The liberation of Rwanda by the RPF-Inkotanyi 25 years ago is of significance to Rwanda, the continent and the whole world, Tanzania’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and East African Cooperation said at an event held Friday night in Tanzania’s capital Dar es Salaam.
“It helped us to come out of the shame of having kept quiet when genocide was happening in Rwanda,” the minister, Palamagamba John Aidan Mwaluko Kabudi, told members of the diplomatic corps and friends of Rwanda at the event held to mark Rwanda’s Liberation Silver Jubilee.
Meanwhile, Tanzania’s Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa Majaliwa was in Kigali on Thursday representing President John Magufuli during the main national festivities marking Rwanda’s 25th liberation anniversary celebrations.
More than one million people were killed in 100 days during the genocide.
At the event in Dar es Salaam, Kabudi stressed that each year the Tanzanian government takes seriously the commemoration of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
“The liberation of Rwanda brought to an end the genocide which caused tremendous pain and suffering to the people of Rwanda and, more equally, caused severe distress to the region as a whole,” he said. “To Tanzania, as a neighboring country, the genocide touched us in a very painful way. Economic and social effects of genocide crossed the border and were felt heavily and made Tanzanians carry a heavy burden. Rwanda has gone through a terrible past which we thank God, that it is now over.”
Kabudi noted that a new Rwanda is a testimony of how people who have been subjected to colonial rule, and sectarianism can restore their own dignity.
“The liberation of Rwanda 25 years ago assured the Rwandese people and also the region that all human beings are born free in dignity and rights,” he said. “The most important message here is dignity. This liberation restored the dignity of the people of Rwanda, but also the dignity of the entire humanity.”