UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has used an international day to remember the victims of the Rwandan massacre to express his concerns over the “rise of racism, hate speech and xenophobia around the world” and the plight of those who are being killed, displaced or abused including, in particular, the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar.
In a statement issued on 7th April to mark the 24th anniversary of the start of the 1994 massacre of some 800,000 mostly ethnic Tutsi Rwandans, Mr Guterres said that while Rwanda had learned from its “tragedy”, “so must the international community”.
“I am deeply concerned about the rise of racism, hate speech and xenophobia around the world,” he said. “These base manifestations of human cruelty provide the breeding ground for far more evil acts. People are still being killed, displaced and their human rights abused in many parts of the world because of their faith or ethnicity.”
Mr Guterres said he was “particularly troubled” by the plight of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar. “Members of this religious and ethnic minority have been systematically killed, tortured, raped, burnt alive and humiliated, and more than 671,000 have fled in search of safety in neighbouring Bangladesh,” he noted.
Mr Guterres called on those UN member states who have not yet become parties to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide – this year marking its 70th anniversary – to do so.
“To save people at risk, we must go beyond words. We must nurture the courage to care and the resolve to act. Only by meeting these challenges can we honour the victims and survivors of genocide and ensure that what happened in Rwanda is never repeated, anywhere, ever again.”
Meanwhile, Adama Dieng, the UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide, has said in an interview that the horrific acts perpetrated on the Rohingya would one day be brought before an international court, adding that he has “no doubt” they will be found to be “crimes against humanity, as ethnic cleansing” and even possibly genocide.
