Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

It's hard to believe

that it has been 20 years. I hope there has been a lot of healing, but we should never forget those who have perished due to hate and realise that it can easily arise and turn into genocide, sometimes with the world looking away, and sometimes with the world looking right at it and doing nothing.

Revisiting the Rwandan Genocide: Origin Stories From The Associated Press
Photographer Jean-Marc Bouju was one of the first journalists to drive into Kigali, Rwanda twenty years ago this month, upon hearing of growing ethnic unrest in the area. It was unclear what was happening at the time, and there was no way of knowing that within the next 100 days, nearly one million people would be slaughtered with machetes and farm tools in what would become known as the Rwandan genocide.

Things seemed normal along the drive at first, Bouju recalls. But soon he began to encounter road blocks leading into the city, and he saw people separated into two lines: one passing through the station, the other leading behind it where, he describes, “you could hear the hacking sounds of machetes.” From there, it only became more horrifying.

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