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26-01-2024
KIGALI: With shovels and garden hoes, villagers stood this January digging where a house once stood in Rwanda to reveal a mass grave filled with bones victims of the genocide still being found 30 years on.
Around 100 volunteers, many wearing face masks and rubber gloves turn over the red soil in Ngoma village in the country’s south, with a sombre determination as a crowd watches on from a slope above.
Skulls, teeth and other shards of bone are placed carefully into plastic bags while shoes and tattered clothing possible clues to identify loved ones never found are collected elsewhere.
The remains of 119 people had been unearthed over three days, said Napthali Ahishakiye, president of the genocide survivors’ group Ibuka.
Andre Kamana, deputy mayor of the wider Huye district in the country’s south, said there was no telling how many more might be found.
“Every time they dig deeper, they find more layers of soil with remains,” he said grimly.
Discoveries of mass graves are remarkably frequent even three decades after the 1994 slaughter instigated by the Hutu extremist regime in Rwanda at the time.
The United Nations estimates that around 800,000 people, mostly from the Tutsi minority, were killed over 100 days in an ethnic pogrom that turned neighbors against each other in the tiny East African nation.
In Ngoma, a three-hour drive from the capital Kigali, roadblocks were erected and Tutsis dragged from their cars and murdered, said Goreth Uwonkunda, a 52-year-old who has lived her entire life in the village.
“The history here is terrible… this is clearly one of the mass graves where they were dumped,” she told media.
“The killers buried victims on top of others. We found big bones, some intact, even whole skulls.”
The mass grave was discovered beneath a family home. Five of the family members have been arrested on suspicion of complicity in genocide and concealment of evidence.
The investigation began last October when a whistleblower tipped off the authorities about the likelihood of a mass grave on the unremarkable rural property on a hillside off a main road.
“It is suspected that those who lived in that house knew what was underneath them, and it was a family secret,” Ibuka’s Ahishakiye said.
The appalling discovery has horrified those living near the graves all these years.
“I knew the people who lived in this house, and I am quite shocked that they comfortably slept on top of bodies every night and were alright with it. It is shameful and shocking,” said Uwonkunda. (Int’l News Desk)
