That day, a genocidal speech was broadcast live on the Democratic Republic of Congo’s public broadcaster, RTNC. Not by a fringe agitator. Not by a drunken demagogue in a bar or a rumba musician thrilling a crowd. It was delivered by Major General Sylvain Ekenge, the official spokesperson of the FARDCâ”the national army of a UN member state.
This was not a mishap, not a slip of the tongue, and not an isolated angry outburst. It was venomous, rehearsed, and properly delivered with the authority of the uniform and the state.
And the world? It hardly blinked. Only two sitting foreign politicians reacted immediately and unequivocally. From Brussels, Belgium’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxime Prévot, condemned the speech softly but without ambiguity.
From Kigali, Rwanda’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Olivier Nduhungirehe, issued a clear, forceful reaction on X, naming the danger for what it was and refusing to normalize genocidal incitement camouflaged as patriotism. Both politicians heard what any serious student of genocide studies picked up straightaway: incitement to hatred, dehumanization, racialized paranoia, and the ideological scaffolding of mass violence. Belgium reacted because it recognized the pattern. Others chose not to.
That these reactions came from Belgium and Rwanda is not incidental. Belgium, held back by the historical weight of its pathetic role in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, recognizes the architecture of mass violence when it hears it. Rwanda, having paid the ultimate price for the world’s indifference, has learnedâ”through blood and abandonâ”that silence kills. These two responses stood in stark contrast to the moral paralysis elsewhere.
Silence: Once Again
From the Americas to Africa, from Addis Ababa to New York, from the African Union to the United Nations Security Council, there was nothing resembling urgency.
The silence from Washington was deafening. The U.S. State Department, which never tires of invoking peace in the Great Lakes region, said nothing. The White House, ever enthusiastic to sermonize about democracy and human rights, was mute. The European Unionâ”so creative and prolific in statements, communiqués, and carefully well-adjusted concernâ”collapsed into spineless quiet.
The African Union, headquartered in Addis Ababa and founded on the promise of 'African solutions to African problems,' behaved as if incitement to genocide were an internal memo rather than a continental alarm. Individual African states, some of whose leaders owe their own survival to the phrase 'Never Again,' choose comfort over conscience. The East African Legislative assembly was clinically silent too. They will argue they are on recess.
Most alarming of all was the silence from the very office designed to prevent exactly this kind of crime: the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Chaloka Beyani of Zambia, appointed in August 2025, said nothing. His predecessor, Alice Wairimu Nderitu of Kenya, had at least learnedâ”however imperfectlyâ”that silence in the face of hateful agitation is itself a form of complicity.
Beyani, an African, from a country neighboring the DRC, failed the first serious test of his mandate. Prevention begins with naming danger when it appears. He did not.
To some, perhaps even to those sitting comfortably in these institutions, the reactions from Brussels and Kigali looked like overreaction. After all, no mass killing followed immediately. Since there were no rivers of blood flooding the TV-screensâ”no emergency sessions were convened. They were deemed unnecessary. Is this really logical? No! This laughable demand for corpses before condemnationâ”is exactly how genocide incubates: through regularized hate, unrestrained authority, and institutional indifference.
Painful Lessons
Rwandans have seen this in the past. Before April 7, 1994, the warning signs were unambiguous in Rwanda. The notorious RTLM poisoned the airwaves daily. The RPF warned the international community. UNAMIR commander General Roméo Dallaire sent his now-infamous January 11, 1994 'genocide fax' to UN headquarters. Foreign embassies based in Kigali knew. The UN force knew. And yet the decision was madeâ”not explicitly, but effectivelyâ”to let it happen, while evacuation plans for foreign nationals were quietly finalized.
For many Rwandans, this indifference did not begin in 1994. It was more evident on Christmas Eve of 1963 and stretched into the early months of 1964, when massacres against Tutsi swept parts of the country.
Families were hunted in churches during what should have been sanctified days of gathering and renewal. Homes were burned while carols should have been sung.
Many Tutsi children learned, early on, that December and January was not a season of joy but of mourning. For decades, many survivors grew up unable to celebrate Christmas or the New Yearâ”not out of ritual abstinence, but because those dates were anniversaries of loss.
There are Rwandans alive today who were born into exile during that period, who grew up without knowing the faces or voices of their parents, whose childhoods were shaped by absence and unanswered questions. For them, hearing a uniformed general spew ethnic hatred on December 27â” was not theoretical or academic. It was a reopening of an old wound, a reminder that the world’s tolerance for incitement has not evolved as much as its technology.
Ekenge’s words did not land on a nonaligned ground; they fell on a historical scar tissue formed by decades of unpunished hatred. Survivors remember the voices of Gregory Kayibanda and Anastase Makuza.
