Speaking at a high-level meeting on R2P held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on September 23, Rwanda’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Olivier Nduhungirehe, stressed that unchecked hate speech in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is laying dangerous ground for mass violence.
“These exchanges are not merely academic, they are part of our collective responsibility to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity,” he said.
Nduhungirehe’s intervention comes amid escalating threats against Tutsi communities in eastern DRC, where armed groups, including the FDLR—formed by remnants of the perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi—continue to operate with backing from Kinshasa. He said the current patterns of ethnic incitement bear troubling similarities to the build-up to the genocide in Rwanda.
“Rwanda knows more than most the cost of inaction,” he warned. “Yet in the Great Lakes region today, we see once again the rise of hate speech, identity-based violence and a fast-spreading genocide ideology—warning signs we cannot afford to ignore.”
The Rwandan minister underscored that while the R2P framework, adopted in 2005, tasked states with protecting their citizens and empowered the international community to intervene when they failed, implementation has fallen short.
He criticised the selective application of the doctrine, saying that ignoring structural injustices and “buying into fabricated narratives that invert the roles of victims and perpetrators” undermines the UN’s moral authority.
“Sovereignty must be understood as a responsibility, not a shield for inaction,” he said. “When states fail to protect their own populations, the legitimacy of international action should not be in question. Lives lost because of our hesitation in the name of sovereignty are lives betrayed by the very UN Charter we swore to uphold.”
Nduhungirehe urged the UN to shift from statements to concrete preventive measures, calling for early warning systems to translate into early action and for clear accountability mechanisms against incitement.
“Hate speech is not free speech when it lays the foundation for genocide,” he said, stressing that actors who fuel violence should face institutional consequences and lose international support.
While acknowledging progress such as the creation of the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and early warning tools, he insisted that gaps remain, particularly in the consistency and timeliness of responses.
“R2P will be judged not by the eloquence of our debate, but by whether it prevents the next mass atrocity. Rwanda, therefore, proposes concrete actions,” he said, adding that the doctrine must be rooted in the historical realities of the Great Lakes region, where land disputes, exclusion and historical injustice continue to drive conflict.
