RWANDA
Rebuild, and Remember
Twenty-five years after the genocide that killed 800,000 people began in Rwanda, President Paul Kagame said the country is rebuilding with the confidence that Rwandans would never turn against each other again.
“We Rwandans have granted ourselves a new beginning. We exist in a state of permanent commemoration, every day, in all that we do,” Kagame said at a ceremony Sunday, according to the Associated Press. “Today, light radiates from this place.”
Earlier in the day, Kagame and his wife paid homage to the 250,000 victims interned in a mass burial ground at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in the capital, Kigali.
The mass slaughter of Rwanda’s ethnic Tutsi minority was touched off in 1994 when a plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu, was shot down, resulting in his death. Blaming the Tutsi minority for shooting down the plane, bands of Hutu extremists began killing them en masse, with support from the army, police, and militias. Even today, bodies are still being found.
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