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27th Anniversary of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

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Senior Fellow and Professional Lecturer Noam Schimmel recently published a thought piece titled “A Postcolonial Reflection on the Rwandan Genocide Against the Tutsi and its Legacy” for the Commemoration of the 27th Anniversary of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The piece calls for Belgian accountability for its role of enabling the genocide by not intervening.

Here is an excerpt from Noam’s piece:

“It was the Belgian government and the United Nations and their mutual perfidiousness in 1994 that enabled the slaughter of more than two thousand Tutsis at the ETO – Ecole Technique Officiale in Kigali willfully and deliberately, and with full knowledge of the consequences of withdrawing their soldiers during the genocide and leaving the Tutsis to the machetes of the Interahamwe and to certain death as they were marched to Nyanza and massacred there. It is the Belgian government today that has yet to be held legally to account for this complicity, which Belgian courts have whitewashed in an example of the legal and moral corruption of Belgium’s courts and their complicity in the Belgian’s government’s enabling of the genocide against the Tutsi. Belgium harbors and protects genocidaires within its borders and enables their impunity and as such violates the 1948 Convention on the Crime and Punishment of Genocide.”

You can find the full text of his powerful and poignant piece here.