Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu travelled to the Rwandan capital of Kigali on Wednesday as part of his ongoing, four-day Africa tour. In Kigali, Netanyahu met with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and paid his respects to victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Netanyahu and his wife Sara visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where they laid a wreath at the tombs where the remains of more than 200,000 victims are buried in mass graves. "My people know the pain of genocide as well, and this is a unique bond that neither one of our peoples would prefer to have. Yet, we both persevered despite the pain, despite the horror, we never lost hope and you never lost hope," Netanyahu said. "Today Israel and Rwanda are successful states and models for progress. We have learned, both of our peoples, I think, a valuable lesson from our tragic past. "So today we hear leaders in Gaza calling for the killing of every Jew around the world, we all have a duty to speak up. When we hear the supreme leader of Iran calling for the annihilation of Israel, we have a duty to speak out -- we have a duty to alert the world of the danger of these hateful words. ... This is the first lesson we learned, but we learned another one -- that in difficult times, we must be able to defend ourselves, by ourselves." Kagame, who has been president of Rwanda since 2000, was instrumental in stopping 1994 genocide when his rebel forces marched into Kigali and drove former government forces out of the country. More than 800,000 people were killed within a span of 100 days, when Hutus went on a killing spree killing Tutsis and moderate Hutus following the April 6, 1994 downing of a plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi's President Cyprien Ntaryamira. Netanyahu, accompanied by an 80-strong delegation of Israeli business executives from more than 50 companies, has so far toured Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and landed in Ethiopia on Wednesday night. Netanyahu's visit is the first by a sitting Israeli prime minister to sub-Saharan Africa in three decades. "I'm in Africa because it is a continent on the rise, and because it hasn't always gotten the attention it deserves, at least not from Israel. But it does now," Netanyahu said on Wednesday. In exchange for its expertise in security and other fields, Israel wants African states to support it in international forums, such as the United Nations Israel played a prominent role in assisting newly independent African countries in the 1960s, but those relations crumbled in the 1970s, when Arab countries, promising aid, pressured African nations to limit or cut ties with Israel.
Credit: Reuters
The prime minister told Rwandans that their plight was well understood in Israel as the Jewish people had faced the same tragedy.
