30 years after the Rwandan genocide, have we really learned anything?

In 1994, "it was the international community which failed all of us, whether from contempt or cowardice."

These were the words of Rwandan President Paul Kagame while addressing dignitaries and global leaders in Kigali to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide this month.

Kagame's speech underlined the shortcomings of world nations in dealing with one of the most brutal chapters in human history, where crimes against humanity in Rwanda resulted in close to 800,000 deaths.

These killings and the recent commemoration held at the Kigali Genocide Memorial serves as stark reminders that such chapters should never be repeated. To ensure this, there is a need to address the root causes of genocide, which are rooted in ethnic hatred, divisiveness and intolerance.

30 years ago

In 1994, the genesis of the genocide stemmed from the Rwandan Civil War, a product of ethnic tensions between the majority Hutu population and the minority Tutsis due to decades of division over political control and formation of governments.

In 1962, the Tutsi monarchy was replaced by a Hutu republic. While exiled in Uganda, aggrieved Tutsis formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and invaded Northern Rwanda in 1990.

Four years later, the RPF was blamed for assassinating Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana in 1994, though the exact cause of his plane crash was never determined.

Habyarimana's death triggered the widespread killing of Tutsi citizens, moderate Hutus and political leaders by Hutu soldiers, militia and police. Some 800,000 people were massacred and close to 250,000 to 500,000 women were victims of sexual violence.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the killings, Rwanda has held a week-long mourning period. International leaders present in solidarity with Kigali included former US President Bill Clinton, who admitted that the genocide was the biggest failure of his administration.

The scale of death, displacement, destruction and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda is why efforts to prevent genocidal ideologies should never escape the public conscience and should remain entrenched in academic and policy discourses.

To avert similar failures, it is also important for the international community to address enabling factors and root causes which underline such ideologies.

Understanding genocide

The United Nations convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as "any five acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, religious, ethnic and racial group."

The acts include killing members of a certain group, causing psychological trauma, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births and forcibly transferring children out of the ethnic group.

Today, Muslims in Myanmar, also known as Rohingya, appear to be facing a textbook case of genocide. So far, at least 25,000 people have been killed in the violence, prompting Gambia to file a case with the International Court of Justice in 2022.

Israel's relentless bombardment against the minority, besieged and battered Palestinian population in Gaza could also constitute as a genocide, according to UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese.

Returning to the Rwandan genocide, there is much that the international community can learn to prevent further suffering in Myanmar, Palestine and other countries.

Picking on minorities

For example, Rwanda was a classic example of ethnicities being targeted by a majority population for narrow-minded gains.

This was enabled by an absence of accountability for prejudices and bigotry that was festering in society and contributing to community tensions and possible violence. Note that propaganda warfare was an extensively used tool by the Hutu government to justify the massacre of the Tutsi population and its sympathisers.

While state-sponsored hate speech is rare in contemporary times, propaganda against ethnic and religious minorities as an enabling factor exists at the societal level in certain countries.

For example, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government in India saw an average of nearly two anti-Muslim hate speech events per day in 2023, according to a recent report by Washington DC-based India Hate Lab. It added that some 68 percent of them were in Bharatiya Janata Party-run states alone.

The BJP government does not endorse genocide against India's minority Muslim population, as was the case with the Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda.

But the alarming trend of hate speech is taking place under the watch of a prime minister who was considered complicit in the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which at least 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. The three days of violence have been described by Genocide Watch as a pogrom.

Lacking political will

International apathy is another key to carrying out a genocide, as was the case in 1994. Rather than turn away from violence, states must join together to put pressure on governments complicit in crimes against humanity.

This duty is not only a moral one. Failure to address enabling factors such as hate and divisions which result in genocide also violates the central tenets of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which came in response to World War II.

In Rwanda's case, the African Union cannot absolve itself from inaction, nor can French allies who were unable to stop the massacres due to what President Emmanuel Macron has called a lack of political will.

The truth is that the international community bears full responsibility for failing to prevent the systematic targeting of an ethnic population that bears the brunt of state-sponsored crackdowns.

The final common element that is used to facilitate genocide is when the dominant groups work to obfuscate and deny their strategies of targeting minority ethnic groups, similar to what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's regime has done in Palestine.

Through hate speech, derogatory narratives and fear-mongering, Palestinians have become dehumanised in the eyes of many people in the international community - and thus not worthy of saving.

The fact that a genocide is taking place in Gaza after the 1994 Rwandan genocide is another instance of the world not learning from history. The international community must tackle enabling factors such as majority overrule, the perpetuation of hate, ethnic discrimination, degradation of communities and social exclusion.

The best tribute that can be paid to the victims of the Rwandan genocide is to call out state aggression, impose sanctions on countries such as Israel and build more tolerant, inclusive and cohesive societies across the world.