negotiate with genocidaires is not conflict resolution—it is a moral admission of defeat. However, today—the very scenario McCall rejected in principle has become entrenched in practice. Peace processes in eastern Congo often operate under the implicit assumption that all armed actors are potential partners in dialogue. This flattening of moral categories—and such refusal to differentiate between political grievance and genocidal intent—has profound consequences. It transforms justice into bargaining. It reduces victims to negotiable variables. But worse, it grants perpetrators the legitimacy they failed to achieve through violence alone. The result is not peace. It is the prolongation of the very cycle the 1998 hearing sought to break. The consequences of institutional amnesia When McCall’s testimony represented clarity, the intervention of former Belgian Senator Alain Destexhe exposed the deeper pathology: institutional amnesia—and the dangerous hierarchy of human suffering that sustains it. Reacting to remarks attributed to Kofi Annan, who had reportedly characterized early warnings of the genocide—specifically the cable sent by Roméo Dallaire—as “an old story,” Destexhe conveyed a response that deserves to be preserved in full moral weight: “I would like to react to the comment made this morning in the New York Times and in the Washington Post by Secretary General Kofi Annan saying that cable was an old story. I think this comment is insulting for the victims, because when we are talking about the genocide, it is never an old story. I mean, 50 years after the genocide of the Jews and the Holocaust, we still think it is a very important story. And the Secretary General, as anybody else, is accountable for his decisions and his behavior.” This was not a spontaneous rebuttal. It was an exposure. Destexhe was drawing a line between two moral universes: one in which the Holocaust remains an enduring reference point for global conscience, and another in which the Genocide Against the Tutsi can simply be relegated to archival inconvenience—invoked when useful, dismissed when inconvenient. His comparison was not linguistic excess; it was a thoughtful indictment of double standards. Why is one genocide permanently engraved into global memory, shaping policy, education, and law, while another is treated as a closed chapter, its lessons negotiable? Certainly, the implications are devastating. If genocide can become “an old story,” then its perpetrators can become “former combatants.” Its ideology can become “grievance.” Its victims can become “collateral.” And its unfinished heinous plans can quietly continue under new names—like the transition from ALiR to the FDLR. Destexhe’s words force an uncomfortable truth: indifference is not passive. It is structured, selective and deadly. The insurgent group referenced in 1998 as the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALiR) did not disappear. It evolved. By the year 2000, it had reconstituted itself as the FDLR—a name change that disguised continuity rather than transformation. The ideological core remained intact: the same genocidal intent, the same networks, the same willingness to target civilians and destabilize the region. To pretend otherwise is to engage in deliberate self-deception. The presence of the FDLR in eastern Congo is not a recent development. It is the direct consequence of decisions made—and warnings ignored—in the aftermath of 1994. The failure to dismantle these structures, to hold perpetrators accountable, and to prevent their reorganization has produced a protracted crisis that continues to claim lives. The travesty of forgetting Genocide There is a particular kind of failure that cannot be blamed on ignorance. It is the failure of knowing—and choosing not to act. The May 1998 hearing belongs precisely to that category. It was not a moment of confusion. It was a moment of clarity. And what makes today’s policy failures in the Great Lakes region so damning is that they unfold in defiance of that clarity. Scholars, journalists, diplomats, and even a few unusually honest politicians have spent decades confirming what was already laid bare in that hearing: that genocidal violence does not simply end—it mutates, reorganizes, and returns when tolerated. The tragedy is not that the world did not know. The tragedy is that it knew too well—and still chose the easier lie. In her monumental book Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (1999), Alison Des Forges methodically documented how the genocide was not an eruption of “ancient tribal hatred,” but a carefully orchestrated campaign directed by political and military elites. Her conclusion is devastatingly relevant to the 1998 testimony: Genocide is planned, executed, and sustained through structures—not chaos. This directly reinforces what witnesses like Richard McCall told the US Congress: that the perpetrators who fled into eastern Congo did not dissolve into harmless refugees. They carried with them command structures, ideology, and intent. Des Forges warned explicitly that failure to dismantle these networks would lead to renewed violence. She was not speculating. She was describing a pattern already visible in 1996–1998. And yet, here we are—decades later—still debating whether groups like the FDLR are “rebels,” “militia,” or something more inconveniently precise. Former Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson chaired the Independent Inquiry into the actions of the United Nations during the 1994 genocide. The resulting report (1999) is one of the most damning official documents ever produced about international failure. Carlsson’s conclusion was direct: the UN did not lack information—it lacked the will to act on it. This finding reflects, almost word for word, the frustration embedded in the 1998 congressional hearing. The warnings were there. The intelligence was there. The patterns were visible. But decision-making structures defaulted to caution, bureaucracy, and