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)

I saw them talking about Rwanda on the news yesterday, I was still shocked at the scale of what happened there. It seems to get bigger to me everytime I hear about it. Killing 8000 people is a really big thing, 800000 is just unthinkable. I was deeply moved yesterday, just trying to picture it. Human beings can be really cruel and devilish, but this one surpasses anything. I wasn't really aware of it when it happened maybe cause I was still young then and wasn't into all this news stuff. I hope they will find a lasting peace there, that is the only good that can come from this horrible Genocide.

BB

Much of the problems of modern Africa can be traced to negligent and racist social engineering on the part of the occupying European powers. The drew boundaries for their own short sighted selfish purposes without thinking about the consequences.However, we must also remember it was commin practice for them to draw and withdraw boundaries everywhere.. even on the European mainland. They were doing what came naturally as a generation of brutaland acqusitive ppl.

BTW I believe in reparations.

Update....Rwanda to probe France's role over 1994 genocide

KIGALI (AFP) - Rwanda is to investigate France's role over the genocide 10 years ago in which the United Nations estimate 800,000 people died, the Rwandan government said.

A cabinet meeting chaired by President Paul Kagame on Friday adopted a draft bill "to create a national independent commission charged with assembling the evidence of France's involvement in the genocide perpetrated in Rwanda in 1994," a statement sent to AFP said.

Details of the membership of the commission were not given.

France is regularly accused by the present Rwandan government of responsibility for the genocide in which hundreds of thousands of the minority Tutsi ethinic group, and many moderate majority group Hutus, were butchered by Hutu militias.

Tutsis claim that France armed and trained the Hutu killers and provided a safe haven for them when they were militarily defeated.

Last month France and Rwanda agreed to work together to review events leading to the 1994 genocide in a bid to improve relations.

"We discussed ways to improve and normalise relations between Rwanda and France following some misunderstandings and we agreed to forge a new spirit and work together on genocide remembrance," French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said on a visit to South Africa.

Barnier acknowledged that there were recriminations from Rwanda over France's role in the genocide and that a review of that painful chapter in the central African country's history would help improve ties.

"We do not share the view of the Rwandan side about what France did. We have to talk about this very painful past in an impartial and objective manner, work on remembrance, draw lessons from this collective inability by the international community to avert the genocide," Barnier said.

"We agreed on this and on moving forward," the French foreign minister said, adding that he was "pleased by this first exchange" with his Rwandan counterpart

A French parliamentary commission in 1998 cleared France of responsibility for the genocide while admitting that "strategic errors" had been committed.

seems everyone is a victim of coding and decoding thats being played in our minds by the media & western governments.

HOW COME THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAS NOT COME CLEAN & APOLOGISE FOR ITS ROLE DURING THE RWANDA GENOCIDE?

now I don't cry that often, but when I watched a documentry on Rwanda,I cried that really made me numb watching these people getting butchered, the same with Sudan.

To think that the civilised western country to be behind the training of militas is terrible but then I would not put past any conflict in Africa originated from Colonization in which land was redistributed btw diiferent tribes to increase tensionand the same goes to Sudan.

Again come to think of it not many christian african countries got involved in Rwanda, why?

What I dont understand is how you can be a normal person with little predjuce against a group(lets admit it all of us has some to a degree) then turn into a hard cold blood murderer.

Now I dont understand the politics in Rwanda and cannot comment on why it happened, but I would like to hear it from someone who lived in Rwanda the cause and its origination of this conflict, unfortunatly my views are based on western media which I try to avoid and the picture they painted was basically Africans as jungle savages with no morals, and I know is not the case.

Safe

@Sooofresh. The Rwanda situation was a tragedy waiting to happen. If you read books on say race and ethnic relations as early as the 70's you will see how all these white liberal academics predicted what would occur. Not even radicals, liberals, because all the factors were there for a blood bath long time.

And it is really easy to if you understand what is called social cleavage or distinctions and how very very sharp clevage which was created by foreign powers led to this situation. For example if you divide two sets of people who had been neighbours for centuries and like all have their prejudices. But prejudice can be from mild humour to something more sinister.

Then say you divide the land of one, take the resources from it and take the majority as a foreigner, but make sure a smaller amount is given to the other tribe and you contiually play these groups off each other. You help to constantly stir the pot of antognism and disadvantage.

Then give your support and political muscle to leaders and petty thugs who play on the most extreme fears the people have. And even arrange for some local attrocities every now and again, you create a situation of potential genocide, when those damns break.

Same as in Boznia and when shit breaks out. Ugly very very ugly and by that time they do not see each other as Africans or neighbours or anything like that. But absolute enemies. All you need is one hard core group led by extremists to go and committ attrocities against the other group and there will be retalilation and the process of genocide has be put into action....

This stuff is old as time and nothing new about it at all.

FB

I remember Robert Kajuga saying how the war was against the Tutsis because the Tutsis wanted to take power, even when the reporter asked him why his men killed children, him pleading self-defence. Even 11-year-old children came with grenades he said.

I remember western leaders denying genocide, and simply dismissing it as tribal war, and watched up to 800,000 people die. I never forget watching my mum cry as United Nations left, leaving the Tutsis to their fate. France and Belgium sending troops to rescue their citizens. America also airlifted their citizens. None of these countries at anytime did they try and rescue a single Rwandans not even those that were employed by Western governments.

The world may be commemorating the 10th anniversary of genocide using the slogan, “Never Again� but in reality Rwandan people especially women who were spared death and repeatedly gang raped, 10 years later genocide has caught up with them and are dying a slow, agonising death from aids.

The UN failed then to protect 800,000 people from death, and is still doing nothing to help this women dying of aids now.

Ethnic cleansing is going on in Sudan right now; as usual, the UN has so far failed to do nothing (what a surprise). 10 years from now, they’ll be commemorating the Sudan genocide and repeating the slogan “Never Again� once more.

The West did nothing in the 1977-78 “red terror� period when ten’s of thousands of Ethiopian’s were killed, and merely dismissed it as a "fight between two different social groups.

The west has so far done nothing to bring the man responsible for the genocide to justice.

I know to some extent how the victims of the Rwandan genocide feel my dad was the only one who escaped the Ethiopian genocide, one of my uncle was caught and executed and my other uncle was imprisoned for 10 years.

My aunt's 17-year-old son was taken away by soldiers who came to her house in the middle of the night, my aunt to this day has refused to leave the country or change her home just in case her son finds his way home some day, that happened in 1977 and she is still waiting. You can still see the pain and the suffering in her eyes.

The crime of the victims was education.

I feel you my beautiful African sister. I've been wanting to see Hotel Rwanda, Don Cheadle is also one of my favorite actors. Lumumba is also another really good movie. Black Africa Unite!!

Do you know what is sadder...that it takes a film made/or fundedby White people for you to understand what is going on....Lumumba is a really good movie?!?!?!?!?!?!confused3