It was mid-afternoon in 2015 when I landed at Kanombe International Airport in Kigali, Rwanda. This was my second visit to the city in the “Land of a Thousand Hills”, as Rwanda is fondly known. My first visit, in 1998 — four years after the tragic 1994 genocide — had been very brief, lasting only half a day.
Kanombe Airport is located near the site where, on the evening of June 6, 1994, the aircraft carrying Rwanda’s then President, Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down by a missile, killing all 12 people on board, including the President and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira.
That incident ignited the infamous Rwandan genocide, during which an estimated one million innocent people — men and women, young and old — were brutally killed in just 100 days. The killings primarily targeted Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
During my 2015 visit, I was advised not to miss the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, where the remains of more than 250,000 victims are interred.
I arrived at the Memorial that day and was received at the Visitors’ Centre, which caters for scholars and others seeking to understand the events that led to the 1994 genocide.
Built in 1999 and inaugurated in 2004, the Memorial Centre is located along the city’s 14th Avenue in Gisozi, about a 10-minute drive from the city centre.
It is one of six major sites that commemorate the genocide, the others being Murambi, Bisesero, Ntarama, Nyamata and Nyarubuye.
The Kigali Memorial Centre documents the genocide and outlines the historical context that preceded it. Comparisons are also drawn with similar atrocities in Germany, Japan, Croatia and Bosnia.
Unlike the other memorials, the Kigali site includes human remains, as well as the weapons and tools used in the killings.
I was able to view audio-visual and GPS documentation, corroborated survivor testimonies and material on the Gacaca courts — traditional community tribunals led by village elders.
The Memorial concludes with a section on the search for justice through the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, alongside the Gacaca court process.
This is an area I know well. I worked with the ICTR for 23 years. In its early days, court sessions were frequently adjourned. The reason was simple and painful: Young court reporters often fainted while transcribing the harrowing testimonies of survivors recounting the horrific massacres they endured during the genocide.
Indeed, scholars of international criminal justice and international humanitarian law can greatly expand their understanding by visiting the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, as well as the ICTR Archives Centre at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, located at Wapiwapi, Kisongo in Arusha.
