Four memorials commemorating the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, in which at least 800,000 people were wiped out, were declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites on Wednesday, the UN agency said.
• Also read: [PHOTOS] Anticosti becomes a world cultural heritage site
• Also read: A former torture center is included in UNESCO
• Also read: Tunisia: The heritage of the island of Djerba on the UNESCO list
“New inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Genocide memorials: Nyamata, Murambi, Gisozi and Bisesero,” UNESCO said on X (formerly Twitter).
These four sites commemorate the massacres that bloodied Rwanda for a hundred days between April and July 1994 and were directed against the Tutsi ethnic group, but also moderate Hutus.
Rwandan government spokesperson Yolande Makolo, in a message posted on the same social network, welcomed a “historic decision” that “will help protect memory, counter denial and strengthen genocide prevention efforts worldwide.”
The umbrella organization of survivors Ibuka also welcomed this announcement.
“This will raise awareness around the world of the genocide committed in Rwanda against the Tutsi,” executive director Naphthali Ahishakiye told AFP.
“Unesco is also providing financial and technical support to the registered sites, which is a welcome gesture,” he added.
The genocide memorial, built in 1999 and inaugurated in 2004, is located on Gisozi Hill, just a few kilometers from the center of the capital Kigali, and is the most important of around 200 memorial sites that dot the “Land of a Thousand Hills”.
The site notably houses the remains of 250,000 people found in the streets, houses, mass graves and rivers of Kigali and surrounding areas.
In the museum, which traces the history of Rwanda, the visitor is confronted with glass cases displaying skulls, bone fragments, torn clothing, images of piled corpses, portraits of victims and weapons – machetes, clubs, rifles – used by genocidal people .
churches
The other UNESCO-classified sites were the scene of some of the bloodiest murders of the genocide.
In the Nyamata Church, about forty kilometers south of Kigali, “more than 45,000 people” who had sought refuge there were massacred in one day, according to UNESCO’s website.
The building has been “converted into a memorial that represents other churches where the victims of the genocide died,” says UNESCO.
In April 1994, on Murambi Hill, about 150 kilometers southwest of Kigali, local authorities and the former Rwandan armed forces asked the Tutsi population to reassign themselves to a group of technical schools under construction under the pretext of ensuring their safety form before they massacred them. According to UNESCO, between 45,000 and 50,000 people died there.
The Bisesero site is primarily a reminder of the resistance that the Tutsi led with spears, machetes and sticks against the genocidal people who murdered hundreds of people in the hills of this region in the west of the country.
The Bisesero massacres are one of the most sensitive episodes of the genocide.
In June, the French judiciary reopened the investigation into the complaint of several associations accusing the forces of the French military-humanitarian mission Turquoise of attacking Tutsi civilians who had taken refuge in the hills of Bisesero from June 27 to 30, 1994. of knowingly abandoning them, which enabled the massacre of hundreds of them.