SNV's mission is to develop the capacities of capacity builders at provincial and local levels, with the twin objectives of reducing poverty and improving governance. Many of the advisory services rendered by SNV Rwanda are directly related to the empowerment of women and the mainstreaming of gender. This can mean the integration of gender in local government, civil society and private sector or lobbying and advocacy skills of women organisations.

A Rwandan opposition group on Monday accused Rwandan President Paul Kagame of sending troops into the east of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to kill Rwandans "refugees" there. "The Kigali government sent thousands of troops disguised as field workers to wipe out Rwandan refugees still living in this region and Congolese who refused to collaborate with the regime," the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) said in a statement. "Kigali authorities are once again preparing to take war to the east of the DRC," said the statement signed by spokesman Augustin Dukuze. Rwanda and the DRC are only now in the process of restoring diplomatic relations that were broken off in 1998 when Rwanda was one of six countries drawn into the DRC's bloody civil war.

Events to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide peaked on Wednesday, with President Paul Kagame saying the nation had learnt its lessons from the killings. "We are prepared that what happened here should never happen again not only in Rwanda but anywhere in the world," he said. "Our never again means never again." Referring to the alleged role of France in the 1994 killings, Kagame said: "Their persistent role is self-evident. They knowingly trained armed government soldiers and militias who were going to commit genocide."

Some 250,000 perished on the streets and in the houses, churches and hospitals of Kigali alone. After the genocide, the Kigali City Council decided to dedicate a site for the burial of its people in a single place. Many mass graves were exhumed from around the city and the remains interred at the Kigali Memorial Centre in Gisozi district. This is now their final resting place. It is a poignant symbol of the devastation that genocide brought to families across the city and the country as a whole. The cemetery has been developed into a centre and place of reflection and learning for the families of victims, for schools and visitors to Rwanda.

On the eve of 10th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, educational software company 23YYZee launched their website. Their new Interactive Documentary Pax Warrior begins pilot programs in schools in May. The web-based multimedia narrative combines text, images, and sound to tell the story of the United Nation’s intervention in one of the worst atrocities of the late 20th century. The immersive narrative briefs students with the information that would have been available to Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who oversaw the UN peacekeeping operation in Rwanda. The software also provides access to archival news documents and primary sources, along with original background articles.

A pilot project in Rwanda on the prevention of mother-to-child HIV infection has registered a high rate of acceptance and has helped improve the chances of HIV positive mothers giving birth to HIV negative children, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported on Tuesday. Rwanda is one of eight pilot countries in eastern and southern Africa to have participated in the project in 1999, involving trials for use of antiretrovirals (ARVs) to minimise the possibility of HIV infection from mother to child.

Ten years after the genocide in Rwanda that took the lives of 800,000 people, the country’s children continue to struggle with the lingering impact of the atrocities, UNICEF has said. “Ten years later, the children of Rwanda are still suffering the consequences of a conflict caused entirely by adults,” UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said. “For them, the genocide is not just a historical event, but an inescapable part of daily life today and tomorrow.”

* Names have been omitted because of the nature of the interviews. One of the subjects is a protected witness.

STORY ONE

"The Genocide was something overwhelming. In the first place, it is impossible to find an explanation for it. You cannot understand how a friend, a long time neighbour, comes to your house to kill you; that because you are a Tutsi you must die. You cannot understand why everyone let it happen, and you are completely left alone, you have nothing, no family...nothing. And that as a result you have to beg for someone to come to your help. I lost all my family and it means I am now responsible for many things, things I was not prepared for. I have to take care of the remaining surviving members of my family as the one who is working. You know there are those who weren't living here when the genocide broke who ask how I survived. How do you answer a question like that! They are implying that I was an accomplice. I met a soldier who asked me why I hadn't gone to fight with them, and if I had I may not have lost my family. That is an insult to an injury!

I lost five members of my family, and until now I cannot get them properly buried. They are in a septic tank where their bodies were thrown. Sometimes I want to open it and look inside but then I get scared and wonder if I can deal with the reality of seeing them in there. If I die now, my family name will be gone. Who will raise my children? I often feel a heat on the top of my head.

I am responsible for educating five children who are not my own. You can imagine my first born is five and a half years old but because of circumstances I am a parent to a 20 year old. My mother has heart problems because of the loss of her children. I have to find the medication and the money to pay for it all. And in all this I am supposed to live my own life too.

How do I cope? One must be very, very strong. If you are weak, if you show a sign of weakness then you are dead. I think we survivors are living dead. Sometimes I ask myself why I am not mad. I cry many evenings, I feel abandoned but in the morning I must get up and go about supporting what is left of my family.

I saw my family members being shot. I was hiding among the bushes. I could hear people crying out for water, crying for help and the next day you would hear they were killed. My younger sister was thrown alive into the latrines. She was begging for water and was caught, but I could not help her because if I came out from the bushes I would surely die. If I was in Europe I would be able to get some psychological help but here, one must help oneself.

Gacaca has people who defend themselves well, with their family members backing them. When you testify, they mock you. They ask you to remember, to testify and then they tell you they will release the suspects because they have accepted killing! And you are obliged to grant them pardon. The person who threw my sister in the latrine continues to live in my sector. In fact I said hello to him one day before someone who had witnessed his deeds told me who he was.

At Gacaca a prisoner will give a memorised testimony and the people there applaud when he speaks. There is a man who shot at my brother three times. I was there. I took him to the police station and they said I needed five witnesses before they could do anything.

So to me reconciliation is really for politicians. Survivors, especially in the countryside, can't do anything - they must collaborate. They are resigned and have no choice. Reconciliation is not for this generation. There are many things people don't dare say, the internal suffering they endure. People can't do anything palpable to come to the aid of those who underwent the horrors of the genocide."

STORY TWO

"As a survivor, the genocide weighs heavy on us. It is impossible to separate ourselves from the past. One is always attached to the horror one went through, and it is always present. The criminals are still free while the victims continue living a life in misery. There are very few who are concerned about the worries of the survivors. This greatly hurts us. But what we would really like is healing; someone to listen to us, empathise with our misery, understand our suffering, soothe us and to give us support.

Ten years on, there has been no compensation and the criminals are free to do what they want, no-one stops them. It is discouraging. People seem more concerned with prisoners and returning refugees. There are widows, young girls who were raped and are now HIV positive, who will soon leave their children behind. The international community that was there at the time should get involved in getting treatment for them."

