Police stand on every corner in New York and barricades line the streets.
Security is so tight that it is hard to get to where we need to. Today [Wednesday], the United Nations World Summit will bring together the heads of state and governments in the biggest conference of world leaders.
As I witnessed the heavy police presence, it made me think that if the world has the capacity to protect 170 world leaders from harm at a huge international meeting, it certainly has the capacity to protect everyday citizens.
But I guess in Rwanda it was never a question of capacity, but more a question of will. While my husband and family were killed in the genocide in 1994, the international community seemed to do nothing but talk about how to respond while around a million people died.
On Tuesday, governments showed that they do have the will to stop atrocities by agreeing that all governments have the responsibility to protect people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
This is a truly historic breakthrough and I am proud to have played a role in this achievement. The agreement to stop future genocide was the one good thing in the formal summit document — a 45-page text that governments officially agreed to late on Tuesday.
I hoped that the press conference and work that we organised yesterday would pressure governments to act in practice on their promises on stopping genocide.
I found it difficult to walk in the mock graveyard with the words “never again?” written on the gravestones because it brought back so many painful memories. I was overcome with emotion and cried.
It made me think back to May 8 1994, when my husband and many of our family were killed. When the troops came to my husband’s village, they beheaded him. My name was on a list of those to be killed the next day. At midnight I escaped, carrying my three small children and two others whose parents had also died. I was pregnant and my youngest child was 11 months old. We walked 18km to a small town and survived. Almost a million others did not.
My children have grown up without a father and their earliest memories are of watching our house burn to the ground and running for their lives. Their dreams are still interrupted by horrific nightmares.
This should never happen again to another family. The UN agreement to stop future genocides could really save millions of lives.
I wish I could say that there were other achievements, but unfortunately all the UN ambassadors could agree on were commitments that had already been signed at other international meetings. There was no real movement forward on other issues that we are working on — aid, trade and debt.
As my colleague Nicola Reindorp, the lead policy adviser for Oxfam at the UN said: “Governments appear to be on their biggest ever recycling drive — hours of negotiations have resulted in a repetition of existing commitments at best.
“We wanted an agenda for reform and instead we got a brochure showcasing existing commitments.”
Today [Wednesday], the presidents and prime ministers were ushered into the UN with police escorts while helicopters flew overhead. The streets around the summit were blocked off. Heads of state will stand up on the podium in the UN chamber giving long speeches about their accomplishments. I wish instead that they would spend more time talking about the poor people who are depending on them.
Grace Mukagabiro is the Oxfam programme coordinator in Kigali, Rwanda