The UN agency said on Wednesday that four memorials honouring the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, which at least 800,000 people were killed, have been designated as UNESCO global heritage sites.
“A new entry has been added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Nyamata, Murambi, Gisozi, and Bisesero are genocide memorial sites”, according to UNESCO on X (formerly Twitter). These four locations honour the atrocities that left Rwanda in ruins over the course of a hundred days in 1994, between April and July, and which targeted both the Tutsi ethnic group and moderate Hutus.
The Genocide Memorial, which was established in 2004 and is situated on Gisozi Hill a few miles from the middle of the capital Kigali, is the most significant of the 200 memorials that dot “the country of a thousand hills.”
The site is notable for housing the remains of 250,000 individuals discovered in Kigali and the area’s streets, homes, mass graves, and rivers.
The visitor is met by display cases filled with skulls, bone fragments, shredded clothing, pictures of piled-up corpses, photographs of victims, and weapons—machetes, clubs, and rifles—used by genocidaires in the museum that traces the history of Rwanda.
The other locations listed by UNESCO were the scene of some of the genocide’s most gruesome executions. 50,000 people who had taken safety at the Nyamata church, roughly forty kilometers south of Kigali, were killed there in a single day.
According to UNESCO, the structure has been turned “into a memorial representative of other churches in which the victims of the genocide died.”
In April 1994, local officials and the former Rwandan armed forces asked for the Tutsi population to assemble in a technical school group that was under construction on Murambi Hill, roughly 150 km south-west of Kigali, under the guise of ensuring their security, before massacring them. There were between 45,000 and 50,000 fatalities.
The Bisesero site is notable for honouring the Tutsi struggle against the genocidaires who massacred hundreds of people in the area’s hills in the west of the country while using spears, machetes, and sticks. One of the most delicate parts of the genocide is the Bisesero atrocities.
The French justice system reopened its investigation into the allegations made by several associations that the French military-humanitarian mission Turquoise’s forces purposefully abandoned Tutsi civilians seeking refuge in the hills of Bisesero from June 27 to June 30, 1994, allowing the massacre of hundreds of them to occur.