STORY THREE

"The Genocide changed my way of life completely. I was a devout Catholic; I had attended a Catholic secondary school and then went on to a seminary. Since secondary school I knew I was heading towards being a priest. In October 1994 I left the seminary as a result of the genocide, the extreme racism I saw. Many colleagues who had participated in the killings were not interested in confessing and changing their views. It was terribly shocking for me to see them take part in the genocide. I am now somewhat isolated. Those with whom I could share my thoughts are either dead or were participants in the genocide. Living outside of the church is a change for me, something I had never thought of, and so I feel I am not settled. I try to overcome some of this by working with widows and orphans but there is always the problem of lack of means.

As I travel around the country frequently, I find that most of the people don't believe in the Genocide. There is a fear in acknowledging their crimes. In a way, to speak of unity and reconciliation is to erase traces of genocide for the accused. Reconciliation is also seen in different views. For some it means the liberation of everyone, to them that is justice being served. These opposing ideas of the genocide creates a rift between the survivors and the prisoners. It is a society that frightens me. Unity and reconciliation is always being touted but it is not the reality. There are those who don't approach the survivors during the commemoration and say it is a preoccupation of the government and the survivors. This is a worrying trend.

With the approach of the 10th anniversary, I also worry about the alienation of the youth. They are not involved in the preparations and are in a sense abandoned. It is worrying for the future. The youth change their ideas all the time so I ask myself where we will be in another 10 years.

I am now accused of being a "RPF politician", an accomplice because it is known I assisted some people to safety. Since 1994, I am always accused of having been 'bought' by the survivors. The problem is that there are a lot of prejudices here. People think if they speak out they will be considered as killers and they don't see it as shedding a light on things. I am taken to be the enemy in my home area. I think of Gacaca going on without my testimony but to give it would mean insecurity for me and my family members.

I saw many who participated in the genocide; many have been liberated and many have not been imprisoned to date. There are also those who played a part in the organisation of the genocide who haven't as yet been accused. It was traumatising to see. For instance, there was a woman who left the parish where we were to return to her home. I went after her but it was too late and I saw her being killed with a machete by several teachers, who are still teaching in my home province. And when I talk about what I saw, I am accused of wanting to destroy unity and reconciliation. That disturbs me. I accuse my society - we are living in lies. There will always be victims. It reflects what is happening all over the country to survivors, it shows how they are viewed.

I try and manage by living with others who have been through similar experiences and we share our feelings. It gives me the morale to continue with life. I ask myself how things stand between Hutus and Tutsis. There are some good people who try to understand things and nurture a different society. They offer a platform for support, a stable base and give a good image to the country. They don't generalise the situation.

With regard to the commemoration, what is missing is a criticism of the population. In the countryside they ignore what happens. They must be prepared and included in the activities until they take them on and participate. They tend to be frightened and don't want to be associated. These events shouldn't be foreign and they should be involved alongside the survivors and the authorities. People should be slowly helped to understand that the dead are like their brothers, their kin and in that way they may slowly start recognising it and talking the truth of what happened."

STORY FOUR

"I was 14 at the time of the genocide. For me, it was people following orders. There were lots of meetings and preparations for the killing, including the purchasing of machetes. There were those who attempted to help out Tutsis and failed. Mainly people were killing so as to get their hands on property. People were dying like snakes, it became a normal sight. I didn't think anything of it, other than people obeying orders that were being given by the authorities and church leaders. I was young at the time. Now, my opinions have changed - we have good leadership.

Everyone is seen as equal, as a human being. You can live where you want and education is open to all. I myself don't have a job at the moment but even so I live relatively well. I decided to testify about what I had witnessed because the new leadership told us that we should speak so the truth of what happened be known, so that those who were guilty could be brought to justice and that those who may be wrongly accused could be set free.

So I decided to speak out because I had witnessed a lot. At the time I didn't know it would lead to any trouble. I ended up receiving threats and people wanted me dead, even my family. It was difficult and it bothered me because they chased me from home and they wanted me to die. They would have helped anyone wanting me dead. They would say that I should let the Tutsis handle things themselves, that I should not involve myself or we would all end up being killed. There is a man who refuses to give me work because I gave testimony implicating his younger brother. But I am saying what I saw, I am speaking the truth and I would do it again even knowing now what I face. The truth is the truth. If it means I die then so be it. When my family disowned me I felt alone, and life is hard. I have no work and I am in the same clothes day after day...

All this has meant that I am constantly on the move, worrying for my life but in telling the truth my heart is at peace. I had thought that if I spoke out, being the youngest among those I was with, the others would testify too but that hasn't been the case. They are at home not saying anything."

* Many thanks to Elizabeth Onyango in Rwanda, who conducted these interviews for Pambazuka News.

The UN says tests on a flight recorder found last week suggest that it is not from the plane that crashed in Rwanda, triggering the country's 1994 genocide. But spokesman Fred Eckhard said more tests were needed on the device which had been locked in a UN filing cabinet for a decade. Both Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira were killed in the attack. The flight recorder was found after the French daily Le Monde published details of a police report which says that the UN had been sent the device a few months after the crash.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has accepted institutional and personal blame for the slaughter of 800,000 civilians in the 1994 Rwanda genocide that was initially ignored by world leaders. "The international community is guilty of sins of omission," said Annan, who was head of the United Nations peacekeeping agency at the time and had asked countries to provide troops. "I believed at the time that I was doing my best. But I realised after the genocide that there was more that I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support," Annan said in a speech on Friday to open the "Memorial Conference on the Rwanda Genocide" to mark 10 years since the massacre.

Rwanda plans to release at least 30,000 suspects who have confessed to participating in the 1994 genocide, letting them be tried in community courts rather than by the country's overburdened judicial system, an official said Saturday. The suspects will be released by the end of June - cutting by a third the 90,000 suspects being held on charges of taking part in the slaughter of at least 500,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, said Johnston Busingye, the secretary general of the justice ministry.

President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time. Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene. Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.

On the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, Christian Aid has called for the UK government to review its support to the Rwandan government. A new report, 'It's time to open up', says the UK should be a more 'critical friend' to Rwanda and concentrate on helping it to establish strong democratic roots and a legitimacy which will provide long term stability for all Rwandans and succeeding governments.

SOURCE: Edited from a chronology of events on the website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/rwanda/etc/cron.html, which was compiled from Fergal Keane's Season of Blood and Alain Destexhe's Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century.

1918: Treaty of Versailles makes the former German colony of Rwanda-Urundi a U.N. protectorate to be governed by Belgium.

1926: Ethnic identity cards differentiating Hutus from Tutsis introduced by Belgium.

1957: Party for the Emancipation of the Hutus is formed.

1959: Hutus rebel against the Belgian colonial power and the Tutsi elite. 150,000 Tutsis flee to Burundi.

