Genocide a 'convenient failure'

2004-04-05 09:08

Kigali - President Paul Kagame on Sunday denounced the "deliberate failure" of international powers to stop the slaughter of up to one million people during Rwanda's genocide 10 years ago.

"We should always bear in mind that genocide, wherever it happens, represents the international community's failure, which I would in fact characterise as deliberate, as a convenient failure, to take responsability," Kagame told an international conference in Kigali.

"When genocide takes place, the international community should not shy away from its responsibilities ... How could the lives of one million Rwandese be considered so insignificant?" he said.

Praising survivors of the carnage and heaping blame on global powers who many say could have stopped it, the three-day international conference formally opened commemorations of the 1994 genocide, in which a total of at least 800 000 and up to one million people were killed.

The Rwandan genocide was sparked by the assassination of the ethnic Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, on April 6 1994, whose plane was shot down as it came in to land at Kigali airport.

- AFP