09 April 2024 - Over two hundred people including members of the diplomatic corps, the Rwandan community, friends of Rwanda and academics attended Kwibuka30, an event to mark the 30^th commemoration of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Singapore, which was held at the Nanyang Technological University.

Also in attendance were business executives and the staff and senior officers from Rwanda Defence Force Command and Staff College, who were on a study tour to Singapore.

During the ceremony, attendees held a minute of silence followed by a candle-lighting ceremony as they reminisced about the tragic events of 1994.

Later, they heard a poignant testimony from Jean Nepo Sibomana, a genocide survivor and recipient of the National Unity Award, who narrated how the plan to exterminate the Tutsi had been in the making for so long.

“In 1991, they started exercising what they had learnt upon our families. We had to leave our home and stay at the church for about two weeks until the government forced us to go back home. That was in 1991, Since then I can’t remember a single day, I slept in a house with my family. During the day it was okay. I would go to school, but when I got home from school, my family and I would go and sleep somewhere in a bush”, Sibomana recounted.

British Investigative Journalist and Author of “A People Betrayed”, Linda Melvern, told the audience that New Zealand, through its UN Ambassador, Colin Keating, consistently called for UN intervention in Rwanda. Unfortunately, these efforts were consistently impeded by powerful members of the UN Security Council.

“The UK, the US and France, from the very first, adamantly refused any help at all […], Colin Keating, believes that every country on the Council at that time, should hold an inquiry into what happened and why they denied what the whole world knew was happening. […] This is an international failure from the UN Security Council”, Melvern noted.

In his remarks, the High Commissioner of Rwanda in Singapore, Jean de Dieu Uwihanganye, appealed to the international community to put in place laws that criminalise genocide and genocide ideology. He also called for collaboration with national and foreign partners in the fight against the denial and revisionism of the genocide.

Watch the highlights of the event here