ultimately paralysis. Carlsson’s report underlines a crucial point: institutional failure is hardly about ignorance. It is about the systematic avoidance of responsibility. If the UN could fail so comprehensively in 1994, the question is not whether it learned the lesson—but whether it chose to. The tenure of Boutros Boutros-Ghali as Secretary-General of the United Nations during the genocide has been the subject of intense scrutiny. In his memoir Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga (1999), Boutros-Ghali pointed to the geopolitical constraints and the reluctance of powerful member states—particularly the United States—to engage. His version is revealing not because it absolves the UN, but because it exposes the political calculations behind inaction. The lesson is uncomfortable: international institutions do not fail in isolation. They fail because their most powerful members permit—or even engineer—that failure. This brings us back to the 1998 hearing. When McCall spoke of the international community “accommodating violence,” he was not referring to an abstract entity. He was describing decisions made by governments. And governments, unlike institutions, can be held accountable—at least in theory. The moral indictment Rakiya Omaar, co-founder of African Rights, remains among the earliest and most powerful voices documenting the genocide and its aftermath. Her work, mainly Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance (1995), combined meticulous documentation with moral clarity. Omaar did not merely catalogue atrocities; she exposed the international community’s complicity in allowing them to occur and persist. Her analysis resonates with the 1998 testimony in its refusal to sanitize language. Like McCall, she rejected the understatements that often dominate diplomatic discourse. Genocide was not “conflict.” Perpetrators were not “combatants.” They were exactly what they were. Genocidaires! This insistence on precision is not rhetorical—it is foundational. Because once language is diluted, responsibility follows. American scholar Herbert Hirsch, in Genocide and the Politics of Memory (1995), examined how societies process—or fail to process—mass atrocities. Hirsch’s central argument is that denial, minimization, and distortion are not fringe phenomena; they are integral to the post-genocide landscape. They allow perpetrators and their sympathizers to re-enter political space, often under new appearances. This framework helps explain why groups like the FDLR can persist. It is not merely a military issue; it is an ideological one. And ideology, once normalized or tolerated, becomes far harder to dismantle or destroy. Hirsch would likely view the contemporary tendency to label genocidaires as “rebels” as a classic case of what he describes: the erosion of moral clarity through linguistic compromise. Rwandan scholar Jean-Paul Kimonyo, in works such as Rwanda’s Popular Genocide (2016), explored how deeply embedded the ideology of genocide was within segments of society—and how it could persist beyond the events of 1994. Kimonyo’s work highlights a critical insight: a genocidal ideology is not switched off by military defeat alone. It endures in narratives, networks, and regional dynamics. This directly reinforces McCall’s warning in 1998 that the perpetrators were “committed to finishing what was left undone.” Kimonyo provides the sociological underpinning for that statement. The threat is not hypothetical. It is structurally embedded. Few journalists have reported the genocide and its aftermath with the depth and persistence of Chris McGreal, of The Guardian. His reporting from Rwanda and the Great Lakes region captured both the immediacy of the violence and the failures of international response. McGreal’s work repeatedly highlighted how the genocidaires regrouped in eastern DR Congo, time and again with alarming visibility. His reporting made clear that this was not a concealed phenomenon. It was happening in plain sight. This is perhaps the most damning aspect of the entire story: the persistence of violence was not hidden. It was observed, documented, and published. And yet, it was not decisively addressed. Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop offers a slightly different but equally powerful lens—one grounded not only in scholarship but in moral imagination. His novel Murambi, The Book of Bones (2000), written after participating in the “Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire” project, is not fiction in the escapist sense; it is testimony rendered through narrative. Diop provokes readers with an unsettling truth: genocide does not end with the killing—it continues in silence, denial, and indifference. His work forces a reckoning with the human cost of abstraction, challenging the comfortable distance often maintained in policy discussions. What Diop contributes to this analysis is something that hearings and reports often lack: the emotional and ethical weight of memory. He exposes the gap between knowing and feeling, between documentation and responsibility. In doing so, he reinforces what the 1998 hearing implied but could not fully express: that failure to act is not only political—it is profoundly moral. British investigative journalist Linda Melvern, in her two books: A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (2000) and Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide (2004), Melvern provides an accurately documented account of how governments and international institutions failed—not passively, but actively. Her research reveals that key actors had detailed knowledge of preparations for genocide and chose not to intervene. She also documents how, in the aftermath, the same patterns of evasion and minimization persisted. Melvern’s work is particularly relevant to the issue raised in the 1998 hearing: the accommodation of genocidaires in refugee camps. She shows that this was not an unforeseen consequence but a known risk—one