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| French Jewish students travel to Rwanda
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The Union of Jewish students in France (UEJF) will take French Jewish students to Rwanda later this month, in the first trip of its kind.
Twelve years after the Tutsi genocide which saw an estimated 800,000 people slaughtered, the study visit aims to build a bridge between Jews and Tutsis.
"Putting the memories in dialogue is our key objective," Benjamin Abtan, President of UEJF, said Monday at a press conference in Paris.
Politicians involved
 A televised genocide took place in front of us and no one made a move
Bernard Kouchner | From February 14 to 21, 40 people will make the trip to Rwanda, including Jewish students, Tutsi survivors and members of the patronage committee.
A number of French politicians will take part in the journey, including Christiane Taubira, a member of Parliament who initiated the 2001 law designating slavery and the slave trade as a “crime against humanity”, Bernard Kouchner, former Socialist health minister and “Doctors Without Borders” founder who coined the phrase “droit d’ingerence” (right of intervention), and Stephan Pocrain, former spokesman of the Green party.
The visiting party will also include best-selling author Gaston Kelman who published “Je suis noir et je n’aime pas la manioc”, an essay on prejudice against the Blacks, novelist Suad Belhaddad, Dominique Sopo, chairman of “SOS Racisme”, an anti-racist association, and Richard Prasquier, President of the French committee for Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Memorial for the Holocaust.
Creating dialogue
The initiative was launched as the Black community in France brought forward the question of trade slave and colonisation in the public debate.
UEJF’s initiative aims at reframing the comparison of sufferings that currently blights Jewish-Black dialogue in France. “I here too often people saying that one speaks too much of the Shoah (Holocaust) and not enough of slavery and colonisation,” Benjamin Abtan said.
“On the contrary we are here to show that this is false. We are here to foster dialogue and exchange on our cultures.”
“This initiative must be saluted because it is not about answering a demand but about sharing remembrance,” Christiane Taubira said.
Trials take place where the perpetrators face their victims
Suad Belhaddad | Bernard Kouchner underlined the political dimension of this trip to Rwanda 12 years after 800,000 victims died in a tragedy largely ignored by the international community.
"A televised genocide took place in front of us and no one made a move," Bernard Kouchner said, stressing that indifference to mass slaughter continues to this day.
"Biafra, Cambodia, Chechnya, Rwanda and now Darfur, and still no one rises in anger."
“I didn’t see the genocide happen back in 1994 and I feel guilty today. I owe it to myself as a political activist to go to Rwanda,” Stephane Pocrain said.
Unique trip
“The timing is unique,” Suad Belhaddad said. “Reconciliation is under way right now in Rwanda. Trials take place where the perpetrators face their victims.”
The delegation will meet Kigali University professors, Public prosecutor Jean de Mucyo, representatives of the Association of Genocide Widows and the Association of Student Genocide Survivors.
The programme includes visits to the Kigali and Butare memorials, tributes to the victims, testimonies and film screenings such as Alain Resnais’s 1955 Holocaust classic documentary “Nuit et Brouillard” as well as Raoul Peck’s 2005 TV fictionalised account of the Rwanda genocide, “Sometimes in April.”
The Jewish students will bring with them an exhibition on the Shoah aimed at the Rwandan universities. Once they are back in France, the students are expected to organise information lectures in their universities.
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