THE international community’s inaction was to blame for allowing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the country’s president said on Sunday.

Paul Kagame was speaking at a commemoration in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, for the estimated 800,000 people who were killed by government-backed extremists 30 years ago.

The killings were ignited when a plane carrying then-president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down over Kigali. 

Tutsis were blamed for downing the plane and killing the president, becoming targets in massacres led by Hutu extremists that lasted for over 100 days. 

Some Hutus who tried to protect members of the Tutsi minority were also killed.

Rwandan authorities have long blamed the international community for ignoring warnings about the killings, and some Western leaders have expressed regret.

French President Emmanuel Macron, in a pre-recorded video ahead of Sunday’s ceremonies, said that France and its allies could have stopped the genocide but lacked the will to do so. 

Mr Macron’s declaration came three years after he acknowledged the “overwhelming responsibility” of France — Rwanda’s closest European ally in 1994 — for failing to stop the slaughter.

After lighting a flame of remembrance and laying a wreath at a memorial site holding the remains of 250,000 genocide victims, President Kagame said: “It was the international community which failed all of us, whether from contempt or cowardice.” 

As mass graves continue to be discovered across Rwanda, Naphtal Ahishakiye, the head of Ibuka, a prominent group of survivors, said: “It’s a time to learn what happened, why it happened [and] what the consequences are to us as genocide survivors, to our country, and to the international community.”

He said his country has come a long way since the 1990s, when only survivors and government officials participated in commemoration events.

“Today even those who are family members of perpetrators come to participate,” he said.