When, on 7 April, people around the world commemorate the 10th
anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, that observance should be fi lled not only
with remorse, but with resolve.
We must remember the victims – the hundreds of thousands of men, women
and children abandoned to systematic slaughter while the world, which
had the capacity to save most of them, failed to save more than a handful,
forever sullying the collective conscience. We must also help the survivors still
struggling with the physical and psychological scars. But most of all, we must
pledge – to ourselves as moral beings and to each other as a human community
– to act boldly, including through military action when no other course will
work, to ensure that such a denial of our common humanity is never allowed
to happen again.