OVER 100 people packed into St Mary’s Guildhall last Friday for the annual Lord Mayor of Coventry peace lecture.
The event saw Coventry Lord Mayor Coun Jaswant Singh Birdi speak as part of the city’s peace festival.
The lecture welcomed international speaker Marc J Gwamaka to the city, who flew from Rwanda.
In 1994, up to one million of the Tutsi minority indigenous people of Rwanda were killed by Hutu militias as a culmination of the Rwandan Civil War, which had started four years earlier.
In 2007 Marc, who had been working on witness projects against hate and genocide since he was a teenager, helped found the Peace and Love Proclaimers to teach the underlying principles of hope, unity, and social responsibility.
Two years later he began ‘Walk to Remember’ which now brings together young people in 25 countries around the world to end mass atrocities.
Marc used his Coventry lecture to speak about how education could change mindsets from mistrust and prejudice to shared responsibility for peace and stability and spoke of how the country’s reconciliation process started and is still taking place.
He also took a question and answer session from the audience, with questions including his views on the UK government’s Rwanda policy, which was deemed unlawful by the supreme court earlier this week.
