A few years ago, 🇫🇷 recognised its “overwhelming” share of responsibility in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. That step had seemed almost impossible just a decade prior. Too often people in our ✋🏿✋🏾✋🏽 parts of the world are denied even the mere possibility of healing, through a refusal to facilitate its most essential steps: there can be no good treatment to any ailment without an accurate diagnosis of what problem occurred, how it occurred, and why it occurred. It’s likely that if suffering is observed but purposefully unacknowledged or diminished, it is because its onlooker considers this suffering justifiable and therefore defendable. A scary thought. But when you have power (whether in relative influence or full military authority), the crimes you defend are crimes you enable. Silence altogether, as some wanted of President Macron, is a coward’s favourite tool of complicity. President Macron chose otherwise, and offered recognition instead. It was an important pivot, but the machinery dedicated to protecting the genocidal order and rehabilitating genocidal ideology was [and is] very much alive. It fought to prove its existence, across traditional and social media, after the publishing of the Duclert report and Macron’s speech in Kigali, where the French President asked for forgiveness from survivors. Publicly, and one would suspect behind closed doors as well, there were those who condemned President Macron for this truthful step or worse yet, this humane approach. Some, of banal racism, simply suggested that Africans were unworthy of the decency of a deserved apology. But there is no comfortable middle ground when it comes to dehumanisation and genocide, particularly when the power to prevent catastrophe sits within your grasp. Faced with the persecution of a people, fence-sitting is, in fact, taking a stance. You either oppose the killers and those who prepare the ground for them, or you help clear their path so they can march ahead, machette in hand, abetted. As President @EmmanuelMacron inaugurates the Quai d’Orsay Memorial to the Genocide against the Tutsi, the hope remains that those who have chosen principle and sincerity regarding their involvement in our past, are succeeded by people with the integrity to adopt the same posture toward the future, because the warning signs did NOT disappear after July 1994. There are STILL people in this region being persecuted for reasons disturbingly similar to those that drove the attempted annihilation of every Tutsi in Rwanda in 94. There are STILL political entrepreneurs in the region invested in scapegoating entire populations for problems they did not create, to justify their murder and erasure, to distract populations as to real problems. Lacking the capacity or legitimacy required to inspire genuine allegiance grounded in shared ambition, trust or love, some “leaders” wager instead on manufacturing hatred of others into partisan loyalty - a common purpose to rally frustrated populations behind them. The political toolkit is the same across the world. There are still those working to make exclusion, persecution, and violence more palatable to the public by wrapping hatred in the language of security, patriotism, or justice for one’s “stolen wealth”. And so there is still responsibility to be taken. The responsibility to recognise the signs and refuse their trajectory BEFORE the graves have to be dug and the memorials have to be built….The responsibility to ensure that future generations are not left inaugurating monuments to tragedies that today’s leaders had every opportunity to prevent. Despite the silver linings, there’s a soft ache here. I think we want to go to France for the gorgeous terrasses, cheese, croissants, and much more. Not in mourning of innocent people whose loss the country had “overwhelming responsibility” in facilitating. This is a step. But it’s just a step. There’s a long way ahead with many, manyyy more.