Remembering the Rwandan Genocide

Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. Mr. Cleaver, I appreciate you doing this.

You know, it is just staggering to think about what happened and all of those people going about their daily lives 20 years ago, on April 7, and knowing they are going to die, knowing their loved ones are going to die.

It is so unspeakable that we can't, I can't really imagine what it would be like to live in that country, to live in a neighborhood where you know your moment is coming, where you have a child who is going to die before your very eyes, where your daughter is going to be raped and then killed.

To have this sense of the horror of what is taking place, it is unspeakable. But the realization that the world is going to ignore it, and that happened, day in and day out. Most of us didn't even know about it. There would be reports, but it would be in a distant place. It wasn't anything that you could do anything about.

It was only as the stories fully came out and the horror was fully revealed that the collective gaze of the world that was not acting--there were all kinds of reasons why I suppose we couldn't or we didn't.

But just try to put yourself in the place of the family, up and down that country, where the word is going from one village to another, from one community to another, from one family to another, that you have got to do everything you can to get out.

And where you live in a community where the majority is going to kill you if they find you, where, as you hide and try to conceal yourself or your kids, you can't figure out how to feed them, and you have got to come out into the light of day and put yourself at the mercy of your luck, where do you find or meet somebody who might give you a meal so that you can carry on another day.

It is not anything that I can imagine, just the wholesale use of murder in ethnic cleansing, in order to achieve a political goal.

What is an amazing thing is what Mr. Cleaver just told us, about the recovery of Rwanda. These people go on.

Imagine living with the heartache that will never leave you, that you lost a son or daughter, a parent or grandparent. How do you get yourself up and start all over again?

How do you deal with the hatred that you have to fight because it will consume you and prevent you from carrying on yourself?

How do you do that?

The people in Rwanda are doing that and rebuilding that country, rebuilding their economy, and facing life on a day-in-and-day-out basis.

But having a moment to pause and remember is, I think, humbling for all of us. The capacity that we have, as people, to go awry and do things that never, in a million years, do we think was possible, reminds me of just how fragile life is and how really, in a lot of ways, fragile good governance is. You can't take it for granted.

I think all of us here know that there are forces that can get unleashed which, once they are, have an enormously powerful and destructive tendency. The challenge for all of us is to create ways where we can resolve conflict in peaceful and civil ways. The work of that is the work of this Congress and the work of this democracy.

It is fragile. It isn't anything we can ever take for granted. It has to be with that purpose of allowing people to find ways to resolve differences peacefully.

So this is an amazing moment, 20 years after the beginning of the slaughter of 800,000 innocent people, and a slaughter by very cruel and very painful and very relentless efforts.

So thank you so much, Mr. Cleaver, for allowing us to have this moment of reflection.

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