“You cannot kill someone twice. Rwanda cannot die twice. Before you kill Rwanda, Rwanda will kill you.” - H.E. Paul Kagame When I went to the Nyanza-Kicukiro Genocide Memorial with my uncle for the commemoration of the ETO massacre last week, what stayed with me first was not the speeches or even the history being retold, but the people. Some were sitting quietly, some were embracing, some just remained still in a way that felt deliberate, like leaving would mean breaking something that needed to hold a little longer. It felt like something ongoing, something people were stepping back into rather than gathering to remember from a distance. Some of the faces weren’t unfamiliar, and that changes everything. The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi is not something I encountered for the first time at that memorial. It exists in the people I know. It exists in my family. Seeing survivors there, people I am connected to, collapsed the distance even further. It wasn’t history being presented. It was something that hasn’t fully moved into the past. And so, being at the memorial felt like recognizing something I already knew, but in a way that was harder to look away from. As we listened to various testimonies, I kept thinking about what that place represented in 1994. The Ecole Technique Officielle – currently the home of IPRC-Kigali – was a UN-protected site, particularly by a contingent of Belgian peacekeepers. People gathered there because protection was visible, it was embodied in peacekeepers, in presence, in the idea that there were limits to what could happen. That assumption wasn’t naive. It was based on what was there. And then it wasn’t. The peacekeepers withdrew as Interahamwe militia surrounded the school, and there’s no way to describe that as chaotic or unclear. It was a decision, and in that moment, something shifted from uncertain to inevitable. The people who had gathered under the expectation of safety were left exposed, and the massacre of roughly 2,000 Tutsis did not unfold in confusion. Standing there, especially during the commemoration, what is found striking is how clear it all was. The sequence of events, the way everything moved forward without ambiguity about what was happening or where it was leading. That clarity makes it difficult to accept the idea that this was something the world did not understand. Because it did, and that thought stayed with me as the ceremony continued. One hundred days is not a long time in most contexts. And yet, in Rwanda, those one hundred days were enough for organized destruction and for one million Tutsis to be hunted down and killed. Throughout that time, there were warnings, intelligence reports, diplomatic communications, and direct appeals from those on the ground who understood exactly what was unfolding and tried to make others understand it too. There was no absence of information, and no lack of clarity about what was happening. So, the question is not whether the world knew. It’s what it chose to do with that knowledge. The answer, when you follow it through, does not look like failure. It looks like restraint. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda was reduced at the very moment it should have been reinforced. Mandates were narrowed when they should have expanded. Distress calls were acknowledged, documented, and then left unanswered. Even the language used at the time reflects that same hesitation. Famously, when US State Department spokesperson Christine Shelley questioned about the Genocide Against the Tutsi in 1994 she said “We have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred,” when asked the follow up question How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide? she replied, That's just not a question that I'm in a position to answer. It is difficult to read that as uncertainty. It feels deliberate, because naming it clearly would have required acting decisively, and that action never came. Standing there, surrounded by people who lived through the Genocide, it becomes harder to see 1994 as a breakdown of the international system. A system became evident to me, one where intervention is not triggered by suffering alone, but by how that suffering fits into a broader set of priorities. Some crises demand immediate action, and others are simply ignored. In that kind of system, division becomes something that can be navigated from the outside. A fragmented country is easier to deprioritize, easier to engage with selectively, easier to leave alone without consequence. The “gain” is not something openly stated, but it exists in quieter forms: influence without accountability and stability elsewhere maintained through instability here. And that pattern does not remain confined to Rwandan borders. It extends into the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where violence continues under the same international gaze. Armed groups, including the same people responsible for the Genocide against the Tutsi now under the banner of FDLR militia, continue to operate within a conflict that is neither hidden nor misunderstood. The Banyamulenge face targeted attacks by the same group, displacement, and ongoing insecurity that is widely documented, and yet the response remains familiar: statements are issued, concern is expressed, and action is limited. Here, the “gain” is harder to ignore. Eastern DR Congo holds resources essential to global industries such as cobalt and coltan. In that context, instability does not always disrupt external interests, rather it makes them easier to sustain, access, and manage without accountability. Intervention becomes costly, and inaction becomes easier to justify. None of this requires a conspiracy to understand. It requires recognizing a pattern in which human suffering does not always compel action, that it is weighed against political and economic priorities, and sometimes it does not outweigh them. That is what makes the lesson of 1994 difficult to sit with. Not just that genocide can happen, but that it can happen in full view of the world, be understood as it happens, and still be set aside. By the time the commemoration began to come to a close, people didn’t leave all at once. Many people lingered. It showed me that remembrance here is not something contained to a moment. It is continuous, carried by the people who were there and by those of us who are connected to them. “Rwanda cannot die twice” doesn’t feel like a slogan in that space. It feels like a responsibility, because if the systems that allowed 1994 to unfold are still in place, then survival cannot depend on them changing. It has to come from unity that isn’t optional, clarity about how power works, and refusing to assume that awareness will automatically lead to action. The commemoration event ends. The walk ends. But the weight of it doesn’t, because what stays is not just what happened there, but what it reveals about the world that allowed it, and the one that still exists now. The greatest danger was never that the world didn’t know. It did, and decided it could wait. For those of us who inherit that history, the question is no longer whether the world will act, but what we do, knowing that the world will not act. The author is a final year student at Green Hills Academy.
