Rwanda readies for anniversary

2004-04-06 12:47

Kigali - Rwanda was gearing up on Tuesday for a major ceremony to mark the 10th anniversary of the genocide which began on April 7 1994, and ended 100 days later with up to a million people dead.

On the eve of the commemoration's highlight on Wednesday, to be hosted by President Paul Kagame in Kigali's national stadium in the presence of numerous officials from around the world, several preliminary events were scheduled.

Romeo Dallaire, the Candian commander of the UN peacekeeping force deployed in Rwanda in 1994, which was unable to halt the slaughter, told a conference on the genocide that the international community was "criminally responsible" for having abandoned the tiny central African state.

"There is no country today, 10 years later, which can wash its hands of Rwandan blood just by saying sorry," said the retired general.

Dallaire accused the United Nations, and specifically the United States, France and Britain, of failing to give his peacekeeping mission the muscle to intervene.

Shooting-down

A well-planned campaign by the Hutu government of the time to wipe out Rwanda's Tutsi minority was set in motion by the shooting-down, on the night of April 6 1994, of President Juvenal Habyarimana.

The killings began in the capital but quickly spread to other parts of the country.

Nevertheless, on April 21, the UN scaled down the peacekeeping mission from 5 500 men to less than 300.

The genocide - the word was deliberately avoided by the world's powers at the time - was finally halted in mid-July when Tutsi rebels, led by Kagame, took power.

Kagame was due to meet Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt of Belgium, Rwanda's former colonial power, on Tuesday.

"This is an emotional moment for me," said Verhofstadt, who leads a 200-strong Belgian delegation, as he disembarked from a military plane at Kigali airport.

"I believe that our place is here, during reconstruction, but also to show the rest of the West that we have to do more for Rwanda, because we have a tendency to fill up pages and pages, to make television programmes on what is happening elsewhere, while forgetting what happened here," he said.

The families of 10 Belgian peacekeepers killed on April 7 1994 were expected to gather at a memorial, erected in their honour, in Kigali.

Many Rwandans and UN workers based in the country have expressed bitterness over the failure of France, the United States and the United Nations to send high-ranking officials to the commemoration.

On Monday, victims' remains were being removed from mass graves for proper burials, memorial sites were being completed, and workers were busy filling potholes on Kigali's main roads, as the first foreign dignitaries, including US ambassador for war crimes, Pierre-Richard Prosper, flew in.

At the National stadium, a military band went through its paces, as hundreds of schoolchildren practised a formation that spelt out the letters of the words "Never Again".

- AFP