My Remarks on the Occasion of the 31st Commemoration of the Genocide against the Tutsi, at NYU.

Dear guests, dear students, dear rwandan community, distinguished guests, dear survivors.

I am honored to welcome you to this commemoration of the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwanda organized with the support of the African Graduate Students Association of NYU. My name is Jessica Mwiza and I will be your host on this occasion.

Kwibuka means to remember in Kinyarwanda. For 31 years, every year, we remember the more than a million people, adults, children, babies, who perished during the last genocide of the 20th century which was committed in plain sight while the whole world looked away in silence. They were massacred for the simple fact of being Tutsi. Through this act of commemoration, we break the silence and honour the dead and the living who have gone through death.

We remind them that we are with them and their suffering will never be in vain.

The crime of genocide is a political crime. In Rwanda, there was and still is one people united by beliefs, culture, the same language, the Banyarwanda. Racist ideology was created and then instrumentalized to divide and then dominate this united people during the missions of Christianization, during colonization and then by neocolonial forces. What followed was a logic of hatred.

A logic of hatred meticulously reinforced by political, religious, cultural, educational, and family discourse.

The Tutsi had become a race of foreigners, usurpers, invaders, vile and cruel and they were subjected to the crime that conspiracy theories - already before the genocide - had attributed to these same innocent unarmed victims. It was what historians call the crime of crimes. Death in atrocious suffering, death following a total, complete dehumanization. Death as a civic service to the nation, the majority of which - back in 1994 - considered that taking a life was a positive social value and that saving the life of a Tutsi constituted a vile complicity.

The terminology is important in this sense: the Tutsi were targeted by extermination, within a political plan, followed by a logic of a decentralized organization that was also eminently political. Minds were prepared for decades, weapons were bought and distributed to militias whose training had been accelerated shortly before those three terrible months from April to July 1994. The Tutsi were targeted by a final solution, as the killers said. So, dear friends, there is no “Rwandan genocide”, or “genocide of the Tutsi but also of all the others”: it is the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi of Rwanda.

Kwibuka is a Rwandan ceremony that we offer to share with you to surround the survivors on this day, then to better understand the multiple facets of the crime of genocide, until its denial that we are currently undergoing in a violent and sophisticated version. A continuation of the crime of genocide through words, which always prepares the worst, elsewhere, for other questions of domination and wars of power and influence.

Dear guests, we thank you again for your presence.

[…] As you can understand, the genocide against the Tutsi did not happen overnight. It was not caused by an attack on a plane, nor by popular fury, nor by reason of fear or hunger.

It was committed because national and local political leaders had chosen to follow the path traced by colonization, that of hierarchical classification between human beings sharing a common land, an air and a common destiny. The choice of hatred is an easy choice. When genocidal leaders down to the lowest officials and accomplices choose hatred, they choose to accept the little voice in their head that says they are usurping their position. Those thoughts that, at the end of the day, bring them back to the reality of their theft, plunder, rape, fraud, profound incompetence, and mediocrity. They project onto the other, the Jewish, Tutsi, Arab, black scapegoat, all the misdeeds of which they themselves are guilty. Then they hate him, they hate the other as they hate themselves.

Faced with this hatred, an entire people has made the conscious and difficult choice to get back on its feet. The exiles and tortured since 1959 took up arms and liberated a country, Rwanda, which many of them had known only through dreams and songs, from refugee camps, from camps of misery where death awaited them. Between perishing and saving lives they made their choice.

We think of the mothers who lost all their children and then at the end of the genocide opened their doors to orphaned children. We think of the 13- or 14-year-olds who took in children even younger than themselves because they, too, had lost their parents.

We think of those survivors and families of victims who dried their tears, hardened their hearts, buried our people with dignity and got back to work, to rebuild the country. A process that is not yet over because every year, on the occasion of construction work or a natural disaster, new mass graves are found, new lies are dug up and hearts are broken again, while the same international community that was silent 31 years ago accuses us of instrumentalizing our memory.

So, thank you, thank you again dear friends, thank you for being the shield to appease the hearts of the survivors, the families of the victims and thank you for being precious allies in fighting evil words with other words: those of peace, resilience, love and solidarity.