Rwanda remembers 1994 Genocide by UN Integrated Regional Information Networks AllAfrica.com 1:39pm 7th Apr, 2004   April 5th, 2004    Rwanda began on Sunday a week of commemoration of the 1994 genocide, with President Paul Kagame urging the international community to show more commitment in acting swiftly to intervene in volatile situations that could result in mass killings of civilians.    "When genocide takes place, the international community should not shy away from its responsibility, it should take strong and immediate action including military action if need be," Kagame said when he opened an international conference in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, on genocide prevention.    Weeklong activities to commemorate the genocide include events to honour and dignify the victims of the killings as well as seek universal acknowledgement that the world must never allow genocide to occur again.    In his opening speech at the conference, Kagame said what happened in Rwanda in 1994 was due to "sheer reluctance" on the part of the international community to rescue innocent lives. He added that the occurrence of genocide in any part of the world represented the failure ofthe international community.    The conference, whose theme is "Preventing and banishing genocide forever through universal active solidarity", is being held 10 years since extremist Hutus killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.    Kagame called on the international community to consider ways of fostering the will to act appropriately and on time to halt atrocities.    "The international community should monitor [the situation] early enough and put in place measures that combat systematic discrimination, dehumanisation, and persecution which all precede the genocide," he said.    Kagame said that 10 years on, Rwanda was still struggling to cope with the destructions of the social, political and economic sectors caused by the genocide.    "The genocidaires, not only murdered a million people, they also destroyed our physical and social economic infrastructure, government, legal system, businesses and the whole economy," he said. "They destroyed everything that supported human life."    He said life had been a nightmare for survivors who now lived in abject poverty.    He added: "The survivors of the genocide have suffered in silence during the last 10 years. They lost their loved ones, their property and everything they called theirs, they were tortured, raped and infected with the HIV/AIDS and now live in abject poverty."    "As if all this was not enough, we are over burdened with the need to forgive, to reconcile, and to live with their former tormentors," Kagame said.    Kagame stunned the audience when he said that at one point, during the genocide, after the head of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, Gen Romeo Dallaire, had told him that his mission had no mandate to protect the masses, he contemplated forcefully taking arms from UN troops.    "I really contemplated taking those arms by force from them and using them to protect the people who were being killed," he said. "But of course we knew that would open for us another front to fight when we still had another complicated situation to deal with."    April 6, 2004    "Dallaire says the West ignored Rwanda because It had no Strategic Resources". Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne)    The former commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) General Romeo Dallaire on Tuesday told participants in the conference held to commemorate 10 years after the 1994 genocide that the West ignored Rwanda because it had no strategic value and no strategic resources.    General Dallaire was presenting a paper on Prevention and intervention to stop genocide when he said western powers were criminally responsible for the genocide because they did nothing to stop it.    He accused America of instigating the concept of fear of casualties in countries which had no value to economies, especially after the Somali incident.    He also challenged why the Yugoslavian conflict was treated "as more special, more complex and given more attention" than the Rwandan genocide. "Why was slaughter of the Rwandans considered as nothing more than slaughter. Are all humans the same or are some more human than others?" he queried.    He went on to say that "the former colonial powers abandoned Rwanda in the face of the genocide" .    The former commander proposed that, "the UN should be offered far more capability to prevent world powers from throwing us in a state of insecurity."    Before completing his 25 minute presentation, he applauded the work of NGO's. " The NGO community is still in its infancy as it pursues the advancement of human rights. They will pressure governments and nations with all necessary resources to prevent genocide".    The General arrived in Kigali on Friday to participate in the commemoration which has attracted thousands of senior officials from around the world.    7 April , 2004    "Rwanda commemorates ten years since genocide atrocity". (ABC News Online : The World Today - Reporter: Edmond Roy).    TANYA NOLAN: It's one of the most haunting episodes in world history and many are still suffering from its effects. Along with the Jewish Holocaust and Pol Pot's killing fields of Cambodia, the Rwanda genocide is one of the worst atrocities of the last century.    And Rwanda is today marking ten years since the genocide which claimed more than 800,000 lives, with ceremonies and vigils at mass burial sites around the country. And as Edmond Roy reports the anniversary has unleashed a new wave of recriminations against the West, for doing nothing to prevent the slaughter.    EDMOND ROY: The slaughter began after the plane carrying the then President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down on April 6, 1994. 100 days later, some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus lay dead. Today marks the anniversary of that genocide and the international community is once again being accused of ignoring Rwanda.    