1961-62: Belgians withdraw. Gregoire Kayibanda installed as president. Fighting continues.

1963: Attack by exiled Tutsis results in massacre and further Tutsis flee. This is followed by further massacres in 1967.

1973: General Juvenal Habyarimana takes power and sets up a one-party state. Tutsis are restricted to nine percent of available jobs. Pattern of exclusion continues through the 1970’s and 1980’s.

1975: Habyarimana's political party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (Mouvement Revolutionnaire National pour le Developpement, or MRND) is formed.

1986: Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army takes power in Uganda, with the help of Rwandan exiles, who then form the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-dominated organisation.

1990: RPF guerrillas invade Rwanda from Uganda. Fierce fighting ends in a cease-fire on March 29, 1991.

1990/91: The Rwandan army begins to train and arm civilian militias known as interahamwe ("Those who stand together")

February 1993: RPF launches a fresh offensive and reach the outskirts of Kigali.

August 1993: Habyarimana and the RPF sign a peace accord that allows for the return of refugees and a coalition Hutu-RPF government. 2,500 U.N. troops are deployed in Kigali.

Sept.1993-Mar.1994: President Habyarimana stalls on setting up of power-sharing government. Training of militias intensifies. Extremist radio station, Radio Mille Collines, begins broadcasting exhortations to attack the Tutsis.

April 6, 1994: President Habyarimana and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, are killed when Habyarimana’s plane is shot down near Kigali Airport, sparking the beginning of the genocide.

April 7, 1994: The Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) and the interahamwe set up roadblocks and go from house to house killing Tutsis and moderate Hutu politicians. U.N. forces cannot intervene as they have only a monitoring mandate. The U.N. soon cuts its forces to 250 after ten Belgian soldiers are murdered.

April 30, 1994: The U.N. Security Council spends eight hours discussing the Rwandan crisis. The resolution condemning the killing omits the word “genocide”. Had the term been used, the U.N. would have been legally obliged to act to “prevent and punish” the perpetrators. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of refugees flee into Tanzania, Burundi and Zaire. In one day 250,000 Rwandans, mainly Hutus fleeing the advance of the RPF, cross the border into Tanzania.

May 17, 1994: As the slaughter of the Tutsis continues the U.N. agrees to send 6,800 troops and policemen to Rwanda with powers to defend civilians. A Security Council resolution says “acts of genocide may have been committed.” Deployment of the mainly African U.N. forces is delayed because of arguments over who will pay the bill.

July 1994: The RPF captures Kigali and sets up an interim government of national unity in Kigali.

November 1994: U.N. Security Council establishes an international tribunal that will oversee prosecution of suspects involved in genocide.

The Rwandan genocide sparked massive population shifts in the country and across the Great Lakes region. Millions of uprooted people scattered and regrouped. In the wake of devastating death and displacement, the landscape of human settlement was completely altered.

The return of diverse groups of Rwandan refugees over the course of ten years since the genocide has shaped the country's current political, physical, social, and economic environments. Rwandan refugees' experiences in exile and in return differ according to their histories, their ethnicity and class. They are rural and urban, well-educated and illiterate. Many were raised in Rwanda, others in neighbouring African countries, in Europe, and beyond.

Some, having been born in exile, have come to Rwanda for the first time after 1994. Yet all have returned in the hope of rebuilding lives and livelihoods in the country they have always called home. The refugees have returned with a vast wealth of knowledge, experience, assets and skills to the most densely populated country in Africa, where the struggling economy is dominated by agriculture.

The socio-economic integration of returnees remains a massive challenge to Rwanda. Productive agricultural land, and even basic shelter, health care, and education, remain inaccessible to many. Sharing community resources is perhaps the greatest challenge to peaceful resettlement and reintegration of returned Rwandan refugees.

A brief history of Rwandan refugees:

Beginning in 1959, as Belgian colonists began to withdraw from power, the politicisation of ethnicity lead to the transfer of power to the majority ethnic Hutu in Rwanda. Targeted attacks on ethnic Tutsi began. Estimates indicate that during the period between 1959 and 1967, 20,000 Tutsi died, and another 300,000 fled Rwanda as refugees with a small number of elite Hutus and Twa into neighbouring countries.

In 1964, estimates of Rwandan refugees in asylum countries were 40,000 in Burundi, 60,000 in Zaire (former DRC), 35,000 in Uganda, and 15,000 in Tanzania. Political crises and refugee flows from neighbouring countries have contributed to the complexities of Rwanda's refugees. In Burundi in 1972, anti-Hutu violence and killings by the Tutsi government forced thousands of Burundian Hutu refugees to flee into Rwanda. These refugees contributed to further anti-Tutsi attacks in Rwanda in 1973 and thousands more Tutsi fled Rwanda. Refugees who fled Rwanda between 1959-1973 are generally referred to as "old-caseload refugees".

Land and property left behind by refugees from Rwanda was subsequently occupied by others who remained or entered the country. This became a political issue. By the 1980s, the Habyarimana regime claimed that repatriation of Rwandan refugees was impossible due to land scarcity. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rwandan refugee communities created secret political and military alliances in exile. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was formed from such groups.

New directions of displacement began with the RPF invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990. Internally displaced people (IDPs) within Rwanda, mainly Hutu fleeing RPF attacks, regrouped into camps of hundreds of thousands surviving in miserable conditions throughout the ensuing war.

As the genocide began in April 1994, RPF soldiers began to advance from the northern border area. Behind the troops over 600,000 "Old Caseload Refugees" followed, some of them entering Rwanda after more than 30 years of exile in Uganda. Ahead of the advancing RPF fled the mainly Hutu "New Caseload Refugees".

In April, an estimated 500,000 fled to Tanzania. In 24 hours alone, 250,000 crossed the Rusumo bridge between Rwanda and Tanzania over April 28-29. By May, about 200,000 mainly ethnic Hutus from Butare, Kibungo, and Kigali-Rural had fled to northern Burundi. As the RPF took control of Kigali in July, the French military launched Opération Turquoise, creating a safe zone beyond RPF control in south-west Rwanda to protect fleeing Hutu, including leaders of the military and government responsible for the genocide as well as ordinary civilians.

300,000 fled to Bukavu, Zaire in July and August, as the French Operation Turquoise pulled out. Another 300,000 were grouped into IDP camps in the region. In north-west Rwanda, the home of the elite of the Habyarimana regime, 1 million refugees fled to Goma, Zaire during four days in mid-July.