What happened in Kinshasa on December 27, 2025 fits the same template. The difference is not the content of the hate, but the technology of disseminating it. Clips of Ekenge’s speech spread instantly on WhatsApp, TikTok, and other platforms.
There was no excuse of distance, no claim of lack of knowledge, no delay in information flow. What Maxime Prévot heard in Brussels and Olivier Nduhungirehe heardâ”and condemnedâ”from Kigali could be heard minutes later in Washington, Pretoria, Addis Ababa, London, Brasília, Beijing, or even Tahiti or Fiji.
Here is important to note; information does not spontaneously produce actionâ”especially when the crime is state-sponsored. Had Ekenge’s speech not been approved, or at least tolerated, by the Congolese state, the Major General would have been arrested and arraigned in court by Monday, December 29. That did not happen, although what he did is a criminal offence.
The failure to prosecute him is not a procedural omission; it is a political gesture. It tells soldiers, militias, and mobs alike that incitement is acceptable, that hatred carries no cost, and that violenceâ”when it comesâ”will be excused as spontaneous or inevitable.
MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping mission, is not in any position to pretend innocence here. It works closely with the FARDC. It trains, supports, and coordinates with the very institution whose mouthpiece delivered this rhetoric. Silence from MONUSCO is not neutrality; it is endorsement by omission.
The fate of the abandoned
Meanwhile, many Banyamulenge civilians have been killed in recent days, with Kinshasa’s forces aided by Burundi. There was no international outrage at all except from some human rights activists and Rwanda’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
There were no emergency meetings. No moral clarity. Yet when AFC/M23 and Twirwaneho captured Uviraâ”bringing a rare moment of hope to survivors in the town and in the highlands of Minembweâ”the international community suddenly found its voice.
The demand for their withdrawal was swift and loud. That asymmetry speaks volumes. It was a clear message to genocidal actors that as long as they wear the mantle of 'state authority,' their crimes will be managed, relativized, or ignored.
This is how impunity becomes an international norm and policy.
Perhaps, then, we are being unfair or impatient. Perhaps the world is merely waitingâ”waiting for the festive season to end, for offices to reopen fully, for diplomatic calendars to clear. Maybe reactions will come two weeks later, once the holidays are over and the outrage is less inconvenient.
Or maybe, meaningful concern will finally materialize when the Democratic Republic of Congo takes its seat as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, where decorum often replaces honesty and power shields culpability.
After all, when the Genocide Against the Tutsi occurred in 1994, Rwanda itself was a non-permanent member of the Security Councilâ”present, seated defending genocidal government, and Tutsis abandoned.
History, it seems, is not merely repeating itself; it is mocking us. And unless indifference is named for what it isâ”a deliberate choiceâ”the question will not be whether genocide can happen again, but how comfortably the world will watch it unfold.
When a government authority declares that a group of people is inherently dangerous, genetically predisposed to harm, or trained from childhood to deceive and destroy, that is not rhetoricâ”it is incitement. History has already ruled on this question. If you hear such language and choose not to act, you are not neutral. You are a silent accomplice.
The world must be shaken out of this comfort zone of indifference, because silence is not a neutral postureâ”it is a message. It tells the targeted communities in the DRC that their lives are negotiable, that their fear is an acceptable collateral cost of geopolitical convenience.
It also tells their neighborsâ”those who still live peacefully among themâ”that coexistence offers no protection when hate is sanctioned from above. When international institutions look away, they do not merely fail to protect; they educate.
They communicate to populations in danger that survival will not come from appeals to law, norms, or moral conscience, but from their own capacity to resist annihilation when the moment arrives. That is a frightening lesson, but history has taught it repeatedly. Armenians learned it. European Jews learned it. Tutsi learned it. Others are learning it now.
So the questions must be asked, bluntly and without diplomatic anesthesia: Will we ever learn from past mistakes? Is genocide still a crime, or merely an inconvenience to be managed in a good diplomatic language? Does 'Never Again' mean anything beyond ceremonial speeches and anniversaries? Or is it a slogan invoked only when it is safe, fashionable, and cost-free?
December 27, 2025 should have triggered alarms across the world. Instead, it exposed a familiar and distressing reality: that indifference, once again, is being allowed to do its work. And we know where that road leads.
The message broadcast through silence is brutal in its clarity: do not expect empathy, do not expect urgency, do not expect rescue. Expect statements too late, resolutions watered down, and regrets spoken over graves. If the world does not decisively confront incitement at the moment it appearsâ”naming it, condemning it, sanctioning itâ”then it forfeits the right to express shock when violence erupts.
Indifference to genocidal speeches is not passive; it is preparatory and dangerous. It clears the space in which crimes become possible and then inevitable. The choice before the international community is therefore not abstract or philosophical. It is immediate and moral: either dismantle the comfort of silence now, or accept responsibility for what that silence makes possible tomorrow.
