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Macron and Kagame inaugurate Paris memorial to Rwanda genocide victims

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This story was published by africanews.com on June 3, 2026 and curated on Africa Front.

June 3, 2026

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Macron and Kagame inaugurate Paris memorial to Rwanda genocide victims

French President Emmanuel Macron and Rwandan President Paul Kagame on Tuesday inaugurated a monument in Paris in memory of the victims of the Rwanda genocide.

Speaking at the event, Macron said the memorial marked “the culmination of a long and patient quest for truth”.

"In a world where empires sometimes have the temptation to falsify history, in this moment also where the past is a battlefield, telling the truth is more necessary than ever. This is the condition for peace," he said.

Rwandan authorities have long blamed the international community for ignoring warnings about the killings, and some Western leaders have expressed regret.

"France was in a unique position to observe and to act. It took too long for France to come to terms with its role causing additional pain and on some points we still have not found consensus," Kagame told those gathered.

But he said that no country "has gone as far as France in setting the record straight and accepting its part in the tragedy."

Dubbed “The Archive”, the monument consists of two black brass steles by Berlin-based Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba is in memory to those victims.

It bears an engraved tribute to the estimated 800,000 men, women and children, mostly ethnic Tutsis, massacred between April and July 1994.

"Here, like an archive, rest the voices and words, the memories and experiences, the feelings and hopes of the victims and the survivors," it reads.

The mass killing was triggered on 6 April 1994, when President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, killing the leader who, like most Rwandans, was an ethnic Hutu.

The Tutsi minority was blamed for downing the plane. Bands of Hutu extremists began slaughtering Tutsis and their perceived supporters, with help from the army, police, and militias.

In a historic speech in Kigali in 2021, Macron acknowledged France's failure to heed warnings of impending massacres in Rwanda.

The monument on the banks of the Seine river in the heart of Paris is part of France's efforts to acknowledge its role in one of the 20th century's worst atrocities.