The refugee crisis in eastern Zaire attracted the assistance of the international community on a scale leagues beyond what had been provided in Rwanda during the genocide, or even after. Among the refugee population, Hutu Power extremists controlled the camps and the aid. They continued to mobilise and arm themselves against the new RPF regime. Political violence was pervasive in the camps.

Despite the relief aid that sustained the refugees, a deadly cholera epidemic killed 50,000 refugees in Goma. During late July and August, 200,000 refugees returned from Goma to Rwanda. By the end of 1994, two million Rwandans had fled the RPF advance, being forced to run by Hutu extremist leaders, or fearing retribution for the genocide. Over 500,000 of these were in Tanzania, 250,000 in Burundi, and more than 1.2 million in Zaire. Among the refugees were Burundians who had fled to Rwanda in 1972. By the end of 1995, 225,778 Rwandan refugees (80,000 new caseload) had returned to Rwanda. 1,707,032 Rwandans remained in 50 refugee camps.

Return and Reintegration of refugee returnees:

Between 1994-1996, approximately 800,000 (mainly old-case refugees) had followed the call of the new Government of National Unity to return home to Rwanda. Still, massive forced population shifts continued throughout the region during the second half of the 1990s.

The Rwandan camps in Zaire continued to threaten the RPF regime and Tutsi of Rwandan origin living in the Kivus of Zaire. In October and November 1996, Rwandan and Ugandan supported Alliance de Forces Democratique de Liberation attacked all of the camps in eastern Zaire and pursued ex-FAR and Interhamwe deeper into Zaire's interior.

An estimated 600,000 refugees repatriated to Rwanda over 6 days, forming a line 260km long. By early 1997, the number had risen to 720,000. Other refugees fled in the direction of the militias towards the interior of Zaire, Angola, and Zambia. Concurrently, conflict has forced 15,000 Congolese and 5,000 Burundians to seek refugee in Rwanda. In December, 500,000 Rwandans were forcibly repatriated by Tanzanian authorities.

Internal displacement remained a serious concern within Rwanda, especially as ex-FAR and Interhamwe launched attacks on north-west Rwanda from their bases in Zaire in mid-1997. In 1998, following the fall of Mobutu and the rise of Laurent Kabila, the second Congo war forced tens of thousands of Congolese refugees into western Rwanda. These were eventually accommodated in refugee camps which remain today.

As the old-caseload refugees returned, the only available properties were those that had been abandoned by the new-caseload refugees. As the new-caseload refugees began to return, the pressure for new housing became imminent.

The solution that had been foreseen in the 1993 Arusha Accords to accommodate refugee return and prevent conflicts over land was a villagization scheme where services would be centralised and modern agricultural technology accessible. According to the Arusha Accords, refugees returning after more than 10 years were not to seek to reclaim previous properties that had been occupied by others, but were to be resettled on unoccupied land with government assistance.

In the aftermath of the genocide, new caseload refugees were entitled to reclaim the land and property they had recently abandoned. The villagization or imidugudu scheme was adopted as a means to create shelter for old and new caseload refugees, and others in need of shelter, such as displaced genocide survivors, and young people seeking new homes.

The imidugudu scheme was criticized by the international community for forcing resettlement to villages in poor sites, for inadequate provision of services, and insufficient compensation to the previous occupants of resettlement land.

Still, the government's scheme received sufficient support from the international community for massive construction of shelter, and social infrastructure such as schools and health centres. UNHCR alone supported the construction of nearly 100,000 houses for 500,000 people between 1995-1999.

Despite the political and financial support which fuelled imidugudu development, the reality is that meeting the land and housing needs of returned refugees has been an enormous challenge and is not yet resolved. As the flow of returns has slowed in recent years, so has donor support to resettlement. In 1999, the Brookings Initiative estimated that 370,000 households were living in inadequate shelter. Donor support and the initiatives of private individuals to construct their own homes reduced this figure to 192,000 in November 2001.

Another estimate by the US Committee for Refugees, found 150,000 Internally Displaced People were living without permanent shelter or basic social services in 2001. More recently, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated the number of IDPs at nearly 200,000 in need of shelter and social services in July 2003.

UNHCR studies have found that a large number of returnees have never received any land. Moreover, many returnees are among the poorest in their communities, without access to health care, education for their children, or basic shelter needs. Among returnees are many individuals and families in need of special psycho-social support: children orphaned or separated from their parents; spouses separated from their partners by death or war; survivors of physical and sexual violence.

The needs of such returnees are in large part provided for by local government structures who tend to keep registers of returnees and "vulnerable" families. Returnees themselves resist being considered as a separate category in their communities. The supports they request, such as health care "mutuelle" associations, school supply packages, shelter construction supplies, and agricultural tools are linked to community development and poverty alleviation plans. Still, as more returnees return with few resources, pressure on their Rwandan communities increases.

The majority of both old caseload and new caseload refugees planning to return to Rwanda have already done so. Between 60,000-80,000 Rwandan refugees are estimated to be still living in Uganda, DRC, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and elsewhere.

The majority are expected to repatriate through state-sponsored, UN-assisted programmes over the next 2 years. As the stable political situation in Rwanda continues, those who choose not to return will be considered to have integrated into the countries where they are and will no longer be considered refugees requiring international protection. In addition to civilian refugees, demobilised soldiers are also returning to Rwanda and undergoing re-education, resettlement, and reintegration. It is expected that 81,462 combatants of ex-FAR, interhamwe, and other militia groups, will have demobilised and returned to Rwanda from DRC by the end of the period 2001-2005. In November 2003, the Rwandan government welcomed the return of ex-military leader of the Forces Démocratiques de la Libération du Rwanda followed by approximately 100 ex-rebel soldiers.

The Future of Rwanda's Refugees:

Rwandan refugees are as diverse as Rwanda's population and play an integral role in reconciliation and development efforts in the post-genocide context. Many who gained higher education and skills in exile returned to strengthen the urban middle and upper classes. Rural returnees contribute to the agricultural sector which remains the backbone of the Rwandan economy. Returned refugees face the economic realities that make livelihoods a struggle for most Rwandans.

Distinctions remain between communities of returnees accustomed to the culture of their country of exile, and in the nature of their exile - some suffered in dismal refugee camps, others survived comfortably in cities. Not least of the distinctions between returned refugees is their ethnicity and the reasons for their flight. Political consciousness developed during exile fuel Rwandan politics. Refugees are a crucial element of Rwandan reconciliation, and socio-economic development. The challenges ahead for Rwandan refugees mirror those for the country as a whole.

