UN Secretary General to visit

KIGALI - The United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, is set to visit Rwanda later this month on a trip aimed at assessing security in the Great Lakes Region. The State Minister for Regional Cooperation Rosemary Museminari said yesterday that Ki-moon’s visit would also be in the interest of understanding the progress Rwanda has registered thirteen years after the 1994 Genocide. “He will be here from the 28 to 30 of this month to appreciate the progress that has been registered so far as well as understanding further the issue of regional stability,” Museminari said. She said that the UN Secretary General will focus on how Rwanda has managed to achieve the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which all the 192 United Nations member states have committed to achieve by the year 2015. This is the second visit for Ki-moon to Rwanda. As South Korea’s Minister of foreign affairs and trade, Ki-moon visited Rwanda in 2006 to canvass for support for his candidature for the top UN job. Museminari said that the visit has since yielded good bilateral relations between Rwanda and South Korea with the latter supporting Rwanda mainly in capacity building programmes. The Director of Communication in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Robert Masozera could not be reached by press time for a detailed schedule of Ki-moon’s visit. Last year, while marking the beginning of the Genocide Mourning Week, Ki-moon paid tribute to both the victims of the 1994 Genocide and the survivors. He called for a global fight against genocide and pledged to strengthen the UN’s mechanisms to ensure that such atrocities never happen again. Rwanda has vigorous supported several UN peacekeeping missions in different places over the years. The country currently maintains at least 2,600 peacekeepers in Darfur, Sudan where a conflict that started in February 2003 has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and left millions others homeless.Ends

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UN Secretary General to visit