Regret, Remorse and the Work of Remembrance: Official Responses to the Rwandan Genocide

Abstract

In 1994, countries and institutions across the world failed to prevent, or stop, the Rwandan genocide. Since then, however, many national and international officials have travelled to Rwanda to express their remorse and regret regarding the international failure to halt the genocide. Their statements of regret constitute the official response to the international failure from the governments and institutions that have been implicated in this occurrence. This article analyses the three most well-known of these political speeches, in order to explore how they come to terms with the international failure. Departing from existing analyses that focus on the apologetic character of these speeches, in this article, I focus on their confessional elements. Understanding these speeches as confessional acts draws attention to their self-interested nature as attempts by these political leaders to configure the international failure as their personal ‘sin’ and then confess its occurrence in order to demonstrate their enlightenment and secure their redemption. In highlighting the self-focused nature of these official responses to the international failure, I demonstrate how they ultimately display the same indifference to the suffering of the Rwandan Tutsis as signified by the international failure itself.