Deaglán de Bréadún, Foreign Affairs Correspondent, reports from Kigali on the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, in which 800,000 people died
Eight hundred thousand. It's about one-fifth the population of our State. It's enough to fill Croke Park about 10 times. It's you and me plus 799,998 other people.
That's the estimated number of deaths in the Rwanda genocide, exactly 10 years ago. And it all happened in 100 days, or at a rate of 8,000 every 24 hours.
The Holocaust killed more people, but at a slower pace. It is all too easy to believe that the Rwanda genocide was planned and carried out in a systematic and well-planned fashion.
The human heart is not capable of coming to terms with the scale and pace of this tragedy.
Rwanda was never a real nation, just a bad marriage between the two main ethnic groups, Hutu and Tutsi.
The shooting down of the plane carrying President Habyarimana at 8.20 p.m. on April 6th, 1994, acted as a signal for fanatical power-hungry Hutu elements to eliminate their Tutsi neighbours along with those moderate Hutus who could not stomach what was happening.
Arriving in Kigali Airport, 10 years to the day that the president was killed, is a slightly worrying experience. But you are soon distracted by the sheer beauty of the Rwandan landscape with its lush green grass and rolling hills, for all the world like Ireland with sunshine.
There is no point in asking people if they lost relatives in the genocide: almost everybody did. Incited by diatribes on the local "hate radio", hitherto normal, decent folk turned into rabid monsters and killers.
The machete was the favoured instrument of death, but people who could afford it paid to be shot by their tormentors because it was the easy way out.
The anniversary of the start of the genocide was celebrated yesterday and two emotions came across very powerfully: Dignity and Anger.
The dignity came in the morning as relatives of some of the victims waited to have their loved ones, whose remains had been taken from another place, buried at the genocide memorial in Gisozi, outside the capital.
The fact that the military-style band played hymns in a reedy, rather out-of-tune manner only added to the pathos and brought home the fact that these were humble folk for the most part.
The sun was blistering, but nobody wore a hat. As we might do ourselves, some of the relatives had brought large family photographs, framed in gilt, which they displayed during the ceremony.
The media turnout was strong, especially in terms of camera crews and photographers.
But a North American TV journalist explained he wasn't doing much on the anniversary: "There's so much going on in the world."
A choir in traditional African costume launched into a series of beautiful harmonies: mournful, naturally, but containing a discreet lilt of hope.
In the background, police sirens heralded the arrival of the dignitaries, mainly African heads of state and government led by Rwanda's president, Mr Paul Kagame, who bears a curious resemblance to our own Dick Spring.
There is a shock and sadness on the faces of the people of Kigali that reminds me of somewhere else. After a while, I recall that the residents of more prosperous but still stricken place had the same expression and demeanour: New York City after 9/11.
President Kagame lights a flame of remembrance which will burn for 100 days.
There are no speeches: these come later at a city football stadium, with Kagame giving full vent to his anger against the French government, alleging that it was complicit in the genocide.
No doubt his anger was fuelled by a well-timed leak in a Paris newspaper last month, suggesting that a French police investigation had fingered Kagame, leader of the Tutsi rebels at the time, as having shot down his predecessor's aircraft.
Kagame vehemently denies it.
There was further anger from South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki, who contrasted the relative alacrity of the West's response to genocide in the Balkans with the pathetic and shameful failure to intervene in Rwanda.
Pride of place was given to African speakers, but the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, admitted "tragic mistakes" were made in 1994. Speaking on behalf of the European Union, he acknowledged that "the international community's response to the genocide came too late and proved insufficient".
Except for the likes of Mr Cowen and the Belgian Prime Minister, Mr Verhofstadt, there was a relative paucity of Western dignitaries.
Partly this may be due to a certain discomfort with Mr Kagame's style of governance: he runs a tight ship in Rwanda. But a much more likely explanation was that the West cares more about 3,000 mainly-white victims in the World Trade Centre or the 200 tragically killed in Madrid than it does about 800,000 black people in the heart of Africa. As a result, one could not feel inspired to optimism by the banners in French and English which hung in the football stadium: "Never Again/Plus Jamais".