Rwanda Remembers, Quarter Of A Century After Genocide

Kigali, April 5 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 5th Apr, 2019 ) :Rwanda on Sunday commemorates the 25th anniversary of the genocide in which at least 800,000 mainly Tutsi people were beaten, hacked and shot to death in a hundred days of slaughter.

A quarter of a century on, the east African nation has recovered economically but the trauma casts a long and dark shadow over the country.

On Sunday, as has become the tradition every April 7, the day the genocide began, President Paul Kagame will light a remembrance flame in the capital at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where more than 250,000 victims are reputed to be buried.

It marks the beginning of a week of commemoration activities, and the start of a hundred days of national mourning.

In the afternoon on Sunday, Kagame, who led the rebels that chased the genocidal killers out of Rwanda and has been in power ever since, leads memorial commemorations at a ceremony at Kigali's main football stadium.

The Amahoro National Stadium -- "peace" in Rwanda's Kinyarwanda language -- was used during the genocide by the UN to protect thousands of Tutsis from the massacres on the streets outside.

The Hutu forces, members of the old army and militia forces called the "Interahamwe", had been cheered on by blood-curdling anti-Tutsi propaganda that began on April 7 1994, the day after the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu.

Kagame, then 36, was a rebel general when he led the mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) into Kigali on July 4, and drove Hutu extremists out of the country.