Rwanda, 1995

On behalf of the Rwandese people and of my delegation,

as well as on my own behalf, allow me to extend to

His Excellency Mr. Diogo Freitas do Amaral my warm

and sincere congratulations on his unanimous election as

President of the General Assembly at its fiftieth session.

This choice does credit to his talent and experience as a

diplomat and statesman, as well as to his country.

I am also pleased to take this opportunity to express

our appreciation and admiration to his predecessor,

His Excellency Mr. Amara Essy of Côte d’Ivoire, whose

dedication, competence and commitment during the forty-

ninth session of the Assembly do honour to that great

diplomat, who embodies the pride of his country and of

Africa as a whole.

Allow me also, on behalf of the Rwandese

Government of National Unity, to thank the Secretary-

General, Mr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, for the skill and

determination he has shown in discharging his duties,

qualities that have scored some notable successes for our

Organization and have strengthened its credibility and the

esteem in which it is held.

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Let me take this opportunity to welcome into this

concert of nations the Republic of Palau, admitted as the

185th Member of the United Nations. The presence here of

its delegation expands the horizons of the Organization and

opens one additional door of cooperation for us.

For my delegation and myself it is a special privilege

to take part in this the fiftieth session, which includes the

commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the United

Nations. My delegation is pleased, on behalf of the

Rwandan people and Government, to be a part of the

concert of nations in celebrating this anniversary. The

creation of this Organization following the Second World

War was aimed at preserving future generations from the

scourge of war, genocide and other evils that had afflicted

the human race for centuries.

The United Nations thus drafted a Charter whose

fundamental principles are based on human rights, justice

and peace. My delegation wishes to take this opportunity to

pay tribute to the founding countries of this indispensable

Organization, who took the initiative to create a world

institution. From the time of its creation, the United Nations

has been an ideal forum for the peace-, justice- and

progress-loving peoples of the world. The celebration of its

fiftieth anniversary is an opportunity for us to take stock of

the road we have travelled, to pause and look at our

objectives and to revise our programmes with a view to

being better prepared for the future. My delegation is

pleased that for half a century the United Nations has

spared us world wars, and that it has been an indispensable

institution for the promotion and maintenance of peace.

As for the developing countries — those of the

African continent in particular — during these 50 years the

Organization has played an important role in the liberation

of many countries from the colonial yoke, and the

establishment of numerous United Nations specialized

agencies has turned it into an instrument of development in

all economic, social, political and cultural spheres. If,

thanks to the existence of this worthy Organization, the

world has been able to avoid other world wars, it has not

succeeded in averting hundreds of conflicts between its

Members or in intervening between Member States which,

for a number of reasons, have engaged in such conflicts by

supporting third countries. Since 1945 wars without

exception have shifted from the northern to the southern

hemisphere.

Following the end of the cold war it has become

imperative to reform and restructure the United Nations to

enable it to respond to the aspirations of its Members,

especially developing countries that receive the least

benefit.

As for the Security Council, we must ensure

equitable geographical representation and increase the

numbers of permanent and non-permanent seats. This

restructuring must provide Africa with some permanent

seats, with all the rights and duties that these entail. This

is the continent’s right, not a privilege. The Security

Council is in great need of democratization and the

introduction of greater transparency, both among its

members and vis-à-vis other organs of the United Nations

and other States Members of the Organization.

My delegation supports the idea of reforming the

United Nations in order to achieve greater efficiency and

to avoid duplication in the Organization and between it

and the specialized agencies. Such reform should be

aimed at strengthening certain institutions and, therefore,

should not be interpreted as having any other purpose,

such as the reduction of Member States’ contributions.

I should like to conclude this introduction by

recalling once again that justice and development are key

elements for the reigning of peace and security in the

world. That is the raison d’être of this Organization and

the highest desire of the Government and delegation of

Rwanda.

This is the first time, since the tragedy of the

genocide and planned massacres in Rwanda began to

afflict our country and people and the world at large, for

members of the new Government of National Unity of

Rwanda to participate in this debate at the United Nations

General Assembly.

We know quite well that speaking at the General

Assembly is not a simple rite, after which we can just go

home. We know that speeches made in this prestigious

forum are listened to, analysed and scrutinized, especially

because they are opportunities for nations to express the

will, aspirations and priorities of their peoples, as well as

their positions on international issues of the day; they

must go beyond purely national egoisms and contribute to

international understanding and solidarity.

The crime against humanity committed in Rwanda

were crimes not just against the Rwandan people but also

against the members of this body, who should give us a

few moments to submit some reflections on the first and

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foremost victim of that crime, which, unfortunately, is my

own country, Rwanda. With respect to this tragedy, it is

painful for us to have to emphasize the conduct of the

United Nations, its failure, on the day it decided to

withdraw the 2,500 Blue Helmets who were in Rwanda

when the genocide and massacres began, thus abandoning

a whole defenceless population and delivering it into the

hands of the killers.

This was clearly a case of failure to assist a people in

danger, a population in peril. A million human lives were

lost in these tragic, planned events, as if it had been

decided to erase from the map of the world at a single

stroke a whole country with a population of that size.

