|
imported post -
07-04-04, 08:45 PM
Western Leaders Absent as Rwanda Recalls Genocide
By Finbarr O'Reilly
KIGALI (Reuters) - With Western leaders conspicuous by their absence, Rwanda marked the 10th anniversary of its genocide on Wednesday as bewildered and angry as ever at the world's failure to stop one of the 20th century's great crimes.
"Women and girls were gang raped, tortured and maimed for life, if not murdered. The victims were forced to kill their kin or dig their own graves before they were buried alive," President Paul Kagame told 28,000 mourners gathered at a stadium in the capital Kigali.
"We will see each other again in heaven," a choir sang at the memorial site where a crowd of barefoot Rwandans in tattered clothes watched from a hilltop as African presidents arrived in gleaming four-wheel-drive vehicles.
In Geneva, U.N. chief Kofi Annan said the risk of genocide remained frighteningly real in parts of the world, explaining that Rwanda-style ethnic massacres may be in the making in Sudan and international military force could be needed to stop it.
The U.N. Secretary-General sounded the alarm in a speech on the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred by Hutu extremists.
He left no doubt he feared something similar might be under way in west Sudan, where U.N. officials say "ethnic cleansing" is carried out by government-backed Arab militias. Khartoum denies it has any role in unlawful killings in the region.
Annan's initiative on Sudan stood in stark contrast to the low-key approach adopted by the international community on Rwanda in the months leading up the genocide, a failure seen by many Rwandans as a disastrous abdication of responsibility.
Kagame singled out France for particular scorn, reiterating an accusation that it had helped train the killers knowing that they would commit a genocide -- a charge France strongly denies.
"As for the French, their role in what happened in Rwanda is self-evident," Kagame said. "They knowingly trained and armed government soldiers and militia who were going to commit genocide, and they knew they would commit a genocide."
ETERNAL FLAME
Kagame lit an eternal flame at the main memorial site as workers buried 15 coffins in a mass grave nearby and later led Rwandans in observing two minutes' silence for the victims.
The silence at the stadium was eventually broken by a chorus of women clad in the Rwandan mourning color of purple.
In a breach of decorum unusual in Rwanda's reserved society, bereaved survivors later sobbed in shock at hearing witnesses tell the stadium audience about gruesome killings they had seen.
For many ordinary Rwandans, most of whom scratch a living as peasant farmers in one of the world's poorest countries, the trauma is far from healed. Many women were infected with AIDS during mass rapes, and thousands of children were orphaned.
"It will take eternity for the detestable and guilty indifference of the international community to be forgotten," said Louis Michel, foreign minister of the former colonial power Belgium, which lost 10 peacekeeping troops to Hutu killers on April 7, prompting Brussels to withdraw its other soldiers.
April 7 has been designated by the United Nations as an "International Day of Reflection" for Rwanda, and the African country had asked other nations also to hold memorial silences.
FEW MEMORIALS OUTSIDE RWANDA
But apart from ceremonies due to take place at U.N. offices in major U.N. centers such as Nairobi and Geneva and at Rwandan embassies there was no sign the gesture was widely observed.
The tiny central African country was plunged into a frenzy of ethnic butchery that saw an average of 8,000 people killed each day in the months after a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down over Kigali on April 6, 1994.
Scholars concluded that the killers -- mostly civilians armed with machetes, garden hoes and spiked clubs and spurred on by hate propaganda -- did their work five times faster than the gas chambers used by the Nazis in World War II.
Annan, head of U.N. peacekeeping in 1994 and a Nobel peace prize winner, came under fire at a genocide conference in Kigali this week for not doing more to rally a response.
Leaders including Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, South African President Thabo Mbeki, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt attended Wednesday's ceremony.
(Additional reporting by Matthew Green)
|