10 April 2014, The Tablet

Thinking the unthinkable

by Karen Kilby

Rwanda genocide, 20 years on

 
Like Auschwitz or the killing fields of Cambodia, today’s memorials in Rwanda to the almost unimaginable horrors of the genocide there 20 years ago are testimony to those who died – a reminder of an unintelligible evil we must confront Last weekend 20 years ago, on 6 April, the Rwandan genocide began. Within 100 days, something like 800,000 people – mostly, but not entirely, Tutsi – were killed, brutally and often crudely, in many cases with the use of everyday farm tools such as machetes.On a recent trip to Rwanda with the Catholic aid agency Cafod, my companions and I visited several genocide memorials. But we also saw a country full of the living, a country rapidly developing with building projects and new roads at every turn. Rwanda is a place where people are
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