* Sarah Erlichman is the UNHCR Community Services Officer in Kigali. The opinions expressed in this article are entirely her own, and not those of UNHCR.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

Rwanda's children have seen the worst of humanity. Ten years after a group of politicians set in motion a genocide in an attempt to retain power, the devastating consequences for those who were left behind are unmistakable.

Traditional protective structures for children including family networks, the judicial system, and the education system were decimated. As a result, children – many of whom survived unspeakable atrocities – are still the victims of systematic human rights violations day in and day out.

Thousands have been arbitrarily arrested and denied prompt access to justice. Hundreds of thousands more living around the country have been abused, exploited for their labour, exploited for their property, or denied the right to education. Thousands have migrated to city streets in an effort to escape these abuses only to find themselves in even more precarious conditions. In the face of the daunting challenge of rebuilding a society devastated by war, poverty, and AIDS, protecting their rights has been sidelined. But this does not do Rwanda's children justice.

Those who planned and executed the genocide of 1994 violated children's rights on an unprecedented scale. Children were raped, tortured, and slaughtered along with adults in massacre after massacre around the country. Carrying their genocidal logic to its absurd conclusion, they even targeted children for killing – to exterminate the "big rats," they said, one must also kill the "little rats."

Countless thousands of children were murdered in the genocide and war. Many of those who managed to escape death had feared for their own lives, surviving rape or torture, witnessing the killing of family members, hiding under corpses, or seeing children killing other children. Some of these children – now adolescents – say they do not care whether they live or die.

Perhaps the most devastating legacy of the genocide and war is the sheer number of children left on their own, who live in precarious conditions and are extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. On Rwanda's green hills, up to 400,000 children – 10 percent of Rwandan children – struggle to survive without one or both parents.

Children who were orphaned in the genocide or in war, children orphaned by AIDS, and children whose parents are in prison on charges of genocide, alike, are in desperate need of protection. Many Rwandans have exhibited enormous generosity in caring for orphans or other needy children.

Yet, because so many Rwandans are living in extreme poverty themselves, to some, vulnerable children are worth only their labour and their property. Foster families have taken needy children in, but some have also exploited them as domestic servants, denied them education, and unscrupulously taken over their family's land.

These children, often suffering the effects of trauma, have nowhere to turn and they know no other fate. Traditional societal networks – severely eroded by poverty, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and, not least, the consequences of the genocide and war – have failed them.

Thousands of children – many of whom had been exploited for their labour or their property and denied the right to education at home – have migrated to city streets to fend for themselves. There, they live in abysmal conditions, suffer poor health and hygiene, and face a near constant risk of harassment by law enforcement officials and arbitrary arrest.

As recently as February 2004, municipal authorities continued to brutally round children up by force in an effort to "clean the streets" before heads of state came to attend the historic New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) summit. It seems the presence of unkempt street children is inconsistent with the image of the city with the newest Intercontinental hotel. Girls living on the streets are frequently raped, sometimes even by law enforcement officials, yet few of those responsible have been prosecuted.

Although they garner less sympathy, children who took part in the genocide are also victims. Some five thousand people were arrested on charges they committed crimes of genocide before they reached the age of eighteen. Their rights were first violated when adults recruited, manipulated, or incited them to participate in atrocities, and have been violated again by the Rwandan justice system.

One boy who confessed and was convicted of genocide said he had been given a choice of killing his sister's children or being killed himself. He was sixteen years old at the time. Large numbers of these children were in fact arrested unjustly.

Another boy, arrested at age thirteen after the genocide, confessed to having killed in order to escape torture, although he now maintains that his confession was false. He had just witnessed other detainees being tortured at the hands of Rwandan government soldiers. His father, among others, had died as a result of torture the night before. He and a thousand others who were younger than fourteen in 1994, and thus too young to be held criminally responsible under Rwandan law, were freed after being transferred from detention facilities to reeducation camps in 2000 and 2001. The government had been promising to release them since 1995.

As many as four thousand children who were between fourteen and eighteen years old during the genocide continued to languish in overcrowded prisons until last year, and some may still be detained. Their adolescence is gone. Despite repeated, hollow promises to give their cases priority within the over-burdened justice system, they have been subjected to the worst of a bad situation.

Juvenile defendants have been tried at an even slower rate than adults. Few have enjoyed the right to adequate legal counsel and other due process protections guaranteed under Rwandan and international law. A few hundred, for whom prosecutors had not conducted investigations or made case files during their years of imprisonment, were provisionally released in 2001 after their neighbours cleared them of wrongdoing in public meetings.

Ironically, now that the government has finally made some progress in dealing with the massive failures of the justice system – including organizing gacaca courts to deal with the bulk of genocide cases and releasing most of those who had been below the age of criminal responsibility and those who confessed – it has become even harder to draw attention to the plight of young adults who remain in detention for crimes they allegedly committed as children, especially those who proclaim their innocence. "We feel that justice has left us," one of them said.

The international community has provided billions of dollars to assist in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Rwanda and continues to donate tens of millions of dollars each year. Yet inadequate resources have been devoted to address the desperate needs of child protection. And there have been insufficient efforts to ensure that money earmarked for the protection of children is actually used for that purpose.

The majority of Rwandan children have been victims of armed conflict. Thousands have been arbitrarily arrested and denied prompt access to justice. Hundreds of thousands more living around the country have been abused, exploited for their labour, exploited for their property, or denied the right to education. Thousands have migrated to city streets in an effort to escape these abuses only to find themselves even worse off.

Rwanda can and must do more to protect their rights. The government has embraced international standards on children’s rights and has passed a strong law on child protection. But words are not enough. Ten years of promises to protect their rights has meant little for vulnerable children in practice. We must not remain complacent while so many children continue to suffer. The future of Rwanda depends on it.

* This article is based on “Lasting Wounds: Consequences of Genocide and War for Rwanda’s Children,” written by Sara Rakita and published by Human Rights Watch in 2003.

Justice and reconciliation are concepts difficult to define, let alone achieve. What may seem 'just' for a community or a country, may be very unjust for the individual victim. There seems to be a tension between reconciliation, implying a kind of moral compromise, and justice in the strict, Western, prosecutorial sense it is usually used.

In the wake of violence on a societal scale, finding the right balance between justice and reconciliation, or between retribution and forgiveness, is an extremely delicate process and this is all the more so in cases of genocide. In the Great Lakes region, where today's oppressors tend to perceive themselves as yesterday's victims, justice and reconciliation become even more subjective and difficult goals.

