Rwanda remembers genocide
2005-04-07 18:50
Murambi, Rwanda - Rwandans began a week of mourning on Thursday for at least 800 000 people slaughtered during the country's 1994 genocide, with grisly accounts from survivors and the reburial of remains of victims exhumed from mass graves.
Some 5 000 people turned out in the northeastern town of Murambi where Rwandan President Paul Kagame led a ceremony to commemorate the 11th anniversary of the 100 days of slaughter between April and July of 1994.
Some survivors recounted horrific atrocities as others read elaborate poems in the local Kinyarwanda language before the sombre crowd that gathered for the annual event and the reburials.
"Many bodies have not been buried with dignity," said Innocent Ntabana, commissioner of Umutara province, adding that remains of 670 bodies had been exhumed and placed in proper plots this year as part of an ongoing campaign.
Several youths, all dressed in T-shirts reading "Let's fight against genocide ideology", carried concrete tombstones to cover the graves of the recently re-interred.
Village tribunals
Some 8 000 bodies - one one-hundredth of the total number of minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed by Hutu extremists during the orgy of death - were dumped into three mass graves in and around Murambi.
Remains from these graves were placed into two coffins draped in white and mauve and buried as Rwandan Prime Minister Bernard Mukuza and other officials looked on.
Many of the chief suspects in the genocide are currently on trial before a UN-mandated court that sits in Tanzania and others are facing local Rwandan justice before state courts and a grass-roots system of village tribunals but there were calls here for the government to boost such prosecutions.
"Many people have made a living out of the lives of others," said Francois Ngarambe, the leader of the country's main genocide survivors' association, Ibuka.
"We ask the authorities to harshly punish those who committed the genocide and we the survivors will do our best so that the gacacas (village tribunals) attain their objectives," he said.