It is important to remind the Assembly that this was

not at all a civil war in Rwanda. Rather, it involved militias

of the former single party and their supporters, military

officials of the former Rwandan armed forces and former

politicians, who were engaged in a manhunt against

innocent, defenceless people — a manhunt against all the

Tutsis in the country and all the moderate Hutus, as well as

their parents, other relatives, friends and everyone else

close to them.

In this manhunt the victims were stripped of their right

to life. They were forced to pay their own killers for the

right to die from a bullet in the head rather than be killed

with a machete or forced to dig their own graves, into

which they would be thrown alive. The price of a bullet in

the head or in the heart ranged from 5,000 Rwandan francs

to 30,000 Rwandan francs in the countryside, and from

50,000 Rwandan francs to 1 million Rwandan francs or

more in the cities.

When the armed forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front

and the democratic forces of change had achieved a

military and political victory against these Nazis of Africa,

the United Nations, at the request of the Government of

National Unity — formed by the groups I have

mentioned — created the International Tribunal for Rwanda

and entrusted it with the trial of those guilty of the

massacres and genocide in the country.

Perhaps this is the appropriate time for the United

Nations to restore respect for it by a people still suffering

the abandonment to which it fell victim in April 1994. That

people looks to the United Nations, which did not protect

it from genocide and massacre, to prove itself capable this

time of trying and sentencing those whom it could not or

would not stop from killing.

The United Nations cannot afford the luxury of yet

another failure in Rwanda. President Arap Moi of Kenya

has announced that he will not cooperate with the

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. That could

be a precedent if we are not careful. The President of

Kenya as well as the United Nations should take care to

measure the degree of poison that the President of Kenya

is calmly distilling in the subregion of the Great Lakes by

announcing publicly that if the investigators of the

International Tribunal for Rwanda dare to set foot in

Kenya seeking persons who committed the genocide in

Rwanda they would be imprisoned by the Government of

Kenya. We fear that this could be the beginning of the

failure of the United Nations and the International

Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in bringing to justice the

commanders, the planners and those who carried out the

genocide and massacres last year in Rwanda. Thus, we

await a decision from the Security Council on what it

intends to do with respect to the refusal by Kenya to

cooperate with the pursuit of persons who have

committed genocide who are taking shelter in Kenya, and

others who may follow them on the basis of the

assurances offered by the President of Kenya in defiance

of Security Council resolution 978 (1995) in this respect.

The Government of National Unity of the Republic

of Rwanda, wishing to promote peace and security in

Rwanda and the subregion, decided when it took office on

19 July 1994 to make the repatriation of refugees its

highest priority. We must recall here that the recent

Rwandan refugees are not the first ones. They date from

1959 and the bloody events of 1961, 1963, 1965, 1967,

1972, 1973 and 1990. The number of refugees has

steadily increased and has now reached the figure of more

than 1 million. The international community remained

silent about the repeated refusal by the former President

of Rwanda to allow these people to return home; he

proclaimed that the country was overcrowded and was too

small, that there was no room for anyone else, and that

the more than 1 million Rwandan refugees would have to

remain forever in exile where they had found refuge for

more than 30 years.

For the new Government of National Unity of

Rwanda — unlike the Governments that preceded it —

the repatriation of refugees is part of the process of

rehabilitating the human capital that is so much needed by

our Government, which has decided to make human

beings the focus of its concerns, for it is the people of a

country who are the most important source of its wealth,

and its greatest asset. It is the population that produces,

and it must therefore be taught and re-taught the positive

22

values of tolerance and respect for life and justice — in this

case, respect for security, health, and social and socio-

professional well-being.

Rwanda, a non-permanent member of the Security

Council has always shouldered its responsibilities in the

promotion of peace and security in the world — in Bosnia,

Somalia, Liberia, Angola, Chechnya and everywhere that

armed conflicts have broken out.

Faithful to those principles the Rwandan Government

supports any initiative likely to create room for peace

anywhere in the world, especially in our subregion. Thus

we were present at the Conference in Brazzaville, Congo;

the Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, in January 1995; and the

Bujumbura Conference in February 1995. The Rwandan

Government requests that the conclusions of the Nairobi

and Bujumbura Conferences be implemented in order to

ensure the rapid repatriation of Rwandan refugees before

considering any additional conferences are held. We find it

difficult to see what the purpose or goal of such additional

conferences would be.

As I had occasion to say at the beginning of my

statement, to make a speech at this prestigious rostrum of

the United Nations is for any nation an opportunity to

express its views and the way it envisages the future of its

people and the world in the light of the experience of the

past. That is especially the case on this fiftieth anniversary

of the United Nations, which is a time to take stock not

only for the Organization itself but also for the nations that

are its Members.

Rwanda, for as long as it has existed as a country and

nation, has been living in a state of constant imbalance that

has inflicted on it a whole series of frustrations: the

imbalances of the monarchic period, when all Tutsis were

forcibly assimilated into the ruling clan; the imbalances of

a badly managed colonial era, which engendered its innate

frustrations; and the imbalances of the post-independence

period, which also created its own frustrations, conflicts and

power struggles in the neocolonial world. All these

imbalances and the resulting frustrations led Rwanda

directly into the large-scale massacres and genocide that

took place from April to July 1994.