In Rwanda, the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) dominated Government of National Unity is prioritising, as its name implies, the reconciliation of its citizens chiefly through a prosecutorial (trial-based) approach. However, since 1998 there has been a recognition among the highest Government echelons that working with a penal and legal system that is completely overstretched - at the beginning of 2003, there were an estimated 115,000 prisoners in Rwandan jails and communal lockups (cachots) - will require some innovative thinking and a move away from the 'white man's' standards of justice. This is why the much talked about gacaca traditional conflict resolution mechanism was adapted and revived.

Moves Towards Justice - Arrests, Courts, Trials and the legacy of genocide:

Despite the opening of a press office in Rwanda and the establishing of some important precedents in international criminal law, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's (ICTR) contribution to justice and reconciliation within the country is very limited.

Domestically, the ICTR's work remains virtually unknown and when it is, the Tribunal's reputation may have been irreparably damaged by early scandals regarding endemic corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency.

The Tribunal's relationship with the Government itself has been a tormented one; the ICTR's mandate covers the period of January to December 1994, during which RPF soldiers allegedly carried out several massacres. The ICTR's insistence that these crimes should be investigated led to moral outrage from the RPF leadership, accusing the Court of putting the RPF on the same level as the génocidaires.

Rwanda's national courts operate in parallel with the ICTR. From having a rumoured 10 lawyers left in the country, no equipment, damaged buildings and no money to pay their staff in 1994, the national courts had by early 2004 tried upwards of 5,500 individuals. Though many of the early trials were severely flawed, the national legal system's performance arguably did more to restore some kind of confidence that (some) perpetrators were being brought to trial - by comparison, the ICTR and its hundreds of staff and multi-million dollar annual budgets had at the beginning of 2004 completed 18 cases and arrested 66 individuals.

Even at this accelerated pace, it was thought that the Rwandan formal judicial system would require more than a century to process the hundred thousand plus detainees. The adaptation of a traditional, grass roots conflict resolution mechanism - the gacaca tribunals - represents an affordable and expedient alternative. After a pilot phase, deemed a success by the Government, gacaca courts are due to open across the country in 2004.

Innovative Thinking - Justice and Reconciliation combined through the gacaca courts:

The goal of gacaca is to promote reconciliation through providing a platform for victims to express themselves, encouraging acknowledgements and apologies from the perpetrators, facilitating the coming together of both victims and perpetrators every week on the grass. Gacaca courts are also empowered to hand down sentences that include community work schemes that can directly benefit the most destitute families of victims. While gacaca is a potential source of 'truth' on how the genocide was implemented, its provisions for confessions and guilt pleas represent one of gacaca's most cited shortcomings.

Under these provisions, if someone confesses before being denounced, he or she is liable for a substantial decrease in the length of the sentence. Importantly, confessions are only acceptable if they include the incrimination of one's co-conspirators.

Some argue that this system of confessions creates rife conditions for vendetta-settling. Others estimate that an additional 200,000 people could see themselves imprisoned for genocide-related crimes. Others still say that intimidation of potential witnesses is widespread in the countryside in particular, where perpetrators presumably far outnumber survivors. Lastly, participation in gacaca is mandatory, implying that subsistence farmers and petty traders must give up a day of labour per week (on average) with no compensation in cash or kind; this mandatory character has fomented some resentment about gacaca.

Despite what may seem like insurmountable problems, gacaca represents the only workable solution for bringing those responsible for atrocities to trial promptly. It is difficult to judge the public perception of the gacaca tribunals. Presumably, Rwanda's tens of thousands of prisoners would favour a system that would help speed up their hearings. Also presumably, survivors would want to see perpetrators punished, and in the spirit of 'restorative' justice, may welcome replacing long prison sentences with more useful community work schemes. Having said that, the genocide survivor organisations remain extremely apprehensive of gacaca.

The real test will be when the tribunals begin working nationwide this year. If judges are incompetent or biased, if communities conspire to silence a witness, or if gacaca is used as a means to settle scores, neither justice nor reconciliation will be served.

Other Measures promoting Reconciliation: The National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC)

Since its inception in 1999, the NURC has organised conferences and workshops on the theme of unity and reconciliation, culminating in two national summits, where Rwandans from all levels of society were represented. The NURC has also held workshops for segments of the population attending 'civic re-education' or 'solidarity' camps (ingandos) - such as provisionally released prisoners and demobilised soldiers (from the national army as well as from ex-FAR and interahamwe combatants repatriated from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)). Despite the NURC's all-encompassing mandate, it is still perceived as being an instrument of the central authorities and as being too 'vertical' in its activities, not doing enough grass roots work on 'the hills'.

Collective Memory:

Monuments and memorials are institutional embodiments of collective memory and as such, part of the reconciliation process. In Rwanda, genocide memorials pepper the country and new ones continue to be created. Often memorials are housed in churches - sites of many group massacres. Another institution created to foster collective memory is the national day of mourning for the victims of the genocide. The month of April more generally is considered to be a month of mourning and parties or celebrations of any kind are discouraged.

It is insightful to reflect on how different groups interpret these memorials and annual mourning periods. Some Rwandans consider the national day of mourning in particular as an obstacle to unity perhaps implicitly taking the view that forgetting the past is the best way to 'move on'. But if those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, then memory may be the best safeguard against a recurrence of violence. Others see the annual periods of mourning as a 'Tutsi affair', claiming that the commemorations are only for Tutsi victims, the moderate Hutu who perished in 1994 having been forgotten. They touch upon an important issue, to which we now turn.

The Challenges Victor's justice? Are the Hutu being collectively stigmatised?

There is a real danger that the RPF are, or will come to be, perceived as a party run by, and for, les Ougandais - an inner circle of Anglophone Tutsi refugees born in Uganda. In light of this, and despite the official party line that all citizens of Rwanda are Banyarwanda ('not Tutsi, nor Hutu, nor Twa') and therefore equal before the law, many Hutu may feel that the justice being meted out is a form of victor's justice.

The official refusal to recognise alleged (Hutu) victims of RPF atrocities in Rwanda and Eastern DRC in particular buttress such feelings. And because the national courts, and presumably this will hold true for the gacaca tribunals and the ICTR as well, are focusing 'punishment' on the Hutu, the judiciary's impartiality is also called into question. (Similar accusations of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia being a form of victors' justice ring true to the ears of an important proportion of Serb public opinion.)

This resentment of 'Tutsi impunity' is visible in, for example, the joke that the ICTR, whose French acronym is the TPIR, should be renamed the TPIH - le tribunal pénal international des Hutus. By leaving these allegations unresolved, the RPF leaves itself open to the possibility that political opponents will inflate the size and nature of RPF abuses.

