UN marks anniversary of Rwanda genocide

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice recalled that the "United Nations was established in the shadow of a genocide," the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War II.

"It suffered an enormous blow to its credibility and effectiveness in the face of another genocide, the one we're gathered to commemorate today," she said, a reference to the U.N.'s failure to intervene and halt the Rwanda genocide.

Rice reminded the gathered diplomats that the first inkling that a genocide had begun in Rwanda came when the U.N. peacekeeping mission chief, Canadian Maj.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire, was called to the morgue room of a Kigali hospital.

"In a dark room, the beam of his flashlight revealed what was left of 10 Belgian peacekeepers, mutilated beyond recognition. In the same hospital, 100 times that number of innocent Rwandans lay dead. And this was just the beginning."

Rwanda's genocide began hours after a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana was mysteriously shot down as it approached the capital, Kigali, on April 6, 1994.

The 100-day slaughter, in which more than 500,000 minority Tutsis and moderate members of the Hutu majority were killed by Hutu extremists, ended after Tutsi-led rebels ousted the extremist Hutu government that orchestrated the killings.

Rwanda's U.N. Ambassador Eugene-Richard Gasana said that "Genocide is a meticulously-thought-out atrocity, harbored in the minds and hearts" of the perpetrators, and rehearsed on various occasions: in 1959, when thousands of Tutsis were killed and driven from their homes, again in the 1960s, and in 1973, when young Tutsis were killed in their schools.

It all led to the "1994 apocalypse," he said.

Gasana warned against genocide denial and trivialization, and appealed for the arrest and trial of Rwandan killers who have found shelter in other nations.