that was insufficiently addressed due to political constraints and lack of will. If Des Forges, Omaar and Kimonyo provides the anatomy of genocide, Melvern provides the autopsy of international failure. And like any honest post-mortem, her findings are not flattering. A challenge to current policy leaders The implications for today’s actors—the United States, Qatar, the United Nations, and the African Union—are unavoidable. Any peace process that fails to distinguish between legitimate political actors and genocidal organizations is fundamentally flawed. Any framework that tolerates the presence of groups like the FDLR as part of the political landscape is complicit in perpetuating violence. The record from 1998 is not ambiguous. It provides both diagnosis and prescription: Should be unequivocally clear about the nature of the actors involved. Have to categorically reject the normalization of genocidal groups. None should accept to negotiate with those whose objective is extermination. Lastly, have to acknowledge that genocide’s legacy is ongoing and not historical. These are not radical positions. They are the minimum requirements of moral and political responsibility. There is a leaning in international diplomacy to privilege the present—by treating each crisis as if it emerged in isolation. But the archives tell a different story. The hearings of May 1998 are not buried relics. They are accessible, documented, and profoundly relevant. They reveal that the current crisis was anticipated, analyzed, and, in many ways, explained. To ignore this record is not an oversight. It is a choice. And it is a costly one. What, then, must be said—clearly, forcefully, and without the anesthetic of diplomatic politeness—to the United States, Qatar, the United Nations, and the African Union? First, that the problem in eastern DR Congo is not stealthy. It is documented. It was described, in detail and with moral clarity, in 1998 before the United States Congress. The architects of today’s violence were identified then. Their intentions were spelled out and haven’t changed. Their methods were understood. Their networks were known. What was lacking was not knowledge—but resolve. Second, that the continued presence and tolerance—whether active or passive—of the FDLR is not a failure of capacity. It is a failure of will. No serious argument can be made that the international system lacks the legal instruments, intelligence capabilities, or military means to dismantle a group whose origins, leadership structures, and operational patterns have been known for decades. The real obstacle is political convenience: the willingness to look away, to reclassify, to dilute language, and to pretend that genocidal ideology can be managed rather than eradicated. Third, that the cost of this failure is not abstract. It is measured in lives—Congolese Tutsis hunted, displaced, and killed; communities terrorized; children raised in the shadow of an unfinished genocide. It is measured in the normalization of hate speech that would provoke immediate global outrage in other contexts but is met here with silence or, worse, rationalization. It is measured in the corrosion of international law itself, when the crime of genocide is stripped of its specificity and reduced to just another “conflict dynamic.” Fourth, and perhaps most damningly, that the international community has created a hierarchy of victims. The comparison drawn by Alain Destexhe was not incidental—it was diagnostic. When the Holocaust is treated as an eternal moral reference point, shaping policy and memory across generations, while the Genocide Against the Tutsi is treated as a concluded episode, the message is unmistakable: some lives command permanent vigilance; others are subject to expiration. This is not merely hypocrisy. It is a structural enabler of future violence. To the policymakers in Washington and Doha, in New York and Addis Ababa, the message must therefore be unambiguous: returning to the clarity of 1998 is not an intellectual exercise. It is a moral imperative. As a matter of principle: Stop calling FDLR by any other name—they are genocidaires. Therefore, avoid creating peace processes that legitimize their presence. It is not useful to pretend that negotiations only can substitute for justice. And above all, stop treating genocide as an “old story. The high price of selective memory and lack of moral courage Because the truth, as the archives make painfully clear, is that genocide does not end when the genocide stops. It persists in ideology, in networks, in silence, and in the cowardice of those who know better but choose expediency over principle. The warnings were given. The record exists. The consequences are visible. What remains is a choice. At this point, one is tempted to ask: what exactly would it take for the international community to act with consistency? Another inquiry? Another commission? Perhaps a new acronym—because nothing says “serious policy response” like rearranging letters. The same system that can produce thousands of pages of analysis on genocide seems remarkably hesitant to act on a single, straightforward conclusion: do not legitimize those who committed it. It is as if policymakers are engaged in an elaborate intellectual exercise—acknowledging every aspect of the problem except the one that requires action. One could almost admire the elegance of this avoidance, if it were not so catastrophically consequential. What remains contested is not the analysis, but the application. The 1998 hearing before the United States Congress did not lack insight. It lacked follow-through. And so we arrive at the present, armed with decades of scholarship, mountains of evidence, and an archive that refuses to stay silent—yet still confronted by policies and positions that behave as if none of it exists. The problem, then, is not that world leaders do not know where to place this analysis. They keep choosing to place it on the shelf to collect dust or pollen.
