Rwanda is holding a week of commemorations marking the 30th anniversary of the 1994 genocide, during which up to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by militia members. Rwandan President Paul Kagame said in a speech Sunday the international community “failed all of us.” This is Allan Ngari of Human Rights Watch.

Allan Ngari: “I think it’s the responsibility of the international community that this should never happen again. And we have a classical example of a country that at the time was seen to be of no strategic importance when the lives of so many people were at stake. We had a United Nations peacekeeping operation that was effectively dismantled, and its size was reduced drastically at the point where the Rwandan people really needed the international community to speak up and actually reinforce that peacekeeping operation. And because the international community failed to do so, then we lost over 800,000 people.”

In 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged France’s role in failing to stop the genocide.

Declassified U.S. documents show the Clinton administration refused to label the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda as a genocide. One State Department document read, “Be careful … Genocide finding could commit the U.S. government to actually 'do something.'”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog traveled to Rwanda for the 30-year commemoration, where he met with President Kagame. Kagame has been president since 2000 and has led a harsh crackdown on the press. He is also accused of fueling deadly violence in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.