OPINION:
As the first African president to address Washington’s largest annual gathering of pro-Israel activists, Rwandan leader Paul Kagame underscored a key reason for his country’s natural kinship with the Jewish state: As two peoples who survived brutal extermination campaigns, they know the real-world consequences of inaction in the face of hate.
Mr. Kagame declared to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Sunday that “our world is not truly safe — not for us, not for anyone” until the twisted ideologies behind the Holocaust or the Rwanda genocide are acknowledged, confronted with a unified front and defeated.
The Rwandan president issued a critical call for “renewed solidarity against relentless efforts to deny genocide and trivialize the victims.”
It’s a huge opportunity not just for the burgeoning partnerships between Israel and African nations, but for the new administration to assess its genocide prevention goals with these partners who know all too well the consequences of silence.
President Trump is expected to make his first overseas trip to Brussels for a NATO meeting in late May, followed by the G7 summit in Italy. But to put the weight of foreign policy in perspective, Mr. Trump should first head to a quiet suburban neighborhood in East Africa.
A presidential visit to Rwanda would be a visceral education in how the decisions the commander in chief will make from this day on can mean peace or war, freedom or oppression, life or death, protection or genocide. It’s a reminder of what man can do to man in the span of just 100 days, and how policies from the local level to the United Nations all the way to the White House can embolden or stop those who continue to commit ghastly crimes against humanity decades after we swore “never again.”
The new president should journey to the Kigali Genocide Memorial and sit in one of the alcoves lined with family photos of the fallen. It’s not a place to talk, but listen. Listen to the silent stories of the women, men and children whose photos dangle from the wires, souls frozen in time whose final smiles belie their grisly fate.
Because Rwanda knows they’re far from alone in suffering crimes against humanity, another memorial exhibit details genocide from Cambodia to Armenia to the Balkans. Another exhibit remembers the child victims, with names, ages, favorite sports and sweets juxtaposed with their photos and causes of death: bludgeoning, torture, more.
Mr. Trump should save plenty of time for reflection in the burial place, where the remains of more than 250,000 victims of the Rwandan genocide are interred — a number that grows each year as new grave sites are found across the country more than two decades after an estimated 800,000 were murdered.
He should book a room for the evening at the Hotel des Mille Collines, better known as blessed accommodations to more than 1,200 souls who sheltered within the hotel’s walls during the genocide. He shouldn’t leave the country without stopping at other genocide memorials well beyond Kigali: Bisesero, hills where more than 50,000 Tutsi were killed after resisting the Hutu militias; Ntarama, where thousands seeking refuge in a church were slaughtered and the bones as well as belongings of those murdered remain today; Nyamata, another mass killing of some 10,000 people who had tried to barricade themselves in a church; Murambi, a technical school under construction at the time where 45,000 victims were slaughtered and left in a mass grave.
No press conference should be scheduled with this trip: Rwandans are beyond wanting to hear tired platitudes from politicians, anyway.
The advice would be the same no matter who moved into the Oval Office as human rights are too often an afterthought, a hastily interjected line near the end of a press release, a disclaimer that condemnation of horrendous violations was brought up in passing while talking economics with the offending regime.
To keep “never again” from becoming “again” and “again,” every president must be guided by a sense of moral responsibility, along with the experiences of the Israelis and Rwandans, the Sudanese and Burmese and Iraqis, and other populations targeted for genocide. Mr. Trump must be guided by the voices speaking to every person in power from the mass graves of Rwanda, and beyond.
• Bridget Johnson is a senior fellow with the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center and D.C. bureau chief for PJ Media.
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