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.
WHERE WAS THE U.N.?
LINING THEIR POCKETS WITH IRAQI OIL FOR FOOD?
Accusing the U.S. of mickey-mouse "abuses"?
WHERE WAS THE U.N.?
LINING THEIR POCKETS WITH IRAQI OIL FOR FOOD?
Accusing the U.S. of mickey-mouse "abuses"?
WHERE WAS THE U.N.?
LINING THEIR POCKETS WITH IRAQI OIL FOR FOOD?
Accusing the U.S. of mickey-mouse "abuses"?
WHERE WAS THE U.N.?
LINING THEIR POCKETS WITH IRAQI OIL FOR FOOD?
Accusing the U.S. of mickey-mouse "abuses"?
WHERE WAS THE U.N.?
LINING THEIR POCKETS WITH IRAQI OIL FOR FOOD?
Accusing the U.S. of mickey-mouse "abuses"?
WHERE WAS THE U.N.? LINING THEIR POCKETS WITH IRAQI OIL FOR FOOD? Accusing the U.S. of mickey-mouse "abuses"?
WHERE WAS THE U.N.?
LINING THEIR POCKETS WITH IRAQI OIL FOR FOOD?
Accusing the U.S. of mickey-mouse "abuses"?
I also agree that the crazed bands of weak, ill-equipped Hutu murderers roaming the Rwandan countryside with nothing more than machetes could have been stopped in their tracks by a few thousand well-disciplined international troops.
Can you imagine the outcry about international troops killing Rwandan civilians? Which most of the killers indeed were.
Perhaps, but even if international troops forestalled an international outcry by interceding only after solid evidence could be presented that 100,000 Tutsis had been massacred by "Rwandan civilians" that still would have saved 700,000 lives.
The killing went on for 100 days. If it could have been cut down to a 30 day or 20 day orgy of blood a lot of lives would have been saved.
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