There is almost a joyous energy about the completion of the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, at Gisozi, on a hill in the Rwandan capital, writes Vincent Browne
Hundreds of workers in a frenzy to finish the centre for the commemoration ceremony next Wednesday. The remains of a quarter of a million victims have been reburied in huge mass graves at the centre, beneath massive concrete slabs.
I went there on Monday. Initially, the energy and industry are distracting and then suddenly you come across one of these graves, which has been left open. Inside, piles of coffins. Familiar dark brown coffins that your father or mother or other relative was buried in, and at once the horror of what all this represents comes home.
They talk of giving dignity to the victims by this reburial and placing the names of those victims that can be identified on a memorial wall facing the mass graves. Others ask what dignity? They were slaughtered in an orchestrated, pre-planned campaign of genocide and the world wilfully looked away.
Two Englishmen, brothers, have designed the memorial museum. There will be representations of the events that led up to the holocaust, of the holocaust itself and of Rwanda since then. There will be a burial chamber, where the remains of some hundreds of victims will be on display - again an issue of controversy, whether the remains should be given the dignity of a burial or kept on view to remind the world.
One of those brothers, James Smith, took us to a room upstairs at this museum where these human remains await placement in the burial chamber. Rows and rows of skulls, most of them showing how heads were broken open, some with gaping holes, others with parts of the skull slashed away. And then you look down and on lower shelves are the clothes victims were wearing when they were hacked to death, fleeces, one with the words "Adrian College Football" emblazoned across the front. Scarves, trousers, blouses, shoes.
And beside them some of the slaughter implements: a few old guns, machetes, hatchets, clubs, some with nails protruding. We go around the shelves and come across a collection of personal belongings: rosary beads, a pipe, identity cards showing the victims to have been Tutsi. And amid that pile of memorabilia, a child's shoe. He/she could have been no more than three or four. It's the left shoe, actually a runner, with a blue rim around it. Someone had hacked that child to death. And beside that shoe, another shoe, a sandal. This time of a slightly older child, maybe five or six.
They tell stories of how the genocide proceeded. How in the first day or so, the focus was on Tutsis that had been identified for killing in advance, along with moderate Hutus who were regarded as enemies of the ideal of a "pure Hutu" society. In the first hours of the genocide on April 6th, 1994, senior political and judicial figures were targeted. They included the then prime minister, a woman, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who was, in effect, head of state, in the hours after the president, Juvenal Habyarimana, had been killed when the plane carrying him and the Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, was shot down at Kigali airport. She had come into government as part of a power-sharing deal two years previously. Her first position had been minister for education and, as such, she abolished one of the most odious anti-Tutsi discriminatory practices on access to education. She had become prime minister on July 17th, 1993, and immediately on her appointment had defied an attempt to unseat here and have her replaced by a Hutu extremist.
She realised immediately on hearing that the president had been killed that her life was in danger. She called the United Nations Assistance Mission headquarters to ask that she be given added protection.
It never arrived. In the early hours of the following morning, along with her husband and five children, she climbed over the walls of her residence and made here way to a UN compound nearby. Some hours later members of the Rwandan army came to the compound, insisted on getting access, and murdered her.
The mass killings of Tutsis started a few days later. One much-practised strategy was to drive Tutsis into centres such as churches and schools and then kill them en masse. Stories of Tutsis being disabled by having a leg chopped off and left on the ground to await the return of their killers abound. Tutsis pleading to be put out of their misery quickly. Children being slaughtered in front of their parents. Women being gang raped, subjected to abominable degradations before being killed.
I am writing this in an internet café in the grounds of Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali. It is maybe the finest hotel I have stayed in. On the night the genocide began, according to one writer on Rwanda, Linda Melvern, the person who was central to its planning and execution, Col Theoneste Bagasora, came here from a meeting with army officers. In the company of fellow conspirators, he broke open bottles of champagne to celebrate the beginning of "The New Rwanda".