Western Leaders Absent as Rwanda Recalls Genocide

With Western leaders conspicuous by their absence, Rwanda marked the 10th anniversary of its genocide on Wednesday as bewildered and angry as ever at the world's failure to stop one of the 20th century's great crimes.

"Women and girls were gang raped, tortured and maimed for life, if not murdered. The victims were forced to kill their kin or dig their own graves before they were buried alive," President Paul Kagame told 28,000 mourners gathered at a stadium in the capital Kigali.

"We will see each other again in heaven," a choir sang at the memorial site where a crowd of barefoot Rwandans in tattered clothes watched from a hilltop as African presidents arrived in gleaming four-wheel-drive vehicles.

In Geneva, U.N. chief Kofi Annan (news - web sites) said the risk of genocide remained frighteningly real in parts of the world, explaining that Rwanda-style ethnic massacres may be in the making in Sudan and international military force could be needed to stop it.

The U.N. Secretary-General sounded the alarm in a speech on the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred by Hutu extremists.

He left no doubt he feared something similar might be under way in west Sudan, where U.N. officials say "ethnic cleansing" is carried out by government-backed Arab militias. Khartoum denies it has any role in unlawful killings in the region.

Annan's initiative on Sudan stood in stark contrast to the low-key approach adopted by the international community on Rwanda in the months leading up the genocide, a failure seen by many Rwandans as a disastrous abdication of responsibility.

Kagame singled out France for particular scorn, reiterating an accusation that it had helped train the killers knowing that they would commit a genocide -- a charge France strongly denies.

"As for the French, their role in what happened in Rwanda is self-evident," Kagame said. "They knowingly trained and armed government soldiers and militia who were going to commit genocide, and they knew they would commit a genocide."

Kagame lit an eternal flame at the main memorial site as workers buried 15 coffins in a mass grave nearby and later led Rwandans in observing two minutes' silence for the victims.

The silence at the stadium was eventually broken by a chorus of women clad in the Rwandan mourning color of purple.

In a breach of decorum unusual in Rwanda's reserved society, bereaved survivors later sobbed in shock at hearing witnesses tell the stadium audience about gruesome killings they had seen.

For many ordinary Rwandans, most of whom scratch a living as peasant farmers in one of the world's poorest countries, the trauma is far from healed. Many women were infected with AIDS (news - web sites) during mass rapes, and thousands of children were orphaned.

"It will take eternity for the detestable and guilty indifference of the international community to be forgotten," said Louis Michel, foreign minister of the former colonial power Belgium, which lost 10 peacekeeping troops to Hutu killers on April 7, prompting Brussels to withdraw its other soldiers.

April 7 has been designated by the United Nations (news - web sites) as an "International Day of Reflection" for Rwanda, and the African country had asked other nations also to hold memorial silences.

But apart from ceremonies due to take place at U.N. offices in major U.N. centers such as Nairobi and Geneva and at Rwandan embassies there was no sign the gesture was widely observed.

The tiny central African country was plunged into a frenzy of ethnic butchery that saw an average of 8,000 people killed each day in the months after a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down over Kigali on April 6, 1994.

Scholars concluded that the killers -- mostly civilians armed with machetes, garden hoes and spiked clubs and spurred on by hate propaganda -- did their work five times faster than the gas chambers used by the Nazis in World War II.

Annan, head of U.N. peacekeeping in 1994 and a Nobel peace prize winner, came under fire at a genocide conference in Kigali this week for not doing more to rally a response.

Leaders including Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, South African President Thabo Mbeki, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt attended Wednesday's ceremony.

Genocide has been a sad fact of human history since recorded time. It has been present in every culture, ethnic race and in every epoch of the human experience.

The most brutal and efficient episodes of genocides have been when a people's own government turns against them. Just the recent 20th century history of the Turkish Government killing Turkish Armenians (1.5 million), the Soviet Government killing Ukrainians/Russian political opponents (20 million), the Nazi Regime killing German Jews/political opponents (20 million), the Chinese Government killing Chinese political opponents (35 million), the Khmer Rouge Regime killing fellow Cambodian educated persons (2 million) and the Rwandan Government killing Rwandan Tutsis (1 million) make this argument crystal clear.

