April, 2004
September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows Statement on the 10th Anniversary of Rwandan Suffering
The members of Sept 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows stand with the families of Rwanda as you mark this 10th year since your people’s great suffering.
We stand with you as you inspire the world to search for peace and justice by your courageous examination of the government-sanctioned evil that was unleashed in hundreds of thousands of horrific individual acts of violence.
We stand with you as you inspire the governments of all nations to examine the part their own inattention and lack of action contributed to this consuming genocide and to all ethnic cleansings and genocides.
We stand with you to demand that all the nations of the world accept their responsibility to respond with preventive non-violent action whenever any government attempts the genocidal killing of people within or outside a nation’s borders.
We stand with you as you inspire the peoples of the world to reject the revenge that only spawns more death, more violence in its wake, and instead to seek long-term solutions that will protect the futures of the generations to come rather than ensuring future slaughters of future generations.
We stand with you in recognizing our own failures to prevent and to remedy the evils that kill and oppress our sisters and brothers wherever they are in this world.
We stand with you to open ourselves to the embrace of all who will stand with us to turn away from senseless revenge and retaliation in order to become a force for peace and justice, a force that will not be defeated in the belief that we end killing by not killing.
We reach our hearts, minds and spirits across all political, social, economic, racial, religious, temporal, and geographic divisions to stand with you, in your hope that the beautiful green hills and misty mountains of Rwanda will never again know the agony of genocide, and will become for all the nations a symbol of a people’s triumph over the evil of destructive hatred as all your families find healing ways to live together.
