Amidst all the great academics, politicians, lawyers, officials and students gathered together, it was an elderly Canadian from Montreal and a cynical mother from Rwanda who seemed to catch the most spirit and attention.
That’s what happened last weekend when former UN Lt. General Romeo Dallaire and Rwandan activist Esther Mujawayo appeared in Montreal to take part in the inaugural Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide.
The event, hosted by McGill University, brought together both local and international representatives for a series of panel discussions on various issues concerning genocide and human rights. Bringing together legislators, activists, journalists, diplomats and students, the conference sought lessons from genocides of the past, and strategies for dealing with them today and preventing them in the future.
Mujawayo is an individual who personifies the topic of genocide consequences. In the opening ceremonies, Mujawayo spoke alongside three other survivors of genocide– Marika Néni of Hungary, Youk Chhang of Cambodia, and Batia Bettman, a survivor of the Holocaust. Mujawayo spoke passionately and angrily about how the world had failed to help her and her family as a result of the idea that she was worth less than other people. “You and me —are we human beings, the same?”
She went on to bitterly relate details of the evacuation of Belgian, French, and American citizens of Rwanda, who took care to also evacuate their pets during the genocide in Rwanda but then painfully ignored Tutsis like herself targeted in the genocide.
“A Belgian dog is better off than my child,” she told the conference.
When Dallaire’s time came to speak, he confronted the crowd with questions highlighting the problems of international intervention. The wellknown humanitarian criticized the lack of guidelines for such action.
“What is the bar determining this need for political intervention?” he questioned. “What is the magic formula that will give politicians the will to intervene?”
The answer may lie in the images that the world wants least to see. In the opening ceremony, evidence of atrocities committed on children was shown to drive home the horror of genocide.
Near the end of a film used to open the conference, the image of a young Rwandan boy was shown with a fiveinch gash across the right part of his head. In a low quiet voice, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka spoke of witnessing such an act of butchery, recounting his experience of seeing a lifeless child on the ground with a machete embedded in his skull.
Such a loss of life was something Mujawayo had personally seen as well. She spoke angrily against the UN and world community, who she said failed to stop the murders of hundreds of her family and friends. And she added that the failure was continuing.
Mujawayo remarked on how, despite the Rwandan genocide having been officially declared to have ended 10 years ago, its effects were still starkly evident in the country’s widespread cases of widows and orphans, many now living with HIV/AIDs.
Despite the painful introductions, the crowd was soon reminded by Mc- Gill’s Professor Payam Akhavan that the purpose of the conference was not to “come here tonight to weep” but rather, to take action against genocide.
He repeated what Mujawayo had said earlier in the conference: “I want to challenge the leaders and academics among you,” she had cried. “Do something about us.”
In part II of this story, The Varsity gets an in-depth look into the critical discussions held on aspects of genocide, the groundbreaking work of the first International Young Leaders Forum following the Global Conference, and work students are doing to fight genocide worldwide.
