Rwandan genocide: World remembers massacre that left 800,000 dead
Sunday 7 April 2019 21:57, UK
By Philip Whiteside, international news reporter
Thousands in Rwanda and around the world have marked the 25-year anniversary since more than 800,000 people were killed in one of the globe's worst genocides since the Second World War.
Rwanda's president Paul Kagame, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, British Africa minister Harriett Baldwin and other dignitaries were among those paying their respects at the Kigali Genocide Memorial on Sunday.
They took part in a ceremony to light a "flame of remembrance" that will burn for 100 days at the spot where more than 250,000 people are buried.
A quarter of a century ago, members of the majority Hutu population went on the rampage, murdering Tutsis and those who tried to protect them in a massacre that lasted more than 100 days.
Speaking at commemoration services, Mr Kagame said that Rwandans would never turn against each other again.
"Our bodies and minds bear amputations and scars, but none of us is alone. We Rwandans have granted ourselves a new beginning.
"We exist in a state of permanent commemoration, every day, in all that we do ... Today, light radiates from this place."
In France, President Emmanuel Macron pledged to declare 7 April a national day of commemoration for the genocide.
The French president is not attending official commemorations on Sunday but sent Herve Berville, a Tutsi survivor who is a member of the French parliament from Mr Macron's ruling party.
Mr Kagame has accused Paris of being complicit in the bloodshed.
While Paris has acknowledged mistakes, it has repeatedly denied allegations it trained militias to take part in the massacre.
French high schools will start teaching students about the Rwandan genocide from September 2020, and Mr Macron has appointed researchers to carry out a two-year investigation into the role of the French army in the genocide.
The commemorations in Rwanda marked the beginning of a week of events to honour the dead.
Officials were due to join around 2,000 people in a "walk to remember" from parliament to the national soccer stadium on Sunday afternoon, where candles will be lit in a night vigil.
The slaughter began on 6 April 1994, after president Juvenal Habyarimana and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi - both Hutus - were killed when their plane was shot down over the Rwandan capital.
The perpetrators have never been identified.
Hutu government soldiers and allied militia responded by orchestrating violence with the aim of exterminating the Tutsi minority.
Despite the presence of UN peacekeepers, stationed in the country to oversee the end of a civil war, neighbour turned on neighbour, women and children were hacked to death, burned alive, clubbed and shot.
The inability of the international community and the UN to prevent, or at least slow the genocide, has been called the "failure of humanity".
The fighting ended in July 1994 when a Tutsi-led rebel force led by Mr Kagame came in from Uganda and took control of the country.
The failure of the international community to act decisively in Rwanda has been the subject of much soul searching.
At the time, much of the focus on international affairs was on the war in the former Yugoslavia.
The fighting in Bosnia and Croatia was appearing nightly on western TV screens and governments had committed a considerable number of UN peacekeepers to protect civilians.
As reports of Rwanda's genocide spread through the media, which has been accused of being slow to pick up on the story, the UN Security Council agreed to send more troops.
But, due to delays and bureaucratic failure, the force did not arrive until after the killing had stopped.
A number of commentators, including then secretary general of the UN Boutros Boutros-Ghali, later criticised the West for failing to act.
Tony Blair, after he became prime minister, said much later regarding the genocide: "We knew. We failed to act. We were responsible."
Some of those who defend the West's response say it is difficult to act when the aggressor is not a government and therefore cannot be clearly identified.
Some also say that putting peacekeepers into a situation on the ground where intelligence is incomplete puts the lives of those soldiers at greater risk.
The legacy of Rwanda weighs heavy on the UN however. Western powers had been able to put together forces to intervene, with varying degrees of success, in other conflicts, such as Iraq and Yugoslavia.
In Rwanda now, an uneasy peace prevails.
Official policy is to strongly discourage any talk of ethnicity, but opposition activists say that only happens because Mr Kagame's government tightly controls the media and stifles dissent. The government denies this.
Yet, people who once were willing to inflict horrific violence against each other are now living side by side.
Hutu Tasian Nkundiye, 43, murdered his neighbour with a machete, joining with a handful of others to chop a Tutsi man to pieces.
He spent eight years in prison and now lives near the widow of the man he killed. Somehow they have become friends - their children and grandchildren playing and sharing lunch together.
Mr Nkundiye said he is "grateful" to his victim's 58-year-old widow, Laurencia Mukalemera.
"Ever since I apologised to her after prison life, confessing to my crimes and asking her for forgiveness, she has accepted me," he said.
They live in one of six "reconciliation villages", where genocide survivors and perpetrators live alongside each other.
The villages are part of Mr Kagame's policy of ethnic reconciliation, although some critics say the reconciliation is artificial.
In the early 2000s, Mr Kagame's government brought in laws that allowed those convicted of genocide crimes to leave prison if they apologised to survivors and sought their forgiveness. Mr Nkundiye was released from prison under this arrangement.
He said: "What we did was horrible."
Ms Mukalemera, the widow of the man he killed, said: "I didn't know that it was Nkundiye who killed my husband. He came and told me he did it and showed me where my husband's body was buried. When he confessed and apologised, I forgave him.
"I found I could not live with anger forever."
Jurisdictions in other countries remain determined to track down those responsible.
On Friday, a Rwandan was convicted in the US of lying about belonging to the political party that led the killings.
Jean Leonard Teganya, 48, was found guilty of five counts of immigration fraud and perjury,
Prosecutors, citing witnesses, alleged that during the course of the genocide, Teganya led Hutu soldiers through the hospital to identify Tutsi patients who were then killed. He also personally participated in the killing and raping of Tutsis, prosecutors said.
At the time of the attacks, archives have shown that British ministers were reluctant for the UK to get involved.
Researcher James White says UN reports viewed the situation as one in which "the ceasefire had broken down.... rather than one of genocide".
Mr White said: "The British media failed to identify the killings as anything other than anarchic and a resumption of the civil war for at least the first three weeks of genocide," but admitted reporting from Rwanda at the time was difficult and dangerous.
Another researcher, Peter Dahlgren, suggests that the media reports about Rwanda were like many of those from Africa, "devoid of social, political and historical context". Consequently, Mr Dahlgren says, the public were left with a perception about Rwandans "that's just the way they are".
Key to Britain's unwillingness to get involved was the US, which did not support intervention in the early stages.
In the end, despite Rwanda, as a former colony of Belgium, not being in the Foreign Office's sphere of interest, Britain provided logistics and personnel to help the aid effort in the refugee crisis that followed.
Since then, the UK has provided tens of millions of pounds in aid to Rwanda, which the government says has helped lift "almost 2 million people out of poverty", and boosted the country so that it is now a major contributor to African peacekeeping missions, "containing extremism and terrorism".
Africa minister Harriet Baldwin said: "The Rwandan people have shown incredible resilience and unity and I am truly inspired by the transformative progress that Rwanda has made since 1994.
"The UK government is committed to continuing to assist Rwanda's recovery from the Genocide: holding perpetrators to account and ensuring justice is achieved."
The legacy of the Rwandan genocide continues to shape and influence the UN and foreign policies around the world.
A statement from the African Union, marking the anniversary, said: "The commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda... is annually organised following the decision of the African Union... to reaffirm... Africa's resolve to prevent and fight genocide on the continent."