30 Years Later, Rwanda Genocide Shows Consequences of U.S. Refusal to Prevent Mass Killing

Rwanda is holding a week of commemorations to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, a period of around 100 days in which up to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu militias while powerful countries, including the United States, stood by and refused to stop the mass killings. Shortly after the genocide, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame took power and has since ruled Rwanda with an iron fist, leading a harsh crackdown on the press and opposition groups. We look back at the 1994 genocide and discuss the country’s trajectory since then with two guests: Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch and now a visiting professor at Princeton, and Noël Zihabamwe, a survivor of the genocide whose parents were killed during the violence in 1994 and whose brothers were disappeared by the Kagame regime in 2019. Zihabamwe now lives in Australia and runs the African Australian Advocacy Center.