Lastly, the unspoken assumption that all Hutu who opposed the genocide were killed in 1994, and thus that the Hutu who were in the country during those months and alive today are morally, if not legally, responsible also undermines justice and national reconciliation: can such a project succeed on the basis of such distrust?

Poverty:

In 2002, Rwanda's GDP grew by 9.7%, ranking it among the top three performers in sub-Saharan Africa for that year. Yet according to Government figures, approximately 60% of Rwandans live on less than US$1 per day and the United Nations Development Programme ranked Rwanda 162nd out of 173 countries in its 2002 Human Development Index.

It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of poverty in Rwanda. In a country where 94% of the population live in rural areas, there is also a 'mental' distance between the urban elite in Kigali and the peasants 'on the hills'.

Rural Rwanda has not been actively engaged in justice and reconciliation debates - though this may change with the gacaca tribunals. As in South Africa, where victims of apartheid are calling for reparations for the legacy of 'economic apartheid', the most destitute genocide widows and orphans - for whom the legacy of 1994 is also, in a very immediate sense, socio-economic - have been benefiting from the Fond National pour l'Assistance aux Rescapés du Génocide (the FARG) created in 1998.

Importantly, this assistance goes only to Tutsi, as the genocide was against the Tutsi and so they are the only ones to qualify as survivors (rescapés). This helps reinforce the perception of victors' justice, mentioned earlier, among Hutu families that may have also lost family members or had property confiscated or destroyed.

A direct economic consequence of gacaca, if it is successful in alleviating the burden on the penal system, will be that thousands of (Hutu) families will no longer have to struggle to feed potentially productive members of their family that have been in jail for up to ten years, with an unknown proportion of them having been falsely accused to begin with.

If grinding poverty contributed to the ease with which the peasant masses where mobilised for the genocidal project, then ensuring that rural Rwanda is not excluded from the benefits of economic growth will not only serve the obvious purpose of improving the quality of life of millions, it will also help prevent the despair, humiliation and feelings of exclusion that contribute to the cycles of violence in the Great Lakes region and to the dynamics of genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

Debating Rwanda's Histories:

A telling indicator for how much Rwanda has moved towards national reconciliation is the fact that since 1994, no history lessons have been taught in Rwandan schools. There has thus been no debate in the public domain about why the 1994 genocide happened. This is important because one cannot say much about the prospects of reconciliation without first reflecting on exactly what it is that gives rise to demands for it. What motivated such large parts of the population to participate? If some were coerced into killing, why were some others such zealous, innovative and cruel killers?

The Government of National Unity's project of creating an all-inclusive Rwandan nationalism around the 'Banyarwanda' label relies on achieving a broad-based consensus among Rwandans that justice has been served. Can this be achieved without a reconciliation with history?

Conclusion:

Rwandans have come a long way since 1994. Above and beyond their individual struggles with their very personal experiences of genocide, Rwandans have had to contend with periods of renewed insecurity in the North-West of the country, worrying escalations of violence in Burundi (the Rwandan 'Siamese twin'), a war in neighbouring DRC, severe deterioration of relations with Uganda, the repatriation of some 2 million refugees since 1994, and a general loss of interest in the international media and the international community.

Perhaps of more immediate relevance for the 94% of Rwandans who live in rural areas, pockets of droughts and food insecurity have been periodic and the very real daily struggle for survival continues unabated. In this context of grinding poverty, 'justice and reconciliation' perversely become a luxury. Projects to foster unity need to become more relevant to rural Rwandans in order to become more effective. Only then can Rwandans afford to start thinking about justice and reconciliation. The government also needs to recognise that a vibrant and independent civil society and media is not a potential threat but a sustainable, countervailing force should there be attempts to foment a new cycle of violence, for which the Great Lakes region is tragically infamous.

* Eugenia Zorbas worked in Rwanda for one year in 2002/3 and has since returned to academia as a PhD student in the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, with a research focus on post-genocide reconciliation debates in Rwanda.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org". Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

Those of us who are preoccupied, even obsessed, with commemorating in 2004 the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide are often taken aback when we’re asked what all the fuss is about. After all, just today I received from the Holocaust Centre of Toronto an invitation to join in commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. Not the entire Holocaust, just the terrible Hungarian chapter. Yet memorializing the genocide in Rwanda is never taken for granted in the same way.

Isn’t it already ancient history? Aren’t there all kinds of human catastrophes that no one much bothers with? Didn’t it take place in faraway Africa, in an obscure country few people could find on a map. Wasn’t it just another case of Africans killing Africans? What does it have to do with us, anyway?

These questions deserve answers, not least because some are entirely legitimate. Above all, it is fundamentally true that there would have been no genocide had some Rwandans not decided for their own selfish reasons to exterminate many other Rwandans. But once this truth is acknowledged, a powerful case for remembering Rwanda remains, and needs to be made.

The responsibility to remember:

First, Rwanda was not just another ugly event in human history. Virtually all students of the subject agree that what happened over 100 days from April to July 1994 constituted one of the purest manifestations of genocide in our time, meeting all the criteria set down in the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Genocide experts debate whether Cambodia or Srebrenica or Burundi were “authentic” genocides; like the Holocaust and (except for the Turkish government and its apologists) the Armenian genocide of 1915, no one disagrees about Rwanda. And since genocide is universally seen as the crime of crimes, an attack not just on the actual victims but on all humanity, by definition it needs to be remembered and memorialized.

Second, it wasn’t just another case of Africans killing Africans, or, as some clueless reporters enjoyed writing, of Hutu killing Tutsi and Tutsi killing Hutu (or Hutsi and Tutu, for all they knew or cared). The Rwandan genocide was a deliberate conspiratorial operation planned, organized and executed by a small, sophisticated, highly organized group of greedy Hutu extremists who believed their self-interest would be enhanced if every one of Rwanda’s 1 million Tutsi were annihilated. They came frighteningly close to total success.

Third, the west has played a central role in Rwanda over the past century. Just as no person is an island and there’s no such thing as a self-made man, so every nation is the synthesis of internal and external influences. This is particularly true of nations that have been colonies, where imperial forces have played a defining role. To its everlasting misfortune, Rwanda is the quintessential example of this reality. The central dynamic of Rwandan history for the past 80 years, the characteristic that allowed the genocide to be carried out, was the bitter division between Hutu and Tutsi. Yet this division was largely an artifact created by the Roman Catholic Church and the Belgian colonizers.

Instead of trying to unite all the people they found in Rwanda 100 years ago, Catholic missionaries invented an entire phony pedigree that irreconcilably divided Rwandans into superior Tutsi and inferior Hutu. When the Belgians were given control of the country following World War 1, this contrived hierarchy served their interests well, and they proceeded to institutionalize what amounted to a racist ideology. At independence in the early 1960s, this pyramid was turned on its head, and for the next 40 years Rwanda was run as a racist Hutu dictatorship. None of this would have happened without the Church and the Belgians.

