“At 8.30pm on April 6 1994, two rockets shot down the plane carrying Rwandan President Habyarimana back home to his country’s capital, Kigali. This attack, whose perpetrators remain unknown to this moment, became the catalyst for one of the great calamities of our age. It was soon evident that a small group among the Hutu elite of Rwanda had decided to use the attack as the opportunity to launch a full-scale genocide that they had been preparing against the country’s Tutsi minority.
When the genocide ended little more than 100 days later, between a half million and one million Tutsi lay dead, alongside thousands of Hutu killed for their opposition to the extremists. Virtually all were civilians, unarmed and defenceless. Women and children were specifically targeted to ensure the final elimination of all Tutsi. Tens of thousands of women and girls were raped, tortured and, if not then murdered, maimed for life. Victims were treated with sadistic cruelty and suffered unimaginable agony.”
Gerry Caplan, Eric Markusen, and Linda Melvern: The Rwandan Genocide: A Brief Overview
These photographs, taken a decade later, offer a forensic view of some of the sites of mass execution and graves that stand as lingering memorials to the many thousands of people slaughtered.
