Picture credit: Bible Society / Dennis Machio
Delegates to the ABLI forum in Kigali, Rwanda, experienced a moving and challenging introduction to their time together with a visit to the national Genocide Memorial that commemorates the victims of the massacres.
The precise number of those who died when Hutus turned on Tutsis during 100 days in 1994 will never be known, but it may be more than a million.
As well as being a place where the stories of the victims are told and their lives and deaths remembered, the Kigali Genocide Memorial is the last resting place of around 250,000 of them.
Visitors are encouraged to watch a video in which survivors of the massacres recount their experiences. In many cases neighbours turned on each other, and even priests and pastors were sometimes complicit. The progress of the genocide is outlined through vivid displays. One room contains some of the bloodstained clothing of the dead; another contains pictures of child victims, with notes about their favourite sports or food, their best friend, dreams for the future – and their manner of death.
Another room contains photographs of some of the dead, reminding visitors that they are not anonymous statistics but real people.
This visit was followed by another, to the Campaign Against Genocide Museum at Rwanda's parliament building, itself the scene of fierce fighting in 1994. The forces of the Rwanda Patriotic Army swept across the country with a mission to end the genocide and defeat the government forces and militias that had perpetrated it.
The museum outlines the progress of the campaign in a series of displays, and there are memorials to the RPA soldiers who fought for their own lives and to save the lives of Tutsi civilians. Its message is one of reconciliation and nation-building after an immense national trauma.
Mark Woods