The Culprits:

Last, but hardly least, the 1994 genocide could have been prevented in whole or in part by some of the same external forces that shaped the country’s tragic destiny. But without exception, every outside agency with the capacity to intervene failed to do so. My own list of culprits, in order of responsibility, is as follows:

-the government of France
-the Roman Catholic Church
-the government of the United States
-the government of Belgium
-the government of Britain
-the UN Secretariat.

I name the French and the Church first since they both had the influence to deter the genocide plotters from launching the genocide in the first place. Rwanda was the most Christianized country in Africa and the Roman Catholics were far and away the largest Christian denomination. Catholicism was virtually the official state religion. Catholic officials had enormous influence at both the elite and the grassroots level, which they consistently failed to use to protest against the government’s overtly racist policies and practices. Indeed, the Church gave the government moral authority. Once the genocide began, Catholic leaders in the main refused to condemn the government, never used the word genocide, and many individual priests and nuns actually aided the genocidaires.

Rwanda was a French-speaking country, and France replaced Belgium as the key foreign presence. When the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group of English-speaking Tutsi refugees from Uganda, invaded Rwanda in 1990, the French military flew in to save the day for the Hutu government. For the following several years, right to the very moment the genocide began, French officials had enormous influence with both the Rwandan government and army. They failed completely to use that leverage to insist that the government curtail its racist policies and propaganda, stop the increasing massacres, end the widespread human rights abuses, and disband the death squads and death lists.

Two months after the genocide began, a French intervention force created a safe haven in the south-west of the country through which they allowed genocidaires leaders and killers, fleeing from the advancing RPF, to escape across the border into Zaire. From Zaire they began an insurgency back into Rwanda with the purpose of “finishing the job”. Eventually this led to the Rwandans invading Zaire/Congo to suppress the insurgency, which in turn soon led to the vicious wars in the Congo and the subsequent appalling cost in human lives throughout eastern Congo.

Once the genocide was launched after April 6, 1994, the American government, steadfastly backed by the British government, were primarily responsible for the failure of the UN Security Council to reinforce its puny mission to Rwanda. Under no circumstances were these governments prepared to budge. The Commander of the UN force - UNAMIR - repeatedly pleaded for reinforcements, and was repeatedly turned down.

Two weeks into the genocide, the Security Council voted to reduce UNAMIR from 2500 to 270 men - an act almost impossible to believe 10 years later. Six weeks into the genocide, as credible reports of hundreds of thousands of deaths became commonplace and the reality of a full-blown genocide became undeniable, the Security Council voted finally to send some 4500 troops to Rwanda. Several contingents of African troops were put on standby, but deliberate stalling tactics by the USA and Britain meant that by the end of the genocide, when the Tutsi-led rebels were sworn in as the new government on July 19, not a single reinforcement of soldiers or material ever reached Rwanda. This was one of the darkest moments in the history of the United Nations.

As for Belgium, notwithstanding the racist attitudes and colonial behaviour of its soldiers, their contingent was the backbone of UNAMIR. When 10 Belgian soldiers were murdered by Rwandan government troops on the very first morning of the genocide, the Brussels government immediately decided to withdraw the remainder of its forces and to lobby the Security Council to suspend the entire Rwandan mission. Its motive was simple: They did not want to be seen as the sole party undermining UNAMIR. At the Security Council, of course, it found eager allies.

The role of the UN Secretariat is somewhat ambiguous. To a large extent, its failure to support the pleas of its own UNAMIR Force Commander reflected its lack of capacity to cope with yet another crisis combined with its understanding that the US and Britain would not alter their intransigent positions. Still, there were many occasions when the Secretariat failed to convey to the full Security Council the dire situation in Rwanda, and many opportunities when it failed to speak up publicly in the hope of influencing world opinion.

A multitude of betrayals:

It is not far-fetched to say that the world has betrayed Rwanda countless times since its first confrontation with Europeans in the mid-1890s. This previous account has presented several of these betrayals before and during the genocide: by the Catholic Church, by the Belgian colonial power, by the French neo-colonial power, by the international community.

To exacerbate further this shameful record, we need to look at the past decade. First, the concept that the world owed serious reparations to a devastated Rwanda for its failure to prevent the genocide has been a total non-starter.

Second, there has been precious little accountability by the international community for its failure to prevent. The French government and the Roman Catholic Church have to this moment refused to acknowledge the slightest responsibility for their roles or to apologize for any of their gross errors of commission or omission. President Bill Clinton and Secretary-General Koki Annan have both apologized for their failure to offer protection, but have both falsely blamed insufficient information; in fact what was lacking was not knowledge - the situation was universally understood - but political will and sufficient national interest. No one has ever quit their jobs in protest against their government’s or their organisation’s failure to intervene to save close to one million innocent civilian lives.

Those we must not forget:

Finally, the very existence of the genocide has largely disappeared from the public and media’s consciousness. This is the latest betrayal. Marginalized during the genocide, Rwanda’s calamity is now largely forgotten except for Rwandans themselves and small clusters of non-Rwandans who have had some connection with the country or specialize in genocide prevention. That’s why I founded the Remembering Rwanda movement in July of 2001. I had four targets for remembering: the innocent victims; the survivors, many of whom live in deplorable conditions with few resources to tend to their physical or psychological needs; the perpetrators, most of whom remain free and unrepentant scattered around Africa, Europe and parts of North America; and the so-called “bystanders”, the unholy sextet named earlier. Rather than being passive witnesses, as the word “bystander” implies, all were active in their failure to intervene to stop the massacres, and all remain unaccountable to this day. It is time the Rwandan genocide is treated with the concern and attention it so grievously earned.

* Gerald Caplan is the author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide (2000), the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities appointed by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and the founder of "Remembering Rwanda: The Rwanda Genocide 10th Anniversary Memorial Project".

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

This year is the 10th Anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. An international campaign is underway to mobilise to mark this anniversary - "REMEMBERING RWANDA". Next week your usual Pambazuka News will be substituted with a special issue on Rwanda that will contain originally commissioned editorials covering key issues relating to Rwanda and the genocide.

At least 4,500 common law prisoners were pardoned and released in Rwanda on Monday in a bid to decongest the nation's prisons, Prosecutor General Jean de Dieu Mucyo told IRIN. "This group of the released exclude those who have confessed to genocide crimes," he said on Monday.