Monday, 9 February 2009

Genocide memorial Rwanda

111The Kigali Memorial Centre was opened on the 10th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, in April 2004. The Centre is built on a site where over 250,000 people are buried. These graves are a clear reminder of the cost of ignorance.

The Centre is a permanent memorial to those who fell victim to the genocide and serves as a place for people to grieve those they lost.

I visited in January this year during a work visit to Rwanda and Congo.

121

This centre is a graveyard as well as a memorial. It is built on the site of several massacresthat took place during the 1994 genocide and it looks out over the capital of Rwanda, Kigali. The large concrete squares you can see are mass graves, into which are deposited remains as they continue to be discovered throughout Rwanda. Nearly 1 million died. The mud in the foreground will be the site of the next mass grace once the one being used at the moment is full. There are many such vaults on this site.

You can read more about what I've been up to here.

5 comments:

  1. [...] 22, 2009 by W12 Regular readers will be aware that my job takes me to war zones in various parts of Africa, many of which are french speaking. Although I can speak French to the extent that I need [...]

    ReplyDelete
  2. [...] conflict and post-conflist zones like that in Africa a lot. These are places where the casualties number in the millions and you cannot find a building, however small, that does not have AK-47 bullet holes in them. When [...]

    ReplyDelete
  3. [...] had some very spectacular weather. I have only ever seen that sort of storm on my trips abroad to equatorial Africa where its the [...]

    ReplyDelete
  4. [...] at a time when the UN forces have launched an all-out military assault against the people that did this in [...]

    ReplyDelete
  5. [...] A day giving a presentation at the heart of our glorious European Parliament on the importance of peacebuilding and then a day off in Cologne, Germany to see the Christmas Market. Have a good weekend [...]

    ReplyDelete