Mission to Rwanda
08 December 2008
EUJS Trips for Tolerance:
Genocide in Rwanda—A History not Acknowledged
Kigali, Rwanda
The European Union of Jewish Students (EUJS) and the "Cercle des étuidiants rwandais de Belgique" organized with the support of the World Jewish Congress, Futur Generation Departement, a fact finding mission to Rwanda. This unique opportunity enabled EUJS to bring a group consisting of Jewish student leaders from across Europe, Israel, South Africa and the United States and Rwandan students from the Free University of Brussels who have witnessed the genocide, to visit the sites where close to 1,000,000 people were killed in 1994. This was an opportunity to recall atrocities that the world’s conscience has forgotten about all too quickly.
The various associations participating in this project aimed to work on the memory of genocide in an original and innovative manner, by organizing intercultural, inter-university, and inter-institutional exchanges, by bringing together the European Community and Rwanda, young people concerned directly by these past events, heirs of the Shoah, students researchers on violence and people working on transmitting Rwandese history and cultural traditions.
The long term process started by this trip was followed by the participation of our delegation to a conference on genocide at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, a picture exposition, the making of a documentary, as well as the publication of a compilation of articles. An action plan for lobbying against the genocide in Darfur was also put into place.