With Western leaders conspicuous by their absence, grieving Rwanda marked the 10th anniversary of its genocide today as bewildered and angry as ever at the world's failure to stop one of the 20th century's worst crimes.
Apollan Odetta, a survivor from the 1994 Rwandan genocide lights candles at a mass grave in Nyamata, Rwanda today
"We will see each other again in heaven," a choir sang under hot, sunny skies at a memorial site, as a crowd of barefoot Rwandans in tattered clothes on a nearby hilltop watched African presidents arrive in a parade of gleaming all-terrain vehicles.
Women in traditional dress held up portraits of lost loved ones, some of the 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates killed amid dithering by Western nations preoccupied by other crises and unwilling to put their own troops in harm's way.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame has repeatedly criticised the outside world for failing to intervene to stop the 100-day slaughter, noting that the West had ample intelligence warnings that ethnic Hutu extremists were planning the massacres.
Human rights groups say it will be impossible to ensure such genocides never recur as long as powerful nations remain apathetic about impoverished countries in turmoil.
"The risk of genocide remains frighteningly real," said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who is due to attend a separate commemoration in Geneva.
"The world must be better equipped to prevent genocide and act decisively to stop it when prevention fails.
"For many ordinary Rwandans, most of whom scratch a living as peasant farmers in one of the world's poorest countries, the legacy of trauma and grief wrought by the genocide is far from healed. Many women were infected with AIDS during mass rapes, thousands of children orphaned.
In the village of Bitare outside Kigali, a party of workmen spent yesterday washing the bones of some of roughly 250 of their neighbours found in latrines or ditches during the past few weeks, heaping the skulls and fragments of skeletons in jumbled piles.
"After they've been cleaned, we'll take them to a memorial site," said Mr Faustin Ngango, 50. "The memorial will teach future generations what took place and make sure that genocide never happens again in this country," he said, as workers cleaned bones in plastic bowls of soapy water.
The United States, Belgium, France and Britain were singled out for blame by participants at a genocide conference in Kigali this week. Mr Annan, head of UN peacekeeping during the genocide and a Nobel peace prize winner, has also come under fire.
"I would like to say very clearly here that I consider that this is a disgrace that he had the Nobel peace prize," Belgian senator Mr Alain Destexhe told the conference.
"I think that this will be a blot on the history of Nobel peace prize winners," he said, to applause from delegates, who included Jewish survivors of the Nazi holocaust.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs and President of the EU Council of Foreign Ministers Mr Brian Cowen is representing the EU at the events.
Other guests include the Kenyan president Mr Mwai Kibaki, the Ugandan president Mr Yoweri Museveni, Ethiopian prime minister Mr Meles Zenawi and senior officials from Burundi and Tanzania.
The genocide memorial site at Gisozi on one of Kigali's many hillsides consists of mass graves containing the remains of an estimated 250,000 people killed in the city, as well as a state-of-the art museum with graphic displays and video presentations of the events of 1994.