Listening to genocide – and what came next

It doesn’t take long for an international event of historic importance to fall off the news agenda. Ukraine is still there, making headlines, but soon it will be forgotten as the political drama in Kiev, Sebastopol, the Crimea is overtaken by an unfolding crisis elsewhere. We who live beyond and outwith the situation are encouraged to move on, gawping instead at another horrifying outpouring of human cruelty and misery. But for those forced to stay on and endure it’s not so easy. For them the terror will linger on long after our sympathies have been translated to another scene, another situation.

On Sunday night, Radio 3 took us back 20 years and to Rwanda, where in April to June 1994 the outside world looked on, helplessly, as the Hutu majority sought to massacre their Tutsi neighbours. More than 800,000 Rwandans were killed in just 100 days. This was violence on a scale never before seen, as the Rwandans slaughtered each other with home-made weapons, knives, machetes, anything they could find, and whole communities were savagely wiped out.