This Monday, April 7, 2025
Find on this occasion, the entire speech of Jacques Fredj, director of the Shoah Memorial:
We are here today to commemorate an absolute crime: the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. Thirty-one years ago, in the space of a hundred days, more than a million men, women and children were exterminated. Murdered not for what they had done, but for what they were.
Genocide is always the result of a racial ideology that constructs an enemy, justifies its persecution and prepares for its extermination. Before the massacres, there is therefore propaganda.
Before bullets and machetes, there are words that kill. Hate propaganda that helps to prepare the population.
In Rwanda, as during the Holocaust and the genocide of the Armenians, propaganda paved the way for crime by dehumanizing its victims. The Tutsi were called
This propaganda, which galvanized the crowds, reminds us that genocide begins with words.
This language is never insignificant: it always precedes the act of acting.
But commemorating a genocide is not only about honoring the memory of those who died, it is also about defending the truth.
We are passing through an era, a moment when the word "genocide" is particularly often misused, overused and instrumentalized for political ends. But to speak of genocide is to name precisely a single crime in its radicality: the deliberate annihilation of a group because of what it is. Using it wrongly risks weakening our collective ability to recognize and prevent true genocides.
Racial ideology, intentionality and planning are common features of the genocides. The work of historians has very clearly shown the existence of a plan for the elimination of Tutsi designed by extremists close to the Hutu power. In addition to the scale of the massacres, it is this planning in particular that makes it possible to legally qualify the events as genocide.
There is also another threat: negation. All genocides have in common their programmed erasure, whether by the executioners themselves or by their ideological heirs.
After the Holocaust, there was Holocaust denial. After the genocide of the Armenians, there was a century of denial. Even today, we see speeches questioning the reality of the genocide of the Tutsi, especially in the context of current tensions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Some seek to rewrite history, to minimize facts, to blur responsibilities.
We know where negation leads. It opens the door to further violence. It allows the criminals of tomorrow to believe that their crime, too, can be erased.
This year also marks the 110th anniversary of the genocide of the Armenians. In 1915, in Anatolia, the Ottoman Empire implemented the systematic extermination of the Armenian people. His persistent denial taught twentieth-century genocidaires a terrible lesson: that one can kill a people and erase its history. In 1939, Hitler himself told his generals: "Who still remembers the massacre of the Armenians?"
Our responsibility is not limited to words. It is not enough to commemorate, we must also act.
In all humility, the Shoah Memorial has the honor to put its expertise at the service of memory. The Shoah Memorial is very proud to have contributed to the classification of the archives of the Ibuka association, which brings together survivors of the genocide. To preserve these documents is to prevent oblivion and provide future generations with irrefutable evidence of what happened.
Last year, we also organized a seminar for guides to places of remembrance at the sites of genocide in Rwanda. The transmission of history cannot be done without those who, on site, carry the memory and make it accessible to visitors from around the world.
Finally, we work closely with the Rwandan Ministry of Memory on the development of places of remembrance and the classification of genocide archives. Because these places are not mere vestiges of the past: they are warnings for the future. They remind new generations that horror is never far away when hatred becomes a state policy. Finally, the preservation of archives is urgent and essential both for writing and for transmitting this history.
Transmitting is also one of the fundamental missions of the Shoah Memorial.
In this regard, I would like to warmly thank the students of Troisième at Jorissens Middle School in Drancy, who are there with their teachers Mrs. Isabelle Louvet and Sacha Betton.
Under our aegis and in partnership with the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, have conducted an educational project on the genocide of the Tutsi. This work of memory, coordinated by Laurine Bahloul with the director and actress Elishéva Décastel, is a valuable example of the commitment of younger generations to understand, remember and fight against oblivion.
This project embodies what we must encourage: a living memory, a transmitted memory, a memory that educates and prevents.
In a few days we will read the names of the Jews deported from France at the Memorial and we will commemorate April 24, 1915 which marks the beginning of the Genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire.
I would like through our action and my presence to show you our solidarity, not only that which must unite all the victims of genocides but also that which comes from all women and men attached to freedom, tolerance and democracy.
To conclude, I would like symbolically to bow before the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Tutsi: women, children and men. I also have a thought for their families and for the survivors who have no other choice but to try to live with these memories, with these images of horror they witnessed and with the absence of loved ones.
I would like to thank Ibuka for the essential work they are doing to bring this story to life and pass it on, and to thank them for their trust.
As every year, I would like to tell you again on behalf of the Memorial that you can count on us.
By your side, we strongly reaffirm our commitment: to transmit and teach this history, and more generally to teach the history of genocides in order to show the consequences of racism and antisemitism, to fight against forgetting, against denial, and against any attempt to exploit history.
Never let the truth falter.
Thank you.”
