View Video | Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal

Avi Singh
speaks on ...

political ethnicity and conflict

Transcript

0:00

All ethnic conflicts are political, right? And you and I are of different ethnicity, we’re on video so people can see that, right? And people living in the same place are of different ethnicity and you can create the political conflict quite easily over time as a political project, through narratives of history.

0:21

And there are narratives of history which have terrible in Rwanda. But that doesn’t mean, even – so that’s itself political, but that doesn’t mean that ethnic conflict will result, either by people acting badly or people not caring enough, or people letting people who have ulterior motives – it gets to a situation and even when it gets to a situation it can be contained.

0:42

So there’s, there's specific political events that happen which lead to it. And they're avoidable at every stage of it, right? I mean Rwanda was avoidable, and the blame frankly is shared by the defendants here. The people in power in Rwanda, first, because in the end it’s their country and they let it happen to themselves.

1:04

And secondly by the international community who played variously malicious roles in it. You know, we're all to blame to some extent – I mean, you know, you can always say we weren’t in power and didn’t have anything to do with it, or didn't even know about it when it started, but in terms of international community, yeah.