My deepest condolences to my brother, His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, his family and the people of Qatar on the passing of His Highness the Father Amir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.
His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani will be remembered as a visionary leader who transformed Qatar into the remarkable nation it is today. His legacy of service to his people and commitment to friendship and cooperation among nations will endure for generations.
At this difficult time, the people of Rwanda and I stand with His Highness Sheikh @TamimBinHamad and our Qatari brothers and sisters.
“Do we really accept that, as black people, we are somehow less human and inferior?
Accepting it is not simply a matter of saying “yes.” No one will ask you that question directly. You can even say “no,” but if you behave in the very ways that brought us to the kind of history we have lived through, then, in reality, you have accepted it. You have diminished yourself. And your actions become the evidence. The evidence is in doing the very things that others did, or in trying to justify them with explanations that should never be accepted.
There are no two ways about it. Good politics and a good ideology produce positive outcomes. Bad outcomes come from bad ideas. You do not need any other evidence.
Many of you are still young. You go abroad to study. Under normal circumstances, there is nothing they know that you cannot also learn. But you can come back having absorbed ideas without questions, ideas that take you away from who you are and try to turn you into something else, something that is not yours.
Whether those ideas are good or bad, there is one illness I do not think we will cure anytime soon: when, in your own mind, you stop being yourself and begin wishing you were somebody else. Why would you want to become someone else? To achieve what? In our own history, with everything we have been through, that is exactly how we lost our way.
And then you wait for someone from outside to tell you, “This is wrong,” and you immediately agree, without realizing that what is being condemned is you. It is about stripping you of your identity, and you willingly accepting it.” President Kagame | Unity Club Meeting.
“The memorial before us is powerful, because it sets the truth in stone and protects it from the heartlessness of time, by instructing the living. It is not a validation, because none is needed. But it will stand as a mark of respect for the dignity of Rwandans and our history.” President Kagame | Inauguration of Monument in Paris honouring the victims of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi.