One minute for victims of massacre

On Friday evening last about 400 Rwandans, at the National Stadium in Kigali, were preparing for the commemoration ceremonies today to mark the 10th anniversary of the genocide. One hundred children, born since the genocide, sat around in a square forming an arena for a dance representation of killings and mourning. A young boy chanted "why, why, why". And a choir of mainly adult Rwandans, mainly women, sang songs of heart-breaking sadness, writes Vincent Browne.

A cameraman who filmed them up close said many of the singers were crying. He was too. The simplicity, the informality, even the chaos of the scene made it all the more moving.

They are hoping that a public address system will make it from Britain for today's events. Other plans for the commemoration have been cancelled because of lack of finance. The Presidents of Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and a few other African states are expected to show up. No head of state or head of government of any non-African state are expected. Brian Cowen will be there representing the EU (following an interview with Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, on Thursday, I mentioned about our Foreign Minister coming, he said he was looking forward to meeting "her"!).

The stories and scenes of the genocide are all around. We went to a church about an hour and a half from Kigali, at Ntatama last week. It is right in the heart of the countryside, alone apart from a community hall across the road. It is a small Catholic church, red brick with corrugated iron roof.

Inside are the remains of some hundreds of mainly women and children, who were massacred here on April 15th, 1994. The bones and skulls are on the floor (some of the skulls have been placed on shelves at the back). It is not possible to go through the church without walking on the remains of victims.

There are handbags, shoes, children's shoes, bloodstained mattresses (they had stayed there for several days before being massacred). Most of the killings occurred in the church grounds. In all, it is claimed around 5,000 were murdered here. They had gathered at the church because in previous pogroms the sanctuary of Church property was respected.

The genocide was represented in the international media at the time as another instance of barbaric African tribal warfare. It was far more complex than that, far more orchestrated, far more savage.

The minority (15 per cent) Tutsi population had had a privileged socio-economic status, vis-à-vis the majority Hutu population, although they shared the same language and same religion. That privileged position was intensified in the colonial period, which saw some Tutsis act as brutal enforcers for the colonisers. Then, as Rwanda reached for independence in the late '50s, there was a "revolution" which saw Tutsi power being replaced by Hutu power. After independence there was a brief genocide in 1963 when up to 10,000 Tutsis were killed.

Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis fled to Uganda and in 1990 the children of that diaspora (including Paul Kagame) formed an army (RPF) and invaded Rwanda. This coincided with the collapse of the Rwandan economy. The resultant tensions saw the rise of Hutu militancy, the formation of a Hutu militia, armed and supported by elements of the Hutu government, the failure of a peace process and, eventually, the genocide where the Hutus sought a "final solution".

In fact the "final solution", or rather the outcome, was the restoration of Tutsi control with the military victory of the RPF under Paul Kagame, who has been in effective control of Rwanda for the past 10 years.

There is an uneasy peace in Rwanda now but little democracy and the claims of reconciliation seem implausible.

Kagame has banned almost all opposition political parties, the media is tightly controlled, thousands of political dissidents have been jailed, several prominent political opposition leaders have been killed or are missing.

Kagame's rationale is that the security of the entire population requires, for now, tight control. He has justified the incursion into the Democratic Republic of the Congo also on the grounds of security (a reasonable claim initially, but now called into question by the report of a UN Commission that found Rwanda, along with Uganda, was illegally looting the mineral wealth of DCR).

But what would Rwanda be like now without Kagame? There is no consensus on how the State should be organised (the Tutsi minority don't trust the Hutu majority and with good reason, for a huge proportion of the adult Hutu population were engaged in the genocide; and the Hutus understandably resent the denial of their democratic rights), there is no consensus on justice (how can hundreds of thousands of killers be brought to justice?).

Kofi Annan has asked that the world observe a minute's silence at noon today in memory of the one million people killed in the Rwandan genocide 10 years ago. If it is appropriate to allow three minutes silence for the 200 killed in Madrid and a day's commemoration for the 2,500 killed in America on 9/11, it is hardly asking too much, even if the million people massacred in Rwanda were African.