Issued by: Ministry for Welfare and Population Development
5 April 1977
PRETORIA - Photographs depicting human remains, the singing of national anthems of South Africa and Rwanda, a moment of silence and moving speeches, on Sunday marked the third commemoration of the 1994 genocide of about a million people in Rwanda - almost three years ago.
In her speech at the ceremony held at the Rwanda Embassy in Pretoria and attended by Deputy President Thabo Mbeki's wife Zanele, Deputy Minister of Justice Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and foreign diplomats, Welfare and Population Development Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi said the challenge to Africa and the world was that of "seeing to it that the genocide does not recur anywhere else".
Minister Fraser-Moleketi: "Today we have come together to commemorate the unfortunate event that hit Rwanda, the region and the world. "We come together today in the hope that the future will not be the one that has no conscience. "The experience of Rwanda is one too many that should not recur."
The Minister said the battered Rwanda she recently visited accompanied by Mrs Mbeki was now "Like a phoenix rising from the ashes'. There was hope, reconstruction and the Nelson Mandela Peace Village, accommodating widows and orphans of the April 1994 genocide in the village of Ntarama.
Referring to the recent Pan African Conference on Peace, Gender and Development she addressed in Kigali, she said peace initiatives had to be strengthened.
The manner, said Fraser-Moleketi, in which ethnicity was exploited in Rwanda by those behind the genocide, was something that Africa and the world had to guard against.
Fraser-Moleketi: "It is time that we became pro-active and pre-empted similar genocides from taking place. Let us give international real meaning that it should never occur again."
In his speech Rwandan Ambassador to South Africa Dr E B Karenzi, called on the world not to give sanctuary to those who perpetrated violence in his country.
His country, he said now faced post-war challenges which included bringing hundreds of thousands of suspected perpetrators of the genocide to justice; attending to the needs of the survivors - many of them orphans and widows; repatriating and resettling over a million of refugees, and reconciling the Rwandan society.
Rwanda has recently suffered one of the most traumatic event sin world history. Within a brief period of four months, from April to July 1994, an estimated one million Rwandans - about one seventh of the country's population - were massacred in an unprecedented scale of mass killing.
Close to two million Rwandans were forced into exile in Zaire and Tanzania where they remained under the control of the former army militia.