On April 7, 1994, a genocide began. It would last one hundred days. By the end, approximately one million people lay dead in Rwanda — the vast majority of them Tutsi — killed at a speed and ferocity that shamed the entire world.

Thirty-two years later, the world must ask itself a deeply uncomfortable question: are we honoring the memory of the Genocide against the Tutsi with the clarity and courage it demands? The answer, in too many respects, is no. But on this very anniversary, there is also reason for genuine hope.

The facts are not in dispute. Beginning on April 6, 1994, Hutu Power extremists launched a pre-planned, systematic campaign to exterminate the Tutsi population of Rwanda. State radio broadcast kill lists. Interahamwe militias hunted Tutsi men, women, and children in their homes, churches, and schools. Moderate Hutu who sheltered their neighbors were also killed.

This was not tribal violence or a civil war that got out of hand. It was a genocide — planned and executed with the explicit intent to destroy the Tutsi as a group.

The génocidaires did not disappear when the killing ended. They fled into what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, reorganized, and in 2000 formally constituted themselves as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda — the FDLR — fueled by the same ideology that produced the genocide and by an explicit........

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