At present, under the leadership since 19 July 1994 of

the Government of National Unity which emerged from

political formations that had fought against the Fascist

ideology of the former single party and its supporters,

Rwanda has left the orbit of constant imbalance, the source

of the majority of the ills of which it had been the victim

up to that time. Today Rwanda is in what I would call a

time of restored balance, in which all progressive people

in Rwanda have decided to work together hand in hand,

going beyond any ethnic and regional divisions for the

sake of the survival of the Rwandan people and nation as

a whole. This time of restored balance is a precious

moment in the history of Rwanda, in our history, and we

wish to assure the Assembly of this. The Rwandan people

and Government call upon the United Nations and the

entire international community present here to continue to

lend their moral, political, material and financial support

to the Rwandan Republic and people during the fragile

and delicate period of this restored balance. For a country

that has so long lived in a virtually permanent state of

imbalance, this moment of restored balance is a great and

precious moment. It is like a child which has just been

born and which one must look after very carefully lest it

slip out of one’s grasp. Help us, then, to preserve this

precious moment of restored equilibrium, for the sake of

the future of the Rwandan nation and all the people of

Rwanda.

In this respect, we urge journalists and political

analysts throughout the world to support the efforts

towards unity and national reconciliation of the Rwandan

people, which have regained their identity. We ask those

journalists and political analysts to abandon the simplistic

terms and ideas of the past, to which they have had the

habit of resorting whenever they have spoken about

Africa and the peoples of Africa, of Rwanda in particular.

We beg them to leave the pre-established corridors, not to

remain prisoners of these often simplistic terms and ideas

of the past, and not to view everything in Rwanda in

terms of ethnic dichotomies. Complexity, pure and

simple, exists in Rwanda. We must understand it in order

to better understand a people which has today regained its

identity and its balance and is united in favour of true,

lasting national reconciliation, one that is not sensational

or superficial, which, rather, seeks to take deep roots.

The Rwandan Government is determined to spare no

effort to establish all the necessary conditions for the

resumption of economic activities, the deep-going national

reconciliation we mentioned a moment ago and the

democratization process. In addition to determination, it

needs human, material and financial resources to carry out

its immense programme of national reconciliation,

reconstruction and rehabilitation. This is why the

Government and the people of Rwanda need

understanding and assistance from the African community

and the international community — so that a Rwandan

nation can be built on an unshakable foundation and the

23

Rwandan people can enjoy a genuine national

reconciliation.

My country, Rwanda, is concerned about numerous

problems, both political and socio-economic, of the Great

Lakes subregion. In this connection, the idea of holding a

regional conference on peace and stability in the Great

Lakes region has recently been put forward. However, as

we have made clear on other occasions, no one has so far

been able to explain what would be original about such a

conference, especially with regard to how its substance

would differ from that of the conferences on the same

subject held in Nairobi in January 1995 and in Bujumbura

in February of the same year.

Rwanda considers that for the sake of credibility and

efficiency, all the measures deemed appropriate in Nairobi

and Bujumbura should first be put to the test, and the

necessary conclusions drawn, before envisaging other

strategies.

In political and security matters, the unrest and

insecurity caused by the rearmament of militias and the

former Rwandan armed forces constitute a threat to peace

in the subregion. In this connection, the Rwanda

Government welcomes the establishment of an international

commission assigned to investigate the illegal arms traffic

intended to destabilize Rwanda and its neighbouring

countries.

In the economic area, the Rwandan Government

belongs to subregional and regional groupings whose aim

is to integrate the States of the African Great Lakes region.

My Government is determined to direct its efforts towards

regional economic unity so that the States of the subregion

can enjoy peaceful understanding and fruitful cooperation.

Regarding Africa, my Government welcomes the

reconciliation efforts of the brotherly people of Angola. My

delegation hopes that, for the well-being of its peoples, that

country will achieve a lasting peace. The Rwandan

delegation welcomes the fact that the parties concerned

recently reached an accord on several important questions

and adopted an accelerated time-table for the

implementation of the Lusaka Protocol with a view to

putting a definitive stop to the war and achieving national

reconciliation in Angola.

We also welcome the political success recorded by the

people of Mozambique for reconciliation and democracy. In

the same spirit, we urge our Somali brothers to resume

dialogue in order to rebuild their nation for the benefit of

the country’s population, which has suffered so much. My

Government welcomes the dialogue initiated between

brothers in Liberia, who yesterday were enemies, with a

view to bringing definitive peace to Liberia. In this

connection, the official installation of the Council of State

on 1 September 1995 makes it possible to hope that the

peace process has begun anew. We urge the international

community to do its part in helping that war-torn country.

In the Middle East, the peace process initiated with

the Israeli-Palestinian accord of 28 September 1995 is

encouraging. We also support the peace process under

way in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In conclusion, my delegation hopes that on entering

the twenty-first century the United Nations will be well

adapted to the challenges of tomorrow’s world. Rwanda,

for its part, assures the Organization that it will do all it

can to establish peace within its borders and preserve

peace throughout the world. That is our mission.