Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne)
12 April 2006
Kigali — Thousands of survivors of the 1994 genocide on Tuesday quietly retraced a three kilometer road where over 2000 of their kin were paraded before most were killed soon after UN soldiers that had been guarding their sanctuary pulled out.
"For us, the UN symbolizes treachery", François Ngarambe, president of IBUKA (Kinyarwanda for Remember) the biggest genocide survivors' organization in Rwanda told about 4,000 genocide survivors at the end of the annual ETO- Nyanza march.
"The UN abandoned Rwandans at a time when we needed them most. That contradicts the ideals for which it was set up", Ngarambe said.The mourners will be keeping vigil at a cemetery on a hill overlooking the city where most of the ETO victims were buried.
On April 11th, 1994, a contingent of Belgian UN peacekeepers that had been guarding the ETO school in the Rwandan capital Kigali pulled out following the killing of 10 of their colleagues at a military camp in Kigali.
According to witnesses, as the UN soldiers left, Rwandan soldiers and militias that had besieged the compound descended on the refugees and marched them to a nearby hill where most were killed.
A university student who lost his parents and two siblings at the school compared the ETO killings to the 1995 massacre of about 7,000 Muslim men in Srebenica after UN forces retreated.
"ETO is Rwanda's Srebenica", said Aimable Kayiranga. "This is a lesson that we can't rely on what people call the 'international community'".
Para-medical personnel carried away dozens of mourners who collapsed as survivors retold their stories of the massacre.
The ETO massacres are the basis of the recently released British film, Shooting Dogs.
Close to one million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in the 1994 genocide.
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