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 commitment to return to Rwanda to, in their own words, “finish the job.”

This force has spent thirty years perpetrating violence against Congolese Tutsi communities, carrying out cross-border attacks that claimed thousands of lives inside Rwanda in the late 1990s. The FDLR is not a historical artifact. It is an active, armed, genocidal organization — and the international community’s repeated failure to treat it as such is a dangerous form of complicity.

From Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to the UN Security Council’s own reports, the documentation is unambiguous: Banyamulenge civilians — the Congolese Tutsi community in eastern DRC — continue to face ethnically targeted killings, the destruction of their homes and livestock, and what survivors describe as manhunts, carried out by armed groups rooted in the same genocidal ideology as 1994.

Until the world treats the FDLR as what it is, the genocide is not only misremembered — it is unfinished.

Every institution in the world — the United Nations, the State of Israel, Yad Vashem, the international academic community — has adopted the correct terminology: the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. For years, the United States government refused to use it, defaulting instead to vague formulations such as “the Rwanda genocide,” deliberately avoiding explicit recognition that the genocide was anti-Tutsi in nature.

It has long been suspected that officials across multiple administrations sought to leverage this terminology as a diplomatic tool — a means of extracting concessions from Kigali. If true, that is not merely inappropriate. It is morally obscene. The accurate naming of a genocide is not a bargaining chip.

That is why this 32nd anniversary brought with it a development that deserves to be acknowledged and praised without reservation.

On April 7, 2026, the United States officially used the terminology “Genocide against the Tutsi” in a formal statement, issued by Nick Checker, Senior Bureau Officer of the US Bureau of African Affairs.

For decades, the United States had refrained from consistently and officially recognizing the genocide in this way, making this a historic shift in diplomatic language. The Trump administration deserves credit for this decision.

Those who dismiss the question of terminology as semantic have not been paying attention to how genocide denial actually works. We say “the Holocaust” — not “a holocaust,” not “European wartime deaths” — because specificity is the enemy of denial. The moment you dilute that language, you open the door to the claim that others also suffered, that all sides were equally guilty, that the history is more complicated than it appears.

True — and entirely beside the point. The suffering of others does not erase a crime committed against a specific group.

The same principle applies in Rwanda. Yes, Hutu and others died in 1994. But they were not the target of a state-organized campaign of extermination. Framing the genocide as “tribal conflict” or “Hutu self-defense” — as FDLR propagandists continue to do — is not historical interpretation. It is denial, using the same techniques, exploiting the same political sensitivities, to drain an event of its specific victims, perpetrators, and intent.

The United States’ recognition on this anniversary is proof that change is possible — that the pressure of survivors, scholars, and advocates who insisted on accurate language was not in vain. It should serve as a challenge to every other government and institution that still hedges, equivocates, or remains silent.

Memory is not simply about the past. It is our most important tool for preventing future atrocities and pursuing justice. Genocide denial is dangerous — it honors no one and enables everything.

On this 32nd anniversary, we owe it to the survivors and to the more than one million dead to call what happened by its proper name, fully and without political qualification: the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The consequences of failing to do so will be measured, as they always are, in human lives.