Just a few pics from a visit to the Presidential Palace 20 years and 1 month to the day after he was killed. His plane was shot down and, by total randomness, actually crashed into his own yard and his body was found by his python pit. That sparked the genocide in which 800,000 people were slaughtered in 100 days. Its a beautiful country side and known as ‘the land of 1000 hills’.
I wasn’t in the mood to photograph much and decided against pics of Murambi – the school building where 50,000 people were killed and the French soldiers set up a volleyball court on a grave of 8500 people to show there was nothing going on (President Mitterand of France essentially funded, trained, supplied the genocide, limited the UN from doing anything, and gave refuge to the people who carried out the genocide – he should be remembered as a war criminal and a disgusting human being). They have bodies hacked to bits (including babies) preserved with lime for viewing to really hammer the point home.
OK I’ve just deleted another paragraph – its too much to write for fb – the takeaway is that this wasn’t simply ‘some africans behaving like savages’ – this was a French funded atrocity in which the head of the UN was mates with the dictator who was killed hence why the UN wasn’t in a hurry to help the Tutsi getting slaughtered. The french were landing weaponry in Congo to supply the genociders while at the same time telling the UN there shouldn’t be any intervention.
I’ve been lucky enough to meet the General of the UN forces at the time and wish I had this amount of background knowledge before doing so. He was a hero being used as a pawn and he isn’t shy about telling it like it is.
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