Posted on 04/04/2004 10:48:22 AM PDT by areafiftyone
KIGALI, April 4 (Reuters) - Rwandans criticised the outside world's failure to prevent the genocide of an estimated 800,000 people on Sunday at the start of a week devoted to commemorating the tenth anniversary of the massacres.
Speakers opening a three-day genocide conference in the Rwandan capital Kigali said the world had compounded its lack of intervention to stop the slaughter by failing to help the survivors who escaped 100 days of bloodshed.
"With the information that the international community had on the preparations for the genocide and the means it had at its disposal, the international community could have prevented the genocide," Francois Garambe, chairman of the Ibuka genocide survivors group, told the opening of the conference.
"The international community still continues after the genocide to display total indifference to the survivors' unspeakable moral and physical suffering," he told the start of three-day meeting.
Stephen Smith, director of Aegist Trust, a British-based charity dedicated to preventing genocide, said the world had failed to prevent the slaughter in Rwanda, leaving the country with a terrible legacy of trauma.
"In this city, you know, there are still more nightmares than dreams, because you know personally, that just 10 years ago, someone hacked your father to death, sliced through your brother, raped your mother," he told several hundred delegates.
"Never forget Rwanda, let it be a dangerous, unsettling, unnerving memory," he said.
On Sunday, a Rwandan cabinet minister said a 2001 census showed there were 937,000 victims of the genocide, reviving a debate over the death toll which has seen conflicting numbers of deaths proposed ranging from 500,000 to one million.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, created by the United Nations to prosecute perpetrators, estimates that "some 800,000 Rwandans were killed" between April and July 1994.
The conference will draw participants from around the world, including former Canadian Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire who led a U.N. force in Rwanda during the killings and who has been haunted by guilt over his failure to save more lives.
Delegates will examine issues like justice for victims, helping survivors and how to commemorate events such as the genocide, which began after a plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents was shot down on April 6, 1994.
The crash acted as the trigger for an attempt by extremists from the ethnic Hutu majority to exterminate the minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates, hoping to preserve the Hutus' decades-long political dominance in the country of about eight million.
Participants at the meeting in Kigali will also scrutinise the role countries can play in preventing genocide, a debate which may be fuelled by comments or revelations made concerning outside powers during the past few weeks.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who was head of peacekeeping at the world body during 1994, accepted institutional and personal blame last month for not doing more to prevent the Rwandan slaughter.
Declassified documents revealed last week U.S. intelligence officials were using the word "genocide" in Rwanda in 1994 even as officials in Bill Clinton's administration avoided the word in public for fear it could spark an outcry for action.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who led the rebel army that took power in July, 1994 has accused France of "direct" involvement in the genocide, saying it provided weapons and training to those who carried out the killings.
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He couldn't figure out how to may a profit out of it.
...while the other side has been heavily armed, promoted, and trained by an outside country which is much larger, richer and powerful. France heavily backed Hutu power.
There's no hope for Rwanda....
It's very obvious. They're all democrats.
The U.N.'s Bill Clinton. Bet he won't resign either. There are a few things going on in Zimbabwe right now that you might want to have a look at, Kofi. Or are you going to wait until all the whites have been slaughtered or have fled and then issue another apology? And the U.N. wants us to turn Iraq over to them. Fat chance.
This is such a strange headline it could have come from the Onion. Rwandans are telling the world that we're not moral enough, not compassionate enough? That's breathtaking.
Foreign Affairs Breaking News News Keywords: UN COWARDS, GENOCIDE COLLABORATORS
Source: Independent
Published: 11 Jan 2000 Author: Karen MacGregor Posted on 01/11/2000 05:50:37 PST by davide
The United Nations is being sued, for the first time in its history, for alleged complicity in the crime of genocide. Lawyers are instituting a case on behalf of two Rwandan women whose families died during the 1994 genocide in which 800,000, mostly Tutsi people, were slaughtered by Hutus.
The women, the widow of a former Rwandan supreme court judge and the sister of a Tutsi former cabinet minister, accuse UN soldiers who were meant to defend their families of either handing them over to their killers or running away.
They are being represented by the former South Australian crown prosecutor Michael Hourigan, who quit his job as an investigator with the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in disgust at UN inaction and barriers to his investigation, and also by the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, a fellow Australian.
Mr Hourigan, who works for a US law firm, told the Melbourne Age that genocide had been committed against Rwandans in the presence of a UN force, and that the murders in question were "caused by the cowardice, negligence and bungling of UN forces".
http://freerepublic.com/forum/a387b352e4b66.htm
'Explosive' leak on Rwanda genocide
Foreign Affairs News Source: National Post Published: 3/1/00 Author: Steven Edwards Posted on 03/06/2000 10:47:48 PST by Sandy Informants told UN investigators they were on squad that killed Rwanda's president -- and a foreign government helped.
UNITED NATIONS - Three Tutsi informants have revealed to the United Nations that they were part of an elite strike team that assassinated the Hutu president in 1994, shedding new light on an event that triggered the genocide of at least 500,000 people in Rwanda.
The informants told UN investigators in 1997 that the killing of president Juvenal Habyarimana was carried out "with the assistance of a foreign government" under the overall command of Paul Kagame, now the vice-president of Rwanda.
The April 6, 1994, assassination proved to be a flashpoint in central Africa in 1994, igniting a bloodletting in which extremist Hutus targeted Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
The report, obtained by the National Post, suggests a critical ...http://freerepublic.com/forum/a38c3fd547ec4.htm
That almost sounds like a Monty Python scenario.
"I'm sorry, but you simply can't come in and start killing people on our watch. It's not in our contract. Now go away."
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