Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide
by Pieter Hugo
Essay by Linda Melvern
In 2004 South African photographer Pieter Hugo was astonished by a photograph used to illustrate an article on the Rwandan genocide. The picture showed a human skull on an altar inside the Catholic church at Ntarama, south of Kigali. Ten years previously an estimated 5,000 Tutsis were massacred there by government soldiers, civilians and the feared Interahamwe; across Rwanda many victims had believed, mistakenly, that churches would provide secure refuge. But what most arrested Hugo was the fact that a decade after the killings (the photograph was made in 2004) the evidence, remains and detritus of genocide were still to be seen. He resolved to visit, 'photographing and contemplating' the sites of Rwanda's carnage. The results of that journey are now published as Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide offering, he writes, "a glimpse of what I saw there before the reburials took place."
Kigali International Airport. Over a period of four days, some 3,900 people of 22 nationalities left
Rwanda with the help of European troops flown in for that purpose. © Pieter Hugo
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Linda Melvern - guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 January 2012
The wreckage of the plane that was shot down killing Rwanda's president Juvénal Habyarimana in 1994. Photograph: AP/Jean Marc Boujou
Few events have been the subject of as many rumours and lies as the assassination on 6 April 1994 of Rwanda's President Juvénal Habyarimana. We may never know the identity of the assassins who fired the two missiles that blew his jet apart as it came in to land at Kigali International Airport; yet this one key event signalled the targeted elimination of Rwanda's political opposition, and triggered the genocide of the Tutsi people.
UN tribunal jails Rwanda genocide mastermind for life
Theoneste Bagosora, country's defence chief of staff, denies directing massacre of 800,000 by Hutu militia.
An international court has sentenced the mastermind of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Theoneste Bagosora, to life imprisonment in what prosecutors hailed as the most significant verdict of its kind since Nuremberg.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/18/rwanda?intcmp=239