AFRICAN EYE

By Rawlings Magede My visit to one of the Genocide memorials During the past weeks I was holed up in Rwanda visiting memorial sites and villages in a quest to learn more on how the country has recovered years after the 1994 genocide that left more than 800,000 civilians dead. The genocide lasted for hundred days and engulfed the country into a turmoil as organised killings and massacres of the Tutsi escalated. The colonial practice of ethnic profiling on identity documents aided in the easy identification of Tutsi minorities during roadblocks and targeted searches. Churches that had since time immemorial been credited for speaking truth to power become complicit in the killings and often deceitfully offered “safe” refuge to Tutsis but only alerted the Interahamwe’s (    Hutu militias) who massacred hundreds of thousands in cold blood. The snail’s pace by the international community to intervene and stop the killings further aided the killers and saw the killings stretching up to hund