The Great Silence: remembering Rwanda, the Yazidis and all genocides
by Heidi Kingstone, The Article:
When the plane carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, the president of Rwanda, crashed on the evening of 6 April, 1994, all hell was unleashed, a hell that had simmered for decades. This year, on April 6-7th, the world will remember the 30 years that have passed since the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. On the anniversary, on the streets of Kigali, the capital, you can hear the silent screams of between 800,000 and 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutu and Twa victims who were murdered — many by their neighbours, relatives, and friends.
Nothing can happen without the neighbours, as the Yazidis also discovered on the Plains of Nineveh when ISIS began their onslaught in 2014. On 3 August, it will be ten years since we witnessed the barbaric murders, kidnapping and the biblical slave markets that sold women for sex.
The conflict between Israel and Hamas has brought the issue of genocide and the precise definition of the word into focus. The word genocide inflames passions, and recently, it has become the leitmotif in a genocide competition. It is also being used as a weapon of political rhetoric, which it has been since the Cold War.
But at the end of the day, it’s the human suffering, the killing of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions, that should jolt the international community into a realisation that the victims of war, however justified, are inevitably innocent civilians: men, women and children who bear no responsibility for the carnage.
As Professor Menachem Rosensaft, an expert on the law of genocide, has observed, “Hamas’ brutal murder of 1,200 Israelis, the rape and violation of Jewish women, the killing of children and infants, do not become more or less heinous because they are or are not categorised as genocide. And the Palestinian civilians killed, displaced, or starving in Gaza do not suffer more or less depending on whether South Africa succeeds in getting the International Court of Justice to declare Israel’s war against Hamas a genocide.”
The 7 October attack by Hamas in Israel has opened the floodgates of what could turn into the beginning of a third world war. If Ukraine fails to prevail against the Russian onslaught, it could lead ultimately to the collapse of democracy. The Houthis are holding the world to ransom by their pirate tactics in the Red Sea. Even the Taliban in Afghanistan spend half their budget on defence. On a bad day, the world seems on a path to oblivion. Some days bring more hope.
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