UN Ambassador from Rwanda to speak at SU’s 10-year genocide commemoration, April 1

UN Ambassador from Rwanda to speak at SU’s 10-year genocide commemoration, April 1March 24, 2004Amy Schmitzaemehrin@syr.edu

Stanislas Kamanzi, Rwanda’s ambassador to the United Nations, will speak at Syracuse University on April 1. The ambassador’s visit is part of the University event “Remembering the Rwanda Genocide: Challenges of Healing and Peace in the 21st Century.” A video chronicling the Rwanda genocide, “Triumph of Evil,” will be shown at 6:30 p.m. in the Heroy Geology Auditorium, followed by Kamanzi’s speech.

The event will also include a day of reflection and healing, April 2 at the Schine Student Center. Speakers will include Ikaweba Bunting, visiting professor at Loyola Marymount University and part of the Mwalimu Nyerere Foundation, which is working to restore peace in Burundi; Bertha Amisi, former program advisor for the Nairobi Peace Initiative and a graduate student in SU’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs; the Rev. Thomas V. Wolfe, dean of Hendricks Chapel; Horace Campbell, author of “Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation” (Africa World Press; April 2004) and SU professor of African American studies and political science; Micere M. Githae Mugo, who was the first African child in Kenya to be admitted into Limuru Girls School, a “White only” institution and now SU professor of African American studies; and members of the Syracuse Congolese, Sudanese, Liberian and Somali refugee communities. SU students are also involved.

A dinner will be hosted at the Community Folk Art Center to cap off the two-day commemoration. The dinner is free for SU students with I.D. and $8 for the general public. All other events are free and open to the public.

“We organized this two-day event to encourage the University and the local community to pause and remember those who were massacred ten years ago,” says Campbell, one of the event’s organizers. “The University is an appropriate place for this commemoration – it is the center of education, and we must educate ourselves and reflect on how we can stop genocide completely.”

The Rwanda genocide began on April 6, 1994 and lasted 100 days. More than 800,000 people were killed. It is widely considered to be the fastest-moving genocide in recorded history.

The event is sponsored by SU’s Africa Initiative, a campus-wide project based in the department of African American studies. The Africa Initiative’s purpose is to focus on Africa as an important site of knowledge by highlighting teaching, research and publication work by Syracuse University scholars representing a variety of disciplines including the arts, humanities, social sciences, sciences, mathematics, engineering and others.