Rwanda Mourns The Dead, 25 Years Since Genocide Began

Kigali, April 7 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 7th Apr, 2019 ) :Rwanda on Sunday begins one hundred days of mourning for over 800,000 people slaughtered in a genocide that shocked the world, a quarter of a century on from the day it began.

President Paul Kagame will start a week of commemoration activities by lighting a remembrance flame at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where more than 250,000 victims are believed to be buried, mainly from the Tutsi people.

They are only some of those killed by the genocidal Hutu forces, members of the old army and militia forces called the "Interahamwe", that began their bloody campaign of death on April 7, 1994, the day after the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu.

Some were shot; most were beaten or hacked by machetes.

The killings lasted until Kagame, then 36, led the mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) into Kigali on July 4, ending the slaughter and taking control of the devastated country.

Kagame, now 61 and who has been in power ever since, will lead the memorial to the dead.

After lighting the flame, Kagame is expected to make a key speech at the Kigali Convention Centre, a dome-shaped auditorium in the centre of the capital, a modern building emblematic of the regeneration of Rwanda since the dark days of 1994.

Kagame will then preside over a vigil at the country's main football ground. The Amahoro National Stadium -- whose name means "peace" in Rwanda's Kinyarwanda language -- was used by the UN during the genocide to protect thousands of people of the Tutsi minority from being massacred on the streets outside.