How do governments kill so many of their own people? That is easy to answer. These governments had the power and the people, the victims, were unable to resist.

In all the above examples, the governments first disarmed their own people (usually for "crime control" and to "make the streets safer"). Once citizens can no longer be trusted with their own defense or arms, they are easy pickings when persons with hate take over that government. As is so poignantly pointed out in Rwanda, the citizens of a state can stop genocide if they have the means to defend themselves.

Reuters - Annan Warns of Rwanda-Style Genocide in Sudan

By Thomas Atkins and Nima Elbagir

GENEVA/KHARTOUM (Reuters) - U.N. chief Kofi Annan (news - web sites) warned on Wednesday a Rwanda-style genocide may be in the making in Sudan and said international military force could be needed -- a suggestion at once rejected by the Khartoum government.

The U.N. Secretary-General issued his warning in a speech in Geneva on the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide in which about 800,000 died. He left no doubt he feared something similar might be under way in west Sudan, where U.N. officials say "ethnic cleansing" is carried out.

"The international community cannot stand idle," declared Annan, who has himself acknowledged more should have been done to halt the orgy of killing in Rwanda in 1994.

"The risk of genocide remains frighteningly real."

Annan said humanitarian workers and human rights experts needed to be given full access to Darfur, a western region in Africa's biggest country, to administer aid to hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homes, many into neighboring Chad.

"They need to get to the victims," Annan said in his speech to the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

"If that is denied, the international community must be prepared to take swift and appropriate action. By action in such situations, I mean a continuum of steps which may include military action."

Sudan immediately rejected any outside military help but welcomed offers of aid for the region, where the United Nations (news - web sites) is warning of a humanitarian crisis caused by a conflict it says has affected one million people.

"We don't think we need outside military help and we do our best according to the available resources," Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail told reporters in Khartoum.

"All that we want from the international community is that it helps us with more supplies of humanitarian aid so that we can try and help those in need."

REBELS APPEAL FOR MILITARY OBSERVERS

Two rebel groups accuse the Khartoum government of arming Arab militias to loot and burn African villages in Darfur and rebels were quick to urge outside military help.

"We are requesting the international community like the United Nations, or the United States...just to bring forces here to protect a cease-fire, to be as an observer for what is going to be another genocide and to protect civilians," Sudan Liberation Movement chairman Abdel Wahed Mohamed Ahmed al-Nur told Reuters by telephone.

U.S. officials said Washington was focusing on diplomatic efforts, not outside military intervention, in west Sudan.

Sudan's government has consistently refused international involvement in Darfur, saying it is just local tribal strife.

Two senior U.N. officials have described killing and looting in Darfur as a "scorched earth" campaign and "ethnic cleansing." Both said Khartoum had done nothing to stop the bloodshed.

Annan criticized U.N. member states for lacking the will to act in potential genocidal situations and unveiled a five-point action plan to address genocidal threats worldwide.

The plan includes calling for a review of the ability of U.N. peacekeeping forces to intervene in genocidal situations and to get prompt reinforcements in case of need, Annan said.

"The best way to honor the dead in Rwanda and to show that we have learned from our failures is to stop massacres from being carried out in the Sudan," Reed Brody, of the U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.

Peace talks in the Chadian capital N'Djamena witnessed a breakthrough late on Tuesday as the government for the first time held direct talks on humanitarian aid with the rebels in the presence of international observers, a key rebel demand.

Rights group Amnesty International urged the negotiators to act swiftly to stop human rights abuses in Darfur.

"The tenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda should concentrate the minds of the negotiators in N'Djamena to act to end a horrifically escalating conflict where civilians -- killed, raped, abused and plundered -- are the principal victims," Amnesty said in a statement on Wednesday.

A separate civil war has raged in the south of Sudan for two decades, pitting the region's mainly Christian and animist peoples against the largely Muslim government in Khartoum. Up to two million people are believed to have died.

(Additional reporting by Opheera McDoom in Cairo)

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