In Kigali, as the government prepares to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the genocide, the absence of leaders from the western world and the United Nations has sparked outrage.    In 1994, the international community looked on with almost indifference as the minority Tutsi ethnic group was systematically slaughtered in a campaign orchestrated by the then Hutu government.    Today, with the exception of Belgium, Rwanda's former colonial power, other western countries and the United Nations are sending only junior officials to Kigali.    Washington is represented by Pierre Richard Proser, the roving ambassador for war crimes. And France by its junior Foreign Minister Renaud Muselier. It's a situation well understood but condemned by the man who was in charge of the small international peace keeping force at the time of the genocide, Canadian General Romeo Dallaire.    ROMEO DALLAIRE: The racist background that we have in the white community of saying, well, you know, our wars are very serious and complex, like Yugoslavia and history and all that, but the fact that you know, Rwandans are black people in Africa that are killing each other, that's nothing more than tribalism which they've done all the time.    So we made it trite, and in doing so, the international community was able to wash its hands and say, well, you know, "let them do it, and when it's finished we'll go and help them."    EDMOND ROY: A strident critic of the international community's reaction to the genocide, General Dallair was in Kigali at the time of the massacre. But he could not act, as the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution to reduce the UN force to a skeleton staff of 270 troops.    Despite that he refuses to blame the UN for the ensuing killing.    ROMEO DALLAIRE: The UN didn't screw up. It's the individual nation state capitals that gave instructions to their people to make sure that the UN failed, and ultimately could become the scapegoat for their inaction and their irresponsibility.    EDMOND ROY: The UN and the former US President Bill Clinton later apologised for failing to intervene, but by then the damage had been done.    One of those who lost several members of his family but managed to escape to neighbouring Burundi and later gained asylum in Australia is Olivier Nyamushi.    While he believes the ten-year anniversary of the killings is a time to reflect and to move on, it's also a time for the international community to accept some responsibility for the slaughter.    OLIVIER NYAMUSHI: The international community has devalued our lives. I think that we have so many problems, and it's easy to put them aside, it's easy not to deal with them. Therefore ignoring them is the best policy for the international community.    When it was happening ten years ago, they knew about it but they were discussing how Rwanda was strategically or economically important to them. That's not the way you can view someone who is being chopped to death or being shot to death day after day.    So I believe that they are still ignoring the situation there. They are far removed from what's happening in Africa that it's easy for them to ignore it.    TANYA NOLAN: Olivier Nyamushi is a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda, now living in Australia. He was speaking there to Edmond Roy.    6 April, 2004 (BBC World News)    Rwanda marks genocide anniversary    Rwanda is marking the 10th anniversary of the 1994 genocide. The slaughter was triggered by the shooting down of a plane with Rwanda's Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana onboard on 6 April 1994. Along with the Jewish Holocaust, it is one of the worst atrocities of the last century.    Ahead of ceremonies to mark the event, the former UN commander in Rwanda said Western states were "criminally responsible" for the genocide.    "There is no country today which can wash its hands of Rwandan blood just by saying sorry", Romeo Dallaire,Head of UN peacekeepers in 1994.    Canadian General Romeo Dallaire said France, which led the small international peacekeeping force at the time of the genocide, the UK and the US in particular did not care enough to stop the killing. "It's up to Rwanda not to let others forget they are criminally responsible for the genocide," he told a genocide conference in Kigali on his first visit to the country since 1994. "There is no country today... which can wash its hands of Rwandan blood just by saying sorry."    General Dallaire's comments came after Rwandan President Paul Kagame accused France of helping prepare the genocide. President Kagame told the BBC that the French trained the militia to kill, knowing they intended to kill.    The BBC's Mark Doyle says that France was the closest ally of the Hutu regime in 1994. It is well known that French military advisers worked with the Hutu government army right up to the beginning of the genocide. France denies involvement in the mass killings.    The plane carrying President Habyarimana and his Burundi counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira was coming in to land in the capital, Kigali, when one or possibly two rockets fired from the ground destroyed it, killing both men. By an extraordinary coincidence the wreckage landed in the garden of the presidential residence.    The crash served as a signal to Hutu extremists, supporters of the government, to start the systematic liquidation of minority ethnic Tutsis and any Hutu opponents of the regime.    Mark Doyle says this was not some chaotic African tribal war, as portrayed by Western governments at the time, but a well-executed political plan. At the time, the West conspired to ignore the clear evidence of genocide and refused to help General Dallaire's force as it tried to stop the massacres. The killing continued for 100 days before a Tutsi-dominated rebel army seized control.. Visit the related web page
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